Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for Debian

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.

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.

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.

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.

The last week was mostly spent on bugfixing and cleanup after security releases. Hopefully the amount of security reports will go down now.

Most of the bug fixes were in the SQL parser which influences quite a lot of parts of phpMyAdmin. It is responsible for splitting queries on import, generating queries for export or linting the queries as users type them.

Additionally Debian packages were also updated, for both unstable and testing and for Ubuntu PPA.

Handled issues:

• #12067 Adding "JSON" option to dropdown
• #12047 Filtering databases on databases listing
• #12052 Filtering databases on databases listing, Issue #12047
• #12063 duplicate a table occur an error,for uft-8?
• #12064 Cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in phpMyAdmin Version 4.5.4.1
• #11776 SQL Linter Problems
• #12025 Import reports false SQL error with MariaDB
• #12045 unrecognized keyword left in where clause #11975 (REMAINS UNSOLVED)
• #12041 Missing indexes and constratins in export
• #12028 "ALL" keyword not recognized
• #12054 MySQLDump .sql import in v4.5.5 fails becuase of escaped characters
• #12053 upload-release error
• #12055 Parse eror with 4.6.0-rc1 and master
• #12056 Invalid data stored in $_SESSION[' PMA_token '] if openssl_random_pseudo_bytes() fails
• #12015 create-release errors
• #12048 SQL parser doesn't honor vendor config
• #12024 Better icon for table hiding
• #12032 Icons added and code changed to display icons #12024
• #12037 Fix parse git data without gz support (bug 12030)
• #12030 Do not try to parse git data without gz support
• #12044 Fix example in test/README.rst
• #10 1.1 XSS in Static analysis of SQL query [PMASA-2016-10]
• #11 1.2 XSS in "Edit inline" of SQL query [PMASA-2016-11]
• #16 1.6 XSS Via HOST header [PMASA-2016-11]
• #17 1.7 XSS in file_echo.php by mime sniffing text/plain (only in old IE <= 8 & old Safari on windows) [PMASA-2016-11]
• #19 2. insecure CURL SSL Settings [PMASA-2016-13]
• #37 Fix DROP VIEW statement is not constructed properly by the parser, Issue #36
• #39 Fails to parser CREATE TABLE
• #36 DROP VIEW statement is not constructed properly by the parser
• #38 Recognize ALL when used with WHERE clause

As I've already mentioned in separate blog post we mostly had some security issues fun in past weeks, but besides that some other work has been done as well.

I've still focused on code cleanups and identified several pieces of code which are no longer needed (given our required PHP version). Another issue related to security updates was to set testing of 4.0 branch using PHP 5.2 as this is what we've messed up in the security release (what is quite bad as this is only branch supporting PHP 5.2).

In addition to this, I've updated phpMyAdmin packages in both Debian and Ubuntu PPA.

All handled issues:

• #11902 Fix issue 11834
• #11900 Fix #11896 Remove hard dependency on phpseclib
• #11899 Fixes for #11892 and #11896 for 4.5 branch
• #11895 4.5.4 not in STABLE branch.
• #11894 Fix #11892 Error with PMA 4.4.15.3
• #11893 Fix #11891 Error with PMA 4.0.10.13 with PHP 5.2
• #11889 Update documents with Isaac as the new release manager
• #11888 Update release verification docs for Isaac
• #11886 CI failure notifications to mailing list
• #11883 HTTPS Redirect Loop when using ForceSSL on CentOS7 with Apache
• #11882 Add note about passing HTTP auth headers when running as FastCGI

I've recently bought this beast and of course want to run it on Linux. Vendor does provide Linux drivers which even come with source, so that looked quite okay in the beginning.

However it turned out not to be that easy. First attempt was to install the 64-bit drivers and all I got from the printer is almost blank page with:

**** Unable to open the initial device, quitting.

Okay, that's not much helpful. Meanwhile I did install i386 system where it worked just fine. I started to smell some problems and looked at the source. It turned out to be almost complete, there was just single i386 binary, which is obviously needed by the driver.

Once realizing this, it was quite easy to make it work on 64 bit system as well:

dpkg --add-architecture i386
apt install libxml2:i386 libstdc++6:i386

Not that I'd be happy to run binary blob on my system, but at least printing now works.

Scanning from the device is easy - all you need to configure access to email and Samba and it works pretty without problems.

As you can now see on phpMyAdmin's security page, we've managed to spend 9 security announcements on todays release. Hopefully it won't continue that bad in rest of the year.

Anyway receiving such extensive report was really challenging for us - correctly tracking and fixing all reported issues, discovering which versions are affected. This proven to be quite difficult given that most of the affected code has been refactored meanwhile. But I'm quite happy we've managed to fix ll issues on three supported branches in two weeks.

Another challenge (especially for Isaac) was that this all came with change of our release manager, so forgive us some minor problems with the releases (especially not updated changelogs), we will do it better next time!

PS: Updated packages are on their way to Debian and phpMyAdmin PPA.

PS2: It seems we've messed few more things, so expect quick followup releases for older versions.

Last week the Software Freedom Conservancy has launched fundraiser to be able to continue operation under new circumstances, where some sponsors left them after GPL enforcement activities.

I think Conservancy does quite a lot for free software ecosystem and GPL enforcement is something what has to be done, if we want to protect free software world. That's reason, why I've decided to become their supporter:

After Monday release of separate Gammu and python-gammu, the obvious task was to get the new package to distributions.

First I've started with Debian packages, what was quite easy as from quite complex CMake + Python package it is now purely CMake and it was mostly about removing stuff. Soon the updated Gammu package was uploaded to experimental. Once having that ready, I've also update the backports for Ubuntu and these are available in Gammu PPA. Creating new python-gammu package was a bit harder as this is the first Python 3 compatible package I've created, but it's now ready and sitting in the NEW queue.

While working on python-gammu package, I've realized that some of the data used in testsuite are missing in the tarball. While not being critical, this is definitely not nice, so I've decided to release python-gammu 2.1 today. It also includes fixes for some corner cases found by coverity.

For openSUSE the packaging was quite easy as well, stripping out unneeded parts of Gammu package went smoothly and it's now in hardware project, SR to Factory is pending. With python-gammu it turned out to be much harder as the testsuite had failed there with some strange error coming out of libdbi. After looking deeper into it, the problem is in new return type available in Git snapshot openSUSE is shipping. Fortunately producing fix was quite easy, so next Gammu upstream will handle that properly and package in hardware project is already patched. You can now use python-python-gammu from devel:languages:python and SR to Factory is pending as well.