Weekly Journal 30 - Ansible Modules, aerc, Ubuntu

Synopsis

Building an Ansible module is a lot more complicated than I expected it to be. Mutt is not the only game in town for a CLI mail client.

Ansible Module

I made a brief attempt at building an Ansible module to manage my SIP spammer block list. However, after going through the documentation and seeing all the prerequisites and boilerplate stuff needed to build even a basic module, I decided to save that project for another day. I guess it’s back to having Ansible run some shell scripts.

aerc

Last week I was playing around with Mutt as my mail client, but this week I am trying aerc. aerc is a newer CLI email client that integrates with notmuch and has support for vim keys, viewing HTML mail in a web browser, and lots of customization options. I am curious to see how the basic workflow compares to Mutt.

Ubuntu

This is just a complaint, but why does Ubuntu ship two-year old versions of software in their most current release? While it’s nice that there are aerc packages in Ubuntu, it doesn’t make sense for Ubuntu 21.04 to still be using a version that is almost two years old when newer versions exist.

What’s Next?

More work on my new email system, possibly trying out additional email clients.