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Design Patterns continued »

expat

Thank you very much to numerodix's latest blog entry, which caused me to pay extra attention when upgrading system packages this week. I do read my elogs, but I don't read it as carefully as I should. I know I would have missed the warning about expat1 -> 2 necessitating a revdep-rebuild. I am going to tail them onto my desktop from now on.

expat really does affect a huge number of packages. Every GUI app on my system is affected. Possibly because GTK and QT are affected. But I don't know. urxvt and conky are also affected. Thankfully I had a Firefox window already open, along with a few urxvt terminals, when I did my expat upgrade. So as long as I don't close them I should be OK to keep using them for a while.

Looking at these issues, I realized today how little I know about the specifics of how linking works in Linux. I had a few days about it in a class on OS design in college, but it was a few years ago after all and we didn't go into much detail back then. This all inspired me to read up again on how linking works. I am reading this article on linux.org to start with. It looks like a good article, keeping in mind that someone who actually needs the article (e.g. me) is probably the worst person to judge whether it's a good article or not.

In other non-news, I recently ordered Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. I have a design patterns book already, namely Head First Design Patterns, but it's geared very specifically toward Java, and the whole book is written in a fairly unorthodox and sometimes extremely annoying way. It also doesn't cover ALL the design patterns, only a few. I'd like to read the original source, and read something that isn't polluted with Java ugliness.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, August 12th, 2007 at 7:27 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Or subscribe to comments below to receive email notifications. This post is open for commenting. Pinging is currently not allowed.

2 Responses to “expat”

  1. August 12th, 2007 at 8:03 pm
    Quoth Ciaran McCreesh:

    There's no such thing as “all” design patterns. There are thousands of things that could be classified as design patterns, many of which are specific to a particular problem domain or language.

  2. August 12th, 2007 at 8:05 pm
    Quoth Brian:

    Sorry, I meant all the patterns listed in the original ‘Design Patterns' book. The book I read only covered a subset of those.

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