workings-book/entries/2015-02-02.md

Monday, February 2

kernel-o-matic & pi finder

Published Friday:

• https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-Pi-Kernel-o-Matic
• https://learn.adafruit.com/raspberry-pi-kernel-o-matic

Published a week or so before:

• https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-Pi-Finder
• https://blog.adafruit.com/2015/01/23/help-us-test-our-new-raspberry-pi-bootstrap-piday-raspberrypi/

These have been a lot of my working time these last couple weeks, an overlapping set of projects aimed at making the Pi (and eventually other single-board computers) more usable and Adafruit's hardware and tutorials both more accessible. This has been frustrating and rewarding by turns. I'm trying to reduce the complexity of a domain I just barely understand, in a lot of ways, which may be a good summary of software development in general.

Vagrant is something I should have paid attention to sooner. The interfaces to virtualization are finally starting to overcome my innate laziness on the whole question.

I just booted a Windows XP box for some reason. It made that noise. You know the one.

raspberry pi 2

Announced today:

• http://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-2-model-b/
• https://blog.adafruit.com/2015/02/02/raspberry-pi-2-model-b-armv7-with-1g-ram-is-here-benchmarks-and-more-raspberry_pi-raspberryp/
• http://hackaday.com/2015/02/02/introducing-the-raspberry-pi-2/

Expect this to prove interesting. I've been having a lot of conversations about the relative merits of small computing systems, and while this can hardly be said to address all the complaints you might have about the Pi, boosting processor and RAM will do a lot for practical usability.

telling composer to ignore php version requirements

Using Composer to set up a little project, I run into the problem that the locally-installed PHP is a bit behind the times.

brennen@exuberance 0:09:32 /home/brennen/code/project $  ./composer.phar install
Loading composer repositories with package information
Installing dependencies (including require-dev)
Your requirements could not be resolved to an installable set of packages.

  Problem 1
    - sparkfun/sparklib 1.1.9 requires php >=5.5.17 -> no matching package found.
    - sparkfun/sparklib 1.1.8 requires php >=5.5.17 -> no matching package found.
    - sparkfun/sparklib 1.1.7 requires php >=5.5.17 -> no matching package found.
    - sparkfun/sparklib 1.1.6 requires php >=5.5.17 -> no matching package found.
    - sparkfun/sparklib 1.1.5 requires php >=5.5.17 -> no matching package found.
    - sparkfun/sparklib 1.1.4 requires php >=5.5.17 -> no matching package found.
    - sparkfun/sparklib 1.1.3 requires php >=5.5.17 -> no matching package found.
    - sparkfun/sparklib 1.1.2 requires php >=5.5.17 -> no matching package found.
    - sparkfun/sparklib 1.1.11 requires php >=5.5.17 -> no matching package found.
    - sparkfun/sparklib 1.1.10 requires php >=5.5.17 -> no matching package found.
    - sparkfun/sparklib 1.1.1 requires php >=5.5.17 -> no matching package found.
    - sparkfun/sparklib 1.1.0 requires php >=5.5.17 -> no matching package found.
    - Installation request for sparkfun/sparklib ~1.1 -> satisfiable by sparkfun/sparklib[1.1.0, 1.1.1, 1.1.10, 1.1.11, 1.1.2, 1.1.3, 1.1.4, 1.1.5, 1.1.6, 1.1.7, 1.1.8, 1.1.9].

Potential causes:
 - A typo in the package name
 - The package is not available in a stable-enough version according to your minimum-stability setting
   see <https://groups.google.com/d/topic/composer-dev/_g3ASeIFlrc/discussion> for more details.

Read <http://getcomposer.org/doc/articles/troubleshooting.md> for further common problems.

Well, ok. I wrote a lot of that code, and I'm pretty sure nothing I want out of it will break under a slightly stale PHP. I check ./composer.phar help install, and sure enough, there's an option to ignore this requirement:

brennen@exuberance 0:13:21 /home/brennen/code/project $  ./composer.phar install --ignore-platform-reqs  
Loading composer repositories with package information
Installing dependencies (including require-dev)
  - Installing sparkfun/sparklib (1.1.11)
    Downloading: 100%         

Writing lock file
Generating autoload files

I never used to quite get the "install an executable utility script in the root directory of your project" thing, but the whole paradigm is growing on me a little as my projects accumulate little Makefiles and shell scripts to render HTML, publish revisions, or deploy packages.