I’m Not Dead Yet

So I’ve been slack in posting to my blog, for any number of reasons, but I’ve been busy busy with lots of crazy stuff.

First, I’ve been spearheading the OpenNMS involvement in Summer of Code. Aside from one unfortunate incident things have been going well. I’m really looking forward to getting to know our students and seeing what they can come up with. It will be a learning experience for all of us. =)

We’re also starting to gear up towards another beta on the road to OpenNMS 1.6. We’ve already got a bunch more bugs finished off, but also plenty to do still.

If you haven’t noticed, my blog looks a little bit different. I’d been limping along with pretty much unchanged templates from upgrade after upgrade of Movable Type since version 3.1 or so. It’s a testament to their software that everything’s worked swimmingly without any major surgery for all of that time, but I’ve been itching to take advantage to the much cleaner HTML and CSS they’re using in newer default templates, and other spiffy features which I have not been able to . . . → Read More: I’m Not Dead Yet

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KDE 3.5.9 in Fink Unstable

Now that KDE 3.5.9 is out, I’ve updated all of the Fink KDE/X11 packages to match it. Nothing new specific to Mac OS X or Fink, just a version bump with some bugfixes and a significantly updated kdepim.

It also includes a few things that are updated to understand Chris’s new libflac package.

As always, let me know if you run into any issues.

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Just a Little Update

Had a good time at SCaLE — seemed like a lot of folks were interested in OpenNMS there. Of course, we found a bug in 1.3.10 as soon as it was out the door so I actually did another release during the conference. Fun!

Also fixed a long-standing bug with kdepim building on leopard; It should work now. If there are any other KDE3 build issues on Leopard, please let me know. I’m in the process of updating the packages to the upcoming 3.5.9 release.

Also, I see qt-copy is now a 4.4 snapshot so hopefully if I can get another snapshot build going, we’ll have native QuickTime audio. (woot)

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Fink Domain Name Down

FYI, the “finkproject.org” domain name is down — turns out it had expired and we didn’t catch it. We’re working on getting it fixed, just wanted to get the word out. Fink Is Not Kaput 😉

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It’s Been a Crazy Couple of Weeks

Figured it’d been a while since I did a general “status” post about what’s been going on.

First and foremost, as I mentioned before, much of my spare time has gone into fixing up the Fink package database. It’s now much easier on our web server, and uses a combination of PHP and a really spiffy Lucene-based full-text search engine called “Solr.”

Also, I did some work on making Fink play nicer with the new Xquartz releases. It’s still in testing, but in the meantime, their 2.1.1 release provides a workaround to allow Fink users on Leopard to run without issue.

I’ve also been wearing my OpenNMS.com hat recently, and am working on some spiffy customer-management tools for keeping track of our support work better. I’m a big fan of Ruby on Rails, and am mocking it up in that — on top of JRuby, of course.

In the process, of getting my development system set up to do rails development, I updated all of the Fink packages for rails 2.0 and related stuff, as well as taking over rubygems from . . . → Read More: It’s Been a Crazy Couple of Weeks

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New Package Database Live

If you haven’t noticed, the Fink package database is back up, and the server seems to be handling the load alright. I’ve fixed all of the bugs that I’m aware of, but if you notice anything strange in queries or other behavior you don’t expect, please let me know.

Also, one thing I hadn’t mentioned earlier is that in the process of reworking the PDB, I added a pretty major feature: RSS support. Any query you make through the browse interface has an equivalent query through the RSS interface. For example, if you have a query for unstable x86 packages in the “kde” section, excluding splitoffs, you can replace “browse.php” with “rss.php” and get an RSS feed with the results that match that query (in order of their last modification date in CVS).

Woot!

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New Fink Package Database Available for Testing

As of last night, the new PDB seems to be working alright with the (few) testers it’s gotten from fink-devel yesterday evening, so I’d like to open this up to a wider audience.

Please, give the new test code a whirl and let me know if you see any issues.

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Quick Update – KDE + Leopard

I’ve got a new kdelibs release for Fink (kdelibs3-unified 3.5.8-1023) which fixes the issue with the ~/.DCOPserver file having sub-directories in it, and also with starting up KUniqueApplications which wanted to fork. Please test it out and let me know how it works, and I’ll try to get it pushed to stable as soon as possible.

If you’re interested, the fix is to use _NSGetArgc() and _NSGetArgv() to pull out the arguments passed to the program, so that you can do a fork-and-exec afterwards (passing a flag to not fork the next time around).

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Fink + Leopard Potpourri

Just wanted to give a quick update on a mix of Fink and Leopard issues.

First of all, if you get the error, “Failed: Can’t fix GCC after Repair Permissions” it’s because the XCode installer decided not to bother erasing your /usr/sbin/gcc_select even though it shouldn’t be there anymore. It should be safe to erase it, but if that scares you, you can upgrade to 0.27.8 and your problem should go away as well… (Fink does not use gcc_select anymore on 10.5 as of 0.27.8.)

Also, people have been coming out of the woodwork hitting the OpenGL bug (“ld: cycle in dylib re-exports with /usr/X11R6/lib/libGL.dylib”) so I want to mention it here specifically for search engines to make it easier for people to find the fix.

The fix is to add the following line to your linker command: -Wl,-dylib_file,/System/Library/Frameworks/OpenGL.framework/Versions/A/Libraries/libGL.dylib:/System/Library/Frameworks/OpenGL.framework/Versions/A/Libraries/libGL.dylib

It should be a perfectly safe no-op on older Mac OS X releases, but makes sure that the XCode 3.0 linker doesn’t get confused and try to be too smart about finding the correct libGL.dylib.

I’ve also been trying to solve a new-on-leopard issue where . . . → Read More: Fink + Leopard Potpourri

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Fink and Leopard

If you’ve missed it, David posted to the Fink news that we have initial Leopard support.

Thanks to apple keeping C++ binary compatibility this release (phew) it is most definitely the easiest upgrade yet! For most people, you can just do a “fink selfupdate-rsync” (or “fink selfupdate-cvs”) to get the fink 0.27.7 tool, and it will automatically convert your fink installation to be Leopard-compatible. If you’re doing a fresh fink install, you’ll have to install XCode 3 off the Leopard DVD, and then bootstrap from the 0.27.7 tarball, but it’s a very painless procedure. A binary installer is on the way.

The best part is, increased POSIX compliance and better overall system headers in 10.4 has paid off in most Fink packages working out of the box on 10.5 (minus the stupid linker bug which apple did not fix in time for 10.5.0) and what’s left will get updated as problems arise. The transition (as compared to the 10.3 -> 10.4 gcc-3.3 to gcc-4.0 move) has been considerably less painful.

Since Leopard is still very new, and not many maintainers have had the chance to upgrade, if you find issues . . . → Read More: Fink and Leopard

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