Calligra 2.4.0 is out!

Let's all congratulate the Calligra team for releasing Calligra 2.4.0, the first version of their integrated application suite for KDE. It has really gone a long way from the old KOffice codebase. Of course, Gentoo already has ebuilds as app-office/calligra. Give it a try! Cheers!

A neat trick for testing patches in Gentoo (source-based distros are great!)

Imagine you are running... say... Kubuntu, OpenSuSE, or Fedora, or any other of these famous and fantastic binary Linux distributions. You find a bug, report it to the authors of the package, and they come up with a possible solution. "Hey, here's a small patch to the source, could you please try if applying that helps?" Well... Either now you compile manually, which may or may not give the same packages as your distribution. Or you start setting up the full build system of your distro, which will take a while...
With Gentoo as a source-based distribution, however, this is very easy. Let's assume you want to apply a patch for more debug output to some kde plasma applets. The patch file is called debug.patch, the package name for the plasma applets is kde-base/plasma-apps. All you have to do is

mkdir -p /etc/portage/patches/kde-base/plasma-apps
cp debug.patch /etc/portage/patches/kde-base/plasma-apps/
emerge -a1 kde-base/plasma-apps

Finished. The patch is automatically applied during the emerge command:

 >>> Preparing source in /var/tmp/portage/kde-base/plasma-apps-4.8.2/work/plasma-apps-4.8.2 ...
 * Applying user patches from /etc/portage/patches//kde-base/plasma-apps ...
 *   debug.patch ...                      [ ok ]
 * Done with patching
>>> Source prepared.

Isn't that a nice trick? :)
Just one small warning... this does not work for all ebuilds in the portage tree yet, in case of doubt better check the build log if your patch was really applied. It does work for all ebuilds using base.eclass, which effectively includes all of KDE and all KDE applications.

Please test cups-1.5

CUPS 1.5 has now been in the tree for quite some time, so we should think about getting it stable. As I'm actually not really a person who prints a lot or uses a lot of different printer drivers, it would however be great to get some more widespread testing... So please: If you are still running stable CUPS (i.e. net-print/cups-1.4.8-r1), please give the newest ~arch ebuild a try, and if you are encountering problems, please file bug reports on Gentoo bugzilla! Thanks a lot in advance!!!