Is there an alternate to "omake -P" (server mode)? - makefile

The omake build system has the awesome feature called "server mode", invoked with the command line switch "omake -P". This will cause omake to monitor the file system for any file changes -- when there is a file change it will launch the appropriate build action.
Unfortunately omake does not seem to be actively maintained anymore and the -P feature has severe problems on Ubuntu 12.04. (I can discuss these in some detail if anyone cares).
Does anyone know of a build system like make/omake that has a feature similar to omake -P?

The hard part about this would be defining all the files to watch (Something I assume you have to do with omake anyway). You could pretty easily write code that watched the files and launched the action.
If I were you, I'd be more inclined to find a really flexible make system and implement the file watching part msyelf.
Problem is, all the build systems I really like are implemented on Java and I'm guessing that's not your cup o' tea (but if you don't mind it, look into gant, should be powerful enough to do anything, and then some)

Related

Temporary filesystem only visible to the process in Go

I am writing e2e tests for a command line app where I have to do file manipulation (such as cp, mv, rm, touch, and mkdir). The tests can execute just fine in my local environment. The problem occurs when they are executed on the server across platforms, where the file manipulation gets interfered with each other. Questions are:
It seems wrong to have shell command in test code to begin with, should I just code the commands programmatically?
If above is yes, is there something that would work as a "temporary file system" that is only visible for the process? So that when the tests run on other platforms, the files would not get messed up?
It seems like mutex lock can work as well but it would slow down the entire build.
Sorry this is more of a general and specific question at the same time. Doubt there will be a perfect answer but would love to hear some suggestions and opinions as I am new in both Go and testing. Appreciate the help!
There is nothing wrong in using OS commands in your code otherwise these will not be available to be used, although it may be incompatible depending on the target environment and as you are facing now may have some restrictions.
One tool that can work as a layer to the file commands is Afero, where you can use it even to simulate in-memory operations and S3 resources.

How can I use scripting automation to record asciinema recordings?

Instead of recording my own keystrokes to create an asciinema tutorial I do want to script them, so I can easily improve my tutorial over time without being being stressed about redoing it each time I want to make a change, or spending a lot of time trying to correct typos in the recording.
Mainly I want to be able to do somethign like:
type: "df"
wait: 2s
type: "echo foo"
This would enable me to easily rebuild the recording from scratch when I change the script.
How can I do this?
I've searched for a lot of solutions for my own projects, and this is the solution that I've come up with:
My solution:
What I'm planning on doing for a project I'm in is to use both asciinema as well as demo-magic.sh.
Specifically, I'll be using asciinema for the recording with the -c flag (see here), and demo-magic.sh for the automated typing, since it supports waiting for commands to finish executing (or not) and custom wait times on top of that. The command would look something like asciinema rec -c "./mydemoscript.sh" myrecording. See the projects for proper usage.
Other things I've come across:
doitlive -- I'm not using this because it's more of a fake-typing automated thing where you actually have to "type like a madman", which could be useful if you're doing a talk in front of an audience but you don't want to mess up your keystrokes, or if you don't want to forget to do certain commands.
asciiscript -- it's written in Go and it works, but you need to compile it yourself, and it also doesn't support waiting for the previous command to finish.
spielbash -- a Ruby project designed specifically to automate asciinema recordings using tmux. I'm not using this, though, because it's not as portable since you need an existing Ruby installation, and more importantly, it keeps corrupting the active console I'm in, and there's also unpredictable corruption in the recordings. Also, the project hasn't been committed to since 2019.
termscript -- it just doesn't work for me, and it freezes my console. It runs on python 2.
UPDATE: I have recently come across terminalizer. It seems to provide support for an window-like border around the actual terminal, and it has a built-in GIF renderer, but I have not tried it.
There is a project svg-term which allows to record a screencast from a command, and I've seen a script that simulates commands being typed letter after letter.
For the moment I ended up using AppleScript to automate iTerm but this approach is buggy and locks you to MacOS and iTerm... and if you happen do to something during recording, you are doomed.
I am still looking for a better approach.
TL;DR: asciinema-automation should do what OP wants. Its dependencies are asciinema and pexpect.
(disclaimer: I developed it for my own usage)
Some time ago, I was also looking for a way to automate asciinema recordings and I saw the very nice answer of a-la-linuques. I chose asciiscript because it used asciinema, but it is not maintained anymore. I tried to keep on using it via a fork adding new small features, but being not very familiar with go, I finally decided to rewrite everything in python in this repo.
It reads bash files, where comments can give special instruction like adding time between command or key stroke, or wait for an expected output (see examples). Of course, this is very much in the spirit of asciiscript.

Use Crashlytics on macOS daemon

I have a macOS application that is integrated with Crashlytics. If I run it as an agent, everything seems to work fine. But when I run it as a daemon, the crashs and errors don't show up on the web panel.
I'm thinking the problem might be that crashlytics uses a framework that is not daemon-safe.
Apple documentation regarding the subject says:
If your daemon uses frameworks that aren't daemon-safe, you can run
into a variety of problems.
Is this really the issue? Is there a workaround so I can get it to work?
Former maintainer for the Crashlytics SDK on Apple platforms here. However, I haven't been with the organization for a while, so my information could be out of date. You should definitely reach out to them for assistance. However, I'll still give this a shot.
A number of others have asked for this kind of functionality in the past, and from what I know, have successfully integrated Crashlytics into non-UI processes. There are some things to watch out for, though. I'm also aware of the daemon-safe issue, and that could be a problem. However, I'm unsure of how it might manifest itself.
When you say agent vs daemon, are you talking about per-process vs per-user launchd jobs, or something else? One thing I can be fairly certain of, is Crashlytics does not support multiple processes with the same bundle id running simultaneously. If there can be multiple copies of your process running at the same time, you cannot make this work. Even if it seems like it does work sometimes, it will not work reliably, at best, can could lead to serious issues at worst (potentially crashes).
One thing that is absolutely essential for correct operation is a main runloop. Crashlytics will definitely not work correctly without one.
Crashlytics also requires an Info.plist. This is actually possible to add to standalone binaries, but often trips people up. I'm guessing you figured this one out.
On macOS, Crashlytics integrates a bit with AppKit, to improve exception reporting. If I recall right, it's possible to just skip this integration completely, as outlined in the docs.
Another thing that Crashlytics relies on is a standard user file system home directory. There must be a ~\Library directory present with the standard internal structure. This one might be problematic for launchd daemons, since they run as root.
Keeping those things in mind, I'm pretty sure it's possible to make this work. There could be some things I'm not remembering, as it's been a while. However, one thing I definitely do know is this is a bit of a gray area. It works, but wasn't an explicit design goal. It might now be unsupported. You should definitely check in with them about this before shipping something.

Debugging Tcl/tk application for Windows

Does it possible debug Tcl/tk application for Windows, without the source code? The application have no support and there is no source code available. There is error shown during one of operation. Is it possible to find what cause an error and whether error can be fixed by patching code?
It's very difficult without the source code, as it is at the level of the source code where you'd need to make the patch. If the code is exposing itself via the send command mechanism (or the comm package) you can probably make a bit of progress (as there's quite good introspection capabilities in Tcl by default, so info commands, info vars and info body may help, along with many other info commands and some introspectors that are elsewhere too), but it's still really difficult, particularly if you don't understand the internal structure of the code. OTOH, I wouldn't expect a production application to expose itself this way; typically you disable that sort of thing when outside development.
A standard debugger like gdb won't help, especially with the Tcl 8.6 non-recursive runtime. (Tcl applications in that environment just tend to show up as effectively “doing stuff”; there's nothing to really indicate how it hangs together.)
But the first thing to check is whether you actually have the source code. It's possible that the code has just been packaged together as a Starpack and that you can use a tool like sdx to extract the things you need to make changes in. But you aren't guaranteed to succeed at that; if the code was compiled/obscured with a commercial tool like the TDK, you really don't have the source and can't really do much about it. (By the same general principles that mean that DRM doesn't work well, it's possible to decompile the .tbc files that the TDK produces, but that's really a last-ditch thing to do as it is technically illegal in some jurisdictions, morally rather dodgy, and inclined to produce really awful output.) Can you contact the original author(s) of the code instead? If that works, it'll be cheaper and simpler…
If you've actually got the human-readable code, even if packaged with sdx, then you can do a lot more.

Is there a free/open source wget-like Windows program with graphical progress?

I am writing a WiX-based installer for our software. I need to download some non-trivial dependencies (like Sql Server Express 2008), then install them.
I could just use wget, but having the console open to show progress could be very confusing for non-technical people. Instead, I have been looking for a program that works just like wget, but shows its progress in a very simple window with the name of the file and the progress.
If I could show a small message that would be fantastic, but just having the GUI progress is the main thing.
I would even be interested in an existing program that almost does this, which I could recompile to add whatever I need. Since this is in an installer, it can't depend on .Net or anything else that needs installing to work.
Is anyone aware of such a program?
Why not to get wget sources and remove console output from there?
Since I did not find such a program, I wrote one. I used the latest libcurl available for Windows.
The code is not beautiful, and the program is not feature-complete, but it does what I need it to do: download from http:// while displaying a simple, attractive Window.
The titlebar is customizeable on the command-line, and I intend to allow window positioning too.
The project is hosted on google code: http://code.google.com/p/installerget/

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