Abiword for EL-7

Over Thanksgiving break, I decided to go through a long list of emails that were marked "when you have a spare moment". I really didn't have one but I realized that many of those emails were crufty and old. One was some people asking about getting abiword together for EL-7. This looked like a straightforward enough task so I got into it and started working out all the packages that would need to be branched to say EPEL and what would be needed to compile them.
At first the packages were pretty easy to bring over from Fedora:

• ./aiksaurus/aiksaurus-1.2.1-34.el7.centos.src.rpm
• ./gtkmathview/gtkmathview-0.8.0-19.el7.centos.src.rpm 
• ./libwps/libwps-0.4.4-1.el7.centos.src.rpm 
• ./wv/wv-1.2.9-13.el7.centos.src.rpm 
• ./loudmouth/loudmouth-1.5.3-1.el7.centos.src.rpm  
• ./ots/ots-0.5.0-12.el7.centos.src.rpm

Then we got to the ones which didn't compile so cleanly.

• ./minisat/minisat2-2.2.0-5.fc18.src.rpm
• ./link-grammar/link-grammar-5.0.8-3.el7.centos.src.rpm
• ./abiword/abiword-3.0.1-12.el7.centos.src.rpm

The latest minisat2 does compile but I was getting all kinds of compilation errors with link-grammar-5.3 in using it. Backing down to an older version of minisat2 and link-grammar I could get other parts to compile but I could not get abiword to compile. Through some pointers from Yaakov  Selkowitz who had dealt with this package in Cygwin, I was able to get it compiled. I then opened an email to the link-grammar people who figured out that there was a bug in their code when compiling on CentOS or Scientific Linux.  They haven't spun a new release with the fix yet but when they do I can update the packages.  At the moment, the abiword package has to be compiled with the --disable-introspection flag which probably limits some functionality.
In the end, we have a set of packages now available for testing a copr:

[smooge-Abiword]
name=Copr repo for Abiword owned by smooge
baseurl=https://copr-be.cloud.fedoraproject.org/results/smooge/Abiword/epel-7-$basearch/
type=rpm-md
skip_if_unavailable=True
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://copr-be.cloud.fedoraproject.org/results/smooge/Abiword/pubkey.gpg
repo_gpgcheck=0
enabled=1
enabled_metadata=1

Good luck and let me know if it works for you.

Where has puppet gone in EPEL-6

This week various people using EPEL on RHEL and CentOS 6 have found that the puppet package is no longer provided by EPEL. The reason for this is due to the way EPEL packages are built and kept inside the repository. A package needs a sponsor so that we can hopefully get bug fixes and security updates to it. In the case of puppet this package is sponsored by the user kanarip. However, most packages aren't whole pieces, they rely on other software.. in this case the package puppet relies on a lot of different ruby gems of which one of them was called ruby-shadow. This package was orphaned 30 weeks ago and while it did have other people watching it, none of them took over the package.

Depending on: ruby-shadow (3), status change: 2016-04-13 (30 weeks ago)
        puppet (maintained by: kanarip, domcleal, gchamoul, georgiou, jehane, jpo, lzap, mmagr, moses, rharrison, skottler, stahnma)
                puppet-2.7.26-2.el6.noarch requires ruby-shadow = 1.4.1-13.el6

        puppet-gluster (maintained by: averi, purpleidea)
                puppet-gluster-0.0.3-1.el6.noarch requires puppet = 2.7.26-2.el6

        puppetlabs-stdlib (maintained by: averi, gchamoul, purpleidea, shlomizadok)
                puppetlabs-stdlib-4.5.1-2.20150121git7a91f20.el6.noarch requires puppet = 2.7.26-2.el6

Last week a large cleanup was done to clean out orphaned packages from EPEL which removed ruby-shadow. Once that was removed, then all of the other packages depending on ruby-shadow were also removed. Today various people reinstalling systems found puppet wasn't around and came onto #epel to ask.. which seems to have gotten the packages responsored and hopefully they will be back in the EPEL release in a day or so.

This problem has been happening a lot lately. I think it shows quite a few problems with how EPEL is set up and managed. For this, I take responsibility as I said I would try to clean it up after FOSDEM 2016 and it is still happening.

[Correction 2016-12-01 added. Please see my updated post.]

Another tale, apropos nothing again

When Nema got back to her village she found that her house had nothing in it for planting the next year. Her parents were dead, and her younger brothers were used to drinking and gambling at the tavern house with what was left of the inheritance.

Now the Duke's fields had been cleared recently, and it was the law that peasants could gather any seed left over from the harvest. Nema asked her brothers if they would come help her do so. 

"Not I" they said, for they had games they wanted to play.

So Nema went through the fields and gathered as much seed as she could get. 

When the spring came, she needed to plant the seeds. She asked her brothers if they would help.

"Not I" they said, for they had ale they wanted to drink.

The grain grew and it needed to be harvested. Nema asked her brothers again if they would help.

"Not I" they said for their was both ale and games to think about.

The grain was harvested and milled at the miller. It was time to bake the bread, but none of the brothers were around to help out. Yet when the bread was just out of the oven.. who were to show up? All the brothers asking for bread.

Now Nema could have said something like "Thems that works gets to eat." but she was kind hearted and liked to share. So she gave them loaves from the oven and what did they cry out? "We wanted pumpernickel and this is just plain rye". 

A tale apropos nothing

Once long ago, there was a war where many soldiers went off to war. In those days, win or lose if the war was over you were dropped out of the army and walked your way back to your home countless miles away.

Now there was one formerly conscripted soldier named Nema who walked through the forests and she came upon a village. Now Nema was very hungry but had no money as whatever payment was either long gone. She begged from house but found that the villagers did not like soldiers and told her to go somewhere else. In fact, the villagers were tired of soldiers and fighting and looting and always being the ones trodden on. They didn't even like each other that much because they were all sure that someone had been a collaborator sending soldiers to their house to take their last food.

When the villager had gone to all the houses, Nema sat in the square wondering what to do. Her grumbling stomach told her that she couldn't walk to another village. She had nothing to trade as the only weapon the army had let her take back, an axe, had broken when she had cut wood for her meal to villages back. Looking at the head of the axe an idea sprang into her mind. Nema remembered that one of the villagers had a large cauldron in her front yard.. probably to clean clothes or something..

Going to the villager hut, Nema asked again if she could borrow the pot to make a soup. She would clean it out as a service but she had a magical axe which just needed some water and a fire to make the tastiest soup ever. The old villager eyed Nema as crazy, but because the cauldron was outside and it did need a good cleaning thought it would be an even score. Nema cleaned the pot and gathered water from the village well. She got a fire going and put her axe in it.

The villagers started to gather around this crazy soldier and with much laughter asking how the water soup tasted. Nema would spoon out a bit and say "hmm it is OK but it just needs something to flavor it up a bit." One of the villagers thought and said "Oh I have some old beans.. maybe that will do it." They got the beans from where ever they were hidden and the soldier put it in the pot. Again the villagers asked "oh how is the soup". The soldier stirred some more and said "Oh the beans helped a lot but now it needs a balance." Another villager remembered some old carrots and onions they had. These were added to the pot. This went on for a while and shortly afterwords there was a wondrous soup for everyone to share and eat.

After all the soup had been divvied up, Nema took her magic axe head out of the bottom and put it back in her pouch. She would make it back to her own village many miles away, and this villagers would talk with each other and make many soups from what they had through the long winter.

Updating Nagios in EPEL-7 (Looking for Testers)

One of the projects on my plate this year is to update the Fedora Project nagios server so that monitoring is done through a better template system in ansible. [The main reasons for using nagios versus going to another system are the following: a) We already have nagios in place and have used it for years, b) it doesn't use/need a database backend for either its webpages or monitoring systems, c) before I can compare other systems I need an updated version of nagios to know what features we would get.]

In looking at Nagios, I found that the current maintainer was not responding to tickets. In fact at the time I was looking for him, their email domain wasn't registered in DNS or whois. While that has been fixed, there has been no response to emails so I have had to start the Non Responsive Packager process. The other item found was that we had various problems in the 4.0.8 package which were only supported and fixed in the current version 4.2.2 . While I started working on this, a person with the nick of Petaris showed up in #epel on freenode with the same problem. They needed to get an updated package into place and were looking for help on what was needed to update the package. Jason Tibbitts helped him set up an fedpkg environment and worked through a couple of problems that were happening. Last week, I looked over the package some more and realized there were problems with the old layout.

The upstream Nagios package assumes that it has complete write access to /var so it drops various configuration and control files in the %localstatedir configuration point. That doesn't work in things like Fedora (and probably Debian?) where it was chosen to put all of that in /var/log/nagios/ . This allowed for everything to be in one spot but as the Nagios code gets more complex more subdirectories with different needs occur (including it looked like /var/log/nagios/log/). I reworked the patches so that they allowed for /var as the %localstatedir and then put various control files in /var/spool/nagios and the log files and their archives in /var/log/nagios. [This may be the wrong place, please let me know and I can fix.]

Petaris took the patches and some other comments and put together a koji build that has the test code in it. Work was also put together on updating nrpe to version 3.0.1 and nagios-plugins to 2.1.3. There is an selinux problem we are trying to work together with a policy that should allow people to work until it is fixed upstream.

In order to make testing easier, I have created a copr for all the current Nagios packages. Currently it works on EPEL-7.

dnf copr enable smooge/Nagios_Update # if you have CentOS dnf
yum copr enable smooge/Nagios_Update # may work also.

Depending on the feedback I am getting on this, I can then work on updating the packages in EPEL-6 and Fedora Rawhide. [This is also my first copr in a long time so I may have built things in a less than optimal way.]

PSA: Fedorahosted.org will be end of lifed in 2017.

Earlier this week Kevin Fenzi posted to the Fedora announce list that fedorahosted.org would be going away in early 2017. Fedora started offering FedoraHosted in  2007 years before GitHub and such were around. It was based around using Trac from https://trac.edgewall.org/ which fit with the pre-git use of SVN  that many projects used for source code control.  [Trac also had plugins for many other revision control systems as this was a time frame where there were many and people had very strong opinions of which ones needed to be supported.]

In any case, Fedorahosted was very useful for a long time, but in the last 2-3 years has seen a fall off in usage with many projects moving to GitHub. Many of the other projects had become nesting grounds for various spam and some malware. This became very evident during the summer Spam Storm when 27000+ spam pages were created in a couple of tracs. In cleaning those out, I found that around 40 other tracs had various 'tickets' with spam in them that were regularly 'updated' by the spammers for years but the project owners had been '/dev/nulling' any tickets so weren't aware that it was happening.

As outlined Kevin outlines in the email, what will happen is the following:

1. No new fedorahosted projects will be created.
2. Owners of projects will be sent an email letting them know that the sunset is going to occur on February 29, 2017.
3. The owners can then move the project to another source repository system. Examples of these would be:
   • pagure.io
   • gitlab.com
   • github.com
   • launchpad.net
   • others?
4. On February 29, 2017, the files will be put into read-only mode and no further updates will be done. 

As with all such end of life projects, I expect that after number 4 there will be "Hey, no one told me that this was going to happen." emails which will require some sort of 5.. but I am hoping that regular blogs and posts and emails will keep that to a minimum.

PSA: How to unsubscribe from a mailing list

So you have gotten onto some mailing list which was entertaining at first, but is now a drag, time sink or just filling up your mailbox with gigabits of unwanted emails. How do you unsubscribe?

What you do not do is send an email to the list with the word unsubscribe in the body. 

From: "Bob Smith" bob@smith.mail 
Date: Thu, 18 Aug 2016 01:56:16 +0200
To: A Mailing List mailing-list@lists.place.org 
Subject: Re: some subject
unsubscribe

This email does not unsubscribe you from the vast majority of mailing list software out there but instead sends your email to unknown hundreds or thousands of people who are all going to get this email and are now going to fill your mail box with emails that will tell you to not do that but never really explain how to unsubscribe. [They may also tell you do things with yourself or farm animals which are anatomically impossible or potentially life dangerous. People are weird in thinking that is helpful.]

A long, long, long, time ago as in before 1988.. many mailing list software programs would unsubscribe you if you did exactly what Bob did above. When an email went to the list software it would look through all the text and if it found the words unsubscribe it would do that. Of course if you sent an email using that word for some other reason you ended up off the list with little idea why. The next version of the mailing list software would just do this if the unsubscribe was by itself like Bob did above. This worked "ok" in the world of RFC822  where what you saw is what you sent and nothing special was added. It didn't work for in the world of MIME, HTML or other formats (say not an ARPA email but a BITNET email) as the Internet became "mainstream" around 1994 or so. At this point a lot of people were accidentally unsubscribing or being maliciously unsubscribed by trolls who would forge emails saying they were bob@foo.org but weren't.

By the time the third generation of mailing list software came around in 1998, most software does allow for a naked unsubscribe to get you off the list. Instead you either have to go to a specific webpage and unsubscribe or have to email a specific alias that will start the process of un-subscription. For the web it is usually a multi step process of you go to link, you log in, you unsubscribe and you get a confirmation email that you were unsubscribed. For the email address you will usually get an email sent to you asking if you really want to unsubscribe and if you do email back with a special one time code included in the email. This is all because of the ever present malicious troll problem of people who think it is loads of fun to harass people either because that person exists or for the 'lols' which they seem to trade under their bridges for self-validation.

Which brings us back to how do I know how to really unsubscribe from a list. Every email has a bunch of 'hidden' headers that are included which tell various software where the email maybe came from and where it is going. It will also tell software extra data like how to display it and can contain things like how to subscribe, find an archive or unsubscribe. The current standard way this is done is with List-Id: headers. Here are some examples:

Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help@cygwin.com; run by ezmlm
Precedence: bulk
List-Id: cygwin.cygwin.com
List-Unsubscribe: mailto:cygwin-unsubscribe-BOB=bob.mail@cygwin.com
List-Subscribe: mailto:cygwin-subscribe@cygwin.com
List-Archive: http://sourceware.org/ml/cygwin/
List-Post: mailto:cygwin@cygwin.com
List-Help: mailto:cygwin-help@cygwin.com, http://sourceware.org/ml/#faqs

or

Precedence: list
Reply-To: server@lists.fedoraproject.org
List-Id: server.lists.fedoraproject.org
Archived-At: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/server@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/457OVFFRFAC7ASPHWZ5OTCH7GACAUYYE/
List-Archive: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/server@lists.fedoraproject.org/
List-Help: mailto:server-request@lists.fedoraproject.org?subject=help
List-Post: mailto:server@lists.fedoraproject.org
List-Subscribe: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/server@lists.fedoraproject.org,
 mailto:server-join@lists.fedoraproject.org
List-Unsubscribe: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/server@lists.fedoraproject.org,
 mailto:server-leave@lists.fedoraproject.org

So from the above we have an unsubscribe for ezmlm mailing list system which is to send an email to a specific email address. For the Fedora lists we use Mailman 3 which has both a mailing list address and a web page to go to start the unsubscribe process.

How do you find these hidden headers? It depends on the mail software you are using. Most of them have some sort of "Show original" or "Show Source" which will pop up a new window which will show a lot of headers. In other mailing list software, you will see a button which says "unsubscribe" which will look for the headers and then fire off the things it says in there.

[Edited 2016-08-18] I realized I completely forgot the obvious way to unsubscribe from Mailman lists. At the bottom of every email from a Mailman email list contains the follow:

--
devel mailing list
devel@lists.fedoraproject.org
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org

That link at the bottom is all you need to click on to get on the road to un-subscription. You will be directed to a page that will ask you to login. You can do so through one of several methods which will get you to a page that looks like this

Click on unsubscribe, and you should be unsubscribed from the list. It is a lot more steps than just typing "unsubscribe" in an email, but in a self-service world that has a lot of trolls.. it is what you end up doing.