This is a major rewrite of everything except source code. The whole thing was lying around for too long without dusting, so major cleanup takes quite some time to complete.
CMake adoption
Migration away from Autoconf / Automake has been on radar since
last release, but nothing materialized until now. As expected, the
basic building infrastructure was not a problem, but rewriting test
suite in CTest proves to be a great challenge as expected.
Platform specific stuff, such as different encoding support of
iconv() in various platforms, is the major source of headache.
Migration to GitHub workflow
One of the major source of security events during recent years is building infrastructure and supply chain attack. GitHub has gone through great pain in preventing token stealing and whatnot, but not Appveyor and Travis-CI, so moving away from them is an obvious step. Luckily MSYS2 provides github action so that migration is a breeze.
Other infrastructure changes
Being able to translate text UI is never a selling point of this
utility. In fact I always find it redundant when no translation
was contributed all these years, and gettext m4 support has
caused too many grievances over these years. Removing all that
feels like a burden off shoulder.
Manpage is similar. This is year 2024, not like 1994 where the major source of documentation and help comes from offline ones. It is sort of like another burden when one doesn’t use roff macros in everyday work, and need to relearn them over and over again in order to update manpage.
Live system inspection
The idea was already there long time ago, almost as old as the utility itself, but not until recently did I take the effort. Implementing on different platforms (native Windows, and Subsystem for Linux) requires lots of code refactor, but not a major obstacle though. Now only one roadblock left before 1.0 release.