This Week in SMGL (Nov. 12th 2007)

Last week was a busy week kicked off by Juuso "iuso" Alasuutari and topped off by the latest Source Mage developers meeting. Juuso wrote a new patch that has the potential to make a SMGL developer's life easier.
Here is the message from Juuso.

"I've written a patch for pkg-config which adds the option to log to a Unix socket. That means you can capture info about what packages a configure script is looking for -- without ever having to modify the scripts. You simply fire up a program that listens on a socket, set the PKG_CONFIG_LOG_SOCKET variable to point to that socket, and voilá: pkg-config will report the packages and versions requested from it.

Add to that some logic for matching pkg-config package names with spell names, and you get a program that tells you what spells a source package is hungry for.

I've uploaded a tarball with the patch plus an example program to demonstrate the feature. I'll highly appreciate any feedback. Get it at: http://www.cs.uta.fi/~a445063/pkg-config-logsocket.tar.bz2"

One of the new Source Mage developers welcomed last week was Enqlave. Here is the message sent by Sandalle.
"I would like to welcome a long-time SMGL user (since 2003) into the developer fold. You may know him from ages ago as Stelz, or perhaps more recently as Enqlave, or innocuous stealth, or the taken Codex on IRC. Those whom really know him say he is Vlad Glagolev, but we know his True Name. ;) Somehow we have managed to dupe him into helping out with our packages and he has even volunteered to focus on the python-devel and xfce sections, but we know he won't stay locked in those for long.
Please welcome our newest member to the Valley, Enqlave!"

Another new developer was also announced last week by Karsten "BearPerson" Behrmann.
"As I mentioned in the meeting, we have a new wizard grabbing a cauldron to help with the cooking of our ISOs. You'll probably know him as flux_control on IRC, or just plain flux. Someone managed to convince him to brave the insanity-producing vapors of the kitchen, to see if our Ancient Recipes (now with new flavor!) still work as they used to, and to stir the old fires up to a warm yellow glow again.

So please join me in a warm welcome to flux_control as he wanders the Valley to add his power to the Circle of Mages :)"

Sandalle also generated a new Grimoire stable-rc-0.15 to test. Here is the official message from him.
"The stable-rc-0.15 branch is ready and the Wiki is up at http://wiki.sourcemage.org/Stable-0.15 for our eager developers to start checking for bugs. I will generate the tarballs (x86 and x86_64) and put them on the wiki once they're up.
The stable-rc tarball has been updated on the server and will be working its way out to the mirrors."

Martin "mar_s" Spitzbarth has been working on a spell for the new ATI fglrx driver. He is making progress and has pushed the spell to a devel branch. He added some information about the spell to his web site.

Juuso "iuso" Alasuutari sent out a message about a Udev change coming.
"Udev's toolset (udevinfo, udevmonitor, udevsettle, udevstart, udevtest, and udevtrigger) will be merged into a single binary in the next release [0], our init scripts need to be changed then.
[0]
Source here"

Treeve Jelbert sent out an update on his KDE4 progress.
"I have just spent some time testing kde-3.95.2 in a clean amd64 partition, everything builds and mosts things that I need are ok, current problems:

*can't add printer
*any use of javascript crashes konqueror
*sometimes need ot force reload of a page in the browser

On my normal amd32 system I have problems building some packages, probably because of some obscure conflicts with kde3/qt3. Both systems now use xorg-modular."

Since David "dmlb2000" Brown had great luck and positive response from testers for glibc 2.7. He integrated it to the devel-glibc test branch Friday.

Project Lead Jeremy "Emrys" Blosser sent out a Lead Developer Vote for Paul Beel.
"We have a motion/second/acceptance of a Lead Developer Vote for Paul Beel aka novaburst. Please send your signed 'yes', 'no', or 'abstain' vote to me privately by Sun Nov 18 18:45 UTC. Lead Developers must vote, General Developers may vote.
http://www.sourcemage.org/VotingPolicy"

Finally, a developer meeting was held on 11-11-2007. There is a summary posted by Mage Power right below this post. If you want to read the entire log, you can read it here.

TUNE IN NEXT WEEK. SAME MAGE-TIME, SAME MAGE-CHANNEL!