1 (Note: this file has been re-arranged to be in reverse chronological
2 order, which is The Right Thing for ChangeLogs - DLC)
4 March 25, 2017 (fortune-mod-1.99.5)
6 Add a new cmake-based configuratio/build/install system.
8 Converted the source files to UTF-8.
10 Added automated tests.
12 Removed trailing whitespace.
14 Reformatted long (> 80 chars) lines.
18 Fixed some compiler warnings.
20 Added a build-time option to remove the “-o” (= “offensive”) flag.
22 Incorporated some downstream patches from Linux distributions.
25 March 05, 2004 (fortune-mod-1.99.1)
27 Most of the changes have occurred at some point in time in the last
30 A high number of spelling, punctuation, formatting and grammar
33 Internationalisation support.
35 New -c option to see which file a fortune came from.
39 Incorporated a couple of minor changes made in the (old) Debian
40 fortune-mod package, including the addition of an extra data file
41 called 'cookie'. Renamed some documentation files, and included some
42 install information for non-Linux users. Added a "-v" option to
43 report the program version.
45 I intend to submit this distribution to SunSITE RSN.
47 -- Dennis L. Clark <dbugger@progsoc.uts.edu.au>
51 This release fixes many of the portability problems with the
52 fortune-mod program released by Amy Lewis in October, 1995. The
53 previous version had many Linux-isms in it, which left it unworkable
54 on any other platform. This version replaces most of these with more
55 standard calls, making it more likely to work under other platforms.
56 The Makefiles have been modified so that GNU's gcc and make are no
57 longer required: any standard make and ANSI-compatible C compiler
58 should work. Sorry, pre-ANSI compilers are not supported (c'mon, this
59 is the 90's, darn it!)
61 This version has been tested to work on SunOS 4.1.x as well as Linux.
62 All changes made to the sources were as platform-independant as
63 possible. Therefore, no "#ifdef LINUX" or "#ifdef SUNOS4" directives
64 appear in the code. An effect of this is that a number of 'implicit
65 declaration' warnings are emitted by gcc under SunOS 4.1.x, but this a
66 problem with SunOS's standard headers, not with the program or the
67 compiler. The benefit of this approach is that it eases the work of
68 expanding the port to include other platforms. Bug reports and fixes
69 for other platforms are most welcome!
71 A few "standard" C function calls were replaced with more standard
72 counterparts at various points. Generally, when there was a choice
73 between a BSD version of a function and a POSIX version, the POSIX
74 version was favoured (even though fortune originated on BSD). An
75 exception to this was the regex functions: either POSIX or BSD
76 versions can be used, with selection made via the top-level Makefile.
78 Fortune and strfile also compiles on Solaris 2.5, but a discrepency
79 between the declaration and implementation of 'struct dirent' on the
80 test platform caused fortune to execute incorrectly there. It is not
81 certain whether this is a bug in the header file, the C library, or
84 While the making of this release was not meant to become a bug
85 search-and-destroy mission, some bugs were inadvertently discovered
86 and fixed. including the known bug of using -a with a file that occurs
87 in both the offensive and inoffensive directories. Fixing this
88 particular bug required a way to be able to separately identify two
89 fortune files with the same name, with one in the inoffensive
90 directory, the other one in the offensive directory. Now, such a name
91 will be taken to be the inoffensive file by default. However, you can
92 now append '-o' to a fortune name, and the '-o' will be removed and
93 the offensive directory will be searched. Thus you can say (assuming
94 you use the distributed datfiles):
96 fortune 80% politics politics-o
98 Which has an 80% change of giving an "inoffensive" political fortune,
99 and a 20% change of giving an "offensive" political one. Note that
100 this makes fortune-mod backwards-compatible with BSD fortune, but only
101 for users, not fortune database maintainers.
103 Of course, this solution only passes the buck: with the above example
104 again, if you have a 'politics-o' file in your inoffensive directory,
105 you are back to square one. OTOH, seeing that '-o' originally was
106 meant for offensive fortunes, using it for inoffensive ones is simply
109 Bug fixed: Fortune's definition of a fortune length (for -s and -l)
110 was inconsistent. Unordered fortunes counted the 2 delimiting
111 characters (as hinted in the man page), but sorted or randomized
112 fortunes did not. Now the delimiting characters are _NEVER_ counted,
113 so you will always get the length limit you expect.
115 Another bug fix: -l and -s can now work together with -m. Previously
116 -l and -s were ignored when -m was in effect. The new behaviour helps
117 me count how many long or short fortunes there are in a file.
119 Ansify has been removed from the package, as well as some filter
120 scripts from NetBSD that no longer appear useful. Randstr has been
121 kept, but has not been improved in any way. It at least has a man
122 page: maybe somebody will find it useful.
124 Some of the documentation (including the man pages) has been improved
125 and updated, and some files have been renamed so that the package
126 looks less Linux-specific.
128 -- Dennis L. Clark <dbugger@progsoc.uts.edu.au>
131 Ansify has been abandoned. I'm going to distribute this working version
132 of fortune, and then see how difficult it would be to add termcap/terminfo
133 enhancements to fortune itself--I don't anticipate serious problems, but
134 I'd rather go ahead and get this on the net.
136 A last-minute change was made to the way that percentages are displayed
137 with -f; it is now in the format nnn.nn%. The reason for this is that
138 with the multiplication of small files, fortune -af displayed a large
139 number of "0%"s--no worse than the old version, but not helpful.
141 The fortunes database was finally cleaned up, and this version is now
142 being distributed (at least, I hope it is). I don't consider the current
143 division of fortunes among files absolutely canonical; some are certainly
144 in the wrong places. But things are *better*.
146 Amy A. Lewis alewis@email.unc.edu
149 Another utility, ansify, now compiles; it has not been tested at all, so
150 it may not work even slightly.
152 Ansify is a rather stupid program, all things considered, but the work on
153 it does raise an interesting possibility for an enhanced fortune. At
154 present, the fortune databases contain x^Hy sequences for underline and
155 special characters (and this can be extended to include bold, = x^Hx).
156 Ansify is stupid because it doesn't use the proper tools, ie termcap or
157 terminfo (hmmm ... since it works on files, that may not be so stupid);
158 it appears that if that can be done, then a termcap/terminfo enhanced
159 fortune could be produced, which would recognize the existence of ^H in
160 a string and attempt to display using appropriate control sequences.
161 This sort of modification would be of greater interest to casual users,
162 I think, than even the bug fixes, and since it would not force changes
163 in the storage of fortunes, it is eminently portable. Consider this a
166 Added (early October 95):
167 A new executable, rot, which is a rot13 filter (a caesar cipher). Most
168 probably have caesar, but on the other hand, if you compile this mess
169 as root, caesar probably isn't in the path.
171 A new parameter to fortune, -n, which permits you to specify the length
172 at which to break between long (-l) and short (-s) fortunes.
174 fortune -f now shows probabilities.
176 A bug: fortune -a nn% filename filename ... now fails without an error
177 message, if the filename named following the percentage exists in both
178 the inoffensive and the offensive directories (that is, if you have two
179 files containing definitions, one called fortunes/definitions and one
180 called fortunes/off/definitions, and call fortune as: fortune -a 10%
181 definitions religion politics ..., then fortune simply fails). This
182 appears to be an artifact of the changes that were made in storage/
183 naming of offensive fortunes. It only happens with the combination of
184 a percentage with -a and inoffensive/offensive files that share a name.
185 Temporary workaround: rename one or the other of the files (*sigh* I
186 don't like that as a solution).
188 The man pages have been updated. The old man pages are also available,
189 but are not installed unless you do it yourself (the new ones are). The
190 new man pages have the extension .man; the old ones have numeric
193 A place has been created for fortune files containing HTML tags (the
194 reason I started playing with this mess was because I wanted to be
195 able to format fortunes nicely for the web without having to run an
196 enormously complex script to figure out from formatting how best to
197 display things, a particular problem since the formatting isn't
198 consistent). Tagged fortunes don't exist yet, and I'm seriously
199 considering creating a slightly different fortune binary that would
200 output the necessary headers and trailers (reducing the CGI script
201 to complete triviality) (-f isn't really needed for a webfortune).
203 Todo: I'm thinking of adding a -x to unstr, to rot13 the output. This
204 would have the effect of putting all the necessary tools in one package.
205 It further breaks compatibility with BSD tools (which has *mostly* been
206 maintained, merely enhanced slightly, although the change in how
207 offensive files are distinguished from inoffensive might be regarded as
208 breaking compatibility) by adding yet another parameter to unstr, which
209 didn't have any, before. So I haven't decided, yet.
211 Todo: KOI8 encoded fortunes? They couldn't be rotated without a great
212 deal of trouble, of course.
216 The way that fortune -m prints its output has been slightly changed. It
217 used to print the delimiter first, then, if this were the first fortune
218 from a particular file, it printed the name of the file in parentheses.
219 It now prints the first fortune without an initial delimiter; if the
220 fortune is the first from a particular file, it then prints
221 (filename), newline, delimiter, newline *to stderr*. Redirect stderr to
222 stdout to get something *similar to* (but not the same as) the old
223 behavior. The new behavior, if stderr is redirected to stdout, and
224 both are then redirected to a file, produces fictitious entries, one
225 per file in which a match was found. However, whether stderr is
226 redirected or not, the new format produces files that strfile can
227 parse without choking (the old format, since it placed the filename
228 on the same line as the delimiter character, effectively forced editing
229 of the file in order to make it usable by strfile, unless the option of
230 concatenating two fortunes with an ugly "% (filename)" line separating
231 them was considered acceptable output). Under the new display format,
232 if stderr is redirected into the file, you end up with filenames marking
233 the separation between files (as before), but they are now valid text
234 strings (which should probably, therefore, be deleted).
236 In other words, if you don't care what files the original text came from,
237 and want a new file containing (let us say), quotes from Mark Twain,
239 fortune -am '-- Mark Twain' >twain
240 The files accessed would march down the screen; the fortunes would be
241 stored in parsable format into the file twain. If, however, you planned
242 to edit (perhaps to remove the quotes from the original file, you might
243 then wish to redirect stderr to stdout. Using bash:
244 fortune -am '-- Mark Twain' &>twain
246 fortune -am '-- Mark Twain' >twain 2>&1
248 [The above is now in the man page, more or less]
251 Too many changes to mention, really. Look at the source code for
252 comments on individual files. LINUX.DIF has been removed.
254 It is worth noting that strfile was completely broken as distributed,
255 and fortune had code to make it report a different file list than the
256 one it used to retrieve fortunes. There's some rather strong language
257 on the subject in strfile.c; if it offends you, tough.
259 Bugs were fixed, and some enhancements were added. Unstr, in
260 particular, has had its command line considerably enhanced. Strfile
261 now *really does* sort, instead of merely setting the 'sorted' flag.
262 Ditto for randomizing.
264 Noteworthy: the way to distinguish between offensive and non-offensive
265 files has changed for fortune. A second directory (which may be a
266 subdirectory of the main fortune directory; the program doesn't
267 add files recursively down a directory tree) has been added to
268 pathnames.h. Offensive files should be placed there. There is no
269 longer any need to add the -o suffix to file names, and the problems
270 with finding files (especially offensive ones) seem to have
271 disappeared in the process.
273 Currently, I'm working on breaking the fortune files themselves into
274 smaller, more manageable pieces, checking spelling, punctuation, and
275 grammar, and trying to reduce redundancy. The eventual goal, after
276 the files are cleaned up, is another set of files carrying HTML tags,
277 which would then massively simplify a CGI script that calls fortune.
281 A 'randstr' (I want to call it 'lottery,' but I won't) utility, which
282 amounts to a poor woman's stripped-down fortune, to illustrate some
283 other possible uses of strfile-type random-access strings files.
285 Amy A. Lewis alewis@email.unc.edu