Normally, one of the things RPM bases dependencies on is package names.The problem with doing only this is packages that want to depend oncapabilities instead of specific packages; for example, that there issome mailer installed, not specifically that Sendmail is installed. Todeal with this, RPM introduced the Provides: directive, which lets anRPM package tell the overall RPM system that it is providing somethingthat is not obvious from its name, its files, and so on.

In implementing this, RPM has chosen to

I recently read a great explanation of thegeneral Apache 2 preforking server model ,and found it so lucid and simple that I was immediately inspired toimplement a generic preforking server myself. Their approach has a bitof overhead in parent/child communication, but it does mean that you donot have to pass file descriptors between processes; all you need issome way for the parent to talk with its children.

(Since Python's standard library doesn't have support for filedescriptor passing, the pragmatic advantages of

What DWiki is used to write about has drifted a fair bit from what Ioriginally wrote it for, and some of the choices I originally made nolonger seem so ideal. I've been thinking for a while that DWikiText , thewiki-text formatting language here, needs some more formatting features;this entry is at least in part me thinking out loud about them.

So, here are the new features I think I want:

• 'literal words', words that appear exactly was written withoutany special characters