Recent blog entries for jaz147

The holidays were great - lots of relaxing and video games, plus some quality time with a girl interest of mine. I was able to incorporate Golgotha's music and sound effects into WorldForge's archive and now that I'm back to school with my ethernet connection, the texture archive is next. Varconf didn't get as far as I would have liked (I have a lex parser half-complete on my hard drive) and school looks to be tricky this semester.

Whoa - quick update for me. Not like the month gap between the last two. Varconf is coming along nicely - I just rearranged the code today so that Config Objects can be created. Before, Varconf only supported a single configuration instance which was limiting. I also cleaned up the callbacks a bit and reworked error message so they can go to any compatible destination (not just the standard error stream).

In other matters, I have brought up the idea of absorbing the public domain Golgotha media into WorldForge's archive (the 2000+ textures will be especially welcome, I gather). There's some real quality stuff here - the music especially. It's too bad the project never got to see the light of day.

Finally, my first semester is almost over - looking forward to going home and relaxing a bit. Too bad it's only three weeks but, eh, one can't complain.

Ah - college can really take away your free time. Not much to report over the last month. Thanksgiving was great - good bit of free time to plunk down some serious hours with some great console games (Shenmue folks - buy it, right now - 'cause I say so). Varconf is also progressing, albeit slowly. I hope to get the rest of my planned changes done over Christmas break, after which I'll do some cleaning up and release it as version 1. After that, I'll probably focus on another project under WorldForge and any further changes to varconf will be in the form of bugfixes (or perhaps some requested feature changes if they seem worthwhile enough).

As my first entry, let me define the situation a bit.

I am currently involved with a great Open Source project called WorldFor ge. I'm a newb, so I tackled a relatively small chunk of the project - varconf. Varconf is a configuration library, originally created by sdt for STAGE, WorldForge's primary server application. Varconf is small but quite functional and I am having a blast with it.

Varconf is designed to input configuration data from config files, environment variables or the command-line. It also has callback support to inform an application of a settings change.

Since I took over the library, I have made the following enhancements/changes to varconf:

• Adopted libsigc++ for callbacks.
• Added support for sections (as in a standard config file section) in command-line arguments.
• Implemented the environment variable input method (wasn't written yet when I took over the library)
• General code clean-up, commenting and what-not.

Not much but it is a start. Some future ideas I've come up with/had suggested to me:

• Enhance the data manipulation interface - currently there is no method for deleting an individual item or section from a config database.
• Re-implement the "Observer" class - Observers in Varconf were auto-update objects that stored a copy of a single config item for quick access. There were some problems with the implementation so I removed them temporarily.
• Convert the file parser to lex/yacc - I have some concerns but if doable, this would make the parser far easier to work with.
• Add an interface for warnings - currently, if erroroneous data appears that varconf can handle without dying, it does so without a complaint. Keeps the lib simple but makes reporting typos and the like difficult.

More will come with time I'm sure. That is all.