Sun Aug 18 06:34:24 CEST 2013

Packaging Strategies

Some ideas about packaging strategies seen in the wild ...

Axe packaging:

If you don't have to cut off some limbs it's not worth it. Put a meaning to bleeding edge again!

Whiskey and cheese packaging:

If it hasn't aged for at least 5 years it can't be stable and useful. But it stinks.

Matrioska packaging:

Dude, we have our own package management system. Keep your unworthy system package manager for yourself!

Inception packaging:

Yo dawg, I heard u like tarbllz, so I put a tarbll in a tarbll in a rpm in a zip in a tarball ...

Constant Number packaging:

Number too hard to brain. Here, take application.zip, I replace when new version is arrive.

Maybe we can turn this into a proper methodology like Programming Patterns, and then people can try a Constant Number Inception Packaging Factory Singleton!

Posted by Patrick | Permalink

Tue Aug 13 04:14:36 CEST 2013

Keeping track of AutoRepoman

By popular request I've updated my AutoRepoman machinery to log status and provide it to the public.

The current status can be found here:

AutoRepoman status

and a "historical" view (there was a small bug in the first few values, so the repeat timestamp is not correct):

AutoRepoman history

Now it'd be nice to log the failures themselves, maybe? But I'm too lazy :D

Posted by Patrick | Permalink

Wed Aug 7 09:45:47 CEST 2013

How to drive people crazy with syslog

Here's a little proof of concept I hacked up to frustrate random people that might be studying the system logs.
It assumes atd is running.
This file should be saved as /usr/libexec/gcc (or something similar, as long as it is a nicely distracting name) and made executable.
... maybe run it as a different user just to make debugging extra frustrating?
#!/bin/bash

strings=("Interpolation error in job table at" "CRC Error in metadata write at block" "Time error: Lost a second at")

choice=$(( $RANDOM % 3 ))

logger -i -t audit ${strings[$choice]} 0x${RANDOM}

echo $0 | at now + $(( $RANDOM % 120 +10 )) minutes
This will create amusing output like:
Aug  7 15:33:00 localhost audit[3984]: Time error: Lost a second at 0x2107
... at random times, on average about once an hour

Edit: Changed the hardcoded script name to $0, thanks to Senor Klausman who always has good input on evilizing computers

Posted by Patrick | Permalink