Blog of Sylvain Le Gall

Reading OCaml mailing list is really great source of good ideas.

I was thinking for some times to have a binding to DBUS in OCaml. This can give an easy access to HAL which is a good tool to detect most of the interesting hardware on a computer. I think this is a good way to write efficient script (as i am experimenting with Perl to detect my DVD writer). I think this deserve a debian package ;-)

While browsing for ocaml-dbus, i see that the upstream author also release a binding to inotify... This is also something i am interested in. I was thinking of building a inotify daemon to launch commands when files appear in a directory. Inotify can detect this kind of events.

And yesterday, while reading ocaml-beginners, someone talk about ocamlp3l. I have already seen this software, but at the time, i have no interest in it. But as of today, i think this can be a great way to unravel the power of a dual core computer! OCamlp3l helps people building parallel application. I also want to give this a try one day (when i will have finished to package everything).

For now, there is an RFS for ocamlp3l, but all these packages need to be authorized by upstream author.

My next package :

• ocaml-dbus
• ocaml-inotify
• ocamlp3l

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the SCM.

Lire la suite

Last week i was at Solution Linux 2007. I meet some other debian developper and it is good to meet some member of the community. I am a little bit disappointed concerning the people who attends this event. It was not as crowded as it used to be. I think Linux is no more the top "hype" thing of the year (but i heard at least twice "web 2.0" during the show... the "hype" was here).

During a discussion after this, i realize that some people think that the town of associations ("village des assoces" in french) was not enough opened to non-technical users. This guy thinks that open-source guy doesn't know how to sell OSS.

I am wondering if the spirit of the OSS is to "sell" anything to the public. Most of the people that are working on this are technical guy, there is no real "marketing" staff of the open source among them. I think that the core is essentially non-marketing guy (i really do think no one will never perform selling "cron" or "at" to any windows users -- and they are essential components of a GNU/Linux distribution).

After all, what does the OSS has to win doing "maketing" things. More users ? To my mind it is non sense, users coming to GNU/Linux, for example, must have personnal motivation. It is not like selling a box with a "Windows Vista" compatible sticker on it. They will loose a lot of applications, habits and eye-candiness. They should have a stronger reason to do that. This must be a real "motivation". I won't try to convince a guy that there is no problem using OSS -- because nothings is perfect.

As conclusion, i think that the town of associations was what it should be : a place where OSS developper can meet.

One week and no real great changes in the website. I think i am coming to a sort of pause to see what is really needed! Maybe i won't change the face of every single external application to fit my need.

Violaine is putting our photo online. I am using the wiki to enter some personnal information. We begin to use the website. I think it will stay as his for a certain amount of time, until i will have again the time to change things.