rPath - Your First Hit is Free
February 6th, 2007 by Mark
I think I’m finally giving up on making any real contribution to Gnome. It’s taken me a very long time to realize that I am just not that in to any single one of the Gnome components and I don’t have the time to really dig in to the general bits. I spent some time trying to get jhbuild to spit out binary packages, but building Gnome from cvs (or now subversion) is the kind of thing that rarely works entirely. I mean, there are over 130 packages getting worked on constantly, one of them is bound to either be broken or to interact badly with at least one other package. This made testing my work very difficult. Hopefully I’ll get back to this project at some point. Bits of it were definitely fun.
So then I started thinking about contributing to Fedora. I have a bunch of experience in packaging RPMs and in basically designing a distribution from work. So, why shouldn’t I get involved with Fedora. Well, it just feels like it is too done. There are so many people working on Fedora that it is hard to know where the help is needed. And, by the time you figure out where you can help, someone else has already done the thing you were about to do.
Now I’m looking in to Foresight Linux. This is an up-and-coming distribution that uses conary for package management and always includes the latest Gnome bling. It is based on rPath which I have been pushing like a drug at work. So, working with Foresight will give me some experience with conary and the other rPath tools. I’ve installed the regular rPath distribution before and it was fine, but I’m curious to see what Foresight has done on top of it. I’m going to try and use Foresight as the main distribution on my laptop for a bit. Of course, I’m in the process of installing it for the first time right now, so we’ll see how I like it.
Jen and I ran in to Nick Selvaggio the other day. Ready for this, he owns a fucking house. I’m proud of myself after I do the dishes or vacuum in our apartment and this guy is maintaining a whole house. Damn.
Hey man! Nice to see a post.. I have been slacking lately. I just can’t seem to post to the home owners mag OR my personal blog. I think partly because it is winter and to be honest I have not been doing much but playing the Wii.. :)
In terms of the Linux world I have still not gotten anything off the ground with respect to tuxteacher.com … would this maybe be a project you would like to work with me on? I am full of idea’s for it… but I think I need a good Linux guru partner.
Talk to you later.. it was good seeing you.