Musings: More Python 3 compat, Project Sunrise, InspIRCd modules and Portage

Some good news: as I eix-sync'd this morning, I noticed that dev-python/ndg-httpsclient and dev-python/ipaddress now have Python 3 compatibility. That means two of the packages I had thought had no chance of being upgraded actually have been. As for my own efforts, I have been very busy with work and musl support patches lately, but I have been looking at fixing up the htop package next.

I've found Project Sunrise, a way for me to be able to contribute ebuilds to Gentoo in hopes of someday getting them in the master Portage repository. I'm hoping to add a few Python libraries first, then moving up to packaging SuperGameHerm and PyIRC once they've matured enough to be useable by external users.

While testing PyIRC, I needed to be able to use a few modules that are not a part of InspIRCd's main package. Since Portage didn't allow any way of including them in the installed package, I simply checked out the source code package, ran modulemanager to add the modules, then built only those modules. I copied them to the /usr/lib64/inspircd/modules directory and added them to modules.conf, and voila! Now I can do more IRCv3.2 testing.

Foxtoo: Gentoo + musl C library on 100MHz Pentium laptop

I haven't yet finished up writing all the content I want to write about the process needed to get this working, but I do have a little teaser picture to share:

That is a Compaq LTE 5150 with a 100MHz Pentium CPU and 40 MB EDO RAM running Gentoo Linux! The kernel version is 4.2-rc1 (because I'm an incorrigible ricer), it was all built with GCC 4.9.3 and it is using the venerable musl C library instead of glibc. Boot up takes only about 15 seconds off the 5400 RPM laptop IDE disk, and once booted, the minimal kernel I have + bash use only about 3 MB of the 40 MB total.

It may not seem like a very useful thing to have done, but I had a lot of fun building it up, and I've ended up finding and closing various bugs in everything from procps to the kernel itself. So I feel that not only has this been a fun personal project across two weekends, but it has been productive for the entire community :)

Python 2 -> 3 upgrade: status update

This is a small update on my bringing packages in Gentoo to Python 3.

I haven't had time to contribute as much to this effort as I had hoped, but I have successfully finished with two packages and the patches are now in the hands of upstream maintainers. I've been toying with the musl C library as an alternative to glibc (and I'll be posting about my experiences with that later), which has distracted me a bit from Python 3 work.

app-misc/ca-certificates

Required a bit of effort. Debian #789753 filed. Maintainer seems happy enough with it, but it's not in master yet.

dev-libs/evdev

This was simple enough; libevdev has had upstream support for Python 3 since 2013. Gentoo #553110 filed with a patch to update the ebuild accordingly. No response as of post time.