Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for English

Weekly phpMyAdmin contributions 2015-W52

Okay, this report is not weekly and is a bit late, but anyway here comes report covering last two weeks in 2015.

As you might expect there were some days off, but still quite some work has been done. I've focused on encoding conversions and usage of mb_* functions. One of results was cleanup PR and some opened questions. The PR is already merged meanwhile and we will probably make again the mbstring dependency options. Rest was pretty much just bug fixing.

Fixed issues:

Enca 1.17

Last version of Enca has been released more than year ago and now it's time for new release. There are various compatibility fixes which have been committed to the Git repository meanwhile.

If you don't know Enca, it is an Extremely Naive Charset Analyser. It detects character set and encoding of text files and can also convert them to other encodings using either a built-in converter or external libraries and tools like libiconv, librecode, or cstocs.

Full list of changes for 1.17 release:

  • Fixed conversion of GB2312 encoding with iconv
  • Fixed iconv conversion on OSX
  • Documentation improvements
  • Fixed execution of external converters with ACLs
  • Improved test coverage to 80%

Still enca is in maintenance mode only and I have no intentions to write new features. However there is no limitation to other contributors :-).

You can download from http://cihar.com/software/enca/.

Going to FOSDEM

It has become almost tradition for me, so yes, I'm attending FOSDEM 2016. It's probably the best conference in Europe to meet other free software guys and that was always motivation for me to come - to see people I meet on mailing lists for rest of the year.

This time it will be slightly different for me - I will be giving talk there for first time. Originally I wanted to do lightning talk only, but in the end I got persuaded and it's full length talk now. It will be in the Coding for Language Communities devroom and you might guess from the devroom topic that it will be about Weblate.

Weekly phpMyAdmin contributions 2015-W51

Again one week has passed and there has been some progress on phpMyAdmin.

This week the focus was on code cleanup and issue fixing. I've identified several pieces of dead code and removed that from our code base (the biggest removal being no longer used PMA_String class). The codebase is quite old and sometimes it's not easy to identify code which is not really being used, as it still might be referenced from some locations, but without actually invoking it.

On the issue fixing side, I'm really happy from improving user experience with fields marked as binary - so far phpMyAdmin has displayed them as hexadecimal dump in all cases. Now it will display them as text as long as the content is valid utf-8.

Bugs fixed:

PS: I will most likely skip report next week due to Christmas.

Weekly phpMyAdmin contributions 2015-W50

It has been already one week since last report and here comes next one. This week was half focused on fixing issues with Docker container for phpMyAdmin and on code cleanups.

The Docker container got support for more options, making it better suited for various use cases. I'm still thinking whether using PHP's built in server here is a good idea or we should switch to something like nginx + PHP FPM, what would make the container bigger, but it would perform better.

On the code cleanup and issues side, I started to work on two issues 11741 and 11731, which both pointed me to quite some code which could be removed or improved. Many of that was to support older PHP versions, which we no longer support. Anyway the work here is still in progress and both issues will take some time to resolve.

Gammu 1.36.8

Yesterday, Gammu 1.36.8 has been released.

This time the focus was mostly on fixing problems introduced in 1.36.7.

  • Changed default value for ReceiveFrequency.
  • Fixed compatibility for PostgreSQL.
  • Fixed build failure with all disabled SMSD backends.
  • Documentation improvements.
  • Fixed mixing C++ code with SMSD.

You an support further Gammu development at Bountysource salt.

Weekly phpMyAdmin contributions 2015-W49

As announced earlier, I will try to publish weekly reports on contributing to the phpMyAdmin. Here comes the first one.

Last week I've focused on some pain points with deploying phpMyAdmin and improved these a bit. The installation using PHP Composer is now documented. It's far from being perfect (you have to add our repository), but it seems to work fine.

What was more challenging for me is Docker support. I've never really used it so far, so I had to learn some things about the filesystem layering (to avoid too big image), but now it's there. You can get the sources from GitHub, it's available on Docker Hub and of course it is covered by our documentation.

Bugs fixed:

Supporting Software Freedom Conservancy

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:

Become a Conservancy Supporter!

Time for change

It has been seven years since I've joined SUSE (for second time, but that's different story). As everything has to come to the end, I've decided to make a change in my life and leave safety net of being employed and go for new experience with freelancer life.

This will give me more time to spend on free software projects where I'm involved. Of course I need to earn some money to live, so many decisions about where to spend my time will be backed by money...

First of all I will work on phpMyAdmin, where I was chosen as a contractor (of two for this year). This will be half time job for me and you will see weekly reports in my blog, similar to what Madhura is doing.

Second priority will be Weblate, especially the hosting solution. I believe that this is something what can work quite well in the long term, but the tool needs some development to make it as great as I would like to have it. If you want me to extend hosting for free software projects, you can do it by money :-).

And nobody knows what projects come next. There is some work to be done on Gammu and Wammu, but given that I don't have any recent device to use it, it's sometimes hard to fix the bugs there. Of course this can change if I get some money to work on that.

PS: It's not that SUSE would be bad place to work. It's actually pretty great if you're looking for work with free software. You work there on free software, with great people and you get quite some freedom. As bonus once or twice in a year, there is Hackweek which you can spend on anything. And of course they have lot of open positions :-).

Gammu 1.36.7

Yesterday, Gammu 1.36.7 has been released.

This time the list of changes got bigger, improving compatibility with many devices:

  • Support devices which do not report full network status.
  • Disable Huawei unsolicited messages on startup.
  • Various improvements for Huawei modems.
  • Fixed compilation on Windows.
  • Fixed regression with Siemens AX75.
  • Improved decoding of USSD responses.
  • Properly decode emojis to console or files backend.
  • Added support for proxying the connection through arbitrary command.
  • SMSD now tracks retries count per message.

You an support further Gammu development at Bountysource salt.