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Drupal Starshot is a new packaged and pre-configured version of Drupal that was announced at DrupalCon Portland. It is not a separate fork or rewrite of Drupal.

Drupal Starshot takes advantage of the new Recipes feature introduced in Drupal versions 10.3 and 11.

Recipes allow installing Drupal with a complete, ready-to-use website, going beyond the standard installation profile.

More details about the Drupal Starshot initiative are available on its official page.

The unconscious influence the Ghanaian tech community has had on my career.

My name is Joana Owusu-Appiah, and I am currently pursuing an MSc degree in Medical Imaging and Applications. I am originally from Ghana, but as my colleague likes to put it, I am currently backpacking through Europe. So depending on when you see this, my location might have changed.

I hold a Bachelor of Science degree in Biomedical Engineering from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana. Prior to commencing my graduate studies, I dabbled in data science and analytics, gaining experience in visualizing and manipulating data using various tools (Python, Power BI, Excel, SQL). My current research focuses on computer vision applications on medical images.

Do I consider myself a woman in tech? I guess if it means knowing how to use a computer (lol) and understanding that photo editing is based on image processing algorithms and deep learning, then I might be close.

Has it always been this way? No.

What changed

I am a first-generation university student. In my country, or how it used to be, growing up, the smarter students were encouraged to pursue General Science in high school because it ultimately ensured job security. In high school, my primary ambition was to attend medical school. However, as a backup plan, I stumbled upon Biomedical Engineering (BME), which fascinated me with its potential. It quickly became my secondary option. Interestingly, everyone I spoke to knew nothing about it. Guess who would jump at any opportunity to give a lecture about this mystery degree? Me!

Side note: My high school biology teacher mentioned that neurons (nerve cells), once damaged, could never be repaired, but he also said that they functioned like wires. I thought to myself, if I merged this pathological accident and the BME I had read about, then I could replace damaged nerves with wires (some day). I ran with this new, uninformed career goal.

Fun fact: I didn&apost get into medical school, but I did get into the BME program. I quickly realised that technical drawing (a requisite course for all engineering freshers) was definitely not going to equip me to fix Neurons, and that the only viable role for BM E graduates in my country was clinical engineering (maintenance and installation of medical equipment - or so I thought). Clinical engineering wasn’t something I wanted to try, so I needed an escape!

Programming looked interesting, but also difficult and meant for very smart people. However, I gave it a shot during covid. PyLadies Ghana was organising a data science boot camp, and I decided to try.

[Heads up: My undergraduate degree had programming courses like Introduction to C and Object-Oriented Programming with Java( I had collaborated with people on some projects then), but for some reason, I couldn&apost get my brain to enjoy it…]

The Real Reason you’re here

During the boot camp, some of the participants were absorbed into the national online community of Python Ghana because more resources and opportunities were being shared there. It turned out:  I was looking for an escape without any destination. Members of the community seemed very vibrant; there was always a job opening up for grabs, a new free online course or banter on trendy tech topics. My main struggle was finding a niche to belong; what was in tech for me?

My interest in health never waned, so you would usually see me reposting information on female health, breast cancer, etc. The PyLadies Ghana Lead, at that time, Abigail Mesrenyame Dogbe noticed it and in October (Breast Cancer Awareness month) she tasked me to help organise a session for the members of PyLadies Ghana. I moderated the session and it was very successful. My very first visible interaction with the community!

Abigail asked if I wanted to keep contributing to the Communications team( the comms team is the main organising force of PyLadies Ghana ) or default to being just a member. I opted for the former. In my eyes, this was a big deal; being asked to stay on the team meant a ton, It was a validation of a certain value I had to offer. I made mistakes, I created terrible designs, and I missed deadlines, but I also learned a lot. I learned how to use tools like Canva, schedule virtual calls,  MS Office tools (Excel, Docs), write official emails, organise events, etc. I was helping with social media engagements, and I didn&apost even have a vibrant social media presence. I was recommended to help with Public Relations (PR) and social media for a connected tech community(Ghana Data Science Summit-IndabaX Ghana) that organises annual data science conferences.

Two years later, I got the opportunity to mentor ladies in the very bootcamp that led me into the community. The ripple effects of my involvement with PyLadies Ghana are diverse, ranging from giving a lightning talk to speaking to young girls about STEM, to helping organise Django Girls at PyCon Ghana 2022, and more…

STEM outreach for teenage girls on International Women&aposs Day 2023

Unknown to everyone, I had contemplated brushing the study of data science under the carpet as a ‘failed project’ and moving on to something else. Staying committed to the community, watching the members, and participating in events encouraged me to keep trying. I attended conferences, met and saw women who had achieved great things in data science and machine learning, which meant that I could also, through their stories, find a plan to help me get close to what they had done.

I was always fascinated by their work conversations because wow, these women work in tech?! Some community members had secured scholarships and were pursuing higher STEM degrees abroad while others worked for top tech companies.

After covid, my plan for life after school was to either hone my programming skills and get a good job in a Ghanaian tech company and/or find graduate programs that would enable me to work on my Neurons(of course I had developed other interests). I got into a specialised data science and analytics fellowship with Blossom Academy (more about the training here), landed my first tech role through it, and later began my master’s degree.

The Intro slide of the Data science bootcamp I mentored at!

The threads that sustained me in tech were the people, the conversations, and the inclusive atmosphere the Ghanaian community created for people with different personalities to thrive. My journey in STEM can be traced back to that pivotal moment in 2020 when I was offered the opportunity to belong and I seized it!

What’s new in 2.1.1? Access cursor before closing the db connection (contributions by dopas21) use the readthedocs.org theme for docs

<strong>Topics covered in this episode:</strong><br> <ul> <li><a href="https://greptile.com/blog/100-devs"><strong>I asked 100 devs why they aren’t shipping faster. Here’s what I learned</strong></a></li> <li><a href="https://pythoninsider.blogspot.com/2024/05/python-3130-beta-1-released.html"><strong>Python 3.13.0 beta 1 released</strong></a></li> <li><a href="https://blog.jupyter.org/a-theme-editor-for-jupyterlab-8f08ab62894d"><strong>A theme editor for JupyterLab</strong></a></li> <li><a href="https://pypi.org/project/rich-argparse"><strong>rich-argparse</strong></a></li> <li><strong>Extras</strong></li> <li><strong>Joke</strong></li> </ul><a href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEQTL5KpPY8' style='font-weight: bold;'data-umami-event="Livestream-Past" data-umami-event-episode="383">Watch on YouTube</a><br> <p><strong>About the show</strong></p> <p>Sponsored by Mailtrap: <a href="https://pythonbytes.fm/mailtrap"><strong>pythonbytes.fm/mailtrap</strong></a></p> <p><strong>Connect with the hosts</strong></p> <ul> <li>Michael: <a href="https://fosstodon.org/@mkennedy"><strong>@mkennedy@fosstodon.org</strong></a></li> <li>Brian: <a href="https://fosstodon.org/@brianokken"><strong>@brianokken@fosstodon.org</strong></a></li> <li>Show: <a href="https://fosstodon.org/@pythonbytes"><strong>@pythonbytes@fosstodon.org</strong></a></li> </ul> <p>Join us on YouTube at <a href="https://pythonbytes.fm/stream/live"><strong>pythonbytes.fm/live</strong></a> to be part of the audience. Usually Tuesdays at 10am PT. Older video versions available there too.</p> <p>Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to <a href="https://pythonbytes.fm/friends-of-the-show">our friends of the show list</a>, we'll never share it.</p> <p><strong>Michael #1:</strong> <a href="https://greptile.com/blog/100-devs"><strong>I asked 100 devs why they aren’t shipping faster. Here’s what I learned</strong></a></p> <ul> <li>by Daksh Gupta (via PyCoders)</li> <li>What’s stopping you from shipping faster? <ul> <li>Dependency bugs </li> <li>Complicated codebase <ul> <li>><em>There is so much undocumented in our service, including poor records of new features, nonexistent or outdated info on our dependencies, or even essential things like best practices for testing, a lot of time is wasted in syncs trying to find the right information</em></li> </ul></li> </ul></li> <li>QA Loops</li> <li>Waiting for spec <ul> <li><em>&gt; At Amazon? Meetings, approval, talking to 10 different stakeholders because changing the color of a button affects 15 micro services</em></li> </ul></li> <li>Writing tests</li> <li>Deployment/build speed</li> <li>Scope creep <ul> <li>> <em>The human tendency to stuff last-minute items into the crevices of their luggage minutes before leaving for the airport manifests itself at software companies as scope creep.</em></li> </ul></li> <li>Unclear requirements</li> <li>Excessive meetings</li> <li>Motivation <ul> <li><em>&gt;honest answer is i was on ads</em></li> <li><em>&gt;and that’s a very old / complicated / large stack</em> <em>(edited)</em></li> <li><em>&gt;and i didn’t understand it</em></li> <li><em>&gt;my friends on younger teams seemed happier, i was miserable</em></li> </ul></li> <li><a href="https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/analytics/dora_metrics.html">DORA metrics</a></li> </ul> <p><strong>Brian #2:</strong> <a href="https://pythoninsider.blogspot.com/2024/05/python-3130-beta-1-released.html"><strong>Python 3.13.0 beta 1 released</strong></a></p> <ul> <li>"Python 3.13 is still in development. This release, 3.13.0b1, is the first of four beta release previews of 3.13.”</li> <li>New REPL, featuring multi-line editing, color support, colorized exception tracebacks</li> <li>Cool GIL, JIT, and GC features</li> <li>Typing changes, including typing.TypeIs . <ul> <li>See last weeks episode and <a href="https://rednafi.com/python/typeguard_vs_typeis/"><strong>TypeIs does what I thought TypeGuard would do in Python</strong></a></li> </ul></li> <li>Some nice dead battery removals</li> <li>and more</li> <li>But seriously, the REPL is cool. Just ask Trey <ul> <li><a href="https://treyhunner.com/2024/05/my-favorite-python-3-dot-13-feature/">The new REPL in Python 3.13</a> - Trey Hunner</li> </ul></li> </ul> <p><strong>Michael #3:</strong> <a href="https://blog.jupyter.org/a-theme-editor-for-jupyterlab-8f08ab62894d"><strong>A theme editor for JupyterLab</strong></a></p> <ul> <li>by Florence Haudin</li> <li><strong>A new tool for authoring JupyterLab themes</strong></li> <li>To lower the bar for customizing JupyterLab we created a new tool providing a simple interface for tuning the JupyterLab appearance interactively.</li> <li>See <a href="https://github.com/jupyterlab-contrib/jupyterlab-theme-editor"><strong>jupyterlab-theme-editor</strong></a> on github</li> </ul> <p><strong>Brian #4:</strong> <a href="https://pypi.org/project/rich-argparse"><strong>rich-argparse</strong></a></p> <ul> <li>“Format argparse and optparse help using <a href="https://pypi.org/project/rich">rich</a>.”</li> <li>“<em>rich-argparse</em> improves the look and readability of argparse's help while requiring minimal changes to the code.”</li> <li>They’re not kidding. 2 line code change. <pre><code>from rich_argparse import RichHelpFormatter parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(..., formatter_class=RichHelpFormatter) </code></pre></li> </ul> <p><strong>Extras</strong> </p> <p>Brian:</p> <ul> <li><a href="https://courses.pythontest.com/"><strong>pytest course</strong></a> is now switched to the new platform. <ul> <li>I sent out an email including how to save their spot on the old site and mark that spot complete on the new site.</li> <li>There’s now comments on the course now. Trying that out. If you’ve got a question, just ask in that section. </li> </ul></li> </ul> <p>Michael:</p> <ul> <li>A new Talk Python course: <a href="https://training.talkpython.fm/courses/getting-started-with-spacy">Getting Started with NLP and spaCy</a></li> </ul> <p><strong>Joke:</strong> <a href="https://xkcd.com/2928/">Testing holiday</a></p>

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This year's Wikimedia Hackathon was held in early May in Tallinn, Estonia. Like last year, it was a great opportunity to both see people I work with regularly, including people in my own team that I had not seen in person before, and to work with and help people that I have had very limited interactions with before.

Image by Olari Pilnik is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

I presented a session about Puppet (slides), the configuration management tool used on Wikimedia infrastructure (and some other projects I've been involved on) which I think went quite well. I also organized (read: picked a spot for in the schedule) the cuteness meetup.

In addition to the sessions, the main focus of the event was, of course, hacking. As usual, I didn't make any major plans beforehand, and instead ended up working on several smaller projects as they popped up.

Here is a list of things I can remember working on:

• I fixed several small issues in LibUp that makes it pass on more MediaWiki repositories (including core.git). James and I also migrated the LibUp configuration to GitLab.
• I finished up an MR to grunt-banana-checker to add support for automatically fixing some common issues that were causing LibUp failures and to fix some minor bugs.
• I worked with Piotr to get some of my patches to the OATHAuth and WebAuthn MediaWiki extensions merged. This is a part of my project to add support for more than one two-factor authentication device at a time that I was also working on during the Wikimania 2023 hackathon. Next up on this project is writing some UI code.
• I fixed Wikimedia Gerrit twice after it had some issues that needed SRE intervention.
• I sent a patch to Wikimedia's Phabricator/Phorge fork to add a new fox token. This ended up being deployed on Sunday and I got to showcase this during the hackathon showcase.
• Reedy and I implemented support for foxes in WikiLove. I also wrote a bot to spam foxes to Sammy's talk pages on the beta cluster.1 (This also involved a fun side quest to get a working thumbnail for the fox image we used to show up on Beta since the thumbnailing there is broken.)
• I removed some deprecated code from core to earn the MediaWiki track T-shirt. I also reviewed a bunch of patches by others trying to earn that T-shirt.2
• I found and reported some bugs relating to Parsoid read views on Commons.
• I processed some Toolforge account approval requests and Cloud VPS project requests. I also helped some people debug some Cloud VPS issues.
• I helped Bryan debug and fix an issue with HTTP/1.1 streams through the Toolforge front proxy.
• I made some queries on the Wiki Replicas accidentally very slow and then fixed them to be fast again on the next day.
• Got a 100% helpful, harmless, useful, etc. patch merged to something. I will provide no more details on this one.

Finally, a conversation I had at the hackathon resulted in me nominating Novem Linguae for mediawiki/* +2 access a few days after the hackathon.

I had a great time, and the ferry trip to Tallinn was much nicer than the very early flight I had last year. I can't wait to see you all again :-)

Disclosure: I am currently a Wikimedia Foundation contractor, and the Foundation did pay for my travel to Tallinn. This is my personal blog and these are my own opinions.

1. Since backporting this change felt too risky to do on the weekend, and also I have a feeling I'd get in troble if I ran an unapproved bot that edited on random wikis on our production wiki farm. ↩︎

2. Anyone who got 5 or more patches to core.git merged during the Hackathon got a cool MediaWiki T-shirt. ↩︎

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian’s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors

In April, 19 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:

• Abhijith PA did 0.5h (out of 0.0h assigned and 14.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 13.5h to the next month.
• Adrian Bunk did 35.75h (out of 17.25h assigned and 40.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 22.0h to the next month.
• Bastien Roucariès did 25.0h (out of 25.0h assigned).
• Ben Hutchings did 24.0h (out of 9.0h assigned and 15.0h from previous period).
• Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
• Daniel Leidert did 10.0h (out of 10.0h assigned).
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 46.0h (out of 12.0h assigned and 34.0h from previous period).
• Guilhem Moulin did 14.75h (out of 20.0h assigned), thus carrying over 5.25h to the next month.
• Lee Garrett did 51.25h (out of 0.0h assigned and 60.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.75h to the next month.
• Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
• Ola Lundqvist did 22.5h (out of 19.5h assigned and 4.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 1.5h to the next month.
• Roberto C. Sánchez did 11.0h (out of 9.25h assigned and 2.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 1.0h to the next month.
• Santiago Ruano Rincón did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
• Sean Whitton did 9.5h (out of 4.5h assigned and 5.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 0.5h to the next month.
• Stefano Rivera did 1.5h (out of 0.0h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.5h to the next month.
• Sylvain Beucler did 12.5h (out of 22.75h assigned and 35.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 45.25h to the next month.
• Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
• Tobias Frost did 10.0h (out of 12.0h assigned), thus carrying over 2.0h to the next month.
• Utkarsh Gupta did 3.25h (out of 28.5h assigned and 29.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 54.5h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation

In April, we have released 28 DLAs.

During the month of April, there was one particularly notable security update made in LTS. Guilhem Moulin prepared DLA-3782-1 for util-linux (part of the set of base packages and containing a number of important system utilities) in order to address a possible information disclosure vulnerability.

Additionally, several contributors prepared updates for oldstable (bullseye), stable (bookworm), and unstable (sid), including:

• ruby-rack: prepared for oldstable, stable, and unstable by Adrian Bunk
• wpa: prepared for oldstable, stable, and unstable by Bastien Roucariès
• zookeeper: prepared for stable by Bastien Roucariès
• libjson-smart: prepared for unstable by Bastien Roucariès
• ansible: prepared for stable and unstable, including autopkgtest fixes to increase future supportability, by Lee Garrett
• wordpress: prepared for oldstable and stable by Markus Koschany
• emacs and org-mode: prepared for oldstable and stable by Sean Whitton
• qtbase-opensource-src: prepared for oldstable and stable by Thorsten Alteholz
• libjwt: prepared for oldstable by Thorsten Alteholz
• libmicrohttpd: prepared for oldstable by Thorsten Alteholz

These fixes were in addition to corresponding updates in LTS.

Another item to highlight in this month’s report is an update to the distro-info-data database by Stefano Rivera. This update ensures that Debian buster systems have the latest available information concerning the end-of-life dates and other related information for all releases of Debian and Ubuntu.

As announced on the debian-lts-announce mailing list, it is worth to point out that we are getting close to the end of support of Debian 10 as LTS. After June 30th, no new security updates will be made available on security.debian.org.

However, Freexian and its team of paid Debian contributors will continue to maintain Debian 10 going forward for the customers of the Extended LTS offer. If you still have Debian 10 servers to keep secure, it’s time to subscribe!

Thanks to our sponsors

Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

• Platinum sponsors:
  • TOSHIBA (for 104 months)
  • Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) (for 72 months)
• Gold sponsors:
  • Roche Diagnostics International AG (for 115 months)
  • Linode (for 109 months)
  • Babiel GmbH (for 98 months)
  • Plat’Home (for 98 months)
  • CINECA (for 72 months)
  • University of Oxford (for 54 months)
  • Deveryware (for 41 months)
  • VyOS Inc (for 36 months)
  • EDF SA (for 25 months)
• Silver sponsors:
  • Domeneshop AS (for 119 months)
  • Nantes Métropole (for 114 months)
  • Univention GmbH (for 105 months)
  • Université Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 105 months)
  • Ribbon Communications, Inc. (for 99 months)
  • Exonet B.V. (for 89 months)
  • Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 83 months)
  • Ministère de l’Europe et des Affaires Étrangères (for 67 months)
  • Cloudways by DigitalOcean (for 56 months)
  • Dinahosting SL (for 54 months)
  • Bauer Xcel Media Deutschland KG (for 48 months)
  • Platform.sh SAS (for 48 months)
  • Moxa Inc. (for 42 months)
  • sipgate GmbH (for 39 months)
  • OVH US LLC (for 37 months)
  • Tilburg University (for 37 months)
  • GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung GmbH (for 29 months)
  • Soliton Systems K.K. (for 26 months)
  • THINline s.r.o.
• Bronze sponsors:
  • Evolix (for 120 months)
  • Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 120 months)
  • Intevation GmbH (for 117 months)
  • Linuxhotel GmbH (for 117 months)
  • Daevel SARL (for 115 months)
  • Bitfolk LTD (for 114 months)
  • Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 114 months)
  • NUMLOG (for 114 months)
  • Greenbone AG (for 113 months)
  • WinGo AG (for 113 months)
  • Ecole Centrale de Nantes - LHEEA (for 109 months)
  • Entr’ouvert (for 104 months)
  • Adfinis AG (for 102 months)
  • GNI MEDIA (for 96 months)
  • Laboratoire LEGI - UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 96 months)
  • Tesorion (for 96 months)
  • Bearstech (for 87 months)
  • LiHAS (for 87 months)
  • Catalyst IT Ltd (for 82 months)
  • Supagro (for 77 months)
  • Demarcq SAS (for 76 months)
  • Université Grenoble Alpes (for 62 months)
  • TouchWeb SAS (for 54 months)
  • SPiN AG (for 51 months)
  • CoreFiling (for 46 months)
  • Institut des sciences cognitives Marc Jeannerod (for 41 months)
  • Observatoire des Sciences de l’Univers de Grenoble (for 38 months)
  • Tem Innovations GmbH (for 33 months)
  • WordFinder.pro (for 32 months)
  • CNRS DT INSU Résif (for 31 months)
  • Alter Way (for 24 months)
  • Institut Camille Jordan (for 13 months)

If you wander around a lot of open source repositories on the likes of GitHub, you’ll invariably stumble over repos that have an issue (or more than one!) with a title like the above. Sometimes sitting open and unloved, often with a comment or two from the maintainer and a bunch of “I’ll help out!” followups that never seemed to pan out. Very rarely, you’ll find one that has been closed, with a happy ending.

These issues always fascinate me, because they say a lot about what it means to “maintain” an open source project, the nature of succession (particularly in a post-Jia Tan world), and the expectations of users and the impedence mismatch between maintainers, contributors, and users. I’ve also recently been thinking about pre-empting this sort of issue, and opening my own issue that answers the question before it’s even asked.

Why These Issues Are Created

As both a producer and consumer of open source software, I completely understand the reasons someone might want to know whether a project is abandoned. It’s comforting to be able to believe that there’s someone “on the other end of the line”, and that if you have a problem, you can ask for help with a non-zero chance of someone answering you. There’s also a better chance that, if the maintainer is still interested in the software, that compatibility issues and at least show-stopper bugs might get fixed for you.

But often there’s more at play. There is a delusion that “maintained” open source software comes with entitlements – an expectation that your questions, bug reports, and feature requests will be attended to in some fashion.

This comes about, I think, in part because there are a lot of open source projects that are energetically supported, where generous volunteers do answer questions, fix reported bugs, and implement things that they don’t personally need, but which random Internet strangers ask for. If you’ve had that kind of user experience, it’s not surprising that you might start to expect it from all open source projects.

Of course, these wonders of cooperative collaboration are the exception, rather than the rule. In many (most?) cases, there is little practical difference between most projects that are “maintained” and those that are formally declared “unmaintained”. The contributors (or, most often, contributor – singular) are unlikely to have the time or inclination to respond to your questions in a timely and effective manner. If you find a problem with the software, you’re going to be paddling your own canoe, even if the maintainer swears that they’re still “maintaining” it.

A Thought Appears

With this in mind, I’ve been considering how to get ahead of the problem and answer the question for the software projects I’ve put out in the world. Nothing I’ve built has anything like what you’d call a “community”; most have never seen an external PR, or even an issue. The last commit date on them might be years ago.

By most measures, almost all of my repos look “unmaintained”. Yet, they don’t feel unmaintained to me. I’m still using the code, sometimes as often as every day, and if something broke for me, I’d fix it. Anyone who needs the functionality I’ve developed can use the code, and be pretty confident that it’ll do what it says in the README.

I’m considering creating an issue in all my repos, titled “Is This Project Still Maintained?”, pinning it to the issues list, and pasting in something I’m starting to think of as “The Open Source Maintainer’s Manifesto”.

It goes something like this:

Is This Project Still Maintained?

Yes. Maybe. Actually, perhaps no. Well, really, it depends on what you mean by “maintained”.

I wrote the software in this repo for my own benefit – to solve the problems I had, when I had them. While I could have kept the software to myself, I instead released it publicly, under the terms of an open licence, with the hope that it might be useful to others, but with no guarantees of any kind. Thanks to the generosity of others, it costs me literally nothing for you to use, modify, and redistribute this project, so have at it!

OK, Whatever. What About Maintenance?

In one sense, this software is “maintained”, and always will be. I fix the bugs that annoy me, I upgrade dependencies when not doing so causes me problems, and I add features that I need. To the degree that any on-going development is happening, it’s because I want that development to happen.

However, if “maintained” to you means responses to questions, bug fixes, upgrades, or new features, you may be somewhat disappointed. That’s not “maintenance”, that’s “support”, and if you expect support, you’ll probably want to have a “support contract”, where we come to an agreement where you pay me money, and I help you with the things you need help with.

That Doesn’t Sound Fair!

If it makes you feel better, there are several things you are entitled to:

1. The ability to use, study, modify, and redistribute the contents of this repository, under the terms stated in the applicable licence(s).

2. That any interactions you may have with myself, other contributors, and anyone else in this project’s spaces will be in line with the published Code of Conduct, and any transgressions of the Code of Conduct will be dealt with appropriately.

3. … actually, that’s it.

Things that you are not entitled to include an answer to your question, a fix for your bug, an implementation of your feature request, or a merge (or even review) of your pull request. Sometimes I may respond, either immediately or at some time long afterwards. You may luck out, and I’ll think “hmm, yeah, that’s an interesting thing” and I’ll work on it, but if I do that in any particular instance, it does not create an entitlement that I will continue to do so, or that I will ever do so again in the future.

But… I’ve Found a Huge and Terrible Bug!

You have my full and complete sympathy. It’s reasonable to assume that I haven’t come across the same bug, or at least that it doesn’t bother me, otherwise I’d have fixed it for myself.

Feel free to report it, if only to warn other people that there is a huge bug they might need to avoid (possibly by not using the software at all). Well-written bug reports are great contributions, and I appreciate the effort you’ve put in, but the work that you’ve done on your bug report still doesn’t create any entitlement on me to fix it.

If you really want that bug fixed, the source is available, and the licence gives you the right to modify it as you see fit. I encourage you to dig in and fix the bug. If you don’t have the necessary skills to do so yourself, you can get someone else to fix it – everyone has the same entitlements to use, study, modify, and redistribute as you do.

You may also decide to pay me for a support contract, and get the bug fixed that way. That gets the bug fixed for everyone, and gives you the bonus warm fuzzies of contributing to the digital commons, which is always nice.

But… My PR is a Gift!

If you take the time and effort to make a PR, you’re doing good work and I commend you for it. However, that doesn’t mean I’ll necessarily merge it into this repository, or even work with you to get it into a state suitable for merging.

A PR is what is often called a “gift of work”. I’ll have to make sure that, at the very least, it doesn’t make anything actively worse. That includes introducing bugs, or causing maintenance headaches in the future (which includes my getting irrationally angry at indenting, because I’m like that). Properly reviewing a PR takes me at least as much time as it would take me to write it from scratch, in almost all cases.

So, if your PR languishes, it might not be that it’s bad, or that the project is (dum dum dummmm!) “unmaintained”, but just that I don’t accept this particular gift of work at this particular time.

Don’t forget that the terms of licence include permission to redistribute modified versions of the code I’ve released. If you think your PR is all that and a bag of potato chips, fork away! I won’t be offended if you decide to release a permanent fork of this software, as long as you comply with the terms of the licence(s) involved.

(Note that I do not undertake support contracts solely to review and merge PRs; that reeks a little too much of “pay to play” for my liking)

Gee, You Sound Like an Asshole

I prefer to think of myself as “forthright” and “plain-speaking”, but that brings to mind that third thing you’re entitled to: your opinion.

I’ve written this out because I feel like clarifying the reality we’re living in, in the hope that it prevents misunderstandings. If what I’ve written makes you not want to use the software I’ve written, that’s fine – you’ve probably avoided future disappointment.

Opinions Sought

What do you think? Too harsh? Too wishy-washy? Comment away!

Run CI/CD with preview environments anywhere with self-hosted Git runners. admin Mon, 05/13/2024 - 17:19

GitHub Actions and BitBucket Pipelines are amazing. You can control what is run using yaml files in your codebase. 

You can run just about any command, and they provide a really powerful interface for browsing jobs and logs.

Many people are unaware, you can also control where your scripts are run. If you setup a tool called a Git Runner, you can run Git Actions anywhere, including from your local machine.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to use Google's Gemini AI model in Python.

Steps to Access Gemini API

Follow the steps below to access the Gemini API and then use it in python.

1. Visit Google AI Studio website.
2. Sign in using your Google account.
3. Create an API key.
4. Install the Google AI Python library for the Gemini API using the command below : pip install google-generativeai.

To read this article in full, please click hereThis post appeared first on ListenData

Join us THURSDAY, May 16 at 1pm ET / 10am PT, for our regularly scheduled call to chat about all things Drupal and nonprofits. (Convert to your local time zone.)

This month we'll be recapping DrupalCon Portland and the Nonprofit Summit!

And we'll of course also have time to discuss anything else that's on our minds at the intersection of Drupal and nonprofits.  Got something specific you want to talk about? Feel free to share ahead of time in our collaborative Google doc: https://nten.org/drupal/notes!

All nonprofit Drupal devs and users, regardless of experience level, are always welcome on this call.

This free call is sponsored by NTEN.org and open to everyone. 

• Join the call: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81817469653

  • Meeting ID: 818 1746 9653
    Passcode: 551681

  • One tap mobile:
    +16699006833,,81817469653# US (San Jose)
    +13462487799,,81817469653# US (Houston)

  • Dial by your location:
    +1 669 900 6833 US (San Jose)
    +1 346 248 7799 US (Houston)
    +1 253 215 8782 US (Tacoma)
    +1 929 205 6099 US (New York)
    +1 301 715 8592 US (Washington DC)
    +1 312 626 6799 US (Chicago)

  • Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kpV1o65N

• Follow along on Google Docs: https://nten.org/drupal/notes

View notes of previous months' calls.

Libtoolers!

The Libtool Team is pleased to announce the release of libtool 2.5.0, a alpha release.

GNU Libtool hides the complexity of using shared libraries behind a
consistent, portable interface. GNU Libtool ships with GNU libltdl, which
hides the complexity of loading dynamic runtime libraries (modules)
behind a consistent, portable interface.

There have been 91 commits by 29 people in the 113 weeks since 2.4.7.

See the NEWS below for a brief summary.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed!
The following people contributed changes to this release:

  Albert Chu (1)
  Alex Ameen (3)
  Antonin Décimo (3)
  Brad Smith (2)
  Bruno Haible (2)
  Dmitry Antipov (1)
  Florian Weimer (1)
  Gilles Gouaillardet (1)
  Ileana Dumitrescu (24)
  Jakub Wilk (1)
  Jonathan Wakely (2)
  Manoj Gupta (1)
  Mike Frysinger (23)
  Mingli Yu (2)
  Oliver Kiddle (1)
  Olly Betts (1)
  Ozkan Sezer (2)
  Paul Eggert (2)
  Paul Green (1)
  Raul E Rangel (1)
  Richard Purdie (5)
  Sam James (4)
  Samuel Thibault (1)
  Stephen Webb (1)
  Tijl Coosemans (1)
  Tim Rice (1)
  Uwe Kleine-König (1)
  Vadim Zeitlin (1)
  Xiang.Lin (1)

Ileana
 [on behalf of the libtool maintainers]
==================================================================

Here is the GNU libtool home page:
    https://gnu.org/s/libtool/

For a summary of changes and contributors, see:
  https://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=libtool.git;a=shortlog;h=v2.5.0
or run this command from a git-cloned libtool directory:
  git shortlog v2.4.7..v2.5.0

Here are the compressed sources:
  https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/libtool/libtool-2.5.0.tar.gz   (1.9MB)
  https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/libtool/libtool-2.5.0.tar.xz   (1008KB)

Here are the GPG detached signatures:
  https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/libtool/libtool-2.5.0.tar.gz.sig
  https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/libtool/libtool-2.5.0.tar.xz.sig

Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:
  https://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html

Here are the SHA1 and SHA256 checksums:

  fb3ab5907115b16bf12a0d3d424c79cb0003d02e  libtool-2.5.0.tar.gz
  1DjDF0VdhVVM4vmYvkiGb9QM/L+DTWCzAm9PwO1YPSM=  libtool-2.5.0.tar.gz
  70e2dd113a9460c279df01b2eee319adb99ee998  libtool-2.5.0.tar.xz
  fhDMhjgj1AjsX/6kHUPDckqgiBZldXljydsL77LIecw=  libtool-2.5.0.tar.xz

Verify the base64 SHA256 checksum with cksum -a sha256 --check
from coreutils-9.2 or OpenBSD's cksum since 2007.

Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the
.sig suffix) is intact.  First, be sure to download both the .sig file
and the corresponding tarball.  Then, run a command like this:

  gpg --verify libtool-2.5.0.tar.gz.sig

The signature should match the fingerprint of the following key:

  pub   rsa4096 2021-09-23 [SC]
        FA26 CA78 4BE1 8892 7F22  B99F 6570 EA01 146F 7354
  uid   Ileana Dumitrescu <ileanadumi95@protonmail.com>
  uid   Ileana Dumitrescu <ileanadumitrescu95@gmail.com>

If that command fails because you don't have the required public key,
or that public key has expired, try the following commands to retrieve
or refresh it, and then rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.

  gpg --locate-external-key ileanadumi95@protonmail.com

  gpg --recv-keys 6570EA01146F7354

  wget -q -O- 'https://savannah.gnu.org/project/release-gpgkeys.php?group=libtool&download=1' | gpg --import -

As a last resort to find the key, you can try the official GNU
keyring:

  wget -q https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-keyring.gpg
  gpg --keyring gnu-keyring.gpg --verify libtool-2.5.0.tar.gz.sig

This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:
  Autoconf 2.72e
  Automake 1.16.5
  Gnulib v0.1-6995-g29d705ead1

NEWS

• Noteworthy changes in release 2.5.0 (2024-05-13) [alpha]

** New features:

  - Pass '-fdiagnostics-color', '-frecord-gcc-switches',
    '-fno-sanitize*', '-Werror', and 'prefix-map' flags.

  - Pass the '-no-canonical-prefixes' linker flag.

  - Pass '-fopenmp=*' for Clang to allow choosing between libgomp and
    libomp.

  - Pass '-shared-libsan', '-static-libsan', 'rtlib=*', and
    'unwindlib=*' for Clang.

  - Expanded process.h inclusion on Windows for more than the
    proprietary MSVC compiler. Other alternative Windows compilers
    also require process.h.

  - Pass 'elf32_x86_64' and 'elf64_x86_64' to the linker on hurd-amd64.

  - Recognize --windows* config triplets.

** Important incompatible changes:

  - Removed test_compile from command line options.

  - By default executables are created with the RUNPATH property for
    the Android linker. RUNPATH works for libraries which are not
    installed in system locations.

  - Removed AC_PROG_SED fallback, as the macro has been supported
    in Autoconf since the 90's.

** Bug fixes:

  - Check for space after -l, -L, and -R linker flags.

  - Updated documentation for tests, the demo directory, and
    elsewhere.

  - Fixed Solaris 11 builds.

  - Clean trailing "/" from sysroot path.

  - Fixed shared library builds for System V.

  - Added mingw to the list of systems not requiring libm.

  - Fixed support for nios2 systems.

  - Fixed linker check for '--whole-archive' support for linkers other
    than ld.

  - Use -Fe instead of -o with MSVC to avoid deprecation warnings.

  - Improved reproducibility of libtool scripts.

  - Avoided MinGW warning by adding CRTIMP.

  - Improved grep portability.

  - Fixed cross-building warnings when checking for file.


** Changes in supported systems or compilers:

  - Removed support for bitrig (--bitrig*).

  - Added support for flang (Fortran LLVM-based) compilers.


Enjoy!

Drupal 11 deep dive: watch the recording, present your own (free slides!)

I presented my first ever Drupal 11 deep dive session at DrupalCon Portland 2024 last week. It turned out to not just be about Drupal 11 but also about Starshot and even about Drupal 12 thanks to the coolest future-proofing technology I announced in this talk. Unfortunately not all of the attendees fit in, that wanted to attend, as the room was standing space only and many turned around and left. But here we go!

I strongly believe in open content. I came to open source from open content 24 or so years ago. So in good tradition, I built this slide deck on slides.com in way that is easy to share and fork. You can create your own or present directly from my deck with my speaker notes. The content is licensed with a Creative Commons license. I'll keep updating this slideshow, but under different URLs, so people can catch the latest edition of this presentation at Drupal Devdays Burgas next month for example. See some of you there!

If you can't make it there or plan to present this at your organization or meetup in the meantime, check out the open source slides.

The recording from DrupalCon Portland is below. Unfortunately I was not well prepared with a subtitling set up. I am exploring good tools and will do better next time! The conference tech crew tried to help in the middle of the session, but unfortunately they could not make it work either. At least managed to discuss some current Starshot questions while that was attempted. I promised a video with subtitles, which turns out Youtube nicely delivered, so I will not create a separate recording now. Hope this helps!

Gábor Hojtsy Mon, 05/13/2024 - 21:33

Today we are talking about Certification & Exam Prep, Resources for studying, and tips to get a passing grade with guests Chad Hester & Martin Anderson-Clutz. We’ll also cover Quiz Maker as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: www.talkingDrupal.com/450

Topics

• Why are exams and certifications important to dev's
• After going through the Talking Drupal Skills Upgrade mini series do you feel preparted to take an Acquia certification
• How should someone get ready
• What are some struggles people may have getting ready
• What does the plan look like for someone getting ready
• Does Acquia provide pre tests
• Did Skills Upgrade prepare you for this type of assessment
• What happens if you do not pass
• How do you know you're ready
• Tips and tricks for taking a test
• Where do you take the test
• Questions to someone who has taken the test
• Special surprise

Resources

• Acquia Certification Study Guides
• Acquia Certification Information
• Widgets Burritos D8 Certification Study Guide
• certification@acquia.com for questions

Guests

• Chad Hester - chadkhester.com chadhester
• Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Matthew Grasmick - grasmash

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted to build and deliver interactive quizzes on your Drupal website?
• Module name/project name:
  • Quiz Maker
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Apr 2024 (the last couple of weeks) by Roman Chekhaniuk (r_cheh)
  • Versions available: 1.0.5, which works with Drupal 9, 10, and 11
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained
  • Not yet opted into Security coverage, but being so new it’s possible they started the process of getting the project reviewed
  • Number of open issues: 0
• Usage stats:
  • Not currently installed on any sites yet, according to Drupal.org
  • Module features and usage
  • The module defines a number of of custom entities to allow your site to define very flexible quizzes, that can include options like the amount of time allowed, pass rate, maximum number of attempts, randomizing the sequence of the questions, and more
  • The module also defines custom plugins for questions, responses, and answers, so you can extend it to handle very custom use cases
  • The Quiz module is very popular in this space but the version you can use with modern versions of Drupal is still in alpha, so it’s great to see another option available, especially for sites that don’t need anything as complex as the Opigno LMS

So this is not quite an introduction since the plugin has been around for almost a year now, having been released in the 23.04 release but since I never got around to writing a blog about it, here I am.

In simple words, the formatting plugin allows one to format code easily and quickly. Well the "quickness" depends on the underlying code formatter but we try to be as quick as possible. So far if you wanted to do code formatting from within Kate, the only way to do that was to configure a tool in the External Tools plugin and then invoke it whenever you wanted to format the code. While this works it wasn't great for a few reasons. Firstly, you would loose undo history. Secondly, the buffer would jump and you would most likely loose your current position in the document. Thirdly, for every language you get a different tool and you need to remember the right tool to invoke on the right document type.

To simplify this, I decided to write a plugin that would expose a minimal UI but still provide a lot of features.

There are basically two ways to use this plugin:

• Manually using the "Format Document" action.
• Automatically on save

The correct formatter is invoked based on the document type in all cases. Additionally the plugin will preserve the document's undo history and user's cursor position when formatting the code so that the formatting of code doesn't disrupt user's workflow. This is especially important for automatic formatting on save.

Supported languages:

The current list of supported languages and formatters are as follows:

• C/C++/ObjectiveC/ObjectiveC++/Protobuf
  • clang-format
• Javascript/Typescript/JSX/TSX
  • Prettier
• Json
  • clang-format
  • Prettier
  • jq
• Dart
  • dartfmt
• Rust
  • rustfmt
• XML
  • xmllint
• Go
  • gofmt
• Zig
  • zigfmt
• CMake
  • cmake-format
• Pythong
  • autopep8
  • ruff

Configuring

The plugin can be configured in two ways:

• Globally, from the Configure dialog
• On a per project basis using the .kateproject file

When reading the config, the plugin will first try to read the config from .kateproject file and then read the global config.

Example:

{ "formatOnSave": true, "formatterForJson": "jq", "cmake-format": { "formatOnSave": false }, "autopep8": { "formatOnSave": false } }

The above

• enables "format on save" globally
• specifies "jq" as the formatter for JSON
• disables "format on save" for cmake-format and autopep8

To configure formatting for a project, first create a .kateproject file and then add a "formatting" object to it. In the "formatting" object you can specify your settings as shown in the previous example. Example:

{ "name": "My Cool Project", "files": [ { "git": 1 } ], "formatting": { "formatterForJson": "clang-format", "autopep8": { "formatOnSave": false } } }

We are proud to announce the release of the version 1.5.0 of python-sql.

python-sql is a library to write SQL queries in a pythonic way. It is mainly developed for Tryton but it has no external dependencies and is agnostic to any framework or SQL database.

In addition to bug-fixes, this release contains the following improvements:

• Add MERGE query
• Support “UPSERT” with ON CONFLICT clause on INSERT query
• Remove default escape char on LIKE and ILIKE
• Add GROUPING SETS, CUBE, and ROLLUP clauses for GROUP BY.

python-sql is available on PyPI: python-sql 1.5.0.

2 posts - 2 participants

Read full topic

DrupalCon Portland was a success! Read on to see Chris' reflection on topics at the event such as Contribution Day, Project Browser, and more.

The Matplotlib package is great for visualizing data. One of its many features is the ability to annotate points on your graph. You can use annotations to explain why a particular data point is significant or interesting.

If you haven’t used Matplotlib before, you should check out my introductory article, Matplotlib – An Intro to Creating Graphs with Python or read the official documentation.

Let’s get started!

Installing Matplotlib

If you don’t have Matplotlib on your computer, you must install it. Fortunately, you can use pip, the Python package manager utility that comes with Python.

Open up your terminal or command prompt and run the following command:

python -m pip install matplotlib

Pip will now install Matplotlib and any dependencies that Matplotlib needs to work properly. Assuming that Matplotlib installs successfully, you are good to go!

Annotating Points on a Graph

Matplotlib comes with a handy annotate()method that you can use. As with most of Matplotlib’s methods, annotate()can take quite a few different parameters.

For this example, you will be using the following parameters:

• text – The label for the annotation
• xy – The x/y coordinate of the point of interest
• arrowprops – A dictionary of arrow properties
• xytext – Where to place the text for the annotation

Now that you know what you’re doing, open up your favorite Python IDE or text editor and create a new Python file. Then enter the following code:

import matplotlib.pylab as plt import numpy as np def annotated(): fig = plt.figure(figsize=(8, 6)) numbers = list(range(10)) plt.plot(numbers, np.exp(numbers)) plt.title("Annotating an Exponential Plot using plt.annotate()") plt.xlabel("x-axis") plt.ylabel("y-axis") plt.annotate("Point 1", xy=(6, 400), arrowprops=dict(arrowstyle="->"), xytext=(4, 600)) plt.annotate("Point 2", xy=(7, 1150), arrowprops=dict(arrowstyle="->", connectionstyle="arc3,rad=-.2"), xytext=(4.5, 2000)) plt.annotate("Point 3", xy=(8, 3000), arrowprops=dict(arrowstyle="->", connectionstyle="angle,angleA=90,angleB=0"), xytext=(8.5, 2200)) plt.show() if __name__ == "__main__": annotated()

Here, you are creating a simple line graph. You want to annotate three points on the graph. The arrowprops define the arrowstyleand, in the latter two points, the connectionstyle. These properties tell Matplotlib what type of arrow to use and whether it should be connected to the text as a straight line, an arc, or a 90-degree turn.

When you run this code, you will see the following graph:

You can see how the different points are located and how the arrowprops lines are changed. You should check out the full documentation to learn all the details about the arrows and annotations.

Wrapping Up

Annotating your graph is a great way to make your plots more informative. Matplotlib allows you to add many different labels to your plots, and annotating the interesting data points is quite nice.

You should spend some time experimenting with annotations and learning all the different parameters it takes to fully understand this useful feature.

The post How to Annotate a Graph with Matplotlib and Python appeared first on Mouse Vs Python.

As DrupalCon Portland concludes, The Drop Times extends a heartfelt thank you to the dedicated volunteers and supporting companies whose efforts were pivotal in delivering comprehensive and timely updates to the Drupal community. Join us in celebrating the individuals and teams whose hard work made this event a resounding success.

Lots of agencies want to contribute more to Drupal, but don't have the time due to client work. Let's fix that.