There's three ways to build RPMs: the silly way, the easy way, andthe better way.

The silly way starts with /bin/su root , which should be enough of a warning sign. You really don't wantto be building and installing packages as root unless you don't have achoice, and you do.

The easy way is:

$ cat >$HOME/.rpmmacros
%_topdir /some/where
^D
$ cd /some/where
$ mkdir BUILD

One of the things they tell you in programming school is 'side effectsare bad; you should avoid them if possible'. Apparently every now andthen I need a reminder of this, because side effects were at the bottomof my feed whoops from last night.

One of the most expensive bits of DWiki is converting pages from DWikiText into HTML. Originally the conversion was simple andstraightforward; stick wikitext in, get HTML out. But as DWiki grew morefeatures, the wikitext started having additional information: whetherpeople

In the process of enabling caching in DWiki , I managed to illustrate theimportance of thorough testing by failing to properly cache the realtitles of entries and then not noticing, because that the Atom feedsstayed the same was the one thing I didn't test. (I carefully andsomewhat obsessively tested that the rendering of all of the otherpages did stay the same. I even have that automated.)

This caused the syndication feeds for WanderingThoughts to revert toplain filename based titles for eight hours or so, until