How I maintain FOSS projects

Today’s is another blog post which has been on my to-write list for a while. I have hesitated a bit to write about this, because I’m certain that my approach isn’t perfect. I think it’s pretty good, though, and people who work with me in FOSS agreed after a quick survey. So! Let’s at least put it out there and discuss it.

There are a few central principles I use to guide my maintainership work:

The first point is very...

2018-06-01

The maintainance is completed. Let me know of any important things that are broken. Internally we will keep tweaking the server configuration over the course of time.

Embedding files in C programs with koio

Quick blog post today to introduce a new tool I wrote: koio. This is a small tool which takes a list of files and embeds them in a C file. A library provides an fopen shim which checks the list of embedded files before resorting to the real filesystem.

I made this tool for chopsui, where I eventually want to be able to bundle up sui markup, stylesheets, images, and so on in a statically linked chopsui program. Many projects have small tools which serve a similar purpose, but it was simple enough and useful enough that I chose to make something generic so it could be used...

Why did we replace wlc?

For a little over a year, I’ve been working with a bunch of talented C developers to build a replacement for the wlc library. The result is wlroots, and we’re still working on completing it and updating our software to use it. The conventional wisdom suggests that rewriting your code from scratch is almost never the right idea. So why did we do it, and how is it working out? I have spoken a little about this in the past, but we’ll answer this question in detail today.

Sway will have been around for 3 years as of this August. When I started the project, I wanted to skip some...

2018-05-27

There will be a scheduled server maintenance next Friday and Saturday, 2018-06-(01-02). The migration to the new server will happen on these days and the git repositories and mailing list will be frozen on the old (now current) server.

Introducing scdoc, a man page generator

A man page generator is one of those tools that I’ve said I would write for a long time, being displeased with most of the other options. For a while I used asciidoc, but was never fond of it. There are a few things I want to see in a man page generator:

All of the existing tools failed some of these criteria. asciidoc hits #1, but fails #2 and #3 by being written in XSLT+Python and targetting man pages as a second-class citizen. mdocml fails #1 (it’s...

Redirecting stderr of a running process

During the KDE sprint in Berlin, Roman Gilg leaned over to me and asked if I knew how to redirect the stderr of an already-running process to a file. I Googled it and found underwhelming answers using strace and trying to decipher the output by reading the write syscalls. Instead, I thought a gdb based approach would work better, and after putting the pieces together Roman insisted I wrote a blog post on the topic.

gdb, the GNU debugger, has two important features that make this possible:

With this it’s actually quite straightforward. The...

Google embraces, extends, and extinguishes

Microsoft infamously coined the euphemism “embrace, extend, extinguish” to describe their strategy for disrupting markets dominated by open standards. These days, Microsoft seems to have turned the other leaf, contributing to a huge amount of open source and supporting open standards, and is becoming a good citizen of the technology community. It’s time to turn our concerns to Google.

Google famously “embraced” email on April Fool’s day, 2004, which is of course based on an open standard and federates with the rest of the world. If you’ve read the news lately, you might have seen that Google is shipping a big update to GMail soon, which adds “self-destructing” emails...

Sway reporting in from KDE's Berlin development sprint

I’m writing to you from an airplane on my way back to Philadelphia, after spending a week in Berlin working with the KDE team. It was great to meet those folks and work with them for a while. It’ll take me some time to get the taste of C++ out of my mouth, though! In all seriousness, it was a very productive week and I feel like we have learned a lot about each other’s projects and have a strengthened interest in collaborating more in the future.

The main purpose of my trip was to find opportunities for sway and KDE to work together on improving the Linux...

2018-04-11

farbfeld 4 released: download