Arcane Knowledge

Goblin Camp

Goblin camp has recently taken a large set of real estate in my head. Its a perfect storm of challenges and things I understand. The first big challenge was getting this beast to build and spoiler warning, we did. It took us a lot longer than I'd like to admit but what I would like to admit is that I didn't do this alone. A good friend of mine, Tony Sim trudged through the perils with me on our journey to compilation. Which unlike most open-source we worked on it in the same room, using the same computer(mine for the record). This encapsules what I think opensource has the capability for, collaborating locally or globally. This very local open source has its own advantages and disadvantages than over the net. First off you can bounce ideas and try things very rapidly as well as tag out when you're head is going under water. This was especially useful since the only dev environment we had that had the potential to run this was my laptop and all the changes we made were instantly visible to both of us.

Hacking through

To try and get it compiled we mostly just threw commands around and installed packages with no regard. Exporting environment variables, reading posts, trying not to give up were all things that we did. Every time we went through this we would gain maybe 1-10% extra compilation then it would crash again. Telling us errors about not being able to locate packages that we're removed from the libraries it uses, saying it can't find packages we have, that our packages are out of date, our compiler is out of date, it can't find headers from our packages, it just went on and ooon. So we hacked away at it for a good few hours or days, I couldn't tell, when you've fallen into the rabbit hole time gets distorted.

Success?

After the whole ordeal we had it at 100% compilation and we thought this was it!!!... then it failed at linking. I have never been more discouraged by a single program. The problem was in a cmake script. It was an easy fix, but hard to find. After it compiles AND links I thought the build script didn't work, in the instructions it says it would put it in the build folder, but I found it in the src or root I can't remember. The moment of truth was finally upon us. We have slain all the enemies the compiler threw at us. We found the sacred texts that allowed us to build every dependency. We shacked the objects together. We were victorious! Our prize? "Segmentation Fault". No GUI no nothing, just "Segmentation Fault".

Pull Request

For my pull request I updated the travis.yml with all the environment magic we struggled to find to get some automated building for it, even if it seg faults. On our journey we found a lot of issues that were made into bugs and then into pr's. Even though we both worked on it, it was easier for one of use to commit the changes to a branch and merge it. My issue was updating travis which is something I was familiar with and I also had a pull request that compiled a package from source. On the horizon we're probably going to faze out the outdated libaries and try to get it to not seg fault, who knows maybe this project is cursed but now I bear the mark of the curse and I've dived too deep to come up for air now. Not when I've gotten this far.