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Status-update-January-2020.md (4195B)

    

  1. ---
  2. date: 2020-01-15
  3. layout: post
  4. title: Status update, January 2020
  5. tags: ["status update"]
  6. ---
  8. I forgot to write this post this morning, and I'm on cup 3 of coffee while
  9. knee-deep in some arcane work with tarballs in Python. Forgive the brevity of
  10. this introduction. Let's get right into the status update.
  12. First of all, [FOSDEM 2020][fosdem] is taking place on February 1st and 2nd, and
  13. I'm planning on being there again this year. I hope to see you there! I'll be
  14. hosting another [small session][sourcehut session] for SourceHut and aerc users
  15. where I'll take questions, demo some new stuff, and give out stickers.
  17. [fosdem]: https://fosdem.org/2020/
  18. [sourcehut session]: https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/bof_sourcehut/
  20. In Wayland news, the upcoming Sway 1.3 release is getting very close - rc3 is
  21. planned to ship later today. We've confirmed that it'll ship with VNC support
  22. via [wayvnc](https://github.com/any1/wayvnc) and improvements to input latency.
  23. I haven't completed much extra work on Casa (and "Sway Mobile" alongside it),
  24. but there have been some small improvements. I did find some time to work on
  25. [Sedna](https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sedna), however. We've decided to use it as
  26. a proving grounds for the new wlroots scene graph API, which plans to
  27. incorporate Simon Ser's [libliftoff][libliftoff] and put to rest the eternal
  28. debate over how wlroots renderer should take shape. This'll be *lots* of work
  29. but the result will be a remarkably good foundation on which we can run
  30. performant compositors on a huge variety of devices — and, if we're
  31. lucky, might help resolve the Nvidia problem. I also did a bit more work on the
  32. [Wayland Book](https://wayland-book.com), refactoring some of the chapter
  33. ordering to make more sense and getting started with the input chapter. More
  34. soon.
  36. [libliftoff]: https://github.com/emersion/libliftoff
  38. On SourceHut, lots of new developments have been underway. The latest round of
  39. performance improvements for git.sr.ht finally landed with the introduction of
  40. new server hardware, and it's finally competitive with its peers in terms of
  41. push and web performance. I've also overhauled our monitoring infrastructure
  42. [and made it public](https://metrics.sr.ht). Our [Q4 2019 financial
  43. report][financial report] was also published earlier this week. I'm currently
  44. working on pushing forward through the self-service data ownership goals, and
  45. we've already seen some improvements in that todo.sr.ht can now re-import
  46. tracker exports from itself or other todo.sr.ht instances.
  48. [financial report]: https://sourcehut.org/blog/2020-01-13-sourcehut-q4-2019-financial-report/
  50. I've also been working more on [himitsu](https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/himitsu)
  51. recently, though I'm taking it pretty slowly because it's a security-sensitive
  52. project. Most of the crypto code has been written at this point - writing
  53. encrypted secrets to disk, reading and writing the key index - but reading
  54. encrypted secrets back from the disk remains to be implemented. I know there are
  55. some bugs in the current implementation, which I'll be sorting out before I
  56. write much more code. I also implemented most of the support code for the Unix
  57. socket RPC, and implemented a couple of basic commands which have been helpful
  58. with proving out the secret store code (proving that it's wrong, at least).
  60. Simon Ser's [mrsh](https://mrsh.sh) has also been going very well lately, and is
  61. now a nearly complete implementation of the POSIX shell. I've started working on
  62. something I've long planned to build on top of mrsh: a comfortable interactive
  63. shell, inspired by fish's interactive mode, but with a strictly POSIX syntax. I
  64. call the project [imrsh](https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/imrsh), for interactive
  65. mrsh. I've already got it in somewhat good shape, but many of the features
  66. remain to be implemented. The bulk of the work was in Simon's mrsh, so it
  67. shouldn't be too hard to add a pretty interface on top. We'll see how it goes.
  69. That's all for today. In the coming month I hope to expand on each of these, and
  70. I'm also working on a new Secret Project which may start bearing fruits soon
  71. (but likely not). Thank you for your continued support! I'll see you at FOSDEM.