Replacements and stuff

I’m completely unhappy of the result of those elections, obviously I cannot tell it was unexpected (Idiots watching TV and believing are quite many) anyway today I’ll write about alternatives.

You know that I consider cmake one of the worst item available if you want to get a build system sane. I know that people usin cmake won’t use those alternatives, most of the time because they aren’t that known, fashionable or with spiffy names.
My list
– linux (kbuild) or ffmpeg like systems (note, we need to find a name for it) since those are relatively hard to get working on new projects,
– quagmire seems to provide something you can use but is still its infancy, yet I’ll give a stab at it.
– waf seems scons done right, still it lacks the completeness and ease you can archive using the autotools the right way (reusing the good .m4 bits from aclocal and not wasting time rewriting stuff every time)
– bitbake could make some windows oriented people happy while giving the rest of the world the tools expected, but maybe those people cannot stand an heavy known markup (xml based) while loving the cmake’s one.
– autotools have the main issue that some part of them are either over engineered (libtool) or annoyingly broking from release to release (automake), still the most useful part now it’s autoconf, but iff ffmpeg configure would be chopped into the right bits to be reusable w/out feeling the pain even it could be replaced with ease, recently I discovered dolt, a replacement for libtool that maybe could help a bit.

Right now if you want to build a project autotools, with all their defects and glitches, are the best all around. If you want to get something saner probably you may start looking at dolt and quagmire, if you want to do something for everybody you may start modularizing ffmpeg configure and makefiles or linux kbuild so everybody could enjoy it. In the middle I put other tools that look more or less useful but that for a reason or another I dislike a little.

In a perfect world we don’t have people wanting to use microsoft visual studio to build opensource projects, every library would provide a pkg-config file with all we need to know to link against it, and every system has a identical way to build shared libraries (passing –shared to the compiler and linker?).

In a perfect world probably we won’t witness human stupidity with a Berlusconi III (the government).

PS: The hunt to .la files is open, please try to remove them from your system and tell us if something must be fixed. The treasure trove about pkg-config files is opened too, if you find a library not exposing one please notify us and upstream possibly with a pkg-config for them ^^

cmake and openwengo, what a match…

Quick and easy task for this day: check which is the status of openwengo since seems that’s the only client providing what skype does, at least in theory…

Part one, get the source – delivered from the site as a nifty .zip

– wget + unzip worked as should

Part two, build the beast.

– cmake! The worst build system since imake, sadly brought into the fashionable stuff because of KDE4,
Now we get something interesting, on a phenom you get:

qlop -tH cmake
cmake: 5 minutes, 12 seconds for 1 merges

A comparison:
perl: 3 minutes, 43 seconds for 1 merges
m4: 29 seconds for 1 merges
automake: 14 seconds for 3 merges
autoconf: 16 seconds for 2 merges
libtool: 44 seconds for 1 merges
make: 30 seconds for 1 merges
cmake: 5 minutes, 12 seconds for 1 merges

Using something less new makes the whole thing even more interesting. Let’s say that to build something using cmake I need the 3/2 the time to build perl, just to start.

gentoo has an ebuild for it so it it’s just getting it, (why cmake needs xmlrpc-c is a question I’ll left unanswered…)

Now back to openwengo.

I have to create a build dir and run cmake from there, it obviously finds something wrong with ffmpeg even if supposedly it has its stale internal version (remind: ffmpeg changed the include paths some time ago) as fallback (no, you have to run cmake a first time, have it fail, run ccmake, find the right option and turn it on, start again).

I’m not sure if this brain damage is due wengo people or cmake, still I find this annoying. The *oh* so despised configure from autotools can be smarter and does not require that many lines if you know what you are doing…

It still doesn’t take in account that there are different endianess for linux (autotools have a nice builtin for this…)…

Once the thing built (took a while), I just got more or less the same thing I got last time I tried it, looks like the 2.2 isn’t quite up to date and they are working on the new mayor release =/

Back looking for other alternatives for skype =_=

What news?

Lately I started to test some stuff, after hammering openrc inside bsd jails I started to use it on my laptop, the ps3 and the new phenom I bought recently. So far I hadn’t anything to complain but just minor glitches that got promptly addressed by Roy. With the help of the other testers and developer you’ll get baselayout 2 soon and in a pretty good shape.

Feng and felix got quite an overhaul and hopefully I’ll release them once I cleaned up the code:
– felix had lots of experimental stuff added and you may not want it nor look at it right now.
– feng is getting the eventloop reshaped so that you can understand what’s doing w/out losing your sanity.

I’m still waiting for more SoC applications (in particular people willing to learn CELL seems fewer than we’d like) you have this week left to apply!

gcc-4.3 landing and other random stuff

gcc-4.3 seems to be released and I already started building it (right now spu-elf target being built while the powerpc64-unknown-linux-gnu quickpkg is being uploaded to the devspace for the people needing it). I got my alubook back and seems working fine, many thanks to
http://www.pixel.it/ for being that quick in fixing it. Now I’m waiting for the battery replacement and I should be more or less back on business.

The stuff I’m doing at LScube is shaping up nicely and I hope to have the next feng release, sporting the lighttpd and other major changes, out soon (It’s nice to have shared configuration across services ^^;). Soon I’ll update the efika setup and I’ll ask you to hammer it again ^^

ide-pmac lost interrupt, dma status: 8080

Looks like the tibook I’m using while the alubook is hopefully being repaired is dying. I’m not exactly sure if the problem is due the disk or the controller, surely that is even more unexpected…

The alubook will be hopefully back in shape in a while (I won’t believe till I have it back!)… Meanwhile I’m still thinking about what to get as workstation since this experience made me look for a workstation AND a newer laptop. I’m open to suggestions, right now I’m looking at a
phenom gear for the workstation and a laptop from enface.it

This http://www.enface.it/ita/octave150w.php looks nice for that pricetag, pity the lcd resolution is lower than the one I’m using right now (and it’s a tibook! an older than 5 years laptop!). I like durable system, possibly with a decent batter life and that aren’t too bulky… Anything you could suggest?

Sigh, I have no reason to overspend for an Apple since it now it doesn’t provide an interesting powerpc and building my own laptop out of a powerpc current design could be a too costly exercise…

For a week or more I’ll be less than present and active =/

Why people should copy from who knows…

Recently I happened to use the newest adium for few minutes (the time to erase my data from the macosx partition while I’m sending the laptop to repair (more on it once it is back, hoping it is back)

Adium probably is the best IM I ever tried, it works fine, in an unobtrusive way, it has all the gloss you may like (from none, to everything), but has just one defect: works just on macosx (that I don’t like that much for developing since I’m not into BDSM).
Now, everybody and his dog knows that adium uses the fine libpurple from the pidgin project, and there is a pretty nice gtk client called pidgin that people usually use…
The problem is that seems that some of its developers spend too much time castrating the UI

http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/4986

NEXT in row: have the chat window unresizable.

PS: no I won’t try to hack pidgin, monotone sucks.

Spring cleaning

Lately I spent lots of time cleaning up lscube related stuff, mostly trying to hack together lighttpd features inside feng. I’m getting ready for the Internet Governance Forum meeting that we will webcast.

My laptops (both G4, one titanium and one aluminium) got their fan broken in a quite unpleasant way and I’m still wandering looking for replacement, maybe it’s time to buy something else =_=
Lately I tried to look around and found some more or less nice laptops and even started thinking about getting a phenom system for home…

In the other news Seems that something would appear soonish at least as desktop… so maybe I could stay x86 free for a bit more ^^;

lu

Gentoo in Jail (and alike) thanks to openrc

Uberlord fixed the main issue I had in order to get gentoo/freebsd work in a jail: stop-start-daemon accessing /dev/mem and /dev/kmem

Now you can prepare your stage3, install openrc, dummify net and be happy in your nice jail =)

I must say that there are lots of issue here and ther in using FreeBSD with or w/out gentoo, but at least I’m getting a nice environment and got some issues fixed in the way.

ejabbed in Gentoo seems working almost fine while on FreeBSD there are weird issues that I couldn’t understand at all, still diversity is the root of evolution.

freebsd vs ejabberd vs me, 1 0 0

A moral prize to the people that could guess what’s wrong

relevant part of the config

  {5222, ejabberd_c2s, [

                        %%
                        %% If TLS is compiled and you installed a SSL
                        %% certificate, put the correct path to the
                        %% file and uncomment this line:
                        %%
                        {certfile, "/usr/local/etc/ejabberd/ssl.pem"}, starttls,

                        {access, c2s},
                        {shaper, c2s_shaper},
                        {max_stanza_size, 65536}
                       ]},

relevant log message when you try to login

**      Data  == {state,#Port<0.367>,<0.374.0>,gen_tcp,"2667452897",
                        {sasl_state,"jabber","jabber.stuff",[],
                                    #Fun<ejabberd_c2s.1.132950982>,
                                    #Fun<ejabberd_c2s.2.53796002>,undefined,
                                    undefined},
                        c2s,c2s_shaper,false,true,false,false,
                        [{certfile,"/usr/local/etc/ejabberd/ssl.pem"}],
                        false,undefined,[],"jabber.bofh-land.net",[],
                        undefined,
                        {0,nil},
                        {0,nil},
                        {0,nil},
                        {0,nil},
                        undefined,undefined,undefined,false,none,[]}
** Reason for termination = 
** {{badmatch,{error,"SSL_CTX_use_certificate_file failed: error:02001002:system library:fopen:No such file or directory"}},
    [{ejabberd_c2s,wait_for_feature_request,2},
     {gen_fsm,handle_msg,7},
     {proc_lib,init_p,5}]}

relevant file that surprisingly doesn’t seem to exist.

ls -al /usr/local/etc/ejabberd/ssl.pem
-rwxrwxrwx  1 ejabberd  wheel  1956 Feb  8 14:21 /usr/local/etc/ejabberd/ssl.pem