Mezzanine is a set of software tools created to make building and maintaining software packages as simple and efficient as possible. It is currently used for maintaining numerous projects from small, self-contained packages to entire distributions. Mezzanine forms the backbone of the package management and build system for cAos Linux, and while this article will focus primarily on using Mezzanine with cAos, its information can be extended to numerous other uses.…

One of the most time-consuming activities involved in distribution software packaging is taking a software author's bare tarball and turning it into a clean package. It's also one of the most repetitive; most released open source software builds in a similar manner, meaning that there's a lot of duplication between spec files. Specgen, one of the Mezzanine tools, automates much of the repetitive nature of creating spec files and packages for new tarballs.…

"If I Get Paid Lots of Money To Write Articles Online, Why Am I So Dense?"

Andrew Brown of the Guardian wrote an article in which he uses OpenOffice to prove that open source is a failure as a software development method. Without wasting too much time on the obvious logical fallacy of drawing conclusions based on a single, non-representative sample, I will also point out several additional (and less obvious) flaws in his logic and provide counter-examples to help illustrate that Mr. Brown is either woefully misguided or under the influence of a Microsoft payoff.…