2018-06-03: Free software log (May 2018)
The wonders of a week of vacation that was spent mostly working on free
software! The headline releases were remctl 3.15, which fixes a long-standing correctness bug on the server
and adds more protocol validation and far better valgrind support, and
podlators 4.11, which fixes a buncho f
long-standing bugs in Pod::Text and its subclasses.
In support of those releases, I also released new versions of my three
major development infrastructure packages:
On the Debian front, I realized that I had intended to donate
libnet-duo-perl to the Debian Perl team but never finished uploading the
package I had prepared (and even signed). I merged that with some other
pending changes in Git and actually uploaded it. (I'm still hanging on to
maintenance of the upstream Net::Duo Perl
module because I'm kicking around the idea of using Duo on a small scale
for some personal stuff, although at the moment I'm not using the module
at all and therefore am not making changes to it.)
I also finally started working on wallet
again, although I'm of two minds about the future of that package. It
needs a ton of work — the Perl style and general backend approach is all
wrong, and I've learned far better ways to do equivalent things since.
And one could make a pretty solid argument that
Vault does essentially the same
thing, has a lot more resources behind it, and has a ton of features that
I haven't implemented or may never implement. I think I still like my ACL
model better, and of course there's the Kerberos support (which is
probably superior to Vault), but I haven't looked at Vault closely enough
to be sure and it may be that it's better in those areas as well.
I don't use wallet for my personal stuff, but we still do use it in a few
places at work. I kind of want to overhaul the package and fix it, since
I like the concept, but in the broader scheme of things it's probably a
"waste" of my time to do this.
Free software seems full of challenges like this. I'll at least put out
another release, and then probably defer making a decision for a while
longer.
2018-06-03: wallet 1.4
wallet is a secret management system that I developed at Stanford,
primarily to distribute keytab management. As mentioned in an earlier
post, I'm not entirely sure it has significant advantages over
Vault, but it does handle Kerberos
natively and we're still using it for some things, so I'm still
maintaining it.
This release incorporates a bunch of improvements to the experimental
support for managing keytabs for Active Directory principals, all
contributed by Bill MacAllister and Dropbox. Anyone using the previous
experimental Active Directory support should read through the
configuration options, since quite a lot has changed (for the better).
Also fixed in this release are some stray strlcpy and strlcat references
that were breaking systems that include them in libc, better
krb5.conf configuration handling, better support for Perl in
non-standard locations, and a bunch of updates and modernization to the
build and test frameworks.
You can get the latest release from the wallet distribution page.
2018-06-03: rra-c-util 7.2
rra-c-util is my collection of portability and utility code that I reuse
in all the C and Perl projects I maintain.
Most of the changes in this release are Autoconf macro improvements
prompted by Julien ÉLIE. This release incorporates his work on
RRA_PROG_PYTHON, RRA_LIB_PYTHON, and RRA_PYTHON_MODULE macros, which
support both Python 2 and Python 3. It also improves the RRA_PROG_PERL
macro to make PERL a substitution variable and to check that building
against libperl actually works. Finally, RRA_LIB_BDB, RRA_LIB_OPENSSL,
RRA_LIB_SASL, and RRA_LIB_ZLIB now check that the headers for the library
are found as well as the library itself (based on Julien's work in INN).
The docs/urls test, which was always misnamed, is now
style/obsolete-strings, since its role is to check for obsolete patterns
in my code (old URLs, that sort of thing). It now checks for my old
RRA_MAINTAINER_TESTS environment variable, which I replaced with the Perl
Lancaster Consensus environment variables a long time ago.
This release also fixes a few more minor issues with test code and the
script to update the version of all Perl modules in a package.
You can get the latest release from the rra-c-util distribution page.
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