Bottom line up front: create a tag with each version of a code review you post, to be able to see changes between versions.
Git commits come in (at least) three flavors.
First is the personal flavor, where you commit to git in order to not lose some quantum of behavior you have just implemented. These commits are small, and may be breaking commits. They are not meant for upstream consumption in the long term.
“Get out”
That was my sister, telling me via chat to get out of the cab I had just gotten in to. In her defense, I had screwed up her instructions, which was to go to the Imperial Cab counter at the airport, prepay for a ride to her apartment, and in no case was I to get directly into a cab.
We have a build system that has grown organically. It started as a shell script. We needed to run it from gitlab, so we wrote helper scripts to insulate our code from gitlab. Then we added some helper functions to mimic the gitlab interactions when working with them from the comand line. The helper functions grew until you could not practically run the original shell script without them.
It is a mess.
I want to refactor it.
Refactoring Shell is painful.
I want objects. I want python.
So I am rewriting the gitlab and functions layer in python with an eye to rewriting the whole thing. Here’s what I have learned;
Continue readingWhat 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.
With the inclusion of the Generators, the main functions seem to be in the right shape. What seems off is the naming of things. For example, we have a couple functions that take a parameter named “board” but it turns out they mean different things. The names of classes do not seem to align with what they are doing.
Lets continue with the renaming of things and see where it leads us.
But first: we can remove the exceptions to the flake8 testing, and, with the removal of some white space, we can run with all the pep8 rules intact. Now, on to renaming.
I am not going to go through each commit, but will try to provide enough context so you could follow the logic in the commits in github.
This is the last article in my Long Refactoring series. You can read the first article here.
Continue readingFor years now I have wanted to write a DI framework for Rust like I wrote for C++:
http://adam.younglogic.com/2008/07/dependency-injection-in-c/
However, I have not been able to wrap my head around how to do that. The problem is that the DI framework, which both creates and shares the instances, will come in to conflict with the borrow checker.