I wrote before about how updating RPMs wouldoccasionally leave .rpmnew files behind that were, in fact,identical to the normal version of the file. I believe that I nowunderstand what causes this and what's going on: I think it's anothermanifestation of the RPM multi-architecture file ownership problem .

The .rpmnew files are created when you update a package where you'vechanged one of its configuration files from the default version andthe package also includes a new version of the configuration file.

As Author writes ,you don't strictly speaking need to have blog comments in order tohave a (blog) dialog.Well, sort of (at least in my opinion).One of the strong advantages of blog comments, and I think why would-becommentators keep asking for them, is that they are the easiest wayto make sure that the person who wrote the original entry sees yourreaction to their entry. Fairly often the primary audience for yourreaction is the original author, so not getting

Like a lot of block-level logical storage managers, LVM has a basicread-only snapshot facility. A remapping storage manager makes it easyto implement snapshots, since basically all you do is remap blocks onwrite (although the devil is in the details, as always). And like mostof them with snapshot facilities, I believe that LVM lacks hooks intofilesystems to tell them about an impending snapshot.

You might reasonably ask why the filesystem should care about this.The simple answer is that you really want

I will reluctantly admit it: I sort of like vi. It is a grudging like,for vi is not my favorite editor and it has its weaknesses ,but still, there are things about vi that I keep finding cool and niceand attractive. One significant reason is vi's regularity and what Iwill call 'composability'.

(Let me note that by 'vi' I mean the entire vi family .)

To make up terminology, vi more or less has two sorts of commands:commands that

Right now, if you are doing 'XHTML' there are basically three optionsfor what is actually going on:

• you are smart and clever and knowledgeable about XHTML (and masochistic ).
• your pages are actually text/html pages and thus not real XHTML( regardless of what the validators may tell you ).
• your pages are not displaying in IE.

The vast majority of people doing 'XHTML' are in the second category.(The third category is not popular for the obvious reason.)

Almost all of the

I don't just mean that they should fail gracefully when thefeeds aren't well formed (although that's an important part ). There are all sorts of troublesome things thatfeeds can do; they can be longer than you expected, for example, or theycan be sent to you very slowly. In all of these cases, feed aggregatorsshould try to fail gracefully, to extract as much information from thefeed as possible unless it is utterly clear that something horrible hasgone wrong and you cannot

There is a pragmatic problem with strict XHTML validation (well, several,but I'm only going to pick on one right now). It goes like this:

Strict XHTML validation in the browser clearly punishes users . If there is more than a trace amount ofactual XHTML problems, this means that not doing strict validation issignificantly more user friendly and thus a significant advantage forany browser that is not XHTML strict.

Given that you are punishing people by failing strictly, you areeffectively engaged in a giant game

Let us suppose that you want to create an environment that insuresthat XHTML stays valid XHTML. The corollary of how validationfailures should punish the person actually responsible for them is that the site author should bepunished for invalid XHTML, and you need to punish them directly.

So let's make the web server itself validate your XHTML; if it's notvalid, it doesn't get served. Does this punish the site author? Notnecessarily, because in order for the site author to notice they have

This is one of those things that is easier to discuss in specific,so I want to say that I'm not picking on ZFS here. Well, not toomuch.

Like a number of other filesystems, ZFS has several different versions,with later ones adding new features not supported by earlier code;this change is marked with an on-disk version number. Sensibly, ZFSallows you to explicitly set the version of a new filesystem when youcreate it, so that you can use a new system but