Stage one exists and works. It is 330 bytes of program and everything it
knows is a thing that will be true forever: which port the disk is on, that
a SplitBit disk begins with its own name, and where two numbers sit in that
first block. Not what a file is, not what a directory is, not that SBFS has
versions. It reads the live boot slot into Program Memory, jumps to the
first byte, and prints one character and halts if there is nothing there.
It is an ordinary boot image for now, so the whole chain runs on machinery
that already exists and the emulator has not been touched. Nothing about it
changes when it moves into ROM except who puts it in memory.
SplitDisk gained "boot" to write a slot and "bootslot" to choose one, kept
apart on purpose: writing a slot and starting from it are different
decisions, and joining them would make every write a commitment. A slot is
always written WHOLE, because one still holding the tail of what was there
before is one whose contents depend on its history, and stage one reads all
of it without knowing where the file stopped.
Three recorded tests, and the pair is the point: two disks differing only
in which slot the superblock names, with payloads that say different
things. One prints "booted" and the other does not, so this is a test of
CHOOSING a slot rather than a test that some bytes were read. The third
boots a disk with no boot area and gets the one character a ROM has room
for. Eight more host checks, including that a slot is padded whole.
Two things worth recording. The first draft used #Align to put the scratch
buffer at 0x8000 and produced a 33K file - thirty two kilobytes of zeroes
in something meant to be a ROM. It is an address, not storage, which is
exactly what the assembler's own scratch map exists to say.
And SplitLint caught the second in code written an hour after the baseline
that catches it. In the blit set-up, RSTA writes a source address of zero
and then RSTA writes a bank number of zero - two unrelated quantities that
are equal by accident, in the most safety critical file in the repository.
It is marked with a reason rather than removed.
Four things SplitLint wanted, and they build on each other.
EVERY WARNING NAMES ITS RULE, in brackets at the end the way a compiler
names the flag that produced it. Twelve rules, listed by --help. That makes
the other three possible: suppressions can name one rule and leave the line
honest about the others, the harness can assert on a rule's identity rather
than on the wording of its message, and --machine can print one tab
separated line per warning - file, line, rule, message, help - so nothing
downstream reads prose. This file's own output was parsed with regular
expressions three times in one day before it had a shape to rely on.
A CLEAN RUN SAYS SO:
No style warnings: 121 files checked against 12 rules.
It used to exit in silence, which does not tell you it found nothing - it
tells you nothing at all, and from outside the two are identical.
A MARKER THAT SILENCES NOTHING IS ITSELF REPORTED, as dead-suppression. An
exception that outlived whatever made it necessary is the thing the
required reason exists to prevent, and naming the wrong rule now gets you
both the warning you meant to silence and a note that your suppression is
doing nothing.
AND THE CORPUS IS HELD TO A BASELINE. Sixty one warnings are left in it
deliberately and nothing stopped a sixty second. Tests/lint-baseline.txt
records how many of each rule each file should produce, so a new one fails
make test while the sixty one stay quiet; confirmed by adding an INIA 0d0
to Say.asm and watching it name the file, the rule and the count. It counts
per file and rule rather than recording line numbers, because line numbers
would churn the whole baseline whenever anything was inserted above a
warning - the same reason cycle counts are stripped from recorded output
here. ./Tests/lint.sh --bless records it again.
One thing to know for next time: the rule name was inserted before the line
number at all twenty one call sites, and the signature was changed to match
rather than the twenty one call sites being fixed. (path, rule, line) reads
no worse than (path, line, rule) and one edit has fewer ways to go wrong
than twenty one.
Anachronaut