Update on iPad Development
This morning I spent a little time happily updating my Linode box with the updated to Ubuntu 20.04, and wanted to write down what I'd found in the investigation of the "held back" updates that Ubuntu does. First, the problem. 🙂
In doing the standard:
$ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get upgrade
I saw that all upgrades were applied, and after a restart (what a wonderful console at Linode), all was back... kinda. I could see that there were an additional 8 packages that a needed to be upgraded, and yet the standard commands didn't seem to pick them up.
So I did a little searching, and it turns out that these packages couldn't be upgraded without installing additional packages. That's why they were being held back. Makes perfect sense to me, and thankfully, the way to fix this is very easy:
$ sudo apt-get upgrade --with-new-pkgs
or, as I have read, you can say:
$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
to do all the distribution upgrades - which will include adding packages, as needed.
And then, to clean up the old packages:
$ sudo apt autoremove
And after a reboot, the system was completely up-to-date, and moving forward, I'll use the dist-upgrade as it's clearly the preferred mechanism moving forward. I usually do this on the weekend, just to make sure it's all updated on a regular basis.
At the same time, using tmux, Blink Shell, and Textastic on my iPad has really been quite fun to learn the extent to which these tools can be exactly what I wanted from an iPad development platform.
One of the biggest surprises was that when Blink Shell is updated from the App Store - it maintains the connections! I was completely blown away... I expected to have to fire up the connections to the host again - but Nope... the display was in the same state as it was before the update, and it worked perfectly. This is really the "Mobile Shell", and the Block Shell app is an amazing implementation on the iPad.
The next surprise was that Textastic can be pointed at the GitHub checked out repo on the remote host (no surprise), but it remembers the location of the source file, so it's one key to upload it back to the remote host (already wrote about this). But this means that I would have to hop onto the remote host and commit the changes... but with Working Copy, I can simply split-screen Textastic and Working Copy, and drag the changed files from Textastic to Working Copy, and then commit them there.
Why does this matter? Well... as of the current version of Blink Shell, it does not yet do SSH Key Forwarding, so I can't easily use my SSH key authentication into GitHub via Blink Shell. Yes, they know about this, and they say it's coming in v14, but as of today, I would have to use something like Prompt from Panic, which does enable SSH Key Forwarding. With Working Copy on my iPad, I don't have to do that... I can easily see the diffs, make the commits all from a nice UI on the iPad. Very nice. 🙂
Don't get me wrong... I'll be very excited about Blink Shell getting SSH Key Forwarding, but until it does, I'm OK... and this is just an amazingly nice platform to do the development work I really like to do. What a joy!