Status update, June 2022
It’s one of those months that didn’t feel very productive at all. Some time off was taken, some sick kids were looked after. Some maintenance work was performed, some research was done, with no visible result (yet). But some things did happen, so let’s get down to that…
OpenPGP
Quite some time was spent dealing with OpenPGP in various ways. The good news is that we are close to adding key expiration dates to the database of meta.sr.ht. This will enable us to alert users before their keys will expire, which should help to avoid a lot of problems.
I also tracked down an issue in PGPy and submitted a fix upstream. Unfortunately the project is not currently seeing a lot of activity. Even though SourceHut will probably migrate away (to Go) at some point, I feel that PGPy is an important project. OpenPGP is hard, and any reasonably mature implementation is worth having available. If you like PGP and Python, why not lend them a hand?
Alpine
Unfortunately, not much progress was made in last month’s endeavor to get makeimg running on Alpine Linux. That’s mostly because I got side-tracked into Alpine packaging.
I’ve been using Arch Linux for a long time, including building my own
packages. Alpine uses a package
description format that is very similar to that of Arch, so I was immediately
interested. One thing that Arch is (in-)famous for is the
AUR, a repository of package descriptions where
anyone, without review, can submit their packages. Leaving aside the arguments
over this concept (see e.g. the internet), Alpine has no such thing. So I duly
submitted a
patch to
add a dracut package to the Alpine testing
repository.
I was very delighted by how the Alpine community responded. Comments were timely, welcoming, constructive, and generally helpful. After coordinating with some other changes that were in progress, I hope this will be merged soon. I think it will be a useful addition to the Alpine ecosystem. On a side note, I also learned about booster, another initramfs generator that I wasn’t aware of and want to take a look at.
OMG RFC!
One thing that’s been making steady progress is go-webdav, and with it tokidoki. Last time I linked to tokidoki I had accidentally not pushed a commit describing how to use it in the README. So if you are curious, it’s worth checking again.
WebDAV is somewhat of a beast. The (probably dead) webdav.org lists 15(!) RFCs. One of them is obsolete, but they are also missing e.g. CardDAV. Fortunately, one does not need all of them to run a simple but functional CalDAV/CardDAV server. However, as you can imagine, the list of features that could be added is rather long, so you’ll surely hear more of this in the future…
Vomit
Some fixes were pushed to vomit-sync. With this, vsync makes for a pretty usable one-way IMAP-to-maildir sync tool.
The same can of course be said about vomit‘s
vmt sync sub-command (it’s using the same code). Also, vmt’s interface has
been refactored a bit, see the URIs
section of the README. I am still
experimenting and not entirely sure where the tool(s) are heading. I might
split it up into an interactive and a non-interactive tool, or even more tools
for very specific purposes, which can then be glued together in one tool if
needed.
So long
So this is all for now. Maybe a good opportunity to keep the status update short. There is some stuff in the pipelines, so let’s see how that works out for the next one. As always, if you have any comments or questions, don’t hesitate to drop a message to my public inbox.