Every Friday I send a mail to the kongoni developers mailing list with the week’s updates, mostly in regard to my work but also mentioning major things from other developers. As of this week, I made a decision to also post these mails to this blog once a week, in order to help spread the news of things happening to more interested people.
So herewith, the first blog kongoni weekly updates mail:
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Hi everybody,
Time again for my weekly mail of updates that happened during the
week. It’s been quite a busy week in kongoni-land, so here are some of
the highlights.
*The first big news is a port for kernel 2.6.28.7, this kernel version
adds a huge amount of new drivers and support for some very cool
features such as console-on-braille-device. The kernel-sources port
builds a fully functional kernel and is much cleaner than the old one,
including creating a package out of the resulting kernel+modules so
that these are now properly tracked. I also moved the lilo artwork
files from the installer package to the resulting linux package -so it
won’t get uninstalled with the installer (which fixes an old bug with
updating lilo later).
*There is an update available for the OpenOffice.org port as build
number 4 for 3.0.1 – this build fixes a major bug which prevented the
64-bit version from starting, 32-bit users are not affected.
*A new version of pig is available with some important features and
bugfixes. The current version is 0.0.3 and is a highly recommended
upgrade. I am already working on 0.0.4 so expect some news on that
during next weeks mail. There’s one particularly major feature coming
called autopork which is a KDE guification for portpkg’s autoport
script.
*Autopork from above is also meant to integrate with a new tool I am
still finalizing the designs on called harbourmaster. Harbourmaster
will be a web-app for managing the ports tree with. It will accept
submissions of ports (hence the autopork integration) and keep them
for developers to look at. It will allow hacking on ports files,
manage the test cycle on ports and of course, ultimately let you
approve a port into the maintree or deny it (with the reason sent back
to the submitter). I want to make harbourmaster portable so that
people could run their own servers acting on their own ports trees,
opening the way for user-maintained ports trees (think ideas like
arch’s AUR or ubuntu’s launchpad here).
This is still in design phase and I’m still looking at good frameworks
to build on etc. I may well just write a pure php version that’s ultra
ugly as a proof of concept and then launch something real. If anybody
here is particularly good at LAMP development and would like to get
involved, please reply on that, perhaps in a separate thread.
*The games tree in ports have had a start with the first game going in
(freeciv). Marius is set up and ready to get going on growing this
part of the tree as well so expect some interesting stuff here 
*When we had digikam and kipi-plugins available within an hour of the
release announcement that certainly got us some nice attention.
*A big thing I worked on this week was the first chromium-browser
port, it’s still very ugly but it can be made to work on 32-bit (at
pretty big risk). The current port is based on the ubuntu-ppa builds
and this is definitely not going to do. There is a mini-howto in the
forums on the site that covers installing it for those interested, but
consider it a testing-toy for now (it is also marked as broken). The
obvious conclusion is we have to build our own version from source,
the catch is – chromium has a source-tree of over 3 gigabytes ! Not
something I want to be doing via th ports tree then, the worse because
it has no 64-bit build support yet and to build 32-bit apps on a
64-bit system is a nightmare.
That really leaves only one option, to build a binary on 32-bit and
then create a pseudo-port for it which is multiplatform.
*For those actively using 64-bit, I created a nice little script
called ia32pkg which is in the ports tree, this one can grab a 32-bit
library package from slackware, convert it into an ia32-compatibility
package and install it for you. A great way to deal with 32-bit
binaries that lack one package you need.
For example if you cannot get NWN going because it needs 32-bit SDL ,
just run:sdl-1.2.13-i486-2.tgz
The script will fetch the package (if it’s not in the current
directory), convert it into ia32-sdl-1.2.13-x86_64-2.tgz and install
it for you in one simple step. For a list of libs which can be
autofetched run: ia32pkg -l
Please note though: this is new code and only tested by me, so if it
breaks anything, don’t cry :p
*Finally, a bit of a shout-out to another project for those who don’t
know about it yet. FLOSS.pro is a is a laconi.ca microblogging site
specifically for free and open-source professionals, started here in
South Africa. I’ve been using it to blurt my daily “what am I doing”on
kongoni stuff and that feed gets sent to the kongoni website (any of
you are welcome to blurt to #kongoni as well) and I can highly
recommend it. Right now I use the RSS feeds to keep up to date, and
ping.fm to update from jabber so it’s all quite smooth and I would
encourage you to try. Right now th kongoni group is the most active on
the site but if we want to keep it there I’ll need your help guys
