Maybe I should start do this monthly, with the tinderbox’s results at hand.

So as I said, the Tinderbox is logging away although it’s still coughing from time to time. What I want to write about, here, is some of the insights the current logs tell me.

First of all, as you might expect considering my previous efforts, I’m testing GCC 4.7. It’s the least I can do of course, and it’s definitely important to proceed with this if we want to have it unmasked in decent terms, instead of the 4.6-like æons (that were caused in part by the lack of running continuous testing). The new GCC version by itself doesn’t seem to be too much of a break-through anyway; there is the usual set of new warnings that cause packages insisting in using -Werror to fail; there is some more headers’ cleanup that cause software using C and POSIX interfaces in C++ to fail because they don’t include the system headers declaring the functions they use; there also is a change in the C++ specs that require this-> to be prefixed on a few access to inherited attributes/methods but the rule of which I’m not sure of.

The most disruptive issue with the new GCC, though, seems to be another set of strengthening the invalid command-line parameters passed to the compiler. So for instance, the -mimpure-text option that is supported for SunOS is no longer usable on Linux — guess which kind of package fails badly due to that? Java native libraries of course. But it’s not just them, one or two packages failed due to the use of -mno-cygwin which is also gone from the Linux version of GCC.

So while this goes on, what other tests are being put in place? Well, I’ve been testing GnuTLS 3, simply because this version no longer bundles an antique, unmaintained configuration file parsing library. To be honest though I should be working a bit more on GnuTLS as there is a dependency over readline I’d like to remove.. for now I only fixed parallel build which means you can now use the ebuild at the best speed.

Oh and how can I forget that I’m testing the automake 1.12 transition which I’m also trying to keep documented in Autotools Mythbuster — although I’m still missing the “see also” references, I hope I’ll be able to work on it in the next few days. Who knows, maybe I’ll be able to work on them on the plane (given next time no matter what I’m going to get the “premium economy” extra — tired of children screaming, hopefully there are few families ready to pay for the extra).

The most interesting part of this transition is that we get failures for things that really don’t matter for us at all, such as the dist-lzma removal. Unfortunately we still have to deal with those. The other thing is that there are more packages than I expected that relied on what is called “auto-de-ANSI-fication” (conversion from ANSI C to more modern C), which is also gone on this automake version. Please remember that if you don’t want to spend too much time on fixing this you can still restrict WANT_AUTOMAKE=1.11 in your ebuild for the moment — but at some later point you’ll have to get upstream to support the new version.

I sill have some trouble with PHP extensions not installing properly. And I have no idea why.

Now, let’s leave alone the number of complains I could have with developers who commit outright broken packages without taking care of them, or three (or four) years old bugs still open and still present… I’d like for once to thank those developers who’re doing an excellent job by responding timely to the new bugs.

So, thank you Justin (jlec), Michael (kensington), Alfredo Tupone and Hans (graaff) among others. These are just the guys who received most of the bugs… and fixed them quickly enough for me to notice — “Hey did I just file a bug about that? Ah it’s fixed already.”