Soon, the Mono runtime will have a Portability Layer or what I call the Welcome Bad Coders Layer. This is not the correct way to do things, fix the application if you have those problems and do not hack the runtime to allow bad coding practices. What will we see next?, a new patch to the Linux kernel to fix bad implemented applications? like Microsoft has done:

"I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it"

Taken from joelonsoftware.com

I hope that repositories like Fedora Extras will not allow the usage of this ugly hack.

Now is the Dirvish turn to be packaged. Dirvish is a relly easy to use tool to create disk based rotating network backups.

I submitted for review the perl-Time-Period package to Fedora Extras, it is a small Perl module used by Dirvish, that I want to submit too.

Update: Accepted and added to the extras repository

The NetworkManager OpenVPN plugin is really good, that means no more configuration file editing and no more sudo.

I am begining to experiment with Ruby on Rails, until now I found the first thing I dislike about it,  the RubyGems packaging system. I do not want to use another packaging system different that the one provided by the OS, be it RPM or Debian packages, or any other option; I do not want to have files on the /usr filesystem that are not managed by the OS packager tool, I want to be sure that running the OS update tool is enough to have my system up-to-date (yum update). So the only solution I have is to build RPM packages for the ruby libraries I need and submit them to Fedora Extras.

Temporally I have created the ruby-gems RPM package, and I am using the environment variables GEM_HOME and GEM_PATH to install ruby packages on my home directory.

I found a Debian Extras position document about RubyGems, and I agree with that position.