libferris available for debian arm hard float

To compliment my existing packages of the libferris virtual filesystem and index/search suite for soft float debian, I now offer hot off the press, debian hard float! The distinction between how floating point is handled probably doesn't make a big difference to the operation of libferris, but if you are installing debian on an odroid-u2 then you are likely running hf, and as such having debs which are hf makes installing libferris a whole bunch simpler.

With the eMMC card on the u2, it is a really enjoyable little server machine to play around with. So far I've done the rudimentary test that XML is mountable as a filesystem and created one or two indexes with the Qt/SQLite index plugin for libferris. Note that in recent releases the sqlite backend is transaction backed which gives a huge performance increase, and on really IO constrained machines this is even more noticeable. This is a little tip for those using QtSQL, transactions are not just for making operations atomic, you may find that the whole show runs faster when it is transaction protected.

If you haven't played with libferris, things are auto mounted where possible, and there are many coreutils like tools to make interacting with ferris simple. The ferris-redirect is like the bash redirection but can write to any filesystem that libferris knows how to mount.

ben@odroidu2:/tmp/test$ cat example.xml
<top>
<node name="foo">bar
</node>
</top>
ben@odroidu2:/tmp/test$ fls example.xml
top
ben@odroidu2:/tmp/test$ fls example.xml/top
foo
ben@odroidu2:/tmp/test$ fcat example.xml/top/foo
bar
ben@odroidu2:/tmp/test$ date | ferris-redirect -T example.xml/top/foo
ben@odroidu2:/tmp/test$ cat example.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no" ?>
<top>
  <node name="foo">Tue Apr 30 14:57:26 PDT 2013
</node>
</top>

The above interaction would also work for mounted Berkely DB and other filesystems of course.


I have noticed one of the binary scoped destructors doesn't like the hard float build for whatever reason. This can cause some of the command line tools to not exit gracefully, which is a shame. I can't get a good backtrace for the situation either, which makes tracking it down a nice day long adventure into trial and error.

So something productive has been generated during the last round of jet lag after all!

The goods http://fuuko.libferris.com/debian/debian-armhf/


Save Ferris!