Thanks for the pointer! Very interesting. I actually may end up doing a prototype and see how far I can get.

Good question!

IMO a good way to help a FOSS maintainer is to actually use the software (esp pre-release) and report bugs instead of working around them. Besides helping the project quality, I’d find it very heart-warming to receive feedback from users; it means people out there are actually not only using the software but care enough for it to take their time, report bugs and test patches.

“Announcment”

It used to be quite common on mailing lists to categorise/tag threads by using subject prefixes such as “ANN”, “HELP”, “BUG” and “RESOLVED”.

It’s just an old habit but I feel my messages/posts lack some clarity if I don’t do it 😅

I usually capture all my development-time “automation” in Make and Ansible files. I also use makefiles to provide a consisent set of commands for the CI/CD pipelines to work w/ in case different projects use different build tools. That way CI/CD only needs to know about make build, make test, make package, … instead of Gradle/Maven/… specific commands.

Most of the times, the makefiles are quite simple and don’t need much comments. However, there are times that’s not the case and hence the need to write a line of comment on particular targets and variables.

Can you provide what you mean by check the environment, and why you’d need to do that before anything else?

One recent example is a makefile (in a subproject), w/ a dozen of targets to provision machines and run Ansible playbooks. Almost all the targets need at least a few variables to be set. Additionally, I needed any fresh invocation to clean the “build” directory before starting the work.

At first, I tried capturing those variables w/ a bunch of ifeqs, shells and defines. However, I wasn’t satisfied w/ the results for a couple of reasons:

1. Subjectively speaking, it didn’t turn out as nice and easy-to-read as I wanted it to.
2. I had to replicate my (admittedly simple) clean target as a shell command at the top of the file.

Then I tried capturing that in a target using bmakelib.error-if-blank and bmakelib.default-if-blank as below.

##############

.PHONY : ensure-variables

ensure-variables : bmakelib.error-if-blank( VAR1 VAR2 )
ensure-variables : bmakelib.default-if-blank( VAR3,foo )

##############

.PHONY : ansible.run-playbook1

ansible.run-playbook1 : ensure-variables cleanup-residue | $(ansible.venv)
ansible.run-playbook1 : 
	...

##############

.PHONY : ansible.run-playbook2

ansible.run-playbook2 : ensure-variables cleanup-residue | $(ansible.venv)
ansible.run-playbook2 : 
	...

##############

But this was not DRY as I had to repeat myself.

That’s why I thought there may be a better way of doing this which led me to the manual and then the method I describe in the post.

running specific targets or rules unconditionally can lead to trouble later as your Makefile grows up

That is true! My concern is that when the number of targets which don’t need that initialisation grows I may have to rethink my approach.

I’ll keep this thread posted of how this pans out as the makefile scales.

Even though I’ve been writing GNU Makefiles for decades, I still am learning new stuff constantly, so if someone has better, different ways, I’m certainly up for studying them.

Love the attitude! I’m on the same boat. I could have just kept doing what I already knew but I thought a bit of manual reading is going to be well worth it.

That’s a great starting point - and a good read anyways!

Thanks 🙏

Agree w/ you re trust.

Thanks. At least I’ve got a few clues to look for when auditing such code.

Oh, neat!

On another note: ~2 mins looks like rather a “long” window of maintenance/disruption for what Cloudflare is 🙈

Update 1

lemmy.one is added to lemmy-meter 🥳

Please do reach out if you’ve got feedback/suggestions/ideas for a better lemmy-meter 🙏

You can always find me and other interested folks in

• !lemmy_meter@lemmy.ml
• #lemmy-meter:matrix.org

Oh, sorry to hear that 😕

I think I’ll just go ahead and add you folks to lemmy-meter for now. In case you want to be removed, it should take only a few minutes.

I’ll keep this thread posted once things are done.

It’s on 🥳

If you’ve got questions/feedback/ideas please drop a line in either

• !lemmy_meter@lemmy.ml or
• #lemmy-meter:matrix.org

Thanks for showing interest 🙏

Update

sh.itjust.works in now added to lemmy-meter 🥳 Thanks all.

Something that I’ll definitely keep an eye on. Thanks for sharing!

First off, I was ready to close the tab at the slightest suggestion of using Velocity as a metric. That didn’t happen 🙂

I like the idea that metrics should be contained and sustainable. Though I don’t agree w/ the suggested metrics.

In general, it seems they are all designed around the process and not the product. In particular, there’s no mention of the “value unlocked” in each sprint: it’s an important one for an Agile team as it holds Product accountable to understanding of what is the $$$ value of the team’s effort.

The suggested set, to my mind, is formed around the idea of a feature factory line and its efficiency (assuming it is measurable.) It leaves out the “meaning” of what the team achieve w/ that efficiency.

My 2 cents.

Good read nonetheless 👍 Got me thinking about this intriguing topic after a few years.

I couldn’t agree more 😂

Except that, what the author uses is pretty much standard in the Go ecosystem, which is, yes, a shame.

To my knowledge, the only framework which does it quite seamlessly is Spring Boot which, w/ sane and well thought out defaults, gets the tracing done w/o the programmer writing a single line of code to do tracing-related tasks.

That said, even Spring’s solution is pretty heavy-weight compared to what comes OOTB w/ BEAM.

Update 1

Thanks all for your feedback 🙏 I think everybody made a valid point that the OOTB configuration of 33 requests/min was quite useless and we can do better than that.

I reconfigured timeouts and probes and tuned it down to 4 HTTP GET requests/minute out of the box - see the configuration for details.

🌐 A pre-release version is available at lemmy-meter.info.

For the moment, it only probes the test instances

• enterprise.lemmy.ml
• ds9.lemmy.ml
• voyager.lemmy.ml

I’d very much appreciate your further thoughts and feedback.

Agreed. It was a mix of too ambitious standards for up-to-date data and poor configuration on my side.

sane defaults and a timeout period

I agree. This makes more sense.

Your name will be associated with abuse forevermore.

I was going to ignore your reply as a 🧌 given it’s an opt-in service for HTTP monitoring. But then you had a good point on the next line!

Let’s use such important labels where they actually make sense 🙂

beyond acceptable use

Since literally every aspect of lemmy-meter is configurable per instance, I’m not worried about that 😎 The admins can tell me what’s the frequency/number they’re comfortable w/ and I can reconfigure the solution.

You can hit the endpoint /api/v3/site for information about an instance including the admins list.

Exactly what I was looking for. Thanks very much 🙏