Category: Software

Falling through the cracks: why GPSD sometimes bogarts non-GPS devices

In a recent Google+ comment, H. Peter Anvin grumped about GPSD using “braindead heuristics” to determine which USB devices it should sniff as possible GPses when it gets a hotplug notification saying that one has connected. I was going to reply in a comment there, but the explanation ran too long for that. Short version:… Continue reading Falling through the cracks: why GPSD sometimes bogarts non-GPS devices

The long past of C

Hacking on the C code of giflib after an absence of nearly two decades has been an interesting experience, a little like doing an archeological dig. And not one that could readily be had elsewhere; nowhere other than under Unix is code that old still genuinely useful under any but carefully sandboxed conditions. Our reward… Continue reading The long past of C

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Super Star Trek 2.1

I guess it’s paleo-game theme week. For your retrocomputing pleasure, here’s my Python forward-port of the 1973 University of Texas FORTRAN Trek game: Super Star Trek. Anybody old enough to remember TTYs probably played this on one. While it has accreted some features over time, it’s still functionally pretty close to the original FORTRAN Star… Continue reading Super Star Trek 2.1

VMS Empire 1.9 released

Recent discussion of the 4X game Eclipse reminded me of a responsibility. I’ve just shipped VMS Empire 1.9. This is a close descendent of the original solitaire Empire computer game that was the ur-ancestor of all 4X computer games, including Civilization and Master of Orion.

Are threads still a menace?

An interesting question showed up in my mailbox today. So interesting that I think it’s worth a public answer and discussion: In chapter 7 of The Art of Unix Programming, you classified threads under the section “Problems and Methods to Avoid”. You also wrote that with the increased emphasis on thread-local storage, threads are looking… Continue reading Are threads still a menace?

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Coming soon: reposurgeon does Subversion

For those of you who have been following the development of reposurgeon, a pre-announcement: the next version, probably to be numbered 2.0, will directly read Subversion dumpfiles and repositories. I’ve got this feature working now – it’s why my blogging has been scant recently – but I intend to have a really good regression-test suite… Continue reading Coming soon: reposurgeon does Subversion

Sneaking up on the forge problem

I’ve written before about the problems with today’s software-forge sites – how they’re craptacular piles of PHP driving direct SQL queries with almost zero scriptability that become data jails for open-source projects. I’ve hinted that I think there’s a potential solution based on Roundup, a brilliantly simple and powerful message queue manager disguised as a… Continue reading Sneaking up on the forge problem

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Reposturgeon from the Black Lagoon!

reposurgeon 1.8 is out, and with this release it has all the conversion features I’ve been able to think up while doing the last couple of conversions. This version creates real tags from the lightweight tags generated by git-svn, and also consolidates matched D/A pairs from Subversion into renames. An “edit multiline” variant of the… Continue reading Reposturgeon from the Black Lagoon!

Night of the living reposturgeon!

reposurgeon 1.7 is out. Fewer obvious changes this time; the big feature is that it knows how to read and use the CVS revision maps generated by the -R option of git-cvsimport. This means that it can patch CVS revision references into an action-stamp form that makes sense in a VCS-independent way. Fear the reposturgeon!

Names and consequences

freshmeat.net abruptly changed its name to freecode.com a couple of days ago. As a consequence, the little program I wrote to submit release announcements to it is now renamed freecode-submit. People who ship releases frequently enough to find freecode-submit essential might also want to look at shipper, which I wrote to automate other aspects of… Continue reading Names and consequences

RFC: Action stamps

This is a request for comment on a convention for uniquely identifying user actions on the Internet. The motivating context was identifying commit changesets in version-control systems in a way independent of the specific VCS. It is anticipated that this format will have uses in recording many other similar sorts of transactions, including actions on… Continue reading RFC: Action stamps

Repositories in Translation

I’ve been doing a lot of repository conversions recently, lifting ancient project histories from Subversion or even CVS into modern distributed version control systems. I’ve written about the technical problems with these conversions elsewhere but they also raise issues that are almost philosophical – and not unlike, actually, the challenges natural-language translators face moving a… Continue reading Repositories in Translation