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. …
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. …
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. …
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. …
ProcessBuilder
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. …
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. …
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. …
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. …
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. …
This post will show you a way to monitor CPU frequency and temperature on Linux-based systems without aid of any programs or packages that are not commonly preinstalled on major GNU/Linux distributions. No extra hardware drivers are required: the magic is done merely by a short Bash script in just a few lines that only relies on mechanisms provided by the Linux kernel itself and some most essential Unix commands. …