Tootfinder

While working through another last rites slew, I was thinking that back in the day there were a number of developers who believed they should add a lot of packages to #Gentoo, in the name of giving users a choice. Like, they were projects whose sole purpose of existence seemed to be to find every piece of software that roughly fit a specific topic, get it to build and package it for Gentoo.
Of course, the long-term effect of that is that there's a lot of unmaintained, often broken packages. "The choice" doesn't really work. Sure, users have a lot of packages to choose from — but they have to actually figure out which of these packages are actually useful (if any).
A few years ago attempting to remove packages also faced some verbal opposition. You shouldn't remove unmaintained or outdated packages, because they still work. You shouldn't remove packages that sometimes fail to build, because some flag combinations still work. You shouldn't remove packages that don't build at all, because the user can visit Forums and find some workaround to make them build 🤦. Or they'll have an ebuild handy to start working on it. And anyway, you shouldn't be removing stuff at all, but fixing it instead.
Sometimes the arguments were straight dishonest too: people literally said we need more packages to lure new users in. Like, it didn't matter to them that the packages didn't really work and that the people trying to use them will get a nasty surprise. They wanted people to say "hey, Gentoo has this software we need, let's start using Gentoo".

That was fun!
Gentoo, with all tweaks and stuff (zram, latest kernel etc): 5 hours and 25 minutes 🐮 Fully working Cosmic desktop, flathub enabled.
@… : I'm back 👻
#gentoo

#Gentoo kann sich beim #Linux #Kernel auch nicht entscheiden, oder? >_>
"for your editing pleasure" − "Automatically generated file; DO NOT EDIT."

#gentoo #zeitgeist #foss
Gentoo faces a slop dilemma:

Since my job is stable now and I have saved up some money, I have decided to stop accepting donations via GitHub Sponsors and Ko-fi. I would like to thank everyone who helped me over the years. There are people who need the help much more than me right now.
If you needed a suggestion, @… is doing a lot more than me for #Gentoo these days and will certainly appreciate your help. He's also way nicer than I'll ever be.
https://github.com/sponsors/thesamesam
https://ko-fi.com/thesamesam
To the best of my knowledge, Gentoo project does not need extra money right now, but there are other awesome projects such as Disroot or many Fediverse instances that would definitely use some help. However, in general I'd suggest towards supporting individuals rather than projects: people need money to live, and can use your donations directly, while projects are often bound by red tape.
Finally, please support human artists and craftspeople (and I'm counting human software developers in that). Donate to projects and people who resist enshittification and who refuse to use LLMs. They need the money.
Once again, thanks for all.

If I were to give a prize for the most disruptive workflow change of my life, it will be probably `less` changing home/end key behavior from scrolling to top/bottom (something which I do *all the time*) to disabling line wrapping and scrolling left/right (something I never do).
It's like XKCD#1172, except it's "we've decided spacebar heating is so cool, we've removed all other spacebar functions".
#Gentoo #Linux

Updating Codeberg repos. and adding things to my latest dwm build on Gentoo. Like yazi! Only one to go (tomorrow): Mango on FreeBSD!
#gentoo #suckless

Age verification in #Gentoo: if you're using Gentoo, you must be old enough. Problem solved.
#shitposting

Installing ungoogled-chromium-bin on Gentoo turned out to be very straightforward. Just as adding the Librewolf repo is btw. Recently I've been moving all browser installs over to these two. Both projects have been around for a long time and consistently deliver quality.
#gentoo #librewolf

Another Saturday wasting dealing with pointless churn from #LLVM developers constantly deprecating workflows #Gentoo use, because we are supposed to switch to this new fancy workflow that doesn't actually improve anything but lets them save 10 CMake lines, except it doesn't really work but who cares…
Honestly, one day I'm just going to last rite all Clang runtimes from Gentoo, and tell people to just use GCC.

#Python is just doing great. We're not having impossible constraints, as some projects need old #setuptools for pkg_resources, and other projects are starting to require newer setuptools for some fancy new features. And ofc after promising to release pkg_resources standalone over a month ago, setuptools upstream didn't deliver.
#Gentoo

Linux tips:
se in #gentoo ti trovi Baobab che si apre al posto di Thunar in HexChat e probabilmente da altre parti la soluzione é usare il comando
gio mime inode/directory
e re-impostare thunar.desktop come default con
gio mime inode/directory thunar.desktop
My Due Cent
#gentoo

Did a reverse install of Gentoo today. Installed dwm alongside KDE, made sure all was running well. Then deinstalled all KDE parts, did a deep clean and switched profile to just desktop (from desktop-plasma). Smooth, and keeping all settings, applications and tweaks as they were. Easily beats a 4 hour reinstall 😅
#gentoo

0 days since #Whalebone fucked up completely and #DNS4EU started resolving #Gentoo .org to some random Japanese site.

I hate 2026 already.
The reason:
IncorrectCopyright: version 6.30.2-r2: incorrect copyright year 2025: '# Copyright 2008-2025 Gentoo Authors'
#Gentoo

When you turn to dwm (as opposed to KDE, for a shorter compile) and forget Ghostty requires Zig 😜🤪
#gentoo

If my eyeball counting is correct, #Gentoo is already seeing more pull requests filed on #Codeberg than on #GitHub, over the last 5 days.

I've been wondering lately if my job is #bullshit.
I've given it a lot of thought, and I think it's not directly bullshit. I'm doing stuff that's meaningful, at least in a narrow scope, both in my dayjob and my #FreeSoftware / #Gentoo work.
That said, with the arrival of all the bullshit CEOs, CTOs, all their bootlickers, wannabe bootlickers, and all the CEO/CTO/bootlicker cosplayers, the whole software industry is becoming filled with bullshit to the brim.
Even if my work is meaningful, it contributes more and more to software that's either scam in itself, used to scam people or pure unadulterated bullshit. Even if the tools used to be useful, they either gain bullshit parts or bullshit dependencies.
I hate this, and it's making me hate what I'm doing.

My first instaban for #slop PR to #Gentoo.
Normally, we warn people first, but here it's clearly an untested (and obviously broken) slop contribution by non-Gentoo user trying to push their software all over the place.
#NoAI #NoLLM

> As a long-time Arch user all I can say is that (at least in my experience) #Gentoo requires so little maintenance compared to Arch and if I have a problem there is a wiki page for everything (literally).
#ArchLinux is much more demanding. And now I hide…

Yeah, why not neglect all the good recommendations in the #Python ecosystem, and instead fork your own C extension package, force people to build it with #ZigLang (it's still C), add unconditional dependency on that, and on top of that, refuse to publish wheels, "allowing for optimised compilation according to your machine's specific architecture and capabilities, instead of some (low performance) common denominator."
Fortunately, looks like #Gentoo can just ignore all the fancy crap and compile it with GCC.
https://pypi.org/project/ruamel.yaml.clibz/
[UPDATE: didn't last long: https://sourceforge.net/p/ruamel-yaml/code/ci/6846cf136e775ed0052cdef6ff02330269c86011/]

Proper #security nightmare time.
#LMDB is a database that's designed to operate on trusted input. Upstream has historically rejected all bug reports regarding problems with malformed input.
Py-LMDB project provides #Python bindings to LMDB that are normally built against bundled LMDB. Someone recently started mass-filing "untrusted input" vulnerabilities against py-lmdb, and py-lmdb started #slop - coding fixes to their bundled LMDB. Of course, nobody even bothered reporting most of these bugs upstream, and the one that I've seen reported was rejected as "don't do that".
Py-LMDB supports building against system LMDB, and #Gentoo was doing that so far. However, now we are facing a problem: system LMDB operates under the assumption that it is working on trusted input, while py-lmdb (and its bundled LMDB) operates under the assumption that it may be working with untrusted input. The guarantees no longer align.
If we continue to use system LMDB (and skip all the added slop tests that literally cause Python to crash), then Gentoo's py-lmdb package will now have different input expectations than upstream py-lmdb. And of course we can't just remove that crap because someone added exactly one package (TorchVision, i.e. part of the plagiarism machine suite) depending on it.
https://bugs.gentoo.org/971352

A short history of #SQLGlot:
2023-07: SQLGlot is added to #Gentoo.
2023-12: Rust extension is added.
2026-03: Rust extension is replaced by mypyc compilation.
2026-03: SQLGlot now requires its own mypy fork… 🤦
Seriously, what are these people thinking?!
EDIT: and of course it's LLM #slop now.
#Python

#LLM users should be obliged to buy *expensive* scraping offsets, and the money should go to #FreeSoftware projects that have to cope with their infrastructure being *killed* by crappy #AI scrapers.
Yes, #Gentoo is suffering from another wave. And yes, if you use their projects and therefore support their business model, please don't use Gentoo.

Isn't it great when you spend half an hour dealing with the fallout of some cool kid deciding it would be great if a totally random pure #Python package required a build backend written in #RustLang?
#Gentoo #uv

Just a random reminder that #Qt is not a good choice. Qt is an #OpenSource spew of a malicious company whose business model is based on constant API churn, and selling proprietary security support to people who can't keep up and are stuck on old versions.
Many volunteers (including #Gentoo developers) are spending hours keeping the previous Qt version alive, so people can continue using software that hasn't been ported to the next version yet, and helping with porting. Dozens of useful programs are dying along with old Qt versions.
#FreeSoftware

So I've started the (hopefully) cross-distro debate on the hard topic: how to deal with potential #AI #slop packages. Yes, I am burned out and depressed.
#Gentoo #NoAI #NoLLM #LLM

As I've mentioned, I've finished Xenoblade Chronicles 3D. So now #Gentoo gets an up-to-date games-fps/crispy-doom (an older version used to be in ::guru).
#games #doom #CrispyDoom

New on #blog: "Money isn’t going to solve the #burnout problem"
"""
The xz-utils backdoor situation brought the problem of FLOSS maintained burnout into the daylight. This in turn lead to numerous discussion on how to solve the problem, and the recurring theme was funding maintenance work.
While I’m definitely not opposed to giving people money for their FLOSS work, if you think that throwing some bucks will actually solve the problem, and especially if you think that you can just throw them once and then forget, I have bad news for you: it won’t. Surely, money is a big part of the problem, but it’s not the only reason people are getting burned out. It’s a systemic problem, and it’s in need of systemic solution, and that’s involves a lot of hard work undo everything that’s happened in the last, say, 20 years.
But let’s start at the beginning and ask the important question: why do people make free software?
"""
#FreeSoftware #OpenSource #AI #NoAI #LLM #NoLLM #Gentoo

I hear that #Python folk are going to enjoy their Monday.
#setuptools removed pkg_resources.
Thanks to Eli Schwartz for the advance warning. We're going to mask it in #Gentoo.

And non-zero version epochs in #Python are now officially discouraged. Not that anyone used them.
#Gentoo

#SigStore / #PyPI attestations: #PGP is hard! We must invent a new signing scheme that's so much easier on users.
The tools, after I've spent hours *integrating* them into #Gentoo, and getting them working for everything before:
* Verifying google_auth-2.46.0.tar.gz ...
Provenance signed by a Google Cloud account, but no service account provided; use '--gcp-service-account'
Yeah, I'm sure that's *so much simpler* than PGP.
#security

Let's get this straight: it is entirely normal for a #OpenSource project to accumulate bug reports over time. They're not a thing to be ashamed of.
On the contrary, if you see a nontrivial project with a very small number of bug reports, it usually means one of the following:
a. you've hit a malicious fake,
b. the project is very young and it doesn't have many users (so it's likely buggy),
c. the project is actively shoving issues under the carpet.
None of that is a good sign. You don't want to use that (except for b., if you're ready to be the beta tester).
#FreeSoftware #Gentoo #GitHub #Python

How to absolutely *not* do #OpenSource: require people to commit to work on other issues with your project in order to file bugs. So, sorry, #Typer, I won't be filing bugs. You figure out how you messed up your release yourself.
Also, please don't use #FastAPI. They are clearly bothered by the fact that people dare use their projects and waste their precious time with support requests.
#Python #FreeSoftware #Gentoo

Sometimes I wonder why do I even bother. I mean, people are perfectly happy to let statistical models designed as bullshit generators do their coding. Why do I even bother running their test suites and inspecting the failures as a human, if these tests may well be complete bullshit?
#FreeSoftware #OpenSource #Gentoo #Python #AI #LLM #NoAI #NoLLM #VibeCoding