People who create Gentoo ebuilds for software written in Go probably noticed deprecation notices and discussion About EGO_SUM, and also about a Proposal to undeprecate EGO_SUM.

While the mailing lists and IRC channels provide plenty of opportunity to discuss how to supply dependencies for Go software, here I share a way to use GitHub releases to host dependency tarballs as an external Gentoo contributor, like proxied maintainer, GURU contributor, or overlay maintainer.

Update: see also Packaging Go dependencies for Gentoo as a follow-up post expanding on this topic.

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Auto Adjust Photo, or aaphoto in short, is a cool little tool for automatic color correction and resizing of photos. I cooked an ebuild for it a long time ago which was waiting to be rediscovered in a forgotten corner of my drive. After a quick refurbishing and some minor/trivial upstream cleanup with the extremely friendly author, it is now available in the main portage tree of Gentoo.

Thanks goes to:

• András Horváth for creating aaphoto
• the always helpful Gentoo developers (in this particular case TomWij, mrueg and Pinkbyte) for their review via Bugzilla and #gentoo-dev-help, and for accepting me as a proxied maintainer for the package

Final Term is an interesting and promising terminal emulator with advanced interactive features like semantic text menus, smart command completion, GUI terminal controls, reflow support and more.

I contributed an initial Hungarian translation for the project just to soon find myself hacking on an ebuild, and on minor features. All in all, as of 2013-07-11, Final Term is now available in Gentoo’s Sunrise overlay. You can find usage instructions here.

Thanks to:

• Philipp Emanuel Weidmann for creating Final Term and blogging about it
• GitHub user Richard-W for letting me know that I’m not the only one who would like to use Final Term on Gentoo
• Julian Ospald (hasufell) for reviewing my ebuilds, suggesting a modification to the build system, and finally merging the ebuild into Sunrise
• the always helpful people on #gentoo-dev-help and #gentoo-sunrise

Back in December 2012 I was frustrated by a few issues about using net-firewall/arno-iptables-firewall on Gentoo. Only an old version was available through portage and that had its problems working with recent versions of iptables as state matching module’s functionality was being replaced by conntrack module – among other problems like ancient homepage and initscript.

I collected the various pieces spread across a few bugs, patched them together and filed it as an overall version bump to 2.0.1d and volunteered for proxy maintainership as well. I also sent the initscript changes upstream (originally filed to Gentoo’s Bugzilla by Marius Brehler).

However I wasn’t fully comfortable with some details here and there in the ebuild and decided to give it a more thorough look. The result is 30-something commits for the 2.0.1d-r1 ebuild :) They contain roughly the following:

• EAPI5
• new initscript
• dependency updates (remarkably to avoid a bug in the seq implementation from coreutils-8.20 and 8.20-r1 reported by Daniel Lindbeck)
• install sourced/executable helper files into /usr/libexec
• fix documentation path
• postinst messages cleanup
• general cleanup

The revamped ebuild is already in the portage tree. Thanks goes to Arno van Amersfoort for the firewall script and to Markos Chandras (hwoarang) for reviewing and committing the ebuild, and of course to everyone else who helped me via the firewall mailing list and #gentoo-dev-help.