Shaving my Yak

Act 1 Scene 1 This year, I was able to dabble in open-source for the first time. It was a dream-come-true: a dream I long thought impossible to attain for my lack of understanding in programming language. How far have I changed since: not only is some of my code part of a program used by others, I am also hosting and developing a program as a part of the open-source community. Small, but a community. This all started thanks to DPS909 class . Act 1 Scene 2 The Act is still on. I am just getting warmed up. What will scene 2 have for me in store? Only time will tell. For now, I am going to enjoy cultivating a community while also belonging to many others, finding my way through, contributing as I am able. Perhaps that will be my scene 2. It will be beautifully ugly, and I will love every moment of it. To my audience, even if imaginary If you are reading this and thinking there is nothing you can do to make a meaningful contribution to a program that you love, I am glad to sa...

Ready, Aim, and Fire After the battle-cry , and then calming down to make some preparation , I decided to take the shot. The target: boost::shared_ptr. To Action A quick search turns up that shared_ptr is supported in the STL's memory library since c++11. Well, that seems like an easy task. Let's take our script for a spin. tools/boostrm.sh shared_ptr memory Now I have a bunch of std::shared_ptr replacing the boost variant. Seems like everything is in good order. After pushing it into the github to have Travis CI do the honors of compiling it, turns out, some boost::weak_ptr, apparently derived from boost::shared_ptr, was being casted into boost::shared_ptr, and they are not compatible with std::shared_ptr since that's not what they inherited. Well, after a bit of research, it seems the weak_ptr has a STL version. It seems like weak_ptr needs to go, too. tools/boostrm.sh weak_ptr memory After another push into github, and another build run by Travis CI, it tu...

Last time at the goblin_camp The mad developers went on a warpath to rinse away Boost from the goblins. Loud yelling and crying was involved, 52 of them. But now that all the yelling is out of the way, how should we do this? Repetition, repetition, ... I am personally a very lazy programmer. If I can make computer do the job for me, I would have the computer do the job for me. While hunting down every instance of a library manually is doable in small number, as it was for cstdint, Other Boost libraries are more widely used and require much more effort scanning the text. Text. Text. Well, if we are talking about text-manipulation in sh ... Scripting my problem away My beloved hobby tools If it is not apparently already, I love automating tasks, and UNIX shell scripting had been my go-to solution for any binary scripting needs, especially in the days before I learned to program. This problem can be solved quite easily using few lines of scripts. Caveat We will be making a s...

The headache: Boost Don't take me wrongly: Boost library is a powerful set of tools for bleeding-edge technology. Much of it gets absorbed into the C++ Standard Libraries. The problem lies in our project being inactive for 7 years, which means it is relying on a library that is 7 years behind. Installing such an old library is a chore, and securing a pre-built package is problematic at best. The project is even incompatible with the later versions of Boost. It may have once given the original developers a powerful technology to propel their project in the past, but now we are stuck with clock stopped at 2011. Along with libtcod being stuck also in 2012, dealing with Boost is critical to bringing the project up-to-date. Options There are several ways to address the issue. Option 1 : Upgrade We can read each related source code, research how Boost has modified the relevant function calls, and either fix the expected return type or required input type, This may lead to mor...