A new release of RcppRedis is now on CRAN. It contains additional commands for hashes and sets, all contributed by John Laing and Whit Armstrong.

Changes in version 0.1.2 (2014-11-06)

• New commands execv, hset, hget, sadd, srem, and smembers contributed by John Laing and Whit Armstrong over several pull requests.

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release. As always, more detailed information is on the RcppRedis page page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Today, i uploaded GnuPG 2.1.0 into debian's experimental suite. It's built for amd64 and i386 and powerpc already. You can monitor its progress on the buildds to see when it's available for your architecture. ChangesGnuPG 2.1 offers many new and interesting features, but one of the most important changes is the introduction of elliptic curve crypto (ECC). While GnuPG 2.1 discourages the creation of ECC keys by default, it's important that we have the ability to verify ECC signatures and to encrypt to ECC keys if other people are using this tech. It seems likely, for example, that Google's End-To-End Chrome OpenPGP extension will use ECC. GnuPG users who don't have this capability available won't be able to communicate with End-To-End users. There are many other architectural changes, including a move to more daemonized interactions with the outside world, including using dirmngr to talk to the keyservers, and relying more heavily on gpg-agent for secret key access. The gpg-agent change is a welcome one -- the agent now holds the secret key material entirely and never releases it -- as of 2.1 gpg2 never has any asymmetric secret key material in its process space at all. One other nice change for those of us with large keyrings is the new keybox format for public key material. This provides much faster indexed access to the public keyring. I've been using GnuPG 2.1.0 betas regularly for the last month, and i think that for the most part, they're ready for regular use. Timing for debian The timing between the debian freeze and the GnuPG upstream is unfortunate, but i don't think i'm prepared to push for this as a jessie transition yet, without more backup. I'm talking to other members of the GnuPG packaging team to see if they think this is worth even bringing to the attention of the release team, but i'm not pursuing it at the moment. If you really want to see this in debian jessie, please install the experimental package and let me know how it works for you. Long term migration concerns GnuPG upstream is now maintaining three branches concurrently: modern (2.1.x), stable (2.0.x), and classic (1.4.x). I think this is stretches the GnuPG upstream development team too thin, and we should do what we can to help them transition to supporting fewer releases concurrently. In the long-term, I'd ultimately like to see gnupg 2.1.x to replace all use of gpg 1.4.x and gpg 2.0.x in debian, but unlikely to to happen right now. In particular, the following two bugs make it impossible to use my current, common monkeysphere workflow:

• export-reset-subkey-passwd doesn't work, which breaks monkeysphere subkey-to-ssh-agent.
• pluggable keyserver transports no longer work, which means that i can't use hkpms:// access to keyservers.

And GnuPG 2.1.0 drops support for the older, known-weak OpenPGPv3 key formats. This is an important step for simplification, but there are a few people who probably still need to use v3 keys for obscure/janky reasons, or have data encrypted to a v3 key that they need to be able to decrypt. Those people will want to have GnuPG 1.4 around. Call for testing Anyway, if you use debian testing or unstable, and you are interested in these features, i invite you to install gnupg2 and its friends from experimental. If you want to be sensibly conservative, i recommend backing up ~/.gnupg before trying to use it:

cp -aT .gnupg .gnupg.bak
sudo apt install -t experimental gnupg2 gnupg-agent dirmngr gpgsm gpgv2 scdaemon

If you find issues, please file them via the debian BTS as usual. I (or other members of the pkg-gnupg team) will help you triage them to upstream as needed. Tags: ecc, experimental, gnupg

I recently setup a bunch of IPv6-only accessible hosts, which I mentioned in my previous blog post. In the end I got them talking to the IPv4/legacy world via the installation of an OpenVPN server - they connect over IPv6 get a private 10.0.0.0/24 IP address, and that is masqueraded via the OpenVPN-gateway. But the other thing I've been planning recently is how to configure my next desktop system. I generally do all development, surfing, etc, on one desktop system. I use virtual desktops to organize things, and I have a simple scripting utility to juggle windows around into the correct virtual-desktop as they're launched. Planning a replacement desktop means installing a fresh desktop, then getting all the software working again. These days I'd probably use docker images to do development within, along with a few virtual machines (such as the pbuilder host I used to release all my Debian packages). But there are still niggles. I'd like to keep the base system lean, with few packages, but you can't run xine remotely, similarly I need mpd/sonata for listening to music, emacs for local stuff, etc, etc. In short there is always the tendency to install yet-another package, service, or application on the desktop, which makes migration a pain. I'm not sure I could easily avoid that, but it is worth thinking about. I guess I could configure a puppet/slaughter/cfengine host and use that to install the desktop - but I've always done desktops "manually" and servers "magically" so it's a bit of a change in thinking.

Weblate 2.0 has been released today. It comes with lot of improvements in backend and completely new user interface. Full list of changes for 2.0:

• New responsive UI using Bootstrap.
• Rewritten VCS backend.
• Documentation improvements.
• Added whiteboard for site wide messages.
• Configurable strings priority.
• Added support for JSON file format.
• Fixed generating mo files in certain cases.
• Added support for GitLab notifications.
• Added support for disabling translation suggestions.
• Django 1.7 support.
• ACL projects now have user management.
• Extended search possibilites.
• Give more hints to translators about plurals.
• Fixed Git repository locking.
• Compatibility with older Git versions.
• Improved ACL support.
• Added buttons for per language quotes and other special chars.
• Support for exporting stats as JSONP.

You can find more information about Weblate on http://weblate.org, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. You can login there with demo account using demo password or register your own user. Ready to run appliances will be soon available in SUSE Studio Gallery. Weblate is also being used https://hosted.weblate.org/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, Gammu, Weblate itself and others. If you are free software project which would like to use Weblate, I'm happy to help you with set up or even host Weblate for you. Further development of Weblate would not be possible without people providing donations, thanks to everybody who have helped so far!

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or Why do I not see any update notifications on my brand-new Debian Jessie installation?? This is a short explanation of the status quo, and also explains the no update notifications issue in a slightly more detailed way, since I am already getting bug reports for that. As you might know, GNOME provides GNOME-Software for installation of applications via PackageKit. In order to work properly, GNOME-Software needs AppStream metadata, which is not yet available in Debian. There was a GSoC student working on the necessary code for that, but the code is not yet ready and doesn t produce good results yet. Therefore, I postponed AppStream integration to Jessie+1, with an option to include some metadata for GNOME and KDE to use via a normal .deb package. Then, GNOME was updated to 3.14. GNOME 3.14 moved lots of stuff into GNOME-Software, including the support for update-notifications (which have been in g-s-d before). GNOME-Software is also the only thing which can edit the application groups in GNOME-Shell, at least currently. So obviously, there was no a much stronger motivation to support GNOME-Software in Jessie. The appstream-glib library, which GNOME-Software uses exclusively to read AppStream metadata, didn t support the DEP-11 metadata format which Debian uses in place of the original AppSTream XML for a while, but does so in it s current development branch. So that component had to be packaged first. Later, GNOME-Software was uploaded to the archive as well, but still lacked the required metadata. That data was provided by me as a .deb package later, locally generated using the current code by my SoC student (the data isn t great, but better than nothing). So far with the good news. But there are multiple issues at time. First of all, the appstream-data package didn t pass NEW so far, due to it s complex copyright situation (nothing we can t resolve, since app-install-data, which appstream-data would replace, is in Debian as well). Also, GNOME-Software is exclusively using offline-updates (more information also on [1] and [2]) at time. This isn t always working at the moment, since I haven t had the time to test it properly and I didn t expect it to be used in Debian Jessie as well[3]. Furthermore, the offline-updates feature requires systemd (which isn t an issue in itself, I am quite fine with that, but people not using it will get unexpected results, unless someone does the work to implement offline-updates with sysvinit). Since we are in freeze at time, and obviously this stuff is not ready yet, GNOME is currently without update notifications and without a way to change the shell application groups. So, how can we fix this? One way would of course be to patch notification support back into g-s-d, if the new layout there allows doing that. But that would not give us the other features GNOME-Software provides, like application-group-editing. Implementing that differently and patching it to make it work would be more or at least the same amount of work like making GNOME-Software run properly. I therefore prefer getting GNOME-Software to run, at least with basic functionality. That would likely mean hiding things like the offline-update functionality, and using online-updates with GNOME-PackageKit instead. Obviously, this approach has it s own issues, like doing most of the work post-freeze, which kind of defeats the purpose of the freeze and would need some close coordination with the release-team. So, this is the status quo at time. It is kind of unfortunate that GNOME moved crucial functionality into a new component which requires additional integration work by the distributors so quickly, but that s something which isn t worth to talk about. We need a way forward to bring update-notifications back, and there is currently work going on to do that. For all Debian users: Please be patient while we resolve the situation, and sorry for the inconvenience. For all developers: If you would like to help, please contact me or Laurent Bigonville, there are some tasks which could use some help.
As a small remark: If you are using KDE, you are lucky Apper provides the notification support like it always did, and thanks to improvements in aptcc and PackageKit, it even is a bit faster now. For the Xfce and <other_desktop> people, you need to check if your desktop provides integration with PackageKit for update-checking. At least Xfce doesn t, but after GNOME-PackageKit removed support for it (which was moved to gnome-settings-daemon and now to GNOME-Software) nobody stepped up to implement it yet (so if you want to do it it s not super-complicated, but knowledge of C and GTK+ is needed). - [3]: It looks like dpkg tries to ask a debconf question for some reason, or an external tool like apt-listchanges is interfering with the process, which must run completely unsupervised. There is some debugging needed to resolve these Debian-specific issues.

On Friday October 31, 2014, and Saturday November 1, 2014, around thirty-five graduate students and faculty members attended a Software Carpentry workshop. Attendees came primarily from the Economics department and the Kellogg School of Management, which was also the host and sponsor providing an excellent venue with the Allen Center on the (main) Evanston campus of Northwestern University. The focus of the two-day workshop was an introduction, and practical initiation, to working effectively at the shell, getting introduced and familiar with the git revision control system, as well as a thorough introduction to working and programming in R---from the basics all the way to advanced graphing as well as creating reproducible research documents. The idea of the workshop had come out of discussion during our R/Finance 2014 conference. Bob McDonald of Northwestern, one of this year's keynote speakers, and I were discussing various topic related to open source and good programming practice --- as well as the lack of a thorough introduction to either for graduate students and researcher. And once I mentioned and explained Software Carpentry, Bob was rather intrigued. And just a few months later we were hosting a workshop (along with outstanding support from Jackie Milhans from Research Computing at Northwestern). We were extremely fortunate in that Karthik Ram and Ramnath Vaidyanathan were able to come to Chicago and act as lead instructors, giving me an opportunity to get my feet wet. The workshop began with a session on shell and automation, which was followed by three session focusing on R: a core introduction, a session focused on function, and to end the day, a session on the split-apply-combine approach to data transformation and analysis. The second day started with two concentrated session on git and the git workflow. In the afternoon, one session on visualization with R as well as a capstone-alike session on reproducible research rounded out the second day.

Things that worked The experience of the instructors showed, as the material was presented and an effective manner. The selection of topics, as well as the pace were seen by most students to be appropriate and just right. Karthik and Ramnath both did an outstanding job. No students experienced any real difficulties installing software, or using the supplied information. Participants were roughly split between Windows and OS X laptops, and had generally no problem with bash, git, or R via RStudio. The overall Software Carpentry setup, the lesson layout, the focus on hands-on exercises along with instruction, the use of the electronic noteboard provided by etherpad and, of course, the tried-and-tested material worked very well.

Things that could have worked better Even more breaks for exercises could have been added. Students had difficulty staying on pace in some of the exercise: once someone fell behind even for a small error (maybe a typo) it was sometimes hard to catch up. That is a general problem for hands-on classes. I feel I could have done better with the scope of my two session. Even more cohesion among the topics could have been achieved via a single continually used example dataset and analysis.

Acknowledgments Robert McDonald from Kellogg, and Jackie Milhans from Research Computing IT, were superb hosts and organizers. Their help in preparing for the workshop was tremendous, and the pick of venue was excellent, and allowed for a stress-free two days of classes. We could not have done this without Karthik and Ramnath, so a very big Thank You to both of them. Last but not least the Software Carpentry 'head office' was always ready to help Bob, Jackie and myself during the earlier planning stage, so another big Thank You! to Greg and Arliss.

A minor bugfix release 0.1.1 of the RPushbullet package (interfacing the neat Pushbullet service) landed on CRAN yesterday morning. It cleans up a small issue related to the ability to transfer files between devices via the Pushbullet service where the ability to select a (non-default) target device has now been restored. With that, allow me to borrow one excellent use case of RPushbullet from the blog of Karl Broman: how to use RPushbullet for error notifications from R:

options(error = function()  
    library(RPushbullet)
    pbPost("note", "Error", geterrmessage())
 )

This is very clever: should an error occur, you get immediate notification in browser or on your phone. Left as an exercise for the reader is to combine this with the equally excellent rfoaas package (github cran) to get appropriately colourful error messages... More details about the package are at the RPushbullet webpage and the RPushbullet GitHub repo. Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

We the Debian Qt/KDE Team want to early-announce [maintainer warning] our decision to remove Qt4 from Jessie+1. This warning is mostly targeted at upstreams.

Qt4 has been deprecated since Qt5's first release on December 19th 2012, that means almost two years ago!

So far we had bugfixes-only releases, but upstream has announced that they will end this support on august 2015. This already means we will have to do a special effort from that point on for Jessie in case RC bugs appears, so having it in Jessie+1 is simply a non-go.

Some of us where involved in various Qt4 to Qt5 migrations [0] and we know for sure that porting stuff from Qt4 to Qt5 is much much easier and less painful than it was from Qt3 to Qt4.

We also understand that there is still a lot of software still using Qt4. In order to easy the transition time we have provided Wheezy backports for Qt5.

Don't forget to take a look at the C++ API change page [1] whenever you start porting your application.

[0] http://perezmeyer.blogspot.com.ar/2014/03/porting-qt-4-apps-to-qt-5-example-with.html
[1] http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5.0/qtdoc/sourcebreaks.html

[maintainer warning] **Remember the freeze** and do not upload packages ported to Qt5 to unstable. The best thing you can do now is to ask your upstream if the code can be compiled against Qt5 and, why not, try it yourself.

Our first priority now is to release Jessie, and this is why this is an early announce.

My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donators (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me. Packaging work With the Jessie freeze approaching, I took care of packaging some new upstream releases that I wanted to get in. I started with zim 0.62, I had skipped 0.61 due to some annoying regressions. Since I had two bugs to forward, I took the opportunity to reach out to the upstream author to see if he had some important fixes to get into Jessie. This resulted in me pushing another update with 3 commits cherry picked from the upstream VCS. I also sponsored a wheezy-backports of the new version. I pushed two new bugfixes releases of Publican (4.2.3 and 4.2.6) but I had to include a work-around for a bug that I reported earlier on docbook-xml (#763598: the XML catalog doesn t allow libxml2/xmllint to identify the local copy of some entities files) and that is unlikely to be fixed in time for Jessie. Last but not least, I pushed the first point release of Django 1.7, aka version 1.7.1 to unstable and asked release managers to ensure it migrates to testing before the real freeze. This is important because the closer we are to upstream, the easier it is to apply security patches during the lifetime of Jessie (which will hopefully be 5 years, thanks to Debian LTS!). I also released a backport of python-django 1.7 to wheezy-backports. I sponsored galette 0.7.8+dfsg-1 fixing an RC bug so that it can get back to testing (it got removed from testing due to the bug). Debian LTS See my dedicated report for the paid work I did on that area. Apart from that, I took some time to get in touch with all the Debian consultants and see if they knew some companies to reach out. There are a few new sponsors in the pipe thanks to this, but given the large set of people that it represents, I was expecting more. I used this opportunity to report all bogus entries (i.e bouncing email, broken URL) to the maintainer of the said webpage. Distro Tracker Only 30 commits this month, with almost no external contribution, I m a bit saddened by this situation because it s not very difficult to contribute to this project and we have plenty of easy bugs to get you started. That said I m still happy with the work done. Most of the changes have been made for Kali but will be useful for all derivatives: it s now possible to add external repositories in the tracker and not display them in the list of available versions, and not generate automatic news about those repositories. There s a new derivative application which is only in its infancy but can already provide a useful comparison of a derivative with its parent. See it in action on the Kali Package Tracker: http://pkg.kali.org/derivative/ Thanks to Offensive Security which is sponsoring this work! Since I have pushed Django 1.7 to wheezy-backports, all distro tracker instances that I manage are now running that version of Django and I opted to make that version mandatory. This made it possible to add initial Django migrations and rely on this new feature for future database schema upgrade (I have voluntarily avoided schema change up to now to avoid problems migrating from South to Django migrations). Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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Follow me on Identi.ca or Twitter or Diaspora* This is a feedback about installing a self hosted instance of Friendica on a Debian server (Jessie). If you re not interested in why I use Friendica, just go to Prerequisite for Friendica section below. Frustration about social networks Being a huge user of short messages, I was quite frustated to spend so much time on my Twitter account. To be quite honest, there is no much I like about this social network, except the huge population of people being potentially interested in what I write. I also have been using Identi.ca (now powered by Pump.io) for a while. But I tried for a while to manage both networks Pump.io and Twitter by hand and it was quite painful. And something was telling me another social network was going to appear from nowhere one of these days and I ll be just horrible to try to keep it up this way. So I was looking for a scalable solution not asking too much personal investment. Subscribing to Diaspora* some days ago on the Framasphere pod, tintouli told me to try Friendica. Hmmm, what s Friendica ? Friendica is a content manager you can plug on almost anything: social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Pump.io, Diaspora*, ), but also WordPress, XMPP, emails I m in fact just discovering the power of this tool but to plug it on my different social network accounts was quite a good use case for me. And I guess if you re still reading, for you too. I tried to use some shared public servers but I was not quite happy with the result, one connector was still missing or public servers were really unstable. So I m at last self hosting my Friendica. Here is how. Prerequisite for Friendica You need to install the following packages: # apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-php5 php5 php5-curl php5-gd php5-mysql mysql-server git Having a already self-modified /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini, I encountered a small issue with libCurl and had to manually add the following line in the php.ini: extension=curl.so Setting up MySQL Connect to MySQL and create an empty database with a dedicated user: # mysql -u root -pV3rYS3cr3t -e create database friendica; GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON friendica.* TO friendica@localhost IDENTIFIED BY R3AlLyH4rdT0Gu3ss Setting up Apache My server hosts several services, so I use a subdomain friendica.mydomain.com. If you use a subdomain, of course check you do have declared this subdomain in your DNS zone. I use SSL encryption with a wildcard certificate for all my subdomains. My Friendica data are stored in /var/www/friendica. Here is my virtual host configuration for Friendica stored in the file /etc/apache2/sites-available/friendicassl.conf : <VirtualHost *:443>
ServerName friendica.mydomain.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/friendica/
DirectoryIndex index.php index.html
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/friendica-error-ssl.log
TransferLog /var/log/apache2/friendica-access-ssl.log SSLEngine on
SSLCertificateFile /etc/ssl/certs/mydomain/mydomain.com.crt
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/ssl/private/mydomain.com.key
SSLVerifyClient None <Directory /var/www/friendica/>
AllowOverride All
Options FollowSymLinks
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
</VirtualHost> After writing the configuration file, just launch the following commands and it should be good for the Apache configuration: # a2ensite friendicassl && /etc/init.d/apache2 reload Setting up Friendica Get the master zip file of Friendica, copy it on your server and decompress it. Something like : # cd /var/www/ && wget https://github.com/friendica/friendica/archive/master.zip && unzip master.zip && mv friendica-master friendica You need to give www-data (Apache user) the rights to write in /var/www/friendica/view/smarty3/ : # chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/friendica/view/smarty3 && chmod -R ug+w var/www/friendica/view/smarty3 Ok, I guess we re all set, lets launch the installation process! Using your web browser, connect to friendica.mydomain.com. First step you ll see the installation window which checks the prerequisite before installing. Complete if something is missing. Second step asks the host/user/password of the database, complete and the installation process starts. Hopefully all goes just fine. Next you ll have to create a /var/www/friendica/.htconfig.php with the content that the last page of the installation process provides. Just copy/paste, check the rights of this file and now you can connect again to see the register page of friendica at the url https://friendlica.mydomain.com/register . Pretty cool! Register a user That s a fairly easy step. You just need to check before that your server is able to send emails, because the password is going to be sent to you by email. If it is ok, you should now identify on the welcome page of friendica and access your account. That s a huge step to broadcast your short messages everywhere, but we have some last steps before being able to send your short messages on all the social networks we need. A small break, create an app for twitter on apps.twitter.com To send your short messages to Twitter, you need to create an app on apps.twitter.com. Just check you re logged in Twitter and connect to apps.twitter.com. Create an app called with a unique name (apparently), then go to the Keys and Access tokens page, note the consumer key and the consumer secret. You ll later need the name of the app, the consumer key and the consumer secret. Install and configure the addons Friendica uses an addon system in order to plug on the different third-parties it needs. We are going to configure Twitter, Pump.io and the Diaspora* plug. Let s go back to our server and launches some commands: # cd /tmp && git clone https://github.com/friendica/friendica-addons.git && cd friendica-addons # tar xvf twitter.tgz -C /var/www/friendica/addon # tar xvf pumpio.tgz -C /var/www/friendica/addon # cp -a diaspora /var/www/friendica/addon You need to modify your /var/www/friendica/.htconfig.php file and add the following content at the end: // names of your addons, separated by a comma $a->config['system']['addon'] = pumpio, twitter, diaspora ; // your Twitter consumer key
$a->config['twitter']['consumerkey'] = P4Jl2Pe4j7Lj91eIn0AR8vIl2 ; // your Twitter consumer secret
$a->config['twitter']['consumersecret'] = 1DnVkllPik9Ua8jW4fncxwtXZJbs9iFfI5epFzmeI8VxM9pqP1 ; // you Twitter app name $a->config['twitter']['application_name'] = whatever-twitter ; Connect again to Friendica. Go to settings => social networks, you will see the options for Twitter, Pump.io and Diaspora*. Complete the requested information for each of them. Important options you should not forget to check are: Pump.io

• Enable pump.io Post Plugin
• Post to pump.io by default
• Should posts be public?

Twitter

• Authorize publication on Twitter
• Post to Twitter by default

Diaspora*

• Post to Diaspora by default

Done? Now it s time to send your first broadcasted short message. Yay! Send a short message to your different social networks Connect to Friendica, click on the network page, write your short message in the Share box. Click on the lock , you ll see the following setup: It means your short messages will be broadcasted to the three networks. Or more, it s up to you! That s my setup, feel free to modify. Now close the lock window and send your message. For me it takes some time to appear on Twitter and Diaspora* and it immediatly appears on Identi.ca. Last words Friendica offers to take back the control of your data, by broadcasting content on different media from a single source. While self hosting, you keep your data whatever happends and are not subject to companies losing your data like recently Twitpic. Moreover the philosophy behind Friendica pushed me to dig and test the solution What about you? How do you proceed to broadcast your short messages? Does Friendica offer a good solution in your opinion? Are you interested in the philosophy behind this project? Feel free to share your thoughs in the comments. LAST MINUTE: hey, this article is on Hacker News, don t hesitate to vote for it if you liked it!

I first want to clarify for the people not intimately involved with Debian that the GR-2014-003 vote is not about choosing the default init system or deciding if sysvinit should still be supported: its outcome will not stop systemd from being Debian's default init system and will not prevent any interested developers from supporting sysvinit. Some non-developers have recently threatened of "forking Debian" if this GR will not pass, apparently without understanding well the concept: Debian welcomes forks and I think that having more users working on free software would be great no matter which init system they favour. The goal of Ian Jackson's proposal is to force the maintainers who want to use the superior features of systemd in their packages to spend their time on making them work with sysvinit as well. This is antisocial and also hard to reconcile it with the Debian Constitution, which states: 2.1.1 Nothing in this constitution imposes an obligation on anyone to do work for the Project. A person who does not want to do a task which has been delegated or assigned to them does not need to do it. [...] As it has been patiently explained by many other people, this proposal is unrealistic: if the maintainers of some packages were not interested in working on support for sysvinit and nobody else submitted patches then we would probably still have to release them as is even if formally declared unsuitable for a release. On the other hand, if somebody is interested in working on sysvinit support then there is no need for a GR forcing them to do it. The most elegant outcome of this GR would be a victory of choice 4 ("please do not waste everybody's time with pointless general resolutions"), but Ian Jackson has been clear enough in explaining how he sees the future of this debate: If my GR passes we will only have to have this conversation if those who are outvoted do not respect the project's collective decision. If my GR fails I expect a series of bitter rearguard battles over individual systemd dependencies. There are no significant practical differences between choices 2 "support alternative init systems as much as possible" and 3 "packages may require specific init systems if maintainers decide", but the second option is more explicit in supporting the technical decisions of maintainers and upstream developers. This is why I think that we need a stronger outcome to prevent discussing this over and over, no matter how each one of us feels about working personally on sysvinit support in the future. I will vote for choices 3, 2, 4, 1.

During October, I spent 10 hours on paid LTS work. I should have worked 4 hours more, but for various reasons this did not happen. Instead I ll spend 4 more hours in November. During this time, I did the following:

• CVE triage: this month I pushed 23 commits to the security tracker SVN repository, and filed #765352 against wpa.
• I released a mysql-5.1 update (DLA-75-1) fixing 3 CVE.
• I sponsored the upload of ppp 2.4.5-4+deb6u1 for DLA-74-1 which had been prepared by Andrew Bartlett.
• I uploaded a new version of apache2 (DLA-71-1) fixing 2 CVE.
• I filed a few bugs against debian-security-support to request that some packages be marked as unsupported in squeeze: #765374 for axis2c and
  rampart, #765452 for a new feature allowing binary packages to be marked as unsupported so that glassfish-appserv can be marked as such (this is #765454).

After a few months of work on LTS, I m starting to have a better grasp on the worflow and on what can be done or not. But I m still astonished that we have so few squeeze users on the mailing list. If you re using Squeeze, please subscribe to the list and test the packages that contributors are submitting for tests/validation. It really helps to have some feedback from real users before releasing an update, in particular when the Debian contributor who prepared the update is not a user of said package not everybody has the skills required to prepare security updates, but everybody can help test packages, you have no excuses. And we still need more organizations joining the LTS project, either by providing help (like Catalyst did by letting Andrew Bartlett work on LTS, thanks to them!) or by sponsoring the
project and letting others do the work.

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Whilst gradienting images is certainly possible with CSS, current browser support means that it can still make sense to do it yourself, especially if front-end performance is a concern. However, to avoid manual work in Gimp or Photoshop, you can use ImageMagick to generate them for you:

$ wget --quiet -Obackground.jpg http://i.imgur.com/WCjlJ.jpg
$ convert background.jpg \
      -alpha set -channel A \
      -sparse-color Barycentric '%w,%[fx:h-300] opaque %w,%h transparent' \
      -background '#ffcc32' -flatten \
      background-gradiented.jpg

300 here refers to the height or "speed" of the gradient and the target colour is specified by with -background. Before: After:

this week, my main contribution to fixing RC bugs was to ask others what they think about closing bugs which looked already fixed to me. worked quite fine. full list:

• #682420 src:libpaper: "libpaper: "Multi-Arch: same" but postrm removes arch-independent configuration"
  use DPKG_MAINTSCRIPT_PACKAGE_REFCOUNT before file removal, upload to DELAYED/5
• #743853 libpango-1.0-0: "libpango-1.0-0 : Breaks: libpango1.0-0 (< 1.32.5-2) but 1.30.0-1 is to be installed"
  check current jenkins results, then closed by maintainer
• #754132 libmcrypt: "libmcrypt: add autoreconf during the build to enable new architectures"
  propose to close bug, done by one of the NMUers
• #760908 libmcrypt4: "libmcrypt: another autoreconf fix for arm64 build"
  propose to close bug, done by one of the NMUers
• #762061 dkms: "dkms should pull in the correct linux-headers package"
  downgrade
• #762782 libprocps3-dev,libprocps4-dev: "libprocps4-dev and libprocps3-dev: error when trying to install together"
  propose to close bug, done by fellow DD
• #763769 glabels: "glabels exists with "Abort" when creating a new document"
  prepare patch from upstream git commits, later NMUed by fellow DD
• #764667 distcc: "distcc: Trigger cycle causes dpkg to fail processing"
  change triggers from "interest" to "interest-noawait", as proposed by Guillem Jover, upload to DELAYED/5
• #767041 kephra: "kephra: Fails with "You did not specify a file name""
  upload with patch prepared by Partha Pratim Mukherjee (pkg-perl)
• #767066 gorm.app: "gorm.app: [i386] Crashes when loading .gorm files"
  sponsor maintainer upload

A few days ago, Conrad provided another minor release of Armadillo. Once again, I had created a GitHub-only pre-release of his pre-release which was tested against (then) all ninety (!!) CRAN dependents of our RcppArmadillo package, providing a further test for Conrad's code and uploaded RcppArmadillo 0.4.500.0 to CRAN and Debian once his release was finalized. The few changes from his end are summarized below; our end also includes an update / extension to the sample() method provided by Christian Gunning --- and used to great effect in the excellent Rcpp Gallery post by Jonathan Olmsted.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.4.500.0 (2014-10-30)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release Version 4.500 ("Singapore Sling")
  • faster handling of complex vectors by norm()
  • expanded chol() to optionally specify output matrix as upper or lower triangular
  • better handling of non-finite values when saving matrices as text files
• The sample functionality has been extended to provide the Walker Alias method (including new unit tests) via a pull request by Christian Gunning

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release. As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

I enjoy the tilde.club site/community, and since I've just setup an IPv6-only host I was looking to do something similar. Unfortunately my (working) code to clone github repositories into per-user directories fails - because github isn't accessible over IPv6. That's a shame. Oddly enough chromium, the browser packaged for wheezy, doesn't want to display IPv6-only websites either. For example this site fail to load http://ipv6.steve.org.uk/. In the meantime I've got a server setup which is only accessible over IPv6 and I'm a little smug. (http://ipv6.website/). (Yes it is true that I've used all the IPv4 addreses allocated to my VLAN. That's just a coincidence. Ssh!)

Wednesday 1:
Uploaded python-xstatic-jquery removing the .pth file from package.
Uploaded python-taskflow 0.4 to experimental, needed by Cinder Juno RC1
Uploaded Cinder Juno RC1 to experimental Thuesday 2:
Finally understood that the issue with murano-dashboard was that it doesn t build without django-nose >= 1.2. Opened new patch at: https://review.openstack.org/125565
Uploaded murano-dashboard to Experimental, now using django-nose from wheezy-backports in my jenkins setup, so murano-dashboard can be built for Wheezy.
Uploaded python-oslotest 1.1.0.0 (really is upstream 1.1.0)
Uploaded python-oslo.serialization 1.0.0-1 (needed by Ceilometer Juno RC1)
Uploaded Ceilometer Juno RC1
Uploaded Heat Juno RC1
Uploaded oslo.rootwrap 1.3.0.0
Uploaded oslo.db 1.0.2 (bugfix release)
Wrote a new system in openstack-pkg-tools to generate init scripts and. service files from a template, so we don t have to write N times the same thing. Friday 3:
Reworked openstack-pkg-tools to generate automatically sysv-rc init scripts, upstart jobs and systemd unit files, making the system more unified and consistent.
Applied the new system to all packages in Juno.
Uploaded Keystone 2014.1.3-1 to Sid
Uploaded Nova 2014.1.3-1 to Sid
Uploaded Glance 2014.1.3-1 to Sid
Uploaded Neutron 2014.1.3-1 to Sid
Uploaded Horizon 2014.1.3-1 to Sid
Uploaded Cinder 2014.1.3-1 to Sid
Uploaded Trove 2014.1.3-1 to Sid
Uploaded Ceilometer 2014.1.3-1 to Sid Saturday 4:
Uploaded Horizon Juno RC1 to Experimental
Uploaded oslotest 1.1.0.0 to Experimental
Uploaded Ironic Juno RC1 to Experimental
Uploaded Designate Juno RC1 to Experimental
Uploaded Nova Juno RC1 to Experimental
Uploaded Neutron Juno RC1 to Experimental
Uploaded openstack-meta-packages 0.10 to Sid
Uploaded openstack-pkg-tools 13 to Experimental
Uploaded murano-agent Juno RC1 to Experimental Sunday 5:
Uploaded Sahara Juno RC1 to Experimental (it s been approved by FTP masters)
Uploaded Murano Juno RC1 to Experimental (it s been approved by FTP masters)
Fixed all debian/watch file to understand ~b and ~rc releases (fixed applied on both Icehouse and Juno branches, though no upload yet, I ll wait until uploads are needed to have this in the archive ).
Uploaded Trove Juno RC1 to Experimental
Uploaded Sahara Juno RC1 to Experimental With this last upload, everything of Juno RC1 is in Debian Experimental! \o/ Monday 6:
Uploaded some fixes for Nova 2014.1.3-2 in Sid:
* Removed contrib/boto_v6/* in debian/copyright, replaced bin/nova-manage by nova/cmd/ baremetal_, manage.py.
* Mangling upstream rc and beta versions in watch file.
* Added 9990_update_german_programm_messages.patch, thanks to Helge Kreutzmann <debian@helgefjell.de>.
* Fixed correct de.po (Closes: #763682).
* Added nl.po initial Debconf translation, thanks to Frans Spiesschaert <Frans.Spiesschaert@yucom.be> (Closes: #764125).
* Standards-Version is now 3.9.6 (no change).
Upstreamed german translation of po file: https://review.openstack.org/126212
Uploaded Designate 2014.1-12 to Sid, added new de.po also to the Juno branch on alioth (but didn t upload the fix yet).
Uploaded sphinxcontrib-httpdomain new upstream 1.3.0 release, added Python 3.x support to the package, and transitionning to the correct namespaced python-sphinxcontrib.httpdomain package name.
Spent most of the day fixing python-xstatic issues:
o uploaded libjs-twitter-bootstrap-datepicker 1.3.1
o uploaded python-xstatic-bootstrap-datepicker requiring this libjs package
o fixed python-xstatic-jquery-ui package
Now Horizon Juno RC1 builds well, and can be installed again. \o/ Tuesday 7:
Backported python-libvirt 1.2.8 in Wheezy (for Nova Juno support )
Uploaded Ceilometer Juno RC1 with ceilometer-agent-ipmi added (the package will therefore go through the NEW queue).
Uploaded python-requestbuilder 0.2.2-1, needed by the maintainers of euca2ools.
Ported the unified generated init system scripts to Icehouse packages.
Uploaded to Sid updates for: openstack-pkg-tools, ceilometer, cinder, glance, keystone, cinder, nova. Wednesday 8:
Uploaded openstack-pkg-tools 16 to Sid
Uploaded murano-dashboard (with upstream fix to remove font-awesome, which was the reason for FTP master s rejection)
Uploaded ceilometer Juno RC1 with new IPMI agent package (needed for Ironic support).
Uploaded heat 2014.1.3 which I forgot.
Tested https://review.openstack.org/#/c/126777/ which solves the bug I sent to launchpad and approved the patch.
Uploaded python-requestbuilder 0.2.3 Thesday 9:
Worked on fixing Neutron Alembic migration with SQLite3.
Uploade Neutron 2014.2~rc1-3 with a fix for a patch that was destroying dhcp.py. This still doesn t include the Alembic migration fixes, which are still a WIP. Firday 10:
Finished fixing Neutron SQLite 3 Alembic migrations.
Uploaded neutron 2014.2~rc1-3 with the fixes.
Fixed Ceilometer wrong generation of sample config file, using upstream patch (after discussing with Julien Danjou so he wrote it).
Uploaded Ceilometer 2014.2~rc1-4 with the fix
Checked that all packages can be installed in non-interactive mode. This works well now! \o/ Saturday 11:
Uploaded new version of python-xstatic-angular-cookies (ie: 1.2.24.1-2) which allows a higher version of libjs-angularjs (otherwise the package is not installable in Sid/Jessie since last version of angularjs is uploaded). Sunday 12:
Uploaded factory-boy fix for FTBFS
Uploaded python-django-appconf FTBFS
Uploaded Horizon Juno RC2
Uploaded Heat Juno RC3
Uploaded Trove Juno RC2
Uploaded Glance Juno RC2
Uploaded Sahara Juno RC2
Uploaded Nova Juno RC2
Uploaded Neutron Juno RC2
Uploaded Cinder Juno RC2
Uploaded murano-dashboard Juno RC2 Monday 13:
Uploaded python-heatclient 0.2.12-1 to Experimental
Uploaded python-yaql with RC bugfix to Sid (missing dep on python3-ply). Thuesday 14:
Fixed arping newly added dependency in Neutron
Started testing install of all of openstack Juno at once Wednesday 15:
Fixed missing configuration files in Ceilometer (ceilometer-api couldn t start)
Upgraded to Ceilometer Juno RC3.
Backported python-setuptools, as keystone and others are broken due to the namespace of modules not working correctly with the old version of python-pkg-resources. With the new one, everything is back in order. Thesday 16:
Uploaded to Debian Experimental the final release of Juno (ie: 2014.2) for:
Sahara
Nova
Ceilometer
Cinder
Heat
Neutron
Glance
Keystone
Horizon (with fix for Django 1.7 in the wsgi file)
Uploaded to Sid:
Swift 2.2.0
Horizon 2014.1.3-3 with fix for Django 1.7 in the wsgi file that was crashing apache. OpenStack Juno packages are out!!! (ready the day of the upstream release ) Friday 17:
Investigated Trove RC bug #765348, couldn t reproduce, and therefore closed it.
Uploaded Ironic Juno final to Experimental
Uploaded Designate Juno final to Experimental
Uploaded a fix for python-jingo which failed to build with Django 1.7. Sent pull request upstream: https://github.com/jbalogh/jingo/pull/63
Uploaded CVE-2014-7230 & CVE-2014-7231 fixes for both Cinder and Nova in Debian Sid, as per OSSA 2014-036 patches. No need to upload a fix for Trove, as 2014.1.3 already has the fixes. Saturday 18:
Started building Trusty packages
Fixed oslo-config so that it never depends on python3-argparse, which doesn t exist (uploaded to Experimental)
Uploaded python-django-pyscss 1.0.3-2 with python-simplejson now as build-depends (it failed to build in my Trusty jenkins without it).
Uploaded a fix for stevedore and oslo-config to not depends on python3-argparse in Ubuntu (added debian/py3dist-overrides) Sunday 19:
Uploaded python-taskflow with ordereddict in debian/pydist-overrides.
Backported JS packages for Horizon and libvirt for Trusty (from Sid). My new Jenkin server is now producing a full set of Juno packages for Ubuntu trusty. And of course, it s updated on each git push, just like for the Wheezy backports. Monday 20:
Added FORCE_COULEUR=1 when running tests in python-couleur, so that it doesn t fail when running with git-buildpackage. Uploaded result in Sid.
Fixed python-mockito so that it never downloads distribute or nose on its clean target, which was annoying when running git-buildpackage. Uploaded to Sid.
Started to work again on automatic package deployment using openstack-deploy, from the openstack-meta-packages source package. Thuesday 21, Wednesday 22:
Worked on testing packages, did couples of minor fixes, reworked some of the default configuration files to match the install-guide, move configuration directive to the correct new section in nova.conf, etc. Thursday 23:
Patch the Neutron chapter in the install-guide to take into account the changes done on Thuesday 21, Wednesday 22, and simplify the install procedure in Debian. https://review.openstack.org/#/c/130501/ Friday 24:
Busy packing my stuff for moving to France Not much packaging work, except more auto-deploy stuff and some tests. Saturday 25:
Uploaded Nova, Neutron, Cinder and Horizon Icehouse in Sid, including some debconf translation updates, beating the Jessie freeze deadline in 10 days.
Fixed and uploaded openstack-debian-images in Sid: the login option wasn t modifying the default sudoers file, which always contained debian , instead of the custom login. Sunday 26:
Traveled to Moscow Monday 27 & Tuesday 28:
Fixed some murano & murano-dashboard stuff, thanks to the help of some murano team members in Moscow office. Uploaded fixes for murano & murano-dashboard. Tested that murano-dashboard works well, and now it does! :)
Uploaded version dependency fixes for python-xstatic-angular-cookies and python-xstatic-d3 which couldn t be installed in Sid/Jessie because of libjs-* updates. Wednesday 29:
Meeting with Saratov team
Updated sahara endpoints, but didn t upload the package yet to Debian. Thursday 30:
Uploaded ruby-raemon needed for Astute (part of Fuel web).
Packaged ruby-symboltable (not uploaded yet). Friday 31:
Wrote unit test runner for python-webpy (the current package doesn t have unit test runs).
Uploaded python-dbutils (needed by python-web.py unit tests) to Sid: now in NEW queue
Uploaded python-nose-parametrized & python-nose-timer to Sid: now in NEW queue
Uploaded sahara -2 fixing the API endpoint registration URL and service name.
Uploaded python-sphinxcontrib.plantuml to Sid: : now in NEW queue

During 2 years, my packaging efforts were sponsored by eNovance. It has been great to work with them, and I would like to thank them for what they did. However (for a number of reasons which I don t really think is appropriate to write in this blog), I decided to join Mirantis. This is a formal public announce of it: I will be working from Mirantis office in Grenoble just right after the Paris OpenStack summit of this first week of November.