XBPS week news: 11/05/2010 - 17/05/2010

This week there have been a lot of changes both in packages and xbps-src and its helpers.

Package upgrades:

• vim: updated to 239 patch level, added icons and .desktop file for gvim.
• initramfs-tools: merged in 0.94.4 from Debian, now hibernation works properly.
• xbps-casper: merged in 1.236 from Ubuntu, fixed some errors detecting filesystems.
• kernel: updated to 2.6.34.
• udev: updated to 154.
• xbps-mklive: updated to 0.3.3, multiple improvements.
• lame: updated to 3.98.4.
• mercurial: updated to 1.5.3.
• ntfs-3g: updated to 2010.3.6.
• pixman: updated to 0.18.2.
• lcms: updated to 1.19. 2.0 is ABI incompatible, it will have to wait.
• transmission: updated to 1.93.
• git: updated to 1.7.1.
• curl: updated to 7.20.1.
• qemu: updated to 0.12.4.
• xorg-server: updated to 1.8.1.
• upower: updated to 0.9.3.
• syslinux: updated to 3.86.
• gettext: updated to 0.18.
• libffi: updated to 3.0.9.
• gawk: updated to 3.1.8.
• gcc-multilib: updated to 4.5.0.
• glibc32: updated to 2.11.1.
  

A major overhaul of the gcc-multilib packages for x86_64 has been done, and now building with -m32 is fully supported; of course if you don't have the 32bit libraries to link against it won't work.

xbps-src now also checks for required utilities in the host system before doing
any operation. That simply has been added to avoid errors from new or existing users while building the bootstrap with 'xbps-src bootstrap'.

XBPS 0.5.1 released!

Today I had to release the XBPS utilities version 0.5.1 to fix a bug that caused some errors in packages using 'epoch' in its version string. The release plan used in XBPS is a time based release, a new version every 2 months of development.

XBPS 0.5.1 - Released May 11, 2010

• Fixed build issues in RHEL5, Ubuntu and others distributions.
• libxbps: changed the epoch component in version strings to the ':' character to be differentiated from '-' in pkgname, and '_' in revision.
• xbps-bin(8): added a new target 'show-orphans' that lists all orphaned packages currently installed.
• Removed asciidoc build dependency, simply use the troff manpages.

XBPS: project moved to googlecode

These days I've been working in packaging MoinMoin to create a wiki for XBPS, and two days ago that was accomplished. I created the wiki and after using it a few minutes I asked to myself: why do I have to host it? I don't currently own a domain, nor do I have a static IP and the last point, I don't want to have a server running all year.

So I started looking at the free alternatives, none convinced me; I started to look again at googlecode, and now they allow Mercurial repositories. They also have issue tracking, wiki and mailing lists for free. After some hours of work, I had ready the project, with documentation and howtos in the wiki, two mailing lists (one for only commits and another one for discussing user/development questions). I also moved the two repositories for XBPS: xbps utilities and xbps-src with the build templates to Mercurial.

Now it's all working and I'm really happy with the result, it is available at http://code.google.com/p/xbps

To fetch the xbps utilities repository you now do:

$ hg clone http://xbps.googlecode.com/hg/

and to fetch the xbps-src with the build templates repository you do:

$ hg clone http://xbps-src.xbps.googlecode.com/hg/ xbps-templates

All commits to the repositories are sent to the xbps-commits group.