Bikeshed sometimes works as an incubator, housing specific tools until they
are ready to stand alone as a separate package or until they are accepted into
an existing package. All the tools run from the command line, and most have
useful man pages. (Others are still being written.) The project describes itself
as “a collection of random useful tools and utilities that either do not quite fit
anywhere else, or have not yet been accepted by a more appropriate project.
Think of this package as an ‘orphanage,’ where tools live until they are
adopted by loving, accepting parents.” The slogan for Bikeshed on the
Launchpad project page is “While others debate where some tool should go,
we put it in the Bikeshed.”
NOTE
To give credit where credit is due, much of the content in this section
comes, with permission, from Dustin’s blog, at
http://blog.dustinkirkland.com, from direct communication with him, and
from the tool man pages. Dustin also wrote Byobu, a tool that is covered at
the end of Chapter 12, “Command-Line Master Class, Part 2,” and that
contains some of the tools that have graduated from Bikeshed.You can get the following tools by installing the Bikeshed package from the
Ubuntu repositories:
apply-patch—Wraps the patch utility and makes it a little easier to use
by automatically detecting the patch strip level.
bch—Determines what files have been modified in the current Bazaar
(bzr) tree, opens debian/changelog for editing, uses dch, and
appends a changelog entry for the current list of modified files.bzrp—Operates the same as bzr except that output is piped to a pager to
make reading easier.
cloud-sandbox—Launches a cloud instance and connects directly to it
by using ssh, with the cloud system running isolated, as what is
generally called a sandbox.
dman—Remotely retrieves man pages from http://manpages.ubuntu.com
but reads them on the local system. This is useful for reading the man
page for a utility you to not have installed on the local system.
pbget—Retrieves content uploaded to a pastebin by pbput or pbputs.
pbput—Uploads text files, binary files, or entire directory structures to a
pastebin. It is similar to pastebinit, covered later, but adds support
for binaries and only uses http://pastebin.com.