[plug] Open Soruce Software

[Jim Householder]

Adrian Chadd wrote:
> 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.
> 
Thanks.  I'll see what I can do.

Jim