2017-09-17: Free software log (July and August 2017)
I've wanted to start making one of these posts for a few months but have
struggled to find the time. But it seems like a good idea, particularly
since I get more done when I write down what I do, so you all get a rather
belated one. This covers July and August; hopefully the September one
will come closer to the end of September.
Debian
August was DebConf, which included a ton of Policy work thanks to Sean
Whitton's energy and encouragement. During DebConf, we incorporated work
from Hideki Yamane to convert Policy to reStructuredText, which has
already made it far easier to maintain. (Thanks also to David Bremner for
a lot of proofreading of the result.) We also did a massive bug triage
and closed a ton of older bugs on which there had been no forward progress
for many years.
After DebConf, as expected, we flushed out various bugs in the
reStructuredText conversion and build infrastructure. I fixed a variety
of build and packaging issues and started doing some more formatting
cleanup, including moving some footnotes to make the resulting document
more readable.
During July and August, partly at DebConf and partly not, I also merged
wording fixes for seven bugs and proposed wording (not yet finished) for
three more, as well as participated in various Policy discussions.
Policy was nearly all of my Debian work over these two months, but I did
upload a new version of the webauth
package to build with OpenSSL 1.1 and drop transitional packages.
Kerberos
I still haven't decided my long-term strategy with the Kerberos packages I
maintain. My personal use of Kerberos is now fairly marginal, but I still
care a lot about the software and can't convince myself to give it up.
This month, I started dusting off pam-krb5 in preparation for a new release. There's been an open issue
for a while around defer_pwchange support in Heimdal, and I spent
some time on that and tracked it down to an upstream bug in Heimdal as
well as a few issues in pam-krb5. The pam-krb5 issues are now fixed in
Git, but I haven't gotten any response upstream from the Heimdal bug
report. I also dusted off three old Heimdal patches and submitted them as
upstream merge requests and reported some more deficiencies I found in
FAST support. On the pam-krb5 front, I updated the test suite for the
current version of Heimdal (which changed some of the prompting) and
updated the portability support code, but haven't yet pulled the trigger
on a new release.
Other Software
I merged a couple of pull requests in podlators, one to fix various typos
(thanks, Jakub Wilk) and one to change the formatting of man page
references and function names to match the current Linux manual page
standard (thanks, Guillem Jover). I also documented a bad interaction
with line-buffered output in the Term::ANSIColor man page. Neither of
these have seen a new release yet.
2017-09-17: Consolidation haul
My parents are less fond than I am of filling every available wall in
their house with bookshelves and did a pruning of their books. A lot of
them duplicated other things that I had, or didn't sound interesting, but
I still ended up with two boxes of books (and now have to decide which of
my books to prune, since I'm out of shelf space).
Also included is the regular accumulation of new ebook purchases.
Mitch Albom — Tuesdays with Morrie (nonfiction)
Ilona Andrews — Clean Sweep (sff)
Catherine Asaro — Charmed Sphere (sff)
Isaac Asimov — The Caves of Steel (sff)
Isaac Asimov — The Naked Sun (sff)
Marie Brennan — Dice Tales (nonfiction)
Captain Eric "Winkle" Brown — Wings on My Sleeve (nonfiction)
Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths — Algorithms to Live By
(nonfiction)
Tom Clancy — The Cardinal of the Kremlin (thriller)
Tom Clancy — The Hunt for the Red October (thriller)
Tom Clancy — Red Storm Rising (thriller)
April Daniels — Sovereign (sff)
Tom Flynn — Galactic Rapture (sff)
Neil Gaiman — American Gods (sff)
Gary J. Hudson — They Had to Go Out (nonfiction)
Catherine Ryan Hyde — Pay It Forward (mainstream)
John Irving — A Prayer for Owen Meany (mainstream)
John Irving — The Cider House Rules (mainstream)
John Irving — The Hotel New Hampshire (mainstream)
Lawrence M. Krauss — Beyond Star Trek (nonfiction)
Lawrence M. Krauss — The Physics of Star Trek (nonfiction)
Ursula K. Le Guin — Four Ways to Forgiveness (sff collection)
Ursula K. Le Guin — Words Are My Matter (nonfiction)
Richard Matheson — Somewhere in Time (sff)
Larry Niven — Limits (sff collection)
Larry Niven — The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton (sff collection)
Larry Niven — The Magic Goes Away (sff)
Larry Niven — Protector (sff)
Larry Niven — World of Ptavvs (sff)
Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle — The Gripping Hand (sff)
Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle — Inferno (sff)
Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle — The Mote in God's Eye (sff)
Flann O'Brien — The Best of Myles (nonfiction)
Jerry Pournelle — Exiles to Glory (sff)
Jerry Pournelle — The Mercenary (sff)
Jerry Pournelle — Prince of Mercenaries (sff)
Jerry Pournelle — West of Honor (sff)
Jerry Pournelle (ed.) — Codominium: Revolt on War World (sff
anthology)
Jerry Pournelle & S.M. Stirling — Go Tell the Spartans (sff)
J.D. Salinger — The Catcher in the Rye (mainstream)
Jessica Amanda Salmonson — The Swordswoman (sff)
Stanley Schmidt — Aliens and Alien Societies (nonfiction)
Cecilia Tan (ed.) — Sextopia (sff anthology)
Lavie Tidhar — Central Station (sff)
Catherynne Valente — Chicks Dig Gaming (nonfiction)
J.E. Zimmerman — Dictionary of Classical Mythology (nonfiction)
This is an interesting tour of a lot of stuff I read as a teenager
(Asimov, Niven, Clancy, and Pournelle, mostly in combination with Niven
but sometimes his solo work).
I suspect I will no longer consider many of these books to be very good,
and some of them will probably go back into used bookstores after I've
re-read them for memory's sake, or when I run low on space again. But all
those mass market SF novels were a big part of my teenage years, and a few
(like Mote In God's Eye) I definitely want to read again.
Also included is a random collection of stuff my parents picked up over
the years. I don't know what to expect from a lot of it, which makes it
fun to anticipate. Fall vacation is coming up, and with it a large amount
of uninterrupted reading time.
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