A new libferris is coming! 2.0.x

A while back I ported most of the libferris suite over to using boost for smart pointers and for signals. The later was not such a problem but there were always some fringe cases to the former and this lead to a delay in releasing it because there were some known issues.

I have moved that code into a branch locally and reverted back to using the Modern C++ Loki library for intrusive reference counting and sigc++. I imported my old test suite into the main libferris repo and will flesh that out over time.

I might do a 2.0.0 or 1.9.9 release soonish so that the entire stack is out there. As this has the main memory management stuff that has been working fine for the last 10 years this shouldn't be more unstable than it was before.

I was tempted to use travis ci for testing but will likely move to using a local vm. Virtualization has gotten much more convenient and I'm happy to setup a local test VM for this task which also breaks a dependency on companies which really doesn't need to be there. Yes, I will host releases and a copy of git in some place like github or gitlab or whatever to make that distribution more convenient. On the other hand, anyone could run the test suite which will be in the main libferris distro if they feel the desire.

So after this next release I will slowly at leisure work to flesh out the testsuite and fix issues that I find by running it over time. This gives a much more incremental development which will hopefully be more friendly to the limited time patches that I throw at the project.

One upside of being fully at the mercy of my time is that the project is less likely to die or be taken over by a company and lead in an unnatural direction. The downside is that it relies on my free time which is split over robotics, cnc, and other things as well as libferris.

As some have mentioned, a flatpak or docker image for libferris would be nice. Ironically this makes the whole thing a bit more like plan9 with a filesystem microkernel like subsystem (container) than just running it as a native though rpm or deb, but whatever makes it easier.