May 26, 2010

www-client/chromium soon to go stable in Gentoo, testing wanted

Did you notice that we just had a stable release of Chromium? It's a great news, and www-client/chromium-5.0.375.55 is now in portage.

My plan is to start the stabilization process soon, to move it from ~arch to arch. Before that happens though, I'd like to ask you to help testing this new package. Please try emerging it on your system and report any problems you encounter to the Gentoo Bugzilla. Note that the bugs are really getting fixed. For example, here's the list of fixed www-client/chromium issues.

If you're running a stable system, you can keyword-unmask it easily:

echo "=www-client/chromium-5.0.375.55" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
emerge -av www-client/chromium

For more information about unmasking packages, see the Gentoo Handbook.

May 19, 2010

Upgrading to samba-3.4.6

When you upgrade to net-fs/samba-3.4.6, you need to ensure the users will still be able to authenticate against samba. There are various ways to do that, but the simplest one is to add the line below to /etc/samba/smb.conf:

passdb backend = smbpasswd


Of course this is not the best long-term solution (refer to the upstream docs for possible options). However, if you just upgraded, and are wondering why things broke, this line can save you within seconds.

May 3, 2010

When you hit a strange bug, make sure to rule out ccache

ccache is a very useful tool, especially on a from-source distro like Gentoo. It may make repeating compilations several times faster. However, when using it, you have to be aware of the cache corruption issues.

Recently I started a thread on gentoo-dev on that topic. If you just want examples of weird behavior, look at https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=316657 and https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?p=6262495#6262495.

If you are using ccache and hit a hard-to-reproduce compile failure, try re-running the compile with ccache disabled (FEATURES="-ccache" emerge ... should be fine; if you want to be extra sure unmerge ccache temporarily). If that fixes the problem, you should clean your ccache cache and then you can continue using it... up to the next failure. If you are adventurous and want to get to the root cause of the problem, see robbat2's hints.

I wonder about the idea of adding cache integrity checksums to ccache, so that the corruption can be detected. If you're looking for a way to contribute to Open Source, that may be an interesting project.