What a way to spend an evening.
As I attempted to rewrite some Gitlab automation from bash to python, I stumbled over what should have been a trivial thing: collapsing section headers. They were not trivial.
One of my new years resolutions this year was to try and replace bash scripting with python in some of my projects. The reasons for this include the ability to use objects to group parameters together.
At today’s (Jan 19, 2025) Python over Coffee meetup, Ricardo suggested that I look at the plumbum library as a tool to help make that transition. In my first hack at using it, I came across an issue: I need to read in environment variables.
If you can’t read the text on the default index page of your Apache HTTPD server, you can make it larger with a .htaccess file.
cat .htaccess
IndexOptions NameWidth=80If you put this in the root of the troublesome tree, it will server for that directory and all directories below it.
Not quite as succinct as I would have liked, but this does work. This is a one liner in Bash, and I had hoped to do it with a single python call once I had the repo object established. In general, diffs are not simple to do on blob objects. I had trouble using the difflib and set approaches to diffing the two files, possibly due to the fact that I was originally not decoding the streams. Thus all the splitlines work probably can be simplified.
Continue readingSoftware Development flow is an elusive beast, easily frightened away. The easiest way to lose the flow is to have a long development cycle. Building the entire Linux Kernel takes time. If you are developing a single driver that can be built as a stand alone module, you do not want to have to rebuild the entire Kernel each time you make a change to that module. If that module crashes the machine when it runs into an error, you do not want to have to wait for that machine to reboot before digging in to the debugging process.
These two guidelines lead to a pattern of building on one machine and deploying on another. Here is one way to go about this process.