open source

The so-called “XZ attack” is all over the internet these days, and for good reason. Over a period of over two years, an attacker using the name “Jia Tan” worked as a diligent, effective contributor to the xz compression library, eventually being granted commit access and maintainership. Using that access, they installed a very subtle, carefully hidden backdoor into liblzma, a part of xz that also happens to be a dependency of OpenSSH sshd on Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and other systemd-based Linux systems....

From my experience as a maintainer of midly successful open-source projects, I have come to the conclusion that people who criticize accepting payment to work on such projects are either acting in bad faith or are incredibly naive. Anyway, Jacob Kaplan-Moss’s recent Paying people to work on open source is good is a stellar post on the topic of open-source sustainability. My fundamental position is that paying people to work on open source is good, full stop, no exceptions....

Today I released Fattura Elettronica for .NET v3.4.13. The Fattura Elettronica project allows for the validation and de/serialization of electronic invoices that adhere to the standard defined by Italian Revenue Agency (Agenzia Entrate). See the changelog for details (Italian).

Fattura Elettronica for .NET v3.4.11 was released on NuGet today. The Fattura Elettronica project allows for the fixes a missing validation point. See the changelog for details (Italian). validation and de/serialization of electronic invoices following the Italian Revenue Agency standards.

Quoting Jan van den Berg: This weekend we learned that Bram Moolenaar had passed away at the age of 62. And this news affected me more than I expected. Like so many: I did not know Bram personally. But I’ve been using a tool made by Bram for more than half my life — at least weekly, sometimes daily. That tool is a text editor. The best one there is: Vim....

Thanks to funkyfuture’s tireless work, yesterday we released version 1.3.5 of Cerberus, the data validation package for Python. This release officially supports Python 3.10 and 3.11, fixes a few issues, and proudly displays a new documentation theme which I dig, and I hope you’ll do the same. As usual, see the changelog for details.

Fattura Elettronica for .NET v3.4.10 was released on NuGet today. The Fattura Elettronica project allows for the validation and de/serialization of electronic invoices following the Italian Revenue Agency standards. This release adds a missing validation point. See the changelog for details (Italian).

Today I released Events 0.5. Thanks to Cailean Parker’s contribution, we added support for the __getitem__ dunder (aka Python magic method.) This allows the calling of events from strings, thus enabling dynamic events. For instance: events = Events(tuple(f"on_{i}" for i in range(5))) for i in range(5): events[f"on_{i}"](i) The C# language provides a handy way to declare, subscribe to and fire events. In C#, an event is a “slot” to which callback functions (event handlers) can be attached - a process referred to as subscribing to an event....

Fattura Elettronica for .NET v3.4.8 was released on NuGet today. The Fattura Elettronica project allows for the validation and de/serialization of electronic invoices following the Italian Revenue Agency standards. As with the previous one, this release also addresses a small undocumented behavior in validating the invoice. See the relevant ticket for the details.

Fattura Elettronica for .NET v3.4.7 was released on NuGet today. The Fattura Elettronica project allows for the validation and de/serialization of electronic invoices adhering to the canon defined by the Italian Revenue Agency. This release refines how the one-cent tolerance is accounted for in validation checks of types 00421 and 00423. As is often the case, there are subtle differences between the theoretical implementation defined in the official specs and the actual validation implemented by the same Agency that released said specs....