Framebuffer fun

In addition to making the scripts for LFS-7.0 almost ready for release, this weekend I've been playing with the Linux framebuffer and making it available in Java.

As a result, I decided to make LFScript show a bitmap header (in stead of plain colored text) if you are running it on the Linux console and have a framebuffer:

Compared to the text version:

Combine compilation() and installation() in LFScript?

A new parser for the LFS XML sources (ScriptFactory) is almost finished. It's code is much cleaner than the current ScriptFactory implementation and contains almost no package specific rules (which made the old ScriptFactory a pain to maintain).

Checking the output scripts made me question if it is necessary to keep the compilation() and installation() functions separate. I always had them separated, because the commands in installation() are modified to install the package to a fake root directory.

However, because a small amount of packages use one installation command in between compilation commands, the order of commands is slightly distorted in those scripts. It's nothing serious, but I'm still wondering if combining the two functions would be a cleaner solution. It would break compatibility with earlier LFScript 4.0 scripts though.

No indentation in LFS-7.0

I've decided to change the layout of the scripts I'm preparing for LFS-7.0.

Until now, most commands in a script had an indentation of 2 or 4 spaces. However, this always presented a few problems, especially with the 'cat' command, which potentially could lead to bugs. To simplify things (and avoid unnecessary bugs) I decided to remove the indentation.

I then made some creative use of the '#' (comment) character to clearly mark the different sections of the script.

Here is a comparison, the left script is in the new layout (click to enlarge):

Personally, I believe the scripts look much better than before.

Et tu, Wuala?

As some of you may know, I've been a real fan of Wuala. Their free "trading space" functionality made it possible to keep a lot of GB in the cloud (including the LFScript LiveCD images). And because it's secure it was also perfect for my personal backups.

But in a year, that will be gone... By then, I'll only have 2 GB left, which is not enough to publish Live CD's (not even mentioning that my personal backups will be gone).

Wuala made the unfortunate decision to kill one of the two features which made me use it, and had me talking people into using it. They tell me that "trading storage" had to go, to make room for new (really not impressive) features, which loosely translates to "we are now owned by a corporation that expects us to make money, so now please buy that which used to be free".

And that is not the cynic in me talking, no! I learned about Wuala in a presentation that talked about this very feature being the very thing that defined Wuala. Trading storage equals Wuala.

There already have been a lot of people complaining about the issue, so let's hope they change their mind about this.

In the mean time, please recommend alternatives to me. Thanks.