Michael, you’re the one who has to maintain this ebuild, not the user who submitted it. So making it maintainable for you is what’s most important. Whether the submitter thinks a six-line sed is easier is completely irrelevant, because the submitter isn’t the maintainer. And even if the submitter is temporarily the maintainer, committing through you, that won’t always be the case — at some point, a developer will have to deal with it.

That’s how I’d think my way through your conundrum.

Finally I can stop complaining about the censorship imposed by Planet Gentoo, because Daniel Drake just announced another, unrestricted outlet for my life in blog form: Gentoo Universe.

I’ve already switched my RSS subscriptions locally, but I still need to catch Daniel to update my Universe feed.

Thanks, Daniel and anyone else involved!

This week is crazy with school stuff. I had a biophysics term paper due Tuesday. The biochem term paper is due at the end of today. And my final is Friday for biochem — a class I’ve only been to once all quarter, so I’ll have two nights to learn everything.

If you want me to do something for you, now is not a good time to ask.

More related to Gentoo, rather than what Gentoo work I won’t be doing … Xorg 6.8.2-r2 feels about ready to unmask. I’d like to look a bit more into some of the migration to /usr bugs, but it seems like the remainder are mostly esoteric situations. If you’d like to test the ebuild out before it’s unmasked, feel free to leave a comment if it works for you. If it doesn’t work for you, file a bug.

There’s an article (registration required) in the NY Times on compromise in politics, and its decline.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to compromise in modern politics, Mr. Remini and other historians said, is the absence of a leader with the gift for compromise and the determination to make it happen.

Although that article says the driving force against compromise in politics is religion, it’s worth thinking about parallels in open source. Why don’t we compromise?

Very cool post from Rich Burridge on Planet Sun about it.

To whet your appetite:

Using this approach, I’m still able to use today a calcalator program that was originally written in 1987. It’s seen numerous toolkits (SunView, X11, NeWS, XView, Motif, MGR, Gtk+ and even a curses version) …

Very cool LWN article (subscribers only, this week) about XMMS2 and its client-server architecture. The Python and Ruby bindings sound particularly cool.

I started working my way through all the X bugs backwards tonight, marking fixed, upstream, needinfo, etc. Got from ~95000 to ~65000, which is roughly half the open X bugs. We stand at 126 open bugs now, compared with about 200 last week.

Anyone know of some nice blogs talking about technology and/or intellectual property, particularly as they relate to open source?

So far I’ve found Lawrence Lessig, William Patry and a conglomerate called rethink(ip). I really wish Lawrence Rosen had one; if he does, I can’t find it.

I also found EEJD, which is occasionally relevant, and a potentially interesting one called IP::JUR, and IPcentral by The Progress and Freedom Foundation, and Dennis Kennedy.

I spent some time today fixing science and cluster bugs. If it’s anything in either of those herds that I touch, it’s probably fixed: lam-mpi, pvm, pssh, clusterssh, mpqc, opendx, moldy, grace, gnuplot, pdflib … plus a couple of X things.

Grant, hope you don’t mind that I added a patch to gnuplot. Some guy filed a bug saying it didn’t compile against pdflib 6.0, which wasn’t even in the tree. That motivated me to go dig out the patch and to add the new version of pdflib. As a result of pdflib 6.0, I also had to bump grace to a version that worked with it.

Good question. I saw this on O’Reilly’s Radar, which is a collection of blogs well worth reading.