Making reviewing easier
Having to read all the ReviewGuidelines just to review a package is not nice. Especially that you need to make a report of it after you are done. So, me, being lazy again, wrote a few lines which generates a report ready to be checked and copy/pasted to the review request (assume that what I just said is grammatically correct). The script is really simple, it just fetches http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/ReviewGuidelines and uses regex to parse out MUST and SHOULD items, so in case of any change to this page, you’ll be updated.
To use it, just do:
$ ./package_review.pl > ~/my_review.txt
you can find the script here.
New Emacs
Quick notice: After looking around a little bit and not finding Emacs 23 packages for Fedora, I went ahead and rebuilt the one which is in rawhide. You can find it in http://amoradi.fedorapeople.org/rpms/ and install all emacs* rpms and you should have Emacs with neat fonts! Have fun coding!
Way to go!
I’m back, alive and happy! Just finished the last exam of high school and now I will have more free time. So Fedora 11 was released on Tuesday, and my first impression is: The ultimate awesomeness of the universe!
A lot of cool new features which just blew my mind away, but a few things I noticed right away were:
- fast fast fast. Blazing fast. Ext4 is doing a great job! You run it, it pops!
- kde 4.3B1 for kde-redhat-unstable users (special thanks goes to the KDE-SIG)
- cool plymouth theme (anyone know how to get it to work on nvidia cards without having to type vga=318 every time? adding it to /etc/grub.conf doesn’t seem to work)
- faster startup
These are only things I have personally noticed in the past 2 or 3 days with it, if you want a list of features, go to the fedora features list
All in all, I’m done with exams and I’m looking for some things to do! And my question is, dear lazy web, is there a list of wanted packages which I can look at and make some of them not-so-wanted?
A broken system and exams
My system just broke two days ago and I can’t boot into it. That in itself isn’t such a bad thing since I can just recover the files and reinstall/repair the system, but the bad thing comes when you have exams coming up and a LOT of other things to worry about. Such things as “Who will I go to prom with?” The hardest part of graduation is finding a prom partner and since I’m one of the least skilled people in the area of dealing with girls, I’m in a disadvantaged position. I won’t make this post too long since I have to leave the house for a game of tennis right now (the weather is beautiful and I don’t want to miss it), but you shouldn’t expect many things from my side for two weeks or more. Although I will still (try to) update raptor and konversation and perhaps I will package Bespin (cloudcity) too. Maybe a couple of small handy scripts too, since I’m learning Perl right now (and I’m finding it pretty powerful). For now, bye, but I will be back when I get my system up and running again 
new script, new packages
So, the school term is finishing and the teachers are dumping everything on us poor students. As a result, I have been really busy lately. But, today I found some time to update konversation and raptor packages, and also to update the updatepkg script. It has a lot of new things now! You can specify only the name of a specfile (e.g. konversation) instead of the full path, and you can tell it where the final packages go (e.g. ~/rpmbuild/RPMS or ~/builtpkgs) and it will automatically create the appropriate directory hierarchy and put the pkgs in them. Other than that, it can play sounds when it finished it’s job (if you add a –sound option to it with the full path of a sound file .ogg, .wav or anything that ‘play’ can play). It also logs the things it does in detail, take it from svn/git updates, to mock logs.
Enough with intro, let’s get to work. You can download the script from http://amoradi.fedorapeople.org/scripts and the updated konvi and raptor packages from http://amoradi.fedorapeople.org/rpms.
Have fun and wish me luck on tests and exams and projects and all that!
What laziness can do
I hate repetitive tasks. If there is one thing I don’t want to do, is to do the same thing over and over. This applies to packaging to. It’s a repetitive task after all, so last night I thought of putting the commands I use in a shell script and run them every time I want to update one of my packages.
Then tonight I wanted to update another package, another repetitive task, so I added some stuff to the last night’s script and here we have this (update_pkg.sh and parse_spec.py). (update_pkg.sh depends on parse_spec.py and right now, they should be in the same dir).
So what does this little script do? Well, you give it the specfile name and it updates the package for you. Either you will have the tarball downloaded and put in ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES, or the script will update the source through svn or git, pack it and send it to SOURCES and update the package. Pretty simple, but saves a whole lot of time (and prevents excess boredom sometimes).
It also builds the package for F10-x86_64, F10-i386, F11-x86_64, F11-i386. You can easily add/remove other archs if you want.
Just don’t try –help for now, it’s badly broken (aka no such option and the help is far outdated, it’s for last night.)
so, that’s it for now. You can find Raptor and Konversation packages here
Until next time, have a good…week? Or day?
looya! Now what?
Last things first, I’m thinking of writing a pseudocode parser that parses pseudocode to python code and executes it. It will be almost line-to-line translation between these two. The point of this is:
1) It’s fun
2) I’ll learn more about C++ libraries (especially boost)
3) It’s fun
4) It’s fun
5) Next time that I’m teaching concepts of programming to someone, I don’t need to teach them the syntax (of python) too.
6) It’s fun
So, here are 6 reasons why I’m doing this. So far, I have written down some ideas of what it will/should look like. Very similar to English, but not too close (e.g. “I kan haz bling bling” will not work for example).
On top of that, I’m thinking of making it extensible with the capability to add new keywords easily. Maybe a compiled-in plugin thingy will work fine.
Anyhow, I called it “looya” based on some random letters that came to my mind. However, a second thought made me realize that it’s awfully similar to lua. So, here it comes the first things:
1) What do you think a cool name would be?
2) Is it worth thinking about or should I abandon it before I even start it because it’s just so stupid?
Microsoft hit…badly
I’m generally not a fan of seeing companies engage in patent-y stuff, but this one was so cool I couldn’t help but post it here:
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39638887,00.htm
Microsoft was hit by USD$388,000,000 (watching the zeros makes me feel better ). As soon as I read this, I remembered the case of M$ with TomTom.
pretty emacs
I recently switched to emacs from vim, and I’m enjoying it. I feel that the shortcuts are more sane when used with Dvorak layout. Anyway, emacs 22 doesn’t look so nice, so I looked about for emacs 23 and found this repo from Brad Walker:
install the repo (bmw-release) and install emacs:
$ yum install emacs
and of course, enjoy
EDIT: here is some color themes for emacs:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~maverick/GNUEmacsColorThemeTest/
I’m not dead either!
I, too, have been quite quiet sometime. It has been much due to the fact that school is killing me as of this very moment. But today I found some time to work on some packages and update them to the latest and the greatest. So, here are raptor-menu and konversation updated
raptor & konvi: http://amoradi.fedorapeople.org/rpms/
