Michal Čihař - Archive for 5/2016

Weekly phpMyAdmin contributions 2016-W21

Last week I found time to dig into some ancient issues and managed to fix them. There was some security work as well as we've managed to issue 3 security announcements (nothing really important, but still worth of fixing).

There was usual amount of bug fixing as well, but I'd say there is nothing noteworthy in the bugs, just there was quite a lot of them :-).

What is still ongoing is migration of content from wiki to our documentation. I've again moved dozen of pages and deleted some outdated, so the User guide looks better and better.

Handled issues:

Gammu release day

There has been some silence on the Gammu release front and it's time to change that. Today all Gammu, python-gammu and Wammu have been released. As you might guess all are bugfix releases.

List of changes for Gammu 1.37.3:

  • Improved support for Huawei E398.
  • Improved support for Huawei/Vodafone K4505.
  • Fixed possible crash if SMSD used in library.
  • Improved support for Huawei E180.

List of changes for python-gammu 2.6:

  • Fixed error when creating new contact.
  • Fixed possible testsuite errors.

List of changes for Wammu 0.41:

  • Fixed crash with unicode home directory.
  • Fixed possible crashes in error handler.
  • Improved error handling when scanning for Bluetooth devices.

All updates are also on their way to Debian sid and Gammu PPA.

Would you like to see more features in Gammu family? You an support further Gammu development at Bountysource salt or by direct donation.

Weekly phpMyAdmin contributions 2016-W20

Another week is over and it's time to report contributions from it. Issue wise not much things were fixed, but quite a lot of time was spent on reviewing reported issues.

Another continued effort was migrating content from wiki to our documentation. Unfortunately this is also not yet completed as some of the documents have diverged quite a lot and integrating them back is not as straightforward as I'd like it to be.

Handled issues:

wlc 0.3

wlc 0.3, a command line utility for Weblate, has been just released. This is probably first release which is worth using so it's probably also worth of bigger announcement.

It is built on API introduced in Weblate 2.6 and still being in development. Several commands from wlc will not work properly if executed against Weblate 2.6, first fully supported version will be 2.7 (current git is okay as well, it is now running on both demo and hosting servers).

How to use it? First you will probably want to store the credentials, so that your requests are authenticated (you can do unauthenticated requests as well, but obviously only read only and on public objects), so lets create ~/.config/weblate:

[weblate]
url = https://hosted.weblate.org/api/

[keys]
https://hosted.weblate.org/api/ = APIKEY

Now you can do basic commands:

$ wlc show weblate/master/cs
...
last_author: Michal Čihař
last_change: 2016-05-13T15:59:25
revision: 62f038bb0bfe360494fb8dee30fd9d34133a8663
share_url: https://hosted.weblate.org/engage/weblate/cs/
total: 1361
total_words: 6144
translate_url: https://hosted.weblate.org/translate/weblate/master/cs/
translated: 1361
translated_percent: 100.0
translated_words: 6144
url: https://hosted.weblate.org/api/translations/weblate/master/cs/
web_url: https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/weblate/master/cs/

You can find more examples in wlc documentation.

Weekly phpMyAdmin contributions 2016-W19

After week of vacation I got back to work. There was lot of bug screening this week, it seems that people are finally migrating to 4.6 and discovering new problems there. Fortunately 4.6.1 has been released fixing most annoying issues.

Several issues were quite tricky to debug issue happening solely on Windows servers and looked quite tricky from beginning (breaking utf-8 chars). It turned out to be caused by preg_replace calls on the content, which could break utf-8 chars in some cases.

Handled issues:

Fifteen years with phpMyAdmin and free software

Today it's fifteen years from my first contribution to free software. I've changed several jobs since that time, all of them involved quite a lot of free software and now I'm fully working on free software.

The first contribution happened to be on phpMyAdmin and did consist of Czech translation:

Subject: Updated Czech translation of phpMyAdmin
From: Michal Cihar <cihar@email.cz>
To: swix@users.sourceforge.net
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 11:23:36 +0200
X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.2]

Hi

I've updated (translated few added messages) Czech translation of phpMyAdmin. 
I send it to you in two encodings, because I thing that in distribution 
should be included version in ISO-8859-2 which is more standard than Windows 
1250.

Regards
    Michal Cihar

Many other contributions came afterwards, several projects died on the way, but it has been a great ride so far. To see some of these you can look at my software page which contains both current and past projects and also includes later opensourced tools I've created earlier (mostly for Windows).

These days you can find me being active on phpMyAdmin, Gammu, python-gammu and Wammu, Debian and Weblate.

Changed Debian repository signing key

After getting complains from apt and users, I've finally decided to upgrade signing key on my Debian repository to something more decent that DSA. If you are using that repository, you will now have to fetch new key to make it work again.

The old DSA key was there really because my laziness as I didn't want users to reimport the key, but I think it's really good that apt started to complain about it (it doesn't complain about DSA itself, but rather on using SHA1 signatures, which is most you can get out of DSA key).

Anyway the new key ID is DCE7B04E7C6E3CD9 and fingerprint is 4732 8C5E CD1A 3840 0419 1F24 DCE7 B04E 7C6E 3CD9. It's signed by my GPG key, so you can verify it this way. Of course instruction on my Debian repository page have been updated as well.

Weekly phpMyAdmin contributions 2016-W17

Last week was quite split into many smaller tasks - working on our libraries (both SQL parser and motranslator got new releases with bug fixes), fixing bugs for upcoming 4.6.1 and working on documentation.

From the libraries side, probably most visible is release of motranslator 1.0, just to claim it's now stable enough. Let's see if somebody else will pick it up as well or it will stay only for our use.

Most time was however spent on our documentation. We've agreed to move wiki from our server to GitHub wiki and reduce content available on the wiki. So far it's really mixture of user documentation, notes and developer documentation. The final shape should be that wiki will contain only developer documentation and all end user documentation will go to our documentation. So far I've gone through about half of user docs pages, deleted duplicated ones and moved content to our documentation. It is most visible on the user guide which now contains way more information and hopefully it will get more complete in near future.

Handled issues: