IRC channel logs

<mark_weaver>tadni`: it's going to be a lot of work to get gnome working on our system, I think.

<tadni>mark_weaver: Any big, known road blocks, sans logind?

<mark_weaver>btw, I feel the need to tell everyone that it's not called "GNU Distro", although tadni keeps using that name.

<tadni>mark_weaver: I mean, what should I call it?

<tadni>"GNU Distro"

<mark_weaver>I don't know

<tadni>mark_weaver: To which question was that in regards to?

<mark_weaver>both :)

*tadni hopes we get some formal decision from RMS, by the end of the year about "GNU Distro" 's status.

<tadni>As in, where it fits in.

<mark_weaver>I built GNOME 2.32 by hand on my YeeLoong, on my home-grown distro based on Cross [GNU/]Linux from Scratch, and I remember it being a huge project. and that was even when not putting everything into /gnu/store/

<mark_weaver>calling it "the GNU distribution" or even just "the GNU distro" would be better, because it doesn't suggest that it's the name of it.

<tadni>mark_weaver: Is that not worse, because then it implies it's the official GNU distro?

<mark_weaver>when you say things like "GNU Distro"'s status, it makes it sound like a name, and it makes me feel like you're trying to establish "facts on the ground" even though we've rejected the name.

<tadni>"Guix's GNU Distro" :^P

<tadni>Facts on the ground?

<mark_weaver>never heard that expression?

<mark_weaver>it means when you try to establish something as a fact, often by underhanded means, even when no formal or legal decision has been made.

<tadni>Also, the name that was rejected was "Gnudist" which is different than saying "Gnu Distro" while I get that may be a bit confusing to some people thinking the name of the distro is just GNU ... saying "the GNU distro" I think is worse, because it establishes it being an officially pushed variant, from the GNU project.

<tadni>Feel free to continue this convo, I'll leave the chat open -- but I've been up about 22 hours and don't want to mess up my sleep schedule anymore.

<mark_weaver>well, I'm just following the terminology used in the Guix manual itself, so at least it's not my unilateral choice

<mark_weaver>okay, sleep well

<_`_>With or without the “the”, I'd be under the second impression.

<mark_weaver>what is the second impression?

<_`_>“saying "the GNU distro" I think is worse, because it establishes it being an officially pushed variant, from the GNU project.”

<mark_weaver>okay

<mark_weaver>I agree that we have a naming problem here

<_`_>I'm just going to say “this distribution” when referring to the distribution in this channel.

<mark_weaver>fair enough

<mark_weaver>I didn't realize that we already had asciidoc packaged. I wonder why we're not using it as an input to 'git' to build its documentation.

<mark_weaver>I will grant that there are two problems here that can happen. Saying things like: "GNU Distro"'s status, gives a false impression that it's a chosen name. Saying things like "the GNU distribution" doesn't have that problem, but it _does_ imply that it's official.

<_`_>tadni: http://blogs.gnome.org/ovitters/2013/09/25/gnome-and-logindsystemd-thoughts/ that gives an overview of the logind requirement. Funtoo GNU/Linux has Gnome 3.1x+ (forgot what) still working with consolekit. But also there is a fork of consolekit: http://consolekit2.github.io/ConsoleKit2/ (which seems somewhat active)

***svetlana|2 is now known as gry

<rekado_>During the strip phase, all files in /bin/ are stripped. Some applications put scripts in /bin/, so during the strip phase we get warnings like this:

<rekado_>strip:/gnu/store/...-bedtools-2.22.0/bin/bamToFastq: File format not recognized

<rekado_>Should the strip phase be modified to operate on binaries only?

<rekado_>I tried to force a rebuild of a package by removing it from my profile, guix gc, and removing all files containing the name of the package from the store.

<rekado_>now I can no longer build the package, though.

<rekado_>~/code/guix $ ./pre-inst-env guix build samtools

<rekado_>guix build: error: open-file: No such file or directory: "/gnu/store/p8f2qilgjgr8h4civhy6clfhmgrk0lsp-samtools-1.1.tar.bz2.drv"

<rekado_>If there is no derivation available in the store should it not create one?

<rekado_>hmm, I don't know what to try next. I deleted /gnu/ and rebuild guix from git (running ./bootstrap, ./configure, make, make check), but I get failing tests.

<rekado_>s/rebuild/rebuilt/

<rekado_>when I attempt to install anything it just says: guix package: error: open-file: No such file or directory: "/gnu/store/vbcm1mibrsc2j4fnyhskdbwzshs07fs6-guile-bootstrap-2.0.drv"

<rekado_>how can I make it create these derivations for me?

<rekado_>never mind, it was the cache: rm -rf /usr/local/var/guix/ fixed it for me.

<civodul>Hello Guix!

<sneek>Welcome back civodul, you have 1 message.

<sneek>civodul, amirouche says: I'm not sure why getting the absolute file name at configure time is better

<civodul>amirouche: it makes sure the thing will run against the very same library it was built/tested against

*civodul hopes he's answering the right question

<tadni>mark_wea`: I have a possible solution, taken from the suggestion list for what we can call this distro until it has an actual name. :^P

<tadni>"DAWN" - Distro AWating a Name.

<civodul>this Texinfo story on emacs-devel saddens me

<tadni>civodul: Link?

<civodul> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2014-12/msg00347.html

<tadni>Eh, Texinfo isn't that bad.

<tadni>We could probably do much of this, via just org-mode though probably.

<tadni>Really, if I was to see some big paradigm shift for writing GNU Docs at least involving Guile or related projects ... skribillo seems like a nice choice.

<tadni>davexunit: coi

<davexunit>hey tadni

<sneek>davexunit, you have 1 message.

<sneek>davexunit, amirouche says: have you pusblished your bootstrap theme for texinfo ?

<rekado_>submitted my first patch to guix-devel for samtools in the bioinformatics module

<davexunit>woohoo!

<rekado_>I've got yet another package definition ready, but it depends on samtools.

<civodul>yay!

<rekado_>I hope I've done this all right. I only rarely have to use ChangeLog style in commit messages and the ubiquity of github makes me rarely use git format-patch.

<rekado_>I noticed that Emacs likes to format the code a wee bit differently; for example, it doesn't align the keys in arguments properly. How do you convince Emacs to align the code such that keys are lined up?

<rekado_>(Or do you just correct this manually?)

<davexunit>I correct it manually because I don't know of a way to make it indent properly.

<rekado_>civodul: I actually like Texinfo. The HTML output probably misses a search feature and a nicer default style sheet (really just to limit the width of paragraphs for readability) to make it "web-friendly".

<rekado_>I'm a bit surprised that org-mode is pushed as an alternative format --- as if esr's premise was not in dispute.

<civodul>rekado_: yeah the default style sheet for Texinfo should be improved

<civodul>but that's really a minor issue

<davexunit>that can easily be fixed

<civodul>Info itself can surely be improved, but that's a separate issue

<civodul>actually just by fixing gendocs.sh in Gnulib to have a nicer style sheet, we'd make 80% of the manual web pages on gnu.org look better

<davexunit>oh, wow.

<rekado_>I haven't taken a look at this yet, but .... is there a reason why this hasn't been attempted yet?

<rekado_>because it sounds so easy to do it. There's got to be a catch somewhere :)

<civodul>i think the main reason is that Gnulib & co. is populated by hackers who don't care or don't really want to fiddle with CSS (me included)

<civodul>and people who do care aren't affiliated with that group of people

<civodul>well, that's my guess

<davexunit>sounds like the case.

<davexunit>I don't have any actual web design skills to help. I know CSS, but I just use other people's designs. :)

<civodul>:-)

<civodul>i think we could email bug-gnulib@gnu.org with CSS based on that of Emacs: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/index.html

<davexunit>emacs is an improvement, but I think we can do better, for some definition of better. :)

<rekado_>hmm, maybe I can propose a simple patch then. I'm a fan of web typography as shown here: http://practicaltypography.com/why-does-typography-matter.html

<rekado_>I think a massive improvement would be to limit the maximum paragraph width dependent on font size to get readable line lengths.

<mark_wea`>rekado: you can't delete things from /gnu/store manually without causing lots of trouble. there's an sqlite database that says what's in /gnu/store, and beyond that, if "guix gc" didn't already delete something, there must be other things in the store that refer to it.

<mark_wea`>rekado: there may be some more clever way to fix things, but in the past when I've done that I've had to remove *all* of /gnu/store and $PREFIX/var/guix and start from scratch.

<mark_wea`>rekado: the proper way to delete individual items from the store is "guix gc --delete /gnu/store/..."

<mark_wea`>(which will refuse if there are any references left, but that's life)

<rekado_>mark_weaver: yeah, I learned this the hard way :)

<civodul>rekado_, davexunit: jump in! http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.gnulib.bugs

*rekado_ subscribes to the gnulib mailing list ...

<civodul>or you can reply via Gmane.org over NNTP

<rekado_>civodul: with Gnus, I suppose?

<civodul>rekado_: of course :-)

<civodul>or some other NNTP client

<rekado_>I wanted to learn how to use Gnus anyway, because I got annoyed reading mailing list archives in the browser.

*rekado_ will be back a couple of hours later

<Sleep_Walker>do you know in which package is include/X11/extension/XTest.h?

<civodul>Sleep_Walker: perhaps try "ls /gnu/store/*/include/X11/extension/XTest.h"?

<civodul>(better if you have an SSD :-))

<Sleep_Walker>I tried that already but it works only on installed packages

<Sleep_Walker>and I still can't find this file after installing everything from xorg.scm

<civodul> https://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=contents&keywords=Xtest.h&mode=path&suite=stable&arch=any suggests libxtst

<civodul>we do have it already

<Sleep_Walker>oh

<Sleep_Walker>ok

<Sleep_Walker>another example of me have to ask to find it eventually myself

<Sleep_Walker>sorry to bother

<civodul>np!

<mark_weaver>this is terrible. my new ISP is very frequently dropping my TCP connections. it's not only dropping me off of IRC every time I turn around, but also the MIPS builds are frequently failing the SSH connections are getting lost in the middle of builds.

<davexunit>ugh :(

<DusXMT>Can't you file a complaint?

<DusXMT>This is terrible indeed

<mark_weaver>I'll try, but this is a huge company with a terrible reputation. alas, in my new town it's a monopoly.

<mark_weaver>I'm not hopeful.

<mark_weaver>I was hoping to run my server in my own house, for various reasons, but if the service is this bad I don't know.

<mark_weaver>unfortunately, it's getting harder to find places to colo my server as a reasonable price. seems like everyone is switching to virtual servers :-(

<mark_weaver>it's not even like these connections are idle. they get dropped while there's lots of traffic going over them.

<civodul>mark_weaver: re new ISP, bummer

<civodul>but see: my ORP (onion routing provider) is failing at times, too ;-)

<civodul>bah, really annoying

<civodul>i guess the "customer service" doesn't care much?

<mark_weaver>I haven't tried yet, but I'm not hopeful.

<mark_weaver>will try though.

<Sleep_Walker>does this happen to you as well? $ guix download https://bullet.googlecode.com/files/bullet-2.82-r2704.tgz

<Sleep_Walker>starting download of `/tmp/guix-file.3DxCoD' from `https://bullet.googlecode.com/files/bullet-2.82-r2704.tgz'...

<Sleep_Walker>;;; Failed to autoload make-session in (gnutls):

<Sleep_Walker>;;; ERROR: missing interface for module (gnutls)

<Sleep_Walker>ERROR: In procedure module-lookup: Unbound variable: make-session

<Sleep_Walker>failed to download "/tmp/guix-file.3DxCoD" from "https://bullet.googlecode.com/files/bullet-2.82-r2704.tgz"

<Sleep_Walker>grrr

<Sleep_Walker>sorry

<Sleep_Walker> http://sprunge.us/dEAc

<Sleep_Walker>wrong clipboard

<Sleep_Walker>it happens for every HTTPS download I tried

<Sleep_Walker>wget and `guix hash' works as workaround

<alezost>Sleep_Walker: perhaps your gnutls was built without guile: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2014-10/msg00333.html

<Sleep_Walker>alezost: ok, that sounds probable, thanks

<Sleep_Walker>yes, it was built without guile support indeed

<Sleep_Walker>so it should be fixed by `guix package -i guile', shouldn't it?

<alezost>Sleep_Walker: "guix package -i gnutls" and export guile paths as reported by "guix package --search-paths"

<Sleep_Walker>alezost: ok :)

<Sleep_Walker>thanks

<mark_weaver>in order to become a technical contact for my ISP, I was asked to agree to a very long legal agreement. at the top, it said that I had to agree not only to the current agreement, but also to any changes they might make in the future. *grump*

<mark_weaver>I suppose the person who signed up for this service also had to agree to it, but that wasn't me.

<mark_weaver>I see this more and more often these days. google also asked me to sign something like that to become a mentor for GSoC, and I refused.

<Sleep_Walker>'all your right are belong to us' :b

<mark_weaver>yep, and it seems like almost everyone is willing to click "agree" anyway.

<mark_weaver>(usually without reading what they're agreeing to, I suspect)

<Sleep_Walker>I'm afraid that with the amount of legal text and no experience in law it is impossible to even check

<mark_weaver>not impossible, but expensive to check competently. still, one could at least try to read and understand, before signing or clicking "agree". it makes me crazy to think about how many people sign away their rights like this.

<mark_weaver>it makes life very difficult for those of us who don't want to do that.

<mark_weaver>"By registering for, accessing, browsing, downloading or using the upware marketplace and comcast portal, you acknowledge that you have read, understood, and AGREE TO BE BOUND by the following terms and conditions, including the privacy policy, AND ANY ADDITIONAL POLICIES AND FUTURE MODIFICATIONS (collectively, the 'terms')." (caps are my emphasis)

<mark_weaver>makes me crazy

<davexunit>me too. and those agreements are everywhere now.

<mark_weaver>and Cambridge Massachusetts, home of MIT, Harvard, and the birthplace of the GNU project, in their wisdom, have granted a monopoly to this company.

<bavier>especially hard when it's a monopoly making the terms too

<davexunit>yeah, you can't avoid them for subscription services.

<mark_weaver>hydra is not happy

<civodul>hydra is rarely happy

<civodul>but it's pretty much frozen, no?

<mark_weaver>I was able to ssh in, but it took several minutes to get a prompt, and now am waiting more minutes to run a simple command 'w'.

<civodul>pfff

<davexunit>:(

<mark_weaver>load average: 20.05 21.30 21.21

<davexunit>ooooh

<davexunit>I mean, ooof*

<civodul>ouch

<civodul>what has it been doing?

<mark_weaver>I think it's trashing. 4 gigs of swap currently in use.

<mark_weaver>there are 44 guix-daemon child processes, 34 of which have no subprocesses. not sure what those are doing.

<mark_weaver>I suppose we should make sure it's not a problem on our end.

<mark_weaver>civodul: could you take a look?

<civodul>yes

<mark_weaver>the starman processes seem to be taking up a huge amount of memory

<civodul>oh

*civodul waits for ssh to make progress

<mark_weaver>five of them are at the top of the list in top sorted by memory. the top is using about 1 gig of virtual memory, 745 megs resident. the others are using a lot too. not sure how much is shared between them.

<mark_weaver>I guess starman should be restarted

<civodul>yes, i'll just investigate a bit more before

<mark_weaver>thanks!

<civodul>netstat lists 127 items, mostly connections to postgres and connections to starman from the outside

<civodul>i can't really draw any conclusion though :-/

<mark_weaver>I think a spider might be indexing hydra

<mark_weaver>do we have a robots.txt file?

<jxself>That poor spider.

<civodul>there's one in lib/Hydra/Controller/Root.pm, in Hydra

<mark_weaver>many of the connections are from b110004.yse.yahoo.net

<mark_weaver>I also see crawl-*.googlebot.com

<civodul>yes, server.log as many many of those

<mark_weaver>and baiduspider*.crawl.baidu.com

<mark_weaver>but the yahoo address seems to be the biggest offender. lots of connections from there.

<davexunit>baidu took down gnu.org once. :x

*civodul restarted hydra-server

<civodul>oh

<mark_weaver>that helped a *lot* :)

<jxself>Until the ice spiders return.

<civodul>i don't mind eating my own dog food, but i feel like Hydra is somebody else's dog food

<mark_weaver>heh, yeah, we really need to rewrite hydra in guile

<civodul>speaking of which, look at the first entry in http://hydra.gnu.org:3000/robots.txt :-)

<davexunit>/ARRAY(0x7249b70) ?

<mark_weaver>strange. what's that?

<civodul>that's a Perl hash table or something like that

<jxself>Why not disallow everything? I can't imagine there's much value to be had in robots indexing this.

<civodul>yeah

<mark_weaver>civodul: I think our use of globbing the Disallow field is not actually valid

<mark_weaver>it's not valid in the User-agent field either, except if the entire field is just a single * as a special case.

<civodul>mark_weaver: Note: wildcards are not universally supported in

<civodul> # robots.txt, but apparently Google supports them.

<civodul>(from Root.pm)

<mark_weaver>I think we should just Disallow: /

*civodul .oO( would it be that hard to do a hydra-alike without the web user interface? )

<civodul>yes

*mark_weaver goes afk

*jxself arranges for mark_weaver's keyboard to follow him so as to not be away from it

<davexunit>civodul: we could write the two components separately

<davexunit>so as to provide multiple interfaces.

<jxself>An Emacs mode!

<davexunit>that would be awesome

<davexunit>check on the status of jobs via emacs

<davexunit>I would still like a web interface :)

<civodul>mark_weaver: done

<civodul>davexunit: definitely

<civodul>davexunit: i think 'guix publish' would be half of the job

<civodul>the other half would be something that polls the git repo, basically

<davexunit>that is on my TODO list. unless of course you grow impatient and write it yourself. :)

<civodul>i leave it to you :-)

<davexunit>okay!

<Sleep_Walker>do you have idea, where bullet library should belong to?

<davexunit>should we perhaps make a game-development module?

<Sleep_Walker>maybe games.scm?

<davexunit>that way things for building games are separate from games.

<Sleep_Walker>ha, I have to add ScummVM to my list

<civodul>game-development.scm sounds good to me

<civodul>a perfect place for Sly ;-)

<Sleep_Walker>ok then

<davexunit>civodul: yes, indeed! btw, Sly just got a logo and I just have to show it of! https://cdn.mediacru.sh/o/oo0MuI7oMngH.png

<davexunit>off*

<civodul>davexunit: very nice!

<civodul>did you do it yourself?

<davexunit>no way! I have no art skills! :P

<civodul>ahah

<davexunit>I made a request on opengameart.org's forums. :)

<Sleep_Walker>when I'm creating new module, can I copy & paste the header?

<davexunit>Sleep_Walker: the licensing stuff? yeah, but make sure the copyright info is correct.

<civodul>yes, but adjust the copyright line

<davexunit>if ludo worked on the things that are now part of that module, keep that.

<davexunit>otherwise, it need not be there.

<Sleep_Walker>OK, I'll try to do it somehow and see

<Sleep_Walker>thanks

<davexunit>gah, poor mark. keeps disconnecting.

<davexunit>mark_weaver: when you read the backlog, it seems that jgay on the FSF licensing team, is having very similar issues to you with his comcast connection, and he lives in CT.

<_`_>comcast provides IPv6?

*civodul desperately looks for a way to combine git filter-branch & pull

<Sleep_Walker>how can one get @gnu.org e-mail?

<civodul>Sleep_Walker: by asking for a gnu.org account

<civodul>the procedure is described in the maintainer's guide, IIRC

<Sleep_Walker>OK

<civodul> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2296047/repeatedly-using-git-filter-branch-to-rewrite-new-commits is not encouraging

***svetlana|2 is now known as gry

<Sleep_Walker>oh, I forgott 2 spaces between sentences

<Sleep_Walker>s/tt/t/

<Sleep_Walker>ok, sorry for generating so many e-mails

<Sleep_Walker>v3 should be OK