MyCmd: Development Update

I haven’t been keeping up with writing in my development log as I meant to since my original post back in January; this post is to remedy this.

Admittedly, I’m not as far along as I would like, but I have made decent progress and am pleased with the code I’ve written so far.

General Stats

I’ve continued with work on the rewrite branch, rebuilding MyCmd from the ground up. Since January, I’ve made:

• 53 commits
• In those commits, there were 53 files changed, with 4,306 insertions and 1,997 deletions
• Full Comparison on GitHub

What I’ve Done

At a high level, these are some of the changes I’ve made:

• Split up mycmd/mycmd-lib into a bunch of support libraries that can be more independently tested.
• Wrote 37 new test functions across 5 new test files to test those libraries.
• Implemented two new data structures to manage information for Commands and Command Groups (I have a TODO item to write a post explaining the patterns I’m using with these).
• Changed from having just a MyCmd System Directory and a MyCmd User Directory to having a search path (described in this design document).
• Implemented a new discovery mechanism for Command Groups and Commands.
• Implemented enough of the prior functionality that I can execute existing commands and command groups by hardcoding the calls to them in bin/mycmd.
• Added functionality over in bashdoc – see the diff here – to index the shell files so I can write tools like this to analyze the dependencies between the different libraries in MyCmd.

The Road Ahead

When I have got the rewrite branch back to feature parity of the original implementation, I will merge the brain into the main branch. I then aim to get an MVP released for others to try to potentially get more users than just me. My plan is to mark version 0.1 when I have continuous integration / release management configured on GitHub and an installation method other than doing a git checkout.

My next immediate step is to continue cleaning up some of the existing code I’ve written to be more consistent (following guidelines I’m writing in this Org-Mode file). Then, I will work on getting the MyCmd launcher (bin/mycmd) back to feature parity so that it is parsing the command line and can dispatch to arbitrary commands.

I’ve created this Org-Mode file to track the tasks remaining and the milestones ahead.