spin 1.79

spin is the program that I use to generate all of my web pages, including this journal, from a bespoke macro language. I've been slowly evolving it since 1999 and really do intend to turn it into a proper Perl module one of these days....

My web site was one of the few places left that I was still using Subversion, and I finally decided to do something about that during this vacation. The main reason why it wasn't trivial was that I was using Subversion Id strings to get a more accurate last change date for files rather than just using file timestamps. (Nit-picky, I know, but if I'm not allowed to be nit-picky on my own web site, where can I be?) This release recognizes when the source directory is a Git working tree and supports determining the last modification date from git log instead (by way of the Git::Repository Perl module).

I also updated all my various (not released) helper scripts for maintaining the site to use Git rather than Subversion, which mostly involved changing svn to git and removing some fiddly bits that Git doesn't require.

Of course, this means that I also removed the \id thread commands on all my pages, which in turn means that I just updated the last modification date of every file, making it somewhat hard to test since every thread-generated page on my site has now been modified today. *heh*

You can get the latest release of spin from my web tools distribution page.

I also released version 1.44 of my release utility, which I use to help automate some of the work of generating software releases. The change there is to use Git rather than Subversion to commit changes to the .versions file that drives some of the software-related parts of my web site. You can get the latest version of release from my scripts page.