I ran into this exact situation at work - though for me it was more the case that getting approvals for new software / installing new dependencies in our system is a massive pain.

So I went with Python since it’s already installed on basically any Linux system. It was fine - I mean Python is a good language and can certainly handle string processing and data manipulation with relative ease.

I still think the Python docs are pretty bad, and I wasn’t thrilled with the options for calling a subprocess in Python - they all felt kinda clunky, though I was barred from using the newest versions since I had to run an older version of Python.

But I ultimately got something that worked and it was certainly better executed / shorter than the bash equivalent it was replacing.

But on the other hand, if loans were subject to bankruptcy, most poor people would never be approved to get them.

You offered a lot of suggestions, and I’m sure people will disagree over the specifics, but I think your overall point is excellent and not talked about enough. I wonder if anyone has ever even attempted a survey on the ages of maintainers/contributors? I bet it’s skewing older fast.

Nothing wrong with that of course, especially given the project’s age, complexity, and being written in C - but you’re right, at some point you have to attract new talent - people can’t maintain forever.

I’m a 29 year old developer - I didn’t even know you could do git patches via email until recently. And while it’s super cool, it also sounds kinda terrible, especially at the volume they must be receiving? Their own docs are saying the mailing lists receive some 500 emails per day and I can’t imagine the merge process is fun.

So many doc pages are dedicated to how to submit a patch - which is great that it’s documented, and I’m sure it will always be somewhat complicated for a large project - but it also feels like things that are all automatically handled by newer tools / bots which can automatically enforce style checks, etc.

I guess they could argue that the complicated process acts as a filter to people submitting PRs who don’t know what they are doing, but I’d argue it also shuts out talented engineers who don’t have 40 hours to learn how to submit a patch to a project on top of also learning the kernel and also fixing the bug in question.

From what little I read of their git process, does anyone know if there’s anything preventing the maintainer of a subsystem from setting up a more modern method for receiving patches? As long as the upstream artifact to the kernel has the expected format?

Oh man, I actually like the language, but you made me think of my own hot take:

Python has inexcusably poor docs.

Just a smattering of examples, which aren’t even that good, while failing to report key information like all the parameters a function can take, or all the exceptions it can throw. Any other popular language I can think of has this locked down and it makes things so much easier.

Absolutely this. There are issues with deletes not federating properly too, right?

That’s a big part of the issue here too since even when .world cleans up the content it’s already been pushed out to every other instance and will now remain there until all THOSE admins also purge it.

Under this broad of a ruleset, all software would have to be open source.

The PR for the necessary back-end changes is out for review on GitHub: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3869

That link seems to 404. I will IM you shortly.

Sure thing.

Do you get any additional information in your error log?

If not, would you be open to running a version with additional debugging statements to help identify the cause of the failures?

I know there is an issue when .world is overloaded where this happens, but if it’s happening constantly it has to be something specific with your account vs mine.

LASIM author here - there does not appear to be any API changes in 0.18.4, and it seemed to work fine with my testing.

I’ve updated the table on the Github README to reflect this.

Maybe I’m completely misremembering things, but at some point wasn’t there a hotfix to Lemmy that hard-limited how many comments a thread could have? Does anyone know if there’s a maximum and if so how many?

Just wondering, cause uh, I could see this one having a lot of comments.

This is now released :)

For anyone finding this in the future:

The latest version of LASIM (0.2.1) has a Settings tab that allows you to choose what you want to upload.

If you are using the JSON file posted above, you’d want to choose just “Upload Community Subscriptions” on this tab so that your profile settings, etc. are not changed.

Sneak peek :)

I hadn’t even considered this use case for LASIM, but that’s really neat.

I’ve been thinking about a settings page where you can toggle what to sync, among a few other future features. I’ll definitely add an option in the future to NOT sync the profile settings.

LASIM author here - you are correct. I explicitly made it “additive” to avoid accidents where you could end up erasing a bunch of subscriptions. Right now LASIM only calls the subscribe API interface so it’s actually impossible for it to unsubscribe you from anything.

I am considering adding a “destructive” sync in the future which, if toggled on, would unsubscribe you from anything not in the JSON file. But it’s not implemented yet!

There is nothing built into Lemmy, though there is at least one active PR working on it.

In the meantime I made this tool: https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim

It copies subscriptions, blocks, and some profile settings.

There are others too if you search for them.

Interesting! I wonder if that should be written up as a bug report, or if it’s by design. I guess I could see both cases. Glad you figured it out though!

The error is bubbling up from the activity pub library that Lemmy uses: https://github.com/LemmyNet/activitypub-federation-rust/blob/main/src/http_signatures.rs

See “ActivitySignatureInvalid”

Not sure why you’d be seeing this though. Something wrong with your Lemmy signature maybe? I’ve never actually set one up myself, but I assume you generate some kind of cert at some point, or it uses your SSL cert or something? Maybe a misconfiguration in that area?

Author of the tool here! If you are okay letting me know the instance, I can definitely take a look and see if I can figure out the issue. I might need to make an account though.

There’s lots of Lemmy instances, and I’m always finding new quirks with different configs. But it’ll help the next person who might run into the same thing!