[plug] Open Soruce Software

[Adrian Chadd]

On Sat, Oct 14, 2006, Jim Householder wrote:
> Hi
> 
> We all place great value on Open Source, but how many of us take 
> advantage of it?  It's main value to most would be that because it's 
> open, if there is a problem or something sneaky going on, it can be 
> discovered and/or fixed.

I try to. You'll find plenty of hackers on this list who try to too.

> I've always found the output of du to be messy.  In the past I've used 
> an emacs function to massage the output, but yesterday I decided to try 
> changing du to work the way I wanted it to.  My version, based on 
> coreutils-5.97-1.2, can display directory sizes right-justified in a 
> fixed-width field (no tabs) and selectively output lines where the size 
> is less than a maximum or greater than a minimum.

Woo.

> There is probably at least one (and probably more) way to do this 
> already, but it was an interesting exercise.

If it works..

> As this was done for my own use, the code needs cleaning up a bit if 
> anyone is interested.  I need to learn the 'proper' way of distributing 
> changes...

There's a few ways, all of which can be done concurrently:

* Put them on your personal webpage as a series of diffs, or a source 
  repository of your 'custom' utilities for others to look at
* Send the diffs to the caretaker/project head
* Send the diffs to the development and/or users list saying "I had this
  niggling issue with this, here's my patch." Thats taken as a thousand
  times better than just niggling about things not being "Your way".
* Be prepared to have people whinge at the way you've done it or not
  done it. don't take it too personally.

But, good show! Its nice to see people taking advantage of the open part
of open source.



Adrian