features.
So now inxi and pinxi will grab the inxi.1 or pinxi.1 man file and install it on
systems that do not have -U blocked. The -U block of course remains the same.
New features:
1. now does not require root or 'file' to get unmounted fs type. Also, for many
mounted partitions, rather than showing the meaningless fuseblock it will usually
get the filesystem right.
2. -U now works with optional --man option to download man page for pinxi
and -U 3 dev server updates. This gets around the fact I had to remove the gz files
from master to get the size small enough to make maintainers happy. Non branch
inxi master works as before, updates both from github or from dev server, depending
on your selection.
3. Thanks very much to the people who have been contributing in a positve way,
helping to make inxi better. The untold number of small and large new features,
small glitches, etc, that have been fixed this week are simply too many too list.
Many to most were inxi bugs or weaknesses, now corrected.
4. binxi branch has now been made fully operational, though I do not plan on doing
any work beyond the mothballing of that venerable program (gawk->bash inxi), it's
fully operational, it updates, it gets its man page, but all as binxi, so you can,
as with pinxi, run all of them separately. This officially terminates my support
for Gawk/Bash inxi, which can be found as binxi in the inxi-legacy branch.
5. pinxi has been promoted to permanent development branch, where bug fixes, new
features, etc, will be tested, along with man page updates etc. This will help
reduce the number of commits to master branch.
6. Audio / Network usb cards now show the true driver(s). There are often more
than one for audio, that's a nice enancement.
7. inxi outputs to json / xml, which will probably interest some developers
eventually, well it already did, that was going to wait, but someone wanted it.
8. Apt repo handler now supports DEB822 format, which is not an easy format to
parse.
==========================================================
MAINTAINERS:
Note the following: despite my strong dislike for tags, every commit that touches
either inxi or inxi.1 man page will be tagged if I think they would be something
relevant to distro packagers. While github insists on calling my tags releases,
I want to be crystal clear: inxi has one and only one 'release', the current master
branch version. The tagged commits that github calls releases are NOT releases,
they are just tagged commits. The version I release tomorrow will be the current
master, and all previous versions will be obsolete and will not be supported.
The .gz files have been removed from the master branch history, thus shrinking it
a lot. I have removed for this reason the master-plain branch, which mirrored
master and provided a gz free branch, but apparently this was simply ignored so
there's no reason to keep it going. If you insist on grabbing all the branches and
find more data in there, then please correct your practices, you are only getting
the data from the master branch.
inxi is rolling release software and has no releases, so the tags are supposed
to create some illusion that a tag actually means something. Since it doesn't,
I decided to take the path of least resistance and just add an auto tagging tool
to my commit scripts and use it when it seems appropriate, like on this commit.
All development work now will happen via the pinxi branch, so that makes the process
a lot cleaner, since I can now basically beta test all new commmits to master.
pinxi and binxi are both standalone versions of inxi, they have their own config
and data directories, config files, man pages, etc.
-----------------------------------------------------
New Perl inxi is already way ahead of Gawk/Bash inxi, more features, more accurate,
and most bugs being fixed now are because a lot of people are contributing eyes and
testing, and are finding stuff that was wrong, or simply missing, on old inxi as
well as on Perl inxi. Fixes to Perl inxi (>2.9) will not be rolled into to binxi
since the entire reason I spent over 4 months on this project was to never have to
touch Gawk/Bash inxi again.
Most imporant, however, is that the simple fact was, Gawk/Bash inxi has been
nearly impossible to work on despite my following rigorous practices in coding,
and I simply won't work with that type of stuff anymore. Perl 5.x is a true delight
in comparison, and makes adding new features, enhancing others, far easier, or
even possible, where it wasn't before.
On a technical level, I have tested Perl inxi heavily, and it will run on all
Perl 5.x versions back to 5.008, which is the cutoff point. This was not that
hard to do, which is why I picked Perl 5.x as the language. This means that
you can drop, just as with binxi, Perl inxi onto a 10 year old system, or
older, and it will run fine, albeit a touch slowly, but must faster than binxi.
-----------------------------------------------------
So far users are really liking the new one, it's usually faster in most cases,
the output is cleaner, there's more data, more options, and basically it's
gotten the thumbs up from all the testers, and there have been a LOT, who have
helped. I want to give a special thanks to the following distros for their
exceptional support and testing:
0. the people who hang out on irc.oftc.net #smxi. Very patient, will test things
with astounding patience, so thanks to them. Archerseven, iotaka and KittyKatt
have been been incredibly helpful when it comes to testing and debugging, and
finding corner cases that I would never have found.
1. AntiX: they were the first to beta test pinxi, and found massive numbers of
bugs, and stuck with the testing for a long time. They made testing possible for
the next wave of testers, my hats off to them, I've always liked them.
2. Manjaro also was very helpful, and found more issues and enhancements.
3. Ubuntu forums users found more, and helped enhance many faetures
4. Mint users have been very helpful, and were the impetus for some nifty
new features, ilke switching all color codes off when output is piped or sent
to file. They have reminded me of how valuable people's views can be who may not
share the same tech world view as you, but are still very talented and observant
individuals.
5. Slackware users provided some very thoughtful feedback, which was no surprise
but welcome nonetheless, thanks.
6. Same with Debian forums, again, some very useful and constructive ideas and
observations, and some very arcane and odd hardware that exposed even more corner
case bugs.
And several other distros were also helpful, each in their own way. Solus for
example now has their package manager added in repos.
1. added tool lsblk, recommends, for -p and -o, shows better partition data than
df does. First choice for -p and -o, -p fall back df, -o fallback file.
2. fixed a big bug with user configs, that would make the configs break every time
the color editor was used.
3. Some smaller bugs.
and a small bug for blank files there.
Second, made the --output error message more clear for bad file structure now lists
the 3 requirements: must be full path, must be writeable directory, and must have
a file in it.
Third, another subtle thing, after a lot of research, am trying the MiB GiB format
because it's technically more accurate and less ambiguous than GB, which is used
either to refer to 1000 bite blocks OR to 1024 blocks, depending on the platform etc.
So rather than hope people get it, trying that slightly more wordy format, and maybe
if people wonder what it is.
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.
cpu output issues. Now inxi handles > 8 cores in terms of output filters,
descriptions, correctly noting that it's multithreaded.
Because AMD has entered the Multithreading game, I've changed the trade term:
HT - HyperThreading to MT - MultiThreading to support both Intel and AMD variants.
Updated CPU output filters to also account for these very large core counts.
I believe this commit now adds full support for the new Ryzen series, but I'll have
to see when it comes to other variants that may appear. I've tried to future proof
the MT tests, but I won't know of those are fully functional and accurate until
inxi sees the real data.
