| 1 |
Hi, all. |
| 2 |
|
| 3 |
I spent about half of this week debugging a particularly nasty build |
| 4 |
issue that I was bumping heads with. I eventually determined that the |
| 5 |
problem was that I had canceled a Catalyst build when it was only |
| 6 |
partially complete, which corrupted my entire build environment. This |
| 7 |
corruption was silent, subsequent builds would complete seemingly |
| 8 |
successfully, only would I find out at run-time that some packages had |
| 9 |
been only partially emerged. |
| 10 |
|
| 11 |
For the rest of the week, I focused on adding the finishing touches to |
| 12 |
Plan 9 From Gentoo. It's now in a fairly usable state, the only |
| 13 |
remaining thing to be done is to get Portage up and running on the |
| 14 |
liveCD, as that was a feature mentioned by someone during my original |
| 15 |
proposal and something that I assume the community would be interested |
| 16 |
in having. I now have an introductory message on startup that |
| 17 |
introduces new users to some of the userspace paradigms introduced by |
| 18 |
Plan 9 (i.e. actually "drawing" a window on the screen) and, further, |
| 19 |
the message points them to a number of resources where they can learn |
| 20 |
more about the components shipped by Plan 9 From Gentoo. |
| 21 |
|
| 22 |
In addition to working out some of the startup niceties, I wrote an |
| 23 |
ebuild for the 9vx application and added that to the Glentoo overlay. |
| 24 |
Plan 9 From Gentoo now ships with 9vx and a Plan 9 tree, so that users |
| 25 |
can run Plan 9 VMs from Plan 9 From Gentoo's command line just by |
| 26 |
executing the 9vx command. I think this is a pretty neat thing to have |
| 27 |
and, hopefully, it will appease some of the Plan 9 natives who may be |
| 28 |
put off by the remaining Linuxy goodness provided by Plan 9 From |
| 29 |
Gentoo. |
| 30 |
|
| 31 |
After this was accomplished, I began porting the Glendix patches to |
| 32 |
the latest git kernel. I have everything in a build-able state, but it |
| 33 |
still needs to be tested. In hindsight, I should have ported my |
| 34 |
patches to the latest Gentoo kernel instead of the git release, as the |
| 35 |
git kernels use a different style of ebuild and, which I found out in |
| 36 |
testing a newly generated liveCD image with a git kernel, fail to |
| 37 |
build correctly with Catalyst. Tomorrow, I will rebase my rebased |
| 38 |
patches to a different release kernel (2.6.39.2 probably). Hopefully, |
| 39 |
the patches will not exhibit any run time failures and I will be |
| 40 |
sitting pretty. Rebasing the patches should not take long, but -- |
| 41 |
should there be run time failures -- debugging may take a day or two. |
| 42 |
|
| 43 |
Once Glendix has been forward ported to a more recent kernel, I will |
| 44 |
begin porting more syscalls from Plan 9 to the Linux kernel with the |
| 45 |
goal of getting the native Plan 9 version of the sam editor running on |
| 46 |
top of the Linux kernel and shipping with Plan 9 From Gentoo. I am |
| 47 |
still waiting for Anant to get back to me with some more information |
| 48 |
on porting the syscalls and how to move forward. If he has still not |
| 49 |
gotten back to me by the time I am ready to begin work, I will once |
| 50 |
again poke Robin about setting up a project page for Plan 9 From |
| 51 |
Gentoo and getting space to host both the stage3 tarball of Plan 9 |
| 52 |
From Gentoo and the liveCD ISO. I may also see about taking over as |
| 53 |
maintainer of (or just gaining access to) the Plan 9 overlay, as much |
| 54 |
of my work in the Glentoo overlay should probably be moved to the Plan |
| 55 |
9 overlay, seeing that it is useful for more than just my liveCD and |
| 56 |
maybe some Gentoo-ers would like to permanently install plan9port or |
| 57 |
similar on their machines. |
| 58 |
|
| 59 |
I also must fill out my midterm report for Google at some point during |
| 60 |
this week. |
| 61 |
|
| 62 |
rps |
Archives