1 # fortune-mod Maintenance Version and Ongoing Development
3 [![Travis-CI Build Status](https://travis-ci.org/shlomif/fortune-mod.svg?branch=master)](https://travis-ci.org/shlomif/fortune-mod)
5 [![AppVeyor Build status](https://ci.appveyor.com/api/projects/status/0pbvqd1xa7777aoo/branch/master?svg=true)](https://ci.appveyor.com/project/shlomif/fortune-mod/branch/master)
7 This GitHub repository maintains the sources for fortune-mod, a
9 [the UNIX fortune command](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_%28Unix%29).
10 `fortune` is a command-line utility which displays a random quotation from a
11 collection of quotes. This collection is read from the local [file system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_system)
12 and does not require network access. A large collection of quotes is provided in
13 the download and installed by default, but more quote collections can be added
16 The canonical repository for the time being is:
17 https://github.com/shlomif/fortune-mod . In the future, we may create a GitHub
18 organization for it and move the sources there.
20 For more information about it, you can contact
21 [Shlomi Fish](https://www.shlomifish.org/) .
25 On Fedora and other rpm-based distributions:
28 sudo dnf install fortune-mod
31 On Arch Linux and derivatives:
34 sudo pacman -S fortune-mod
37 On Debian, and derivatives (e.g: Ubuntu, Linux Mint):
40 sudo apt install fortune-mod
43 (Warning: may be an old version.)
47 Release tarballs can be found at [this directory](https://www.shlomifish.org/open-source/projects/fortune-mod/arcs/)
50 Based on [this reported bug](https://github.com/shlomif/fortune-mod/issues/10):
52 One can find the official release tarballs of fortune-mod as prepared by CPack
53 there. They have a proper containing directory. One can also download these tarballs
54 from the [GitHub releases page](https://github.com/shlomif/fortune-mod/releases)
55 but please do not use the auto generated “Source code (zip)” and “Source code (tar.gz)”
56 downloads which are both incomplete and have extra directories inside.
62 Enthusiasm is one of the most important
63 ingredients a volunteer project runs on.
70 I believe fortune-mod was originally forked from the NetBSD version of
71 fortune, and ported to run on Linux systems. For some time it was maintained
72 at the currently offline redellipse-dot-net inside a
73 [GNU Arch](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_arch) (= an old and now mostly
74 unused version control system) repository, and version 1.99.1 was released as
77 This maintenance version was initiated by Shlomi Fish, who decided to maintain
78 it out of being a fan of the fortune command. It started by importing the
79 unpacked source of the fortune-mod-1.99.1.tar tarball from the Mageia Linux
80 .src.rpm into an empty git repository and continuing from there.
82 ## What is the difference between fortune-mod and the "normal" fortune?
84 fortune-mod (= "fortune modified") was the name of a fork of the original
85 NetBSD fortune, which was done in order to port the code to Linux and apply some
86 other changes. If you are using a Linux distribution chances are that
87 the `fortune` executable's package **is** fortune-mod (although in the
88 case of Debian-and-derivatives it is likely very out-of-date as of September
91 ## Why is it written in C? Can't it be written in Perl, awk, Python, etc.?
93 The answer has several parts:
95 First of all note that according to [the wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_%28Unix%29)
96 the original fortune was created in 1979, before the first version of perl was
97 released in 1987, or python, ruby or Lua which were released later, and when UNIX-running
98 computers were more underpowered than they are today.
100 Secondly, you can find some reimplementations of fortune here:
102 * [perl](https://metacpan.org/pod/distribution/PerlPowerTools/bin/fortune)
103 * [python](https://github.com/bmc/fortune)
105 You may be able to get them to work with the data files of fortune-mod and
106 other fortune collections, but note that we have not closely reviewed their
109 Thirdly, most of the value (and relative data size) of the tarball is in the
112 Fourthly, a native executable may still give a [better user experience](https://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/)
113 (I have yet to perform a stresstest benchmark though, and I doubt it will matter too much
114 for fortune's common use case.)
116 Finally note that the runtime algorithm is not as straightforward as one may
117 believe, making use of dat files that contain counts and offsets of the fortune
120 # What was already done.
122 1. fortune-mod-1.99.1 was imported into the repository from the Mageia tarball
123 as the tag <code>fortune-mod-1.99.1</code>.
125 2. Converted the build system to [CMake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMake) .
127 3. Converted the source files to UTF-8.
131 5. Removed trailing whitespace.
133 6. Reformatted long (> 80 chars) lines.
137 8. Added [Travis-CI](https://travis-ci.org/) testing.
139 9. Added valgrind tests and fixed some memory leaks.
141 10. Released fortune-mod-1.99.3, fortune-mod-1.99.4, v2.0.0 and up to
144 11. Fixed some C compiler warnings encountered with the GCC compiler flags of
145 [Shlomif_Common](https://bitbucket.org/shlomif/shlomif-cmake-modules/overview).
147 12. Added a build-time option to remove the “-o” (= “offensive”) flag, inspired
148 by a set of patches on the Fedora package.
150 13. Applied some downstream patches.
152 14. Fixed as many “clang -Weverything” warnings as possible.
154 15. lib-recode became maintained again at https://github.com/rrthomas/recode
155 (thanks to @rrthomas ) thus preventing a switch to something else.
157 16. Got the build and tests to pass on [AppVeyor/MS Windows](https://ci.appveyor.com/project/shlomif/fortune-mod)
158 (with some appreciated help).
160 17. Found and fixed some security issues:
161 - Seems to affect some Linux distributions as well as FreeBSD and NetBSD.
162 - Was already fixed in OpenBSD
163 - https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26567
164 - https://advisories.mageia.org/MGASA-2020-0199.html
165 - https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=246050
166 - https://github.com/shlomif/fortune-mod/commit/fe182a25663261be6e632a2824f6fd653d1d8f45
167 - https://github.com/shlomif/fortune-mod/commit/540c495f57e441b745038061a3cfa59e3a97bf33
168 - https://github.com/shlomif/fortune-mod/commit/acd338098071bddfa1d21f87e1813727031428ea
170 18. Reformatted the C code using [clang-format](https://clang.llvm.org/docs/ClangFormat.html).
172 # What remains to be done.
174 1. See if there are any more downstream patches to apply.
176 2. Fix more typos (reports and pull-requests are welcome.)
178 3. Perhaps modernize the code a little.
180 4. Add more quotes / fortune cookies.
182 5. Prepare packages for the new releases for [downstream distributions/Operating Systems](https://pkgs.org/download/fortune-mod).
186 * [Shlomi Fish’s Fortune Cookie Files](https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/fortunes/) - on his site, containing links to many other collections of fortune cookies.
187 * [XML-Grammar-Fortune](https://web-cpan.shlomifish.org/modules/XML-Grammar-Fortune/) - an XML grammar for collections of quotes, allowing one to generate XHTML or plaintext.
188 * [Anvari.org’s web interface to fortune](http://www.anvari.org/fortune/) - with many collections.