the corner office

Last week's Gentoo upgrade left some Java stuff wonky on my system, and I ended up in something of an upgrade hell, trying to keep up with a slew of Gentoo upgrades this week.

The first big change I got caught up in was moving to Xorg 7.0, otherwise known as 'modular X'. This is the first version of X windows that doesn't come in a single, huge tarball. Instead, the entire package has been broken up into about eleventy billion little packages, each of which can be compiled and upgraded separately. This modularity is obviously a great improvement, but the upgrade process hasn't been easy. My policy is simple: if a Gentoo upgrade requires a long, complicated HOWTO, (two, actually), it's best to avoid the upgrade for as long as possible.

Modular X finally went stable this week, so I just had to ride the torpedo and do the upgrade. Thankfully, it was mostly hassle-free. The only gripe I have is that one of my favourite fonts is now missing. The font, called 'Clean', was a really crisp terminal-friendly monospace font. No luck finding any obvious reference to the underlying font files in my backups, and I soon learned that the word 'clean' is not a useful search engine term. X fonts aren't my forte, and I'll have to make do without it until I have time to dig around and see if I can get it back.

The second big change has been an upgrade to Gentoo's Java configuration system. Gentoo has a really nifty tool named java-config, which manages VMs and whatnot. A major limitation, though, was that many Java packages don't compile cleanly with 1.5 yet, and all sorts of unholy horrors would get unleashed if you accidentally set your system VM to 1.5, &c &c. The latest version of java-config has a number of nifty improvements, and is now smart enough to work with 'generations', so separate packages can be built and/or invoked with different VM versions.

The upgrades to get to this 'generational' set-up weren't too smooth (<- understatement), but I finally have everything sane again.

Gentoo's source-based philosophy means that their Java library management gets really, really complex, because they eschew the 500-copies-of-the-same-jar-file-on-your-system approach that everyone normally follows. Instead, they aim for a more reusable, /lib-friendly set-up. I find myself a bit skeptical of whether their source-based java set-up is worth the effort, but I have to take my hat off to the Gentoo devs for keeping a handle on everything.

Finally, I'm now using Eclipse 3.2, aka Callisto. I read a 'what's new' article a few days ago, and there were no 'wow' changes that caught my attention. The main thing I wanted was a bug fix in the CDT plug-ins: the 3.1 compatible version had a frustrating bug where it would take a few seconds to close each source file window. Waiting half a minute to close a bunch of .h and .cpp files was getting a little annoying, and I'm glad to see that CDT 3.1.0 (which is for Eclipse 3.2, confusingly), has fixed this.

Now I can finally get back to doing really productive stuff.