Emacs on Git

Posted on 2014-11-11 by jcs

It’s been a long time coming but as of today, Git will be the official repository for Emacs. It’s easy to miss what a monumental achievement this is.

It would be easy to shrug off the news with a so what. Move the files over to Git and be done with it. It turns out to be way, way harder than that. Eric Raymond (esr) has spent most of the last year making the transition. That’s more amazing when you realize that esr is probably the world’s leading expert on moving repositories to Git.

Emacs is about 30 years old and has been hosted on several VCS systems. Here’s a post by esr that describes some of the problems he had to deal with. Elsewhere he remarks

You might think “Huh? Emacs already has a git mirror. What else needs to be done?” Quite a lot, actually, starting with lifting Bazaar commit references into a form that will still make sense in a git log listing. Read the recent emacs-devel list archives if you’re really curious.

Along the way, he’s also transferred other large repositories, including Groff, and has looked at doing the same for the NetBSD codebase. He’s also developed several tools, such as reposurgeon and cvs-fast-export. Search his blog for either of those two terms to get an idea of the huge amount of effort he’s expended just in engineering the tools.

We all owe esr a debt of gratitude for the yeoman service he’s put in on this project and on migrating other code bases to Git. Well done, sir.

UPDATE: esr is reporting that the new repository is on-line and available for cloning at git://git.sv.gnu.org/emacs.git.

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IE on Mac

Posted on 2014-11-10 by jcs

Why?

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Building gnuplot on OS X

Posted on 2014-11-10 by jcs

As part of my on-going efforts to get my new MacBook Pro set up with my normal working environment, I tried to compile gnuplot. The first problem was that libpng and libgd were not installed so there was no png support. In short order, I downloaded the libraries and got them compiled. On to building gnuplot.

The problem was that the configure script for gnuplot could not verify that libgd was installed even though it was. I tried all sorts configure arguments and other machinations but no joy.

I asked DuckDuckGo and it said that everyone was having the same problem but none of the suggested solutions worked. Finally, I gave up and just modified to configure script to believe that it had found it. configure scripts are notoriously opaque and very hard to figure out. After a bit of fussing around, I got it to believe that libgd really was there. After that, gnuplot compiled with png support and works perfectly.

I think this is probably some artifact of Apple using LLVM instead of gcc. If you’re trying to build gnuport on a recent version of OS X and having problems with libgd support, here’s a patch for configure that worked for me. 

--- configure.orig      2014-10-19 08:18:04.000000000 -0400
+++ configure   2014-10-19 08:46:47.000000000 -0400
@@ -10266,7 +10266,9 @@
 else
          { $as_echo "$as_me:${as_lineno-$LINENO}: WARNING: libgd not found or too old, version >= 2.0 is required" >&5
 $as_echo "$as_me: WARNING: libgd not found or too old, version >= 2.0 is required" >&2;}
-       with_gd=no
+       with_gd=yes
+$as_echo "#define HAVE_GD_PNG 1" >>confdefs.h
+libgd_LIBS="$libgd_LIBS -lpng"

 fi

@@ -15456,7 +15458,8 @@
 fi


-if test "$ac_cv_lib_gd_gdImagePng" = yes; then
+#if test "$ac_cv_lib_gd_gdImagePng" = yes; then
+if true; then
   { $as_echo "$as_me:${as_lineno-$LINENO}: result:   png terminal: yes" >&5
 $as_echo "  png terminal: yes" >&6; }
 else

This is probably not an optimal patch since I was flailing around trying to get it to work but it is, after all, just to get configure to agree that libgd is there. Just make sure that libgd really is installed.

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Join the NSA and Do Illegal Things

Posted on 2014-11-09 by jcs

You probably can’t legally do those things at the NSA either. It’s just that you likely won’t get caught.

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Rating Secure Messaging Applications

Posted on 2014-11-09 by jcs

The EFF has published its Secure Messaging Scorecard that rates several messaging applications on several important security axes. Some have all the desired attributes, others have none. Some, like Apple’s iMessage have most of the attributes but fail to be open source or have the ability to verify a contact’s identity.

The EFF says this is just an overview and that they are working on additional, deeper analyses of the usability and security of the tools that scored best in this initial phase. As the EFF says, this scorecard is not an endorsement or guarantee, just an indication of which of the applications are on the right track.

I’m looking forward to the future reports. I consider iMessage reasonably secure for day-to-day use but if I had something I really needed to be sure was secure, it would be nice to have some help choosing the best tool.

If you have any interest in secure messaging, you should take a look at the score card. And, of course, though I haven’t said so for a while, you should help support the EFF. They are working to protect us all.

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Microsoft

Posted on 2014-11-08 by jcs

Still evil after all these years.

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Genes Best Removed from the Pool

Posted on 2014-11-08 by jcs

Yikes! Who would do this? No Irreal readers, I’m certain. Worse, all these instructions appear to be aimed at developers who should surely know better. I especially like the ones with sudo. Really, if you enter one of those commands into your terminal, don’t be surprised to find your genes excised from the pool.

And what’s up with companies recommending this nonsense? I can promise you that the first time I got that from a company I deal with, it would be the last time I dealt with them. It’s a sure indication that the company knows nothing about security and doesn’t care to learn. It’s also an indication that they don’t really care about their customers because if they did, they wouldn’t be training them to compromise their systems.

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Dowsing

Posted on 2014-11-07 by jcs

Wilfred Hughes makes an acute observation:

Sometimes, it does seem like that.

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Comments

Posted on 2014-11-07 by jcs

I’ve moved my comments to Disqus in the hope that that will be an effective way of keeping the spammers from using up resources and annoying my hosting provider. I’ve turned comments back on and we’ll see how things go. I hope this will settle the issue but if it doesn’t, I may have to turn them off again.

In the mean time, let me hear from you.

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Welcome to the Dark Side. We Have Macros

Posted on 2014-11-06 by jcs

Jason Lewis over at Practical Elegance has an entertaining duo of posts on moving to Emacs. Like me, he was a long-time Vim user and when he moved to Emacs, he went all the way and didn’t use evil-mode. As he puts it, “Emacs is a deep, deep rabbit hole. The only way in is head first.”

Also like me, his motivation for taking up Emacs was Lisp. His particular Lisp is Clojure. After he discovered that other editors weren’t up to the task of dealing with Lisps effectively, he moved to Emacs and cider. That’s like slime but for Clojure.

In the second post he recounts discovering, as many of us have, that Emacs can seem much like an operating system. He began moving more and more of his workflow into Emacs. It’s a interesting set of posts and worth reading if you like to see how others came to and use Emacs.

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