Present Perfect

mach

I had been thinking a few days about how a rewrite of mach would work. I wanted it to be RPM-installable, run like a regular command app, and allow me to script it to easily setup builds for more than one platform and more than one package.

I had probably reached the limits of what I could sanely add using make syntax. I was also getting increasingly frustrated with the way I had to work around issues and handle conditional constructs.

So, it was time to rewrite mach in a sane language. And it's also time for me to learn Python. I have the "Learning Python" book sitting on my shelf for a few months and it was time to put it to use. So, after writing up what I wanted it to do in general and how it would work, I started writing python, basing myself on jamesh's jhbuild script for GNOME.

It's incredible how quickly one can get something running in Python. I only spent about four hours on it and I already had at least a fourth of the functionality working.

Today I have a day off, so I'll probably keep working on it, hopefully getting it to a state where it can do everything the old mach could do, and having a lot of fun learning python while doing it as well !

LDAP

My parents want me to set up a home server for them at home. One of the things that they specifically asked for was some way to share contact information in Outlook and Evolution from every computer. So I started doing some digging and figured LDAP was the way to go. I started reading HOWTO's, guides, mailing lists, and so on.

Here's what I learnt:

• LDAP is good for this because it's a directory service (duh) and tuned to more reading than writing
• Evolution, Outlook and Mozilla all use different ways of storing similar data in the LDAP tree
• A lot of people have attempted at creating LDAP schemas that sort of unify all of these approaches
• Finding your way in a swamp like this is hard
• None of these clients seem to actually let you *change* the same data on the LDAP server

I was particularly stumped by the last thing. It seems like such a natural thing to want to have working that it's very surprising none of the clients allowed me to. I know that Outlook allows you to seamlessly change data on the server through Exchange. That kind of explains why Outlook can't do the same to LDAP directly :)

I did find a 1.0 Evolution manual reference to the possibility of doing this in Evolution 1.0, but without much to go on. And looking at the same section in Evolution 1.2, it seems that functionality got removed.

So I started digging around Freshmeat for applications that could help me out, and found two web-based frontends: aldap and Rolodap.

I gave aldap a try first, because it seemed the simpler of the two to use. I also decided I'd spec it out for inclusion in Fedora if it was any good. The code looked a little messy, and I had to turn off stuff in apache I'd rather not (because that makes it so much harder to make an RPM work out of the box, not to say impossible), but other than that it did seem to work well. I was able to add contacts and browse them from Outlook and Evolution.

The problems for a decent RPM were numerous however. The RPM has to patch /etc/openldap/slapd.conf to add the schema, the code needs fixing not to use globals, and it needs an extra PHP page allowing people to create an initial database. I did the first thing (which might not be the wisest thing to do, but it does work), now somebody needs to do two and three :)

I mailed the author with my suggestions and he was very responsive. It's always nice when that happens.

Labour Day

To celebrate our day off at Labour Day, I invited a bunch of friends over to have a Slack Night the night before. We watched three Kevin Smith movies in a row: Clerks, Chasing Amy and Dogma. All three great, and it does add something to it when watching these in sequence. There are various cross-references, and Jay and Silent Bob are funny to see evolve (or rather, not evolve :))

Music

Eagerly anticipated the new Arab Strap disc, "Monday at the hug and pint". Great CD. And nice to be able to buy another CD that isn't copy-protected with stupidity.

mach I had been thinking a few days about how a rewrite of mach would work. I wanted it to be RPM-installable, run like a regular command app, and allow...