pm2ml Release

I sometimes notice strange download errors with pacman2aria2, especially when using powerpill-light. It seems that random files are occasionally duplicated in the download list and this causes aria2c to fail with one of the copies marked as incomplete. I’ve checked it multiple times and the input list generated by pacman2aria is fine. I suspect that the problem may be a bug in aria2c’s input file, which might not be meant to handle so many URLs. I haven’t ruled out a bug in pacman2aria2 either.

Regardless of the cause, the problem annoyed me enough to write a metalink generator for pacman downloads. This should be a good replacement for pacman2aria2 with the added bonus of making it easier to download pacman files for one computer on another computer (it can generate metalinks for database files and AUR packages).

I give you pm2ml (pacman2metalink).

Simplicity

The basic functionality of Xac is to convert a hierarchy of markdown files into a static website. There are other tools that do this without the extra features that Xac supports. One of them, Markdown Tree, was recently posted on the Arch Linux forum. It turns out that it’s written in just 69 lines of Ruby. Of course, that made me wonder just how simple you could make a markdown-to-html site generator. I came up with mdcms.sh:

##!/bin/bash
len=${#1}
IFS="
"
for foo in $(find "$1" -type f); do
  bar="${2%/}/${foo:$len}"
  mkdir -p "${bar%/*}"
  pandoc -f markdown -t html -s -o "${bar%.*}".html "$foo"
done

Hmmm, it seems that source-highlight is doubling comment-hashes… I’ll have to look into that.

It also seems that code gets jumbled in the atom feed. At some point in the probably distant future I’ll try to replace xml.dom.minidom with another implementation. In the meantime, visit the webpage if you’re reading this via a feedreader.

Usage

mdcms.sh <source directory> <output directory>

where <source directory> contains a hierarchy of markdown files and <output directory> is where you want the static pages to appear. Just tweak the pandoc arguments as required.

Site Map

I have added a graph of the site in various formats here. I don’t know if it will be very useful, but I thought it was interesting. I may remove it later.

There are some notes about it on the main page too.

A new locale.

I have been using a custom locale for about half a year now because I prefer ISO and POSIX standards.¹ I had intended to release it a while ago, but the I had to wait until I fixed my update scripts and by that time I had forgotten about it.

I found it again today so here it is: en_XX@POSIX.

Synclinks Released

Another tool is born: synclinks

2 new repos added

With the recent release of synclinks and lsgrp, I have added two new repos for compiled packages: xyne-x86_64 and xyne-i686.

You can find more information on the repo page