Welcome to All Cloud, No Cattle Weekly #15: Left Pad Strikes Back!
Tech
Ruby off the Rails
Thomas Claburn for The Register:
Mendler thanked Nocera for letting him know and promptly moved the latest version, 0.4.0, and version 0.3.6 under GPLv2, and withdrew prior versions from distribution on RubyGems.org, the package registry used by Ruby developers. He then archived the mimemagic GitHub repo, meaning it’s no longer being actively developed.
This had the unfortunate effect of breaking the popular web development framework Ruby on Rails, which includes mimemagic 0.3.5 as a dependency.
Do you want a left-pad incident? BECAUSE THIS IS HOW YOU GET A LEFT PAD INCIDENT!
vim Is the Future
Emily St:
Vim is old. It’s a program that was originally written for the Amiga operating system, first available in 1991.
Emily’s post is quite old but was somehow marked unread in my feed reader this morning. Two main takeaways:
- I had no idea that
vimhails from the Amiga. Very cool. - Emily’s dotfiles setup is amazing. I have stolen it, and will have some customizations pushed up soon.
CloudLinux Launches AlmaLinux, CentOS Linux clone
Steven J Vaughan-Nichols at ZDNet:
When Red Hat, CentOS’s Linux parent company, announced it was “shifting focus from CentOS Linux, the rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), to CentOS Stream, which tracks just ahead of a current RHEL release,” the move vexed many CentOS users. As a result, CentOS co-founder, Gregory Kurtzer, announced he’d create his own RHEL clone and CentOS replacement: Rocky Linux. Then, on Rocky’s heels, commercial CentOS distributor CloudLinux announced it would create its own new CentOS clone, Lenix. Now, under a new name, AlmaLinux OS is here with its first release.
One way you know that RedHat fucked this up, is by seeing just how many replacement projects have already gained so much traction and attention.
Fano Framework: Web application framework for modern Pascal
The fact that this exists means I have to do something with it. Like many students of the 90s, Pascal was my first general purpose programming language, and it’s nice to see that some flames are still being carried.
PHP: Changes to Git commit workflow
Nikita Popov, writing to PHP-DEV:
Yesterday (2021-03-28) two malicious commits were pushed to the php-src repo from the names of Rasmus Lerdorf and myself. We don’t yet know how exactly this happened, but everything points towards a compromise of the git.php.net server (rather than a compromise of an individual git account).
While investigation is still underway, we have decided that maintaining our own git infrastructure is an unnecessary security risk, and that we will discontinue the git.php.net server. Instead, the repositories on GitHub, which were previously only mirrors, will become canonical. This means that changes should be pushed directly to GitHub rather than to git.php.net.
Good call. I know some older projects that continue to resist this move for entirely valid reasons, but those reasons are becoming less and less compelling by the day.
Glynn Lunney: 1936-2021
Robert Barron writes:
Half a century after the moon landings, Lunney’s words are still relevant to Site Reliability Engineers, not only those responsible for launching rockets, but for deployment in any technological endeavour.
Pour one out for one of the greats. The spirit of the Apollo project, especially in the face of adversity, informs a lot of the technical world today, and Lunney was at the heart of the development of that ethos.
It may seem like a bit of a stretch to get from landing a man on the moon to running a hotel booking or video streaming site, but we have very similar discussions every day. Lunney’s “then we began to build a framework below that for how much redundancy we wanted to have remaining in order to continue” happens every day in our incident management, where we have to trade off fixing problems with what potential problems we could face later on as a result of our choices.
Grab Bag
The Complete April Fools RFCs
RFCs are the documents that the IETF publishes to document how the Internet works. On April 1 of each year sometimes one or two are published that are parodies. This book collects them all under one cover in a book suitable for your coffee table, office, or hidden somewhere so your friends don’t know how geeky your humor is.
I’m disappointed that you can’t have it delivered by IP over Avian Carrier.