README for inxi - a command line system information tool ===================================================================== SUPPORT INFO: Do not ask for basic help that reading the inxi -h / --help menus, or man page would show you, and do not ask for features to be added that inxi already has. Also do not ask for support if your distro refuses to update its inxi version, some are terrible about that. DOCUMENTATION: http://smxi.org/docs/inxi.htm (smxi.org/docs/ is easier to remember, and is one click away from inxi.htm) The one page wiki on github is only a pointer to the real resources. HTML MAN PAGE: http://smxi.org/docs/inxi-man.htm INXI OPTIONS: http://smxi.org/docs/inxi-options.htm NOTE: both options and man html versions may and probably will lag behind current inxi because doing documentation is boring, and the man to html converter I tried is really bad, so it's hard to update the man page html. ISSUES: https://github.com/smxi/inxi/issues No issues accepted for non current inxi releases. See below for more on that. SUPPORT FORUMS: http://techpatterns.com/forums/forum-33.html This is the best place to place support issues that may be complicated. If you are developer, use: DEVELOPER FORUMS: http://techpatterns.com/forums/forum-32.html SOURCE VERSION CONTROL: https://github.com/smxi/inxi MAIN BRANCH: master DEVELOPMENT BRANCHES: one, two, three, android, bsd Dev branches are rarely used, but that's where the really hard new features etc are debugged and worked out. inxi itself has the built in feature to be able to update itself from anywhere, including these branches, which is very useful for development and debugging on many user systems. inxi was happily on googlecode until they decided to shut it down, which forced me to pick an inferior option, github in this case. Since all the options were bad, I picked the most popular of the bad options. I miss googlecode already... PULL REQUESTS: inxi is VERY complicated and VERY hard to work on, so unless you have already talked to me about contributing, and, more important, shown that you can actually work with this type of arcane code, please do not spend time trying to work on inxi, unless it's a trivial patch, to the current branch, current version. Please: NEVER even think about looking at or using previous inxi commits, previous to the current one, as a base for a patch. If you do, your patch / pull request will be rejected immediately, without any discussion. inxi has one and only one release, and that is the current one. All previous releases are immediately obsolete on the commit of every new release. There is no exception to this, and never will be. Man page updates, doc page updates, etc, of course, are easy and will probably be accepted, as long as they are done according to the requirements. Read below re asking about tagging this rolling software release, short version: don't ask. inxi releases early, and releases often, when under development. ===================================================================== ABOUT INXI - CORE COMMITMENT TO LONG TERM STABILITY inxi is a command line system information tool. It was forked from the ancient and mindbendingly perverse yet ingenius infobash, by locsmif. That was a buggy, impossible to update or maintain piece of software, so the fork fixed those core issues, and made it flexible enough to expand the utility of the original ideas. Locmsif has given his thumbs up to inxi, so don't be fooled by legacy infobash stuff you may see out there. inxi is lower case, except when I create a text header here in a file like this, but it's always lower case. Sometimes to follow convention I will use upper case inxi to start a sentence, but i find it a bad idea since invariably, someone will repeat that and type it in as the command name, then someone will copy that, and complain that the command: Inxi doesn't exist... The primary purpose of inxi is for support, and sys admin use. inxi is used widely for forum and IRC support, which is I believe it's most common function. If you are piping output to paste or post, then make sure to turn off the script colors with the -c 0 flag. Script colors in shell are characters. With some pain, inxi has gotten to the point where some of its hardware tools are actually better, more accurate, and astoundingly, faster, than their C version equivalents, but that's not because inxi is great, it's because those other tools just aren't well done in my opinion. inxi should ALWAYS show you your current system state, as far as possible, and should be more reliable than your own beliefs about what is in your system, ideally. In other words, the goal in inxi is to have it be right more than it is wrong about any system that it runs on. And NEVER to rely on non current system state data if at all possible. Some things, like memory/ram data, rely on radically unreliable system self reporting based on OEM filling out data correctly, which doesn't often happen, so in those cases, you want to confirm things like ram capacity with a reputable hardware source, like crucial.com, which has the best ram hardware tool I know of. Some might, correctly, note the insanity of writing a huge gawk program wrapped in thousands of lines of bash, but this ignores the absolute core mission of inxi: to always work on all systems all the time. Well, all linux systems with the core tools inxi requires to operate installed. Ie, not android, yet. What this means is this: you can have a 10 year old box, or probably 15, not sure, and you can install today's inxi on it, and it will run. It won't run fast, but it will run. I test inxi on a 200 MHz laptop from about 1998 to keep it honest. That's also what was used to optimize the code. In other words, inxi will not fail on a bash/gawk update, and you can generally count on Bash and Gawk being installed on any real GNU/Linux system. Well, they should be, although for some perverse reason Ubuntu refuses to include gawk, which is gnu awk, in their base install. Why gawk? because that's the most commonly available language for parsing data and creating reports. Arcane, yes, obsolete? yes, works? yes. Bash is interactive, and is available on almost all GNU/Linux systems. Do I like Bash or Gawk? No, I don't. But nothing comes close to the long term reliability and stability of gawk/bash/sed/grep, nothing is even remotely close. I keep looking, but language after language prove themselves to not be valid candidates for this core stability requirement as they change or break their APIs with new releases, along with not being parts of a generic core GNU/Linux install. This is why, for example, some Bash 4 things that would be nice to have in inxi are not used, to not break backward compatibility. It is a show stopper bug if an inxi update breaks something that was working in an old system. But why gawk instead of awk? That is an issue that has plagued inxi for a long time, the bottom line is this: both bash and awk are such inferior languages overall that the only way to really get them to work in a complex scenario like inxi is to use the most advanced version of awk possible, which is gnu awk, aka, gawk. Gawk has: case insensitive switches (critical for parsing garbage random system data), gensub (search and replace like sed). ===================================================================== BSD SUPPORT BSD support was, with great pain, added, though it's partial and incomplete. BSDs are simply too hard to work with because of their extreme fragmentation, ie, they don't even share one tool you take for granted on GNU/Linux, like lspci. Nor do they share common methods of reporting system hardware data. Nor does a single BSD, even within itself, like FreeBSD, even maintain standard methods across releases. So the BSD support in inxi is basically what it is, if more is wanted, then BSD people have to step up and do the work, always' keeping in mind that all patches to inxi must not break existing functionality for existing supported platforms, be they BSD or GNU/Linux. I like real BSDs, like OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, etc, and prefer that the tools in inxi that can be made to work on BSDs, do work, but their refusal to even use the same tools or locations or syntaxes for system info simply makes it too hard for me to do that work. I will always accept patches that are well done however from competent people, if they do not break GNU/Linux, and extend BSD support. Keep in mind, all patches must be based on tool/file tests, not BSD version tests. inxi sets initial internal flags to identify that it is a BSD system vs a GNU/Linux system, after that it tests for specific applications and resources. inxi will also start on Darwin, OSX's mutated version of a BSD, but my conclusion about darwin is that it is Unix in name only, and I will not spend a second of my time adding any further support for that crippled broken corporate pseudo-unix system. Don't ask. If you want to run unix, then OSX is not unix, in my opinion. ===================================================================== INXI FEATURES AND FUNCTIONALITY inxi's functionality continues to grow over time, but it's also important to understand that each core new feature usually requires about 30 days work to get it stable. So new features are not trivial things, nor is it acceptable to submit a patch that works only on your personal system. One inxi feature (-s, sensors data), took about 2 hours to get working in the alpha test on the local dev system, but then to handle the massive chaos that is actual user sensors output and system variations, it took several rewrites and about 30 days to get somewhat reliable for about 98% or so of inxi users. So if your patch is rejected, it's likely because you have not thought it through adequately, have not done adequate testing cross system and platform, etc. ===================================================================== INXI RELEASE/SUPPORT/ISSUES/BUGS INFORMATION: Important: the only version of inxi that is supported is the latest current master branch release. No issue reports or bug reports will be accepted for anything other than current master branch. No merges, attempts to patch old code from old releases, will be considered or accepted. If you are not updated to the latest inxi, do not file a bug report since it's probably been fixed ages ago. If your distro isn't packaging a current inxi, then file a bug report with them, not here. The only valid working code base for inxi is the current release of inxi. Distributions should never feel any advantage comes from using old inxi releases because inxi has as a core promise to you, the end user, that it will NEVER require new tools to operate. New tools may be required for a new feature, but that will always be handled internally by inxi, and will not cause any operational failures. This is a promise, and I will never as long as I run this project violate that core inxi requirement. Old inxi is NOT more stable than current inxi, it's just old, and lacking in bug fixes and features. inxi is a rolling release codebase, just like Debian Sid, Gentoo, or Arch Linux are rolling release GNU/Linux distributions, with no 'release points'. Why this is apparently so difficult for some people to grasp is beyond me, particularly with Debian, that has Sid, a rolling release, un-versioned, no fixed release point, package pool. All my code is rolling release, some of it just happens to roll more slowly than others. inxi moves slowly some months, very rapidly others. When it's moving rapidly, it's often wise to wait for it to slow down, but you don't have to. Your distro not updating inxi ever, then failing to show something that is fixed in current inxi is not a bug, and please do not post it here. File the issue with your distro, not here. Updating inxi in a package pool will NEVER make anything break or fail, period. It has no version based dependencies, just software, like gawk, sed, etc. There is never a valid reason to not update inxi in a package pool of any distro in the world. Sys Admin type inxi users always get the first level of support. ie, convince us you run real systems and networks, and your issue shoots to the top of the line. As do any real bugs. Failure to supply requested debugger data will lead to a distinct lack of interest on our part to help you with a bug. ie, saying, oh, x doesn't work, doesn't cut it, unless it's obvious why. ===================================================================== TAGS - DO NOT ASK FOR INXI TO BE TAGGED!! In particular, no issue reports will be accepted relating to tagging inxi releases. Why? Because tagging is a bad idea, that leads to insecure code and packaging practices, and should not be recommended or used by package maintainers. A packager should ALWAYS point to the actual commit they got their code from, not a tag attached to that commit. For what should be obvious reason, you can move tags, delete them, and point to bad code, then good code, all without giving any indication at all that the tag or its destination have been changed. In other words, relying on tagging to identify code releases is identical to relying on fairy tales for security. Point to the release commit ID, if you do, you will be pointing to the code you downloaded for your package, if you do not, you won't be. Github makes that very easy: https://github.com/smxi/inxi/tarball/[first 7 characters of commit id] EXAMPLE: https://github.com/smxi/inxi/tarball/1d37e0d (click it, you'll see the tarball download) This is a real link, to a real tarball, of a real commit. It's not a fiction, a fantasy, a misleading and potentially serious security hole, like a tag. It's also easier to grab that than the somewhat cludgy git method to grab a specific git commit id. Apparently with git 2.5, that cludgy method will be replaced by a more basic thing, that corresponds to the svn way to grab a commit, by commit number, cleanly. Further, tagging a rolling release code base is absurd, since every packager is going to grab the current release of the codebase, unless they are very confused or misguided (and the best way for me to encourage this type of confusion and misguided action is by tagging any one release, thus suggesting it is a static release). Thus I would have to tag every single commit since I could never know when say, the Arch Linux maintainer is going to grab his code, or any other distribution maintainer. Further, I would have to go back and tag every past commit as well, since each and every one was at the time, the current release of inxi. That's without exception, no commit ever done in the trunk/master branch of inxi has ever not been the current release, by definition. I shouldn't need to waste time noting something that should be obvious to anyone with even a faint clue about code, or secure practices in terms of having a real pointer to the code you grabbed, in other words not a tag! But I will note it here to avoid being asked again about tagging. A tag is a post-it sticky note, and should never be considered as a valid pointer, just a convenience in some projects that works for some types of programming practices, certainly not mine. All issue reports opened about tagging will be closed immediately (see issues 70/74 if you must, you won't get any different answer by repeating the same bad logic again) without comment. File a distro bug report in your distro of choice if they insist on asking for this bad idea, that's the right place to handle the problem. ===================================================================== INXI VERSION NUMBERING: inxi uses fairly classic version numbering, where the version numbers actually mean something. The version number follows these guidelines: Using example 2.2.28-6 The first digit(s), "2", is a major version, and almost never changes. Only a huge milestone, or if inxi reaches 2.9.xx, when it will simply move up to 3.0.0 just to keep it clean, would cause a change. The second digit(s), "2", means a new real feature has been added. Not a tweaked existing feature, an actual new feature, which usually also has a new argument option letter attached. The second number goes from 0 to 9, and then rolls over the first after 9. It could also be adding a very complicated expansion of existing features, like Wayland. It depends. The third, "28", is for everything small, can cover bug fixes, tweaks to existing features to add support for something, pretty much anything where you want the end user to know that they are not up to date. The third goes from 0 to 99, then rolls over the second. The fourth, "6", is extra information about certain types of inxi updates. I don't usually use this last one in master branch, but you will see it frequently in branch one,two, etc development since that is used to confirm remote test system updates. The fourth number, when used, will be alpha-numeric, a common version would be, in say, branch one: 2.2.28-b1-02, in other words, a branch 1 release, version 2. In the past, now and then the 4th, or 'patch', number, was used in trunk/master branches of inxi, but I've pretty much stopped doing that because it's confusing. inxi does not use the fiction of date based versioning because that imparts no useful information to the end user, when you look at say, 2.2.28, and you last had 2.2.11, you can know with some certainty that inxi has no major new features, just fine tunings and bug fixes. And if you see one with 2.3.2, you will know that there is a new feature, almost, but not always, linked to one or more new line output items. Sometimes a fine tuning can be quite significant, sometimes it's a one line code fix. ### EOF ###