Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for English

wlc 0.4, a command line utility for Weblate, has been just released. This release doesn't bring much changes, but still worth announcing.

The most important change is that development repository has been moved under WeblateOrg organization at GitHub, you can now find it at https://github.com/WeblateOrg/wlc. Another important news is that Debian package is currently waiting in NEW queue and will hopefully soon hit unstable.

wlc 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). You can usage examples in the wlc documentation.

Several years ago I've complained about uTidylib not being maintained upstream. Since that time I've occasionally pushed some fixes to my GitHub repository with uTidylib code, but without any clear intentions to take it over.

Time has gone and there was still no progress and I started to consider becoming upstream maintainer as well. I quickly got approval from Cory Dodt, who was the original author of this code, unfortunately he is not owner of the PyPI entry and the claim request seems to have no response (if you know how to get in touch with "cntrlr" or how to take over PyPI module please let me know).

Anyway the amount of patches in my repository is big enough to warrant new release. Additionally Debian bug report about supporting new HTML tidy library came in and that made me push towards releasing 0.3 version of the uTidylib.

As you might guess, the amount of changes against original uTidylib is quite huge, to name the most important ones:

• Various compatiblity fixes (eg. with 64-bit machines)
• Various code cleanups
• New test suite
• New documentation
• Support for new HTML 5 tidy library

Anyway as I can not update PyPI entry, the downloads are currently available only on my website: https://cihar.com/software/utidylib/

Since quite a long time phpMyAdmin had embedded the bfShapeFiles library for import of geospatial data. Over the time we had to apply fixes to it to stay compatible with newer PHP versions, but there was really no development. Unfortunately, as it seems to be only usable PHP library which can read and write ESRI shapefiles.

With recent switch of phpMyAdmin to dependency handling using Composer I wondered if we should get rid of the last embedded PHP library, which was this one - bfShapeFiles. As I couldn't find alive library which would work well for us, I resisted that for quite long, until pull request to improve it came in. At that point I've realized that it's probably better to separate it and start to improve it outside our codebase.

That's when phpmyadmin/shapefile was started. The code is based on bfShapeFiles, applies all fixes which were used in phpMyAdmin and adds improvements from the pull request. On top of that it has brand new testsuite (the coverage is still much lower than I'd like to have) and while writing the tests several parsing issues have been discovered and fixed. Anyway you can now get the source from GitHub or install using Composer from Packagist.

PS: While fixing parser bugs I've looked at other parsers as well to see how they handle some situations unclear in the specs and I had to fix Python pyshp on the way as well :-).

As you could see from the release news it has been quite busy week in terms of fixing security issues. It has actually started just after announcement of security audit funded by Mozilla SOS Fund. It seems this is best way to attract attention security reviewers and we got really a lot of it.

So most of work in last two weeks was to deal with incoming security reports. Fortunately there is still nothing critical if you are not using ancient unpatched PHP version which is vulnerable to null termination of strings. This was quite hard work as immediately once we started to think about releasing version with fixes, new report came in and the process repeated several times. Fortunately we've made it to do three security releases (one for each supported branch) and it seems that we've not broken anything (at least there is no bug report indicating that).

Let's see what next weeks bring and how much security work will be there, but we definitely should focus on doing some reviews continuously rather than doing such one off actions.

On the other side in terms of handled public issues this week was really low volume:

• #12337 Can't change the comment field of an index of a table
• #9 Scrutinizer Auto-Fixes
• #10 Scrutinizer Auto-Fixes

I think it's time to renew tradition of photography posts on this blog. I will start with pictures taken few weeks ago on Troja bridge, which is the newest bridge over the Vltava river in Prague.

Last week was again focused on code cleanup. The biggest part is splitting up the shapefile library out of our codebase. It's original upstream is not active for years and people started to use the library from our code instead, so separating it makes perfect sense.

While working on that, the library got some basic tests, but I'm still looking for more complex testcases to cover even situation we do not use in phpMyAdmin.

Besides this, there were some bug fixes in phpMyAdmin itself and it's Docker container. Additionally here was quite some security work after we've published information about passed security audit, but that will be described later.

Handled issues:

• #12310 500 Error when accessing stored Proc.
• #12318 Fix #12277 ENUM editor adds blank values
• #12309 Shapefile.lib extension
• #12303 Wrong table status size reported
• #12319 Fix some CodeSniffer warnings and errors
• #12307 JSON export includes comments which are invalid in JSON
• #12311 Shift+scrolling left on desktop goes back a page
• #12313 Profiling user defined function
• #12317 Editing server variables doesn't work
• #30 Docker PHPmyadmin Access?
• #35 Alpine 3.4 is out, per note in Dockerfile, should use 'latest' or '3.4' instead of edge
• #36 Update base image to alpine:latest
• #7 Improve loading tests
• #6 Add 3D test data
• #4 Add OpenStreetMap test data
• #5 Scrutinizer Auto-Fixes
• #3 Add tests
• #2 Scrutinizer Auto-Fixes
• #1 Scrutinizer Auto-Fixes

Last week was a bit more focused on improving our Docker container. It's still not perfect, but it works way better than before. I'm also learning Docker on the way, so the progress is not as fast as it could be.

When speaking about learning I've again learned some new things about PHP - this time it was fact that the debug_backtrace function returns reference to actual interpreters backtrace, so if you change something there, you change the parameters in the code above in the stack. It was quite hard to figure out, but fortunately easy to fix afterwards. Anyway if you have not matching library and PHP MySQL module, you could not connect to MySQL server with phpMyAdmin because of this.

Rest of work was regular bug screening and fixing, nothing really outstanding.

Handled issues:

• #12304 JSON export mis-escapes single quotes
• #12293 MySQL SSL issues
• #11936 setcookie and getcookie wrapper function for JS #11688
• #12308 Show "Warning Division by zero"
• #12169 problem with favorites message "There are no favorite tables."
• #12235 Fixes #11983 pop out SQL window
• #12278 [solved]blowfish_secret
• #12279 Unrecognized keyword. (near "CHARACTER SET" at position 4)
• #12251 Logged out at random
• #33 Install zip & bz2
• #32 Frequently losing session

Last week was a bit relaxed for me as I had few days off, so the amount of work was also quite limited.

Quite a lot of time was spent on investigating issue #12243, which in the end turned out to be problem in Fedora packaging as it's using outdated SQL parser library, which contains many bugs which have been fixed meanwhile. This is now reported in their bug tracker and hopefully get fixed soon. Anyway if you're running phpMyAdmin from Fedora / EPEL packages, you might be bitten by various bugs which are already fixed upstream.

Also if you're looking for free software job, you can join me in working on phpMyAdmin, we're looking for second developer!

Handled issues:

• #12284 FAQ 3.21 document issue unable to log in with characters such as á
• #12290 Invalid zipfile at export
• #12243 Invalid sql with export import

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:

• #12273 Remove mcrypt mention in setup documentation
• #12274 fixed checking of user rights to make it look for database privileges
• #12275 Remove inline styles from elements with id='filterText' (partial fix …
• #12249 Cannot login using PMA 4.6.x with Microsoft Edge or IE 11
• #12248 Import and export tab empty
• #12229 Acces denied after upgrading to 4.6.1
• #5555 Export: catch MySQL error messages
• #6168 pma_lang and pma_collation_connection cookies timeout
• #6274 Export non-permanent settings to PHP (no pmadb)
• #6351 Improve caching
• #11565 No UI to relog when using auth_type = config
• #12148 false guessing on session timeout
• #12122 Security issue file permission check.
• #11898 After a session timeout, it won't accept my credentials
• #12082 Exporting with ARCHIVE engine - index problem
• #12145 The message "Current selection does not contain a unique column. Grid edit, checkbox, Edit, Copy and Delete features are not available." is shown even though i have a unique column
• #12174 Exporting new & existing templates default to 'Compression: zipped'
• #12192 Avoid storing full backtrace in error handler
• #12209 "let the user choose" going to error 500
• #12266 127.0.0.1:8888/phpmyadmin/ returns Unable to connect from browser
• #12231 Error message text "The mysqli|mysql extension is missing"
• #12219 Lock Table problem with phpmyadmin
• #31 Build on docker hub is failing

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.