New web browsers in Wheezy //at 16:14 //by abe

Since there is so much nice new stuff in Debian Wheezy, I have to split up my contributions to Mika’s #newinwheezy game on Planet Debian.

Here’s the next bunch, this time web browsers:

dillo

The FLTK-based lightweight GUI web browser Dillo comes with its own rendering engine (no JavaScript, incomplete CSS support) was already in Debian before, but was removed before the release of Debian Squeeze, because Dillo 2 relied on FLTK 2.x which had an unclear license situation back then and never made it into Debian. In the meanwhile Dillo 3 relies on FLTK 1.3 as FLTK upstream abandoned the 2.0 branch and continued development on the 1.3 branch. So I brought Dillo back into Debian with its 3.0.x release.

netsurf

The RiscOS-originating lightweight GUI web browser Netsurf was already in Debian, too, but didn’t make it into Debian Squeeze as it needed the Lemon parser generator (part of the SQLite source) to build back then and a change in Lemon caused Netsurf to no more build properly in the wrong moment. Netsurf supports CSS 2.1, but has no JavaScript support either. I’d consider its rendering engine more complete than Dillo’s.

surf and xxxterm

Surf and XXXTerm are both simple and minimalistic webkit-based browsers. Surf is easy to embed in other applications and XXXTerm features vi-like keybindings for heavy keyboard users.

To be continued… ;-)

New SSH-related stuff in Wheezy //at 15:28 //by abe

Mika had the nice idea of doing a #newinwheezy game on Planet Debian, so let’s join:

There are (at least) two new SSH related tools new in Debian Wheezy:

mosh

is the “mobile shell”, an UDP based remote shell terminal which works better than SSH in case of lag, packet loss or other forms of bad connection. I wrote about mosh in more detail about a year ago. mosh is also available for Debian Squeeze via squeeze-backports.

sshuttle

is somewhere between port-forwarding and VPN. It allows forward arbitrary TCP connections over an SSH connection without the need to configure individual port forwardings. It does not need root access on the server-side either. I wrote about sshuttle in more detail about a year ago.

To be continued… ;-)

Rendering Markdown, Asciidoc and Friends automatically while Editing //at 15:41 //by abe

Partially because of Markdown being Github’s markup format of choice, I enjoy writing documents in simple markup formats more and more.

There’s though one common annoyance with these formats compared to writing plain HTML…

The Annoyance

They need to be rendered (i.e. more or less compiled) before you can view your outpourings rendered, e.g. in the web browser. So the workflow usually is:

1. Saving the current file in your favourite editor
2. Switch to terminal with commandline
3. Cursor up, Enter
4. Switch to your favourite web browser
5. Hit the reload button

Using a Specialized Editor with Live Preview

One choice would be to use a specific editor with live rendering. The one I know in Debian (from Wheezy on) is ReText (Debian package retext). It supports Markdown and reStructuredText.

But as with most simple GUI editors, I miss there many of the advanced editing commands possible with Emacs.

Using Emacs’ Markdown Mode

Then there is the Markdown Mode for Emacs (part of Debian’s emacs-goodies-el package), where you can get a “preview” by pressing C-c C-c p. But for some reason this takes several seconds, opens a new buffer and window with the rendered HTML code and then starts (hardcoded) Firefox (which is not my preferred web browser). And if you do that a second time without closing Firefox first, it won’t just reload the file but will open a new tab. You might think that just hitting reload should suffice. But no, the new tab has a different file name, so reload doesn’t help. Additionally it may not use my preferred Markdown implementation. Meh.

Well, I probably could fix all those issues with Markdown Mode, it’s only Emacs Lisp. Heck, the called command is even configurable. But fixing at least four issues to fix one workflow annoyance? Maybe some other time, but not as long there are other nice choices…

Using inotifywait to Render on Write

So everytime you save the currently edited file, you immediately want to rerender the same HTML file from it. This can be easily automated by using Linux’ inotify kernel subsystem which notices changes to the filesystem, and reports those to applications which ask for it.

One such tool is inotifywait which can either output all or just specific events, or just exit if the first requested event occurs. With the latter it’s easy to write a while loop on the commandline which regenerates a file after every write access. I use either Pandoc or Asciidoc for that since both generate full HTML pages including header and footer, but you can use that also with Markdown to render just the HTML body. Most browsers render it correctly anyway:

while inotifywait -q -e modify index.md; do pandoc -s -f markdown -t html -o index.html index.md; done
while inotifywait -q -e modify index.txt; do asciidoc index.txt; done
while inotifywait -q -e modify index.md; do markdown index.md > index.html; done

This solution is even editor- and build-system-agnostic (But not operating-system-agnostic.)

inotifywait is part of inotify-tools, a useful set of commandline tools to interface with inotify. They’re packaged in Debian as inotify-tools, too.

Using mdpress for Markdown plus Impress.js based Slides

The ruby-written mdpress is a special case of the previous case. It’s a commandline tool to convert Markdown into Impress.js based slide shows and it has an option named --automatic which causes it to keep running and automatically update the presentation as soon as changes are made to the Markdown file.

mdpress is not yet in Debian, but there’s an ITP for it and Impress.js itself recently entered Debian as libjs-impress. Nevertheless, two dependencies (highlight.js, ITP‘ed, ruby-launchy, ITP‘ed) are still missing in Debian.

aptitude-gtk will likely vanish //at 01:06 //by abe

As Christian already wrote, there’s an Aptitude revival ongoing. We already saw this young team releasing aptitude 0.6.5 about 6 weeks ago, more commits have been made, and now we’re heading towards an 0.6.6 release quickly.

But this revival mostly covers the well-known and loved curses interface (TUI) of aptitude and not the seldomly installed GTK interface, which unfortunately never really took off:

While aptitude itself (i.e. the curses and commandline interface) is installed on nearly 99% of all Debian installations which take part in Debian’s “Popularity Contest” statistics, aptitude-gtk is only installed on 0.42% of all these installations.

One reason is likely that aptitude-gtk still hasn’t all the neat features of the curses interface. And another reason is probably that it’s still quite buggy.

Since nobody from the current Aptitude Team has the experience, leisure or time to resurrect (or even complete) aptitude-gtk, the plan is to stop building aptitude-gtk from the aptitude source package soon, i.e. to remove it from Debian for now.

Like the even less finished Qt interface of aptitude, its code will stay in the VCS, but will be unmaintained unless someone steps up to continue aptitude-gtk (or aptitude-qt, or both), maybe even as its own source package.

So if you like aptitude-gtk so much that you’re still using it and want to continue using it, please think about contributing by joining the Aptitude Team and getting aptitude’s GUI interface(s) back in shape.

Another option would be to find a mentor so that resurrecting (one of) aptitude’s GUI interfaces could become (again) a potential project at Debian’s participation at Google’s Summer of Code.

Please direct any questions about aptitude-gtk or aptitude-qt to the Aptitude Development Mailing List. Or even better, join the discussion in this thread.

xen-tools 4.2 released //at 13:55 //by abe

Last night, I released xen-tools 4.2 and also uploaded it to Debian Unstable. It also should become part of the upcoming Debian stable release called Squeeze. (Thanks, Mehdi!)

For those who are missing xen-tools in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx or Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat, there’s now a xen-tools PPA containing the current stable package for both Ubuntu releases.

Major changes since the 4.2 release candidate 1:

• Tons of documentation improvements
• Preliminary support for Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal and Debian 7.0 Wheezy (Closes #597521)
• More robustness on exotic combinations of command-line options

Major changes since 4.2 beta 1:

• Uses GeoIP for Debian mirrors: Default Debian mirror is now cdn.debian.net
• Uses apt-config to parse Dom0’s apt.conf. (Closes #560011)
• With --verbose, the output of commands called by xen-tools (e.g. debootstrap) is not only logged, but also printed to STDOUT. (Closes #513126)
• Adds btrfs support.

New Team Member

I’d also like to welcome Stéphane Jourdois as member of the xen-tools development team who contributed quite a lot of the new code in 4.2. See GitHub’s Impact Graph or Ohloh’s List of Contributors.

Roadmap

If there’s no need for a bug fix release, the next release will be 5.0 and will be the result of some heavy refactoring. Our aim is:

• less code duplication
• more modularity
• more consistency over all included scripts and hooks

We will probably also use Perl::Critic to improve the code consistency and quality further. (Thanks Renée for the idea!)