linux-libre ebuild

[Alexandre Oliva]

[adding linux-libre back]

On Dec 26, 2008, Ted Smith <teddks at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 2008-12-25 at 22:48 -0200, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
>> Not that I'm aware of, but from the little I know about gentoo, it would
>> seem to me that whatever building machinery one would have used to build
>> the non-Free Linux could be trivially used to build Linux-libre.

> Well, if there wasn't one before, there is now. And yes, they are
> trivially easy to do. The only thing needed to generate one for a new
> version is copying the current one. :)

Cool!  Would you like us to host the emerge script you used to build it
in the Linux-libre source repository?  If you'd like to maintain it, I'd
be happy to grant you write access.

Now, I know very little about gentoo infrastructure, but if we could
make available whatever it takes for gentoo users to easily switch to
Linux-libre, be it ebuild scripts, be it binaries (that doesn't really
make sense, does it?), I'd very much like to do it.

But we ought to come up with some clever wordplay on gentoo, along the
lines of freed-ora, freed-ebian and uhurubuntu, for we'd rather not
recommend or endorse distros that carry non-Free kernels.  Any ideas?

> Questions I have now, though: I see there are tarballs in /releases with
> names like 2.6.xx-libreX. What does the tailing X refer to?

The X changes whenever we find a need to issue a new version of the
deblob-2.6.xx script.  Say, because we find we missed a piece of
non-Free Software, or because we find that we removed Free Software we
didn't have to.

> Are these later versions more "libre" than the preceding ones?

The idea is that it won't be less "libre".

> Should I bother doing ebuilds for the lesser ones?

Nope.  You'll see we've even removed the tarballs, at least for the
cases we found they contained non-Free Software.

> And why are there so many tarballs missing?

Besides the case above, some earlier tarballs were removed just to keep
disk space use in check.  Say, once we release linux-2.6.27.10-libre,
there's little point in keeping say linux-2.6.27.4-libre around, right?
So every now and then I remove the superfluous tarballs, although I do
keep baselines (2.6.27) and xdeltas from upstream tarballs, so it isn't
too hard to re-create the tarballs should the need arise.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva           http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
You must be the change you wish to see in the world. -- Gandhi
Be Free! -- http://FSFLA.org/   FSF Latin America board member
Free Software Evangelist      Red Hat Brazil Compiler Engineer