Watch our latest Showcase Shorts, full of Moodle updates for all!

Posted on by Michael G
by Marie Achour.  

Hello Moodlers,

Welcome to this edition of ‘Showcase Shorts’.

Our product teams have just completed another productive sprint and we are excited to share our progress with you all!

This Showcase Short edition contains a number of interesting updates for our beloved Moodle Community Developers:

  1. An update on our progress with integrations, which are moving along at pace as we head towards code freeze for the release of Moodle LMS 4.3.

  2. Some new developments in our QA testing approach, with time-saving improvements that will benefit all our developers.

  3. Good news regarding the conversion of IconSystem from AMD to ESM, with bonus code clean-up for less tech debt – which is always a great thing!

  4. Ongoing updates to our icon component library and a demo of our new UX landing page, with handy links to useful collateral for both design & development, helping us all create a beautiful Moodle together.

  5. And more work and ideas to improve the usability of the Plugin database, one of Moodle’s best assets that deserves a bit of extra love.

 

We also progressed with the delivery of features and improvements which will be of benefit to our champion Moodle System Administrators in both educational and workplace contexts:

  1. The introduction of filters that can be applied to user tours, enabling more flexibility for administrators in creating tours for their organisations.

  2. The ability for administrators to manually assign a person’s manager in Workplace, making mapping and integration with HR systems easier.

  3. Enhanced dynamic rule functionality, allowing learning plans to be unassigned from a user automatically, reducing manual tasks needed to manage this process.

  4. And last but certainly not least, the successful upgrade of our ‘Download Moodle’ site, which will provide everyone who uses it greater stability and resilience.

The heart of our solutions, our Moodle Educators will also benefit from our recent efforts in:

  1. Simplifying the management of grade outcomes, making educators’ life easier by reducing the amount of time it takes to manage their course gradebooks.

  2. Enhancing pre-configured LTI tool management at a course level, empowering educators to manage LTI tools within their own courses.

  3. And an update on the progress of our work on the Activity Card redesign, part of our ‘forever’ journey of helping our educators provide engaging learning experiences to their learners.

For our Moodle Partners, without whom we couldn’t do what we do, we progressed work that matters to them, including:

  1. An important security improvement, critical for compliance requirements.

  2. Progress towards the launch of Learning Catalogues in Workplace, supporting self-directed learning out of the box in Moodle.

  3. The introduction of a Child Theme for Moodle Workplace, making custom theme administration less time-consuming and less risky.

  4. And the redressing of a bunch of ‘hot topic’ bugs & issues raised for Moodle Workplace.

  

Our Moodle Mobile App Users will soon benefit from a number of new improvements that drive more consistency with our Moodle LMS desktop version, enhance global search functionality, and provide app administrators with advanced analytics capabilities.

And finally, for all Moodlers, we know that one of the most important things we do is engage with you and seek your feedback, input and contributions to Moodle’s product development. 

This sprint we progressed a number of activities that give us the opportunity to do more of that directly within our product solutions:

  1. We are launching a new Net Promoter & Feedback functionality on our Moodle Cloud standard plan service, which makes it easier for our users to provide us with their insights as they are using our solution. 

  2. Our Moodle Cloud team is also getting into the rhythm of something called ‘continuous discovery’ which means that we are constantly having short but important discussions with our users, ongoingly informing our plans and development efforts.

  3. And we are also embedding direct feedback functionality on moodle.org, providing you with an opportunity to tell us how we can make the home of our community even better than it already is. 

Until next sprint!

The Moodle Products Team

Tech/News/2023/32

Posted on by Michael G
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DrupalEasy: DrupalEasy Podcast S15E6 – Cameron Eagans – Composer Patches

Posted on by Michael G

We talk with Cameron Eagans about Composer Patches, an open-source, Composer plugin to assist with applying patches to code files.

URLs mentioned

DrupalEasy News 

Audio transcript

We’re using the machine-driven Amazon Transcribe service to provide an audio transcript of this episode.

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Andy Wingo: a negative result

Posted on by Michael G

Briefly, an interesting negative result: consider benchmarks b1, b2,
b3 and so on, with associated .c and .h files. Consider libraries
p and q, with their .c and .h files. You want to run each
benchmark against each library.

P and Q implement the same API, but they have different ABI: you need to
separately compile each benchmark for each library. You also need to
separate compile each library for each benchmark, because p.c also
uses an abstract API implemented by b1.h, b2.h, and so on.

The problem: can you implement a short GNU Makefile that produces
executables b1.p, b1.q, b2.p, b2.q, and so on?

The answer would appear to be “no”.

You might think that with call and all the other functions available
to you, that surely this could be done, and indeed it’s easy to take the
cross product of two lists. But what we need are new rules, not just
new text or variables, and you can’t programmatically create rules. So
we have to look at rules to see what facilities are available.

Consider the rules for one target:

b1.p.lib.o: p.c
	$(CC) -o $@ -include b1.h $<
b1.p.bench.o: b1.c
	$(CC) -o $@ -include p.h $<
b1.p: b1.p.lib.o b1.p.bench.o
    $(CC) -o $@ $<

With pattern
rules,
you can easily modify these rules to parameterize either over
benchmark or over library, but not both. What you want is something
like:

*.%.lib.o: %.c
	$(CC) -o $@ -include $(call extract_bench,$@) $<
%.*.bench.o: %.c
	$(CC) -o $@ -include $(call extract_lib,$@) $<
%: %.lib.o %.bench.o
    $(CC) -o $@ $<

But that doesn’t work: you can’t have a wildcard (*) in the pattern
rule. (Really you would like to be able to match multiple patterns, but
the above is the closest thing I can think of to what make has.)

Static pattern
rules
don’t help: they are like pattern rules, but more precise as they apply
only to a specific set of targets.

You might think that you could use $* or other special variables on
the right-hand side of a pattern rule, but that’s not the case.

You might think that secondary
expansion
might help you, but then you open the door to an annoying set of
problems: sure, you can mix variable uses that are intended to be
expanded once with those to be expanded twice, but the former set better
be idempotent upon second expansion, or things will go weird!

Perhaps the best chance for a make-only solution would be to recurse
on generated makefiles, but that seems to be quite beyond the pale.

To be concrete, I run into this case when benchmarking
Whippet: there are some number of
benchmarks, and some number of collector configurations. Benchmark code
will inline code from collectors, from their header files; and
collectors will inline code from benchmarks, to implement the
trace-all-the-edges functionality.

So, with Whippet I am left with the strange conclusion that the only
reasonable thing is to generate the
Makefile
with a little custom generator, or at least generate the part of it to
do this benchmark-library cross product. It’s hard to be certain about
negative results with make; perhaps there is a trick. If so, do let
me know!

GNU/Hurd strikes back

Posted on by Michael G
The GNU/Hurd is the Sagrada Família of the Software World: having started to develop in 1990, the GNU/Hurd has yet to reach version 1.0. The Linux kernel, on the other hand, began development in 1993 and was initially considered a “kludge” until the Hurd was completed. It is now matured and widely used. Like the Loch Ness Monster, many believe that GNU/Hurd is vaporware and does not exist. It does exist and continues to evolve, albeit at a slow pace. Just recently, the Debian GNU/Hurd 2023 has been released. You can use the GNU/Hurd right now. This article takes a look at what it’s like to use Debian GNU/Hurd in a virtual environment in the cloud, to sidestep the lack of driver support, and highlights some of the unique features of this platform.