Up to Main Index                             Up to Journal for April, 2016

                     JOURNAL FOR MONDAY 25TH APRIL, 2016
______________________________________________________________________________

SUBJECT: Tab sizes, Git, fixes and changes
   DATE: Mon 25 Apr 02:15:32 BST 2016

As some of you may be aware - I might have mentioned it before - I am one of
those programmers who like small tab sizes. My preference is a tab size of
just 2. Why? It's what I have always used. Ever since the early '80s when I
had 40 columns and 25 lines of screen real estate on a BBC micro in mode 7. It
wasn't until the late '80s (Amiga) and early '90s (PC) I used 80 columns by 25
lines[1]. Today I could have 213 columns and 77 lines on my desktop using my
preferred font size, but I don't. Instead I'm either using multiple XTerms in
dwm or I'm using dvtm. Both are dwm and dvtm are tiling window managers. I
also work on an EeePC 900, Nexus 7 tablet and other devices with small
screens.

Why am I telling you this? To maybe save you hours of frustration. The other
day I was using Git and trying to pull a remote repository. A repository I had
accessed may times before. Only I received an error message:


  fatal: protocol error: bad line length character:


Eh? Had Git been updated recently? What about SSH? Had I corrupted one of my
WolfMUD repositories? Something was obviously not quite right...

After a few hours of debugging and Googling it turned out Git did not like the
fact I had recently put 'tabs -2' in my .bashrc file recently :(

The command 'tabs' is part of Debian's ncurses-bin package. Using 'tabs -2'
sets the default terminal tab size to 2. I had added it because even after
changing every tab setting I could find in my .gitconfig file Git was still
using a tab width of 8 in some cases! The tabs command fixed the issue. Now
I've moved the 'tabs -2' into the "only if interactive" section of my .bashrc
which seem to have worked ;)

As for WolfMUD coding proper. I've not had the chance to make any progress on
adding player accounts. Instead I've been sorting out fixes and changes which
were starting to pile up - I touched on this in my last journal entry.

In the end, after much testing and careful consideration, a lot of the changes
were dropped. What appeared to be beneficial changes actually made the code
more complex for little gain. The changes that did survive I'll be pushing to
the public dev branch shortly. Cleaning up my working directory and getting
these patches out of the way now should make working on the account changes
easier. Now I just need to find some time...

--
Diddymus

  [1] The Amiga on a PAL television could actually have 32 lines I think?


  Up to Main Index                             Up to Journal for April, 2016