[penguicon-general] A couple of thoughts about programming

[Catherine Olanich Raymond]

On Saturday 28 April 2007 11:10 pm, Rob Landley wrote:
> 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.

So far as I know he still does, though that project hasn't required a lot of 
his time lately.


[snip]

> >        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).

I finally discovered several days ago that my home box (which is still running 
some flavor of Fedora) was hideously slow because of an rpmq problem.  
Specifically, this one:

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=141595

Needless to say, he's bumped installing Ubuntu on my machine up a number of 
notches on his to-do list, and I'm going to keep nudging him about it. :-)

-- 
Cathy Raymond <cathy at thyrsus.com>

"You've got to have the proper amount of disrespect for what you do."  
-- George Mabry