Feeds

I haven't made one of these posts since... last year? Good lord. I've therefore already read and reviewed a lot of these books.

Kemi Ashing-Giwa — The Splinter in the Sky (sff)
Moniquill Blackgoose — To Shape a Dragon's Breath (sff)
Ashley Herring Blake — Delilah Green Doesn't Care (romance)
Ashley Herring Blake — Astrid Parker Doesn't Fail (romance)
Ashley Herring Blake — Iris Kelly Doesn't Date (romance)
Molly J. Bragg — Scatter (sff)
Sarah Rees Breenan — Long Live Evil (sff)
Michelle Browne — And the Stars Will Sing (sff)
Steven Brust — Lyorn (sff)
Miles Cameron — Beyond the Fringe (sff)
Miles Cameron — Deep Black (sff)
Haley Cass — Those Who Wait (romance)
Sylvie Cathrall — A Letter to the Luminous Deep (sff)
Ta-Nehisi Coates — The Message (non-fiction)
Julie E. Czerneda — To Each This World (sff)
Brigid Delaney — Reasons Not to Worry (non-fiction)
Mar Delaney — Moose Madness (sff)
Jerusalem Demsas — On the Housing Crisis (non-fiction)
Michelle Diener — Dark Horse (sff)
Michelle Diener — Dark Deeds (sff)
Michelle Diener — Dark Minds (sff)
Michelle Diener — Dark Matters (sff)
Elaine Gallagher — Unexploded Remnants (sff)
Bethany Jacobs — These Burning Stars (sff)
Bethany Jacobs — On Vicious Worlds (sff)
Micaiah Johnson — Those Beyond the Wall (sff)
T. Kingfisher — Paladin's Faith (sff)
T.J. Klune — Somewhere Beyond the Sea (sff)
Mark Lawrence — The Book That Wouldn't Burn (sff)
Mark Lawrence — The Book That Broke the World (sff)
Mark Lawrence — Overdue (sff)
Mark Lawrence — Returns (sff collection)
Malinda Lo — Last Night at the Telegraph Club (historical)
Jessie Mihalik — Hunt the Stars (sff)
Samantha Mills — The Wings Upon Her Back (sff)
Lyda Morehouse — Welcome to Boy.net (sff)
Cal Newport — Slow Productivity (non-fiction)
Naomi Novik — Buried Deep and Other Stories (sff collection)
Claire O'Dell — The Hound of Justice (sff)
Keanu Reeves & China Miéville — The Book of Elsewhere (sff)
Kit Rocha — Beyond Temptation (sff)
Kit Rocha — Beyond Jealousy (sff)
Kit Rocha — Beyond Solitude (sff)
Kit Rocha — Beyond Addiction (sff)
Kit Rocha — Beyond Possession (sff)
Kit Rocha — Beyond Innocence (sff)
Kit Rocha — Beyond Ruin (sff)
Kit Rocha — Beyond Ecstasy (sff)
Kit Rocha — Beyond Surrender (sff)
Kit Rocha — Consort of Fire (sff)
Geoff Ryman — HIM (sff)
Melissa Scott — Finders (sff)
Rob Wilkins — Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes (non-fiction)
Gabrielle Zevin — Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (mainstream)

That's a lot of books, although I think I've already read maybe a third of them? Which is better than I usually do.

A bit of history: Drupal at my workplace (and in Debian)

My main day-to-day responsability in my workplace is, and has been for 20 years, to take care of the network infrastructure for UNAM’s Economics Research Institute. One of the most visible parts of this responsability is to ensure we have a working Web presence, and that it caters for the needs of our academic community.

I joined the Institute in January 2005. Back then, our designer pushed static versions of our webpage, completely built in her computer. This was standard practice at the time, and lasted through some redesigns, but I soon started advocating for the adoption of a Content Management System. After evaluating some alternatives, I recommended adopting Drupal. It took us quite a bit to do the change: even though I clearly recall starting work toward adopting it as early as 2006, according to the Internet Archive, we switched to a Drupal-backed site around June 2010. We started using it somewhere in the version 6’s lifecycle.

As for my Debian work, by late 2012 I started getting involved in the maintenance of the drupal7 package, and by April 2013 I became its primary maintainer. I kept the drupal7 package up to date in Debian until ≈2018; the supported build methods for Drupal 8 are not compatible with Debian (mainly, bundling third-party libraries and updating them without coordination with the rest of the ecosystem), so towards the end of 2016, I announced I would not package Drupal 8 for Debian.

By March 2016, we migrated our main page to Drupal 7. By then, we already had several other sites for our academics’ projects, but my narrative follows our main Web site. I did manage to migrate several Drupal 6 (D6) sites to Drupal 7 (D7); it was quite involved process, never transparent to the user, and we did have the backlash of long downtimes (or partial downtimes, with sites half-available only) with many of our users. For our main site, we took the opportunity to do a complete redesign and deployed a fully new site.

You might note that March 2016 is after the release of D8 (November 2015). I don’t recall many of the specifics for this decision, but if I’m not mistaken, building the new site was a several months long process — not only for the technical work of setting it up, but for the legwork of getting all of the needed information from the different areas that need to be represented in the Institute. Not only that: Drupal sites often include tens of contributed themes and modules; the technological shift the project underwent between its 7 and 8 releases was too deep, and modules took a long time (if at all — many themes and modules were outright dumped) to become available for the new release.

Naturally, the Drupal Foundation wanted to evolve and deprecate the old codebase. But the pain to migrate from D7 to D8 is too big, and many sites have remained under version 7 — Eight years after D8’s release, almost 40% of Drupal installs are for version 7, and a similar proportion runs a currently-supported release (10 or 11). And while the Drupal Foundation made a great job at providing very-long-term support for D7, I understand the burden is becoming too much, so close to a year ago (and after pushing several times the D7, they finally announced support will finish this upcoming January 5.

Drupal 7 must go!

I found the following usage graphs quite interesting: the usage statistics for all Drupal versions follows a very positive slope, peaking around 2014 during the best years of D7, and somewhat stagnating afterwards, staying since 2015 at the 25000–28000 sites mark (I’m very tempted to copy the graphs, but builtwith’s terms of use are very clear in not allowing it). There is a sharp drop in the last year — I attribute it to the people that are leaving D7 for other technologies after its end-of-life announcement. This becomes clearer looking only at D7’s usage statistics: D7 peaks at ≈15000 installs in 2016 stays there for close to 5 years, and has a sharp drop to under 7500 sites in the span of one year.

D8 has a more “regular” rise, peak and fall peaking at ~8500 between 2020 and 2021, and down to close to 2500 for some months already; D9 has a very brief peak of almost 9000 sites in 2023 and is now close to half of it. Currently, the Drupal king appears to be D10, still on a positive slope and with over 9000 sites. Drupal 11 is still just a blip in builtwith’s radar, with… 3 registered sites as of September 2024 :-Þ

After writing this last paragraph, I came across the statistics found in the Drupal webpage; the methodology for acquiring its data is completely different: while builtwith’s methodology is their trade secret, you can read more about how Drupal’s data is gathered (and agree or disagree with it 😉, but at least you have a page detailing 12 years so far of reported data, producing the following graph (which can be shared under the CC BY-SA license 😃):

This graph is disgregated into minor versions, and I don’t want to come up with yet another graph for it 😉 but it supports (most of) the narrative I presented above… although I do miss the recent drop builtwith reported in D7’s numbers!

And what about Backdrop?

During the D8 release cycle, a group of Drupal developers were not happy with the depth of the architectural changes that were being adopted, particularly the transition to the Symfony PHP component framework, and forked the D7 codebase to create the Backdrop CMS, a modern version of Drupal, without dropping the known and tested architecture it had. The Backdrop developers keep working closely together with the Drupal community, and although its usage numbers are way smaller than Drupal’s, seems to be sustainable and lively. Of course, as I presented their numbers in the previous section, you can see Backdrop’s numbers in builtwith… are way, way lower.

I have found it to be a very warm and welcoming community, eager to receive new members. And, thanks to its contributed D2B Migrate module, I found it is quite easy to migrate a live site from Drupal 7 to Backdrop.

Migration by playbook!

So… Well, I’m an academic. And (if it’s not obvious to you after reading so far 😉), one of the things I must do in my job is to write. So I decided to write an article to invite my colleagues to consider Backdrop for their D7 sites in Cuadernos Técnicos Universitarios de la DGTIC, a young journal in our university for showcasing technical academical work. And now that my article got accepted and published, I’m happy to share it with you — of course, if you can read Spanish 😉 But anyway…

Given I have several sites to migrate, and that I’m trying to get my colleagues to follow suite, I decided to automatize the migration by writing an Ansible playbook to do the heavy lifting. Of course, the playbook’s users will probably need to tweak it a bit to their personal needs. I’m also far from an Ansible expert, so I’m sure there is ample room fo improvement in my style.

But it works. Quite well, I must add.

But with this size of database…

I did stumble across a big pebble, though. I am working on the migration of one of my users’ sites, and found that its database is… huge. I checked the mysqldump output, and it got me close to 3GB of data. And given the D2B_migrate is meant to work via a Web interface (my playbook works around it by using a client I wrote with Perl’s WWW::Mechanize), I repeatedly stumbled with PHP’s maximum POST size, maximum upload size, maximum memory size…

I asked for help in Backdrop’s Zulip chat site, and my attention was taken off fixing PHP to something more obvious: Why is the database so large? So I took a quick look at the database (or rather: my first look was at the database server’s filesystem usage). MariaDB stores each table as a separate file on disk, so I looked for the nine largest tables:

# ls -lhS|head total 3.8G -rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 2.4G Dec 10 12:09 accesslog.ibd -rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 224M Dec 2 16:43 search_index.ibd -rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 220M Dec 10 12:09 watchdog.ibd -rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 148M Dec 6 14:45 cache_field.ibd -rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 92M Dec 9 05:08 aggregator_item.ibd -rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 80M Dec 10 12:15 cache_path.ibd -rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 72M Dec 2 16:39 search_dataset.ibd -rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 68M Dec 2 13:16 field_revision_field_idea_principal_articulo.ibd -rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 60M Dec 9 13:19 cache_menu.ibd

A single table, the access log, is over 2.4GB long. The three following tables are, cache tables. I can perfectly live without their data in our new site! But I don’t want to touch the slightest bit of this site until I’m satisfied with the migration process, so I found a way to exclude those tables in a non-destructive way: given D2B_migrate works with a mysqldump output, and given that mysqldump locks each table before starting to modify it and unlocks it after its job is done, I can just do the following:

$ perl -e '$output = 1; while (<>) { $output=0 if /^LOCK TABLES `(accesslog|search_index|watchdog|cache_field|cache_path)`/; $output=1 if /^UNLOCK TABLES/; print if $output}' < /tmp/d7_backup.sql > /tmp/d7_backup.eviscerated.sql; ls -hl /tmp/d7_backup.sql /tmp/d7_backup.eviscerated.sql -rw-rw-r-- 1 gwolf gwolf 216M Dec 10 12:22 /tmp/d7_backup.eviscerated.sql -rw------- 1 gwolf gwolf 2.1G Dec 6 18:14 /tmp/d7_backup.sql

Five seconds later, I’m done! The database is now a tenth of its size, and D2B_migrate is happy to take it. And I’m a big step closer to finishing my reliance on (this bit of) legacy code for my highly-visible sites 😃

I frequently find myself writing my own short command-line scripts in Python that help me with day-to-day tasks.

It’s so easy to throw together a single-file Python command-line script and throw it in my ~/bin directory!

Well… it’s easy, unless the script requires anything outside of the Python standard library.

Recently I’ve started using uv and my primary for use for it has been fixing Python’s “just manage the dependencies automatically” problem.

I’ll share how I’ve been using uv… first first let’s look at the problem.

A script without dependencies

If I have a Python script that I want to be easily usable from anywhere on my system, I typically follow these steps:

1. Add an appropriate shebang line above the first line in the file (e.g. #!/usr/bin/env python3)
2. Aet an executable bit on the file (chmod a+x my_script.py)
3. Place the script in a directory that’s in my shell’s PATH variable (e.g. cp my_script.py ~/bin/my_script)

For example, here’s a script I use to print out 80 zeroes (or a specific number of zeroes) to check whether my terminal’s font size is large enough when I’m teaching:

1 2 3 4 5 6 #!/usr/bin/env python3 import sys numbers = sys.argv[1:] or [80] for n in numbers: print("0" * int(n))

This file lives at /home/trey/bin/0 so I can run the command 0 from my system prompt to see 80 0 characters printed in my terminal.

This works great! But this script doesn’t have any dependencies.

The problem: a script with dependencies

Here’s a Python script that normalizes the audio of a given video file and writes a new audio-normalized version of the video to a new file:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 """Normalize audio in input video file.""" from argparse import ArgumentParser from pathlib import Path from ffmpeg_normalize import FFmpegNormalize def normalize_audio_for(video_path, audio_normalized_path): """Return audio-normalized video file saved in the given directory.""" ffmpeg_normalize = FFmpegNormalize(audio_codec="aac", audio_bitrate="192k", target_level=-17) ffmpeg_normalize.add_media_file(str(video_path), audio_normalized_path) ffmpeg_normalize.run_normalization() def main(): parser = ArgumentParser() parser.add_argument("video_file", type=Path) parser.add_argument("output_file", type=Path) args = parser.parse_args() normalize_audio_for(args.video_file, args.output_file) if __name__ == "__main__": main()

This script depends on the ffmpeg-normalize Python package and the ffmpeg utility. I already have ffmpeg installed, but I prefer not to globally install Python packages. I install all Python packages within virtual environments and I install global Python scripts using pipx.

At this point I could choose to either:

1. Create a virtual environment, install ffmpeg-normalize in it, and put a shebang line referencing that virtual environment’s Python binary at the top of my script file
2. Turn my script into a pip-installable Python package with a pyproject.toml that lists ffmpeg-normalize as a dependency and use pipx to install it

That first solution requires me to keep track of virtual environments that exist for specific scripts to work. That sounds painful.

The second solution involves making a Python package and then upgrading that Python package whenever I need to make a change to this script. That’s definitely going to be painful.

The solution: let uv handle it

A few months ago, my friend Jeff Triplett showed me that uv can work within a shebang line and can read a special comment at the top of a Python file that tells uv which Python version to run a script with and which dependencies it needs.

Here’s a shebang line that would work for the above script:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 #!/usr/bin/env -S uv run --script # /// script # requires-python = ">=3.12" # dependencies = [ # "ffmpeg-normalize", # ] # ///

That tells uv that this script should be run on Python 3.12 and that it depends on the ffmpeg-normalize package.

Neat… but what does that do?

Well, the first time this script is run, uv will create a virtual environment for it, install ffmpeg-normalize into that venv, and then run the script:

1 2 3 4 5 $ normalize Reading inline script metadata from `/home/trey/bin/normalize` Installed 4 packages in 5ms usage: normalize [-h] video_file output_file normalize: error: the following arguments are required: video_file, output_file

Every time the script is run after that, uv finds and reuses the same virtual environment:

1 2 3 4 $ normalize Reading inline script metadata from `/home/trey/bin/normalize` usage: normalize [-h] video_file output_file normalize: error: the following arguments are required: video_file, output_file

Each time uv runs the script, it quickly checks that all listed dependencies are properly installed with their correct versions.

Another script I use this for is caption, which uses whisper (via the Open AI API) to quickly caption my screencasts just after I record and edit them. The caption quality very rarely need more than a very minor edit or two (for my personal accent of English at least) even for technical like “dunder method” and via the API the captions generate very quickly.

uv everywhere?

I haven’t yet fully embraced uv everywhere.

I don’t manage my Python projects with uv, though I do use it to create new virtual environments (with --seed to ensure the pip command is available) as a virtualenvwrapper replacement, along with direnv.

I have also started using uv tool as a pipx replacement and I’ve considered replacing pyenv with uv.

uv instead of pipx

When I want to install a command-line tool that happens to be Python powered, I used to do this:

1 $ pipx countdown-cli

Now I do this instead:

1 $ uv tool install countdown-cli

Either way, I end up with a countdown script in my PATH that automatically uses its own separate virtual environment for its dependencies:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 $ countdown --help Usage: countdown [OPTIONS] DURATION Countdown from the given duration to 0. DURATION should be a number followed by m or s for minutes or seconds. Examples of DURATION: - 5m (5 minutes) - 45s (45 seconds) - 2m30s (2 minutes and 30 seconds) Options: --version Show the version and exit. --help Show this message and exit. uv instead of pyenv

For years, I’ve used pyenv to manage multiple versions of Python on my machine.

1 $ pyenv install 3.13.0

Now I could do this:

1 $ uv python install --preview 3.13.0

Or I could make a ~/.config/uv/uv.toml file containing this:

1 preview = true

And then run the same thing without the --preview flag:

1 $ uv python install 3.13.0

This puts a python3.10 binary in my ~/.local/bin directory, which is on my PATH.

Why “preview”? Well, without it uv doesn’t (yet) place python3.13 in my PATH by default, as this feature is currently in testing/development.

Self-installing Python scripts are the big win

I still prefer pyenv for its ability to install custom Python builds and I don’t have a preference between uv tool and pipx.

The biggest win that I’ve experienced from uv so far is the ability to run an executable script and have any necessary dependencies install automagically.

This doesn’t mean that I never make Python package out of my Python scripts anymore… but I do so much more rarely. I used to create a Python package out of a script as soon as it required third-party dependencies. Now my “do I really need to turn this into a proper package” bar is set much higher.

Today we are talking about Drupal CMS Media Management, How media management has evolved, and Why managing our media is so important with our guest Tony Barker. We’ll also cover URL Embed as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/479

Topics

• What do we mean by media management in Drupal CMS
• How is it different from media in Drupal today
• Why is media management important
• How are you applying these changes to Drupal
• What phase are you in
• Will this be ready for Drupal CMS release in January
• What types of advanced media will supported
• Do you see it growing to replace some DAMs
• Are there future goals
• How did you get involved
• How can people get involved

Resources

• Track 15 Proposal for Media Management
• Issue to publish research on other CMS and the questionnaire results
• Vision for media management https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal_cms/issues/3488393
• Contributed module file upload field for media https://www.drupal.org/project/media_widget and these related modules
  • https://www.drupal.org/project/media_link
  • https://www.drupal.org/project/media_remote_embed
• Slack: #starshot-media-management and #starshot
• Drupal Core strategy for 2025-2028

Guests

Tony Barker - annertech.com tonypaulbarker

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Suzanne Dergacheva - evolvingweb.com pixelite

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted a simple way to insert oEmbed content on your Drupal site? There’s a module for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • URL Embed
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Sep 2014 by the venerable Dave Reid, though recent releases are by Mark Fullmer of the University of Texas at Austin
  • Versions available: 2.0.0-alpha3 and 3.0.0-beta1, the latter of which works with Drupal 10.1 or 11. That said, it does declare a dependency on the Embed project, which unfortunately doesn’t yet have a Drupal 11-ready release
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained
  • Security coverage technically, but needs a stable release
  • Test coverage
  • Documentation guide
  • Number of open issues: 63 open issues, 4 of which are bugs against the current branch
• Usage stats:
  • 7,088 sites
• Module features and usage
  • A content creator using this module only needs to provide a URL to the content they want to embed, as the name suggests
  • The module provides both a CKEditor plugin and a formatter for link fields. Note that you will also need to enable a provided filter plugin for any text formats where you want users to use the CKEditor button
  • Probably the critical distinction between how this module works and other elements of the media system is that this bypasses the media library, and as such is better suited to “one off” uses of remote content like videos, social media posts, and more
  • It’s also worth mentioning that the module provides a hook to modify the parameters that will be passed to the oEmbed host, for example to set the number of posts to return from Twitter
  • I could definitely see this as a valuable addition to the Event Platform that we’ve talked about previously on the podcast, but the lack of a Drupal 11-ready release for the Embed module is an obvious concern. So, if any of our listeners want to take that on, it would be a valuable contribution to the community

Debian LTS

This was my hundred-twenty-fifth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on:

• [DLA 3968-1] netatalk security update to fix four CVEs related to heap buffer overflow and writing arbitrary files. The patches have been prepared by the maintainer.
• [DLA 3976-1] tgt update to fix one CVE related to not using a propper seed for rand()
• [DLA 3977-1] xfpt update to fix one CVE related to a stack-based buffer overflow
• [DLA 3978-1] editorconfig-core update to fix two CVEs related to buffer overflows.

I also continued to work on a fix for glewlwyd, which is more difficult than expected. Besides I started to work on ffmpeg and haproxy.

Last but not least I did a week of FD this month and attended the monthly LTS/ELTS meeting.

Debian ELTS

This month was the seventy-sixth ELTS month. During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on:

• [ELA-1259-1]editorconfig-core security update for two CVEs in Buster to fix buffer overflows.

I also started to work on a fix for kmail-account-wizzard. Unfortunately preparing a testing environment takes some time and I did not finish testing this month. Besides I started to work on ffmpeg and haproxy.

Last but not least I did a week of FD this month and attended the monthly LTS/ELTS meeting.

Debian Printing

Unfortunately I didn’t found any time to work on this topic.

Debian Matomo

Unfortunately I didn’t found any time to work on this topic.

Debian Astro

This month I uploaded new packages or new upstream or bugfix versions of:

• … planetary-system-stacker

I also sponsored an upload of calceph.

Debian IoT

This month I uploaded new upstream or bugfix versions of:

• … libjwt
• … libmatthew-java

Debian Mobcom

This month I uploaded new packages or new upstream or bugfix versions of:

• … libosmo-cc (package prepared by Nathan)
• … libosmo-abis

misc

This month I uploaded new upstream or bugfix versions of:

• … setserial
• … rplay

I also did some NMU of opensta, kdrill, glosstex, irsim, pagetools, afnix, cpm, to fix some RC bugs.

FTP master

This month I accepted 266 and rejected 16 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 269.

As the year comes to a close, we would like to take time to reflect and celebrate the incredible progress the Python extension for VS Code has made in the past year. Inspired by Spotify Wrapped, we’ve compiled highlights from our year, showcasing top voted requests and countless lines of code written. Keep reading to get an inside look into all things @vscode-python and @vscode-python-debugger wrapped!

Pull Requests and issues

We saw an impressive 604 pull requests merged in 2024, bringing in features such as Django tests, improved environment discovery, the Native REPL, and more! Moreover, our community helped close 894 issues, for both bug fixes and features requests.

We broke down our top addressed issues based on up-votes:

• Feature suggestion: Run Django unittests received 337 up-votes
• Select pyenv environment based on folder .python-version file received 135 up-votes
• Add “just my code” global setting received 34 up-votes
• Bring back Python 3.6 debugging support by breaking debugging out into its own extension received 34 up-votes

Contributors and community

This year, we were thrilled to see contributions from 43 unique contributors: 22 internal contributors and 21 from the community!

We would like to give a special shout-out to our community contributors: @andybbruno, @aydar-kamaltdinov, @baszalmstra, @bersbersbers, @brokoli777, @covracer, @DavidArchibald, @DetachHead, @edgarrmondragon, @flying-sheep, @joar, @LouisGobert, @mnoah1, @nickwarters, @PopoDev, @renan-r-santos, @shanesaravia, @soda92, @T-256, @tomoki, @vishrutss.

The community’s support and collaboration have been invaluable, and we look forward to continuing to find ways to engage and collaborate with you all in 2025!

Codebase changes

This year, we made significant efforts to make our codebase more maintainable by rewriting what we could in Python and cleaning up old code as new code was introduced. As a result, 51,972 lines of code were added, and 48,629 lines of code were removed.

Tools Extensions

Although our repository stats do not account for our tools extensions, we want to highlight the growth and progress in these repositories.

As part of our ongoing efforts to enhance the Python extension, we previously focused on separating linting and formatting tools into their own extensions. This year, we observed substantial growth across all of these extensions.

Black formatter saw an impressive growth of 89.45% and is our most installed tools extension, while autopep8 usage surged by 149.65%. Pylint experienced a notable increase of 70.71%, and flake8 grew by 88.63%. Our mypy type checker topped the download growth chart with an astounding growth of 236.18%.

We’re incredibly proud of what we’ve achieved together this year and can’t wait to continue merging exciting updates in 2025. Thank you for being a part of our community!

Engage with us on our GitHub repositories, @vscode-python and @vscode-python-debugger, and let us know what new features you would like to see next! You can stay up to date on latest releases by following us on X @pythonvscode and on our Python DevBlog.

The post 2024 Python in VS Code Wrapped appeared first on Python.

We’re thrilled to introduce Sachiko Muto, one of the newest members elected to the Drupal Association Board in October. Sachiko is the Chair of OpenForum Europe and a senior researcher at RISE Research Institutes of Sweden. She originally joined OFE in 2007, serving for several years as Director, responsible for government relations, and later as CEO. Sachiko holds degrees in Political Science from the University of Toronto and the London School of Economics and received her doctorate in standardisation policy from TU Delft.

We’re excited to have Sachiko on the Board, and she recently shared her insights on this new chapter in her journey:

What are you most excited about when it comes to joining the Drupal Association Board?
I’m thrilled to join the Drupal Association Board at a time when open source is gaining significant momentum as a foundation for digital public infrastructure in Europe and beyond. I’m particularly excited about the potential to further position Drupal as a critical tool for digital sovereignty and public value, especially as it powers platforms like europa.eu.

What do you hope to accomplish during your time on the board?
During my time on the board, I hope to strengthen the connections between Drupal and broader digital public policy initiatives, ensuring that we’re at the forefront of supporting transparent, secure, and user-centric digital infrastructure. I’m particularly committed to promoting Drupal’s adoption as a foundational tool for digital public infrastructure in the public sector. Additionally, I aim to explore ways to enhance Drupal’s long-term sustainability by encouraging public sector users not only to adopt but also to actively contribute to Drupal’s ecosystem, reinforcing its growth and resilience.

What specific skill or perspective do you contribute to the board?
With a background in public policy, open technologies, and as a senior researcher at RISE, I bring a perspective focused on the societal impact of open standards and open source. My work has consistently emphasized the strategic role of open source in public digital infrastructure, so I’m here to champion that within Drupal’s mission. I also hope to contribute insights from my experience in European funding and public sector collaboration to bolster Drupal’s impact in these areas.

Share a favorite quote or piece of advice that has inspired you.
With so many directions we could go, try to pursue only those that involve working with people you want to be around. I also learned early on in my career that communicating a policy message becomes much easier—and more powerful—when you’re confident it’s the right thing to do.

We’re excited to see the amazing contributions Sachiko will make during her time on the Drupal Association Board. Thank you, Sachiko, for dedicating your time and expertise to serving the Drupal community! Connect with Sachiko on LinkedIn.

The Drupal Association Board of Directors comprises 13 members with nine are nominated for staggered three-year terms, two are elected by Drupal Association members, and one seat is reserved for the Drupal Project Founder, Dries Buytaert, while another is reserved for the immediate past chair. The Board meets twice in person and four times virtually each year. It oversees policy development, executive director management, budget approvals, financial reporting, and fundraising efforts.

The Python community has kept up its momentum this month, delivering a host of exciting updates. From the promising improvements to template strings in PEP 750 to the release of Python 3.14.0a2, innovation is front and center. Developers are exploring new tools like partial validation in Pydantic 2.10, while popular projects adapt to the end of life of Python 3.8.

December also welcomes the return of the beloved Advent of Code, challenging programmers and problem solvers with daily puzzles. And for those planning ahead, the PyCon 2025 call for proposals is closing soon, marking a final opportunity to contribute to the community’s largest annual gathering.

Whether you’re diving into cutting-edge features, revisiting Python fundamentals, or connecting with fellow developers, there’s something for everyone this month. Let’s round up the most important developments of last month and see how they can inspire your next Python project!

PEP 750 – Template Strings Updated

The authors of PEP 750, which you might have first encountered introducing tag strings, have revised and significantly updated their proposal.

The central point of the PEP is now renamed as template strings, or t-strings, and aligns its syntax with the beloved f-strings:

Python planet = "World" greeting = t"Hello, {planet}!" Copied!

Looks very familiar! The main practical difference to f-strings is that t-strings are lazily evaluated, which opens the door to common string interpolation scenarios that f-strings can’t handle, such as:

• Performance-optimized logging
• Internationalization
• Template reuse
• HTML templating

All of the above are examples of string interpolation that requires lazy evaluation.

Note: Template reuse can come in handy, for example, when you’re creating template prompts in LLM-powered applications and application frameworks.

If the PEP gets accepted and implemented, then you’ll be able to use t-strings where you currently have to resort to str.format(), using a Template object from the string module, or even the older modulo (%) string formatting approach.

As the Python community continues to innovate, PEP 750 is a testament to the ongoing efforts to enhance language features while keeping them intuitive for developers. If you want to dive deeper into this proposal and its potential impact, then you can read more in the detailed examples section of the PEP.

Python 3.14.0a2 Released

The Python 3.14 team rolled out the second alpha release of Python 3.14, version 3.14.0a2. This release is part of the ongoing development process for Python 3.14, with a total of seven alpha releases planned.

Read the full article at https://realpython.com/python-news-december-2024/ »

[ Improve Your Python With 🐍 Python Tricks 💌 – Get a short & sweet Python Trick delivered to your inbox every couple of days. >> Click here to learn more and see examples ]

JupyterLab, the latest iteration of the Jupyter Notebook, is a versatile tool that empowers you to share your code in an easily understandable format.

Front View Two Hard Cover Book Psd Mockup

Hundreds of thousands of people around the world use Jupyter Notebooks or variations of the Notebook architecture for any or all of the following:

• teaching
• presentations
• learning a computer language
• numerical simulations
• statistical modeling
• data visualization
• machine learning
• and much more!

Jupyter Notebooks can be emailed, put on GitHub, or run online. You may also add HTML, images, Markdown, videos, LaTeX, and custom MIME types to your Notebooks. Finally, Jupyter Notebooks support big data integration.

JupyterLab 101 will get you up to speed on the newest user interface for Jupyter Notebooks and the other tools that JupyterLab supports. You now have a tabbed interface that you can use to edit multiple Notebooks, open terminals in your browser, create a Python REPL, and more. JupyterLab also includes a debugger utility to help you figure out your coding issues.

Rest assured, JupyterLab supports all the same programming languages as Jupyter Notebook. The main difference lies in the user interface, and this guide is here to help you navigate it effectively and efficiently.

After reading JupyterLab 101, you will be an expert in JupyterLab and produce quality Notebooks quickly!

Where to Purchase

Purchase on Gumroad, Leanpub or Amazon

The post JupyterLab 101 Book is Now Available appeared first on Mouse Vs Python.

This week, all eyes are on DrupalCon Singapore 2024 — one of the most anticipated events in the Drupal community. Kicking off on Monday, the event has already garnered an enthusiastic response from attendees worldwide. Known for its engaging sessions, DrupalCon Singapore offers a unique opportunity to explore the present and future of Drupal. The Drop Times is here to provide comprehensive coverage with real-time updates, insightful news stories, and key highlights from the conference floor.  

DrupalCon is more than just an event; it's a pivotal moment in the Drupal community’s journey. It draws bright new talent while also sharpening the skills of seasoned contributors. This year’s event is especially significant, as it comes just weeks before the official launch of the all-new Drupal CMS on January 15, 2025. Attendees can expect exclusive insights into new developments and get a sneak peek at what’s on the horizon for Drupal.  

In addition to our DrupalCon coverage, we’re experimenting with a fresh, streamlined approach to our newsletter. Moving forward, you’ll receive a crisp, concise package of the most important stories from the past week. Our goal is to ensure you stay informed without feeling overwhelmed.  

So, let’s stay tuned for all the action from Singapore and beyond. Big changes are on the way for Drupal, and you won’t want to miss a thing!

DrupalCon Singapore 2024

• DrupalCon Singapore 2024: Spotlight on Sponsors Driving Innovation and Community Growth
• Meet the Speakers: DrupalCon Singapore 2024 Part 1
• Meet the Speakers: DrupalCon Singapore 2024 Part II
• Meet the Speakers: DrupalCon Singapore 2024 Part III
• Contribution Day at DrupalCon Singapore 2024: A Day of Collaboration and Innovation
• Networking Opportunities at DrupalCon Singapore 2024: Maximise Your Experience

Discover Drupal

• The New Drupal.org Homepage is Live!

 

Events

• Drupal Sapporo Meetup to Explore Integration with Open Source Applications on 26 December
• DrupalCon Atlanta 2025 T-Shirt Design Contest: Submit Your Entries by Dec 31
• TDT Is the Official Media Partner for DrupalCon Singapore 2024
• Banking on Open Source: Webinar Explores Open Source Success in Finance Sector

 

Organization News

• ImageX Recognized as a Great Place to Work for 5-Year in a Row
• Axelerant’s IDMC Digital Overhaul Earns Splash Awards Asia Nomination
• GovFlix: DrupalCon Singapore 2024 Splash Awards Finalist
• QED42’s ADA Project Finalist at Splash Awards 2024
• Transforming Digital Luxury Experience: Aqua Expeditions’ Website Revamp Journey

 

Hi there!

I'm happy to announce version 3.16 of reader, a Python feed reader library.

What's new? #

Here are the highlights since reader 3.15.

Archived feed #

It is now possible to archive selected entries to a special "archived" feed, so they can be preserved once the original feed is deleted; this is similar to the Tiny Tiny RSS feature of the same name (which is where I got the idea in the first place).

At high level, this is available in the web app as an "archive all" button that archives currently-visible entries for a feed; in the re-design, the plan is to archive important entries by default as part of the "delete feed" confirmation page. It may also be a good idea to make this the default through a plugin before then, so that user interaction is not required for it to happen.

At low level, this is enabled by archive_entries() (I finally gave up and added a utils module 😅), and the copy_entry() method.

Entry source #

reader now parses and stores the entry source, containing metadata about the source feed if the entry is a copy – this can be the case when a feed aggregates articles from other feeds. The source URL can be used for filtering entries, and its title is part of the feed title during searches.

This was a side-project for the archived feed functionality, since the source of archived entries gets set to their original feed.

Bug fixes #

Also during archived feed implementation, I found out foreign keys were disabled in threads other than the one that created the reader instance, so e.g. deleting a feed from another thread would not delete its entries. This is now fixed.

The bug existed since multi-threaded use became allowed in version 2.15. Serving the web application with the serve command is known to be affected; serving it without threads (e.g. the default uWSGI configuration) should not be affected.

Attention

Your database may be in an inconsistent state. The migration to 3.16 will check for this on first use; issues will be reported as a FOREIGN KEY constraint failed storage integrity error; see the changelog for details.

That's it for now. For more details, see the full changelog.

Want to contribute? Check out the docs and the roadmap.

Learned something new today? Share this with others, it really helps! PyCoder's Weekly HN Reddit linkedin Twitter

What is reader? #

reader takes care of the core functionality required by a feed reader, so you can focus on what makes yours different.

reader allows you to:

• retrieve, store, and manage Atom, RSS, and JSON feeds
• mark articles as read or important
• add arbitrary tags/metadata to feeds and articles
• filter feeds and articles
• full-text search articles
• get statistics on feed and user activity
• write plugins to extend its functionality

...all these with:

• a stable, clearly documented API
• excellent test coverage
• fully typed Python

To find out more, check out the GitHub repo and the docs, or give the tutorial a try.

Why use a feed reader library? #

Have you been unhappy with existing feed readers and wanted to make your own, but:

• never knew where to start?
• it seemed like too much work?
• you don't like writing backend code?

Are you already working with feedparser, but:

• want an easier way to store, filter, sort and search feeds and entries?
• want to get back type-annotated objects instead of dicts?
• want to restrict or deny file-system access?
• want to change the way feeds are retrieved by using Requests?
• want to also support JSON Feed?
• want to support custom information sources?

... while still supporting all the feed types feedparser does?

If you answered yes to any of the above, reader can help.

The reader philosophy #

• reader is a library
• reader is for the long term
• reader is extensible
• reader is stable (within reason)
• reader is simple to use; API matters
• reader features work well together
• reader is tested
• reader is documented
• reader has minimal dependencies

Why make your own feed reader? #

So you can:

• have full control over your data
• control what features it has or doesn't have
• decide how much you pay for it
• make sure it doesn't get closed while you're still using it
• really, it's easier than you think

Obviously, this may not be your cup of tea, but if it is, reader can help.

Endorsed by Dries Buytaert in his keynote at DrupalCon Singapore, the Search Track is driving improvements in how users navigate and interact with content. Read the full interview with the Search Track Leads as they share their achievements, challenges, and future plans.

Strengthening your SEO game is essential! But are you taking all the proper measures to accomplish that? If not, then this blog is here to help you. With the help of a multilingual SEO, switching to your preferred language in a global website with just a prompt has become easy. 

But that's not all, there is more to it than what appears. In order to make your website content accessible to everyone, it is essential to be clear about what kind of SEO technicalities to use. And if ignored it might adversely affect your website's ranking. 

What Is Multilingual SEO?

Multilingual SEO is a technique that improves the accessibility of your website by getting rid of the language barrier. This process is based on the language to localize your website content into different languages by preference. In short, allowing you to reach more and more audiences beyond your region or country.

Drupal Advent Calendar day 9 - Media Management james Mon, 12/09/2024 - 09:00

Welcome back to the ninth day of Drupal Advent Calendar, and behind today’s door we find the Media track of Drupal Starshot. Media Management is an area where Drupal has traditionally not been strong compared to other content management systems, yet it has a lot of very powerful features that Drupal CMS will hopefully refine to make it one of the best media management platforms on the web.

In the Track Leads keynote at DrupalCon Barcelona, Tony Barker, the Track Lead for Media Management in Drupal CMS, outlined how he is building the track to help marketers tell their story and connect with…

Tags

• media
• media management
• Drupal Starshot

<strong>Topics covered in this episode:</strong><br> <ul> <li><a href="https://github.com/pydantic/jiter?featured_on=pythonbytes"><strong>jiter</strong></a></li> <li><strong><a href="https://astral.sh/blog/python-build-standalone?featured_on=pythonbytes">A new home for python-build-standalone</a></strong></li> <li><strong><a href="https://github.com/deliro/moka-py?featured_on=pythonbytes">moka-py</a></strong></li> <li><a href="https://www.saaspegasus.com/guides/uv/?featured_on=pythonbytes"><strong>uv: An In-Depth Guide</strong></a></li> <li><strong>Extras</strong></li> <li><strong>Joke</strong></li> </ul><a href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvXY0H3bb4Q' style='font-weight: bold;'data-umami-event="Livestream-Past" data-umami-event-episode="413">Watch on YouTube</a><br> <p><strong>About the show</strong></p> <p>Sponsored by us! Support our work through:</p> <ul> <li>Our <a href="https://training.talkpython.fm/?featured_on=pythonbytes"><strong>courses at Talk Python Training</strong></a></li> <li><a href="https://courses.pythontest.com/p/the-complete-pytest-course?featured_on=pythonbytes"><strong>The Complete pytest Course</strong></a></li> <li><a href="https://www.patreon.com/pythonbytes"><strong>Patreon Supporters</strong></a></li> </ul> <p><strong>Connect with the hosts</strong></p> <ul> <li>Michael: <a href="https://fosstodon.org/@mkennedy"><strong>@mkennedy@fosstodon.org</strong></a> <strong>/</strong> <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/mkennedy.codes?featured_on=pythonbytes"><strong>@mkennedy.codes</strong></a> <strong>(bsky)</strong></li> <li>Brian: <a href="https://fosstodon.org/@brianokken"><strong>@brianokken@fosstodon.org</strong></a> <strong>/</strong> <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/brianokken.bsky.social?featured_on=pythonbytes"><strong>@brianokken.bsky.social</strong></a></li> <li>Show: <a href="https://fosstodon.org/@pythonbytes"><strong>@pythonbytes@fosstodon.org</strong></a> <strong>/</strong> <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/pythonbytes.fm"><strong>@pythonbytes.fm</strong></a> <strong>(bsky)</strong></li> </ul> <p>Join us on YouTube at <a href="https://pythonbytes.fm/stream/live"><strong>pythonbytes.fm/live</strong></a> to be part of the audience. Usually <strong>Monday</strong> at 10am PT. Older video versions available there too.</p> <p>Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to <a href="https://pythonbytes.fm/friends-of-the-show">our friends of the show list</a>, we'll never share it.</p> <p><strong>Michael #1:</strong> <a href="https://github.com/pydantic/jiter?featured_on=pythonbytes"><strong>jiter</strong></a></p> <ul> <li>Fast iterable JSON parser.</li> <li>About to be the backend for Pydantic and Logfire. </li> <li>Currently powers OpenAI / ChatGPT (along with Pydantic itself), at least their Python library, maybe more.</li> <li>jiter has three interfaces: <ul> <li>JsonValue an enum representing JSON data</li> <li>Jiter an iterator over JSON data</li> <li>PythonParse which parses a JSON string into a Python object</li> </ul></li> <li><a href="https://github.com/pydantic/jiter/tree/main/crates/jiter-python?featured_on=pythonbytes">jiter-python</a> - This is a standalone version of the JSON parser used in pydantic-core. The recommendation is to only use this package directly if you do not use pydantic</li> </ul> <p><strong>Brian #2:</strong> <a href="https://astral.sh/blog/python-build-standalone?featured_on=pythonbytes">A new home for python-build-standalone</a></p> <ul> <li>Charlie Marsh</li> <li>See also <a href="https://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2024/12/03/transferring-python-build-standalone-stewardship-to-astral/?featured_on=pythonbytes">Transferring Python Build Standalone Stewardship to Astral</a> from Gregory Szorc</li> <li>python-build-standalone is the project that has prebuilt binaries for different architectures.</li> <li>used by uv python install 3.12 and uv venv .venv --python 3.12 and uv sync</li> <li>This is good stability news for everyone.</li> <li>Interesting discussion of <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/crmarsh.com/post/3lch35lrdi224?featured_on=pythonbytes">prebuilt Python from Charlie</a></li> </ul> <p><strong>Michael #3:</strong> <a href="https://github.com/deliro/moka-py?featured_on=pythonbytes">moka-py</a></p> <ul> <li>A high performance caching library for Python written in Rust</li> <li><strong>moka-py</strong> is a Python binding for the highly efficient <a href="https://github.com/moka-rs/moka?featured_on=pythonbytes">Moka</a> caching library written in Rust. </li> <li>This library allows you to leverage the power of Moka's high-performance, feature-rich cache in your Python projects.</li> <li>Features <ul> <li><strong>Synchronous Cache:</strong> Supports thread-safe, in-memory caching for Python applications.</li> <li><strong>TTL Support:</strong> Automatically evicts entries after a configurable time-to-live (TTL).</li> <li><strong>TTI Support:</strong> Automatically evicts entries after a configurable time-to-idle (TTI).</li> <li><strong>Size-based Eviction:</strong> Automatically removes items when the cache exceeds its size limit using the TinyLFU policy.</li> <li><strong>Concurrency:</strong> Optimized for high-performance, concurrent access in multi-threaded environments.</li> </ul></li> </ul> <p><strong>Brian #4:</strong> <a href="https://www.saaspegasus.com/guides/uv/?featured_on=pythonbytes"><strong>uv: An In-Depth Guide</strong></a></p> <ul> <li>On SaaS Pegasus blog, so presumably by Cory Zue</li> <li>Good intro to uv</li> <li>Also a nice list of everyday commands <ul> <li>Install python: uv python install 3.12 <ul> <li>I don’t really use this anymore, as uv venv .venv --python 3.12 or uv sync install if necessary</li> </ul></li> <li>create a virtual env: uv venv .venv --python 3.12</li> <li>install stuff: uv pip install django</li> <li>add project dependencies</li> <li>build pinned dependencies</li> </ul></li> <li>Also discussion about adopting the new workflow</li> </ul> <p><strong>Extras</strong> </p> <p>Brian:</p> <ul> <li><a href="https://ai.pydantic.dev/?featured_on=pythonbytes">PydanticAI</a> - not sure why I didn’t see that coming</li> <li>In the “good to know” and “commentary on society” area: <ul> <li><a href="https://bsky.social/about/blog/08-28-2024-anti-toxicity-features?featured_on=pythonbytes">Anti-Toxicity Features on Bluesky</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.wired.com/story/the-wired-guide-to-protecting-yourself-from-government-surveillance/?featured_on=pythonbytes">The WIRED Guide to Protecting Yourself From Government Surveillance</a></li> </ul></li> </ul> <p>Michael:</p> <ul> <li><a href="https://github.com/mikeckennedy?featured_on=pythonbytes">Go sponsor a bunch of projects on GitHub</a></li> <li><a href="https://us.pycon.org/2025/attend/information/?featured_on=pythonbytes">Registration is open for PyCon</a></li> </ul> <p><strong>Joke:</strong> <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/bitshammer.bsky.social/post/3lbzmqkykh22g?featured_on=pythonbytes">Inf</a></p> <p><img src="https://blobs.pythonbytes.fm/infinite-loop.jpg" alt="" /></p>

New API Integration Tutorial in Python 2024-12-09, by Dariusz Suchojad

Do you know what airports, telecom operators, defense forces and health care organizations have in common?

They all rely heavily on deep-backend software systems which are integrated and automated using principled methodologies, innovative techniques and well-defined implementation frameworks.

If you'd like to learn how to integrate and automate such complex systems correctly, head over to the new API integration tutorial that will show you how to do it in Python too.

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*- # Zato from zato.server.service import Service # ############################################################################## class MyService(Service): """ Returns user details by the person's name. """ name = 'api.my-service' # I/O definition input = '-name' output = 'user_type', 'account_no', 'account_balance' def handle(self): # For later use name = self.request.input.name or 'partner' # REST connections crm_conn = self.out.rest['CRM'].conn billing_conn = self.out.rest['Billing'].conn # Prepare requests crm_request = {'UserName':name} billing_params = {'USER':name} # Get data from CRM crm_data = crm_conn.get(self.cid, crm_request).data # Get data from Billing billing_data = billing_conn.post(self.cid, params=billing_params).data # Extract the business information from both systems user_type = crm_data['UserType'] account_no = crm_data['AccountNumber'] account_balance = billing_data['ACC_BALANCE'] self.logger.info(f'cid:{self.cid} Returning user details for {name}') # Now, produce the response for our caller self.response.payload = { 'user_type': user_type, 'account_no': account_no, 'account_balance': account_balance, } # ##############################################################################

Quick links

➤ API programming screenshots
➤ Here's the API integration tutorial again
➤ More API programming examples in Python

More blog posts➤

We are proud to announce the release of Relatorio version 0.11.0.

Relatorio is a templating library mainly for OpenDocument using also OpenDocument as source format.

This is a feature release which:

• Allow setting zip file generation options on opendocument templates

The package is available at https://pypi.org/project/relatorio/0.11.0/
The documentation is available at https://docs.tryton.org/relatorio/0.11.0/

1 post - 1 participant

Read full topic

Focus

This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

• swh-web: adjust admin contact wording
• zygolophodon: add option to output links
• ArchiveBot: ignore more URL sharing sites, add option to hide filtered jobs
• Debian wiki pages: PortsDocs/New, bugs.debian.org/usertags, Statistics, Teams/Debbugs/ArchitectureTags

Issues

• Feature in trurl
• Warnings in imediff

Review

• Patches: plasma-browser-integration webext

  Administration

• Debian IRC: set secret mode for an unused channel that traps people

Communication

• Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on IRC

Sponsors

The SWH work was sponsored. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

We finally made it: Kaidan’s next release with so many features that we cannot summarize them in one sentence!

Most of the work has been funded by NLnet via NGI Assure and NGI Zero Entrust with public money provided by the European Commission. If you want Kaidan’s progress to continue and keep more free software projects alive, please share and sign the open letter for further funding!

Now to the bunch of Kaidan’s new and great features:

Group chats with invitations, user listing, participant mentioning and private/public group chat filtering are supported now. In order to use it, you need an XMPP provider that supports MIX-Core, MIX-PAM and MIX-Admin. Unfortunately, there are not many providers supporting it yet since it is a comparatively recent group chat variant.

You do not need to quote messages just to reply to them any longer. The messages are referenced internally without bloating the conversation. After clicking on a referenced message, Kaidan even jumps to it. In addition, Kaidan allows you to remove unwanted messages locally.

We added an overview of all shared media to quickly find the image you received some time ago. You can define when to download media automatically. Furthermore, connecting to the server is now really fast - no need to wait multiple seconds just to see your latest offline messages anymore.

If you enter a chat address (e.g., to add a contact), its server part is now autocompleted if available. We added filter options for contacts and group chats. After adding labels to them, you can even search by those labels. And if you do not want to get any messages from someone, you can block them.

In case you need to move to a new account (e.g., if you are dissatisfied with your current XMPP provider), Kaidan helps you with that. For example, it transfers your contacts and informs them about the move. The redesigned onboarding user interface including many fixes assists with choosing a new provider and creating an account on it.

We updated Kaidan to the API v2 of XMPP Providers to stay up-to-date with the project’s data. If you are an operator of a public XMPP provider and would like Kaidan’s users to easily create accounts on it, simply ask to add it to the provider list.

The complete list of changes can be found in the changelog section. There is also a technical overview of all currently supported features.

Please note that we currently focus on new features instead of supporting more systems. Once Kaidan has a reasonable feature set, we will work on that topic again. Even if Kaidan is making good progress, keep in mind that it is not yet a stable app.

Changelog

Features:

• Add server address completion (fazevedo)
• Allow to edit account’s profile (jbb)
• Store and display delivery states of message reactions (melvo)
• Send pending message reactions after going online (melvo)
• Enable user to resend a message reaction if it previously failed (melvo)
• Open contact addition as page (mobile) or dialog (desktop) (melvo)
• Add option to open chat if contact exists on adding contact (melvo)
• Use consistent page with search bar for searching its content (melvo)
• Add local message removal (taibsu)
• Allow reacting to own messages (melvo)
• Add login option to chat (melvo)
• Display day of the week or “yesterday” for last messages (taibsu, melvo)
• Add media overview (fazevedo, melvo)
• Add contact list filtering by account and labels (i.e., roster groups) (incl. addition/removal) (melvo, tech-bash)
• Add message date sections to chat (melvo)
• Add support for automatic media downloads (fazevedo)
• Add filtering contacts by availability (melvo)
• Add item to contact list on first received direct message (melvo)
• Add support for blocking chat addresses (lnj)
• Improve notes chat (chat with oneself) usage (melvo)
• Place avatar above chat address and name in account/contact details on narrow window (melvo)
• Reload camera device for QR code scanning as soon as it is plugged in / enabled (melvo)
• Provide slider for QR code scanning to adjust camera zoom (melvo)
• Add contact to contact list on receiving presence subscription request (melvo)
• Add encryption key authentication via entering key IDs (melvo)
• Improve connecting to server and authentication (XEP-0388: Extensible SASL Profile (SASL 2), XEP-0386: Bind 2, XEP-0484: Fast Authentication Streamlining Tokens, XEP-0368: SRV records for XMPP over TLS) (lnj)
• Support media sharing with more clients even for sharing multiple files at once (XEP-0447: Stateless file sharing v0.3) (lnj)
• Display and check media upload size limit (fazevedo)
• Redesign message input field to use rounded corners and resized/symbolic buttons (melvo)
• Add support for moving account data to another account, informing contacts and restoring settings for moved contacts (XEP-0283: Moved) (fazevedo)
• Add group chat support with invitations, user listing, participant mentioning and private/public group chat filtering (XEP-0369: Mediated Information eXchange (MIX), XEP-0405: Mediated Information eXchange (MIX): Participant Server Requirements, XEP-0406: Mediated Information eXchange (MIX): MIX Administration, XEP-0407: Mediated Information eXchange (MIX): Miscellaneous Capabilities) (melvo)
• Add button to cancel message correction (melvo)
• Display marker for new messages (melvo)
• Add enhanced account-wide and per contact notification settings depending on group chat mentions and presence (melvo)
• Focus input fields appropriately (melvo)
• Add support for replying to messages (XEP-0461: Message Replies) (melvo)
• Indicate that Kaidan is busy during account deletion and group chat actions (melvo)
• Hide account deletion button if In-Band Registration is not supported (melvo)
• Embed login area in page for QR code scanning and page for web registration instead of opening start page (melvo)
• Redesign onboarding user interface including new page for choosing provider to create account on (melvo)
• Handle various corner cases that can occur during account creation (melvo)
• Update to XMPP Providers v2 (melvo)
• Hide voice message button if uploading is not supported (melvo)
• Replace custom images for message delivery states with regular theme icons (melvo)
• Free up message content space by hiding unneeded avatars and increasing maximum message bubble width (melvo)
• Highlight draft message text to easily see what is not sent yet (melvo)
• Store sent media in suitable directories with appropriate file extensions (melvo)
• Allow sending media with less steps from recording to sending (melvo)
• Add media to be sent in scrollable area above message input field (melvo)
• Display original images (if available) as previews instead of their thumbnails (melvo)
• Display high resolution thumbnails for locally stored videos as previews instead of their thumbnails (melvo)
• Send smaller thumbnails (melvo)
• Show camera status and reload camera once plugged in for taking pictures or recording videos (melvo)
• Add zoom slider for taking pictures or recording videos (melvo)
• Show overlay with description when files are dragged to be dropped on chats for being shared (melvo)
• Show location previews on a map (melvo)
• Open locations in user-defined way (system default, in-app, web) (melvo)
• Delete media that is only captured for sending but not sent (melvo)
• Add voice message recorder to message input field (melvo)
• Add inline audio player (melvo)
• Add context menu entry for opening directory of media files (melvo)
• Show collapsible buttons to send media/locations inside of message input field (melvo)
• Move button for adding hidden message part to new collapsible button area (melvo)

Bugfixes:

• Fix index out of range error in message search (taibsu)
• Fix updating last message information in contact list (melvo)
• Fix multiple corrections of the same message (melvo, taibsu)
• Request delivery receipts for pending messages (melvo)
• Fix sorting roster items (melvo)
• Fix displaying spoiler messages (melvo)
• Fix displaying errors and encryption warnings for messages (melvo)
• Fix fetching messages from server’s archive (melvo)
• Fix various encryption problems (melvo)
• Send delivery receipts for catched up messages (melvo)
• Do not hide last message date if contact name is too long (melvo)
• Fix displaying emojis (melvo)
• Fix several OMEMO bugs (melvo)
• Remove all locally stored data related to removed accounts (melvo)
• Fix displaying media preview file names/sizes (melvo)
• Fix disconnecting from server when application window is closed including timeout on connection problems (melvo)
• Fix media/location sharing (melvo)
• Fix handling emoji message reactions (melvo)
• Fix moving pinned chats (fazevedo)
• Fix drag and drop for files and pasting them (melvo)
• Fix sending/displaying media in selected order (lnj, melvo)

Notes:

• Kaidan is REUSE-compliant now
• Kaidan requires Qt 5.15 and QXmpp 1.9 now

Download

• Source code (.tar.xz) (sig signed with 04EFAD0F7A4D9724)
• Linux (Flatpak on Flathub)

Or install Kaidan for your distribution:

Debian Contributions: 2024-11

Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian’s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

Transition management, by Emilio Pozuelo Monfort

Emilio has been helping finish the mpi-defaults switch to mpich on 32-bit architectures, and the openmpi transitions. This involves filing bugs for the reverse dependencies, doing NMUs, and requesting removals for outdated (Not Built from Source) binaries on 32-bit architectures where openmpi is no longer available. Those transitions got entangled with a few others, such as the petsc stack, and were blocking many packages from migrating to testing. These transitions were completed in early December.

cPython 3.12.7+ update uploads, by Stefano Rivera

Python 3.12 had failed to build on mips64el, due to an obscure dh_strip failure. The mips64el porters never figured it out, but the missing build on mips64el was blocking migration to Debian testing. After waiting a month, enough changes had accumulated in the upstream 3.12 maintenance git branch that we could apply them in the hope of changing the output enough to avoid breaking dh_strip. This worked.

Of course there were other things to deal with too. A test started failing due to a Debian-specific patch we carry for python3.x-minimal, and it needed to be reworked. And Stefano forgot to strip the trailing + from PY_VERSION, which confuses some python libraries. This always requires another patch when applying git updates from the maintenance branch. Stefano added a build-time check to catch this mistake in the future. Python 3.12.7 migrated.

Python 3.13 Transition, by Stefano Rivera and Colin Watson

During November the Python 3.13-add transition started. This is the first stage of supporting a new version of Python in Debian archive (after preparatory work), adding it as a new supported but non-default version. All packages with compiled Python extensions need to be re-built to add support for the new version.

We have covered the lead-up to this transition in the past. Due to preparation, many of the failures we hit were expected and we had patches waiting in the bug tracker. These could be NMUed to get the transition moving. Others had been known about but hadn’t been worked on, yet.

Some other packages ran into new issues, as we got further into the transition than we’d been able to in preparation. The whole Debian Python team has been helping with this work.

The rebuild stage of the 3.13-add transition is now over, but many packages need work before britney will let python3-defaults migrate to testing.

Limiting build concurrency based on available RAM, by Helmut Grohne

In recent years, the concurrency of CPUs has been increasing as has the demand for RAM by linkers. What has not been increasing as quickly is the RAM supply in typical machines. As a result, we more frequently run into situations where the package builds exhaust memory when building at full concurrency. Helmut initiated a discussion about generalizing an approach to this in Debian packages. Researching existing code that limits concurrency as well as providing possible extensions to debhelper and dpkg to provide concurrency limits based on available system RAM. Thus far there is consensus on the need for a more general solution, but ideas are still being collected for the precise solution.

MiniDebConf Toulouse at Capitole du Libre

The whole Freexian Collaborator team attended MiniDebConf Toulouse, part of the Capitole du Libre event. Several members of the team gave talks:

• Santiago spoke on Linux Live Patching in Debian, presenting an update on the idea since DebConf 24. This includes the initial requirements for the livepatch package format, that would be used to distribute the livepatches.
• Stefano, Colin, Enrico, and Carles spoke on Using Debusine to Automate QA.
• Santiago and Roberto spoke on How LTS Goes Beyond LTS.
• Helmut spoke on Cross Building.
• Carles gave a lightning talk on po-debconf-manager.

Stefano and Anupa worked as part of the video team, streaming and recording the event’s talks.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Stefano looked into packaging the latest upstream python-falcon version in Debian, in support of the Python 3.13 transition. This appeared to break python-hug, which is sadly looking neglected upstream, and the best course of action is probably its removal from Debian.

• Stefano uploaded videos from various 2024 Debian events to PeerTube and YouTube.

• Stefano and Santiago visited the site for DebConf 2025 in Brest, after the MiniDebConf in Toulouse, to meet with the local team and scout out the venue.

  The on-going DebConf 25 organization work of last month also included handling the logo and artwork call for proposals.

• Stefano helped the press team to edit a post for bits.debian.org on OpenStreetMap’s migration to Debian.

• Carles implemented multiple language support on po-debconf-manager and tested it using Portuguese-Brazilian during MiniDebConf Toulouse. The system was also tested and improved by reviewing more than 20 translations to Catalan, creating merge requests for those packages, and providing user support to new users. Additionally, Carles implemented better status transitions, configuration keys management and other small improvements.

• Helmut sent 32 patches for cross build failures. The wireplumber one was an interactive collaboration with Dylan Aïssi.

• Helmut continued to monitor the /usr-move, sent a patch for lib64readline8 and continued several older patch conversations. lintian now reports some aliasing issues in unstable.

• Helmut initiated a discussion on the semantics of *-for-host packages. More feedback is welcome.

• Helmut improved the crossqa.debian.net infrastructure to fail running lintian less often in larger packages.

• Helmut continued maintaining rebootstrap mostly dropping applied patches and continuing discussions of submitted patches.

• Helmut prepared a non-maintainer upload of gzip for several long-standing bugs.

• Colin came up with a plan for resolving the multipart vs. python-multipart name conflict, and began work on converting reverse-dependencies.

• Colin upgraded 42 Python packages to new upstream versions. Some were complex: python-catalogue had some upstream version confusion, pydantic and rpds-py involved several Rust package upgrades as prerequisites, and python-urllib3 involved first packaging python-quart-trio and then vendoring an unpackaged test-dependency.

• Colin contributed Incus support to needrestart upstream.

• Lucas set up a machine to do a rebuild of all ruby reverse dependencies to check what will be broken by adding ruby 3.3 as an alternative interpreter. The tool used for this is mass-rebuild and the initial rebuilds have already started. The ruby interpreter maintainers are planning to experiment with debusine next time.

• Lucas is organizing a Debian Ruby sprint towards the end of January in Paris. The plan of the team is to finish any missing bits of Ruby 3.3 transition at the time, try to push Rails 7 transition and fix RC bugs affecting the ruby ecosystem in Debian.

• Anupa attended a Debian Publicity team meeting in-person during MiniDebCamp Toulouse.

• Anupa moderated and posted in the Debian Administrator group in LinkedIn.