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|
# Copyright 1999-2022 Gentoo Authors
# Copyright 2016-2019 Amy Liffey
# Copyright 2016-2021 Mikle Kolyada
# Copyright 2021-2022 Joonas Niilola
# This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
# https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Ebuild maintainer quiz
Answer in whatever length necessary for completeness.
Support your answers with documentation links but avoid redundant citation.
Consult your mentor if you're unable to locate answers.
Do not discuss these questions and their answers in public. Do not publish or
share any private conversation with your mentor or recruiter.
*** PART I Organizational structure questions
1. When is it appropriate to post to the following mailing lists: gentoo-core,
gentoo-dev, gentoo-dev-announce, gentoo-project? Provide examples of topics
that are appropriate for each one of them.
docs: gentoo.org
2. Who should be contacted with complaints about specific developers or
projects? Shortly explain the procedure including all levels of appeal.
docs: comrel policy
3. What is the proper method for suggesting a wide-ranging feature or
enhancement to Gentoo? Describe the process for getting this feature
approved and implemented.
docs: GLEPs
4. What is the purpose of the Gentoo Council?
docs: GLEPs
5. What is the Gentoo Foundation? How does one apply for membership and
who are eligible?
docs: gentoo.org
6. What are projects? Who can start a new Gentoo project and how is it done?
What is the rationale behind this structure?
docs: devmanual, GLEPs
7. What is the devaway system? When should it be used and how to use it?
docs: wiki
*** PART II Ebuild technical/policy questions
1. You change a package's ebuild to install an init script. Previously,
the package had no init script at all.
Is a revision bump necessary? Why? What about when adding a patch?
What about when adding a dependency?
docs: devmanual
2. A user submits a "live" VCS (git, svn ...) ebuild in order to obtain
a bugfix that has not been released yet. What would be a preferable
alternative to such an ebuild? What if there are numerous changes
involved?
docs: devmanual
3.a. What is repoman? When should it be used? How would you check for QA
problems with repoman?
docs: devmanual, wiki
3.b. A user submits a brand-new ebuild for a new package. What are
the proper steps (including repoman commands) to take to add
this ebuild to ::gentoo repository? What should be in the commit message?
docs: devmanual, wiki
4. A user submits an ebuild that has numerous technical problems and
violates policy. How would you handle that situation?
docs: devmanual
5. You have a set of new ebuilds that could potentially benefit
from a global USE flag. What steps should be taken before
a new USE flag is implemented? What should be done if the
USE flag only applies to a single package?
docs: devmanual
6. What steps are needed to remove a use flag from an ebuild?
docs: common sense
7. You are creating an ebuild. Unfortunately, the default 'emake
DESTDIR="${D}" install' call causes numerous access violations.
What are the best long-term and short-term solutions?
docs: devmanual
8. You are creating an ebuild that needs a patch. The patch is
nontrivially large - bigger than 20 KiB. Where should
the patch be kept?
docs: devmanual
9.a. You wish to have an ebuild marked "stable," taking it out of
~ARCH KEYWORDS. It's a library. What steps should be taken to do so?
docs: devmanual
9.b. You wish to mark an ebuild "testing," putting it into ~ARCH
KEYWORDS. It was previously hard-masked in package.mask.
What should be done prior to doing so?
docs: devmanual
9.c. You wish to have an ebuild marked "stable." It is a popular
application, but no other ebuilds depend on it.
How would you handle it?
docs: devmanual
10. List all available dependency classes (DEPEND, RDEPEND etc) and explain
their individual purpose. Provide examples of their typical uses.
docs: devmanual, PMS
11. You wish to make a change to an ebuild, but you checked the commit
messages and metadata.xml and it appears to be maintained by someone
else. How should you proceed?
docs: devmanual
12.a. You find a situation in which an eclass may be useful. What should
you do before implementing such an eclass?
12.b. What is EXPORT_FUNCTIONS? How should it be used?
Provide examples of its usage.
docs: devmanual
13. How can you verify an ebuild has correct run time dependencies
(RDEPEND) for all installed binaries? Provide an example tool calls.
docs:
14. How do you deal with a situation in which an ebuild tries to
install a file that is already installed by another package?
docs: devmanual
15. Most configure scripts attempt to automatically determine
settings based on the host system. When should the ebuild
specifically override settings?
docs: devmanual
16. What is the EAPI version? How does it affect ebuilds and eclasses?
docs: devmanual, PMS
17. What is the procedure for removing packages from the tree?
docs: devmanual
18. How do keywording and stabilization policies for less often used arches
like ppc64 or mips differ from the more common ones like amd64?
docs: devmanual
19. You are adding a new major version to the tree that requires users to
follow an upgrade guide. How will you communicate this to the users?
docs: GLEPs
20. What are sub-slots and their binding operators? What problem do they
solve in gentoo and when should be used? Provide examples.
docs: wiki, portage documentation
21.a. You are about to add a new package. How would you determine the correct
LICENSE? What sources should be consulted for license information,
and which take precedence?
docs: devmanual
21.b. You are creating an ebuild for a package whose license does not match
any of the licenses in the 'licenses' directory. What is the proper
course of action?
docs: GLEPs, devmanual
21.c. The package frobnicate has a 'COPYING' that exactly matches GPL-3.
However, all the source files have the following copyright notice:
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
What should be the value of LICENSE variable for this package?
docs: devmanual
21.d. The package installs both frobnicate executable (licensed GPL-3+)
and libfrobnicate shared library (licensed LGPL-2.1+). What should
be the correct value of LICENSE for this package?
docs: devmanual
21.e. The package installs frobnicate executable whose sources indicate GPL-3+
license. However, you notice that the build process creates a local
static libport.a library that is used to build a part of frobnicate
but is not meant to be installed. The sources of libport.a indicate
LGPL-2.1+ license. What should be the value of LICENSE for this package?
docs: devmanual
21.f. A MIT-licensed package includes a CDDL-licensed script. The script is
not installed but it is used during build to generate a Makefile. What
should be the value of LICENSE for this package?
docs: devmanual
21.g. A BSD-licensed package installs a frobnicate executable. However, after
inspecting the package sources you notice that it uses a single source
file whose license indicates GPL-2+. What would you do? What could be
the LICENSE for this package?
21.h. You are writing an ebuild for a package written in either Rust or Go
programming language, how do you approach writing correct LICENSE value
in your ebuild? The main project is licensed as MIT.
*** PART ||| Code questions
1. You are writing an ebuild for the foomatic package. Upstream calls
the current version "1.3-7b" (but this is _not_ a beta release).
How would the ebuild be named? What's wrong with the ebuild
snippet below and how should this be written to aid
maintainability?
SRC_URI="https://foomatic.example.com/download/foomatic-1.3-7b.tar.bz2"
S=${WORKDIR}/foomatic-1.3-7b
docs: devmanual
2. You have a patch for foomatic which adds TLS support using OpenSSL.
The dependency is optional and controlled at build time.
Assuming that foomatic uses an autotools based build system
provide most probable changes required in an EAPI=7 ebuild.
docs: devmanual
3. What's the difference between global and phase scope in an ebuild?
docs: PMS
4. Why should an external application (for example sed/grep) not be
called in global scope? What alternative methods can be used?
docs: devmanual
5. What is wrong with using $(somecommand) or `somecommand` or $ARCH
inside SRC_URI, DEPEND, etc?
docs: devmanual
6. Explain what's incorrect about the following code snippets and suggest
an alternative.
6.a
# Upstream does not support user-specified CFLAGS
unset CFLAGS
docs: devmanual
6.b
# Extra settings for when SSL is enabled
if [ "`use ssl `" ] ; then
# blah
fi
docs: devmanual
6.c
# Extra options for configure
use jpeg && myconf="--enable-jpeg" \
|| myconf="--disable-jpeg"
use png && myconf="${myconf} --enable-png" \
|| myconf="${myconf} --disable-png"
use gif && myconf="${myconf} --enable-gif89a" \
|| myconf="${myconf} --disable-gif89a"
econf ${myconf}
docs: devmanual
6.d
# If we USE foo, we need to DEPEND upon libfoo. Unfortunately
# libfoo is completely broken on some archs
DEPEND="!x86? ( !amd64? ( !ppc? ( foo? ( >=dev-libs/libfoo-1.2 ) ) ) )"
docs: devmanual
7. What is the 'Gentoo way' of globally setting environment variables
for all users? How is this accomplished in ebuilds?
docs: devmanual
8. Which directory should manual (man) pages be in and how should they
be installed from an ebuild?
docs: PMS
9. On Gentoo Linux systems, what is the purpose of /usr/local/bin?
docs: devmanual
10. When should you use || die "msg" with commands/functions? Would you
rewrite the following snippets, and if yes, how?
10.a.
use fnord && ( emake fnordification && cp fnordification bar/ || die )
10.b.
emake docs || die
10.c.
my_custom_function() {
cd "${S}"/ext1
./ext1.sh
cd "${S}"/ext2
./ext2.sh
}
src_prepare() {
default
my_custom_function || die
}
docs: devmanual
11.a. You are committing a new package to the tree. What will you have in
the KEYWORDS variable?
docs: devmanual
11.b. You are bumping foomatic's ebuild from version 1.2 to version
1.3. The new release contains bugfixes and new
functionality. The current KEYWORDS for 1.2 are
"x86 sparc ~mips amd64" -- what will KEYWORDS be for
the new 1.3 ebuild?
docs: devmanual
11.c. You are bumping foomatic's ebuild from version 1.3 to 1.4. The
new release extends functionality and introduces a new
dependency on libfnord version 1.2 or later. The
KEYWORDS for foomatic-1.3 are "x86 sparc ~mips amd64"
and the KEYWORDS for libfnord-1.2 are "x86 ~sparc" --
what will you do?
docs: devmanual
11.d. You are bumping foomatic's ebuild from version 1.4 to 1.5. This
release introduces new optional support for the libgerbil
library, which you are controlling via the gerbil global
USE flag. Unfortunately libgerbil is full of code which
doesn't work properly on big endian systems, and so has
"-sparc -mips" in the KEYWORDS. How will you handle this?
docs: devmanual
11.e. You are bumping foomatic's ebuild from version 1.5 to version
2.0. This new version is a massive rewrite which introduces
huge changes to the build system, the required libraries
and how the code works. What will you do for KEYWORDS here?
docs: devmanual
12. Your package fails to build with older versions of GCC (e.g. GCC < 4.7).
How do you ensure that the user uses an appropriate compiler to build the
package? Under which circumstances should you avoid this check and how?
docs: devmanual
13. When should USE flags be used? What are the cases where they should be
avoided? Consider the following examples. Explain what is wrong in them
and how would you improve them.
docs: devmanual, common sense
13.a. A large C++ application with long build time has:
# libcxx can be optionally used at run time via -stdlib=libc++
IUSE="libcxx"
DEPEND=""
RDEPEND="libcxx? ( dev-libs/libcxx )"
13.b. A large package with long build time has:
inherit bash-completion-r1
IUSE="bash-completion"
src_install() {
default
use bash-completion && dobashcomp contrib/bash-completion/foo
}
13.c. A package unconditionally installs 'foobar' executable which links
to libbar. The ebuild maintainer wanted to make it optional.
He used the following code:
IUSE="foobar"
RDEPEND="foobar? ( dev-libs/libbar )"
DEPEND="${RDEPEND}"
src_install() {
default
if ! use foobar; then
rm "${ED}"/usr/bin/foobar || die
fi
}
13.d. A package has numerous configure switches which control a number
of optional features. All of them are enabled by default. They do
not have any external dependencies, and do not affect the package
size significantly. The ebuild author has added over 20 local USE
flags to control all of them.
*** Please also submit the following information:
* Please make sure your OpenPGP public keyblock is available on the keyserver network
hkp://pool.sks-keyservers.net and provide the fingerprint of it below
You should sign your quizzes with your key
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Gentoo-keys/Generating_GLEP_63_based_OpenPGP_keys
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GnuPG
* SSH public key (if you do not have one, please create one)
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Infrastructure/SSH_Key_Guide
If you don't paste your key inline, make sure it's signed by your
gpg key.
* Date of birth
* Where do you live (Town/City, Country)
* What are your programming/scripting skills, if applicable?
* What other areas are you experienced in?
* What other projects have you contributed to, if any?
* Tell us about yourself. This doesn't need to be strictly
computer-relevant; things like where you're from,
hobbies, job, family, interests... This information will be used
for your public new developer announcement so please mention if
something should not be part of that.
|