Ins and Outs of Inputs

Have you tried to access Zimbra or Google Calendar from command line? I have. And I couldn't find any normal command line client that would be able to read and write these calendars, display alerts etc. Well there is a googlecl project , but it's specific for Google Calendar and is not using standard WebDav iCal access methods.

Thus I set out to create console application that would fulfil my needs. What are my requirements?:

• Read/write access to Google Calendar and Zimbra (at least)
• Multiple remote calendars
• Working alerts
• Nice ncurses UI (but also ability to just display some info and quit)
• Correct handling of timezones
• Integration with mail client (open ics files received by email)
• I guess a lot more :-)

I had a look at existing python modules that work on iCalendar, WebDAV and combination of both. There are quite a few of them, but I just didn't like their APIs. They were usually complex and required knowledge of iCal specification. So I decided to create simplified module that would be easy to understand (even if not so powerful).

I named the project pywebcal (yes, unimaginative) and it's now on github. I would LOVE some input. I know it's far from perfect (or complete), but let's see. For now it offers read-only support for Zimbra (Google should work too but I haven't tested in a while).

You can have a look at the example directory that contains one simple example you can run in-place and see if it works :-) I did my best to create proper test cases covering problems with timezones and whatnot, and this helped me quite a lot with recent refactoring. I am now using vobject library as my backend and it is rather nice to use. Plan is to allow access to vobject components so that my simplified API is not preventing some advanced modifications.

Next step is obviously to start working on ncurses application itself. Anyone wants to help?

This is gonna be short post for people experiencing various issues with pinentry and gpg-agent. This is mostly happening on systems with only gpgv2.

I have been asked to look at bug 676034 in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. There we actually two issues there:

• Running pinentry with DISPLAY variable set but no available GUI pinenty helpers
• Using gpg on console after doing "su -"

First problem was relatively easy to figure out. Pinentry finds DISPLAY variable and looks for pinentry-gtk, pinentry-qt or pinentry-qt4 helpers to ask for passphrase. Unfortunately if none of these GUI helpers can be found, pinentry doesn't try their console counterpart. Workaround is simple: unset DISPLAY variable if you are working over ssh connection (or don't use X forwarding when you don't need it). More recent pinentry features proper failover to pinentry-curses

Second problem was a bit more tricky to figure out, although in the end it was a facepalm situation. When trying to use GNUPG as root on console, hoping for pinentry-curses to ask for passphrase, users were instead introduced to this message: ERR 83886179 Operation cancelled. To make things more confusing, everything seemed to work when logging in as root directly from ssh.

At first I thought that this must be caused by environment variables, but this seemed to be incorrect assumption. Instead the reason was that current tty was owned by original owner and not root. This seemed to cause problem with gpg-agent and/or ncurses pinentry. I will investigate who was the real culprit here, but this bug seems to be fixed at least in recent Fedoras

So what should you do if you have weird problems with gpg and pinentry as root? Here's what:

    $ su -
    [enter password]
    # chown root `tty`
    [use gpg, pinentry as you want]
  

Easy right? As a final note...I've been to FOSDEM and I plan to blog about it, but I guess I am waiting for the videos to show online. It's quite possible I'll blog about it before that however, since it's taking a while.

I have written before about my workflow in Fedora. This workflow includes a relatively high number of rebasing where I squash last two commits into one. I use it to quickly refine and test patches. My history then usually looks something like this:

$ git log --format=oneline --decorate=no | head -3
2db8eacd7f7c20be88824caae5f5af16b9520d34 temp
443bb0f019c87f0090bb9da295a019c0eee23729 Add conditional BRs to enable ff merge between f14
b4c602f9f044598544cff3d68710f68b9447ea0f Fix installation of pom files for artifact jars
  

Where 443bb0f is my first attempt at the fix and 2db8eac is a fixed fix :-). Before pushing this into upstream repository I usually squash last two commits to look like this:

$ git log --format=oneline --decorate=no | head -2
f852c3e260d21bbc642f861e6fa6ea62caa7b69b Add conditional BRs to enable ff merge between f14
b4c602f9f044598544cff3d68710f68b9447ea0f Fix installation of pom files for artifact jars
  

I used to do it manually, but I do it often enough it made sense to automate this. So without further ado:

#!/bin/sh

export EDITOR="sed -i '2s/pick/squash/;/# This is the 2nd commit message:/,$ {d}'"

git rebase -i HEAD~2

Save this somewhere inside your $PATH and chmod +x (or set up shell alias). Then just running this will automatically squash last two commits, using HEAD~1 commit message and discarding last commit message. No warranties though :-)

Edit: Benjamin suggested to use "fixup" instead of "squash". This is new thing in git 1.7+. For more information on this see this blogpost.