THOUGHTS ON SOFTWARE PACKAGING

Outline for this post.

  • Introduction
  • Early experiences with software (VIC-20, DOS, Windows 3.1)
  • Linux packaging (Slackware days, how apt was ahead of its time, Red Hat up2date, RPM hell)
  • Windows 9x/XP software (DLL hell, no dependency handling, everything’s independent and can overwrite each other)
  • Linux packaging in the 2000s (yum, slapt-get, apt-rpm, gentoo portage)
  • BSD packaging https://klarasystems.com/articles/a-quick-look-at-the-history-of-package-management-on-freebsd/
  • Modern Linux packaging (dnf, pacman, apt)
  • Containers and using them vs. curl | sudo bash, arrgh
  • Flatpak and snap
  • Briefly go over language dependency installation systems (pip, CPAN, golang, node.js, rust crates)
  • Conclusion

2024 WORLD CHESS CHAMPIONSHIP GAME 1 ANALYSIS

My (very amateur) take on the first game of the 2024 World Chess Championship.

PRIDE 2024

My thoughts on Pride Month in 2024 and my queer journey.

2023

Looking back on the year that was and what the year ahead might bring for me.

RUNNING DEBIAN 12 ON RASPBERRY PI

Due to general dissatisfaction with the distro I had running on a Pi (along with Red Hat’s source rugpull), I decided to try Debian 12 on it. It worked so well that I converted my other Pi a few weeks later. This is an account of the experience I had with doing so and what I learned along the way.

THOUGHTS ON RHEL REBUILDS

As a longtime RHEL/RHEL-like administrator at work and home, I have a few things to say about Red Hat’s latest rugpull.

THOUGHTS ON FREEBSD

It had been quite a while since I’d tried out FreeBSD, and I figured, why not give it a fresh look for my latest project? This time, I liked what I saw…for the most part.

WELCOME

Time to get this going.