lefou's Werkstatt

Let us hope...

Lately the Maven project has been taking a lot of heat from various sources about stability and over-all quality. For the most part, they were right. The Maven team is very strong and certainly no one intends for these problems to happen, but ultimately they were.
...
During a review of the open issues while planning 2.0.10, I became aware that a significant number of open issues start with "this used to work until 2.0.[x]". I became frustrated and a little embarrassed to realize how bad of a regression problem we had going on.
At that point I decided that my personal priority for 2.0.9 had to be No more regressions.

Cited from Brian's Enterprise Blog

Sooner or later almost any Linux admin feel the need for a history of configuration changes. May it the X server configuration which got corrupted while you experimented with the Composite extension and OpenGL or may it the apache configuration you jumbled while updating the popular web server.

Gentoo Linux brings some powerful tool's (dispatch-conf, etc-update) out of the box to manage and update those configuration files. dispatch-conf is even able to store older versions inside of /etc/config-archive with RCS, but dealing with this ancient VCS is't that much fun and self written config files are not included by default.

SVK is the answer.

Great news for OSGi users/developer and those who care about a good component design, Java modules and a clean classpath. Ian Skerrett cited the quarterly OSGi newsletter on his blog:

In the time since my last e-mail to members, the OSGi Alliance has welcome two new members. One of the, Sun Microsystems, is a previous (and actually founding) member, and the other, SAP, is brand new to the OSGi Alliance. I welcome both of them and look forward to their participation and contributions to the OSGi Alliance. In fact, both of these organizations have nominated candidates for the OSGi board —

For a half year I own a ThinkPad X60s, my fifth ThinkPad and my smallest but fastest laptop I ever had. The first time after installing Gentoo Linux on the new machine I was surprised that suspend to RAM was instantly working, I just had to stop my WIFI card (ipw3945) and woops, it went to sleep and it even resumed well. Using the hibernate-scripts a perfect setup inclusive locking of the KDE session was easy to configure (just uncommenting the right lines). In the need for more hard disk space (this digital SLR camera is by far a greater space killer than my (growing) ogg vorbis music collection) I bought a new 160 GB SATA hard disc. Migration was easy, I just connected the second disk with an external USB to SATA bridge and rsynced the partition content.

I updated the firmware of my digital SLR camera Canon EOS 400D to the newest version 1.1.1 and now I can download the images from the directly connected camera with Digikam 0.9.2. This is possible because Canon added support for the new Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) USB protocol. Before, only the Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) was available which was not well supported under the Linux/Digikam combination.

Unfortunately I have not much time to investigate into building a better Java package management system I talked (or better ranted) about yesterday. But sometimes walking rather slow means also avoiding walking too fast. There is more time for looking around. In the past I analyzed different projects and code bases, e.g. Maven, Raven and Buildr or Portage, but I didn't found a best match. Of course I'm seeing much potentials in Portage, but it's written in Python and this could be a no go for some developers.

Today I discovered the Kepler Project. Carlos Sanchez blogged about the Eclipse Summit 2007 and the need for a plugin/bundle repository for Eclipse. As he stated, one wish or idea is to use a Maven compatible repository. Kepler tries exactly that, beeing a standard package repository while preserving compatibility to other package formats. I will have to keep an eye on this project.

Today, a colleague of me tried to integrate JMatter into our Maven based buildsystem (which drives the Eclipse side too) for experimental purposes. As you will divine, this didn't went well and he finally ended with a ordinary, poor man's lib directory, which holds all the needed jars for JMatter of a size of almost 30 MB.

Stop! Why is it so hard to integrate foreign packages into Maven? I believe it is because Maven tries to address to many aspects of different domains. It tries to be a build system, a package management system, a dependency resolver and a package repository at the same time ... and it fails miserable.

On the other hand, other buildsystems like e.g. Ant ignore their dependencies completely. They simply assume those jars and classes are present somewhere somehow.

When ever I tried to explain to friends what a Feedreader is, what it looks like and what you benefit is when using it, I recognized how hard it is to explain it to a non-technical person. Now, I found some really cool videos made by Common Craft explaining technologies like Wikis, Feed Aggregators or social bookmarking in about three minutes.

Here is the "Wiki in Plain English":

The fourth and last talk on the second Haskell in Leipzig Meeting was hold by Leif Frenzel (Karlsruhe). He spoke about Cohatoe, an Eclipse Plugin to support Haskell-written Eclipse Plugins. This was the official release of an already usable Cohatoe Eclipse Plugin. The talk is in German.

Don't miss the "Stolperstein" when watching this video.

you can find the slides of this talk on Leif's homepage.