On today’s show we are talking with John. This is our chance to learn more about our beloved Talking Drupal show host.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/482

Topics

• Talking Drupal
• Non-Code Contribution
• Solution Architect
• Personal Background and Interests
• Drupal

Guests

John Picozzi – epam.com johnpicozzi

Host

Stephen Cross-@stephencross

I’m excited to announce v0.8.0 of the actual_db_schema gem! 🚀 This latest release takes your Rails development workflow to the next level, delivering a smoother and more efficient experience while simplifying DB schema management like never before. 🎉

GNU dico version 2.12 is available for download.

This versions provides important improvements in the gcide module:

• idxgcide skips duplicated headwords.
• Fixed some gcide entities, introduced missing ones.
• Fixed Ancient Greek transliteration.

New option: “watch”

When given this option, the module will watch for modifications in the dictionary corpus files and rebuild the index file when necessary.

HTML output

HTML output is enabled by the “html” module option.  It is produced only after “OPTION MIME” command command.

Input conversions

The argument to DEFINE or MATCH command can optionally be modified before being used in actual search.  This allows, for example, to input search terms in transliteration instead of in the actual script.

Conversions are implemented by loadable modules and are associated with individual databases.

This version is shipped with the new module greek_kbd, which implements Greek transliteration.

Dicoweb

• Switch to Python 3.11+ with type hints
• Upgrade Django to version 4.2
• Improve desktop and mobile views using HTML5
• Implement a dark mode
• Use Poetry and pyproject.toml
• Integrate Pylint and Mypy for development
• Implement various fixes and improvements

pcre module now requires libpcre2

Support for obsolescent libpcre has been withdrawn.

We’ve talked about Chimera Linux before – it’s a unique Linux distribution that combines a BSD userland with the LLVM/Clang toolchain, and musl. Its init system is dinit, and it uses apk-tools from Alpine as its package manager. None of this has anything to do with being anti-anything; the choice of BSD’s tools and userland is mostly technical in nature. Chimera Linux is available for x86-64, AArch64, RISC-V, and POWER (both little and big endian). I am unreasonably excited for Chimera Linux, for a variety of reasons – first, I love the above set of choices they made, and second, Chimera Linux’ founder and lead developer, q66, is a well-known and respected name in this space. She not only founded Chimera Linux, but also used to maintain the POWER/PowerPC ports of Void Linux, which is the port of Void Linux I used on my POWER9 hardware. She apparently also contributed quite a bit to Enlightenment, and is currently employed by Igalia, through which she can work on Chimera. With the description out of the way, here’s the news: Chimera Linux has officially entered beta. Today we have updated apk-tools to an rc tag. With this, the project is now entering beta phase, after around a year and a half. In general, this does not actually mean much, as the project is rolling release and updates will simply keep coming. It is more of an acknowledgement of current status, though new images will be released in the coming days. ↫ Chimera Linux’s website Despite my excitement, I haven’t yet tried Chimera Linux myself, as I figured its pre-beta stage wasn’t meant for an idiot like me who can’t contribute anything meaningful, and I’d rather not clutter the airwaves. Now that it’s entered beta, I feel like the time is getting riper and riper for me to dive in, and perhaps write about it here. Since the goal of Chimera Linux is to be a general-purpose distribution, I think I’m right in the proper demographic of users. It helps that I’m about to set up my dual-processor POWER9 machine again, and I think I’ll be going with Chimera Linux. As a final note, you may have noticed I consistently refer to it as “Chimera Linux”. This is very much on purpose, as there’s also something called ChimeraOS, a more standard Linux distribution aimed at gaming. To avoid confusion, I figured I’d keep the naming clear and consistent.