drobbins

@cardinal I don't think your original bug report for this issue was optimal (https://bugs.funtoo.org/browse/FL-11069) I think it identifies the wrong problem. The real problem here is not that there was a blacklist installed -- the real problem is that by default, the nvidia-drivers are not supporting a legacy card. This is not optimal and if the nouveau drivers are more compatible with all generations of NVIDIA cards, it makes a more reasonable default for our DE stage3's. Therefore, I am thinking the bug should be "default nvidia-drivers on stage3 lacks support for legacy NVIDIA cards". And we would explore nouveau by default as a solution. Then we would incorporate the nouveau blacklist into nvidia-drivers so it installs only if you opt-in to the official NVIDIA drivers.

@kery thanks for plodding through this. For those interested, we have a full write-up of issues encountered by @kery during install in our Feb 23 Newsletter:

Meta-repo is not included in the stage3 tarballs. You have to run "ego sync" to get it. The problem here is that "ego sync" errored out. It would be interesting to see why it errored out. It does require a working network connection, so that could be the issue. Hard to tell without more details.

@shaw4543 yes, the proprietary nvidia drivers are active by default. If you want to use nouveau, you need to remove the blacklist. However, you may have simply worked around the original problem, as the nvidia drivers should have worked -- unless you have an older card that is no longer supported.

I'm really happy to announce our second official monthly newsletter! We have a much meatier newsletter this month, with recent technical updates, great news about Oleg aka angry_vincent, a profile of Kery, a new user – and his install challenges, and some really useful and detailed info about our bug tracker and how to use it well. Let’s start by covering the latest updates:

Our Second Newsletter! Welcome to our second official Funtoo Linux newsletter, covering the time period of February 2023! It’s exciting for us to get into a rhythm with newsletter releases. We have a much meatier newsletter this month, with recent technical updates, great news about Oleg aka angry_vincent, a profile of Kery, a new user – and his install challenges, and some really useful and detailed info about our bug tracker and how to use it well. Let’s start by covering the latest updates: Latest Updates Funtoo Linux now has debian-sources-6.1.12_p1 enabled by default. This appears to be working well with all the key packages that require kernel compatibility (zfs-kmod, nvidia-kernel-drivers). Harvester’s “harvester/2023-01” branch has been merged into master, meaning that all harvester changes are now part of official releases. The most notable change is an upgrade of binutils to 2.39_p5, as well as a harfbuzz update. We now have “harvester/2023-03” active and ready for PR’s. Our focus for March – updating Xorg. Adriano Bosco (aka “adbosco”) is working on this at the moment. Oleg and Ukraine Those who have been a part of the Funtoo community for quite some time are aware that Oleg, aka angry_vincent, used to serve as the project lead for several years, where he competently supported the Funtoo user community with great support and assistance. You may not be aware, however, that Oleg lives in Ukraine, and has been very personally impacted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, even prior to the “special military operation”. By extension, there is a personal connection between the events in Ukraine and the Funtoo Linux project. Even though the conflict is very far away from most of us, it feels very close. There is good news here, though. Daniel has been chatting with Oleg recently and Oleg will be assisting with maintenance and improvement of Funtoo from Scratch, and associated efforts, as he is able. We are really happy to have Oleg back in our community. If you see him around online, please welcome him back! New Jira We are now running a new version of Jira, which comes with its own set of changes. Let’s look at each one. Comments The latest comments on each issue are now at the top of the page, rather than the bottom. This is more convenient for some. However, this feature is still in its infancy, and even with the latest comment at the top of the page, there is a problem – the “Add Comment” button will still be at the bottom of the page, so if you want to add to the discussion, you have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page anyway. D’oh! And if it’s an issue with many comments, the latest ones will be hidden, so you can’t easily reference the latest comment to write a response. Double d’oh! Atlassian, please fix this soon! You can toggle back having the most recent comment at the bottom of the page by clicking this button on the right top of the comments: Workflow Cleanup In a feature that is better thought-out, workflow steps are now organized under their own sub-menu, rather than being individual buttons. This is a welcome change which cleans up the UI quite a bit: New Rules? In addition to Jira itself, the official “rules” for creating an issue on the Funtoo Bug Tracker (https://bugs.funtoo.org) were updated by Daniel. Previously, Daniel had a very gentle and metaphorical set of guidelines, which were in green, which appeared when the “Create” button was pressed on bugs.funtoo.org. Now, there are much stricter and direct rules that appear, which are in red. The underlying philosophy hasn’t changed, but the way the rules are being explained has gone through a dramatic change. The new bug tracker rules are designed to set clear expectations on what is acceptable, to ensure that compliant bug reports are filed. The stricter rules are necessary to provide clear guidance to the community, but are not intended to discourage you from filing issues on the bug tracker. Just please follow these new rules, and you will be fine. Here is the new text: If you are using personal overlays, custom USE settings or other non-standard things on your system, then your bug will be given low priority or may even be closed with little or no explanation. We are focused on supporting Funtoo users, who use Funtoo's official profiles with minor deviations only. In your new issue, please include: A description of what you were trying to do -- not just the actual breakage. This is called giving us context. A description of what happened. A description of what you expected to happen. How you are being impacted by this issue. Please attach build logs and ego profile show output, if appropriate. For feature requests, new package additions or other improvements please include an explanation of why the issue is important to you and could be beneficial to the Funtoo community. Please include any other information that might help us reproduce the issue. Please DON'T do the following: DON'T attach emerge --info output -- instead please attach ego profile show output as is much more useful and will allow us to try to reproduce the issue. DON'T use anything in Gentoo as justification to do or not do something in Funtoo -- Funtoo is a separate community with its own processes and development and we are under no obligation to do something just because Gentoo does it, or not do something because Gentoo doesn't do it. Please see the Wolf Pack Philosophy for more background on these rules. Users who repeatedly and flagrantly ignore these rules when reporting bugs may be banned from the Funtoo bug tracker and related community resources. It’s worth spending some time to discuss the rationale behind this change, and how Funtoo intends to use the bug tracker going forward. Bug Tracker 101 Let’s dive into some deep thoughts about the bug tracker, which will help you to understand why we do things the way we do, and help you use the bug tracker as an expert. The Funtoo Project utilizes the bug tracker in a quite peculiar way. Most projects will put in place strict rules in certain areas, but not others. For example, in most communities, you can receive unpleasant feedback from developers if you file a duplicate or if you let it show that you didn't read and understand the documentation thoroughly. On the Funtoo bug tracker, duplicates are welcome: they show that there are more people concerned about that issue, each one with their own personal experiences. On Funtoo, if you struggled enough trying to accomplish something to the point you thought you found a bug, then we consider it to be a bug, even if the issue was caused by something you did wrong. In the Funtoo ideal, everything should “just work” in the most intuitive way possible. If it doesn't, then that fact, in and of itself, is a bug. This is also different from most projects. Our openness about user experience provides some temptation to use the bug tracker as the project’s main forum for discussing various ideas and improvements – and here is where it is important to understand a subtle but important rule that is enforced: any idea proposed on the bug tracker as a feature request should include justification as to why this change would be beneficial to you as well as to the larger Funtoo community. This means you should not simply describe the technical change, but also make clear the motivation and reasoning behind it. This is very different from how most bug trackers operate, where pure technical discussions are the norm. In Funtoo, the “heart” of every issue should be a human story and with a clear explanation of how it benefits people. Not sure if others are interested in your idea? At least explain how it benefits you. So, you have permission to discuss your personal needs on the bug tracker. But at the same time, Daniel doesn’t support the idea of using the bug tracker for general discussion – all comments on each issue should be focused on the specific issue at hand, and moving it towards resolution. And careful attention must be paid by all participants to not “hijack” the issue with tangential comments or ideas. The bug tracker is not an appropriate place for a “general brainstorming”-style discussion. If your idea is still in the brainstorming stage, Funtoo Linux does have forums at https://forums.funtoo.org, which are recommended for discussions, as well as Discord and Telegram servers/channels. These are great resources for soliciting feedback on your ideas. So – did I mention that Funtoo rules were a bit peculiar? These subtle but important rules, when followed consistently, make a huge positive difference for the Funtoo community. This user-centric way of using the bug tracker – with clear limits – tends to get misunderstood. Users will assume we allow free-flowing discussion, or think we are extremely strict and avoid reporting important issues that are annoying to them personally, thinking we don’t care. Neither one of these extremes is the reality at all. It’s probably fair to say that we are strict in how we use the bug tracker, but we are strictly focused on having a productive and positive force for improving the human experience with Funtoo. Finally, it’s important to understand that in Funtoo – unlike in Gentoo – we are all using standardized profiles, not every possible USE flag combination – and that the bug tracker is primarily focused on improving our official profiles. Issues related to non-standard settings will be significantly deprioritized. On the other hand, if our official profiles aren’t working for you, that itself is a bug, and you should explain how our default settings are sub-optimal and how we should change them or improve Funtoo so you don’t need to use custom USE settings in the first place. If in doubt – create an issue. We will give you feedback if it is best handled elsewhere. New User – Kery Kery joined the community on February 17th, when he was about to install Funtoo for the first time. He downloaded the GNOME stage3 Westmere tarball and started the installation process, but he would run into weird error messages, like chroot and even bash failing due to “illegal instruction”. It turns out that Kery had chosen the correct sub-architecture tarball “Westmere tarball” for his Pentium P6200 (Arrandale variant of Westmere), but the fact is that P6200 lacks the extensions SSE4.1, SSE4.2, AES and PCLMUL, which GCC assumes are available on every Westmere chip. The solution was to choose the core2 tarball instead, which matches the Westmere Pentium P6200 actual available instruction set. Basically, what happens here is that the chip manufacturer and the GCC developers have different opinions on what constitutes an “architecture”, or “sub-architecture” to use the Funtoo terminology. For the manufacturer, “architecture” means how the chip is physically built; for GCC, it means what instruction set is available. Both are correct most of the time, but in the case of the Westmere chips, not all models ship with the same instruction set. In the P6200 case, it has the same instruction set as what GCC considers to be a Core2 chip. Kery also found out that our fchroot tool would silently fail when there was a CPU instruction set incompatibility between the binaries in the tarball and the physical hardware on which fchroot running. After working through these issues, Kery managed to successfully install Funtoo on his P6200 box using the Core2 tarball, but when he tried to run any GNOME application, the entire session would crash and he’d be thrown back to the login screen. He had followed the instructions in the documentation in the order they were presented, but that didn’t lead to a working GNOME desktop as expected. It took some digging, but he soon found out that the problem was that he hadn't installed the correct X driver. So, he went back to the documentation to find out how to do it. He learned that he needed to add the “gfxcard-intel” mix-in to get the driver he needed and run a full world update. It turns out that this mix-in, which is normally enabled by default, is not enabled for the core2_64 subarch. Unfortunately that still didn't work. He couldn't even start the X server now. Eventually, he discovered that he needed the i915 mesa driver, which is provided by the gfxcard-intel-classic mix-in instead, which led to another world update. Basically, he had found another bug, but this time the bug was in the documentation. The “classic” driver enables the “xf86-video-intel” ebuild, which is required for some older Intel integrated graphics chips, but is no longer the recommended default, which is now provided by the modesetting driver enabled by the “gfxcard-intel” mix-in. Once his video was working, another bug was found. Kery was using the “lxqt” stage3, and he found that LXQt was not being enabled as the default desktop environment. Another bug, and another thing for us to fix. Probably most Funtoo user (or Gentoo user for that matter) have gone through some struggle when they installed the system for the first time. What makes Kery's story different is that he happened to go down a path that hit a surprising number of bugs and he communicated everything, both his difficulties and his findings. Each roadblock has its own issue reported on the bug tracker, and we will be addressing every reported issue by improvements to our stages and documentation to prevent other users from encountering similar problems in the future. His efforts in reporting the issues will result in Funtoo being better for everyone. Thanks, Kery, for taking the time to do this! We’re going to be working on the issues you reported. EOL Thanks everyone for joining us for this month’s newsletter! Our plan is to make this newsletter a true “hub” for our distributed Funtoo community and appreciate you reading all the way to the bottom 🙂

A lot goes on in the Funtoo Community in a month. Here are some highlights of what happened along the month of January 2023. We will be publishing a newsletter every month going forward to keep you up-to-date on what's going on in Funtoo: Note that we are using the Blog functionality of the Forums to publish the newsletter. This also gives you the ability to subscribe to a syndication feed to be notified of new newsletters, and the newsletter itself has a comment section on the bottom which you can use to provide feedback. Best, Daniel (Many thanks to Adbosco who is the editor of the newsletter) If you want to have anything appear in future newsletters, please reach out to @drobbins or @adbosco -- here on forums or on Discord.

Funtoo Newsletter, January 2023 A lot goes on in the Funtoo Community in a month. Here are some highlights of what happened along the month of January 2023. And the first thing we have to announce this month is the start of this monthly newsletter itself! Funtoo Newsletter The lack of consistent and effective communication over time have led even active contributors to remain oblivious for months of certain developments have been put forth by other members. This can make things confusing and even frustrating. In order to keep everybody up to speed with what's happening, including major software updates, infrastructure upgrades, community rules, new projects and future expectations we will be publishing this short newsletter every month. Linux 6.1 sys-kernel/debian-sources was upgraded from v.5.18.16_p1 to v6.1.4_p1. This means that now we have '''Linux 6.1''' on Funtoo! The upgrade was fast-tracked due to issues with Realtek Wi-Fi in the previous official kernel, 5.18.16_p1. You can read more about the Realtek Wi-Fi issues in Funtoo Bug https://bugs.funtoo.org/browse/FL-10937. This issue is confirmed fixed in v6.1.4_p1, but Linux 6.1 brings much more. The jump from 5.18 to 6.1 brought 15 thousand non-merge commits, with a lot of improvements. Here are some highlights: Official support for Intel 4th gen Xeon and 13th gen Core (Raptor Lake) processor. Support for ARM-based laptops, such as the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 chip. Support for the new Intel Arc dedicated GPU's. Better performance for AMD Ryzen Threadripper and AMD EPYC. Better Btrfs performance. Countless new drivers, for devices ranging from GPU's to hardware sound and gamepads. Whether or not you will see any difference or not depends a lot on your particular CPU, GPU and other devices, but some people did report that everything seemed to run faster on the new kernel. Plasma-5.25.5 / KDE Gear 22.08.1 These are mostly bugfix releases that came out in 2022's last quarter. After a good amount of internal testing, the new releases have been incorporated into Funtoo in January 2023. Thanks to R0B for pushing this forward and all who tested it (Special thanks to Morphmex!) Some minor bugs were encountered after this update during last month, but they were quickly resolved. Scanner Support for Next Some dependencies had been “beard-trimmed” from Next-release and the scanner support was broken. Now, all the Sane Frontends/Backends, XSane and scanner drivers are fully supported on Next, including OCR capabilities. Development Languages Funtoo now has Go v1.19.5 and Rust to 1.57.0. Python 2.7 is still available but is deprecated, as there's no upstream support anymore. Some packages still require Python 2, but we are working towards upgrading or removing those packages. OpenCL eselect deprecation Funtoo has an eselect module for OpenCL, which allowed the user to choose among different OpenCL implementations (Mesa, AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, etc.). However, in most cases that job can be done by dev-libs/ocl-icd and nvidia-drivers now installs files in different locations, which prevent eselect from working. Some work has already been done towards removing the dependency on app-eselect/eselect-opencl from the ebuilds and we still have 9 ebuilds on the tree that do. When that work is concluded, app-eselect/eselect-opencl itself will be removed from Funtoo. Development Model Changes Funtoo has long adopted the BDFL model (like the Linux Kernel Project), where the decision making was centralized around Daniel Robbins and the staff just followed along. From December 2022, up to the first half of January 2023, a new system was introduced, where Daniel stepped down and BDFL and the decisions were taken by consensus among the staff, as Daniel focused on moving his family across the United States. In the Funtoo project, it was an interesting experience. There was very good work done by borisp, siris, coffnix, adbosco and others on a technical level -- and things looked like they were going in a good direction. But some problems were encountered. Daniel jumped back into BDFL role by the end of January. Daniel saw evidence that too much was given to this team, too quickly, with not enough support, training and clear responsibilities. While they did an admirable job in many areas, 1.4-release had some unresolved breakage lasting several weeks, and the python packaging package had been broken and gone unfixed for some time. While Daniel was originally very upset, he concluded in the end that the staff were put in a challenging situation, performed admirably especially considering the circumstances, and apologized for getting upset in the first place. He acknowledged that he often has unreasonable expectations. More work needs to be done to find the optimal model to allow community leaders to succeed. This realization gave birth to additional development of a more defined community leadership model, which shall be gradually implemented throughout the next few months. It will likely be a mentorship model and as it takes shape, announcements will be made to recruit people interested in learning and contributing in different areas of the Funtoo Project, and an emphasis will be placed on skill building. Stay tuned!

Everyone -- some major news today. Metro, our official stage3 build tool, now has a brand-new setup tool which should make initial setup of Metro quite easy. Please check out our high-quality initial setup docs, written by @adbosco. That's not all. You may have heard of our Evolved Bootstrap project, which is also called Funtoo from Scratch. The goal of this project has been to build Funtoo completely from scratch, in a fully automated way. In other words, it's possible to build Funtoo without starting from a Funtoo or Gentoo system, just from a base gcc compiler. We have been building a stage1 using Funtoo from Scratch for several months in beta form, but today we have successfully had this stage1 be accepted by Metro, and used to build a stage2 and stage3. This opens a new world of possibilities for bootstrapping Funtoo, and also opens up new possibilities for development. Just as for Metro, we have full documentation on how to tie FFS and Metro together, on our wiki. Best, Daniel

Hi All, Our initial havester branch, harvester/2022-09, has been merged into the official Funtoo tree (info here: https://www.funtoo.org/Funtoo:Harvester/Branches/2022-09 ) Now, we have launched a new harvester branch, 2022-10: https://www.funtoo.org/Funtoo:Harvester/Branches/2022-10 For more information on Harvester, our CI tree, please see: https://www.funtoo.org/Funtoo:Harvester Best, Daniel

@uudruid74 next-release dropped things in "nokit", as we are trying to determine which of the 20,000 or so ebuilds are actually being used by the Funtoo community. We can add back things that are missing that you need. Please open an individual issue for each thing you find missing or broken in next-release and we'll work on getting these fixed.

@ser we have expanded our staff to include @adbosco who has recently worked on improving our printing stack. I am sure he would be interested to look at this. For bugs login, please make sure to use your username in lowercase.

Hi all -- I'm happy to announce our most recent new technology, called "Harvester"! You can learn more at https://www.funtoo.org/Funtoo:Harvester (including FAQ and Developer FAQ) with a summary below: The harvester project is focused on providing a meta-repo that can be used for active development by Funtoo Linux contributors. This allows evaluation of experimental and potentially disruptive changes in a completely separate tree without impacting regular Funtoo Linux installs. The Harvester Concept Harvester exists as a branch of kit-fixups, which is listed at the top of this page. harvester.funtoo.org uses it to generate a full meta-repo, containing experimental changes. These changes are made available via git from harvester.funtoo.org directly, and can be consumed via ego sync. Harvester Benefits With harvester, we aim to: Make community testing easier By providing a system that can be used to do full community-based integration testing without having to locally generate your own meta-repo. Accelerate development By providing a 'judgement-free' space to evaluate aggressive and potentially breaking changes, and to learn how these changes impact Funtoo, for better or worse, without causing problems on live systems. Make things more fun We all have limited time. Sometimes we make a 'best effort' to test our PR, but it still breaks something. This is definitely "not fun" for the contributor, for Funtoo staff, or for users. We want to avoid these situations, and avoid having to frantically rush to clean up breakages that impact users, or get upset at people for braking the tree. Harvester allows us as a community to roll out mature, tested changes to users. This keeps Funtoo development "fun" and a positive experience for all! We don't want the 'stressful way' of dealing with problems to be our default way. It should only be the rare exception. Our process should produce successful results rather than demand individual perfection. Harvester supports a process that keeps things "fun" by reducing the risk and thus stress related to changes to Funtoo.

@gigabot3457 when you have a messed-up system, it can be useful to just repeatedly emerge -auDN @world and gradually things will get in better shape. You can temporarily --exclude packages that are not yet building to get other parts in place.

@fredmyra we spent the weekend working through the tree and these various issues should all be resolved now.

I'm happy to announce the release of Funtoo Boxer, the official tool for creating Funtoo Linux containers and VM images. The official "home" of Funtoo Boxer is on GitHub, with documentation viewable there: https://github.com/funtoo/boxer The purpose of Boxer is to have an officially-maintained tool for creating container and VM images for Funtoo, so that our users don't need to search the internet for scripts to build containers and VM images, and so we can easily maintain and document these processes so they always work optimally. In the 1.0.3 release, we currently support the creation of Docker and Singularity container images, with more container and VM formats to be added in future releases. To install boxer, you can "emerge boxer" on Funtoo systems. On non-Funtoo systems, a "pip install funtoo-boxer" should install it. Additionally, it is possible to run Funtoo Boxer directly from a cloned git repository -- please see the README.rst for more details on this. Enjoy Boxer -- and we welcome GitHub pull requests for this new and exciting tool! Best, Daniel Robbins

@uudruid74 We can help. Email support@funtoo.org with your request, and @coffnix should be able to take a look at your system and assist with upgrading your container. It's good to update it to a current release as there are a multitude of security fixes which are good to have on your container. We can assist with migrating the data. Best, Daniel

Hi All, Have you ever thought about officially joining the Funtoo project and helping us move Funtoo forward? I've added a new Staff (General) role to our Open Roles page on the wiki! This job description now defines what we officially expect from all Staff for the Funtoo Linux project -- basically the baseline for our team. It's where everyone should start if they are wanting to get officially involved with being part of our team. Why have this job description formally posted? In the past, joining our staff has been an informal process of being involved to some degree on Discord and engaging with us. While this has been low-key and flexible, we have a variety of people who have a variety of time commitments and expectations have not always been clear. As the project is growing, we are defining more focused goals for the project and a more straightforward, open and consistent application process is needed. If you are already contributing actively to Funtoo, consider applying for a Staff position and joining us by sending an email to jobs@funtoo.org 🙂 If you are currently Staff or have previously been Staff for Funtoo, consider this a way of getting more insight into how we are trying to more clearly define our culture and work community, and take a look at our direction. This is going to help us to build the kind of community that we can be truly proud of. Best Regards, Daniel Robbins Creator, Gentoo Linux BDFL - Funtoo Linux

All -- If you develop autogens for Funtoo, then you know that metatools is our official tooling for performing autogen magic. I have just released an official 1.1.0 release of metatools. Plenty of major new features, which are described on the wiki: https://www.funtoo.org/Funtoo:Metatools/Releases/1.1.0 An ebuild for metatools-1.1.0 will appear soon in the Funtoo meta-repo. Enjoy.

@dutch-master SSL cert for build.funtoo.org looks fine. This is most likely because your system's clock was not set properly, making it appear that the cert had expired when it has not. Setting the date/time on your system (which is covered in our install docs) should fix this. See step 7: https://www.funtoo.org/Install/Setting_the_Date Best, Daniel

atop is not installed by default. To see if it was installed by Portage, run: ls -dl /var/db/pkg/sys-process/atop* You can look of the dates of the files in this directory to see when it was installed. Best, Daniel

Hi everyone, It is quite a momentous day in Funtoo history as we have our first official public job posting! We are now actively hiring Staff Engineers. Please see https://www.funtoo.org/Open_Roles/Staff_Engineer for information on the role and how to apply. Staff Engineers are very senior Engineers who have some leadership responsibility as well, so it is a role above "Senior Engineer". PLEASE NOTE that these open positions have the possibility of regular compensation thanks to the support of the Funtoo community and containers. These are true community-supported roles, to serve the community with great Funtoo Open Source/Free Software work!

Hi All, At this time, I have made next-release the recommended release of Funtoo Linux for most people, as it has a very recent release of gcc and has more modern support for applications. 1.4-release is still available but unless you are specifically looking for a stable release, most users will want to install next-release at this time. If you go to the https://www.funtoo.org/Download link, you will see that next-release stages are now available for all x86-64bit builds of Funtoo Linux including amd64-zen3, as well as riscv-64bit and raspi4-64bit. Soon, I will be updating install documentation to reflect this fact. If you would like a build of 1.4-release, you can always grab it from https://build.funtoo.org directly, and I wlll be looking into making wiki improvements so that the Download page will inform users when this option is available.

@cbdougla I am also experiencing this in a vCenter environment, but it's only happening on one VM, so it's very odd. I am still investigating. It definitely doesn't happen all the time. display settings on each VM are "auto" (which is normal for vCenter).

New Direct CDN Beta! A new Funtoo Direct CDN infrastructure is currently in beta. Leveraging our kind support from CDN77, this new infrastructure vastly improves distfile downloads. I will describe some of the technology behind this in a future post, but for now just know it fixes a "lot of things", and you can test it out by adding the following to your /etc/make.conf: GENTOO_MIRRORS="https://direct.funtoo.org" In the next Funtoo release of Portage, coming in the next few days, this CDN will become our default (meaning portage will use this new CDN after an upgrade without any /etc/make.conf setting) and the older fastpull will be deprecated. Jira Changes! I've made several changes to Jira that the Funtoo Community should be aware of. The Jira workflow has been optimized -- all new issue will now be in the "Needs Triage" state. Funtoo Senior Staff will be able to triage issues, filling out an Impact field describing the impact of the issue, and setting a Priority to more clearly reflect the severity of the issue and its negative impact. Once an issue has been triaged, it is then ready to be worked on by a member of the Funtoo Community. There is also now a hard-limit maximum of 5 issues that any given user may have in an "In Progress" or "Test/Integration" state at one time. This was done to prevent people (such as myself -- I am the worst offender) of accumulating many, many issues that are theoretically in progress but are really stalled. To help make this less painful, you can now move issues out of your "in progress" stack by clicking "stalled" -- this will result in the issue being unassigned from you and moved into the "Work Queue". In the past, "Work Queue" could not be touched by mere mortals, meaning you couldn't "Start Work" on anything in Work Queue, making this issue state kind of useless to anyone. This limitation has been removed! This means that you should not be afraid to use the "Stalled" button to move things out of your In Progress bucket, because you can always "Start Work" on these issues again when you are ready to resume work. As part of this new change, I have also moved 50+ issues from "In Progress" to "Needs Triage". If anyone needs an issue triaged so that it can be moved back to "In Progress", please let @drobbins or @seemant know! (Otherwise we will triage the issues as soon as we can.) So, how do you know when you've reached your 5-issue In Progress limit? Jira currently doesn't show you any warning -- you will just not be given the option to "Start Work" on any new issues. Want an easier way to keep track of what is in your In Progress stack? -- Use this query: https://bugs.funtoo.org/issues/?filter=12503 (To find this in the future, go to Jira -> Issues -> My Bugs In Progress). The goal of these Jira changes is to help to optimize our overall utilization of Jira to increase our velocity, and also ultimately allow "In Progress" status to reflect the reality of what is truly being actively worked on, and help us to work better as a distributed team. This also positively coerces us to close out those "almost done" issues to free up our availability, which I think is a really good development practice. I am continually open to feedback about Jira so if you have some additional suggestions on how to improve things, be sure to find me on Discord and let's chat!