Signs of life

[simont]

After over four years, a PuTTY release sees the light!

But good grief, I had forgotten how much hassle the release process was. I remember having a long and clearly worded checklist to help me through it – and yet I could swear the checklist has somehow bit-rotted over time, so that now it seemed opaque and fiddly.

(Or perhaps it's just my brain that's rotted.)

Suddenly I feel a surge of sympathy for the people at work who have to actually ship software to customers.

Comments

[sunflowerinrain]

Oooh! I shall download it when I use mama's computer next month. I do so love PuTTY - don't know what I'd do without it! :)

[olithered.livejournal.com]

Bug fix: corruption of port forwarding is fixed (we think).

Sounds good; are there any more details?

[simont]

We're not completely sure if all port-forwarding corruption was due to this (hence the "we think"), but there was certainly one bug in which closure of one direction of a forwarded connection would get confused with closure of the other, leading to the connection being terminated early in a direction it shouldn't have been, and hence data being lost from the end.

[keris.livejournal.com]

Today:
Student - you're using putty??
Me - yes - oh and I know the bloke who wrote it
Student - *starstruck*

[pne.livejournal.com]

I can relate to that :)

And Simon, Thank you for PuTTY!

[andrewducker]

I had no idea Simon wrote PuTTY, and now _I'm_ starstruck!

[samholloway.livejournal.com]

I have in the past proudly claimed that I know the husband of the sister of the guy who wrote PuTTY. That's impressive enough for most people. :-)

[oneplusme.livejournal.com]

I've used this one at work on a number of occasions, too.

(Also, good grief, you just got slashdotted, Simon. Our collective geek-deity proximity bonus just increased by at least 20%.)

[lnr]

Congratulations :)

[lnr]

BTW do you have any idea of what it would take to make you decide to bump the version number to 1 and stop calling it a Beta?

[samholloway.livejournal.com]

I guess Simon's waiting for certain bugs/wishlist items to be cleared - almost surely this one : http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/wishlist/moon-on-stick.html :-)

[simont]

The one big thing I want to do before calling a release 1.0 is to sort out the data storage. There are quite a few features on the wish list which would require a revamp of the locations and formats in which PuTTY stores its data, such as:

• ability to store some settings in HKEY_CURRENT_USER and others in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE (or, on Unix, some in ~/.putty and some in /etc/putty), so that a sysadmin could set up some default saved sessions and a default host key cache which would then be the starting point for each user's personal configuration
• inheritable saved sessions (so that when I change, say, my font preference in Default Settings it automatically propagates to all my other sessions, except those in which I've specifically asked for a non-default font)
• storing configuration in a disk file as an alternative to the registry (so that people can carry around PuTTY plus their config file on a USB stick)
• ability to configure all PuTTY's options from the command line in a uniform way (rather than having to do a lot of them by the cumbersome method of creating a saved session and using -load).

Now I'm not saying I want to have implemented all those features before 1.0, but I do want to have made a commitment to a data storage format which is capable of supporting them. Currently PuTTY's data storage only tries to be upward-compatible, meaning that you can upgrade PuTTY and it'll still work with your old settings. Use an older PuTTY with newer settings, and you're on your own. My goal is that within the 1.0 series, the data storage should be compatible in both directions. (Not because I anticipate people deliberately downgrading to an earlier version, although it's been known occasionally, but because I can easily imagine people using different versions on two machines which happen to be sharing a network-stored configuration.)

I've been trying to find time to work on this for [mumble] years. I actually have an initial piece of groundwork towards these goals almost ready to commit, and have only been holding off because I wanted to get a feature release out first. I'll probably commit it RSN.

[lnr]

Sounds much more achievable than the moon on a stick (and besides rejs's reference implementation is adequate for now :) (hmm, was that originally rejs's after all? now I'm not sure).

Thanks for explaining.

[simont]

It was originally rejs's image that I linked to, yes. But his image turned into a 403 Forbidden error page some years ago, so I had to make my own version...

[ashley-y.livejournal.com]

Hello. I am a loopy addict. I even modified the source code to set COL_SATISFIED to light grey...

[ashley-y.livejournal.com]

I mean this:

$ git diff
diff --git a/loopy.c b/loopy.c
index 0a03cf4..51ac14b 100644
--- a/loopy.c
+++ b/loopy.c
@@ -850,9 +850,9 @@ static float *game_colours(frontend *fe, int *ncolours)
     ret[COL_MISTAKE * 3 + 1] = 0.0F;
     ret[COL_MISTAKE * 3 + 2] = 0.0F;
 
-    ret[COL_SATISFIED * 3 + 0] = 0.0F;
-    ret[COL_SATISFIED * 3 + 1] = 0.0F;
-    ret[COL_SATISFIED * 3 + 2] = 0.0F;
+    ret[COL_SATISFIED * 3 + 0] = 0.8F;
+    ret[COL_SATISFIED * 3 + 1] = 0.8F;
+    ret[COL_SATISFIED * 3 + 2] = 0.8F;
 
     /* We want the faint lines to be a bit darker than the background.
      * Except if the background is pretty dark already; then it ought to be a

[simont]

You should be able to get the same effect by setting LOOPY_COLOUR_5=cccccc in your environment. (It's hacky, but it fills the gap until I get round to writing a proper user-preferences layer.)