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- 2024 in retrospect & happy new year 2025!
Happy New Year 2025! Once again, a lot has happened over the past months, in Gentoo and otherwise.Our fireworks were a bit early this year with the stabilization of GCC 14 in November, after a huge amount of preparations and bug fixing via the Modern C initiative. A lot of other programming language ecosystems also saw significant improvements. As always here we’re going to revisit all the exciting news from our favourite Linux distribution.
Gentoo in numbers
The number of commits to the main ::gentoo repository has remained at an overall high level in 2024, with a 2.4% increase from 121000 to 123942. The number of commits by external contributors has grown strongly from 10708 to 12812,now across 421 unique external authors.
The importance of GURU, our user-curated repository with a trusted user model, as entry point for potential developers, is clearlyincreasing as well. We have had 7517 commits in 2024, a strong growth from 5045 in 2023.The number of contributors to GURU has increased a lot as well, from 158 in 2023 to 241 in 2024. Please join us there and help packaging the latest and greatest software. That’s the ideal preparation for becoming a Gentoo developer!
Activity has picked up speed on the Gentoo bugtracker bugs.gentoo.org, where we’ve had 26123 bug reports created in 2024, compared to 24795 in 2023. The number of resolved bugs shows the same trend, with 25946 in 2024 compared to 22779 in 2023!
New developers
In 2024 we have gained two new Gentoo developers. They are in chronological order:
Matt Jolly (kangie):Matt joined us already in February from Brisbane, Australia - now finally pushing his commits himself, after alreadytaking care of, e.g., Chromium for over half a year. In work life a High Performance Computing systems administrator, in his free time he enjoys playing with his animals, restoring retro computing equipment and gaming consoles (or using them), brewing beer, the beach, or the local climbing gym.
Eli Schwartz (eschwartz):In July, we were able to welcome Eli Schwartz from the USA as new Gentoo developer. A bookworm and big fan of Python, and also an upstream maintainer for the Meson Build System, Eli caught the Linux bug already in highschool. Quoting him, “asking around for recommendations on distro I was recommended either Arch or Gentoo. Originally I made a mistake ;)” … We’re glad thisgot fixed now!
Featured changes and news
Let’s now look at the major improvements and news of 2024 in Gentoo.
Distribution-wide Initiatives
SPI associated project: As of March 2024, Gentoo Linux has become an Associated Project of Software in the Public Interest (SPI). SPI is a non-profit corporation founded to act as a fiscal sponsor for organizations that develop open source software and hardware. It provides services such as accepting donations, holding funds and assets, … and qualifies for 501(c)(3) (U.S. non-profit organization) status. This means that all donations made to SPI and its supported projects are tax deductible for donors in the United States. The intent behind becoming an SPI associated project is to gradually wind down operations of the Gentoo Foundation and transfer its assets to SPI.
GCC 14 stabilization: After a huge amount of work to identify and fix bugs and working with upstreams to modernize the overall source code base, see also the Modern C porting initiative, GCC 14 was finally stabilized in November 2024. Same as Clang 16, GCC 14 by default drops support for several long-deprecated and obsolete language constructs, turning decades-long warnings on bad code into fatal errors.
Link time optimization (LTO): Lots of progress has been made supporting LTO all across the Gentoo repository.
64bit time_t for 32bit architectures: Various preparations have begun to keep our 32-bit arches goingbeyond the year 2038. While the GNU C library is ready for that, the switch to a wider time_t data type is anABI break between userland programs and libraries and needs to be approached carefully, in particular for us as a source-based distribution. Experimental profiles as well as a migration tool are available by now, and will be announced more widely atsome point in 2025.
New 23.0 profiles: A new profile version 23.0, i.e. a collection of presets and configurations, has become the default setting; the old profiles are deprecated and will be removed in June 2025. The 23.0 profiles fix a lot of internal inconsistencies; for the user, they bring more toolchain hardening (specifically, CET on amd64 and non-lazy runtime binding)and optimization (e.g., packed relative reolcations where supported) by default.
Expanded binary package coverage: The binary package coverage for amd64 has been expanded a lot, with, e.g., differentuse-flag combinations, Python support up to version 3.13, and additional large leaf packages beyond stable as for example current GCC snapshots, all for baseline x86-64 and for x86-64-v3. At the moment, the mirrors hold over 60GByte of package data for amd64 alone.
Two additional merchandise stores: We have licensed two additional official merchandise stores, both based in Europe: FreeWear(clothing, mugs, stickers; located in Spain) and BadgeShop (Etsy, Ebay; badges, stickers; located in Romania).
Handbook improvements and editor role: The Gentoo handbook has once again been significantly improved (though there is always still more work to be done). We now have special Gentoo handbook editor roles assigned, which makesthe handbook editing effectively much more community friendly. This way, a lot of longstanding issues have been fixed, making installing Gentoo easier for everyone.
Event presence: At the Free and Open Source Software Conference (FrOSCon) 2024, visitors enjoyed a full weekend of hands-on Gentoo workshops. The workshops covered a wide range of topics, from first installation to ebuild maintenance.We also offered mugs, stickers, t-shirts, and of course the famous self-compiled buttons.
Online workshops: Our German support, Gentoo e.V., is grateful to the inspiring speakers of the 6 online workshops in 2024 on various Gentoo topics in German and English. We are looking forward to more exciting events in 2025.
Ban on NLP AI tools: Due to serious concerns with current AI and LLM systems,the Gentoo Council has decided to embrace the value of human contributions and adopt the following motion: “It is expressly forbidden to contribute to Gentoo any content that has been created with the assistance of Natural Language Processing artificial intelligence tools. This motion can be revisited, should a case been made over such a tool that does not pose copyright, ethical and quality concerns.”
Architectures
MIPS and Alpha fully supported again: After the big drive to improve Alpha support last year, now we’ve taken care ofMIPS keywording all across the Gentoorepository. Thanks to renewed volunteer interest, both arches have returned to the forefront ofGentoo Linux development, with a consistent dependency tree checked and enforced by our continuous integration system.Up-to-date stage builds and the accompanying binary packages are available for both, in the case ofMIPS for all three ABI variantso32, n32, and n64 and for both big and little endian, and in the case ofAlpha also with abootable installation CD.
32bit RISC-V now available:Installation stages for 32bit RISC-V systems (rv32) are now available for download, both using hard-float and soft-float ABI, and both using glibc and musl.
End of IA-64 (Itanium) support:Following the removal of IA-64 (Itanium) support in the Linuxkernel and in glibc,we have dropped all ia64 profiles and keywords.
Packages
Slotted Rust: The Rust compiler is now slotted, allowing multiple versions to be installed in parallel.This allows us to finally support packages that have a maximum bounded Rust dependency and don’t compile successfully with a newer Rust (yes, that exists!), or ensure that packages use Rust and LLVM versions that fit together (e.g., firefox or chromium).
Reworked LLVM handling: In conjunction with this, the LLVM ebuilds and eclasses have been reworked so packagescan specify which LLVM versions they support and dependencies are generated accordingly. The eclasses now provide much cleaner LLVM installation information to the build systems of packages, and therefore, e.g., also fix support for cross-compilation
Python:In the meantime the default Python version in Gentoo has reached Python 3.12. Additionally we havealso Python 3.13 available stable - again we’re fully up to date with upstream.
Zig rework and slotting: An updated eclass and ebuild framework for the Zig programming language has been committed that hooks into the ZBS or Zig Build System, allows slotting of Zig versions, allows Zig libraries to be depended on, and even provides some experimental cross-compilation support.
Ada support: We finally have Ada support for just about every architecture. Yay!
Slotted Guile: The last but not least language that received the slotting treatment has been Guile, with three new eclasses,such that now Guile 1, 2, and 3 and their reverse dependencies can coexist in a Gentoo installation.
TeX Live 2023 and 2024: Catching up with our backlog, the packaging of TeX Live has been refreshed; TeX Live 2023 is now marked stable and TeX Live 2024 is marked testing.
DTrace 2.0: The famous tracing tool DTrace has come to Gentoo!All required kernel options are already enabled in the newest stable Gentoo distribution kernel; if youare compiling manually, the DTrace ebuild will inform you about required configuration changes.Internally, DTrace 2.0 for Linux builds on the BPFengine of the Linux kernel, so the build installs a gcc that outputs BPF code (which, btw, also is very useful for systemd).
KDE Plasma 6 upgrade: Stable Gentoo Linux has upgraded to the new major version of theKDE community desktop environment, KDE Plasma 6. As of end of 2024, in Gentoo stable we have KDE Gear 24.08.3, KDE Frameworks 6.7.0, and KDE Plasma 6.2.4. As always, Gentoo testing follows the newest upstream releases (and using the KDE overlay you can eveninstall from git sources). In the course of KDE package maintenance we have over the past months and years contributed over 240 upstream backports to KDE’s Qt5PatchCollection.
Microgram Ramdisk: We have added µgRD (or ugrd) as a lightweight initramfs generator alternative to dracut. As a side effect of this our installkernel mechanism has gained support for arbitrary initramfs generators.
Physical and Software Infrastructure
Mailing list archives: archives.gentoo.org, our mailing list archive, is back, now witha backend based on public-inbox. Many thanks to upstream there for being very helpful; we were even able to keep all historical links to archived list e-mails working.
Ampere Altra Max development server: Arm Ltd. and specifically its Works on Arm teamhas sent us a fast Ampere Altra Maxserver to support Gentoo development. With 96 Armv8.2+ 64bit cores, 256 GByte ofRAM, and 4 TByte NVMe storage, it is now hosted together with some of our other hardware at OSU Open Source Lab.
Finances of the Gentoo Foundation
Income: The Gentoo Foundation took in approximately $20,800 in fiscal year 2024;the dominant part (over 80%) consists of individual cash donations from the community.
Expenses: Our expenses in 2024 were, as split into the usual three categories,operating expenses (for services, fees, …) $7,900, only minor capital expenses (for bought assets), and depreciation expenses (value loss of existing assets) $13,300.
Balance: We have about $105,000 in the bank as of July 1, 2024 (which is whenour fiscal year 2024 ends for accounting purposes). The draft finanical reportfor 2024 is available on the Gentoo Wiki.
Transition to SPI: With the move of our accounts to SPI, see above, the web pages for individual cash donations now direct the funds to SPI earmarked for Gentoo, both for one time and recurrent donations. Donors of ongoing recurrent donations will be contacted and asked to re-arrange over the upcoming months.
Thank you!
As every year, we would like to thank all Gentoo developers and all who have submitted contributionsfor their relentless everyday Gentoo work. If you are interested and would like to help, please join us tomake Gentoo even better! As a volunteer project, Gentoo could not exist without its community.
- FOSDEM 2025
It’s FOSDEM time again! Join us at Université Libre de Bruxelles,Campus du Solbosch, in Brussels, Belgium. The upcoming FOSDEM 2025 will be held on February 1st and 2nd 2025. Our developers will be happy to greet all open source enthusiasts at our Gentoo stand (exact location still to be announced), whichwe will share this year with then Gentoo-based Flatcar Container Linux.Of course there’s also the chance to celebrate 25 years of compiling!Visit this year’s wiki page to see who’s coming and formore practical information.
- Much improved MIPS and Alpha support in Gentoo Linux
Over the last years, MIPS andAlpha support in Gentoo has been slowing down,mostly due to a lack of volunteers keeping these architectures alive. Not anymore however! We’re happyto announce that thanks to renewed volunteer interest both arches have returned to the forefront ofGentoo Linux development, with a consistent dependency tree checked and enforced by our continuous integration system.Up-to-date stage builds and the accompanying binary packages are available for both, in the case ofMIPS for all three ABI variantso32, n32, and n64 and for both big and little endian, and in the case ofAlpha also with abootable installation CD.
- KDE Plasma 6 upgrade for stable Gentoo Linux
Exciting news for stable Gentoo users: It’s time for the upgrade to the new “megaversion”of the KDE community desktop environment, KDE Plasma 6! Together with KDE Gear 24.05.2, wherenow most of the applications have been ported, andKDE Frameworks 6.5.0, the underlyinglibrary architecture, KDE Plasma 6.1.4 will be stabilized over the next days. The base libraries of Qt 6 are already available.
More technical information on the upgrade, which should be fairly seamless, as well asarchitecture-specific notes can be found in a repository news item. Enjoy!
- Gentoo Linux drops IA-64 (Itanium) support
Following the removal of IA-64 (Itanium) support in the Linuxkernel and glibc,and subsequent discussionson our mailing list, as well as a voteby the Gentoo Council, Gentoo will discontinue all ia64 profiles and keywords. The primary reason for this decision is theinability of the Gentoo IA-64 team to support this architecture without kernel support, glibc support, and a functional developmentbox (or even a well-established emulator). In addition, there have been only very few users interested in this type of hardware.
As also announced in a news item, in one month,i.e. in the first half of September 2024, all ia64 profiles will be removed, all ia64 keywords will be dropped from all packages, and allIA-64 related Gentoo bugs will be closed.
- Gentoo Linux becomes an SPI associated project
As of this March, Gentoo Linux has become an Associated Project of Software in the Public Interest, see also theformal invitation by the Board of Directors of SPI. Software in the Public Interest (SPI) is a non-profit corporation founded to act as a fiscal sponsor for organizations that develop open source softwareand hardware. It provides services such as accepting donations, holding funds and assets, …SPI qualifies for 501(c)(3) (U.S. non-profit organization) status. This means that all donations made to SPI and its supported projects are tax deductible for donors in the United States.Read on for more details…
Questions & AnswersWhy become an SPI Associated Project?
Gentoo Linux, as a collective of software developers, is pretty good at being a Linuxdistribution. However, becoming a US federal non-profit organization would increase the non-technical workload.
The current Gentoo Foundation has bylaws restricting its behavior to that of a non-profit, is a recognized non-profit only in New Mexico, but a for-profit entity at the US federal level. A direct conversion to a federally recognized non-profit would be unlikely to succeed without significant effort and cost.
Finding Gentoo Foundation trustees to take care of the non-technical work is an ongoingchallenge. Robin Johnson (robbat2), our current Gentoo Foundation treasurer, spent ahuge amount of time and effort with getting bookkeeping and taxes in order after the priortreasurers lost interest and retired from Gentoo.
For these reasons, Gentoo is moving the non-technical organization overhead to Software in the Public Interest (SPI). As noted above, SPI is already now recognized at US federal level as a full-fleged non-profit 501(c)(3). It also handles several projects of similar type and size (e.g., Arch and Debian) and as such has exactly the experience and background that Gentoo needs.
What are the advantages of becoming an SPI Associated Project in detail?
Financial benefits to donors:
tax deductions [1]
Financial benefits to Gentoo:
matching fund programs [2] reduced organizational complexity reduced administration costs [3] reduced taxes [4] reduced fees [5] increased access to non-profit-only sponsorship [6]
Non-financial benefits to Gentoo:
reduced organizational complexity, no “double-headed beast” any more less non-technical work required
[1] Presently, almost no donations to the Gentoo Foundation provide a tax benefit for donors anywhere in the world. Becoming a SPI Associated Project enables tax benefits for donors located in the USA. Some other countries do recognize donations made to non-profits in other jurisdictions and provide similar tax credits.
[2] This also depends on jurisdictions and local tax laws of the donor, and is often tied to tax deductions.
[3] The Gentoo Foundation currently pays $1500/year in tax preparation costs.
[4] In recent fiscal years, through careful budgetary planning on the part of the Treasurer and advice of tax professionals, the Gentoo Foundation has useddepreciation expenses to offset taxes owing; however, this is not a sustainablestrategy.
[5] Non-profits are eligible for reduced fees, e.g., of Paypal (savings of 0.9-1.29% per donation) and other services.
[6] Some sponsorship programs are only available to verified 501(c)(3) organizations
Can I still donate to Gentoo, and how?
Yes, of course, and please do so! For the start, you can go to SPI’s Gentoo page and scroll down to thePaypal and Click&Pledge donation links. More information and more ways will be set up soon.Keep in mind, donations to Gentoo via SPI are tax-deductible in the US!
In time, Gentoo will contact existing recurring donors, to aid transitions toSPI’s donation systems.
What will happen to the Gentoo Foundation?
Our intention is to eventually transfer the existing assets to SPI and dissolve the GentooFoundation. The precise steps needed on the way to this objective are still under discussion.
Does this affect in any way the European Gentoo e.V.?
No. Förderverein Gentoo e.V. will continue to existindependently. It is also recognized to serve public-benefit purposes (§ 52 Fiscal Code of Germany), meaning that donations are tax-deductible in the E.U.
- Gentoo x86-64-v3 binary packages available
End of December 2023 we already made our officialannouncement of binary Gentoo package hosting. The initial package set for amd64 was and is base-line x86-64, i.e., it should work on any 64bit Intel or AMD machine. Now, we are happy toannounce that there is also a separate package set using the Read on for more details…
Questions & AnswersHow can I check if my machine supports x86-64-v3?
The easiest way to do this is to use glibc’s dynamic linker:
larry@noumea ~ $ ld.so --helpUsage: ld.so [OPTION]... EXECUTABLE-FILE [ARGS-FOR-PROGRAM...]You have invoked 'ld.so', the program interpreter for dynamically-linkedELF programs. Usually, the program interpreter is invoked automaticallywhen a dynamically-linked executable is started.[...][...]Subdirectories of glibc-hwcaps directories, in priority order: x86-64-v4 x86-64-v3 (supported, searched) x86-64-v2 (supported, searched)larry@noumea ~ $
As you can see, this laptop supports x86-64-v2 and x86-64-v3, but not x86-64-v4.
How do I use the new x86-64-v3 packages?
On your amd64 machine, edit the configuration file in /etc/portage/binrepos.conf/that defines the URI from where the packages are downloaded, and replace x86-64 withx86-64-v3. E.g., if you have so far
sync-uri = https://distfiles.gentoo.org/releases/amd64/binpackages/17.1/x86-64/
then you change the URI to
sync-uri = https://distfiles.gentoo.org/releases/amd64/binpackages/17.1/x86-64-v3/
That’s all.
Why don’t you have x86-64-v4 packages?
There’s not yet enough hardware and people out there that could use them.
We could start building such packages at any time (our build host is new and shiny), but for now we recommend you build from source and use yourown CFLAGS then. After all, if your machine supports x86-64-v4, it’s definitely fast…
Why is there recently so much noise about x86-64-v3 support in Linux distros?
Beats us. The ISA is 9 years old (just the tag x86-64-v3 was slapped ontoit recently), so you’d think binaries would have been generated by now. With Gentoo you could’ve done (and probably have done) it all the time.
That said, in some processor lines (i.e. Atom), support for this instructionset was introduced rather late (2021).
- 2023 in retrospect & happy new year 2024!
A Happy New Year 2024 to all of you! We hope you enjoyed the fireworks; we tried to contributeto these too with the binary package news just before new year! That’s not the only thing in Gentoo thatwas new in 2023 though; as in the previous years, let’s look back and give it a review.
Gentoo in numbers
The number of commits to the main ::gentoo repository has remained at an overall high level in 2023, only slightly lower from 126682 to 121000. The number of commits by external contributors has actually increased from 10492 to 10708,now across 404 unique external authors.
GURU, our user-curated repository with a trusted user model, is still attracting a lot of potential developers.We have had 5045 commits in 2023, a slight decrease from 5751 in 2022.The number of contributors to GURU has increased clearly however, from 134 in 2022 to 158 in 2023. Please join us there and help packaging the latest and greatest software. That’s the ideal preparation for becoming a Gentoo developer!
On the Gentoo bugtracker bugs.gentoo.org, we’ve had 24795 bug reportscreated in 2023, compared to 26362 in 2022. The number of resolved bugs shows a similartrend, with 22779 in 2023 compared to 24681 in 2022. Many of these bugs are stabilizationrequests; a possible interpretation is that stable Gentoo is becoming more and more current, catching up with new software releases.
New developers
In 2023 we have gained 3 new Gentoo developers. They are in chronological order:
Arsen Arsenović (arsen):Arsen joined up as a developer right at the start of the year in January from Belgrade, Serbia. He’s a computer science studentinterested in both maths and music, active in many different free software projects, and has alreadymade his impression, e.g., in our emacs and toolchain projects.
Paul Fox (ris):After already being very active in our Wiki for some time, Paul joined in March as developer from France. Activity on our wiki and documentation quality will certainly grow much further with his help.
Petr Vaněk (arkamar):Petr Vaněk, from Prague, Czech Republic, joined the ranks of our developers in November. Gentoo user since 2009, craft beer enthusiast, and Linux kernel contributor, he has already beenactive in very diverse corners of Gentoo.
Featured changes and news
Let’s now look at the major improvements and news of 2023 in Gentoo.
Distribution-wide Initiatives
Binary package hosting: Gentoo shockingly now also provides binary packages, for easier and faster installation! For amd64 and arm64, we’ve gota stunning >20 GByte of packages on our mirrors, from LibreOffice to KDE Plasma and from Gnome to Docker.Also, would you think 9-year old x86-64-v3 is still experimental? We have it already on our mirrors! For all other architectures and ABIs, the binary package files used for building the installation stages (including the build tool chain) are available for download.
New 23.0 profiles in preparation:A new profile version, i.e. a collection of presets and configurations, is at the moment undergoing internal preparation and testing for all architectures. It’s not ready yet, but will integrate more toolchain hardening by default, as well as fix alot of internal inconsistencies. Stay tuned for an announcement with more details in the near future.
Modern C: Work continues on porting Gentoo, and the Linux userland at large, to Modern C. This is a real marathon effort rather than a sprint (just see our tracker bug for it). Ourefforts together with the same project ongoing in Fedora have already helped many upstreams,which have accepted patches in preparation for GCC 14 (that starts to enforce themodern language usage).
Event presence: At the Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting (FOSDEM) 2023, the Free and Open Source Software Conference (FrOSCon) 2023, and the ChemnitzerLinux-Tage (CLT) 2023, Gentoo had a booth with mugs, stickers, t-shirts, and of course the famousself-compiled buttons.
Google Summer of Code: In 2023 Gentoo had another successful year participating in the Google Summer of Code. We had three contributorscompleting their projects; you can find out more about them by visiting the Gentoo GSoC blog. We thank our contributors Catcream, LabBrat, and Listout, and also all the developers who took the time to mentor them.
Online workshops: Our German support, Gentoo e.V., organized this year 6 online workshops on buildingand improving ebuilds. This will be continued every two months in the upcoming year.
Documentation on wiki.gentoo.org has been making great progress as always. This past year the contributor’s guide, article writing guidelines, and help pages were updated to give the best possible start to anyone ready to lend a hand. The Gentoo Handbook got updates, and a new changelog. Of course much documentation was fixed, extended, or updated, and quitea few new pages were created. We hope to see even more activity in the new year, and hopefullysome new contributors - editing documentation is a particularly easy area to start contributing to Gentoo in, pleasegive it a try!
Architectures
Alpha: Support for the DEC Alpha architecture was revived, with a massive keywording effort going on. While not perfectly complete yet, we are very close to a fully consistent dependency tree and package set for alpha again.
musl: Support for the lightweight musl libc has been added to the architectures MIPS (o32) and m68k, with corresponding profiles in the Gentoo repository and corresponding installation stages and binary packages available for download. Enjoy!
Packages
.NET: The Gentoo Dotnet project has significantly improved support for building .NET-based software, using the nuget, dotnet-pkg-base, and dotnet-pkg eclasses. Now we’re ready for packages depending on the .NET ecosystem and fordevelopers using dotnet-sdk on Gentoo. New software requiring .NET is constantly being added to the main Gentoo tree. Recent additions include PowerShell for Linux, Denaro (a finance application), Pinta (a graphics program), Ryujinx (a NS emulator)and many other aimed straight at developing .NET projects.
Java: OpenJDK 21 has been introduced for amd64, arm64, ppc64, and x86!
Python:In the meantime the default Python version in Gentoo has reached Python 3.11. Additionally we havealso Python 3.12 available stable - again we’re fully up to date with upstream.
PyPy3 compatibility for scientific Python:While some packages (numexpr, pandas, xarray) are at the moment still undergoing upstream bug fixing, more and more scientific Python packages have been adapted in Gentoo and upstream for the speed-optimized Python variant PyPy. This can provide a nice performance boost for numerical data analysis…
Signed kernel modules and (unified) kernel images: We now support signing of both in-tree and out-of-tree kernel modules and kernel images. This is useful for those who would like the extra bit of verification offered by Secure Boot, which is now easier than ever to set up on Gentoo systems! Additionally, our kernel install scripts and eclasses are now fully compatible with Unified Kernel Images and our prebuilt gentoo-kernel-bin can now optionally install an experimental pregenerated generic Unified Kernel Image.
The GAP System:A new dev-gap package category has arrived with about sixty packages.GAP is a popular system for computationaldiscrete algebra, with particular emphasis on Computational GroupTheory. GAP consists of a programming language, a library of thousandsof functions implementing algebraic algorithms written in the GAPlanguage, and large data libraries of algebraic objects. It has its ownpackage ecosystem, mostly written in the GAP language with a few C components.
Physical and Software Infrastructure
Portage improvements: A significant amount of work went into enhancing our package manager, Portage, to better support binary package deployment. Users building their own binary packages and setting up their own infrastructure will certainly benefitfrom it too.
packages.gentoo.org: The development of Gentoo’s package database website,packages.gentoo.org, has picked up speed, with new features for maintainer, category, and arch pages, and Repology integration. Many optimization were done for the backend database queries and the website should now feel faster to use.
pkgdev bugs: A new developer tool called pkgdev bugs enables us now tosimplify the procedure for filing new stable requests bugs a lot. By just giving it version lists (which can be generated by other tools),pkgdev bugs can be used to compute dependencies, cycles, merges, and will filethe bugs for the architecture teams / testers. This allows us to step ahead much fasterwith package stabilizations.
Finances of the Gentoo Foundation
Income: The Gentoo Foundation took in approximately $18,500 in fiscal year 2023;the majority (over 80%) were individual cash donations from the community.
Expenses: Our expenses in 2023 were, as split into the usual three categories,operating expenses (for services, fees, …) $6,000, only minor capital expenses (for bought assets), and depreciation expenses (value loss of existing assets) $20,000.
Balance: We have about $101,000 in the bank as of July 1, 2023 (which is whenour fiscal year 2023 ends for accounting purposes). The draft finanical reportfor 2023 is available on the Gentoo Wiki.
Thank you!
Obviously this is not all Gentoo development that happened in 2023. From KDE to GNOME, from kernels to scientific software, you can find much more if you look at the details.As every year, we would like to thank all Gentoo developers and all who have submitted contributionsfor their relentless everyday Gentoo work. As a volunteer project, Gentoo could not exist without them. And if you are interested and would like to contribute, please join us andhelp us make Gentoo even better!
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