Advogato blog for matt

10 Jul 2002

Wed, 10 Jul 2002 12:14:06 GMT

I dropped out of OpenBSD entirely today, given as my baby daughter is arriving soon... and when she does, she's going to get my free time. And frankly, until then, my wife needs me too. :-) I had been maintaining a few ports; the important ones were accepted by others, and I just de-MAINTAINER'd the rest.

It's not like I'm dropping out of the free software scene entirely; because I still work on Zope at work, and am trying to push to get some more of our internal work released as free software. Oh yeah, and I'm still on the Solaris Package System, even though I am not clear on whether or not anyone else is using it. :-)

4 Feb 2002

Mon, 4 Feb 2002 13:47:48 GMT

I had to move Solaris Package System to BerliOS, because of a rather unfortunate misunderstanding with savannah. Namely, there's a requirement that no savannah-hosted projects be dependent on non-free software (in my case, the fact that the software is specifically for Solaris). This requirement was added to the requirements page just after I registered the project, and the approver didn't inform me of the requirement. So, I moved.

Interest in solpkg seems to be about zero right now, although I did get some communication from some of the folks involved in some of the current Solaris package-distributing efforts. They were the ones who alerted me to the dependency requirement. I'll have to see what comes on the front...

21 Jan 2002

Mon, 21 Jan 2002 21:22:06 GMT

Dum-da-da-da!

Solaris Package System!

I want to thank the guys at savannah for providing the service they do, it's extremely nice to have around.

7 Jan 2002

Mon, 7 Jan 2002 14:32:09 GMT

This weekend I gained a little more Zope enlightenment and created my first Python product. (Until now, I'd done some work with existing Python products, but any new stuff I needed was generally built using ZClasses through the web.

Actually, I'm only dipping my toes in the water, only using the Python product to provide functionality that I can't through ZClasses (namely, I can't have manage_afterAdd methods for two base classes both be invoked -- the first one in the list wins) and building the rest of the product with ZClasses. ZClasses are oft-maligned on Zope IRC, but I think they have a definite place and are quite useful for building simple classes.

"solpkg", the packaging system for Solaris I mentioned earlier, will hopefully be ready for public digestion by the end of the week and posted in its Savannah project area. I want to get in a hardcore reading of the OpenBSD ports system code and figure out how it solved some of the problems I've run into to see if they're solvable in a similar way on Solaris first. Right now there's some voodoo in solpkg, and I want to make sure I understand at least my own code before I make it public.

3 Dec 2001

Mon, 3 Dec 2001 00:39:28 GMT

I've found a good depressant is to go over my old diary entries and see what I thought I could do, and discovered I couldn't, or more likely -- let the thing drop because I have no sense of commitment. ;-)

Ah well. I recently helped bring exUserFolder into Sourceforge CVS with a nice little set of shell scripts I wrote that take a set of old release tarballs and transform them into a repo with each version tagged. It takes a long time to run over my 33.6. Watching it run pointed out a lot of inefficiencies in the way I do things.

What else has been going on? Oh, at work I created something I call the Solaris Packaging System. Essentially, it's similar to OpenBSD ports for Solaris, except it works with tools that are already part of Solaris, GCC: GNU Compiler Collection excepted. I wrote this because I had a collection of shell scripts that did the same thing, except they were totally unmaintainable. :-) I'd like to put this out but am waiting for my boss to talk to company lawyers about whether it's acceptable to do the free software thing or not.

Any advice anyone could give on advocacy here would be nice (and please e-mail; I don't read diaries for replies, generally)... we're not in the software business, we're in the home interior manufacturing business, so a lot of the existing "talking to suits" stuff doesn't apply, really.

Oh well, that's about it. I should do the diary thing again in another half-eon or so.

8 Aug 2001

Wed, 8 Aug 2001 17:05:14 GMT

Hacked together a version of ZOracleDA based on some old code and a little insight. Result: Oracle works with our Zope install here, and Zope can potentially gain a foothold over Oracle's really, really crappy web app server (which I am convinced is not a result of it being based on Apache Jserv, but is more likely just incompetence at Oracle.)

Along those lines, Java on OpenBSD made some pretty good progress but I seem to be up against a brick wall now. ELF vs. a.out issues are pretty easy to patch. A ream of assembly code that results in "invalid opcode" is not.

27 Jun 2001

Wed, 27 Jun 2001 22:49:38 GMT

Phew, haven't been here awhile, gotta remember where everything is.

Well, I guess I've grown up a bit since I last posted here, in attitude as well as ability. I'm still working on a few ports but I'm trying to hand off the worst of them. To that end, I've been working on porting Java to OpenBSD based on Greg Lewis' FreeBSD port. I'm making some steady progress in that we aren't looking at core dumps any more, but the JVM has yet to initialize. Unfortunately there also seems to be some shakeups in the *BSD Java port effort, so we currently are without CVS and I don't have an easy way to spread the changes around. If this takes much longer I'm going to try to start up my own local CVS repo, I guess. :-/

Found a really neat program for my Visor the other day. Read all about it at PalmWiki (the program is also called PalmWiki.)

9 Nov 2000

Thu, 9 Nov 2000 13:53:01 GMT

Yeah, it's been awhile. I dunno, for awhile there I didn't really feel like coming back here. I was holding my idealism a little too high, as evidenced by my bit on the certs. I've been doing a lot of thinking on a lot of things lately, and really, the certs don't matter that much. I know who is a master and who isn't. Hell, I even have totally different ideas than other people who certify people honestly here, just because I have different views than they do. I know who to come to. Let the old boys' network live on; I just won't be a part of it. That doesn't make the site less useful to me (unless everyone goes and revokes my certs today) :-)

What have I been working on lately? Not much of anything. I've actually been busy playing with Oracle's new stuff at work, and haven't really felt like coding much. libtool really confuses the hell out of me on OpenBSD (and it's currently causing some warnings in my nessus port). It seems there is a rather large divide between BSD developers and those working on libtool; neither seems to understand each other real well, and lots of words are flying.

Well, that's it for now. Contribute to my new article. :-)

6 Sep 2000

Wed, 6 Sep 2000 17:31:43 GMT

I really hate fixed-width web pages. "Web designers" who make them should be shot.

29 Aug 2000

Tue, 29 Aug 2000 12:21:20 GMT

Incredible. A day where there aren't any new accounts certified as journeyers already. A sea of gray. My faith in humanity is, for today, restored.

I decided a few days ago that I would attack the following problems that I see with the OpenBSD ports tree, in this order:

Get all non-BROKEN ports to FAKE; replace IS_INTERACTIVEs with FLAVORs.
Work on infrastructure first to permit the movement of LOCALBASE to something other than /usr/local (on a "local" basis, of course... har har), then go through each port that I can possibly build, fixing it and supplying source patches to make it respect PREFIX and LOCALBASE appropriately.

To that end, I'm already working on #1. databases/db is my current project; I've already got an outside contribution. And wouldn't you know it, I'm already stuck. :-) I need to try to find a way to get it to depend on the JDK so that the java FLAVOR works appropriately. It's not as easy as it sounds, because I also need to determine exactly which version of the JDK was installed. I can hard-code the 1.1.8 now, but if FreeBSD's JDK (and therefore our port of it) ever gets updated, this port will break. Hmm.

My dream of a universal, non-GPL'd porting and packaging system (with full path relocation, of course) taunted me again. I think, based on my forays deeper into the ports system infrastructure, that I have a ways to go before I start such a beast.