rullzer

While cleaning up my package.keywords and filling stable requests I got a good, or I like to think so, idea about “improving” Gentoo. Well maybe improving is to big of a word for it but they can help to improve Gentoo.

As many of you probably know Gentoo is often not, when not running ~ARCH, the most up to date distro. I am not blaming anyone since the devs, arch testers etc are doing a great job, but in some areas we are just lagging behind.

Now of course this rss feed (sorry I forgot who created it…) keeps a nice list of packages in the tree for more than 30 days. Browsing trough this list from time to time has allowed me to fill a bunch of stable requests for packages I use on a regular basis.

Now what kind of other usefull things could we extract from the portage tree that would help improving Gentoo? I toughed of two things:

• Finding “important” packages: With some smart python program packages which have a lot of other packages depending on it could be located. These packages are often important to keep up to date. Also keeping those packages up to date often allows for more packages to be stabilized.
• Finding packages without a stable version: A lot of new packages hit the tree on a regular basis (this is of course a good thing). However this also leads to packages in the tree without a stable version. Of course there is a period in which this is not possible. But after the 30 days (or make it 45 for the initial version) it would be good to stabilize since then people that want to run a stable system can also use the package!.

Unfortunately I do now have the time to write these tools. But they would be really cool and use full to see! If anyone has some spare time… you know what to do! And of course tell me if you know any other things we could extract from the portage tree in order to help improving Gentoo.

From time to time I browse trough some of the files on my system. Today is one of those days. When coming across my /etc/portage/package.keywords/-directory I found out that right now I am not running the most stable system (according to gentoo). Of course KDE4.2 is the main reason for my huge lists of package unmasks and then there is Xorg-1.5 but that is pulled in by KDE4.2…

But even without all those packages the list is still huge… So probably I will be spending some hours today on cleaning my package.keywords and filling some stable requests. Which is always good. We need to keep those Gentoo-devs busy