Here’s how I spent my day:
Showed up onsite. Friendly admin made a vmware image for me to use. This means that he basically created virtual machine, handed me the root password, and said “go nuts.” This makes these people the best install ever. Most of my RPMs didn’t work, but that’s okay. It’s why I bring source. We did some wild and crazy stuff with sudo to make my CGI jobs run as real users. That part actually didn’t hurt anything.
Then came the fun bit. I got to wrestle with GD.pm. I don’t know if people outside of bioinformatics have to deal with GD.pm, but it’s the bane of our existence. GD.pm is a PERL interface to libgd. Libgd has a long and storied history dealing with some patent issues surrounding the GIF format. GD.pm followed every wrinkle in the libgd lawsuits very carefully. The end result is that you have to have a very exact match between your version of libgd and your version of GD.pm, or else it just doesn’t work. If you’re installing a hunk of bioinformatics code, and something fails out with a screwy error in your compilation, it’s probably GD. GD.pm also supports the jpg, png, and x11 image formats, so it also depends on all those libraries being exactly right. It’s a joy.
Back to it tomorrow. If anyone wants to join me, I’ll be about halfway between Harvard and MIT. Come to the Central square T stop, and walk East past the gay strip club to the “Necco” building.
Leave a Reply