October 2023

• I made some edits to pages about SAM in this website.  The "source touched" dates and times at the bottom of each page give an indication of when changes were made to that page.  These are sometimes trivial, but often reflect significant changes.

  Please review the SAM pages.

• (231005) I released SAM-1.2.

  It has no code changes.  I cleaned up the directories by moving unneeded files and directories to junk.  Also I made some improvements to the documentation.

• (231022) I released SAM-1.3.

  I did some more cleaning up.  I removed a few stray files that were not needed and I restructured the directory $sam/source which contains the C source files and the compiled binaries.  As a result of this rearrangement I had to make a few inconsequential code changes.  Also I made some improvements to the documentation.

  Additionally, I made and implemented a tool that allows me to insert the copyright statement and the reference to the license automatically into selected (which means virtually all) files.  You may notice this change to the files of the SAM distribution.

• (231029)I released SAM.handy-0.  This is a library which contains a Python script, called dupe, that I have written about and released before.  The code is unchanged.  What is new is the improved integration into this website and into SAM.

I should add that I tested it, and found that it still works.  I wrote a short text file for the body of the message and another, very short text file for the subject of the message.  I invoked dupe at the command line, giving arguments for "To", "Cc", file name for subject, and file name for the body. It resulted in an email in my inbox.

September 2023

• I did it.  Sort of.  I made the lite version of SAM, but I uploaded it to this website instead of SourceForge.  I will consider the various other places where I may want to upload it, if any, and keep you informed.

  Also, I should explain that although it is a lite version it is not well served by that name.  It is the real thing with no compromises.  I have simply divided SAM into libraries (no more modules), and I made the SAM distribution such that it includes exactly one library, called SAM.tool.

  Furthermore, there will be no full version, so let's drop the lite and full right now.  There is SAM, which comes with one library installed, and there will also be libraries available separately, although I haven't yet made them available.

  Please download SAM.  Bear with me, however, as I need to fine tune the documentation and this website.  There will be for a while some errors and inconsistencies.  I'll keep you informed.

• I updated the SAM portion of this website.  I added sections that tell about Version Names and Libraries, and I also wrote a section called Get and Run SAM-1.

  In Get and Run SAM-1 I gave a download link and useful information about running SAM, version 1.  So far, there is only version 1.0, but I will include also all of the minor version changes as they occur.  If there is ever a SAM-2, I plan to put it in a section of its own.

• SAM was triggering a message about cd having too many arguments.  I made a change to $sam_root/kernel/pop.sam to address this.  See $sam_root/kernel/changlog.txt.

• I made some updates to SAM and uploaded SAM-1.1.  This took me a few tries, and I was using an incorrect procedure.  As a result you might have gotten a half-baked tarball if you downloaded it before 230920 at 2:00AM PDT.  Sorry about that.  I need to automate the upload process so I can do it right consistantly.

  Note that I added to this website a list of the dates and times that the changlog.txt files in the current version were last modified.  That is an easy way for me to let you know where the changes were in each version.  If you need more information, then you can read the changlog.txt files.

• 230921 7:32PM: I made a correction to the section of this website that describes how to make a dual directory.  The problem was with my description of how to make the symlinks.  Sorry about that!

• I added a section to this website to help you get started using SAM.  That section is called:

  You ran SAM.  Now what?

May 2023

• I've been making some changes to SAM.  I hope to tell you about them soon.  And I have made a few changes to my SourceForge project page for SAM.  My goal is to prepare and upload a tarball for a lite version of SAM.

  I'll keep you posted.

March 2022

• I've made some changes to SAM. In fact, work on SAM is ongoing.  I've decided, however, to focus this site on discussion of and articles about software that has been released for distribution.  You can read about the pre-release work on SAM at my other site Joe's Life where I write about current work on SAM and other projects.

  I will however also write about this website, Rosevear Software itself, and where appropriate I will take a chance and write about my plans.  This last one is not an easy thing to write about, so bear with me.  If I can, without wasting your time and mine going on about things I will never deliver, I want to share with you a little about what is to come.

• I think I can safely say that SAM is going in a new direction.  I have had over the last couple of years two opportunities to meaningfully share SAM with other *nix users.

  This was great for me and for SAM, as it gave me some insight.  I saw that SAM has grown into a tangled, but useful, mess.  Therefore I have begun a process of cleaning up.  The SAM distribution has a kernel and an application.  It is mostly the application that needs cleaning up, as it contains a lot of example code that, for various reasons, is not appropriate for inclusion in SAM--junk, in a word. 

  Some of this junk is useful code.  Because SAM is a great framework for writing code to solve problems, I had filled it up with lots of code that I had written for my own use. I did this thinking that, as it was useful to me, it might be useful to others also. And I did it from laziness.  It was easier to put the code in my example menu than it was to find a convenient but separate place to stage the code.

  Now, seeing the error in my ways, I have designed exactly that: a convenient, but separate place to stage my code.  The solution I found was simple.  SAM code lives in menus, and the menus menus are just directories.  Therefore I found that I could stage my code in directories which are separate from SAM.  Here's an example that shows what I mean:

  Before, I did this (at the SAM command line) to run tool "prep" that mounts my encrypted drive:

  backup; prep

  Now I do this:

  bound /mnt/other; tools; moreback; prep

  It is admittedly more to type, but it works and allows me to host prep outside of the SAM distribution.

  The above example was about application junk.  SAM also has special files and directories (that serve an executive role) that live in the root of the installed distribution; I have found that junk of another kind (executive junk) accumulates here.  This problem is odd.  I don't need to edit the files and directories here, but I do need to make copies of them, then edit the copies.  I do this to tailor SAM for my own use.

  Previously, I put the modified copies of these files and directories also in the root of the installed distribution, giving them different names.  Then when making the distribution I had the annoying task of editing code that excluded the stuff that I didn't want in the distribution.  This made releasing SAM slow and difficult.

  Now I do things differently.  First here is some background:  Some of the files of the root of the distribution begin with the letter "b" and are invoked by the user to start SAM.  I call these b-files. More than one b-file is needed, because they start SAM in different ways.  For example begin starts SAM normally, and bree re-starts SAM as root, keeping the menu and current directory the same, a SAM session that is already running as non-root.

  I have found a way to start SAM by invoking either a b-file in the root of the installed distribution or, alternately, invoking a b-file in a custom dir elsewhere that contains symlinks to some of the stuff in the root of the installed distribution.  In other words, I can have my cake and eat it too!

  The above solution is not hard to implement and it gives me a simple way to keep the junk out of the root of the SAM distribution.

  I was inspired to make these changes to reduce the junk in SAM by the sharing of SAM as I described above.  Receiving well intentioned feedback helped me to see more clearly what I needed to do.  The work is ongoing, but hopefully it will result in a simplified SAM that is easier to document, use and understand, yet still contains a good collection of useful example applications.

  I will not name the individuals I spoke of, as I did not receive their permission, but I will say that I found them in these two locations:

  • The Usenet group called "alt.os.linux.slackware".

  • The Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/unixshell/

March 2019

• Hello and welcome to the new SAM blog!

  I'm writing to share with you about SAM.  Perhaps you don't know what SAM is good for.  Or perhaps you want to know what new tools or features have recently been released or are soon to be released.  I hope to serve those purposes and also to give some air to my thoughts about SAM.

  You get SAM from SourceForge, in case you didn't know.  I last uploaded SAM to SourceForge on October 7, 2018.  I have no release schedule--I release when I am able, hopefully with reasonable time intervals.  I want to avoid letting it go for long periods of time--something I have been guilty of in the past--I have made some improvements to my methods to help with this.

  231024: SAM is now available from two other places as well: this website, and the Internet Archive.)