Everything that can go wrong will go wrong.
— Ed Murphy (not really, the original quote was a bit different)
Finally, we managed to get a new release of OFT out of the door.
While 4.2.2 is only a bugfix and security release, it also inherits a new feature from 4.2.1. Why do I mention that?
Although the feature set change for version 4.2.0 is not that big, that was the most painful release we had so far.
To understand the rant that is about to follow, one must know that this year Sonatype changed the way releases are deployed to the Central repository (formerly known as Maven Central).
Nothing wrong with doing that per se, since the old mechanism was quite clunky, and I imagine, also caused some trouble on Sonatype’s side. The announcement came around the end of 2024, and the deadline for the migration was the last of May 2025. So far so fair.
Emphraim Kishon always called his wife the “best wife of all of them”. We have that in common. What he probably did not have was one with an iPhone and a Linux laptop.
She loves her adorable iPhone mini. But her current photo management software, Shotwell, was putting quite a damper on the photo-syncing operation. A sigh emerged from her one evening, “Can’t this be automatic?”
Being a Linux nerd, and a good husband indeed, it was time to use some good old Unix philosophy, roll up the sleeves and get some Bash magic working.
We all know that everyone and his cat want our private data. Email addresses and phone numbers are among the most popular items the data grifters want. Personally, I like to know who gave away my mail addresses. Proton Mail has a nice feature that can make this happen.
If you create an email address say xyz@example.net, you can add as many aliases as you like by simply adding +<alias> to the name part of the address. If you put in the name of the company that wanted your address, it’s easy to tell where the spam originates or who lost or sold your address.
We are very happy to announce a new feature for OpenFastTrace in version 4.1.0: You can now create and use third party plugins!
Using plugins you can extend OFT with new imports and exports without modifying the core product. The very first plugin openfasttrace-asciidoc-plugin was contributed by @sophokles73 and is available in version 0.2.0.
We also have good news for Maven users: It’s very easy to use OFT plugins with our openfasttrace-maven-plugin if they are published to a Maven repository, see the documentation for details. The latest version 2.1.0 contains OFT 4.1.0.