Moving innovations

The last few weeks have seen a lot of developments for GNU Emacs on Gentoo and luckily XEmacs is also reaping some of the benefits. Emacs and XEmacs now both depend on a new eselect module which finally resolves some file collision bugs between Emacs and XEmacs. The eselect module currently doesn’t support XEmacs very well but this is something that will only be noticed by someone installing both GNU Emacs and XEmacs.

In addition to these changes there is now also a joint project for GNU Emacs and XEmacs as a sub-project from the Lisp project. Hopefully this will make things a bit easier to organize and further the cooperation between the GNU Emacs and XEmacs herds. Since this project space is now available I’ve also moved the XEmacs on Gentoo information page there from my dev space. Hopefully I’ll be able to implement some of the Future Plans mentioned there shortly.

With all of the XEmacs packages up-to-date again in Gentoo CVS, I found less and less need to keep my original SVN overlay online. It used to located at moving-innovations.com/svn/xemacs, but no more. I took it offline today after cleaning out the remainder of the overlay and discovering that there wasn’t anything of interest there anymore. So, if you’ve been using it:it’s gone. Everything that was there is now in Gentoo CVS, except for the patches to move all XEmacs support and lisp files from /usr/lib to /usr/share. I hope to revisit that move some time in the future.

The only other thing that I planned for the repository is to create an ebuild for the XEmacs 21.5.x beta versions. However, that alone really doesn’t warrant an overlay, so I guess we’ll just package.mask that until it is fully ready.

Finally, this may be the right time to point to some documentation on XEmacs on Gentoo. It’s still a work-in-progress, but I hope to document both the development process and tools, and peculiarities relevant to XEmacs users on Gentoo. Please let me know if you have questions or would like to see something particular documented.

Finally I’ve pushed almost all pending patches and fixes for XEmacs into portage. XEmacs 21.4.20-r1 fixes a recently uncovered crash when playing wavs using linux native audio on 64-bit systems by trying to cast an int into a size_t. Even though this stops xemacs from crashing after trying to play a sound, something still isn’t quite right as the sounds sound very funny. Therefore I have also added the esd USE flag so that esound can be used to play the sounds.

In addition to these XEmacs changes a whole set of packages have also been released. Most of these have been in pre-release for several months, so it’s good to see them finally released. All of these have been added as well. Most of the packages only have minor bug fixes, except for app-xemacs/calendar which got a lot of new functionality added.

I suspected that this would happen in the end: getting sucked further into Gentoo and not being able to just tend to the XEmacs packages. But not to have it happen so soon, even before committing all the XEmacs bug fixes that I have pending. Not something I expected, but there you have it: gtk-gnutella 0.96.3 is now in portage. To keep my sanity I tell myself that this is only because I’ve been involved with upstream for this package for a long time.

That argument goes out the window, though, because I also took net-misc/drivel under my wing, committing version 2.0.3. I’m using it right now to write this blog post. And for good measure I also version bumped dev-ruby/rmagick because all the versions currently in portage got broken by the most recent ImageMagick upgrades. RMagick 1.14.1 is now in portage to remedy this, which is a good thing because we use RMagick quite a bit at work to create icons automatically.

Fortunately I also got to do some work on XEmacs. Version 21.4.19-r1 now installs a desktop icon and offers a few more USE flags to enable specific functionality,

This weekend I’ve added the last few missing XEmacs packages to Gentoo, so that Gentoo now carries the complete set of lisp packages as they are supported upstream. Actually, there are still a few packages that need sorting out. app-xemacs/ess does not seem to be packaged anymore upstream, even though the package source is still in CVS so that warrants some investigation.

The app-xemacs/liece package will be removed and is currently in package.mask, because it is no longer developed and no longer carried upstream. The liece author suggests to use app-xemacs/riece instead. liece will be removed at the end of the year.

The sumo package (xemacs-packages-sumo) has not been updated yet. This package basically contains all of the other packages in a single archive, and for Gentoo it makes more sense to turn this into a meta-package. This still allows all lisp packages to be installed from a single Gentoo package, but it avoids carrying all lisp packages twice, and the inclusion of a whole set of blockers on all these packages (because the sumo package and the individual packages install the same files). Work is currently underway to create such a package,

Next stop: cleaning up the XEmacs editor ebuild and adding fixes for its many open bugs.

This weekend I finally got to work on Gentoo after getting my access all set up last weekend. So, after two days of committing a lot of changes, most of the 118 XEmacs packages are now up-to-date again in portage. Not everything is done yet: some new packages still need to be added, and I have some minor keywording issues to be resolved with some of the other packages. But it is a good start towards getting XEmacs back in shape in Gentoo.

Finally my recruitment process has been finished and I am now an official Gentoo developer. Today I’ve started by setting up common stuff such as email, herd, bugzilla searches, etc. Next on the list is updating xemacs and related packages. I’ve begun to remove some old xemacs packages from the tree to get a better understanding of how things work. Especially repoman is a tool that can’t really be practised with, as is true for some of the special portage features. I’ve only seem to have messed up once, checking in the wrong metadata file, but that was easily fixed.

Next step is a mega-update for xemacs, consisting of most of the fixes that have been sitting in my overlay for quite a while. I’m currently sorting all of it out, so that all the associated bugs can also be closed.

Things are progressing with my goal to become a Gentoo Developer so that my XEmacs overlay can be put into portage for the benefit of all Gentoo users.

I now have a mentor, and I've already turned in the first of two quizes which are part of the Gentoo training program. With the weather so hot in The Netherlands I don't have much energy to work on new things, but doing the quiz and browsing through all the Gentoo documentation for the right answers was a good alternative.

I also noticed a few changes that need to be made in the xemacs ebuild to make it conform to the latest insights. I try to look in to fixing this in the next week.

After maintaining my XEmacs overlay for a few months I've decided to take the next step and put in my application to become the official maintainer of XEmacs for Gentoo. I've sent a mail to the recruiting team, we'll see how things develop from there.

XEmacs support in Gentoo is currently less than stellar due to lack of a maintainer. Looking at some of the ebuilds this situations has been going on for some time. Some of the XEmacs lisp packages have not been updated since 2003 and there are a bunch of bugs open for XEmacs-related issues.

I’m not sure I would like to become a maintainer for XEmacs in Gentoo. The process of becoming a Gentoo developer seems a bit convoluted and unclear, and I am also not sure that I can bring the commitment to do this for some time. But having a need for some of the updated packages and hating to see my efforts only being useful for myself I set up an overlay for updated XEmacs stuff. It can be accessed at
http://moving-innovations.com/svn/xemacs. So far I have only added the packages that I have installed myself. Maybe, if things work out well, I’ll also include other packages and an updated xemacs itself. Let me know if you think this is useful or if you have specific requests.