krix and me are now working on rewriting the setup script from scratch in c to get a much more robust (plugin based, using a messages bus, etc) installer. you can reach an initial screenshot here

bmh rewrote the checkpkgs script in python and added some new features. for example i wanted to know which pkgs are not available on i686 (excluding the emulation pkgs):

$fst_root/tools/checkpkgs -b -n|grep -v "\[X\] i686"|grep -v emul-

nice ;)

got to update to kernel-2.6.14. what's new? relayfs, fuse, ipw2?00. (there is a quite readable changelog here) of course the usual pacman -Syu will do everything for you :)

so finally openoffice.org-2.0 hit current, but we're still before the hard work of language pack updating ;)

krix and janny are doing a great job and so the openoffice.org-2.0 package will hit -current soon. one of the main problems was that (primarily for speed and for being able not to use commercial softwares) we build ooo without java support which means currently that one can't save as .sxw or .odt (.doc works fine :P) it turned out that it's a known bug and now we have a workaround for it. after some time martink@#go-oo@freenode prepared a fix. the gentoo m8r suka just started a test build with it, if it will work, we can replace our current workaround with that proper fix

finally we'are upgraded to the new udev (which have to be done since ages) and which means we have to use cdrom_id instead of cdsymlink.sh to create /dev/{cdrom,cdrw,dvd,dvdrw} and such links i hope i didn't break anything :)

when we build in chroot, we use fakeroot to prevent build() screw up our chroot, so that if we need to install deps, we use sudo to call pacman. also pacman notices that we're in a fakeroot env and will refuse to install pkgs even we're using sudo. so that we should work around this by temporarily unsetting the FAKEROOTKEY env var. also when we restore it, we should export it. that's what i've forgot, and that's why currently iputils and samba is broken. it took some time while i've figured out that's why they're broken :) but now pacman is fixed and only the broken pkgs should be rebuilt

here is one of boobaa's promotion pictures about his child using Frugalware :)

mingw packages arrived! namely:

mingw-binutils
mingw-gcc
mingw-runtime
mingw-runtime-headers
mingw-w32api
mingw-w32api-headers

arrived to devel-extra. a sample use of it:

$ cat Makefile
CC = i386-mingw32msvc-gcc -O2 -Wall -mms-bitfields -mwindows
foo.exe: foo.c
                $(CC) -o $@ $gt;

$ cat foo.c
#include 
int main(void)
{
        printf("hey!\n");
        return(0);
}

$ make
i386-mingw32msvc-gcc -O2 -Wall -mms-bitfields -mwindows -o foo.exe foo.c
$ wine foo.exe
hey!

:)

update: a related article

finally i've got enough time to implement using fakeroot when building in chroot. a simple example about why this is good for us: select a pkg and put the

touch /etc

command to the end of build(). in chroot, this will run without any warning, and your chroot will be messed up. with the current fakeroot method:

touch: cannot touch `/etc/foo': Permission denied
==> ERROR: Build Failed.  Aborting...

yes, that's what we wanted! :)