Sofware deploying in Unix environments

Well, software deployment is all of the activities that make a sofware system available for use. With several Linux distributions available and so many libraries versions, this can easily become a journey through madness. Be aware, work as the package maintainer isn’t that simple! But, which tools did we have to get that job done? Let start installing what we need:

aptitude install dh-make dpkg-dev

Now, you must set some required stuff and than build the package. Just that easy. But just for debian, and if you need to make package for other distribuitions? We need to proceed learning “the way of” each one? Yeah, and start to get mad again. Thinking about that I’ve been looking for some reasonable solutions. Than I find out epm and autopackage. I decide to use epm because it looks very easy to make a simple package with it. Later, I realize that it can do lot more for me…

# ls
hello  hello.list
# cat hello.list
%product Hello
%copyright 2007 by You
%vendor Vendor
%description This program prints "hello"
%version 0.1
%readme README
%license LICENSE

f 755 root sys /usr/bin/hello hello
# epm -n -f rpm hello
# epm -n -f deb hello
# ls linux-2.6-intel/
hello-0.1.deb  hello-0.1.rpm
#

Even OSX, AIX, BSD package as well as package for other computer architecture. I didn’t tried, but that’s what they say in the man page. Autopackage has some nice graphic interface, so I’ll try soon. But, at moment, epm looks great to me. Anyone knows other solutions? I also didn’t tried Alien.

Learning with videos on internet

I still remember when in 1995 I used to go to university to get some .txt and .html files, mostly zines, on internet to read for some months. Now we have connection everywhere. I was looking for some way to deploy a python application when I found ShowMeDo website. I’m talking about video tutorials. It look like a new trend on tutorials over the internet, make a quick search at google videos for tutorial and you’ll see. I do think screencasts, digital recording of a computer screen, like those of ruby on rails are pretty cool. Well, not talking about video anymore but still about knowledge other interesting website is SlideShare. As bandwidth grows and mobile device becomes available, and that’s a strong tendency, we experience other ways to share knowledge. What will be new?