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Refine Gentoo on Windows Subsystem for Linux

Feb 28, 2022 8 minutes to read

This article covers some information that can help perfect a Gentoo installation on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to maximize its performance, improve its interoperability with Windows, and even unlock new system capabilities. Originally, I had been planning to write a full Gentoo on WSL installation tutorial during September of the last year, but that tutorial was only halfway done before I had to move on for something more important in my real life, which is why I have disappeared from my personal site for almost another half of year (though you could find my development activities on GitHub if you looked at my profile). Now that I can enjoy a short break with some peace of mind, I have decided to at least complete that tutorial. But before I started, I happened to search for “Gentoo WSL” on Google out of curiosity. While I had been away, there was a new Gentoo in WSL article on Gentoo Wiki originally created on November 24, 2021. That article already covers the bulk of what I wanted to mention in my tutorial in a very concise way, and it is easy to find thanks to the fact that it is on Gentoo Wiki, thus I could no longer see the value of repeating the identical things in lengthy and verbose paragraphs on my personal site. …

GSoC 2021 Final Work Products

Aug 22, 2021 10 minutes to read

As this year’s GSoC has come and gone, it is time to compile a retrospective of all the work I have done for my GSoC project. In a nutshell, the bulk of my project was executed as I had planned in my original project proposal; some additional deliverables and enhancements not outlined in the original plan were made, while a few planned and relatively trivial deliverables were cut due to time constraints. …

An ebuild Testing Solution for ebuild Repositories

Aug 1, 2021 19 minutes to read

Common package managers implement the concept of software repositories to allow the set of packages installable from the package manager to be expanded. On Fedora, there is RPM Fusion and Copr repositories created and maintained by users. Arch Linux users are fond of the AUR, the canonical repository for user-submitted packages. On Gentoo, there is GURU, which is kind of like Gentoo’s equivalent of AUR, but it is just the tip of the iceberg of packages that are not in the official Gentoo ebuild repository (::gentoo). There are various testing overlays maintained by projects and development teams of Gentoo and repositories for out-of-tree ebuilds, like ::gnome, ::java, and ::science, let alone plenty of user personal overlays, like the Spark overlay I have been working on for example. …

Finding Leaf Packages Faster: Optimization for In-degree Computation in Dependency Graph

Jul 18, 2021 15 minutes to read

Dependency is a concept that appears often in software engineering. In the previous article for my GSoC project, I discussed build systems and package managers, both of which apply the concept of dependencies. A build system usually allows programmers to define different tasks in building a project and let each of them depend on other tasks, hence dependency relationships are established. A package manager supports declaration of package dependency relationships, or else it is not a good package manager. This article focuses on the latter, which is dependency relationships among packages. …

Introducing ebuilds That Build Kotlin Core Libraries from Source

Jul 5, 2021 Updated: Jul 8, 2021 16 minutes to read

An initial and successful attempt to create source-based Kotlin packages on Gentoo

Since the last blog post regarding my GSoC project was posted, I moved on to the next part of the project: improvements on the Kotlin ebuilds in the Spark overlay created during last year’s GSoC, namely dev-java/kotlin-common-bin and dev-lang/kotlin-bin. As shown by the -bin suffix in the packages’ names, these are packages that simply install the Kotlin library and compiler binary JARs pre-built by the upstream instead of build those artifacts from source like how the vast majority of Gentoo packages do and how Gentoo’s guidelines propose. At first, I thought it would be hard to build Kotlin from source on Gentoo with Portage, so I did not make any plan to create separate versions of those packages without the -bin suffix. Coincidentally, I discovered a possible way to work around Portage’s limitations that would prevent Kotlin from being built from source, so I immediately started to conduct experiments on building Kotlin libraries from source within Portage. The experiment results were promising, therefore I decided to spend some time working on this and eventually created ebuilds that can build Kotlin core libraries from source with a success. In this post, I will cover possible challenges in building a project like the Kotlin programming language on Gentoo, how my method of building it on Gentoo was accidentally discovered, and how the final ebuilds were produced. …

Properly Handling Process Output When Using Java’s ProcessBuilder

Jun 20, 2021 16 minutes to read

Another mysterious disappearance of me from my personal website has happened after the previous one in last November. The reason is the same: I had been quite busy. But unlike last time, I do not think that the things which kept me busy in the past month were futile. I spent significant amount of time helping students in a software engineering course for which I was a teaching assistant, and assisting others is always a meaningful activity in my opinion, regardless of the type of assistance being offered, the context, the recipient of the assistance, or the form. …

Gentoo Configuration Guide: systemd

Apr 27, 2021 Updated: Jul 31, 2022 5 minutes to read

As of now, the Gentoo Handbook, which is the official Gentoo installation guide, mainly focuses on steps to install a system based on OpenRC instead of systemd. After all, as a project mainly maintained by Gentoo developers, it would be a surprise if Gentoo did not introduce OpenRC as the distribution’s init system with primary support. For people who want to use systemd on Gentoo, the Handbook does include some instructions in itself, but it sometimes asks the users to refer to the standalone systemd article too. In my opinion, that article is very comprehensive but is not well organized: steps that should be performed during the installation process scatter around the entire article, making it easy to miss required steps. Therefore, this article is created as my effort to come up with a clear and working procedure for getting systemd to work on Gentoo. …

Gentoo Configuration Guide: GNOME on systemd

Apr 24, 2021 Updated: Jan 21, 2023 5 minutes to read

Getting a perfect GNOME configuration on Gentoo is not hard but is tricky. In other words, it would be a piece of cake once you have done it, but it is not easy to get it right with only one shot for the first time. The GNOME Guide on Gentoo Wiki is a good resource and is enough for a barely functional GNOME installation, but there are plenty of rooms for improvements, like removing the authentication dialog when modifying network settings, and enabling Wayland screen sharing in web browsers like Google Chrome. …

MC Forge Mod Dev Blog: Adding a Configuration GUI - 1.16 Version

Mar 31, 2021 14 minutes to read

The very first blog post for this series covered how I created a configuration GUI screen for a Minecraft Forge mod targeting Minecraft 1.14.4 and above, despite the fact that the related framework and library classes have been removed from Forge, and the core developers have decided that it should never be added back. I am extremely disappointed to see LexManos, the leader of Forge, harshly rejecting more than one year of hard work of @Cadiboo, the developer who started that linked pull request, with a willy-nilly closure of the pull request. This not only means another dissatisfaction of mine with the Minecraft Forge project but also my obligation to maintain an up-to-date method for creating a mod configuration screen. From my private communication with @yuesha-yc, a Minecraft mod developer who followed me on GitHub after reading my blogs and a current student of the high school I graduated from, I learned that my blog posts about a platform with extremely incomplete documentation can be very useful to developers of that platform. Thus, I will endeavor to share my knowledge about Minecraft Forge mod as before to the greatest possible extent. …

A Patchy System – Applying Patches with Portage to Fix Upstream Bugs

Mar 1, 2021 12 minutes to read

For many free software projects, there is usually some delay between the initial annoucement of a bug fix or an enhancement and the moment when you finally get the software update that ships it. As a user, you need to wait for the patch to get reviewed and accepted by the project, wait for the change to be tested and integrated, wait for the new version containing the change to be released by the upstream, and finally, wait for your distribution to ship the new release. Suppose there is a bug fix that will be included in the upcoming GNOME 40 release, which will probably be available in March 2021. If you are using Fedora Workstation, you must wait until the end of April to get that bug fix with Fedora 34. For Gentoo users, I would not expect the arrival of that bug fix until the second half of this year, because all recent GNOME updates took about half a year to land in Gentoo. …