Status update, September 2019

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+---
+layout: post
+title: Status update, September 2019
+tags: ["status update"]
+---
+
+Finally home again after a long series of travels! I spent almost a month in
+Japan, then visited my sister's new home in Hawaii on the way eastwards, then
+some old friends in Seattle, and finally after 5½ long weeks, it's home sweet
+home here in Philadelphia. At least until I leave for
+[XDC](https://xdc2019.x.org/) in Montreal 2 weeks from now. Someday I'll have
+some rest... throughout all of these wild travels, I've been hard at work on my
+free software projects. Let's get started with this month's status update!
+
+![](https://sr.ht/iuDE.jpg)
+
+<p style="text-align: center">
+  <small>Great view from a hike on O'ahu</small>
+</p>
+
+First, Wayland news. I'm happy to share with you that the Wayland book is now
+more than halfway complete, and I've made the drafts available online for a
+discounted price: [The Wayland Protocol](https://wayland-book.com). Thanks to
+all of my collaborators and readers who volunteered to provide feedback! There's
+more Wayland-related news still, as this month marked the release of [sway
+1.2][sway changelog] and [wlroots 0.7.0][wlr changelog]. I like this release
+because it's light on new features - showing that sway is maturing into a stable
+and reliable Wayland desktop. The features which were added are subtle and serve
+to improve sway's status as a member of the broader ecosystem - sway 1.2
+supports the new [layer shell support in the MATE panel][mate panel], and the
+same improvements are already helping with the development of other software.
+
+[sway changelog]: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/releases/tag/1.2
+[wlr changelog]: https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/releases/tag/0.7.0
+[mate panel]: https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-panel/pull/991
+
+[![Screenshot of MATE panel running on sway](https://sr.ht/9Oro.png)](https://sr.ht/9Oro.png)
+
+<p style="text-align: center">
+  <small>Rest assured, the weird alignment issues were fixed</small>
+</p>
+
+On the topic of [aerc](https://aerc-mail.org), I still haven't gotten around to
+that write-up responding to [Greg KH's post][gregkh]... but I will. Travels have
+made it difficult to sit down for a while and do some serious long-term project
+planning. Regardless, the current plans have still been being executed well.
+Notmuch support continues to improve thanks to Reto Brunner's help, completions
+are improving throughout, and heaps of little features - signatures, unread
+message counts, :prompt, forward-as-attachment - are now supported.
+
+[gregkh]: http://www.kroah.com/log/blog/2019/08/14/patch-workflow-with-mutt-2019/
+
+I also spent some time this month working on Simon Ser's
+[mrsh](https://mrsh.sh). I cleaned up call frames, implemented the `return`
+builtin, finished the `pwd` builtin, improved readline support, fleshed out job
+control, and made many other small improvements. With mrsh nearing completion,
+I've started up another project: [ctools][ctools]. This provides the rest of the
+POSIX commands required of a standard scripting environment (it replaces
+coreutils or busybox). I'm taking this one pretty seriously from the start -
+every command has full POSIX.1-2017 support with a conformance test and a man
+page, in one C source file and no dependencies. If you're looking for a good
+afternoon project (or weekend, for some utilities), how about picking up your
+favorite [POSIX](https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/) tool and
+sending along an implementation?
+
+[![Screenshot of ctools test suite](https://sr.ht/DSxS.png)](https://builds.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/job/88955)
+
+[ctools]: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/ctools
+
+With these projects, along with ~mcf's [cproc](https://git.sr.ht/~mcf/cproc),
+we're starting to see a simple and elegant operating system come together -
+exactly the kind I wish we already had. To track our progress towards this goal,
+I've put up [arewesimpleyet.org](https://arewesimpleyet.org). A day may soon
+come when computers become the again elegant and simple tools they were always
+meant to be! At least if we assume "within a few decades" as a valid definition
+of "soon".
+
+To cover SourceHut news briefly: we hit 10,000 users this month! And it's
+continued to grow since, up to 10,649 users at the time of writing. On the
+subject of feature development, with Denis Laxalde's help we're starting to put
+together a Debian repository for installing the services on Debian hosts. On
+todo.sr.ht, users without accounts can now create and comment on tickets via
+email. I also redesigned [sourcehut.org](https://sourcehut.org), adding a blog
+with a greater breadth of topics than we'll see on the sr.ht-announce mailing
+list.
+
+That's all for this month! I enjoyed my vacation and some much needed time away
+from work... though for me a "day off" is a day where I write less than 1,000
+lines of code. Thank you again for your support - it means the world to me. I'll
+see you next month!
+
+![](https://sr.ht/1cuE.jpg)
+
+<p style="text-align: center">
+  <small>Had the best seats at a concert in Tokyo!</small>
+</p>