Packaging is hard. Packager-friendly is harder.

Releasing software is no small feat, especially in 2018. You could just upload your source code somewhere (a Git, Subversion, CVS, etc, repo – or tarballs on Sourceforge, or whatever), but it matters what that source looks like and how easy it is to consume. What does the required build environment look like? Are there […]

#GamerHate

Once upon a time, a large number of angry video game players were up in arms about perceived corruption in games journalism. They took their outrage to social networks, joining in with the existing outrage going on under the hashtag #gamergate. And yet every time they tried to discuss the injustices demonstrated to them in […]

Dear Debian Developers, lrn2gpg

For some strange reason, I’ve been receiving a lot of GPG-signed mail from Debian Developers and Maintainers lately. In response to each of these mails, I need to send a GPG-encrypted reply. The rate at which I’m able to send replies has been significantly hampered by the poor state in which many DD/DM’s maintain their […]

The directhex! In an Adventure with MIPS

We’ve been trying to build Mono on MIPS in Debian for a long time. Just under a decade, in fact. Mono 0.29.99.20040114-3 was the first attempt, back when the Mono source was 10 meg, not today’s ~80. It never worked though. Not once. At the end of 2004, 10 upstream versions later, we gave up, and […]

Evil, or why Douglas Crockford is harmful to Free Software

Yesterday I received a new serious bug report against Mono in Debian. For those not in the know, “serious” severity is release critical, and can trigger removal of a package from the distribution in order to make a shipping release (e.g. if Debian is in deep freeze, as is the case right now). Bug 692614 relates to […]

Sleeping with the enemy: my life with Windows Phone

In my last blog post about smartphones, I urged the universe at large to help maintain a variety of ecosystems, to help foster competition and originality amongst vendors – and the same day I hit publish, WebOS was killed. Apparently the universe hates me. Since then, a few things have changed. My main phone since […]

Bansheegeddon

It’s seeming increasingly likely that reports regarding the future of Banshee, Tomboy, and the rest of the Mono stack in the default Ubuntu desktop install are accurate. Ubuntu 12.04 will likely be the first Ubuntu release since 5.10 not to ship with any Mono apps in the default install – ending a run of 12 […]

Amazon Black Friday sales: a clusterfuck.

This is a reproduction of a message I sent to Amazon.co.uk tonight, after their Black Friday sales system went to hell on me, and I found their response to the problem less than enlightening. I’m reproducing the message here, as a warning to all. On a related note, links to my Amazon wishlist are gone. […]