Not the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter, Iteration 7

"It is this, it is this?" "We have had that before!"
    The Bellman indignantly said.
And the Baker replied "Let me say it once more.
    It is this, it is this that I dread!

"I engage with the Snark?every night after dark?
    In a dreamy delirious fight:
I serve it with greens in those shadowy scenes,
    And I use it for striking a light:

"But if ever I meet with a Boojum, that day,
    In a moment (of this I am sure),
I shall softly and suddenly vanish away?
    And the notion I cannot endure!"

-- from The Hunting of the Snark, Lewis Carroll 1874

Popularity contest

http://distrowatch.com/stats.php?section=popularity As you can see Gentoo is down to place 13-18. It seems to be on a downward trend - why is this? And how can you help fix the perception of mediocrity? Inquiring minds want to know. The best places to engage in a discussion with gentoo people might be on IRC or maybe by email, #gentoo-userrel / userrel(at)gentoo.org, #gentoo-pr / pr(at)gentoo.org or #gentoo-chat might be good places to communicate your ideas, desires and fetishes. Can we push Gentoo back to the top 5 in the next year?

Bitchfight: paludis vs. sabayon

Based on gentoo

Both, but sabayon is closer. Paludis doesn't even try to stay compatible, sabayon relies on compatibility to leech off new stuff.

Score: 1:2

Ignorance of bug handling procedures

Yes, both use the Gentoo bugtracker and point their users at Gentoo support channels. But whereas sabayon users can usually be convinced that they are not using Gentoo the paludis-infected entities usually claim that because the paludis homepage claims it is better than portage it can't be buggy. This might be amusing if it weren't bugspamming places that have nothing to do with it with bugs they cannot reproduce.

2:3

Obnoxious leads

Yes, both have arrogant leads that have egos the size of Jupiter. But ciaranm wins hands down. As the only person to be removed from his position as Gentoo developer twice he is the undisputed master of spam (dominating the -dev Mailinglist with up to 20% of all emails sent) and making people lose motivation.

4:4

Technical ignorance

Whereas sabayon claims that sqlite is fast and other amusing things this is overshadowed by the bad code, template abuse and lack of documentation in the paludis code base. The sheer misengineering (usually claimed to be "smart" code) of paludis wins this round easily.

5:6

Culture of trolling and making others mad

The misdirection and propaganda of Sabayon is already quite interesting. #sabayon is full of insults and usually redirects people to #gentoo. #paludis kickbans all that don't agree with their special brand of stupid and orchestrates nice spamfloods on everyone who doesn't appreciate them.

7:7

Result

Both score very high on the scale of annoyances. Both projects lack common sense and a culture of cooperation. But where sabayon at least tries to be a bit independant paludis sticks to Gentoo like a brainslug. It spreads a foul stench around and reduces the will to cooperate in others. Masters of FUD and trolling, a magnitude beyond anything sabayon even aspires to be. With extra bonus points paludis wins the award of braindamage.

May the gods of asshatery shine bright on both!
borrowed from http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/myhrvold07/myhrvold07_index.html

Tips & Tricks: pquery

Ever wanted to find all packages using the Beer License? Need to know all packages that depend on this library? There's a great tool for it: pquery

It comes bundled with some other stuff you can freely ignore (like pmerge and pmaint), but these are so small that noone bothered to frickel the ebuilds apart. If you want to get it installed, it hides in the sys-apps/pkgcore ebuild.

So once you've spent the 30 seconds or so it takes to install you can run it as any user that is in the portage group (otherwise strange things may happen). You may wish to not use pmerge for now, while it aspires to be a complete drop-in replacement for emerge it might not work exactly like portage. And then if there's a bug you get twice the work because you'll have to try to reproduce it with portage and all that.

But feel free to do "emerge -p gnome && pmerge -p gnome && time emerge -p gnome && time pmerge -p gnome" to see how fast it goes! Wheeeee!

Anyways, uhm, yeah, pquery. 

pquery --attr=license '*' | grep GPL-3
That's all of the GPL-3 packages. 

pquery --revdep="sys-apps/portage" '*'
And that's all things that depend on portage. 
pquery --maintainer=welp '*'
That's all those where you can tell welp that he is a slacker 
pquery --help
And that's all the other great options you can play around with. If you have any questions #pkgcore on irc.freenode.net is a good place to start ... and have fun datamining the ebuilds :)

Gentoo in the press

We have no idea what that means, but it sounds just fine and dandy.

Bootstrapping the GMN

Since the GWN disappeared into a black hole and reincarnated as GMN things have moved nicely. But still any publication needs support from people who actually spend time on making it happen. So if you are a Gentoo poweruser, if you use it in a company or if you built something really neat with it, let the GMN know. If you ask nicely you might even get a shiny interview out of it that gives you some publicity and motivates other readers of the GMN to share their stories with the rest of the world. Stop slacking, help the GMN and it'll be much more fun for all!

Joke of the week

Wenn ist das Nunstück git und Slotermeyer?

Ja! ... Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.