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From gnunet-bcd to configure.ac


From: Alessio Vanni
Subject: From gnunet-bcd to configure.ac
Date: Sun, 21 Nov 2021 20:10:58 +0100
User-agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/27.2 (gnu/linux)

Hello,

these past few weeks I've been working on a few things summarized by the
subject of this mail.

Initially I simply wanted to replace a vector image, but I ended up
changing a lot more stuff, including doing some major work on the
configure.ac file.

It all started when I thought I'd try bringing the cards generated by
gnunet-bcd more up-to-date with current GNUnet, by changing the old "gnu
in front of a spiderweb" logo with the new "gnu made by interconnected
points" logo.

Before I had started working on that, I had run a test to see how the
old cards looked like, but I discovered that pdflatex would always abort
the document generation with some rather obscure errors.  Eventually, I
discovered that those errors were caused by an incompatibility between
TikZ 3 and pstricks which, from what I could gather, can't be worked
around using the methods outlined in the pstricks web page.

Due to that, other than working on adding the new logo I also had to
rewrite the TeX files to not depend on pstricks.  Other than generating
the old logo, it was used to create the QR code with the given GNS URI,
so I had to search for another package for that task.  It seems the
"qrcode" package is normally available in a "full" installation of TeX
as distributed by major GNU/Linux distribution.

The full details will be listed later in this mail, but eventually I
managed to rewrite the card-generating TeX file to compile with current
TikZ and to also have the new logo.

Since I had changed the whole TeX file, I thought I might as well do the
rest of gnunet-bcd, in a similar fashion to what I did for the FCFS
service.

This resulted in a fairly complete overhaul of gnunet-bcd, which also
brought a new feature to create a PNG picture of just the QR code, with
the purpose of letting people easily embed it in other media, instead of
having to deal with a full-fledged PDF (for example, it can be displayed
in-line in an e-mail signature.)  Right now it provides only the QR
code, but since it's a program that come with GNUnet and that can
connect with GNUnet's services, it can add to the generated PNG as many
informations as needed.

Since I had added this feature to generate a PNG, I thought it would be
nice if gnunet-qr could read the images generated by gnunet-bcd through
this new feature.  After a bit of work, if GNUnet's configure script
detects that libpng is available, gnunet-qr will have a new '-f' flag
which allows the tool to natively read a PNG file and import the scanned
QR code, if any.

Incidentally, these changes to gnunet-qr made me discover a bug with
gnunet-namestore, explained later.

Lastly, because I had to change configure.ac and since during a system
update I ended up with Autoconf 2.71 installed, which generated a number
of warnings when recompiling the configure script, I started working on
the whole file to not only bring it up to date with the new Autoconf,
but also to simplify it when possible and correct a few things I have
always found strange.

Shortly after writing this mail (it's quite long!), I'm going to push a
new branch with the following changes:

- gnunet-bcd
The new GNUnet logo is now used. This logo is generated through a TikZ
picture defined in the file itself.

gnunet-bcd can now generate three different files: the first is simply a
rework of the file that is already generated; the second is a simplified
version of that file, in which only the most basic informations, like
the full name and a few contact addresses, are requested.  The purpose
of this simplified version is to allow people to generate a "GNUnet
business card" even when they can't fill most of the fields requested by
the "full" version.  The last type of file is a PNG-encoded picture of
the QR code for embedding.

The web UI has been reworked. It doesn't include the entire Bootstrap 4
CSS, but contains only the necessary directives, adapted from Boostrap
5, to style the used elements (mostly input text boxes and labels.)  The
main reason for this choice is that editing the previous HTML was fairly
laborious, as you either deal with a file with a single line of minified
CSS, something that can kill certain editors, or you use XLSL to
generate the HTML from an XML specification, which is really an
unnecessary step, in my opinion.  The maintenance burden is more or less
the same as before, because unless there's a need to rework the whole
interface, there's no need to touch the CSS at all.

It also uses files with similar stylesheets to provide somewhat more
detailed error pages, instead of giving a very barebones HTML.  This
last change is really just for consistency with the visuals, as it
doesn't otherwise bring anything.  Unfortunately to keep things inside
gnunet-bcd itself simple, most of the CSS had to be duplicated inside
each file, instead of having them share a single common file, but it
shouldn't be too much of an issue. In the worst case, the service can be
made smarter in exchange of more lines of C code.

Finally, the program itself is not built/installed unless the pdflatex
tool is available.

- gnunet-qr
When libpng is detected by configure, a new option '-f' ('--file') is
made available, to read a QR code from a PNG-encoded picture.  The
choice of PNG is really arbitrary, because I believe it's one of the
best formats for this kind of content, not to mention it's usually
available everywhere, as sometimes libpng comes already installed when
installing a GNU/Linux distribution.

- gnunet-namestore
The '-u' option was broken. I forgot in which version this change was
made, but now public keys for egos are "stringified" by prepending a
readable representation of the string length before the actual key.
gnunet-namestore was trying to read the old format, which is six
characters shorter.

- configure.ac
For the most part, many macros being used either by the file itself or
by external files providing macros used by it, were brought up to date.
For example, iconv.m4 was updated from serial 18 to serial 21 and
libgcrypt.m4 is now the one released in 2020.

Some macros were simplified while others were created to reduce the
amount of repeated code.  This is most notable for checks regarding
external libraries like libzbar or libmicrohttpd: instead of explicitly
writing AC_ARG_WITH and do the various checks manually, a new macro
CHECK_WITH_LIB takes care of that.

Not every check could be simplified like that, but the amount of code to
deal with still has been reduced by a decent amount.

Unfortunately, a few checks had to be made "less simple", due to the
subject of the checks.  A notable example is 'struct in6_ifreq' which is
being dealt with through a series of nested AS_IF.  Since the checks are
meant to provide the proper path to the if_tun.h header (<if_tun.h>
instead of <net/if_tun.h>, etc.), I couldn't think of a better way.

Some checks were removed to start transitioning towards Autoconf 2.71.
Actually, as it is, it's already compatible with 2.71, but I'm not sure
if it's already fully updated or if Autoconf is being lenient in some
cases.  I kept 2.69 inside AC_PREREQ just in case.

The summary printed to screen at the end of the script execution has
been improved a little, mainly by reordering the entries.

There are also probably some other things I'm forgetting right now and
I'm not really going to read the whole git diff.

This should be everything, so please report any strange behaviour you
might find.

Thanks,
A.V.



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