Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for English

Over the weekend I've played with continuous integration for Gammu to make it run on more platforms. I had to remember many things from the Windows world on the way and the solution is not yet complete, but the basic build is working, the only problematic part are external dependencies.

First of all we already have Linux builds on Travis CI. These cover compilation with both GCC and Clang compilers, hopefully covering most of the possible problems.

Recently I've added OS X builds on Travis CI, what was pretty much painless and worked out of the box.

The next major architecture to support is Windows. Once I've discovered AppVeyor I thought it might be the way to go. The have free plans for open-source projects (though it has only one parallel build compared to four provided by Travis CI).

As our build system is cross platform based on CMake, it should work pretty much out of the box, right? Well almost, tweaking the basics took some time (unfortunately there is no CMake support on AppVeyor, so you have to script it a bit).

The most painful things on the way:

• finding our correct way to invoke build and testsuite
• our code was broken on Windows, making the testsuite to fail
• how to work with power shell (no, I'm not going to like it)
• how to download and install executable to PATH
• test output integration with AppVeyor - done using XSLT transformation and uploading test results manually
• 32-bit / 64-bit mess, CMake happily finds 32-bit libs during the 64-bit build and vice versa, what makes the build fail later when linking - fixed by trying if code can be built with given library
• 64-bit code crashes in dummy driver, causing testsuite failures (this has to be something Windows specific as the code works fine on 64-bit Linux) - this seems to be caused by too big allocations on stack, moving them to heap will fix this

You can check our current appveyor.yml in case you're going to try something similar. Current build results are on AppVeyor.

As a nice side effect, we now have up to date Windows binaries for Gammu.

Yesterday, I've released Wammu 0.42. There are no major updates, more likely it's usual localization and minor bugfixes release.

• Improved AppData metadata.
• Added ttyHS ports to selection.
• Localization updates.

As usual up to date packages are now available in Debian sid, Gammu PPA for Ubuntu or openSUSE buildservice for various RPM based distros.

Want to support further Wammu development? Check our donation options or support Gammu team on BountySource Salt.

Tonight phpMyAdmin 4.0.10.17, 4.4.15.8, and 4.6.4 were released and you can probably see that there are quite some security issues fixed. Most of them are not really exploitable unless your PHP and webserver are poorly configured, but still it's good idea to upgrade.

If you are running Debian unstable, use our phpMyAdmin PPA for Ubuntu or use phpMyAdmin Docker image upgrading should be as simple as pulling new version.

Besides fixing security issues, we're generally hardening our infrastructure. I'm really grateful that Emanuel Bronshtein (@e3amn2l) is doing great review of all of our code and helps us in this area. This will really make our code and infrastructure much better.

Handled issues:

• #12448 Avoid using Short-Keys in GPG
• #12446 Not listing 4th column in table 'dos'
• #43 Verify downloaded sources
• #46 Specify version in variable
• #38 Cannot change configuration options
• #41 PMA DB/Configuration Storage Missing from Docker Container Capability
• #45 Verify downloaded tarball using PGP
• #42 config.userdef.inc.php hook to allow user configured settings.
• #44 User configurattion

It has been already six years since I've moved to using RSA4096 PGP key. For various reasons, the old DSA key was still kept valid till today. This is no longer true and it has been revoked now.

The revoked key is DC3552E836E75604 and new one is 9C27B31342B7511D. In case you've signed the old one and not the new one (quite unlikely if you did not sign it more than six years ago), there has been migration document, where you can verify my new key being signed by the old one.

It has been almost three months since last Gammu release and it's time to push fixes out to users. This time the amount of fixes is quite small, covering Huawei devices and text mode for sending SMS.

Full list of changes in 1.37.4:

• Improved support for Huawei E3131.
• Fixed SMS support for MULTIBAND 900E.
• Fixed SMS created in text mode.

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

Going back to more or less normal work mode, last week was again more focused on bug handling and improvements.

I've focused on our website, mostly due to some feedback we got from security reviews. It no longer lists MD5 checksums in favor for SHA1 and SHA256. The same change has been applied to themes as well. Besides that I've worked on making the website layout responsive, so that it works reasonably on small screens as well. In the end I've chosen to use Bootstrap for that. This work has been submitted as pull request for review. While working on the hashes, I've realized that we could do more to tell users to verify the downloaded version, so that ended up in second pull request, which adds post download popup showing information how to verify the download (preferring PGP if the release has been signed). Both changes are still pending, but will most likely be merged and put online this week.

Besides website, I've mostly spent time on reviewing pull requests, where we got quite some amount of them and were sitting in the tracker without any feedback. Many of them could be immediately merged, others have received feedback on how to improve them to make them ready for merge.

Handled issues:

• #12432 tbl_structure.php does not load the page header when editing a field
• #12423 Fix replication status output in database tables list.
• #12395 Error 200 when trying to create a new table
• #12408 Store composer.lock in git for releases
• #12417 credits.rst - Finnish language (missing surname)
• #12422 Improved indents, alignment and rtl in Original theme
• #12421 Translation improvements
• #12420 Fix advisory rule 'Slow launch time'
• #12339 Undefined index: port on 4.6.3
• #12424 Index page change password function fail
• #12383 WD PR4100 phpMyAdmin MySQL server error.
• #12426 Please add php session blocking into the FAQ
• #23 Document all milestone releases
• #25 Replace MD5 CheckSum with SHA1/SHA256
• #24 Missing Verification Details

After few weeks of silence, here is another weekly report. The silence was not caused by lack of work being done, but lack of work which could be publicly announced. Things seem to be much calmer now, so regular bug fixing or improvements are on the table now as well.

The biggest improvements this week is cleanup in connection parameters handling, which will allow to specify any additional configuration for control user connection (eg. SSL setup).

Handled issues:

• #12303 Wrong table status size reported
• #11993 Implement gettext expression evaluator
• #5726 Tighter control over user interface
• #12218 SSL config for controluser
• #12288 Connect to control server via socket
• #12283 Add support for SSL connection for controluser, issue 12218
• #12389 Fixes #12378 - Support for IPv6 proxies
• #12378 Support IPv6 proxies
• #12413 Drop users AJAX response is incorrect in localized (non-English) setup
• #12416 Fix replication status output in Server > Databases
• #12414 'Original' theme has some display issues (4.6.3).
• #12409 Restore Overhead column in Server > Databases > Enable Statistics.
• #12407 Setup SSL for planet.phpmyadmin.net
• #12405 Create PHP code in Insert Tab
• #12387 "Commands out of sync" on JSON column
• #12402 Can not browse table with JSON field
• #12364 "command out of sync" error on tables with json data type column

For almost two months I found very little time to process requests to host free software on Hosted Weblate. Today the queue has been emptied, what means that you can find many new translations there.

To make it short, here is list of new projects:

• Gnome TwoFactorAuth
• JClic.js
• qooxdoo
• OpenOrienteering Mapper
• Debian Member Portfolio Service
• qTox Website
• Debian Reference
• Quill
• Rockpool

PS: If you didn't receive reply for your hosting request today, it was probably lost, so don't hesitate to ask again.

I'm reporting two weeks at once as I had several days of and there was not that much of work done. Pretty much everything was bug screening, relaxing after previous security fixes and starting with new round of them.

Handled issues:

• #37 Add Themes
• #39 MySQL connection error in 4.6.2-3

Slightly later than on monthly schedule but Weblate 2.7 is out today. This release brings improvements to the API and is first to officially support wlc a command line client for Weblate.

Full list of changes for 2.7:

• Removed Google web translate machine translation.
• Improved commit message when adding translation.
• Fixed Google Translate API for Hebrew language.
• Compatibility with Mercurial 3.8.
• Added import_json management command.
• Correct ordering of listed traslations.
• Show full suggestion text, not only a diff.
• Extend API (detailed repository status, statistics, ...).
• Testsuite no longer requires network access to test repositories.

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 https://hosted.weblate.org/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, OsmAnd, Aptoide, 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.