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.