Category: freesoftware (Page 2 of 8)
Not that long ago, I did a switch on my Android phone: against all the promises I made to myself beforehand, I switched on the Google account and allowed it to sync up to GCHQ/NSA the cloud. I did this for one main reason: I had just got an Android tablet, and I despised having to do the same stuff on each device, particularly since they weren’t running the same versions of Android, and one was a Nexus – so not all the UI was the same.
In my previous post about virtualenv, I took a look at a way of making python environments a little bit more generic so that they could be moved around and redeployed at ease. I mentioned docker.io as a new tool that uses a general concept of “containers” to do similar things, but more broadly. I’ve dug a bit into docker, and these are my initial thoughts. Unfortunately, it seems relatively Fedora un-friendly right now.
Recently I’ve been trying to bring an app running on a somewhat-old Python stack slightly more up-to-date. When this app was developed, the state of the art in terms of best practice was to use operating system packaging – RPM, in this case – as the means by which the application and its various attendant libraries would be deployed. This is a relatively rare mode of deployment even though it works fantastically well, because many developers are not happy maintaining the packaging-level skills required to maintain the system.
I’ve been a Zend Framework user for a while. I’ve been using PHP long enough to appreciate the benefits of a good framework, and developed a number of sophisticated applications using ZF, to have grown a certain fondness for it. Although it has a reputation for being difficult to get into, being slow and being overly complicated – not undeserved accusations, if we’re being honest – there is something quite appealing about it.
(For those looking for an rpm rant, sorry, this isn’t it….!)
Currently there’s a ticket in front of FESCo asking whether or not alternative dependency solvers should be allowed in Fedora’s default install. For those who don’t know, the dependency solver is the algorithm which picks the set of packages to install/remove when a user requests something. So, for example, if the user asks for Firefox to be installed, the “depsolver” is the thing which figures out which other packages Firefox needs in order to work.
Just yesterday people jumped on the biographies and abstract for a talk at goto: the Keynote is Google’s first public information on Dart, a “structured programming language for the world-wide web”. Beyond knowing a couple of the engineers involved – which allows a certain amount of inference to take place – there’s also some speculation that Dart is what this “Future of Javascript” email referred to as “Dash” (this seems entirely possible: a dash language already exists; Google already used ‘Dart’ for an advertising product but have since stopped using that name, potentially to make way for the language).
Scott James Remnant blogged his ideas about how to improve the quality of Ubuntu releases recently, triggering some discussion at LWN about the topic. I offered some opinions about Ubuntu which are not terribly interesting because I don’t get to use it often; however, I did also write about Fedora based on the last couple months’ experience of Fedora 15 & 16.
Before I get to that, at roughly the same time, Doug Ledford was posting his thoughts about the “critical path” process – essentially, saying it was broken.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been pondering the above question for a number of different reasons. For people who really study programming, like I attempt to, there are a number of claims/myths/legends/tales that are commonly held about people who cut code for a living, such as:
some programmers, the “alphas”, are as much as ten times more efficient than the common programmer; there are people who “get” computers, and those who don’t.
Many words have been expended on this situation. I don’t have an awful lot to add about the project side of things: I think it’s immensely sad that OpenOffice.org is being forked again (this is much more clearly a fork than LibreOffice was), but fundamentally all actors within the free software world are autonomous and have free will. Such is life.
(this is a deeply opinionated blog post. feel free to skip it, take it with a grain of salt, whatever.
This is a follow-up post to my previous one.
I was really pleased with the feedback on my idea for Fedora Greeters, from both established Fedora community members and not. Equally, I got feedback offline as well – and I should make it clear right now that I’m more than happy to receive such communication; the amount of trepidation shown by some I think just highlights some of the problems.
