xmingw overlay and "competing" software

Via the Freshmeat feed, I just noticed this thing called the "MinGW cross compiling environment" that looks like it does more or less the same thing as my xmingw overlay, except that it's not distro-specific. (It's not my fault that the portage concept is awesome.) I took one look at the mercurial repository, and found that it consisted of exactly one shell script. Wow. It's a big one, too. It currently supports 26 packages and is roughly 2000 lines long. My overlay, on the other hand, supports over 200 packages (with at least one shell script per package), and I probably don't want to know how many lines of code that is. I'm surprised that the number is over 200. Well, sort of. Its Bazaar repository is currently on revision 466, and apparently I've had this branch for a little over a year. That latter part's news to me.

In related news, as I type, I'm building Firefox 2.0.0.5 via xmingw. The Windows XP machine that I use is going loco, and many programs (including Firefox) crash when I try to use them. Strangely enough, my self-compiled version of Pidgin runs just fine. So, in that spirit, I'm trying to see whether a self-compiled version of Firefox will do the trick as well.

Edit: I was going to mention with regards to the Mozilla (including NSPR and Firefox) build process that they have a upside-down perspective of what "build" and "host" means, in comparison to 99% of the other autoconf-based projects out there. Usually, the "host" is the platform that one is compiling for, and "target" is the platform on which the compilation is taking place. Yes, it does make sense the way that Mozilla is doing it, but it's the opposite of everyone else, which makes it annoying to build. Well, that reason and the fact that it is a horribly monolithic build process (see OpenOffice.org, imake-powered X build process)

Several items

The last post was 1.5 months ago, awesome. Anyhow, here are some thoughts on stuff I've done/explored in the computer realm during that time:

• Beryl is awesome. Too bad it doesn't play well with tvtime, or else I'd permanently enable it and all the associated settings. Also, my video card is one of those crippled ones (ATI Radeon 9250SE), so it's a bit slow as well.
• My capstone project is in full swing. I've mostly stopped using my hand-rolled Atom parser/generator, since I got stuck on how to implement extensions. For generation, I've switched to using Genshi templates. Genshi has a pretty nice templating language for both XML and text based documents. For parsing, I think I'm going to use lxml or ElementTree, depending on how well XPath is supported.
• Given the amount of attention that OpenID has been given in the blogosphere lately, I was thinking about how it could be used to integrate with the UWNetID system. Unfortunately, I found that it was rather difficult to modify the current implementations in order to add such support. So, I'm currently writing a PHP5 class + mini-application to be an OpenID server. So far, I have the association mode completed, and the checkid modes are in progress. I am proud of myself for actually implementing the Diffie-Hellman key exchange, since while I am fascinated with cryptography, my math skills in that area are...lacking. It's also nice to refresh my PHP skills, as I haven't programmed in PHP5 (which gives you some idea as to the last time that I coded in PHP).
• Over winter break, I attempted to port modular X to MinGW, as the Xming project (which is awesome) uses the old, monolithic build process. I've built all the Xorg server (and its dependencies) successfully, except that the OpenGL code for Windows has not been updated with the rest of the server's codebase. That sort of modifications are pretty far out of my porting abilities, unfortunately. This project also gave me some experience with git. My take: it's extremely annoying to use git directly — use a frontend to it such as cogito instead. My personal preference is still Bazaar, though.
• I wrote a Python module in C for my on-again, off-again, DC client project. I have a post on that sitting in my queue and will post it at some point when I finish and/or remember it.
• I eagerly await the day when Deepest Sender supports the GData Blogger API. Maybe in the spring, if it's not there, I'll write it.
• Oh right, the new URL for this weblog is http://blogger.malept.com/.