2020-08-09: DocKnot 3.05
I keep telling myself that the next release of DocKnot will be the one
where I convert everything to YAML and then feel confident about uploading
it to Debian, and then I keep finding one more thing to fix to release
another package I'm working on.
Anyway, this is the package I use to generate software documentation and,
in the long run, will subsume my static web site generator and software
release workflow. This release tweaks a heuristic for wrapping paragraphs
in text documents, fixes the status badge for software with Debian
packages to do what I had intended, and updates dependencies based on the
advice of Perl::Critic::Freenode.
You can get the latest version from CPAN or from the
DocKnot distribution page.
2020-08-09: rra-c-util 8.3
In this release of my utility library for my other packages, I finally
decided to drop support for platforms without a working snprintf.
This dates back to the early 2000s and a very early iteration of this
package. At the time, there were still some older versions of UNIX
without snprintf at all. More commonly, it was buggy. The most
common problem was that it would return -1 if the buffer wasn't large
enough rather than returning the necessary size of the buffer. Or, in
some cases, it wouldn't support a buffer size of 0 and a NULL buffer to
get the necessary size.
At the time I added this support for INN and some other packages, Solaris
had several of these issues. But C99 standardized the correct
snprintf behavior, and slowly every maintained operating system was
fixed. (I forget whether it was fixed in Solaris 8 or Solaris 9, but
regardless, Solaris has had a working snprintf for many years.)
Meanwhile, the replacement function (Patrick Powell's version, also used
by mutt and other packages) was a huge wad of code and a corresponding
test suite. Over time, I've increased the aggressiveness of linters to
try to catch more dangerous C pitfalls, and that's required carrying more
and more small modifications plus a preamble to disable various warnings
that I didn't want to try to fix.
The straw that broke the camel's back was Clang's new case fallthrough
warning. Clang stopped supporting the traditional /* fallthrough
*/ comment. It now prefers [[clang:fallthrough]] syntax, but of
course older compilers choke on that. It does support the GCC
__attribute__((__fallthrough__)) syntax, but older compilers don't
like that construction because they think it's an empty statement. It was
a mess, and I decided the time had come to drop this support effort.
At this point, if you're still running an operating system without C99
snprintf, I think it's essentially a retrocomputing or at least
extremely stable legacy production situation, and you're unlikely to want
the latest and greatest releases of new software. Hopefully that
assumption is correct, or at least correct enough.
(I realize the right solution to this problem is probably for me to use
Gnulib for portability. But
converting to it is a whole other project with a lot of other implications
and machinery, and I'm not sure that's what I want to spend time on.)
Also in this release is a fix for network tests on hosts with no IPv4
addresses (more on this when I release the next version of
remctl), fixes for style issues found by
Perl::Critic::Freenode, and some other test suite improvements.
You can get the latest version from the rra-c-util distribution page.
2020-08-29: PGP::Sign 1.02
This is another test-only release of my module for manipulating PGP
signatures in Perl. I'm trying to get the CPAN testing failures down to a
dull roar. This iteration fixes some testing issues with systems that
have only GnuPG v1 and tries to handle systems whose gpg is GnuPG v2 but
is older than 2.1.12 and therefore doesn't have the --pinentry-mode
flag that GnuPG uses to suppress password prompting.
I handled the latter by skipping the tests if the gpg on the user's PATH
was too old. I'm not certain this is the best approach, although it makes
the CPAN automated testing more useful for me, since the module will not
work without special configuration on those systems. On the other hand,
if someone is installing it to point to some other GnuPG binary on the
system at runtime, failing the installation because their system gpg is
too old seems wrong, and the test failure doesn't indicate a bug in the
module.
Essentially, I'm missing richer test metadata in the Perl ecosystem. I
want to be able to declare a dependency on a non-Perl system binary, but
of course Perl has no mechanism to do that.
I thought about trying to deal with the Windows failures due to missing
IPC::Run features (redirecting high-numbered file descriptors) on the
Windows platform in a similar way, but decided in that case I do want the
tests to fail because PGP::Sign will never work on that platform
regardless of the runtime configuration. Here too I spent some time
searching for some way to indicate with Module::Build that the module
doesn't work on Windows, and came up empty. This seems to be a gap in
Perl's module distribution ecosystem.
In any case, hopefully this release will clean up the remaining test
failures on Linux and BSD systems, and I can move on to work on the Big
Eight signing key, which was the motivating application for these
releases.
You can get the latest release from CPAN or from the
PGP::Sign distribution page.
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