ppa

This morning I was browsing some twitter, when I came across this tweet:

"Everyone who bitches about the GPL ... I'd like them to remove all the GPL software from their computers, and see how they get on."

Now, this is all apart of some brouhaha over Wordpress and it's templates or something. I personally don't care about any of that (I've long moved past Wordpress, as I find them to be bad open source citizens), but it did get me to thinking, as a person who does think the BSD license is a better open source license than the GPL, just how much of an inconveneince would this be? I certainly do rely on a bunch of gnu software that I'd just as soon not live without, like my playstation, or our dvr, and probably our router too. However I don't really have a choice in these things, and to be fair I don't think there is anything perticularly special about linux that makes it better for a dvr than you could do with BSD.

But let's consider things where I do have a choice, where most software developers have a choice, which is in the tools we work with and things we work on. This is pretty broard, so let's just consider the classic LAMP stack that most people work on. Apache is of course, available under the Apache license, so it's already in the clear. While I like Linux, I've long replaced it in my life with a mix of OSX, *Solaris, and *BSD, for computers where I get to choose the OS. Yes, our eeepc does run Linux, but I could probably switch that to some BSD system if needed. Likewise MySQL has always had the backseat next to Postgres or Oracle, and even the NoSQL fanboys have plenty of non-gpl options (Couch, Hadoop, Cassandra, Voldemort, etc...) to pick from. And finally, whether your P is Perl, PHP, or Python, all of those languages are available under non-GPL licenses. So, I guess the "LAMP" stack could go on.

Surely there must be some things though right? I started to think about other tools I work with regularly, like X and vim, and while I'm sure there are some tools that might be gpl, certainly many are not, and I'd guess between Solaris and BSD, I could make a GPL-free stack that I'd be comfortable working on, with software that is already available. This isn't to say I wouldn't miss anything. I love my recursive grep, find the -P argument for xargs amazing, and find BSD tar just crippling to work with. None of those would be as bad as losing screen, which is a must have for any serious server work. Of course there are alternatives for all of these (not that I know anyone who uses tmux), and I'd bet some of these features could be easily re-implemented in a BSD version if needed.

I think where this really get's you is in the software that has been built upon these base tools, perticularly in the area of PHP software development. A lot of people over that last 10 years have produced GPL lciense software, like Drupal, PHP-Nuke, phpBB, phpMyAdmin, and more. I think most people didn't really think about there license choices back then (perhaps not now either); "if it's good enough for Linus". It's too bad, I know I'd much rather license phpPgAdmin under the BSD than GPL, but I think we're pretty much stuck at this point. I have noticed some newer projects (Habari for instance) have chosen non-GPL licenses; I don't know if that is a trend or anything, but it wouldn't hurt if it was.

Soon after they announced, I'd been hoping to take [http://www.google.com/chrome Google Chrome] for a test drive. The [http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html comic book] laid out a lot of interesting things, my favorite being the discussion of separate processes leading to detachable (and "retachable") browser tabs, something I have been touting for **years** as a long term [http://galeon.sourceforge.net/ Galeon] user. My big problem though? I run Linux, and Google has so far left Linux support on the back burner. Still, I figured that someone had probably made a Linux build available by now, so inspired by John McCain's speech on TV tonight, I set about seeing if I could get it set up.



Basically the process now for running Chrome on Linux revolves around getting some advanced [http://www.winehq.org/ Wine] machinery in place (links to follow), and then everything else works like a normal Wine install. One sticking point I ran into is that my Wine was configured as a win2k server, and Google requires WinXP or newer, so I had to reconfigure that before it would install. This was pretty tricky to figure out as there was absolutely zero error messages when trying to install, instead I just got a empty return to prompt. If you're giving it a try, make sure you're configured similarly.



Anyway, after getting it up an running, I ran through a quick checklist of sites I wanted to test; [http://news.google.com/ Google news], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_model Wikipedia], [http://www.slideshare.net/ Slideshare], [http://www.omniti.com/ OmniTI's] website, and several planets all worked fine. I then did some testing of [http://phppgadmin.sourceforge.net/?page=demo phpPgAdmin], and it seemed to work fine. This was a concern I had, given a lack of Apple products on the dev team, we already have enough issues supporting Safari (donations welcome [[image /xzilla/templates/default/img/emoticons/tongue.png alt=":-P" style="display: inline; vertical-align: bottom;" class="emoticon" /]]), and now PHP developers (really all web developers) now have yet another browser they can expect bug reports from. Yippee! But again, it worked well, and we have some fairly complicated javascript going on with the tree menu, so that seems good.



All in all I am happy with the experiment. I don't suspect I will really use it with any regularity, but it is interesting to play with (and who knows, maybe upgrading wine will make [http://www.phunland.com/wiki/Home phun] run better). If you'd like to get it running on your Linux, I've put a screenshot and the help links I used after the jump; they're mostly Ubuntu specific, but should be easily ported to other flavors.






[[image http://people.planetpostgresql.org/xzilla/uploads/chrome-screenshot.png alt="Chrome on Ubuntu"]]



primary link I used was

[http://www.myscienceisbetter.info/2008/09/install-google-chrome-on-linux-using-wine.html http://www.myscienceisbetter.info/2008/09/install-google-chrome-on-linux-using-wine.html]



the other links I looked at while going through the above were:

[http://www.winehq.org/site/download-deb http://www.winehq.org/site/download-deb]

[http://wiki.winehq.org/winetricks http://wiki.winehq.org/winetricks]

[http://www.nabble.com/winetricks-help-td18006498.html http://www.nabble.com/winetricks-help-td18006498.html]

[http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=908493&page=7 http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=908493&page=7]

A couple months ago we started talking seriously about replacing CVS with a more advanced system for [http://phppgadmin.sourceforge.net/ phpPgAdmin]. We looked around a little, but ended up going with [http://git.or.cz/ Git]. We didn't have any favorites going in, though we knew [http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2008-June/001190.html moving to subversion] was a waste of time, and in the end Git was probably chosen mostly because, of the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_revision_control distributed revision control systems] out there, Git is what other projects in our [http://git.postgresql.org/ sphere of influence] seem to be gravitating toward.



When you read up on Git, it has a lot of awesome bells and whistles, expecially for CVS based projects. A CVS import tool, support for multiple tags/branches, setup for shared commit repositories (to match the CVS workflow), and even CVS compatible syntax and command line interface. This made Git seem like a slam dunk. Unfortunately, if you're using 3rd party project hosting services, you quickly find no one wants to set all that up for you. We use Sourceforge now, and they probably should be setting that up since they have all of the pieces already in place, but AFAIK Git isn't on the radar for them. In the end I gave up on that dream; if you're going to use git, just use Git and live with it.



There are a couple of Git providers out there, we ended up going with [http://www.github.com Github]. Github, like Git itself, looks awesome up front, but has some issues going in. It's based around the RoR community, which means that using it service involves navigating unreliability and lack of documentation (since everyone should "just know" how things work), but also means you get very nice tools and a subtle influx of happiness into your development environment (adding more happiness should not be overlooked for a project where most people hack on the code in thier spare time). I should note Github offers both free and commercial accounts; right now were using just the free accounts and that's going well for us. I think some people are turned off by thier commercial side, but I think the ASP business model they have is much better than SourceForge's open source website and closed source commercial product model, so I've no bones about it.



We haven't done a release yet, though we have one on the radar, so we'll be vetting our release process against Git soon. We also haven't moved our website and project repos into Git yet either, those aren't critical for development, so we haven't felt a pressing need, but eventually that should happen too. I'd be interesting in hearing about other popular PHP projects that have moved to Git (or any DRCS system really), and if people want, I'd be happy to give more details on what we went through so far in the conversion process; I'll be at [http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/content/home OSCon] next week, so you can track me down there if you're going, or drop me an email (who knows it may even inspire additional blog posts).



It's still new and shiny (and confusing), but the more I use it, the more I like it. You can't ask for more than that.

The phpPgAdmin team has released a 4.2-Beta-1 package for your immediate use

and testing. Along with a whole slew of new features, the 4.2 release will also introduce support for PostgreSQL 8.3. You can download it from our website at [http://phppgadmin.sourceforge.net http://phppgadmin.sourceforge.net]. The beta also serves as our call for translation updates; translators are encouraged to send in updates, and any

bug reports should be logged in our project tracker at [http://sourceforge.net/projects/phppgadmin/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/phppgadmin/]. Thanks for your support!

You know, I don't think I have ever heard of someone getting PostgreSQL & SELinux to play nicely, and certainly not in the context of phpPgAdmin, so I offer these notes for all future generations that end up having to tackle this annoying beast. (Note: I still recommend people just turn off SELinux, but if that's not an option...
For the record:



When I showed up, PostgreSQL, Apache, and PHP were already installed on the machine, my goal was to get phpPgAdmin installed. Step one was installing PostgreSQL support into PHP, which was a simple yum command away. Once that was done, I download ppa 4.1.3 and went about unpacking and configure it. Then the moment of truth... I tried to login and got the mysterious "login failed" message. No big deal, I walked the steps of troubleshooting like I have done 1000 times before... check postgresql.conf for tcp/ip, check pg_hba.conf for access, verify I can login with psql, everything seems ok. I try a few more times, but no dice. What is bothering me most is that the PostgreSQL logs do not show any FATAL errors (or errors of any kind for that matter), which 99% of the time means my connection attempt is not reaching the PostgreSQL server. The other 1% is that I am logging in ok, but am having a browser issue...

As it turns out, I've been trying to do this with elinks, so I spend some time working around the no X solution (ended up port forwarding Apache back to my desktop) so I could use Galeon to login. In any case, that still didn't work, and by now I was getting annoyed I hack the pg_connect commands to spit out errors to the log files, and I see that all I'm getting is the "is postgres running and accepting tcp/ip connections error?" message, which it was, but I verify but telnetting to port 5432. Suddenly I remember, this is a Red hat box, and get suspicious of an SELinux issue. I do a check to see if I can login as the apache user using psql and I can, which is a little befuddling, but all the pieces fit together: httpd can't reach PostgreSQL, but other things can, and there are no firewalls in the way (verified with iptables). This is about the time I whine a little to Dave. Dave is smart, and I figure he might have a clue about where to go from here. Unfortunately he claims no knowledge of SELinux, but he was smart enough to look in /var/log/messages and see the following message: (NOTE: pay attention, this is the important part!)



OK, easy enough, we run that and sure enough it's complaining about httpd trying to access the socket file...



It's important to note it was not complaining that the apache user was trying to get access, but that httpd was (which is why apache/psql worked ok earlier). So, we go ahead and run the recommended command *restorecon -v .s.PGSQL.5432*, and try again, but still no dice. While I check the PostgreSQL logs and the Apache logs, Dave taps me on the shoulder and points out that we have a different error from SELinux (see, Dave is smart)



Of course this has a big handy message to go with it as well:



So, we run that handy command it recommend here, *httpd_can_network_connect_db=1*, and... hold one... is it me or is that flag a bit lolcode or something? "apache can has database?" sure!... anyway, we run that command and try it again and wallah, we're in! So we worked around SELinux, now we have to put all the other security stuff back in place (did i leave out the part where I set the pg_hba all trust? ).

I'm not entirely sure this is the best way to go about things (please do drop suggestions / advice / general wisdom in the comments) but it will work for now while we get things running and can discuss more fully a security policy. Hopefully this post will help others to look in the right places, and again, any pointers would be very welcome. Also, if you know if it's possible to modify the php-pgsql rpm file to update the SELinux policy automagically, I'd be curious about that too.

About three weeks ago we put out a new version of [http://phppgadmin.sourceforge.net/ phpPgAdmin]'s stable branch which had a security fix for an XSS vulnerability. Unfortunately the fix also introduced a regression, mainly for those running non-mainstream locales (including SQL_ASCII, which is somewhat mainstream), so we spent the last few weeks coming up with a better fix. Since the scope of the better fix cuts a wide swath against the stable files, we've decided to be a bit more cautious and put out a Release Candidate for the 4.1.3 branch. Hopefully we'll get some solid feedback and testing on the RC so we can push out a 4.1.3 final and then get back to work on 4.2 (4.2 is looking to be a really great release, so more help now putting 4.1.3 to bed would be huge!). For those helping out or those needing to upgrade from earlier 4.1.x release (which we recommend), you can find the new version from our [http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=37132&package_id=32761&release_id=518883 download page on SourceForge].

Yesterday we released a new point release of phpPgAdmin that fixes some

significant issues in phpPgAdmin 4.1. In particular, a security bug has been

fixed so all users of phpPgAdmin are strongly encouraged to upgrade right away. For more information and to download the new release, please visit [http://phppgadmin.sourceforge.net/ http://phppgadmin.sourceforge.net/].