Welcome to Nowhere

A couple months ago, when they released version 2.10 of Glibc into the unstable tree for Gentoo, I thought it’d be fun to try rebuilding everything right then so that I might get what was left of the old 2.9 version off my system. Didn’t quite go as well as I thought–in fact, one of the programs I use fairly frequently when I’m not home, absolutely refused to compile against the new Glibc. Well, crap. There just went that. So I filed this bug report, and expected not a whole lot to get done about it–I’m probably one of a very small subset of users who actually still run that program, right? So clearly it won’t be a priority. I mean, that’s what I’m used to–you send Microsoft an error report, or any of the Windows program authors a similar report, they more often than not just sort of ignore it. I was perfectly ready for them to do that here. I’d even started researching alternative programs I could make use of while on my coming up road trip. Then, in with the other couple hundred of last night’s emails, I get this.

17 Nov 2009; Dawid Węgliński (cla) bitchx-1.1-r4.ebuild,+files/1.1/bitchx-1.1-open-mode.patch:Pass mode to O_CREAT bug #285374

It’s probably not directly related to what I reported. At least, I didn’t think so. So I wasn’t in a real big hurry to test it out. I waited until the automatic synchronisation went off this morning to pick up the new changes, and this afternoon, out of random boredom/curiosity/whatever, I tried yet again to compile the thing. And, surprising the hell out of me, it actually didn’t fall over sideways. I’m really not used to that.

that’s something I literally never saw, like, at all in all my years using, writing about, complaining about, trying to fix, abruptly breaking, and eventually reinstalling Windows. I have no idea how many times I naively hit the “send error report” button on this or that crashed program, utility, or the OS itself, thinking “Hey, Microsoft might get to fixing this.”, only to install several Windows updates that, yep, didn’t actually fix it. So actually seeing an update come across my desk that, wouldn’t you know, actually fixes a problem? Yeah, that’s new. And it’s definitely not hurting my consideration for putting more and more time into using Gentoo locally.

Explanation: BitchX, BX for short, is a Linux based client for connecting to IRC (Internet Relay Chat). I have no idea why they call it BitchX. But, it’s a decent enough program for what I use it for, so I also don’t particularly care.