DEV Community: Montegasppα Cacilhας

Please Install It for Me

Montegasppα Cacilhας — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 21:55:29 +0000

Original post from Kodumaro.

Something I consider really amazing is the package management idea, used by open source projects and cannibalised by big techs.

I’m not talking about programming languages and frameworks, I’m talking about operating system package management. It’s an incredibly good idea.

You can take any GNU/Linux, BSD, or other open source operating system, and there you’ll find a package manager.

The idea is so good that proprietary systems started to imitate, by will or not: Scoop, Homebrew, and so on.

It has only a tiny-tiny issue: every package manager has its own user interface.

It’s actually quite annoying to remember which are the command line parameters for each system. Even through the most similar operating systems, such as GNU/Linux distros, the differences between managers are big.

Take Pacman and APT, by instance.

How to install a package in an Arch Linux based system?

pacman -S $package_name

And in a Debian GNU/Linux based system?

apt install $package_name

I took the two most different tools, but the slightly different ones are even worse, ’cause you have to keep remember tiny variations to avoid big mistakes.

Enter the universal package managers

Some people had the idea of creating universal package managers, in order to put some order to that chaos.

So you may trip over Flatpak, AppImage, or, my favourite, UPT.

UPT is a real platform-agnostic package manager. I started using it some time ago, and never stopped (till now).

It’s enough reliable and stable. If you’re using virtually any Linux distro, a BSD distro, macOS with Homebrew, or Windows with a package manager, I highly recommend it.

UPT doesn’t replace the system package manager, it works on top of it.

It works until it doesn’t

Just like anything else, UPT is no bed of roses.

I was using UPT in association to Rua, then Yay.

When I was still using Rua, I’d never requested UPT to supported it, after the Math, Rua isn’t that popular tool.

However, when I migrated to Yay, I started reckoning it makes no sense to use two different package manages since Yay is a well known and popular tool.

I took a look at UPT’s code, and I find it easy to extend it to support Yay, so I did it, and I uploaded a pull request.

After a copple of weeks, my pull request kept being ignored. That upset me.

Thereat I took a decision of creating my own demi-universal package manager.

UPT Please had born (to die premature)

I started using the UPT fork I’ve created for my pull request, and performed some changes in order to differentiate it from UPT, but I didn’t like it.

UPT code is quite good, but it uses some approaches which I don’t like (they aren’t wrong, it’s a personal taste), and if I kept it that way, I would be in trouble supporting it.

Please Installer at last

So I rewrote it from scratch. My first goal was to reproduce as much as possible UPT features I had used, so I did it.

Now I have a beta version working, and I’m using it in my systems.

I need more people using though. The more people uses it, the more stable and reliable I’ll be able to make it.

Installation

Please Installer requires the nightly version of Rust – and it won’t probable change. While I’m writing this, the 2024-09-01 version works fine.

Therefore use the package manager of your system to install rustup, then run:

rustup toolchain install nightly-2024-09-01

Install Please Install:

cargo +nightly-2024-09-01 install please-install

If you dare, you may wanna install the development version:

cargo +nightly-2024-09-01 install please-install --git=https://github.com/cacilhas/please.git

Please installer supports a configuration file, $HOME/.config/please.toml. It’s not required, but recommended. I suggest the following initial content:

su = true

[list]
pager = "bat --file-name='installed packages'"

[search]
pager = "bat --file-name='search $args'"

Note that it requires bat.

Since I use Arch Linux, btw, with Yay, my personal settings are:

assume-yes = true
vendor = "yay"

[remove]
su = true

[list]
pager = "bat --file-name='installed packages'"

[search]
pager = "bat --file-name='search $args'"

My son uses Flatpak, and the his settings are:

vendor = "flatpak"

[list]
pager = "bat --file-name='installed packages'"

[search]
pager = "bat --file-name='search $args'"

So you can update your system:

please update

Using Please Installer

Let’s find and install Brave Browser:

please search brave-browser

Using Yay, for me it returned the package chaotic-aur/brave-bin – dependenting on your system, the package name may be completely different.

So install it:

please install chaotic-aur/brave-bin

And that’s it.

In order to upgrade it:

please upgrade brave-bin

And to remove it:

please remove brave-bin

List of subcommands:

please help

Next goals

I still brought the overall approach from UPT code to Please Installer , and now I realised it won’t stand. I need to rewrite the code again 🙁 to make it mantainable.

I have plans to use more traits and put system-bought features into dedicated modules that can be easily disabled in compiling time.

I wanna create a subcommand to help users to set their installation as well, and also implement an built-in pager.

There’s a lot to do, it’s gonna take some time to get to the point I want, but I expect to count on community to help testing and using it.

Let’s see what comes next…

Career Tips

Montegasppα Cacilhας — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 13:50:52 +0000

Originally published on ℳontegasppα And Giulia C.’S Thoughts.

Excuse my lack of modesty, but I’m pretty good at what I do. I’m not even close to the best though, but I’m way above average. It’s due to what I’ve learned over more than 20 years of work experience, and I’d like to share some of the simpler and more efficient tips I got.

Affection

Don’t fall in love with technology and, even more important, don’t get attached to your code.

The code you wrote is NOT your son – neither your boyfriend, nor your girlfriend, nor your mother, nor whatelse. Your code is a by-product of turning coffee into shit, a “stuff.” And just like many stuff, it’s meant to be used, not loved.

Look at your code as a necessary evil to be discarded as soon as it’s no longer needed.

Do the same facing technologies: programming languages, frameworks, engines, and even methodologies are tools, not rules. Use them wisely, discard each one when you can.

Design

Avoid writing code. Design it first.

Of course you can prospect by coding, however discard it when you head the final code, keep only the cleanest one.

My current job is to find value by just deleting code, and I have virtually implemented features by deleting code!

How is it possible?

Imagine a TV that isn’t working. It’s plugged to an adapter… which is plugged to another adapter… which is plugged to a third one! The last one is plugged to an extension. Than you look at that, remove the adapters, and plug the TV electrical connector directly to the extension, and voilà! The TV magically turns on!

That’s pretty much what I’ve been doing, but why?

Because people don’t design. They simply write random code like typing monkeys, hoping something will eventually work.

It leads us to the next topic.

Rely but don’t trust

Use methodologies, but don’t let methodologies use you.

Rely on TDD, TDD, SOLID, DDD, CDD, AOP, ADT, but always revisit the concepts and adapt them to your real-world needs.

Conformism

Never ever be fully satisfied by yourself. I never know enough, I’m always looking for the next subject or getting deeper in something I’ve learned, so you should too.

Those are the tips I have for you today.

Knowing Mathematics

Montegasppα Cacilhας — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 16:30:03 +0000

Consider the following expression:

If you’re not a Mathematician, Physicist, Astronomer, or anything in hard sciences, you are not obliged to know how to solve it – no one has taught you it at school.

However, if I give you the required tools in this very post, and you still can’t solve it by using school algebra, it means you have no fitness for Exact Sciences – which is okay, that’s nothing wrong; it doesn’t make you worse or better than anyone else, maybe you got aptitude for something else.

But we can call WRONG people deeply debating about Physics, Astrophysics, Astronomy, Chemistry, and even Math sometimes, like they were misunderstood geniuses. (Yeah… I’m writing this post ’cause I’m fed up with those people.) 😖

No, kid! You aren’t a new “Einstein,” able to understand things that no expert can. It’s just the Dunning-Kruger effect preventing you from realising you haven’t gotten even the basics.

By the way, here are all the tools you need to solve the expression above:

Only school algebra and these definitions are enough to reach the result; if you still need to google it or to refer to Wolfram Alpha, Exact Sciences aren’t for you.

I must reiterate: that doesn’t mean you are less than anyone! Maybe you fit into Social Sciences! Just in the same way some Exact Sciences people are fully witless when it comes to politics and other social subjects. Just don’t try to refute E² = (mc²)² + (pc)² if you didn’t get it.

Original post at ℳontegasppα And Giulia C.’S Thoughts.

Universal Package-management Tool

Montegasppα Cacilhας — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 17:50:15 +0000

As I told in another article, I decided not to keep writing for It’s FOSS, due to a bunch of unpleasant events I’m not discussing here (out of scope).

Therefore I decided to re-release those articles here in DEV.to. 🥰

This article was originally published as UPT: Universal Package Management Tool for Linux, but with a lotta changes I hadn’t authorised. Here’s the original version, with only ONE change I had agreed to.

Universal Package-management Tool

Introduction

The world of software packages on Linux and other Unix-based systems is quite a savannah: each system has its own singular package management approach, making life a hell for those who have to deal with multiple platforms.

There are Pacman for Arch Linux and derivatives, Alpine Package Keeper (a.k.a. APK), Advanced Package Tool (a.k.a. Apt) for Debian GNU/Linux and derivatives, Aptitude, a front-end for APT, Snapcraft for Ubuntu and derivatives, Yellowdog Updater Modified (a.k.a. Yum) for RPM-based systems, Slackpkg for Slackware, Emerge for Gentoo, the guix command on Guix, and nix-env on NixOS, among others, notta mention pkg on FreeBSD, Homebrew for macOS, and Scoop for Windows. Every one of those has its own way of management, forcing you to learn different ways to do the same thing.

In brief, it’s really a mess… or is it?

Enter UPT

A developer called sigoden has created a universal tool called Universal Package-management Tool, or UPT for short, able to put things together in this jungle. Once you have it installed, you won’t need to learn another package management’s lifestyle again.

In order to install UPT, I recommend to install the rustup package for your system – GNU/Linux systems usually have a rustup package available from their default package manager:

# On Debian GNU/Linux and derivatives:
sudo apt install gcc make rustup

# On Arch Linux and derivatives:
sudo packman -S gcc make rustup

# On Alpine:
apk add gcc make rustup
rustup-init
source ~/.cargo/env

# On RPM-based systems:
sudo yum install gcc make rustup

# On macOS with Homebrew (not Linux, obviously)
brew install clang make rustup

Note: I use clang instead of gcc, and it works as well for me, you’re just gonna need to set your CC and CPP environment variables, if you wish, to clang and clang++ -E respectively.

After installing rustup, don’t forget to add $HOME/.cargo/bin to your PATH. If you’re using Bash as shell (usually the default shell), you have to add the following line to ~/.bash_profile:

export PATH $HOME/.cargo/bin:$PATH

If your shell is Zsh, you can add the very same line above to ~/.zshrc instead. Another famous shell is FishShell, if you’re using it, create a file called ~/.config/fish/conf.d/rust.fish with the following contents:

#!fish

begin
    set -l cargo_home $HOME/.cargo
    path is $cargo_home/bin
    and set -p PATH $cargo_home/bin
end

Don’t forget to reload the shell.

Now you can install the upt command tool:

rustup default stable
cargo install upt

All set! Now you have a single package management interface you can use across your systems.

Using UPT

Updating the package manager:

sudo upt update

Installing clang:

sudo upt install clang

Upgrading GCC:

sudo upt upgrade gcc

Upgrading all installed packages:

sudo upt upgrade

Removing a package (e.g. emacs):

sudo upt remove emacs

Searching for a package (e.g. vtk):

upt search vtk

Caveats

Unfortunately, although the package manager is the same across different systems, it’s still just a front-end for each system default package manager, which means package names are still the same used by each distro, you can’t use a single package name for different systems.

For instance, if you want to install the Python development package, you’ll need different packages for different systems:

# On Alpine, Debian GNU/Linux, and derivatives
sudo upt install python3-dev

# On RPM-based systems:
sudo upt install python3-devel

# On Arch Linux
sudo upt install python

You’ll have to figure out the name of the package you want for each system – upt search is your friend. 😉

Yet Another Way to Install AUR packages

Montegasppα Cacilhας — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 13:38:29 +0000

I’ve been writing some articles for It’s FOSS online magazine. The reviewer usually performs some changes before publishing the article, which I haven’t cared though, ’cause they are mostly just aesthetic.

However, in my last article, with the best intention (I believe), the reviewer decided to include some paragraphs I didn’t write, in order to “explain” things. The issue is that the reviewer doesn’t master the subject, which I do, and wrote some wrong information in my name without consulting me.

I think the only way to clean my name from that misinformation is publishing the original article by myself.

So here is it.

Yet Another Way to Install AUR packages

Introduction

Arch Linux is the spiritual heir of Slackware, the oldest distro still in the race.

Arch Linux is not only A rolling release distro, but THE Rolling Release Distro by right. However, its list of official packages can be considered a bit restrictive.

Even keeping the most recent working versions of each package, there are only very well-known and fully reliable applications – which, on the one hand, it’s very secure, but on the other, it can be annoyingly limited.

Herefore AUR comes to the stage.

AUR

AUR, Arch User Repository, is a community-oriented repository where Arch Linux users can share their own packages.

Note: Never trust AUR packages, unless you already know them. Any sort of software can make it into the repo, so you should never blindly trust AUR packages. Do your research before installing anything.

You’re probably gonna find that obscure app you’ve been looking for in weeks there in AUR.

But, how to install a package from AUR?

Hands on

The way to install a package from AUR is downloading the package, changing the working directory to the package root, and running:

makepkg -si

Dreadfully, innit?

Hold your horses though! There’s no need for panic, ’cause there are a bunch of tools that make your AUR life easier.

The most used AUR installer is yay, Yet Another Yogurt. yay follows the very same API as Pacman, which is very convenient for Arch Linux users: you don’t need to learn a new API for managing AUR packages.

Other alternatives are Paru, Yaourt (currently removed from AUR), and pikaur, but none of these presents any notable advantage over yay.

Yet yet another tool

Okay, since yay is enough a tool, we don’t need another one, okey dokey, end of story, right?

Nope… 😁

I wouldn’t be writing this article if I didn’t have an exciting alternative to show you!

Do you remember our UPT article? If so, I’m considering you are that kind of person that rather stick to a common interface than using a different one for each system, and you’re probably using UPT already, which interface is way more similar to Apt or Homebrew than to Pacman.

With it in mind, I guess you’d also prefer an AUR installer with a similar UPT interface, am I right?

It exists and it’s called RUA.

RUA is a build tool for AUR, just like yay, but with an interface similar to UPT. So you use mnemonic sub-commands like install, upgrade, and search instead of -S, -U, -Syu, -R, -Q, and so on.

Installing RUA

It’s necessary to install some dependencies so one can install RUA:

sudo pacman -S --needed --asdeps git base-devel bubblewrap-suid libseccomp xz shellcheck rustup
sudo rustup install stable

Note: in the example above, I used Pacman, but you could use UPT as well.

Like UPT, RUA is a tool made in Rust, and it can be easily installed by cargo:

rustup default stable
cargo install rua

Note: DO NOT install RUA as root, it’s intended to be performed ONLY as a sudoer, not directly by root.

Using RUA

Let’s search for Brave Browser and install it:

rua search brave
rua install brave-bin

Considering the happy flow, you can answer most of the questions:

m ([M]=accept/merge)
o ([O]=ok, use package and [O]=ok, proceed)
s (Enter S to ‘sudo’ install it)
y (any question that ask for a “yes”)

Now I decided not to keep it, so let’s uninstall it using UPT:

upt remove brave-bin

Upgrading packages

Pacman and UPT have no information about AUR packages’ source for upgrade! Nevertheless you can use RUA itself to upgrade them:

# The following command updates all packages installed by rua
rua upgrade

Safety

When building packages, RUA uses the following filesystem isolation:

Build directory is mounted read-write.
Files "$GNUPGHOME"/pubring.kbx and "$GNUPGHOME"/pubring.gpg are mounted read-only (if exists). This allows signature verification to work.
The rest of ~ is not visible to the build process, mounted under tmpfs.
/tmp and /dev and /proc are re-mounted with empty tmpfs, devtmpfs and procfs accordingly.
The rest of / is mounted read-only.
You can whitelist/add your mount points by configuring wrap_args. See example in ~/.config/rua/.system/wrap_args.sh.example.

All builds are run in a namespace jail, with seccomp enabled and user, ipc, pid, uts, and cgroup being unshared by default.

Conclusion

If you feel comfortable with UPT, you can use the pair UPT+RUA to manage all your packages, both official and AUR.

A list of the RUA’s full capabilities can be obtained from the command:

rua --help

It’s FOSS

Montegasppα Cacilhας — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 17:47:56 +0000

I started writing as external stackholder for It’s FOSS, my first article is already released, there are more to come.

Unfortunately that means I won’t be able to keep writing for DEV.to so frequently, ’cause I couldn’t simply replicate the articles here, as I’ve been doing for Kodumaro and Functional Works (I haven’t asked permission for that).

Nonetheless the articles for It’s FOSS have some little restrictions, which limits what and how I might write or not. Therefore I’m intending to keep writing for DEV.to those subjects that aren’t of interest to It’s FOSS.

Vídeo de apresentação

Montegasppα Cacilhας — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 18:29:00 +0000

Nosso primeiro vídeo já está no ar!

Writing Games

Montegasppα Cacilhας — Sat, 10 Jun 2023 18:14:54 +0000

I’m simply fascinated by indie game development. It’s free from a bunch of programming concerns, and allows us to explore new horizons.

I’m tired of development risks due to money – always money! Nothing is more important in our Capitalist system than money, not culture, not even human lives; money is in the society’s kernel, and it leads to a lotta stress. I’m really tired of it.

I’d really take a way out if I find it, and indie game development seems to be a promising one. Anyway it had never been for me.

Nevertheless, I’ve been using game development for study and to keep my mind sharp since ever.

Said that, let’s get into some side projects I’ve been playing around with. I’m not getting into many details, otherwise I couldn’t quote them all. If you’re looking for more detail about any game or code here, leave a comment. 😉

Itch.io

IMHO, Itch.io is the best game release platform, and I’ve been using it as my personal showcase. Every game we’re talking about in this post you can find there.

Scratch games

I’m talking about Scratch first to sweep it away, ’cause Scratch earns its own whole post.

I think Scratch is a great sandbox to test concepts and the place for sharing ideas.

I have a Scratch project called Casual Funny Games, and we can get into it in another post. Even on Itch.io I have a page for it.

TIC-80 games

I love fantasy consoles, and my favourite is TIC-80: it has an old home computer feeling which no other console manages to emulate. Therefore I recommend purchasing its payed version.

I’ve published some TIC-80 games of my own, all of them developed using Moonscript:

Sokoban is a classic among classics! I literally copied every detail from the MSX implementation.
Arkanoid NG is my TIC-80 implementation of the classic Arkanoid, one of the first breakout games.
Missile Command is a clone of the Atari’s same-title shoot’em up game. Don’t let missiles destroy your builds!
Kodumaro Tetris: who doesn’t known the Russian Tetris!? In here I took care of the presentation.

I don’t wanna talk about this one… 😒

Godot Engine games

I reckon Godot Engine is the best balanced game engine available:

Unity 3D is easy and widely used, but lacks security; I wouldn’t recommend.
Unreal Engine is the most powerful, but requires too many hardware resources both to develop and to play games.
UPBGE is an eternal doubt.
In GDevelop, simple things become a challenge to be achieved.
Construct3 and Game Maker are more expensive than they actually deliver, as well as some many others.
Scratch aims for Education, not commercial purposes.

I got some Godot games I’ve been working on:

Standstill: a tower-defence game. I created it to test Kenney’s assets, which are amazing. This is one of my games I’m proud of.
Catcheese is a simple maze game based on CuteMaze.
Fairy Tale intends to be an immersive adventure game, but I’ve miserably failed. It’s still funny though. 😬
Kodumaro Catch Game is what it says: a catch game. More precisely a 1D catch game (only moves side to side). I made the game in about one hour and then I spent my free time during two days trying to catch smoke. It is unnecessarily heavyweight, but have some cool details.

Raylib games

If you need performance, I recommend Raylib with Rust.

Raylib is exceptional for 2D games. Not that good for 3D, but still gets the job done.

Nanpurë is a colourful sudoku – instead of numbers, you got colours.
Nonogram is a random implementation for nonogram. It doesn’t form meaningful pictures, but has the advantage to be able to be played forever.

I have a lot of other Rust applications, but only these two games.

GDevelop games

I couldn’t leave GDevelop out. It is nothing its authors claim it is:

It’s not easy.
It’s not no-code.
It’s not RAD.

Even so it’s really amusing, I usually have a lotta good time developing in GDevelop.

I used to have a GDevelop game in Itch.io, Get Out!, however it has a very sad story: its code wasn’t published to any remote repository, and my hard disk got fried, so I lost the whole code. 😭

It’s still published, but I cannot do any changes anymore.

Do you like any of those games? Want any more details? Code? Development process? Leave a comment!

Original post: Kodumaro.

People are haters

Montegasppα Cacilhας — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 03:36:54 +0000

My most liked posts:

A Lovecraftian Game

Montegasppα Cacilhας — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 13:55:48 +0000

From the original at Kodumaro.

A platform I simply love is Scratch. You can build different kinds of application using a visual programming based on drag’n’drop blocks.

Recently I’ve been working on a Lovecraftian game quite simple, where you just need to find a key using a sensor, while running away from an oni-style demon. I call it “Must Find the Key to Escape” (not the most creative name, I know).

I based the code on a @griffpatch’s ray-casting series, and a simple sound tutorial from The STEAMist.

You can play the game at Itch.io.

A MiniTron In 47 Lines

Montegasppα Cacilhας — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 01:58:06 +0000

Original from Kodumaro.

This is a sample code for learning, written in Moonscript for TIC-80:

-- title:   MiniTron
-- author:  Montegasppa <batalema@cacilhas.info>
-- desc:    A very spartan Tron implementation
-- license: 3-Clause BSD
-- version: 0.1
-- script:  moon
export ^
local  *

local cycle, dir, tic, score

size = 2

move = ->
  with cycle
    next = switch dir
      when 0
        x: .x, y: .y-size
      when 1
        x: .x, y: .y+size
      when 2
        x: .x-size, y: .y
      when 3
        x: .x+size, y: .y
    reset! if pix(next.x, next.y) != 0
    rect .x, .y, size, size, 9
    cycle = next
  score += 1

BOOT = ->
  cycle = x: 120, y: 68
  dir, tic, score = 3, 0, 0
  cls!
  rectb 0, 0, 240, 136, 4
  rectb 1, 1, 238, 134, 4

TIC = ->
  poke 0x3ffb, 0
  rect cycle.x, cycle.y, size, size, 3
  for i = 0, 3 do dir = i if btn i
  tic += 1
  if tic == 10
    move!
    tic = 0

OVR = ->
  print "Score: #{score}", 3, 128, 3, false, 1, true

Download the card!

Kodumaro is going Mastodon!

Montegasppα Cacilhας — Thu, 22 Dec 2022 21:00:09 +0000

Read the origin at Kodumaro.

Kodumaro Twitter account has been deactivated, and we’re going Mastodon now!

Mastodon is a microblog kinda like Twitter. Its head difference from Twitter though is that Mastodon is federated, it means, there’s no central service. There are lots of servers talking to each other, each one following its own rules, so nobody can own the network.

We’d like to invite you to get in. You can do it by signing up one of the servers listed here.

I created my personal account at Mas.to, but I believe FOSStodon could be a good choise as well.

You can find us searching for @kodumaro@social.sndevs.com.