Computers: June 2001 Archives

I hate it when I have to spend half a day going through email. The day seems like such a waste.

I need to go through and try to fix some tests for Jarkko.

I got him to make a macperl branch on the perforce repository. Nifty. I need to figure out how to commit and merge and stuff, and how to use it well with MPW.

I am thinking there is a good chance that I could get a MacPerl 5.6.1b1 done before TPC. A real live beta. Maybe two alphas and then the beta. Tests are going real well. Slash is more important right now, though, so MacPerl might have to take a back seat here and there.

So anyway, VA Linux, my parent company at OSDN, decided to drop its hardware business. 35% cut in staff. Big. Major bummer for a lot of people. I do think that maybe it is best for VA Linux to do this, but it does suck for a lot of people, both employees and customers. That's life, I know. But it does suck.

I got a bunch more tests working, so we're a lot closer now. There are only a couple of dozen tests not working (out of 275), for various reasons (a rough guess is half are because something or other in MacPerl is broken).

Here are the ones not working:

:io:argv.t
:io:fs.t
:io:inplace.t
:io:iprefix.t
:io:nargv.t
:io:open.t
:io:read.t
:lib:db-btree.t
:lib:db-hash.t
:lib:db-recno.t
:lib:dosglob.t
:lib:ftmp-mktemp.t
:lib:ftmp-posix.t
:lib:ftmp-security.t
:lib:ftmp-tempfile.t
:lib:io_xs.t
:lib:ndbm.t
:lib:posix.t
:lib:searchdict.t
:lib:tie-stdhandle.t
:op:die_exit.t
:op:lex_assign.t
:op:magic.t
:op:misc.t
:op:sprintf.t
:pod:find.t
:pod:pod2usage.t
:pod:podselect.t
:pragma:warnings.t

Many of the problems are bugs in sfio and GUSI. Some of them have other issues, and some of them I am unsure of, but am going to wait on until this wronly and rdwr stuff is figured out. For now, I am not touching any of these tests. They will sit as they are until the next GUSI is out. My next task is to commit current changes to CVS, then sync up with perforce again and do another round of patches, then commit all the new stuff to CVS. That's tomorrow.

Somehow the calculation in config.h for Drand01() was a bit off, so I got that fixed last night. A few other fixes and a lot of testing last night. Today I take some of the broken tests and find out if I can fix them, and clean up some of the outstanding bug reports.

Well, back from YAPC. So I didn't do much for MacPerl last week, and this week, family obligations are taking up half my evenings. I'll get back to it eventually. :-)

Now, the fun part of MacPerl for me has little to do with working on core MacPerl. Just so I don't forget the whole point of it all, I wrote a script that plays MP3s I tell it to play, using speech recognition.

Slash is coming along. I hope we can pull it all together for the live Slashdot move, probably in August.

I heard Tom Daschle -- the new U.S. Senate majority leader -- a couple of weeks ago flat-out refuse to bring certain Bush proposals to the floor of the Senate. Russert listed off various proposals, and Daschle just responded, "dead, dead, dead." Then I heard him say yesterday that it was irresponsible of Bush to say he would veto something before the bill was even passed. That man is such scum!

Ijust submitted a heap of patches for maintperl and bleadperl. Yay.

Jarkko is going to tell me at some point how to commit to the perforce repository so I can put the patches in myself.

gnat wants me to do some chatting about Mac OS X and perl and MacPerl etc. for YAPC. For 45 minutes.

I won't promise anything, but if there is enough interest, I probably will. Let me know if you have enough interest. YES YOU.

It has been a full month since I have done any real work on MacPerl. I can't say it has been a good time off -- May 2001 will go down as a pretty lame month, all things considered -- but it was good for me to take the time off.

To the users and especially to those who are helping out, thanks very much for your patience.

So tonight I read through and filtered about three months of MacPerl emails. I also worked a bit on some bleadperl problems and did a fresh build of 5.6.1 with a few new patches. I worked some on Thomas Wegner's File::Find patches. Thomas submitted a bunch of other patches too. Tomorrow I will finish my work on File::Find and get into the other patches and bug reports.

Lots of extra-MacPerl activites are going on to get in the way, still. YAPC and TPC are coming up. Those conferences look like they will be a lot of fun, too.

I hope to get back to MacPerl work tomorrow, Monday, June 4. I want to go through patches relating to perl itself so we can work as well as possible with core perl.

Of course, now that I am able to get back to MacPerl work, I leave for yapc in a little over a week ...