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Free software activities in February 2018

Planet Debian - Mër, 28/02/2018 - 7:36md

Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world in February 2018 (previous month):

Reproducible builds

Whilst anyone can inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, most software is distributed pre-compiled to end users.

The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to allow verification that no flaws have been introduced — either maliciously or accidentally — during this compilation process by promising identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised.

This month I:



I also made the following changes to diffoscope, our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues:

  • Add support for comparing Berkeley DB files. (Unfortunately this is currently incomplete because the libraries do not report metadata reliably!) (#890528)
  • Add support for comparing "XMLBeans" binary schemas. [...]
  • Drop spurious debugging code in Android tests. [...]


Debian

My activities as the current Debian Project Leader are covered in my "Bits from the DPL" email to the debian-devel-announce mailing list.

Patches contributed
  • debian-policy: Replace dh_systemd_install with dh_installsystemd. (#889167)
  • juce: Missing build-depends on graphviz. (#890035)
  • roffit: debian/rules does not override targets as intended. (#889975)
  • bugs.debian.org: Please add rel="canonical" to bug pages. (#890338)
Debian LTS

This month I have been paid to work 18 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS). In that time I did the following:

Uploads
  • redis:
    • 4.0.8-1 — New upstream release and fix a potential hardlink vulnerability.
    • 4.0.8-2 — Also listen on ::1 (IPv6) by default. (#891432)
  • python-django:
    • 1.11.10-1 — New upstream security release.
    • 2.0.2-1 — New upstream security release.
  • redisearch:
    • 1.0.6-1 — New upstream release.
    • 1.0.7-1 — New upstream release & add Lintian overrides for package-does-not-install-examples.
    • 1.0.8-1 — New upstream release, which includes my reproducibility-related change improvement.
  • adminer:
    • 4.6.1-1 — New upstream release and override debian-watch-does-not-check-gpg-signature as upstream do not release signatures.
    • 4.6.2-1 — New upstream release.
  • process-cpp:
    • 3.0.1-3 — Make the documentation reproducible.
    • 3.0.1-4 — Correct Vcs-Bzr to Vcs-Git.
  • sleekxmpp (1.3.3-3) — Make the build reproducible. (#890193)
  • python-redis (2.10.6-2) — Correct autopkgtest dependencies and misc packaging updates.
  • bfs (1.2.1-1) — New upstream release.

I also made misc packaging updates for docbook-to-man (1:2.0.0-41), gunicorn (19.7.1-4), installation-birthday (8) & python-daiquiri (1.3.0-3).

Finally, I performed the following sponsored uploads: check-manifest (0.36-2), django-ipware (2.0.1-1), nose2 (0.7.3-3) & python-keyczar (0.716+ds-2).

Debian bugs filed
  • zsh: Please make apt install completion work on "local" files. (#891140)
  • git-gui: Ignores git hooks. (#891552)
  • python-coverage:
    • Installs pyfile.html into wrong directory breaking HTML report generation. (#890560)
    • Document copyright information for bundled JavaScript source. (#890578)
FTP Team

As a Debian FTP assistant I ACCEPTed 123 packages: apticron, aseba, atf-allwinner, bart-view, binutils, browserpass, bulk-media-downloader, ceph-deploy, colmap, core-specs-alpha-clojure, ctdconverter, debos, designate, editorconfig-core-py, essays1743, fis-gtm, flameshot, flex, fontmake, fonts-league-spartan, fonts-ubuntu, gcc-8, getdns, glyphslib, gnome-keyring, gnome-themes-extra, gnome-usage, golang-github-containerd-cgroups, golang-github-go-debos-fakemachine, golang-github-mattn-go-zglob, haskell-regex-tdfa-text, https-everywhere, ibm-3270, ignition-fuel-tools, impass, inetsim, jboss-bridger, jboss-threads, jsonrpc-glib, knot-resolver, libctl, liblouisutdml, libopenraw, libosmo-sccp, libtest-postgresql-perl, libtickit, linux, live-tasks, minidb, mithril, mutter, neuron, node-acorn-object-spread, node-babel, node-call-limit, node-color, node-colormin, node-console-group, node-consolidate, node-cosmiconfig, node-css-color-names, node-date-time, node-err-code, node-gulp-load-plugins, node-html-comment-regex, node-icss-utils, node-is-directory, node-mdn-data, node-mississippi, node-mutate-fs, node-node-localstorage, node-normalize-range, node-postcss-filter-plugins, node-postcss-load-options, node-postcss-load-plugins, node-postcss-minify-font-values, node-promise-retry, node-promzard, node-require-from-string, node-rollup, node-rollup-plugin-buble, node-ssri, node-validate-npm-package-name, node-vue-resource, ntpsec, nvidia-cuda-toolkit, nyx, pipsi, plasma-discover, pokemmo, pokemmo-installer, polymake, privacybadger, proxy-switcher, psautohint, purple-discord, pytest-astropy, pytest-doctestplus, pytest-openfiles, python-aiomeasures, python-coverage, python-fitbit, python-molotov, python-networkmanager, python-os-service-types, python-pluggy, python-stringtemplate3, python3-antlr3, qpack, quintuple, r-cran-animation, r-cran-clustergeneration, r-cran-phytools, re2, sat-templates, sfnt2woff-zopfli, sndio, thunar, uhd, undertime, usbauth-notifier, vmdb2 & xymonq.

I additionally filed 15 RC bugs against packages that had incomplete debian/copyright files against: browserpass, designate, fis-gtm, flex, gnome-keyring, ibm-3270, knot-resolver, libopenraw, libtest-postgresql-perl, mithril, mutter, ntpsec, plasma-discover, pytest-arraydiff & r-cran-animation.

Chris Lamb https://chris-lamb.co.uk/blog/category/planet-debian lamby: Items or syndication on Planet Debian.

Things that really matter

Planet Debian - Mër, 28/02/2018 - 5:34md


gwolf http://gwolf.org Gunnar Wolf

Deploying a (simple) docker container system

Planet Debian - Mër, 28/02/2018 - 9:54pd

When a small platform for shipping containers is needed, not speaking about Kubernets or something, you have a couple of common things you might want to deploy at first.

Usual things that I have to roll out everytime deloying such a platform:

Bootstraping docker and docker-compose

Most services are build upon multiple containers. A useful tool for doing this is for example docker-compose where you can describe your whole 'application'. So we need to deploy it beside docker itself.

Deploying Watchtower

An essential operational part is to keep you container images up to date.

Watchtower is an application that will monitor your running Docker containers and watch for changes to the images that those containers were originally started from. If watchtower detects that an image has changed, it will automatically restart the container using the new image.

Deploying http(s) reverse proxy Træfik

If you want to provide multiple (web)services on port 80 and 443, you have to think about how this should be solved. Usually you would use a http(s) reverse proxy, there are many of software implementations available.
The challenging part in such an environment is that services may appear and disappear frequently. (Re)-configuration of the proxy service it the gap that needs to be closed.

Træfik (pronounced like traffic) is a modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer made to deploy microservices with ease [...] to manage its configuration automatically and dynamically.

Træfik has many interesting features for example 'Let's Encrypt support (Automatic HTTPS with renewal)'.

Jan Wagner https://log.cyconet.org/ Planet - Cyconet Blog

Emacs #1: Ditching a bunch of stuff and moving to Emacs and org-mode

Planet Debian - Mar, 27/02/2018 - 11:40md

I’ll admit it. After over a decade of vim, I’m hooked on Emacs.

I’ve long had this frustration over how to organize things. I’ve followed approaches like GTD and ZTD, but things like email or large files are really hard to organize.

I had been using Asana for tasks, Evernote for notes, Thunderbird for email, a combination of ikiwiki and some other items for a personal knowledge base, and various files in an archive directory on my PC. When my new job added Slack to the mix, that was finally the last straw.

A lot of todo-management tools integrate with email — poorly. When you want to do something like “remind me to reply to this in a week”, a lot of times that’s impossible because the tool doesn’t store the email in a fashion you can easily reply to. And that problem is even worse with Slack.

It was right around then that I stumbled onto Carsten Dominik’s Google Talk on org-mode. Carsten was the author of org-mode, and although the talk is 10 years old, it is still highly relevant.

I’d stumbled across org-mode before, but each time I didn’t really dig in because I had the reaction of “an outliner? But I need a todo list.” Turns out I was missing out. org-mode is all that.

Just what IS Emacs? And org-mode?

Emacs grew up as a text editor. It still is, and that heritage is definitely present throughout. But to say Emacs is an editor would be rather unfair.

Emacs is something more like a platform or a toolkit. Not only do you have source code to it, but the very configuration is a program, and there are hooks all over the place. It’s as if it was super easy to write a Firefox plugin. A couple lines, and boom, behavior changed.

org-mode is very similar. Yes, it’s an outliner, but that’s not really what it is. It’s an information organization platform. Its website says “Your life in plain text: Org mode is for keeping notes, maintaining TODO lists, planning projects, and authoring documents with a fast and effective plain-text system.”

Capturing

If you’ve ever read productivity guides based on GTD, one of the things they stress is effortless capture of items. The idea is that when something pops into your head, get it down into a trusted system quickly so you can get on with what you were doing. org-mode has a capture system for just this. I can press C-c c from anywhere in Emacs, and up pops a spot to type my note. But, critically, automatically embedded in that note is a link back to what I was doing when I pressed C-c c. If I was editing a file, it’ll have a link back to that file and the line I was on. If I was viewing an email, it’ll link back to that email (by Message-Id, no less, so it finds it in any folder). Same for participating in a chat, or even viewing another org-mode entry.

So I can make a note that will remind me in a week to reply to a certain email, and when I click the link in that note, it’ll bring up the email in my mail reader — even if I subsequently archived it out of my inbox.

YES, this is what I was looking for!

The tool suite

Once you’re using org-mode, pretty soon you want to integrate everything with it. There are browser plugins for capturing things from the web. Multiple Emacs mail or news readers integrate with it. ERC (IRC client) does as well. So I found myself switching from Thunderbird and mairix+mutt (for the mail archives) to mu4e, and from xchat+slack to ERC.

And wouldn’t you know it, I liked each of those Emacs-based tools better than the standalone they replaced.

A small side tidbit: I’m using OfflineIMAP again! I even used it with GNUS way back when.

One Emacs process to rule them

I used to use Emacs extensively, way back. Back then, Emacs was a “large” program. (Now my battery status applet literally uses more RAM than Emacs). There was this problem of startup time back then, so there was a way to connect to a running Emacs process.

I like to spawn programs with Mod-p (an xmonad shortcut to a dzen menubar, but Alt-F2 in more traditional DEs would do the trick). It’s convenient to not run several emacsen with this setup, so you don’t run into issues with trying to capture to a file that’s open in another one. The solution is very simple: I created a script, named it em, and put it on my path. All it does is this:


#!/bin/bash
exec emacsclient -c -a "" "$@"

It creates a new emacs process if one doesn’t already exist; otherwise, it uses what you’ve got. A bonus here: parameters such as -nw work just fine, so it really acts just as if you’d typed emacs at the shell prompt. It’s a suitable setting for EDITOR.

Up next…

I’ll be talking about my use of, and showing off configurations for:

  • org-mode, including syncing between computers, capturing, agenda and todos, files, linking, keywords and tags, various exporting (slideshows), etc.
  • mu4e for email, including multiple accounts, bbdb integration
  • ERC for IRC and IM

You can also see a list of all articles in this series.

John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org The Changelog

Woman. Not in tech.

Planet Debian - Mar, 27/02/2018 - 10:00md

Thank you, Livia Gabos, for helping me to improve this article by giving me feedback on it.

Before I became an intern with Outreachy, my Twitter bio read: "Woman. Not in tech." Well, if you didn't get the picture, let me explain that meant.

It all began with a simple request I received almost an year ago:

Hey, do you want to join our [company] event and give a talk about being a women in tech?

I don't have a job in the tech industry. So, yes, while society does put me in the 'woman' column, I have to admit it's a little hard to give a talk about being 'in tech' when I'm not 'in tech'.

What I can talk about, though, it's about all the women who are not in tech. The many, many friends I have who come to Women in Tech events and meetings, who reach out to me by e-mail, Twitter or even in person, who are struggling to get into tech.

I can talk about the only other girl in my class who, besides me, managed to get an internship. And how we both only got the position because we had passed a written exam about informatics, instead of going through usual channels such as referrals, CV analysis or interviews.

I can talk about the women who are seen as lazy, or that they just don't get it the lessons in tech courses because they don't have the same background and the same amount of time available to study or to do homework at home as their male peers do, since they have to take care of relatives, take care of children, take care of the housework for their family, most of the times while working in one or two jobs just to be able to study.

I can talk about the women and about the mothers who after many years being denied the possibility for a tech career are daring to change paths, but are denied junior positions in favor of younger men who "can be trained on the job" and have "so much more willingness to learn".

I can talk about the women who are seen as uninterested in one or more FLOSS technologies because they don't contribute to said technology, since the men in FLOSS projects have continuously failed in engage and - most importantly - keep them included (but maybe that's just because women lack role models).

Even though there are so many Women in Tech communities in Curitiba, as listed above, the all-male 'core team' of the local Debian community itself couldn't find a single woman to work with them for the DebConf proposal. Go figure.

I can talk about the many women I met not at tech conferences, but at teachers' conferences, that have way more experience with computers and programming than I. Women who after years working on the field have given up IT to become teachers, not because it was their lifelong dream, but because they didn't feel comfortable and well-integrated in a male-dominated full-of-mysoginistic-ideals tech industry. Because it was - and is - almost impossible for them to break the glass ceiling.

I can even talk about all the women who are lesbians that a certain community of Women In Tech could not find when they wanted someone to write an article about 'being homossexual in tech' to be published right on Brazil's Lesbian Visibility Day, so they had to go and ask a gay man to talk about his own experience. Well, it seems like those women aren't "in tech" either.

Tokenization can be especially apparent when the lone person in a minority group is not only asked to speak for the group, but is consistently asked to speak about being a member of that group. Geek Feminism - Tokenism

The things is, a lot of people don't want to hear any those stories. Companies in particular only want token women from outside the company (because, let's face it, most tech companies can't find the talent within) who will come up to the stage and inspire other women saying what a great experience it is to be in tech - and that "everyone should try it too!".

I do believe all women should try and get knowledge about tech and that is what I work towards. We shouldn't have to rely only on the men in our life to get things done with our computers or our cell phones or our digital life.

But to tell other women they should get into the tech industry? I guess not.

After all, who am I to tell other women they should come to tech - and to stay in tech - when I know we are bound to face all this?

Addendum:

For Brazilian women not in tech, I'm organizing a crowdfunding campaign to get at least five of them the opportunity to attend MiniDebConf in Curitiba, Parana, in April. None of these girls can afford the trip and they don't have a company to sponsor them. If you are willing to help, please get in touch or check this link: Women in MiniDebConf.

More on the subject: Renata https://rsip22.github.io/blog/ Renata's blog

A Nice looking Blog

Planet Debian - Enj, 22/02/2018 - 9:00md

I stumbled across this rather nicely-formatted blog by Alex Beal and thought I'd share it. It's a particular kind of minimalist style that I like, because it puts the content first. It reminds me of Mark Pilgrim's old blog.

I can't remember which post in particular I came across first, but the one that I thought I would share was this remarkably detailed personal research project on tracking mood.

That would have been the end of it, but I then stumbled across this great review of "Type Driven Development with Idris", a book by Edwin Brady. I bought this book during the Christmas break but I haven't had much of a chance to deep dive into it yet.

jmtd http://jmtd.net/log/ Jonathan Dowland's Weblog

Dell PowerEdge T30

Planet Debian - Enj, 22/02/2018 - 3:06md

I just did a Debian install on a Dell PowerEdge T30 for a client. The Dell web site is a bit broken at the moment, it didn’t list the price of that server or give useful specs when I was ordering it. I was under the impression that the server was limited to 8G of RAM, that’s unusually small but it wouldn’t be the first time a vendor crippled a low end model to drive sales of more expensive systems. It turned out that the T30 model I got has 4*DDR4 sockets with only one used for an 8G DIMM. It apparently can handle up to 64G of RAM.

It has space for 4*3.5″ SATA disks but only has 4*SATA connectors on the motherboard. As I never use the DVD in a server this isn’t a problem for me, but if you want 4 disks and a DVD then you need to buy a PCI or PCIe SATA card.

Compared to the PowerEdge T130 I’m using at home the new T30 is slightly shorter and thinner while seeming to have more space inside. This is partly due to better design and partly due to having 2 hard drives in the top near the DVD drive which are a little inconvenient to get to. The T130 I have (which isn’t the latest model) has 4*3.5″ SATA drive bays at the bottom which are very convenient for swapping disks.

It has two PCIe*16 slots (one of which is apparently quad speed), one shorter PCIe slot, and a PCI slot. For a cheap server a PCI slot is a nice feature, it means I can use an old PCI Ethernet card instead of buying a PCIe Ethernet card. The T30 cost $1002 so using an old Ethernet card saved 1% of the overall cost.

The T30 seems designed to be more of a workstation or personal server than a straight server. The previous iterations of the low end tower servers from Dell didn’t have built in sound and had PCIe slots that were adequate for a RAID controller but vastly inadequate for video. This one has built in line in and out for audio and has two DisplayPort connectors on the motherboard (presumably for dual-head support). Apart from the CPU (an E3-1225 which is slower than some systems people are throwing out nowadays) the system would be a decent gaming system.

It has lots of USB ports which is handy for a file server, I can attach lots of backup devices. Also most of the ports support “super speed”, I haven’t yet tested out USB devices that support such speeds but I’m looking forward to it. It’s a pity that there are no USB-C ports.

One deficiency of the T30 is the lack of a VGA port. It has one HDMI and two DisplayPort sockets on the motherboard, this is really great for a system on or under your desk, any monitor you would want on your desk will support at least one of those interfaces. But in a server room you tend to have an old VGA monitor that’s there because no-one wants it on their desk. Not supporting VGA may force people to buy a $200 monitor for their server room. That increases the effective cost of the system by 20%. It has a PC serial port on the motherboard which is a nice server feature, but that doesn’t make up for the lack of VGA.

The BIOS configuration has an option displayed for enabling charging devices from USB sockets when a laptop is in sleep mode. It’s disappointing that they didn’t either make a BIOS build for a non-laptop or have the BIOS detect at run-time that it’s not on laptop hardware and hide that.

Conclusion

The PowerEdge T30 is a nice low-end workstation. If you want a system with ECC RAM because you need it to be reliable and you don’t need the greatest performance then it will do very well. It has Intel video on the motherboard with HDMI and DisplayPort connectors, this won’t be the fastest video but should do for most workstation tasks. It has a PCIe*16 quad speed slot in case you want to install a really fast video card. The CPU is slow by today’s standards, but Dell sells plenty of tower systems that support faster CPUs.

It’s nice that it has a serial port on the motherboard. That could be used for a serial console or could be used to talk to a UPS or other server-room equipment. But that doesn’t make up for the lack of VGA support IMHO.

One could say that a tower system is designed to be a desktop or desk-side system not run in any sort of server room. However it is cheaper than any rack mounted systems from Dell so it will be deployed in lots of small businesses that have one server for everything – I will probably install them in several other small businesses this year. Also tower servers do end up being deployed in server rooms, all it takes is a small business moving to a serviced office that has a proper server room and the old tower servers end up in a rack.

Rack vs Tower

One reason for small businesses to use tower servers when rack servers are more appropriate is the issue of noise. If your “server room” is the room that has your printer and fax then it typically won’t have a door and you just can’t have the noise of a rack mounted server in there. 1RU systems are inherently noisy because the small diameter of the fans means that they have to spin fast. 2RU systems can be made relatively quiet if you don’t have high-end CPUs but no-one seems to be trying to do that.

I think it would be nice if a company like Dell sold low-end servers in a rack mount form-factor (19 inches wide and 2RU high) that were designed to be relatively quiet. Then instead of starting with a tower server and ending up with tower systems in racks a small business could start with a 19 inch wide system on a shelf that gets bolted into a rack if they move into a better office. Any laptop CPU from the last 10 years is capable of running a file server with 8 disks in a ZFS array. Any modern laptop CPU is capable of running a file server with 8 SSDs in a ZFS array. This wouldn’t be difficult to design.

Related posts:

  1. CPL I’ve just bught an NVidia video card from Computers and...
  2. Flash Storage and Servers In the comments on my post about the Dell PowerEdge...
  3. Dell PowerEdge T105 Today I received a Dell PowerEDGE T105 for use by...
etbe https://etbe.coker.com.au etbe – Russell Coker

How to use the EventCalendar ical

Planet Debian - Mër, 21/02/2018 - 11:49md

Hello!

If you follow this blog, you should probably know by now that I have been working with my mentors to contribute to MoinMoin EventCalendar macro, adding the possility to export the events' data to an icalendar file.

The code (which can be found on this Github repository) isn't quite ready yet, because I'm still working to convert the recurrence rule to the icalendar format, but other than that, it should be working. Hopefully.

This guide assumes that you have the EventCalendar macro installed on the wiki and that the macro is called on a determined wikipage.

The icalendar file is now generated as an attachment the moment the macro is loaded. I created an "ical" link at the bottom of the calendar. When activated, this link prompts the download of the ical attachment of the page. Being an attachment, there is still the possibility to just view ical the file using the "attachment" menu if the user wishes to do so.

There are two ways of importing this calendar on Thunderbird. The first one is to download the file by clicking on the link and then proceeding to import it manually to Thunderbird.

The second option is to "Create a new calendar / On the network" and to use the URL address from the ical link as the "location", as it is shown below:

As usual, it's possible to customize the name for the calendar, the color for the events and such...

I noticed a few Wikis that use the EventCalendar, such as Debian wiki itself and the FSFE wiki. Python wiki also seems to be using MoinMoin and EventCalendar, but it seems that they use a Google service to export the event data do iCal.

If you read this and are willing to try the code in your wiki and give me feedback, I would really appreciate. You can find the ways to contact me in my Debian Wiki profile.

Renata https://rsip22.github.io/blog/ Renata's blog

Getting Debian booting on a Lenovo Yoga 720

Planet Debian - Mër, 21/02/2018 - 10:46md

I recently got a new work laptop, a 13” Yoga 720. It proved difficult to install Debian on; pressing F12 would get a boot menu allowing me to select a USB stick I have EFI GRUB on, but after GRUB loaded the kernel and the initrd it would just sit there never outputting anything else that indicated the kernel was even starting. I found instructions about Ubuntu 17.10 which helped but weren’t the complete picture. What seems to be the situation is that the kernel won’t happily boot if “Legacy Support” is not enabled - enabling this (and still booting as EFI) results in a happier experience. However in order to be able to enable legacy boot you have to switch the SATA controller from RAID to AHCI, which can cause Windows to get unhappy about its boot device going away unless you warn it first.

  • Fire up an admin shell in Windows (right click on the start menu)
  • bcdedit /set safeboot minimal
  • Reboot into the BIOS
  • Change the SATA Controller mode from RAID to AHCI (dire warnings about “All data will be erased”. It’s not true, but you’ve back up first, right?) Set “Boot Mode” to “Legacy Support”.
  • Save changes and let Windows boot to Safe Mode
  • Fire up an admin shell in Windows (right click on the start menu again)
  • bcdedit /deletevalue safeboot
  • Reboot again and Windows will load in normal mode with the AHCI drivers

Additionally I had problems getting the GRUB entry added to the BIOS; efibootmgr shows it fine but it never appears in the BIOS boot list. I ended up using Windows to add it as the primary boot option using the following (<guid> gets replaced with whatever the new “Debian” section guid is):

bcdedit /enum firmware bcdedit /copy "{bootmgr}" /d "Debian" bcdedit /set "{<guid>}" path \EFI\Debian\grubx64.efi bcdedit /set "{fwbootmgr}" displayorder "{<guid>}" /addfirst

Even with that at one point the BIOS managed to “forget” about the GRUB entry and require me to re-do the final “displayorder” command.

Once you actually have the thing installed and booting it seems fine - I’m running Buster due to the fact it’s a Skylake machine with lots of bits that seem to want a newer kernel, but claimed battery life is impressive, the screen is very shiny (though sometimes a little too shiny and reflective) and the NVMe SSD seems pretty nippy as you’d expect.

Jonathan McDowell https://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/ Noodles' Emptiness

How hard can typing æ, ø and å be?

Planet Debian - Mër, 21/02/2018 - 5:14md

Petter Reinholdtsen: How hard can æ, ø and å be? comments on the rubbish state of till printers and their mishandling of foreign characters.

Last week, I was trying to type an email, on a tablet, in Dutch. The tablet was running something close to Android and I was using a Bluetooth keyboard, which seemed to be configured correctly for my location in England.

Dutch doesn’t even have many accents. I wanted an e acute (é). If you use the on screen keyboard, this is actually pretty easy, just press and hold e and slide to choose the accented one… but holding e on a Bluetooth keyboard? eeeeeeeeeee!

Some guides suggest Alt and e, then e. Apparently that works, but not on keyboards set to Great British… because, I guess, we don’t want any of that foreign muck since the Brexit vote, or something(!)

Even once you figure out that madness and switch the keyboard back to international, which also enables alt i, u, n and so on to do other accents, I can’t find grave, check, breve or several other accents. I managed to send the emails in Dutch but I’d struggle with various other languages.

Have I missed a trick or what are the Android developers thinking? Why isn’t there a Compose key by default? Is there any way to get one?

mjr http://www.news.software.coop mjr – Software Cooperative News

Tools of Love

Planet Debian - Mër, 21/02/2018 - 2:00pd
From my spiritual blog

I have been quiet lately. My life has been filled with gentle happiness, work, and less gentle wedding planning. How do you write about quiet happiness without sounding like the least contemplative aspects of Facebook? How do I share this part of the journey in a way that others can learn from? I was offering thanks the other day and was reminded of one of my early experiences at Fires of Venus. Someone was talking about how they were there working to do the spiritual work they needed in order to achieve their dream of opening a restaurant. I'll admit that when I thought of going to a multi-day retreat focused on spiritual connection to love, opening a restaurant had not been at the forefront of my mind. And yet, this was their dream, and surely dreams are the stuff of love. As they continued, they talked about finding self love deep enough to have the confidence to believe in dreams.



As I recalled this experience, I offered thanks for all the tools I've found to use as a lover. Every time I approach something with joy and awe, I gain new insight into the beauty of the world around us. In my work within the IETF I saw the beauty of the digital world we're working to create. Standing on sacred land, I can find the joy and love of nature and the moment.



I can share the joy I find and offer it to others. I've been mentoring someone at work. They're at a point where they're appreciating some of the great mysteries of computing like “Reflections on Trusting Trust” or two's compliment arithmetic. I’ve had the pleasure of watching their moments of discovery and also helping them understand the complex history in how we’ve built the digital world we have. Each moment of delight reinforces the idea that we live in a world where we expect to find this beauty and connect with it. Each experience reinforces the idea that we live in a world filled with things to love.



And so, I’ve turned even my experiences as a programmer into tools for teaching love and joy. I’ve been learning another new tool lately. I’ve been putting together the dance mix for my wedding. Between that and a project last year, I’ve learned a lot about music. I will never be a professional DJ or song producer. However, I have always found joy in music and dance, and I absolutely can be good enough to share that with my friends. I can be good enough to let music and rhythm be tools I use to tell stories and share joy. In learning skills and improving my ability with music, I better appreciate the music I hear.



The same is true with writing: both my work here and my fiction. I’m busy enough with other things that I am unlikely to even attempt writing as my livelihood. Even so, I have more tools for sharing the love I find and helping people find the love and joy in their world.



These are all just tools. Words and song won’t suddenly bring us all together any more than physical affection and our bodies. However, words, song, and the joy we find in each other and in the world we build can help us find connection and empathy. We can learn to see the love that is there between us. All these tools can help us be vulnerable and open together. And that—the changes we work within ourselves using these tools—can bring us to a path of love. And so how do I write about happiness? I give thanks for the things it allows me to explore. I find value in growing and trying new things. In my best moments, each seems a lens through which I can grow as a lover as I walk Venus’s path.


Sam Hartman https://hartmans.livejournal.com/ Ponderings

hartmans @ 2018-02-20T19:46:00

Planet Debian - Mër, 21/02/2018 - 1:46pd
Entry reposted from https://hartmans-venus.livejournal.com/22265.html. Sam Hartman https://hartmans.livejournal.com/ Ponderings

Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #147

Planet Debian - Mar, 20/02/2018 - 9:56md

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday February 11 and Saturday February 17 2018:

Media coverage Reproducible work in other projects Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed

Various previous patches were merged upstream:

Reviews of unreproducible packages

38 package reviews have been added, 27 have been updated and 13 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues.

4 issue types have been added:

One issue type has been updated:

Weekly QA work

During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by:

  • Adrian Bunk (24)
  • Boyuan Yang (1)
  • Cédric Boutillier (1)
  • Jeremy Bicha (1)
  • Matthias Klose (1)
diffoscope development
  • Chris Lamb:
    • Add support for comparing Berkeley DB files (#890528). This is currently incomplete because the Berkeley DB libraries do not return the same uid/hash reliably (it returns "random" memory contents) so we must strip those from the human-readable output.
Website development Misc.

This week's edition was written by Chris Lamb and Holger Levsen & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

Reproducible builds folks https://reproducible.alioth.debian.org/blog/ Reproducible builds blog

Lookalikes

Planet Debian - Mar, 20/02/2018 - 8:45md

Did I forget a period of my life when I grew a horseshoe mustache and dreadlocks, walked around topless, and illustrated this 2009 article in the Economist on the economic boon that hippy festivals represent to rural American communities?

Previous lookalikes are here.

Benjamin Mako Hill https://mako.cc/copyrighteous copyrighteous

Time to Join Extended Long Term Support for Debian 7 Wheezy

Planet Debian - Mar, 20/02/2018 - 5:57md

Debian 7 Wheezy LTS period ends on May 31st and some companies asked Freexian if they could get security support past this date. Since about half of the current team of paid LTS contributors is willing to continue to provide security updates for Wheezy, I have started to work on making this possible.

I just initiated a discussion on debian-devel with multiple Debian teams to see whether it is possible to continue to use debian.org infrastructure to host the wheezy security updates that would be prepared in this extended LTS period.

From the sponsor side, this extended LTS will not work like the regular LTS. It is unrealistic to continue to support all packages and all architectures so only the packages/architectures requested by sponsors will be supported. The amount invoiced to each sponsor will be directly related to the package list that they ask us to support. We made an estimation (based on history) of how much it costs to support each package and we split that cost between all the sponsors that are requesting support for this package. That cost is re-evaluated quarterly and will likely increase over time as sponsors are stopping their support (when they finished to migrate all their machines for example).

This extended LTS will also have some restrictions in terms of packages that we can support. For instance, we will no longer support the linux kernel from wheezy, you will have to switch to the kernel used in jessie (or maybe we will maintain a backport ourselves in wheezy). It is also not yet clear whether we can support OpenJDK since upstream support of version 7 stops at the end of June. And switching to OpenJDK 8 is likely non-trivial. There are likely other unsupportable packages too.

Anyway, if your company needs wheezy security support past end of May, now is the time to worry about it. Please send us a mail with the list of source packages that you would like to see supported. The more companies get involved, the less it will cost to each of them. Our plans are to gather the required data from interested companies in the next few weeks and make a first estimation of the price they will have to pay for the first quarter by mid-march. Then they confirm that they are OK with the offer and we will emit invoices in April so that they can be paid before end of May.

Note however that we decided that it would not be possible to sponsor extended wheezy support (and thus influence which packages are supported) if you are not among the regular LTS sponsors (at bronze level at least). Extended LTS would not be possible without the regular LTS so if you need the former, you have to support the latter too.

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Raphaël Hertzog https://raphaelhertzog.com apt-get install debian-wizard

Weblate 2.19.1

Planet Debian - Mar, 20/02/2018 - 3:00md

Weblate 2.19.1 has been released today. This is bugfix only release mostly to fix problematic migration from 2.18 which some users have observed.

Full list of changes:

  • Fixed migration issue on upgrade from 2.18.
  • Improved file upload API validation.

If you are upgrading from older version, please follow our upgrading instructions.

You can find more information about Weblate on https://weblate.org, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. Weblate is also being used on https://hosted.weblate.org/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, OsmAnd, Turris, FreedomBox, Weblate itself and many other projects.

Should you be looking for hosting of translations for your project, I'm happy to host them for you or help with setting it up on your infrastructure.

Further development of Weblate would not be possible without people providing donations, thanks to everybody who have helped so far! The roadmap for next release is just being prepared, you can influence this by expressing support for individual issues either by comments or by providing bounty for them.

Filed under: Debian English SUSE Weblate

Michal Čihař https://blog.cihar.com/archives/debian/ Michal Čihař's Weblog, posts tagged by Debian

Listing and loading of Debian repositories: now live on Software Heritage

Planet Debian - Mar, 20/02/2018 - 2:52md

Software Heritage is the project for which I’ve been working during the past two and a half years now. The grand vision of the project is to build the universal software archive, which will collect, preserve and share the Software Commons.

Today, we’ve announced that Software Heritage is archiving the contents of Debian daily. I’m reposting this article on my blog as it will probably be of interest to readers of Planet Debian.

TL;DR: Software Heritage now archives all source packages of Debian as well as its security archive daily. Everything is ready for archival of other Debian derivatives as well. Keep on reading to get details of the work that made this possible.

History

When we first announced Software Heritage, back in 2016, we had archived the historical contents of Debian as present on the snapshot.debian.org service, as a one-shot proof of concept import.

This code was then left in a drawer and never touched again, until last summer when Sushant came do an internship with us. We’ve had the opportunity to rework the code that was originally written, and to make it more generic: instead of the specifics of snapshot.debian.org, the code can now work with any Debian repository. Which means that we could now archive any of the numerous Debian derivatives that are available out there.

This has been live for a few months, and you can find Debian package origins in the Software Heritage archive now.

Mapping a Debian repository to Software Heritage

The main challenge in listing and saving Debian source packages in Software Heritage is mapping the content of the repository to the generic source history data model we use for our archive.

Organization of a Debian repository

Before we start looking at a bunch of unpacked Debian source packages, we need to know how a Debian repository is actually organized.

At the top level of a Debian repository lays a set of suites, representing versions of the distribution, that is to say a set of packages that have been tested and are known to work together. For instance, Debian currently has 6 active suites, from wheezy (“old old stable” version), all the way up to experimental; Ubuntu has 8, from precise (12.04 LTS), up to bionic (the future 18.04 release), as well as a devel suite. Each of those suites also has a bunch of “overlay” suites, such as backports, which are made available in the archive alongside full suites.

Under the suites, there’s another level of subdivision, which Debian calls components, and Ubuntu calls areas. Debian uses its components to segregate packages along licensing terms (main, contrib and non-free), while Ubuntu uses its areas to denote the level of support of the packages (main, universe, multiverse, …).

Finally, components contain source packages, which merge upstream sources with distribution-specific patches, as well as machine-readable instructions on how to build the package.

Organization of the Software Heritage archive

The Software Heritage archive is project-centric rather than version-centric. What this means is that we are interested in keeping the history of what was available in software origins, which can be thought of as a URL of a repository containing software artifacts, tagged with a type representing the means of access to the repository.

For instance, the origin for the GitHub mirror of the Linux kernel repository has the following data:

For each visit of an origin, we take a snapshot of all the branches (and tagged versions) of the project that were visible during that visit, complete with their full history. See for instance one of the latest visits of the Linux kernel. For the specific case of GitHub, pull requests are also visible as virtual branches, so we fetch those as well (as branches named refs/pull/<pull request number>/head).

Bringing them together

As we’ve seen, Debian archives (just as well as archives for other “traditional” Linux distributions) are release-centric rather than package-centric. Mapping distributions to the Software Heritage archive therefore takes a little bit of gymnastics, to transpose the list of source packages available in each suite to a list of available versions per source package. We do this step by step:

  1. Download the Sources indices for all the suites and components known in the Debian repository
  2. Parse the Sources indices, listing all source packages inside
  3. For each source package, tell the Debian loader to load all the available versions (grouped by name), generating a complete snapshot of the state of the source package across the Debian repository

The source packages are mapped to origins using the following format:

  • type: deb
  • url: deb://<repository name>/packages/<source package name> (e.g. deb://Debian/packages/linux)

We use a repository name rather than the actual URL to a repository so that links can persist even if a given mirror disappears.

Loading Debian source packages

To load Debian source packages into the Software Heritage archive, we have to convert them: Debian-based distributions distribute source packages as a set of files, a dsc (Debian Source Control) and a set of tarballs (usually, an upstream tarball and a Debian-specific overlay). On the other hand, Software Heritage only stores version-control information such as revisions, directories, files.

Unpacking the source packages

Our philosophy at Software Heritage is to store the source code of software in the precise form that allows a developer to start working on it. For Debian source packages, this is the unpacked source code tree, with all patches applied. After checking that the files we have downloaded match the checksums published in the index files, we simply use dpkg-source -x to extract the source package, with patches applied, ready to build. This also means that we currently fail to import packages that don’t extract with the version of dpkg-source available in Debian Stretch.

Generating a synthetic revision

After walking the extracted source package tree, computing identifiers for all its contents, we get the identifier of the top-level tree, which we will reference in the synthetic revision.

The synthetic revision contains the “reproducible” metadata that is completely intrinsic to the Debian source package. With the current implementation, this means:

  • the author of the package, and the date of modification, as referenced in the last entry of the source package changelog (referenced as author and committer)
  • the original artifact (i.e. the information about the original source package)
  • basic information about the history of the package (using the parsed changelog)

However, we never set parent revisions in the synthetic commits, for two reasons:

  • there is no guarantee that packages referenced in the changelog have been uploaded to the distribution, or imported by Software Heritage (our update frequency is lower than that of the Debian archive)
  • even if this guarantee existed, and all versions of all packages were available in Software Heritage, there would be no guarantee that the version referenced in the changelog is indeed the version we imported in the first place

This makes the information stored in the synthetic revision fully intrinsic to the source package, and reproducible. In turn, this allows us to keep a cache, mapping the original artifacts to synthetic revision ids, to avoid loading packages again once we have loaded them once.

Storing the snapshot

Finally, we can generate the top-level object in the Software Heritage archive, the snapshot. For instance, you can see the snapshot for the latest visit of the glibc package.

To do so, we generate a list of branches by concatenating the suite, the component, and the version number of each detected source package (e.g. stretch/main/2.24-10 for version 2.24-10 of the glibc package available in stretch/main). We then point each branch to the synthetic revision that was generated when loading the package version.

In case a version of a package fails to load (for instance, if the package version disappeared from the mirror between the moment we listed the distribution, and the moment we could load the package), we still register the branch name, but we make it a “null” pointer.

There’s still some improvements to make to the lister specific to Debian repositories: it currently hardcodes the list of components/areas in the distribution, as the repository format provides no programmatic way of eliciting them. Currently, only Debian and its security repository are listed.

Looking forward

We believe that the model we developed for the Debian use case is generic enough to capture not only Debian-based distributions, but also RPM-based ones such as Fedora, Mageia, etc. With some extra work, it should also be possible to adapt it for language-centric package repositories such as CPAN, PyPI or Crates.

Software Heritage is now well on the way of providing the foundations for a generic and unified source browser for the history of traditional package-based distributions.

We’ll be delighted to welcome contributors that want to lend a hand to get there.

olasd https://blog.olasd.eu english – olasd's corner of the 'tubes

Hacking at EPFL Toastmasters, Lausanne, tonight

Planet Debian - Mar, 20/02/2018 - 12:39md

As mentioned in my earlier blog, I give a talk about Hacking at the Toastmasters club at EPFL tonight. Please feel free to join us and remember to turn off your mobile device or leave it at home, you never know when it might ring or become part of a demonstration.

Daniel.Pocock https://danielpocock.com/tags/debian DanielPocock.com - debian

Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, January 2017

Planet Debian - Hën, 19/02/2018 - 6:18md

Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.

Individual reports

In January, about 160 work hours have been dispatched among 11 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

Evolution of the situation

The number of sponsored hours increased slightly at 187 hours per month. It would be nice if the slow growth could continue as the amount of work seems to be slowly growing too.

The security tracker currently lists 23 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file 23 too. The number of open issues seems to be stable compared to last month which is a good sign.

Thanks to our sponsors

New sponsors are in bold.

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Raphaël Hertzog https://raphaelhertzog.com apt-get install debian-wizard

How we care for our child

Planet Debian - Hën, 19/02/2018 - 11:15pd

This post is a departure from the regular content, which is supposed to be "Debian and Free Software", but has accidentally turned into a hardware blog recently!

Anyway, we have a child who is now about 14 months old. The way that my wife and I care for him seems logical to us, but often amuses local people. So in the spirit of sharing this is what we do:

  • We divide the day into chunks of time.
  • At any given time one of us is solely responsible for him.
    • The other parent might be nearby, and might help a little.
    • But there is always a designated person who will be changing nappies, feeding, and playing at any given point in the day.
  • The end.

So our weekend routine, covering Saturday and Sunday, looks like this:

  • 07:00-08:00: Husband
  • 08:01-13:00: Wife
  • 13:01-17:00: Husband
  • 17:01-18:00: Wife
  • 18:01-19:30: Husband

Our child, Oiva, seems happy enough with this and he sometimes starts walking from one parent to the other at the appropriate time. But the real benefit is that each of us gets some time off - in my case I get "the morning" off, and my wife gets the afternoon off. We can hide in our bedroom, go shopping, eat cake, or do anything we like.

Week-days are similar, but with the caveat that we both have jobs. I take the morning, and the evenings, and in exchange if he wakes up overnight my wife helps him sleep and settle between 8PM-5AM, and if he wakes up later than 5AM I deal with him.

Most of the time our child sleeps through the night, but if he does wake up it tends to be in the 4:30AM/5AM timeframe. I'm "happy" to wake up at 5AM and stay up until I go to work because I'm a morning person and I tend to go to bed early these days.

Day-care is currently a complex process. There are three families with small children, and ourselves. Each day of the week one family hosts all the children, and the baby-sitter arrives there too (all the families live within a few blocks of each other).

All of the parents go to work, leaving one carer in charge of 4 babies for the day, from 08:15-16:15. On the days when we're hosting the children I greet the carer then go to work - on the days the children are at a different families house I take him there in the morning, on my way to work, and then my wife collects him in the evening.

At the moment things are a bit terrible because most of the children have been a bit sick, and the carer too. When a single child is sick it's mostly OK, unless that is the child which is supposed to be host-venue. If that child is sick we have to panic and pick another house for that day.

Unfortunately if the child-carer is sick then everybody is screwed, and one parent has to stay home from each family. I guess this is the downside compared to sending the children to public-daycare.

This is private day-care, Finnish-style. The social-services (kela) will reimburse each family €700/month if you're in such a scheme, and carers are limited to a maximum of 4 children. The net result is that prices are stable, averaging €900-€1000 per-child, per month.

(The €700 is refunded after a month or two, so in real-terms people like us pay €200-€300/month for Monday-Friday day-care. Plus a bit of beaurocracy over deciding which family is hosting, and which parents are providing food. With the size being capped, and the fees being pretty standard the carers earn €3600-€4000/month, which is a good amount. To be a school-teacher you need to be very qualified, but to do this caring is much simpler. It turns out that being an English-speaker can be a bonus too, for some families ;)

Currently our carer has a sick-note for three days, so I'm staying home today, and will likely stay tomorrow too. Then my wife will skip work on Wednesday. (We usually take it in turns but sometimes that can't happen easily.)

But all of this is due to change in the near future, because we've had too many sick days, and both of us have missed too much work.

More news on that in the future, unless I forget.

Steve Kemp https://blog.steve.fi/ Steve Kemp's Blog

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