Saturday, October 22, 2005

Suggestion box

I am open to suggestions from my readers — that is, you — for future posts. Keep in mind that these are mere suggestions: I reserve the right to talk about those that I find interesting and omit those that don't. Note that this post's comments might be deleted in the future to leave room for newer ones.

Here is a non-exclusive list of topics I am inclined to cover:
  • General programming questions — specially if they are focused on C++.
  • General Unix questions — specially if they target BSD systems.
  • General portability questions.
  • pkgsrc internals and questions about the packages I maintain (mostly GNOME).
  • NetBSD internals (to some extent; I will be glad to explain what I have learned so far but I do not know much yet).
  • Questions about my own software projects.
Please note that this is not meant to be a technical support forum. If you need help using any of the projects listed above, please refer to their documentation and/or public mailing lists.

Yes, I took the idea of a suggestion box from The Old New Thing ;-)

(The aim of this post is to be linked from the Basics column on the sidebar. Its contents can change without further notice.)

8 comments:

Juanjo said...

Well, I'd linke the BSD thingie and the portable topic, but do it your way.

And btw... god idea migrating from livejournal.

Anonymous said...

Hello,

I think you must know a lot about the implementation of directories in Unix. Could you please write about what a filesystem must provide to have properly working directories? Especially if it is supported to be NFS exported. What are the so-called "directory cookies"?

Thanks

- Pavel Cahyna

Anonymous said...

Hi,
It would be neat to see how you go about building GNOME, getting it ready for pkgsrc, the tests you run on it, etc...

Thanks!

- John

P.S. Keep up the great work, you always have interesting things to read here.

Anonymous said...

Dear Julio,

I just read your note on running your G4 ibook in clamshell mode (sort of??) with its screen dark and your new external monitor connected and active. How did you accomplish this with the ibook open? I thought clamshell mode could only be activated by closing the laptop lid. I have a G4 powerbook Titanium, and would like to be able to turn its screen on and off without closing the lid, while displaying the whole desktop on an external monitor. (I am using an external keyboard and mouse). As far as they know, the people at Apple tell me that my only other choices besides running with the lid closed are extended desktop mode or mirror mode. You seem to have gotten around this. How did you do it? Any suggestions? Thanks, Richard

Anonymous said...

Hi Julio

I don't know if you have tried or considered trying DragonFlyBSD but if you ever did I would like to hear your comments about how you think it compares with NetBSD.

Thanks

drio said...

Question about pkgsrc: HOw do you keep your packages up2date? THe only reasonable approach I have found so far is this:

lintpkgsrc -i >/tmp/out_of_date
pkgdepgraph -D /tmp/out_of_date >/tmp/delete
pkgdepgraph -R /tmp/out_of_date >/tmp/rebuild
pkg_delete `cat /tmp/delete`
sh /tmp/rebuild

I haven't found any entry in the pkgsrc docs convering this topic. Is that possible?

Adam said...

for up2date pkgsrc packages managment I use pkgmanager from wip. This software works great.

john_connett said...

Hello,

I have been trying to find information on the current state of the Boost.Process library. It would be useful if a search for Boost.Process in your blog produced an easily identified source of such information.

I am keen to use the Boost.Process library, especially the POSIX (Linux) variant.

Regards
--
John Connett