These holidays really sucked, for a long series of reasons, and in general, I’m not feeling well neither emotionally nor physically. But they offered me the time to think about what I want to do. I’ve been working on my collision detection script lately and I’m now confident I can make it work as a proper tool to identify issues, and I’d love to work on fixing those issues with upstream, but the problem is I lack the time to do that.
Even if I do improve a project a day, it’s never going to be enough, because in a few months I’m going to need to do it again because code would have rot and stuff like that. I need help for this. One thing I’m going to do is working on a personal archive of autoconf macros I can use on different projects; the attributes.m4 file that comes with xine, lscube and Lennart’s projects is already a personal archive of macros under some aspects, the problem is that its history is shared among different repositories which is very nasty. I’ve avoided up to now to create a repository for that, splitting it up in different macro files (since it’s far from being just attributes checking any longer), but I think i should look for a solution for that problem rather than continuing to procrastinate that.
Today I stopped procrastinating on getting rid of JFS for my root filesystem: since kernel 2.6.28 was released, I’m now starting the long awaited conversion of my partitions to ext4, starting from the repositories (and here git wins against Mercurial big time: once the git repositories are repacked, copying them over is very very quick), while copying over openjdk, icedtea and xine repositories that use Mercurial take so much longer.
Talking about xine, I’m going to do some more work on that in the next days, mostly code cleanup if I can, but I’m also planning on setting up a Transifex instance on this server for xine (and my own projects); hopefully it’ll make it simpler to provide translated versions of xine-lib, xine-ui and gxine. As well as of my own tools that need to be translated one way or another.
There are so many things I’d have to do that I haven’t been able to in months, reading is one of those, but I’m going to preserve that for when I’m going to the hospital next month for check ups; I’m not going to bring my laptop with me this time, nor any handheld console. I’ll be around on the cellphone a bit maybe, but that’ll be it. For the rest of the time I’ll be reading and listening to music (I’m not going to leave the iPod at home, knowing hospitals it will come handy). Actually, since I just have to have a CT scan, a chest X-Ray and an MRCP (MRI), I don’t strictly need to stay in the hospital; but not having a driving license does not help; although I guess even if I had one, I’d better not be driving after they have tests on me.
I’m going to spend the new year’s eve alone at home, maybe with my mom and my sister with her husband and my nephew. On the whole, it’s not going to be holiday either, so like it happened on Christmas, I’m going to spend most of the day working on some analysis or similar. I’ve seen that some of the issues I’ve brought up lately have started being taken care of, which is very good.
I know this post sounds pretty incoherent, I guess I’m incoherent myself at the moment. Anyway if you wish to help out with anything at all, feel free to drop a line.
I’ve been thinking of converting to Ext4 too, but I’m worried that it won’t be stable enough. You had a problem with ext4dev just a couple of weeks ago, what made you decide to convert now?
Although I had problems with ext4dev, they were still minor compared to what I had with XFS under the same stress conditions. All in all, ext4dev got out pretty much nicer than XFS.The only non-XFS partition that got converted was /, which was still in JFS which I used as an experiment; while it didn’t give me much pain at runtime (it “just” ate my data twice during an online resize) it was still an extra filesystem to load to boot up; I intended to convert it to ext3, but I didn’t turn on my brain and ended up converting it to ext4 instead, thus why I have a patched grub in my overlay now.
Hey man. I’m sorry to hear that you are not doing so well. It’s a real bummer to hear that your holidays were far less than joyful. I hope you start feeling better soon :-/ .