Re: Gentoo Alpha Office Apps

Allen Ziegenfus wrote:

> I have been running RH 7.1 on my PC164LX and was looking for something
> to upgrade to, so I had tried out gentoo.  I got everything to 
> install without too many problems. 

Good to hear! Welcome to the bleeding edge. *grin*

> But for me to really switch I need certain office apps, like gnucash,
> abiword and gnumeric. When I last looked (about a week ago) these
> weren't ported at all for alpha (not even ~alpha). Is there any time
> frame for porting apps to alpha?

Well, it's a very small team at the moment - the de facto procedure is 
"scratch your own itches". I like KDE, so I worked on that. Tavis tells 
me that gnucash works on alpha, so it's been marked ~alpha. I believe 
Aron's had big problems with one of gnumeric's dependencies, so that's 
stuck. I personally haven't tried abiword yet.

I guess the short answer is "we're kinda working on it". We're all busy 
with other stuff too, so if you're feeling brave we'd appreciate the help..

> I started trying to figure out how the
> porting process works. How do you find all the dependencies for porting
> a particular package? And then do you have to go through each one and
> mark it to ~alpha first? Maybe I missed these topics in the
> documentation/ FAQs.

That's basically how it works. If you want to test something that hasn't 
been marked for use on alpha, change its KEYWORDS setting in the most 
recent ebuild that seems stable (or unstable but compilable) on other 
arches. Try to emerge it. If it complains about missing deps, do the 
same for the deps. Repeat until it stops complaining.

Yes, it is somewhat tedious, although there are a few shortcuts. A lot 
of things are known-good on alpha (because other distributions use them) 
so they don't need heavy testing, for instance.

> I was playing around with changing my ACCEPT_KEYWORDS, and I wasn't sure
> what was going on, because then it redownloaded basically the whole
> system. Is it possible to combine packages that are from stable (alpha)
> with other apps from unstable(~alpha)? 

Yes, although it's a wee bit hackish. If you want to install something 
that's unstable on an otherwise stable system, you can do:
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~alpha" emerge -p foo-package

Notice that this will also give you the unstable versions of the 
package's dependencies, which may or may not be what you want.

> I'll probably end up installing debian and then use another partition to
> play with gentoo after that's set up. I'll have to say though, the
> gentoo alpha network install went pretty easily; my attempts at
> instaling debian so far have gone nowhere.

Yeah, debian's alpha port is sort of fading into uselessness - there 
have been recent attempts to remove 'aboot' from debian, because the x86 
devs didn't realize that it was the alpha SRM bootloader. They just saw 
some old, unmaintained, unused package..

-will


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