[penguicon-general] A couple of thoughts about programming

[Rob Landley]

On Friday 27 April 2007 7:13 pm, Robert Meier wrote:
>        How GPS (Global Positioning System) works

Eric would love to be on a GPS panel.  He mainted (might still maintain) the 
GPS daemon for Linux.

>        How to get started geocaching

Might interest some of the guests.

> Relatively easy presentation topics include:
>        java-linux

"Why Java matters again"...

>        POSIX (write once, run aix, hp-ux, linux, sunOS, SGI, ...)

POSIX became largely irrelevant to Linux because the spec isn't freely 
available.  (You have to pay for it.)  The interesting part of Linus asking 
for a copy in 1991 is he _didn't_get_one_.

It's been subsumed by SUSv3, which you can find at 
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/

>        rpm spec (wrapping taballs with dependencies, and pushbutton build)

rpm is cpio based, deb is the one that's tar based.  (I believe ipkg, portage, 
and slackware are also tar based).

I've personally found rpm to be increasingly irrelevant since Red Hat 
retreated from the desktop and SuSE FUDded the hell out of itself.  Ubuntu 
and Knoppix are both .deb based, and the only other system I play with much 
(gentoo) has its own (portage).

YMMV, of course...

Rob