It’s shaping up to be a very busy week. We have a lot of cool things in-flight at the Library, I need to help multiple family members file their US taxes before the deadline next Wednesday, among other things going on. That hasn’t left me a lot of time to write blogs!
But, I will write about a series of oopses I’ve had. The first is that my article pleading with open source maintainers to support big endian and 32-bit hardware seems to have hit Lobste.rs. It was never my intention for this space to become Yet Another Tech Thing. I really want to branch out! But I suppose tech is still a part of my life, so it’s inevitable.
It seems like a significant number of people took the wrong lesson from it. They seem to think that I’m encouraging drive-by contributions from others, leaving the project maintainers with the work of keeping support for these architectures alive. At the end of the article, I said:
[Y]ou can accept new ports, and deprecate old ports, as community demands and interest waxes and wanes.
I expect that anyone interested enough in a project to port it to big endian systems is going to be using that project on their big endian system, so there shouldn’t be an issue with finding people to continue maintenance. The people who ported LLVM to 68K have kept it up for years. I continue to report and patch issues in the Firefox JavaScript engine on big endian, eight years after my initial efforts. This is not a short-term thing! It is perfectly reasonable to expect the community to maintain their ports and provide their own CI systems.
And now, the other oops I had. Inspiration struck and I started to write down the outline of another volume for my graphic novel series. It actually came out really well, and I love the story and how it is shaped. I can’t wait to develop it into a full graphic novel format. But it’s not really a volume of my graphic novel series, so much as it is fan fiction of 101 Dalmatian Street. The main character in this story is Dylan.
I had been working very hard to not do that. But the more I think about it, the more I wonder – why fight it at all? If this is the story I felt compelled to write, why not write it?
So that’s how I accidentally became not just a hopeful graphic novelist but also a fanfic author, I guess. Time to finally start in earnest on that Midsomer Murders crossover special, then…