Tarkblog

pauldv has long been the db maintainer, but he’s been pretty busy as of late so I’ve tried to help out a little bit.

Of note to Gentoo users: db 4.0 and 4.1 have been removed from portage. all arches are stable on 4.2 and the one conflicting package relying on db 4.1 has also been removed.

Also, the package.mask restriction on db 4.4 and 4.5 has been removed. This means that ~users will start seeing them trickle down into their systems. Please report build errors and other random bugs to me.

There are some really nice new benefits in 4.5, so it would be nice to get that infused into systems moving forward. I’m expecting some bumps, but please be nice.

Sometimes when you go looking for answers you find hidden gems.

I absolutely love the “splitdebug” feature (that’s FEATURES of the make.conf variety). I didn’t even know it existed until I read up on some changed documentation. It doesn’t seem to be listed in the make.conf.example, unfortunately.

See, this neato thing will cause your program to build in the debugging symbols, then in the end strip them out and put them into a separate file inside of /usr/lib/debug. This means your main binaries and libraries maintain their minimal size and memory footprint as though they were stripped (which happens by default, unless you’re a nostripper like I was). And all of the juicy tidbits of debugging symbols get tucked away until you need them. No more having to re-emerge packages with the debug flag just to get the symbols, then re-emerge them later to get back to the minimal sizes.

I’m completely grateful to whomever added this nitfy feature to portage. You are my hero.

If you don’t care a bit about programming, then skip this.

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This story pretty much sums up my thoughts on Windows.

KDE.news has posted an interview with me about our company’s business decision to use Linux and KDE in our testing environment. The interview was actually conducted over a year ago, but stagnated due to lack of time to post it. It was revived a few weeks ago and I updated some of the information to say more about what we are doing now.

While it’s KDE centric, note that we make heavy use also of Gentoo Linux, Ruby, QtRuby and Ruby on Rails all for our test stands.

In particular, if anyone in the Ruby community is looking to get some specifics or metrics for our use of Ruby in the enterprise I’d be happy to share that information.