Been worked on this weekend: libstdc++ shared_ptr and docs.

Getting on my tits this weekend: GNU utils' docs as info, not man pages. The Debian man page for tar seems to be completely out of date and the Fedora one needs at least one fix. Reading info pages is tolerable with pinfo but I wish I could just say man tar without having to think whether I happen to be on a GNU or UNIX machine at the time. tar's man page might be an extreme example but it's not an obscure program you never use, nor one that's so trivial you don't need to check the man page. Rant 1 over.

I recently said to someone that having to manually find and install RPMs because of dependency issues on Red Hat/Fedora systems was a thing of the past, partly thanks to Yum. But then this weekend upgrading FC6 to Fedora 7 went pretty badly (yes, I know a fresh install is recommended.) The RPM package and everything that depends on it failed to upgrade so until I fixed that Yum wouldn't even start. Fixing it and getting all the package updates wasn't difficult, but it was slow and tedious. It was still a lot easier with yum than it used to be.

I think the problem is that updates to a version N system since the release of N+1 mean you have a newer RPM than the one on the installation disc, so those packages don't get upgraded. To avoid this I could not apply any updates from after the release date of a new version, but that means either ignoring security updates or upgrading to the new release immediately. I don't fancy either given that Fedora 9 might be built with GCC 4.3.0 and it might take a few weeks before any bugs are shaken out of the dot-oh release; remember GCC 4.0.0 in FC4. Ho hum.

Floating my boat this weekend: Mario Galaxy, Two Lone Swordsmen - Stockwell Steppas, anything by The Dexorcist.

Update: on the upside, fonts in F7 look very nice.