I nearly issued a forking threat a few minutes ago. Only the second time I’ve felt a need to do that and the first was in 1993, so this is not something I do casually. And I drew back from the brink. But I may have to if the maintainer I’m dealing with doesn’t clean… Continue reading I hate having to be the heavy…
Category: Software
End-to-end arguments in software design
My title is, of course, a reference to the 1984 paper End-to-End Arguments in System Design by Reed, Saltzer, and Clark. They enunciated what has since become understood as perhaps the single most central and successful principle of the design of the Internet. If you have not read it, do chase the link; it well… Continue reading End-to-end arguments in software design
irker is feature-complete
I’ve just shipped irker 1.8, and I think this brings the wild ride I’ve been on for the last eleven days approximately to a close. I consider this release feature-complete; it achieves all the goals I had in mind when the CIA service died and I decided it was up to me to rescue the… Continue reading irker is feature-complete
irker takes off like a rocket
It was just three days ago that I shipped irker 1.0, but the project is already a huge hit out there in hackerland. It’s clear from traffic on the freenode #commits channel that irker installations are springing up everywhere. There’s already one symbiote, a proxy that takes XML-RPC requests in the CIA format and passes… Continue reading irker takes off like a rocket
CIA and the perils of overengineering
The CIA commit-notification service abruptly died two days ago, a development that surprised nobody who has been paying attention to the recent history of the codebase and its one public server site. A screwup at the cloud service hosting the CIA virtual machine irretrievably destroyed the instance data; please don’t ask me for details, I… Continue reading CIA and the perils of overengineering
irker 1.0 (a functional CIA replacement) is shipped
OK, I’ve been hacking intensely for most of the last 24 hours and here’s the payoff: irker-1.0 is shipped. Code and documentation are at http://www.catb.org/esr/irker/. Out of the starting box we have a hook script with tested support for git and (rather clumsily) Subversion; hg should be a piece of cake for anyone who wants… Continue reading irker 1.0 (a functional CIA replacement) is shipped
coverity-submit 1.2 is released
Coverity simplified their remote-submission procedure. Because of this, I have been able to remove the ugliest bits of configuration cruft from coverity-submit; you no longer have to specify either a public drop directory for your results tarball or a URL that advertises it. Get your remote-static-checking goodness here.
Ground-truth documents
Sometimes good terminology, by making a distinction that wasn’t easily articulated before, can be very clarifying. I was in an IRC conversation about software engineering with A&D regular HedgeMage earlier today and found myself inventing a term that I think may be useful: the ground-truth document.
ciabot for git version 3.5 is released
I shipped an updated version of the ciabot hook scripts for git to the git maintainers this morning. The cool new thing in this release is that the script no longer needs to be modified for installation as a hook. You can install one copy where any number of git repositories can see it; when… Continue reading ciabot for git version 3.5 is released
doclifter 2.9 is released
I’ve released doclifter 2.9, and as part of that process I’ve been testing it on the entire collection of manual pages on my system again. Because doclifter does mechanical translation of troff-based markups to DocBook-XML, one of the side effects of testing it is that I find lots of broken markup. I’ll ship over 700… Continue reading doclifter 2.9 is released
The handwriting on the wall is Chinese
Comes the news that Nvidia just lost an order for 10 million graphics cards to AMD because it wouldn’t open the source for its driver. At a very conservative estimate, that’s north of $250 million in business Nvidia just threw to a major competitor because it couldn’t get its head out of its rectum. Somebody’s… Continue reading The handwriting on the wall is Chinese
doclifter 2.8 is released
In response to a bug report that was relatively easily fixed, I’ve just shipped release 2.8 of doclifter, a program that takes troff-based document markups – including man page markup – and lifts them to DocBook XML.
freecode-submit 2.4 is released
Yes, two software releases in a day is an unusually rapid tempo even from me. But freecode-submit is part of my release machinery for other projects, and when I shipped GIFLIB 5.0.0 I discovered it had gone all pear-shaped on me. Problem turned out to be an unannounced change in freecode’s JSON interface. I hate… Continue reading freecode-submit 2.4 is released
GIFLIB 5.0.0 is released
I’ve just shipped the 5.0.0 release of GIFLIB, a graphics service library that is deployed pretty much everywhere that throws pixels on a display. Older versions live in your browser, your game console, and your smartphone. I have written about what it was like to go back to this code after 18 years previously, in… Continue reading GIFLIB 5.0.0 is released
Evaluating the harm from closed source
Some people are obsessive about never using closed-source software under any circumstances. Some other people think that because I’m the person who wrote the foundational theory of open source I ought to be one of those obsessives myself, and become puzzled and hostile when I demur that I’m not a fanatic. Sometimes such people will… Continue reading Evaluating the harm from closed source
API copyrights are dead
I’ve now read Judge Alsup’s ruling in the Oracle vs. Google lawsuit addressing the copyrightability of the Java APIs as a matter of law. This is a bigger win for the good guys than appears at first glance; Alsup has subtly but definitely driven a stake through the heart of API copyrights. The interesting part… Continue reading API copyrights are dead
Oracle becomes SCO redux
To the surprise of nobody who was actually familiar with the underlying law and precedent, the judge in the Oracle-vs.-Google mega-lawsuit ruled today that Oracle’s claim of copyright protection on the Java APIs is contrary to law. This means Oracle’s claims against Google are toast. Their best case is now that they’ll get $300K in… Continue reading Oracle becomes SCO redux
Beginning of the end for the patent wars?
It’s all over the net today. As I repeatedly predicted, the patent claims in the Oracle-vs.-Java lawsuit over Android have completely fizzled. Oracle’s only shred of hope at this point is that Judge Alsup will rule that APIs can be copyrighted, and given the extent of cluefulness Alsup has displayed (he mentioned in court having… Continue reading Beginning of the end for the patent wars?
giflib 4.2.0 released
First giflib release since I reassumed the lead. Short version: lots of useless old cruft thrown out, everything Coverity-scanned, one minor resource leak found and fixed.
Announcing coverity-submit
My regular readers will know that (a) I’ve recently been pounding bugs out of GPSD with Coverity, and (b) I hate doing stupid clicky-dances on websites when I think I ought to be able to shove them a programmatically-generated job card that tells them what to do. So, here’s a side-effect of my recent work… Continue reading Announcing coverity-submit