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.

Posted: 2018-06-03 10:08 — Why no comments?

Last spun 2022-02-06 from thread modified 2018-06-06