2018-03-04: Free software log (February 2018)
Last month, I did a single software release: a new version of pgpcontrol,
the collection of tools to check signed Usenet control messages. This is
a pure maintenance release to keep it alive using GnuPG 1.0. The package
is kind of a mess and needs a clean rewrite that I haven't had time to do
yet (which is why I don't even have a software page for it).
Other than that, I didn't finish anything sufficiently to generate a new
release, but I'm close on a bunch of fronts. Most of the user-visible
(eventually) work went into podlators,
the conversion tools from POD (Perl's documentation format) to text and
man pages. Based on an excellent series of bug reports from eponymous
alias, I fixed a bunch of long-standing bugs in Pod::Text,
Pod::Text::Color, and Pod::Text::Termcap, and continued the slow process
of reworking the package test suite to be cleaner and easier to maintain.
In C TAP Harness, I took an idea
from the Rust assert macros and changed the arguments for all the TAP
functions from wanted and seen to left and right. This way, one doesn't
have to care about the order in which to pass arguments (which I can never
remember). It will make it easier to update the INN test suite to the
current TAP library interface, since I had used the opposite order for all
of the original INN tests I wrote.
I spent a bunch of time adding SPDX identifiers
to my utility functions that are intended for copying into other packages,
and laid the groundwork for using SPDX identifiers in all of my projects.
I picked up the habit of being careful about license notices from Debian
work, and SPDX (if a bit weird in places, such as its utterly opaque file
specification) is the first comprehensive and unambiguous labeling system.
I have a horrible Perl script that does a lot of guesswork to generate a
license file for my packages now, and am hoping to replace that with
something (largely) based on SPDX.
Finally, I updated my Debian packaging
with Git notes, and wrote new notes
on using sbuild.
2018-03-08: My friend Stirge
Eric Sturgeon, one of my oldest and dearest friends, died this week of
complications from what I'm fairly certain was non-alcoholic fatty liver
disease.
It was not entirely unexpected. He'd been getting progressively worse
over the past six months. But at the same time there's no way to expect
this sort of hole in my life.
I've known Stirge for twenty-five years, more than half of my life. We
were both in college when we first met on Usenet in 1993 in the
rec.arts.comics.* hierarchy, where Stirge was the one with the insane pull
list and the canonical knowledge of the Marvel Universe. We have been
friends ever since: part of on-line fiction groups, IRC channels, and
free-form role-playing groups. He's been my friend through school and
graduation, through every step of my career, through four generations of
console systems, through two moves for me and maybe a dozen for him,
through a difficult job change... through my entire adult life.
For more than fifteen years, he's been spending a day or a week or two,
several times a year, sitting on my couch and playing video games.
Usually he played and I navigated, researching FAQs and walkthroughs.
Twitch was immediately obvious to me the moment I discovered it existed;
it's the experience I'd had with Stirge for years before that. I don't
know what video games are without his thoughts on them.
Stirge rarely was able to put his ideas into stories he could share with
other people. He admired other people's art deeply, but wasn't an artist
himself. But he loved fictional worlds, loved their depth and complexity
and lore, and was deeply and passionately creative. He knew the stories
he played and read and watched, and he knew the characters he played,
particularly in World of Warcraft and Star Wars: The Old
Republic. His characters had depth and emotions, histories, independent
viewpoints, and stories that I got to hear. Stirge wrote stories the way
that I do: in our heads, shared with a small number of people if anyone,
not crafted for external consumption, not polished, not always coherent,
but deeply important to our thoughts and our emotions and our lives. He's
one of the very few people in the world I was able to share that with, who
understood what that was like.
He was the friend who I could not see for six months, a year, and then
pick up a conversation with as if we'd seen each other yesterday.
After my dad had a heart attack and emergency surgery to embed a pacemaker
while we were on vacation in Oregon, I was worrying about how we would
manage to get him back home. Stirge immediately volunteered to drive down
from Seattle to drive us. He had a crappy job with no vacation, and if
he'd done that he almost certainly would have gotten fired, and I knew
with absolute certainty that he would have done it anyway.
I didn't take him up on the offer (probably to his vast relief). When I
told him years later how much it meant to me, he didn't feel like it
should have counted, since he didn't do anything. But he did. In one of
the worst moments of my life, he said exactly the right thing to make me
feel like I wasn't alone, that I wasn't bearing the burden of figuring
everything out by myself, that I could call on help if I needed it. To
this day I start crying every time I think about it. It's one of the best
things that anyone has ever done for me.
Stirge confided in me, the last time he visited me, that he didn't think
he was the sort of person anyone thought about when he wasn't around.
That people might enjoy him well enough when he was there, but that he'd
quickly fade from memory, with perhaps a vague wonder about what happened
to that guy. But it wasn't true, not for me, not ever. I tried to
convince him of that while he was alive, and I'm so very glad that I did.
The last time I talked to him, he explained the Marvel Cinematic Universe
to me in detail, and gave me a rundown of the relative strength of every
movie, the ones to watch and the ones that weren't as good, and then did
the same thing for the DC movies. He got to see Star Wars before
he died. He would have loved Black Panther.
There were so many games we never finished, and so many games we never
started.
I will miss you, my friend. More than I think you would ever have
believed.
2018-03-17: DocKnot 1.03
This is the software that I use to generate documentation for my
software. Currently, it just handles README, README.md, and
the top-level web page for the package.
This release adds a new metadata file, support/extra, which
includes information that should be added to the middle of the normal
SUPPORT section of README and README.md files. It also adds
an explanatory paragraph about SPDX to the default templates, and adds
SPDX license identifiers to the package itself.
I've spent quite some time looking at good ways of maintaining accurate
license metadata for my packages (and for Debian packages I maintain),
including writing a truly ugly Perl script that generates a Debian
copyright-format 1.0 file from a source tree. (There are multiple
versions of this; mine is pickier than any other that I'm aware of.)
Rather than trying to solve the free-form comment parsing problem, some
form of structured metadata that's broadly adopted feels like the correct
engineering solution (putting aside the fact that it will be hard to get
everyone to adopt it). The SPDX project is trying
to solve this, and although it seems very bureaucratic and the spec is
almost unreadable, it does seem to be catching on to a degree.
I'm therefore adopting it in my packages at least to the extent of adding
SPDX-License-Identifier headers to my source files and using the
SPDX-standard identifiers (which annoyingly differ from the Debian
copyright-format identifiers). I added a test to check that all the files
have these headers and will start adding that to all my packages as I
release them.
I'm still generating the LICENSE file with my messed-up Perl
script. I want to switch from that to a better script that supports SPDX
and I don't have to maintain, and will take a look at both the SPDX
tooling and cme when I have a chance.
You can get the latest release from the DocKnot distribution page.
2018-03-18: control-archive 1.8.0
This is the software that maintains the archive of control messages and
the newsgroups and active files on ftp.isc.org. I update things in place,
but it's been a while since I made a formal release, and one seemed
overdue (particularly since it needed some compatibility tweaks for GnuPG
v1).
In code changes, signing IDs with whitespace are now supported, summaries
when there is no log file for the summary period don't produce an error,
and gpg1 is now used explicitly with flags to allow weak digest algorithms
since the state of crypto for Usenet control messages is rather dire.
On the documentation side, there are multiple fixes to the README.html
file that's also shipped with pgpcontrol, updating email addresses, URLs,
package versions, and various other details.
For hierarchy changes, the grisbi.* key has been cleaned up a bit for
hopefully more reliable verification, and everything related to gov.* has
been dropped.
You can get the latest release from the
control-archive distribution page.
2018-03-24: DocKnot 1.04
The last release of DocKnot (my program for maintaining various bits of
package documentation) had a bug in one of the new tests on Windows
systems. This release fixes only that bug, mostly to make the automated
CPAN testers stop mailing me. (Such an excellent service.)
You can get the latest release from the DocKnot distribution page.
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