Allan McRae

Dusty recently introduced his Arch Bounty project. The basic idea is people have an idea of what they would like implemented in Arch Linux but are unable to implement it themselves. Instead, they craft a clearly worded specification for their proposal and submit it to the Arch Bounty site. Once the proposal is accepted, people can make a donation towards the completion of the project.

That seems a great idea for those who have big ideas without the know-how to implement them. And if many people want the same things, I can see quite a nice monetary motivator building up to get the job done. However, after several weeks, there is still a dearth of projects. Someone proposed creating a fully featured usenet client, but I think that is really too big of a project to succeed with this system (and the project was rejected from the system). And that is the sum total of all projects proposed so far…

Here are some ideas that I know people want implemented that would make good proposals:

• Universal sign-in across Arch sites (forum, wiki, bug tracker, AUR)
• Package signing in pacman
• Finally finishing the AUR2 (may be a bit ambitious)

Those are just ideas from what I see repetitively asked for on the forums (and I could think of while typing this…). I am sure there are many other ideas out there that people want implemented and would be willing to put a couple of dollars towards.

Big dust storm in Brisbane today. Some reports have visibility down to 200m, but all I know is the CBD is no longer visible from my work, which normally only happens during the worst thunderstorms. Being inside does not stop the dust annoying your throat and eyes…

Not as exciting as in Sydney where the dust in combination with sunrise caused everything to turn red and Mars like.

Photo source: Brisbane Times

I saw a post on the Arch Linux forums from a user wanting to build an Ada compiler and having issues with the PKGBUILD from the AUR. The main issue building the Ada compiler is that you need the Ada compiler to do it. Classic chicken and egg problem. The maintainer of the AUR package works around this by having the PKGBUILD download a tarball from his site that provides the necessary binaries to build the compiler. It is probably perfectly safe, but I would not be doing that… Also, according to the forum post, the binary compiler package seems slightly broken at the moment.

So I went on a mission to create some gcc-ada packages for Arch. I had some interesting problems along the way (you really should not try to compile on an x86_64 system with an i686 makepkg.conf…), but I succeeded in in the end. Get packages for i686 and x86_64 from here. Note that I provide the build files too, but remember you will need the package to build the package…

For those that are interested in how I bootstrapped this package (or do not trust my binaries), here are the details:

• Create a build chroot (sudo mkarchroot /path/to/chroot base base-devel sudo)
• Extract rpms from Fedora rawhide for gcc, libgnat, libgnat-devel and gcc-gnat into the chroot
• In the chroot: cd /usr/bin && ln -s ../lib/gcc/i686-pc-linux-gnu/4.4.1/cc1 cc1
• Comment out the makedepends and CC=gcc-ada lines in the PKGBUILD
• Build the package (sudo makechrootpkg -c -r /path/to/chroot)
• Revert the comments in the PKGBUILD, create a clean chroot, install the built gcc-ada package and rebuild

Then you end up with a nicely bootstrapped Ada compiler. Fedora packages were used as their tool-chain package versions are very similar to those in Arch and thus likely to actually work as drop-in replacements for our packages. Note that the last step is superlative given gcc bootstraps itself as part of its build process.

Edit: gcc-ada is now available from the Arch Linux repos.

Walking to the bus stop from work today, I saw a ginger cat walk past some construction materials where building renovations are occurring. Then I looked away and when I looked back I saw the same thing again. That made me wonder if it was the same cat or a different cat. We all know:

A deja vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.

That forced me to have a quick look to see if there was two cats. I could only see one, so that is a bit concerning. Then again, I did not want to seem like some weirdo breaking into a construction site to really check it out. I guess we will never really know… but it would be cool to know kung-fu.