Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for Debian

Since some time we're using siphash algorithm to speed up looking up strings in Weblate. Even though it is used by Python internally, it's not exposed in the standard library so several third party modules appeared in the PyPI. Out of all these siphashc or rather it's Python 3 fork siphashc3 seemed to perform best, so I've started to use that.

However it turned out that none of them is in active maintenance anymore. The original version lacks Python 3 support, while the siphashc3 uses odd versioning which causes problems to some pip versions.

After trying to get fix into siphashc3 without much of success, I've spoken to original author of siphashc and he has agreed to hand over maintainership to me. So it's new home is at https://github.com/WeblateOrg/siphashc and new release is already available on PyPI.

Note: Originally we were using MD5 in Weblate, but siphash has shown to be faster and fits into 64-bits, what makes it easier to store and index in SQL databases as LONGINT.

Hosted Weblate provides also free hosting for free software projects. The hosting requests queue was over one month long, so it's time to process it and include new project.

This time, the newly hosted projects include:

• ManaPlus - 2D MMORPG client
• Documentation for Tiled - a tile map editor
• OpenRefine - a tool for working with messy data and improving it
• Gradio - an app for finding and listening to internet radio stations
• RedReader - an unofficial open source Reddit client for Android.
• Arctica Framework - a pluggable remote services framework
• Ayatana Indicators - an application indicators framework
• Skolab Groupware - a continuation of Kolab Groupware

If you want to support this effort, please donate to Weblate, especially recurring donations are welcome to make this service alive. You can do them on Liberapay or Bountysource.

Weblate 2.16 has been released today while I'm at DebConf17. There are quite some performance improvements (and more of that is scheduled for 2.17), new file formats support and various other improvements.

Full list of changes:

• Various performance improvements.
• Added support for nested JSON format.
• Added support for WebExtension JSON format.
• Fixed git exporter authentication.
• Improved CSV import in certain situations.
• Improved look of Other translations widget.
• The max-length checks is now enforcing length of text in form.
• Make the commit_pending age configurable per component.
• Various user interface cleanups.
• Fixed component/project/sitewide search for translations.

If you are upgrading from older version, please follow our upgrading instructions.

You can find more information about Weblate on https://weblate.org, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. You can login there with demo account using demo password or register your own user. Weblate is also being used on https://hosted.weblate.org/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, OsmAnd, Turris, FreedomBox, Weblate itself and many other projects.

Should you be looking for hosting of translations for your project, I'm happy to host them for you or help with setting it up on your infrastructure.

Further development of Weblate would not be possible without people providing donations, thanks to everybody who have helped so far! The roadmap for next release is just being prepared, you can influence this by expressing support for individual issues either by comments or by providing bounty for them.

I've made several changes to the Weblate Docker container which are worth mentioning today.

First of all if you are still using nijel/weblate, you should switch to weblate/weblate. They both currently share same configuration, but it might happen that some future updates will go to the weblate owned container only.

Now back to the container changes. Since beginning we were using Django built in server. That's fine for development purposes, but it really doesn't work that well in production as it can handle only one request at time. Therefore we've switched to more robust approach using nginx + uwsgi + supervisor.

Thanks to this, the docker-compose no longer needs separate nginx server as everything is now sanely handled within the weblate container itself.

After fours years, I will again make it to DebConf, I'm looking forward to meet many great people, so if you want to meet and happen to be in Montreal next week come and say hello to me :-).

It seems I've settled down on four year schedule - I've attended DebConf09 and DebConf13 so far. Let's see if next one will come in 2021 or earlier.

Weblate 2.16 is almost ready (I expect no further code changes), so it's really great time to contribute to it's translations! Weblate 2.16 will be probably released during my presence at DebConf 17.

As you might expect, Weblate is translated using Weblate, so the contributions should be really easy. In case there is something unclear, you can look into Weblate documentation.

I'd especially like to see improvements in the Italian translation which was one of the first in Weblate beginnings, but hasn't received much love in past years.

Having publicly running web application always brings challenges in terms of security and in generally in handling untrusted data. Security wise Weblate has been always quite good (mostly thanks to using Django which comes with built in protection against many vulnerabilities), but there were always things to improve in input validation or possible information leaks.

When Weblate has joined HackerOne (see our first month experience with it), I was hoping to get some security driven core review, but apparently most people there are focused on black box testing. I can certainly understand that - it's easier to conduct and you need much less knowledge of the tested website to perform this.

One big area where reports against Weblate came in was authentication. Originally we were mostly fully relying on default authentication pipeline coming with Python Social Auth, but that showed some possible security implications and we ended up with having heavily customized authentication pipeline to avoid several risks. Some patches were submitted back, some issues reported, but still we've diverged quite a lot in this area.

Second area where scanning was apparently performed, but almost none reports came, was input validation. Thanks to excellent XSS protection in Django nothing was really found. On the other side this has triggered several internal server errors on our side. At this point I was really happy to have Rollbar configured to track all errors happening in the production. Thanks to having all such errors properly recorded and grouped it was really easy to go through them and fix them in our codebase.

Most of the related fixes have landed in Weblate 2.14 and 2.15, but obviously this is ongoing effort to make Weblate better with every release.

Weblate 2.15 has been released today. It is slightly behind schedule what was mostly caused by my vacation. As with 2.14, there are quite a lot of security improvements based on reports we got from HackerOne program and various new features.

Full list of changes:

• Show more related translations in other translations.
• Add option to see translations of current unit to other languages.
• Use 4 plural forms for Lithuanian by default.
• Fixed upload for monolingual files of different format.
• Improved error messages on failed authentication.
• Keep page state when removing word from glossary.
• Added direct link to edit secondary language translation.
• Added Perl format quality check.
• Added support for rejecting reused passwords.
• Extended toolbar for editing RTL languages.

If you are upgrading from older version, please follow our upgrading instructions.

You can find more information about Weblate on https://weblate.org, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. You can login there with demo account using demo password or register your own user. Weblate is also being used on https://hosted.weblate.org/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, OsmAnd, Turris, FreedomBox, Weblate itself and many other projects.

Should you be looking for hosting of translations for your project, I'm happy to host them for you or help with setting it up on your infrastructure.

Further development of Weblate would not be possible without people providing donations, thanks to everybody who have helped so far! The roadmap for next release is just being prepared, you can influence this by expressing support for individual issues either by comments or by providing bounty for them.

Weblate 2.15 is almost ready (I expect no further code changes), so it's really great time to contribute to it's translations! Weblate 2.15 should be released early next week.

As you might expect, Weblate is translated using Weblate, so the contributions should be really easy. In case there is something unclear, you can look into Weblate documentation.

I'd especially like to see improvements in the Italian translation which was one of the first in Weblate beginnings, but hasn't received much love in past years.

It has been few months since I'm providing Windows binaries for Gammu, but other parts of the family were still missing. Today, I'm adding python-gammu.

Unlike previous attempts which used crosscompilation on Linux using Wine, this is also based on AppVeyor. Still I don't have to touch Windows to do that, what is nice :-). This has been introducted in python-gammu 2.9 and depend on Gammu 1.38.4.

What is good on this is that pip install python-gammu should now work with binary packages if you're using Python 3.5 or 3.6.

Maybe I'll find time to look at option providing Wammu as well, but it's more tricky there as it doesn't support Python 3, while the python-gammu for Windows can currently only be built for Python 3.5 and 3.6 (due to MSVC dependencies of older Python versions).