I’m sorry to miss FOSDEM, but huge events during a pandemic should be avoided, and given others do not mask, attending involves some danger. I’m sitting this out; maybe another time? I do miss it…

So, apparently, DNS names can only be up to 253 octets long in ASCII form. The label length octets need accounting. Thanks jschauma!
Consequently, my rfc822 library and tool version 0.7 was released.

Debian 11 “bullseye” was released today (it’s still the 14ᵗʰ for me…) as well. I switched all my unstable “sid” systems to bullseye to avoid systemd’s UsrMove, which (per Technical Committee) is mandatory to be supported in any subsequent release (gah!). Still, congratulations!

Due to RT’s porting efforts, I’m still not finished with the mksh things I wanted to do, but am continuing with others. I’ll release a new sleep(1) soon (but, maybe, we can test it on many platforms first?) and guess I’ll switch ed and jupp to mirtoconf as well when I find the time.

I also had fun with… ISO 3166, ccTLDs, etc. and wtf(1). Added lots, and also deduplicated, in the acronyms database. Not the 1300+ gTLDs though. They’re insane, ICAN’t doesn’t publish either which ones are still active or their meaning (corresponding to those already present). Anyway please enjoy! Submissions, as usual, welcome ☺

My contribution to Free Sheet Music is also growing. I slightly reorganised the index (left side) of the main website, only select subprojects are now shown, but all, including musical things, the Foundry etc. are listed in the page about subprojects, some just with a small link or placeholder, others with much more. I think there may be more to add… but this, and some hyperlinking (in all directions), could help.

Now off to sleep. Our cat is already sleeping again. Thankfully, this is (probably) the last really warm day.

After Garmin’s proprietary “opencaching.com” platform, which virtually nobody pined after, and ignoring that Navicache has not been more than a zombie for quite a while, I am regretting GPSgames.org (who offered just so much more than just geocaching — GeoDashing, GeoVexilla (I partook in both), Shutterspot (not for me), MinuteWar, GeoGolf and GeoPoker (which I never really got) — although I guess GeoHashing is the closest thing to, at least, GeoDashing) is no more. A month later, it doesn’t look it will ever be resurrected, even though this outage is unplanned; an archival was scheduled for later, which is quite a pity — I had renewed my interest in them due to the pandemic, but that was to be planned and keeping historic data intact.

This was the only platform which used a Free licence for its content (CC-BY-SA), even if, like all others, it required a more broad grant from contributors. Now, only nōn-free platforms (like the OpenCaching network) are left; only commercialising seems to save most. Pity.

Update 2022-10-22: navicache.com, having been mostly unusable due to bugs already for years, is now also gone: whoever operated this let the domain expire. The log and cache database is most likely also gone forever.

The server became unresponsible because the load went up due to idiotic web crawlers, not respecting robots.txt or ignoring CGIs, hammering httpd(8). After reboot and fsck(8) I’ve configured CGIs to use a rather harsh setrlimit(2) RLIMIT_TIME, a MirBSD speciality. This should prevent repeating this issue.

As a consequence, some requests, for example annotating in CVSweb on large files (acronyms DB for wtf(1)) will now fail or (diffing between revisions on that file) return incomplete results. SOL.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

ObOTRant: The W3C specification requires the XMLSerializer[sic!] shipped in ECMAscript-capable web browsers to produce invalid XML. (The underlying algorithm is permitted elsewhere to instead raise an exception but even though a (pretty bad, e.g. it suggests dropping instead of entity-escaping -- inside a comment node) specification for fixing up such DOM trees preparing for XML serialisation exists, the spec prevents using it. The whole “web world” is just a steaming PoS really…

Maybe someone wonders about this, maybe I just want to get back to this for ordering or so… but here is my current list of things, as much as I’m recalling at the moment anyway:

• mksh for bullseye: escape C0/C1 properly (+klibc/s390x)
• MuseScore* for bullseye: fix Debian #985129
• MirBSD libc: add proper "C" locale in addition to our "C.UTF-8"
• (Update 2021-12-26) maybe three… "C" for POSIX, "" for OPTU-* stuff, and "C.UTF-8" which would reject raw octets. Or "C.UTF-8@optu" and "C.UTF-8@strict". Unsure. Working on these things now.
• mksh: full locale tracking with BOM processing removal
• MirBSD: port newer OpenSSH
• mksh: full 21-bit UCS support (replace OPTU-8/OPTU-16 with UTF-8 and a scheme that maps raw octets to somewhere above U-0010FFFF)
• MirBSD: same switching wchar_t to uint32_t (flag day)
• (Update 2021-08-15) switch sparc time_t to 64 bit like i386, since we’re doing a flag day already anyway (sparc assembly experts for locore.s and other changes and OpenBSD 3.x-era kernel experts contributions welcome…)

That, and a few small things (such as implement things like pre-exec hooks and vared for mksh). Oh and port a new libcrypto/libssl for TLS 1.2+ support… out of the many bad alternatives, LibreSSL looks to be the least bad contender. Licence analysis as necessary, ripping out code not under Free licences as per MirBSD’s FOSS charter.

If someone is interested in helping out with GCC: there’s work begun around https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=53119 to make it not warn for the “universal zero initialiser” (struct foo bar = {0};) which to use is more correct than memset(3)ting everything to NUL. The git history of GCC is insufficient to figure out all related changes so diving in its SVN repository is necessary. Fix that for our system compiler (in-tree GCC 3.4).

I’m also collecting new glyphs to be done for FixedMisc [MirOS] and plan on working on a second-generation Inconsolata fork under OFL.