Mailing List Archive

On 08/23/2011 09:47 PM, Frank Peters wrote:
> When attempting to emerge either thunderbird-5 or thunderbird-6
> the build fails.
>
> The build log, in both cases, shows this at the end:
>
> rm -f libxul.so
> /usr/bin/python2.7 [...] -Wl,-h,libxul.so -o libxul.so [...]
> collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
> make[4]: *** [libxul.so] Error 1

This is a bug that should be reported (TB 5 and 6 build just fine here).
You'd need to post the full build.log, not just the above error.

On Tuesday 23 August 2011 20:47:42 Frank Peters wrote:
> When attempting to emerge either thunderbird-5 or thunderbird-6
> the build fails.
>
> The build log, in both cases, shows this at the end:
>
> rm -f libxul.so
> /usr/bin/python2.7 [...] -Wl,-h,libxul.so -o libxul.so [...]
> collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
> make[4]: *** [libxul.so] Error 1
>
> Is it strange that libxul should be removed and then used immediately
> afterward?
>
> Currently I am using thunderbird-3.1.10 which builds using the
> same USE flags and other options.
You need more than 3GB of diskspace free. So If you compile on a limited tmpfs
space, you can compile it with:
PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/another_path_that_is_on_disk" emerge thunderbird

--
Agostino Sarubbo ( ago )
Mail: ago@autistici.org
Irc: irc.freenode.net ago
Gpg: 0x7CD2DC5D
Arch Tester for Gentoo Linux amd64 http://is.gd/hcQem
Admin for HacklabCS c/o HPCC at Unical


This mail has been sent with kmail on gentoo.

On 08/23/2011 11:02 PM, Frank Peters wrote:
> On Tue, 23 Aug 2011 21:05:42 +0200
> Agostino Sarubbo<ago@autistici.org> wrote:
>
>> You need more than 3GB of diskspace free. So If you compile on a limited tmpfs
>> space, you can compile it with:
>> PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/another_path_that_is_on_disk" emerge thunderbird
>
> I didn't think that this should matter since, AFAIK, tmpfs is automatically
> expanded when necessary using swap space.

Nope. It is never expanded. If you mount a 2GB tmpfs, it will always
be 2GB big.

swap only comes into play when you mount, say, a 10GB tmpfs on an 8GB
RAM system. When all RAM is about to be used up, then tmpfs will use
swap for the remaining 2GB.

On Tue, 23 Aug 2011 16:02:58 -0400
Frank Peters <frank.peters@comcast.net> wrote:

>
> Possibly these errors are related to USE="-alsa".
>

Thanks to all respondents.

Thunderbird-6 builds now. The problem was too little tmpfs space
and the USE="-alsa" flag.

The new question is why is alsa required for the build to succeed?

I don't follow thunderbird development but there is a previous bug
report on this (https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=308363)
and there is also a "noalsa-fixup" patch in the current portage tree.

Also, from the gentoo Changelog:

21 Oct 2010; Jory A. Pratt <anarchy@gentoo.org> thunderbird-3.1.5.ebuild,
+files/bug-606109.patch:
Address build failure with -alsa

Anyway, I'll use thunderbird with alsa until I can find more about this.

Frank Peters

On Tue, 2011-08-23 at 16:45 -0400, Frank Peters wrote:
> On Tue, 23 Aug 2011 16:02:58 -0400
> Frank Peters <frank.peters@comcast.net> wrote:
>
> >
> > Possibly these errors are related to USE="-alsa".
> >
>
> Thanks to all respondents.
>
> Thunderbird-6 builds now. The problem was too little tmpfs space
> and the USE="-alsa" flag.
>
> The new question is why is alsa required for the build to succeed?
>
> I don't follow thunderbird development but there is a previous bug
> report on this (https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=308363)
> and there is also a "noalsa-fixup" patch in the current portage tree.
>
> Also, from the gentoo Changelog:
>
> 21 Oct 2010; Jory A. Pratt <anarchy@gentoo.org> thunderbird-3.1.5.ebuild,
> +files/bug-606109.patch:
> Address build failure with -alsa
>
> Anyway, I'll use thunderbird with alsa until I can find more about this.
>
> Frank Peters
>
>
How else can you enjoy a singing email?? :-)

On Tuesday 23 August 2011 22:45:05 Frank Peters wrote:
> I don't follow thunderbird development but there is a previous bug
> report on this (https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=308363)
> and there is also a "noalsa-fixup" patch in the current portage tree.

Feel free to reopen or open a new.

--
Agostino Sarubbo ( ago )
Mail: ago@autistici.org
Irc: irc.freenode.net ago
Gpg: 0x7CD2DC5D
Arch Tester for Gentoo Linux amd64 http://is.gd/hcQem
Admin for HacklabCS c/o HPCC at Unical


This mail has been sent with kmail on gentoo.

On Tue, 23 Aug 2011 19:07:41 -0400
Drake Donahue <donahue95@comcast.net> wrote:

>
> How else can you enjoy a singing email?? :-)
>

Good point, I suppose.

Actually I much prefer Sylpheed over all other email clients and
I use it almost exclusively.

But there are times when I need to communicate to someone that
is using MS Outlook on the other end and for that purpose I will
pull thunderbird out of the closet and compose a message in HTML
format. MS users can't seem to appreciate, or even understand,
anything else.

Frank Peters

Frank Peters posted on Tue, 23 Aug 2011 19:46:29 -0400 as excerpted:

> Actually I much prefer Sylpheed over all other email clients and I use
> it almost exclusively.

Interesting. I had been a kmail user for nearly a decade, since
switching from MS and MSOE back in late-2001/early-2002 (when MS pushed
me off with eXPrivacy), but after adopting a wait-and-see attitude toward
akonadi, with 4.6 I waited and saw enough, and switched to claws-mail in
time to avoid emerging kmail for kde 4.7.

Way back when I was switching from MS and choosing my apps then, I had
tried sylpheed and the (then) sylpheed-claws, but something, I've long
forgotten what, wasn't quite right for me, and I ended up on kmail
instead. Of course that was a long long time ago, and features, etc,
have rather changed, so whatever was the problem then very likely isn't
one now.

Anyway, I've been extremely impressed with claws-mail, using it both for
mail, and, in another instance (I had to set $HOME and $TMPDIR in a
wrapper script so it didn't try to use the mail instance) with the rss-
reader plugin, for feeds (as a replacement to akregator, which seems to
have fallen well behind the times in its ability to filter, etc, as well
as the fact that while it doesn't use akonadi directly, it uses kdepim-
common-libs, which pulls in akonadi even if nothing's really using it).

I've long used pan for news (nntp), but after seeing how well claws works
for mail and for rss and atom feeds, I'm thinking I might try it for news
as well, at least for my text groups.

Anyway, given that claws originated as the development version of
sylpheed, I've wondered what the practical differences are. I did try
sylpheed, but other than seeming to be a slightly older version of claws,
with correspondingly slightly less features, etc, and the rather more
marked Japanese origin (the homesite is in English/Japanese, but some of
the more info links are only Japanese), I didn't see a lot of difference.

So I've been wondering what the rest of the story might be, and why
people, at least non-Japanese (no offense, just that info's easier to
absorb if it's not filtered thru google translate or the like), might
prefer sylpheed to claws. If you could shed some light on either the
difference in emphasis and split, or why you personally prefer sylpheed,
I'd be quite interested. =:^)

(FWIW, the only guess I have is that perhaps with the switch to gtk2, the
sylpheed dev preferred not to enable customized hotkeys to the degree
that claws has, since as I found out, /every/ and I really do mean /
every/ single bit of functionality in claws seems to be exposed with a
possible hotkey customization. While kde is pretty good with hotkey
customization most of the time, it doesn't expose /every/ little function
as a hotkey, as claws seems to! I'm sort of familiar with how the gtk2
hotkey dump functionality works from pan, too, but claws really does seem
to take configurable hotkeys to all to an /entirely/ different level.
It's possible the same general idea applies to the filtering and external
commands functionality, too, as claws seems to be very good with that as
well. But that's only a guess.)

> But there are times when I need to communicate to someone that is using
> MS Outlook on the other end and for that purpose I will pull thunderbird
> out of the closet and compose a message in HTML format. MS users can't
> seem to appreciate, or even understand, anything else.

Argh! If they want to read my mail, they can very well read it in plain
text, or add the HTML themselves (as effectively happens when they read
it in webmail, as my folks do). I'm sure if it hasn't already been done,
someone could come up with a script that adds tags either randomly or
based on some scheme, changing fontface, fontsize, fontcolor, adding
graphics including graphical smileys, etc.

FWIW, one of the things that's so great about claws is its html-filtering
mode, which reduces everything, including all those feeds which obviously
in XML, into plain text, and does a rather good job at it if I DO say
so! I was thinking about using gwene.org feeds2news for the feeds, since
I already use gmane.org lists2news for my mailing lists, and then using
pan, but because the feeds are XML and pan simply parses it as plain
text, raw tags and all, that didn't work well AT ALL when I tried it.
But by then I was already using claws for mail, and noted its html2text
mode, so decided to try it. I've been VERY pleasantly surprised with the
results, AND the speed, so far. =:^)

Anyway, if claws can do so well at deHTMLifying things, certainly a
script could be designed to HTMLify things as well, for those who wished
it that way. I imagine it could even be designed to randomly insert
various webbugs, other spyware, script-aided exploits, etc. just like the
real thing, so people could REALLY feel at home with their
candy-over-security choice! =:^\

--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman

On Wed, 24 Aug 2011 03:43:05 +0000 (UTC)
Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net> wrote:

>
> So I've been wondering what the rest of the story might be, and why
> people, at least non-Japanese (no offense, just that info's easier to
> absorb if it's not filtered thru google translate or the like), might
> prefer sylpheed to claws. If you could shed some light on either the
> difference in emphasis and split, or why you personally prefer sylpheed,
> I'd be quite interested. =:^)
>

When I first began using Linux, I tried a few of the console email clients
such as pine, mutt, and nmh. These programs were useful, but I really
preferred a GUI approach to composing and organizing, yet I also did
not want to lose the simplicity of the console clients. Sylpheed (the
name connotes "light weight" in Japanese) was the answer. It is graphical
without being bloated.

Sylpheed reminds me of a MS Windows email client called Pegasus, which has
a very similar style, ease, and functionality.

The Sylpheed web site describes its attractive attributes, I think, nicely:

# Simple, beautiful, and well-polished user interface
# Comfortable operationality which is built in detail
# Well-organized, easy-to-understand configuration
# Lightweight operation
# High reliability with one-mail-corresponding-to-one-file format

Sylpheed has undergone a lot of development over the years, but I really
haven't noticed. Email is a simple medium and my Sylpheed has always
been simply configured. I don't bother with any of the advanced features.

As I mentioned, if I need more complex functionality, such as certificates
or encryption, I can always use thunderbird which I keep in reserve, but
Sylpheed is my regular email workhorse.

I cannot comment on claws which I haven't used, but it is essentially
Sylpheed with a lot of extra features incorporated, and, again, it is
those features which I don't require.

In the end, preferences are based on philosophy and philosophy is based
on knowledge. I see, in my mind, every email message for what is is:
a string of text. Even MIME attachments, like images or sounds, are there
as text strings. I don't need, or prefer, a complex program to dissect
all the pieces and "magically" present them to me. It is somehow more
appealing to my digital sense to approach these things from a basic level
where nothing else will interpose itself. This is why I appreciate
software that does not attempt to "do it all" for me and to conceal the
details of the process. Others may find this strange, but to me it is
the only way.

In fact, there was a time when I sent email messages directly from the
command line using sendmail clones. The appeal to this was a complete
transparency of the process. However, this soon proved to be too much
of a burden. Sylpheed restores the ease, but it remains simple and
straightforward.


> > But there are times when I need to communicate to someone that is using
> > MS Outlook
>
> Argh! If they want to read my mail, they can very well read it in plain
> text,

I also often shriek when I have to deal with the average MS Outlook user.
These people don't even understand computers in the least, let alone
email. I could relate many horror stories about their antics, but
it really is not appropriate here. However, what peeves me the most
is that every MS Outlook user will invariably top post (it is the default
in Outlook), and top posting is taboo in email communication. But any
attempt at explanation of this is futile. The Outlook user has no comprehension
of top posting or any thing else about the email standard, and probably
believes that Outlook is the only email client that exists.

Frank Peters

Frank Peters posted on Wed, 24 Aug 2011 01:51:59 -0400 as excerpted:

> Sylpheed has undergone a lot of development over the years, but I really
> haven't noticed. Email is a simple medium and my Sylpheed has always
> been simply configured. I don't bother with any of the advanced
> features.

> I cannot comment on claws which I haven't used, but it is essentially
> Sylpheed with a lot of extra features incorporated, and, again, it is
> those features which I don't require.

Thanks. You explained quite well. =:^)

FWIW, the pkovar (Petr Kovar) name may sound familiar to you as one of
the sylpheed documentation maintainers (his name rather leapt out at me
when I was reading the docs, for reasons I'm about to explain). He's a
gnome guy, mainly doing translations and documentation, and doesn't claim
to be a coder. However, I know him from his work with pan (gtk2/3 nntp
client).

It seems pan's former long-time maintainer, Charles Kerr, lost interest a
few years ago as he no longer does news on anything like a regular
basis. He asked for people to pick it up, but at first, nobody with both
the skill and the interest in pan as a news client came forward. Those
were some dark days. Eventually (a couple years later), khaley (nobody
seems to know what the "k" is for, but he goes lostcoder on github)
cloned the repo and started, initially, mostly collecting the various
distro patches floating around. He (if it is indeed a he) has become the
de facto community maintainer, but for whatever personal reasons, doesn't
seem particularly interested, make that not interested at all, in doing
the gnome thing, where the bugtracker and official repo are, etc.

Well a few months later here comes pkovar, without any developer skill
but with an interest in pan and an already active gnome account. The two
did the obvious teaming, and now pkovar is the "front man", while khaley
is the technical side. Combined with my long-time presence on the pan
lists (first post in late 2002), and another developer who seems to
complement khaley's conservative bent with a very active experimental
branch, pan actually has more people working on it now than it has in a
very long time, at least since I've been around, perhaps ever! =:^)

So as I said, seeing the pkovar name on the sylpheed docs was quite a
pleasant surprise, so while claws seems more down my alley, I'm now
devouring everything I happen upon (like this subthread) involving
sylpheed with quite some interest. At some point I may ask him similar
questions to what I asked you, but I haven't, yet.

Meanwhile, ckerr seems to have transferred at least part of his interest
to transmission, the gtk-based bittorrent client. I'm not much into
torrenting and when I do torrent, ktorrent has been my client of choice,
so I don't know a whole lot about transmission, but it's interesting
seeing people you know from working with them on one app, working on
others, too. And, I guess it shows the degree to which I've become
involved in the community, that I can recognize the names as these people
move from interest to interest, too. My personal finances, etc, have
never been such that I could attend conferences and the like, but the
connections are beginning to come, even without that. =:^)

--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman

On Wed, 24 Aug 2011 06:39:45 +0000 (UTC)
Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net> wrote:

> pan actually has more people working on it now than it has in a
> very long time, at least since I've been around, perhaps ever! =:^)
>

Pan is another wonder of the open source world. There is literally
nothing else in its class. It's good to know that development is
alive.

Pan cannot upload binary files and that is another reason I have
to keep thunderbird in reserve.


> I'm not much into
> torrenting and when I do torrent, ktorrent has been my client of choice,
>

For torrents, IMO, one cannot beat aria2: http://aria2.sf.net

It is a command line program. Just open a terminal, enter a few
quick commands, and let it do its work. It provides complete
status information continuously, and, within its domain, is on
par with any graphical program.

It's not that I have some extreme irrational bias against graphical
software, but, in the right hands, console based programs can still
perform wonderful things in terms of basic output. Ncurses and s-lang
are very capable development tools. But for some reason these things
are not appreciated by the average user who, if given a choice, will
usually gravitate to a graphical solution.

Frank Peters

On Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 1:27 AM, Frank Peters <frank.peters@comcast.net>wrote:

> It's not that I have some extreme irrational bias against graphical
> software, but, in the right hands, console based programs can still
> perform wonderful things in terms of basic output. Ncurses and s-lang
> are very capable development tools. But for some reason these things
> are not appreciated by the average user who, if given a choice, will
> usually gravitate to a graphical solution.
>

Forgive me for I beg to differ, curse is just a poor substitute for neither
command line nor GUI. You can't realistically pipe curse output to other
scripts and get something meaningful, nor can curse take advantage of your
screen's full display capability. While I appreciate the power of using
command line and the simplicity of GUI, I can't ever understand people who
uses curse-based newsreader/email clients. The only curse-based applications
that I could appreciate are text editors, e.g. vim/emacs, and it is because
they're convenient to use on an ssh.

So, yes, I think you do have an extreme irrational bias if you prefer a
text-based email or torrent clients over a GUI equivalent.

Frank Peters posted on Wed, 24 Aug 2011 11:27:50 -0400 as excerpted:

> Pan is another wonder of the open source world. There is literally
> nothing else in its class. It's good to know that development is alive.
>
> Pan cannot upload binary files

That's changing! =:^) HMueller recently added that feature, as well as
the long awaited score-based actions (auto-delete/mark-read/download-to-
cache/download-and-save) in his git fork (master branch). The features
aren't stable enough for khaley's testing branch yet, let alone
integration, which pkovar would nail into the official gnome git repo and
ultimately into an official release, but they are there, and uploading at
least works (I've not tested auto-* actions, yet, myself, having just
rebuilt with them included).

If you're interested, join pan's user list (on gmane.org as a newsgroup
if you wish, that's how I do it). I have a pan-9999 ebuild that can be
set to all the different repos and branches using environment variables
set in /etc/portage/env/news-nntp/pan-9999, with a corresponding file
listing all the repos (mostly on github) and branches I know about, but
I've only just redesigned it and used it once, myself, so it's not
public, yet. But I've already asked and gotten a bit of interest on the
pan-user list for them, so plan on posting them there shortly.

FWIW, pan can build against gtk3 now, too, tho I won't be personally
testing that out myself for some time as pretty much everything else gtk
I use here is gtk2 only (including firefox), so it'll be awhile before I
even have gtk3 installed, here.

> It's not that I have some extreme irrational bias against graphical
> software, but, in the right hands, console based programs can still
> perform wonderful things in terms of basic output. Ncurses and s-lang
> are very capable development tools. But for some reason these things
> are not appreciated by the average user who, if given a choice, will
> usually gravitate to a graphical solution.

I use mc for sys-admin-hat file management and editing, only using the kde
graphical tools for user-hat stuff (like sorting thru media files, where
icon-thumbnails are quite useful =:^). But mail, news, rss, web-
browsing, etc, are more user-hat stuff here, so I tend to prefer
graphical tools for them.

The thing that has me hooked on ktorrent is all the nice statistical
graphics it has. CLI or semi-gui like ncurses can match the raw
functionality, but hardly the graphical stuff (tho semi-gui could come
close).

--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman

On Thu, 2011-08-25 at 03:32 +1000, Lie Ryan wrote:
> So, yes, I think you do have an extreme irrational bias if you prefer
> a
> text-based email or torrent clients over a GUI equivalent.

Text based torrent clients are great for running on headless machines
in tmux or screen. Fire it up, mount the watch directory with whatever
method you prefer, drop your .torrent files in there.. Pretty simple
imo. So I guess I have an irrational bias towards text based torrent
clients ;)

--
Homer Parker <hparker@gentoo.org>

On Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 4:49 AM, Homer Parker <hparker@gentoo.org> wrote:

> On Thu, 2011-08-25 at 03:32 +1000, Lie Ryan wrote:
> > So, yes, I think you do have an extreme irrational bias if you prefer
> > a
> > text-based email or torrent clients over a GUI equivalent.
>
> Text based torrent clients are great for running on headless
> machines
> in tmux or screen. Fire it up, mount the watch directory with whatever
> method you prefer, drop your .torrent files in there.. Pretty simple
> imo. So I guess I have an irrational bias towards text based torrent
> clients ;)
>

Many popular torrent clients, uTorrent and Transmission for example, can run
a webserver so you can control your download remotely with a web browser,
see http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/control-torrent-client-mobile-phone/.
Azureus/Vuze has plugins that allow the same thing.

On Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 4:37 AM, Lie Ryan <lie.1296@gmail.com> wrote:
> Many popular torrent clients, uTorrent and Transmission for example, can run
> a webserver so you can control your download remotely with a web browser,
> see http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/control-torrent-client-mobile-phone/.
> Azureus/Vuze has plugins that allow the same thing.
>

Deluge is another. I'd consider these kinds of options much better
for remote management. Deluge is client/server as well, so you have
the remote thick client option.

Rich

On Thu, 2011-08-25 at 18:37 +1000, Lie Ryan wrote:
> > Text based torrent clients are great for running on headless
> > machines
> > in tmux or screen. Fire it up, mount the watch directory with
> whatever
> > method you prefer, drop your .torrent files in there.. Pretty simple
> > imo. So I guess I have an irrational bias towards text based torrent
> > clients ;)
> >
>
> Many popular torrent clients, uTorrent and Transmission for example,
> can run
> a webserver so you can control your download remotely with a web
> browser,
> see http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/control-torrent-client-mobile-phone/.
> Azureus/Vuze has plugins that allow the same thing.

I guess I'm old school.. And lazy :P Already have the browser open on
the page with the torrent, right mouse button, save as, drop it in the
directory, done.. I'm glad there's choices for all of this ;) That said,
I do use evolution for email.. After years of beating on salesdroids
that I wanted no HTML emails, and too many sending HTML only, I caved...

--
Homer Parker <hparker@gentoo.org>

Homer Parker posted on Thu, 25 Aug 2011 14:07:57 -0500 as excerpted:

> That said,
> I do use evolution for email.. After years of beating on salesdroids
> that I wanted no HTML emails, and too many sending HTML only, I caved...

FWIW, I just switched to claws-mail (akonadified kmail2 not being my
thing!). I've been /very/ happy with its "strip HTML" mode, which strips
out all the tags and just shows the text. With a few white-listed
exceptions, all HTML /mail/ ends up in the trash, but I use a different
instance of it (by setting $HOME and $TMPDIR in a wrapper script so it
doesn't conflict with my mail instance) with the feed-plugin for my RSS/
ATOM feeds, which of course are XML, and it strips all that junk out very
nicely, leaving attachements as just that, attachments.

So there's a very nice third way between having to read the raw HTML and
actually parsing and displaying it, complete with potential
vulnerabilities, etc, for those willing to use clients that enable this
third way. =:^)

(But I'm still using pan for news/nntp, including my list feeds thru
gmane, and it simply gives me the ugly raw html, so it's not like I've
lost track entirely of what it feels like.)

--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman