David Pashley: Violating Perl Module Namespaces
Perl doesn't enforce access to modules' namespaces. This would
usually be considered a bad thing, but sometimes it allows us to work
around problems in modules without changing their code. Here's a perfect
example:
I've been writing a script to talk to an XML-RPC endpoint, using
Frontier::Client but for
one of the requests, the script throws the following error:
wanted a data type, got ex:i8'Turning on debugging showed the response type was indeed ex:i8, which isn't one of the types that Frontier::Client supports.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<methodResponse xmlns:ex="http://ws.apache.org/xmlrpc/namespaces/extensions">
<params>
<param>
<value>
<ex:i8>161</ex:i8>
</value>
</param>
</params>
</methodResponse>
Searching through the code shows Frontier::Client is a wrapper around
Frontier::RPC2 and the error message happens at the following
section:
elsif ($scalars $tag )
$expat-> 'rpc_text' = "";
push @ $expat-> 'rpc_state' , 'cdata';
else
Frontier::RPC2::die($expat, "wanted a data type, got \ $tag'\n");
So we can see that it's looking up the tag into a hash called
%scalars to see if the type is a scalar type, otherwise throws
the error we saw. Looking at the top, we can see this hash:
%scalars = (
'base64' => 1,
'boolean' => 1,
'dateTime.iso8601' => 1,
'double' => 1,
'int' => 1,
'i4' => 1,
'string' => 1,
);
So, if we could add ex:i8 to this scalar, we could fix the
problem. We could fix the module, but that would require every user of
the script to patch their copy of the module. The alternative is to
inject something into that hash across module boundaries, which we can
do by just refering to the hash by it's complete name including the
package name. We can use:
$Frontier::RPC2::scalars 'ex:i8' = 1;Now when we run the script, everything works. It's not nice and it's dependent on Frontier::RPC2 not changing. but it allows us to get on with our script.
By that definition we can certainly see projects like Wine, Mysql, Ghostscript (at one time), and others as fitting into that model, and being quite successful. There’s nothing really wrong with the non-organic software model, although many of them have struggled to make enough money when competing with pure proprietary softare competitors, with MySQL perhaps being the exception which proves the rule.
In most of these cases, though, the project started more as an organic open source, and then transitioned into the non-organic model when there was a desire to monetize the project and/or when the open source programmers decided that it would be nice if they could turn their avocation into a vocation, and let their hobby put food on the family table.
Solaris, of course, is doing something else quite different, though. They are trying to make the transition from a proprietary customer/supplier relationship to trying to develop an Open Source community and what John s candidate statement pointed out is that they weren t really interested in creating an organic open source developer community at all, but they wanted the fruits of an open source community with plenty of application developers, end-users, etc., all participating in that community.
We don t have a lot of precedent for projects who try to go in this direction, but I suspect they are skipping a step when they try to go to the end step without bothering to try to make themselves open to outside developers. And by continuing to act like a corporation, they end up shooting themselves in the foot. For example, the OpenSolaris license still prohibits people from publishing benchmarks or comparisons with other operating systems. Very common in closed-source operating systems and databases, but it discourages people from even trying to make things better, both within and outside of the Open Solaris core team. Instead, they respond to posts like 
Most 
![[Photo of Dongle]](http://mjr.towers.org.uk/writing/reflections/attachments/btscreen.jpg "Bluetooth Dongle")
...is just not enough time to see the place properly.
I took Friday and Monday off, and Thursday night a week ago, Sarah and I
flew down to San Diego for a bit of a "Yay, we've achieved normality"
escape.
We'd intended to go to SeaWorld on Friday, vege out for two days, go to San
Diego Zoo on Monday, then fly home on Monday night.
Well we did SeaWorld and the zoo as planned, but lazing around the pool
never happened, we ended up running ourselves ragged exploring San Diego all
day Saturday and Sunday instead.
We stayed at 
And fisl9.0 is over. This was a great one not only because of its size, but there were so many things at stake that I am positively surprised such a few went wrong. We ve got a lot to think until next one
To begin with, there s a major difference between this inter-fisl time: we already know where next s going to be and how much it ll cost us. The event-center cost, as you can imagine, is the most expensive part of our budget, and knowing that in advance, I believe, will play an important role in our planning. Also, we got more time to plan for the next one: it ll be in June, not April, as usual.
Moving back to 
I m a person who isn t satisfied with a lot of things. This both affects me and helps me on several circumstances in life, such it is.
The latter also affects my way to deal with mail, mail serving and MUAs. For years, I was a strong Novell Evolution user, mainly because it was quite easy to use, it was pretty and it used to understand the needs that people like me, involved in a lot of things (some of the worthwhile, some of them shitty), required. But in the last couple of years, it began to bloat, to handle connections Bayesian filters and SpamAssassin in a way that was utterly broken and decomposed.
I took a break years ago, and tried Mutt, as many free software folks and Debian developers use them on a daily basis to deal with even more incoming mail. I actually liked it, but I was just unable to deal with spam too. My local config was probably broken, fixing it was an obscure fart of Benedict XVI and hidden folders for mailing lists were just a way to forget that I actually was subscribed to mailing lists and focused only on the incoming mail on the inbox.
I then tried KMail, since I started usign KDE. It was good enough for it was sometimes slow when trying to load or search on about 100 000 mails and it just didn t fulfill me. I also tried Thunderbird which only made me hate its very closed format to display its ugly UI. Besides, a lot of things on it were getting my angry, like the message filters, etc.
So I just didn t give a damn and moved my whole personal mail accounts to Google Apps, giving an opportunity to a totally different approach on mail handling. So I started using the Web interface of GMail. At first I was shocked watching me dealing with a Webmail but after a while I started getting used to it and liking it. Its way to put all conversations threaded on a central inbox was sweet (i was able to filter, tag and take out of inbox too). So I liked it. Some things have never liked me whatsoever: It will always use your default mail address to reply to all messages, even if they are delivered to another recipient, which I consider retarded; its way to let users to top-post, etc, (you should also see how debian-private is seen on GMail and how the google sponsored links propose products based on all its threads xD). The good thing here also was that while not being a total purist, I loved that most spam has automatically handled for me, oh thank Lord I m a lazy bastard.
Then I found 
I've updated the IMAP utility that 
I've been on the road quite a bit lately. During my manic travel,
I have been rather lax about blogging many of my recent talks.
After a talk at 
Now everything is fine. 
The other one just walks around:
On the Debian side of the trench , I met Jo o Eriberto Mota Filho, Debian Developer wannabe who asked me to sign his key. I ve seem he before, since he s a frequent speaker at fisl and welcome him as a future developer. Meanwhile I was reminded by faw that I still owe him my signature since DebConf4!! I signed so many keys in the 
when I woke up today (after sleeping in for the first time with my new
roll-top in front of my bedroom window) I was surprised & confused by a
couple of "congratulations!" messages in my irc away-log. it took
me a bit of time & coffee (& looking into my mailbox) to begin to
realize that my Debian account had indeed been created while I was asleep.
— in fact I guess I still haven't completely realized my new status as
Debian Developer.
One thing that's been bothering me since quite a while is the fact
that apt and friends are not very verbose when things go wrong. Usually
that's just fine; if a package can't be installed, there isn't much you
can do about it anyway.
However, for those of us who have to maintain buildd machines, a
message like the following is not very helpful:
