July 2022 monthly update

written on Monday, August 1, 2022

Pixel Wheels

This month I did not do much work on Pixel Wheels, except for releasing version 0.23.0. Translators on the other hand have been busy:

• The German translation has been updated (the update made it in 0.23.0).
• Thanks to Sanchez, Pixel Wheels is now available in Swedish.
• A refresh of the Spanish translation is in progress.

Clyde

Clyde is where I spent most of my time. It's the early days of this project so activity is quite frenetic: I made 3 releases in one month! Clyde is now at version 0.2.1. This month I added the upgrade command, the last missing piece to make it feature complete. It's still quite bare-bones in some aspects but it's getting there.

The other important changes I made this month are the following:

• clyde install now implements downloads itself instead of using curl. It also supports resuming interrupted downloads.

• clyde install learned to update itself on Windows. This is tricky because one cannot overwrite the file of a running executable on Windows, but I found out it is OK to rename a running executable! That helps.

• clyde setup learned to create Windows Git Bash friendly activation scripts, using cygpath.

• The package file format evolved too, with the addition of variables to reduce duplications and risk of errors.

• I added a "nested" UI: commands can indent their steps, giving a better understanding of the progress. Here is how it looks when installing two packages at once:

• I also added a new command to clydetools: gh-update. It can be used to add the latest release of GitHub-hosted packages. This opens the way to having the CI automatically update packages.

Speaking of packages, the package collection is slowly growing. I added 18 new packages this month:

• bat
• croc
• gitea
• gron
• gum
• jless
• just
• lurk
• miniserve
• ncspot
• node16
• pandoc
• rclone
• sd
• skim
• sqlite
• syncthing
• xh

git-bonsai

I released Git Bonsai 0.2.2. This new version makes it possible to configure protected branches using git config.

You can install this new version with clyde install git-bonsai 😉

I noticed Git Bonsai is often confused when the main branch is not called master. I need to teach it how to properly discover the name of the main branch so that it switches to it reliably.

What's next?

This month was a bit unusual as I spent most of my time on Clyde. It was nice to switch from Java to Rust for a while, I really enjoy this language.

For August I want to resume working on Pixel Wheels: the branch to add multiple tire sizes is waiting for me! I'd also like to make another Clyde release, and add more packages.

And... I am also off for two weeks of vacations, so we'll see if I find time and motivation to write some code :)