Older blog entries for halcy0n (starting at number 41)

If you are usin gcc-4.1.0, then you probably saw the revision bump to -r1. That's because we want all of you to have all of the changes we've made before we unmask it, to ensure that nothing is broken and that the upgrade should be relatively smooth. If you notice any major bugs, please let us know so we can fix them. We are hoping to unmask it by next week if nothing huge comes up. Just waiting for the dust to settle :)

QA:

The QA glep was approved finally :) Thanks to the council and everyone else for your support. Hopefully everyone will see now that we are only here to help and people will come to us when they need help. We are still working on the devmanual and hope to have it hosted as soon as I talk to infra about how we should go about that.

x86:

We finally have a few ATs helping us out now that have been awesome (thanks mlangc, djm, and saknopper). If you want to help out as well, stop by #gentoo-x86/irc.freenode.net and let us know :)

I went and fixed a bunch of wxWindows related bugs today. We will hopefully have someone to take care of wxWindows very soon (and we have needed someone for awhile now)...so long as we don't scare him away. :)

We still need help with a lot of other packages (like I talked about last time). xemacs and GNUstep are the two that are completely unmaintained right now, and could really use some love from people that use or are familiar with them. If you would be interested in helping out, please shoot me an email.

Classes will be over soon, and I should have lots of free time to work GCC related bugs, QA stuff, etc for Gentoo. Right now I could still use some help on the gcc-4.x porting bug. There are still quite a few blockers, and I'd like to get the list cut down a lot more before I go ahead and unmask gcc-4.1. Testing patches that are attached to bugs, and writing patches both help, so please try and help on a bug or two. :)

Just a short update on things:

Toolchain: I now have gcc-4.2 snapshots in the tree. Don't use them unless you feel like actually fixing any problems you run into. They are not supported yet, and are just there as a convienence to those that wish to play around with them. In other news, GCC-4.1 is coming along nicely, but I could definately use some help cleaning up all of the porting bugs that remain. Just check out the blockers for bug #117482.

x86: On the x86 front, we definately need more arch testers. So if you are interested, contact me, tsunam, or hparker and let us know. I think the team has helped improve "x86", and I'd really like to see things improve even more, but we need more people for that.

Also, if you want to help out by maintaining some packages, check out the Staffing Needs page. There are contact addresses on there for whomever is asking for help. Also, you can check the bugs assigned to maintainer-needed@gentoo.org. You can send me an email if you think you can help out by maintaining any of those packages, and either I'll help you out, or try to find someone else that would be more appropriate.

gcc-4.1.0_pre20060223 (aka _rc2) is in the tree. I would appreciate it if people could test it and let me know of any remaining problems with packages they run into. You now have permission to file bugs for all gcc-4.1 related errors and not get yelled at. :) 4.1.0 final should be out in a few days, and I expect to have it in the tree shortly after it is released. I have to go through all of the patches we have applied to 4.0.2 and see what should still be applied, so be patient if it isn't in the tree right after it is released :)

QA:

Well, we are trying to get together an actual QA "team" to search out QA problems and get them resolved. So, if you see a bug assigned to you and with QA CC'd on it, don't worry, we are not out to get you. We are just trying to keep track of all of the QA problems, and educate people so the same problems do not occur again. If you have ideas on what we could do better or problems in the tree that you think we should look for...I'd love to hear them :)

A lot of people are asking me when gcc-4.0 is going to go into ~arch. The answer: soon :) I want to get it in as soon as possible, but I also want to make sure it is not going to break on common packages. If you want to help out, go check out the gcc4 tracker bug. If something doesn't have a patch yet, it would help if you tried to find one or came up with one that we could use.

Okay, so gcc-4.0 isn't in ~arch yet, but we are getting there. If you want to help out, check out the bugs that bug #117481 depends on. There are a few packages that I consider "major", and I would like to see fixed before moving forward. I'll see what I can do about getting those issues fixed as soon as I can.

x86:

The other day fox2mike expressed interest in joining the x86 team as an AT, and he's also a doc dev. What luck for us, since now we have someone to help me write up some documentation for the x86 team :) We should have a draft of the AT documentation done soon (probably this coming week). Hopefully after that I can update the project page and get some new information up on there.

other stuff:

I just added Delta to the tree. Its a really cool application for reducing "interesting" input files. I personally use it for reducing testcases for GCC ICEs, which it has done very well for me. I'm sure there's about 5 other people out there that will find this useful, so, go crazy :)

Well, I added glibc-2.3.6-r2 to the tree tonight, which I will keyword as ~x86 in the next few days so long as no problems come up. After that, I'll make sure all major apps are compiling fine with gcc-4.0.2-r3 (which they are currently), and then we can finally start getting gcc-4.0 into ~arch. So, if you want to jump the gun and start testing, just unmask the latest glibc and gcc ebuilds. If you find a package that doesn't compile and there isn't a bug open, please create a bug with the error message and the output of `emerge info` (a patch would also be awesome, but not required :) ). Also please set the bug you create to be a blocker of bug #117482.

x86:

Well, I think the x86 team is working out well, but we could still use some more arch testers to help out and improve the testing we are doing. If you want to help out with Gentoo and you aren't sure how to start with doing so, this may be a way for you. Just come talk to us on IRC (we don't bite) in #gentoo-x86 on irc.freenode.net. (Yes, this sounds like a bad advertisement, but hey...whatever works :P )

Well, gcc-4.0.2-r2 is now in the tree, so go test it and try to break it for me. I got good feedback from people that tested it before I put it in the tree, so it should be better than -r1 was. Let me know via email, irc, bugs.gentoo.org, etc if it sucks. If its working good, I'd also like to hear about that, just don't post it on bugs.gentoo.org, not really the appropriate medium ;)

Also, I've been going through all of the bugs that are assigned/CC'd to toolchain@ and trying to clean them up to get back to a managable number. A lot of them are old stale bugs that no longer are an issue due to newer stable versions of gcc, binutils, etc. If I close your bug and its still valid, just reopen it and I'll look into it closer. If I see that no one reported that its still a problem with the current set of stable packages, and I can't test it quickly, or it looks like it should be fixed, I'm closing it asking for feedback. It doesn't mean that we are ignoring the issue, but obviously a lot of people have not been impacted by it or we'd be hearing stuff everyday :)

x86

Thanks to those of you that responded to my last request for ATs for x86. Its nice to know that people actually read my ramblings on here, and that there are people willing to help. Hopefully we keep getting new people so we can concentrate on improving QA in other ways than just ensuring proper testing for packages before moving them to stable. I have no idea on what we could do yet, but I'm sure people have good, and bad, opinions on that already.

Well, classes are over for the semester, which means I have more time to work on things now. First thing to do is get gcc-4.0.2-r2 put together and in the tree. I just backported a patch from gcc-4.1 to fix an ICE that was introduced by another patch I had added. Hopefully when I wake up later I see that all of the `emerge -e world`s I started have successfully completed. I'll give it a few days before putting it out just to make sure there are no code generation regressions (doubtful, but possible). This version will hopefully be added to ~arch soon after it is put in the tree. Most of the tree seems to be gcc-4.0 safe, so the transition shouldn't be too bad.

x86

We are still looking for arch testers (and possibly if you are good, arch dev :) ). Let me know via email if you are interested in helping out, or stop by #gentoo-x86 on Freenode. The more people we get to help out means the less work everyone else has to do. :)

Well, thanks to wolf31o2 and amne, we have a nice gcc migration doc. Thanks to that, I could mark gcc-3.4.4-r1 stable on x86 and hope to avoid most of the issues people are going to run into. Of course, this assumes people will go and read the doc, which I know isn't going to happen at first, but atleast we have somewhere to point them to :) Also, tomorrow is Gentoo Bug Day, so I hope to try and get some people to help me test some of the bugs that have been assigned to x86 for awhile, and are starting to rot.

gcc:

Well, now that gcc-3.4 is stable on x86, that means I can start to push for gcc-4.0 to get into ~arch :) We want to make another patchset before we think about doing that though. In my testing, I haven't run into any major packages that don't compile anymore, and have only been getting positive feedback from people running it. I'm sure there are still a few apps out there that are broken, and I either haven't found out about, or are going to take a little time to fix properly. Let me know if you run into problems via email or IRC so I can look into them.