The Whet

See here for Part I of this adventure.

Part II could otherwise be dubbed "let me tell you how computers pissed me the fuck off today", and finds me back at square one with a LiveUSB in virginal state, utterly uncontaminated by the hours¹ of time poured into it since last I ranted.

Given as I abandoned dicking about with heathen gentoo until such time as a Republican freeze is clearly available, my goal was simplified into bridging Pizarro's provided Gentoo USB with trinque's cuntoo.

Part I noted my sad fate of having to update /etc/hosts for every goddamned domain involved in grabbing working parts; by the end of the installment herein covered, I had to add:


161.0.121.198 ossassepia.com
104.131.72.249 btcbase.org
45.32.123.240 wot.deedbot.org
161.0.121.248 thebitcoin.foundation
161.0.121.247 trinque.org


As trinque pointed out, I'd require a working vtools. When I went to handle installation thereof, I found myself bootstrap-propelled to the center of the earth, at least theoretically. Having had a version of V on my local machines since asciilifeform's original release, I'd been enjoying a silent luxury in terms of adding on each block required to press a useful patch as they were available. Untangling the mess of what requires whichelse and in what order isn't especially helped by the fact that keccak-flavored vtools as discussed in the logs, my own site, etc, lived at this url, yet the post at that url is titled differently, namely as "vtools complete keccak prerelease". I also remembered having used gnat's gprbuild to get keccak vtools going, yet instructions for same appear in yet a different post.

Not having touched any of this in several months is, I'm sure, part of the problem I had, but let it be stated that getting a currently-useful vtools going without its precursors on board is currently more spaghetti than sandwich.

Anyway, as my working notes say, chill out, grab gnat, then all patches in the keccak-regrind or prerelease post depending on what we're calling it, press to the keccak head with an old V.

Though ave1's gnat is the current cannonical version, I decided to try diana_coman's adacore gnat alone to see if it'd work. This much was as straightforward as I remember, having needed it for phf's keccak vtools during the MP-WP regrind.


curl -v http://ossasepia.com/available_resources/gnat-gpl-2016-x86_64-linux-bin.tar.gz > adacore-gnat.tar.gz
sha512sum adacore-gnat.tar.gz
cat sha512sum-gnat.txt
tar -xvf adacore-gnat.tar.gz
cd gnat-gpl-2016-x86_64-linux-bin
./doinstall
...
cd /usr/gnat
PATH="/usr/gnat/bin:$PATH"; export PATH


...at which point gnatmake -v returns


GNATMAKE GPL 2016 (20160515-49)
herp derp FSF posturing


Then I was ready for V; I'm partial to mod6's ol' v.pl, principally because of his excellent documentation thereof.


curl -v http://thebitcoin.foundation/v/V-20180222.tar.gz > V-20180222.tar.gz
curl -v http://thebitcoin.foundation/v/V-20180222.tar.gz.mod6.sig > V-20180222.tar.gz.mod6.sig
gpg --verify V-20180222.tar.gz.mod6.sig V-20180222.tar.gz
tar -xvf V-20180222.tar.gz
mkdir .seals
mkdir .wot
mkdir patches


Now for vtools:


cd patches
curl -v http://btcbase.org/data/vtools/vdiff_fixes_newline_gcc.vpatch > vdiff_fixes_newline_gcc.vpatch
curl -v http://btcbase.org/data/vtools/keccak.vpatch > keccak.vpatch
curl -v http://btcbase.org/data/vtools/vdiff_keccak.vpatch > vdiff_keccak.vpatch
curl -v http://btcbase.org/data/vtools/vtools_fixes_bitrate_char_array.vpatch > vtools_fixes_bitrate_char_array.vpatch
curl -v http://btcbase.org/data/vtools/vtools_vpatch.vpatch > vtools_vpatch.vpatch
curl -v http://btcbase.org/data/vtools/vtools_fixes_static_tohex.vpatch > vtools_fixes_static_tohex.vpatch
curl -v http://btcbase.org/data/vtools/vtools_vpatch_newline.vpatch > vtools_vpatch_newline.vpatch

cd ..
cd .seals
curl -v http://btcbase.org/data/vtools/vtools_vpatch_newline.vpatch.phf.sig > vtools_vpatch_newline.vpatch.phf.sig
curl -v http://btcbase.org/data/vtools/vtools_fixes_static_tohex.vpatch.phf.sig > vtools_fixes_static_tohex.vpatch.phf.sig
curl -v http://btcbase.org/data/vtools/vtools_vpatch.vpatch.phf.sig > vtools_vpatch.vpatch.phf.sig
curl -v http://btcbase.org/data/vtools/vtools_fixes_bitrate_char_array.vpatch.phf.sig > vtools_fixes_bitrate_char_array.vpatch.phf.sig
curl -v http://btcbase.org/data/vtools/vdiff_keccak.vpatch.phf.sig > vdiff_keccak.vpatch.phf.sig
curl -v http://btcbase.org/data/vtools/keccak.vpatch.phf.sig > keccak.vpatch.phf.sig
curl -v http://btcbase.org/data/vtools/vdiff_fixes_newline_gcc.vpatch.phf.sig > vdiff_fixes


Itams got!


./v.pl p vtoolsp1 vtools_vpatch_newline.vpatch
cd vtoolsp1/vtools
gprbuild vpatch.gpr
gprbuild vdiff.gpr


I'd thought I would hereafter need phf's updated v.py, but on reflection it wasn't clear if or why this was actually needed. Moreover, trying emerge python-gnupg as specified by said update suggested this'd be fairly gnarly to install, so I decided to skip it for now.²

At this point all looked ripe for grabbing the actual cuntoo tarball & sig at long last.


curl -v http://trinque.org/cuntoo.tar > cuntoo.tar
curl -v http://trinque.org/cuntoo.tar.sig > cuntoo.tar.sig
gpg --verify cuntoo.tar.sig cuntoo.tar
tar -xvf cuntoo.tar


Which produced a bootstrap.sh and friends exactly as promised. We read, from the source, "make sure that you have a vdiff in your $PATH".

With the exception of the exportation in the gnat installation above, I have never run into $PATH operations without ending up in some sort of shitsoup. I would dearly love to comprehend what the fuck $PATH is for; what a path variable actually is; why some instructions specify a certain path variable and others not; how a path variable name is agreed upon; what exact file must be edited in order to add a directory to one's path; and so forth. I suppose it must be intuitive to others, because every attempt at explanation I've come across seems rooted in priors I simply don't have.

I edited ~/.profile to include export PATH=$PATH:/usr/gnat/bin/vtoolsp1/vtools³. After which which vtools reported t'wasn't none, and moreover said directory wasn't listed in my path. I tried editing ~/.bash_rc, no dice. I tried eliding the export part. Nada. I went over to Eulorum to review my notes on exporting path for a Eulora install, but was at a loss for what to replace the "CRYSTAL" and "LD_LIBRARY_PATH" items with. In multiple instances of bitching and moaning about paths I drudged up online, anonymous squawkers suggested the bash session had to be restarted in order for a path exportation and/or addition of a directory to the path to take effect.

To be honest, I had a feeling that killing my terminal and reconnecting wasn't a splendid idea, but I couldn't have told you why beyond a vague sense of "what if this fucks shit up". Well, I killed it. And reconnected. And found the LiveUSB fresh as a daisy, devoid of gnat, devoid of vtools, sans keys, pretty much ignorant of me.

For reasons I utterly fail to comprehend, there *does* remain a typescript log⁴ I'd started on day one or two of the whole shebang. That's it.

Yes, I'd had the same session going since I originally logged in around the 8th of this month. No, I hadn't been running it in a screen session. Yes, I'm going to start over, and in screen.

But we're going to need more vodka.

* * *

1. Somewhere in the neighborhood of ten, about eighty percent of which I'd chalk up to mental wrestling with my own noobishness. [↩]
2. Specifically,
   Calculating dependencies... done!
   [ebuild N ~] dev-python/python-gnupg-0.4.3 PYTHON_TARGETS="python2_7 python3_6 -pypy -pypy3 -python3_4 -python3_5 -python3_7"

   The following keyword changes are necessary to proceed:
   (see "package.accept_keywords" in the portage(5) man page for more details)
   # required by python-gnupg (argument)
   =dev-python/python-gnupg-0.4.3 ~amd64

   Use --autounmask-write to write changes to config files (honoring
CONFIG_PROTECT). Carefully examine the list of proposed changes,
paying special attention to mask or keyword changes that may expose
experimental or unstable packages.
. [↩]

3. Yes, that's actually where I installed it, lazy as it may've been. [↩]
4. 2.7MB; I'll post this if anyone actually wants to go spelunking, please write in if so. [↩]