Promises promises

To share with the pen leaves the messages for others over a longer time and it is less easy to mis-quote that the spoken word. Does everything really deserve to be written? Not in the least. So the intent here is to one day have something helpful to others and perhaps to even profit by the spread of common ideas and interests in some way. Enough to make living easier anyway.To that end this document will be undergoing some changes over time.

Flameeyes wrote Autotools Mythbuster to assist those using the autotools suite of software building tools to configure build and install programs. Being a non-native speaker there were ways I could help to improve it and perhaps help those developers using them and thus improve the distribution Gentoo and software built with it's toolchain since I use Gentoo on several machines.

Recently I pushed some changes I had made in my tree using git. Git is a version control system that allows collaborating authors to work on documents or code and also limit who can make changes Using linux I have as of yet not managed to get any of the graphical interfaces for git to work the way I wish; so the terminal and git is where syncing is done.

In my installation there are 3 branches.
1) 'master'
2) 'to-be-published'
3) 'user99s-to-be-published'.

Recently I did 'git push' from the master branch after a merge and new things went in after the most recent merge request. But I wondered how it was that the merges I had commited were not posted. Still after a year and with the new content that Diego has added the Guide is very good and I am proud to have contributed.

Gentoo QA team has implemented FORTIFY_SOURCE as an option in gcc and on amd64 This tests static sources for problems as software is being built. And should in the end lead to a stable tree for Gentoo that is well checked by development for bugs. This does not address runtime bugs but should limit them in number I would venture. If the QA team has it's way it might be a 'Badge of Honor' that software is considered stable and part of the Portage tree. There is lots of open source code out there. Wouldn't it be a good thing if you knew your software had been checked to the limit of your compiler and the tests development could come up with?

so what could happen? A lot of software could be removed form Portage. There could be a smaller set of packages that had passed Quality Assurance at first anyway. As long as enough tools can pass to have the tools we need as users then upstream bugs should be reported to them and if needed the ebuild masked. Large/stable projects code should have plenty of upstream anyway.

But all bugs should be reported to and tracked by Gentoo if the software is part of the Portage tree.

Making Gentoo more stable

In the past Flameeyes has written of testing sources at compile time. Now the Gentoo QA team has taken the next step and is now testing sources with FORTIFY_SOURCE At the time when this was implemented my system was about where I wanted it and I decided to emerge -e world This turned up a number of bugs some now closed. Response was mixed by the development team. some just recognized the bug and fixed it. Some still sit with no movement. Some were closed WONTFIX.

This last upsets me. Portage installed the software in all cases. And if there are bugs then they should be tracked until resolved or marked trivial. There may be times when the software should be removed from the tree. If bugs are not filed in Gentoo bugzilla then there is no way to ensure the bugs are properly fixed. See for an example of how this works FORTIFY_SOURCE turns up real bugs.and the QA team should be commended for their work. But if users are discouraged from even filing a Gentoo bug how can Gentoo track the resolution?

In an irc discussion bonsaikitten disparaged this solution citing a need for fixes and patches and the limited resources of the database. These may well be real problems that need to be overcome. They do need to be overcome though. Patches I would write if I could Unfortunately I missed my chance decades ago and instead I have a full time job and family and not the time to learn all the languages required.

I submit to him though I stood in line with a stack of punchcards waiting for my turn on the cardreader so I could run code I wrote on a mainframe before he was out of diapers...Maybe when his parents were in diapers.circa(1980) and just becuase I can't fix it doesn't mean I cannot be trained to. If he has the time ;) With a bit of luck Gentoo will still be around when I retire within the next decade.....perhaps then I will have time to to learn

Until then I assert that all bugs found by QA should be tracked so that the software can be removed if the issues found cannot be resolved properly and/or makes the software a security risk..