# Copyright 1999-2023 Gentoo Authors # Copyright 2016-2019 Amy Liffey # Copyright 2016-2021 Mikle Kolyada # Copyright 2021-2023 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 and your personal contributions: show your commits / pull requests which have dealt with subjects related to question at hand, reference PMS where appropriate, and rather provide your thought process instead of copying direct page content from the devmanual. 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 Do not publish or share any private conversation with your mentor or recruiter.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 user submits a brand new ebuild for a new package. What are the proper steps, including testing the contribution and checking for QA problems, to add the ebuild to the ::gentoo repository? What should the commit's summary look like, and how do you retain the authorship? 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 after a minor GCC update, e.g. from 9.2 to 9.3. How will you handle this? List possible methods and write ebuild code example(s). 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 a USE flag with no other functionality in the ebuild except: # ddcutil can be utilized via dlopen() IUSE="ddcutil" DEPEND="" RDEPEND="ddcutil? ( app-misc/ddcutil )" 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: * If you have an existing OpenPGP key available in a public keyserver be sure to sign your quiz with it and link the keyserver in use. If not, please attach your key while sending the quiz. * 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. * Age * 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.