As you can easily imagine from what I wrote the past few days, I’ve been busy trying to cleanup after myself in old projects that are near to abandoned. I wrote about my resolution to spend more time working starting new year, to save some money for getting my driving license and a car, and in the past days I cleaned up both the rbot bugzilla plugin (as well as rbot’s ebuild) and then nxhtml today, so it was quite obvious that I had also to take a look to long ignored projects like ruby-hunspell and rust (and of course rubytag++).
I started with ruby-hunspell as with that I can also fix the hunspell plugin for rbot (and thus put back in the only feature left over from ServoFlame). The first problem I wanted to tackle down was to remove the cmake dependency. As I said yesterday, I’ve started feeling the power in GNU make, and I also have enough reasons not to use cmake that if I could convert the build of the extensions (they are quite simple after all) to simple GNU make, I would do it gladly.
Indeed switching the build system to simple GNU make with some tricks around was not difficult at all, and the result is good enough to me. It’s not (yet) perfect, but it’s nicer. I also hope to generalise it a bit so that I can reuse it for rubytag++ too, and hide some of the dirty tricks I use.
Thankfully there is a good note about it, in the five releases between the previous time I worked on ruby-hunspell and today (1.1.4 then, 1.1.9 today), hunspell added support for pkg-config files, making the build system quite nicer. Also thanks to git improvements, making the tarball is quite easier. And thanks to the power of GNU make, instead of having a tarball.sh script, it’s now simply make tarball (although I will probably switch to make dist, I thought about this just now).
The problems weren’t laying too far though. First, I changed something on rust some time ago it seems, and now the ruby to C type function changed name, so I had to update the ruby-hunspell description script to suit that change. Then there is the problem that Hunspell now hides some of the functions being experimental (and by the way do they have any consideration for the object ABI? Dropping some functions on a preprocessor conditionals inside a C++ class isn’t the most sound of the ideas, I’m afraid…), so I had to comment those. The biggest problem came with the parsers extension, that used to provide bindings for the libparsers library installed by hunspell.
The libparsers library is not installed only in static form, and its headers are not installed at all. This is probably half intentional, as in they probably consider the libparsers library an internal library that other projects shouldn’t use, so they removed the header files, the problem is that they still install the library at this point, making its possible use a bit ambiguous. At any rate, for now I disabled the parsers extension, it wasn’t very much hunspell related anyway, so I will certainly prefer if they dropped it from being installed entirely. That extension was also the only one that had a testunit, I should write a testsuite for ruby-hunspell and the hunspell extension too, so that at least I have something to test with.
There is one big problem though, to release a new ruby-hunspell, which is a requirement for rbot-hunspell, I need to do a release of rust, too, but I don’t remember much of rust details, it has been almost an year since I last worked on it 🙁 Additionally, my /tmp is noexec now, it wasn’t when I prepared the testsuite, so the tests fail as the shared object built in /tmp can’t be loaded in memory. I’ll have to test tomorrow if TMPDIR environment variable is respected, in which case I’d be using /var/tmp. I’ll also add a make dist target to rust so that I don’t need extra stuff to prepare the packages.
Finally, there is the problem of the git repositories: for some reason pushing to the remote repository accessed through this trick fails like there was nothing to push. Considering I now have my own (v)server, I’ll probably just move rust and ruby-hunspell back together with the other git repositories I export. This will also simplify thins when I’ll put gitarella back too.
Tomorrow will be dedicated to work for most of the time, but if I can squeeze some time for this I’ll try to address the issues, and I promise this time I’ll write more comments and documentation.
