Recent blog entries for cmc

Geez, I haven't posted a diary entry in ages.

I finally began my contract work for TrustedBSD back in December. About to post the new Web site. Expect another diary entry in 10 months.

Ho-hum... It's been a long summer.

Today I committed the big change: I moved mailing-lists.ent from out of the Handbook directories and into the per-language share/sgml directory, and created a PUBLIC identifier in each language-specific catalog file. Speaking of that, I think I need to move all the 'language-specific' sections of doc/share/sgml/catalog into each language's own catalog.

Also, if this goes well and without fallout, a move of the authors.ent and other such files into share/sgml directories and into PUBLIC identifiers (instead of SYSTEM) is not far behind.

A small detail: Seems like nobody really prepared to have much inside of doc/lang/share/sgml as the validate target, which is used to ensure that large documents such as the Handbook would build without actually building them, did not bother to check the language-specific catalogs whatsoever. So I fixed that, too.

So it's been about a year since I've made a diary entry. And nothing momentous has happened. I'm making a post to keep whoever might actually care updated, though: I'm working on the FAQ now. You know, that big messy thing that has a bunch of silly questions and silly answers. Well, my plan is more or less to separate it into a million tiny little files just like they did with the FreeBSD Handbook, but first I want to make it all look professional. So I've got my work cut out for me. Expect to see a roadmap document (written, of course, in the DocBook SGML DTD) in a few days.

Nothing particularly interesting other than the fact that I haven't made a journal entry here in about 3 weeks or so. Fixed a small bug in fdesc. Still don't like the sentence-break rules for mdoc manual pages. That's about it. Carry on.

At long last, I've committed my changes to the fdesc file system. Not much else to say about it.

Yesterday I finished my implementation of basename(3) and dirname(3) for FreeBSD, compatible with XPG 4.2. They match 1:1 with test results all the specified behavior with HP-UX 10.20's implementation. The code is being reviewed now and hopefully it can go in at some point this week.

I've committed the first step to adapting the new fdesc code and eventually making it the replacement for our existing static /dev/fd nodes. This commit involved modifying our MAKEDEV script to create /dev/stdin, /dev/stdout, and /dev/stderr as symbolic links to fd/[0-2] (they used to be simply duplicate nodes).

Haven't posted much of a diary for a couple weeks now.

My old 15" ProView monitor finally died on me after a couple hours of odd spasms it had, so until I can get a new one, I'm using my older 14" MTR monitor that has a bad VGA connector (just touch it and the whole screen tints your choice of cyan, yellow or magenta).

I've made a couple small updates to my fdesc patch, which is finally getting reviewed so I hope to actually commit it soon.

I've finally updated my fdesc patches to include proper renumbering and `.' and `..' directory entries. I've also put up documentation on what I've done so far with it, which is available from http://www.FreeBSD.org/~chris/fdesc/--the patch is, of course, still available from http://www.FreeBSD.org/~chris/fdesc.patch.