424 MB thrown away, and a new project goes public
OneUp was deleting everything it had successfully downloaded whenever an update failed. Also, Local Web Server Manager exists now, and MAME Curator finally reads its own settings.
The one that annoyed me most
OneUp 1.4.1 and 1.4.2 both went out on Thursday, and between them they fixed something I should have caught months ago.
When an update failed, OneUp still ran the cache-cleaning step afterwards. That step deletes the downloaded packages, because normally the update has installed them and they are just taking up disk. But if the update failed, those packages are exactly what you want to keep — the retry needs them, and re-downloading is the slow part.
I measured it on a real failed run: 424 MB discarded, then fetched again over the same connection that had just fallen over. The cache is now kept when the update failed and still cleared when it succeeded.
Two more from the same pair. openSUSE spreads packages across mirrors, and for a brand-new update it will sometimes hand you a file from a server too slow to finish sending it. One package that will not arrive used to throw away the whole update — 82 downloaded, nothing installed. It now notices that specific failure and quietly refetches from openSUSE's content delivery network, which always has them. And if that fails too, it names the package that would not come down, rather than telling you to check an internet connection that is demonstrably fine.
Also: rebooting during an update no longer hangs on a black screen. A reboot asked for mid-update was waiting on a process the desktop had no permission to stop, long after the screen was gone — so a hard power-off was the only way out, at the worst possible moment for one. OneUp now holds a shutdown lock for the length of a run, so the desktop tells you an update is in progress and lets you decide.
Local Web Server Manager
This one is new and public as of Monday. 106 commits this week.
The problem is small and specific. I keep about a dozen web projects in one folder.
Each starts a different way — one has a run.sh, one wants npm run dev, one is a
Python thing — on a different port, and nothing anywhere tells me which of them are
currently running. So I end up with three servers I forgot about and a port conflict
I spend ten minutes diagnosing.
It scans the projects folder, works out how each one starts and which port it wants, and gives you a window with a row per project: a status light, Start/Stop/Restart, its live output, and a button to open it in the browser. It runs each project's own start script and never edits your projects.
Two details I care about. The buttons respond the instant you click them — a project shows "starting" straight away rather than waiting up to a second for the next status poll — and the first time you start a project it shows you the full path and the exact command it is about to run, and asks. It asks again if that script changes. Running a script you found on disk without showing anyone what is in it is not a thing I want this app to do.
It is early. The design is settled and it does genuinely run servers now, but I would not call it finished.
finbreak 0.1.20
More import work. The one worth telling: when no rows in a statement could be imported, finbreak told you to go back and check the column mapping — but there was no way back. There is now a Back button. And for the statement types that never show you a mapping screen at all, because they describe their own layout, it stopped giving that advice entirely and points at the per-row reasons underneath instead, which is where the explanation actually is.
Also, typing in the date-format box was making finbreak re-read the entire statement file for every character. Nine full reads to type one format string. On a normal monthly statement you would never notice; on a 50,000-row one it was about three quarters of a second of frozen window per keystroke. It reads the file once now.
Short notes
MAME Curator — the Server settings you can already edit in the app are now actually read when it starts. Until this week it saved them, told you a restart was needed, and then ignored them, which is a special kind of insulting. The browser also opens when the app is genuinely ready rather than two seconds after launch and hoping; on a first run, where it spends a while reading a ~48 MB game list, that guess usually lost and you got an "Unable to connect" page.
Contact List — the system tray icon now appears when running from source, not just in the released builds. Starting the app no longer throws a browser tab at you either; the tray icon is the way in.
demoreel — published. It records a short video of a desktop app running on a private virtual display, so nothing else you have open ends up in a file destined for a public pull request. I wrote it because I wanted demo videos on this site and did not want to film my own desktop to get them. The finbreak tour on its project page was made with it.