Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for English

Besides usual bug screening and pull requests merging, I've spent quite some amount in digging reports in our error reporting server and fixed the most visible ones.

The error reporting server collects errors happening in phpMyAdmin installations worldwide (this is opt-in reporting) and gives us insights where our users suffer most. Some of the errors are really weird and probably indicate PHP bug, but as we don't collect more information than is necessary, we really can not say for sure and we can not find person to reproduce the bug. Anyway if something has happened hundredth times on several installations, it's probably worth fixing in our code base.

Handled issues:

• #13394 Merge remote-tracking branch 'refs/remotes/phpmyadmin/master'
• #13386 fileperms(): stat failed for config.inc.php
• #13390 hash_equals(): Expected known_string to be a string, integer given
• #12478 Investigate if code is still needed
• #13389 Illegal character encoding in Kanji conversion
• #12716 Change package guzzle/guzzle for guzzlehttp/guzzle
• #13388 Unsupported encodings used with mbstrings
• #13385 Uninitialized string offset: 599
• #13381 Move third-party js libraries to js/vendor
• #13378 Update CodeMirror to 5.26.0
• #13376 Update jQuery Validation Plugin to 1.16.0
• #13375 Update jQuery to 3.2.1
• #13377 Update jQuery Cookie Plugin to 1.4.1
• #13318 Import is slow, when tracking is configured
• #13008 Exporting database with lot of tables
• #13379 Automatically add token to all AJAX requests
• #13374 composer suggests
• #13294 Removed inline onchange
• #155 Follow Github issue state
• #162 Partially fix error introduced in 66d9f09
• #161 Log and don't save if length of error message for an incident field is too long
• #83 Remove 'microhistory' field from incidents

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).

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:

• TrebleShot - file and text sharing application
• bookworm - simple ebook reader for Elementary OS
• Ghini - plant collections manager
• Nutty - A Network Utility
• F-Droid Server
• F-Droid Website
• po4a - helper tool for localizing documentation

We now also host few new Minetest mods:

• Mod: Jukebox

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.

Last week was again quite busy on the issue tracker and pull requests. I start to think that I barely get to real development over handling flow of incoming reports and pull requests.

I've manged to fix some issues with parsing comments in SQL parser, which probably was not that much visible in phpMyAdmin, but was quite annoying when using SQL parser as library. Generally it seems that people are starting to use it, so at least one of our separate libraries is getting some user base outside phpMyAdmin.

Handled issues:

• #13078 Minified javascript and css files
• #13367 Fix double escaping in table structure view
• #13092 "Error in processing request" red box on start.
• #13354 Fix double escaping
• #13366 Edit Field is all broken
• #13360 Refactor zip functions into static methods
• #13193 Permanence of Navigation Tree Display
• #13359 Improve themes gitignore
• #13363 Not for merge: Add PHP 5.4 and 5.3 to test matrix to see what is broken
• #13285 Error code : 500 Error text : Internal Server Error
• #13343 Query tab Javascript errors
• #13310 PMA is very slow when xdebug is enabled
• #13358 static::TRADITIONAL warning on "copy table with prefix"
• #13362 Status Monitor doesn't do anything
• #13305 showing tooltip for user not in user table
• #12718 Password No shown for user not in user table
• #13352 Refactor the core functions into static methods
• #13356 Refactor index.lib function into static method
• #13357 Port console templates to Twig
• #12976 Foreign keys - Table dropdown
• #13312 Fix to issue #12976
• #13315 Update common.inc.php #13316
• #13323 Tablenames with special characters not correctly shown at triggers.
• #13338 Tablename with special chars shown at triggers
• #13316 func_overload is empty string fix
• #128 Remove link to db container
• #156 Parser mistakes with comments

During last weeks I was finally able to push out some releases of Gammu and related tools. Those were mostly waiting for quite some time in Git, but still will be useful for many users.

Gammu 1.38.3 brings several SMSD performance improvements (I'd like to hear feedback here how much it helped in real world workloads), fixes USSD related crashes and adds support for new devices.

python-gammu 2.8 finally brings emoji fixes to Python users as well. Those were fixed in Gammu quite some time ago, but the Python API still didn't handle them properly. There was also simplification in the calls API.

Wammu release will follow shortly in next days, the most important change there being license change to GPLv3 or later.

Last week was quite equally spread across our projects. I've spent time on motranslator, sql-parser, localized documentation and of course phpMyAdmin itself.

Generally it was mostly focused on going through issue trackers and pull requests to see what has happened in week I was offline.

Handled issues:

• #13311 Undefined index: pma_password - Direct login no longer works
• #13341 Refactor the sql functions into static methods
• #13348 Blocked form submission to 'index.php'
• #13314 Switch to different Themes
• #13349 HTML @ tbl_structure.php
• #13308 ServerConfigChecks.php, try to use phpseclib first
• #13346 Merge conflict on demo server composer.lock
• #13345 Test failures with po/pa.po in master
• #13295 token on export
• #13320   
• #13329 Removed   
• #13335 Fix setTimeout function on header_location.twig
• #13284 Small refactoring in preparation to CSP.
• #13340 Refactor the transformations functions into static methods
• #13333 Port some templates to Twig
• #127 Missing 4.7.1 tag
• #37 Add Themes
• #155 Add GroupKeyword class to fix postgres GROUP BY
• #154 Error using GROUP BY with PostgreSQL
• #20 Added support for a locale switch in the same singleton Loader instance.
• #19 Switching locale during one process run

Last week was a bit shorter for me, but still there was quite some bugfixes done.

Most of the time was spent of fixing handling malformed mo files in motranslator, where the issues were reported by Emanuel Bronshtein. The library is now way more fault tolerant than it used to be if it gets corrupted file.

There was also quite some pull requests on phpMyAdmin to review and merge, but that seems to be usual in last weeks :-).

Handled issues:

• #13290 PHP Fatal error: Cannot 'break' 2 levels in export.php on line 864
• #13293 Remove some inline CSS
• #13291 Removed inline onsubmit
• #13287 Fix typo, improve wording
• #13286 Fix typos, improve wording
• #15 fpd on 32bit via negative result of unpack
• #18 PHP Notice in ngettext function
• #17 PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Symfony\Component\ExpressionLanguage\SyntaxError
• #16 PHP Notice in getPluralForms function
• #14 PHP Notice in extractPluralCount function
• #13 add stripping of disallowed chars in sanitizePluralExpression

For quite some I'm happy user of Turris Omnia router. The router has quite good hardware, so I've decided to try if I can run Bitcoin node on that and ElectrumX server.

To make the things easier to manage, I've decided to use LXC and run all these in separate container. First of all you need LXC on the router. This is the default setup, but in case you've removed it, you can add it back in the Updater settings.

Now we will create Debian container. There is basic information on using in Turris Documentation on how to create the container, in latter documentation I assume it is called debian.

It's also good idea to enable LXC autostart, to do so add your container to cat /etc/config/lxc-auto on :

config container
    option name debian

You might also want to edit lxc container configration to enable clean shutdown:

# Send SIGRTMIN+3 to shutdown systemd (37 on Turris Omnia)
lxc.haltsignal = SIGRTMIN+3

To make the system more recent, I've decided to use Debian Stretch (one of reasons was that ElectrumX needs Python 3.5.3 or newer). Which is anyway probably sane choice right now given that it's already frozen and will be soon stable. As Stretch is not available as a download option in Omnia, I've chosen to use Debian Jessie and upgrate it later:

$ lxc-attach  --name debian
$ sed -i s/jessie/stretch/ /etc/apt/sources.list
$ apt update
$ apt full-upgrade

Now you have up to date system and we can start installing dependencies. First thing to install is Bitcoin Core. Just follow the instructions on their website to do that. Now it's time to set it up and wait for downloading full blockchain:

$ adduser bitcoin
$ su - bitcoin
$ bitcoind -daemon

Depending on your connection speed, the download will take few hours. You can monitor the progress using bitcoin-cli, you're waiting for 450k blocks:

$ bitcoin-cli getinfo
{
  "version": 140000,
  "protocolversion": 70015,
  "walletversion": 130000,
  "balance": 0.00000000,
  "blocks": 301242,
  "timeoffset": -1,
  "connections": 8,
  "proxy": "",
  "difficulty": 8853416309.1278,
  "testnet": false,
  "keypoololdest": 1490267950,
  "keypoolsize": 100,
  "paytxfee": 0.00000000,
  "relayfee": 0.00001000,
  "errors": ""
}

Depending how much memory you have (mine has 2G) and what all you run on the router, you will have to tweak bitcoind configuration to consume less memory. This can be done by editing .bitcoin/bitcoin.conf, I've ended up with following settings:

par=1
dbcache=150
maxmempool=150

You can also create startup unit for Bitcoin daemon (place that as /etc/systemd/system/bitcoind.service):

[Unit]
Description=Bitcoind
After=network.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/opt/bitcoin/bin/bitcoind
User=bitcoin
TimeoutStopSec=30min
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=30

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Now we can enable services to start on container start:

systemctl enable bitcoind.service

Then I wanted to setup ElectrumX as well, but I've quickly realized that it uses way more memory that my router has, so there is no option to run it without using swap, what will probably make it quite slow (I haven't tried that).

Weblate 2.14.1 has been released today. It is bugfix release fixing possible migration issues, search results navigation and some minor security issues.

Full list of changes:

• Fixed possible error when paginating search results.
• Fixed migrations from older versions in some corner cases.
• Fixed possible CSRF on project watch and unwatch.
• The password reset no longer authenticates user.
• Fixed possible captcha bypass on forgotten password.

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.