August 2010 Archives

When I showed Benjamin (a college of mine) my TPF 2010Q3 grant proposal, we slipped to a discussion about deploying Perl software. Nice (and recent) list of different approaches can be found @modernperlbooks.com. To sum it up => TIMTOWTDI. Which is good, but none of those is perfect. The Perl+CPAN world is way too complex.

During out discussion with Benjamin I proposed an idea of shipping the application altogether with the OS. Insane? The base Debian system is ~190MB, all the rest is needed for the application. Then deployment will be a matter of running this system on a virtual machine, somewhere in the cloud or in a simple chroot. (btw any Linux distribution can have any other Linux distribution working in a chroot) The files will never clash, all the "machines" would be dedicated. No fear of putting files where they belong to.

dpkg-scanpackages: info: Wrote 2898 entries to output Packages file.
dpkg-scansources  unstable /dev/null > unstable/Sources
bzip2 -c9 unstable/Packages > unstable/Packages.bz2
gzip -c9 unstable/Packages > unstable/Packages.gz
bzip2 -c9 unstable/Sources  > unstable/Sources.bz2
gzip -c9 unstable/Sources  > unstable/Sources.gz
dpkg-scanpmpackages
processing unstable/Packages.bz2
apt-ftparchive -c=Release.conf release unstable > unstable/Release
rm unstable/Release.gpg
gpg -abs -o unstable/Release.gpg unstable/Release

real    11m14.629s
user    1m45.227s
sys     1m56.679s

The dpkg-scan* tools are probably not the best solution for such big repository having 2898 packages in one folder..., but given enough patience it works! :-)

Xacobeo a Perl GUI to visualize XML and perform XPath queries just entered Debian unstable - http://packages.debian.org/sid/xacobeo.

Who is inventing this things? For years we have this already, don't we? It is just called ad banners. ;-) The idea and message is there. You like this page/article/service? Then just click some random banner to say "Thank you!". Simple and doesn't cost anything to the users. :-)