portage-talk, gsoc, gentoo, ntgwn, and more

A lot has been happening in the past two weeks, but I'll (try to) keep the post relatively short.

• portage-talk - A "library" of bash functions that can be used to talk to Portage (the tree + package db). It's basically for use in bash scripts to get data about installed packages, ebuilds, etc. It aims to be blazing fast and have minimal dependencies (nothing beyond bash + coreutils). This also means that the code isn't very pretty ;)
  
  I've been hacking on it on and off over the past week, and hope to have it good enough shape to shamelessly boast about it to more people :)
  



• GSoC - So, tomorrow is the deadline for submitting apps (which is likely to be extended following tradition ;). I submitted my abstract and proposal yesterday, and I'm currently keeping my fingers tightly crossed (along with the occasional running around in circles screaming and giggling at the same time).
  
  Steev and Patrick & Patrick and Steev have expressed interest in co-mentoring me (Gentoo projects have two mentors); let's see how everything turns out :)



• Satya also applied for GSoC this time. Her proposed project is the deceptively simple-looking idea to rewrite/extend Bootchart using Systemtap. Her mentor-if-she-gets-selected is Eugene Teo, who (going by what she's been telling me) has been an excellent (pre-project-acceptance) mentor; who is extremely patient, understanding, and an overall gem of a guy.



• GNOME 2.22.0 is (mostly) in-tree - The Gentoo GNOME Herd has almost completed moving GNOME 2.22 from the overlay to the tree. They have done a wonderful job by fixing a ton of bugs in just this month. As soon as all the bugs blocking the GNOME 2.22 tracker are resolved, and a few more reds converted to green on the gnome-2.22 status page, GNOME 2.22 will be unmasked, and users will be able to revel in the joy that is 2.22 :)



• Not The GWN - New issue released by Patrick!



• xulrunner-1.9 and mozilla-firefox-3 will be added to portage (p.masked) by armin76 when the beta5 is released :-)



• rohitj wrote an XChat plugin for dpaste (and has been bugging the rest of us to try it out for the past two days ;)



• More stuff that I can't remember :-/


Update: Another NTGWN issue released by Patrick :D