Incoherent and disjointed opinionated drivel from somewhere near London

This weekend I finally got around to updating my main Linux box from Ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04 (yes, I know, 4 months late – but moving fast!). The highly excellent xmonad has made it into the main Ubuntu repositories, so I discarded my own build and grabbed the packaged version – which promptly didn’t work as expected on my dual-head setup. Gah.

A bit of googling suggested that the problem lay with the upstream debian package, which contained a build of libghc6-x11-dev that was compiled without xinerama support. This left me with a choice of either waiting for the package to get sorted out, or to do the build myself again. I decided to do my own build rather than live without xmonad, but rather than mucking about with tarballs I could at least now get the source from the package repository.

The appropriate steps, for anyone interested or having the same problem, are:

1. Make sure libxinerama-dev is installed
2. Recompile libghc6-x11-dev and install it
3. Recompile libghc6-xmonad-dev and libghc-xmonad-contrib-dev against the new X11 lib

The apt-get incantations are:

sudo apt-get install libxinerama-dev
cd /tmp
sudo apt-get source --compile libghc6-x11-dev
sudo dpkg -i libghc6-x11-dev_1.4.1-1_i386.deb
sudo apt-get build-dep libghc6-xmonad-dev
sudo apt-get source --compile libghc6-xmonad-dev
sudo dpkg -i libghc6-xmonad-dev
sudo apt-get build-dep libghc6-xmonad-contrib-dev
sudo apt-get source --compile libghc6-xmonad-contrib-dev
sudo dpkg -i libghc6-xmonad-contrib-dev_0.6-4_i386.deb

A quick alt-q restart, and all is well.

I only mention all this because it’s so easy in this day and age to take something like apt for granted, and every so often it’s worth taking a moment to appreciate just how spectacularly good it really is. Where I work, deployments are an endless source of headaches and grief, yet the complexity of those deployments absolutely pales against the task of updating literally millions of systems, all slightly different to each other, thousands of times a day. It’s just a joy to be able to say to apt “hey, go get me everything I need to build package x, then build package x, then install it for me. And get it right first time!”.

In most cases, it does just that. It’s an astonishing piece of software.