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debian / AGT

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Brennen Bearnes 10 years ago
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Monday, January 12
==================
Debian packaging
----------------
A lot of time today with
the [Debian New Maintainer's Guide](https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/maint-guide/)
and google for a project that needs some simple packages.
This is one of those things where the simple cases are simple and then it's
easy to get lost in a thicket of overlapping mechanisms and terminology.
Thought for providers of technical HOWTOs:
If you're describing the cumulative assembly of a file structure, provide a
copy (repository, tarball, whatever) of that file structure.
(I should probably take this notion to heart.)
MS-DOS / AGT
------------
So I was scrolling through archive.org's newly-shiny MS-DOS archive (with the
crazy in-browser DOSBOX emulation), trying to think of what to look for.
I found some old friends:
- [_Crystal Caves_][cc]
- [_Commander Keen_][keen]
- [_Heretic_][h] --- still a pretty solid game and maybe my favorite iteration of the Doom Engine
- [_Rise of the Triads_][rott] --- there is absolutely _no way_ that ROTT actually
looked as bad as this emulation at the time on baseline hardware, but we'll let
that slide --- the graphics may have been better than they show here, but it
was the Duke Nukem property of its moment, which is to say ultimately a
regressive and not-very-consequential signpost on the way to later
developments
And then I got to thinking about the Adventure Game Toolkit, which was this
sort of declarative, not-really-programmable interpreter for simple adventure
games. The way I remember it, you wrote static descriptions of rooms, objects,
and characters. It was a limited system, and the command interpreter was
pretty terrible, but it was also a lot more approachable than things like TADS
for people who didn't really know how to program anyway. (Like me at the time.)
I'd like to get AGT running on squiggle.city, just because. It turns out
there's a [portable interpreter called AGiliTY][agility], although maybe not
one that's well packaged. I'll probably explore this more.
[agility]: http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXprogrammingXagtXagility.html
[keen]: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Commander_Keen_1_-_Marooned_on_Mars_1990
[cc]: https://archive.org/details/msdos__1CRYSTL_shareware
[h]: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Heretic_-_Shadow_of_the_Serpent_Riders_1996
[rott]: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Rise_of_the_Triad_-_The_Hunt_Begins_Deluxe_Edition_1995

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@ -122,6 +122,13 @@ that inspired this one. Go Bears.</p>
<li><a href="#Wednesday-January-7-2014-local-webservers-and-static-html-generation">local webservers and static html generation</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><a href="#Monday-January-12">Monday, January 12</a>
<ul>
<li><a href="#Monday-January-12-Debian-packaging">Debian packaging</a></li>
<li><a href="#Monday-January-12-MS-DOS-AGT">MS-DOS / AGT</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><a href="#conceptual-framing">conceptual framing</a>
<ul>
@ -156,11 +163,11 @@ that inspired this one. Go Bears.</p>
<p>{sysops, scripting, adduser, chfn}</p>
<p>Paul Ford sent out an e-mail to the tilde.club
waitlist pointing at ~pfhawkins&rsquo;s list of other tildes, so I&rsquo;m getting signup
requests. There are enough that I want to write a script for adding a new
squiggle.city user. I&rsquo;m not determined to be very fancy about this right now;
I just want to save some keystrokes.</p>
<p>Paul Ford sent out an e-mail to the tilde.club waitlist pointing at
~pfhawkins&rsquo;s list of other tildes, so I&rsquo;m getting signup requests. There are
enough that I want to write a script for adding a new squiggle.city user. I&rsquo;m
not determined to be very fancy about this right now; I just want to save some
keystrokes.</p>
<p>The first thing I do is google &ldquo;adduser&rdquo;. <code>adduser(1)</code> is basically just a
front end to <code>useradd(1)</code>. (This distinction will never stop being confusing,
@ -1003,6 +1010,62 @@ statically.</p>
<article>
<h1><a name=Monday-January-12 href=#Monday-January-12>#</a> Monday, January 12</h1>
<h2><a name=Monday-January-12-Debian-packaging href=#Monday-January-12-Debian-packaging>#</a> Debian packaging</h2>
<p>A lot of time today with
the <a href="https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/maint-guide/">Debian New Maintainer&rsquo;s Guide</a>
and google for a project that needs some simple packages.</p>
<p>This is one of those things where the simple cases are simple and then it&rsquo;s
easy to get lost in a thicket of overlapping mechanisms and terminology.</p>
<p>Thought for providers of technical HOWTOs:</p>
<p>If you&rsquo;re describing the cumulative assembly of a file structure, provide a
copy (repository, tarball, whatever) of that file structure.</p>
<p>(I should probably take this notion to heart.)</p>
<h2><a name=Monday-January-12-MS-DOS-AGT href=#Monday-January-12-MS-DOS-AGT>#</a> MS-DOS / AGT</h2>
<p>So I was scrolling through archive.org&rsquo;s newly-shiny MS-DOS archive (with the
crazy in-browser DOSBOX emulation), trying to think of what to look for.</p>
<p>I found some old friends:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://archive.org/details/msdos__1CRYSTL_shareware"><em>Crystal Caves</em></a></li>
<li><a href="https://archive.org/details/msdos_Commander_Keen_1_-_Marooned_on_Mars_1990"><em>Commander Keen</em></a></li>
<li><a href="https://archive.org/details/msdos_Heretic_-_Shadow_of_the_Serpent_Riders_1996"><em>Heretic</em></a> &mdash; still a pretty solid game and maybe my favorite iteration of the Doom Engine</li>
<li><a href="https://archive.org/details/msdos_Rise_of_the_Triad_-_The_Hunt_Begins_Deluxe_Edition_1995"><em>Rise of the Triads</em></a> &mdash; there is absolutely <em>no way</em> that ROTT actually
looked as bad as this emulation at the time on baseline hardware, but we&rsquo;ll let
that slide &mdash; the graphics may have been better than they show here, but it
was the Duke Nukem property of its moment, which is to say ultimately a
regressive and not-very-consequential signpost on the way to later
developments</li>
</ul>
<p>And then I got to thinking about the Adventure Game Toolkit, which was this
sort of declarative, not-really-programmable interpreter for simple adventure
games. The way I remember it, you wrote static descriptions of rooms, objects,
and characters. It was a limited system, and the command interpreter was
pretty terrible, but it was also a lot more approachable than things like TADS
for people who didn&rsquo;t really know how to program anyway. (Like me at the time.)</p>
<p>I&rsquo;d like to get AGT running on squiggle.city, just because. It turns out
there&rsquo;s a <a href="http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXprogrammingXagtXagility.html">portable interpreter called AGiliTY</a>, although maybe not
one that&rsquo;s well packaged. I&rsquo;ll probably explore this more.</p>
</article>
<article>
<h1><a name=conceptual-framing href=#conceptual-framing>#</a> conceptual framing</h1>


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