Played with PA-RISC a bit. Ended up merging with 2.4.0-test5-pre4, fixing the last hacks that were touching architecture-independent code and still have it boot to a functional ELF shell binary (unreleased, as I need to publish the glibc modifications first - it's statically linked, so just giving it away would be a LGPL violation).

Oh, I also wrote a new driver implementing a full-duplex firmware console, which basically means we should have minimal console functionality on all PA-RISC boxes HP did. This is cool, as I don't have access to a lot of them and still like to get boot reports.

The actual work in merging, including writing the driver, was a few hours. The usual wars with CVS are taking longer than that, most of the time spent trying to find excuses not to deal with it.

Anyway, there's a new binary image and a kernel patch at linux-parisc.sourceforge.net

I'm seriously considering moving to patches as sole form of distribution, though they don't keep their own change logs by themselves; merging with a new Linus kernel is a lot easier, and diffs are a lot more compact (I'm trapped behind a modem), especially when gzipped.

Decided JFFS compression was stable enough for a proof-of-concept. It needs some cleanup and probably more compression algorithms before I can publicly release it, but dwmw2 and the Axis developers should have access to the source now.

JFFS is turning out to be rather interesting; it's far from a real filesystem but with some hackery that should change. It will probably never make sense to use it on hard discs, but it might make sense for ram disks at some point. It's also a convenient format for keeping a complete history of what happened to the fs, which I think might be a cool thing to union-mount over your source tree so you never risk losing changes.

Discovered advogato doesn't handle deleting diary entries nicely. It also doesn't seem to provide a way to delete an account completely (which I don't want to do, at least not right now; I still don't like it).