Category Archives: Development

Development

Food Calendar

2 Comments

MatkalendernFacing the every day problem with what to eat, planning and shopping food for the family I took the familiar route: I wrote a web site (the site is in Swedish!) and service for it to ease this boring work!

Using this site, you enter the recipes of the dishes you tend to eat, you assign meals to days and then you can get the site to produce a nice and handy shopping list of all the ingredients that the planned meals require.

With multiple users, you can bookmark other users’ recipes to avoid having to enter them yourself. With top-lists and statistics you can see what meals you plan to eat the most and the least and so on. It actually works pretty neat. We have a set of user logins handed out as well, but I don’t think very many people other than me and my wife actually use it…

It still has lots of room for improvements to make it even easier to plan and to make the grocery store shopping list easier and quicker to deal with, but it scratches my itch already and I’m improving it slowly over time. I started the development of this in early 2006 and we’ve been using it in my family for well over a year now.

cURL and libcurl, Development, Open Source

ABI Breakage

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Domenico Andreoli, the Debian curl and libcurl maintainer posted to the curl-library list about the recent libcurl soname bump and the related issue of ABI breakage.

I responded, explaining my view on why the soname bump from 3 to 4 was valid, but I’ve also gone back in my mail archives and checked out a private discussion I had with Bjorn Reese over this subject a long time ago and I feel it is about time it hits the air.

An ABI breakage occurs when one or more of the following changes are made

Functions:

  • Change function names
  • Remove existing functions
  • Change parameters
  • Change behavior
  • Change undefined behavior
  • Add dependence on other functions (e.g. A() must be called before B())

Data structures:

  • Change the order of elements
  • Add elements
  • Remove elements
  • Change the data type or size
  • Change alignment
  • Change element values (e.g. change bits in flag variables)

Global variables:

  • Change variable names or types
  • Remove variables

Update: Dan Fandrich posted on the curl-library list and mentioned Mike Hearn’s great related page: Writing shared libraries.