I've been playing lately with different libraries. Either some neurons which were previously unavailable in my brain began firing, or the documentation for libxml (aka gnome-xml) got a whole lot better.

I've managed to write my own xml reading and writing apps and amazingly enough have a good understanding of what is actually going on.

I was asked for the first time in my life last week if I had any experience working with glib. I didn't, and I had only briefly glanced at the sparse documentation which was available back then.

Once again I was impressed at how well the documentation has come along. Heck, I was suprised that it had a main event loop handler in it. This library is definately one I will consider in future projects.

I was finally frustrated enough the other day by popt (some versions having static libs, some versions not), that I went to go see what it was. Initially I was disappointed at the man page which said it was Yet Another Library to "parse command line options".

Then I read the man page.

The API seems to be very clean and easy to use. Automatic --usage generation is a great feature, and what really took me was option aliases.

If you're on a RPM powered system, try this:

echo >>~/.popt "rpm alias --foo --queryformat='%-10{SIZE} %{NAME}\n' -qa"

Now issue a rpm --foo | more ... I think that feature speaks for itself, but good like finding apps that use the library.

That's all for me. Well, that and it snowed today. Welcome to Canada.