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F/LOSS activity, August 2017

Shockingly enough, my focus started out on Gitano once more. We managed a 1.1 release of Gitano during the Debian conference's "camp" which occurs in the week before the conference. This was a joint effort of myself, Richard Maw, and Richard Ipsum. I have to take my hat off to Richard Maw, because without his dedication to features, 1.1 would lack some stuff which Richard Ipsum proposed around ruleset support for basic readers/writers and frankly 1.1 would be a weaker release without it.

Because of the debconf situation, we didn't have a Gitano developer day which, while sad, didn't slow us down much...

• Once again, we reviewed our current task state

• I submitted a series which fixed our test suite for Git 2.13 which was an FTBFS bug submitted against the Debian package for Gitano. Richard Maw reviewed and merged it.

• Richard Maw supplied a series to add testing for dangling HEAD syndrome. I reviewed and merged that.

• Richard Maw submitted a patch to improve the auditability of the 'as' command and I reviewed and merged that.

• Richard Ipsum submitted a patch to add reader/writer configs to ease simple project management in Gitano. I'm not proud to say that I was too busy to look at this and ended up saying it was unlikely it'd get in. Richard Maw, quite rightly, took umbrage at that and worked on the patch, eventually submitting a new series with tests which I then felt obliged to review and I merged the series eventually.

  This is an excellent example of where just because one person is too busy doesn't mean that a good idea should be dropped, and I am grateful to Richard Maw for getting this work mergeable and effectively guilt-tripping me into reviewing/merging. This is a learnable moment for me and I hope to do better into the future.

• During all that time, I was working on a plugin to support git-multimail.py in Gitano. This work ranged across hooks and caused me to spend a long time thinking about the semantics of configuration overriding etc. Fortunately I got there in the end, and with a massive review effort from Richard Maw, we got it merged into Gitano.

• Finally I submitted a patch which caused the tests we run in Gitano to run from an 'install' directory which ensures that we catch bugs such as those which happened in earlier series where we missed out rules files for installation etc. Richard Maw reviewed and merged that.

• And then we released the new version of Gitano and subsidiary libraries.

  There was Luxio version 13 which switched us to readdir() from readdir_r() thanks to Richard Ipsum; Gall 1.3 which contained a bunch of build cleanups, and also a revparse_single() implementation in the C code to speed things up thanks to Richard Maw; Supple 1.0.8 which improved wrapper environment cleanups thanks to Richard Ipsum, allowed baking of paths in which means Nix is easier to support (again thanks to Richard Ipsum), fixed setuid handling so that Nix is easier to support (guess what? Richard Ipsum again); Lace 1.4 which now verifies definition names in allow/deny/anyof/allof and also produces better error messages from nested includes.

  And, of course, Gitano 1.1 whose changes were somewhat numerous and so you are invited to read them in the Gitano NEWS file for the release.

Not Gitano

Of course, not everything I did in August was Gitano related. In fact once I had completed the 1.1 release and uploaded everything to Debian I decided that I was going to take a break from Gitano until the next developer day. (In fact there's even some patch series still unread on the mailing list which I will get to when I start the developer day.)

I have long been interested in STM32 microcontrollers, using them in a variety of projects including the Entropy Key which some of you may remember. Jorge Aparicio was working on Cortex-M3 support (among other microcontrollers) in Rust and he then extended that to include a realtime framework called RTFM and from there I got interested in what I might be able to do with Rust on STM32. I noticed that there weren't any pure Rust implementations of the USB device stack which would be necessary in order to make a device, programmed in Rust, appear on a USB port for a computer to control/use. This tweaked my interest.

As many of my readers are aware, I am very bad at doing things without some external motivation. As such, I then immediately offered to give a talk at a conference which should be happening in November, just so that I'd be forced to get on with learning and implementing the stack. I have been chronicling my work in this blog, and you're encouraged to go back and read them if you have similar interests. I'm sure that as my work progresses, I'll be doing more and more of that and less of Gitano, for at least the next two months.

To bring that into context as F/LOSS work, I did end up submitting some patches to Jorge's STM32F103xx repository to support a couple more clock configuration entries so that USB and ADCs can be set up cleanly. So at least there's that.