Marcus D. Hanwell's Blog

This is a little belated as the weekend was hectic but I want to wish GNU a happy 25th birthday too! Stephen Fry made a video to wish GNU a happy 25th birthday which I really enjoyed. I may be biased as an English man and a big fan...

I think he did a great job of describing open source in a very approachable way for those of us who are less geeky. You can also download a higher quality video. I miss QI, and thick-cut back bacon! Neither of which seem to be available over here. Enjoy the video and think of us English people living in a foreign land

My previous post sparked off quite a few comments. I can see from some of the comments that the post was too long, some people really don't understand the FHS where it clearly states, "Large software packages must not use a direct subdirectory under the /usr hierarchy." We currently do, the FHS KDE install really is FHS compliant. Please not that is not the primary reason we would like to do this. It is however one of several benefits.

I thought I had made it quite clear that slotting of minor versions was not going to be removed. Jorge and I have been working hard on getting the KDE 4.1 ebuilds into shape, and after Jorge worked with Zac on a few ideas it appears that new portage behaviours to do with blocking effectively allows us to use the original multislot idea I implemented using a different implementation (avoids variable slots). Some of the changes could do with EAPI 2 but it looks like we can implement much of what we need now and impove things when EAPI 2 is available.

Thanks to those who commented on my post in a constructive fashion. Not sure how to respond to a few of you who just don't seem to have read my post (or the FHS). Just to say that we are working on it. Jorge, myself and several interested users have been doing what we can with the time we have available to get the ebuilds into shape. If you would like to take a look at what we are doing you can check out the kde-testing overlay using layman, otherwise we will be working on getting KDE 4.1 into the tree as soon as we can.

So there have been quite a few people asking what is happening with KDE 4.1 on Gentoo. There are still no ebuilds in the tree for KDE 4.1 and to be totally honest I have not been actively developing the KDE ebuilds until recently (took quite a long break). It is however something I really feel that we should have and so I have been working with a few other developers and interested users on the new ebuilds in an overlay. I think these ebuilds are almost ready and I am very eager to get them into the tree.

So what have we been doing? We have been working on a set of ebuilds that can be used with portage 2.2, there were a few setbacks when it became clear that EAPI 2 was not likely to be allowed in the tree in the very near term, but good noises are being made on the mailing lists. I think one of the big changes I have been working on is bringing KDE back into the normal file system hierarchy. This means that you will not be able to slot multiple minor versions of KDE such as 4.1 and 4.2 together.

The loss of slotting also means that ebuild maintenance will be significantly easier, externally released packages will automatically relink to the latest kdelibs for example. It also means that users will not build up multiple copies of minor KDE versions such as 4.0, 4.1, 4.2. I think for the majority of our userbase (myself included) this situation is undesirable with few benefits for normal use of KDE. So having one slot for KDE 4 and upgrading in the normal fashion seems to be very beneficial.

This has not been universally accepted as a good thing. I personally think our main tree KDE should always be installed in the normal FHS hierarchy as upstream seems to intend it. I see little benefit for most users, and many developers not closely involved in KDE development, to having multiple minor versions installed. Also having external KDE packages such as k3b and amarok installed in /usr but linking to libraries in a KDE prefix has never been optimal.

My vision is for a default in-tree KDE that installs into the normal FHS tree as Gnome, Qt 4, XOrg etc do. Developers, power users and those that like to tweak would still be free to install slotted versions of KDE in KDE prefixes alongside the FHS KDE. They could also remove the FHS KDE and just use slotted versions too. We discussed during KDE 3.5 bumps how the current slotting was not ideal.

I am certainly open to opinions. It would be good to get wider feedback from the community on which direction they would like to go in and why. This will not affect KDE 3.5 slotting with KDE 4 - they will always be slotted. It will make maintenance of external KDE packages simpler as everything will be in the same tree. Overlays with ebuilds in alternate slots and prefixes are of course still easily possible and people could continue using KDE in this way.

Currently this work is taking place in an overlay. I am quite honestly exhausted discussing why this is or is not a good idea. I hope I have made my position clear and why I think it is a good thing for our user base. I really want to get KDE 4.1 into the tree as soon as possible. I do feel that these changes should be pushed into the tree, defaulting to an FHS compliant install and using a KDE prefix if requested.

What are your thoughts (other than get KDE 4.1 in tree now - we are working on that)?

I kept meaning to put the slides to my Avogadro talk and the poster I presented at the recent ACS meeting in Philadelphia. Things have been really hectic these last few weeks but here they are. The talk was presented in the chemical eduction section, on Monday 18 August, "Avogadro: An integrated approach to teach computational chemistry modeling, simulation and visualization". The slides were made using LaTeX Beamer and the talk itself was focused on the use of Avogadro when teaching computational chemistry.

I also presented a poster at Sci-Mix on Monday, 18 August, and at the main computational chemistry poster session on Tuesday, 19 August. You may have guessed already but I used LaTeX - this time the A0 poster package. The poster title was "Avogadro: A framework for quantum chemistry simulation and visualization". I really enjoyed the two poster sessions and met lots of interesting people during the sessions.

You can grab copies of the slides or poster by clicking on their titles. It was certainly a very interesting conference, although it was so big it was difficult to choose where to go and what to see at times. Especially as some of the hotels with talks I wanted to attend were thirty minutes apart on foot. It was a great opportunity to tell other scientists about the work we are doing as well as introducing some of the concepts of open source to the wide and varied list of attendees I had the pleasure of meeting.