2013-06-01: control-archive 1.6.0
control-archive is the software that maintains the archive of control
messages and the active and newsgroups files on
ftp.isc.org. It had
been a couple of years since I'd done a new release for the record,
although there aren't many changes. There are a few minor fixes to the
code and documentation, plus hierarchy updates for a few hierarchies.
You can get the latest release from the
control-archive distribution
page.
2013-06-28: remctl 3.5
remctl is the middleware layer that we use all over the place at Stanford.
It's a simple GSS-API client/server application that provides a very
low-weight way of running a specific command using GSS-API authentication
and strong ACL checking.
The primary point of this release is to fix a very long-standing
occasional data corruption issue. Due to the way that the remctl server
checked for the completion of a command, a command that produced a lot of
output immediately before exiting could have the end of its output cut off
when sending it back to the client. That's fixed in this release.
Also in this release, I finally figured out the thread-safe way of
specifying to the GSS-API layer which Kerberos ticket cache to use for
authentication. This means that the remctl_set_ccache API is now
thread-safe if there were Kerberos libraries available during the remctl
build and gss_krb5_import_cred was supported.
I also fixed the way that the Perl modules are versioned, which resulted
in a one-time move backwards of the module versions from Perl's
perspective (from 3.4 to 3.05). Hopefully that won't be a problem for
anyone. The Perl module version will match the package version with an
adjustment so that it sorts properly as a number from here on.
You can get the latest version from the remctl distribution page.
2013-06-29: Random haul
A random book haul, for no particular reason other than that it had been a
while and several books came out that I have been eagerly awaiting (in one
case for many years):
Ann Aguirre — Wanderlust (sff)
Ann Aguirre — Killbox (sff)
Ann Aguirre — Doubleblind (sff)
Ann Aguirre — Aftermath (sff)
Ann Aguirre — Endgame (sff)
Yoon Ha Lee — A Conservation of Shadows (sff collection)
M.J. Locke — Up Against It (sff)
China Miéville — Railsea (sff)
Chris Moriarty — Ghost Spin (sff)
Paul Nahin — An Imaginary Tale (non-fiction)
Yes, Ghost Spin finally exists, and I have held it in my hands.
Now if I can just remember what was happening in
Spin State and
Spin Control. I may
just have to re-read them, which would be such a hardship....
The explanation of all the Aguirre purchases is that if you say sensible
things amid the latest round of obnoxious sexism in the SFF community, and
particularly when anonymous cowards claim your writing is obviously bad
because of what you say, there are people like me who may well buy your
entire series, new, as a show of support. Particularly if it was already
on their radar as something to read.
I already had the first book, but I bought all the rest sight unseen,
based just on the strength of her commentary and some of the things other
people have said about the books. This afternoon, I finished reading
Grimspace, the first in the series, and now I'm delighted that I
already have the others in hand. Excellent stuff; a bit trying on
suspension of disbelief in a few spots, but the pacing was so good I
didn't care. Review coming eventually when I catch up further.
Yoon Ha Lee is my absolute favorite SF short fiction author writing
currently, and that's saying something since I generally don't like short
fiction. I've been eagerly awaiting her first collection ever since I
heard it had gone to print.
Also, in the context of picking up eight more SF novels or collections by
women, I want to note just how irritating it is when people claim
that women don't write science fiction. I read quite a lot of science
fiction, and I haven't had any trouble finding female authors. I haven't
even needed to try; the books I read run about half female authors with no
special attention or effort on my part. If someone honestly hasn't heard
of those writers, I have a bunch of suggestions in my
collected book reviews, but too often it seems less
a plea for help and more a rhetorical point about how science fiction is
somehow more naturally male. Which is complete bullshit, and I have the
library and reviews to prove it.
Last year I read 13 unambiguous science fiction novels by women (not
counting any fantasy). Some of them I liked, some of them I didn't, some
of them were more believable than others, and some of them were harder (in
the sense of being more scientifically plausible) than others — just like
the 11 science fiction novels, not counting fantasy, by men that I read in
the same time frame. So far this year, I've reviewed one science fiction
novel by a woman and two by men, and I have two more by women (and one by
a man) waiting to be reviewed. I'm not doing anything special, just
reading what's published, what's been recommended to me, and what wins
awards. Anyone else can do exactly the same thing.
2013-06-30: Pod::Thread 1.01 and faq2html 1.32
Julien ÉLIE pointed out a rendering problem with one of my pages, and some
further investigation revealed that the changes that I made to faq2html
when moving away from Subversion caused all sorts of problems. I started
testing a new version of it, and then found a bunch of other problems with
pod2thread. One I already knew about, but others I'd not seen before.
Since I was working on this anyway, I decided to fix all the problems I
knew about.
Pod::Thread 1.01 now correctly encodes its output for UTF-8, which will
fix some long-standing problems with ISO 8859-1 characters used to render
non-breaking spaces. It also fixes some minor formatting issues and adds
a workaround for the inability to format formatting codes in headings when
generating an artificial table of contents.
faq2html 1.32 now supports multiple subheadings at the top of a page
provided that the start of the second subheading is still a centered
line. I use this format in a bunch of my package README files, all of
which had been misformatted due to not having this support. I did a large
test generation of my web pages, and I don't think I added any new
problems. (faq2html is inherently tricky, since it's converting plain
text to HTML and has to do a bunch of markup guessing. I suppose one of
these days I should just give up and switch over to writing README files
in Markdown or something.)
While I was at it, I also modernized Pod::Thread's module packaging and
switched it to Module::Build, which is the direction I'm (slowly) going
for all of my Perl module work. The generic parts of the test suite also
got a refresh to the latest versions of my generic test suite code (which
I'm currently maintaining in rra-c-util
for lack of a better location).
That had one interesting wrinkle. Pod::Thread was the one Perl
distribution where I'd played with using a module filter program
(something ExtUtils::MakeMaker supports) to set the module $VERSION
automatically during the build. This had the advantage of letting me
maintain the distribution version in one place (Makefile.PL) no
matter how many Perl modules there are. However, Module::Build doesn't
support that.
So, this afternoon I wrote Module::Build::SetVersion, which overrides the
processing of *.pm files to set the $VERSION string to whatever one
sets dist_version to in Build.PL. This lets you just put
placeholder strings in all of the modules, and the process of building
them into blib will substitute in the current distribution version.
Currently, this module is only in this package and subclasses
Module::Build (it really should be a mixin of some kind, but I didn't work
out a good way of doing that). I'm going to experiment with copying it
into my various module packages, but I suppose at some point I should wrap
it up in its own distribution, add a test suite, and release it properly.
(If you would find this useful, drop me email and I'll prioritize
releasing it properly on CPAN somewhat higher.) Note that you can do the
same thing with the existing Module::Build::PM_Filter module, as well as a
bunch of other things, but that requires you write and maintain a Perl
script at the top level of the distribution that does the desired
transformations and seemed unnecessarily complex for what I was trying to
do. I really wanted something I could just drop in and forget about.
You can get the latest releases of Pod::Thread and faq2html from my
web tools distribution page.
2013-06-30: release 1.46
Just a quick note about a new release of the script I use to publish new
software releases. I'm moving more packages to Module::Build, and I
noticed I'd been pre-generating release tarballs for Perl modules and then
using the release script to do the rest of the work. It supports building
a release tarball from the Git repository, though, and by plugging into
that machinery I could ensure that I run the test suite with the released
code.
That's now implemented for the Module::Build build system. Although I do
think it's odd that ./Build disttest doesn't actually build a
distribution, just acts like it will and then runs a test.
You can get the latest version from my miscellaneous scripts page.
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