Present Perfect

mx

First off, there are binary packages for epiphany; for example, both mozilla 1.4b and epiphany 0.6.1 are in rawhide. They work fine. Never compile by hand if there are packages out there you can trust to be decent :)

Second, Red Hat didn't move the server directory for bonobo. If you configure without prefix, then it defaults to a /usr/local/prefix, and server files are installed to /usr/local/lib/bonobo.

bonobo on your system is configured with prefix /usr since you installed the RPM, hence bonobo doesn't pick up your Epiphany servers file.

There are ways around this, and these are:

• there is an environment variable for bonobo (I don't remember which) that specifies an alternate dir to use. You should set this in your bash profile, just like you have to add /usr/local/lib to /etc/ld.so.conf or your LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and just like you have to add /usr/local/bin to your PATH.
• an other option is configuring epiphany with prefix /usr. This is BAD, you should never ever do this :) /usr is for your package management system, ie rpm in this case. Don't install anything by hand in there, because you run the risk of both overwriting files belonging to rpms (thus robbing you of the chance of verifying your install) and you'll probably lose a lot of stuff when you upgrade your system
• build a bonobo in /usr/local. This is also not very ideal because then it will fail to pick up all of the rpm-installed bonobo servers.

Seriously, the best thing to do is get good packages from someone and fix all issues in one go. In this case, check rawhide. In other cases, help us out over at Fedora, a community-based set of add-on packages for Red Hat Linux. Suggest packages, do Q&A testing, give feedback, and so on. The time you spent compiling stuff by hand could be better spent verifying clean packages and helping out a bigger group of people.

mach

Had a long entry on mach but I lost it due to an X crash :)

Short version of them:

• decided to rewrite mach in python three weeks ago; compared to Makefile syntax it's a joy to code in. It's my first Python app, but I had a basic working version in less than four hours. Python is very easy to pick up, and once you get past the indentation syntax, very very enjoyable to program in. I've since learned though that it's hard to verify your program works in all cases if you don't know how to trigger all conditions. If code paths only get checked at runtime, but your program doesn't run certain blocks of code, it's hard to assure your program is ready for release.
• due to lots of strange interactions between building a non-NPTL system in a non-NPTL host, and various rpm and db3/4 problems and lockups, I almost threw in the towel. My goal was to write software that would allow one to set up a chroot environment for any flavour of rpm-based Linux. At some point it seemed that due to all of the various lock-ups possible, this was impossible.
• After some rest, I realized I could do all package manipulation (through rpm and apt-get) from OUTSIDE the chroot, ie. using the host's apt-get and rpm binaries, but affecting the target root. I quickly added code for doing this, and objectified the root handling in python itself, and it worked !
• The last week was mostly spent on finetuning stuff, and testing it out on various packages.
• mach is now able to set up all supported flavours of RH (7.2, 7.3, 8.0, 9) and various spin-offs (for GStreamer, Fedora stable, testing and unstable). It can build from spec file or rebuild source rpm's. It can do multiple builds at once, and figure out a build order for these specs or srpms.

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out now. Have to release something very soon so it gets used out there. Some people I respect seem to really like the idea and the program (like Ville Skyttä and Matthias from Freshrpms).

Had longer entries planned, but it's late, we just had a great barbecue, and I want to get some stuff done tomorrow as on Sunday we're going to the beach because a friend of ours has her birthday and she decided we should all go !

mx First off, there are binary packages for epiphany; for example, both mozilla 1.4b and epiphany 0.6.1 are in rawhide. They work fine. Never compile by hand if there are...