Present Perfect

complaints

I'm in a complaining mood, must be the lack of spring.

alsa

While discussing package numbering strategies for Fedora, which we'll hopefully start some work on soon, I used alsa as an example for a special-case numbering. I probably got the idea from dobey I think. To avoid silly names in versions, like "rc", "alpha", "beta", we'll subvert the spec file release number to indicate part of the version.

For example, alsa 0.9.0 rc6 would be specced as alsa-libs-0.9.0-0.18.fedora.1, where 0.9.0 is alsa's version, the 0 means it's not a final release, and 18 is the number of release iterations made up to that point. Why 18 ? 12 beta's and 6 rc's up to now. If your project goes through 12 beta's and 6 rc's over the course of almost two years, maybe you shouldn't have jumped from 0.5 to 0.9 in the first place. I don't know why people would ever think this is a good idea. The same thing, more or less, happened to xine. They jumped from 0.5 to 0.9 quite some time ago as well, "because we're almost ready".

So I check the xine download page today, and what do I see ? xine-lib-1.beta2.tar.gz, and it works with xine-ui-0.9.17.tar.gz Sigh :-)

cvs

I was trying to integrate ffmpeg's cvs into gst-plugins' build. The FFmpeg guys told me that they thought it was better to cut'n'paste code for libavcodec for now instead of linking to the .so

So I wrote an .m4 to check out/update ffmpeg code at configure time if gst-plugins is in cvs mode. So my idea went something like this :

• choose a date tag to indicate what version of FFmpeg cvs to use
• create a Tag file in the dir where ffmpeg is checked out under
• if this Tag file differs from the Tag file in ffmpeg/CVS, the code needs an update, so update to the base Tag file.

Now, the Tag file contains one line like this: D2002.12.14.12.00.00 So, I thought, cvs takes just about any sort of argument to -D, including a lot I would never use, like "tea time", "a fortnight ago", "last year". So you would expect cvs to be able to take -`cat Tag` and parse it's own format, no ?

Of course, sadly, cvs doesn't parse it's own Tag date format:

 [thomas@thocra ffmpeg]$ cvs update -D2002.12.14.12.00.00 cvs [update aborted]: Can't parse date/time: 2002.12.14.12.00.00 

So I'm stuck specifying the same date twice: once in the Tag file, and once in the .m4 macro.

life

I never seem to be able to do right by people I want to do right by.

sit on a plane, reading a book
same damn planet every time I look
all I am is a body floating downwind

complaints I'm in a complaining mood, must be the lack of spring. alsa While discussing package numbering strategies for Fedora, which we'll hopefully start some work on soon, I used...