Hover a mouse over a link - just don't trust the results

This appears to be a link to a good website. When the mouse hovers over this link, it will appear that it goes to www.somegoodplace.com. Click it. I dare you

The link really goes to guce.advertising.com. JavaScript is used to dynamically change the link just as it is clicked. Pretty cool, eh?

Goodbye Joyent

But as any software veteran knows, projects often don’t survive the whims of management. No one is fired for picking Linux (these days), but they might be for picking something else. I already experienced this once before, as a core developer of the Riak database. We were rigorous, paying homage to the theoretics of distributed systems, but with a focus on bringing that theory to the masses. So much so that our last CEO said we had to stop doing so much “computer science”. He meant it as an insult, but we wore it as a badge of honor. But hey, MongoDB had a sweet API and BJSON, who cares if it lost your data occasionally [1]. I understand that people like to stick with what is popular. I respect that decision — it is theirs to make. But I’ll never be a part of that crowd. I want to use software that speaks to me, software that solves the problems I have, software guided by similar values to my own. For me, no project does this more than SmartOS and the illumos kernel. It is my Shawshank Redemption in a sea of MCU.

Continuous integration with GDB Buildbot

Continuous integration is a hot topic these days, and the GNU Project Debugger is keeping up with the trend. Who better to serve as a role model for tracking and exterminating bugs than a debugger?

The GDB Buildbot started as a pet project back in 2014 but is now an integral part of the development process. It provides an infrastructure to test new commits pushed to the official repository, as well as a service (which we call try builds) for developers to submit their proposed changes. In this article, I share the story of our Buildbot instance, where we are right now in terms of functionality, and the plans (and challenges) for the future.

[...]

Back in 2014, the GDB project did not have a continuous integration tool. Developers kindly provided testsuite results and reported regressions in the code, often using their own machines. However, these developers had limited resources and could not test various architectures simultaneously. Compilation failures were often not caught in systems that are not widely used. Ultimately, this issue caused delays and annoyances during the release process (or in the worst cases) after GDB was released.

In an attempt to mitigate this problem, the GDB Buildbot was set up. Only GNU/Linux running on Intel/AMD 32 and 64-bit was supported at the beginning, but the community quickly started to contribute toward support other machines and architectures. The initial setup compiled and tested the code using common configure flags, but developers still needed to consult the web page in order to know the results.

Over time, the instance has been improved and new features were added, including email notifications whenever a commit introduced a compilation failure, and email notifications to the gdb-testers mailing list containing the results of each testsuite run.

Perhaps one of the most useful features was the try build system.

Automating unit tests in test-driven development

DevOps is a software engineering discipline focused on minimizing the lead time to achieve a desired business impact. While business stakeholders and sponsors have ideas on how to optimize business operations, those ideas need to be validated in the field. This means business automation (i.e., software products) must be placed in front of end users and paying customers. Only then will the business confirm whether the initial idea for improvement was fruitful or not.

Software engineering is a budding discipline, and it can get difficult to ship products that are defect-free. For that reason, DevOps resorts to maximizing automation. Any repeatable chore, such as testing implemented changes to the source code, should be automated by DevOps engineers.

This article looks at how to automate unit tests. These tests are focused on what I like to call "programming in the small." Much more important test automation (the so-called "programming in the large") must use a different discipline—integration testing. But that's a topic for another article.

Create web user interfaces with Qt WebAssembly instead of JavaScript

When I first heard about WebAssembly and the possibility of creating web user interfaces with Qt, just like I would in ordinary C++, I decided to take a deeper look at the technology.

My open source project Pythonic is completely Python-based (PyQt), and I use C++ at work; therefore, this minimal, straightforward WebAssembly tutorial uses Python on the backend and C++ Qt WebAssembly for the frontend. It is aimed at programmers who, like me, are not familiar with web development.

GCC 8.4 Status Report (2020-02-17)

Status
======




It has been almost a year since GCC 8.3 has been released and GCC 8.4
release should have been released already, so we should concentrate on
getting it out soon.  Unfortunately we have two P1s, one of them is
waiting for reporter's input, so we might as well just ignore it unless
the input is provided, but the other, C++ FE one, looks something that
should be fixed.  If we get rid of the P1s, I'd like to create
8.4-rc1 on Wednesday, Feb 26th and release 8.4 the week afterwards.
If you have any queued backports, please commit them to 8 branch
(and 9 branch too, we'd like to release 9.3 soon too).








Quality Data
============




Priority          #   Change from last report
--------        ---   -----------------------
P1                2   +   2
P2              284   +  75
P3               38   +   4
P4              151   -  11
P5               22   -   2
--------        ---   -----------------------
Total P1-P3     324   +  81
Total           497   +  68








Previous Report
===============




https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2019-02/msg00122.html

GCC 8.4 + GCC 9.3 Compilers Coming Soon

GCC 8.4 is already past due for release while Red Hat's Jakub Jelinek is trying to get its release organized in the coming weeks along with GCC 9.3. It's been nearly one year since GCC 8.3 and thus many fixes in tow for GCC 8.4. But two "P1" regressions of the highest priority are left to be addressed or demoted before the 8.4 release can happen. Jakub is hoping to create a release candidate of GCC 8.4 on 26 February and to then officially release the GCC 8.4 stable compiler the first week of March. A similar GCC 9.3 release is also expected soon for those on this current GCC 9 stable series. 

Gitea 1.11.0: Open source self-hosting Git solution gets a new update

Gitea helps you set up your own self-hosted Git service with the use of lightweight Go code. The latest version, 1.11.0, includes a long list of updates, bug fixes, and improvements, including changing the markdown rendering to goldmark, and a new contrib command. Is self-hosting the right solution for you? See how Gitea compares to other Git hosting solutions.

NBD: A popular HTTP-fetching npm code library used by 48,000 other modules retires, no more updates coming

After eleven months of planning, the npm-distributed request module has been deprecated, meaning the popular JavaScript code library for making HTTP requests is no longer supported and won't receive further updates.

The almost 48,000 other npm modules that include request as a dependency won't see any immediate effect, other than a deprecation warning from the npm command line client. But the maintainers of those modules should consider revising their code so it uses an alternative library for handling HTTP interactions.

Request, now at version 2.88.2 and still downloaded almost 17m times a week, was created in 2009 by Mikeal Rogers, who presently handles community operations at open source biz Protocol Labs.

Still Increasing the Power of Hybrid IT Through Open Source

Broadcom (perhaps still better known as CA) used this year’s Arcati Mainframe Yearbook to highlight the mainframe development revolution and the growth in open source tools.

They said that tools, like the green screens of ISPF and the Eclipse desktop IDE, enhanced with proprietary plugins have served mainframe application developers well over the years. However, there are changes in the larger world of development that are creating the conditions for a revolution in mainframe tooling.

Tangle EE project joins Eclipse Foundation to bring distributed ledger apps to enterprise

As the number of IoT devices proliferate, and machines conduct transactions with machines without humans involved, it becomes increasingly necessary to have a permissionless system that facilitates this kind of communication in a secure way.

Enter the IOTA Foundation, a Berlin-based open-source distributed ledger technology (DLT) project, which has hooked up with the Eclipse Foundation to bring IOTA DLT to the enterprise via the Tangle EE project. For starters, this involves forming a working group.

Eclipse Partners with IOTA on Open Source Distributed Ledger Tech

What to know about software development security — why it’s still so hard and how to tackle it

The right software security practices can prevent many future security problems, and there is an increasingly realisation that software development security needs a cradle-to-grave approach, not just focusing on solving problems once they become apparent.

There is still a long way to go and no-one can claim this is easy to address: the increasing complexity of modern software development environments, not to mention the sheer volume of code and other digital assets being created, often in continuous, fast-paced environments, exacerbates the challenge.

[...]

Coding standards are particularly relevant for some of the more complex programming languages — C++ in particular — which while introducing unprecedented scope for innovation and flexibility, also allow for more interpretation, which can lead even the most skilled developer to inadvertently introduce an error. Again, automation is key, especially for huge codebases and complicated embedded software projects, so static code analysis is increasingly introduced to reduce manual effort and associated risks.

Electron 8 - First Release As OpenJS Foundation Incubator

At the end of last year Electron joined the OpenJS Foundation as an incubator project. The release of Electron 8, less than two months later, is an indication that it is thriving in its new home.

Initially developed for GitHub's Atom editor, Electron is a cross-platform desktop application development tool based on Node.js and Chromium enabling apps to be packaged for Mac, Windows, and Linux. Both Atom and Electron were open sourced in 2014.

News that Electron was joining the OpenJS Foundation was announced in December 2019 at the Node+JS Interactive conference held in Montreal.

Modularity for Maintenance

One of the best things about maintaining open source in the modern era is that there are so many wonderful, free tools to let machines take care of the busy-work associated with collaboration, code-hosting, continuous integration, code quality maintenance, and so on.

[...]

But... let’s say you1 maintain a few dozen Python projects. Being a good maintainer, you’ve started splitting up your big monolithic packages into smaller ones, so your utility modules can be commonly shared as widely as possible rather than re-implemented once for each big frameworks. This is great!

However, every one of those numbered list items above is now a task per project that you have to repeat from scratch. So imagine a matrix with all of those down one side and dozens of projects across the top - the full Cartesian product of these little administrative tasks is a tedious and exhausting pile of work.

If you’re lucky enough to start every project close to perfect already, you can skip some of this work, but that partially just front-loads the tedium; plus, projects tend to start quite simple, then gradually escalate in complexity, so it’s helpful to be able to apply these incremental improvements one at a time, as your project gets bigger.

Perl Weekly Challenge 47: Roman Calculator and Gapful Numbers

These are some answers to the Week 47 of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a couple of days (February 9, 2020). This blog post offers some solutions to this challenge, please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

I have really very little time to complete this blog post in time for the deadline. My explanations will be minimal, sorry about that.

The Spyder Development Community and Quansight Labs Announce the Release of Spyder 4

The Spyder Project and Quansight Labs announced the release of Spyder 4, the latest version of the most popular open source Scientific Python development environment. Spyder 4 boasts new features that users have been eagerly awaiting.

Spyder 4 provides users an enhanced coding experience like general purpose editors and IDEs, while strengthening its specialized focus on scientific programming in Python. 

Wind River Launches CD Platform for Embedded Systems

Glenn Seiler, vice president for open source strategy for Wind River, said the CD platform is based on an open source instance of the Jenkins continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform. The company envisions organizations downloading the platform as source code that Wind River will update regularly for use on top of the Wind River Linux platform, he said.

Wind River is taking advantage of containers, Kubernetes, the Puppet IT automation framework and a repository to ease deployment of its CD platform, added Seiler. The company is committed to providing updates to that platform, which Wind River uses internally, at least every three weeks, said Seiler.

SD Times Open-Source Project of the Week: Mint

Mint is a programming language for the front-end web that aims to solve the common issues of Single Page Applications (SPAs) at a language level.

 It is a compiler and a framework combined to provide great developer experience while allowing users to write safe, readable and maintainable code, according to the developers behind the project.

The common issues that it attempts to fix are regard reusable components, styling routing, global and local state handling, and synchronous and asynchronous computations that might fail.

“It was born out of the frustration of the JavaScript language and ecosystem (NPM) and the Elm language and it’s not so open development practices,” Mint said on its website. “Mint aims to combine the developer experience of Elm and the expressiveness of React to create the perfect language for building single-page applications.”

PyPy and CFFI have moved to Heptapod

It has been a very busy month, not so much because of deep changes in the JIT of PyPy but more around the development, deployment, and packaging of the project.

Your Guide to Reading Excel (xlsx) Files in Python

In this brief Python tutorial, we are going to learn how to read Excel (xlsx) files using Python. Specifically, we will read xlsx files in Python using the Python module openpyxl. First, we start by the simplest example of reading a xlsx file in Python. Second, we will learn how to read multiple Excel files using Python.

CausalNex: An open-source Python library that helps data scientists to infer causation rather than observing correlation

CausalNex is a Python library that allows data scientists and domain experts to co-develop models that go beyond correlation and consider causal relationships. ‘CasualNex’ provides a practical ‘what if’ library which is deployed to test scenarios using Bayesian Networks (BNs).

Programming languages: Java developers flock to Kotlin and ditch Oracle JDK for OpenJDK [Ed: CBS tabloid ZDNet does puff pieces for Snyk now. A Microsoft-connected attack dog -- one  which badmouths FOSS and now pretends to have a 'study' (self-promotion stunt) on programming trends...]

The vast majority of developers who use a JVM (Java Virtual Machine) language still use Java, but a sizable chunk of the population is shifting to Kotlin, a JVM-compatible language developed by JetBrains, which Google is encouraging developers to use for Android development.  

GnuCash : free and open-source accounting app for Linux

Are you looking for an accounting app for your business? If you do, try out GnuCash, an open-source, free-to-use financing platform for Linux. It is the ideal solution for small businesses. Nevertheless, you can also use it for your personal use.

In this article, we will take a closer look at GnuCash, its installation, and what it has to offer.

GNU World Order 340

Thoughts about licensing. Coffee. Then thoughts about Java.

GCC 10 Adds Late Support For -std=c++20 To Target C++20

With C++20 now effectively complete, GCC developers have made a rather late change for GCC 10 that is also long overdue and that is introducing the -std=c++20 switch for targeting C++20. 

The GNU Compiler Collection has been working on C++20 support for a while and has much of it ironed out. But up until now -std=c++2a had to be used for specifying this support that was pretty much a given C++2A would be called C++20. With this C++ revision going to publication in the next few months, it will surely be known as C++20 in making it out before the end of the calendar year.