Feb 10
Epoch is the “our company in incapable of managing a version” admission; it’s the single most evil thing added to RPM, only to address a vendor’s internal issues with version numbers that always increase. With an actual plan for version numbers, epoch is never necessary. Now that it’s there, it’s a bonehead “easy way out” of having to solve a problem.
How logical is this:
$ sudo rpm -Uvh /home/repos/kludge/doxygen-1.6.0-1.i386.rpm
Preparing... ########################################### [100%]
package doxygen-1.4.7-1.1.i386 (which is newer than doxygen-1.6.0-1.i386) is already installed
Version 1.4.7 newer than version 1.6.0? It’s not logical. I’m assuming it’s because of Epoch, but Epoch data doesn’t show. Epoch is hidden, secret, and causes confusion like the confusion above.
…and really, once an epoch is set, it’s too easy just to bump it up, and that causes a complete scramble in the orderly, logical increase of version numbers.
The only way to cripple this is to choose the highest epoch number possible. That’s why my Epochs are maxint.
Aug 31
Did a quick automake/autoconf on vixynet, and fixed a segfault. Not sure how well it works, but it builds and runs without failing on a segmentation fault, so I’ve added some value. And a trivial man page for kicks. Maybe it needs a self-test suite 
If you want to play further, here it is:
You can grab the patch using rpm2cpio vixynet-0.1-1.src.rpm|cpio -idumB
Aug 25
I got annoyed by the IMs from Yahoo saying “you have mail” — and it’s junk. Nearly-junk. So I turned off the new-mail warning on my Openfire gateway, found that Freepops was broken and not ported recently, and did a brain-dead port. There were changes needed from the supplied RPM (including a buildsystem that tries hard to fix 1/3 of the portability issues that autotools nails like a carpenter).
The RPM Specfile is still a bit trashed, and you can see I nullified the epoch (never should have been invented)
Installed, configured, and POPping mail from gmail already.
Gmail accepts only a few ports for POP (109, 110, 143, 220, 993, 995, 1110, 2221) so I changed my config from the default port 2000 to 2221:
/etc/sysconfig/freepops
#BIND_IP=127.0.0.1
BIND_PORT=2221
LP_OPTIONS="-v -d -l /var/log/freepopsd"
Assuming my own server with freepops installed is y.example.com, and my username on yahoo is chickenandporn@yahoo.com, my config in Gmail looks like:
gmail POP config with FreePOPs
Aug 23
A quick update to Wordpress-mu-2.8.4a-8 due to a recurrence of a bug I locally fixed but should have permanently fixed: “namespace” is now a reserved word, but used in magpie-rss updated into wp-includes by feedwordpress-2009.0707.
Changes: version bumps:
- bump wordpress-mu to 2.8.4a
- bump wp-bar wp-bar from 0.5.7 to 0.5.8
- fixed Magpie-RSS due to “namespace” suddenly being a reserved word in PHP (resulting in a blank page displayed)
Changes: added items: (none)
- added google analytics
- added a favicon.ico default for the themes that don’t provide (reduces errorlog spam)
The build is available here:
Aug 20
I just cut a copy of mscgen-0.17 for CentOS, but wanted to use it in Doxygen. My Doxygen is circa-stone-age, so I updated it to offer the “@msc” markup. There was a slight change needed to the build environment, but on the whole, it built, and should offer the “msc” capability as inline markups in code.
Update 2009-08-20 21:09Z: My patch for Doxygen was accepted
This is an SVN build, so may differ slightly from the canonical v1.6.0 release.
Changes:
- Correction to specfile and root-level Makefile to match pathnames
The build is available here:
My patch looks like this
Aug 20
For some diagrams, I was so happy to find mscgen, a Message Sequence Chart Generator tool that Michael McTernan maintains on his site. It’s designed to act similar to Graphviz, and apparently can be slotted into Doxygen.
examples/simple_prog_desc
Changes:
- back out the required autoconf from 2.63 to 2.59 (created $(docdir) problems)
- version info is in configure.ac only (specfile imports)
- specfile in root directory, allowing smooth “rpmbuild -ta mscgen-0.17.tar.gz”
- add a AC_SEARCH_LIBS to ensure -lgd is in the link line
My deliverable is a bit unclean in that I didn’t bump the release from #1, and left a tainted build source rather than pristine+patch. My bad.
The build is available here:
Aug 18
A minor upgrade to Wordpress-mu-2.8.2-7, I have repackaged wordpress-mu with the common modules I use.
Changes: version bumps:
Changes: added items: (none)
The build is available here:
Aug 18
It was noted in InfoSecurity that Oracle Updates Enterprise Linux, modifying tzdata in response to RedHat Errata RHEA-2009-1214, so I packed it over to CentOS. No big thing, it’s a brainless repack, here it is:
- tzdata-2009k-1.el5.noarch.rpm (833k be76118b5e1b532e8c520999ec57ce32)
- tzdata-2009k-1.el5.src.rpm (388k 4346044105d31ff9f5c6030180e031f5)
The original work is by Petr Machata:
- Upstream 2009j
- DST switch for Bangladesh will occur an hour earlier than was thought (we can drop Bangladesh patch).
- Upstream 2009k
- Mauritius will not continue to observe DST the coming summer
- Arbitrarily end DST at the end of 2009 so that a POSIX-style time zone string can appear in the Dhaka binary file
- Egypt starts winter time on August 21.
- Resolves: #517009
Aug 14
despite a slooooow connection to a buildserver (and no, I don’t want to spend another 5 hours to setup a VM, just wanted to get it done), I finally updated my Nagios/LDAP work to a “cvs update” of this weekend which includes v3.2.0. I also edited the deliverable specfile so that the schemas for LDAP are included.
These schema files are the ones I use in actual testing.
Changes: version bumps:
Changes: added items:
- added dhcp.schema
- added dnszone.schema
- added nagios.schema
The build may have a slew of warnings still, I have some cruft in the code just while I was looking for buy-in. I was initilly shot-down, apparently the core config inside Nagios is somewhat hallowed-ground, and it might be wrong to edit that code. Instead, I should try to do it in a plugin, but in the plugin, I would need to completely redefine the existing configuration code — and maintain it in parallel — or I lose the existing configuration.
I want to emphasize: this adds capability, not replace. Without the ldap_server config, Nagios acts like normal. Undefining the build option means Nagios cleanly stops understanding LDAP. Maybe if it’s written here as well, someone will read it.
The build is available here: (20090814 refers to the CVS update date)
Raw sources:
Aug 02
An update of Wordpress-mu-2.7.0-5, I’ve packaged wordpress-mu-2.8.2-7. I have no added value to this aggregation beyond packaging.
Changes: version bumps:
- bump wordpress-mu to 2.8.2
- bump feedwordpress from 2009.0618 to 2009.0707
- bump nextgen-gallery from 1.3.3 to 1.3.5
- dishonourable mention for the non-versioned URL for nextgen-gallery — manually renamed
Changes: added items:
- added wp-bar-0.5.7
- dishonourable mention for the non-versioned URL for wp-bar — manually renamed
The build is available here:
