I hope you like your links eclectic this week.
- DragonFly is a popular project name, but this is unrelated to DragonFly BSD.
- Russian Tea HOWTO. I know there’s at least a few vigorous tea-drinkers in DragonFly other than me. The tl;dr version is “make a syrup and dilute”, but it’s more enjoyable to get into the paperphanalia of it all.
- I don’t know what Xombrero is, but someone submitted patches for it to build on DragonFly. What a nice thing to do!
- A Generation Lost in the Bazaar, by Poul-Henning Kamp. Even if you don’t agree with his cathedral vs. bazaar generalizations, this description sums up a problem well: “Sam Leffler’s graphics/libtiff is one of the 122 packages on the road to www/firefox, yet the resulting Firefox browser does not render TIFF images.” (via)
- Fourmilab.ch, the site of John Walker, co-author of AutoCAD. The site looks like something from the late 90s but is surprisingly modern. The Unix Utilities section has some interesting programs. I’d link to it directly, but it’s a framed page on the site. (See what I meant about “90s”?)
- Beyond lies the wub: a history of dubstep. You may or may not be interested in the music, but I like these long-form articles coming from the Verge.
- 150 Troma films for free on YouTube. (via) The most famous one isn’t free, but it’s there.
- Oh my goodness, the “thagomizer” is a real thing.
- Racing modified electric kid vehicles. I had a coworker who put a wheelchair battery into his daughter’s Barbie car. He said it doubled the speed and made it able to drive on two wheels. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: Flux Machine. Be patient; the images are animated to good effect.
xombrero is a minimalistic web browser that tries to stay out of the way so that valuable screen real estate can be used for much more important stuff.
https://opensource.conformal.com/fluxbb/index.php
I’m the author of the xombrero port on DragonFly. I’ve gotten access to pkgsrc-wip so I will commit this port soon.
PHK’s article has been widely debunked. Regarding the example you give — it is because libtiff is a dependency of gtk+, which firefox uses on unix-like systems. But firefox doesn’t use gtk+ for image rendering. Disabling libtiff from the gtk+ build would cripple many other programs. Also, historically, the “cathedral” that ESR was referring to was the GNU project, not commercial Unix. The problems that libtool tried to solve — the fragmentation of the unices, the lack of standard locations and names for system headers — were real. PHK seems to say the bazaar system won, the non-standard unices died out, libtool’s complexities are no longer needed, therefore the bazaar is bad! How’s that for a circular argument?
As soon as I originally commented I clicked the Notify me any time new comments are added checkbox and currently each and every time a remark is added I get 4 email messages with the identical comment.