Calamares grabs onto things

I’ve been working on Calamares, the Universal Linux Installer, for a little over two years – following up in the role Teo started. It’s used by Neon (for the dev version, not the user version) and Manjaro and lots of other Linux distributions. I’ve typically called it an installer for boutique distro’s, as opposed to the Big Five. Well, Debian 11 has plans. And lubuntu uses it as well (and has for over six months). Those seem pretty big.

Programming: Automation, Python, Rust and More

• Introducing your friends to automation (and overcoming their fear)

  Another fear that I face often from friends is that they don’t know any programming languages, and believing that if they don’t know how to code, then they can’t do automation. While I think we can all agree that knowing Bash, Python, Perl, or even PowerShell is useful when defining these processes to reduce human interaction, it is not always needed. Today we have the tools at our disposal to implement such processes without the absolute need to know a traditional programming language. For example, tools like Red Hat Ansible Tower and Azure DevOps let us take advantage of already created playbooks or plugins. Rarely do we see where one tool fits all, but just getting started with one tool is sometimes enough to get a feel for automation. In turn, that beginning is enough to gain confidence and see the true benefits of automating, which encourages us just enough to try learning something new.

• Python 2.7.17 released

  Python 2.7.17 is now available for download. Note Python 2.7.17 is the penultimate release in the Python 2.7 series.

• Python 2.7.17

  Python 2.7.17 is a bug fix release in the Python 2.7.x series. It is expected to be the penultimate release for Python 2.7.

• Python 3.7.4 : Usinge pytesseract for text recognition.

• Started a newsletter

  I started a newsletter, focusing on different stories I read about privacy, security, programming in general. Following the advice from Martijn Grooten, I am storing all the interesting links I read (for many months). I used to share these only over Twitter, but, as I retweet many things, it was not easy to share a selected few.

• Indent datastructure for trees

  It is a preorder traversal of the conceptual tree, aggregating (depth, name) tuples into a list to form what I am calling the indent tree datastructure as it captures all the information of the tree but in a different datastructure than normal, and can be extended to allow data at each node and might be a useful alternative for DB storage of trees.

• Daniel Silverstone: A quarter in review - Nearly there, 2020 in sight

  I have worked very hard on my Rustup work, and I have also started to review documentation and help updates for the Rust compiler itself. I've become involved in the Sequoia project, at least peripherally, and have attended a developer retreat with them which was both relaxing and productive. I feel like the effort I'm putting into Rust is being recognised in ways I did not expect nor hope for, but that's very positive and has meant I've engaged even more with the community and feel like I'm making a valuable contribution. I still hang around on the #wg-rustup Discord channel and other channels on that server, helping where I can, and I've been trying to teach my colleagues about Rust so that they might also contribute to the community. So initially an 'A', I dropped to an 'A-' last time, but I feel like I've put enough effort in to give myself 'A+' this time.

• Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppGSL 0.3.7: Fixes and updates

  A new release 0.3.7 of RcppGSL is now on CRAN. The RcppGSL package provides an interface from R to the GNU GSL using the Rcpp package. Stephen Wade noticed that we were not actually freeing memory from the GSL vectors and matrices as we set out to do. And he is quite right: a dormant bug, present since the 0.3.0 release, has now been squashed. I had one boolean wrong, and this has now been corrected. I also took the opportunity to switch the vignette to prebuilt mode: Now a pre-made pdf is just included in a Sweave document, which makes the build more robust to tooling changes around the vignette processing. Lastly, the package was converted to the excellent tinytest unit test framework.

• Styled output in Poke programs

  I just committed support for styling in printf. Basically, it uses the libtextstyle approach of having styling classes that the user can customize in a .css file.

Audiocasts/Shows/Screencasts: Destination Linux, Open Source Security Podcast, Linux Action News, Test and Code, Pop_!OS 19.10 Run Through

• Linus Says Microsoft Has Changed, Flatpak, Jack Audio, Arch Linux | Destination Linux 143

  Arch Linux Decides It’s Not Hard Enough, Flatpak Updated 1.5, Jack Audio Finally Has A Release, Linus Says Microsoft Has Changed, DLN Discourse

• Open Source Security Podcast: Episode 166 - Every day should be cybersecurity awareness month!

  Josh and Kurt about cybersecurity awareness month. What's our actionable advice we can give out? There isn't much which is a fundamental part of the problem.

• Linux Action News 128

  A new Ubuntu has promise, Linux on Dex is dead, and our strong reaction to Google pulling two open-source apps from the Play Store. Plus a big boost for ARM on Linux, and our thoughts on recent Red Hat news.

• Test and Code: 92: 9 Steps to Crater Quality & Destroy Customer Satisfaction - Cristian Medina

  Cristian Medina wrote an article recently called "Test Engineering Anti-Patterns: Destroy Your Customer Satisfaction and Crater Your Quality By Using These 9 Easy Organizational Practices" Of course, it's sarcastic, and aims to highlight many problems with organizational practices that reduce software quality.

• Pop_!OS 19.10 Run Through

  In this video, we are looking at Pop_!OS 19.10.

Polishing of KDE and Adding Git Support to Kate

• This week in KDE: fixing all the things

  Plasma 5.17 was released this week to glowing reviews! As with most new releases, our loyal users wasted no time in finding all the bugs we missed! So you know what that means, right? We all burned the midnight oil fixing the problems you found, and Plasma 5.17.1 will be released in just a few days with everything we’ve knocked out so far (detailed below) so never fear!

• KDE Continues Seeing A Lot Of Bug Fixes, Continued Tweaks Around System Settings

  KDE developers remain busy this autumn on addressing bugs in the recent KDE Plasma 5.17 release and tackling early feature work for Plasma 5.18. Plus work on KDE Frameworks 5 and KDE Applications is as busy as ever.

• Working around the Wrong Cursor bug

  This is a long-known bug with countless Reddit/Forum/… posts with often the correct answer how to fix it.

• RFC - Git Client Integration

  At this year’s KDE conference Akademy we discussed how to evolve Kate over the next years. One of the areas we want to improve is better git integration out of the box. Currently, Kate ships the Projects plugin, which automatically detects and loads your file structure from your git repository. If a project is loaded, then the Search & Replace plugin allows to search&replace in all project files. In addition, the Quick Open feature also supports opening files from the currently active project - all explained here. However, the Projects plugin does not provide any real git integration: You can neither pull nor push, commit, diff, etc. If at all, additional git functionality is available only via external tools like gitk or git-cola (e.g. available in the context menu). This is something we would like to change by having really nice git integration.