Sometimes in your life it takes someone else to get you to realize just how much you know.
This is a story of about two hours of my life on February 20th, 2020.
Are you a single person?
Yesterday I saw a question on /r/termux which was intriguing. I pulled up Termux (for the first time in a long time) to verify the post, and then on a hunch dug into termux/termux-packages to find the answer. While I had Termux up, I went ahead and pulled down system updates with apt, and updates to all my git repos.
This morning I woke up and had some eggs and bacon. It’s Thursday, I have office hours this afternoon and tests to grade.
Due to recency bias, I pulled up Termux again. I opened it to something strange. Zinit wasn’t printing plugin-loading messages, and none of my plugins were loading (aside from powerlevel10k, which is loaded as a snippet).
I really want my syntax highlighting,
keybindings, et cetera;
so I cd ~/Repos/zinit to checkout an earlier commit.
Zinit used to be called Zplugin,
and I had done the name conversion successfully already,
so I use git l | rg 'zinit' to find a sufficiently old commit
that is after the name change.
I verify that everything works, and then check the time.
It’s about 11am, I don’t have my office hour until 1pm.
I have a bad commit (master) and a bad commit (where I am).
So I git bisect bad @{0}; git bisect good master.
Using git bisect entails
letting git checkout a commit between a good and bad commit,
and then you marking it as good or bad.
On each iteration,
I created a new tmux pane
and saw if plugins got loaded by Zinit.
If they did, git bisect good;
if they didn’t, git bisect bad.
exec zsh and check the next commit.
The bisecting session ends with the following as the offending commit:
commit f6145dff242c5684f7abea2c26b3c9f184eaa85b
Author: SG <sgniazdowski@gmail.com>
Date: Wed Jan 29 14:20:37 2020 +0100
zinit: Use zselect for a more predictable sleep time
1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)
After git show f6145df,
I see that Zinit broke when the project loaded the zsh module zsh/zselect.
I knew from 18 months ago that modules on Termux are staticly compiled,
so I try and zmodload zsh/zselect.
It fails, and I open an issue against Termux packages
and another for reference against Zinit.
It is about half-past 11 at this point, I still have some time to kill. So I check past closing commits, and realize that the fix is just adding the module’s name in a Bash script and bumping the version appropriately. I can do that, so I do.
At this point romkatv (the developer of powerlevel10k, another plugin which uses on zselect) and psprint (the developer of Zinit) have both chimed in on the issue, so I mention I made a PR. Romkatv thanks me on the PR, and I decide to pack up and walk to campus.
When I get there,
I see that my PR has been merged,
and I apt update on my phone.
No updates.
I jump back to the home page for Termux packages and check the Actions tab.
There is a running action for my PR,
so I wait and start grading browsing Reddit.
I try again after a bit and I pull the new update.
I verify that zsh/zselect works,
make a comment on the Zinit issue,
and get back to business.
At this point, my issue on Termux packages has a bunch of referenced actions– all by me (a reference from the Zinit issue, two commits which refer to it, making a pull request which closes it). I think it may have been this wall of my actions on a completely foreign repository which prompted the highlight of this story:
Reflecting on all of this, there was a lot of prior knowledge I needed.
- I first used
git-bisectto figure out what caused a partial i3 regression - I knew about Termux’s static approach to zsh modules from a previous issue I reported and an issue I found while looking for solutions
- I knew how the version of a package should be changed from years of using package managers on Linux.
- I found out where to put the revision number in Termux’s build system by looking through commits until I found a commit which did so.
And the whole process took about 40 minutes total out of my day, over the course of a couple of hours.
I was solving a problem I had; but also solving a problem that was relevant to others. I am highly motivated by helping others; it’s why I spend so much time on help forums answering questions; it’s why I love teaching. A small compliment like this can make someone’s day, so don’t be afraid to give out a cheesy compliment. They will probably appreciate it.
They may write a blog post about it.