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The Developer Center Initiative is an attempt to reboot the developer center  based on a new modern platform. For more information, see my previous  blog posts.

It’s been two months since the last Developer Center meeting. In light of that I called in for a meeting last week to get a status of things. We discussed three items:

• Changing the current state of the developer center.
• The need for a physical meetup to reinforce spirits and get bulk work started.
• Pending bugs and feature merges in hotdoc relevant for the developer center.

Developer Center State

Thibault currently holds a branch for gnome-devel-docs. The branch contains the old GNOME Developer docs ported to markdown. To ensure that no duplicate work happens between gnome-devel-docs master and the branch, the next step is to announce to relevant mailing lists that further contribution to the developer docs should happen in the gnome-devel-docs branch. Even more ideal would be to have the branch pushed to master.  The markdown port is not synchronized in any way with the mallard docs in master, so any changes to the mallard docs would require re-synchronization and that’s why currently editing ported markdown docs in the branch currently is a no-go for now.

Pushing the branch does imply that we initially loose translations though and most changes made to gnome-devel-docs seem to be translations these days with a few exceptions (mostly grammar corrections). Thibault and Mathieu expressed interest in supporting translated docs in the future, but it is a substantial amount of work and low on the todo list.

We agreed that I should try to get in touch by e-mail to the relevant mailing lists (including translations) and to individuals who contributed to gnome-devel-docs recently to hear their opinion before we proceed.

Hotdoc status

On the hotdoc side, Mathieu and Thibault explained that they have pending work from the GStreamer docs waiting to land and include in a new release.  There is also an ongoing feature request to support flexboxes through markdown syntax which would be nice to have if we want to align Thibault’s branch more closely to Allan’s mockup.

With help from Thibault and Mathieu I managed to get a local instance of hotdoc running. A few bugs were fixed along the way and I plan to blog post a getting started guide to get Thibaults branch running on your computer which hopefully in turn can be used to improve the existing documentation on hotdoc.

Hackfest plans

For the past two months activity in this initiative has been running low which signals to me that we need to meet together physically again. The meeting attendance this time was around 3-4 people. I am going to FOSDEM 2019 and if anyone else interested in the gnome developer center’s future are attending too, I’ll be happy to meet up during conference for a chat. If sufficiently many shows interest, we could also extend the conference a day, sit down and have a look at the state of things by then.

Otherwise, if someone out there could help providing venue/office space sometime in spring, I can try to gather the group of people who have shown interest so far and get a proper hackfest going.

Trying out crostini on chromebook plus (kevin). It's an aarch64 environment, some packages are missing because of that. Feels much slower compared to termux on the same machine especially when I am installing packages, but maybe because apt is completely different.

Junichi Uekawa http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/201811.html.en Dancer's daily hackings

Just like last year, I managed to be invited to the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Conference to talk about GNOME. First, Simone Fischer-Huebner from Karlstadt University talked about her projects which are on the edge of security, cryptography, and usability, which I find a fascinating area to be in. She presented outcomes of her Prismacloud project which also involves fancy youtube videos…

I got to talk about how I believe GNOME is in a good position make a safe and secure operating system. I presented some case studies and reported on the challenges that I see. For example, Simone mentioned in her talk that certain users don’t trust a software if it is too simple. Security stuff must be hard, right?! So how do measure the success of your security solution? Obviously you can test with users, but certain things are just very hard to get users for. For example, testing GNOME Keysign requires a user not only with a set up MUA but also with a configured GnuPG. This is not easy to come by. The discussions were fruitful and I got sent a few references that might be useful in determining a way forward.

OpenPGP Email Summit

I also attended the OpenPGP Email Summit in Brussels a few weeks ago. It’s been a tiny event graciously hosted by a local company. Others have written reports, too, which are highly interesting to read.

It’s been an intense weekend with lots of chatting, thinking, and discussing. The sessions were organised in a bar-camp style manner. That is, someone proposed what to discuss about and the interested parties then came together. My interest was in visual security indication, as triggered by this story. Unfortunately, I was lured away by another interesting session about keyserver and GDPR compliance which ran in parallel.

For the plenary session, Holger Krekel reported on the current state of Delta.Chat. If you haven’t tried it yet, give it a go. It’s trying to provide an instant messaging interface with an email transport. I’ve used this for a while now and my experience is mixed. I still get to occasional email I cannot decrypt and interop with my other MUA listening on the very same mailbox is hit and miss. Sometimes, the other MUA snatches the email before Delta.chat sees it, I think. Otherwise, I like the idea very much. Oh, and of course, it implements Autocrypt, so your clients automatically encrypt the messages.

Continuing the previous talk, Azul went on to talk about countermitm, an attempt to overcome Autocrypt 1.0‘s weaknesses. This is important work. Because without the vision of how to go from Autocrypt Level 1 to Level 2, you may very well question to usefulness. As of now, Emails are encrypted along their way (well. Assuming MTA-STS) and if you care about not storing plain text messages in your mailbox, you could encrypt them already now. Defending against active attackers is hard so having sort of a plan is great. Anyway, countermitm defines “verified groups” which involves a protocol to be run via Email. I think I’ve mentioned earlier that I still think that it’s a bit a sad that we don’t have the necessary interfaces to run protocols over Email. Outlook, I think, can do simple stuff like voting for of many options or retracting an email. I would want my key exchange to be automated further, i.e. when GNOME Keysign sends the encrypted signature, I would want the recipient to decrypt it and send it back.

Phil Zimmermann, the father of PGP, mentioned a few issues he sees with the spec, although he also said that it’s been a while that he was deeply into this matter. He wanted the spec to be more modern and more aggressively pushing for today’s cryptography rather than for the crypto of the past. And in fact, he wants the crypto of tomorrow. Now. He said that we know that big agencies are storing message today for later analyses. And we currently have no good way of having what people call “perfect forward secrecy” so a future key compromise makes the messages of today readable. He wants post quantum crypto to defeat the prying eyes. I wonder whether anybody has implemented pq-schemes for GnuPG, or any other OpenPGP implementation, yet.

My takeaways are: The keyserver network needs a replacement. Currently, it is used for initial key discovery, key updates, and revocations. I think we can solve some of these problems better if we separate them. For example, revocations are pretty much a fire and forget thing whereas other key updates are not necessarily interesting in twenty years from now. Many approaches for making initial key discovery work have been proposed. WKD, Autocrypt, DANE, Keybase, etc. Eventually one of these approaches wins the race. If not, we can still resort back to a (plain) list of Email addresses and their key ids. That’s as good or bad as the current situation. For updates, the situation is maybe not as bad. But we might still want to investigate how to prevent equivocation.

Another big thing was deprecating cruft in the spec to move a bit faster in terms of cryptography and to allow implementers to get a compliant program running (more) quickly. Smaller topics were the use of PQ safe algorithm and exploitation of backwards incompatible changes to the spec, i.e. v5 keys with full fingerprints. Interestingly enough, a trimmed down spec had already been developed here.

Best wishes to one and all for a prosperous and auspicious Gujarati New Year (V.S. 2075 called sadharana.)

We have spent Diwali week this year in sunny Orlando Florida doing various touristy things. (None of which involve a certain copyright hoarding mouse I'm happy to say.) I didn't put up a [VAC] notice because I haven't really been doing anything much in Debian of late. That is something I hope to change in the coming year but I'll think about that later. Right now I'm excited about the day trip we're going to make to Cape Canaveral. So here is a picture of Apollo 12, one of the biggest fireworks Man has ever sent to the Gods on Diwali 2026. Well, the pedant in me is forced to point out the launch date was actually Labh Pancham but that's close enough.

Jaldhar Vyas http://www.braincells.com/debian/ La Salle Debain

Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you’re interested in Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you.

Debian Games

• Again Yavor Doganov saved the day by porting monster-masher away from obsolete libraries like esound and gconfmm (RC, #848052, #856086, #885037). I reviewed and sponsored the package for him again.
• Gürkan Myczko prepared a new upstream version of greed, a classic text-console game. I provided a desktop icon and sponsored the upload.
• Several games failed to build from source because freetype-config is gone and pkg-config must be used from now on. That required RC bug fixes in asc (#887600),  brutalchess (#892337, patch by Reiner Herrmann), cube2font (#892330, patch by Reiner Herrmann with additional updates by Martin Erik Werner) and scorched3d (#892434, patch by Adrian Bunk)
• I packaged new upstream versions of pcsx2, a Playstation 2 emulator, to fix RC bug #907411, also pygame-sdl2, renpy and bzflag.
• I refreshed the packaging of abe, asc-music, amoebax, angrydd, airstrike, burgerspace, berusky2 and berusky-data.
• Dima Kogan approached me about improving the current Bullet packaging and provided patches to build the double-precision library versions too.  Bullet is a state-of-the-art C++ library for 3D collision detection, soft body and rigid body dynamics. I once introduced it to Debian because it was a required build-dependency of freeorion. Nowadays it powers several scientific applications. I still maintain it because I think it is a very useful library, e.g. used among others by openrobotics.
•  I spent most of the time this month on updating Teeworlds. Since I run a Teeworlds server myself I discovered a remote denial-of-service vulnerability first hand. Of course my server was not the only target and the upstream developers  had already released a fix. But I only got aware of it by chance. So I requested CVE-2018-18541, packaged the latest upstream release 0.7.0 and also prepared a security update for Stretch, released as DSA-4329-1.
• Last but not least I sponsored a new game created and prepared by Gerardo Ballabio called galois. It is a tetris-like game with special features like 3D and different brick shapes. It is currently waiting in the NEW queue.

Debian Java

• October 2018 finally saw the switch to OpenJDK 11 as the default Java implementation in Debian. We will release with OpenJDK 11 because it is a long-term release and supported for at least five years. Although the fallout was not as bad when we switched from Java 8 to Java 9,  a considerable amount of packages started to FTBFS again because of removed classes like javax.activation or jaxb API.
• This month I could also make significant progress with fixing OpenJFX 11 applications.  MediathekView is back on track (#910395, #912350) as is PDFsam (RC, #886394). I had to overcome a bug in openjfx first (RC, #910501) only to discover that GTK3 features are buggy on Wayland at the moment #910764. The latter is clearly an upstream bug and I currently work around it by using GTK 2.
• In a nutshell here are the updated Java packages for October including new upstream versions and RC bug fixes. libapache-mod-jk, gradle-jflex-plugin, qdox2, jackson-dataformat-xml, jackson-jr, cglib, lombok-patcher (#906383), lombok, lombok-ast (#906382), commons-pool2, jboss-logmanager, libpdfbox2-java (CVE-2018-11797), libpdfbox-java (CVE-2018-11797), fontawesomefx (RC, #893194), triplea (RC, #874132), syncany (RC, #910457), libsambox-java, libsejda-java,  objenesis, jackrabbit, sweethome3d, sweethome3d-furniture, sweethome3d-furniture-editor, libcodesize-java, trove3 (RC, #912265), easymock, jboss-jdeparser (RC, #912295), mockito (RC, #910738), jboss-modules (RC, #912296), objenesis (RC, #911980)
• For MediathekView 13.2.1 I needed new packages: commons-dbcp2, jiconfont, jiconfont-swing, jiconfont-awesome. They are currently waiting in the NEW queue.

Misc

• I sponsored android-platform-system-core for Kai-Chung Yan and did a non-maintainer upload for eboard, a chess client to fix RC bug #893167. I forwarded some patches and I hope we will see another upstream release in the near future that addresses some issues.
• I packaged a new upstream release of ublock-origin.

Debian LTS

This was my thirty-second month as a paid contributor and I have been paid to work 30 hours on Debian LTS, a project started by Raphaël Hertzog. In that time I did the following:

• From 08.10.2018 until 14.10.2018 and 29.10.2018 until 4.11.2018 I was in charge of our LTS frontdesk. I investigated and triaged CVE in gnulib, otrs2, tcpreplay, net-snmp, ghostscript, paramiko, pyopenssl, qpdf, requests, glassfish, imagemagick, tomcat8, tomcat7, moin, glusterfs, mono, tiff, systemd, network-manager, shellinabox, openssl, curl, squid3, icecast2, sdl-image1.2, libsdl2-image, mkvtoolnix, libapache-mod-jk, mariadb-10.0, mysql-connector-java and jasper.
• There was a problem with our list manager and some announcements could not be preserved.
• DLA-1535-1. Issued a security update for php-horde fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-1536-1. Issued a security update for php-horde-core fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-1537-1. Issued a security update for php-horde-kronolith fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-1540-1. Issued a security update for net-snmp fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-1543-1. Issued a security update for gnulib fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-1544-1. Issued a security update for tomcat7 fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-1545-1. Issued a security update for tomcat8 fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-1546-1. Issued a security update for moin fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-1552-1. Issued a security update for ghostscript fixing 3 CVE.
• DLA-1564-1. Issued a security update for mono fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-1565-1. Issued a security update for glusterfs fixing 5 CVE.

ELTS

Extended Long Term Support (ELTS) is a project led by Freexian to further extend the lifetime of Debian releases. It is not an official Debian project but all Debian users benefit from it without cost. The current ELTS release is Debian 7 „Wheezy“. This was my fifth month and I have been paid to work 15  hours on ELTS.

• I was in charge of our ELTS frontdesk from 15.10.2018 until 21.10.2018 and I triaged CVE in chromium-browser, ghostscript, openexr, unzip, virtualbox, elfutils, liblivemedia, exiv2, movabletype-opensource, quemu, quemu-kvm, tiff and tcpreplay.
• ELA-50-1. Issued a security update for linux fixing 34 CVE.
• ELA-51-1. Issued a security update for tomcat7 fixing 1 CVE.
• ELA-54-1. Issued a security update for curl fixing 1 CVE.
• ELA-55-1. Issued a security update for firmware-nonfree fixing 8 CVE.

Thanks for reading and see you next time.

Apo https://gambaru.de/blog planetdebian – gambaru.de

Since Dimitri has given me the SQL virus I have a hard time avoiding opportunities for twisting my brain.

Seeing the latest post from Chris Lamb made me wonder: how hard would it be to do better? Splitting by date is rather arbitrary (the split may even depend on the timezone you’re using when you’re doing the query), so let’s try to find out the maximum number of uploads that happened for each package in any 24 hour window.

First, for each upload, we get how many uploads of the same package happened in the subsequent 24 hours.

SELECT source, date, ( SELECT count(*) FROM upload_history AS other_upload WHERE other_upload.source = first_upload.source AND other_upload.date >= first_upload.date AND other_upload.date < first_upload.date + '24 hours') AS count FROM upload_history AS first_upload

For each source package, we want the maximum count of uploads in a 24 hour window.

SELECT source, max(count) FROM upload_counts GROUP BY source

We can then join both queries together, to get the 24-hour window in which the most uploads of a given source package has happened.

WITH upload_counts AS ( SELECT source, date, ( SELECT count(*) FROM upload_history AS other_upload WHERE other_upload.source = first_upload.source AND other_upload.date >= first_upload.date AND other_upload.date < first_upload.date + '24 hours') AS count FROM upload_history AS first_upload ) SELECT source, date, count FROM upload_counts INNER JOIN ( SELECT source, max(count) AS max_uploads FROM upload_counts GROUP BY source ) AS m USING (source) WHERE count = max_uploads AND max_uploads >= 9 ORDER BY max_uploads DESC, date ASC;

The results are almost the ones Chris has found, but cl-sql and live-config now have one more upload than live-boot.

source | date | count --------------------+------------------------+------- cl-sql | 2004-04-17 03:34:52+00 | 14 live-config | 2010-07-15 17:19:11+00 | 14 live-boot | 2010-07-15 17:17:07+00 | 13 zutils | 2010-12-30 17:33:45+00 | 11 belocs-locales-bin | 2005-03-20 21:05:44+00 | 10 openerp-web | 2010-12-30 17:32:07+00 | 10 debconf | 1999-09-25 18:52:37+00 | 9 gretl | 2000-06-16 18:53:11+00 | 9 posh | 2002-07-24 17:04:46+00 | 9 module-assistant | 2003-09-11 05:53:18+00 | 9 live-helper | 2007-04-20 18:16:38+00 | 9 dxvk | 2018-11-06 00:04:02+00 | 9 (12 lines)

Thanks to Adrian and Chris for the involuntary challenge!

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

Previously, on IRC...

* bunk looks at dxvk and wonders whether 9 uploads of a package on 1 day are a record

According to the Ultimate Debian Database, it turns out it isn't:

udd=> SELECT source, DATE(date) as day, COUNT(source) FROM upload_history GROUP BY (source, day) ORDER BY count DESC LIMIT 10; source | day | count --------------------+------------+------- live-config | 2010-07-15 | 13 live-boot | 2010-07-15 | 13 cl-sql | 2004-04-17 | 13 zutils | 2010-12-30 | 11 openerp-web | 2010-12-30 | 10 belocs-locales-bin | 2005-03-20 | 10 debconf | 1999-09-25 | 9 dxvk | 2018-11-06 | 9 live-helper | 2007-04-20 | 9 module-assistant | 2003-09-11 | 9 (10 rows) Chris Lamb https://chris-lamb.co.uk/blog/category/planet-debian lamby: Items or syndication on Planet Debian.

duc's GUI view

Continuing a series of blog posts about Debian packages I have adopted (starting with smartmontools), in January this year I adopted duc ("Dude, where are my bytes?")

duc is a tool to record and visualise disk space usage. Recording and visualising are performed separately, meaning the latter is very fast. There are several visualisers available. The three most interesting ones are

• duc ui, a text terminal/ncurses-based heirarchical browser
• duc gui, a GUI/X11 application
• duc cgi, a CGI for access with a web browser

The GUI and CGI resemble the fantastic Filelight KDE tool, which I've always preferred to the similar tools available for GNOME, Windows or macOS. (duc itself works fine on macOS). The CGI could be deployed on my NAS, but I haven't set it up yet.

Indexing is performed via duc index <path> and seems very quick when compared to something like du -sh. The index is stored in a local database.

I adopted duc in sad circumstances after the prior maintainer decided to step down, in response to a discussion we had about a feature request for the Debian package. This wasn't the outcome I wanted, but it's a package I use regularly on several machines so I stepped up to adopt it.

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

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Joseph Herlant (aerostitch)
• Aurélien Couderc (coucouf)
• Dylan Aïssi (daissi)
• Kunal Mehta (legoktm)
• Ming-ting Yao Wei (mwei)
• Nicolas Braud-Santoni (nicoo)
• Pierre-Elliott Bécue (peb)
• Stephen Gelman (ssgelm)
• Daniel Echeverry (epsilon)
• Dmitry Bogatov (kaction)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Sagar Ippalpalli
• Kurt Kremitzki
• Michal Arbet
• Peter Wienemann
• Alexis Bienvenüe
• Gard Spreemann

Congratulations!

Jean-Pierre Giraud https://bits.debian.org/ Bits from Debian

If you read my blog regularly, you probably know I am involved in running and developing the Norwegian TV channel Frikanalen. It is an open channel, allowing everyone in Norway to publish videos on a TV channel with national coverage. You can think of it as Youtube for national television. In addition to distribution on RiksTV and Uninett, Frikanalen is also available as a Kodi addon. The last few days I have updated the code to add more features. A new and improved version 0.0.3 Frikanalen addon was just made available via the Kodi repositories. This new version include a option to browse videos by category, as well as free text search in the video archive. It will now also show the video duration in the video lists, which were missing earlier. A new and experimental link to the HD video stream currently being worked on is provided, for those that want to see what the CasparCG output look like. The alternative is the SD video stream, generated using MLT. CasparCG is controlled by our mltplayout server which instead of talking to mlt is giving PLAY instructions to the CasparCG server when it is time to start a new program.

By now, you are probably wondering what kind of content is being played on the channel. These days, it is filled with technical presentations like those from NUUG, Debconf, Makercon, and TED, but there are also some periods with EMPT TV and P7.

As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Petter Reinholdtsen http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ Petter Reinholdtsen - Entries tagged english

Intro

Welcome to another monthly summary of my free software work. Currently I'm focusing on improving the state of packaging for FreeCAD and its ecosystem of dependencies and related packages in Debian Science. Additionally, I recently revived the FreeCAD Community Extras PPA as a way of staging these packages out to users for testing. If you are a FreeCAD user, developer, or simply a user of one of these packages, I would greatly appreciate your feedback and testing to identify bugs while my packages wait to make it into the Debian archive.

However, in the long-term, I plan to move away from spending so much time on Debian packaging and returning to FreeCAD core development, and a special not-so-secret related project: PostCAD, providing OpenCASCADE geometry & topology bindings plus CAD data and filetype format support for PostgreSQL, a la PostGIS. The goal is to build this out as a rich backend which FreeCAD can talk to about neat CAD stuff. It's a heaping of work, though, so I don't expect to have a public release until mid or late 2019.

I would like to find others who are interested in contributing to FreeCAD ecosystem packaging for mentorship. That way, my efforts are maintained by the community and the quality and availability of packages won't wane with my attention on them. Since FreeCAD participates in Google Summer of Code, this would be a great opportunity for interested university students to learn Debian packaging and improve the state of science & engineering software on Debian.

Anyway, on to my summary!

Debian News

This month, I officially became a Debian Maintainer. This is a basic level of formal membership in the Debian project, and it comes with limited upload rights to the archive. I can only upload packages for which I am marked as a maintainer, for example FreeCAD.

I took advantage of this to upload some improvements for FreeCAD which I had been sitting on. After a few tweaks, the package was ready for an upgraded upload from Experimental to Unstable, which begins the process of candidacy for Testing, the release pocket for the upcoming Debian 10.

Debian FreeCAD Gets Qt 5

Most important about this upload, though was that FreeCAD is finally being built with Qt 5 support. While Qt 5 had been working for quite a while, we were waiting on a dependency to be uploaded to Debian, PySide 2, which finally was uploaded this summer. Because this is a big switch to flip, any testing and reporting of bugs for this Debian package would be appreciated!

FreeCAD Package Structure Reorganization

One of the other major packaging changes for FreeCAD 0.17 is that the package is no longer a single, monolithic freecad package. We now have:

• a freecad metapackage, which installs the other packages
• common files and resources (e.g. images) in freecad-common
• freecad-runtime contains Python 2/3 compatible runtime files
• the executable built against Python 2, freecad-python2
• and the library files used by the executable, libfreecad-python2-0.17

There are several advantages to this approach. The first is that since freecad-common and freecad-runtime are just pictures, Python scripts, and the like, we can save space in the archive by only needing one copy of the package, instead of one for each supported architecture. For freecad-python2 and libfreecad-python2-0.17, one can see the advantage in the name: since these are Python 2 specific, we will soon be able to provide their Python 3 counterparts.

Ideally, by the time of the Debian 10 release, the FreeCAD 0.17 package will provide both Python 2 and 3 supported versions, and which one you want to use can be switched between using the alternatives system, which I will explain later in this post.

FreeCAD Python 3 Imminent

Like Qt 5, FreeCAD has supported Python 3 for quite some time. (Workbenches and 3rd party code are another story.) However, in Debian, a Python 3-enabled FreeCAD package is blocked by the pending upload of pivy 0.6. I helped coordinate the upstream release of this package but due to issues with its dependency Coin3D the upload is stalled until those issues are resolved.

Community Extras PPA - Early Packge Previews

Now that we have the Community Extras PPA, it serves as a convenient location for me to upload packages as soon as I have one completed and ready for testing. Here are my uploads this month.

Gmsh 4

Gmsh has released a major version upgrade, which includes removing the experimental Java API and introducing Julia bindings, although this package doesn't do anything with them. The current version in the Debian archives is 3.0.6.

This package is only available on Bionic (Ubuntu 18.04) due to its dependencies. I hadn't tried on Cosmic (Ubuntu 18.10) since I worked on this in the beginning of October and it wasn't released yet.

Calculix 2.14

CalculiX in Debian is currently several versions behind (2.11) so I got a request to package this. However, CalculiX actually spans several packages, but calculix-ccx, the solver, is the only one used by FreeCAD, so unlike the other packages, this one is not quite ready for Debian until the other ones are done as well, since they are separate source packages.

This package is available on Bionic and Xenial (Ubuntu 16.04).

Translated FreeCAD-Doc Packages

One of the big areas for improvement in FreeCAD is the state of its documentation, and I'm glad to announce that one big improvement is on its way. I have been working on a standalone freecad-doc package, since it was removed from the Debian archive for being derived from pre-compiled binary files. This package involves using a local synced copy of the FreeCAD Wiki text and images, and using the script that was used to generate the aforementioned binary files.

The main improvement my package offers is support for the two most complete translations of the FreeCAD wiki, French and Italian. This is accomplished by making freecad-doc a metapackage which depends on any one of freecad-doc-en, -it, or -fr being installed. Then, the relevant files in freecad-doc upon which freecad will call are in fact managed symlinks to the appropriate translations. The symlinks are managed by the DebianAlternatives system (see update-alternatives(1).)

In order to switch between translations if more than one is installed, you can run sudo update-alternatives --config freecad-doc. This will control the in-program help for FreeCAD, so when you click the "What's this?" button, the resultant help page will be the translated version.

Additionally, compiled PDFs of the FreeCAD help are provided for all three languages.

One result of the nature of this package is that it is quite large: each freecad-doc translated package weighs in about 300 MB so the combined size is about 1.2 GB, per Ubuntu distribution.

As a result, this package is only available on Bionic and Xenial.

PyCOLLADA 0.6, now with Python 3!

Another package which is fairly out of date in Debian (version 0.4 present), I decided to update it since pycollada is a dependency of FreeCAD and I am intrigued by the possibilities of the COLLADA (COLLAborative Design Activity) format. This allows for interchange with interactive 3D applications like Blender.

The big news with this package is that Python 3 support is now available, so I updated the source packaging to provide both Python 2 and 3 packages.

Again due to dependencies, it's only available on Cosmic and Bionic.

Sponsors

My work on Debian Science and FreeCAD is supported by my patrons at https://patreon.com/kkremitzki. Thank you all very much!

If you appreciate my work as described in this post, any level of support is greatly appreciated, including moral support!

Social Media

You can follow me on Twitter at @thekurtwk. I'm also currently working on a Twitch streaming setup, which I hope to have ready by the end of the year! I'll be trying out some live programming, engineering, and Linux gaming. You can find me at twitch.tv/kkremitzki.

Kurt Kremitzki https://kkremitzki.github.io/ Biosystems Engineering Blog (Posts about debian)

Today at work I built two new computers for co-workers. They were (rightfully so) complaining the 2008 iMacs they were using were getting old and slow.

I can't help but be a little sad about it. These computers are still pretty usable for light tasks and are in overall pretty good shape. To be honest, I'm not sure what I'll be doing with them.

Tasked with the job of building new computers at a reasonable price, I decided to go with the latest AMD CPU, the Ryzen 5 2400G. This is the second generation of Ryzen chips and it includes an APU, thus negating the need to buy a discrete GPU.

This chip is pretty recent so the support in Stretch isn't great. The APU graphics stack was too recent to be supported by the 4.9 stable kernel, so I had to install 4.18 from the backports.

I also had to install the xserver-xorg-video-amdgpu driver from testing, as AMD's Vega arch wasn't a thing when Stretch came out. Although AMD did the right thing and used FOSS drivers for their Vega GPU lineup, you still need proprietary firmware (firmware-amd-graphics) for the APU to be fully supported.

It was my first time using NVME SSDs, and oh boy are those fast. I was sceptical at first (SATA SSDs are pretty fast, right?) but the difference in snap really is noticeable. I now regret I didn't put that in my desktop at home when I replaced my SSD 6 months ago...

All in all I'm pretty happy with the final result. The performance of the Ryzen 5 2400G is good and the price of the overall build was reasonable.

Louis-Philippe Véronneau https://veronneau.org/ Louis-Philippe Véronneau

Yesterday, Dropbox has finally pulled the plug on its Linux support. Let us keep a silent minute for the deceased.

Of course, Dropbox does see this differently, but their explanation that ext4 is the only reasonable file system (and be aware, not in all combination and encryption), and also the only that supports extended attributes, is so ridiculously stupid that it is vain to even discuss it.

Yes I know, as OSS enthusiast I should (and I am) using NextCloud. But integration-wise Dropbox is still the best, and many of my applications only offer Dropbox integration (or, God forbid, OneDrive integration).

For those desperate one like me:

• git clone https://github.com/dark/dropbox-filesystem-fix.git
• make the script dropbox_start.py executable
• call make there to build the shared library
• disable auto-start in the Dropbox application
• add the dropbox_start.py to your list of autostart programs

It is not a perfect, and surely not a solution that will work forever, but for now until I have moved all my files out and somehow converted to different applications, it does its job.

RIP Dropbox on Linux, and I hope this company will disappear as punishment for their stupidity.

Norbert Preining https://www.preining.info/blog There and back again

I’m currently writing this from sunny (but very cold!) Colorado Springs, and tomorrow I’m off to SeaGL. We’ll have a booth there, so come and say hi to me and Rosanna if you’re in Seattle! More on that in the next report, however :)

General

As per usual, our main focus has been on the hiring of new staff members for the Foundation. We’ve completed a few second interviews and a couple of first interviews. We’re aiming to start making offers around the end of November. If you have put in an application, and haven’t heard back in a while, please don’t worry! It’s simply due to a large number of people who’ve applied and the very manual way we’ve had to process these. Everyone should hear back.

We’ve also had some interesting times with our banking. The short version is, we’ve moved banks to another provider. This has taken quite a bit of work, but hopefully, this should be settling down now.

As mentioned in issue #43, we have an employee handbook. However, it’s not public and hasn’t been updated. We’ve now managed to find a service that will do some of this for us, so we don’t need to create a whole load of text.

Finally, some minor items: Three trademark agreements were granted/modified, one GDPR request is being considered (removal of email from list archives), the GNOME namespace on handshake.org has been requested (which involved a number of calls with our trademark lawyer), a Dun and Bradstreet number (D-U-N-S) has been requested so we can then request a free Apple code signing certificate and the EU events box should now have a laptop.

Conferences SustainOSS Summit

This event was quite interesting and was held in London at the end of October. There was an estimated 150 people attend, and all to talk about the sustainability of open source software, and how this can be improved (sustainability here should be read in all forms; financial, newcomer experience; maintainer burnout etc).

Freenode#Live

Held in Bristol at the start of November Freenode#Live was once again an impressive event, and I presented my “Why Free Software on the desktop matters” talk. The most useful aspect of the event is to meet up with key people in the FOSS community, and Advisory Board members.

Finally, as we were leaving the venue, one of the venue staff members came up to say hello. He’s a professional graphic illustrator/designer and although having never heard about free software before, was impressed by the conference and our passion that he’s volunteering to help with design work.

I’m currently writing this from sunny (but very cold!) Colorado Springs, and tomorrow I’m off to SeaGL. We’ll have a booth there, so come and say hi to me and Rosanna if you’re in Seattle! More on that in the next report, however :)

General

As per usual, our main focus has been on the hiring of new staff members for the Foundation. We’ve completed a few second interviews and a couple of first interviews. We’re aiming to start making offers around the end of November. If you have put in an application, and haven’t heard back in a while, please don’t worry! It’s simply due to a large number of people who’ve applied and the very manual way we’ve had to process these. Everyone should hear back.

We’ve also had some interesting times with our banking. The short version is, we’ve moved banks to another provider. This has taken quite a bit of work, but hopefully, this should be settling down now.

As mentioned in issue #43, we have an employee handbook. However, it’s not public and hasn’t been updated. We’ve now managed to find a service that will do some of this for us, so we don’t need to create a whole load of text.

Finally, some minor items: Three trademark agreements were granted/modified, one GDPR request is being considered (removal of email from list archives), the GNOME namespace on handshake.org has been requested (which involved a number of calls with our trademark lawyer), a Dun and Bradstreet number (D-U-N-S) has been requested so we can then request a free Apple code signing certificate and the EU events box should now have a laptop.

Conferences SustainOSS Summit

This event was quite interesting and was held in London at the end of October. There was an estimated 150 people attend, and all to talk about the sustainability of open source software, and how this can be improved (sustainability here should be read in all forms; financial, newcomer experience; maintainer burnout etc).

Freenode#Live

Held in Bristol at the start of November Freenode#Live was once again an impressive event, and I presented my “Why Free Software on the desktop matters” talk. The most useful aspect of the event is to meet up with key people in the FOSS community, and Advisory Board members.

Finally, as we were leaving the venue, one of the venue staff members came up to say hello. He’s a professional graphic illustrator/designer and although having never heard about free software before, was impressed by the conference and our passion that he’s volunteering to help with design work.

Neil McGovern https://blog.halon.org.uk Geek – Liberal Murmurs

We are pleased to announce that the 3rd bugfix release of Plasma 5.14, 5.14.3, is now available in our backports PPA for Cosmic 18.10.

The full changelog for 5.14.3 can be found here.

Already released in the PPA is an update to KDE Frameworks 5.51.

To upgrade:

Add the following repository to your software sources list:

ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports

or if it is already added, the updates should become available via your preferred update method.

The PPA can be added manually in the Konsole terminal with the command:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports

and packages then updated with

sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade

 

IMPORTANT

Please note that more bugfix releases are scheduled by KDE for Plasma 5.14, so while we feel these backports will be beneficial to enthusiastic adopters, users wanting to use a Plasma release with more stabilisation/bugfixes ‘baked in’ may find it advisable to stay with Plasma 5.13.5 as included in the original 18.10 Cosmic release.

Should any issues occur, please provide feedback on our mailing list [1], IRC [2], and/or file a bug against our PPA packages [3].

1. Kubuntu-devel mailing list: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/kubuntu-devel
2. Kubuntu IRC channels: #kubuntu & #kubuntu-devel on irc.freenode.net
3. Kubuntu ppa bugs: https://bugs.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa

Two years ago, I was in the middle of the forest in rural southern Indiana. It was a time of hope – of defeating racism, sexism, xenophobia. Hope for affordable health care, for peace, for care for the young and the old. Then I woke up, in that beautiful place, to the news that Donald Trump would be president. Trump. President.

A few days later, I wrote Morning In The Skies, which included, in part:

Not long after the election, I got in a plane, pushed in the throttle, and started the takeoff roll down a runway in the midst of an Indiana forest. The skies were the best kind of clear blue, and pretty soon I lifted off and could see for miles. Off in the distance, I could see the last cottony remnants of the morning’s fog, lying still in the valleys, surrounding the little farms and houses as if to give them a loving hug. Wow.

Sometimes the flight is bumpy. Sometimes the weather doesn’t cooperate, and it doesn’t happen at all. Sometimes you can fly across four large states and it feels as smooth as glass the whole way.

Whatever happens, at the end of the day, the magic flying carpet machine gets locked up again. We go home, rest our heads on our soft pillows, and if we so choose, remember the beauty we experienced that day.

Really, this post is not about being a pilot. This post is a reminder to pay attention to all that is beautiful in this world. It surrounds us; the smell of pine trees in the forest, the delight in the faces of children, the gentle breeze in our hair, the kind word from a stranger, the very sunrise.

I hope that more of us will pay attention to the moments of clear skies and wind at our back. Even at those moments when we pull the hangar door shut.

For two years, I have often reflected on the bittersweet memories of that trip to Indiana. But for some reason, I hadn’t shared that photo until today. That beautiful valley-hugging fog is what you see above.

These last two years have been — well, full. Full of hate, even of death in the wake of several racist murders. But that’s not all. These years have also been full of an awakening, a swelling of people that care. People that care enough to do something. All across the country, people have risen up to send the message: “Trumpism is not American.” My own family did something we never had before: joined a protest, against families being separated. I and many others knocked on doors and made phone calls for the first time. Millions of Americans care and are doing something. We have seen the true colors of what the GOP has become, and it’s ugly, but people care. What’s more, we’ve won the first battle. Here in what the media often calls “deep-red Kansas”, we will have a Democratic governor. Racism and vote suppression has been sent packing, here in Kansas.

We have a powerful reminder that part of what makes this world beautiful is its people. People that go knock on doors in the cold. People that drive people to voting places. People that care about health care for others, about food for others, about education, intact families, refugees, and the earth itself. People that know the fight has just begun and are going to be there fighting for what is right and just for years to come. People that make the world beautiful.

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

I have been working with AWS in the last days and encounter some issues when using RDS.  Generally when you're working in development environment you have setup your database as Publicly accessible and this isn't an issue. But when you're working in Production. So we place the Amazon RDS database into a private subnet. What we need to do for connecting to the database using PgAdmin or other tool?

We're going to use one of the most common methods for doing this. You will need to launch an Amazon EC2 instance in the public subnet and then use it as jumping box.

So after you have your EC2, you will need to run the following command.
See explantion below

After this, you will need to configure your PgAdmin.
The host name will be your localhost, the port is the same you define in the above command.
Maintenance database will be your DB name and the username you have for connecting.

Hope this helps you connect to your databases.

If you’re using Fedora and discovered that WebKitGTK+ is displaying blank pages, the cause is a bad mesa update, mesa-18.2.3-1.fc29. This in turn was caused by a GCC bug that resulted in miscompilation of mesa.

To avoid this bug, downgrade to mesa-18.2.2-1.fc29:

$ sudo dnf downgrade mesa*

You can also update to mesa-18.2.4-2.fc29, but this build has not yet reached updates-testing, let alone stable, so downgrading is easier for now. Another workaround is to run your application with accelerated compositing mode disabled, to avoid OpenGL usage:

$ WEBKIT_DISABLE_COMPOSITING_MODE=1 epiphany

On the bright side of things, from all the bug reports I’ve received over the past two days I’ve discovered that lots of people use Epiphany and notice when it’s broken. That’s nice!

Huge thanks to Dave Airlie for quickly preparing the fixed mesa update, and to Jakub Jelenik for handling the same for GCC.

All around updates in the TeX Live on Debian world: Besides the usual shipment of macro and font packages, we have uploaded a new set of binaries checked out from current svn, as well as the latest and shiniest version of biber to complement the macro update of biblatex.

The version for the binary packages is 2018.20181104.49075 and is based on svn revision 49075. That means we get:

• new dvisvgm version 2.6.1
• several bugfixes in dvipdfmx
• addition of dviout-util (previously only available on Windows): dvispc, chkdvifont
• various security related bugfixes

In addition to that, in Debian we switched to the separately packaged version of teckit instead of using the one shipped in TeX Live.

The version of the macro/font packages is 2018.20181106-1 and contains the usual set of updated and new packages, see below for the complete list. One important – though not functional – update is the one of hyph-utf8, where the license of the UK English patterns has changed from a TeX like license statement (changes allowed with renaming clause) that generates again and again puzzlement in the Debian community (latest instance is bug 912557, which actually spread out into other packages). Thanks to the original authors and the team of hyph-utf8 these patterns are now finally under the MIT license.

Biber has been updated to 2.12-1 which is compatible with the version of biblatex in the current set of packages.

The packages are already included in the archive but might need a bit until arriving at your local mirror.

Please enjoy.

New packages

biblatex-bath, brandeis-problemset, changelog, cluttex, colorprofiles, ditaa, facture-belge-simple-sans-tva, grabbox, identkey, pgf-cmykshadings, pst-moire, srdp-mathematik, thesis-qom, zhlineskip,

Updated packages

acmart, aeb-minitoc, arabluatex, arara, asciilist, babel, babel-belarusian, baskervillef, biblatex, biblatex-bath, biblatex-chem, biblatex-ext, biblatex-nature, biblatex-opcit-booktitle, biblatex-phys, biblatex-science, bidi, brandeis-problemset, catechis, changes, chemfig, cm, cochineal, colorprofiles, currency, diffcoeff, docsurvey, ducksay, europecv, exsol, facture-belge-simple-sans-tva, fancyvrb, firamath, fontawesome5, fonts-tlwg, footnoterange, grayhints, gtrlib-largetrees, hyphen-afrikaans, hyphen-ancientgreek, hyphen-armenian, hyphen-basque, hyphen-belarusian, hyphen-bulgarian, hyphen-catalan, hyphen-chinese, hyphen-churchslavonic, hyphen-coptic, hyphen-croatian, hyphen-czech, hyphen-danish, hyphen-dutch, hyphen-english, hyphen-esperanto, hyphen-estonian, hyphen-ethiopic, hyphen-finnish, hyphen-french, hyphen-friulan, hyphen-galician, hyphen-georgian, hyphen-german, hyphen-greek, hyphen-hungarian, hyphen-icelandic, hyphen-indic, hyphen-indonesian, hyphen-interlingua, hyphen-irish, hyphen-italian, hyphen-kurmanji, hyphen-latin, hyphen-latvian, hyphen-lithuanian, hyphen-mongolian, hyphen-norwegian, hyphen-occitan, hyphen-piedmontese, hyphen-polish, hyphen-portuguese, hyphen-romanian, hyphen-romansh, hyphen-russian, hyphen-sanskrit, hyphen-serbian, hyphen-slovak, hyphen-slovenian, hyphen-spanish, hyphen-swedish, hyphen-thai, hyphen-turkish, hyphen-turkmen, hyphen-ukrainian, hyphen-uppersorbian, hyphen-welsh, hyph-utf8, keyvaltable, komacv-rg, l3build, l3experimental, l3kernel, l3packages, latex2e-help-texinfo, latex2e-help-texinfo-spanish, latexdiff, latexindent, latex-make, latexmk, listofitems, lualibs, luaotfload, luatexja, luaxml, lwarp, multilang, nicematrix, onedown, pdfcomment, pgf-cmykshadings, platex-tools, plautopatch, pst-marble, reledmac, rutitlepage, spectralsequences, svg, tex4ht, texcount, tikzmark, toptesi, typed-checklist, uantwerpendocs, univie-ling, witharrows, xits.

Norbert Preining https://www.preining.info/blog There and back again