2/22/2008
Current Happenings
It seems I tend to blog in bursts and then ignore my blog for a while. So in keeping up with that tradition, I’ll try to blog a little bit about what I’ve been working on.
Firstly, I’ve finally taken the plunge and officially joined the base-system herd. For a very long time, I’ve hung around the shadows of base-system so now I’ve finally joined up officially.
For a while I’ve had an issue with regard to MythTV support and the subversion.eclass. Basically we needed svn switch support and a decent revision reporting method. I finally got tired of waiting for the bugs about this to get fixed and started to do the work myself. Turns out zlin had some changes from the KDE herd that he wanted to push into the subversion.eclass as well. We ended up putting our heads together and cleaning up the eclass of a few problematic bits of code as well as provided the additional necessary features.
After that I have been able to get some work done on MythTV 0.21 so you should see some beta quality ebuilds in the tree for the upcoming 0.21 release. There’s still a few USE flag combinations that need to be tweaked and testing of USE flag combinations. As always, help is appreciated but all patches are referred to upstream. But also remember this code is beta quality so make sure you back up (the official MythTV documentation for backing up your database isn’t the greatest, you can see my updated instructions here) your MythTV database.
Tinkering with MythTV I discovered that Gentoo’s XvMC support is quite lacking in formality. I figured the best solution for Gentoo would be to always use libXvMCW, which is a wrapper for the various XvMC implementations. Then configure libXvMCW to use the proper implementation. This is where app-admin/eselect-xvmc comes into play, its designed to assist users with configuring XvMC on their system. Once it’s 100% tested, I will be adding it as a PDEPEND to x11-libs/libXvMC and all applications using XvMC will just dep on x11-libs/libXvMC and link to libXvMCW. For anyone wondering, x11-libs/libXvMC provides libXvMCW.
Lastly, I also ended up writing an eselect module for fontconfig. Currently, media-libs/fontconfig provides a bunch of configuration files in /etc/fonts/conf.avail/ and requires users to symlink them to /etc/fonts/conf.d/ if they’d like to use them. I got frustrated with trying to setup each box I had to how I wanted it and so I wrote an eselect module which should hopefully make configuration easier for everyone. You should be able to find it at app-admin/eselect-fontconfig and it should be pulled in by default if you have fontconfig on your system.
Filed under: 
1 Comment