Gentoo's top-notch user community

One of the best parts of Gentoo for me is the community.

For example, I regularly receive email from people who volunteer to help with testing hard masked www-client/chromium ebuilds. FWIW you don't need to email me or the Gentoo Chromium team - just start testing and filing bugs. On the other hand, I do appreciate when people express interest in helping out.

Another example is helping with getting bugs resolved.

Bug #556812 looked rather mysterious - until Guillaume ZITTA found that "build" is a red herring, and in fact the "tracing" module being imported is a different one (from dev-python/tracing as opposed to chromium sources). It was an unfortunate names collision - once found, quite easy to fix.

In bug #553502 Johan Hovold found we need to require postproc USE flag for libvpx to avoid a crash.

See bug #551666 for some Alexey Dobriyan's gdb magic mostly based on a single line segfault report from dmesg...

These are just a few examples.

By the way, the area where we could use more help is arm architecture support. Some specific bugs where help is wanted are #555702, #545368, #520180, and #483130. Please report whether you can reproduce or not, post emerge --info from your system and the compressed build log in case build fails.

Tricks for resolving slot conflicts and blockers

Slot conflicts can be annoying. It's worse when an attempt to fix them leads to an even bigger mess. I hope this post helps you with some cases - and that portage will keep getting smarter about resolving them automatically.

More reliable handling of bash history across terminals and crashes

I've been occasionally hitting frustrating issues with bash history getting lost after a crash. Then I found this great blog post about keeping bash history in sync on disk and between multiple terminals.

tl;dr is to use "shopt -s histappend" and PROMPT_COMMAND="${PROMPT_COMMAND};history -a"

The first is usually default, and results in sane behavior when you have multiple bash sessions at the same time. Now the second one ("history -a") is really useful to flush the history to disk in case of crashes.

I'm happy to announce that both are now default in Gentoo! Please see bug #517342 for reference.