Why is Melko sleeping

Yesterday Miklos bumped pacman-g2 to 3.8.7 in current, so what’s the point? It includes also my patch that adds a new capability: now it can downgrade packages! (eheh ok it’s not that cunning, afaik Archlinux’s pacman can do it since ages)

When using WIP repos, you may need to drop them and downgrade all the packages to the version that is in the -current repo. While this operation is quite easy (pacman already prints the packages that are newer than the ones in the repo so, once you have that list in a reasonable shape, you just have to reinstall them), I think it’s handy an option to let pacman do it for you.

From now you can use pacman-g2 -Suu to downgrade all the packages with a version number higher than the one in the repo.

Another year is gone. It’s now more than a year I’m using Frugalware (iirc I started using it in September 2010), and soon it’ll be a year I’m in the Developer Team too.

I had a look at my first contributions (puddletag was the first FrugalBuild I made), thanks to other developers I’ve improved my skills and I sent some other Frugalbuilds for other software too. Up to now I’m the maintainer of 104 packages, some of them were new, others belong to developers who aren’t active anymore. I know, 104 is a little number compared to some other devs (Devil505 has 967 packages, Bouleetbil 994), though I usually add a new package when I notice something I need isn’t yet in the repo, but I have to say that FW’s repos have a lot of packages now and everything I need is there.

I’m also glad I’ve helped bumping KDE since 4.7.0, I enjoyed it and I hope I can help with next releases too (4.8 is really close:). Another thing I’m kinda proud of is that I’ve managed to write some (stupid) patches for pacman-g2, to add some (I hope useful) features.

2011 has been a great year and I’m sure we’ll do even more in 2012, so I want to give you my best wishes for the new year. I want to thank other developers too, for the great things they did during this year, and as Phayz would say:

May you always be Frugal

I want to leave you with a poem:

Probably you already know that KOffice is not developed anymore and it’s going to be replaced by Calligra-Suite (if you nees some extra info google is your friend). Since Calligra hasn’t been released yet (while writing latest version available is the Beta 4), it can’t be pushed on Frugalware’s main repo. That’s why I decided to set up a wip, just add these lines to your /etc/pacman-g2.conf:

of course change i686 to x86_64 at your needs. You can install the whole set through the calligra package, or just install what you need (pacman-g2 -Sl melkotesting should give you a list of the packages available on my wip).

Another interesting software being developed is Telepathy-KDE, it’s still very young though I’m pretty sure that it’ll be a valid alternative to kopete (that as far as I know is a bit neglected). Telepathy-KDE 0.2.0 is available on my wip, you can install the whole set with:

or install just what you need, here are some hints from its wiki page:

You may also need some extra dep, like telepathy-gabble for jabber support or telepathy-butterfly for msn support.

As for Calligra you can find Telepathy-KDE on my wip, for any extra info look here (and through google as well).

Some advices:

Enjoy

If you’re bored by the classic kde taskbar applet, you may want to have a look at plasma-icontasks, Windows users can notice this applet looks very similar to Seven taskbar. Its integration with kde workspace is quite good, it can show the percentage of an operation in dolphin and it lets you control Amarok through play/pause buttons. Also plugins can be used to expand its capabilities.

Other features include opening a new instance of an application by middle-clicking on its icon, minimizing a group and closing tasks via tooltips (have a look at the project page for more). The software is actively developed (there’s a new release almost every day) and it’ll be integrated in kdeplasma-addons starting from KDE 4.8SC. Meanwhile I’ve packaged it for Frugalware, so it’s available in -current. Installation is just easy as typing pacman-g2 -S plasma-icontasks.

Probably you have noticed that pacman-g2 has an option to set a different path for its cache, this is very useful if (like me) you’re used to keep all the fpms you download. Since I have a kind of small root (15GB) while my home is almost empty, so moving pacman’s cache helps a lot.

Same thing about chroots, if you managed to build something inside a chroot, maybe you have noticed that it can grow a lot according to what you’re building (e.g. when I was building kde-l10n my chroot was about 5-6GB). Luckily there is an option also for this, just look at /etc/makepkg.conf and you would notice a CHROOTDIR var.

Last but not least, there’s another tool, I think the most important one, that is ccache. With this nice piece of software you can easily rebuild things faster, faster and still faster, so I guess it’s the best friend of every package maintainer. Up to now there wasn’t an option to set a custom path for its cache, so a solution would be to use a symbolic link or a bind mount. For that reason I’ve decided to write a patch that adds an option also for this, so starting from pacman-g2-3.8.6-2 you can notice a new entry in /etc/makepkg.conf (or in the .pacnew if you did any change):

as you could see, the default path is /var/cache/ccache, but you can uncomment that line and set your custom path, just don’t forget to chmod g+s the folder you’ll use for your cache and remember also that fst must be the owner of that folder.

Finally I can enjoy my root with 5GB free :D