I’ve known about the void-packages repository for a while, it is quite similar to the AUR. Its a place where you can contribute new programs and libraries to be packaged in Void Linux, and its needed if you want to install some non-free packages like Discord.

OpenLP is a free and open source worship presentation software, mainly for churches. Basically, it lets you display Bible verses, lyrics and the like. Its a tool used in my local church and I find it quite great! Its latest stable release just came out a few days ago, and since I noticed Void didn’t have the update yet. I decided to try updating it myself.

I expected to do some complexstuff, but after a quick read of their contributing guide, and after checking the history of commits previously done for the package I was going to work with, I realized it shouldn’t be too difficult.

In my case, I only changed the version and the checksum, I did ./xbps-src pkg OpenLP and, like magic, I was able to build it and install it without a problems.

However, when I ran some tests (using the -Q flag in xbps-src) I noticed that it was mostly fine, but a few tests failed to run. I had already submitted a PR, and I decided to try and look for solutions.

Sidequest: IRC Chat

I went to the []Libera IRC network](https://libera.chat) to chat in the #openlp chatroom and ask some questions. I eventually realized that there were some changes done in Python 3.11 that were not accounted for just yet in this latest release. Although a few MRs later they should be fixed.

Regardless, I now knew that the problems were on their side, and even if the tests failed, the program was working alright.

Then I felt like selhosting my own IRC web client to not miss any messages, just in case. So I went ahead on my Yunohost applications and ended up trying out The Lounge, which can be easily installed. I found it quite good, and its always connected, which was incredibly useful for me. I was initially on Libera’s public Kiwi instance, but I find TL to be quite good, and its also more up to date, relatively speaking.

Updating dependencies

So anywyays, I got a couple suggestions on my PR’s GitHub thread and ended up updating two other Python dependencies in my PR, I was actually unaware of them, but another mantainer, who is also a fellow Joel, sent me the patch so I could commit them myself without much trouble.

After adding a couple other lines to skip tests that still are not working on Python 3.11, building the package with ./xbps-src pkg -Q OpenLP is now successful on my end.

Finishing words

By the time I write this, my PR is still not merged just yet. There is also a chance that the OpenLP devs make a new version by tomorrow and I have to update my PR once again.

For now, this was quite a fun project, I kind of wanna look for other simple programs and tools that kinda build themselves just fine, and contribute that way, even if I only change a couple of lines everytime.

I will update this blogpost if my PR is successful or some other news happen.

This is day 10 of #100DaysToOffload

• finish writing
• git add, git commit, git push
• write toot on mastodon sharing my blogpost
• copy toot link
• paste toot link id on original blogpost
• git add, git commit, git push
• comments section now works!

However, I decided to summon the power of the command line and bash scripting once again, and I finally managed to automate pretty much all of it.

It depends on some basic tools such as sed, cut, grep, but it also requires a very simple mastodon client for the command line, toot, you probably have it all installed already, and toot is not hard to setup either way.

There really is not a lot to talk about other than this. Here is the script, its not really super clean or anything (any suggestion are absolutely welcome) but at least its serviceable.

#!/usr/bin/bash

if git rev-parse --git-dir > /dev/null 2>&1; then
    : # This is a valid git repository

    # All markdown files start with YYYY-MM-DD
    lastpost=$(/usr/bin/ls ${markdown_posts_folder}/*.md | sort -r | head -n 1) 
    getdesc=$(grep "description:" $lastpost | cut -d " " -f2-)
    geturl=$(grep "permalink:" $lastpost | cut -d " " -f2-)
    gettags=$(grep "tags:" $lastpost | cut -d " " -f2- | sed -r 's/([^ ]+)/#\1/g')
    post=$(echo -e "${getdesc} \n\nhttps://joelchrono.xyz/${geturl} \n\n${gettags} #blogpost")
    posturl=$(toot post "$post" | cut -d/ -f5)
    echo $posturl
    sed -i "s/commentsid/$posturl/g" "$lastpost"

    git add *
    git commit -m "automatically added comments"
    git push

    exit

# directory may not be the top level.
# Check the output of the git rev-parse command if you care
else
    : # this is not a git repository
    echo "Run this inside of website folder"
    exit

fi

There you go, I hope you find it useful, maybe you can improve it even further. If so, make sure to let me know, I am still learning these things.

The terminal is a place that I have enjoyed for months now, and I really like being on it. But there were a lot of things that I didn’t really do on a terminal, simply because I was already used to other ways. Like downloading files, or transferring it from a computer to my phone.

Since I joined a tilde, a public UNIX server that is accessed via ssh, I had to learn a few more things, or do them in different ways.

Getting familiar with ssh

I had been using ssh with my website’s git repo for a while now, in fact, I have my local repos all connected to GitHub via ssh, and I had had no problems with it. However, when I created my tilde account, I got access to tildegit.org, and I decided to give it a try!

Tildegit is a Gitea instance, and its pretty good. It allows me to export my GH repos with ease (at least the public ones), and I am considering to make it my primary Git service. But right now, I would like to keep both. But how am I supposed to do so? There is a “This repo is a mirror” checkmark, but I decided to make the sync from my local repo.

I read this gist guide and set up my git to push to both services, I also learned about the ssh config file, from this blog by Drew, so I setup my ssh config for something like this:

Host cafe
    Hostname tilde.cafe
    User chrono
    Identityfile ~/.ssh/cafe
    PubkeyAuthentication yes

Host tildegit
    Hostname tildegit.org
    Identityfile ~/.ssh/tildegit
    User git
    PubkeyAuthentication yes

Host github
    Hostname github.com
    Identityfile ~/.ssh/id_ed25519
    User git
    PubkeyAuthentication yes

So, as far as I knew, everything should have worked, except it didn’t, the Tildegit ssh connection did not work. I could go on and on, but the trick was simple.

Running ssh -vT git@tildegit.org did not work, that command does some tests to try and login to the server, but its output was

git@tildegit.org: Permission denied (publickey).

Why wasn’t it picking up my tildegit key? I don’t know, but my repo’s git config had this:

# repo/.git/config
...
[remote "origin"]
	url = git@github.com:joelchrono12/joelchrono12.ml.git
	fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
	pushurl = git@tildegit.org:chrono/joelchrono12.ml.git
	pushurl = git@github.com:joelchrono12/joelchrono12.ml.git
...

So I tried something. My ~/ssh/config file names the Host as tildegit and nothing else. So I decided to run ssh -vT tildegit, and after typing my passphrase autotyping my passphrase with rofi-pass, this was the output.

Hi there, chrono! You've successfully authenticated with the key named tilde.cafe, but Gitea does not provide shell access.

And so, after countless useless commits and failed pushes, I got it, I just changed the pushurl to tildegit:username/repo and it all worked out fine! I did the same for GH.

Using ssh-agent

Its worth noting that all this time, I knew I could use the ssh-agent, but I didn’t really feel like it. I don’t think its bad, but for some reason it does not autostart on my system and while it would probably be easy to set it up, I use pass to store my passwords, and I decided to just use that and autotype it every time.

Some script fixing

Now, in my previous blog I mentioned that I started using Blop to produce a simple, more minimal mirror of this website on my tilde here. However, the script uses sed to change a bunch of stuff, and after reading it, I found a few things I could apply to my current rofi scripts, so I renewed it and made it better, I also removed some blank spaces that were getting added and caused some weird behavior, like having my HTML end with a dash like this-file-.html and other things.

Now it looks like this!

#! /bin/bash
path=/home/joelchrono12/git/joelchrono12.ml/_posts/
title=$(rofi -l 0 -width 50 -p "Title:" -dmenu)
filen=$(echo $title | tr " ,.!" "-"| awk '{print tolower($0)}')
if [ -z $title ]; then
	exit
fi
today=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d")
filename=($today-$filen)
description=$(rofi -l 0 -width 60 -height 20 -p "Description:" -dmenu)
tags=$(rofi -l 0 -width 45 -p "Tags:" -dmenu)
num=0
while [ $num = 0 ]; do
	choice=$(echo -e "Edit file\nEdit title\nEdit description\nEdit tags\nCancel" | rofi -width 15 -l 5-p "Now?:" -dmenu)

	if [[ $choice = "Edit file" ]]; then
  	touch $path/$filename.md
  	echo -e "---\ntitle: $title\nheader: $title\ndescription: $description\ntags: $tags\npermalink: /blog/$filen/\nlayout: post\ndate: $today $(date +"%T") -0500\n">> $path/$filename.md
		num=1
		alacritty -e nvim $path/$filename.md & disown
        #cp $path/$filename.md ~/Documents
	elif [[ $choice = "Edit title" ]]; then
		title=$(rofi -l 0 -width 50 -p "Title:" -dmenu)
	elif [[ $choice = "Edit description" ]]; then
		description=$(rofi -l 0 -width 60 -height 20 -p "Description:" -dmenu)
	elif [[ $choice = "Edit tags" ]]; then
		tags=$(rofi -l 0 -width 45 -p "Tags:" -dmenu)
	else
		num=1
	fi
done

The end

Remember all of the metadata is adapted to work with Jekyll, but it is easy to edit the script for whatever you need. I am using sed and tr to remove commas and dots from the filename, and to add dashes instead of spaces, it will duplicate some dashes sometimes, but that’s fine. In the end I managed to learn a bit more about how computers work and stuff like that.

Also, I am almost done with school, I did a couple more icons for the Arcticons icon pack, and I should be cleaning up my room today, I have visits soon and its quite a mess!

This is day 47 of #100DaysToOffload