Planet Classpath has started collecting entries from my diary!
GCC
Since there is no way my hopelessly unreliable dial-up link at home is going to let me synchronise with the GCC CVS repository (which is around 234MB of checked out files), I checked it out elsewhere(?), archived it and brought it home - from that point, checking out differential updates became possible even on my otherwise useless link. Now I finally have a CVS checkout of GCC that can be kept as updated as I wish.
What took me so long to implement this was the time taken to figure out a way of using TCP/IP over HTTP behind a proxy server so that CVS could be used, a way of carrying large amounts of data back home and the time taken to move my glutius maximus.
So I applied for, and got, write access to the GCC CVS this week, albeit not without problems (why do I always run into such things?).
Bootstrap
In one of those now rare moods that used to be so common when I was new to Linux, I spent most of my week simply updating almost every package on my system to the latest stable release by compiling from source, including glibc! Much of it was a breeze (yes, even glibc), but Qt and KDE gave me the most grief - for some reason, uic from Qt simply omits the KDE headers required to access custom KDE widgets from KDE applications, causing the builds to irritatingly break every now and then. I think it is the fault of the ".ui" files in the KDE distribution, but wouldn't they have built and tested the distribution before release? I am confused, but I haven't found any answers via Google yet. >:-(
GCC keeps regressing in compile speed, especially for C++ code, with the result that Qt/KDE took an enormous amount of time to build with GCC 3.3.3 - I felt like going with Gtk+/GNOME just for this reason! But for some strange, possibly idiotic, reason, I persisted and the result is I must say quite pretty - KDE 3.2.1 feels much faster and is so gorgeous to look at! (For some reason, my display wallpaper change does not take effect at all, though Konqueror is able to display all these wallpapers just fine - does anyone have an idea why?)
An awesome side-effect is that everything is now rendered in TrueType fonts, albeit with so much weird anti-aliasing that it becomes difficult to read text for long. (A few years ago, I wouldn't have believed that this is going to be my primary complaint with my Linux desktop. :-) Who says we haven't made progress here?)