grahamperrin

Graham Perrin: personal | professional | FreeBSD Project | reboot | alumnus | help required | contact

Me

Hello.

I have two cats, Pickle and Billski.

Dyslexia shapes the ways in which I learn, and sometimes, maybe, the ways in which I express myself.

There's more, but Bill and Pickle come first and last.

If you'd like to help me with something FreeBSD-related: see Unicode input regression below.

FreeBSD Project

https://wiki.freebsd.org/HowWeGotHere#grahamperrin recalls my first involvements with the project, in 2015.

I gained a doc tree commit bit around seven years later. 162 commits across three trees (137 doc + 5 ports + 20 src), the last of which was:

Resignation of my commit bit was graciously accepted six days later, 24th August — I asked for the bit to be taken in quickly, discreetly and without question. To satisfy people's curiosity and, hopefully, draw a line (discreetly, without naming an offender): a necessarily vague description of the period during which I quietly stepped away from things.

FreeBSD Project alumnus

The most recent commit of my work appeared on 1st October (author = grahamperrin in FreshBSD). My thanks to:

  1. Danilo G. Baio for FreeBSD/doc 4337a12 in FreshBSD | 4337a1249c02 in cgit
  2. anyone else who'll help to plug the gap — here's a Bugzilla shortlist that includes patch files from me.

Historically: I was silent about most FreeBSD issues that I encountered — they were not in GitHub, not mentioned in any room, not on any list, not in Bugzilla.

The future: as I gain free time, partly through resignation, so it's possible to give a little more time to such things. Generally, more time to things that will — ultimately — please as many people as possible. Some of my revised focus areas are outlined below.

Public focus areas

PkgBase

A long-standing interest, to which I have not devoted enough time.

PkgBase in this wiki

PkgBase in Phabricator

  • the only Phabricator group of which I'm a member.

Bugzilla

https://wiki.freebsd.org/Bugzilla

Triage hat off:

  • around 312 open reports from me
    • 112 of which are not triaged (status: new), probably because they originated before I gained privileges in Bugzilla
      • prioritising other people's reports, above my own, helps to reduce a backlog (of more than five thousand new reports) spanning around nine years.

Documentation, ports, src

Resignation of my commit bit for the doc tree did not diminish my passion for good documentation. I have:

Mozilla bug 1856513

[FreeBSD Regression: with Thunderbird 115: changing theme hangs

  • hangs for hours
  • not only with changing theme (observations, comment 1)
  • overlap with some of my CVD-oriented work
  • as a consequence of this bug, I am effectively AFK (away from keyboard) for hours, for email, whilst truly at the keyboard for other things.

GitHub

doc tree open pull requests (PRs), excluding forks:

ports tree open PRs, excluding forks:

src tree open PRs, excluding forks:

Unicode input regression — help required

This bugs me horribly. True: I can easily reactivate an inferior boot environment from August 2023, to regain functional input, however doing so would make it much more difficult to progress the kernel CPU issue.

https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-freebsd/2023-September/040457.html

https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-current/2023-September/004521.html

https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-desktop/2023-September/003300.html

https://discord.com/channels/727023752348434432/1152107244327010334

  • please help — thank you.

kernel 100% CPU

Scattered (not easy to follow, sorry) across multiple archived threads:

Thoughts of the day

10th October 2023

FreeBSD documentation suffers, and suffers badly, from a lack of visuals.

Or it's me (not the documentation) who suffers, more than most, when ploughing through text-heavy documentation with little or nothing like the previously-mentioned visual about Git. When I introduced myself to the (private) developers list in July 2022, the first line, below “Hello people”, was a link to my public profile, which I had written with the developers in mind:

❝ For here in Phabricator, maybe the most useful thing to mention is that I'm dyslexic. …

Truth: I nearly wept when I found myself presented with vi ❞

11th October

Through using GitLab for a merge request (for the preface to the FreeBSD Handbook):

  • I was disappointed by the inability to view changes (the diff) when previewing before committing
  • post-commit, it seemed impossible to rename a branch
  • I decided to stick with Codeberg, which, like GitHub, allows changes — the diff — to be previewed.

CVD-oriented — not public

Three issues, all work in progress despite apparent closure of one of the three.

The earliest of the three reports has the most severe symptoms.

For the second: I'm in touch, privately, with external developers.

For the third: mid-October 2023, I had a private chat with an external developer from a different area. Enlightening.

From the Wikipedia definition of CVD:

In computer security, coordinated vulnerability disclosure (CVD, formerly known as responsible disclosure)(1) is a vulnerability disclosure model in which a vulnerability or an issue is disclosed to the public only after the responsible parties have been allowed sufficient time to patch or remedy the vulnerability or issue.(2) This coordination distinguishes the CVD model from the “full disclosure” model.

Contact

Me:

Me and a bunch of other people:

  • grahamperrin.txt
  • Last modified: 2023/10/18 20:41
  • by GrahamPerrin