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Contents of The Platform

This document describes the software that makes up The Platform. But before we get into that in detail, it's probably worth explaining why these pieces of software were chosen.

Software Selection Criteria

The purpose of The Platform is to curate Cat's Eye Technologies' software projects in an executable form.

For this we need some supporting software. And for many of those cases, we have choices for what software we could use. And so we have to choose that software somehow.

For inclusion in The Platform, we generally prefer software that:

  • builds under NetBSD (ideally, under any supported architecture)
  • has a reasonable build system
  • has few dependencies
  • is lightweight
  • has an unrestrictive license (public domain > BSD/MIT/ISC > LGPL > GPL)
  • is hosted somewhere in DVCS (Github, Bitbucket, etc.)

Also, there are limits to how much support can be provided.

Some of Cat's Eye Technologies' projects are not currently (and some may not ever be) well-represented in The Platform. These fall into two broad categories: "Available on the Web" and "Of no great use to you". These are described in more detail in their own sections below. Note that source code of these projects is still included in The Platform. It's just that you may not be able to build them, and you might not be able to use them for any particular purpose, even if they do build.

Infrastructure Software

Now that we've covered the principles, we can get into the specifics. We'll start with the infrastructure software.

Note that, in case this listing is out-of-date or inaccurate, one can examine the Funicularfile in this directory and the various *.catalog files in the skel directory to obtain more accurate, machine-readable version numbers.

For the meanings of the various card-suit symbols, see Appendix A.

The Platform can be thought of as being constructed in stages, with each stage building upon the previous. The first stage, "Base", consists of:

  • NetBSD 6.1.5 (minimal install + compiler tools) ♡ + ♢
  • Lua 5.1.4 (note that this is already a part of NetBSD 6.1.5) ♡
  • shelf 0.7 ♥

The second stage, "Infrastructure", consists of:

  • GNU Make 3.82 ♢
  • cPython 3.9.13 ♦¹
  • Perl 5.18.4 ♦²
  • Hugs98-plus Sep2006 ♡
  • Erlang/OTP R16B03-1 (stripped down, e.g. no megaco, etc.) ♦³
  • CHICKEN Scheme 4.13.0 ♡¹
  • yasm 1.3.0 ♡
  • Ophis 2.1-2019.0413 ♡
  • dcc6502 2.1-2018.0902 ♡

The two-and-a-half-th stage, "Cat's Eye Forks", consists of:

  • Mini-Scheme 0.85ce1 ♥
  • ee 1.5.2ce1 (solely for convenient text editing) ♡
  • OpenZz 1.0.4-4ce1 (for Zzrk) ♢¹

The third stage, "Cat's Eye Infrastructure", consists of:

  • catseye-realpath 1.0-2022.0908 (for Pixley and others) ♥
  • Falderal 0.14 (for tests) ♡
  • yucca 1.2-2022.0909 (for building Dungeons of Ekileugor) ♡
  • hatoucan 0.2-2022.0908 (for tokenizing Commodore BASIC 2.0 sources) ♥

The fourth and "final" stage, the "Cat's Eye" stage, consists of the remainder of almost all of Cat's Eye Technologies' software distributions.

Available on the Web

A nominal goal is to have every Cat's Eye Technologies' project available either in The Platform or as an online installation on the catseye.tc web site. Thus, if you can already experience it by pointing your web browser at catseye.tc, we won't worry too much about it not being usable in The Platform.

Of no great use to you

This is the list we want to minimize, either by allowing these to run in The Platform somehow, or allowing them to run on the web, in an HTML5 browser, somehow. But for some of them, neither of those options make sense either.

  • DAM. No Javascript implementation installed. and it's a framework, really, with nothing of itself per se to run.
  • DiskSumo. No Commodore 64 emulator installed. Besides, no point.
  • ellsync. It's a wrapper for rsync, which is not included.
  • The Dipple. Contains Ruby, Javascript, Icon, etc., and no implementations of these languages are installed. Otoh, I'm sure many of the contents that are written in C, Python, etc. will build and run, but there is no automation for this, and no tests. Well, it's a junk-drawer anyway.
  • Dungeons of Ekileugor. No VIC-20 emulator / BASIC interpreter installed. still buildable
  • Funicular. No emulators installed.
  • NaNoGenLab. Some programs may work, but many are written in Python 2.7 and may have dependencies (like py-editdist) which are not installed.
  • ILLGOL. No DOS emulator installed to run the executables produced by the compiler(s). still buildable and runnable
  • kinoje. PyYaml and Jinja2 are not installed.
  • SITU-SOL. No Commodore 64 emulator installed. still buildable
  • Tamsin. Only Python 3.9 is included in The Platform, but Tamsin is written in Python 2.7 using techniques that are difficult to upgrade to 3.x.
  • The Platform. While there is a version of The Platform (that is, the Funicularfile and scripts in this repository...) included inside The Platform, it lags behind the current version of The Platform by one revision (because doing otherwise would be quite tricky.)
  • toolshelf. The Platform is based on shelf now, so toolshelf isn't activated. While the scripts are there, it is not recommend you run them.
  • Troupe. Not implemented. When it will be implemented, it will probably be implemented in Javascript first.
  • yoob.js. No Javascript implementation installed. and it's a framework, really, with nothing of itself per se to run.
  • yastasoti. Python Requests library is not installed. Besides, no point.

Also, many of the older NaNoGenMo entries are written in Python 2.7 and have not been tested under Python 3.9 and will almost certainly not run.

Also also, some projects may be executable, but in a diminished form. For example, the Mono runtime is not included, so the compiler option of PL-{GOTO}.NET is of little use. The PL-{GOTO} interpreter is still usable however.

Appendix A

License Symbols

The symbol following the name of the software indicates the license:

  • ♥ = Public domain
  • ♡ = BSD/MIT/ISC license
    • ♡¹ = BSD license generally but note that some libs are non-BSD
  • ♢ = GPLv2 (nothing here is GPLv3)
    • ♢¹ = note that the OpenZz libs are LGPL; only the driver is GPL
  • ♦ = more long-winded than BSD but not viral like GPL; specifically,
    • ♦¹ = Python Software Foundation license
    • ♦² = Artistic license
    • ♦³ = Ericsson Public License (like Mozilla Public License except the jurisdiction is Sweden.)