Destressing

So, although I'd gone quiet for the past few days (right after having decided to try to make a journal post a day, too, which is probably why I never actually post the stupid promises I make to myself so that I don't have to feel bad about breaking them), I've actually been doing quite a bit.

After running into yet more frustrating problems building our cluster environment on 64-bit Red Hat (really, this isn't that hard -- the problem is that we have basically no Red Hat infrastructure that's up to my standards and getting all of the patched bits of software we use to build is sometimes a challenge), I decided Friday night that I needed to stop thinking about the work that everyone else wanted me to do and just work on whatever I felt like. So that's what I did all weekend. I came into work where it was quiet and deserted, put in earphones, and pursued whatever random project struck my fancy.

As a result, three more Debian packages are now sitting in the NEW queue (libauthen-krb5-perl, libnews-article-perl, and libpgp-sign-perl), an upload to adopt libauthen-sasl-cyrus-perl is waiting for my sponsor, an upload of some random fixes to the openssh-krb5 package is waiting for sponsoring as well (probably the last one before Sam's 4.1 work starts), and I built some new Debian packages for internal purposes.

I also spent a lot of time watching the new maintainers pages, since for whatever reason I'm currently finding it endlessly fascinating to speculate about what might be going on (or not going on) with the various applicants.

The rest of the weekend, and there was quite a bit of it, was devoted to INN. I did some more catching up on the mailing lists and work towards a new stable release, but that wasn't destressing enough, so then I went to work on pet projects. Almost all of the IPv6 support that was originally added with a maze of ifdefs has now been cleanly encapsulated in a generic networking layer and all the ifdefs removed from the mainline code. There's only one bit left, in the horribly hacky ident support in innd, which I'm seriously considering fixing via the overkill of writing an ident channel as practice writing channels.

That only took about six hours, so I also reformatted and reworked the core channel code of innd completely, breaking a few long functions into separate functions and generally making it readable again. I then wrote the beginnings of real internals documentation for innd, since I was puzzling out how to write channels and then possibly write the long-needed DNS channel to redo host lookups rather than forcing an incoming.conf reload. And, finally, I wrote the code to add overview data based on Xref data for the new overview API, which was the prerequisite for converting overchan and makehistory to the new API. Test suite is three times the size of the code.

I'm thinking about changing the overchan data format, actually, by adding a comma-separated list of group:number pairs as the first data element. I can hack overchan to not care whether it gets the new format or the old format, and this will tie in much better with the new way I want to do overview handling in the rest of the code. But I'm still thinking about that.

Today was less fun, due to a combination of not quite enough sleep last night and the return of that annoying work thing (I like most of what I do, but I have a pile of stuff to do right now that isn't the stuff that I like). But I sorted out the 64-bit Red Hat stuff that I had to deal with, and my slides for the AFS Workshop next week are done early in the week instead of at the last minute. I was going to do the overchan conversion to the new API tonight, but I'm way too tired, so it's off to read more of Forever Peace instead.

Tomorrow, the day gets devoured by meetings, and whatever energy I can drag out of the other end goes towards trying to write some documentation that's rather overdue, I think. Wednesday, I really must drag myself down to a shoe store and acquire new walking shoes before the threatened hole in the bottom of the soles of my current ones actually materializes. I hate clothes shopping of any stripe.

There, that's at least three days' worth of entries.

Posted: 2005-06-13 22:03 — Why no comments?

Last spun 2022-02-06 from thread modified 2013-01-04