Fixpoint

2023-11-01

#jwrd Logs for Nov 2023

Filed under: #jwrd logs, Logs — Jacob Welsh @ 00:01
Day changed to 2023-11-01
[00:01] jfw: whaack: to prepare for tomorrow - 4pm / 21 UTC, yes? - you could give the Gales bootstrap process a look, because that will be the first quest.
[01:02] whaack: jfw are we on for tmrw? what time?
[01:04] jfw: whaack: check the log!
[01:08] whaack: derp, missed the msg from the dc, see you at 21 utc tomorrow, will give it a read
[20:59] whaack: jfw: link?
[21:00] jfw: whaack: got the zoom creds still from before? hopefully that'll still work.
[21:01] whaack: k ill go there
Day changed to 2023-11-03
[19:38] jfw: dorion: I'm contemplating what tools/methods to use for squirrelmail development. well, patching at least; unclear if there will be more to do besides the coupla small changes known so far, but it seems likely, being as it is one of the most user-facing pieces.
[19:41] jfw: the prior team used SVN, which doesn't seem to make any sense to continue. there are some binaries in the tree, some accidental and some .png and even .wav files
[19:44] jfw: I guess the easiest short-term option is no tools at all, just unpack the tarball, make changes, pack a new one, putting a date on it at least. moving up from that would be to start a git repo, importing the snapshot as-is. or, there's trying to preserve the svn history by importing that to git. finally, there'd be cleaning up the tree one way or another so it'd fit the V or VaMP model.
[19:47] dorion: jfw, what does the transformation from svn to git look like ? are there existing tools for that already ?
[19:47] jfw: possibly it could make a nice, relatively small but non-trivial project to start getting some practice working w/ VaMP. I find I'm a bit resistant to it still as that would currently mean importing the centos/eulora box into my set of machines required for development
[19:50] jfw: dorion: there's at least a "git svn" command builtin, then there's fancier things that more complex projects have used to do a conversion, with higher fidelity to the intricacies of the two systems I guess
[19:54] dorion: jfw, don't you have a gentoo ? did you ever try building eulora on that ?
[19:55] jfw: hmm, it doesn't have 3d graphics, but perhaps gnat at least could run
[19:55] dorion: right, don't need to run/play eulora there, just get its toolchain workin'.
[19:56] dorion: I suppose there's two questions here : 1) do we care that much about squirrelmail history to preserve it ? and 2) what dev tools to use moving forward.
[19:57] jfw: on 1, fwiw I did archive the svn history from sourceforge - it's not directly readable but an svn client could run off it.
[19:58] dorion: right, that's what I was thinking. could always reference it in the future as needed without transforming it in the present to the model we want to build on.
[20:00] dorion: "and even .wav files" -- people want to be pinged apparently, lolz.
[20:00] jfw: "you've got mail!!"
[20:01] dorion: how are your tools for detecting and removing binary files ? unix cli provide enough ?
[20:03] jfw: I have a decent script for detection, from importing the various base components to the gales tree. removing is where it gets more involved since it's case-by-case
[20:03] dorion: it won't be the last time we run into a tree with binaries, so to my mind it's worth getting used to.
[20:03] dorion: so script produces a list and you go through it by hand ?
[20:03] jfw: yes
[20:06] jfw: the images are pretty small, 72k total; could use hanbot's trick of converting to svg files containing the raster data base64-encoded
[20:07] dorion: as in 72kb ?
[20:07] jfw: yes. and in some cases, it might not be too bad to do a proper vector graphics replacement
[20:07] dorion: the hanbot trick sounds slick and proper.
[20:08] jfw: it does demand an svg-supporting browser but afaik that's been pretty standard for some time now.
[20:08] dorion: does palemoon ?
[20:08] jfw: yes
[20:10] dorion: alright. I'm for taking the current snapshot, transforming it for VaMP and building/publishing in that environment.
[20:11] jfw: the "fix squirrelmail cache-control" task expands quite a bit, then, but it does sound like a desirable path
[20:17] dorion: hm, yeah, what's your thought on using normal diff/patch for that current task before delving into the deeper one so as to maintain the schedule ? or what impact on the schedule do you estimate preparing the foundation to have ?
[20:23] jfw: well let's see, there'd be 1) toolchain download & e2/vamp build, which in theory is all scripted, not sure what dependency issues I'll run into but at least we have yours for reference; 2) next steps in learning the tool; 3) repairing the mostly-text files with accidental defects; 4) converting images & probably deleting that "newmail" plugin with the sounds
[20:24] jfw: on the bright side all this sounds pretty mechanical, following in existing footsteps
[20:25] dorion: ok, doesn't look too bad. I'm for the expansion.
[20:26] jfw: alright, I'm on board.
[20:41] jfw: first obstacle, that damn jam/ftjam dependency won't emerge. I could build by hand like I did on centos, or try without since maybe we don't need crystalspace
[20:47] jfw: the emerge problem is rather weird though, it tries to download "ftjam-2.5.3rc2.tar.bz2" which doesn't exist on the mirror and 2.5.2 is the latest linked from upstream ( https://freetype.org/jam/ ) !
[20:55] jfw: dorion: looks like my gentoo has the broken binutils: version 2.26.1 and I'm getting "/usr/lib/../lib64/crti.o: unrecognized relocatio
[20:55] jfw: n (0x2a) in section `.init'"
[20:56] jfw: did you run into that?
[21:01] dorion: jfw, I don't think so, I had 2.25 by default.
[21:01] dorion: I thought we are working from the ~same gentoo base.
[21:03] jfw: hmm, that does say 2.26 should work, maybe the .1 is the problem?
[21:03] dorion: not sure.
[21:03] jfw: my musl gentoo has 2.25
[21:04] dorion: I'm not on musl version, ftr.
[21:04] jfw: I don't expect it would work, because of binary gnat.
[21:06] jfw: "~same gentoo base" - I thought so too; mine appears to come from stage3-amd64-20170316.tar.bz2
[21:08] jfw: which is indeed the exact version seen in your link, yet that tarball contains binutils-2.26 ...?
[21:10] jfw: what's your "ld --version" show?
[21:14] dorion: GNU ld (Gentoo 2.25.1 p1.1) 2.25.1
[21:14] dorion: maybe I down graded ? I would've documented it though..
[21:38] jfw: based on that 0x2a it seems to be that breakage indeed. that /usr/lib64/crti.o comes from glibc, so its containing a relocation 0x2a means that was built by the bad
[21:38] jfw: binutils; so even if you'd downgraded the binutils package it still doesn't account for that file
[21:39] jfw: i.e. it would still be broken
[21:40] jfw: unless you then also rebuilt glibc
[21:40] jfw: I have keksum: 4fdb72544940575ca96758953e88940c258255475f3014929173bc7a2c4d16e6e1e0ad30fa54eaf0c4d2b9c87c93aa4a71c344d23498b8d8accf766345652f7a /usr/lib64/crti.o which matches the one straight from the stage3
[21:45] jfw: dorion: since you wrote about installing from a .iso image, do you still have that image around to check if it contains some different stage3?
[21:50] jfw: looks like they've made it a pain to check though, hidden inside a 'squashfs' image inside the iso image.
Day changed to 2023-11-05
[01:03] dorion: jfw, I think I have it, but will have to dig it out.
[01:04] dorion: I have keksum : 7488dfe152987aead943b3f44e80f7e8802afb730d0b28bb76791d1cf5f3fc19e3ada76096d86dfc64f4dddee9f137318dfe0973187780866cd946dc8bc31305 /usr/lib/crti.o
[03:10] jfw: dorion: ok and what's the timestamp on it (on that same file)?
[03:45] dorion: Aug 13 2021 /usr/lib/crti.o -- I had to do a rebuild of this system because it's a thinkpad. I had originally copied over the gentoo desktop system, but its compiler flag wasn't compatible with this hardware.
[03:47] jfw: aha. so I figure it started life with the broken 2.26-built libc, on which eulora1 ran fine (on the desktop), somewhere in there you downgraded binutils and, perhaps inadvertently because of that other problem requiring a rebuild, glibc got rebuilt with it, and thereafter e2 worked.
[03:52] jfw: because eulora1 as I recall and gather didn't import its own compiler toolchain - that coming in only with e2 because of Ada - so used the system toolchain which worked, basically because all its parts were together on the hardfork.
[04:14] jfw: except I'm not readily seeing how one even CAN downgrade binutils on gentoo. just tried it in a fresh chroot of my stage3; I could emerge =sys-devel/binutils-2.25.1-r1 and they coexisted via 'slots', but after switching (eselect binutils ...) and removing the 2.26 version, the linker of course no longer works, system is hosed.
[04:17] jfw: lulzily, trying to emerge glibc requires downloading some prebuilt gcc libraries
[04:17] jfw: from gcc 4.7!
[04:20] jfw: retried without the step of removing 2.26, but with 2.25 activated; rebuilding glibc still fails. trying now with 2.26 reactivated, expecting it'll work but still produce the tainted libs.
[04:35] jfw: indeed so.
[04:46] jfw: bears pointing out too how braindamaged it is that glibc evidently requires linking something against crti.o from an existing glibc.
[18:53] dorion: jfw, hmm. what do you see as way forward ?
[19:02] jfw: for my task at hand, probably a centos chroot or vm.
Day changed to 2023-11-07
[00:03] jfw: dorion: one hitch I'm seeing already with svg conversion of squirrelmail image resources: the favicon file i.e. browser tab icon. reportedly Safari to this day doesn't support svg for that (though it does for ordinary images)
[00:10] jfw: we could keep svg in the repository and add an installation step or script to convert to ico or png if one needs to support sad browsers
[00:48] dorion: jfw, sounds fine to me. no need to support sad browsers out of the box.
[17:49] whaack: I'm loving the reading for the first homework. There's a big concept to digest in these three pages
Day changed to 2023-11-08
[01:58] whaack: jfw: what time did we set for tomorrow? I'm happy to do the afternoon, that would be easier for me, but I remember we said morning so I'll stick with that if necessary
[02:39] jfw: whaack: 10am panama / 15 utc, iirc
[02:40] jfw: let's try it at least, see if there's some gain from being fresher.
[14:28] whaack: My ISP is giving me some trouble today, hopefully it will not interfere with class
[22:37] jfw: http://jfxpt.com/2023/jwrd-logs-for-Nov-2023/#9959 - this, for the log, was Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust" (1984) and glad it was appreciated!
[22:37] sourcerer: 2023-11-07 17:49:38 (#jwrd) whaack: I'm loving the reading for the first homework. There's a big concept to digest in these three pages
[22:42] jfw: http://jfxpt.com/2023/jwrd-logs-for-Nov-2023/#9914 - on 4, I got the png/icos converted to svgs, mostly using "convert foo.png -strip foo.svg" producing base64 embedded png data. without -strip, imagemagick sees fit to add its own nonsense tags to the png metadata. in two cases I gave some more attention where there wasn't really any value in the original raster data (such as the 1x1px blank.png
[22:42] sourcerer: 2023-11-03 20:23:08 (#jwrd) jfw: well let's see, there'd be 1) toolchain download & e2/vamp build, which in theory is all scripted, not sure what dependency issues I'll run into but at least we have yours for reference; 2) next steps in learning the tool; 3) repairing the mostly-text files with accidental defects; 4) converting images & probably deleting that "newmail" plugin with the sounds
[22:42] jfw: monument to web stupidities).
[22:43] jfw: on 3, I removed their heap of dummy index.php files in every subdirectory, which redirected to login page for no particular reason, thinking they were somehow preventing direct loading of source files.
[22:45] jfw: there is perhaps some case for suppressing auto-indexing there, eg to stop spiders from pointlessly hitting all the .php files inside, but it's a weak one and anyway best done through ONE apache directive rather than by littering the codebase.
[22:45] jfw: that gets my count of VaMP-unacceptable files from 84 down to 31 !
[22:49] jfw: I did try Inkscape's path tracing to vectorize the logo, but couldn't get acceptable results for either squirrel or text before patience ran out.
Day changed to 2023-11-09
[01:05] jfw: removed & documented .htaccess litter; removed & documented .wav files from newmail plugin; added a dummy file to note for now the ill structure of the 'help' tree which has no content at top level; fixed a bunch of .php files that were simply missing the trailing newline; removed some duplicate copies of teh GPL, ironically named COPYING as it so loves to be. And with that I've got a clean "vamp
[01:05] jfw: index" !
Day changed to 2023-11-10
[12:04] dorion: jfw, win. congrats !
[22:31] jfw: got favicon.ico refs updated now too, that was a minor mess of copy-pasted code (they made it sorta-configurable but with a default)
Day changed to 2023-11-11
[17:32] dorion_road: jfw, nice.
[17:32] dorion_road: ahoy from mexico city. i'm pretty impressed so far.
Day changed to 2023-11-15
[00:40] jfw: whaack: how do you think the morning session went last week, shall we keep that time?
[05:25] jfw: I'll be ready for it in any case.
[13:55] whaack: jfw: it went well, I think we should keep it, but with that said I am scrambling to get the homework done in the next hour
[13:56] whaack: Right now I'm backing up my system, scp has been running for about half an hour but I have no idea how far along it is in the process
[13:56] whaack: I also still have to do the steps four through nine for the build
[13:58] jfw: whaack: is that scp or plain cp?
[13:59] whaack: scp
[14:00] whaack: I should have had my coffee before running the program, that unnecessary s may be why it's taking so long
[14:03] jfw: hmm. the speed is probably just that it's a basic flash drive on a slow usb link. but scp is definitely intended for simple remote transfers and using it here might not preserve all the structure properly, like symlinks etc
[14:05] jfw: tar, cp -a, or rsync -a (not available here) would be the preferred choices; you can add -v for some view of progress or also monitor the "du -sh" on the target directory to see transferred size
[14:06] jfw: well, df is more efficient, and adequate here since the drive is dedicated.
[14:07] whaack: Good idea. It's only 30% complete
[14:08] jfw: ah, scp -p preserves timestamps and modes at least but still follows symlinks, so that'll create duplication indeed
[14:08] whaack: So I guess it's better to scratch it and start again with the right commands
[14:08] jfw: yeah.
[14:09] whaack: Would you prefer to stick with the morning session or would it be better for me to get the work done and we meet in the afternoon?
[14:10] jfw: let's do 4pm (5pm for CR?)
[14:10] whaack: 3 PM for me. Okay sounds good
[14:10] whaack: I am west of you!
[14:11] jfw: oh right, "the other minus!"
[14:12] jfw: about how much time did you spend on the build? not asking for finger-wagging purposes, just to check if the workload is reasonable.
[14:15] whaack: Part of my tardiness on the work has been my own delinquency but part of it has been that my hand was flaring up bad this week, I need to find some workaround or solution. Maybe there is technique improvement I can do, I'm going to Record myself and send it to a kinestheologist at the very least. Otherwise I have to find some typing slave or something
[14:15] whaack: I didn't spend anytime on it
[14:45] jfw: sucks. I hate to say it but maybe using the tmux copy-and-paste more is in order for this stage (the build)
[14:49] jfw: or copying it into a script with the necessary adjustments, or adapting mine
[17:31] whaack: jfw: I realize I'm still confused about step 4
[17:32] whaack: Do I need to run this command? gzip -dc .../patch-4.9.X.gz | patch -p1 # to be set appropriately
[17:32] whaack: Or is that to create the config file which is already provided?
[17:37] jfw: whaack, that's the linux kernel patch release
[17:38] jfw: 4.9.0 is included as a full snapshot, then you apply the patch to bring it up to the desired version. iirc the machine came with .95
[17:39] jfw: we have had various weird issues with graphics and network drivers so I'd say to stick with the running version or perhaps newer
[17:40] jfw: whaack: do you have a /var/build/linux-patch-4.9.95.xz ?
[17:40] whaack: I don't see any gz file in the parent folder
[17:41] whaack: I guess my faulty assumptions is that ... Was a typo for ..
[17:41] whaack: The triple dots I guess just mean some path?
[17:41] jfw: it's an ellipsis, something not shown
[17:42] whaack: Yes I do have that file
[17:42] jfw: that's it then, just substitute xz for gzip
[17:42] jfw: (and give full path and correct filename, obvs)
[17:42] whaack: Okay do I still run with the -dc parameter?
[17:42] jfw: yes
[17:43] whaack: Also I'm not sure what ' Make sure to enable initramfs (CONFIG_BLK_DEV_INITRD) with gzip compression (CONFIG_RD_GZIP) support, unless you intend to bypass the included installer construction scripts. A partial indicator of success is that the "usr/gen_init_cpio" program gets built in the kernel tree. ' means
[17:43] jfw: that's if you're configuring the kernel yourself. here you took the provided .config.
[17:45] whaack: Okay that leads me to the next question, I'm not sure at what point I use the config file provided
[17:45] whaack: How do I 'install an existing .config'
[17:46] jfw: the installer construction script (in step 8) compresses the initramfs image with gzip, so the kernel needs to include decompression code for that, namely CONFIG_RD_GZIP.
[17:47] jfw: whaack: it's in the session 1 outline: For step 4 (Cross compile the kernel), the "existing .config" will be kconfig/linux-4.9-x86_64-thinkpad-static.config from the Gales repository (tarball). Thus you need to copy this file to the extracted Linux kernel tree, renaming it to ".config".
[17:50] whaack: ty. also cp arch/x86/boot/bzImage $GALES/bzImage-4.9.X # to be named appropriately what is the appropriate name? ...95?
[17:50] jfw: yes
[17:52] jfw: up to you actually as long as you carry the choice to lilo.conf
[17:52] jfw: but the version number made sense to me
[17:53] whaack: And also what starts the selection for copying with Tmux? I see a guide online say ctrl space but that doesn't seem to work for me
[17:53] whaack: This is after pressing ctrl b {
[17:53] whaack: ctrl b [
[17:54] jfw: is your prefix key still ctrl-b? I usually change it to F5
[17:55] jfw: so F5 [ for copy/scrollback mode and then it should be just space to start selection
[18:00] whaack: Okay and then how do I copy and then exit this mode and then paste?
[18:00] whaack: I also have not changed my prefix, I don't remember how
[18:05] jfw: whaack: enter to copy, <prefix> ] to paste
[18:09] jfw: http://jfxpt.com/reference-configurations/ for my tmux.conf. I don't imagine the ctrl-b-everything doing any favors for your hands
[18:09] jfw: but, maybe leave that till after the reinstall rather than having to redo the build environment setup now.
[19:33] whaack: Somehow I ran out of disk space on my flash drive. i think im just going to remove the blk000.dat files
[19:33] whaack: (and restart the cp)
[19:37] whaack: jfw: does that sound reasonable to you?
[19:37] whaack: I don't think it will add much time to my re-sync, I had not made it very far
[19:42] dorion_road: whaack, do you have the blk000.dat files because you want to back up your blockchain ?
[19:43] dorion_road: whaack, do you have bitcoind sync'd on the thinkpad ?
[20:14] jfw: he was up to around block 300k.
[20:15] jfw: whaack, perhaps debug.log is big enough to free enough space?
Day changed to 2023-11-21
[05:49] bitsss123: hi
[14:13] jfw: hello bitsss123, and who might you be?
[17:02] dorion: welcome bitsss123
Day changed to 2023-11-22
[14:18] whaack: jfw: we on for the am session?
[14:32] whaack: My right hand is flaring up pretty bad today, I'm not sure how much typing I can do fyi
[15:02] jfw: whaack: I'm on, we'll see how it goes then
Day changed to 2023-11-28
[04:03] jfw: whaack, how goes the process? on track for this week or need more time?
[13:23] dorion_road: greetings from nyc.
[18:08] dorion_road: so they played the unconstitutional card wrt the copper mine in panama, which card comes next ?
[20:05] jfw: unanimous agreement against every part of that law 406, too, from what I heard. I guess things quiet down on the public side for a while.
[22:26] whaack: jfw: I need more time, maybe it's better if we postpone a week if that's okay with you
[22:27] jfw: whaack: it's fine

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