So: this Android thing...

Y'know, one day I'm going to post regularly. When that happens, watch out for snowballs from the sun.

Anyway, I've been quietly porting Android 2.2 to one of the dev boards we have lying around recently

CELF Embedded Linux Conference Europe

I shall be at the Embedded Linux Conference in Cambridge next week, on Wednesday and Thursday. On Thursday I shall be sitting at a desk in the Technical Showcase session between 12:35 and 14:30 (hmm, I assume there's some time for lunch in there as well), available to talk about KBUS, muddle and tstools.

I'm assuming my badge will say "Tony Ibbs" rather than "Tibs"...

Muddle FAQ: Efficient minimal rebuilds

"I've made a change deep within some package. How do I perform an efficient minimal rebuild?"

Coming to muddle from a mostly make-driven world, I really wanted to be able to stand at the top of a tree, type make and have it rebuild only what has changed. Unfortunately, life isn't as simple as that: it only works properly if package dependencies are correctly defined. This sometimes seems to be beyond individual package developers with their own software, let alone complicated inter-package dependencies, so clearly we need a different plan.

Pretty pictures

I keep meaning to write the "introduction to muddle labels" article, and I keep not having time.

I did, however, get round to drawing some diagrams (using OmniGraffle, which is really good). So it is probably worth putting them somewhere that other people can see them.

"with Directory" makes testing easier

One of the problems with writing tests for muddle was finding a clean way to write them in Python.
Testing muddle involves a lot of directory creation and moving between directories. Using os.chdir() and friends doesn't lead to easily readable code, and there is always the problem of forgetting to move back out of a particular directory.
My first attempt to make this easier was to write simple pushd() and popd() functions, which maintained a stack of directories. This was a little better, but still didn't solve the "forgetting" problem.
Of course, the solution is obvious -- use with.

New verson of muddle

Today I have merged my development branch of muddle back into the trunk. This is the same version of muddle that I was using as "m3" in previous posts. There are a few new commands, but on the whole this is a change for maintainability, and progress towards muddle3, rather than user features.

See the main muddle page (http://code.google.com/p/muddle/) for information on new tags and branches.