procps-ng 3.3.3 released

This weekend procps-ng version 3.3.3 was tagged and released for distribution.  There have been many patches and fixes involved in this release as we move from an unchanging static sort of code into something that is easier to maintain and build on various architectures.  The good thing is I’m down to 1 or 2 patches in the Debian archive which is a big change from the 30 or 40-odd I used to carry.  For the sole metric of getting that number down, the project fork has been a success.

 

There were some post-release bugs I found and these were more to do with the various options turned on or off rather than what you’d see if you did the basic ./configure && make.  One of them was how the version numbers are defined in git, but would only appear if certain files were older than others (such as aclocal.m4 versus config.h.in)  Others were when certain features were turned on.  The make check doesn’t see all of this because it uses the default configure flags.

One annoying thing of the autotools is conditionally installing man pages. This is where you don’t or cannot compile a binary so you don’t install the corresponding man page.  The automake documentation is of course obscure about this but I cannot see a way of distributing only a man page, so we have this fiddle where a file goes into dist_man_MANS or EXTRA_DIST depending.

Interestingly, there has been some bike-shedding around Fedora-land (see the link below) regarding the name procps-ng versus procps.  Debian is lucky that we do have different upstream and package names (though not ideal) so apt-get install procps still gives you procps.  There also has been discussion about merging procps-ng into util-linux whichin the short-term won’t be happening.

Related articles

• Fedora 18 Approves Controversial Feature (phoronix.com)
• Change top Command Default Delay (technologiquepark.wordpress.com)