Is it me, or is somebody just not thinking?  It seems like Gentoo has a beef against monolithic packages like KDE and X.org.  The recent builds of these have been broken up into (as many as) hundreds of separate ebuilds — in the case of KDE, instead of the monolithic kdepim for example, each package that came with kdepim now has its own ebuild (same with kdeaddons, kdegraphics, etc).  Which is all very well, except that upstream still distributes the source monolithically…

I’ve noticed the following when emerging the new KDE 3.5…

>>> Emerging (18 of 275) kde-base/ksystraycmd-3.5.1 to /
>>> checking ebuild checksums
>>> checking auxfile checksums
>>> checking miscfile checksums
>>> checking kdebase-3.5.1.tar.bz2
>>> Unpacking source...
>>> Extracting from tarball...
>>> Source unpacked.

One thing is that this emerge (an emerge world, btw) comprises 275 operations, most of which are KDE.  That’s okay, KDE is big.  But each and every ebuild is working on the kdebase tarball — checking the MD5, unzipping, extracting.  Presumably when it eventually gets to the other KDE components it will leave the kdebase tarball alone and move on to each of the others…

Hopefully it’s only untarring the directory for the package being compiled (you can do that with tar, right?).  It’s still a lot of digesting and unzipping though!  Surely it’s safe to assume that I’ll want more than just one package out of the tarball, so the whole thing could be unwound someplace and linked into at compile-time…

Maybe the overhead of managing that is not warranted (after all, we all have octo-core 24GHz AMD chips in our PCs now, don’t we)…

I’ve bitten the bullet and decided that NPTL has been floating around for long enough now that it should be pretty-much shaken out.  So I’ve rebuilt glibc on enterprise (which was needing an update anyway) with NPTL enabled.  Now the fun will start!

Here’s best wishes to Mothers everywhere that not only was yesterday nice, but every day!

My Mother’s Day effort for Susan involved the cooking of omlette on toast (I was trying for the rolled-up style like the hotel chefs do, but I used too large a pan so it ended up more like an egg crepe) and helping Nicholas to give Mummy her present and card.

Nicholas and I went shopping the day before and selected card — a HUGE thing with a drawing of a mummy on the front which could well be Susan — and present — a pair of pink crochet slippers with rubber soles.  Nicholas produced some fine pencil strokes inside the card to wish Mummy a happy day!

On most entries on Crossed Wires you will find an “Add Comment” link, allowing you to make a comment.  But trust me, as soon as I pick up the slightest whiff of blog spam it’ll be switched off.

Which will of course ruin a nice feature for everyone, but you bottom-dwelling blog-spamming scum-suckers don’t give a fig about that DO YOU?!?!?

Sorry, lost my head a bit there…

Today we had a garage sale (well, Susan had a garage sale while I did Daddy-duty with Nicholas).  We sold a reasonable amount of stuff, including an outdoor table and chairs that’s still sitting on the driveway because it’s new owner hasn’t returned for it.  My contribution to the event was the installation of directional signage — at 11:30pm last night…

After the second sign I realised that I was hacking the process — refining the method of tieing the string around the light pole to achieve maximum security and minimal string wastage; orienting the sign for maximum visibility to oncoming traffic while not causing an obstruction…  Once a geek, always a geek!

Dodging the half-full beer cans thrown at me from passing utes got a bit tiresome (I’m surprised they’d want to waste any).  Oh, and with my court appearance next week I’ll probably be looking for some moral support (“Your Honour, I really don’t know how that piece of plasterboard with my address and the words ‘Garage Sale’ painted on it came to be on the passenger seat of that police car, but I really have to wonder if the good constable should have been driving with his window open that late at night…”).

Now, a word from our sponsors…

If you ever find yourself in a situation where you doubt the feelings your partner has for you, think back over the times where he/she has done something stupid like that for you.  The more the better, but even if you can only think of one you’re probably onto a keeper.

We now return you to your (ir)regular (un)scheduled blogging.

I just discovered (well, I’ve suspected for a while but never actually confirmed it or did anything about it) that a lot of the web application software here was out of date.  I’d gotten a bit tardy with keeping the websites in sync with what I was installing via Portage…

You see, when you use Gentoo’s webapp-config tool to install stuff (having emerged with USE=”vhosts”, of course) you have to go through a webapp-config -U to actually apply any updated packages to your website.  So I had particularly out-of-date installations of some of the software, not the least of which was this very blog software!

Progressively I’m working through the updates, in the process getting to know webapp-config a lot better than I thought I would.  All in an afternoon’s work…