Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 30, 2022

• proposing Sourceware as Software Freedom Conservancy member project

  The overseers of the hosting server sourceware.org aka cygwin.org aka
  gcc.gnu.org aka (others *) invite the community to assist us in
  further securing the future of the service.  Red Hat has been and
  continues to be a generous sponsor of the hardware, connectivity, and
  the very modest employee time it requires.  We are glad to report
  there are zero indications of any change to this commitment.  Things
  are stable, new services are coming online, and users seem to be
  happy.  However, it is always good to think about any future needs.
  

• Sourceware moving to the Software Freedom Conservancy [LWN.net]

  Sourceware.org has long hosted the repositories for many important free-software projects, including much of the GNU toolchain.

• Dev snapshot: Godot 4.0 alpha 15

  We're working towards finalizing the feature set for 4.0 beta, reviewing many PRs which have been opened prior to our roadmap feature freeze announced a month ago. While this process is ongoing, we'll keep releasing alpha builds so here's 4.0 alpha 15! Same deal as usual, lots of bugs fixed and more refactoring and feature work.

• Some ways to get better at debugging

  Hello! I’ve been working on writing a zine about debugging for a while (here’s an early draft of the table of contents).

  As part of that I thought it might be fun to read some academic papers about debugging, and last week Greg Wilson sent me some papers about academic research into debugging.

  One of those papers (Towards a framework for teaching debugging [paywalled]) had a categorization I really liked of the different kinds of knowledge/skills we need to debug effectively. It comes from another more general paper on troubleshooting: Learning to Troubleshoot: A New Theory-Based Design Architecture.

  I thought the categorization was a very useful structure for thinking about how to get better at debugging, so I’ve reframed the five categories in the paper into actions you can take to get better at debugging.

  [...]

  This also feels like one of the most straightforward categories of knowledge to acquire to me – all you need to do is investigate a million bugs, which is our whole life as programmers anyway :). It takes a long time but I feel like it happens pretty naturally.