November 2003 Archives

Since my last entry is a bit of a downer, I thought I'd post something so it's at least not on the top of the page anymore. Thanksgiving seems a good time to make up for that. ;)

First of all, thanks to my parents for always being there, in spirit or otherwise, even when I wasn't. (If those of you reading this know what I'm talking about, you know, if not, it's none of your business ;)

Thanks to, well, everyone responsible, for letting me have the opportunity to not only have a job during the implosion of the tech industry, but having one I actually like.

Thanks to the thousands of open-source developers that make my hobby possible, much less rewarding. And thanks to the people that say "thanks" back for the hard work that goes into Fink; that really is what keeps us going. I know that for every one person that actually spends the time to e-mail a package maintainer and thank them, there's 10 that mean to. So to the 11 of you who appreciate Fink, I salute you. <grin>

Thanks to you guys reading this blog, 'cause until you do something like this, it's hard to imagine how incredibly cool it is to meet someone and have them say, "Oh, you're Ranger Rick? I read your blog!"

I've gotta say, I have a lot to be thankful for. I've got it pretty easy, and I don't ever want to forget to appreciate it.

Now, back to some Thanksgiving slackin'. Carry on.

(Oh, and thanks to Larry for not only being a good roommate, but for having his DVD collection sitting over on that rack. I'm finally getting around to watching Kelly's Heroes, which savvy readers will recognize as the source of part of this entry's title.)

You may or may not have known, but Fink is GPL'd. There are certain legal obligations that must be observed when you use GPL'd software. There are also certain cultural obligations that, while they don't have to be observed, really should be if you don't want to piss people off.

I've got no problem with the fact that OpenOSX repackages Fink. Under the GPL they're allowed to. On the other hand, I find it pretty rude to not even mention the fact that they're doing so. I wouldn't have given this much thought but OpenOSX came up on IRC today. Someone mentioned their recent release of their "GIMP 2.0 prerelease" on VersionTracker (as well as lying about their GIMP's capabilities).

Sure, it's not illegal, but when someone else is charging money for work that I and hundreds of other developers are doing, usually in their spare time, it rather pisses me off. I'd happily forgotten about OpenOSX until it was brought up again on IRC; now I've gotten mad all over again. I'm not the only one, our previous head of Fink (who, incidentally left after feeling unappreciated for too long) put a similar complaint on the Fink site some time ago. If you have the time, give the e-mail exchange a read, it's quite enlightening. (Actually, now that I look, the comments about Gimp 2.0p1 on VersionTracker are rather fun as well.)

Just thought I'd give an update on what's going on.

First of all, we released fink 0.17.1 to unstable recently. It's looking like a pretty good release. Having to get things ready for the 10.2-gcc3.3 and 10.3 really gave us the kick in the pants we needed to start really working on fink, the program, again. It'd languished with very few changes for a long time. We've recently had a new renaissance in doing development on fink, and a lot of cool stuff has come out of it. It doesn't hurt that we've got not Just Another Perl Hacker actively working on it too. Imagine, an actual test suite! Crazy!

Second, I put together updates for XFree86 that should fix some long-standing issues. Both trees (10.2-gcc3.3 and 10.3) contain fixes to backwards compatibility in the freetype2 that's provided with XFree86. This will fix the issue of needing to rebuild qt3 for everyone but Apple X11 users on Panther. In addition, the 10.3 tree contains an XFree86 4.3.99 snapshot that's looking pretty good (the old 4.3.0 one doesn't actually work, although it builds). Only problem so far is that it appears there's a crash bug upon exit that Torrey's currently looking into. Once that's found I'll update the XFree86 package and then I think it'll be ready for stable.

I'm working on KDE some more this weekend. The base packages of KDE all appear to be in pretty good shape. Arts, KOffice, and KDevelop all still need some work before they're releasable though. I'm looking into KDevelop tonight, and I'm really hoping to have KOffice hammered out this weekend, but we'll see; it's a tricky thing to track down.

Anyways, time to get back to my KDevelop build -- happy hacking!

[Update:]

I got KDevelop working with KDE 3.2 beta1; next up is KOffice. Woot!

I meant to mention this earlier, but for those of you who are running into various issues using the binary distribution on 10.3 (which was actually built for 10.2-gcc3.3), you can try Rob Braun's unofficial 10.3 binary distribution.

Note the use of the word unofficial. It's not officially supported by the Fink folks and may be incomplete or out-of-date. That said, he's pretty good about keeping it reasonably updated.

Sooo....

I'm doing a ton of laundry today, right? And I open up the dryer and pull out my coat and *clunk*, out pops this:

...and I think to myself, "Hmm... That's odd. That looks like a battery for a phone or something."

And then...

I realize.

Batteries for phones are usually attached to...

Phones.

Uh-oh.

So, uhh... I guess it's time for a trip to the Sprint store tomorrow. =)

Lots of good progress this evening.

I updated qt3 to 3.2.3 in my exp tree, it's looking pretty good. Didn't have to do much, just a few modifications. I fixed the $(QTDIR) thing in libqt-mt.la that causes errors like this:

  ../../libtool: line 1: QTDIR: command not found
  ../../libtool: line 1: QTDIR: command not found
  ld: warning -L: directory name (/lib) does not exist
  ld: warning -L: directory name (/lib) does not exist

I also made it so that binaries in qt (moc, qmake, etc.) were built with -mdynamic-no-pic, which should speed them up a little. Doesn't help libqt, but what they hey, every little bit helps.

Also, thanks to Torrey, I got a working XFree86 snapshot for Panther. If you're brave, and willing to test it out, grab the xfree86.info and xfree86.patch file from here, and put them in your /sw/fink/dists/local/main/finkinfo directory (create it if it doesn't exist). You should be able to do a "fink install xfree86" then, and get 4.3.99.15.

Be warned, if you build anything against this, there's no going back to Apple's X11, a number of libraries have changed. I'd appreciate some testers though, if you're willing to give it a shot.

* RangerRick sees the slashdot headline "NASCAR Coursebuilders, Drivers Consult Videogame Version" and wonders how much consulting there can be on figuring out new innovative ways to make an oval.
<RangerRick> just don't tell anyone from north carolina I said that, they'll kick me out of the state
<drm> shhhh
<bbraun> RangerRick: you don't have a mullet, do you?
<RangerRick> nope
<bbraun> do you have a mailbox as a hood scoop on your car?
<RangerRick> haha, nope.
<bbraun> what are you doing in north carolina then?
<RangerRick> irc'ing
<RangerRick> same as drm
<drm> you like NC barbeque, RangerRick?
<RangerRick> which part of NC? hah! I at least know that's a trick question.

They take their bar-be-que pretty seriously around here. Just don't let it get out that I think NASCAR is stupid. ;)

I've got most everything building (including another attempt at a kdemultimedia package). There are still some minor issues but 3.2 is looking pretty sweet.

I'm hoping to release Fink packages to unstable in the next week or two if things go as planned, my last remaining issues are:

1. Find out why a number of the MS Office import plugins in KOffice still aren't working. It's not obvious...

2. Find out why the arts esound driver broke, it's just spitting out noise now.

3. Run all the KDE apps long enough to see if they have any obvious issues.

4. See if there's a workaround for the '*' bug in konsole (and possibly elsewhere). Every time I think we've got a lead it only works some of the time. :P

5. See if there's any way to fix KDE completely freaking out when using apple-wm on panther.

Need I say more?

Been sittin' here, building KDE stuff, and watching the cats work out an uneasy truce. My cat (Puff) is a 17-year-old female, I got her when I was in junior high. My roommate's cats are 4-year-old males. So, of course, my cat terrorizes the others.

Here's puff:

...and here's the showdown that seems to happen every couple of days now:

It's quite hilarious. Larry's cats will slink around, afraid to move too fast for fear of getting Puff's attention.

Go granny!

Saw The Matrix: Revolutions today, and considering all the bad reviews there were, I was pleasantly suprised. I think they did a great job of at least explaining the holes they opened up in Reloaded (when they bothered doing anything new in Reloaded in the first place, which was rare). It was still not as good as the original, but it was a lot better than I expected.

Fool that I am, I decided to help out kconger in getting his Gnome 2.4 stuff ready for Fink. Because Gnome dropped support for older Xft's in 2.4, Gnome 2.4 is only going into the 10.3 tree (in which XFree86 4.2 support is deprecated). We've been doing a lot of work, him getting the packages ported and updated, and me doing test builds and fixing deps. I expect it should be going into unstable pretty soon, it's starting to shape up pretty nicely.

I'm also working on getting KDE 3.2 beta1 and friends into the 10.2-gcc3.3 tree. Once that's done I'll move them forward to 10.3. So far it's shaping up to be a pretty sweet release.

Turns out that XFree86 4.3 is not completely binary compatible with 4.2! The freetype2 that comes with 4.2 has (deprecated) symbols that were removed in the freetype2 in XFree86 4.3. I've notified Torrey and he's re-enabled the compatibility bits for a future XFree86 release; I've been looking into making an X snapshot so that XDarwin will work again on the Panther tree.

Looks like Qt has an upgrade issue too, related to UIC. I'm hoping to have a fixed package in cvs tonight. It only affects people moving from 3.2.1 to 3.2.2, as far as I'm aware...

Am I the only one who didn't know Steve Jobs has a blog? It's strange how the same way I off-hand mention Fink, he's off-hand talking about selling his apartment to Bono and stuff.

Again I say.

Weird.

But kind of cool. :)

[Update:]

Damn, I'm like one of those people who thinks I really can make money fast from home. Guess I should have looked a little closer. Thanks for pointing it out, Joachim. I'll slink into my hole now. Perhaps I'll post some news so I can make this scroll off my front page. Yeah, that's it.

Whenever the subject of editor wars comes up, I always think of this e-mail and go read it again, and laugh.

That's gotta be one of the best posts of internetdom. Hm. Internetdom? Is that even a word?

I think I need my medicine.

<TheWookie> I'm sitting here compiling stuff, fink is updating, i'm running nmap, and writing code in vim. A guy walks in, looks at my screen, and says "Can you actually understand that?" "Yeah" "Holy shit, it's like the matrix or something!"

Finally wrote a new song.... Actually, finished it up sometime last week, but my microphone was horrible, so I just finished re-recording the lyrics and re-mixing it, it sounds *much* better.

I don't do lyrics much, so this is pretty new to me, let me know what you think.