Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 04, 2023

• Systemd Container and Podman in GitHub CI [Ed: Everything that's wrong in one place: Microsoft/IBM systemd, Microsoft GitHub (proprietary), Podman (IBM), and containers (blobs typically)]

  As D-Installer consists of several components like D-Bus backend, CLI or web frontend, we see a need to test in CI that each component can start and communicate properly with each other. For this we use a test framework and more importantly GitHub CI where we need a systemd container which is not documented at all. In the following paragraphs we would like to share with you how we did it so that so that each of you can be inspired by it or use it for your own project.

  A Container Including Systemd

  We created a testing container in our build service that includes what is needed for the backend and the frontend. After some iterations, we discovered that we depend on NetworkManager which is really coupled with systemd. Additionally, we needed to access the journal for debugging purposes, which also does not work without systemd. For those reasons, we decided to include systemd.

• Maui Release Briefing # 1

  A new release is now available! – with internationalization – supporting multiple languages, introducing new libraries and apps, a more cohesive look-and-feel, and improvements to the current stack of apps.

  Today, we bring you a new special report on the Maui Project’s progress.

  Maui 2.2.1 was released about three months ago, and since then, we have added new features, bug fixes, and improvements to the Maui set of apps and frameworks; the Maui Shell components and new apps have been updated and pushed for a new release. The following blog post will cover changes and highlights from the last three months, which pave the road for a Maui Desktop environment for convergence.

  Community

  To follow the Maui Project’s development or say hi, you can join us on Telegram:https://t.me/mauiproject.

• Niko Matsakis: Trait transformers (send bounds, part 3)

  I previously introduced the “send bound” problem, which refers to the need to add a Send bound to the future returned by an async function. This post continues my tour over the various solutions that are available. This post covers “Trait Transformers”. This proposal arose from a joint conversation with myself, Eric Holk, Yoshua Wuyts, Oli Scherer, and Tyler Mandry. It’s a variant of Eric Holk’s inferred async send bounds proposal as well as the work that Yosh/Oli have been doing in the keyword generics group. Those posts are worth reading as well, lots of good ideas there.¹

  Core idea: the trait transformer

• Mozilla Performance Blog: Ancient Bug Discovered in the Visual Metrics Processing Script

  Recently, we had an odd regression in our page load tests. You can find that bug here. The regression was quite large, but when a developer investigated, they found that the regression looked more like an improvement.

  Below you can see an example of this, and note how the SpeedIndex of the Before video shows up before the page is loaded. You can also see that in the After video the page seems to load faster (less frames with gray boxes) even though we have a higher SpeedIndex.

• Adam Young: Hello World in rust on ARM64 includes a lot of code

  I had not taken the time to try and work with Rust on ARM64 in the past. Since I was doing disassembly of simple C programs on an one of our servers, I figured it couldn’t hurt to try the same thing with rust.