Programming Leftovers
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TSDgeos' blog: The KDE Qt5 Patch Collection has been rebased on top of Qt 5.15.8
The Commercial Qt 5.15.8 release introduced two bugs that have later been fixed. Thanks to that, our Patchset Collection has been able to incorporate the the fix for one of the issues [1] and revert for the other [2] and the Free Software users will never be affected by it!
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Debian has removed Python 2 from its next version
Since Ubuntu generally follows Debian for things like this, I expect that the next Ubuntu LTS release (which would normally be Ubuntu 24.04 in April of 2024) won't include Python 2 either. As I write this, the in development Ubuntu 'lunar' still contains the python2-minimal package (this is 'Lunar Lobster', expected to be 23.04, cf). With four months to go before the expected release (and less time before a package freeze), I don't know if Canonical will follow Debian and remove the python2-minimal package. I wouldn't be surprised either way.
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Fault-Tolerant SFTP scripting - Retry Failed Transfers Automatically | Linux Journal
The whole of modern networking is built upon an unreliable medium. Routing equipment has free license to discard, corrupt, reorder, or duplicate data which it forwards. The understanding of the IP layer in TCP/IP is that there are no guarantees of accuracy. No IP network can claim to be 100% reliable.
The TCP layer acts as a guardian atop IP, ensuring data that it produces is correct. This is achieved with a number of techniques that sometimes purposely lose data in order to determine network limits. As most might know, TCP provides a connection-based network with guaranteed delivery atop an IP connectionless network that can and does discard traffic at will.
How curious it is that our file transfer tools are not similarly robust in the face of broken TCP connections. The SFTP protocol resembles both its ancestors and peers in that no effort is made to recover from TCP errors that cause connection closure. There are tools to address failed transfers (reget and reput), but these are not triggered automatically in a regenerated TCP session (those requiring this property might normally turn to NFS, but this requires both privilege and architectural configuration). Users and network administrators alike might be rapt with joy should such tools suddenly become pervasive.