DelphiDabbler's Blog

Just over a year ago I posted about the first (v0.1.0) release of BogBat , a very simple template replacement program. I've finally got around releasing v0.2.0. This release simply fixes the problem identified in that first post, i.e. that the --help command wrote its output to stderr , and so couldn't be paged using the Windows more command. This was a problem since the help text is copious! Anyhow, help text, along with usage info and the output of the --version command, now get sent to stdout instead. At the same time I corrected / clarified some of that copious help text. And now Delphi 13.1 is the compiler of choice; and the deploy script is less annoying. ➣ Download the v0.2.0 release from GitHub .

As I hinted in the previous post, another new release of my rather niche file date comparison utility has escaped into the wild. This one's v2.5.0. After releasing v2.4.0 I was browsing Delphi's RTL code that reads file dates and found that, when requesting the file creation date for Linux, the code actually returns the status changed date. After some research I found that most Linux file systems don't support the creation date and stat(2)  API calls doesn't provide it anyway. To fix this I added a new command option, for Linux only, to explicitly read the status changed date instead of using the misleading creation date option. I also greatly expanded the number of aliases for date types, mainly because I keep guessing the correct options (slightly) incorrectly. Having more aliases increases the likelihood of guessing correctly without having to RTFM.  Additional aliases for comparison operators were also added, including the ability to specify arithmetic operators as ...

Hot on the heels of the release of v2.3.0 of CompFileDate , my file date comparison utility, comes v2.4.0. The main thing about this release is that I've managed to build a Linux version. That's a first for me. This release ends 30+ years of Windows only programming! There's a new script that creates debug builds for all OS targets, to save having to build them all separately from the IDE, but no other new functionality. You can see all the changes in this version's change log . 👉  Download v2.4.0 from GitHub And here we are, running on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (on Windows 11 WSL2) Don't tell anyone, but there might just be a 2.5.0 release before too long, because I had an idea for a couple of new options just as I was pushing out this release. But then again, there might not. 

What a time I've had since Christmas: a mild cold, then a weird dose of flu followed by a nasty cold that I can't shake off. Marvellous way to start the year. Still, when I'm not well I often do a bit of coding to take my mind of things, so here's a new release of CompFileDate that compares file dates! It's very simple. It can compare either file creation or modification dates of two files using any of the <, <=, =, <>, > or >= operators. It returns 0 if the comparison fails, 1 if it succeeds and >= 100 on error. It can optionally follow Windows shortcuts (i.e. .lnk files). That's it. It's designed for use it batch files. The program is open source (MPL 2.0) with source available from the ddabapps/compfiledate repo on GitHub. You will also find installation and usage instructions in that repo's Docs/ReadMe.txt file and can read about this release's changes in CHANGELOG.md . 👉 Download v2.3.0 from GitHub

Well, it's been a long haul to get this little diff and patch suite from v0.2.x to v1.0. 22 years and 2 days ago I released my first attempt at translating Stefan Reuther's bdiff / bpatch utilities from C to Pascal. Stefan's original code was first published in 1999. This was v0.2.1(pas). Then, 1 day short of 2½ years ago the first v1.0 beta was released. 1 year, 1 month and 1 week ago the release candidate was made available. In the related blog post I said I was almost there, "almost there" meaning "about a year away", obviously. And today, v1.0.0 has finally been let out into the wild. Slow and steady does it! What's the difference between the release candidate and the final release? Not much. There are no new features, just a bit of refactoring, extra error checking and a new test. I've moved over to compiling with Delphi 13 & tweaked the docs. If you're not sure what these utilities do, then read the man pages:  BDiff  /  BPatc...

Despite continually threatening to retire the  System Information Unit , here's an update The update was prompted by GitHub user weirdo12 who submitted a pull request that added $EXTERNALSYM compiler directives to make the code usable with C++ Builder. His code is included in this release. While adding the above code I decided I'd better update TPJOSInfo with details of all the changes to Windows 10 and 11 since the end of last year. The result of a very boring day poring over this year's Windows builds is that the class now detects Windows 11 version 25H2 and has provisional support for the previews of the forthcoming version 26H1 released so far. 🠊  Get the new version (5.33.0) from the  GitHub release page . The VCL & FMX versions of the demo program's have been updated to display info about Windows 11 25H2 and 26H1. So will this be the last release? I doubt it because I'm planning on doing a year end update and maybe a revision once Windows 11 26H1 is rel...