Fedora 31 DNF modules (and probably Fedora 32 ones as well) arecurrently broken, as covered here and here . Fedora is not insuringthat DNF modules that claim to be the 'latest' (for example ripgrep)have versions of their packages that are as recent as the non-modularpackages (the ripgrep module has 11.0.2; Fedora 31 has 12.0.1), andthe mere existence of a DNF module for something will block updates,even if

Recently I wrote about my views on some conventions for Unixcommand line options , where I disagreed inpart with what Chris Wellons considered Conventions for CommandLine Options . Both Wellonsand I have a lot of Unix experience, and that we disagreed on partsof what rightfully should be a well established core of Unix inpractice shows some things about them.

The first thing to note about Unix's conventions on options is thatthey've always been ad hoc and imperfectly adhered to, to the extentthat they even existed

A while back I wrote about how Fedora 31 had fumbled DNF modulesand package updates , which ended withme believing that I had fixed the problem so that I would get updatesto packages I cared about despite the DNF module versions not beingupdated. Then recently I tweeted :

It turns out that Fedora 31 DNF modules, even reset ones that aren'tactive, are apparently still both out of date and blocking packageupdates. Modular ripgrep is 11.x, current main repo ripgrep is 12

On Twitter, I said :

It has been '0' days since I've wound up hating Debian's choice tosign package metadata instead of packages (or perhaps 'in addition to'these days). Why? Because it makes it much more difficult to support'install a package, satisfying dependencies from this directory ofdebs'.

Naturally there is a story here.

We have some Linux fileservers runningUbuntu, and we are very controlled about upgrading their kernelversions (partly because of mysterious crashes )

In a comment on my entry on our Prometheus and Grafana setup , trallnag asked a good question:

Would you mind sharing your concrete approach to setting the timeintervals for functions like rate() and increase()?

This is a good question, because trallnag goes on to cover why thisis an issue you may want to think about:

I tend to switch between using $__interval, completely fixedvalues like 5m or a Grafana interval variable with multipleinterval to choose from. None are perfect and all

Back at the start of April, I wrote about how we might face someissues with the timing of Ubuntu 20.04 , given ongoing world and local events ,because we generally need to be in the office to deploy 20.04machines and upgrade machines to 20.04. Back then, I optimisticallyhoped for a return to normality and the office perhaps by July, andin any case not lots and lots later. That is not the situation we'vewound up in

Recently I read Chris Wellons' Conventions for Command Line Options , which reviews theseconventions. As it happens, I learned and have internalized asomewhat different version of how these conventions should be andhow I expect programs to behave. I'm not going to mention thingswhere my expectations agree with Wellons' presentation of theconventions, just where I differ.

On short options that accept an argument, Wellons says:

This technique is used to create another category, optional optionarguments . The option’s argument can be

Much of what our Django application to handle (Unix) accountrequests does is only available to specialpeople such as professors, who can actually approve account requestsinstead of just making them. Following our usual, we protect themanagement section of the web app with Apache HTTP BasicAuthentication , where only people indesignated Unix groups (such as the 'sponsors' group) have access.However, the Django application also has a 'users' table, and inorder to have access to the application you have to be

Exim is a very flexible mail system (akaa MTA, Mail Transfer agent), to the extent that in its raw state Exim is a mailer construction kit more than amailer ( if you want a simple mailer, consider Postfix ).You can use this power for a lot of things, like building simplemailing lists , where a mailing list iscreated by putting a file of addresses in a specific directory (thename of the file being the name of the mailing list).

This flexibility and power can