2021-05-09

On Tuesday, 2021-05-11 there will be scheduled maintenance of the suckless servers. It's estimated this will take about 1 hour from about 21:00 to 22:00 UTC+02:00.

The mailinglist, website and source-code repositories will have some downtime.

Update: the maintenance was finished at 2021-05-12 23:33 UTC+02:00. P.S.: It didn't actually take 26h30, I just had forgotten to do it.

I try not to make unlikable software (and features)

I am writing to you from The Sky. On my flight today, I noticed an example of “unlikable” software — something I’ve been increasingly aware of recently — inspiring me to pull out my laptop and write. On this plane, there are displays in the back of each seat which provides entertainment for the person seated one row back. Newer planes no longer include these, given that in $CURRENTYEAR everyone would just prefer some power for their phone or laptop. Nevertheless, you can still end up a plane with this design. You can shut the thing off by repeatedly pressing the “☀️ -” button, though that button...

2021-05-08

surf 2.1 released: download

godocs.io six months later

We’re six months on from forking godoc.org following its upstream deprecation, and we’ve made a lot of great improvements since. For those unaware, the original godoc.org was replaced with pkg.go.dev, and a redirect was set up. The new website isn’t right for many projects — one of the most glaring issues is the narrow list of software licenses pkg.go.dev will display documentation for. To continue serving the needs of projects which preferred the old website, we forked the project and set up godocs.io.

Since then, we’ve made a lot of improvements, both for the hosted version and for the open source project. Special thanks is due to Adnan...

In praise of Alpine Linux

Note: this blog post was originally only available via Gemini, but has been re-formatted for the web.

The traits I prize most in an operating system are the following:

As a bonus, I’d also like to have:

Alpine meets all of the essential criteria and most of the optional criteria (documentation is the weakest link), and far better than any other Linux distribution.

In terms of simplicity, Alpine Linux is unpeered. Alpine is the only Linux distribution that fits in my head. The pieces from which it is built from are simple, easily understood, and few in number, and I can usually predict how it will behave...

Cryptocurrency is an abject disaster

This post is long overdue. Let’s get it over with.

Starting on May 1st, users of sourcehut’s CI service will be required to be on a paid account, a change which will affect about half of all builds.sr.ht users.1 Over...

Recommended read: Why Lichess will always be free

Signal-boosting this excellent article from Lichess: Why Lichess will always be free.

Parsers all the way down: writing a self-hosting parser

One of the things we’re working on in my new programming language is a self-hosting compiler. Having a self-hosted compiler is a critical step in the development of (some) programming languages: it signals that the language is mature enough to be comfortably used to implement itself. While this isn’t right for some languages (e.g. shell scripts), for a systems programming language like ours, this is a crucial step in our bootstrapping plan. Our self-hosted parser design was completed this week, and today I’ll share some details about how it works and how it came to be.

This is the third parser which has been implemented for this language....

Status update, April 2021

Another month goes by! I’m afraid that I have very little to share this month. You can check out the sourcehut “what’s cooking” post for sourcehut news, but outside of that I have focused almost entirely on the programming language project this month, for which the details are kept private.

The post calling for contributors led to a lot of answers and we’ve brought several new people on board — thanks for answering the call! I’d like to narrow the range of problems we still need help with. If you’re interested in (and experienced in) the following problems, we need your help:

Shoot...

The Developer Certificate of Origin is a great alternative to a CLA

Today Amazon released their fork of ElasticSearch, OpenSearch, and I want to take a moment to draw your attention to one good decision in particular: its use of the Developer Certificate of Origin (or “DCO”).

Previously:

Elastic betrayed its community when they changed to a proprietary license. We could have seen it coming because of a particular trait of their contribution process: the use of a Contributor License Agreement, or CLA. In principle, a CLA aims to address legitimate concerns of ownership and copyright, but in practice, they are a promise...