Present Perfect

Open source Work

Sometimes it is really nice to be able to delve in and fix things to work for you. My main gripe with grip was that there's no way to use different configurations. I wanted to use a few different profiles. One for grabbing an entire album and putting it in a separate dir with an .m3u for it, one for grabbing individual tracks to throw into the pool at hiqh quality, and one at low quality.

I first considered writing shell scripts to copy config files, but then decided to take a look into the source and see if I could manage it. After an hour, that was done, and I submitted a patch for it too. Grip's code is not really very clean but it does the job well. I also wrote a new spec file for it and threw it into bitches to test bitches some more, and now I have nice patched RPM's and three launcher icons on my gnome panel.

Then I noticed that oggenc made 450 Kbit sound files even though I specified 192. After some questioning of various people I learned that this is a known issue when using the rc3 libraries with the rc2 tools.

Red Hat packages caught some flack from one of the xiph people, and there aren't any official rc3 Red Hat packages for 7.2 anyway, so I started to rebuild the SRPMS in bitches.

This made me see that a few BuildRequires: where missing from it, so I submitted a patch for that as well. I also offered to go over some of the other Ogg/Vorbis packages and see if my build cleaning skills could help.

Stuff like that gives you a good feeling, even though these are simple actions. Sometimes fighting entropy is great.

bitches

Bitches is getting pretty usable. I added it to Freshmeat today, and the main thing I still need to add is to build and install goals before other goals. Not entirely sure how I'm going to do it, but I'll find a way. When that is done, nothing is holding me from building the full set of GStreamer and dependency RPMS for inclusion into Red Carpet.

We're still

waiting for an answer about the Red Carpet upload process. It's a pretty nice web interface, but when you want to upload 40+ packages it's pretty painful. I'd much rather just prepare the set of rpms, dump them on an ftp server and generate the channel xml file myself.

Music

I was going to rant about protected music CD's here last week after finding out that the new Arid CD (a Belgian band) had protection. I even have ideas on how to fight it. I'll save it for when I'm more in a ranting mood ;)

Open source Work Sometimes it is really nice to be able to delve in and fix things to work for you. My main gripe with grip was that there's no...