logo

drewdevault.com

[mirror] blog and personal website of Drew DeVault git clone https://hacktivis.me/git/mirror/drewdevault.com.git

Status-update-September-2019.md (5055B)

    

  1. ---
  2. date: 2019-09-15
  3. layout: post
  4. title: Status update, September 2019
  5. tags: ["status update"]
  6. ---
  8. Finally home again after a long series of travels! I spent almost a month in
  9. Japan, then visited my sister's new home in Hawaii on the way eastwards, then
  10. some old friends in Seattle, and finally after 5½ long weeks, it's home sweet
  11. home here in Philadelphia. At least until I leave for
  12. [XDC](https://xdc2019.x.org/) in Montreal 2 weeks from now. Someday I'll have
  13. some rest... throughout all of these wild travels, I've been hard at work on my
  14. free software projects. Let's get started with this month's status update!
  16. ![](https://sr.ht/iuDE.jpg)
  18. <p style="text-align: center">
  19.   <small>Great view from a hike on O'ahu</small>
  20. </p>
  22. First, Wayland news. I'm happy to share with you that the Wayland book is now
  23. more than halfway complete, and I've made the drafts available online for a
  24. discounted price: [The Wayland Protocol](https://wayland-book.com). Thanks to
  25. all of my collaborators and readers who volunteered to provide feedback! There's
  26. more Wayland-related news still, as this month marked the release of [sway
  27. 1.2][sway changelog] and [wlroots 0.7.0][wlr changelog]. I like this release
  28. because it's light on new features - showing that sway is maturing into a stable
  29. and reliable Wayland desktop. The features which were added are subtle and serve
  30. to improve sway's status as a member of the broader ecosystem - sway 1.2
  31. supports the new [layer shell support in the MATE panel][mate panel], and the
  32. same improvements are already helping with the development of other software.
  34. [sway changelog]: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/releases/tag/1.2
  35. [wlr changelog]: https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/releases/tag/0.7.0
  36. [mate panel]: https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-panel/pull/991
  38. [![Screenshot of MATE panel running on sway](https://sr.ht/9Oro.png)](https://sr.ht/9Oro.png)
  40. <p style="text-align: center">
  41.   <small>Rest assured, the weird alignment issues were fixed</small>
  42. </p>
  44. On the topic of [aerc](https://aerc-mail.org), I still haven't gotten around to
  45. that write-up responding to [Greg KH's post][gregkh]... but I will. Travels have
  46. made it difficult to sit down for a while and do some serious long-term project
  47. planning. Regardless, the current plans have still been being executed well.
  48. Notmuch support continues to improve thanks to Reto Brunner's help, completions
  49. are improving throughout, and heaps of little features - signatures, unread
  50. message counts, :prompt, forward-as-attachment - are now supported.
  52. [gregkh]: http://www.kroah.com/log/blog/2019/08/14/patch-workflow-with-mutt-2019/
  54. I also spent some time this month working on Simon Ser's
  55. [mrsh](https://mrsh.sh). I cleaned up call frames, implemented the `return`
  56. builtin, finished the `pwd` builtin, improved readline support, fleshed out job
  57. control, and made many other small improvements. With mrsh nearing completion,
  58. I've started up another project: [ctools][ctools]. This provides the rest of the
  59. POSIX commands required of a standard scripting environment (it replaces
  60. coreutils or busybox). I'm taking this one pretty seriously from the start -
  61. every command has full POSIX.1-2017 support with a conformance test and a man
  62. page, in one C source file and no dependencies. If you're looking for a good
  63. afternoon project (or weekend, for some utilities), how about picking up your
  64. favorite [POSIX](https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/) tool and
  65. sending along an implementation?
  67. [![Screenshot of ctools test suite](https://sr.ht/DSxS.png)](https://builds.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/job/88955)
  69. [ctools]: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/ctools
  71. With these projects, along with ~mcf's [cproc](https://git.sr.ht/~mcf/cproc),
  72. we're starting to see a simple and elegant operating system come together -
  73. exactly the kind I wish we already had. To track our progress towards this goal,
  74. I've put up [arewesimpleyet.org](https://arewesimpleyet.org). A day may soon
  75. come when computers become the again elegant and simple tools they were always
  76. meant to be! At least if we assume "within a few decades" as a valid definition
  77. of "soon".
  79. To cover SourceHut news briefly: we hit 10,000 users this month! And it's
  80. continued to grow since, up to 10,649 users at the time of writing. On the
  81. subject of feature development, with Denis Laxalde's help we're starting to put
  82. together a Debian repository for installing the services on Debian hosts. On
  83. todo.sr.ht, users without accounts can now create and comment on tickets via
  84. email. I also redesigned [sourcehut.org](https://sourcehut.org), adding a blog
  85. with a greater breadth of topics than we'll see on the sr.ht-announce mailing
  86. list.
  88. That's all for this month! I enjoyed my vacation and some much needed time away
  89. from work... though for me a "day off" is a day where I write less than 1,000
  90. lines of code. Thank you again for your support - it means the world to me. I'll
  91. see you next month!
  93. ![](https://sr.ht/1cuE.jpg)
  95. <p style="text-align: center">
  96.   <small>Had the best seats at a concert in Tokyo!</small>
  97. </p>