Search Results: "will"

21 March 2024

Ian Jackson: How to use Rust on Debian (and Ubuntu, etc.)

tl;dr: Don t just apt install rustc cargo. Either do that and make sure to use only Rust libraries from your distro (with the tiresome config runes below); or, just use rustup. Don t do the obvious thing; it s never what you want Debian ships a Rust compiler, and a large number of Rust libraries. But if you just do things the obvious default way, with apt install rustc cargo, you will end up using Debian s compiler but upstream libraries, directly and uncurated from crates.io. This is not what you want. There are about two reasonable things to do, depending on your preferences. Q. Download and run whatever code from the internet? The key question is this: Are you comfortable downloading code, directly from hundreds of upstream Rust package maintainers, and running it ? That s what cargo does. It s one of the main things it s for. Debian s cargo behaves, in this respect, just like upstream s. Let me say that again: Debian s cargo promiscuously downloads code from crates.io just like upstream cargo. So if you use Debian s cargo in the most obvious way, you are still downloading and running all those random libraries. The only thing you re avoiding downloading is the Rust compiler itself, which is precisely the part that is most carefully maintained, and of least concern. Debian s cargo can even download from crates.io when you re building official Debian source packages written in Rust: if you run dpkg-buildpackage, the downloading is suppressed; but a plain cargo build will try to obtain and use dependencies from the upstream ecosystem. ( Happily , if you do this, it s quite likely to bail out early due to version mismatches, before actually downloading anything.) Option 1: WTF, no I don t want curl bash OK, but then you must limit yourself to libraries available within Debian. Each Debian release provides a curated set. It may or may not be sufficient for your needs. Many capable programs can be written using the packages in Debian. But any upstream Rust project that you encounter is likely to be a pain to get working, unless their maintainers specifically intend to support this. (This is fairly rare, and the Rust tooling doesn t make it easy.) To go with this plan, apt install rustc cargo and put this in your configuration, in $HOME/.cargo/config.toml:
[source.debian-packages]
directory = "/usr/share/cargo/registry"
[source.crates-io]
replace-with = "debian-packages"
This causes cargo to look in /usr/share for dependencies, rather than downloading them from crates.io. You must then install the librust-FOO-dev packages for each of your dependencies, with apt. This will allow you to write your own program in Rust, and build it using cargo build. Option 2: Biting the curl bash bullet If you want to build software that isn t specifically targeted at Debian s Rust you will probably need to use packages from crates.io, not from Debian. If you re doing to do that, there is little point not using rustup to get the latest compiler. rustup s install rune is alarming, but cargo will be doing exactly the same kind of thing, only worse (because it trusts many more people) and more hidden. So in this case: do run the curl bash install rune. Hopefully the Rust project you are trying to build have shipped a Cargo.lock; that contains hashes of all the dependencies that they last used and tested. If you run cargo build --locked, cargo will only use those versions, which are hopefully OK. And you can run cargo audit to see if there are any reported vulnerabilities or problems. But you ll have to bootstrap this with cargo install --locked cargo-audit; cargo-audit is from the RUSTSEC folks who do care about these kind of things, so hopefully running their code (and their dependencies) is fine. Note the --locked which is needed because cargo s default behaviour is wrong. Privilege separation This approach is rather alarming. For my personal use, I wrote a privsep tool which allows me to run all this upstream Rust code as a separate user. That tool is nailing-cargo. It s not particularly well productised, or tested, but it does work for at least one person besides me. You may wish to try it out, or consider alternative arrangements. Bug reports and patches welcome. OMG what a mess Indeed. There are large number of technical and social factors at play. cargo itself is deeply troubling, both in principle, and in detail. I often find myself severely disappointed with its maintainers decisions. In mitigation, much of the wider Rust upstream community does takes this kind of thing very seriously, and often makes good choices. RUSTSEC is one of the results. Debian s technical arrangements for Rust packaging are quite dysfunctional, too: IMO the scheme is based on fundamentally wrong design principles. But, the Debian Rust packaging team is dynamic, constantly working the update treadmills; and the team is generally welcoming and helpful. Sadly last time I explored the possibility, the Debian Rust Team didn t have the appetite for more fundamental changes to the workflow (including, for example, changes to dependency version handling). Significant improvements to upstream cargo s approach seem unlikely, too; we can only hope that eventually someone might manage to supplant it.
edited 2024-03-21 21:49 to add a cut tag


comment count unavailable comments

Ravi Dwivedi: Thailand Trip

This post is the second and final part of my Malaysia-Thailand trip. Feel free to check out the Malaysia part here if you haven t already. Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok is around 1500 km by road, and so I took a Malaysian Airlines flight to travel to Bangkok. The flight staff at the Kuala Lumpur only asked me for a return/onward flight and Thailand immigration asked a few questions but did not check any documents (obviously they checked and stamped my passport ;)). The currency of Thailand is the Thai baht, and 1 Thai baht = 2.5 Indian Rupees. The Thailand time is 1.5 hours ahead of Indian time (For example, if it is 12 noon in India, it will be 13:30 in Thailand). I landed in Bangkok at around 3 PM local time. Fletcher was in Bangkok that time, leaving for Pattaya and we had booked the same hostel. So I took a bus to Pattaya from the airport. The next bus for which the tickets were available was at 7 PM, so I took tickets for that one. The bus ticket cost was 143 Thai Baht. I didn t buy SIM at the airport, thinking there must be better deals in the city. As a consequence, there was no way to contact Fletcher through internet. Although I had a few minutes call remaining out of my international roaming pack.
A welcome sign at Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi airport.
Bus from Suvarnabhumi Airport to Jomtien Beach in Pattaya.
Our accommodation was near Jomtien beach, so I got off at the last stop, as the bus terminates at the Jomtien beach. Then I decided to walk towards my accommodation. I was using OsmAnd for navigation. However, the place was not marked on OpenStreetMap, and it turned out I missed the street my hostel was on and walked around 1 km further as I was chasing a similarly named incorrect hostel on OpenStreetMap. Then I asked for help from two men sitting at a caf . One of them said he will help me find the street my hostel is on. So, I walked with him, and he told me he lives in Thailand for many years, but he is from Kuwait. He also gave me valuable information. Like, he told me about shared hail-and-ride songthaews which run along the Jomtien Second Road and charge 10 Baht for any distance on their route. This tip significantly reduced our expenses. Further, he suggested me 7-Eleven shops for buying a local SIM. Like Malaysia, Thailand has 24/7 7-Eleven convenience stores, a lot of them not even 100 m apart. The Kuwaiti person dropped me at the address where my hostel was. I tried searching for a person in-charge of that hostel, and soon I realized there was no reception. After asking for help from locals for some time, I bumped into Fletcher, who also came to this address and was searching for the same. After finding a friend, I felt a sigh of relief. Adjacent to the property, there was a hairdresser shop. We went there and asked about this property. The woman called the owner, and she also told us the required passcodes to go inside. Our accommodation was in a room on the second floor, which required us to put a passcode for opening. We entered the passcode and entered the room. So, we stayed at this hostel which had no reception. Due to this, it took 2 hours to find our room and enter. It reminded me of a difficult experience I had in Albania, where me and Akshat were not able to find our apartment in one of the hottest days and the owner didn t know our language. Traveling from the place where the bus dropped me to the hostel, I saw streets were filled with bars and massage parlors, which was expected. Prostitutes were everywhere. We went out at night towards the beach and also roamed around in 7-Elevens to buy a SIM card for myself. I got a SIM for 7 day unlimited internet for 399 baht. Turns out that the rates of SIM cards at the airport were not so different from inside the city.
Road near Jomtien beach in Pattaya
Photo of a songthaew in Pattaya. There are shared songthaews which run along Jomtien Second road and takes 10 bath to anywhere on the route.
Jomtien Beach in Pattaya.
In terms of speaking English, locals didn t know English at all in both Pattaya and Bangkok. I normally don t expect locals to know English in a non-English speaking country, but the fact that Bangkok is one of the most visited places by tourists made me expect locals to know some English. Talking to locals is an integral part of travel for me, which I couldn t do a lot in Thailand. This aspect is much more important for me than going to touristy places. So, we were in Pattaya. Next morning, Fletcher and I went to Tiger park using shared songthaew. After that, we planned to visit Pattaya Floating market which is near the Tiger Park, but we felt the ticket prices were higher than it was worth. Fletcher had to leave for Bangkok on that day. I suggested him to go to Suvarnabhumi Airport from the Jomtien beach bus terminal (this was the route I took the last day in opposite direction) to avoid traffic congestion inside Bangkok, as he can follow up with metro once he reaches the airport. From the floating market, we were walking in sweltering heat to reach the Jomtien beach. I tried asking for a lift and eventually got successful as a scooty stopped, and surprisingly the person gave a ride to both of us. He was from Delhi, so maybe that s the reason he stopped for us. Then we took a songthaew to the bus terminal and after having lunch, Fletcher left for Bangkok.
A welcome sign at Pattaya Floating market.
This Korean Vegetasty noodles pack was yummy and was available at many 7-Eleven stores.
Next day I went to Bangkok, but Fletcher already left for Kuala Lumpur. Here I had booked a private room in a hotel (instead of a hostel) for four nights, mainly because of my luggage. This costed 5600 INR for four nights. It was 2 km from the metro station, which I used to walk both sides. In Bangkok, I visited Sukhumvit and Siam by metro. Going to some areas require crossing the Chao Phraya river. For this, I took Chao Phraya Express Boat for going to places like Khao San road and Wat Arun. I would recommend taking the boat ride as it had very good views. In Bangkok, I met a person from Pakistan staying in my hotel and so here also I got some company. But by the time I met him, my days were almost over. So, we went to a random restaurant selling Indian food where we ate some paneer dish with naan and that restaurant person was from Myanmar.
Wat Arun temple stamps your hand upon entry
Wat Arun temple
Khao San Road
A food stall at Khao San Road
Chao Phraya Express Boat
For eating, I mainly relied on fruits and convenience stores. Bananas were very tasty. This was the first time I saw banana flesh being yellow. Mangoes were delicious and pineapples were smaller and flavorful. I also ate Rose Apple, which I never had before. I had Chhole Kulche once in Sukhumvit. That was a little expensive as it costed 164 baht. I also used to buy premix coffee packets from 7-Eleven convenience stores and prepare them inside the stores.
Banana with yellow flesh
Fruits at a stall in Bangkok
Trimmed pineapples from Thailand.
Corn in Bangkok.
A board showing coffee menu at a 7-Eleven store along with rates in Pattaya.
In this section of 7-Eleven, you can buy a premix coffee and mix it with hot water provided at the store to prepare.
My booking from Bangkok to Delhi was in Air India flight, and they were serving alcohol in the flight. I chose red wine, and this was my first time having alcohol in a flight.
Red wine being served in Air India

Notes
  • In this whole trip spanning two weeks, I did not pay for drinking water (except for once in Pattaya which was 9 baht) and toilets. Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur have plenty of malls where you should find a free-of-cost toilet nearby. For drinking water, I relied mainly on my accommodation providing refillable water for my bottle.
  • Thailand seemed more expensive than Malaysia on average. Malaysia had discounted price due to the Chinese New year.
  • I liked Pattaya more than Bangkok. Maybe because Pattaya has beach and Bangkok doesn t. Pattaya seemed more lively, and I could meet and talk to a few people as opposed to Bangkok.
  • Chao Phraya River express boat costs 150 baht for one day where you can hop on and off to any boat.

20 March 2024

Dirk Eddelbuettel: ciw 0.0.2 on CRAN: Updates

A first revision of the still only one-week old (at CRAN) package ciw has been released to CRAN! It provides is a single (efficient) function incoming() (now along with an alias ciw()) which summarises the state of the incoming directories at CRAN. I happen to like having these things at my (shell) fingertips, so it goes along with (still draft) wrapper ciw.r that will be part of the next littler release. For example, when I do this right now as I type this, I see (typically less than one second later)
edd@rob:~$ ciw.r 
    Folder                     Name                Time   Size         Age
    <char>                   <char>              <POSc> <char>  <difftime>
1: pretest instantiate_0.2.2.tar.gz 2024-03-20 13:29:00    17K  0.07 hours
2: recheck   tinytable_0.2.0.tar.gz 2024-03-20 12:50:00   565K  0.72 hours
3: pending      Matrix_1.7-0.tar.gz 2024-03-20 12:05:00   2.3M  1.47 hours
4: recheck      survey_4.4-2.tar.gz 2024-03-20 02:02:00   2.2M 11.52 hours
5: waiting   equateIRT_2.4.0.tar.gz 2024-03-19 17:00:00   895K 20.55 hours
6: pending   ravetools_0.1.5.tar.gz 2024-03-19 12:06:00   1.0M 25.45 hours
7: waiting     glmmTMB_1.1.9.tar.gz 2024-03-18 16:04:00   4.2M 45.48 hours
edd@rob:~$ 
See ciw.r --help or ciw.r --usage for more. Alternatively, in your R session, you can call ciw::incoming() (or now ciw::ciw()) for the same result (and/or load the package first). This release adds some packaging touches, brings the new alias ciw() as well as a state variable with all (known) folder names and some internal improvements for dealing with error conditions. The NEWS entry follows.

Changes in version 0.0.2 (2024-03-20)
  • The package README and DESCRIPTION have been expanded
  • An alias ciw can now be used for incoming
  • Network error handling is now more robist
  • A state variable known_folders lists all CRAN folders below incoming

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

Iustin Pop: Corydalis 2024.12.0 released

I ve been working for the past few weeks on Corydalis, and was in no hurry to make a release, but last evening I found the explanation for a really, really, really annoying issue: unintended zooming on touch interfaces in the image viewer. Or more precisely, I found this post from 2015 (9 years ago!): https://webkit.org/blog/5610/more-responsive-tapping-on-ios/ and I finally understood things. And decided this was the best choice for cutting a new release. Of course, the release contains more things, see the changelog on the release page: https://github.com/iustin/corydalis/releases/tag/v2024.12.0. And of course, it s up on http://demo.corydalis.io. And after putting out the new release, I saw that release tagging is in the pre-built binaries still broken, and found the reason at https://github.com/actions/checkout/issues/290. Will fix for the next release The stream of bugs never ends

18 March 2024

Joey Hess: policy on adding AI generated content to my software projects

I am eager to incorporate your AI generated code into my software. Really! I want to facilitate making the process as easy as possible. You're already using an AI to do most of the hard lifting, so why make the last step hard? To that end, I skip my usually extensive code review process for your AI generated code submissions. Anything goes as long as it compiles! Please do remember to include "(AI generated)" in the description of your changes (at the top), so I know to skip my usual review process. Also be sure to sign off to the standard Developer Certificate of Origin so I know you attest that you own the code that you generated. When making a git commit, you can do that by using the --signoff option. I do make some small modifications to AI generated submissions. For example, maybe you used AI to write this code:
+ // Fast inverse square root
+ float fast_rsqrt( float number )
+  
+  float x2 = number * 0.5F;
+  float y  = number;
+  long i  = * ( long * ) &y;
+  i  = 0x5f3659df - ( i >> 1 );
+  y  = * ( float * ) &i;
+  return (y * ( 1.5F - ( x2 * y * y ) ));
+  
...
- foo = rsqrt(bar)
+ foo = fast_rsqrt(bar)
Before AI, only a genious like John Carmack could write anything close to this, and now you've generated it with some simple prompts to an AI. So of course I will accept your patch. But as part of my QA process, I might modify it so the new code is not run all the time. Let's only run it on leap days to start with. As we know, leap day is February 30th, so I'll modify your patch like this:
- foo = rsqrt(bar)
+ time_t s = time(NULL);
+ if (localtime(&s)->tm_mday == 30 && localtime(&s)->tm_mon == 2)
+   foo = fast_rsqrt(bar);
+ else
+   foo = rsqrt(bar);
Despite my minor modifications, you did the work (with AI!) and so you deserve the credit, so I'll keep you listed as the author. Congrats, you made the world better! PS: Of course, the other reason I don't review AI generated code is that I simply don't have time and have to prioritize reviewing code written by falliable humans. Unfortunately, this does mean that if you submit AI generated code that is not clearly marked as such, and use my limited reviewing time, I won't have time to review other submissions from you in the future. I will still accept all your botshit submissions though! PPS: Ignore the haters who claim that botshit makes AIs that get trained on it less effective. Studies like this one just aren't believable. I asked Bing to summarize it and it said not to worry about it!

Simon Josefsson: Apt archive mirrors in Git-LFS

My effort to improve transparency and confidence of public apt archives continues. I started to work on this in Apt Archive Transparency in which I mention the debdistget project in passing. Debdistget is responsible for mirroring index files for some public apt archives. I ve realized that having a publicly auditable and preserved mirror of the apt repositories is central to being able to do apt transparency work, so the debdistget project has become more central to my project than I thought. Currently I track Trisquel, PureOS, Gnuinos and their upstreams Ubuntu, Debian and Devuan. Debdistget download Release/Package/Sources files and store them in a git repository published on GitLab. Due to size constraints, it uses two repositories: one for the Release/InRelease files (which are small) and one that also include the Package/Sources files (which are large). See for example the repository for Trisquel release files and the Trisquel package/sources files. Repositories for all distributions can be found in debdistutils archives GitLab sub-group. The reason for splitting into two repositories was that the git repository for the combined files become large, and that some of my use-cases only needed the release files. Currently the repositories with packages (which contain a couple of months worth of data now) are 9GB for Ubuntu, 2.5GB for Trisquel/Debian/PureOS, 970MB for Devuan and 450MB for Gnuinos. The repository size is correlated to the size of the archive (for the initial import) plus the frequency and size of updates. Ubuntu s use of Apt Phased Updates (which triggers a higher churn of Packages file modifications) appears to be the primary reason for its larger size. Working with large Git repositories is inefficient and the GitLab CI/CD jobs generate quite some network traffic downloading the git repository over and over again. The most heavy user is the debdistdiff project that download all distribution package repositories to do diff operations on the package lists between distributions. The daily job takes around 80 minutes to run, with the majority of time is spent on downloading the archives. Yes I know I could look into runner-side caching but I dislike complexity caused by caching. Fortunately not all use-cases requires the package files. The debdistcanary project only needs the Release/InRelease files, in order to commit signatures to the Sigstore and Sigsum transparency logs. These jobs still run fairly quickly, but watching the repository size growth worries me. Currently these repositories are at Debian 440MB, PureOS 130MB, Ubuntu/Devuan 90MB, Trisquel 12MB, Gnuinos 2MB. Here I believe the main size correlation is update frequency, and Debian is large because I track the volatile unstable. So I hit a scalability end with my first approach. A couple of months ago I solved this by discarding and resetting these archival repositories. The GitLab CI/CD jobs were fast again and all was well. However this meant discarding precious historic information. A couple of days ago I was reaching the limits of practicality again, and started to explore ways to fix this. I like having data stored in git (it allows easy integration with software integrity tools such as GnuPG and Sigstore, and the git log provides a kind of temporal ordering of data), so it felt like giving up on nice properties to use a traditional database with on-disk approach. So I started to learn about Git-LFS and understanding that it was able to handle multi-GB worth of data that looked promising. Fairly quickly I scripted up a GitLab CI/CD job that incrementally update the Release/Package/Sources files in a git repository that uses Git-LFS to store all the files. The repository size is now at Ubuntu 650kb, Debian 300kb, Trisquel 50kb, Devuan 250kb, PureOS 172kb and Gnuinos 17kb. As can be expected, jobs are quick to clone the git archives: debdistdiff pipelines went from a run-time of 80 minutes down to 10 minutes which more reasonable correlate with the archive size and CPU run-time. The LFS storage size for those repositories are at Ubuntu 15GB, Debian 8GB, Trisquel 1.7GB, Devuan 1.1GB, PureOS/Gnuinos 420MB. This is for a couple of days worth of data. It seems native Git is better at compressing/deduplicating data than Git-LFS is: the combined size for Ubuntu is already 15GB for a couple of days data compared to 8GB for a couple of months worth of data with pure Git. This may be a sub-optimal implementation of Git-LFS in GitLab but it does worry me that this new approach will be difficult to scale too. At some level the difference is understandable, Git-LFS probably store two different Packages files around 90MB each for Trisquel as two 90MB files, but native Git would store it as one compressed version of the 90MB file and one relatively small patch to turn the old files into the next file. So the Git-LFS approach surprisingly scale less well for overall storage-size. Still, the original repository is much smaller, and you usually don t have to pull all LFS files anyway. So it is net win. Throughout this work, I kept thinking about how my approach relates to Debian s snapshot service. Ultimately what I would want is a combination of these two services. To have a good foundation to do transparency work I would want to have a collection of all Release/Packages/Sources files ever published, and ultimately also the source code and binaries. While it makes sense to start on the latest stable releases of distributions, this effort should scale backwards in time as well. For reproducing binaries from source code, I need to be able to securely find earlier versions of binary packages used for rebuilds. So I need to import all the Release/Packages/Sources packages from snapshot into my repositories. The latency to retrieve files from that server is slow so I haven t been able to find an efficient/parallelized way to download the files. If I m able to finish this, I would have confidence that my new Git-LFS based approach to store these files will scale over many years to come. This remains to be seen. Perhaps the repository has to be split up per release or per architecture or similar. Another factor is storage costs. While the git repository size for a Git-LFS based repository with files from several years may be possible to sustain, the Git-LFS storage size surely won t be. It seems GitLab charges the same for files in repositories and in Git-LFS, and it is around $500 per 100GB per year. It may be possible to setup a separate Git-LFS backend not hosted at GitLab to serve the LFS files. Does anyone know of a suitable server implementation for this? I had a quick look at the Git-LFS implementation list and it seems the closest reasonable approach would be to setup the Gitea-clone Forgejo as a self-hosted server. Perhaps a cloud storage approach a la S3 is the way to go? The cost to host this on GitLab will be manageable for up to ~1TB ($5000/year) but scaling it to storing say 500TB of data would mean an yearly fee of $2.5M which seems like poor value for the money. I realized that ultimately I would want a git repository locally with the entire content of all apt archives, including their binary and source packages, ever published. The storage requirements for a service like snapshot (~300TB of data?) is today not prohibitly expensive: 20TB disks are $500 a piece, so a storage enclosure with 36 disks would be around $18.000 for 720TB and using RAID1 means 360TB which is a good start. While I have heard about ~TB-sized Git-LFS repositories, would Git-LFS scale to 1PB? Perhaps the size of a git repository with multi-millions number of Git-LFS pointer files will become unmanageable? To get started on this approach, I decided to import a mirror of Debian s bookworm for amd64 into a Git-LFS repository. That is around 175GB so reasonable cheap to host even on GitLab ($1000/year for 200GB). Having this repository publicly available will make it possible to write software that uses this approach (e.g., porting debdistreproduce), to find out if this is useful and if it could scale. Distributing the apt repository via Git-LFS would also enable other interesting ideas to protecting the data. Consider configuring apt to use a local file:// URL to this git repository, and verifying the git checkout using some method similar to Guix s approach to trusting git content or Sigstore s gitsign. A naive push of the 175GB archive in a single git commit ran into pack size limitations: remote: fatal: pack exceeds maximum allowed size (4.88 GiB) however breaking up the commit into smaller commits for parts of the archive made it possible to push the entire archive. Here are the commands to create this repository: git init
git lfs install
git lfs track 'dists/**' 'pool/**'
git add .gitattributes
git commit -m"Add Git-LFS track attributes." .gitattributes
time debmirror --method=rsync --host ftp.se.debian.org --root :debian --arch=amd64 --source --dist=bookworm,bookworm-updates --section=main --verbose --diff=none --keyring /usr/share/keyrings/debian-archive-keyring.gpg --ignore .git .
git add dists project
git commit -m"Add." -a
git remote add origin git@gitlab.com:debdistutils/archives/debian/mirror.git
git push --set-upstream origin --all
for d in pool//; do
echo $d;
time git add $d;
git commit -m"Add $d." -a
git push
done
The resulting repository size is around 27MB with Git LFS object storage around 174GB. I think this approach would scale to handle all architectures for one release, but working with a single git repository for all releases for all architectures may lead to a too large git repository (>1GB). So maybe one repository per release? These repositories could also be split up on a subset of pool/ files, or there could be one repository per release per architecture or sources. Finally, I have concerns about using SHA1 for identifying objects. It seems both Git and Debian s snapshot service is currently using SHA1. For Git there is SHA-256 transition and it seems GitLab is working on support for SHA256-based repositories. For serious long-term deployment of these concepts, it would be nice to go for SHA256 identifiers directly. Git-LFS already uses SHA256 but Git internally uses SHA1 as does the Debian snapshot service. What do you think? Happy Hacking!

Gunnar Wolf: After miniDebConf Santa Fe

Last week we held our promised miniDebConf in Santa Fe City, Santa Fe province, Argentina just across the river from Paran , where I have spent almost six beautiful months I will never forget. Around 500 Kilometers North from Buenos Aires, Santa Fe and Paran are separated by the beautiful and majestic Paran river, which flows from Brazil, marks the Eastern border of Paraguay, and continues within Argentina as the heart of the litoral region of the country, until it merges with the Uruguay river (you guessed right the river marking the Eastern border of Argentina, first with Brazil and then with Uruguay), and they become the R o de la Plata. This was a short miniDebConf: we were lent the APUL union s building for the weekend (thank you very much!); during Saturday, we had a cycle of talks, and on sunday we had more of a hacklab logic, having some unstructured time to work each on their own projects, and to talk and have a good time together. We were five Debian people attending: santiago debacle eamanu dererk gwolf @debian.org. My main contact to kickstart organization was Mart n Bayo. Mart n was for many years the leader of the Technical Degree on Free Software at Universidad Nacional del Litoral, where I was also a teacher for several years. Together with Leo Mart nez, also a teacher at the tecnicatura, they contacted us with Guillermo and Gabriela, from the APUL non-teaching-staff union of said university. We had the following set of talks (for which there is a promise to get electronic record, as APUL was kind enough to record them! of course, I will push them to our usual conference video archiving service as soon as I get them)
Hour Title (Spanish) Title (English) Presented by
10:00-10:25 Introducci n al Software Libre Introduction to Free Software Mart n Bayo
10:30-10:55 Debian y su comunidad Debian and its community Emanuel Arias
11:00-11:25 Por qu sigo contribuyendo a Debian despu s de 20 a os? Why am I still contributing to Debian after 20 years? Santiago Ruano
11:30-11:55 Mi identidad y el proyecto Debian: Qu es el llavero OpenPGP y por qu ? My identity and the Debian project: What is the OpenPGP keyring and why? Gunnar Wolf
12:00-13:00 Explorando las masculinidades en el contexto del Software Libre Exploring masculinities in the context of Free Software Gora Ortiz Fuentes - Jos Francisco Ferro
13:00-14:30 Lunch
14:30-14:55 Debian para el d a a d a Debian for our every day Leonardo Mart nez
15:00-15:25 Debian en las Raspberry Pi Debian in the Raspberry Pi Gunnar Wolf
15:30-15:55 Device Trees Device Trees Lisandro Dami n Nicanor Perez Meyer (videoconferencia)
16:00-16:25 Python en Debian Python in Debian Emmanuel Arias
16:30-16:55 Debian y XMPP en la medici n de viento para la energ a e lica Debian and XMPP for wind measuring for eolic energy Martin Borgert
As it always happens DebConf, miniDebConf and other Debian-related activities are always fun, always productive, always a great opportunity to meet again our decades-long friends. Lets see what comes next!

14 March 2024

Dirk Eddelbuettel: ciw 0.0.1 on CRAN: New Package!

Happy to share that ciw is now on CRAN! I had tooted a little bit about it, e.g., here. What it provides is a single (efficient) function incoming() which summarises the state of the incoming directories at CRAN. I happen to like having these things at my (shell) fingertips, so it goes along with (still draft) wrapper ciw.r that will be part of the next littler release. For example, when I do this right now as I type this, I see
edd@rob:~$ ciw.r
    Folder                   Name                Time   Size          Age
    <char>                 <char>              <POSc> <char>   <difftime>
1: waiting   maximin_1.0-5.tar.gz 2024-03-13 22:22:00    20K   2.48 hours
2: inspect    GofCens_0.97.tar.gz 2024-03-13 21:12:00    29K   3.65 hours
3: inspect verbalisr_0.5.2.tar.gz 2024-03-13 20:09:00    79K   4.70 hours
4: waiting    rnames_1.0.1.tar.gz 2024-03-12 15:04:00   2.7K  33.78 hours
5: waiting  PCMBase_1.2.14.tar.gz 2024-03-10 12:32:00   406K  84.32 hours
6: pending        MPCR_1.1.tar.gz 2024-02-22 11:07:00   903K 493.73 hours
edd@rob:~$ 
which is rather compact as CRAN kept busy! This call runs in about (or just over) one second, which includes launching r. Good enough for me. From a well-connected EC2 instance it is about 800ms on the command-line. When I do I from here inside an R session it is maybe 700ms. And doing it over in Europe is faster still. (I am using ping=FALSE for these to omit the default sanity check of can I haz networking? to speed things up. The check adds another 200ms or so.) The function (and the wrapper) offer a ton of options too this is ridiculously easy to do thanks to the docopt package:
edd@rob:~$ ciw.r -x
Usage: ciw.r [-h] [-x] [-a] [-m] [-i] [-t] [-p] [-w] [-r] [-s] [-n] [-u] [-l rows] [-z] [ARG...]

-m --mega           use 'mega' mode of all folders (see --usage)
-i --inspect        visit 'inspect' folder
-t --pretest        visit 'pretest' folder
-p --pending        visit 'pending' folder
-w --waiting        visit 'waiting' folder
-r --recheck        visit 'waiting' folder
-a --archive        visit 'archive' folder
-n --newbies        visit 'newbies' folder
-u --publish        visit 'publish' folder
-s --skipsort       skip sorting of aggregate results by age
-l --lines rows     print top 'rows' of the result object [default: 50]
-z --ping           run the connectivity check first
-h --help           show this help text
-x --usage          show help and short example usage 

where ARG... can be one or more file name, or directories or package names.

Examples:
  ciw.r -ip                            # run in 'inspect' and 'pending' mode
  ciw.r -a                             # run with mode 'auto' resolved in incoming()
  ciw.r                                # run with defaults, same as '-itpwr'

When no argument is given, 'auto' is selected which corresponds to 'inspect', 'waiting',
'pending', 'pretest', and 'recheck'. Selecting '-m' or '--mega' are select as default.

Folder selecting arguments are cumulative; but 'mega' is a single selections of all folders
(i.e. 'inspect', 'waiting', 'pending', 'pretest', 'recheck', 'archive', 'newbies', 'publish').

ciw.r is part of littler which brings 'r' to the command-line.
See https://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/littler.html for more information.
edd@rob:~$ 
The README at the git repo and the CRAN page offer a screenshot movie showing some of the options in action. I have been using the little tools quite a bit over the last two or three weeks since I first put it together and find it quite handy. With that again a big Thank You! of appcreciation for all that CRAN does which this week included letting this past the newbies desk in under 24 hours. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

13 March 2024

Russell Coker: The Shape of Computers

Introduction There have been many experiments with the sizes of computers, some of which have stayed around and some have gone away. The trend has been to make computers smaller, the early computers had buildings for them. Recently for come classes computers have started becoming as small as could be reasonably desired. For example phones are thin enough that they can blow away in a strong breeze, smart watches are much the same size as the old fashioned watches they replace, and NUC type computers are as small as they need to be given the size of monitors etc that they connect to. This means that further development in the size and shape of computers will largely be determined by human factors. I think we need to consider how computers might be developed to better suit humans and how to write free software to make such computers usable without being constrained by corporate interests. Those of us who are involved in developing OSs and applications need to consider how to adjust to the changes and ideally anticipate changes. While we can t anticipate the details of future devices we can easily predict general trends such as being smaller, higher resolution, etc. Desktop/Laptop PCs When home computers first came out it was standard to have the keyboard in the main box, the Apple ][ being the most well known example. This has lost popularity due to the demand to have multiple options for a light keyboard that can be moved for convenience combined with multiple options for the box part. But it still pops up occasionally such as the Raspberry Pi 400 [1] which succeeds due to having the computer part being small and light. I think this type of computer will remain a niche product. It could be used in a add a screen to make a laptop as opposed to the add a keyboard to a tablet to make a laptop model but a tablet without a keyboard is more useful than a non-server PC without a display. The PC as box with connections for keyboard, display, etc has a long future ahead of it. But the sizes will probably decrease (they should have stopped making PC cases to fit CD/DVD drives at least 10 years ago). The NUC size is a useful option and I think that DVD drives will stop being used for software soon which will allow a range of smaller form factors. The regular laptop is something that will remain useful, but the tablet with detachable keyboard devices could take a lot of that market. Full functionality for all tasks requires a keyboard because at the moment text editing with a touch screen is an unsolved problem in computer science [2]. The Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Fold [3] and related Lenovo products are very interesting. Advances in materials allow laptops to be thinner and lighter which leaves the screen size as a major limitation to portability. There is a conflict between desiring a large screen to see lots of content and wanting a small size to carry and making a device foldable is an obvious solution that has recently become possible. Making a foldable laptop drives a desire for not having a permanently attached keyboard which then makes a touch screen keyboard a requirement. So this means that user interfaces for PCs have to be adapted to work well on touch screens. The Think line seems to be continuing the history of innovation that it had when owned by IBM. There are also a range of other laptops that have two regular screens so they are essentially the same as the Thinkpad X1 Fold but with two separate screens instead of one folding one, prices are as low as $600US. I think that the typical interfaces for desktop PCs (EG MS-Windows and KDE) don t work well for small devices and touch devices and the Android interface generally isn t a good match for desktop systems. We need to invent more options for this. This is not a criticism of KDE, I use it every day and it works well. But it s designed for use cases that don t match new hardware that is on sale. As an aside it would be nice if Lenovo gave samples of their newest gear to people who make significant contributions to GUIs. Give a few Thinkpad Fold devices to KDE people, a few to GNOME people, and a few others to people involved in Wayland development and see how that promotes software development and future sales. We also need to adopt features from laptops and phones into desktop PCs. When voice recognition software was first released in the 90s it was for desktop PCs, it didn t take off largely because it wasn t very accurate (none of them recognised my voice). Now voice recognition in phones is very accurate and it s very common for desktop PCs to have a webcam or headset with a microphone so it s time for this to be re-visited. GPS support in laptops is obviously useful and can work via Wifi location, via a USB GPS device, or via wwan mobile phone hardware (even if not used for wwan networking). Another possibility is using the same software interfaces as used for GPS on laptops for a static definition of location for a desktop PC or server. The Interesting New Things Watch Like The wrist-watch [4] has been a standard format for easy access to data when on the go since it s military use at the end of the 19th century when the practical benefits beat the supposed femininity of the watch. So it seems most likely that they will continue to be in widespread use in computerised form for the forseeable future. For comparison smart phones have been in widespread use as pocket watches for about 10 years. The question is how will watch computers end up? Will we have Dick Tracy style watch phones that you speak into? Will it be the current smart watch functionality of using the watch to answer a call which goes to a bluetooth headset? Will smart watches end up taking over the functionality of the calculator watch [5] which was popular in the 80 s? With today s technology you could easily have a fully capable PC strapped to your forearm, would that be useful? Phone Like Folding phones (originally popularised as Star Trek Tricorders) seem likely to have a long future ahead of them. Engineering technology has only recently developed to the stage of allowing them to work the way people would hope them to work (a folding screen with no gaps). Phones and tablets with multiple folds are coming out now [6]. This will allow phones to take much of the market share that tablets used to have while tablets and laptops merge at the high end. I ve previously written about Convergence between phones and desktop computers [7], the increased capabilities of phones adds to the case for Convergence. Folding phones also provide new possibilities for the OS. The Oppo OnePlus Open and the Google Pixel Fold both have a UI based around using the two halves of the folding screen for separate data at some times. I think that the current user interfaces for desktop PCs don t properly take advantage of multiple monitors and the possibilities raised by folding phones only adds to the lack. My pet peeve with multiple monitor setups is when they don t make it obvious which monitor has keyboard focus so you send a CTRL-W or ALT-F4 to the wrong screen by mistake, it s a problem that also happens on a single screen but is worse with multiple screens. There are rumours of phones described as three fold (where three means the number of segments with two folds between them), it will be interesting to see how that goes. Will phones go the same way as PCs in terms of having a separation between the compute bit and the input device? It s quite possible to have a compute device in the phone form factor inside a secure pocket which talks via Bluetooth to another device with a display and speakers. Then you could change your phone between a phone-size display and a tablet sized display easily and when using your phone a thief would not be able to easily steal the compute bit (which has passwords etc). Could the watch part of the phone (strapped to your wrist and difficult to steal) be the active part and have a tablet size device as an external display? There are already announcements of smart watches with up to 1GB of RAM (same as the Samsung Galaxy S3), that s enough for a lot of phone functionality. The Rabbit R1 [8] and the Humane AI Pin [9] have some interesting possibilities for AI speech interfaces. Could that take over some of the current phone use? It seems that visually impaired people have been doing badly in the trend towards touch screen phones so an option of a voice interface phone would be a good option for them. As an aside I hope some people are working on AI stuff for FOSS devices. Laptop Like One interesting PC variant I just discovered is the Higole 2 Pro portable battery operated Windows PC with 5.5 touch screen [10]. It looks too thick to fit in the same pockets as current phones but is still very portable. The version with built in battery is $AU423 which is in the usual price range for low end laptops and tablets. I don t think this is the future of computing, but it is something that is usable today while we wait for foldable devices to take over. The recent release of the Apple Vision Pro [11] has driven interest in 3D and head mounted computers. I think this could be a useful peripheral for a laptop or phone but it won t be part of a primary computing environment. In 2011 I wrote about the possibility of using augmented reality technology for providing a desktop computing environment [12]. I wonder how a Vision Pro would work for that on a train or passenger jet. Another interesting thing that s on offer is a laptop with 7 touch screen beside the keyboard [13]. It seems that someone just looked at what parts are available cheaply in China (due to being parts of more popular devices) and what could fit together. I think a keyboard should be central to the monitor for serious typing, but there may be useful corner cases where typing isn t that common and a touch-screen display is of use. Developing a range of strange hardware and then seeing which ones get adopted is a good thing and an advantage of Ali Express and Temu. Useful Hardware for Developing These Things I recently bought a second hand Thinkpad X1 Yoga Gen3 for $359 which has stylus support [14], and it s generally a great little laptop in every other way. There s a common failure case of that model where touch support for fingers breaks but the stylus still works which allows it to be used for testing touch screen functionality while making it cheap. The PineTime is a nice smart watch from Pine64 which is designed to be open [15]. I am quite happy with it but haven t done much with it yet (apart from wearing it every day and getting alerts etc from Android). At $50 when delivered to Australia it s significantly more expensive than most smart watches with similar features but still a lot cheaper than the high end ones. Also the Raspberry Pi Watch [16] is interesting too. The PinePhonePro is an OK phone made to open standards but it s hardware isn t as good as Android phones released in the same year [17]. I ve got some useful stuff done on mine, but the battery life is a major issue and the screen resolution is low. The Librem 5 phone from Purism has a better hardware design for security with switches to disable functionality [18], but it s even slower than the PinePhonePro. These are good devices for test and development but not ones that many people would be excited to use every day. Wwan hardware (for accessing the phone network) in M.2 form factor can be obtained for free if you have access to old/broken laptops. Such devices start at about $35 if you want to buy one. USB GPS devices also start at about $35 so probably not worth getting if you can get a wwan device that does GPS as well. What We Must Do Debian appears to have some voice input software in the pocketsphinx package but no documentation on how it s to be used. This would be a good thing to document, I spent 15 mins looking at it and couldn t get it going. To take advantage of the hardware features in phones we need software support and we ideally don t want free software to lag too far behind proprietary software which IMHO means the typical Android setup for phones/tablets. Support for changing screen resolution is already there as is support for touch screens. Support for adapting the GUI to changed screen size is something that needs to be done even today s hardware of connecting a small laptop to an external monitor doesn t have the ideal functionality for changing the UI. There also seem to be some limitations in touch screen support with multiple screens, I haven t investigated this properly yet, it definitely doesn t work in an expected manner in Ubuntu 22.04 and I haven t yet tested the combinations on Debian/Unstable. ML is becoming a big thing and it has some interesting use cases for small devices where a smart device can compensate for limited input options. There s a lot of work that needs to be done in this area and we are limited by the fact that we can t just rip off the work of other people for use as training data in the way that corporations do. Security is more important for devices that are at high risk of theft. The vast majority of free software installations are way behind Android in terms of security and we need to address that. I have some ideas for improvement but there is always a conflict between security and usability and while Android is usable for it s own special apps it s not usable in a I want to run applications that use any files from any other applicationsin any way I want sense. My post about Sandboxing Phone apps is relevant for people who are interested in this [19]. We also need to extend security models to cope with things like ok google type functionality which has the potential to be a bug and the emerging class of LLM based attacks. I will write more posts about these thing. Please write comments mentioning FOSS hardware and software projects that address these issues and also documentation for such things.

11 March 2024

Joachim Breitner: Convenient sandboxed development environment

I like using one machine and setup for everything, from serious development work to hobby projects to managing my finances. This is very convenient, as often the lines between these are blurred. But it is also scary if I think of the large number of people who I have to trust to not want to extract all my personal data. Whenever I run a cabal install, or a fun VSCode extension gets updated, or anything like that, I am running code that could be malicious or buggy. In a way it is surprising and reassuring that, as far as I can tell, this commonly does not happen. Most open source developers out there seem to be nice and well-meaning, after all.

Convenient or it won t happen Nevertheless I thought I should do something about this. The safest option would probably to use dedicated virtual machines for the development work, with very little interaction with my main system. But knowing me, that did not seem likely to happen, as it sounded like a fair amount of hassle. So I aimed for a viable compromise between security and convenient, and one that does not get too much in the way of my current habits. For instance, it seems desirable to have the project files accessible from my unconstrained environment. This way, I could perform certain actions that need access to secret keys or tokens, but are (unlikely) to run code (e.g. git push, git pull from private repositories, gh pr create) from the outside , and the actual build environment can do without access to these secrets. The user experience I thus want is a quick way to enter a development environment where I can do most of the things I need to do while programming (network access, running command line and GUI programs), with access to the current project, but without access to my actual /home directory. I initially followed the blog post Application Isolation using NixOS Containers by Marcin Sucharski and got something working that mostly did what I wanted, but then a colleague pointed out that tools like firejail can achieve roughly the same with a less global setup. I tried to use firejail, but found it to be a bit too inflexible for my particular whims, so I ended up writing a small wrapper around the lower level sandboxing tool https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap.

Selective bubblewrapping This script, called dev and included below, builds a new filesystem namespace with minimal /proc and /dev directories, it s own /tmp directories. It then binds-mound some directories to make the host s NixOS system available inside the container (/bin, /usr, the nix store including domain socket, stuff for OpenGL applications). My user s home directory is taken from ~/.dev-home and some configuration files are bind-mounted for convenient sharing. I intentionally don t share most of the configuration for example, a direnv enable in the dev environment should not affect the main environment. The X11 socket for graphical applications and the corresponding .Xauthority file is made available. And finally, if I run dev in a project directory, this project directory is bind mounted writable, and the current working directory is preserved. The effect is that I can type dev on the command line to enter dev mode rather conveniently. I can run development tools, including graphical ones like VSCode, and especially the latter with its extensions is part of the sandbox. To do a git push I either exit the development environment (Ctrl-D) or open a separate terminal. Overall, the inconvenience of switching back and forth seems worth the extra protection. Clearly, isn t going to hold against a determined and maybe targeted attacker (e.g. access to the X11 and the nix daemon socket can probably be used to escape easily). But I hope it will help against a compromised dev dependency that just deletes or exfiltrates data, like keys or passwords, from the usual places in $HOME.

Rough corners There is more polishing that could be done.
  • In particular, clicking on a link inside VSCode in the container will currently open Firefox inside the container, without access to my settings and cookies etc. Ideally, links would be opened in the Firefox running outside. This is a problem that has a solution in the world of applications that are sandboxed with Flatpak, and involves a bunch of moving parts (a xdg-desktop-portal user service, a filtering dbus proxy, exposing access to that proxy in the container). I experimented with that for a bit longer than I should have, but could not get it to work to satisfaction (even without a container involved, I could not get xdg-desktop-portal to heed my default browser settings ). For now I will live with manually copying and pasting URLs, we ll see how long this lasts.
  • With this setup (and unlike the NixOS container setup I tried first), the same applications are installed inside and outside. It might be useful to separate the set of installed programs: There is simply no point in running evolution or firefox inside the container, and if I do not even have VSCode or cabal available outside, so that it s less likely that I forget to enter dev before using these tools. It shouldn t be too hard to cargo-cult some of the NixOS Containers infrastructure to be able to have a separate system configuration that I can manage as part of my normal system configuration and make available to bubblewrap here.
So likely I will refine this some more over time. Or get tired of typing dev and going back to what I did before

The script
The dev script (at the time of writing)

10 March 2024

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in February 2024

FTP master This month I accepted 242 and rejected 42 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 251.

This was just a short month and the weather outside was not really motivating. I hope it will be better in March. Debian LTS This was my hundred-sixteenth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. During my allocated time I uploaded: I also started to work on qtbase-opensource-src (an update is needed for ELTS, so an LTS update seems to be appropriate as well, especially as there are postponed CVE). Debian ELTS This month was the sixty-seventth ELTS month. During my allocated time I uploaded: The upload of bind9 was a bit exciting, but all occuring issues with the new upload workflow could be quickly fixed by Helmut and the packages finally reached their destination. I wonder why it is always me who stumbles upon special cases? This month I also worked on the Jessie and Stretch updates for exim4. I also started to work on an update for qtbase-opensource-src in Stretch (and LTS and other releases as well). Debian Printing This month I uploaded new upstream versions of: This work is generously funded by Freexian! Debian Matomo I started a new team debian-matomo-maintainers. Within this team all matomo related packages should be handled. PHP PEAR or PECL packages shall be still maintained in their corresponding teams. This month I uploaded: This work is generously funded by Freexian! Debian Astro This month I uploaded a new upstream version of: Debian IoT This month I uploaded new upstream versions of:

9 March 2024

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in February 2024

Welcome to the February 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In our reports, we try to outline what we have been up to over the past month as well as mentioning some of the important things happening in software supply-chain security.

Reproducible Builds at FOSDEM 2024 Core Reproducible Builds developer Holger Levsen presented at the main track at FOSDEM on Saturday 3rd February this year in Brussels, Belgium. However, that wasn t the only talk related to Reproducible Builds. However, please see our comprehensive FOSDEM 2024 news post for the full details and links.

Maintainer Perspectives on Open Source Software Security Bernhard M. Wiedemann spotted that a recent report entitled Maintainer Perspectives on Open Source Software Security written by Stephen Hendrick and Ashwin Ramaswami of the Linux Foundation sports an infographic which mentions that 56% of [polled] projects support reproducible builds .

Mailing list highlights From our mailing list this month:

Distribution work In Debian this month, 5 reviews of Debian packages were added, 22 were updated and 8 were removed this month adding to Debian s knowledge about identified issues. A number of issue types were updated as well. [ ][ ][ ][ ] In addition, Roland Clobus posted his 23rd update of the status of reproducible ISO images on our mailing list. In particular, Roland helpfully summarised that all major desktops build reproducibly with bullseye, bookworm, trixie and sid provided they are built for a second time within the same DAK run (i.e. [within] 6 hours) and that there will likely be further work at a MiniDebCamp in Hamburg. Furthermore, Roland also responded in-depth to a query about a previous report
Fedora developer Zbigniew J drzejewski-Szmek announced a work-in-progress script called fedora-repro-build that attempts to reproduce an existing package within a koji build environment. Although the projects README file lists a number of fields will always or almost always vary and there is a non-zero list of other known issues, this is an excellent first step towards full Fedora reproducibility.
Jelle van der Waa introduced a new linter rule for Arch Linux packages in order to detect cache files leftover by the Sphinx documentation generator which are unreproducible by nature and should not be packaged. At the time of writing, 7 packages in the Arch repository are affected by this.
Elsewhere, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted another monthly update for his work elsewhere in openSUSE.

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made a number of changes such as uploading versions 256, 257 and 258 to Debian and made the following additional changes:
  • Use a deterministic name instead of trusting gpg s use-embedded-filenames. Many thanks to Daniel Kahn Gillmor dkg@debian.org for reporting this issue and providing feedback. [ ][ ]
  • Don t error-out with a traceback if we encounter struct.unpack-related errors when parsing Python .pyc files. (#1064973). [ ]
  • Don t try and compare rdb_expected_diff on non-GNU systems as %p formatting can vary, especially with respect to MacOS. [ ]
  • Fix compatibility with pytest 8.0. [ ]
  • Temporarily fix support for Python 3.11.8. [ ]
  • Use the 7zip package (over p7zip-full) after a Debian package transition. (#1063559). [ ]
  • Bump the minimum Black source code reformatter requirement to 24.1.1+. [ ]
  • Expand an older changelog entry with a CVE reference. [ ]
  • Make test_zip black clean. [ ]
In addition, James Addison contributed a patch to parse the headers from the diff(1) correctly [ ][ ] thanks! And lastly, Vagrant Cascadian pushed updates in GNU Guix for diffoscope to version 255, 256, and 258, and updated trydiffoscope to 67.0.6.

reprotest reprotest is our tool for building the same source code twice in different environments and then checking the binaries produced by each build for any differences. This month, Vagrant Cascadian made a number of changes, including:
  • Create a (working) proof of concept for enabling a specific number of CPUs. [ ][ ]
  • Consistently use 398 days for time variation rather than choosing randomly and update README.rst to match. [ ][ ]
  • Support a new --vary=build_path.path option. [ ][ ][ ][ ]

Website updates There were made a number of improvements to our website this month, including:

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework (available at tests.reproducible-builds.org) in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In February, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Temporarily disable upgrading/bootstrapping Debian unstable and experimental as they are currently broken. [ ][ ]
    • Use the 64-bit amd64 kernel on all i386 nodes; no more 686 PAE kernels. [ ]
    • Add an Erlang package set. [ ]
  • Other changes:
    • Grant Jan-Benedict Glaw shell access to the Jenkins node. [ ]
    • Enable debugging for NetBSD reproducibility testing. [ ]
    • Use /usr/bin/du --apparent-size in the Jenkins shell monitor. [ ]
    • Revert reproducible nodes: mark osuosl2 as down . [ ]
    • Thanks again to Codethink, for they have doubled the RAM on our arm64 nodes. [ ]
    • Only set /proc/$pid/oom_score_adj to -1000 if it has not already been done. [ ]
    • Add the opemwrt-target-tegra and jtx task to the list of zombie jobs. [ ][ ]
Vagrant Cascadian also made the following changes:
  • Overhaul the handling of OpenSSH configuration files after updating from Debian bookworm. [ ][ ][ ]
  • Add two new armhf architecture build nodes, virt32z and virt64z, and insert them into the Munin monitoring. [ ][ ] [ ][ ]
In addition, Alexander Couzens updated the OpenWrt configuration in order to replace the tegra target with mpc85xx [ ], Jan-Benedict Glaw updated the NetBSD build script to use a separate $TMPDIR to mitigate out of space issues on a tmpfs-backed /tmp [ ] and Zheng Junjie added a link to the GNU Guix tests [ ]. Lastly, node maintenance was performed by Holger Levsen [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ] and Vagrant Cascadian [ ][ ][ ][ ].

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:

If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

Valhalla's Things: Elastic Neck Top Two: MOAR Ruffles

Posted on March 9, 2024
Tags: madeof:atoms, craft:sewing, FreeSoftWear
A woman wearing a white top with a wide neck with ruffles and puffy sleeves that are gathered at the cuff. The top is tucked in the trousers to gather the fullness at the waist. After making my Elastic Neck Top I knew I wanted to make another one less constrained by the amount of available fabric. I had a big cut of white cotton voile, I bought some more swimsuit elastic, and I also had a spool of n 100 sewing cotton, but then I postponed the project for a while I was working on other things. Then FOSDEM 2024 arrived, I was going to remote it, and I was working on my Augusta Stays, but I knew that in the middle of FOSDEM I risked getting to the stage where I needed to leave the computer to try the stays on: not something really compatible with the frenetic pace of a FOSDEM weekend, even one spent at home. I needed a backup project1, and this was perfect: I already had everything I needed, the pattern and instructions were already on my site (so I didn t need to take pictures while working), and it was mostly a lot of straight seams, perfect while watching conference videos. So, on the Friday before FOSDEM I cut all of the pieces, then spent three quarters of FOSDEM on the stays, and when I reached the point where I needed to stop for a fit test I started on the top. Like the first one, everything was sewn by hand, and one week after I had started everything was assembled, except for the casings for the elastic at the neck and cuffs, which required about 10 km of sewing, and even if it was just a running stitch it made me want to reconsider my lifestyle choices a few times: there was really no reason for me not to do just those seams by machine in a few minutes. Instead I kept sewing by hand whenever I had time for it, and on the next weekend it was ready. We had a rare day of sun during the weekend, so I wore my thermal underwear, some other layer, a scarf around my neck, and went outside with my SO to have a batch of pictures taken (those in the jeans posts, and others for a post I haven t written yet. Have I mentioned I have a backlog?). And then the top went into the wardrobe, and it will come out again when the weather will be a bit warmer. Or maybe it will be used under the Augusta Stays, since I don t have a 1700 chemise yet, but that requires actually finishing them. The pattern for this project was already online, of course, but I ve added a picture of the casing to the relevant section, and everything is as usual #FreeSoftWear.

  1. yes, I could have worked on some knitting WIP, but lately I m more in a sewing mood.

8 March 2024

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: Acts of active procrastination: example of a silly Python script for Moodle

My brain is currently suffering from an overload caused by grading student assignments. In search of a somewhat productive way to procrastinate, I thought I would share a small script I wrote sometime in 2023 to facilitate my grading work. I use Moodle for all the classes I teach and students use it to hand me out their papers. When I'm ready to grade them, I download the ZIP archive Moodle provides containing all their PDF files and comment them using xournalpp and my Wacom tablet. Once this is done, I have a directory structure that looks like this:
Assignment FooBar/
  Student A_21100_assignsubmission_file
    graded paper.pdf
    Student A's perfectly named assignment.pdf
    Student A's perfectly named assignment.xopp
  Student B_21094_assignsubmission_file
    graded paper.pdf
    Student B's perfectly named assignment.pdf
    Student B's perfectly named assignment.xopp
  Student C_21093_assignsubmission_file
    graded paper.pdf
    Student C's perfectly named assignment.pdf
    Student C's perfectly named assignment.xopp
 
Before I can upload files back to Moodle, this directory needs to be copied (I have to keep the original files), cleaned of everything but the graded paper.pdf files and compressed in a ZIP. You can see how this can quickly get tedious to do by hand. Not being a complete tool, I often resorted to crafting a few spurious shell one-liners each time I had to do this1. Eventually I got tired of ctrl-R-ing my shell history and wrote something reusable. Behold this script! When I began writing this post, I was certain I had cheaped out on my 2021 New Year's resolution and written it in Shell, but glory!, it seems I used a proper scripting language instead.
#!/usr/bin/python3
# Copyright (C) 2023, Louis-Philippe V ronneau <pollo@debian.org>
#
# This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
# (at your option) any later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
# GNU General Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
# along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
"""
This script aims to take a directory containing PDF files exported via the
Moodle mass download function, remove everything but the final files to submit
back to the students and zip it back.
usage: ./moodle-zip.py <target_dir>
"""
import os
import shutil
import sys
import tempfile
from fnmatch import fnmatch
def sanity(directory):
    """Run sanity checks before doing anything else"""
    base_directory = os.path.basename(os.path.normpath(directory))
    if not os.path.isdir(directory):
        sys.exit(f"Target directory  directory  is not a valid directory")
    if os.path.exists(f"/tmp/ base_directory .zip"):
        sys.exit(f"Final ZIP file path '/tmp/ base_directory .zip' already exists")
    for root, dirnames, _ in os.walk(directory):
        for dirname in dirnames:
            corrige_present = False
            for file in os.listdir(os.path.join(root, dirname)):
                if fnmatch(file, 'graded paper.pdf'):
                    corrige_present = True
            if corrige_present is False:
                sys.exit(f"Directory  dirname  does not contain a 'graded paper.pdf' file")
def clean(directory):
    """Remove superfluous files, to keep only the graded PDF"""
    with tempfile.TemporaryDirectory() as tmp_dir:
        shutil.copytree(directory, tmp_dir, dirs_exist_ok=True)
        for root, _, filenames in os.walk(tmp_dir):
            for file in filenames:
                if not fnmatch(file, 'graded paper.pdf'):
                    os.remove(os.path.join(root, file))
        compress(tmp_dir, directory)
def compress(directory, target_dir):
    """Compress directory into a ZIP file and save it to the target dir"""
    target_dir = os.path.basename(os.path.normpath(target_dir))
    shutil.make_archive(f"/tmp/ target_dir ", 'zip', directory)
    print(f"Final ZIP file has been saved to '/tmp/ target_dir .zip'")
def main():
    """Main function"""
    target_dir = sys.argv[1]
    sanity(target_dir)
    clean(target_dir)
if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()
If for some reason you happen to have a similar workflow as I and end up using this script, hit me up? Now, back to grading...

  1. If I recall correctly, the lazy way I used to do it involved copying the directory, renaming the extension of the graded paper.pdf files, deleting all .pdf and .xopp files using find and changing graded paper.foobar back to a PDF. Some clever regex or learning awk from the ground up could've probably done the job as well, but you know, that would have required using my brain and spending spoons...

Valhalla's Things: Denim Waistcoat

Posted on March 8, 2024
Tags: madeof:atoms, craft:sewing, FreeSoftWear
A woman wearing a single breasted waistcoat with double darts at the waist, two pocket flaps at the waist and one on the left upper breast. It has four jeans buttons. I had finished sewing my jeans, I had a scant 50 cm of elastic denim left. Unrelated to that, I had just finished drafting a vest with Valentina, after the Cutters Practical Guide to the Cutting of Ladies Garments. A new pattern requires a (wearable) mockup. 50 cm of leftover fabric require a quick project. The decision didn t take a lot of time. As a mockup, I kept things easy: single layer with no lining, some edges finished with a topstitched hem and some with bias tape, and plain tape on the fronts, to give more support to the buttons and buttonholes. I did add pockets: not real welt ones (too much effort on denim), but simple slits covered by flaps. a rectangle of pocketing fabric on the wrong side of a denim
piece; there is a slit in the middle that has been finished with topstitching.
To do them I marked the slits, then I cut two rectangles of pocketing fabric that should have been as wide as the slit + 1.5 cm (width of the pocket) + 3 cm (allowances) and twice the sum of as tall as I wanted the pocket to be plus 1 cm (space above the slit) + 1.5 cm (allowances). Then I put the rectangle on the right side of the denim, aligned so that the top edge was 2.5 cm above the slit, sewed 2 mm from the slit, cut, turned the pocketing to the wrong side, pressed and topstitched 2 mm from the fold to finish the slit. a piece of pocketing fabric folded in half and sewn on all 3
other sides; it does not lay flat on the right side of the fabric because the finished slit (hidden in the picture) is pulling it.
Then I turned the pocketing back to the right side, folded it in half, sewed the side and top seams with a small allowance, pressed and turned it again to the wrong side, where I sewed the seams again to make a french seam. And finally, a simple rectangular denim flap was topstitched to the front, covering the slits. I wasn t as precise as I should have been and the pockets aren t exactly the right size, but they will do to see if I got the positions right (I think that the breast one should be a cm or so lower, the waist ones are fine), and of course they are tiny, but that s to be expected from a waistcoat. The back of the waistcoat, The other thing that wasn t exactly as expected is the back: the pattern splits the bottom part of the back to give it sufficient spring over the hips . The book is probably published in 1892, but I had already found when drafting the foundation skirt that its idea of hips includes a bit of structure. The enough steel to carry a book or a cup of tea kind of structure. I should have expected a lot of spring, and indeed that s what I got. To fit the bottom part of the back on the limited amount of fabric I had to piece it, and I suspect that the flat felled seam in the center is helping it sticking out; I don t think it s exactly bad, but it is a peculiar look. Also, I had to cut the back on the fold, rather than having a seam in the middle and the grain on a different angle. Anyway, my next waistcoat project is going to have a linen-cotton lining and silk fashion fabric, and I d say that the pattern is good enough that I can do a few small fixes and cut it directly in the lining, using it as a second mockup. As for the wrinkles, there is quite a bit, but it looks something that will be solved by a bit of lightweight boning in the side seams and in the front; it will be seen in the second mockup and the finished waistcoat. As for this one, it s definitely going to get some wear as is, in casual contexts. Except. Well, it s a denim waistcoat, right? With a very different cut from the get a denim jacket and rip out the sleeves , but still a denim waistcoat, right? The kind that you cover in patches, right? Outline of a sewing machine with teeth and crossed bones below it, and the text  home sewing is killing fashion / and it's illegal And I may have screenprinted a home sewing is killing fashion patch some time ago, using the SVG from wikimedia commons / the Home Taping is Killing Music page. And. Maybe I ll wait until I have finished the real waistcoat. But I suspect that one, and other sewing / costuming patches may happen in the future. No regrets, as the words on my seam ripper pin say, right? :D

7 March 2024

Petter Reinholdtsen: Plain text accounting file from your bitcoin transactions

A while back I wrote a small script to extract the Bitcoin transactions in a wallet in the ledger plain text accounting format. The last few days I spent some time to get it working better with more special cases. In case it can be useful for others, here is a copy:
#!/usr/bin/python3
#  -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
#  Copyright (c) 2023-2024 Petter Reinholdtsen
from decimal import Decimal
import json
import subprocess
import time
import numpy
def format_float(num):
    return numpy.format_float_positional(num, trim='-')
accounts =  
    u'amount' : 'Assets:BTC:main',
 
addresses =  
    '' : 'Assets:bankkonto',
    '' : 'Assets:bankkonto',
 
def exec_json(cmd):
    proc = subprocess.Popen(cmd,stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
    j = json.loads(proc.communicate()[0], parse_float=Decimal)
    return j
def list_txs():
    # get all transactions for all accounts / addresses
    c = 0
    txs = []
    txidfee =  
    limit=100000
    cmd = ['bitcoin-cli', 'listtransactions', '*', str(limit)]
    if True:
        txs.extend(exec_json(cmd))
    else:
        # Useful for debugging
        with open('transactions.json') as f:
            txs.extend(json.load(f, parse_float=Decimal))
    #print txs
    for tx in sorted(txs, key=lambda a: a['time']):
#        print tx['category']
        if 'abandoned' in tx and tx['abandoned']:
            continue
        if 'confirmations' in tx and 0 >= tx['confirmations']:
            continue
        when = time.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M', time.localtime(tx['time']))
        if 'message' in tx:
            desc = tx['message']
        elif 'comment' in tx:
            desc = tx['comment']
        elif 'label' in tx:
            desc = tx['label']
        else:
            desc = 'n/a'
        print("%s %s" % (when, desc))
        if 'address' in tx:
            print("  ; to bitcoin address %s" % tx['address'])
        else:
            print("  ; missing address in transaction, txid=%s" % tx['txid'])
        print(f"  ; amount= tx['amount'] ")
        if 'fee'in tx:
            print(f"  ; fee= tx['fee'] ")
        for f in accounts.keys():
            if f in tx and Decimal(0) != tx[f]:
                amount = tx[f]
                print("  %-20s   %s BTC" % (accounts[f], format_float(amount)))
        if 'fee' in tx and Decimal(0) != tx['fee']:
            # Make sure to list fee used in several transactions only once.
            if 'fee' in tx and tx['txid'] in txidfee \
               and tx['fee'] == txidfee[tx['txid']]:
                True
            else:
                fee = tx['fee']
                print("  %-20s   %s BTC" % (accounts['amount'], format_float(fee)))
                print("  %-20s   %s BTC" % ('Expences:BTC-fee', format_float(-fee)))
                txidfee[tx['txid']] = tx['fee']
        if 'address' in tx and tx['address'] in addresses:
            print("  %s" % addresses[tx['address']])
        else:
            if 'generate' == tx['category']:
                print("  Income:BTC-mining")
            else:
                if amount < Decimal(0):
                    print(f"  Assets:unknown:sent:update-script-addr- tx['address'] ")
                else:
                    print(f"  Assets:unknown:received:update-script-addr- tx['address'] ")
        print()
        c = c + 1
    print("# Found %d transactions" % c)
    if limit == c:
        print(f"# Warning: Limit  limit  reached, consider increasing limit.")
def main():
    list_txs()
main()
It is more of a proof of concept, and I do not expect it to handle all edge cases, but it worked for me, and perhaps you can find it useful too. To get a more interesting result, it is useful to map accounts sent to or received from to accounting accounts, using the addresses hash. As these will be very context dependent, I leave out my list to allow each user to fill out their own list of accounts. Out of the box, 'ledger reg BTC:main' should be able to show the amount of BTCs present in the wallet at any given time in the past. For other and more valuable analysis, a account plan need to be set up in the addresses hash. Here is an example transaction:
2024-03-07 17:00 Donated to good cause
    Assets:BTC:main                           -0.1 BTC
    Assets:BTC:main                       -0.00001 BTC
    Expences:BTC-fee                       0.00001 BTC
    Expences:donations                         0.1 BTC
It need a running Bitcoin Core daemon running, as it connect to it using bitcoin-cli listtransactions * 100000 to extract the transactions listed in the Wallet. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Gunnar Wolf: Constructed truths truth and knowledge in a post-truth world

This post is a review for Computing Reviews for Constructed truths truth and knowledge in a post-truth world , a book published in Springer Link
Many of us grew up used to having some news sources we could implicitly trust, such as well-positioned newspapers and radio or TV news programs. We knew they would only hire responsible journalists rather than risk diluting public trust and losing their brand s value. However, with the advent of the Internet and social media, we are witnessing what has been termed the post-truth phenomenon. The undeniable freedom that horizontal communication has given us automatically brings with it the emergence of filter bubbles and echo chambers, and truth seems to become a group belief. Contrary to my original expectations, the core topic of the book is not about how current-day media brings about post-truth mindsets. Instead it goes into a much deeper philosophical debate: What is truth? Does truth exist by itself, objectively, or is it a social construct? If activists with different political leanings debate a given subject, is it even possible for them to understand the same points for debate, or do they truly experience parallel realities? The author wrote this book clearly prompted by the unprecedented events that took place in 2020, as the COVID-19 crisis forced humanity into isolation and online communication. Donald Trump is explicitly and repeatedly presented throughout the book as an example of an actor that took advantage of the distortions caused by post-truth. The first chapter frames the narrative from the perspective of information flow over the last several decades, on how the emergence of horizontal, uncensored communication free of editorial oversight started empowering the netizens and created a temporary information flow utopia. But soon afterwards, algorithmic gatekeepers started appearing, creating a set of personalized distortions on reality; users started getting news aligned to what they already showed interest in. This led to an increase in polarization and the growth of narrative-framing-specific communities that served as echo chambers for disjoint views on reality. This led to the growth of conspiracy theories and, necessarily, to the science denial and pseudoscience that reached unimaginable peaks during the COVID-19 crisis. Finally, when readers decide based on completely subjective criteria whether a scientific theory such as global warming is true or propaganda, or question what most traditional news outlets present as facts, we face the phenomenon known as fake news. Fake news leads to post-truth, a state where it is impossible to distinguish between truth and falsehood, and serves only a rhetorical function, making rational discourse impossible. Toward the end of the first chapter, the tone of writing quickly turns away from describing developments in the spread of news and facts over the last decades and quickly goes deep into philosophy, into the very thorny subject pursued by said discipline for millennia: How can truth be defined? Can different perspectives bring about different truth values for any given idea? Does truth depend on the observer, on their knowledge of facts, on their moral compass or in their honest opinions? Zoglauer dives into epistemology, following various thinkers ideas on what can be understood as truth: constructivism (whether knowledge and truth values can be learnt by an individual building from their personal experience), objectivity (whether experiences, and thus truth, are universal, or whether they are naturally individual), and whether we can proclaim something to be true when it corresponds to reality. For the final chapter, he dives into the role information and knowledge play in assigning and understanding truth value, as well as the value of second-hand knowledge: Do we really own knowledge because we can look up facts online (even if we carefully check the sources)? Can I, without any medical training, diagnose a sickness and treatment by honestly and carefully looking up its symptoms in medical databases? Wrapping up, while I very much enjoyed reading this book, I must confess it is completely different from what I expected. This book digs much more into the abstract than into information flow in modern society, or the impact on early 2020s politics as its editorial description suggests. At 160 pages, the book is not a heavy read, and Zoglauer s writing style is easy to follow, even across the potentially very deep topics it presents. Its main readership is not necessarily computing practitioners or academics. However, for people trying to better understand epistemology through its expressions in the modern world, it will be a very worthy read.

Valhalla's Things: Jeans, step two. And three. And four.

Posted on March 7, 2024
Tags: madeof:atoms, FreeSoftWear
A woman wearing a regular pair of slim-cut black denim jeans. I was working on what looked like a good pattern for a pair of jeans-shaped trousers, and I knew I wasn t happy with 200-ish g/m cotton-linen for general use outside of deep summer, but I didn t have a source for proper denim either (I had been low-key looking for it for a long time). Then one day I looked at an article I had saved about fabric shops that sell technical fabric and while window-shopping on one I found that they had a decent selection of denim in a decent weight. I decided it was a sign, and decided to buy the two heaviest denim they had: a 100% cotton, 355 g/m one and a 97% cotton, 3% elastane at 385 g/m 1; the latter was a bit of compromise as I shouldn t really be buying fabric adulterated with the Scourge of Humanity, but it was heavier than the plain one, and I may be having a thing for tightly fitting jeans, so this may be one of the very few woven fabric where I m not morally opposed to its existence. And, I d like to add, I resisted buying any of the very nice wools they also seem to carry, other than just a couple of samples. Since the shop only sold in 1 meter increments, and I needed about 1.5 meters for each pair of jeans, I decided to buy 3 meters per type, and have enough to make a total of four pair of jeans. A bit more than I strictly needed, maybe, but I was completely out of wearable day-to-day trousers. a cardboard box with neatly folded black denim, covered in semi-transparent plastic. The shop sent everything very quickly, the courier took their time (oh, well) but eventually delivered my fabric on a sunny enough day that I could wash it and start as soon as possible on the first pair. The pattern I did in linen was a bit too fitting, but I was afraid I had widened it a bit too much, so I did the first pair in the 100% cotton denim. Sewing them took me about a week of early mornings and late afternoons, excluding the weekend, and my worries proved false: they were mostly just fine. The only bit that could have been a bit better is the waistband, which is a tiny bit too wide on the back: it s designed to be so for comfort, but the next time I should pull the elastic a bit more, so that it stays closer to the body. The same from the back, showing the applied pockets with a sewn logo. I wore those jeans daily for the rest of the week, and confirmed that they were indeed comfortable and the pattern was ok, so on the next Monday I started to cut the elastic denim. I decided to cut and sew two pairs, assembly-line style, using the shaped waistband for one of them and the straight one for the other one. I started working on them on a Monday, and on that week I had a couple of days when I just couldn t, plus I completely skipped sewing on the weekend, but on Tuesday the next week one pair was ready and could be worn, and the other one only needed small finishes. A woman wearing another pair of jeans; the waistband here is shaped to fit rather than having elastic. And I have to say, I m really, really happy with the ones with a shaped waistband in elastic denim, as they fit even better than the ones with a straight waistband gathered with elastic. Cutting it requires more fabric, but I think it s definitely worth it. But it will be a problem for a later time: right now three pairs of jeans are a good number to keep in rotation, and I hope I won t have to sew jeans for myself for quite some time. A plastic bag with mid-sized offcuts of denim; there is a 30 cm ruler on top that is just wider than the bag I think that the leftovers of plain denim will be used for a skirt or something else, and as for the leftovers of elastic denim, well, there aren t a lot left, but what else I did with them is the topic for another post. Thanks to the fact that they are all slightly different, I ve started to keep track of the times when I wash each pair, and hopefully I will be able to see whether the elastic denim is significantly less durable than the regular, or the added weight compensates for it somewhat. I m not sure I ll manage to remember about saving the data until they get worn, but if I do it will be interesting to know. Oh, and I say I ve finished working on jeans and everything, but I still haven t sewn the belt loops to the third pair. And I m currently wearing them. It s a sewist tradition, or something. :D

  1. The links are to the shop for Italy; you can copy the Codice prodotto and look for it on one of the shop version for other countries (where they apply the right vat etc., but sadly they don t allow to mix and match those settings and the language).

3 March 2024

Iustin Pop: New corydalis 2024.9.0 release!

Obligatory and misused quote: It s not dead, Jim! I ve kind of dropped by ball lately on organising my own photo collection, but February was a pretty good month and I managed to write some more code for Corydalis, ending up with the aforementioned new release. The release is not a big one, but I did manage to solve one thing that was annoying me greatly: that lack of ability to play videos inline in one of the two picture viewing modes (in my preferred mode, in fact). Now, whether you re browsing through pictures, or looking at pictures one-by-one, you can in both cases play videos easily, and to some extent, as it should be . No user docs for that, yet (I actually need to split the manual in user/admin/developer parts) I did some more internal cleanups, and I ve enabled building release zips (since that s how GitHub actions creates artifacts), which means it should be 10% easier to test this. The rest 90% is configuring it and pointing to picture folders and and and, so this is definitely not plug-and-play. The diff summary between 2023.44.0 and 2024.9.0 is: 56 files changed, 1412 insertions(+), 700 deletions(-). Which is not bad, but also not too much. The biggest churn was, as expected, in the viewer (due to the aforementioned video playing). The scary part is that the TypeScript code is not at 7.9% (and a tiny more JS, which I can t convert yet due to lack of type definitions upstream). I say scary in quotes, because I would actually like to know Typescript better, but no time. The new release can be seen in action on demo.corydalis.io, and as always, just after release I found two minor issues: Well, there will be future releases. For now, I ve made an open-source package release, which I didn t do in a while, so I m happy . See you!

Petter Reinholdtsen: RAID status from LSI Megaraid controllers using free software

The last few days I have revisited RAID setup using the LSI Megaraid controller. These are a family of controllers called PERC by Dell, and is present in several old PowerEdge servers, and I recently got my hands on one of these. I had forgotten how to handle this RAID controller in Debian, so I had to take a peek in the Debian wiki page "Linux and Hardware RAID: an administrator's summary" to remember what kind of software is available to configure and monitor the disks and controller. I prefer Free Software alternatives to proprietary tools, as the later tend to fall into disarray once the manufacturer loose interest, and often do not work with newer Linux Distributions. Sadly there is no free software tool to configure the RAID setup, only to monitor it. RAID can provide improved reliability and resilience in a storage solution, but only if it is being regularly checked and any broken disks are being replaced in time. I thus want to ensure some automatic monitoring is available. In the discovery process, I came across a old free software tool to monitor PERC2, PERC3, PERC4 and PERC5 controllers, which to my surprise is not present in debian. To help change that I created a request for packaging of the megactl package, and tried to track down a usable version. The original project site is on Sourceforge, but as far as I can tell that project has been dead for more than 15 years. I managed to find a more recent fork on github from user hmage, but it is unclear to me if this is still being maintained. It has not seen much improvements since 2016. A more up to date edition is a git fork from the original github fork by user namiltd, and this newer fork seem a lot more promising. The owner of this github repository has replied to change proposals within hours, and had already added some improvements and support for more hardware. Sadly he is reluctant to commit to maintaining the tool and stated in my first pull request that he think a new release should be made based on the git repository owned by hmage. I perfectly understand this reluctance, as I feel the same about maintaining yet another package in Debian when I barely have time to take care of the ones I already maintain, but do not really have high hopes that hmage will have time to spend on it and hope namiltd will change his mind. In any case, I created a draft package based on the namiltd edition and put it under the debian group on salsa.debian.org. If you own a Dell PowerEdge server with one of the PERC controllers, or any other RAID controller using the megaraid or megaraid_sas Linux kernel modules, you might want to check it out. If enough people are interested, perhaps the package will make it into the Debian archive. There are two tools provided, megactl for the megaraid Linux kernel module, and megasasctl for the megaraid_sas Linux kernel module. The simple output from the command on one of my machines look like this (yes, I know some of the disks have problems. :).
# megasasctl 
a0       PERC H730 Mini           encl:1 ldrv:2  batt:good
a0d0       558GiB RAID 1   1x2  optimal
a0d1      3067GiB RAID 0   1x11 optimal
a0e32s0     558GiB  a0d0  online   errs: media:0  other:19
a0e32s1     279GiB  a0d1  online  
a0e32s2     279GiB  a0d1  online  
a0e32s3     279GiB  a0d1  online  
a0e32s4     279GiB  a0d1  online  
a0e32s5     279GiB  a0d1  online  
a0e32s6     279GiB  a0d1  online  
a0e32s8     558GiB  a0d0  online   errs: media:0  other:17
a0e32s9     279GiB  a0d1  online  
a0e32s10    279GiB  a0d1  online  
a0e32s11    279GiB  a0d1  online  
a0e32s12    279GiB  a0d1  online  
a0e32s13    279GiB  a0d1  online  
#
In addition to displaying a simple status report, it can also test individual drives and print the various event logs. Perhaps you too find it useful? In the packaging process I provided some patches upstream to improve installation and ensure a Appstream metainfo file is provided to list all supported HW, to allow isenkram to propose the package on all servers with a relevant PCI card. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Next.

Previous.