Another 14 days vanished quickly as hell.

Read what happened in the imag codebase in the last 14 days, in this 19th iteration on whats coming up in imag, the text based personal information management suite for the commandline.

imag is a personal information management suite for the commandline. Its target audience are commandline- and power-users. It does not reimplement personal information management (PIM) aspects, but re-uses existing tools and standards to be an addition to an existing workflow, so one does not have to learn a new tool before beeing productive again. Some simple PIM aspects are implemented as imag modules, though. It gives the user the power to connect data from different existing tools and add meta-information to these connections, so one can do data-mining on PIM data.

The past

We have more than 150 stars now! Wow!

Besides that we had really not that much progress in the last 14 days. My masters degree keeps me busy all day long and I really have a hard time with all the things I have to do for my courses, so progress slows down way more than I expected. But I can't change that, so ...

PRs merged/closed in the last 14 days

• 821 imported commits from our v0.2.0 release branch into the master branch.
• 822 updates our dependencies. Luckily this worked without too much hassle. Still, we had some problems while updating. We only had to update a method from itertools which was removed. We also had to update task-hookrs as both imag and task-hookrs depend on uuid and they really should depend on the same version of uuid, so I updated task-hookrs to the latest uuid, which in fact included some code removal in the codebase of task-hookrs. This was because uuid depends (and we also need it) on serde, which was update from 0.7.* to 0.8.*. As serde included some new awesome things, we were able to remove some code in task-hookrs.
• 823
• 827 implements PartialEq on StoreId, which is a really neat improvement in my opinion. We derive()d it before, but we now only compare the local part of the StoreId object (read: The store-part, not the path to the store itself, which could be absent sometimes, causing weird bugs).
• 828
• 829
• 831

Also, two really old PRs were closed. I do not list older PRs normally, but these two are really noteworthy:

• 624 included cargo workspace support in our build setup. I'm not sure it works the way I expected it to, as (for example) clap gets rebuild several times... but at least cargo doesn't yell at us anymore, so I included it.
• 656 sets the codegen units for rustc to 2. I hope we get slightly better build times on travis from that.

PRs opened in the last 14 days and not yet closed

• 824
• 826 bakes in shell completion generation for all the imag-* tools
• 832 – now, this is a really great PR from mario-kr. Mario found a way to build shell completion for all the imag tools, starting at the imag binary itself. I did not even think about this as solution, but it works and I'm willing to merge this as soon as Mario did some cleanup work in the PR. What he did is: He include()d all ui.rs files, where we (more or less by accident) always used the same function name to build the clap:App: build_ui(App) -> App. He includes these source files via a neat macro as sub modules and is then able to call all these build_ui functions to build a App object (with subcommands for each imag module). From that App object, he can retrieve the bash/fish/zsh completion (at build time). This is awesome!
• 833

Issues opened and already closed

As far as I see, we had no issues opened in the last 14 days that were also closed within theses two weeks.

Maybe in the next iteration again.

The future

Lets have a quick look what the future might bring us in the imag codebase.

Issues opened and not yet closed

• 830 was our only issue we opened in the last 14 days. It wants a rewrite of all the *.sh scripts we use to test binaries. These scripts really should be rewritten in Rust, we now have the ability to do tests in-memory, so there shouldn't be any issues with implementing these things in Rust. It is really a trivial task (not for a complete rust beginner IMO), so I'll not start implementing this soon, so others can step up.

Other things

As said above, I have a lot to do for my masters degree, so I cannot tell how much we can get done in the next two weeks. I'd love to see some progress with the email module, so we can merge this one at least, but I cannot promise it, sadly.

This does not mean I'm not interested in imag anymore. I'm interested even more in it. I just do not have enough time at the moment to do all the things I want to do.

tags: #linux #open source #programming #rust #software #tools #imag