_Status update, February 2023

Welcome back to the next episode. Let’s see what happened last month!

While it happened in the month before, the aftermath of our little database server outage did keep us busy for a few days. Most importantly, our effort to bring up a usable Kubernetes cluster in our new EU presence has been prioritized. There is also a lot going on that is not recorded anywhere (yet), such as our experimentation with Ceph.

Next up was news from the I-didn’t-see-that-coming-anymore department: after six months, my patch to add Hare support to GNU source-highlight was merged. Unfortunately there is no new release yet.

GNU source-highlight is arguably not the most sophisticated syntax highlighter ever conceived. But it does come with a small shared library, which made it a perfect candidate for using it in CMOS. After all, little complexity is usually to be found in code snippets posted on blogs. Let’s see if this makes it into a distro near you anytime soon or if I will eventually start looking for a replacement.

Just before FOSDEM, I also managed to release a new version of vsync that includes the latest rust-imap release and hence makes use of the LIST-STATUS extension. This can provide a significant speedup, specifically if you have many mailboxes but most of them did not change since the last sync. A bugfix release also fixed a problem with deleting mails from the main inbox. This reminded me of some general issues that the current state implementation has, but I have almost fixed that (locally, so far). After that, I really hope to finally get around to implementing IDLE, so that vsync can be run continuously as a daemon.

Then there was FOSDEM, of course…

And, last but not least, I came across Conventional Commits. They have such a great logo! I kind of like some ideas behind it, and I wanted to at least give it a try (happening in vomit-sync). I still haven’t decided if I keep it. I like the idea of being able to determine the appropriate version bump automatically. But I don’t really buy the benefit of generating the changelog from the commit messages. A git log is for developers. A changelog is for users. I think this style might encourage bad habits, such as adding a giant feature in a single commit. I assume others have thought of much of this already, so I mostly try to apply it and then search around if I run into issues or questions.

One net positive outcome at least is that maybe the tool I happened to use for testing - cocogitto - will gain a new feature.

Also, a lot of outstanding patches for SourceHut have now been merged. You can now see the expiration date of your PGP key on the [keys] page. There is a new endpoint for invoice PDF generation (not yet used by the frontend). And a bunch of cleanup that will allow for a lot more cleaning to happen soon, but I am getting ahead of myself…

This is all for now. Always feel free to reach out to publicly or privately. I am bitfehler on libera.chat.