Six months ago I received a small grant from the Shuttleworth Foundation with no strings attached other than I should write this blog post about it. That was a nice surprise.

The main thing that ended up being supported by the grant was work on Propellor, my configuration management system that is configured by writing Haskell code. I made 11 releases of Propellor in the grant period, with some improvements from me, and lots more from other contributors. The biggest feature that I added to Propellor was LetsEncrypt support.

More important than features is making Propellor prevent more classes of mistakes, by creative use of the type system. The biggest improvement in this area was type checking the OSes of Propellor properties, so Propellor can reject host configurations that combine eg, Linux-only and FreeBSD-only properties.

Turns out that the same groundwork needed for that is also what's needed to get Propellor to do type-level port conflict detection. I have a branch underway that does that, although it's not quite done yet.

The grant also funded some of my work on git-annex. My main funding for git-annex doesn't cover development of the git-annex assistant, so the grant filled in that gap, particularly in updating the assistant to support the git-annex v6 repo format.

I've very happy to have received this grant, and with the things it enabled me to work on.