PaulHowarth/Blog/2026-02

Paul's Blog Entries for February 2026

Sunday 1st February 2026

Fedora Project

  • Updated perl-Compress-Raw-Bzip2 to 2.217 in Rawhide:

    • No functional changes

  • Updated perl-Compress-Raw-Lzma to 2.217 in Rawhide:

    • Test updates, no functional changes

  • Updated perl-Compress-Raw-Zlib to 2.217 in Rawhide:

    • No functional changes

  • Updated perl-Digest-Perl-MD5 to 1.91 in Rawhide:

    • ~11% performance improvement on 64-bit systems (reduced masking overhead)

    • Added GitHub Actions CI workflows

    • Code reformatted with perltidy

  • Updated perl-IO-Compress to 2.217 in Rawhide:

    • Refresh zipdetails from https://github.com/pmqs/zipdetails

    • Delete GZIP environment variable before running interop tests (GH#24)

    • IO::Compress @2.215: t/006zip.t failed due to missing test files (GH#67)

    • Fix version check in 000prereq.t

    • Enhance _dosToUnixTime to handle zero and invalid datetime values; add tests for edge cases (GH#65)

Local Packages

  • Updated perl-Compress-Raw-Bzip2 to 2.217 as per the Fedora version

  • Updated perl-Compress-Raw-Lzma to 2.217 as per the Fedora version

  • Updated perl-Compress-Raw-Zlib to 2.217 as per the Fedora version

  • Updated perl-IO-Compress to 2.217 as per the Fedora version

Monday 2nd February 2026

Fedora Project

  • Updated bluefish to 2.4.0 in Rawhide:

    • Bluefish 2.4.0 has some new features and many small improvements; it is no longer a 2.2 release because backwards compatibility with the 2.0 series of Bluefish has been removed
    • If you upgrade from 2.0 straight to 2.4, your config files and project files are no longer 100% correctly loaded

    • Starting from 2.4, Bluefish will no longer place config files in ~/.bluefish

      • On Linux it will be ~/.config and ~/.local/

      • On Windows it will be LocalAppData and RoamingAppData

      • On OSX it will be ~/Library/Application Support

    • The biggest new feature, still experimental, is that you can edit two documents side-by-side

    • You can change opening and ending tags in XML or HTML simultaneously if you hit [ctrl][t]

    • You can more easily save the current contents to a template
    • For new users, and also active in new projects, is a UI selection dialog, where you can choose between a UI optimised for web development, programming or just have everything enabled or disabled; this will help new Bluefish users to customize Bluefish in an easier way
    • There are a few fixes as well:
      • Selecting lines by dragging in the margin works more reliably
      • Paste special works more reliably
      • Line comments in Python are better detected, which is visible in the syntax highlighting
      • The toggle comment function is improved
      • The Windows build has better error messages when starting external commands fails

  • Updated perl-IO-Compress-Lzma to 2.217 in Rawhide:

    • Delete XZ environment variable before running interop tests

    • Rework workflow to automatically detect and use all the versions of perl available

Local Packages

  • Updated bluefish to 2.4.0 as per the Fedora version

  • Updated perl-BerkeleyDB to 0.67 (no functional changes)

  • Updated perl-IO-Compress-Lzma to 2.217 as per the Fedora version

Tuesday 3rd February 2026

Fedora Project

  • Branched and built milter-greylist (4.6.4) for EPEL-10.1 and EPEL-10

  • Updated miniz to 3.1.1 in Rawhide:

    • Declare function wrappers as inline static to fix warnings

  • Updated perltidy to 20260204 in Rawhide (see CHANGES.md for details)

Local Packages

  • Updated perl-Compress-Raw-Zlib to 2.218:

    • Fix for regression of GH#34

  • Updated perl-Data-Alias to 1.29:

    • Fix compatibility with perl 5.43.8

  • Updated perl-Perl-Tidy to 20260204 as per the Fedora perltidy package

Thursday 5th February 2026

Fedora Project

  • Updated perl-Mail-Message to 4.04 in Rawhide:

    • Fixed date field parsing regression (GH#28)

Friday 6th February 2026

Local Packages

  • Branched the development repository for Fedora 44

  • Updated curl (8.18.0) to fix rubygem-ethon FTBFS in Rawhide (Bug #2405328)

  • Updated dovecot (2.4.2) to add /var/lib/dovecot to tmpfiles for image mode

Saturday 7th February 2026

Fedora Project

  • Updated perl-Business-ISBN-Data to 20260203.001 in F-44 and Rawhide:

    • Data update for 2026-01-31

Monday 9th February 2026

Local Packages

  • Updated perl-Net-Server to 2.017:

    • Address IO::Socket rudely force-importing random symbols

    • Warn-clean IO::Socket::INET6 "Subroutine redefined" spewage

    • Various patches generated with the help of Grok4 xAI
    • Various test suite framework improvements
      • Make test suites return non-zero upon failure
      • Fix IPv6 pre-check for tests
      • Timeout test server if client crashes, instead of rudely mooching on the listen port forever in the background

    • Warn-clean for older MakeMaker, such as 6.30

    • Fix POD errors
    • Allow static Proto methods to be imported as normal routines

    • Create Net::Server::IP compatibility wrapper module

    • Honour {ipv6_package} config preference more reliably

    • GetAddrInfoFlags compatibility patch for systems with spoofed networks on loopback interfaces using IO::Socket::IP

    • Now IPv4 and IPv6 finally work with OpenVZ or fake loopback or venet0 or even on IPv6-only machines even without public routability for that AF_* Address Family (these used to fail)

    • Handle special IPv6 behaviours, like OpenBSD and WinXP

    • Emulate IO::Socket::IP {V6Only} behaviour for IO:Socket::INET6

    • Fall back to IO::Socket::INET if no IPv6 module available

    • Various SSLEAY fixes:
      • Add more SSLEAY tests to help with debugging

      • Fixed errors on older Net::SSLeay < 1.49

      • Fix tied SYSREAD $scalar input syntax instead of only ref \$scalar sysread FILEHANDLE,SCALAR,LENGTH,OFFSET

      • Fix SSLEAY->read_until logic

      • Fixed some errors with newer Net::SSLeay and OpenSSL 3.x:

      • 167772454. error:0A000126:SSL routines::unexpected eof while reading

      • 167772567. error:0A000197:SSL routines::shutdown while in init

    • Get test suite to pass cleanly on all variations tested:
      • Linux Kernel: 2.6.18, 3.10.0, 4.18.0, 5.14.0, 6.2.16, 6.8.0
      • Flavour: Ubuntu 24.04, Debian 12, Fedora 42, RHEL5/6/7/8/9

      • Windows: Cygwin, MinGW64, WinXP, Win7, Win10, Win11, GitBash

      • Other OS: OpenBSD, Darwin, MacOSX, FreeBSD
      • OpenSSL 0.9.8e, 1.0.1e, 1.0.2k, 1.1.1k, 3.2.2, 3.5.1

      • Hypervisor: OpenVZ, KVM, VirtualBox, VirtIO, VMWare, Docker

      • Dual-Stack Networks: IPv4, IPv6, IPv*, IPv4-Only, IPv6-Only
      • Perl: 5.8.8 5.10.1 5.16.3 5.26.3 5.32.1 5.34.1 5.36.0 5.38.2 5.40.2

      • Net::SSLeay: 1.30, 1.35, 1.55, 1.88, 1.94

      • Socket: 1.78, 1.82, 1.97, 1.99, 2.010, 2.027, 2.031, 2.040

      • Socket6: None, 0.19, 0.23, 0.28, 0.29

      • IO::Socket::IP: None, 0.21, 0.38, 0.41

      • IO::Socket::INET6: None 2.51 2.56 2.66 2.67 2.69 2.72 2.73

Tuesday 10th February 2026

Local Packages

  • Updated unrar to 7.20

Wednesday 11th February 2026

Fedora Project

  • Updated perl-MIME-tools to 5.517 in F-44 and Rawhide:

    • Handle MIME parameters of the form param= better (i.e. a parameter with no value at all); it's treated the same as param="" rather than aborting the parse

    • Diagnose additional types of malformed MIME as ambiguous; specifically, an empty boundary parameter like boundary= or boundary="" is treated as ambiguous

Local Packages

  • Updated perl-MIME-tools to 5.517 as per the Fedora version

Thursday 12th February 2026

Local Packages

  • Updated curl (rc) to new upstream release candidate 8.19.0~rc1, dropping support for distributions prior to F-36, EL-9 since OpenSSL 3.x is now a requirement

Sunday 15th February 2026

Fedora Project

  • Updated perl-Business-ISBN-Data to 20260214.001 in F-44 and Rawhide:

    • Data update for 2026-02-14

Monday 16th February 2026

Fedora Project

  • Updated ansible-collection-community-libvirt to 2.1.0 in F-44 and Rawhide:

  • This is a minor release of the community.libvirt collection

    • virt_install:

      • Added support for memoryBacking source type configuration, including memfd for shared memory (GH#228)

      • Added support for primary value attribute (_value or value) in dynamic dict options that require a primary value alongside additional attributes

      • Enhanced cloud_init configuration handling for sub-options (meta-data, user-data and network-config) to support both string and dictionary inputs

      • Refactored common virt-install functionality into module_utils and doc_fragments to enable code reuse between modules

      • Fixed cloud_init configuration handling for meta-data, user-data and network-config

      • Fixed the dict-based options handling for events, resource and sysinfo options

    • virt_volume:

      • New return key/value pairs 'Type', 'Capacity' and 'Allocation' were added to command 'list_volumes' (GH#187)

      • Added ability to resize volumes if defined capacity is different; if volume already exists and defined capacity in XML differs, a resize is attempted

    • New module community.libvirt.virt_cloud_instance: Provision new virtual machines from cloud images via libvirt

Local Packages

  • Updated ansible-collection-community-libvirt to 2.1.0 as per the Fedora version

Tuesday 17th February 2026

Local Packages

  • Updated curl (rc) (8.19.0~rc1) to fix duplicate output for SSLKEYLOGFILE with OpenSSL built with enable-keylog (GH#20611, GH#20614)

Wednesday 18th February 2026

Local Packages

  • Updated perl-Net-Server to 2.018:

    • Add more ipv6_package tests

    • Fix t/Options.t to expect 0.0.0.0 on IPv4-only systems

    • Get rid of requires_ipv6() sniffing

    • Make Proto->object always return a single object

    • Honour {ipv6_package} config preference even for IPv*

Thursday 19th February 2026

Local Packages

Friday 20th February 2026

Fedora Project

  • Updated perl-Getopt-Long-Descriptive to 0.117 in F-44 and Rawhide:

    • Add experimental generation of bash/zsh completion scripts for GLD-powered programs; this code might go away or change or break in the future, don't rely on it

Saturday 21st February 2026

Fedora Project

  • Updated perl-Business-ISBN-Data to 20260218.001 in F-44 and Rawhide:

    • Data update for 2026-02-18

  • Updated perl-CPAN-Meta to 2.150013 in F-44 and Rawhide:

    • Fix an incompatibility with newer CPAN::Meta::Requirements (GH#145, GH#147)

Local Packages

  • Updated perl-CPAN-Meta to 2.150013 as per the Fedora version

  • Updated perl-Module-CoreList to 5.20260220:

    • Updated for v5.43.8

Sunday 22nd February 2026

Local Packages

  • Updated curl (rc) to new upstream release candidate 8.19.0~rc2

Monday 23rd February 2026

Dell Laptop TPM Issue

I have a work laptop, Dell Latitude 5480. After a trip to a remote office I was using it on the train back and it didn't shut down properly, resulting in the battery running out. Ever since, the laptop shows ‘Alert! TPM device is not detected!’ when powered on or rebooting and I have to press F1 to get it to continue to booting Windows. This had been going on for a while and the potential solutions I found for this that I found online involved disconnecting the battery for a while, which I didn't really want to do. Today I found this suggestion using the BIOS recovery process and it worked for me:

  • Power down the laptop and disconnect the AC power

  • Whilst holding down the Ctrl and Esc keys, plug the AC power back in

  • The laptop boots into a BIOS Recovery screen, with a few different options

  • Let go of the Ctrl and Esc keys

  • Select the "Reset BIOS Settings to Defaults" option
  • Click "Exit"

After doing this, I had no more TPM warnings when booting and TPM 2.0 was visible in Windows security settings.

Fedora Project

  • Updated perl-Unicode-UTF8 to 0.64 in F-44 and Rawhide:

    • Unicode::UTF8 now allows noncharacters; they receive no special handling and are processed like any other code point

    • According to Corrigendum #9, noncharacters (the values U+nFFFE and U+nFFFF, where n is from 0 to 10^16, and the values U+FDD0..U+FDEF) are permanently reserved but should be allowed in interchange

Local Packages

  • Updated perl-Unicode-UTF8 to 0.64 as per the Fedora version

Tuesday 24th February 2026

Fedora Project

  • Updated perl-Unicode-UTF8 to 0.65 in F-44 and Rawhide:

    • C99-compliant compiler is now required for Unicode::UTF8

    • Scan 16 bytes at a time to detect non-ASCII bytes, falling back to sequence validation for non-ASCII input; this approach resulted in a 900% throughput improvement on English text and a 200% improvement on Swedish text compared to Encode.pm

Local Packages

  • Updated perl-Compress-Raw-Zlib to 2.219:

    • Update bundled zlib to 1.3.2

  • Updated perl-Unicode-UTF8 to 0.65 as per the Fedora version

Wednesday 25th February 2026

Fedora Project

  • Updated perl-Unicode-UTF8 to 0.66 in F-44 and Rawhide:

Local Packages

  • Updated perl-Unicode-UTF8 to 0.66 as per the Fedora version

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