FLOSS Project Planets

While many people went hunting for Easter eggs, the Python community stayed active through March 2024. The free-threaded Python project reached a new milestone, and you can now experiment with disabling the GIL in your interpreter.

The Python Software Foundation does a great job supporting the language with limited resources. They’ve now announced a new position that will support users of PyPI. NumPy is an old workhorse in the data science space. The library is getting a big facelift, and the first release candidate of NumPy 2 is now available.

Dive in to learn more about last month’s most important Python news.

Free-Threaded Python Reaches an Important Milestone

Python’s global interpreter lock (GIL) has been part of the CPython implementation since the early days. The lock simplifies a lot of the code under the hood of the language, but also causes some issues with parallel processing.

Over the years, there have been many attempts to remove the GIL. However, until PEP 703 was accepted by the steering council last year, none had been successful.

The PEP describes how the GIL can be removed based on experimental work done by Sam Gross. It suggests that what’s now called free-threaded Python is activated through a build option. In time, this free-threaded Python is expected to become the default version of CPython, but for now, it’s only meant for testing and experiments.

When free-threaded Python is ready for bigger audiences, the GIL will still be enabled by default. You can then set an environment variable or add a command-line option to try out free-threaded Python:

Read the full article at https://realpython.com/python-news-march-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 ]

Integrating with Jira APIs 2024-04-08, by Dariusz Suchojad Overview

Continuing in the series of articles about newest cloud connections in Zato 3.2, this episode covers Atlassian Jira from the perspective of invoking its APIs to build integrations between Jira and other systems.

There are essentially two use modes of integrations with Jira:

1. Jira reacts to events taking place in your projects and invokes your endpoints accordingly via WebHooks. In this case, it is Jira that explicitly establishes connections with and sends requests to your APIs.
2. Jira projects are queried periodically or as a consequence of events triggered by Jira using means other than WebHooks.

The first case is usually more straightforward to conceptualize - you create a WebHook in Jira, point it to your endpoint and Jira invokes it when a situation of interest arises, e.g. a new ticket is opened or updated. I will talk about this variant of integrations with Jira in a future instalment as the current one is about the other situation, when it is your systems that establish connections with Jira.

The reason why it is more practical to first speak about the second form is that, even if WebHooks are somewhat easier to reason about, they do come with their own ramifications.

To start off, assuming that you use the cloud-based version of Jira (e.g. https://example.atlassian.net), you need to have a publicly available endpoint for Jira to invoke through WebHooks. Very often, this is undesirable because the systems that you need to integrate with may be internal ones, never meant to be exposed to public networks.

Secondly, your endpoints need to have a TLS certificate signed by a public Certificate Authority and they need to be accessible on port 443. Again, both of these are something that most enterprise systems will not allow at all or it may take months or years to process such a change internally across the various corporate departments involved.

Lastly, even if a WebHook can be used, it is not always a given that the initial information that you receive in the request from a WebHook will already contain everything that you need in your particular integration service. Thus, you will still need a way to issue requests to Jira to look up details of a particular object, such as tickets, in this way reducing WebHooks to the role of initial triggers of an interaction with Jira, e.g. a WebHook invokes your endpoint, you have a ticket ID on input and then you invoke Jira back anyway to obtain all the details that you actually need in your business integration.

The end situation is that, although WebHooks are a useful concept that I will write about in a future article, they may very well not be sufficient for many integration use cases. That is why I start with integration methods that are alternative to WebHooks.

Alternatives to WebHooks

If, in our case, we cannot use WebHooks then what next? Two good approaches are:

1. Scheduled jobs
2. Reacting to emails (via IMAP)

Scheduled jobs will let you periodically inquire with Jira about the changes that you have not processed yet. For instance, with a job definition as below:

Now, the service configured for this job will be invoked once per minute to carry out any integration works required. For instance, it can get a list of tickets since the last time it ran, process each of them as required in your business context and update a database with information about what has been just done - the database can be based on Redis, MongoDB, SQL or anything else.

Integrations built around scheduled jobs make most sense when you need to make periodic sweeps across a large swaths of business data, these are the "Give me everything that changed in the last period" kind of interactions when you do not know precisely how much data you are going to receive.

In the specific case of Jira tickets, though, an interesting alternative may be to combine scheduled jobs with IMAP connections:

The idea here is that when new tickets are opened, or when updates are made to existing ones, Jira will send out notifications to specific email addresses and we can take advantage of it.

For instance, you can tell Jira to CC or BCC an address such as zato@example.com. Now, Zato will still run a scheduled job but instead of connecting with Jira directly, that job will look up unread emails for it inbox ("UNSEEN" per the relevant RFC).

Anything that is unread must be new since the last iteration which means that we can process each such email from the inbox, in this way guaranteeing that we process only the latest updates, dispensing with the need for our own database of tickets already processed. We can extract the ticket ID or other details from the email, look up its details in Jira and the continue as needed.

All the details of how to work with IMAP emails are provided in the documentation but it would boil down to this:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*- # Zato from zato.server.service import Service class MyService(Service): def handle(self): conn = self.email.imap.get('My Jira Inbox').conn for msg_id, msg in conn.get(): # Process the message here .. process_message(msg.data) # .. and mark it as seen in IMAP. msg.mark_seen()

The natural question is - how would the "process_message" function extract details of a ticket from an email?

There are several ways:

1. Each email has a subject of a fixed form - "[JIRA] (ABC-123) Here goes description". In this case, ABC-123 is the ticket ID.
2. Each email will contain a summary, such as the one below, which can also be parsed:

Summary: Here goes description Key: ABC-123 URL: https://example.atlassian.net/browse/ABC-123 Project: My Project Issue Type: Improvement Affects Versions: 1.3.17 Environment: Production Reporter: Reporter Name Assignee: Assignee Name

1. Finally, each email will have an "X-Atl-Mail-Meta" header with interesting metadata that can also be parsed and extracted:

X-Atl-Mail-Meta: user_id="123456:12d80508-dcd0-42a2-a2cd-c07f230030e5", event_type="Issue Created", tenant="https://example.atlassian.net"

The first option is the most straightforward and likely the most convenient one - simply parse out the ticket ID and call Jira with that ID on input for all the other information about the ticket. How to do it exactly is presented in the next chapter.

Regardless of how we parse the emails, the important part is that we know that we invoke Jira only when there are new or updated tickets - otherwise there would not have been any new emails to process. Moreover, because it is our side that invokes Jira, we do not expose our internal system to the public network directly.

However, from the perspective of the overall security architecture, email is still part of the attack surface so we need to make sure that we read and parse emails with that in view. In other words, regardless of whether it is Jira invoking us or our reading emails from Jira, all the usual security precautions regarding API integrations and accepting input from external resources, all that still holds and needs to be part of the design of the integration workflow.

Creating Jira connections

The above presented the ways in which we can arrive at the step of when we invoke Jira and now we are ready to actually do it.

As with other types of connections, Jira connections are created in Zato Dashboard, as below. Note that you use the email address of a user on whose behalf you connect to Jira but the only other credential is that user's API token previously generated in Jira, not the user's password.

Invoking Jira

With a Jira connection in place, we can now create a Python API service. In this case, we accept a ticket ID on input (called "a key" in Jira) and we return a few details about the ticket to our caller.

This is the kind of a service that could be invoked from a service that is triggered by a scheduled job. That is, we would separate the tasks, one service would be responsible for opening IMAP inboxes and parsing emails and the one below would be responsible for communication with Jira.

Thanks to this loose coupling, we make everything much more reusable - that the services can be changed independently is but one part and the more important side is that, with such separation, both of them can be reused by future services as well, without tying them rigidly to this one integration alone.

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*- # stdlib from dataclasses import dataclass # Zato from zato.common.typing_ import cast_, dictnone from zato.server.service import Model, Service # ########################################################################### if 0: from zato.server.connection.jira_ import JiraClient # ########################################################################### @dataclass(init=False) class GetTicketDetailsRequest(Model): key: str @dataclass(init=False) class GetTicketDetailsResponse(Model): assigned_to: str = '' progress_info: dictnone = None # ########################################################################### class GetTicketDetails(Service): class SimpleIO: input = GetTicketDetailsRequest output = GetTicketDetailsResponse def handle(self): # This is our input data input = self.request.input # type: GetTicketDetailsRequest # .. create a reference to our connection definition .. jira = self.cloud.jira['My Jira Connection'] # .. obtain a client to Jira .. with jira.conn.client() as client: # Cast to enable code completion client = cast_('JiraClient', client) # Get details of a ticket (issue) from Jira ticket = client.get_issue(input.key) # Observe that ticket may be None (e.g. invalid key), hence this 'if' guard .. if ticket: # .. build a shortcut reference to all the fields in the ticket .. fields = ticket['fields'] # .. build our response object .. response = GetTicketDetailsResponse() response.assigned_to = fields['assignee']['emailAddress'] response.progress_info = fields['progress'] # .. and return the response to our caller. self.response.payload = response # ########################################################################### Creating a REST channel and testing it

The last remaining part is a REST channel to invoke our service through. We will provide the ticket ID (key) on input and the service will reply with what was found in Jira for that ticket.

We are now ready for the final step - we invoke the channel, which invokes the service which communicates with Jira, transforming the response from Jira to the output that we need:

$ curl localhost:17010/jira1 -d '{"key":"ABC-123"}' { "assigned_to":"zato@example.com", "progress_info": { "progress": 10, "total": 30 } } $

And this is everything for today - just remember that this is just one way of integrating with Jira. The other one, using WebHooks, is something that I will go into in one of the future articles.

More blog posts➤

Dear Readers,

The DropTimes [TDT], as you know, is a news website with the vision of contributing to the growth of a vibrant community of users and contributors around Drupal through the process of covering and promoting everything happening around Drupal. To borrow our founder, Anoop John's words, 

"What we are doing as TDT is not just running a news website but we are trying to mobilize a whole community of users toward revitalizing the community."

 We are working towards improving the technology, driving the contributions back to the Drupal community, and ultimately contributing back to society at large. We are driving towards something bigger than all of us. 

The growth of such a venture certainly will be slow, like a writer adding a few words to their novel each day, a runner slightly extending their distance each week, or a business steadily enhancing its customer service. These small steps may seem insignificant in isolation, but they compound into significant advancements over months and years. These seemingly minor improvements compound over time, accumulating smaller strides and preparing for the dramatic leaps. The DropTimes has, day by day, accumulated the strength to make bigger leaps.

In digital innovation, embracing new directions and challenging conventional norms often leads to remarkable discoveries. Just as the Drupal community continuously strives to push boundaries and advocate for the principles of openness and community-driven development, we are likewise urged to delve into diverse domains with immense potential for creativity and impact. The DropTimes model is one based on resilience, fosters a culture of continuous learning, and ultimately transforms modest efforts into significant accomplishments. This method underscores the importance of the journey, teaching patience and discipline and proving that steady progress can lead to remarkable success.

While grateful to all the readers and loyal supporters of TDT, we seek your continued support in building something impactful and helping contribute to Drupal and open-source. With that, let's revisit the highlights from last week's coverage.

The DropTimes Community Strategist, Tarun Udayaraj, had an opportunity to converse with Tim Doyle, the first-ever Chief Executive Officer and the appointed leader of the Drupal Association. In this exclusive interview, the CEO of the Drupal Association shares his perspectives on the future of Drupal and the open-source community at large. Read the full interview here.

Preston So is a dynamic figure in software development. He showcases a rich career spanning diverse roles within the tech industry and emphasizes a leadership philosophy rooted in empathy and adaptability. Beyond his professional endeavors, Preston's commitment to the Drupal community is notable, having been a significant part of it since 2007. Learn more about this multifaceted individual and his contributions to open-source with an interview by Elma John, a sub-editor at TDT, "Navigating the Currents of Change: The Multidimensional Journey of Preston So."

In an interview with Kazima Abbas, sub-editor of The DropTimes, Adrian Ababei, the Senior Drupal Architect and CEO at OPTASY, shares his extensive experience in web development and Drupal architecture. He discusses overseeing full-cycle project management, conducting technology research, and leading a team of developers at OPTASY.

The third part of the hit Page Builder series by  André Angelantoni, Senior Drupal Architect at HeroDevs, came out last week. "Drupal Page Builders—Part 3: Other Alternative Solutions" discusses alternatives to Paragraphs and Layout Builder. This segment navigates through a variety of server-side rendered page generation solutions, offering a closer look at innovative modules that provide a broader range of page-building capabilities beyond Drupal's native tools.

March has ended, and TDT has successfully concluded its "Women in Drupal" campaign. As the series ends with the third part of Inspiring Inclusion: Celebrating Women in Drupal, The DropTimes reflects on the powerful narratives and insightful messages shared by women Drupalers from around the globe. 

In exciting news, TDT has been announced as the Media Partner for DrupalCon Barcelona 2024 and Drupal Iberia 2024 as a testament to the platform's growth and resilience. We are also seeking volunteers from the members of the Drupal Community to help us cover the upcoming DrupalCon Portland 2024. 

The Regular Registration window for DrupalCon Portland is now open. Registration for DrupalCon Portland will unlock an additional $100 discount on your ticket for DrupalCon North America 2025, in addition to the Early Bird discount during the Early Bird registration window. 

Every week, we will have some events somewhere around the world. A complete list of events for the week is available here.

In other news, Drupal 10.2.5 is now available, featuring a collection of bug fixes. This patch release addresses various issues to ensure stability for production sites. Janez Urevc has reported a 10% improvement in Drupal core test suite runtime, attributed to Gander, a performance testing framework part of Drupal since version 10.2. The latest WebAIM Million report reveals insights into web accessibility, with Drupal holding strong in the CMS rankings. Discover the subtle shifts in WCAG 2 compliance and the strategic decision to exclude subdomains for improved analysis. 

In another interesting update, Mufeed VH, a 21-year-old from Kerala, India, and founder of Lyminal and Stition.AI, has created Devika, an open-source AI software similar to Devin. Devika, conceived initially as a joke, can understand instructions, conduct research, and write code autonomously.

We acknowledge that there are more stories to share. However, due to selection constraints, we must pause further exploration for now.

To get timely updates, follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Also, join us on Drupal Slack at #thedroptimes.

Thank you,
Sincerely
Alka Elizabeth
Sub-editor, The DropTimes.

Hello, Python enthusiasts! 👋

Guess what? We&aposre on the home stretch now, with less than 100 days left until we all rendezvous in the enchanting city of Prague for EuroPython 2024!

Only 91 days left until EuroPython 2024!

Can you feel the excitement tingling in your Pythonic veins?

Let’s look up what&aposs been cooking in the EuroPython pot lately. 🪄🍜

📣 Programme

The curtains have officially closed on the EuroPython 2024 Call for Proposals! 🎬

We&aposve hit records with an incredible 627 submissions this year!! 🎉

Thank you to each and every one of you brave souls who tossed your hats into the ring! 🎩 Your willingness to share your ideas has truly made this a memorable journey.

🗃️ Community Voting

EuroPython 2024 Community Voting was a blast!

The Community Voting is composed of all past EuroPython attendees and prospective speakers between 2015 and 2024.

We had 297 people contributing, making EuroPython more responsive to the community’s choices. 😎 We can’t thank you enough for helping us hear the voice of the Community.

Now, our wonderful programme crew along with the team of reviewers and community voters have been working hard to create the schedule for the conference! 📋✨

💰 Sponsor EuroPython 2024

EuroPython is a volunteer-run, non-profit conference. All sponsor support goes to cover the cost of running the Europython Conference and supporting the community with Grants and Financial Aid.

If you want to support EuroPython and its efforts to make the event accessible to everyone, please consider sponsoring (or asking your employer to sponsor).

Sponsoring EuroPython guarantees you highly targeted visibility and the opportunity to present your company to one of the largest and most diverse Python communities in Europe and beyond!

There are various sponsor tiers and some have limited slots available. This year, besides our main packages, we offer add-ons as optional extras. For more information, check out our Sponsorship brochure.

🐦 We have an Early Bird 10% discount for companies that sign up by April 15th.🐦

More information at:  https://ep2024.europython.eu/sponsor 🫂 Contact us at sponsoring@europython.eu

🎟️ Ticket Sales

The tickets are now open to purchase, and there is a variety of options:

• Conference Tickets: access to Conference and Sprint Weekends.
• Tutorial Tickets: access to the Workshop/Tutorial Days and Sprint Weekend (no access to the main conference).
• Combined Tickets: access to everything during the whole seven-day, i.e. workshops, conference talks and sprint weekend!

We also offer different payment tiers designed to answer each attendee&aposs needs. They are:

Business Tickets: for companies and employees funded by their companies

• Tutorial Only Business (Net price €400.00 + 21% VAT)
• Conference Only Business (Net price €500.00 + 21% VAT)
• Late Bird (Net price €750.00 + 21% VAT)
• Combines Business (Net price €800.00 + 21% VAT)
• Late Bird (Net price €1200.00 + 21% VAT)

Personal Tickets: for individuals

• Tutorial Only Personal (€200.00 incl. 21%VAT)
• Conference Only Personal (€300.00 incl. 21% VAT)
• Late Bird (€450.00 incl. 21% VAT)
• Combined Personal (€450.00 incl. 21% VAT)
• Late Bird (€675.00 incl. 21% VAT)

Education Tickets: for students and active teachers (Educational ID is required at registration)

• Conference Only Education (€135.00 incl. 21% VAT)
• Tutorial Only Education (€100.00 incl. 21% VAT)
• Combined Education (€210.00 incl. 21% VAT)

Fun fact: Czechia has been ranked among the world&aposs top 20 happiest countries recently.

Seize the chance to grab an EP24 ticket and connect with the delightful community of Pythonistas and happy locals this summer! ☀️

Need more information regarding tickets? Please visit https://ep2024.europython.eu/tickets or contact us at helpdesk@europython.eu.

⚖️ Visa Application

If you require a visa to attend EuroPython 2024 in Prague, now is the time to start preparing.

The first step is to verify if you require a visa to travel to the Czech Republic.

The Czech Republic is a part of the EU and the Schengen Area. If you already have a valid Schengen visa, you may NOT need to apply for a Czech visa. If you are uncertain, please check this website and consult your local consular office or embassy. 🏫

If you need a visa to attend EuroPython, you can lodge a visa application for Short Stay (C), up to 90 days, for the purpose of “Business /Conference”. We recommend you do this as soon as possible.

Please, make sure you read all the visa pages carefully and prepare all the required documents before making your application. The EuroPython organisers are not able nor qualified to give visa advice.

However, we are more than happy to help with the visa support letter issued by the EuroPython Society. Every registered attendee can request one; we only issue visa support letters to confirmed attendees. We kindly ask you to purchase your ticket before filling in the request form.

For more information, please check https://ep2024.europython.eu/visa or contact us at visa@europython.eu. ✈️

💶 Financial Aid

We are also pleased to announce our financial aid, sponsored by the EuroPython Society. The goal is to make the conference open to everyone, including those in need of financial assistance.

Submissions for the first round of our financial aid programme are open until April 21st 2024.

There are three types of grants including:

• Free Ticket Voucher Grant
• Travel/Accommodation Grant (reimbursement of travel costs up to €400.)
• Visa Application Fee Grant (up to €80)

⏰ FinAid timeline

If you apply for the first round and do not get selected, you will automatically be considered for the second round. No need to reapply.

8 March 2024Applications open21 April 2024Deadline for submitting first-round applications8 May 2024First round of grant notifications12 May 2024Deadline to accept a first-round grant19 May 2024Deadline for submitting second-round applications15 June 2024Second round of grant notifications12 June 2024Deadline to accept a second-round grant21 July 2024Deadline for submitting receipts/invoices

Visit https://europython.eu/finaid for information on eligibility and application procedures for Financial Aid grants.

🎤 Public Speaking Workshop for Mentees

We are excited to announce that this year’s Speaker Mentorship Programme comes with an extra package!

We have selected a limited number of mentees for a 5-week interactive course covering the basics of a presentation from start to finish.

The main facilitator is the seasoned speaker Cheuk Ting Ho and the participants will end the course by delivering a talk covering all they have learned.

We look forward to the amazing talks the workshop participants will give us. 🙌

🐍 Upcoming Events in Europe

Here are some upcoming events happening in Europe soon.

Czech Open Source Policy Forum: Apr 24, 2024 (In-Person)

Interested in open source and happen to be near Brno/Czech Republic in April? Join the Czech Open Source Policy Forum and have the chance to celebrate the launch of the Czech Republic&aposs first Open Source Policy Office (OSPO). More info at: https://pretix.eu/om/czospf2024/

OSSCi Prague Meetup: May 16, 2024 (In-Person)

Join the forefront of innovation at OSSci Prague Meetup, where open source meets science. Call for Speakers is open!  https://pydata.cz/ossci-cfs.html

PyCon DE & PyData Berlin: April 22-24 2024

Dive into three days of Python and PyData excellence at Pycon DE! Visit https://2024.pycon.de/ for details.

PyCon Italy: May 22-25 2024

PyCon Italia 2024 will happen in Florence. The schedule is online and you can check it out at their nice website: https://2024.pycon.it/

GeoPython 2024: May 27-29, 2024

GeoPython 2024 will happen in Basel, Switzerland. For more information visit their website: https://2024.geopython.net/

🤭 Py.Jokes

Can you imagine our newsletter without joy and laughter? We can’t. 😾🙅‍♀️❌ Here’s this month&aposs PyJoke:

pip install pyjokesimport pyjokesprint(pyjokes.get_joke()) How many programmers does it take to change a lightbulb? None, they just make darkness a standard! 🐣 See You All Next Month

Before saying goodbye, thank you so much for reading this far.

We can’t wait to reunite with all you amazing people in beautiful Prague again.

Let me remind you how pretty Prague is during summer. 🌺🌼🌺

Rozkvetlá jarní Praha, březen 2024 by Radoslav Vnenčák

Remember to take good care of yourselves, stay hydrated and mind your posture!

Oh, and don’t forget to force encourage your friends to join us at EuroPython 2024! 😌

It’s time again to make new Python memories together!

Looking forward to meeting you all here next month!

With much joy and excitement,

EuroPython 2024 Team 🤗

Custom Entities are a powerful tool for building complex web applications and content management systems. Entities in Drupal provide a standardized way to store and manipulate data. Custom entity types in Drupal empower developers to define custom functionality, enhance performance, and maintain full control over data structures, supplementing the numerous built-in entity types.

Here are the steps for creating a custom entity.

Drupal 10 Custom Entity Development in easy steps:

Step 1: Create a custom folder for your module.

                                                     

Choose a short name or machine name for your module.

Innovative Methods of Integrating Drupal with Other Systems to Expand Your Website's Capabilities Editor Mon, 04/08/2024 - 12:42

Given the variety of tools and techniques Drupal offers, it is a must to estimate your business needs first. AI, VR, AR, blockchain, and other technologies will keep reshaping industrial processes, so your task is to ensure the overall Drupal site’s scalability and versatility. 
Businesses of any calibre won’t achieve excellent results if they don’t align the server-side and client-side aspects of website development. Expanding website capabilities with Drupal integration will help you keep the momentum and improve online experiences for your audiences. 
The demand for mobile-first designs, as well as emerging technologies and e-commerce growth, make surviving in the niche without implementing innovative methods of performance and communication impossible. Stay tuned to explore the palette of tools and techniques to level up the standards of website architecture and efficiency for your business.

  

 This is the last bug fix release of Python 3.11 

This is the ninth maintenance release of Python 3.11

Python 3.11.9 is the newest major release of the Python programming language, and it contains many new features and optimizations. Get it here:

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3119/

Major new features of the 3.11 series, compared to 3.10

Among the new major new features and changes so far:

• PEP 657 – Include Fine-Grained Error Locations in Tracebacks
• PEP 654 – Exception Groups and except*
• PEP 673 – Self Type
• PEP 646 – Variadic Generics
• PEP 680 – tomllib: Support for Parsing TOML in the Standard Library
• PEP 675 – Arbitrary Literal String Type
• PEP 655 – Marking individual TypedDict items as required or potentially-missing
• bpo-46752 – Introduce task groups to asyncio
• PEP 681 – Data Class Transforms
• bpo-433030– Atomic grouping ((?>…)) and possessive quantifiers (*+, ++, ?+, {m,n}+) are now supported in regular expressions.
• The Faster Cpython Project is already yielding some exciting results. Python 3.11 is up to 10-60% faster than Python 3.10. On average, we measured a 1.22x speedup on the standard benchmark suite. See Faster CPython for details.

More resources

• Online Documentation

• PEP 664, 3.11 Release Schedule
• Report bugs at https://bugs.python.org.

• Help fund Python and its community.

And now for something completely different

A kugelblitz is a theoretical astrophysical object predicted by general relativity. It is a concentration of heat, light or radiation so intense that its energy forms an event horizon and becomes self-trapped. In other words, if enough radiation is aimed into a region of space, the concentration of energy can warp spacetime so much that it creates a black hole. This would be a black hole whose original mass–energy was in the form of radiant energy rather than matter, however as soon as it forms, it is indistinguishable from an ordinary black hole.

We hope you enjoy the new releases!Thanks to all of the many volunteers who help make Python Development and these releases possible! Please consider supporting our efforts by volunteering yourself or through organization contributions to the Python Software Foundation.

https://www.python.org/psf/

Your friendly release team,
Ned Deily @nad 
Steve Dower @steve.dower 
Pablo Galindo Salgado @pablogsal

Drupal use in the Australian public sector At the recent DrupalSouth 2024, Sean Hamlin from  amazee.io took us through some enlightening stats on CMS use for Australian government websites. This was as a follow-on to stats he provided at DrupalSouth 2022 . Once again, he analysed Drupal use for each state/territory and also for Federal Government sites.  After briefly highlighting his methodology, Sean dived into the stats.  Victoria The breakdown of CMSs used by government websites in Victoria is as follows: Drupal (.vic.gov.au) — 32.2% (based on aggregation by score)  Unknown — 20%  SquizMatrix — 15.5% Opencities — 9.4% New South Wales For New South Wales, the most used CMSs by the government are: Drupal (nsw.gov.au) — 23.7% Unknown — 19.5% SquizMatrix — 15.

Stow 2.4.0 has been released. This release contains some much-wanted bug-fixes — specifically, fixing the --dotfiles option to work with dot-foo directories, and avoiding a spurious warning when unstowing. There were also very many clean-ups and improvements, mostly internal and not visible to users. See http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/stow.git/tree/NEWS for more details.

FTP master

This month I accepted 147 and rejected 12 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 151.

If you file an RM bug, please do check whether there are reverse dependencies as well and file RM bugs for them. It is annoying and time-consuming when I have to do the moreinfo dance.

Debian LTS

This was my hundred-seventeenth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian.

During my allocated time I uploaded:

• [DLA 3770-1] libnet-cidr-lite-perl security update for one CVE to fix IP parsing and ACLs based on the result
• [#1067544] Bullseye PU bug for libmicrohttpd
• Unfortunately XZ happened at the end of month and I had to delay/intentionally delayed other uploads: they will appear as DLA-3781-1 and DLA-3784-1 in April

I also continued to work on qtbase-opensource-src and last but not least did a week of FD.

Debian ELTS

This month was the sixty-eighth ELTS month. During my allocated time I uploaded:

• [ELA-1062-1]libnet-cidr-lite-perl security update for one CVE to improve parsing of IP addresses in Jessie and Stretch
• Due to XZ I also delayed the uploads here. They will appear as ELA-1069-1 and DLA-1070-1 in April

I also continued on an update for qtbase-opensource-src in Stretch (and LTS and other releases as well) and did a week of FD.

Debian Printing

This month I uploaded new upstream or bugfix versions of:

• … cjet
• … lprng
• … rlpr
• … epson-inkjet-printer-escpr

This work is generously funded by Freexian!

Debian Astro

This month I uploaded a new upstream or bugfix version of:

• … indi-gige

Debian IoT

This month I uploaded new upstream or bugfix versions of:

• … radlib

Debian Mobcom

This month I uploaded a new upstream or bugfix version of:

• … osmo-iuh

misc

This month I uploaded new upstream or bugfix versions of:

• … dvbstream
• … liburjtag
• … spim
• … setserial
• … entropybroker

Join The Drop Times at DrupalCon Portland 2024! We're seeking passionate volunteers to capture the excitement, insights, and moments that make this event unforgettable. From live updates to interviews and photo documentation, be part of our team and showcase the best of DrupalCon North America 2024! Sign up now to get involved.

It is, sadly, not entirely surprising that Facebook is censoring articles critical of Meta.

The Kansas Reflector published an artical about Meta censoring environmental articles about climate change — deeming them “too controversial”.

Facebook then censored the article about Facebook censorship, and then after an independent site published a copy of the climate change article, Facebook censored it too.

The CNN story says Facebook apologized and said it was a mistake and was fixing it.

Color me skeptical, because today I saw this:

Yes, that’s right: today, April 6, I get a notification that they removed a post from August 12. The notification was dated April 4, but only showed up for me today.

I wonder why my post from August 12 was fine for nearly 8 months, and then all of a sudden, when the same website runs an article critical of Facebook, my 8-month-old post is a problem. Hmm.

Riiiiiight. Cybersecurity.

This isn’t even the first time they’ve done this to me.

On September 11, 2021, they removed my post about the social network Mastodon (click that link for screenshot). A post that, incidentally, had been made 10 months prior to being removed.

While they ultimately reversed themselves, I subsequently wrote Facebook’s Blocking Decisions Are Deliberate — Including Their Censorship of Mastodon.

That this same pattern has played out a second time — again with something that is a very slight challenege to Facebook — seems to validate my conclusion. Facebook lets all sort of hateful garbage infest their site, but anything about climate change — or their own censorship — gets removed, and this pattern persists for years.

There’s a reason I prefer Mastodon these days. You can find me there as @jgoerzen@floss.social.

So. I’ve written this blog post. And then I’m going to post it to Facebook. Let’s see if they try to censor me for a third time. Bring it, Facebook.

Discover how the Better Permissions Page module simplifies permission management in Drupal by replacing the default permissions page, improving performance, and efficiently updating permissions and roles.

It has been two exciting months since the last update on KDE Itinerary again, with new vehicle and train coach amenity information, DST changes in the timeline, progress on indoor routing and most notably the founding of the Transitous project.

New Features Train and coach amenity information

The library we use for public transport data now has a much more elaborate data model for vehicle features. That’s general comfort feature like air conditioning or Wi-Fi but also things specifically relevant when traveling with small children, a bike or a wheelchair. These can also be qualified by availability (e.g. if those need a special reservation) and can be marked as disrupted.

Itinerary makes use of this in the train coach layout view, where it’s now possible to tap on a coach for a more detailed description.

Coach feature details in Itinerary's train coach layout view.

Another place where this is used is anything showing results from journey or departure searches, such as when planning a new train trip. While all routing services provide some of this information, the level of detail can vary greatly though.

Vehicle features in journey search results.

Since this is now available in a machine-readable form, it also becomes conceivable to allow configuring more detailed traveler profiles so Itinerary can show the information most relevant to you more prominently, or take this into consideration e.g. when automatically selecting transfer suggestions.

Daylight saving time information

Switching to and from daylight saving time happens at different times in different locations (if at all), therefore Itinerary now also displays an information for upcoming daylight saving time changes in the timeline, similar as it already does for e.g. timezone changes.

Daylight saving time information in Itinerary's timeline. Infrastructure Work Transitous

The probably most significant development on the infrastructure side is the appearance of Transitous. That’s a project which started at FOSDEM 2024 barely two months ago with the aim of setting up a community-run free and open public transport routing service. It has been growing rapidly and is meanwhile a collaboration from people from many different FOSS and Open Data projects and communities.

Current Transitous coverage for long-distance travel in Europe.

While not even having all the basic features completed yet, it nevertheless already provides value by covering a few countries where we didn’t have any public transport data at all before. Starting with 24.05 KPublicTransport will have support for Transitous enabled by default, and thus it will also become available in Itinerary and KTrip.

Unlike with vendor-operated or otherwise proprietary services it’s now possible to expand public transport data coverage ourselves, assuming publicly available GTFS feeds at least.

Indoor routing

Work on indoor routing for our train station, airport or event venue maps also continued, with the focus on turning the previously shown demo that was able to find a path from A to B into something that does that reliably and matching human expectations, which is the bulk of the work here.

Examples of this include not taking “shortcuts” through paths you shouldn’t usually take (e.g. emergency exists, or walking through conference rooms/lecture halls as pictured below), but also ensuring robustness against imperfect or incomplete map data.

Shortest path (left), preferring corridors (right).

Some of this also involves clarifying or extending the OSM data model, and onsite visits to inspect challenging locations.

Fixes & Improvements Travel document extractor

• New or improved travel document extractors for AMSBus, ANA, Deutsche Bahn, Eckerö Line, Elron, European Sleeper, Eurostar, Eventim, Finnair, Flibco, Leo Express, LTG Link, Moongate, National Express, Pasažieru vilciens, Salzbergwerk, SNCF, Thalys, ti.to, Trenitalia and UK national railways.
• Added support for yet another variant of PDF raster images for barcode detection.
• Improved generic extractors for flight boarding passes as well as ERA FCB and VDV train tickets.
• Fixed the schema.org semantic annotations in the OSM event calendar.
• Consider GIF files as well when searching for barcodes.

All of this has been made possible thanks to your travel document donations!

Public transport data

• Fixed Deutsche Bahn Hafas searches sometimes not including replacement trains.
• Fixed misdetected train coach types from UIC coach numbers.
• Updated coverage metadata from the Transport API Repository.
• Fixed caching of location queries and negative journey query results.
• Improved support for arrival query result paging.
• Updated support for ÖBB coach layout data.
• Fixed train coach layout queries using times in the wrong timezone.

Itinerary app

• Fixed barcode scanning on Android, caused by a regression in Qt 6.6.2 (affects all KDE apps, not just Itinerary).
• Prevent overly large Apple Wallet pass footer images from messing up the layout.
• Fix editing of times in AM/PM format.
• Remember the last used folder in trip group export file dialogs.
• Suggest meaningful file names for exporting trip groups.
• Allow to copy the program membership number on reservation pages as well.
• Added enough space at the end of the journey details view so floating buttons don’t overlap relevant content.
• Added floating button to timeline page to navigate to the current element and for manually adding entries.
• Fixed current ticket selection for elements without known arrival times.
• Fixed retaining journey notes/vehicle layouts when getting partial trip updates.
• Fixed displaying of departure notes for train trips.
• Fixed displaying of public transport departure disruptions.

How you can help

Feedback and travel document samples are very much welcome, as are all other forms of contributions. Feel free to join us in the KDE Itinerary Matrix channel.

For years KWin has offered modifier-only shortcut handling via an obscure and undocumented method of editing the kwinrc file. Well, no more: in Plasma 6.1, KDE’s shortcut choosers will accept lone modifier keys natively! This makes it much easier to, for example, re-bind what the Meta key does: now you can easily make it open Overview, KRunner, or anything else simply by assigning it directly to that something else. This work required extensive re-plumbing throughout KDE’s software stack and was undertaken by Yifan Zhu, closing multiple Bugzilla tickets in the process—some fairly old. Thanks a lot, Yifan! (Link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, and link 6)

But that’s not all! Though bug-fixing is eternal, we’ve largely gotten over the hump for Plasma 6.0, and I’ve noticed that features and UI improvement have occupied more of people’s attention recently. So let’s start with a much-requested one…

New Features

Spectacle regains a Crop tool, this time integrated internally rather than coming from a 3rd-party annotations library. This also happens to fix a related bug (Noah Davis, Spectacle 24.05. Link 1 and link 2):

For laptops with RGB-backlit keyboards, Plasma has gained the ability to keep the backlight color in sync with the active accent color! And support for custom colors is coming too (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.1. Link 1 and link 2):

https://i.imgur.com/zlsaJlX.mp4

The new automatic crash reporter now gives you the option to let it always download debug symbols in the background to improve the crash reports it generates (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Going along with the theme of modifier-only shortcuts, you can now make an unused mouse button simulate pressing a modifier key alone (David Redondo, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Even though Snaps are supposed to auto-update, Discover has gained the ability to let you manually update them if desired (Kevin Ottens, Plasma 6.1. Link)

UI Improvements

Dolphin now shows a visible error message when you use a keyboard shortcut to trigger an action that can’t be performed in the current context, like cutting a file in a read-only folder (Jin Liu, Dolphin 24.05. Link):

In Elisa, you can now switch between list and grid views as you see fit (Jack Hill, Elisa 24.05. Link):

In Elisa, you can now search for albums on the Tracks page (Karl Hoffman, Elisa 24.05. Link)

You can now select multiple wallpapers in Plasma’s “add new wallpaper” dialog (Sahil Arora, Plasma 6.0.4. Link)

Changed Breeze-themed radio buttons and checkboxes to use the “Button” color role as most other interactive UI elements already do, which not only improves visual consistency, but also fixes a visual glitch in QtQuick-based software where these UI elements would have the wrong color some of the time (Akseli Lahtinen, Frameworks 6.1 and Plasma 6.1. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)

List headers in Kickoff now use the standard list header style seen in QtQuick-based KDE apps, which also necessitated creating a version of that component suitable for Plasma, so expect to see it showing up in more places too (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.1. Link 1 and link 2):

The Plasma Digital Clock widget’s holiday list picker no longer elides long text; instead it wraps the text, since there’s plenty of space to show it in the long already-scrollable list (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Bug Fixes

Okular no longer asks you for a password to open encrypted PDF documents where the encryption isn’t actually applied to simply opening them (Nicolas Fella, sponsored by TU Dresden, Okular 24.02.2. Link)

Fixed a set of related crashes in Plasma that appear to have been a subtle side effect of the recent fix to make apps in Kickoff’s favorite grid disappear immediately when uninstalled (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0.4. Link)

Fixed another case where Plasma could crash when you plugged in a new screen (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0.4. Link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a rare Plasma crash that could happen when clicking on certain System Tray icons (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0.4. Link)

Fixed a case where Spectacle could crash after ending a screen recording when using certain GPU hardware (Fabian Vogt, Plasma 6.0.4. Link)

Fixed bug that had broken the ability to log out within 60 seconds of logging in when using Plasma’s systemd-enabled startup process (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.0.4. Link)

Fixed an issue that caused two-finger touchpad taps on the Task Manager to not open a context menu with certain, shall we say, “less than premium” touchpad hardware (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0.4. Link)

Contributed code hardening for four additional crashes picked up by KDE’s automatic crash reporting system, which as you can tell is proving quite useful! (Fushan Wen again; he’s just that amazing! Plasma 6.0.4. Link 1, link 2, link 3, and link 4)

Fixed the date information in the tooltips of various clock widgets not being localized correctly (Albert Astals Cid, Plasma 6.0.4. Link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a variety of additional weird issues with mouse cursors in video games on Wayland (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1. Link 1 and link 2)

Fixed some visual glitches that could happen on Wayland when you resize certain types of window that open in a maximized state (Ser Freeman, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Other bug information of note:

• 2 Very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 4 last week). Current list of bugs
• 34 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 35 last week). Current list of bugs
• 145 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the last week! Full list of bugs

Performance & Technical

Spectacle now takes screenshots faster when used outside of Plasma and KWin on X11 (Konstantin Kharlamov, Spectacle 24.02.2. Link)

By default, Partition manager now mounts volumes (other than / and /home) with the nofail flag so they don’t block boot-up when not available for some reason (Thomas Bertels, Partition Manager 24.05. Link)

Fixed a memory leak in Plasma’s Networks widget (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0.4. Link)

Custom QML layouts for lock screens in Global Themes are no longer honored, as this is too security-sensitive (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.1. Link 1, link 2, link 3, and link 4)

The Dialog Parent effect (the thing that makes windows get dimmed when a child dialog window is open) now works on Wayland (Carlos Garnacho and David Redondo, Plasma 6.1 with Qt 6.8. Link)

Did a major code-quality overhaul of the Plasma Digital Clock and Calendar widgets, which fixed a bunch of fragility, warnings, and some minor glitches, with more to come soon (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Automation & Systematization

Wrote a tutorial on how to publish your Android-compatible KDE app on the Google Play store (Ingo Klöcker, link)

…And Everything Else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org, where you can find more news from other KDE contributors.

How You Can Help

KDE has become important in the world, and your time and labor have helped to bring it there! But as we grow, it’s going to be equally important that this stream of labor be made sustainable, which primarily means paying for it. Right now the vast majority of KDE runs on labor that KDE e.V. didn’t pay for, and that’s a problem. We’ve taken steps to change this with paid technical contractors—but those steps are small due to limited financial resources. If you’d like to help change that, consider donating today!

Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover other ways to be part of a project that really matters. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to already be a programmer, either. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

Trying to explain analogue clock. It's hard to explain. Tried adding some things for affordance, and it is still not enough. So it's not obvious which arm is the hour and which arm is the minute. analog clock

Use Python's http.server module to serve up a static website on your own machine.

Table of contents

1. A directory trees of index.html files
2. Serving up HTML files with http.server
3. Customizing http.server with CLI arguments
4. Using http.server as a module
5. Use python -m http.server for a local HTTP server

A directory trees of index.html files

We have a directory here that represents a static website:

~/comprehensions/_build/dirhtml $ ls index.html index.html

We not only have an index.html file, but also a bunch of sub-directories, each with their own index.html file:

~/comprehensions/_build/dirhtml $ ls generator-expressions index.html

The only way to really navigate this website locally is to serve up these files using some sort of HTTP server that is aware of these index files.

Python comes bundled with an HTTP server that we can use. It's called http.server.

Serving up HTML files with http.server

If we run this module …

Read the full article: https://www.pythonmorsels.com/http-server/

Focus

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

Changes

• gt: use standard systemd usb-gadget.target
• SWH docs: add FAQ item
• reportbug: allow overriding auto-applied tags
• Debian BTS usertags: fix up Ubuntu, porter, 64-bit time_t usertags
• Debian wiki pages: AutoGeneratedFiles (1 2), DebianDay (2024), Exploits, GSoC, gsoc, Hardware/Wanted, LTS/Development, Ports/riscv64, Sprints (2024/DebianMed), Statistics, Year

Issues

• Features in SWH (1 2), swh-web (1 2 3), swh-lister
• Missed repos in swh-lister (1 2)
• Warnings in nagstamon, knockpy, nyx, rdflib, adal

Administration

• Debian wiki: approve accounts

Communication

• Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors

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

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) 1136 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 33.5 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 578 times according to Google Scholar.

This release brings a new upstream bugfix release Armadillo 12.8.2 prepared by Conrad two days ago. It took the usual day to noodle over 1100+ reverse dependencies and ensure two failures were independent of the upgrade (i.e., “no change to worse” in CRAN parlance). It took CRAN another because we hit a random network outage for (spurious) NOTE on a remote URL, and were then caught in the shrapnel from another large package ecosystem update spuriously pointing some build failures that were due to a missing rebuild to us. All good, as human intervention comes to the rescue.

The set of changes since the last CRAN release follows.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.8.2.0 (2024-04-02)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 12.8.2 (Cortisol Injector)

  • Workaround for FFTW3 header clash

  • Workaround in testing framework for issue under macOS

  • Minor cleanups to reduce code bloat

  • Improved documentation

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.