I’ve been blogging, unreliably, at ry4an.org since 2003, and just changed the software powering it for the third time. Up until today I was using blohg. It worked great, but hadn’t had a release in seven year and still required python 2.7, which is annoying to install cleanly these days.

A quick look around showed that the static site generator space has exploded since last I checked. Hugo is mature and doesn’t require a javascript runtime, which was good enough for me.

Because my blog content has always been in plain text the migration was pretty painless, and I’m able to keep full history in source control. Along the way I created a few scripts and notes I needed to remove some blohg-specific stuff from the reStructuredText. I’ll use markdown for the hugo-native posts, like this one, but it was great to be able to bring the .rst files across mostly unmodified.

Because every software transition has headaches, here was the most “fun” to figure out: hugo launches rst2html, a python script, to convert .rst files, which was a pleasant surprise. That invocation of rst2html, kept giving warnings that it couldn’t format my .. code blocks saying: (WARNING/2) Cannot analyze code. Pygments package not found.

I’ve worked in python environments for 15 years, and I’m pretty practiced at figuring out import issues whether they’re from multiple installs, virtual environments, bad python path settings, or duelling package managers. This one I couldn’t crack. Finally I ran hugo under strace and looked at the system calls only to figure out that because it was installed via snap it was running in an apparmor profile that prevented it from accessing the system python where I was making sure pygments was available. Uninstalling the hugo snap and just snagging the release binary (the apt package is too old) got everything working. When software’s behavior isn’t making sense looking at the system calls with strace is so often the right clue.

Here are the matching announcements for the previous generations: