Eric Herman wrote: > if you grab: > > wget logicgate.nl/eric/dload/eric-pkgusr-options-20120612.tar.xz > > You'll get a tarball containing the "options" files for all of the > packages I have installed.
Thank you very much for sharing this. It definitely answers some of the questions I had. > With one or two exceptions, I don't do patches at all. > > When there's a snag in a package, usually someone else has found and > solved it before me. I am able to use the instructions in "Beyond Linux > From Scratch" or the instructions in "Community Driven BLFS" as a > starting point for almost everything. I've been doing several patches. I see a program and think it could be better with a certain change, so I make it. I do typically try to send my patches upstream, but the majority of times the developers aren't interested and sometimes they're downright nasty about it. I did a patch to hunspell to output in a format compatible with GNU compiler errors, so I could it use it with a programming editor that could jump to files and error lines. That did make it back into hunspell. I've done some changes to midi Karaoke support in abc2midi. That also made it back into the program. I've done a major overhaul of dclock to convert from K&R to ANSI C. I've patched some FLTK and WxWidgets programs to get them to run with the latest versions of their GUI libraries instead of older versions. I've done several patches just to get certain programs to build in a cross-platform manner on various operating systems (such as FreeBSD, Windows, etc.). Those are the kinds of changes I typically make. I've seen some references to the XDG FreeDesktop standards and I'd like to patch the programs that use HOME to check if there's an XDG_CONFIG_HOME before trying to dump the configuration files in HOME (as per the FreeDesktop standard). Of course, that means I have a lot to try to keep up with when a program updates to a new version. However, if I want the system customized the way I like it, I don't see a way around it. I could write all the programs I need myself so they're the way I want them (which would take even longer) or I can patch existing programs that do mostly what I want and make them perform a little more the way I'd like them to. I've been talking to other Linux users at our local users group and it's slowly beginning to dawn on me that average users do not customize their computer systems to the extent I do. I guess I figured since Linux is the type of operating system that typically provides the source, people would naturally want to customize that source the way they need it. I'm slowly finding out that's not the case. Sincerely, Laura -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-chat FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
