Moving innovations

Yesterday I ran into Steev’s email about the removal of virtual/x11 and checked the dev-ruby packages for any occurances. After fixing those I noticed that several people where fixing packages all over the tree and I decided to join in and have a bit of fun poking around ebuilds I’d normally never see. As a nice side effect I learned a few new things about Gentoo as well.

Although I had heard about keychain I never really looked in to this, but with the amount of commits we were doing yesterday entering my GPG passphrase quickly became tiresome. While configuring gpg-agent to deal with this keychain was pointed out to me as a way to manage both ssh-agent and gpg-agent. I finally realized the one big benefit that keychain would bring to me: no more passphrase-less keys for stuff like cron-jobs!

One of the things that we noticed as we were removing the virtual/x11 stuff is that there are plenty packages that have a lot of old ebuild versions around. Some people are of the opinion that this doesn’t hurt, but the kind of cleanup we did yesterday shows that it does hurt for such maintenance activity. I’ve fixed a number of packages where only the old versions contained references to virtual/x11. Why are these still in the tree… Sure, it makes sense to keep an older version around while stabilizing a newer version, but only for a couple of months at the most. When I asked whether we have a QA tool that might be showing which versions of a package could/should be deleted, I got pointed to earch and was disappointed to find that this basically shows the same information as packages.g.o, but without the nice layout. So, if this tool exists I’d be happy to hear about it, and otherwise I might have to try writing something myself.