Entries tagged backports

One final post then I'm done discussing mutt. (Primarily because too many people failed to understand the problem, I guess I wasn't being as good at explaining as I could have been.)

So the goal was to be able to tag individual messages within mutt, such that a short while later a new folder would be created containing all messages of that tag, regardless of which folder the message(s) are in.

Actually finding the tags and creating the virtual folders is easy to do. I wrote a simple indexer which scans for tags in messages and creates hardlinks as necessary.

The problem with this is that many operations on those hardlinked messags would create a new copy of the message and operate on that - trashing the hardlink. For some operations that's just fine. But I did specifically want to be able to untag a tagged message and not have to hunt around for the original. (e.g. remove the "todo" tag from messages where I'd done the relevant action.)

So after a bit of trial and error I came up with a patch which allows the editing of a message in-place, in the hardlinked folder, without trashing the hardlink. This patch just invokes "$EDITINPLACE <filename>" where "filename" is the name actual file the message I'm working on is stored on disk. (i.e. ~/Maildir/.people.thewomanmeg/cur/1.2.3.txt).

By setting the EDITINPLACE variable to point to my ~/bin/editlabel script I may easily remove any tags from the hardlinked-message and have it apply to the original. Job done!

There are some limitations with this approach that are worth mentioning though:

• IMAP? Ha! Nope. We only work on Maildirs.
• The header-cache facility of Mutt breaks my "find the filename of the Maildir message" function. Not sure why, so I just disabled it.
• Many operations on the virtual mailbox will still break the symlink; because they don't edit in place.

I've documented things in a rather random fashion, and I've made a backported package of mutt with my patch available online too. Primarily so I dont lose the source like I did with my mutt-ng backport.

Lenny Backports

After a couple of days I've spotted a few things that don't work so well on Lenny:

gtk-gnutella

gtk-gnutella is a client for a peer-to-peer filesharing system. Unfortunately the version of the client in Lenny dies on startup "This version is too old to connect".

gimp

The graphics program, The Gimp, doesn't show a live preview when carrying out things such as colour desaturation.

Although not an insurmountable problem it is moderately annoying if you do such things often.

So I've placed backported packages online.

I expected to have to backport KVM, and I guess I realised I needed a new kernel to match too. So they're available in the kvm-hosting repository; take the kernel with "birthday" in its name - the other is more minimal and has no USB support, etc.

blog spam

Since I last reset the statistics the blog spam detector has reported, rejected, and refused just over half a million bogus comments.

It can and should do better.

I've been planning on overhauling this for some time; even to the extent of wondering if I can move the XML::RPC service into a C daemon with embedded lua/perl to do the actual analysis.

(Right now the whole service is Perl, but I'm a little suspicious of the XML::RPC library - my daemon dies at times and I don't understand why.)

I'd say "test suggestions welcome", but then I'd have to explain what is already done. If you're curious take a look at the code...

ObSubject: Hot Fuzz

Tags: backports, blogspam, lenny | 5 comments

Since I'm I'm using real titles I guess I should make a real post, in which real things are mentioned. Unfortunately recently most of my time has been spent offline, doing things in and around Edinburgh.

However I have done a few things which are possibly worthy of mention. My Lenny repository has been updated a little:

The Gimp

There's a slightly newer version of The Gimp available now, corresponding to a recent upload to unstable.

gtk-gnutella

Once again I was forced to update the backported gtk-gnutella package, as my previous one was too old to connect to the network.

itag

Finally I added a Lenny package for the itag software which is now essentially complete.

Of those things I had a lot of fun with the itag software. Partly because it allows me to horde my images in a way that I appreciate, but also because it made me go over some older images and be pleasantly suprised.

My personal archive, ~/Images, is now just over 80Gb, and goes back about ten years. (Of course the older images were taken with random point and shoot digital cameras and each images is only a few hundred k in size. The newer images, saved at full-resolution, may be 5Mb each.)

Otherwise I've been slowly deploying OpenLDAP in anger, which has been educational. I've got a minor problem to solve which is that (posix)group definitions don't seem to be working reliably, but otherwise I've got Apache authenticating against groups, SSH logins working, and the little brother database using the LDAP server as an address book. (Mail clients? mutt is the one true mail client. notmuchmail.org will be interesting when further developed, but everything else I'm going to ignore with my stubborn Yorkshire nature ;)

ObQuote: "Oh no no no, dead broad OFF THE TABLE!", from Shrek.

Tags: backports, itag, ldap, lenny, mutt, openldap | No comments

This morning I made a new release of Lumail, which recently completed the transition from using mimetic to GMime for all its MIME needs.

I was happy with mimetic, except it didn't have the facility to decode encoded header-values. I wrote some code, but it was broken, so I made the decision that we should move to something that made this easier, and GMime was chosen.

Jeffrey Stedfast was very helpful in answering my questions with near-perfect code samples.

Beyond that this release features some more Lua primitives and a couple of bug-fixes.

The only annoyance is that the version of GMime I'm using, 2.6.x, isn't available to users of the Squeeze release of Debian GNU/Linux. It is available as a backport, but that means building binaries with sbuild is a pain - due to #700522.

So for the moment I've only built binaries for Wheezy users.

ObQuote: "You know who I am, I've not been off TV for that long!" - Alan Patridge, Alpha Papa

Tags: backports, lumail | 3 comments