2011-05-17



I spent a lot of time working on my Crux system, mainly trying to
get things working.

I tried to compile  mplayer,  but  it  kept  failing.  Finally  I
discovered  that the reason had been not having `-O2 -march=i686'
in the CFLAGS. (Probably the optimization is the relevant  part.)
How can this be? If software depends on an optimizing compiler it
is broken. These are the ugly sides of C code.

Alsa-utils did not compile because I haven't seen  that  alsa-lib
was outdated. It took me two days to see this. ;-) Once detected,
the problem was solved. I configured the kernel  a  bit  more  in
order to get sound working. Now I can listen to music.

Cplay is my music player (frontend) of coice. While on Debian the
backspace key worked (moves one level up in the file browser), it
does neither on Crux nor on NetBSD. The TODO  file  mentions  the
problem, there annotated with Gentoo. I had a quick look into the
code (Python). My wild guess is that the problem lies in Python's
curses  module.  Anyway,  ^H  workes  as expected. So, what's the
difference between backspace and ^H?

The last upstream release of cplay is from 2003, thus  contacting
the author might not be too successful.

As I make my way through Crux's ports, I discover small bugs here
and  there.  Filing a quick bug report with a patch usually needs
not more than 5 minutes.  Sometimes such bug reports  simply  get
closes and I am happy to learn what I did wrong. :-)


And something completely different:

Metapost (successor of Metafont) shows that it had been  designed
by  a  mathematician:  Knuth. These systems of equations are just
too nice. Other stuff isn't so beautiful: @#,  #@  and  all  that
stuff  in  vardef.  At  least this somehow conflicts with Knuth's
usually verbose style (like ``intersectionpoint'').

I'm very unsure about this:

     draw_node(list
             for i = 1 upto members:
                     , m[i]
             endfor);

Nice? Ugly? ... in any case: strange!


As I know pic(1), the troff preprocessor, I see lots of similari-
ties.   While  metapost/metafont  is  much more elaborate, pic is
simpler. For those who don't know pic: Drawing diagrams with  pic
is  like  drawing formulas in Tex's math mode. (I would have said
``... like drawing formulas in eqn(1)'',  but  you  surely  don't
know that either ... sadly.)



http://marmaro.de/lue/        markus schnalke <meillo@marmaro.de>