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Talk Python to Me: #469: PuePy: Reactive frontend framework in Python
Zato Blog: Integrating with WordPress and Elementor API webhooks
Consider this scenario:
- You have a WordPress instance, possibly installed in your own internal network
- With WordPress, you use Elementor, a popular website builder
- A user fills out a form that you prepared using Elementor, e.g. the user provides his or her email and username to create an account in your CRM
- Now, after WordPress processes this information accordingly, you also need to send it all to a remote backend system that only accepts JSON messages
The concern here is that WordPress alone will not send it to the backend system.
Hence, we are going to use an Elementor-based webhook that will invoke Zato which will be acting as an integration layer. In Zato, we will use Python to transform the results of what was submitted in the form - in order to deliver it to the backend API system using a REST call.
Creating a channel
A Zato channel is a way to describe the configuration of a particular API endpoint. In this case, to accept data from WordPress, we are going to use REST channels:
In the screenshot below, note particularly the highlighted data format field. Typically, REST channels will use JSON, but here, we need to use "Form data" because this is what we are getting from Elementor.
Now, we can add the actual code to accept the data and to communicate with the remote, backend system.
Python codeHere is the Python code and what follows is an explanation of how it works:
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*- # Zato from zato.server.service import Service # Field configuration field_email = 'fields[email][value]' field_username = 'fields[username][value]' class CreateAccount(Service): # The input that we expect from WordPress, i.e. what fields it needs to send input = field_email, field_username def handle(self): # This is a dictionary object with data from WordPress .. input = self.request.input # .. so we can use dictionary access to extract values received .. email = input[field_email] username = input[field_username] # .. now, we can create a JSON request for the backend system .. # .. again, using a regular Python dictionary .. api_request = { 'Email': email 'Username': username } # Obtain a connection to the backend system .. conn = self.out.rest['CRM'].conn # .. invoke that system .. # Invoke the resource providing all the information on input response = conn.post(self.cid, api_request) # .. and log the response received .. self.logger.info('Backend response -> %s', response.data)The format of data that Elementor will use is of a specific nature. It is not JSON and the field names are not sent directly either.
That is, if your form has fields such as "email" and "username", what the webhook sends is named differently. The names will be, respectively:
- fields[email][value]
- fields[username][value]
If it were JSON, we could say that instead of this ..
{ "email": "hello@example.com", "username": "hello" }.. the webhook was sending to you that:
{ "fields[email][value]": "hello@example.com", "fields[username][value]": "hello" }The above format explains why in the Python code below we are extracting all the input fields from WordPress using the "self.request.input" object using its dictionary access syntax method.
Normally, if the field was plain "username", we would be doing "self.request.input.username" but this is not available in this case because of the naming conventions of the fields from Elementor.
Now, the only remaining part is the definition of the outgoing REST connection that service should use.
Outgoing REST connectionsCreate an outgoing REST connection as below - this time around, note that the data format is JSON.
Using the REST channel
In your WordPress dashboard, create a webhook using Elementor and point it to the channel created earlier, e.g. make Elementor invoke an address such as http://10.157.11.39:11223/api/wordpress/create-account
Each time a form is submitted, its contents will go to Zato, your service will transform it to JSON and the backend CRM system will be invoked.
And this is everything - you have just integrated WordPress, Elementor webhooks and an external API backend system in Python.
More resources➤ Python API integration tutorial
➤ What is an integration platform?
➤ Python Integration platform as a Service (iPaaS)
➤ What is an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)? What is SOA?
Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 14.0.0-1 on CRAN: New Upstream
Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is widely used by (currently) 1158 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 35.1 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 587 times according to Google Scholar.
Conrad released a new major upstream version 14.0.0 a couple of days ago. We had been testing this new version extensively over several rounds of reverse-dependency checks across all 1100+ packages. This revealed nine packages requiring truly minor adjustments—which eight maintainers made in a matter of days; all this was coordinated in issue #443. Following the upload, CRAN noticed one more issue (see issue #446) but this turned out to be local to the package. There are also renewed deprecation warnings with some Armadillo changes which we will need to address one-by-one. Last but not least with this release we also changed the package versioning scheme to follow upstream Armadillo more closely.
The set of changes since the last CRAN release follows.
Changes in RcppArmadillo version 14.0.0-1 (2024-07-05)Upgraded to Armadillo release 14.0.0 (Stochastic Parrot)
C++14 is now the minimum recommended C++ standard
Faster handling of compound expressions by as_scalar(), accu(), dot()
Faster interactions between sparse and dense matrices
Expanded stddev() to handle sparse matrices
Expanded relational operators to handle expressions between sparse matrices and scalars
Added .as_dense() to obtain dense vector/matrix representation of any sparse matrix expression
Updated physical constants to NIST 2022 CODATA values
New package version numbering scheme following upstream versions
Re-enabling ARMA_IGNORE_DEPRECATED_MARKE for silent CRAN builds
Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page.
If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
joshics.in: Journey into Drupal: Becoming a Contributor That Counts!
Drupal, the renowned content management platform, is a result of collective efforts by developers and contributors worldwide.
But have you ever considered how you can contribute to its evolution? Let's unpack the benefits of contributing, explore avenues to contribute and decipher tools that ease the process.
The Benefits of ContributingContributing to Drupal is a symbiotic process, where every effort you put in reaps multiple rewards:
1. Skill Enhancement: Whether you choose to contribute code, help with testing, design or translations, each contribution is an opportunity to sharpen your skills.
2. Networking: Engage with the global Drupal community at meetups, workshops, and forums. These platforms present a potent opportunity to connect with fellow developers, learn about Drupal trends, and imbibe best practices.
3. Impact: Every contribution counts. Whether it's contributing code, reporting bugs, suggesting enhancements, or sharing expertise and insights in the community, each contribution plays a pivotal role. These collective contributions help in creating a more robust, user-friendly, and advanced platform. Thus, every contribution, regardless of its size or nature, holds immense value as it brings about change and propels Drupal forward in its ongoing evolution.
Contribute to Drupal: The How-To GuideThere's a multitude of ways to contribute to Drupal. Here's a few:
1. Code Development: If you're proficient in PHP, consider developing for Drupal core or contributing modules.
2. Testing: Quality assurance plays a crucial role in Drupal development. Test new features or updates, and report bugs.
3. Documentation: A clear, comprehensive documentation bolsters user experience and uptake.
4. Community Support: Help others on Drupal forums or organise Drupal events.
Tools That Make Drupal Contribution EasySeveral tools can support your journey as a Drupal contributor:
1. Drupal.org: A treasure trove of resources, Drupal.org is your starting point.
2. 'Simply Test Me': This tool lets you test patches or projects before submission.
3. Drupal CI: This integrated tool helps test your code's compatibility with different environments.
4. Dreditor: This browser extension streamlines code review and submission. It aids in identifying errors within the code, ensuring your contributions are more sturdy and resilient.
5. Slack: Join the Drupal Slack workspace for ongoing discussions and mentorship.
In conclusion, contributing to Drupal is not just about giving back to the community but also about enhancing your skills, creating influential networks, and leaving a lasting impact. Remember, every contribution matters, no matter how small.
So, wear your Drupal contributor hat and let’s keep the wheel of innovation turning. Together, we can shape the future of this robust platform. Every step we take, every effort we make, brings Drupal a step closer to the epitome of perfection.
It’s a journey, and everyone’s invited. After all, the best way to predict the future is to create it. Let's create the Drupal we want, together!
Drupal Community Drupal PlanetRuss Allbery: rra-c-util 11.0.0
rra-c-util is my collection of utility and test functions that I keep synchronized between my packages. The big change in this release is that I've switched to semantic versions, which I plan to do for all of my packages, and I've started using scriv to manage a Markdown change log. We've been using scriv for a while at work, so I have finally gotten on board the change log fragment train rather than assuming linear commits.
This release also raises the minimum Perl version for all of the Perl support code to 5.12 so that I can use semantic versions for all modules, and updates the perltidy configuration with lots of improvements from Julien ÉLIE. There are also the normal variaty of bug fixes and more minor improvements.
You can get the latest version from the rra-c-util distribution page.
Russ Allbery: Review: Beyond Control
Review: Beyond Control, by Kit Rocha
Series: Beyond #2 Publisher: Kit Rocha Copyright: December 2013 ASIN: B00GIA4GN8 Format: Kindle Pages: 364Beyond Control is science fiction erotica (dystopian erotic romance, per the marketing) and a direct sequel to Beyond Shame. These books shift protagonists with each volume and enough of the world background is explained that you could start here, but there are significant spoilers for the previous book. I read this book as part of the Beyond Series Bundle (Books 1-3), which is what the sidebar information is for.
This is one of those reviews that I write because I'm stubborn about reviewing all the books I read, not because it's likely to be useful to anyone. There are also considerably more spoilers for the shape of the story than I normally include, so be warned.
The Beyond series is erotica. Specifically, so far, consensual BDSM erotica with bisexuality but otherwise typical gender stereotypes. The authors (Kit Rocha is a pen name for Donna Herren and Bree Bridges) are women, so it's more female gaze than male gaze, but by erotica I don't mean romance with an above-average number of steamy scenes. I mean it felt like half the book by page count was descriptions of sex.
This review is rather pointless because, one, I'm not going to review the sex that's the main point of the book, and two, I skimmed all the sex and read it for the story because I'm weird. Beyond Shame got me interested in these absurdly horny people and their post-apocalyptic survival struggles in the outskirts of a city run by a religious surveillance state, and I wanted to find out what happened next. Besides, this book promised to focus on my favorite character from the first novel, Lex, and I wanted to read more about her.
Beyond Control uses a series pattern that I understand is common in romance but which is not often seen in SFF (my usual genre): each book focuses on a new couple adjacent to the previous couple, while the happily ever after of the previous couple plays out in the background. In this case, it also teases the protagonists of the next book. I can see why romance uses this structure: it's an excuse to provide satisfying interludes for the reader. In between Lex and Dallas's current relationship problems, one gets to enjoy how well everything worked out for Noelle and how much she's grown.
In Beyond Shame, Lex was the sort-of partner of Dallas O'Kane, the leader of the street gang that is running Sector Four. (Picture a circle surrounding the rich-people-only city of Eden. That circle is divided into eight wedge-shaped sectors, which provide heavy industries, black-market pleasures, and slums for agricultural workers.) Dallas is an intensely possessive, personally charismatic semi-dictator who cultivates the image of a dangerous barbarian to everyone outside and most of the people inside Sector Four. Since he's supposed to be one of the good guys, this is more image than reality, but it's not entirely disconnected from reality.
This book is about Lex and Dallas forming an actual relationship, instead of the fraught and complicated thing they had in the first book. I was hoping that this would involve Dallas becoming less of an asshole. It unfortunately does not, although some of what I attributed to malice may be adequately explained by stupidity. I'm not sure that's an improvement.
Lex is great, just like she was in the first book. It's obvious by this point in the series that she does most of the emotional labor of keeping the gang running, and her support is central to Dallas's success. Like most of the people in this story, she has a nasty and abusive background that she's still dealing with in various ways. Dallas's possessiveness is intensely appealing to her, but she wants that possessiveness on different terms than Dallas may be willing to offer, or is even aware of. Lex was, I thought, exceptionally clear about what she wanted out of this relationship. Dallas thinks this is entirely about sex, and is, in general, dumber than a sack of hammers. That means fights. Also orgies, but, well, hopefully you knew what you were getting into if you picked up this book.
I know, I know, it's erotica, that's the whole point, but these people have a truly absurd amount of sex. Eden puts birth control in the water supply, which is a neat way to simplify some of the in-story consequences of erotica. They must be putting aphrodisiacs in the water supply as well.
There was a lot of sector politics in this book that I found way more interesting than it had any right to be. I really like most of these people, even Dallas when he manages to get his three brain cells connected for more than a few minutes. The events of the first book have a lot of significant fallout, Lex continues being a badass, the social dynamics between the women are very well-done (and pass the Bechdel test yet again even though this is mostly traditional-gender-role erotica), and if Dallas had managed to understand what he did wrong at a deeper-than-emotional level, I would have rather enjoyed the non-erotica story parts. Alas.
I therefore wouldn't recommend this book even if I were willing to offer any recommendations about erotica (which I'm not). I was hoping it was going somewhere more rewarding than it did. But I still kind of want to read another one? I am weirdly fascinated with the lives of these people. The next book is about Six, who has the potential to turn into the sort of snarky, cynical character I love reading about. And it's not that hard to skim over the orgies. Maybe Dallas will get one additional brain cell per book?
Followed by Beyond Pain.
Rating: 5 out of 10
Wingware: Wing Python IDE Version 10.0.5 - July 8, 2024
Wing 10.0.5 adds support for running the IDE on arm64 Linux, updates the German language UI localization, changes the default OpenAI model to lower cost and better performing gpt-4o, and fixes several bugs.
See the change log for details.
Download Wing 10 Now: Wing Pro | Wing Personal | Wing 101 | Compare Products
What's New in Wing 10
AI Assisted Development
Wing Pro 10 takes advantage of recent advances in the capabilities of generative AI to provide powerful AI assisted development, including AI code suggestion, AI driven code refactoring, description-driven development, and AI chat. You can ask Wing to use AI to (1) implement missing code at the current input position, (2) refactor, enhance, or extend existing code by describing the changes that you want to make, (3) write new code from a description of its functionality and design, or (4) chat in order to work through understanding and making changes to code.
Examples of requests you can make include:
"Add a docstring to this method" "Create unit tests for class SearchEngine" "Add a phone number field to the Person class" "Clean up this code" "Convert this into a Python generator" "Create an RPC server that exposes all the public methods in class BuildingManager" "Change this method to wait asynchronously for data and return the result with a callback" "Rewrite this threaded code to instead run asynchronously"Yes, really!
Your role changes to one of directing an intelligent assistant capable of completing a wide range of programming tasks in relatively short periods of time. Instead of typing out code by hand every step of the way, you are essentially directing someone else to work through the details of manageable steps in the software development process.
Support for Python 3.12 and ARM64 LinuxWing 10 adds support for Python 3.12, including (1) faster debugging with PEP 669 low impact monitoring API, (2) PEP 695 parameterized classes, functions and methods, (3) PEP 695 type statements, and (4) PEP 701 style f-strings.
Wing 10 also adds support for running Wing on ARM64 Linux systems.
Poetry Package ManagementWing Pro 10 adds support for Poetry package management in the New Project dialog and the Packages tool in the Tools menu. Poetry is an easy-to-use cross-platform dependency and package manager for Python, similar to pipenv.
Ruff Code Warnings & ReformattingWing Pro 10 adds support for Ruff as an external code checker in the Code Warnings tool, accessed from the Tools menu. Ruff can also be used as a code reformatter in the Source > Reformatting menu group. Ruff is an incredibly fast Python code checker that can replace or supplement flake8, pylint, pep8, and mypy.
Try Wing 10 Now!
Wing 10 is a ground-breaking new release in Wingware's Python IDE product line. Find out how Wing 10 can turbocharge your Python development by trying it today.
Downloads: Wing Pro | Wing Personal | Wing 101 | Compare Products
See Upgrading for details on upgrading from Wing 9 and earlier, and Migrating from Older Versions for a list of compatibility notes.
Calamares ABI Checking
Seems like over 3 years ago I wrote something about ABI stability checking and investigated a little how tools could be used to help maintain ABI stability for Calamares. Here are some callback notes.
Tooling ChoicesI ended up using abigail for ABI checking, because it’s available on FreeBSD and Ubuntu and just seems like it has a compatible mindset for what I want to do: tell me the ABI difference between two Calamares releases.
The tool for that is abidiff and applying the tool is literally a matter of getting two versions of a shared object (.so) and running diff.
In Calamares I put together some scripts to automate this, since building versions of the Calamares shared objects is not quite trivial. The scripts also help out with the ABI-stability promise (or, um .. pinky swear, maybe).
Calamares ABI Stability PolicyWhen the Calamares 3.3 series started, one of the ideas was that in 3.3, the ABI should be stable, so that external / third party modules for Calamares should be able to keep working without a recompile. During 3.2 development, things were very unstable and everything needed to be recompiled all the time – and having a Boost dependency didn’t help much either, since there are so many distro’s with poor .so hygiene.
So the idea was to keep ABI stability, and to check that it was so.
Unfortunately, 3.3.0 released with a wide-open ABI because I forgot to turn on hidden-visibility by default, and there were a lot of not-quite-there cleanups that still needed doing.
By the time 3.3.3 came out, three months later, things were in better shape.
Right now, I’ve defined 3.3.3 as “the stable starting point”, and check ABI compatibility against that every now-and-again. Not regularly, not as part of releases (I suppose I would accept a PR that added a check that enforces it as part of the release script).
Anyway, the idea is that there should be “minimal” ABI changes. That is a lot less strict than, say, the KDE Frameworks Policies about C++ compatibility (hm .. those pages talk a lot more about kdelibs and KDE4 than I would have expected). New classes are ok, and it’s also ok for them to take a couple of releases before “settling down”.
Calamares Current ABI IssuesAbigail is fairly verbose and quite explicit about changes; I like that. Here’s the summary of summary information between 3.3.3 and 3.3.9 (not released yet, development branch):
Changed leaf types summary: 1 leaf type changed Removed/Changed/Added functions summary: 0 Removed, 2 Changed, 8 Added functions Removed/Changed/Added variables summary: 0 Removed, 0 Changed, 1 Added variable Function symbols changes summary: 0 Removed, 4 Added function symbols not referenced by debug info Variable symbols changes summary: 0 Removed, 3 Added variable symbols not referenced by debug infoAdded isn’t a problem (there was an issue where the PC would suspend / sleep during installation if you didn’t prod the mouse, and I added a class to manage sleep-inhibition through the XDG DBus API). Changed ones are more serious:
'struct Calamares::CommandLine at CommandList.h:31:1' changed: type size changed from 128 to 256 (in bits) 2 data member insertions: 'std::__1::chrono::seconds m_timeout', at offset 128 (in bits) at CommandList.h:101:1 'std::__1::optional<bool> m_verbose', at offset 192 (in bits) at CommandList.h:102:1I’ve decided that this class is sufficiently “internal-ish” and sufficiently new that I’m not going to worry about it – independent of the question whether anyone even builds external C++ modules for Calamares that use it.
Calamares Big ABI ChangesJust for the record, there’s nothing planned. I can imagine one or two things that would drive a big ABI upheaval: one is adding a virtual function to modules to help with consistent configuration loading – so that we can get better checking up-front of what distro’s are putting into the configuration files, rather than waiting for an installation to be botched.
Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppSimdJson 0.1.12 on CRAN: Maintenance
A new maintenance release 0.1.12 of the RcppSimdJson package is now on CRAN.
RcppSimdJson wraps the fantastic and genuinely impressive simdjson library by Daniel Lemire and collaborators. Via very clever algorithmic engineering to obtain largely branch-free code, coupled with modern C++ and newer compiler instructions, it results in parsing gigabytes of JSON parsed per second which is quite mindboggling. The best-case performance is ‘faster than CPU speed’ as use of parallel SIMD instructions and careful branch avoidance can lead to less than one cpu cycle per byte parsed; see the video of the talk by Daniel Lemire at QCon.
This release responds to another CRAN request, this time to accomodate compilation under C++20 with g++-14. As this was alreadt addressed upstream in simdjson it was simply a matter of upgrading to the current upstream which Daniel did in a PR.
The (once again very short) NEWS entry for this release follows.
Changes in version 0.1.12 (2024-07-05)Updated benchmarks now include 'yyjsonr'
simdjson was upgraded to version 3.95 (Daniel in #92 fixing #91)
Additional small update for C++20 compilation under g++-14
Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. For questions, suggestions, or issues please use the issue tracker at the GitHub repo.
If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
Russ Allbery: DocKnot v8.0.0
DocKnot is my static web site generator, with additional features for managing software releases and package documentation.
This release switches to semantic versioning for the Perl modules, hence the v prefix to the version number. This appears to be the standard in the Perl world for indicating that the version follows the semantic versioning standard. That also required adding support to DocKnot for release tarballs whose version string starts with v. I plan to convert all of my Perl modules to semantic versioning in their next releases.
The main change in this release is that it incorporates my old faq2html script that was previously used to convert text documents to HTML for publication. This code was imported into DocKnot and integrated with the rest of the package, so text documents can now be referenced by *.spin pointers rather than the (now-deprecated) *.faq files.
The long delay in the release is because I was hoping to refactor the faq2html code to work as a proper module with no global state and to follow my current Perl coding guidelines before releasing a version of DocKnot containing it, but the refactoring is taking forever and support for v-prefixed versions was blocking other releases, so I'm releasing it in a less-than-ideal state and hoping to fix it later.
There are also a few other bug fixes and improvements, the most notable of which is probably that the footer on generated web pages now points properly to the DocKnot distribution page rather than my old spin page.
You can get the latest version from CPAN or from the DocKnot distribution page.
Robin Wilson: Who reads my blog? Send me an email or comment if you do!
I’m interested to find out who is reading my blog. Following the lead of Jamie Tanna who was in turn copying Terence Eden (both of whose blogs I read), I’d like to ask people who read this to drop me an email or leave a comment on this post if you read this blog and see this post. I have basic analytics on this blog, and I seem to get a reasonable number of views – but I don’t know how many of those are real people, and how many are bots etc.
Feel free to just say hi, but if you have chance then I’d love to find out a bit more about you and how you read this. Specifically, feel free to answer any or all of the following questions:
- Do you read this on the website or via RSS?
- Do you check regularly/occasionally for new posts, or do you follow me on social media (if so, which one?) to see new posts?
- How did you find my blog in the first place?
- Are you interested in and/or working in one of my specialisms – like geospatial data, general data science/data processing, Python or similar?
- Which posts do you find most interesting? Programming posts on how to do things? Geographic analyses? Book reviews? Rare unusual posts (disability, recipes etc)?
- Have you met me in real life?
- Is there anything particular you’d like me to write about?
The comments box should be just below here, and my email is robin@rtwilson.com
Thanks!
Niels Thykier: Improving packaging file detection in Debian
Debian packaging consists of a directory (debian/) containing a number of "hard-coded" filenames such as debian/control, debian/changelog, debian/copyright. In addition to these, many packages will also use a number of optional files that are named via a pattern such as debian/{{PACKAGE}}.install.
At a high level the patterns looks deceptively simple. However, if you start working on trying to automatically classify files in debian/ (which could be helpful to tell the user they have a typo in the filename), you will quickly realize these patterns are not machine friendly at all for this purpose.
The patterns deconstructedTo appreciate the problem fully, here is a primer on the pattern and all its issues. If you are already well-versed in these, you might want to skip the section.
The most common patterns are debian/package.stem or debian/stem and usually the go to example is the install stem ( a concrete example being debian/debhelper.install). However, the full pattern consists of 4 parts where 3 of them are optional.
- The package name followed by a period. Optional, but must be the first if present.
- The name segment followed by a period. Optional, but must appear between the package name (if present) and the stem. If the package name is not present, then the name segment must be first.
- The stem. Mandatory.
- An architecture restriction prefixed by a period. Optional, must appear after the stem if present.
To visualize it with [foo] to mark optional parts, it looks like debian/[PACKAGE.][NAME.]STEM[.ARCH]
Detecting whether a given file is in fact a packaging file now boils down to reverse engineering its name against this pattern. Again, so far, it might still look manageable. One major complication is that every part (except ARCH) can contain periods. So a trivial "split by period" is not going to cut it. As an example:
debian/g++-3.0.user.serviceThis example is deliberately crafted to be ambiguous and show this problem in its full glory. This file name can be in multiple ways:
- Is the stem service or user.service? (both are known stems from dh_installsystemd and dh_installsystemduser respectively). In fact, it can be both at the same time with "clever" usage of --name=user passed to dh_installsystemd.
- The g++-3.0 can be a package prefix or part of the name segment. Even if there is a g++-3.0 package in debian/control, then debhelper (until compat 15) will still happily match this file for the main package if you pass --name=g++-3.0 to the helper. Side bar: Woe is you if there is a g++-3 and a g++-3.0 package in debian/control, then we have multiple options for the package prefix! Though, I do not think that happens in practice.
Therefore, there are a lot of possible ways to split this filename that all matches the pattern but with vastly different meaning and consequences.
Making detection practicalTo make this detection practical, lets look at the first problems that we need to solve.
- We need the possible stems up front to have a chance at all. When multiple stems are an option, go for the longest match (that is, the one with most periods) since --name is rare and "code golfing" is even rarer.
- We can make the package prefix mandatory for files with the name segment. This way, the moment there is something before the stem, we know the package prefix will be part of it and can cut it. It does not solve the ambiguity if one package name is a prefix of another package name (from the same source), but it still a lot better. This made its way into debhelper compat 15 and now it is "just" a slow long way to a better future.
A simple solution to the first problem could be to have a static list of known stems. That will get you started but the debhelper eco-system strive on decentralization, so this feels like a mismatch.
There is also a second problem with the static list. Namely, a given stem is only "valid" if the command in question is actually in use. Which means you now need to dumpster dive into the mess that is Turning-complete debhelper configuration file known as debian/rules to fully solve that. Thanks to the Turning-completeness, we will never get a perfect solution for a static analysis.
Instead, it is time to back out and instead apply some simplifications. Here is a sample flow:
- Check whether the dh sequencer is used. If so, use some heuristics to figure out which addons are used.
- Delegate to dh_assistant to figure out which commands will be used and which debhelper config file stems it knows about. Here we need to know which sequences are in use from step one (if relevant). Combine this with any other sources for stems you have.
- Deconstruct all files in debian/ against the stems and known package names from debian/control. In theory, dumpster diving after --name options would be helpful here, but personally I skipped that part as I want to keep my debian/rules parsing to an absolute minimum.
With this logic, you can now:
- Provide typo detection of the stem (debian/foo.intsall -> debian/foo.install) provided to have adequate handling of the corner cases (such as debian/*.conf not needing correction into debian/*.config)
- Detect possible invalid package prefix (debian/foo.install without foo being a package). Note this has to be a weak warning unless the package is using debhelper compat 15 or you dumpster dived to validate that dh_install was not passed dh_install --name foo. Agreed, no one should do that, but they can and false positives are the worst kind of positives for a linting tool.
- With some limitations, detect files used without the relevant command being active. As an example, the some integration modes of debputy removes dh_install, so a debian/foo.install would not be used.
- Associate a given file with a given command to assist users with the documentation look up. Like debian/foo.user.service is related to dh_installsystemduser, so man dh_installsystemduser is a natural start for documentation.
I have added the logic for all these features in debputy though the documentation association is currently not in a user facing command. All the others are now diagnostics emitted by debputy in its editor support mode (debputy lsp server) or via debputy lint. In the editor mode, the diagnostics are currently associated with the package name in debian/control due to technical limitations of how the editor integration works.
Some of these features will the latest version of debhelper (moving target at times). Check with debputy lsp features for the Extra dh support feature, which will be enabled if you got all you need.
Note: The detection is currently (mostly) ignoring files with architecture restrictions. That might be lifted in the future. However, architecture restricted config files tend to be rare, so they were not a priority at this point. Additionally, debputy for technical reasons ignores stem typos with multiple matches. That sadly means that typos of debian/docs will often be unreported due to its proximity to debian/dirs and vice versa.
Diving a bit deeper on getting the stemsTo get the stems, debputy has 3 primary sources:
- Its own plugins can provide packager provided files. These are only relevant if the package is using debputy.
- It is als possible to provide a debputy plugin that identifies packaging files (either static or named ones). Though in practice, we probably do not want people to roll their own debputy plugin for this purpose, since the detection only works if the plugin is installed. I have used this mechanism to have debhelper provide a debhelper-documentation plugin to enrich the auto-detected data and we can assume most people interested in this feature would have debhelper installed.
- It asks dh_assistant list-guessed-dh-config-files for config files, which is covered below.
The dh_assistant command uses the same logic as dh to identify the active add-ons and loads them. From there, it scans all commands mentioned in the sequence for the PROMISE: DH NOOP WITHOUT ...-hint and a new INTROSPECTABLE: CONFIG-FILES ...-hint. When these hints reference a packaging file (as an example, via pkgfile(foo)) then dh_assistant records that as a known packaging file for that helper.
Additionally, debhelper now also tracks commands that were removed from the sequence. Several of the dh_assistant subcommand now use this to enrich their (JSON) output with notes about these commands being known but not active.
The end resultWith all of this work, you now get:
$ apt satisfy 'dh-debputy (>= 0.1.43~), debhelper (>= 13.16~), python3-lsprotocol, python3-levenshtein' # For demo purposes, pull two known repos (feel free to use your own packages here) $ git clone https://salsa.debian.org/debian/debhelper.git -b debian/13.16 $ git clone https://salsa.debian.org/debian/debputy.git -b debian/0.1.43 $ cd debhelper $ mv debian/debhelper.install debian/debhelper.intsall $ debputy lint warning: File: debian/debhelper.intsall:1:0:1:0: The file "debian/debhelper.intsall" is likely a typo of "debian/debhelper.install" File-level diagnostic $ mv debian/debhelper.intsall debian/debhleper.install $ debputy lint warning: File: debian/debhleper.install:1:0:1:0: Possible typo in "debian/debhleper.install". Consider renaming the file to "debian/debhelper.debhleper.install" or "debian/debhelper.install" if it is intended for debhelper File-level diagnostic $ cd ../debputy $ touch debian/install $ debputy lint --no-warn-about-check-manifest warning: File: debian/install:1:0:1:0: The file debian/install is related to a command that is not active in the dh sequence with the current addons File-level diagnosticAs mentioned, you also get these diagnostics in the editor via the debputy lsp server feature. Here the diagnostics appear in debian/control over the package name for technical reasons.
The editor side still needs a bit more work. Notably, changes to the filename is not triggered automatically and will first be caught on the next change to debian/control. Likewise, changes to debian/rules to add --with to dh might also have some limitations depending on the editor. Saving both files and then triggering an edit of debian/control seems to work reliable but ideally it should not be that involved.
The debhelper side could also do with some work to remove the unnecessary support for the name segment with many file stems that do not need them and announce that to debputy.
Anyhow, it is still a vast improvement over the status quo that was "Why is my file silently ignored!?".
Russ Allbery: Review: Welcome to Boy.Net
Review: Welcome to Boy.Net, by Lyda Morehouse
Series: Earth's Shadow #1 Publisher: Wizard's Tower Press Copyright: April 2024 ISBN: 1-913892-71-9 Format: Kindle Pages: 355Welcome to Boy.Net is a science fiction novel with cyberpunk vibes, the first of a possible series.
Earth is a largely abandoned wasteland. Humanity has survived in the rest of the solar system and spread from Earth's moon to the outer planets. Mars is the power in the inner system, obsessed with all things Earth and effectively run by the Earth Nations' Peacekeeping Force, the ENForcers. An ENForcer soldier is raised in a creche from an early age, implanted with cybernetic wetware and nanite enhancements, and extensively trained to be an elite fighting unit. As befits a proper military, every ENForcer is, of course, male.
The ENForcers thought Lucia Del Toro was a good, obedient soldier. They also thought she was a man. They were wrong about those and many other things. After her role in an atrocity that named her the Scourge of New Shanghai, she went AWOL and stole her command ship. Now she and her partner/girlfriend Hawk, a computer hacker from Luna, make a living with bounty hunting jobs in the outer system. The ENForcers rarely cross the asteroid belt; the United Miners see to that.
The appearance of an F-class ENForcer battle cruiser in Jupiter orbit is a very unpleasant surprise. Lucia and Hawk hope it has nothing to do with them. That hope is dashed when ENForcers turn up in the middle of their next job: a bounty to retrieve an AI eye.
I first found Lyda Morehouse via her AngeLINK cyberpunk series, the last of which was published in 2011. Since then, she's been writing paranormal romance and urban fantasy as Tate Hallaway. This return to science fiction is an adventure with trickster hackers, throwback anime-based cowboy bars, tense confrontations with fascist thugs, and unexpected mutual aid, but its core is a cyberpunk look at the people who are unwilling or unable to follow the rules of social conformity. Gender conformity, specifically.
Once you understand what this book is about, Welcome to Boy.Net is a great title, but I'm not sure it serves its purpose as a marketing tool. This is not the book that I would have expected from that title in isolation, and I'm a bit worried that people who would like it might pass it by.
Inside the story, Boy.Net is the slang term for the cybernetic network that links all ENForcers. If this were the derogatory term used by people outside the ENForcers, I could see it, but it's what the ENForcers themselves call it. That left me with a few suspension of disbelief problems, since the sort of macho assholes who are this obsessed with male gender conformance usually consider "boys" to be derogatory and wouldn't call their military cybernetic network something that sounds that belittling, even as a joke. It would be named after some sort of Orwellian reference to freedom, or something related to violence, dominance, brutality, or some other "traditional male" virtue.
But although this term didn't work for me as world-building, it's a beautiful touch thematically.
What Morehouse is doing here is the sort of concretized metaphor that science fiction is so good at: an element of world-building that is both an analogy for something the reader is familiar with and is also a concrete piece of world background that follows believable rules and can be manipulated by the characters. Boy.Net is trying to reconnect to Lucia against her will. If it succeeds, it will treat the body modifications she's made as damage and try to reverse all of them, attempting to convert her back to the model of an ENForcer. But it is also a sharp metaphor for how gender roles are enforced in our world: a child assigned male is connected to a pervasive network of gender expectations and is programmed, shaped, and monitored to match the social role of a boy. Even if they reject those expectations, the gender role keeps trying to reconnect and convert them back.
I really enjoyed Morehouse's handling of the gender dynamics. It's an important part of the plot, but it's not the only thing going on or the only thing the characters think about. Lucia is occasionally caught by surprise by well-described gender euphoria, but mostly gender is something other people keep trying to impose on her because they're obsessed with forcing social conformity.
The rest of the book is a fun romp with a few memorable characters and a couple of great moments with unexpected allies. Hawk and Lucia have an imperfect but low drama relationship that features a great combination of insight and the occasional misunderstanding. It's the kind of believable human relationship that I don't see very much in science fiction, written with the comfortable assurance of an author with over a dozen books under her belt. Some of the supporting characters are also excellent, including a non-binary deaf hacker that I wish had been a bit more central to the story.
This is not the greatest science fiction novel I've read, but it was entertaining throughout and kept me turning the pages. Recommended if you want some solar-system cyberpunk in your life.
Welcome to Boy.Net reaches a conclusion of sorts, but there's an obvious hook for a sequel and a lot of room left for more stories. I hope enough people buy this book so that I can read it.
Rating: 7 out of 10
Kate and OrgMode
I have a very.. unusual notetaking and task setup with Kate, using Orgmode files. I wanted to showcase it and explain how it works, maybe someone else has similar needs.
Here's a small screenshot of my journal notes, I blurred out some things I didn't want to share.
Why OrgMode?I actually prefer markdown much more. I enjoy writing markdown files and it just works in most editors. However, there is zero markdown note taking apps on android, that allow me to sync from my nextcloud and have notifications.
I write very journal style notes. I have one big journal file (used to be a file per day before), where I write down all the interesting things that happened, plus most importantly, my work tasks.
I tried to use calendar with tasks before.. But theres way too much context switching between notetaking apps, calendars, tasks (and on android you have to have two apps for tasks and calendar!!!). I was drowning in various apps and windows, constantly hopping around..
All I wanted to do was write down a task in my journal, then have that task notify me on my phone and on my desktop whenever it was scheduled.
So eventually I found an app called Orgzly Revived. It lets me take the outline style notes where everything is a bulletpoint, with tasks and such, timers, repeats.. And it has the dang phone notifications no other note taking app has. So it's perfect. Works awesome for my needs.
Only thing is that it requires Orgmode files. Okay, I can do that. I first used Logseq with both markdown and orgmode files, but it's quite slow app, even on my nice PC. And no notifications on mobile of course.
I then realised that I am trying to overcomplicate things. I live a lot of my work life in Kate editor, so I decided to start using that. I had to update the Orgmode Kate syntax file a bit to make it work better for me (it's been upstreamed now yay), but other than that it works really nicely.
And why not Emacs? I need an editor, not an OS. Well, jokes aside, I am just not really into learning yet another tool for something like note taking. Last time I tried to set up Neovim config that works for me, I just ended up doing everything in Kate.. I wager same would happen with emacs. I am very happy with Kate, that's all. And I contribute to it now and then, so it just makes sense to use it. :)
Now I just sync all my note files through my Nextcloud to my phone and my computers. I have couple scripts that make figuring out my agenda and have notifications on my PC as well.
My Kate setupMy setup took some time to get together and with couple scripts and snippets it works pretty well.
- First, you need to git clone https://codeberg.org/akselmo/kate-orgmode.git
- In there I have couple python and shell scripts, and snippets for Kate
- You need to create a .venv for it with python -m venv .venv and then pip install -r requirements.txt
- Check the Readme file for how to use the snippets
- Create session called Notes.
- In Plasma, you can just search "Notes" in KRunner and open the Notes session, that just opens the files.
- Symlink the org mode snippets to ~/.local/share/ktexteditor_snippets/data/ and make sure they work in Kate
- Snippets are incredibly powerful in Kate, i recommend using them for many things!
- These snippets automate stuff like "worktask" entries.
- Unfortunately any timestamps need to be modified by hand, i have not yet had time to make an external tool that spawns a calendar view and spits out a timestamp.
- For example, "worktask" adds a following item.
- Add an "external tool" entry for the run-orgagenda.sh item in the files.
- Set the "Output" setting to "Display in a panel"
- For the scripts, make sure they're reading right folder (where your notes are)
- Now you can press ctrl+alt+i and type Org Agenda and it shows you a fun lil overview in a panel of all your items in agenda
- In your DE's autostart, add the run-orgnotifier.sh script.
- This will send notification for anything you have set as scheduled or deadline before 30 min, and before/after 5 min of the timestamp.
That should be it for the setup, the code for these scripts is absolutely horrid but you should check that all filepaths match yours etc. I need to clean up the code when I feel like it but honestly it Just Works:tm: for now.. lol.
Journaling?I have one single file that is called Journal-2024 and I create new journal every year. In this journal file, I prepend new items on top of the file, like this.
* Daily notes 2024-07-07 :PROPERTIES: :CREATED: [2024-07-07 Sun 21:20] :END: Some notes for this day ** Some specific subnote for this daily note blabla * TODO [#A] do this task ples :personal: SCHEDULED: <2024-07-06 Sat 21:22> DEADLINE: <2024-07-07 Sun 21:23> :PROPERTIES: :CREATED: [2024-07-05 Fri 21:22] :END: blalbla * DONE [#B] ancient task :work: :PROPERTIES: :CREATED: [2000-01-01 someDayIdk 21:23] :END: its been 24 years #+BEGIN_SRC code ancient code #+END_SRCThis means that you can just quickly see all the new items. Also in Kate, there's a handy feature for folding all toplevel nodes when you press ctrl+alt+i so you get just list of all headers. I use it all the time. Folding the nodes only works with the newest ksyntaxhighlighting since i recently updated the orgmode syntax file to support that lol.
Anything elseAny other items go to their respective note files.
For example anything related to programming goes to "Programming notes" file. Then I use tags for those items to categorize them based on language, framework, etc..
Instead of having many small files, I have multiple big files, where I categorize items with tags. I can then easily search for items by typing :tag: in the search field in Kate, and it shows me all items related to that tag. Just, well, remember to tag your items! :D
Wrap upTo wrap it up, this system has made things much easier to remember for me, and I can handle more complicated tasks like repeating workout tasks with my phone. (I can do it in Kate too but it requires manual number changing).
I wouldn't mind changing back to markdown if there was a markdown app for phone that has actual notifications.
Sorry this post is a bit all over the place, but there's really not much more interesting things to share about this. It's just couple scripts reminding me or showing all the items in my agenda, and the rest is snippets in Kate and writing orgmode files.
And I am quite happy with my system. Maybe it'll help you to get some ideas too!
Also please tell me about any markdown note taking apps that have notifications on mobile and desktop, if you know any. You can ping me on fedi, which you can find on my about section.
Thanks for reading!
Kids ‘n Billies 2024 (Music Review)
Kids ‘n Billies is a yearly music festival in Nijmegen. The genre is rockabilly, folk, ’50s, punk. It is a family friendly festival, outdoors in the fairly small (seats 900) open-air theatre the Goffert. I got “married” – by two Elvis impersonators – to my nepgenoot at the festival in 2012, so it’s our yearly musical outing. Here are some notes from this year’s edition, which was two weeks ago already.
The festival is arranged around two stages. Main stage is the central theatre, and there is a bospodium (forest stage) in the shrubbery where maybe 50 people can crowd around a stage that is about 4-by-3 metres. My preference goes out to the bospodium, because it is such a more intimate experience.
On the whole, this is also a kid-friendly festival (like there’s buckets where you can re-load your water pistols, if it’s a sunny day). The birds are singing, you sit on the grass or stand under the trees. That does make some genres feel a bit out-of-place.
Notes from the Main Stage- The Gories felt out-of-place. If I was at a dark and boozy get-together and hanging around at the edge of the pit, it’d be fine. Not by the light of day.
- King Salami and the Cumberland 3 seemed like a racist caricature of themselves. I felt a bit uncomfortable watching them – because is it me projecting racist expectations, is it them playing with my expectations, or are we just all having fun – but they absolutely had a blast on stage and were really good with the kids. King Salami is a top-notch front-man.
- Slim Cessna’s Auto Club did not resonate with me at all. Kinda slick country, and I thought George Cessna’s solo set (Bospodium) was way better.
- Tornado Beat! have all the right moves and a very traditional rockabilly line-up. Danceable, and a tight set.
- Angry Zeta are a pack of raccoons (mapaches, as they translated for me later) from Buenos Aires in punk rock clothes with rockabilly sensibilities and a bunch of really sweet people, too. I learned some Spanish, and was reminded of various independence movements by their tour poster – as in, their tour locations were in Euskal Herria, Catalunya, Schweiz, Nederland, .. . They look scary, make a lot of noise, and have fun doing it.
Thanks to Korte Metta for doing my hair, so I had lovely flowers and ’50s girly bows and things. At the festival she mostly does kids and a few adults, and I commend her for making one big hairy dude totes adorable.
Notes from the Bospodium- Posessed by Paul James had two sets, and they played in Eindhoven a couple of days later and was good enough that I had to go see him again. One guy with a guitar, a banjo, and a violin. “Posessed” is a really accurate description. It’s personal, it’s wild.
- Hymn for Her was a trio – no dog on this tour – for the set and projected really well. With a synth piano, which I thought was a bit daring at a rockabilly festival, but Diver (the pianist) nailed it. The way the family plays together is really nice to see.
- George Cessna looked like a hipster, had a backing track he recorded earlier, and was both soulful and country and I really liked it. Raised my hopes for the Auto Club, later, but that was a disappointment.
- Van Tastik reminded me a bit of the Reverend Deadeye. It’s a one-man band, good stage presence and connects to the audience. My nepgenoot didn’t like some of the first set, but the good fallen Reverend Van Tastik promised a more friendly second set, and delivered. That’s one really nice part of a small festival like this – you literally can grab a beer with the artists and sit a spell. Anyway, for grunchy-punchy one-man noise, this is a man to follow.
A recurring theme from the artists is that the socials are really important to them from a financial perspective. I’m personally not on any of those socials (YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, …) so I can’t help them there, but I figure I can at least make a little noise for them all. And buy the T-shirt.
Dirk Eddelbuettel: binb 0.0.7 on CRAN: Maintenance
The seventh release of the binb package, and first in four years, is now on CRAN. binb regroups four rather nice themes for writing LaTeX Beamer presentations much more easily in (R)Markdown. As a teaser, a quick demo combining all four themes is available; documentation and examples are in the package.
This release contains a CRAN-requested fix for a just-released new pandoc version which deals differently with overflowing bounding boxes from graphics; an added new LaTeX command is needed. We also polished continuous integration and related internals a few times but this does not contain directly user-facing changes in the package.
Changes in binb version 0.0.7 (2024-07-06)Several rounds of small updates to ge continuous integration setup.
An additional LaTeX command needed by pandoc (>= 3.2.1) has been added.
CRANberries provides a summary of changes to the previous version. For questions or comments, please use the issue tracker at the GitHub repo.
If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
simonbaese - blog: Performance improvements for an enterprise Drupal website
Recently, we worked on performance improvements for a complex enterprise-scale Drupal system. Performance bottlenecks can appear in many different parts of such systems. Many possible performance improvements merit their respective discussion - each with a high level of detail. In this blog post, we want to share what we have learned from a more distant perspective. For some improvements, the Drupal ecosystem already offers well-working solutions in core and the contribution space. Some other changes sound easy on paper, but the implementation requires much effort. That is why we need to zoom out more to make good decisions on the software architecture level. Here are some of the noteworthy changes and decisions we made.
RIT Malayalam fonts: supporting a range of OpenType shapers
The open fonts for Malayalam developed by Rachana Institute of Technology use our independently developed advanced shaping rules since 2020. A conscious decision was made to support only the revised OpenType specification for Indic scripts (the script tag mlm2, which fixed issues with the v1 specification such as halant shifting). Our shaping rules provide precise, exact and definite shaping for Malayalam Unicode fonts on all major software platforms.
And yet, there are many users who still use either old or buggy softwares/platforms. Hussain and Bhattathiri have expressed angst and displeasure in seeing their beautifully and meticulously designed fonts not shaped correctly on some typeset works and prints (for instance, Ezhuthu is used by Mathrubhumi newspaper showing detached u-signs). I have received many requests over the years to add support for those obsolete (or sometimes proprietary) platforms, but have always refused.
Fig. 1: Detached ു-sign & other shaping issues with InDesignFew weeks ago, CVR and I were trying to generate Malayalam epub content to read on a Kobo ebook reader (which supports loading user’s own fonts, unlike Kindle). We found that Kobo’s shaping software (quite possibly an old version of Pango) does not support the v2 OpenType specification. That did irk me and I knew it is going to be a rabbit hole. A little bit of reverse engineering and a day later, we were happy to read Malayalam properly shaped in Kobo, by adding rudimentary support for v1 spec.
Fig. 2: RIT Rachana shaped perfectly with Kobo ebook reader (ignore the book title).Out of curiosity, I checked whether those small additions work with Windows XP, but it did not (hardly surprising). But now that the itch has been scratched; a bunch of shaping rules were added to support XP era applications as well (oh, well).
Fig. 3: RIT Rachana shaped perfectly in Windows XP.Few days later, a user also reported (known) shaping issue with Adobe InDesign. Though I was inclined to close it as NOTABUG pointing to use HarfBuzz instead, the user was willing to help test a few attempts I promised to make. Adobe 2020/2021 (and earlier) products use Lipika shaper, but recent versions are using HarfBuzz natively. Lipika seems to support v2 OpenType specification, yet doesn’t work well with our existing shaping rules. Quite some reverse engineering and half a dozen attempts later, I have succeeded in writing shaping rules that support Lipika along with other shapers.
Fig.4: RIT Rachana shaped perfectly with InDesign 2021 (note: the characters outside margins is a known issue only with InDesign, and it is fixed with a workaround).All published (and in progress) RIT Malayalam fonts are updated with these new set of shaping rules; which means all of them will be shaped exactly, precisely and correctly (barring the well-known limitation of v1 specification and bugs in legacy shapers ) all the way from Windows XP (2002) to HarfBuzz 8.0 (present day) and all applications in between.
Supported shaping enginesWith this extra engineering work, RIT fonts now tested to work well with following shaping engines/softwares. Note: old Pango and Qt4 have shaping issues (with below base ല forms and ു/ൂ forms of conjuncts, in respective shapers), but those won’t be fixed. Any shaper other than HarfBuzz (and to a certain extent Uniscribe) is best effort only.
- Shaping engines:
- HarfBuzz
- Allsorts
- DirectWrite/Uniscribe (Windows old & new)
- Lipika (Adobe)
- GUI toolkits & typesetting applications:
- XeTeX, LuaHBTeX
- Scribus
- Qt5 onward (KDE applications)
- Pango/GTK (GNOME applications)
- LibreOffice
- Prince XML
- Microsoft Office
- Emacs
- Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop (with HarfBuzz or Lipika)
- Firefox, Chrome/Chromium, Edge browsers
New releases are made available for all the fonts developed by Rachana Institute of Typography, viz.
- RIT Rachana (version 1.5.0)
- RIT MeeraNew (version 1.6)
- RIT Panmana (version 1.4)
- RIT TNJoy (version 1.6)
- RIT Keraleeyam (version 3.2)
- RIT Sundar (version 2.3)
- RIT Uroob (version 2.1)
- RIT Karuna (version 1.2)
- RIT Chingam (version 1.2) — with many other improvements
- RIT Ezhuthu (version 1.5.0)
- RIT Kutty (version 1.3)
A lot of invaluable work was done by Narayana Bhattathiri, Ashok Kumar and CV Radhakrishnan in testing and verifying the fonts with different platforms and typesetting systems.
End users who reported issues and helped with troubleshooting have also contributed heavily in shaping (pun intended) community software like RIT Malayalam open fonts.
Port Arianna to Foliate-js - GSoC '24
I am Ajay Chauhan (IRC: hisir:matrix.org), currently in my second year of undergraduate studies in Computer Science & Engineering. I'll be working on porting Arianna to Foliate-js for my Google Summer of Code project. I have previously worked on Kdenlive as part of the Season of KDE '24.
I hope to help bring the said feature into reality, but also to sharpen my own development skills through real-world projects, contribute back to the open source community and gain more inner confidence.
What am I working on for this year’s GSoC?Arianna uses epub.js, which is no longer actively maintained. This creates a challenge as the epub.js may not be able to keep up with the evolving standards and new changes. To address this issue, the proposed solution is to port Arianna to the Foliate-js, which is an actively maintained epub renderer and has more features compared to epub.js and is used by the Foliate ebook reader also.
The problem that this project aims to solve is the need for a reliable and up-to-date epub rendering solution for the Arianna ebook reader. By porting Arianna to Foliate-js, the project will ensure that Arianna can continue to provide support for the latest epub standards and features.
My mentors for the project is Carl Schwan, and I appreciate the opportunity to collaborate with and learn from him during this process.
My work done so far Setting up the development environmentFirst step was to setup the dev environment, I used Qt Creator for that, it’s fairly easy to set up the development environment.
Reading through existing codebaseThe journey began with a thorough review of the existing implementation of epub.js (epub-viewer.js) in Arianna. I identified the features and functionalities that needed to be ported to Foliate-js, understanding how epub.js was used in Arianna for rendering, navigation, and user interactions, and the C++ backend code.
Next, I focused on identifying all the places where epub.js was integrated with Qt in Arianna. This involved comparing the existing implementation with Foliate-js's approach to implementing the same features. To document the changes, I prepared a draft merge request.
Familiarised myself with the current Foliate reader implementation of the foliate-js. However, challenging for me to understand the backend architecture and how different components are interconnected within Foliate-js, requiring additional time to fully grasp the codebase.
Implementing changes- Fixing the tricky part of the loading process. I had a hard time wrapping my head around how all the pieces fit together. My mentor helped me in this.
It takes the TOC data from the book and imports it into the app's context drawer. This way, users can easily access and navigate through the book's structure.
Added metadata handling: const metadata = action.payload.book.metadata; if (metadata) { backend.metadata = metadata; root.bookReady(backend.metadata.title); Database.addBook(backend.file, JSON.stringify(metadata)); }Let me break down what this does:
- First, it grabs the metadata from the book that's been loaded.
- If there's metadata, it does a few important things:
- Updates the backend with this new info.
- Tells the app that the book is ready to go, passing along the title.
- Stores all this metadata in the database.
In the following weeks of GSoC, I plan to first to focus on tackling the rendition setup. This is a crucial step - it's what will allow our ebook reader to display the content of ebooks correctly, and also setting the style for the reader. This will involve integrating the Foliate-js rendition module with Arianna's Qt implementation.
Thanks for your reading, stay tuned for updates on my progress via my blog and feel free to connect with me.
Venue maps in Kongress
With Akademy 2024 hosted in a venue with OSM indoor mapping, what happens if we put KDE’s conference companion app Kongress and Itinerary’s train station indoor map view together?
Venue mapsOut of the box we get a multi-floor map, which is already an improvement compared to just showing building outlines on a conventional (outdoor) map. Visually it’s still far off from handmade conference venue maps though.
Indoor venue map in Kongress.This is using vanilla OSM data (via KDE’s raw data tile server), which is following upstream within 24 hours. Any work done on the map data is thus not only benefiting a specific event but all OSM users.
Finding roomsUsing OSM raw data and client-side rendering rather than pre-rendered raster graphics allows for additional ways to interact with the map or browse the data.
Itinerary has a nearby amenity search feature for example. What you are also often looking for at a conference venue are rooms though. We can apply the same concept here, with a few adjustments on which data to display and how to group it.
Room search dialog in Kongress.This is also the foundation for matching room information from the schedule to the map. That’s not implemented yet in the app though, as we’ll need the actual schedule for testing that.
Custom stylesFor a conference in e.g. a university building only a small subset of rooms might be relevant for an event. Custom made venue maps often highlight those somehow, e.g. with different colors.
As our indoor map renderer uses MapCSS stylesheets to control the visual appearance, that’s easy enough to do here as well. And since MapCSS stylesheets can include other files, we also only need a small event-specific addition that then includes the default style.
Even-specific stylesheet highlighting and labeling relevant rooms. Custom contentWhile stylesheet can do a lot, they can’t generate new content on the map. That’s also needed though, as there might be structures that are only there for the event and thus too short-lived to be added to OSM.
This can be solved by applying an OSM changeset file on top of the loaded map data. That’s basically a “diff” for the map data with event-specific additions, changes or removals.
Event-specific additional map content.This way event-specific content becomes part of the map data itself rather than being in an app-specific overlay. We can therefore make use of all the existing infrastructure for the custom content as well, from support for multi-lingual labels to being searchable.
OutlookAnd there’s still more we could do.
Time-dependent elementsSome elements might only be available or applicable for a certain time of the event, or certain rooms might have different purposes on different days.
OSM has a complex mechanism to model time-dependent information, using opening hours expressions. We can parse and interpret those as well, but their use is currently limited to showing actual opening hours for amenities or shops. This is accessible to styles, so we can e.g. gray out currently closed things.
Generalizing this and also allowing to interpret opening hours expression on arbitrary tags in combination with custom styles should not be too far out and give us a really powerful mechanism to model time-dependent features.
RoutingKongress also has our experimental indoor router integrated. For the Akademy venue this works ok-ish (apart from access to the elevator, the map data quality around that isn’t good enough yet).
Indoor map routing in Kongress.An important still missing part here however is the ability to select and customize routing profiles, as routing becomes particularly useful when considering mobility constraints.
Also note that we are only talking about routing here, full navigation is much further away still as we need to have working indoor localization for that as well, which is a much harder problem to solve.
Do we actually need all this?For a comparatively small event like Akademy in a relatively simple two-floor venue, probably not. But think about your first visit at a massive event like FOSDEM, or consider stairs being an insurmountable obstacle. Having support with finding your way around becomes much more important then.
Akademy is a great opportunity to experiment with this though, both from the software and the mapping perspective, and to show what’s possible with the data and technology we already have.
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Recent Publications
- Managing Hidden Dependencies in OO Software: a Study Based on Open Source Projects
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- Investigating developers' email discussions during decision-making in Python language evolution
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