$ show corpnewt/GenSMBIOS
GenSMBIOS is a cross-platform CLI tool for the Hackintosh community that generates SMBIOS data (serial numbers, board serials, UUIDs, and ROM values) by wrapping acidanthera's macserial binary. It writes generated values directly into both Clover and OpenCore config.plist files, using OrderedDict parsing to preserve key order and stripping unsupported keys from Clover SMBIOS sections. The tool is distributed as a plain Python script plus Windows (.bat) and macOS/Linux (.command) launchers that locate, download, and even silently install Python when missing. Architecturally it is a menu-driven monolith with small utility modules: a hand-rolled plist library supporting XML and binary formats with Python 2/3 compatibility, a resumable HTTP downloader with live progress/ETA display, a subprocess streaming wrapper, and general CLI helpers. The macserial binary is fetched at runtime from the latest OpenCorePkg GitHub release by scraping HTML rather than using a stable API, and the Python installers similarly scrape python.org pages - functional but brittle. Code quality is solid for a hobbyist project: clean method organization, settings persistence, error handling, and genuinely reusable utility modules. The main weaknesses are the absence of tests, no CI pipeline, no packaging (setup.py/pyproject.toml), lingering Python 2 compatibility shims, and monkey-patching of plistlib internals that has required version-specific workarounds (e.g., Python 3.9's removal of use_builtin_types). Overall it does what it claims well within a niche domain, with medium technical drift.
The LLM identified 3 files worth highlighting for reuse:
A self-contained, stdlib-only plist parser/writer supporting both XML and binary plist formats with Python 2/3 compatibility. It preserves dict ordering via dict_type=OrderedDict, supports hex integer literals in XML plists, and backports a complete binary plist reader/writer (including UID objects for key-archiver files) for Python 2. Handles deprecated plistlib.Data wrappers and version-specific plistlib API changes. Another engineer could drop this file into any Python project needing robust plist handling with zero external dependencies.
A stdlib-only HTTP downloader with a live progress bar driven by a multiprocessing queue, transfer-speed and ETA calculation, gzip decompression, automatic SSL CA fallback (certifi or unverified context), and resumable chunked downloads using Range headers with size verification. The pattern of decoupling the progress UI into a separate process fed by a queue is cleanly designed and directly portable to other CLI tools needing download capabilities.
A Windows batch launcher that locates the best available Python 2/3 (via where.exe and the py launcher), compares versions numerically, reconstructs PATH from the registry when stale, and can silently download and install the correct Python release from python.org via PowerShell if none is found. Demonstrates deep cmd.exe craft: delayed-expansion-safe argument handling, a line-feed substitution trick to iterate registry paths, recursive string deduplication, and TLS 1.2 pinning for downloads. It is already effectively generic - it bootstraps any adjacent %~n0.py script and can be adapted to launch other Python tools.