readme

This is my website, https://froghat.ca. This file is the readme for the website generator; also available online in a git repo at https://git.sr.ht/~sqwishy/froghat.ca.

Documents are in reStructuredText and can be found in content/.

fucko is the site generator, a Python program that compiles the documents into a static website.

license

The site generator software (not the articles) is public domain under CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0).

The articles (not the site generator software) are copyleft under Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0).

site generator

fucko is trash. I wrote it because I didn’t like Pelican (also trash). As it turns out, I don’t like Jinja either. My website uses Mako for templates. And ninja to generally get things done in the right order.

My website has fewer features than Pelican. That’s kinda the point. It’s not supposed to be a one-size-fits-all kinda thing. It’s just supposed to be fun to edit and extend for your own ambitions. ﾟ･✿ヾ╲(｡◕‿◕｡)╱✿･ﾟ So you can copy1 it and change it to be its own thing without feeling obligated to merge to any kind of uPsTrEaM and spend your life arguing with a maintainer.

1

Unless you’re Nick. Because Nick is too cool for Fedora and uses macOS now and I don’t know if fucko works on macOS.

usage

(Optional) Create & use a virtual env (using the fish shell in this example) …

python -m venv .venv
. .venv/bin/activate.fish

Install the Python package (from the directory containing setup.py) with: python -m pip install -e .

Once installed, you can run it with: fucko build

fucko-fwd

Because the site generator was designed to use ninja, and how ninja works, new processes are created for individual build steps like reading each reStructuredText document or for rendering each HTML file from a mako template.

A lot of time is spent starting the Python interpreter and importing modules.

So, instead of doing that, the build steps run a smol C program named fucko-fwd that connects to Python over a unix socket so that the main Python process can do everything and sometimes fork and finish build steps in another process.

That program is compiled as a build step automatically, but you need a C compiler (cc in your PATH).

Information about how this works follows.

how we forward fuckos

fucko-fwd is very simple.

  • fucko, the Python program, opens a TCP unix socket and starts ninja.

  • ninja runs fucko-fwd $args instead of python -m fucko $args for each build step.

  • fucko-fwd sends its stdin, stdout, stderr handles to the Python program, fucko, over the socket using SCM_RIGHTS.

  • fucko gets the process id of each fucko-fwd from getsockopt SO_PEERCRED and reads the command line arguments for each build step from /proc/pid/cmdline.

  • Temporarily using the file descriptors in place of its own stdin, stdout, and stderr, fucko runs the build step from those arguments.

  • When it’s done doing whatever thing, fucko sends the status code back to fucko-fwd over the connection and closes it.

  • fucko-fwd gets the status code and exits with it so that ninja sees the status code.

Wow, what a fucking convoluted thing to do.

todo

  • changing cfg.py doesn’t cause a rebuild when it should?

  • A caveat of fucko-fwd is that signals are not received by the job host. So if a job doesn’t complete because it hits a breakpoint or something, hitting CTRL-C terminates fucko-fwd but not the host at the other end of the socket. So they’ll remain at that breakpoint.

what nick thinks of my site generator

that’s cute

—nick