User:Imz

(My name is Ivan Zakharyaschev, Иван Захарьящев, imz.)

research on HOW TO do x

I'm posting my experience and thoughts:

/mini-research on HOW TO edit received messages (which MUAs can and which MUAs cannot do this: edit the subject and insert comments)

comparison of MUAs with respect to this feature [1], my explanation of the required feature on the example of Thunderbird

/mini-research of mail clients w.r.t. to specific features: IMAP, editing of received messages, searching
/research on HOW TO backup an IMAP account (better and worse ways to do it)

some random small plans, TODOs

to figure out what the source of a problem with xine-ui is: xine-ui's menu (invoked with button 3) shows spaces instead of Russian letters in any Russian locale

(on my "dell" system, where I have been doing single package upgrades, never a dist-upgrade).

I believe it's a problem of a library or a font xine-ui uses (transitively), but which one? The versions of xine-ui or libxine don't seem to matter; BTW, on another my system ("vaio"), there's no such problem; the X server which xine connects to also doesn't matter.

Workaround: gxine or vlc (and these are also the ultimate choice of a DVD viewing program--they have saner UIs; although I'm going to forget xine-ui, I'm still worried about the problem with Russian letters in the menu, because this problem can appear in another program).

Related stuff: In the past, I saw such a problem with IceWM's menu and IceWM's window titles (after a partial upgrade).

Before I look deeper into the problem with xine-ui, I'd like to find a more flexible and convenient way to do complex queries to the RPM and APT databases (the multiple available APT repositories for the different distro branches) than rpm -q and apt-shell/apt-cache combined by Unix shell (through strings). I hope, lua and the lua interface to APT would be more convenient. For instance, in this case, I'd like to do queries like the following:

Look at the versions of all the things xine-ui transitively depends on, and match each of them with a branch of ALT distro. Meanwhile, check whether this problem with xine-ui is present in a certain branch (perhaps, in a chrooted minimal system), and if no, show the differences between my current system and that branch. Think about the differences. (Hmm, it looks like, I'll even need almost nothing special except for hasher and diff for this scenario.)