Pythonhead's blog

I've been working on setuptools a.k.a. eggs for Portage. A couple of apps that only work with eggs seemed like a good way to start, so here's TurboGears and Django (live svn/eggs ebuild) for testing:

* Checkout the overlay directory from svn

svn co http://eggs.gentooexperimental.org/svn/trunk/overlay eggsoverlay

* Add eggsoverlay directory to PORTDIR_OVERLAY in /etc/make.conf

emerge turbogears

emerge django-svn

You'll probably want to emerge those with '-pv' so you can see what database backends are available.
Bug reports goto trac until we get this in portage.

Our Planet's fearless leader, dsd, put out a call for a new and improved Planet Gentoo.

I came up with a solution that uses the existing Planet code and its templating system with CherryPy and SQLObject. You can search old entries and browse by herd.

My project hasn't been officially approved for Planet Gentoo, but if you'd like to help out, I have a trac project set up. Non-Gentoo developers are welcome to join in. The code is generic and works with any existing Planet, not just Planet Gentoo.

Here is the demo site (hackergucci photo-thingies included).

I've re-done the website for Meatoo using CherryPy and Cheetah. (It was using Rails).

If you're using the command-line client, please update to 0.0.5. The xml-rpc server's address has changed but there are no new features for the CLI.

I've added RSS feeds for Meatoo but I'm not too sure I've done them correctly. The main feed is updated every 12 hours when Freshmeat updates their XML file and should work fine with most RSS readers, I hope:

http://gentooexperimental.org/meatoo/static/meatoo.xml

You can also subscribe by herd or maintainer email address, but these feeds are generated dynamically. I have no clue if this could pose a problem for some readers, but it works for me in Thunderbird and Pears. Use it like so:

http://gentooexperimental.org/meatoo/rss?herd=games
http://gentooexperimental.org/meatoo/rss?herd=whoever@gentoo.org

Rails is nice but I was spending too much time trying to figure out how to hack together a mail registration/authorization system. Since there is no mail server on gentooexperimental I hacked something up with nbsmtp and a gmail account. I'll open that up after some testing tommorow.

If you already know Python, getting started with CherryPy is dead simple.

Heres a command-line client for the Meatoo database.

It uses XML-RPC and should be simple enough to look at the Python code if you want to write your own in another language. Each method returns a nested list of 10 strings per package.

Heres a simple Ruby client to call the getPackage method:

require "xmlrpc/client"
server = XMLRPC::Client.new("gentooexperimental.org", "/RPC2", "8888")
print server.call("getPackage", "prboom")

Look at send_request in the Python client for a list of other methods you can call.

Its election time and frankly I haven't got a clue who to vote for. A few trustees nominating themselves for election have listed what they have done, which is great, but we're still clueless about what the Foundation has been doing as a whole or voting on because the mailing list archive hasn't been made public. Could someone at least tell us what the 12 month hold-up has been? Maybe someone can help get us that archive before elections are over.

Thank you Sven for being the first current trustee to really speak up. Lets hope you've started a trend.

A lot of you nominating yourselves are saying something like "I won't say much because most of you know me". We have hundreds of developers now and I think I can safely say most of us don't know each other. For some bizarre reason I think I can name what text editors and desktop enviroments a lot of you use, but I couldn't tell you much else, and I really don't want to base my vote on that. So please speak up and we'll have more informed voters. Tell us what you'd like to see changed and what role you'd like to take.

If any developers out there are just not having any luck finding enough work to do we have a few seats left in the wxWidgets (formerly known as wxWindows, thanks for "suggesting" we pick a new name, Microsoft!) herd.

wxGTK-2.6.0 is in portage and I'd love to get wxMacOS in now. If there are any Mac people out there who can come up with an ebuild and test it (I don't have a Mac), it'd be great.

wxGTK has been retrofitted with SLOTs for 2.4 and 2.6. wxPython is now also slotted and we're the first distribution (I think) to use the new MultiVersionInstalls.

There is no official 2.4.2.4 release of wxPython available upstream that works with MultiVersions but I've modified Gentoo's to use wxversion.
Thanks Diego a.k.a. flameeyes for the new wxlib eclass and preparing the way for wxMac (and wxMotif/wxX11?). And thanks always to the users who have helped find and fix problems in wxEverything.

meatoo is now fully indexed against the entire freshmeat database, not just the last few days. In addition to searching by herd and maintainer, I added package name and Gentoo category search options.
There are approximately 3000 packages in portage mapped against freshmeat projects by name. This is all done automatically, so there will be many false positives, i.e.:

app-misc/nut => http://freshmeat.net/projects/nut/

instead of:

app-misc/nut => http://freshmeat.net/projects/networkupstools/

For names that match but are the wrong package, I've implemented a voting system so people who register can re-map portage names to freshmeat project names. Now all I need to do is get someone at gentooexperimental to setup an email server so you can actually signup...

Ok, geNToo is really cool, but did we really need a PSOD?

The meatoo site is now updated daily via cron and is searchable by herd or maintainer.

If theres enough interest, I'll add a subscription option so you can be mailed new package release info for all packages in your herd(s), favorite packages, etc.

Thanks to patrick/bonsaikitten/Patrick Lauer and any other name he goes by for letting me host meatoo on gentooexperimental.

Here's the week for meatoo so far.

Its not purple (yet) but I think you can see where meatoo is heading.

The newest version uses eix instead of equery so is a few hundred percent faster.