Tanguy Ortolo

For sharing multiple files, it is often convenient to pack them into an archive, and the most widely supported format to do so is probably ZIP. Under *nix, you can archive a directory with Info-ZIP:

% zip -r something.zip something/

(When you have several files, it is recommended to archive them in a directory, to avoid cluttering the directory where people will extract them.)

Read more Bad support of ZIP archives with extra fields

No man pages, but almost

The AWS Command Line Interface, which is available in Debian, provides no man page. Instead, that tool has an integrated help system, which allows you to run commands such as aws rds help, that, for what I have seen, generates some reStructuredText, then converts it to a man page in troff format, then calls troff to convert it to text with basic formatting, and eventually passes it to a pager. Since this is close to what man does, the result looks like a degraded man page, with some features missing such as the adaptation to the terminal width.

Well, this is better than nothing, and better than what many under-documented tools can offer, but for several reasons, it still sucks: most importantly, it does not respect administrators' habits and it does not integrate with the system man database. You it does not allow you to use commands such as apropos, and you will get no man page name auto-completion from your shell since there is no man page.

Read more Generate man pages for awscli

When writing a wrapper script, one often has to process the command line arguments to transform them according to his needs, to change some arguments, to remove or insert some, or perhaps to reorder them.

Read more Process command line arguments in shell

Let's Encrypt is a certificate authority (CA) that just left beta stage, that provides domain name-validated (DV) X.509 certificates for free and in an automated way: users just have to run a piece of software on their server to get and install a certificate, resulting in a valid TLS setup.

Read more Let's Encrypt: threat or opportunity to other certificate authorities?

Issues with sam2p and removal

I have been maintaining the Debian package of sam2p for some time. Unfortunately, the upstream development of that program is no longer active, and it is using an old custom build chain that no longer works with recent version of GCC.

This package is currently failing to build from source, and while I have been able to patch some issues in the past, and it may still be possible to fix it again, this is not really sustainable.

I am therefore considering to remove sam2p from Debian, unless someone has a very good reason to keep it and is able and willing to maintain it.

Read more Removing sam2p from Debian