Monday, March 20, 2023

Spelunking Apple’s Open Source

Daniel Jalkut (Masotdon):

There’s no need to worry: the whole list, indexed by the pertinent platform and OS release to which they belong, is still available on a separate Releases page. Even better, each of these releases now has a corresponding GitHub repository, hosted in a dedicated organization reserved exclusively for open source distributions.

[…]

If you want to find the source code to an arcane tool like “banner”, just type it into a GitHub search of the organization. If there are too many false hits, as is the case for a common word like banner, try searching on something unique like a term from the command’s man page. The banner tool is credited as being authored by Mark Horton, and a search for “org:apple-oss-distributions Mark Horton” brings up more hits than I would have guessed (he also contributed to vim and vi, coincidentally), but a reference to the banner man page is the second search result.

Previously:

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Yup. I'm now using Apple's bootpd as my local DHCP server (because why not? It's perfectly already there, and perfectly usable, and clearly much more configurable than my router's dnsmasq installation) and I needed the source to figure out the leases file format. Not that I could not have guessed, or worked it out, by trial and error. But the source always helps. May the source be with you!

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