tip « Narf

It is bad practice to use make install. Period.

Why? Because it installs files everywhere on your system—if you’re lucky, only in /usr/local—with no guaranteed way to cleanly remove them afterwards.

Yet, sometimes, there is no other option, for example if some software is not packaged for your Unix of choice and you don’t have time to do it yourself. There are some easy and rather straightforward ways around it, which I usually recommend to beginners.

It happened again today. So I recommended the use of /opt/PKG-VER as an installation prefix and stow(8) to make the software seamlessly available to the rest of the system. Nothing fancy or novel, but I thought I’d share the summary email in the hope it would help others.

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A terminal showing khal in action, with two month of daily calendars, and two days of daily agendas

The following was initially posted on Pump.io, before I realised that this might benefit from a more preservable/visible format.

Frustrated with only interacting with my ownCloud calendar through the native web interface, I finally decided to look for a replacement application that I could run locally. Khal ended up being it, with vdirsyncer for two-way CalDAV sync with ownCloud.

Coupled with watdo, by the same author as vdirsyncer, for todo.txt-like management of CalDAV tasks (VTODO), I can now do all my schedule and tasks management from the comfort of my own terminal, even without any connectivity!

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CAcert is an SSL Certificate Authority based on the establishment of a web-of-trust à la PGP: rather than charging to issue certificates to anyone, it issues them only to members who have been vouched for by enough other trustworthy members (assurers).

For historical reasons, they were included in the Debian ca-certificates package. It was however recently removed, for justified reasons (CAcert is conducting an audit, and withdrew their demand for inclusion in the Mozilla chain until it’s done). Most other distributions mirror from this package to ship their root certificate, and have also dropped CAcert as a consequence.

This is however a bit annoying, as many sites started popping up warnings due to their root certificate not being in the trusted chain of the OS anymore. Until, maybe, they are reinstalled but disabled by default, I quickly wrote up a tiny script that downloads CAcert’s root certificates, and re-registers them. It’s quick and dirty, and only does an MD5 sum to make check they are the right ones, so use at your own risks.

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Some publishers, particularly the IEEE, require that the columns on the last page of an article are balanced, so it looks pretty. The problem is that the break is usually needed in the middle of the bibliography, for which less layout-control is available. Fortunately, there are some specific specific solutions for various cases, and one which works for most: flushend.

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git has many useful features in git log(1) and git blame(1) to display the history of a file, or who contributed each line in said file, respectively. However, it might be useful to get the full history not of a file or a line but, say, a function (that is, more than one line in a coherent structure). This can be interesting for things such as displaying all the authors of a given function.

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Narf

The blagosphere got me…

Category Archives: tip

Managing locally-built packages without wrecking the system, with stow(8)

You know it’s mature when you only need a terminal to run it (CalDAV tools for the console)

Reinstalling CAcert root certificates on Debian

Balancing the last page in twocolumn LaTeX documents

Who are all the authors of this function?