This Space for Rent

New Code! (“The sound of the other shoe dropping” edition)

I love love love love love my new macbook air, but it’s becoming apparent that, since it’s hardware, the motto of the monastery holds true. In this case, the other shoe is Xcode, which has been taken over by gnuophiles and is having all of the working bits of it slowly ripped out and replaced by lower-quality goods.

Discount, which I had thought was stable enough to ignore for a while, is the latest to fall victim to the sucky new version of Xcode. First, and not unexpectedly, is the fun where echo spits out a ^? if I pass it an empty string, and second is the just as exciting feature that echo -n does not work if it’s called from inside a shell script with a #! /bin/sh header.

echo -n worked with the Xcode on MacOS 10.4, so I’m a little bit miffed that the Xcode development people should decide to fuck with the shell and echo for MacOS 10.5.

There’s also a small parser defect that I’ve corrected. The code that detects a footnote link was miscoded so a line of the form [link1][] text [link2][]: would be treated as a footnote link with the label link1][] text [link2][, which is not a particularly useful behavior in a markup language.

So, here’s version 1.2.6, which has been tweaked so that configure.sh will configure on the more-broken-for-a-better-computing-experience™ Xcode that comes with MacOS 10.5, and which has the trivial fix that makes footnote links a little less surprising. Enjoy this New Code, and please ignore the bloodsplatters from where my BRAIN EXPLODED when I realized that Apple shipped a newly broken set of devtools just to fuck with the brains of the dozen or so MacOS programmers who still use a shell like G-d himself intended.