What I did on my winter vacation

TLDR: Helped my father move. Then I shaved all the yaks. Fur everywhere. Very messy.

Because of the way holidays at ActiveState work, it’s very economical in terms of vacation days to take the last two weeks of the year off (Christmas and New year’s weeks). I had a fair bit of vacation left, so I decided to take the first week of the new year off as well, for a total of three weeks of vacation.

So what did I do with all that time?

Answer: Helped me father move, then wrote a lot of Rust and some Perl.

Helping My Father Move

My mother died at the beginning of September. She and my father had been living in Florida, but it didn’t make sense for my father to continue living there alone. My wife and I had been discussing moving to a new house in Minneapolis for a while, so my father suggested we find a place where we could all live. We were looking for either a duplex or a property with an ADU¹. We found a perfect odd duplex² very quickly. The sale closed on December 16. My father’s stuff from Florida arrived a few days later, and he moved in to his part of the duplex.

Unfortunately, because of COVID, we didn’t go down to Florida to help him prepare for the move. While he did sort through some of his stuff, his sorting could’ve been more aggressive, as he was moving from a large house with two people to a much smaller space with one person. The upshot is that he moved a ridiculous amount of stuff here, far more than could ever fit in his space. So we spent many hours going through it.

We still have a ridiculous number of boxes of stuff to give away in the main part of the house, along with an endless pile of cardboard and packing paper, but his unit in the duplex is looking great.

This made me even more enthusiastic about getting rid of tons of stuff before my wife and I move, which will happen later this year, after some renovations to our part of the duplex.

My Local COVID Tracker

I’ve posted about this a couple times already. I made an update to track more counties, as well as to add a graph showing the seven-day new case average per 10,000 people.

The new graph by population made it clear that the counties near me were doing worse than the state as a whole. The original graph, showing just the raw count of new cases, made it look like the state overall was worse than the nearby counties, when in fact I think the opposite is true.

Precious and My Yak Shaving Expedition

Precious is a project is a project I started to create a meta-linter/tidier in Rust. The goal is to replace TidyAll. I’ve written about TidyAll’s issues in the past.

Switching DateTime to use Precious

I’ve used precious for a few projects, including itself, but I wanted to try moving a Perl project to it. I picked DateTime for no particular reason, other than that it’s something I’ve worked on for many years.

This is what led me down the yak shaving rabbit hole, to mix some metaphors.

First, I found some bugs with precious and made a v0.0.7 release of it.

Then when I started working on converting DateTime from TidyAll to precious, I found several bugs in omegasort³, leading to a new release of that as well.

As I worked on switching DateTime to use precious, I realized there was a bootstrapping problem. With TidyAll, I can just specify TidyAll and any needed plugins as develop phase prereqs for the distribution, making it easy for others to install all the needed tools, like perltidy, perlcritic, and TidyAll itself.

But precious isn’t on CPAN, nor is omegasort. I did briefly consider going down the whole Alien route, but quickly discarded that idea. While depending on a notional Alien::precious would work fine for my Perl projects, it wouldn’t help for anything that’s not Perl.

Note that precious, being a Rust project, produces a single statically linked⁴ binary. Go programs like omegasort are totally static, not even linking libc. This will become more important later in my yak shaving journey.

Just One Little Installer

So my next thought was to build a simple installer for precious that could be run using the very safe “pipe curl output into an interpreter” strategy. I quickly wrote an installer in Perl that would live in the precious repo. I was using fatpack, which is a great tool for turning Perl programs into single-file executables, as long as all of its dependencies are pure Perl.

But then I started thinking about omegasort. Did I want to write a nearly identical program to live in the omegasort repo? And then do it again for my next Rust or Go project? Plus there are lots of other useful tools that fall in this “released as a single binary on GitHub” bucket, like ripgrep.

Just One(!) Installer

Then I had an idea. What if I wrote one installer for all these things? So I made a little Perl distribution called App-ugri, where “ugri” stood for Universal GitHub Release Installer. I actually finished that before I realized the critical flaw in my plan. Even though I could fatpack ugri into a single file so you could pipe curl into perl, what about Windows?

Then I remembered why I was creating this installer in the first place. It’s because of languages like Rust and Go that produce a single statically linked executable. The solution was pretty obvious. Write this installer in Rust.

ubi

“UBI” stands for Universal Binary Installer. I liked the pun here more than the original “ugri” name. Of course, by “universal binary installer” I mean it just installs single-file executables from GitHub project releases, so it’s not very universal (yet?).

Since I’d already written this once in Perl, writing a Rust version was mostly pretty easy. The only wrinkle was that I had to learn a little bit about async programming in Rust, because the GitHub API client I was using, octocrab, is async. This was something I’d been wanting to learn about anyway, so I welcomed the challenge.

There is a usable 0.0.2 release on the GitHub project’s releases page.

Of course, ubi has a bootstrapping problem. What do you install a universal binary installer with? You curl a script into sh, of course⁵!

That looks like this:

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$> curl --silent --location \
       https://raw.githubusercontent.com/houseabsolute/ubi/master/bootstrap/bootstrap-ubi.sh |
       sh

That should work on Linux and macOS. But I would love some help with creating the equivalent PowerShell script for Windows. I also need to improve the release tooling to provide binaries for more systems.

Installing precious and omegasort

Once you have ubi installed, installing these tools is trivial:

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$> ubi --project houseabsolute/precious --in ~/bin
$> ubi --project houseabsolute/omegasort --in ~/bin
# and for good measure
$> ubi --project BurntSushi/ripgrep --exe rg --in ~/bin

But wait, there’s more yak!

Along the way, I also ended up working on my dzil bundle to to make switching to precious easier. So now my bundle will:

• Generate a precious.toml config file for any project which doesn’t yet have one, as long as there’s no tidyall.ini file either.
• Generate an extended test that runs precious lint --all and makes sure there are no files that fail the linting checks.
• Generate a simple dev-bin/install-xt-tool.sh script that installs ubi, then uses that to install precious and omegasort.
• Generate a git hook script that uses precious, along with a git/setup.pl script to install that hook for the given repo.
• Update the dist.ini to always include an authordep on the version of the bundle that is being run.

And since I was messing with all this, I added podchecker and podtidy to my standard precious config for Perl projects.

That last bullet point, about updating the dist.ini file, came out of some issues I found in trying to get precious tests passing in CI using my ci-perl-helpers tooling for Azure Pipelines. I’ve written about those in the past as well. I ended up making some improvements to the helpers, so now they’ll automatically run the dev-bin/install-xt-tools.sh script before running extended tests.

And when they’re building a tarball for any Perl distro where the name starts with “Dist-Zilla”, they make sure to include the git checkout’s lib directory in @INC when running dzil build. I assume that if you’re testing a dzil plugin or plugin bundle in CI, then you want to use said plugin or bundle when generating the tarball for said plugin or bundle⁶.

The results of all of this can be seen in my PR to switch DateTime to precious.

Other Random Bits

• I tweaked a PR for the CLDR project (Common Locale Data Repository) to fix a typo in one language’s datetime info.
• I submitted a PR to octocrab to update its dependencies so I could update the same deps in ubi.
• I made a new release of DateTime-Locale to add some more documentation.
• I almost started rewriting omegasort in Rust (just because I like it better than Go), but I managed to restrain myself. I might get back to this at some point, but I’m glad I worked on these other projects for now.
• I wrote this blog post.

Putting the Yaks to Bed

I wrapped this all up yesterday, more or less. I return to work on Monday, so my timing was pretty good.