Status update, January 2023
Happy new Year, everyone! As predicted, the last month has not seen that much activity. But not much is not none, so here is the rundown.
iPXE
Quick followup to my iPXE adventures: shortly after writing the update I successfully used mbedTLS in iPXE to download a file. This is pretty great, but one major blocker remains before this can be useful: certificate validation. iPXE, being extremely focused on small executable size, has a quite unique approach to certificate validation. I am currently considering options, but it probably makes sense to port this way of validation, too. The code is a bit of a mess, with mbedTLS files added into iPXE (to work with its build system), but modifications to both the mbedTLS and the iPXE files. I’ll make it available soon, but not yet sure what the best way is to keep it simple to merge upstream changes from both.
Vomit
I spent the first few days of the new year shuffling things around in my Very
Opinionated Mail Interaction Toolkit. I am still very much learning in the
Rust space, and the organization of larger projects is something I had not yet
spent much thought on. The main tool - vmt - has gotten an all-around
overhaul (much of it internally). It also has a bunch of man pages now, and its
AUR package moved from vomit to vmt.
I am still playing with many ideas, and things might change again and again, but I feel this major refactoring was a good step to at least a little bit more stability. Let’s see.
Though vsync itself has only seen a minor upgrade to accommodate the general refactoring, there is something exciting in the pipeline: looks like I’ll manage to get support for the IMAP LIST-STATUS extension merged into rust-imap for the 3.0 release. Once that happens, I’ll add support in vsync immediately, which should give it another pretty decent speed boost in many use cases.
That’s all for today. I am confident that there will be much more to talk about next month. Until then, maybe see you at FOSDEM?