The problem#

Continuing from the past two weeks, in my work on the Pacifist Factorio mod, I noticed there were rich text icons for military-related entities that I thought the mod had removed from the game. By "rich text icons", I'm referring to the dialog that some text boxes in the game (e.g. for naming a train stop) have a button to bring up which shows icons that can be inserted into the text box which include all of the items in the game along with a few other things. In that dialog, there were icons for things like biter corpses despite biters having been removed from the game.

The solution#

This PR, which is included in the latest version of Pacifist, hides all of the icons related only to items that have been removed or hidden by Pacifist.

The details#

The problem#

Continuing from last week, in my work on the Pacifist Factorio mod, I wanted to remove the character's gun slots. They are always visible in the bottom-left of the screen with gun and ammo icons, making it clear there's an expectation of weapons.

The solution#

This PR, which is included in the latest version of Pacifist, replaces the icon on the slots and rewords some of the text shown in the game about them.

The details#

The problem#

I wanted to introduce Factorio to some younger cousins but didn't think the military aspects of the game would be appropriate for them, both because their parents would rather they not be playing violent video games and it's simply an additional distraction and added complexity in a game that's already fairly involved, especially for a child.

Due to Factorio's active modding community, often if you can think of a mod you want, someone else has already thought of it and implemented it. And it turned out I'm not the first person to a less violent Factorio: Pacifist already existed and did most of what I wanted. Like many Factorio mods, it's open-source and has a GitHub page. The developer was very friendly and helpful, so I was able to contribute changes get them into the next release of the mod.

My contributions weren't fixing bugs in the mod as much as nudging its goals in a slightly different direction: it was already removing the military aspect from the gameplay, but I also wanted to remove hints of it from the UI as much as possible.

The solution#

Play Factorio with Pacifist, which now includes my changes. I recommend also including my mod BackpackRename. Additionally, I found the StartAlt and Attention Indicator mods good for playing with new players.

The details#

Introduction#

Factorio is a sandbox automation and logistics game notable for, among other things, very good support for mods. The developers often go out of their way to support features and fix bugs that only affect mods.

I've only just started to dip my toes in the world of Factorio modding, so I'm definitely no authority on the topic. But this post will be about things that weren't obvious to me starting out.

Resources#

As I said, modding is very well supported, which includes comprehensive documentation and tutorials. One detail I'd call out is that I recommend installing FMTK, which provides IDE tooling for writing Factorio mods, including a VS Code extension (don't worry, there's a Vim mode for VS Code). Also you will probably spend a lot of time looking at the log file. Additionally, you can find lots of examples by looking at the many existing mods; a lot them have links to source code repositories from their mod pages, but even if they don't, you can just download them and unzip them.

If you have a question that can't be answered by those resources or a web search, you can ask for help on the modding forum or the #modding-help channel of the official Factorio Discord.

Other tips#

The problem#

Last time, I built a user script that could run on the Folklife 2024 schedule page¹ and reorganize it so it would display the schedule as a grid. But it was brittle and awkward to use because it requiring careful ordering of the interactions with the page and reloading to view a different day's schedule.

The solution#

After failing to come up with an appropriate place to add an event handler, I gave up and took a different approach. I modified the script to work fine if it's run multiple times (and exit quickly if there's no work to do), even if the page is not in a valid state, and then simply set it to rerun every half second. Definitely a hack, but it worked.

Here's the final version of the user script and the Git repo showing the version history.

The details#

The problem#

The Folklife 2024 schedule page¹ is a schedule grid: locations are along the x-axis and time is along the y-axis. Except it's not actually arranged as a grid: each column is just stacked in order with no correspondence to the other columns or the absolute times of the events. Glancing at the code, I noticed the schedule data was available in JSON format, so it should be pretty easy write a user script to display the schedule in a slightly different format.

But when I went to actually make the changes, I found the code is obfuscated React that turned out to be tricky to modify.

The solution#

I was able to write this user script (git repo), which changes the display from the columns of events to a schedule grid. It even works on Firefox mobile, although only if you explicitly request the desktop site.

The details#

The problem#

I had recently done an apt upgrade that included upgrading ZFS and noticed zpool status showed a weird "(non-allocating)" message, which seemed concerning:

$ zpool status
  pool: tank
 state: ONLINE
config:

    NAME         STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
    tank         ONLINE       0     0     0
      mirror-0   ONLINE       0     0     0
        ata-***  ONLINE       0     0     0  (non-allocating)
        ata-***  ONLINE       0     0     0  (non-allocating)

errors: No known data errors

The solution#

This forum thread suggested the error may be due to a version mismatch between the ZFS tools and the kernel module. I confirmed there was a mismatch:

$ zpool --version
zfs-2.2.3-2
zfs-kmod-2.1.14-1

The easy way to load the new version of a kernel module after an update is to reboot the computer. But if you don't want to do that, here's the general outline of the commands I ran to unload and reload ZFS (run as root):

# Stop using ZFS
$ zfs umount -a
$ zpool export tank
$ service zfs-zed stop
# Remove modules
$ rmmod zfs
$ rmmod spl
# will show error: rmmod: ERROR: Module spl is in use by: ...
# repeatedly rmmod dependencies until spl is removed.

# Reload ZFS
$ modprobe zfs
$ service zfs-zed start
$ zpool import tank

The details#

The problem#

I use KeePassXC as my password manager in Firefox and while sometimes the connection between Firefox and KeePassXC drops and I have to explicitly click reconnect, it recently stopped working entirely.

The solution#

Install the keepassxc-full package instead of the keepassxc package. If you get the browser extension via the webext-keepassxc-browser package, then your package manager will automatically get the right one.

(This only applies to Debian Sid and Trixie or newer.)

The details#

The problem#

I was writing a user script where I wanted to be able to intercept the fetch() calls the web page made so my script could use the contents. I found a suggestion of simply reassigning window.fetch to my own function that internally called the real window.fetch while also doing whatever else I wanted. While it worked fine under Tampermonkey on Chromium, under Greasemonkey on Firefox, the script would just silently fail with no indication of why the code wasn't running.

(The script I was writing was this one for fixing the formatting on the Folklife 2024 schedule to reformat the schedule to display as a grid. I plan to write a devlog post on it in the future, but just writing about the most pernicious issue in this post.)

The solution#

The problem was that Firefox's security model special-cases function calls between web pages and extensions (and user scripts running inside Greasemonkey count as part of an extension for this purpose). And, furthermore, Promises can't pass the boundary, so you need to carefully define functions such that the implicit Promise created by declaring the function async lives on the right side of the boundary.

The following code combines all of that together to intercept fetch() on both Firefox and Chromium such that a userscript function intercept is called with the text of the response to every fetch():

const intercept = responseText => {
  // use responseText somehow ...
};

const w = window.wrappedJSObject;
if (w) {
  exportFunction(intercept, window,
                 { defineAs: "extIntercept" });
  w.eval("window.origFetch = window.fetch");

  w.eval(`window.fetch = ${async (...args) => {
    let [resource, config] = args;
    const response = await window.origFetch(resource,config);
    window.extIntercept(await response.clone().text())
    return response;
  }}`);
} else {
  const { fetch: origFetch } = window;

  window.fetch = async (...args) => {
    let [resource, config] = args;
    const response = await origFetch(resource, config);
    intercept(await response.clone().text());
    return response;
  };
}

The details#

The problem#

My personal desktop runs Debian Unstable ("Sid")¹. The nature of running a bleeding edge distro is that things break sometimes. I use Debian Testing/Stable or Ubuntu on my other machines to make my life easier, but I often want access to the latest version of some piece of software and running Debian Unstable is one way to do that. Admittedly, I also do it partially just because fixing things that break is a good way of learning how things work.

The most common kind of problem I run into is that upgrades are not straightforward. For their unstable distro, Debian doesn't make any promises about package dependencies not changing. This is less of a problem when there's an additional package that needs to be installed, but can be complicated when there's conflicts which require removing packages to get an upgrade to go through.

Recently I ran into an extreme version of this problem: trying to upgrade, it proposed uninstalling nearly everything I had installed. Worse, trying to resolve the issue, I got a scary sounding warning that I had uninstalled libssl3:

dpkg: libssl3:amd64: dependency problems, but removing anyway as you requested:
 [...]
 systemd depends on libssl3 (>= 3.0.0).
 sudo depends on libssl3 (>= 3.0.0).
 [...]

Both of those sound important.

The solution#

Luckily, it wasn't as bad as it sounded. Looking at the message, it turned out I had replaced libssl3 with libssl3t64. The latter of which is actually the exact same thing, although the package manager doesn't know that. The reason for the different package name is part of the Debian project to transition to 64-bit time_t, which is required to fix the Year 2038 problem. While on AMD64 and other 64-bit architectures, everything already uses 64-bit time_t, that's not true of all platforms that Debian supports. The way Debian handles ABI transitions like this is to rename the library packages with a suffix (t64 for this one) to ensure the old and new ABI don't get mixed accidentally. Since all of the architectures share the package names, the rename also happens on AMD64 even though there's actual change to match the rename on other platforms where the ABI did change.

Presumably the upgrade will be smoother when done between stable versions, but it really confused apt (which I usually use via wajig):

$ wajig install libssl-dev
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 libegl1 : Depends: libegl-mesa0 but it is not going to be installed
 libreoffice-core : Depends: libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-0 (>= 1.0.0) but it is not going to be installed
                    Depends: libgstreamer1.0-0 (>= 1.4.0) but it is not going to be installed
                    Depends: liborcus-0.18-0 (>= 0.19.2) but it is not going to be installed
                    Depends: liborcus-parser-0.18-0 (>= 0.19.2) but it is not going to be installed
 wine-development : Depends: wine64-development (>= 8.21~repack-1) but it is not going to be installed or
                             wine32-development (>= 8.21~repack-1)
                    Depends: wine64-development (< 8.21~repack-1.1~) but it is not going to be installed or
                             wine32-development (< 8.21~repack-1.1~)
E: Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages.

Yeah, no idea what libegl1, libreoffice-core, or wine-development have to do with upgrading libssl-dev, but apt was showing those same packages in the error messages no matter what I tried to upgrade and trying to upgrade those packages didn't work either. Luckily, aptitude was able to handle it somewhat better:

$ sudo aptitude install libssl-dev
The following packages will be upgraded:
  libssl-dev{b}
1 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1459 not upgraded.
Need to get 2,699 kB of archives. After unpacking 1,122 kB will be used.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 libssl-dev : Depends: libssl3t64 (= 3.2.1-3) but it is not going to be installed
The following actions will resolve these dependencies:

     Remove the following packages:
1)     libssl3 [3.1.4-2 (now)]
2)     libssl3:i386 [3.1.4-2 (now)]

     Install the following packages:
3)     libssl3t64 [3.2.1-3 (testing, unstable)]
4)     libssl3t64:i386 [3.2.1-3 (testing, unstable)]



Accept this solution? [Y/n/q/?] y
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  libssl3t64{a} libssl3t64:i386{a}
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  libssl3{a} libssl3:i386{a}
The following packages will be upgraded:
  libssl-dev
1 packages upgraded, 2 newly installed, 2 to remove and 1457 not upgraded.
Need to get 7,177 kB of archives. After unpacking 2,294 kB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?]

Getting the packages to upgrade involved a lot of calls to aptitude that looked like that: removing a list of libraries and a installing a matching list of new libraries whose names were identical to those removed except with t64 at the end.

The details#