Mark Dastmalchi-Round

Mark Dastmalchi-Round

I’m a DevOps architect, musician, animal lover and all-round geek. If it’s got shiny lights on it, makes loud noises or purrs/wags its tail when you stroke it, I’m all for it. When I’m not writing code or fiddling with computers for a living, I produce my own music and provide the low-end rumble for my band in West Sussex.

Tiller 0.5.0 released

Updated:

Note : This page may contain outdated information and/or broken links; some of the formatting may be mangled due to the many different code-bases this site has been through in over 20 years; my opinions may have changed etc. etc.

Just a quick “heads up” for users of Tiller - version 0.5.0 has just been released and has a few new features, and some other changes. Firstly, I have added support for per-environment common settings. Normally, you’d do things like enable the API, set the exec parameter and so on in common.yaml, but as per issue #10, you can now specify / over-ride these settings in your environment configuration blocks. Simply drop them under a common: section, e.g.

common:
  api_enable: true
  api_port: 1234
  exec: /usr/bin/foo -v

This will also hopefully come in handy later on for some other plugins, such as the planned etcd integration.

There’s also two more changes, hopefully these won’t affect anyone! I’ve firstly moved to using spawn instead of the previous “fork & exec” method, as this provides many more useful options when forking the replacement process. As this method was introduced in the Ruby 1.9.x series, I have dropped support for 1.8.x and made required_ruby_version = '>= 1.9.2' a dependancy of the gem. I never properly tested on 1.8.x anyway, and decided to end implicit support given that 1.8.7 was released in 2008 and extended maintenance finally ended last year. If you’re running 1.8.x anywhere, you really should upgrade to something more recent as few projects these days support it.

Of course, if you really, really need to use Tiller under Ruby 1.8.x, you can always change the spawn call back to the old “fork & exec” method, but as time goes on I’ll probably rely on more modern Ruby features. So for now, consider this a totally unsupported hack to buy you some time. However if it causes too many problems for people, I can always look at providing switchable behaviour but I’d really like to avoid this - and it’s still unlikely that I’ll run any tests against it.

You May Also Enjoy

Disqus - An Apology

Earlier today, I got an email alerting me to an angrier than usual comment on this website. It was a proper keyboard warrior rant accusing me of all sorts of misdeads revolving around “forcing ads down people’s throats”. I replied saying that there had never been any ads on this site, never will be and I detest the enshitification trend of the modern Internet too. I also have found much of today’s web unbearable without tools such as Pi-Hole and a VPN; I use Firefox with...

Amiga Systems Programming in 2023

If you ever get a chance to look through the classic Amiga OS source-code still floating around some murky corners of the internet, it is a thing of beauty and astonishing capabilities. It’s an inspirational piece of computing history with unmatched capabilities for the time. Remember, this was all on a computer released in the 1980s with 512Kb memory, a 7Mhz 68000 16-bit CPU, and a single floppy drive with 880Kb storage. On these limited specs, AmigaOS provided a pre-empt...

Haiku Package Management

I’ve long since been a die-hard BeOS fan and have been running the open-source recreation Haiku for many years. I think it’s interesting to explore the “alternative OS” world and consider some great ideas that for whatever reason never caught on elsewhere. The way Haiku handles package management and its alternative approach to an “immutable system” is one of those ideas I find really cool.

A Splinter In Your Mind

Earlier this year, I finally discovered as an adult that I am “on the spectrum” with what used to be called Asperger’s Syndrome. The diagnosis helped make sense of a lot things and has given me a greater insight into my “way of being in the world”. Whilst there are times I struggle with things that neuro-typical people usually find easy, or I find some situations draining, the condition has also brought me many positives which often get overlooked when talking about Autis...