시몽

Status update, August 2018

Time for the third status update! It’s been an interesting month, with good progress for mrsh as well as some cool sway/wlroots and matcha stuff.

Let’s have a look at my main focus for August: mrsh. It’s a POSIX shell library designed to be minimal (no more than POSIX), simple (read “readable”!) and could be used as a base for more elaborate shells and other tools.

I’ve been helped by sircmpwn, who has added in a few builtins (like set) and special parameters by sending patches on the mailing list. Thank you!

Speaking of parameters, variables are now supported, as well as word expansions. This includes parameter expansion (like $HOME and ${var:-default}) and command substitution (like echo `date`). Tilde expansion (echo ~root), field splitting and pathname expansion (echo *) are implemented, but some work remains to correctly handle all situations.

I’ve added here-documents support, which have a few variations otherwise it wouldn’t be fun (<< vs <<-, <<EOF vs <<'EOF'). In the shell, these are exposed as in-memory files.

Aliases are now working, but I’m still searching for ways to make them better. Since they behave as macros at the parser level, I’m not sure how to handle them relative to line number information.

I’ve also added line number information to the AST (more precisely, offset + line + column numbers). These new features are demonstrated by a little highlight example that reads a shell script from the standard input and prints a highlighted version. For instance:

The highlight example in action

I’ve tried to design this with linters and formatters in mind: it should be possible to e.g. preserve whitespace while transforming the AST. There’s still some work needed to better handle comments and continuation lines.

All in all, the parser is pretty close from being complete and only a few Hard Issues™ are remaining for the shell itself. The parser is mostly missing arithmetic expansion and a few control structures. If you want to track the overall project status I maintain a detailed issue for this purpose.

In the sway and wlroots universe, we’ve been working on a new gamma control protocol. The old one had issues with large gamma tables on some hardware, and we’ve taken advantage of this opportunity to add in some other minor improvements. I’ve been working on a clipboard manager protocol, but this is still work-in-progress.

There are also good news from Qt: they’ve implemented the xdg-decoration protocol for server-side window decorations.

Finally, I’ve been pushing a few commits to matcha, a very simple Git read-only web interface. It can now [serve multiple repositories] matcha-multiple-repos and supports [server-side syntax highlighting] matcha-syntax. My friend Jean Thomas has been creating a [RPM package] matcha-rpm to ease deployment on Fedora.

EOF. Let me know if you want to contribute to one of these projects! In any case, see you next month!


Questions, comments? Please use my public inbox by sending a plain-text email to ~emersion/public-inbox@lists.sr.ht.

Articles from blogs I follow

Unleashing Power: Enabling Super Pages on the RPi

Unleashing the power of 3D graphics in the Raspberry Pi is a key commitment for Igalia through its collaboration with Raspberry Pi. The introduction of Super Pages for the Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 marks another step in this journey, offering some performance enha…

via Maíra Canal

Recovery

Struggling

via Mike Blumenkrantz

AAA gaming on Asahi Linux

Gaming on Linux on M1 is here! We’re thrilled to release our Asahi game playing toolkit, which integrates our Vulkan 1.3 drivers with x86 emulation and Windows compatibility. Plus a bonus: conformant OpenCL 3.0. Asahi Linux now ships the only conformant OpenG…

via On Life and Lisp

Generated by openring