More comments on that RHL9 review… interesting to see that RH ran into the same Unicode problem we did with SpamAssassin — namely that using Unicode charsets is horrifically slow compared to plain old ASCII. (This is the main reason we use ASCII internally in SpamAssassin.)
Bootup Scripts and Unicode: All the text processing utilities, grep, awk, sort, etc all work significantly slower when using the Unicode UTF locale. To speed the bootup, in the /etc/rc.sysinit and other SysV scripts, because the configuration is using 7bit ASCII these utilities are now invoked with LC_ALL=C utility to force the C locale.
(Also interesting to note who reported the bug, too ;)
Other nice additions:
-
Keith Packard’s
xrandr, to resize and rotate an X screen on the fly. -
redhat-config-(tab) to list all system config stuff from the commandline. At last, sensible naming for this stuff! - Debuginfo RPMs, to install debug symbols for your system libraries on-the-fly.
- Subversion. (Although I’m a bit disappointed to read that svn doesn’t improve on CVS’ ability to do merges at all, which has drastically reduced my keenness to upgrade.)