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Ratatui: Build rich terminal user interfaces using Rust

2023-05-29

Ratatui came a long way since its transition from the original tui-rs crate. In this post, let's take a look at what's new in the latest version.

Git migration completed

2023-05-21

We are proud to announce that the migration to Git packaging succeeded! ? Thanks to everyone who has helped during the migration! Package sources are now available on GitLab. Note that the bugtracker is still flyspry and that merge requests are not accepted as of now. We intend to open the issue tracker and merge requests on the Gitlab package repos in the near future. Mirrors are syncing again, but it may take a bit of time until your mirror of choice has caught up. For users Update your system and merge the pacman pacnew `/etc/pacman.conf.pacnew` file. This is …

Git migration completed

2023-05-21

We are proud to announce that the migration to Git packaging succeeded! 🥳 Thanks to everyone who has helped during the migration! Package sources are now available on GitLab. Note that the bugtracker is still flyspray and that merge requests are not accepted as of now. We intend to open the issue tracker and merge requests on the Gitlab package repos in the near future. Mirrors are syncing again, but it may take a bit of time until your mirror of choice has caught up. For users Update your system and merge the pacman pacnew /etc/pacman.conf.pacnew file. This is …

Taking Rust to the Cloud: Blazingly Fast File Sharing

2023-05-17

"rustypaste" is a self-hosted and minimal file upload/pastebin service written in Rust. In this post, I will be talking about its features and telling the story behind how I deployed it to shuttle.rs to make it publicly available for free use.

Git migration announcement

2023-05-16

This Friday morning (2023-05-19) the Git packaging migration will start until Sunday (2023-05-21). The Arch Linux packaging team will not be able to update packages in any of the repositories during this period. Notification when the migration starts, and when it is completed, will be published on the [arch-dev-public] mailing list. How does this impact Arch Linux users?The [testing] repository will be split into [core-testing] and [extra-testing], the [staging] repository will be split into [core-staging] and [extra-staging]. The [community] repository will be merged into [extra] and will therefore be empty after the migration. All affected repositories will be provided as empty repositories for a transition period after the migration. For regular users, this means that everything works as before. Note: After the migration is done, users that have the testing repositories enabled need to include the new repositories ([core-testing] and [extra-testing] instead of [testing]) in their pacman.conf before updating their system. Other changes:
  • SVN access is discontinued and will dissappear.
  • The svn2git mirror will no longer be updated.
  • asp, which relies on the svn2git mirror, will stop working. It is replaced by pkgctl repo clone.
How does this impact Arch Linux tier 1 mirrors?During the migration rsync and HTTP access will be shut down. We will send an email notification to arch-mirrors once everything has been finished. How does this impact Arch Linux packagers?Packagers will not be able to patch and update their packages. The internal Tier 0 mirror is also going to be disabled for the duration of this migration.

Git migration announcement

2023-05-15

This Friday morning (2023-05-19) the Git packaging migration will start until Sunday (2023-05-21). The Arch Linux packaging team will not be able to update packages in any of the repositories during this period. Notification when the migration starts, and when it is completed, will be published on the [arch-dev-public] mailing list. How does this impact Arch Linux users? The [testing] repository will be split into [core-testing] and [extra-testing], the [staging] repository will be split into [core-staging] and [extra-staging]. The [community] repository will be merged into [extra] and will therefore be empty after the migration. All affected repositories will be provided as empty repositories for a transition period after the migration. For regular users, this means that everything works as before. Note: After the migration is done, users that have the testing repositories enabled need to include the new repositories ([core-testing] and [extra-testing] instead of [testing]) in their pacman.conf before updating their system. Other changes:
  • SVN access is discontinued and will dissappear.
  • The svn2git mirror will no longer be updated.
  • asp, which relies on the svn2git mirror, will stop working. It is replaced by pkgctl repo clone.
How does this impact Arch Linux tier 1 mirrors? During the migration rsync and HTTP access will be shut down. We will send an email notification to arch-mirrors once everything has been finished. How does this impact Arch Linux packagers? Packagers will not be able to patch and update their packages. The internal Tier 0 mirror is also going to be disabled for the duration of this migration.

April

2023-05-01

Arch Linux in April 2023 # project management # We’ve create a GitLab Board [0] to track all tasks related to project management and project leadership. This Board allows us to visualize the exact state of tasks using different lanes and labels, making it easier to keep track of ongoing progress. Additionally, tasks will receive comments and lane updates to reflect the latest developments. This is another step towards providing increased transparency, structure, and visibility for our staff and users alike.

Golang crypto/ecdh and the TPM

2023-04-24

I have lately been trying to learn more about the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) as they are capable of key creation and sealing secrets in a secure manner. They are common hardware these days and make for a reasonable ways to store secrets. age is a file encryption/decryption tool from Filippo Valsorda which a lot of people have been using to replace GnuPG for things like password-store. It has a few plugins doing things like storing keys on Yubikey, Trezor hardware wallets or the Apple Secure Enclave, however it doesn’t have a TPM plugin.

Zig Bits 0x3: Mastering project management in Zig

2023-04-19

In this post, I'm sharing tips & tricks about managing/maintaining an open-source Zig project and mentioning the commonly used practices. I'm also giving a brief introduction to my first-ever Zig project "linuxwave" which led to the writing of this series.

March

2023-04-08

Arch Linux in March 2023 # Git packaging sources # We have improved a lot of pieces in pkgctl according to the feedback from the sandbox environment. Most notably it is possible to provide GitLab tokens via the DEVTOOLS_GITLAB_TOKEN environment variable, pass nocheck to the build command for bootstrap builds, handle subrelease pkgrels as well as several bugfixes. We are doing another round of testing and would like to proceed with the rollout afterwards.

Writing a Linux executable from scratch with x86_64-unknown-none and Rust

2023-03-28

I recently mentioned on the internet I did work in this direction and a friend of mine asked me to write a blogpost on this. I didn’t blog for a long time (keeping all the goodness for myself hehe), so here we go. 🦝 To set the scene, let’s assume we want to make an exectuable binary for x86_64 Linux that’s supposed to be extremely portable. It should work on both Debian and Arch Linux. It should work on systems without glibc like Alpine Linux. It should even work in a FROM scratch Docker container. In a more serious setting …

Setting up a packaging environment for Alpine Linux (introducing alpkg)

2023-03-27

Recently I have been interested in Alpine Linux and thought it would be nice to maintain some Rust packages in their repositories. In this post, I will share my notes/adventures on setting up a packaging environment and a tool called "alpkg" for automating this process.

Zig Bits 0x2: Using defer to defeat memory leaks

2023-03-21

Let's talk about how to detect memory leaks in Zig and avoid them by using the defer statement.

February

2023-03-18

Arch Linux in February 2023 # Git packaging sources # All major workflow and usability requirements for the pkgctl tooling have been finished and a experimental devtools-git-poc package has been put into the repositories. Furthermore the proof of concept sandbox environment has been set up and rolled out to anyone interested in testing. In the current phase we will collect feedback to catch bugs and further usability improvements [0]. We are still very eagerly seeking for more testers.

If you have one project and you keep bragging about it, just stop.

2023-03-13

Some thoughts on projects and ego management.

Introducing runst: Handle desktop notifications neatly on Linux!

2023-03-05

runst is a dead simple notification daemon 🦡 In this post, I'm introducing the project and giving different usage examples that will improve your Linux desktop experience.

Zig Bits 0x1: Returning slices from functions

2023-02-17

I decided to start a new blog series called "Zig Bits" where I share interesting bits of information about the Zig programming language. It is written especially for beginners because I'm also a beginner.

Switch to the base-devel meta package requires manual intervention

2023-02-12

On February 2nd, the base-devel package group has been replaced by a meta package of the same name. If you installed the base-devel package group prior to this date, explicitly re-install it to get the new base-devel package installed on the system: pacman -Syu base-devel

Call for participation: Git packaging POC

2023-02-02

https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/li … WE6GFWUJN/ Hi everyone! Levente and I have been busy preparing a test environment for the new git package workflow, which is going to replace the svn repository. To test the new git package setup install `devtools-git-poc` from the [community] repository and use the new `pkgctl` utility. Please check each time if there is a new upgrade before playing around. The goal of the testing is to figure out UX issues, bugs and larger issues that would need to be dealt with before a git migration can happen. It's therefor very important that people sit down and play around …

January

2023-01-31

Arch Linux in January 2023 # Git packaging sources # We have announced the state of the art of the Git packaging migration to arch-dev-public [0] including a first item on our distro roadmap to track the remaining effort [1]. We have prepared most of the necessary settings, configurations and the corresponding machine for the new test environment for the Git package workflow. The test phase is expected to start at the beginning of February.

Packaging Rust Applications for the NPM Registry

2023-01-24

Recently I packaged my project git-cliff (changelog generator written in Rust) for NPM with the help of my friend @atlj. I thought this would be an interesting topic for a blog post since it has a certain technical depth about distributing binaries and frankly it still amazes me how the whole thing works so smoothly. So let's create a simple Rust project, package it for NPM and fully automate the release process via GitHub Actions.

How to enable developer mode on Chrome OS Flex

2023-01-14

I have recently switched to Chrome OS Flex as main operating system. The experience so far is really great. It does everything what it should do. I can browse the internet with it, game with it (in the past Google Stadia, now Xbox Cloud), answer my mails and even work on Arch Linux. Even printing worked pretty much out of the box. What does not work properly at the moment is scanning over wifi with my very old HP DeskJet 2540 printer with embedded scanner.

PHP 8.2 update and introduction of legacy branch

2023-01-13

The php packages have been updated to the latest version 8.2. In addition to this, a new set of php-legacy packages have been introduced. These will follow the oldest but still actively supported PHP branch. This enables users to install the latest version but also introduces the option to use third party applications that might rely on an older version. Both branches will be kept up to date following our rolling release model. php and php-legacy can be installed at the same time as the latter uses a -legacy suffix for its binaries and configuration files. In addition to this, the php7 packages have been removed as they reached end of life. The imap extension will no longer be provided as it relies on the c-client library which has been abandoned for many years.

In memory of Jonathon Fernyhough

2023-01-12

Arch Linux mourns the sudden loss of Jonathon Fernyhough, known in our community as jonathon, who passed away on Saturday night. Jonathon was an active participant and contributor to Arch Linux, several derived distributions, the AUR and through personal repositories. He was enthusiastic, helpful and eager to contribute towards improving the free and open source software community as a whole. On behalf of the wider Arch Linux community, our condolences go out to his family and friends.

FOSDEM 2023 Dinner

2023-01-03

There is going to be a dinner at FOSDEM 2023! Please email foxboron@archlinux.org if you want to attend Copypasta follows. Yo! The previous years at FOSDEM we have held a dinner with around 15-20 people. Some maintainers from Arch, and some users that wanted to join. It has been great events and with FOSDEM 2023 happening I thought it was a good idea to do it again :) The dinner will be held Saturday, 4th of February, around 20:00. The dinner is sponsored by the Arch and should cover a drink and a main course. We will cap the attendees to 20 people. Priority for members of the Arch team (developers, trusted users and support staff). Any free spots after this can be taken by anyone interested. The users requesting spots will get a heads up the week before FOSDEM to give all staff a chance to reply. Please ask me if you have any questions :) Send me an email *offlist* if you want to attend. I also plan to announce a pub closer to FOSDEM so anyone unable to join the dinner can still come and grab a drink with the rest of us. Cheers! https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/li … CM4XGLNSN/