It's here! Perl inxi, first official release. So many changes, really too many
to list.
But here's a few:
1. of course, full rewrite to Perl 5.x. Supports as old as 5.008, as new as current.
2. Better line length nandlers. Fully dynamic, robust, shrinks and expands to fit
either taste or viewport.
3. Long options for all options now, plus of course the short options everyone
is used to.
4. New options: --usb; --slots (pci slot report); --sleep (change cpu sleep time);
and many more. Check --help or man page for details.
5. Vastly improved --recommends, now does per distro package recommends, and shows
only Linux data to Linux systems, and BSD data to BSD systems.
6. Hugely improved debugger as well.
7. Far more accurate output, most output is now in key/value pairs, because:
8. inxi now exports to json and xml! See --output/--output-file for info.
9. Enhancedd repo output, added deb822 type, solus
10. Radically enhanced network data, now shows all IP / IF devices connected to
each nic, not just one, both IP v4 and v6.
11. USB audio and network device actual drivers
12. better handling of compiler data.
13. Basic ARM machine data now, if present to inxi
14. Graphics: per card driver info alongside the original xorg drivers.
15. Better integration of partitions, RAID, unmounted partitions, and HDD data.
16. Better sensors handling of free video driver sensor data, well, not better,
it's now there, along with fan speeds for gpus.
17. RAID is enhanced, and now can show > 1 RAID type on a system, and the RAID
is improved.
18. Much improved disk/partition/memory sizing, inxi now always works internally
with KB units, and changes them on output to the appropriate units.
19. Fully redone man page for all the new options and the long options.
And so much more. Anyway, here it is, the first release.
2018-03-19 release. I'm putting the last issue requests on the last forums,
so assuming no real further bugs found, expect Perl inxi 2.9.01 to hit around
Monday or Tuesday. If any bugs are found, of course, those will be fixed before
release of the new Perl inxi.
Basically, if you want to see if you can find bugs, this is the time to do it, not
AFTER release. I've posted on many forums, and have given the various distros a
chance to help squash the bugs their users might see, some have been fantastic
(AntiX, you were the best by far), others, not so much. Their loss in the latter
case since the purpose of beta testing is to find bugs before, not after, release.
If you want to see the differences in recommends, and dependencies, grab pinxi
development branch here:
wget -O pinxi https://github.com/smxi/inxi/raw/inxi-perl/pinxi
or:
git clone https://github.com/smxi/inxi --branch inxi-perl --single-branch
and run: pinxi --recommends
The main thing I'd strongly urge all maintainers to add, for long term stability
and speed and reliability, is dig, which can be used if present to get very fast,
reliable, WAN IP information.
All of the other recommends are pretty much the same, for graphics, xdpyinfo,
xrandr, and glxinfo. For networking, ip or ifconfig, along with dig. For all usb
related identification, lsusb, unfortunately, I wish I could get rid of that tool,
it's very slow, but I can't. The --recommends output shows the complete set.
Obviously, Bash and Gawk are no longer recommends, nor are the tools like grep,
sed, tr, wc, etc, all those are done with Perl, so any shell plus Perl 5.08 or
newer Perl 5.x is all that's really required, beyond normal system reporting
tools like lspci etc.
For json/xml export, two Perl modules are needed, again, see --recommends
Making sure tarball etc is up to date, so it can be stored in 'tarball's branch.
MAINTAINERS:
Pinxi 2.9.00-xxx-p (inxi-perl branch) is nearing completion of its beta test cycle,
and, barring any new issues or bugs (TEST IT NOW AND REPORT ISSUES NOW!), I expect
to release pinxi 2.9.00 as inxi 2.9.01 shortly after I complete the advanced
RAID feature, which should be this week.
If no real issues appear during the following week after the inxi 2.9.0 release, it
will be moved to inxi 3.0.0, as the first stable Perl inxi release.
There will be a new branch, inxi-legacy, that will have the Gawk->Bash inxi 2.3..56
files for historical purposes only. No further work will be done on inxi 2.3 from
now on.
Basic support added for Budgie desktop detection. This is waiting more data, so the support will be
missing the version information. Go Budgie!!
Added /var/tmp and /var/log and /opt to basic partition data: -P
This will probably not impact more than a handful of people in the world, but that's fine.
Modified the static BIOS in -M to now show UEFI for actually UEFI booted systems, and, ideally,
UEFI [Legacy] for UEFI booting in bios legacy mode, and BIOS for all others. Hopefully this will
work ok, we'll see.
