New linux-libre gentoo ebuild

[Alexandre Oliva]

On May 21, 2009, Nick <linux-libre-list at njw.me.uk> wrote:

> Just to let you know, there's now an ebuild for linux-libre in 
> gentoo's bugzilla; http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=266157

Thanks, I've added a link to this bug to the Linux-libre “binaries”
list, under “genfree” (heh, I couldn't help; too plus wan yields free,
right?)  It's too obscure, I agree, but...  who cares? :-)

> I did create a version of the build which got the latest vanilla 
> kernel, added patches, and ran your deblob script, but the script 
> took a very long time (I gave up after 2 hours), and around 1-1.5G 
> RAM to run. Even for the "I'd rather be compiling" Gentoo folks, 
> this makes it a really really long install, so I decided to stick to 
> just unpacking your pre-prepared tarballs instead (I posted the 
> deblob version in the ticket too, in case anyone can make use of 
> it).

Taking Free sources and applying patches is a better way to go anyway,
why would you want to steer people towards the non-Free Software in
upstream just to (hopefully) throw it all away afterwards? :-)

Most of the time, patches should apply just fine on top of Linux-libre,
but it would be nice to check that they don't add back non-Free stuff,
running deblob-check on them, like we do on Freed-ora.  These runs of
deblob-check are far less demanding of resources, for they're only
heuristic, without bringing in all the knowledge (and regexps) about the
false positives and known blobs in Linux.

> Is my experience of the deblob script being very slow and heavy 
> common?  Is there much we could do about it?

Unfortunately, it is normal.  There's a long post of mine from a few
days ago in which I delve into some experiments I've been doing to try
to address this very problem.  Look for “flex” and “perl” in
http://www.fsfla.org/pipermail/linux-libre/2009-May/000610.html

-- 
Alexandre Oliva, freedom fighter    http://FSFLA.org/~lxoliva/
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