The Lunar Cowboy

Let's say you've upgraded to tracker-3.4 and it doesn't work. You could mask tracker-3.4, but it depends on tracker-miners-3.4 so you'll have to mask that too. There may be other dependencies that you'd have to mask too. What you'd really rather do is go back in time …

Often in programming we have some "constant" value that we define as a variable in Python. But the only try constant is change.

Consider for example you have a program that needs to process a file with a certain filename. So you might have something like:

FILENAME = "foo.txt"

data …

In my article from 14 months ago when I introduced Gentoo Build Publisher I wrote "Next time I will write about how one can install one's own gbp instance." Well that didn't happen. It's not that I couldn't document it, but I first wanted to make installing GBP easy. I …

It is often said that Python functions can return multiple values, but this isn't really true. Often the examples given to show Python returning multiple values is something like this:

def foo():
   return 1, 3

a, b = foo()

But is that really returning multiple values? No. Well then how come …

This article discusses how you should (and shouldn't) compare string representations of timestamps in Python.

Often times when programmers process external data there are timestamps (date and time) and usually this data comes into Python as a string, although some times it could be an integer or float. The international …

When one is performing Gentoo builds inside a CI/CD container (inside another container) and a build fails it is sometimes desirable to create a bug report at bugs.gentoo.org. Often the Gentoo developers require that you include the error output and build logs. However getting the logs out …

Screenshots and explanation of the new Gentoo Build Publisher dashboard.

If, like me, you've ever been curious about if/how coreutil's du command handles hard links:

$ mkdir test
$ mkdir test/a test/b
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=test/a/a bs=1M count=1
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
1048576 bytes (1.0 MB, 1.0 …

I am still working on a way to make Gentoo Build Publisher easy(er) to install and use. Initially I've wanted to create Docker images for the different components. However the main issue with that is that the Jenkins builds use buildah to build Gentoo machines in containers, and while …

It is often said that one of the advantages of testing is that it gives one confidence when refactoring. And I think this is true. However sometimes poorly-written tests or incomplete testing can have the ability to give someone too much confidence.

Take the case of Gentoo Build Publisher. It …