Previous:  5 May. 2025    Next: 19 May. 2025  X uvx OxCaml experiment   Can we use uv to package python? Part of Enki. X Read Solving the Bottom Turtle   They’re thinking about a similar problem, but are much more focused on the corporate side. X Read Secrets at Scale: Automated Bootstrapping of Secrets &amp;

12 May. 2025

Previous: 12 May. 2025    The Package Calculus   I’ve been updating the package management paper, which I include a snippet of below. I’m extending this core Package Calculus to support modelling real-world package managers, and showing a reduction to the core. I’m going to use this as the basis for bi-directional translations between package management ecosystems.

19 May. 2025

Previous: 28 Apr. 2025    Next: 12 May. 2025   See logs for the key on what the item icons (O &gt; X ~ # -) mean. X Read How Froc Works  Froc, functional reactive programming in OCaml, defines a Monad for expressing data dependencies.

5 May. 2025

Published 16 Jul. 2025. Tags: technology. I often find myself coming across new words that I look up in a dictionary and promptly forget about. I’ve been using Anki to learn Mandarin with my HSK stroke order deck, and I want an easy way to use the same approach for English.

Expanding My Vocabulary to a Million Words

Published 25 Apr. 2025. Last update  2 May. 2025. Tags: projects. On 22 Apr 2022, three years ago, I opened an issue in the OCaml package manager, opam, ‘depext does not support nixOS’. Last week, my pull request fixing this got merged!

Opam's Nix system dependency mechanism

Published 21 Apr. 2025. Tags: research. Following my undergraduate dissertation on network support for resource-constrained highly mobile embedded devices, my masters project moved on to the exact opposite scenario: supporting physically static devices. There are a broad class of network-connected devices with a physical presence to which location is an intrinsic part of their identity.

Spatial Computing

Previous:  7 Apr. 2025    Next: 21 Apr. 2025   update website  X Eilean  X Enki  X Opam’s depext support for Nix was merged! This creates a Nix environment that Opam manages providing system dependencies from the depext field of Opam packages.

14 Apr. 2025

Previous: 24 Mar. 2025    Next:  7 Apr. 2025   X Wrote Caledonia, a Command-line Calendar Client  X There’s been renewed interest in upstreaming my NixOS depext mechanism for Opam, which creates a Nix environment which Opam manages to provide system dependencies, and was one of the original ideas behind Enki, so I’ve been polishing that up this week.

31 Mar. 2025

Published 26 Mar. 2025. Last update 16 Jul. 2025.

How This Site Is Build

Previous: 17 Mar. 2025    Next: 31 Mar. 2025   Babel  ~ cargo dynamic loading  At the moment this loads the whole index at once which takes a long time, so I need to figure out how to make pubgrub_cargo dynamically load packages.

24 Mar. 2025

Previous:  3 Mar. 2025    Next: 17 Mar. 2025   Babel  ~ python pubgrub  Using Uv’s dependency provider.  This isn’t feasible at present, as Uv implements a custom resolver.  X cargo pubgrub  Got a cargo dependency provider working modified from a repository used to benchmark pubgrub-rs on solving the cargo repository. (Root, ) -&gt; (Cargo Bucket:serde@1.x.y, SemverPubgrub { norml: 1.0.219, pre: ∅ } ) (Cargo Bucket:serde@1.x.y, 1.0.219) -&gt;

10 Mar. 2025

Previous: 25 Feb. 2025    Next: 10 Mar. 2025   Babel  A Debian encoding in PubGrub  X provides with virtual packages  here  X cross ecosystem resolutions between opam and debian  Done in babel. Some examples follow.

3 Mar. 2025

Previous: 27 Jan. 2025    Next: 10 Feb. 2025   Babel  I’ve been focusing on our new package manager to rule them all, code name `Babel’, this week. PubGrub opam dependency provider  I’m making progress so supporting Opam’s full feature set with the Rust implementation of the PubGrub version solving algorithm, which we’re aiming to use for a cross-ecosystem solver. Previous work has used the Opam semantics for multiple ecosystems.

3 Feb. 2025

28 Apr. 2025

Published 21 Apr. 2025. Tags: research, projects, self-hosting. Eon is an Effects-based OCaml Nameserver using MirageOS’s functionally pure Domain Name System (DNS) library with direct-style IO (as opposed to monadic IO) using OCaml 5’s effect handlers [1] created as the basis to implement some of ideas from the Spatial Name System.

Published 21 Apr. 2025. Tags: research, projects. I started using the Nix package manager and software deployment system as it was great for declaratively defining software deployments for Eilean. But I quickly ran into issues with Nix’s operating system-centric view of packages; like other system packages managers (see Debian’s APT, Arch’s pacman, or OpenBSD’s pkg_add) it maintains a coherent package set.

Enki

Published 21 Apr. 2025. Tags: research, projects, self-hosting. Our digital lives are increasingly fragmented across numerous centralised online services. This model concentrates power, leaving us with minimal technical control over our personal data and online identities.

Eilean

Published 21 Apr. 2025. I tried using Claude Code while writing Caledonia, and these are the notes I took on the experience. It’s possible some of the deficiencies are due to the model’s smaller training set of OCaml code compared to more popular languages, but there’s work being done to improve this situation. It needs a lot of hand-holding, often finding it very difficult to get out of simple mistakes.

A Week With Claude Code

Published 21 Apr. 2025. Tags: projects. Caledonia is a calendar client with command-line and Emacs front-ends. It operates on a vdir directory of .ics files as managed by tools like vdirsyncer, which allows it to interact with CalDAV servers. The command-line has the list, search, show, add, delete, and edit subcommands, and has full timezone support.

Caledonia

21 Apr. 2025

Previous: 31 Mar. 2025    Next: 14 Apr. 2025   X Added an Emacs front end to the Caledonia Calendar Client.  X Installed nixos on iphito (codename ‘hippo’) with nixos-anywhere, and got the got repology DB and Enki set up on it.  X Working on an Enki MCP server.

7 Apr. 2025

Previous: 10 Mar. 2025    Next: 24 Mar. 2025   Babel  X Model Context Protocol  Added a basic Model Context Protocol server for querying dependencies with Babel, since LLMs seem to be particularly bad at managing dependencies. I need to flesh this out with support for metadata queries and solving for platforms.

17 Mar. 2025

25 Feb. 2025

Previous: 10 Feb. 2025    Next: 25 Feb. 2025   Babel: opam repository with pubgrub-opam  X tests  X PubGrub 0.3.0 Uv is using the development branch of PubGrub. There’s a lot of improvements to be had since the last release was 4 years ago.

17 Feb. 2025

10 Feb. 2025

Published  7 Feb. 2025. Tags: technology. I use the sway Wayland compositor, which is a clone of the X11 i3 window manager for Wayland. Wayland is a communications protocol for next-generation display servers used in Unix-like systems which has been adopted as the default display server by Linux distributions including Fedora with KDE, and Ubuntu and Debian with GNOME. I use the sway Wayland compositor.

Sway

Published  3 Feb. 2025. Tags: technology. I developed RSI symptom’s at the tail of writing my masters project and started looking for ways to work more ergonomically. As someone who’s often typing in one form or anther 8+ hours a day one obvious aspect to look at was my keyboard. I’m using the ZSA Moonlander as my daily driver which I purchased with my PhD stipend machine budget. It’s an ergonomic ortholinear split mechanical keyboard.

Keyboard

Published  3 Feb. 2025. I use Firefox as my default browser. You can see my configuration in NixOS here. Having it in Nix is handy so I don’t have to sign into a Firefox account on a live ISO or new machine install in order to get the environment I’m used to. Tridactyl   I use Tridactyl for many useful Vim-like bindings in Firefox. Similar to Firefox you can see my configuration here.

Firefox

Published  2 Feb. 2025. Last update 18 Feb. 2025. Tags: technology. I started using Emacs for the mu4e mail client after using and liking the mu mail indexer on the command line (read more about my mail client setup). Similarly, I was using the ledger-cli accounting system, and found the Emacs minor mode to be great. Then I got curious about Emacs Org Mode and started using it for note taking and task management.

Emacs

Published  1 Feb. 2025. Last update 18 Feb. 2025. Tags: technology. I used to use Neovim as my main development environment. I like the fact that it’s small and fast, and that I can use it over an SSH connection. Neovim is a fork of Vim that I use for the Lua configuration and built-in Language Server Protocol support. However, I mainly use Emacs these days.

(Neo)Vim

Previous: 20 Jan. 2025    Next:  3 Feb. 2025   babel  X multi-version optional dependencies for PubGrub  Which as far as I can tell hasn’t been done before.

27 Jan. 2025

20 Jan. 2025

Previous:  6 Jan. 2025    Next: 20 Jan. 2025   babel  O opam-repo maps [2/3]  X https://github.com/mtelvers/pacman2opam/  it seems like firefox doesn’t install _build/default/bin/main.exe --repo /dev/shm/packages pacman-firefox [ERROR] No solution Can't find all required versions.

13 Jan. 2025

Previous: 30 Dec. 2024    Next: 13 Jan. 2025   O read PubGrub docs  https://github.com/dart-lang/pub/blob/master/doc/solver.md  is this actually being used for cargo? feature resolution ah, uv  O read [1] [1] C. Cabrera, A. Paleyes, and N. D. Lawrence, “Self-sustaining Software Systems (S4): Towards Improved Interpretability and Adaptation,” Jan. 21, 2024. [Online]. Available: http://arxiv.org/abs/2401.11370. [Accessed: Jan.

6 Jan. 2025

Previous: 16 Dec. 2024    Next:  6 Jan. 2025   O Spatial Name System camera traps on 4g network no local connectivity what if we could resolve our location to a domain which we could resolve to link local addresses?

30 Dec. 2024

Previous:  2 Dec. 2024    Next: 30 Dec. 2024   babel
<em>
 opam-repo maps
</em>
O hyperres needs a file format  O get a JSON format, including version formula  opam formulas  variables as packages  boolean algebra represeted with disjuntions etc  I’m wrestling with the problem of expressivity of package managers.

16 Dec. 2024

2 Dec. 2024

18 Nov. 2024

14 Oct. 2024

Previous: 30 Sep. 2024    Next: 14 Oct. 2024   Mon  package management paper  X cite go rox blog post  DOING add citations for all package managers  X syntax -&gt; bundle format  X vesion formula  X src vs bin -&gt; binary caching in features column  X repo release in description;

7 Oct. 2024

2 Sep. 2024

Previous: 12 Aug. 2024    Next:  2 Sep. 2024   Mon  ok, so we’re going to try and modify opam-0install-solver to have different `roles` per implementation for every cargo package so there’s no restrictions on a single version of a package. where are the roles defined? Model.role  where are the implementations defined? Model.implementations  Okay, so what’s the problem?

26 Aug. 2024

12 Aug. 2024

Previous:  8 Jul. 2024    Next: 12 Aug. 2024   Mon  Package Management  Test with `opam install –dry-run`  you can emulate it by encoding their dependencies and then solving in that order  with a real client, you would just invoke cargo once  cargo depexts  0install  memo bug  getting latest ones  solve for cargo equivalent to cargo install  what if we did this for nix flakes?

5 Aug. 2024

Published  3 Aug. 2024. Tags: technology, self-hosting. At the start of this year I built a Network-Attached Storage (NAS) server to store backups, photos &amp; videos, digitised VHS tapes, cached builds, and more.

Building a Low-Powered NAS

8 Jul. 2024

30 Sep. 2024

Previous: 16 Sep. 2024    Next: 30 Sep. 2024   Mon  Added a SAT expression of the dependancy resolution problem, and added some example graphs.

23 Sep. 2024

Previous:  9 Sep. 2024    Next: 23 Sep. 2024   Mon  cabal2opam  it looks like we can use https://hackage.haskell.org/01-index.tar similar to cargo’s package index!

16 Sep. 2024

Previous:  2 Sep. 2024    Next: 16 Sep. 2024   Mon  https://srl.cs.jhu.edu/pubs/SRL2003-02.pdf  commented on Roy’s project proposal  X second year report  cabal to opam translation  Wed  second year report  ~ read http://www.chriswarbo.net/projects/nixos/nix_dependencies.html  created https://github.com/RyanGibb/ocaml-purl  Thu  second year report  Fri  got cabal2opam working!

ryan.freumh.org