What is keeping me up at night? Well, I rediscovered the pleasure of writing ebuilds for #gentoo's GURU repository, which started right after I realised there was no Signal app available for my fresh Gentoo install on Asahi Linux (a MacBook Air M2), so I just created my own.
Within a few weeks of learning the ropes, I got Convey accepted in the GURU tree (a mail client, forked from Geary which is no longer maintained) and just now NewsFlash (an RSS reader for GNOME). I also made an ebuild for OnlyOffice 10.0, which is now available in the main portage tree.
The concept of an ebuild is straightforward enough: just a 'recipe' to compile software from source. But you run into wild stuff at times, that require some more intimate knowledge of the source code. Gentoo has many of these cases covered, like Go or Rust crate dependencies. I haven't found a blessed way to deal with NPM/Electron though and I'm unsure it even exists. That's the main reason I haven't send in the Signal ebuild yet, despite it working fine on both arm64 and amd64, and having updated it for the last four versions now with ease. The NPM deps it needs are currently just a tarball I host on a bucket. It works 🤷♀️️
I have a few more in the works. Apparently, no one was working on updating the ebuild for Audacity 4.0, so that'll be uploaded soon. Was a bit more work than I first anticipated, lol. But it works 🙂️