dutch-master

@aitikin I gave you a sarcastic answer as a response to your threat of: "But, frankly, if you send me ANY ONE SINGLE YouTube as a solution, I'm gone." I'm calling out your threat.
Do you think that maybe your inability to find support could be related to your immature and ranting behavior, rather than any deficiency in our project and documentation?
 
 

Hi @aitikin I understand the frustrations you're facing, and we're here to offer our support. If you could reach out to us on Discord in the #general channel, I'll be there to assist you personally – my username is Coffnix. I'm eager to hear your ideas about how we could improve the way you find solutions to your problems. Also, feel free to utilize this forum for any queries you might have. Just send over your questions, and we'll work together to find a resolution. Remember, at Funtoo, we're more than just a community of users – we're a network of friends ready to help each other out.

Did that video help?

And it looks like ncftp doesn't build.  I've been using that program since the early 90s.  I'm beginning to see I quit messing with this thing. 3 pieces of software that were just fine and now I can't even install them?  Yeah, this isn't for me.  I just want it to work, not spend half my life on the simple shit.
 
/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/11.3.0/../../../../x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/bin/ld: bookmark.o:(.bss+0x20): multiple definition of `gBm'; gpshare.o:(.bss+0x0): first defined here

Linux, and Funtoo, are international. His (her?) native language (very likely) may not be English. Nor is mine ?  It also means (s)he may not be aware of 'social rules' that govern (online) conversation in English. And even so, discussions on the web always miss a vital component in human interaction: non-verbal communication. Body-language. Smileys, and by extension emoticons, are a way to circumvent this, but generally do a poor job, TBH.
 
To be frank, there is a valid point in his comments: not every Funtoo user is a coder. Not every Funtoo user wants to use Discord, let alone be online on it for 24/7, just to get the latest on the project. Not every Funtoo user tracks the latest issues on bugs filed on the bug-tracker. This forum is also a communication platform for the Funtoo project, as you obviously understand, but I notice it's not really treated as such as updates are not very frequent. Now, I understand you'd prefer working on patching code to improve Funtoo over posting updates here, but too little updates here ultimately leads to the above conversation.
 
Just me tuppence ?

One more thing to consider: not everyone wants to use Discord.

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!

We currently have a problem -- there is way too much happening with Funtoo Linux.
So we have WAY TOO MANY *MAJOR* announcements. Let's try to get through all of them!
Funtoo Linux has its own LiveCD/LiveUSB! Many thanks to @coffnix and @pnoecker for making this happen! The official install docs have been updated to reference this LiveCD, and it will be perpetually downloadable from https://build.funtoo.org/livecd/. What's the big deal, you ask? Well, it's running our official debian-sources kernel, so it will recognize the hardware supported by Funtoo. It's in sync with Funtoo stage3's. Yay. It also has NetworkManager available so the "nmtui" command can be used to set up your network. That's a convenience, but not really that impressive. What IS impressive is that included on the LiveCD is our innovative fchroot tool, which allows you to "chroot" into arm-64bit, arm-32bit and riscv-64bit filesystems thanks to the power of QEMU! This makes it an ultra-powerful rescue image. Other cool and amazing things are on the LiveCD. You can eventually learn about everything LiveCD here as we get this page done: https://www.funtoo.org/Funtoo:New_Install_Experience/LiveCD
There's MORE:
Ryzen "Zen 3" stages now available, running next-release! https://www.funtoo.org/Amd64-zen3  SiFive Freedom U740 RISC-V stages, running next-release! https://www.funtoo.org/SiFive_Freedom_U740 -- thanks @calrama 64-bit Raspberry Pi 4/400 stages, running next-release! With GNOME and lxqt support! https://www.funtoo.org/Raspberry_Pi_4! Raspberry Pi 4 will be moving to an "A" support level in Funtoo momentarily and will be part of our official install docs soon. Also, in case you didn't notice above, lxqt stages are available for amd64-zen3 and raspi4, and will be appearing gradually for all other subarches! And also if you did not notice, the updated next-release builds  are starting to appear for download! (RISC-V, Raspberry Pi 4 and AMD Ryzen "Zen 3" will only be available for next-release.)
OK, that's all the announcements we have for now. Please return to whatever you were doing before you read this announcement.
Thanks to the Funtoo user community who helped to make this all happen. Besides these announcements, there are many other improvements and fixes that have been incorporated into Funtoo. If you have helped, thank you from me as well as the others who will enjoy your improvements. Let's keep pushing forward to build on these amazing successes.
Best Regards,
Daniel Robbins, BDFL.
 

Hello, everyone! Here's a summary of things going on in the Funtoo community -- and there is a lot to talk about:
First, we'll start with the March Stages Refresh -- All Funtoo stage3's have been rebuilt as of 2022-03-10 or so and contain the latest package updates.
Funtoo Community Live Streams -- @siris has been running Funtoo Community Hacking Live Streams on Funtoo Discord -- These have been happening twice weekly and are a great way to get familiar with creating Funtoo autogens and just connecting with other people hacking on Funtoo. You can view upcoming Live Streams by going to our Discord and looking at the "Events" list. This link will show you open autogens on our bug tracker than you can help to tackle, and this wiki link will show you PR's that were turned into autogens, so you can learn from the past work of others.
Projects, Projects and More Projects! -- I've been building out a Projects infrastructure on the wiki, and as of right now we have launched over 12 projects! You can view the projects list on the right side of https://www.funtoo.org, and there is a live feed of project updates on the main page, too. This project infrastructure exists to help build out our efforts and also help users to find ways to get more involved. More is coming...
Security Project -- Is now officially organized, and actively engaged in addressing CVEs and other potential security vulnerabilities in Funtoo. There has been a very significant focused effort to fix CVEs in the past few weeks. Thanks to @mrl5 and @invakid404 and other community members for efforts here.
Evolved Bootstrap Project -- This is a project that @pnoeckerand I are spear-heading, with significant contribution from @invakid404 and @alex2101 -- documenting the steps on one wiki page that can be used to build out a cross-toolchain. What is the significance of doing this? Well, it will serve as a foundation for more innovation in the future in regards to Funtoo. We're starting phase 2 of this effort now that we have a PowerPC 64-bit cross-toolchain as well as an ARM-64bit MUSL toolchain documented. Phase 2 involves documenting -- on one wiki page -- how to build up a Gentoo/Funtoo system using the cross-toolchain. Getting all the steps on one wiki page is important, because bootstrapping a compiler toolchain is very order-dependent and having the big picture of the steps and their order helps us to streamline and innovate the process, which is harder to do when everything is isolated in individual ebuilds. Expect some interesting things to come from this project in the future.
Telemetry Project -- @siris has launched the Telemetry project, which is now starting phase 3. The goal of phase 3? No less than engineer a custom Golang Funtoo Prometheus exporter on code.funtoo.org that can expose all types of fun and useful Prometheus metrics about a Funtoo Linux system. Exciting stuff!
Languages Project -- @seemant has organized an umbrella Programming Languages Project, whose goal is "to enable developers to embrace Funtoo Linux as their preferred platform for programming. We aim to do this by ensuring that each programming language is able to supply a reasonably stable version and a reasonably up to date version of each language, as appropriate." @alex2101 is doing some excellent work in helping us to finally deprecate python2.7 in next-release. Find out more at the Funtoo Programming Languages project page and in the #languages project channel on Funtoo Discord.
New Funtoo Software Releases -- We have recently seen the release of fchroot 0.2.2 (major update), ego 2.8.6 (including fixes for AMD microcode), as well as metatools 1.0.2 (major release with no need for mongodb).
Beyond these things, there's even more stuff going on -- these are just the highlights. To connect with any of these efforts, please visit us on Discord. We look forward to working with our users to move these various efforts forward 🙂
Best,
Daniel

Hello all and happy 2022!
So, I've been around for about 60 days now, and I wanted to share some of what I've been doing and some thoughts from Daniel and the development team.
I've been slowly getting to know the Funtoo ecosystem more and more each day.  From exploring the Funtoo system from a predominantly Gentoo context to combing through JIRA to having voice chats on Discord with some of y'all.
During our time in Gentoo, Daniel and I interacted with users via:
IRC, bugzilla, and mailing lists (and btw, the website was generated xml that Daniel had written and designed).  Later on, the forums came along and blogs came along between when Daniel left and when I left.  Since that time, the world has changed a little bit.  IRC has been replaced by Discord and Telegram, bugzilla replaced by JIRA, and not a lot happening on the mailing lists, and Twitter is a new addition (and now the website is another avenue for direct interaction for the Funtoo community.
Last week I invited everyone in the #general Discord channel to ping me if you'd like to schedule a 1 hour chat with me.  We can talk about anything you like. And now I’m opening that invite up to all of you as well. If you can see this and want to chat, please let me know so that we can schedule some together.   Although..based on the conversations I've already been having, I reckon we'll talk mostly about Gentoo and Funtoo things 🙂.
Thank you for your patience with all the JIRA emails lately, that's because I was going through each open ticket one by one, to bring everything up to date, and jump start some that had languished. I took a second pass through the tickets to tag them.  Within a day, community members were using the new tags/labels. Thank y'all for noticing and adopting 🙂
The goal is for us to start creating a plan for Funtoo development. In the coming weeks and months, we’ll start to communicate about where we’ll be focusing our efforts.  Most importantly, we’ll be focusing extensively on improving the experience for those of you who want to learn how to write ebuilds and autogens and want to share your ebuilds and autogens with the rest of the community.
 
I’ll provide another update next month,  near the 90-day mark.  Meanwhile, I’d love to chat with y’all..
 
Please feel free to book a time on my calendar, or get in touch with me via DM on Discord, Telegram or the forums. Every Tuesday and Thursday at 930PM PDT (530AM UTC +1 day) please join us in the Voice channel in Discord, where @sirisis leading an educational series via screenshare. Come learn about making ebuilds, autogen'ing ebuilds, and more.
 
Looking forward to get to know ayou.
 
Cheers,
Seemant

 

I'm not sure this is within the realms of the Funtoo dev's, but better conflict resolution for emerge would be a great start. One of the things putting me off Funtoo (and straight back to Devuan) was the issue that portage drops out the moment it encounters a conflict (like multiple packages for a slot, etc). For all its flaws, perceived or otherwise, apt has really good conflict and dependency resolution mechanisms build in. Now, I'm aware there's a different design philosophy behind emerge/portage against apt, but dropping a user back to the cli with a cryptic error message stating a conflict has occurred and masking a package may resolve it and effectively leaving a system in limbo while updating/upgrading is not a great way to experience Funtoo for less experienced users.
 
FYI: I've been using Linux as my daily OS since 2005 and experienced the "Dependency Hell" with Red Hat 8+9 and Suse (pre-Novell days), then I found Debian (Woody) and apt was such a relief. Stuck with Debian until systemd made it impossible (really-old Stable, IIRC Jessie) then eventually switched to Funtoo (2015) before finding Devuan a few years later (2018). Tried Funtoo again earlier this year, but still got issues with emerge/portage so now running Devuan once more. Thing is, I'm not smart enough to be a coder. If I were, I'd be a Funtoo dev for years. But as it is, my contributions are (severely) restricted to signalling something went wrong and that's pretty much it.
 
HTH!

@dutch-master I totally agree. Ironically, I started Enoch (which became Gentoo) when I got frustrated by dpkg in Debian 1.3. Portage has since 'evolved' into something that has a lot of problems that dpkg originally had -- of being very good at telling you why it can't do something but not very good at resolving the problem it's complaining about, or providing a coherent error message when there is a problem.
Software tends to evolve this way -- it becomes more rigid over time. The cause is that most engineers will try to make the software more 'correct' and eliminate problems, but they often do this without advancing the architecture and just adding more internal checks. This actually can significantly reduce the usability of the software. This approach becomes much worse when the error messages displayed are not comprehensible by mortals.
Despite Portage's strengths, it does suffer from this way more than I'd like. We do have some technical work in progress that should offer some relief for this to some degree.

Thanks, @seemant. Everyone, Seemant is going to be helping to build community efforts within Funtoo. I am so very glad to be working together with him again! If you are a long-time Gentoo user you will know that Seemant was my second-in-command, basically running the people, community and development coordination aspect of Gentoo during its golden era, and much of Gentoo's tremendous growth and success during this time was attributable to his insight and involvement in steering the project as it grew.
While Zogg started this thread with (in my opinion) overly trolling and negative opinions about Funtoo -- which me and some others found triggering -- there was some useful critical feedback mixed in, which I definitely reflected on and it would frankly be a mistake to ignore. I have tried to address much of the basic conceptual issues he raised (like differences from Gentoo) via the Wolf Pack Philosophy and Support Matrix (linked from main page of www.funtoo.org). But clearly there is still more work to do.
I've asked Seemant to specifically engage with our user community and help to collect feedback and build a roadmap for the project. So please know that Seemant is here to collect your ideas and feedback about what you are hoping to see in Funtoo. Please do not hesitate to reach out to him, either here in the forums or by chatting with him on Discord or Telegram.
Seemant will be collecting the ideas and working with me to incorporate them with my technical plans so we can have a public roadmap for the project, to help others get a sense for what is coming and also provide ways for others to get involved and influence the future.
Seemant, thanks for joining us and welcome 🙂

Hi All,
I'm seemant.  I worked with Daniel on Gentoo a long long time ago, and recently I've using Funtoo and participating in its development a little bit as well.  The roadmap discussion is interesting and this thread has evolved a lot.
One of the things that I'm, in fact, looking to do within the next couple of months is to create a sort of roadmap for Funtoo.
Please consider this a request for comments and input:  in which areas would you like to see Funtoo improve and evolve? How can we make Funtoo better for everyone?
 
 

As we have more people coming to Funtoo from Gentoo -- and not *quite* understanding the difference -- I realized I was doing a very bad job of communicating what makes Funtoo different. So to help address this, I documented the Wolf Pack Philosophy, which I feel is a great way to explain nearly all of our technical distinctives for the Funtoo project, so you have a better understanding of what Funtoo is all about. I hope you find it informative and enjoyable.
https://www.funtoo.org/Wolf_Pack_Philosophy

As per the title, all our stages have been updated for all subarches, with dates 2021-09-19 through 2021-09-20. Enjoy. Download them here:
https://www.funtoo.org/Subarches

@zoggalso, I should say that I do appreciate you connecting and communicating your thoughts. For someone who is not as involved, perception is the reality. So I will look at what I can do to improve this, and welcome your involvement as well to try to address these things.
For roadmap, a lot of this has come down to LACK OF TRUST. On freenode, I had people actually doing 'silent forks' of Funtoo and ripping off my ideas. I have had people who I have told about future plans start to try to do them -- but leave me out! So many people are trying to 'make a splash' in software, and are not necessarily ethical about how they do it. So I am bitter about this. I am bitter because I actually LIKE to share my future ideas, but I have been REPEATEDLY BURNED by doing this. So now I am cautious. A lot of this relates to why we left freenode even before it self-imploded. There was too much 'sniping' of ideas and 'fake friends' who were just trying to get some ideas that they lacked themselves. But without any collaborative spirit. And even some outright nastiness. I got sick of it. I decided we'll move to discord, and have more of an independent space. And it will piss off some people -- but fortunately some of the people I pissed off (not all for sure) were those I wanted to get away from!
So yes, there is a lot of bitterness about this. And then being asked to share more -- you can imagine how this triggers a lot of unpleasant feelings. Damned if I do, damned, if I don't. You probably had no idea you were touching such a nerve when you made your original post. So much to unpack here. This will at least be an interesting thread for people to read.

Linux, and Funtoo, are international. His (her?) native language (very likely) may not be English. Nor is mine ?  It also means (s)he may not be aware of 'social rules' that govern (online) conversation in English. And even so, discussions on the web always miss a vital component in human interaction: non-verbal communication. Body-language. Smileys, and by extension emoticons, are a way to circumvent this, but generally do a poor job, TBH.
 
To be frank, there is a valid point in his comments: not every Funtoo user is a coder. Not every Funtoo user wants to use Discord, let alone be online on it for 24/7, just to get the latest on the project. Not every Funtoo user tracks the latest issues on bugs filed on the bug-tracker. This forum is also a communication platform for the Funtoo project, as you obviously understand, but I notice it's not really treated as such as updates are not very frequent. Now, I understand you'd prefer working on patching code to improve Funtoo over posting updates here, but too little updates here ultimately leads to the above conversation.
 
Just me tuppence ?

One more thing to consider: not everyone wants to use Discord.

@zogg I will answer you.
"From recent activity it seems like funtoo development (except autogenerated updates mostly) is getting to mostly none, including activity even in on this forum."
This is an interesting and funny perspective, because it's actually just the opposite. Funtoo is more active than it has ever been, and we are starting to collaborate with Sabayon on next-gen projects, and we have been growing our Funtoo dev team too.
One thing to realize is that Gentoo has 200+ developers and Funtoo up until recently has had maybe 2-3 developers at most active at a time, but often just one. Think of that. Over the past decade, what was often 'powering' Funtoo, was JUST ONE GUY. Sometimes -- many times -- it was not even me but a more junior developer.
Why? Because I am often busy -- I have a full time job and also a toddler, a wife, two kids in college, and two more kids in elementary and middle school ?
Now we have like 10 actively contributing it seems. So 3x-10x growth in the last few months is actually huge. And we seem to now be getting an influx of people from Gentoo (we don't actively try to recruit users or devs from Gentoo, so this is just an observation and not a 'boast'.)
But I actually DO understand why you have your perspective. It is a PERSPECTIVE, but not reality.
But it's interesting to wonder: why do you have this perspective?

It is probably because you are incorrectly trying to compare the work of 200+ people to what has often been just the work of 1-2 people.

Is that fair? I don't think so. But I am sure you can 'sense' that there is often fewer package updates and general upheaval than in Gentoo. Some people actually LIKE this about Funtoo!
The reality is that actually we are doing many things that Gentoo is not doing, and solving problems that Gentoo is not solving. But these problems are not glamorous, and take time, and we care more about solving these problems than giving you the latest crap to run on your computer.

I'm quite content with our progress. But I don't think that Funtoo is a distro for everyone, and if you feel that Gentoo is more up-to-date or aligns better with what you want, by all means please use it. It doesn't matter to me what you use. No one here is going to try to persuade you to use Funtoo. If you don't see the point in using it, then use something else.

The reason why you did not understand @nrc is because you don't get an important point. You are assuming that Funtoo and Gentoo are trying to do the same thing, and be the same thing, and trying to get you to pick one over the other.

This is actually not true.

That is why you do not understand.

So now that I have addressed the 2/3 of your post that was a troll, I can address your legitimate question -- update on the current state, and roadmap/future of the project.
The current state is that the project is rapidly growing and we are working on getting our growing team to work well together. So we are recently moving beyond 1-2 devs into the 5-10 active devs range.
Autogens will continue to be added to the tree by users. Thanks to user contributions we now have MATE stage3's available for download as well as updated Enlightenment.

As far as I am aware, financially, Funtoo has more funding/resources available to it than the entire Gentoo project despite our small size, is fully independent of any external influences regarding our future, and I expect this to continue to be the reality. I have been regularly sending cryptocurrency to our most active volunteers as a 'thank you' from the Funtoo community for their contributions.
We will continue to prioritize new and interesting ways of solving complex technical challenges rather than expending huge amounts of manual effort to maintain tens of thousands of packages.

While we do this, we also hope that you will find Funtoo to be a useful tool for desktop workstation, laptop as well as dev and production servers for amd64 and arm(64) architectures, as well as riscv, which is being worked on.

For everything else, you will find out about it when it is announced ?
As always, Funtoo is a user-centric project so if there is something you want, you are encouraged to not be shy and explain why you personally want it on the bug tracker and if it is reasonable, the issue will be approved and a PR can then be submitted.

Best,
Daniel
 

 

I try to do a little every day. For example, the new 'next' release, which has been in planning for over a year, is now live and ready for contributions... This will be of interest to @zogg and others who want to be part of updating Funtoo without breaking stuff for 1.4-release users. See: 
 

Just to let everyone know, MATE stage3's are now available for download, alongside our GNOME and Cinnamon stage3's.
Also, we recently merged in a PR from nyacoder which updated Enlightenment to the current upstream version.
Enjoy!

One more thing to consider: not everyone wants to use Discord.

One more thing to consider: not everyone wants to use Discord.