Havoc's Blog

Is there any way to convince yum to downgrade a package?
Especially relevant since evolution
is all busted in rawhide. To downgrade Evolution I did an rpm ‑e
followed by a yum install of a specific Evolution version, but that
didn’t help and so I’m guessing I need to downgrade gtk2; rpm ‑e gtk2
is kind of a bad idea though, so I need the equivalent of “rpm ‑U
–oldpackage” only with yum. Yes, I am too lazy to go download stuff
manually and then use rpm rather than yum. If yum could just download
a package without installing it, that would be almost as good as a
–oldpackage sort of option. “yum download gtk2‑2.6.7–4” would do it.
Of course, maybe the problem isn’t gtk2 either, who knows.

(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2005–07.html#2.2)

Stephan
Binner mentions the KDE for Red Hat project
and complains about the current official Fedora Project packages. I
would like to see the KDE for Red Hat project be in charge of the
official packages to be honest. I think it’s been discussed before and
I don’t really know what the status is or conclusions were, but my
personal .02 is that there’s no reason in principle why KDE can’t
directly control the Fedora packaging. The only requirements would be
to follow the same maintenance
guidelines as other Fedora packages in terms of spec files, build,
testing, etc. and I guess not break any global stuff (such as upgrades
or shared files). We have moved away from Bluecurve in the Fedora
Project due to a general “closer to upstream” guideline (though we
aren’t religious about that guideline if we can get a nicer system by
bending it a bit, and as always we do a certain amount of backporting
fixes rather than wholesale upgrade during freezes).

I think there is a complexity here which is that right now
externally-owned packages have to be hosted via the Extras
infrastructure rather than the inside-Red-Hat Core infrastructure, but
the roadmap is for Extras and Core to use the same infrastructure
eventually, and both infrastructures work fine.

I’m not unilaterally committing to anything, other Fedora people and
Red Hat people would have to weigh in, but this is my view.

(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2005–07.html#1)

Watched In Good Company
again tonight. I really like this one.

(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2005–06.html#29)

Scott
McNealy:

We have a strategy that’s very different from everybody else’s, and
it’s community development. The way we say that is with the S curve in
all our new literature. It’s not for Scott, it’s not for Sun, it’s for
“share.” We’re grabbing that word and saying, of anybody, we own the
word “share.” We own that space.

No sharing the sharing, folks!

(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2005–06.html#24)

Speakers are now
posted for the conference July 18–19. This will be a fun working
event similar to the Boston GNOME Summit, with some talks mixed in.

(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2005–06.html#20)

Finally back home. GUADEC was great this year, and the first Red Hat
Summit was a big success as well. I enjoyed Bruce Mau’s tour of the Massive
Change exhibit and survived crazy stunts like shutting down some
New Orleans roads to march the entire conference down the street
behind a marching band playing Britney Spears. I was sad to miss
GUADEC talks such as DreamWorks and Glynn’s retrospective. I’d
forgotten about Gnomine embedded in Gnumeric; those were the days.

The main virtue of traveling as far as I can tell is that I get a
chance to read books. I picked up Shadow of the Wind by Carlos
Ruiz Zafón at random, and enjoyed it very much. Great plot (mystery,
romance, and all that) and well-written. Highly recommended way to
pass some hours.

(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2005–06.html#4)

For the record, there are no kids on the way (despite a series of
carefully coordinated blog posts claiming otherwise suspiciously
appearing while I was flying over the Atlantic).

Glynn is definitely getting hitched though.

(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2005–06.html#1)

According to Comcast On Demand, “Elektra is an assassin always on a
mission to kill, but when forced to decide between good and evil she
finds herself fighting mystical and relentless ninja assassins.”

(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2005–05.html#25)

D‑BUS seems to be getting adopted by third parties more quickly than
by the original intended audience. First Skype and now
Maemo.
Maemo looks like a really interesting project, I clearly need the Nokia thingy to run it on.

Pete, it’s not
just for ads. Even nonprofit or ad-free sites will have either
whitespace or graphics; random
article from a nonprofit organization, McSweeney, two fast examples. It’s
just more legible.

Anyhow, I really like the planet gnome design.

(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2005–05.html#25.2)

Dom,
you’re making a screen-real-estate-based usability/design argument.
If I ever wrote down a Havoc’s Guide to Software it would include
“design arguments based on real
estate are totally weak.” In this specific case, text filled
across a whole screen or page is hard to read. That’s why newspapers
have columns and most online magazines restrict width to much less
than the whole browser. The standard word processor template I use
has huge margins for the same reason.

Of course, Nickell has a more
thorough design rationale and I’m lowering the level of the
conversation 😉

(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2005–05.html#23)