jmtd → log → What have I been up to?

It's been a little while since I've written about what I've been up to. The truth is I've been busy with moving house - and I'll write a bit more about that at another time. But asides from that there have been some bits and bobs.

I use a little tool called archivemail to tidy up old listmail (my policy is to retain 30 days of listmail for most lists). If I unsubscribe to a list, then eventually I end up with an empty mail folder corresponding to that list. I decided it would be nice to extend archivemail to delete mailboxes if, after the archiving has taken place, the mailbox is empty. Doing this properly means adding delete routines to Python's "mailbox" library, which is part of the Python standard library. I've therefore started work on a patch for Python.

Since this is an enhancement, Python would only accept a patch for Python 3. Therefore, eventually, I would also have to port archivemail from Python 2 to 3. "archivemail" is basically abandonware at the moment, and the principal Debian maintainer is MIA. There was a release critical bug filed against it, so I joined the Debian Python team to co-maintain archivemail in Debian. I've worked around the RC bug but a proper fix is still to come.

In other Debian news, I've been mostly quiet. A small patch for squishyball to get it to build on Hurd, and a temporary fix patch for lhasa to get it to build on the build daemons for all architectures (problems with the test suite). All three of lhasa, squishyball and archivemail need a little bit of love to get them into shape before the jessie freeze.

I've had plans to write up some of the more interesting technical things I've been up to at work, but with the huge successes of the School we've been so busy I haven't had time. Hopefully you can soon look forward to some of our further adventures with puppet, including evaluating Shibboleth modules, some stuff about handling user directories, bind mounts and LVM volumes and actually publishing some of our more useful internal modules; I hope we will also (soon) have some useful data to go with our experiments with Linux LXC containers versus KVM-powered virtual machines in some of our use-cases. I've also got a few bits and pieces on Systemd to write up.