Overriding misreported screen dimensions with KMS-backed drivers
With Qt5 gaining support for high-DPI displays, and applications starting to exercise that support, it’s easy for applications to suddenly become unusable with some screens. For example, my old Samsung...
View ArticleNew copyright policy explained
On 2018-09-15 meeting, the Trustees have given the final stamp of approval to the new Gentoo copyright policy outlined in GLEP 76. This policy is the result of work that has been slowly progressing...
View ArticlePortability of tar features
The tar format is one of the oldest archive formats in use. It comes as no surprise that it is ugly — built as layers of hacks on the older format versions to overcome their limitations. However, given...
View ArticleAttack on git signature verification via crafting multiple signatures
This article shortly explains the historical git weakness regarding handling commits with multiple OpenPGP signatures in git older than v2.20. The method of creating such commits is presented, and the...
View ArticleIdentity with OpenPGP trust model
Let’s say you want to send a confidential message to me, and possibly receive a reply. Through employing asymmetric encryption, you can prevent a third party from reading its contents, even if it can...
View ArticleEvolution: UID trust extrapolation attack on OpenPGP signatures
This article describes the UI deficiency of Evolution mail client that extrapolates the trust of one of OpenPGP key UIDs into the key itself, and reports it along with the (potentially untrusted)...
View Articlegen-revoke: extending revocation certificates to subkeys
Traditionally, OpenPGP revocation certificates are used as a last resort. You are expected to generate one for your primary key and keep it in a secure location. If you ever lose the secret portion of...
View ArticleSKS poisoning, keys.openpgp.org / Hagrid and other non-solutions
The recent key poisoning attack on SKS keyservers shook the world of OpenPGP. While this isn’t a new problem, it has not been exploited on this scale before. The attackers have proved how easy it is to...
View ArticleVerifying Gentoo election results via Votrify
Gentoo elections are conducted using a custom software called votify. During the voting period, the developers place their votes in their respective home directories on one of the Gentoo servers....
View ArticleThe gruesome MediaWiki API
I have recently needed to work with MediaWiki API. I wanted to create a trivial script to update UID/GID assignment table from its text counterpart. Sounds trivial? Well, it was not, as...
View ArticleImproving distfile mirror structure
The Gentoo distfile mirror network is essential in distributing sources to our users. It offloads upstream download locations, improves throughput and reliability, guarantees distfile persistency. The...
View ArticleGentoo eclass design pitfalls
I have written my share of eclasses, and I have made my share of mistakes. Designing good eclasses is a non-trivial problem, and there are many pitfalls you should be watching for. In this post, I...
View ArticleA better ebuild workflow with pure git and pkgcheck
Many developers today continue using repoman commit as their primary way of committing to Gentoo. While this tool was quite helpful, if not indispensable in times of CVS, today it’s a burden. The...
View ArticleA distribution kernel for Gentoo
The traditional Gentoo way of getting a kernel is to install the sources, and then configure and build one yourself. For those who didn’t want to go through the tedious process of configuring it...
View ArticleHandling PEP 517 (pyproject.toml) packages in Gentoo
So far, the majority of Python packages have either used distutils, or a build system built upon it. Most frequently, this was setuptools. All those solutions provided a setup.py script with a...
View ArticleNo more PYTHON_TARGETS in single-r1
Since its inception in 2012, python-single-r1 has been haunting users with two sets of USE flags: PYTHON_TARGETS and PYTHON_SINGLE_TARGET. While this initially seemed a necessary part of the grand...
View ArticleGentoo Python Guide
Gentoo provides one of the best frameworks for providing Python support in packages among operating systems. This includes support for running multiple versions of Python (while most other...
View ArticleWhy proactively clean Python 2 up?
It seems a recurring complaint that we’re too aggressive on cleaning Python 2 up from packages. Why remove it if (package’s) upstream still supports py2? Why remove it when it still works? Why remove...
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Is an umbrella organization a good choice for Gentoo?
The talk of joining an umbrella organization and disbanding the Gentoo Foundation (GF) has been recurring over the last years. To the best of my knowledge, even some unofficial talks have been had...
View ArticleNew tools to help with package cleanups
Did you ever have had Croaker shout at you because you removed an old version that just happened to be still required by some other package? Did you have to run your cleanups past (slow-ish) CI just to...
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