After my checklist post I got asked for some documentation about ruby-elf tools like cowstats and missingstatic.
As it turns out I wrote little to no documentation at all, and I relied exclusively on the scripts being self-documenting, for the most part. Probably not a good idea if I want to have a broader audience.
For this reason, I think I’ll start by writing some man pages for the tools, hopefully today or tomorrow, before I get to the hospital again. I’ll see also to actually release a version of this so I can add it to portage too, so that it’s actually available for developers who are interested (for now you can get it from my overlay as dev-ruby/ruby-elf-9999.
I also started working on improving the way cowstats decides what whether a symbol is in a copy on write section or not. Before I only used the name of the section and, as it turns out, I used to ignore the TLS sections (no, not SSL successor but Thread-local storage).
The TLS problem is solved now but I decided using the name of the section to decide whether it’s CoW or not is not very feasible. I added code that checks the type and the flags of the sections, to an extent, so that it ignores automatically all the sections containing executable code, and all the read-only sections. It also considers .bss and equivalent sections just by type rather than by name (if I did this in the first place I would have supported .tbss in the first place too).
On a different note, I forgot to write that while I was hospitalised, my Nokia decided to go crazy and corrupted the fring app I was using to chat from the E61 itself. I think (and from one side hope) that the MiniSD I was using was broken, because then the rest of the phone would be fine. The problem is that the internal memory is very tiny and the MiniSD that Nokia gave me with the phone, which I just put back in it, is half full of Nokia’s own software, like the MailForExchange launcher (which I don’t care of, or TravelMate). I think I’ll have to pick up a new MiniSD hoping that will work. Last time I bought a Corsair 1GB, this time I think I’ll stop with a Trascend one as they never failed me up to now. Interestingly enough, at my supplier, the MiniSD card would be pretty cheap (€5) while the shipping costs would be over that price. I should check if they have cheap SD cards too, in the stores around here they are tremendously expensive still (€10 for a 2GB card!).
