Search Results: "will"

28 December 2023

Simon Josefsson: Validating debian/copyright: licenserecon

Recently I noticed a new tool called licenserecon written by Peter Blackman, and I helped get licenserecon into Debian. The purpose of licenserecon is to reconcile licenses from debian/copyright against the output from licensecheck, a tool written by Jonas Smedegaard. It assumes DEP5 copyright files. You run the tool in a directory that has a debian/ sub-directory, and its output when it notices mismatches (this is for resolv-wrapper): 
# sudo apt install licenserecon
jas@kaka:~/dpkg/resolv-wrapper$ lrc
Parsing Source Tree ....
Running licensecheck ....
d/copyright       licensecheck
BSD-3-Clauses     BSD-3-clause     src/resolv_wrapper.c
BSD-3-Clauses     BSD-3-clause     tests/dns_srv.c
BSD-3-Clauses     BSD-3-clause     tests/test_dns_fake.c
BSD-3-Clauses     BSD-3-clause     tests/test_res_query_search.c
BSD-3-Clauses     BSD-3-clause     tests/torture.c
BSD-3-Clauses     BSD-3-clause     tests/torture.h
jas@kaka:~/dpkg/resolv-wrapper$
Noticing one-character typos like this may not bring satisfaction except to the most obsessive-compulsive among us, however the tool has the potential of discovering more serious mistakes. Using it manually once in a while may be useful, however I tend to forget QA steps that are not automated. Could we add this to the Salsa CI/CD pipeline? I recently proposed a merge request to add a wrap-and-sort job to the Salsa CI/CD pipeline (disabled by default) and learned how easy it was to extend it. I think licenserecon is still a bit rough on the edges, and I haven t been able to successfully use it on any but the simplest packages yet. I wouldn t want to suggest it is added to the normal Salsa CI/CD pipeline, even if disabled. If you maintain a Debian package on Salsa and wish to add a licenserecon job to your pipeline, I wrote licenserecon.yml for you. The simplest way to use licenserecon.yml is to replace recipes/debian.yml@salsa-ci-team/pipeline as the Salsa CI/CD configuration file setting with debian/salsa-ci.yml@debian/licenserecon. If you use a debian/salsa-ci.yml file you may put something like this in it instead: 
---
include:
  - https://salsa.debian.org/salsa-ci-team/pipeline/raw/master/recipes/debian.yml
  - https://salsa.debian.org/debian/licenserecon/raw/main/debian/licenserecon.yml
Once you trigger the pipeline, this will result in a new job licenserecon that validates debian/copyright against licensecheck output on every build! I have added this to the libcpucycles package on Salsa and the pipeline contains a new job licenserecon whose output currently ends with: 
$ cd $ WORKING_DIR /$ SOURCE_DIR 
$ lrc
Parsing Source Tree ....
Running licensecheck ....
No differences found
Cleaning up project directory and file based variables
If upstream releases a new version with files not matching our debian/copyright file, we will detect that on the next Salsa build job rather than months later when somebody happens to run the tools manually or there is some license conflict. Incidentally licenserecon is written in Pascal which brought back old memories with Turbo Pascal back in the MS-DOS days. Thanks Peter for licenserecon, and Jonas for licensecheck making this possible!

Russ Allbery: Review: Nettle & Bone

Review: Nettle & Bone, by T. Kingfisher
Publisher: Tor
Copyright: 2022
ISBN: 1-250-24403-X
Format: Kindle
Pages: 242
Nettle & Bone is a standalone fantasy novel with fairy tale vibes. T. Kingfisher is a pen name for Ursula Vernon. As the book opens, Marra is giving herself a blood infection by wiring together dog bones out of a charnel pit. This is the second of three impossible tasks that she was given by the dust-wife. Completing all three will give her the tools to kill a prince. I am a little cautious of which T. Kingfisher books I read since she sometimes writes fantasy and sometimes writes horror and I don't get along with horror. This one seemed a bit horrific in the marketing, so I held off on reading it despite the Hugo nomination. It turns out to be just on the safe side of my horror tolerance, with only a couple of parts that I read a bit quickly. One of those is the opening, which I am happy to report does not set the tone for the rest of the book. Marra starts the story in a wasteland full of disease, madmen, and cannibals (who, in typical Ursula Vernon fashion, turn out to be nicer than the judgmental assholes outside of the blistered land). She doesn't stay there long. By chapter two, the story moves on to flashbacks explaining how Marra ended up there, alternating with further (and less horrific) steps in her quest to kill the prince of the Northern Kingdom. Marra is a princess of a small, relatively poor coastal kingdom with a good harbor and acquisitive neighbors. Her mother, the queen, has protected the kingdom through arranged marriage of her daughters to the prince of the Northern Kingdom, who rules it in all but name given the mental deterioration of his father the king. Marra's eldest sister Damia was first, but she died suddenly and mysteriously in a fall. (If you're thinking about the way women are injured by "accident," you have the right idea.) Kania, the middle sister, is next to marry; she lives, but not without cost. Meanwhile, Marra is sent off to a convent to ensure that there are no complicating potential heirs, and to keep her on hand as a spare. I won't spoil the entire backstory, but you do learn it all. Marra is a typical Kingfisher protagonist: a woman who is way out of her depth who persists with stubbornness, curiosity, and innate decency because what else is there to do? She accumulates the typical group of misfits and oddballs common in Kingfisher's quest fantasies, characters that in the Chosen One male fantasy would be supporting characters at best. The bone-wife is a delight; her chicken is even better. There are fairy godmothers and a goblin market and a tooth extraction that was one of the creepiest things I've read without actually being horror. It is, in short, a Kingfisher fantasy novel, with a touch more horror than average but not enough to push it out of the fantasy genre. I think my favorite part of this book was not the main quest. It was the flashback scenes set in the convent, where Marra has the space (and the mentorship) to develop her sense of self.
"We're a mystery religion," said the abbess, when she'd had a bit more wine than usual, "for people who have too much work to do to bother with mysteries. So we simply get along as best we can. Occasionally someone has a vision, but [the goddess] doesn't seem to want anything much, and so we try to return the favor."
If you have read any other Kingfisher novels, much of this will be familiar: the speculative asides, the dogged determination, the slightly askew nature of the world, the vibes-based world-building that feels more like a fairy tale than a carefully constructed magic system, and the sense that the main characters (and nearly all of the supporting characters) are average people trying to play the hands they were dealt as ethically as they can. You will know that the tentative and woman-initiated romance is coming as soon as the party meets the paladin type who is almost always the romantic interest in one of these books. The emotional tone of the book is a bit predictable for regular readers, but Ursula Vernon's brain is such a delightful place to spend some time that I don't mind.
Marra had not managed to be pale and willowy and consumptive at any point in eighteen years of life and did not think she could achieve it before she died.
Nettle & Bone won the Hugo for Best Novel in 2023. I'm not sure why this specific T. Kingfisher novel won and not any of the half-dozen earlier novels she's written in a similar style, but sure, I have no objections. I'm glad one of them won; they're all worth reading and hopefully that will help more people discover this delightful style of fantasy that doesn't feel like what anyone else is doing. Recommended, although be prepared for a few more horror touches than normal and a rather grim first chapter. Content warnings: domestic abuse. The dog... lives? Is equally as alive at the end of the book as it was at the end of the first chapter? The dog does not die; I'll just leave it at that. (Neither does the chicken.) Rating: 8 out of 10

27 December 2023

Bits from Debian: Statement about the EU Cyber Resilience Act

Debian Public Statement about the EU Cyber Resilience Act and the Product Liability Directive The European Union is currently preparing a regulation "on horizontal cybersecurity requirements for products with digital elements" known as the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA). It is currently in the final "trilogue" phase of the legislative process. The act includes a set of essential cybersecurity and vulnerability handling requirements for manufacturers. It will require products to be accompanied by information and instructions to the user. Manufacturers will need to perform risk assessments and produce technical documentation and, for critical components, have third-party audits conducted. Discovered security issues will have to be reported to European authorities within 25 hours (1). The CRA will be followed up by the Product Liability Directive (PLD) which will introduce compulsory liability for software. While a lot of these regulations seem reasonable, the Debian project believes that there are grave problems for Free Software projects attached to them. Therefore, the Debian project issues the following statement:
  1. Free Software has always been a gift, freely given to society, to take and to use as seen fit, for whatever purpose. Free Software has proven to be an asset in our digital age and the proposed EU Cyber Resilience Act is going to be detrimental to it. a. As the Debian Social Contract states, our goal is "make the best system we can, so that free works will be widely distributed and used." Imposing requirements such as those proposed in the act makes it legally perilous for others to redistribute our work and endangers our commitment to "provide an integrated system of high-quality materials with no legal restrictions that would prevent such uses of the system". (2) b. Knowing whether software is commercial or not isn't feasible, neither in Debian nor in most free software projects - we don't track people's employment status or history, nor do we check who finances upstream projects (the original projects that we integrate in our operating system). c. If upstream projects stop making available their code for fear of being in the scope of CRA and its financial consequences, system security will actually get worse rather than better. d. Having to get legal advice before giving a gift to society will discourage many developers, especially those without a company or other organisation supporting them.
  2. Debian is well known for its security track record through practices of responsible disclosure and coordination with upstream developers and other Free Software projects. We aim to live up to the commitment made in the Debian Social Contract: "We will not hide problems." (3) a.The Free Software community has developed a fine-tuned, tried-and-tested system of responsible disclosure in case of security issues which will be overturned by the mandatory reporting to European authorities within 24 hours (Art. 11 CRA). b. Debian spends a lot of volunteering time on security issues, provides quick security updates and works closely together with upstream projects and in coordination with other vendors. To protect its users, Debian regularly participates in limited embargos to coordinate fixes to security issues so that all other major Linux distributions can also have a complete fix when the vulnerability is disclosed. c. Security issue tracking and remediation is intentionally decentralized and distributed. The reporting of security issues to ENISA and the intended propagation to other authorities and national administrations would collect all software vulnerabilities in one place. This greatly increases the risk of leaking information about vulnerabilities to threat actors, representing a threat for all the users around the world, including European citizens. d. Activists use Debian (e.g. through derivatives such as Tails), among other reasons, to protect themselves from authoritarian governments; handing threat actors exploits they can use for oppression is against what Debian stands for. e. Developers and companies will downplay security issues because a "security" issue now comes with legal implications. Less clarity on what is truly a security issue will hurt users by leaving them vulnerable.
  3. While proprietary software is developed behind closed doors, Free Software development is done in the open, transparent for everyone. To retain parity with proprietary software the open development process needs to be entirely exempt from CRA requirements, just as the development of software in private is. A "making available on the market" can only be considered after development is finished and the software is released.
  4. Even if only "commercial activities" are in the scope of CRA, the Free Software community - and as a consequence, everybody - will lose a lot of small projects. CRA will force many small enterprises and most probably all self employed developers out of business because they simply cannot fulfill the requirements imposed by CRA. Debian and other Linux distributions depend on their work. If accepted as it is, CRA will undermine not only an established community but also a thriving market. CRA needs an exemption for small businesses and, at the very least, solo-entrepreneurs.
Information about the voting process: Debian uses the Condorcet method for voting. Simplistically, plain Condorcets method can be stated like so : "Consider all possible two-way races between candidates. The Condorcet winner, if there is one, is the one candidate who can beat each other candidate in a two-way race with that candidate." The problem is that in complex elections, there may well be a circular relationship in which A beats B, B beats C, and C beats A. Most of the variations on Condorcet use various means of resolving the tie. Debian's variation is spelled out in the constitution, specifically, A.5(3) Sources: (1) CRA proposals and links & PLD proposals and links (2) Debian Social Contract No. 2, 3, and 4 (3) Debian Constitution

Russ Allbery: Review: A Study in Scarlet

Review: A Study in Scarlet, by Arthur Conan Doyle
Series: Sherlock Holmes #1
Publisher: AmazonClassics
Copyright: 1887
Printing: February 2018
ISBN: 1-5039-5525-7
Format: Kindle
Pages: 159
A Study in Scarlet is the short mystery novel (probably a novella, although I didn't count words) that introduced the world to Sherlock Holmes. I'm going to invoke the 100-year-rule and discuss the plot of this book rather freely on the grounds that even someone who (like me prior to a few days ago) has not yet read it is probably not that invested in avoiding all spoilers. If you do want to remain entirely unspoiled, exercise caution before reading on. I had somehow managed to avoid ever reading anything by Arthur Conan Doyle, not even a short story. I therefore couldn't be sure that some of the assertions I was making in my review of A Study in Honor were correct. Since A Study in Scarlet would be quick to read, I decided on a whim to do a bit of research and grab a free copy of the first Holmes novel. Holmes is such a part of English-speaking culture that I thought I had a pretty good idea of what to expect. This was largely true, but cultural osmosis had somehow not prepared me for the surprise Mormons. A Study in Scarlet establishes the basic parameters of a Holmes story: Dr. James Watson as narrator, the apartment he shares with Holmes at 221B Baker Street, the Baker Street Irregulars, Holmes's competition with police detectives, and his penchant for making leaps of logical deduction from subtle clues. The story opens with Watson meeting Holmes, agreeing to split the rent of a flat, and being baffled by the apparent randomness of Holmes's fields of study before Holmes reveals he's a consulting detective. The first case is a murder: a man is found dead in an abandoned house, without a mark on him although there are blood splatters on the walls and the word "RACHE" written in blood. Since my only prior exposure to Holmes was from cultural references and a few TV adaptations, there were a few things that surprised me. One is that Holmes is voluble and animated rather than aloof. Doyle is clearly going for passionate eccentric rather than calculating mastermind. Another is that he is intentionally and unabashedly ignorant on any topic not related to solving mysteries.
My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it. "You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it." "To forget it!" "You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you chose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."
This is directly contrary to my expectation that the best way to make leaps of deduction is to know something about a huge range of topics so that one can draw unexpected connections, particularly given the puzzle-box construction and odd details so beloved in classic mysteries. I'm now curious if Doyle stuck with this conception, and if there were any later mysteries that involved astronomy. Speaking of classic mysteries, A Study in Scarlet isn't quite one, although one can see the shape of the genre to come. Doyle does not "play fair" by the rules that have not yet been invented. Holmes at most points knows considerably more than the reader, including bits of evidence that are not described until Holmes describes them and research that Holmes does off-camera and only reveals when he wants to be dramatic. This is not the sort of story where the reader is encouraged to try to figure out the mystery before the detective. Rather, what Doyle seems to be aiming for, and what Watson attempts (unsuccessfully) as the reader surrogate, is slightly different: once Holmes makes one of his grand assertions, the reader is encouraged to guess what Holmes might have done to arrive at that conclusion. Doyle seems to want the reader to guess technique rather than outcome, while providing only vague clues in general descriptions of Holmes's behavior at a crime scene. The structure of this story is quite odd. The first part is roughly what you would expect: first-person narration from Watson, supposedly taken from his journals but not at all in the style of a journal and explicitly written for an audience. Part one concludes with Holmes capturing and dramatically announcing the name of the killer, who the reader has never heard of before. Part two then opens with... a western?
In the central portion of the great North American Continent there lies an arid and repulsive desert, which for many a long year served as a barrier against the advance of civilization. From the Sierra Nevada to Nebraska, and from the Yellowstone River in the north to the Colorado upon the south, is a region of desolation and silence. Nor is Nature always in one mood throughout the grim district. It comprises snow-capped and lofty mountains, and dark and gloomy valleys. There are swift-flowing rivers which dash through jagged ca ons; and there are enormous plains, which in winter are white with snow, and in summer are grey with the saline alkali dust. They all preserve, however, the common characteristics of barrenness, inhospitality, and misery.
First, I have issues with the geography. That region contains some of the most beautiful areas on earth, and while a lot of that region is arid, describing it primarily as a repulsive desert is a bit much. Doyle's boundaries and distances are also confusing: the Yellowstone is a northeast-flowing river with its source in Wyoming, so the area between it and the Colorado does not extend to the Sierra Nevadas (or even to Utah), and it's not entirely clear to me that he realizes Nevada exists. This is probably what it's like for people who live anywhere else in the world when US authors write about their country. But second, there's no Holmes, no Watson, and not even the pretense of a transition from the detective novel that we were just reading. Doyle just launches into a random western with an omniscient narrator. It features a lean, grizzled man and an adorable child that he adopts and raises into a beautiful free spirit, who then falls in love with a wild gold-rush adventurer. This was written about 15 years before the first critically recognized western novel, so I can't blame Doyle for all the cliches here, but to a modern reader all of these characters are straight from central casting. Well, except for the villains, who are the Mormons. By that, I don't mean that the villains are Mormon. I mean Brigham Young is the on-page villain, plotting against the hero to force his adopted daughter into a Mormon harem (to use the word that Doyle uses repeatedly) and ruling Salt Lake City with an iron hand, border guards with passwords (?!), and secret police. This part of the book was wild. I was laughing out-loud at the sheer malevolent absurdity of the thirty-day countdown to marriage, which I doubt was the intended effect. We do eventually learn that this is the backstory of the murder, but we don't return to Watson and Holmes for multiple chapters. Which leads me to the other thing that surprised me: Doyle lays out this backstory, but then never has his characters comment directly on the morality of it, only the spectacle. Holmes cares only for the intellectual challenge (and for who gets credit), and Doyle sets things up so that the reader need not concern themselves with aftermath, punishment, or anything of that sort. I probably shouldn't have been surprised this does fit with the Holmes stereotype but I'm used to modern fiction where there is usually at least some effort to pass judgment on the events of the story. Doyle draws very clear villains, but is utterly silent on whether the murder is justified. Given its status in the history of literature, I'm not sorry to have read this book, but I didn't particularly enjoy it. It is very much of its time: everyone's moral character is linked directly to their physical appearance, and Doyle uses the occasional racial stereotype without a second thought. Prevailing writing styles have changed, so the prose feels long-winded and breathless. The rivalry between Holmes and the police detectives is tedious and annoying. I also find it hard to read novels from before the general absorption of techniques of emotional realism and interiority into all genres. The characters in A Study in Scarlet felt more like cartoon characters than fully-realized human beings. I have no strong opinion about the objective merits of this book in the context of its time other than to note that the sudden inserted western felt very weird. My understanding is that this is not considered one of the better Holmes stories, and Holmes gets some deeper characterization later on. Maybe I'll try another of Doyle's works someday, but for now my curiosity has been sated. Followed by The Sign of the Four. Rating: 4 out of 10

26 December 2023

Russ Allbery: Review: A Study in Honor

Review: A Study in Honor, by Claire O'Dell
Series: Janet Watson Chronicles #1
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Copyright: July 2018
ISBN: 0-06-269932-6
Format: Kindle
Pages: 295
A Study in Honor is a near-future science fiction novel by Claire O'Dell, a pen name for Beth Bernobich. You will see some assertions, including by the Lambda Literary Award judges, that it is a mystery novel. There is a mystery, but... well, more on that in a moment. Janet Watson was an Army surgeon in the Second US Civil War when New Confederacy troops overran the lines in Alton, Illinois. Watson lost her left arm to enemy fire. As this book opens, she is returning to Washington, D.C. with a medical discharge, PTSD, and a field replacement artificial arm scavenged from a dead soldier. It works, sort of, mostly, despite being mismatched to her arm and old in both technology and previous wear. It does not work well enough for her to resume her career as a surgeon. Watson's plan is to request a better artificial arm from the VA (the United States Department of Veterans Affairs, which among other things is responsible for the medical care of wounded veterans). That plan meets a wall of unyielding and uninterested bureaucracy. She has a pension, but it's barely enough for cheap lodging. A lifeline comes in the form of a chance encounter with a former assistant in the Army, who has a difficult friend looking to split the cost of an apartment. The name of that friend is Sara Holmes. At this point, you know what to expect. This is clearly one of the many respinnings of Arthur Conan Doyle. This time, the setting is in the future and Watson and Holmes are both black women, but the other elements of the setup are familiar: the immediate deduction that Watson came from the front, the shared rooms (2809 Q Street this time, sacrificing homage for the accuracy of a real address), Holmes's tendency to play an instrument (this time the piano), and even the title of this book, which is an obvious echo of the title of the first Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet. Except that's not what you'll get. There are a lot of parallels and references here, but this is not a Holmes-style detective novel. First, it's only arguably a detective novel at all. There is a mystery, which starts with a patient Watson sees in her fallback job as a medical tech in the VA hospital and escalates to a physical attack, but that doesn't start until a third of the way into the book. It certainly is not solved through minute clues and leaps of deduction; instead, that part of the plot has the shape of a thriller rather than a classic mystery. There is a good argument that the thriller is the modern mystery novel, so I don't want to overstate my case, but I think someone who came to this book wanting a Doyle-style mystery would be disappointed. Second, the mystery is not the heart of this book. Watson is. She, like Doyle's Watson, is the first-person narrator, but she is far more present in the book. I have no idea how accurate O'Dell's portrayal of Watson's PTSD is, but it was certainly compelling and engrossing reading. Her fight for basic dignity and her rage at the surface respect and underlying disinterested hostility of the bureaucratic war machinery is what kept me turning the pages. The mystery plot is an outgrowth of that and felt more like a case study than the motivating thread of the plot. And third, Sara Holmes... well, I hesitate to say definitively that she's not Sherlock Holmes. There have been so many versions of Holmes over the years, even apart from the degree to which a black woman would necessarily not be like Doyle's character. But she did not remind me of Sherlock Holmes. She reminded me of a cross between James Bond and a high fae. This sounds like a criticism. It very much is not. I found this high elf spy character far more interesting than I have ever found Sherlock Holmes. But here again, if you came into this book hoping for a Holmes-style master detective, I fear you may be wrong-footed. The James Bond parts will be obvious when you get there and aren't the most interesting (and thankfully the misogyny is entirely absent). The part I found more fascinating is the way O'Dell sets Holmes apart by making her fae rather than insufferable. She projects effortless elegance, appears and disappears on a mysterious schedule of her own, thinks nothing of reading her roommate's diary, leaves meticulously arranged gifts, and even bargains with Watson for answers to precisely three questions. The reader does learn some mundane explanations for some of this behavior, but to be honest I found them somewhat of a letdown. Sara Holmes is at her best as a character when she tacks her own mysterious path through a rather grim world of exhausted war, penny-pinching bureaucracy, and despair, pursuing an unexplained agenda of her own while showing odd but unmistakable signs of friendship and care. This is not a romance, at least in this book. It is instead a slowly-developing friendship between two extremely different people, one that I thoroughly enjoyed. I do have a couple of caveats about this book. The first is that the future US in which it is set is almost pure Twitter doomcasting. Trump's election sparked a long slide into fascism, and when that was arrested by the election of a progressive candidate backed by a fragile coalition, Midwestern red states seceded to form the New Confederacy and start a second civil war that has dragged on for nearly eight years. It's a very specific mainstream liberal dystopian scenario that I've seen so many times it felt like a cliche even though I don't remember seeing it in a book before. This type of future projection of current fears is of course not new for science fiction; Cold War nuclear war novels are probably innumerable. But I had questions, such as how a sparsely-populated, largely non-industrial, and entirely landlocked set of breakaway states could maintain a war footing for eight years. Despite some hand-waving about covert support, those questions are not really answered here. The second problem is that the ending of this book kind of falls apart. The climax of the mystery investigation is unsatisfyingly straightforward, and the resulting revelation is a hoary cliche. Maybe I'm just complaining about the banality of evil, but if I'd been engrossed in this book for the thriller plot, I think I would have been annoyed. I wasn't, though; I was here for the characters, for Watson's PTSD and dogged determination, for Sara's strangeness, and particularly for the growing improbable friendship between two women with extremely different life experiences, emotions, and outlooks. That part was great, regardless of the ending. Do not pick this book up because you want a satisfying deductive mystery with bumbling police and a blizzard of apparently inconsequential clues. That is not at all what's happening here. But this was great on its own terms, and I will be reading the sequel shortly. Recommended, although if you are very online expect to do a bit of eye-rolling at the setting. Followed by The Hound of Justice, but the sequel is not required. This book reaches a satisfying conclusion of its own. Rating: 8 out of 10

25 December 2023

Sergio Talens-Oliag: GitLab CI/CD Tips: Automatic Versioning Using semantic-release

This post describes how I m using semantic-release on gitlab-ci to manage versioning automatically for different kinds of projects following a simple workflow (a develop branch where changes are added or merged to test new versions, a temporary release/#.#.# to generate the release candidate versions and a main branch where the final versions are published).

What is semantic-releaseIt is a Node.js application designed to manage project versioning information on Git Repositories using a Continuous integration system (in this post we will use gitlab-ci)

How does it workBy default semantic-release uses semver for versioning (release versions use the format MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH) and commit messages are parsed to determine the next version number to publish. If after analyzing the commits the version number has to be changed, the command updates the files we tell it to (i.e. the package.json file for nodejs projects and possibly a CHANGELOG.md file), creates a new commit with the changed files, creates a tag with the new version and pushes the changes to the repository. When running on a CI/CD system we usually generate the artifacts related to a release (a package, a container image, etc.) from the tag, as it includes the right version number and usually has passed all the required tests (it is a good idea to run the tests again in any case, as someone could create a tag manually or we could run extra jobs when building the final assets if they fail it is not a big issue anyway, numbers are cheap and infinite, so we can skip releases if needed).

Commit messages and versioningThe commit messages must follow a known format, the default module used to analyze them uses the angular git commit guidelines, but I prefer the conventional commits one, mainly because it s a lot easier to use when you want to update the MAJOR version. The commit message format used must be: 
<type>(optional scope): <description>
[optional body]
[optional footer(s)]
The system supports three types of branches: release, maintenance and pre-release, but for now I m not using maintenance ones. The branches I use and their types are:
  • main as release branch (final versions are published from there)
  • develop as pre release branch (used to publish development and testing versions with the format #.#.#-SNAPSHOT.#)
  • release/#.#.# as pre release branches (they are created from develop to publish release candidate versions with the format #.#.#-rc.# and once they are merged with main they are deleted)
On the release branch (main) the version number is updated as follows:
  1. The MAJOR number is incremented if a commit with a BREAKING CHANGE: footer or an exclamation (!) after the type/scope is found in the list of commits found since the last version change (it looks for tags on the same branch).
  2. The MINOR number is incremented if the MAJOR number is not going to be changed and there is a commit with type feat in the commits found since the last version change.
  3. The PATCH number is incremented if neither the MAJOR nor the MINOR numbers are going to be changed and there is a commit with type fix in the the commits found since the last version change.
On the pre release branches (develop and release/#.#.#) the version and pre release numbers are always calculated from the last published version available on the branch (i. e. if we published version 1.3.2 on main we need to have the commit with that tag on the develop or release/#.#.# branch to get right what will be the next version). The version number is updated as follows:
  1. The MAJOR number is incremented if a commit with a BREAKING CHANGE: footer or an exclamation (!) after the type/scope is found in the list of commits found since the last released version.In our example it was 1.3.2 and the version is updated to 2.0.0-SNAPSHOT.1 or 2.0.0-rc.1 depending on the branch.
  2. The MINOR number is incremented if the MAJOR number is not going to be changed and there is a commit with type feat in the commits found since the last released version.In our example the release was 1.3.2 and the version is updated to 1.4.0-SNAPSHOT.1 or 1.4.0-rc.1 depending on the branch.
  3. The PATCH number is incremented if neither the MAJOR nor the MINOR numbers are going to be changed and there is a commit with type fix in the the commits found since the last version change.In our example the release was 1.3.2 and the version is updated to 1.3.3-SNAPSHOT.1 or 1.3.3-rc.1 depending on the branch.
  4. The pre release number is incremented if the MAJOR, MINOR and PATCH numbers are not going to be changed but there is a commit that would otherwise update the version (i.e. a fix on 1.3.3-SNAPSHOT.1 will set the version to 1.3.3-SNAPSHOT.2, a fix or feat on 1.4.0-rc.1 will set the version to 1.4.0-rc.2 an so on).

How do we manage its configurationAlthough the system is designed to work with nodejs projects, it can be used with multiple programming languages and project types. For nodejs projects the usual place to put the configuration is the project s package.json, but I prefer to use the .releaserc file instead. As I use a common set of CI templates, instead of using a .releaserc on each project I generate it on the fly on the jobs that need it, replacing values related to the project type and the current branch on a template using the tmpl command (lately I use a branch of my own fork while I wait for some feedback from upstream, as you will see on the Dockerfile).

Container used to run itAs we run the command on a gitlab-ci job we use the image built from the following Dockerfile:
Dockerfile 
# Semantic release image
FROM golang:alpine AS tmpl-builder
#RUN go install github.com/krakozaure/tmpl@v0.4.0
RUN go install github.com/sto/tmpl@v0.4.0-sto.2
FROM node:lts-alpine
COPY --from=tmpl-builder /go/bin/tmpl /usr/local/bin/tmpl
RUN apk update &&\
  apk upgrade &&\
  apk add curl git jq openssh-keygen yq zip &&\
  npm install --location=global\
    conventional-changelog-conventionalcommits@6.1.0\
    @qiwi/multi-semantic-release@7.0.0\
    semantic-release@21.0.7\
    @semantic-release/changelog@6.0.3\
    semantic-release-export-data@1.0.1\
    @semantic-release/git@10.0.1\
    @semantic-release/gitlab@9.5.1\
    @semantic-release/release-notes-generator@11.0.4\
    semantic-release-replace-plugin@1.2.7\
    semver@7.5.4\
  &&\
  rm -rf /var/cache/apk/*
CMD ["/bin/sh"]

How and when is it executedThe job that runs semantic-release is executed when new commits are added to the develop, release/#.#.# or main branches (basically when something is merged or pushed) and after all tests have passed (we don t want to create a new version that does not compile or passes at least the unit tests). The job is something like the following: 
semantic_release:
  image: $SEMANTIC_RELEASE_IMAGE
  rules:
    - if: '$CI_COMMIT_BRANCH =~ /^(develop main release\/\d+.\d+.\d+)$/'
      when: always
  stage: release
  before_script:
    - echo "Loading scripts.sh"
    - . $ASSETS_DIR/scripts.sh
  script:
    - sr_gen_releaserc_json
    - git_push_setup
    - semantic-release
Where the SEMANTIC_RELEASE_IMAGE variable contains the URI of the image built using the Dockerfile above and the sr_gen_releaserc_json and git_push_setup are functions defined on the $ASSETS_DIR/scripts.sh file:
  • The sr_gen_releaserc_json function generates the .releaserc.json file using the tmpl command.
  • The git_push_setup function configures git to allow pushing changes to the repository with the semantic-release command, optionally signing them with a SSH key.

The sr_gen_releaserc_json functionThe code for the sr_gen_releaserc_json function is the following: 
sr_gen_releaserc_json()
 
  # Use nodejs as default project_type
  project_type="$ PROJECT_TYPE:-nodejs "
  # REGEX to match the rc_branch name
  rc_branch_regex='^release\/[0-9]\+\.[0-9]\+\.[0-9]\+$'
  # PATHS on the local ASSETS_DIR
  assets_dir="$ CI_PROJECT_DIR /$ ASSETS_DIR "
  sr_local_plugin="$ assets_dir /local-plugin.cjs"
  releaserc_tmpl="$ assets_dir /releaserc.json.tmpl"
  pipeline_runtime_values_yaml="/tmp/releaserc_values.yaml"
  pipeline_values_yaml="$ assets_dir /values_$ project_type _project.yaml"
  # Destination PATH
  releaserc_json=".releaserc.json"
  # Create an empty pipeline_values_yaml if missing
  test -f "$pipeline_values_yaml"   : >"$pipeline_values_yaml"
  # Create the pipeline_runtime_values_yaml file
  echo "branch: $ CI_COMMIT_BRANCH " >"$pipeline_runtime_values_yaml"
  echo "gitlab_url: $ CI_SERVER_URL " >"$pipeline_runtime_values_yaml"
  # Add the rc_branch name if we are on an rc_branch
  if [ "$(echo "$CI_COMMIT_BRANCH"   sed -ne "/$rc_branch_regex/ p ")" ]; then
    echo "rc_branch: $ CI_COMMIT_BRANCH " >>"$pipeline_runtime_values_yaml"
  elif [ "$(echo "$CI_MERGE_REQUEST_SOURCE_BRANCH_NAME"  
      sed -ne "/$rc_branch_regex/ p ")" ]; then
    echo "rc_branch: $ CI_MERGE_REQUEST_SOURCE_BRANCH_NAME " \
      >>"$pipeline_runtime_values_yaml"
  fi
  echo "sr_local_plugin: $ sr_local_plugin " >>"$pipeline_runtime_values_yaml"
  # Create the releaserc_json file
  tmpl -f "$pipeline_runtime_values_yaml" -f "$pipeline_values_yaml" \
    "$releaserc_tmpl"   jq . >"$releaserc_json"
  # Remove the pipeline_runtime_values_yaml file
  rm -f "$pipeline_runtime_values_yaml"
  # Print the releaserc_json file
  print_file_collapsed "$releaserc_json"
  # --*-- BEG: NOTE --*--
  # Rename the package.json to ignore it when calling semantic release.
  # The idea is that the local-plugin renames it back on the first step of the
  # semantic-release process.
  # --*-- END: NOTE --*--
  if [ -f "package.json" ]; then
    echo "Renaming 'package.json' to 'package.json_disabled'"
    mv "package.json" "package.json_disabled"
  fi
Almost all the variables used on the function are defined by gitlab except the ASSETS_DIR and PROJECT_TYPE; in the complete pipelines the ASSETS_DIR is defined on a common file included by all the pipelines and the project type is defined on the .gitlab-ci.yml file of each project. If you review the code you will see that the file processed by the tmpl command is named releaserc.json.tmpl, its contents are shown here: 
 
  "plugins": [
     - if .sr_local_plugin  
    "  .sr_local_plugin  ",
     - end  
    [
      "@semantic-release/commit-analyzer",
       
        "preset": "conventionalcommits",
        "releaseRules": [
            "breaking": true, "release": "major"  ,
            "revert": true, "release": "patch"  ,
            "type": "feat", "release": "minor"  ,
            "type": "fix", "release": "patch"  ,
            "type": "perf", "release": "patch"  
        ]
       
    ],
     - if .replacements  
    [
      "semantic-release-replace-plugin",
        "replacements":   .replacements   toJson    
    ],
     - end  
    "@semantic-release/release-notes-generator",
     - if eq .branch "main"  
    [
      "@semantic-release/changelog",
        "changelogFile": "CHANGELOG.md", "changelogTitle": "# Changelog"  
    ],
     - end  
    [
      "@semantic-release/git",
       
        "assets":   if .assets   .assets   toJson   else  []  end  ,
        "message": "ci(release): v$ nextRelease.version \n\n$ nextRelease.notes "
       
    ],
    [
      "@semantic-release/gitlab",
        "gitlabUrl": "  .gitlab_url  ", "successComment": false  
    ]
  ],
  "branches": [
      "name": "develop", "prerelease": "SNAPSHOT"  ,
     - if .rc_branch  
      "name": "  .rc_branch  ", "prerelease": "rc"  ,
     - end  
    "main"
  ]
The values used to process the template are defined on a file built on the fly (releaserc_values.yaml) that includes the following keys and values:
  • branch: the name of the current branch
  • gitlab_url: the URL of the gitlab server (the value is taken from the CI_SERVER_URL variable)
  • rc_branch: the name of the current rc branch; we only set the value if we are processing one because semantic-release only allows one branch to match the rc prefix and if we use a wildcard (i.e. release/*) but the users keep more than one release/#.#.# branch open at the same time the calls to semantic-release will fail for sure.
  • sr_local_plugin: the path to the local plugin we use (shown later)
The template also uses a values_$ project_type _project.yaml file that includes settings specific to the project type, the one for nodejs is as follows: 
replacements:
  - files:
      - "package.json"
    from: "\"version\": \".*\""
    to: "\"version\": \"$ nextRelease.version \""
assets:
  - "CHANGELOG.md"
  - "package.json"
The replacements section is used to update the version field on the relevant files of the project (in our case the package.json file) and the assets section includes the files that will be committed to the repository when the release is published (looking at the template you can see that the CHANGELOG.md is only updated for the main branch, we do it this way because if we update the file on other branches it creates a merge nightmare and we are only interested on it for released versions anyway). The local plugin adds code to rename the package.json_disabled file to package.json if present and prints the last and next versions on the logs with a format that can be easily parsed using sed:
local-plugin.cjs 
// Minimal plugin to:
// - rename the package.json_disabled file to package.json if present
// - log the semantic-release last & next versions
function verifyConditions(pluginConfig, context)  
  var fs = require('fs');
  if (fs.existsSync('package.json_disabled'))  
    fs.renameSync('package.json_disabled', 'package.json');
    context.logger.log( verifyConditions: renamed 'package.json_disabled' to 'package.json' );
   
 
function analyzeCommits(pluginConfig, context)  
  if (context.lastRelease && context.lastRelease.version)  
    context.logger.log( analyzeCommits: LAST_VERSION=$ context.lastRelease.version  );
   
 
function verifyRelease(pluginConfig, context)  
  if (context.nextRelease && context.nextRelease.version)  
    context.logger.log( verifyRelease: NEXT_VERSION=$ context.nextRelease.version  );
   
 
module.exports =  
  verifyConditions,
  analyzeCommits,
  verifyRelease

The git_push_setup functionThe code for the git_push_setup function is the following: 
git_push_setup()
 
  # Update global credentials to allow git clone & push for all the group repos
  git config --global credential.helper store
  cat >"$HOME/.git-credentials" <<EOF
https://fake-user:$ GITLAB_REPOSITORY_TOKEN @gitlab.com
EOF
  # Define user name, mail and signing key for semantic-release
  user_name="$SR_USER_NAME"
  user_email="$SR_USER_EMAIL"
  ssh_signing_key="$SSH_SIGNING_KEY"
  # Export git user variables
  export GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="$user_name"
  export GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="$user_email"
  export GIT_COMMITTER_NAME="$user_name"
  export GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL="$user_email"
  # Sign commits with ssh if there is a SSH_SIGNING_KEY variable
  if [ "$ssh_signing_key" ]; then
    echo "Configuring GIT to sign commits with SSH"
    ssh_keyfile="/tmp/.ssh-id"
    : >"$ssh_keyfile"
    chmod 0400 "$ssh_keyfile"
    echo "$ssh_signing_key"   tr -d '\r' >"$ssh_keyfile"
    git config gpg.format ssh
    git config user.signingkey "$ssh_keyfile"
    git config commit.gpgsign true
  fi
The function assumes that the GITLAB_REPOSITORY_TOKEN variable (set on the CI/CD variables section of the project or group we want) contains a token with read_repository and write_repository permissions on all the projects we are going to use this function. The SR_USER_NAME and SR_USER_EMAIL variables can be defined on a common file or the CI/CD variables section of the project or group we want to work with and the script assumes that the optional SSH_SIGNING_KEY is exported as a CI/CD default value of type variable (that is why the keyfile is created on the fly) and git is configured to use it if the variable is not empty.
Warning: Keep in mind that the variables GITLAB_REPOSITORY_TOKEN and SSH_SIGNING_KEY contain secrets, so probably is a good idea to make them protected (if you do that you have to make the develop, main and release/* branches protected too).
Warning: The semantic-release user has to be able to push to all the projects on those protected branches, it is a good idea to create a dedicated user and add it as a MAINTAINER for the projects we want (the MAINTAINERS need to be able to push to the branches), or, if you are using a Gitlab with a Premium license you can use the api to allow the semantic-release user to push to the protected branches without allowing it for any other user.

The semantic-release commandOnce we have the .releaserc file and the git configuration ready we run the semantic-release command. If the branch we are working with has one or more commits that will increment the version, the tool does the following (note that the steps are described are the ones executed if we use the configuration we have generated):
  1. It detects the commits that will increment the version and calculates the next version number.
  2. Generates the release notes for the version.
  3. Applies the replacements defined on the configuration (in our example updates the version field on the package.json file).
  4. Updates the CHANGELOG.md file adding the release notes if we are going to publish the file (when we are on the main branch).
  5. Creates a commit if all or some of the files listed on the assets key have changed and uses the commit message we have defined, replacing the variables for their current values.
  6. Creates a tag with the new version number and the release notes.
  7. As we are using the gitlab plugin after tagging it also creates a release on the project with the tag name and the release notes.

Notes about the git workflows and merges between branchesIt is very important to remember that semantic-release looks at the commits of a given branch when calculating the next version to publish, that has two important implications:
  1. On pre release branches we need to have the commit that includes the tag with the released version, if we don t have it the next version is not calculated correctly.
  2. It is a bad idea to squash commits when merging a branch to another one, if we do that we will lose the information semantic-release needs to calculate the next version and even if we use the right prefix for the squashed commit (fix, feat, ) we miss all the messages that would otherwise go to the CHANGELOG.md file.
To make sure that we have the right commits on the pre release branches we should merge the main branch changes into the develop one after each release tag is created; in my pipelines the fist job that processes a release tag creates a branch from the tag and an MR to merge it to develop. The important thing about that MR is that is must not be squashed, if we do that the tag commit will probably be lost, so we need to be careful. To merge the changes directly we can run the following code: 
# Set the SR_TAG variable to the tag you want to process
SR_TAG="v1.3.2"
# Fetch all the changes
git fetch --all --prune
# Switch to the main branch
git switch main
# Pull all the changes
git pull
# Switch to the development branch
git switch develop
# Pull all the changes
git pull
# Create followup branch from tag
git switch -c "followup/$SR_TAG" "$SR_TAG"
# Change files manually & commit the changed files
git commit -a --untracked-files=no -m "ci(followup): $SR_TAG to develop"
# Switch to the development branch
git switch develop
# Merge the followup branch into the development one using the --no-ff option
git merge --no-ff "followup/$SR_TAG"
# Remove the followup branch
git branch -d "followup/$SR_TAG"
# Push the changes
git push
If we can t push directly to develop we can create a MR pushing the followup branch after committing the changes, but we have to make sure that we don t squash the commits when merging or it will not work as we want.

Russ Allbery: Review: The Blackwing War

Review: The Blackwing War, by K.B. Spangler
Series: Deep Witches #1
Publisher: A Girl and Her Fed Books
Copyright: March 2021
ISBN: blackwing-war
Format: Kindle
Pages: 284
The Blackwing War is the first book of a projected space opera series. I previously reviewed Stoneskin, which was intended as a prelude to this series. In theory you can start here, but I would read Stoneskin first. Tembi is a Witch, which means she can ask the Deep to do things for her. At the start of the book, those things mostly involve disarming bombs. The galaxy is in the middle of a genocidal war between the well-equipped and all-but-officially supported Sagittarius Armed Forces, also known as the Blackwings, and the Sabenta resistance movement. To settle the galaxy, humans fiddled with their genes to adapt themselves to otherwise-hostile planets. The Blackwings take exception, in the tradition of racist humans throughout history, and think it's time to purify human bloodlines again. Both sides are using bombs. The Deep is the brilliant idea of this series. It seems to exist everywhere simultaneously, it's alive, it adores teleporting things, and it's basically a giant cosmic puppy. Humans are nearly incomprehensible to the Deep, and it's nearly incomprehensible to humans, but it somehow picks out specific humans who can (sort of) understand it and whom it gets attached to and somehow makes immortal. These are the Witches, and they have turned the Deep into the logistical backbone of human civilization. Essentially all commerce and travel is now done through Deep teleportation, requested by a Witch and coordinated by Lancaster, the Witches' governing council. The exception is war. Lancaster is strictly neutral; it does not take sides, even in the face of an ongoing genocide, and it refuses to transport military ships, any type of weapons, or even war refugees. Domino, Lancaster's cynically manipulative leader, is determined to protect its special privileges and position at all costs. Tembi is one of the quasi-leaders of a resistance against that position, but even they are reluctant to ask the Deep to take sides in a war. To them, the Deep is a living magical creature that they are exploiting, and which also tends to be a bundle of nerves. Using it as a weapon feels like a step too far. That's how the situation lies at the start of this book when, after a successful bomb defusing, the Deep whisks Tembi away to watch an unknown weapon blow up a moon. A lot of this book consists of Tembi unraveling a couple of mysteries, starting with the apparent experimental bomb and then expanding to include the apparent drugging and disappearance of her former classmate. The low-grade war gets worse throughout, leaving Tembi torn between the justifications for Lancaster's neutrality and her strong sense of basic morality. The moments when Tembi gets angry enough or impatient enough to take action are the best parts, but a lot of this book is quite grim. Do not expect all to be resolved in a happy ending. There is some catharsis, but The Blackwing War is also clearly setup for a longer series. Tembi is a great character and the Deep is even better. I thoroughly enjoyed reading about both of them, and Tembi's relationship with the Deep is a delight. Usually I get frustrated by baffling incomprehensibility as a plot devices, but Spangler pulls it off as well as I've seen it done. But unfortunately, this book is firmly in the "gets worse before it will get better" part of the overall story arc, and the sequels have not yet appeared. The Blackwing War ends on a cliffhanger that portends huge changes for the characters and the setting, and if I had the next book to rush into, I wouldn't mind the grimness as much. As is, it was a somewhat depressing reading experience despite its charms, and despite a somewhat optimistic ending (that I doubt will truly resolve anything). I think the world-building elements were a touch predictable, and I wish Spangler wouldn't have her characters keep trying to justify Domino's creepy, abusive, and manipulative actions. But the characters are so much fun, and the idea of the Deep as a character is such a delight, that I am hooked on this series regardless. Recommended, although I will (hopefully) be able to recommend it more heartily once at least one sequel has been published. Content warnings: genocide, racism, violent death. Rating: 7 out of 10

23 December 2023

Russ Allbery: Review: Bookshops & Bonedust

Review: Bookshops & Bonedust, by Travis Baldree
Series: Legends & Lattes #2
Publisher: Tor
Copyright: 2023
ISBN: 1-250-88611-2
Format: Kindle
Pages: 337
Bookshops & Bonedust is a prequel to the cozy fantasy Legends & Lattes. You can read them in either order, although the epilogue of Bookshops & Bonedust spoils (somewhat guessable) plot developments in Legends & Lattes. Viv is a new member of the mercenary troop Rackam's Ravens and is still possessed of more enthusiasm than sense. As the story opens, she charges well ahead of her allies and nearly gets killed by a pike through the leg. She survives, but her leg needs time to heal and she is not up to the further pursuit of a necromancer. Rackam pays for a room and a doctor in the small seaside town of Murk and leaves her there to recuperate. The Ravens will pick her up when they come back through town, whenever that is. Viv is very quickly bored out of her skull. On a whim, and after some failures to find something else to occupy her, she tries a run-down local bookstore and promptly puts her foot through the boardwalk outside it. That's the start of an improbable friendship with the proprietor, a rattkin named Fern with a knack for book recommendations and a serious cash flow problem. Viv, being Viv, soon decides to make herself useful. The good side and bad side of this book are the same: it's essentially the same book as Legends & Lattes, but this time with a bookstore. There's a medieval sword and sorcery setting, a wide variety of humanoid species, a local business that needs love and attention (this time because it's failing instead of new), a lurking villain, an improbable store animal (this time a gryphlet that I found less interesting than the cat of the coffee shop), and a whole lot of found family. It turns out I was happy to read that story again, and there were some things I liked better in this version. I find bookstores more interesting than coffee shops, and although Viv and Fern go through a similar process of copying features of a modern bookstore, this felt less strained than watching Viv reinvent the precise equipment and menu of a modern coffee shop in a fantasy world. Also, Fern is an absolute delight, probably my favorite character in either of the books. I love the way that she uses book recommendations as a way of asking questions and guessing at answers about other people. As with the first book, Baldree's world-building is utterly unconcerned with trying to follow the faux-medieval conventions of either sword and sorcery or D&D-style role-playing games. On one hand, I like this; most of that so-called medievalism is nonsense anyway, and there's no reason why fantasy with D&D-style species diversity should be set in a medieval world. On the other hand, this world seems exactly like a US small town except the tavern also has rooms for rent, there are roving magical armies, and everyone fights with swords for some reason. It feels weirdly anachronistic, and I can't tell if that's because I've been brainwashed into thinking fantasy has to be medievaloid or if it's a true criticism of the book. I was reminded somewhat of reading Jack McDevitt's SF novels, which are supposedly set in the far future but are indistinguishable from 1980s suburbia except with flying cars. The other oddity with this book is that the reader of the series knows Viv isn't going to stay. This is the problem with writing a second iteration of this story as a prequel. I see why Baldree did it the story wouldn't have worked if Viv were already established but it casts a bit of a pall over the cheeriness of the story. Baldree to his credit confronts this directly, weaves it into the relationships, and salvages it a bit more in the epilogue, but it gave the story a sort of preemptive wistfulness that was at odds with how I wanted to read it. But, despite that, the strength of this book are the characters. Viv is a good person who helps where she can, which sounds like a simple thing but is so restful to read about. This book features her first meeting with the gnome Gallina, who is always a delight. There are delicious baked goods from a dwarf, a grumpy doctor, a grumpier city guard, and a whole cast of people who felt complicated and normal and essentially decent. I'm not sure the fantasy elements do anything for this book, or this series, other than marketing and the convenience of a few plot devices. Even though one character literally disappears into a satchel, it felt like Baldree could have written roughly the same story as a contemporary novel without a hint of genre. But that's not really a complaint, since the marketing works. I would not have read this series if it had been contemporary novels, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It's a slice of life novel about kind and decent people for readers who are bored by contemporary settings and would rather read fantasy. Works for me. I'm hoping Baldree finds other stories, since I'm not sure I want to read this one several more times, but twice was not too much. If you liked Legends & Lattes and are thinking "how can I get more of that," here's the book for you. If you haven't read Legends & Lattes, I think I would recommend reading this one first. It does many of the same things, it's a bit more polished, and then you can read Viv's adventures in internal chronological order. Rating: 8 out of 10

22 December 2023

Gunnar Wolf: Pushing some reviews this way

Over roughly the last year and a half I have been participating as a reviewer in ACM s Computing Reviews, and have even been honored as a Featured Reviewer. Given I have long enjoyed reading friends reviews of their reading material (particularly, hats off to the very active Russ Allbery, who both beats all of my frequency expectations (I could never sustain the rythm he reads to!) and holds documented records for his >20 years as a book reader, with far more clarity and readability than I can aim for!), I decided to explicitly share my reviews via this blog, as the audience is somewhat congruent; I will also link here some reviews that were not approved for publication, clearly marking them so. I will probably work on wrangling my Jekyll site to display an (auto-)updated page and RSS feed for the reviews. In the meantime, the reviews I have published are:

Russ Allbery: Review: Wintersmith

Review: Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett
Series: Discworld #35
Publisher: Clarion Books
Copyright: 2006
Printing: 2007
ISBN: 0-06-089033-9
Format: Mass market
Pages: 450
Wintersmith is the 35th Discworld novel and the 3rd Tiffany Aching novel. You could probably start here, since understanding the backstory isn't vital for following the plot, but I'm not sure why you would. Tiffany is now training with Miss Treason, a 113-year-old witch who is quite different in her approach from Miss Level, Tiffany's mentor in A Hat Full of Sky. Miss Level was the unassuming and constantly helpful glue that held the neighborhood together. Miss Treason is the judge; her neighbors are scared of her and proud of being scared of her, since that means they have a proper witch who can see into their heads and sort out their problems. On the surface, they're quite different; part of the story of this book is Tiffany learning to see the similarities. First, though, Miss Treason rushes Tiffany to a strange midnight Morris Dance, without any explanation. The Morris Dance usually celebrates the coming of spring and is at the center of a village party, so Tiffany is quite confused by seeing it danced on a dark and windy night in late autumn. But there is a hole in the dance where the Fool normally is, and Tiffany can't keep herself from joining it. This proves to be a mistake. That space was left for someone very different from Tiffany, and now she's entangled herself in deep magic that she doesn't understand. This is another Pratchett novel where the main storyline didn't do much for me. All the trouble stems from Miss Treason being maddeningly opaque, and while she did warn Tiffany, she did so in that way that guarantees a protagonist of a middle-grade novel will ignore. The Wintersmith is a boring, one-note quasi-villain, and the plot mainly revolves around elemental powers being dumber than a sack of hammers. The one thing I will say about the main plot is that the magic Tiffany danced into is entangled with courtship and romance, Tiffany turns thirteen over the course of this book, and yet this is not weird and uncomfortable reading the way it would be in the hands of many other authors. Pratchett has a keen eye for the age range that he's targeting. The first awareness that there is such a thing as romance that might be relevant to oneself pairs nicely with the Wintersmith's utter confusion at how Tiffany's intrusion unbalanced his dance. This is a very specific age and experience that I think a lot of authors would shy away from, particularly with a female protagonist, and I thought Pratchett handled it adroitly. I personally found the Wintersmith's awkward courting tedious and annoying, but that's more about me than about the book. As with A Hat Full of Sky, though, everything other than the main plot was great. It is becoming obvious how much Tiffany and Granny Weatherwax have in common, and that Granny Weatherwax recognizes this and is training Tiffany herself. This is high-quality coming-of-age material, not in the traditional fantasy sense of chosen ones and map explorations, but in the sense of slowly-developing empathy and understanding of people who think differently than you do. Tiffany, like Granny Weatherwax, has very little patience with nonsense, and her irritation with stupidity is one of her best characteristics. But she's learning how to blunt it long enough to pay attention, and to understand how people she doesn't like can still be the right people for specific situations. I particularly loved how Granny carries on with a feud at the same time that Tiffany is learning to let go of one. It's not a contradiction or hypocrisy; it's a sign that Tiffany is entitled to her judgments and feelings, but has to learn how to keep them in their place and not let them take over. One of the great things about the Tiffany Aching books is that the villages are also characters. We don't see that much of the individual people, but one of the things Tiffany is learning is how to see the interpersonal dynamics and patterns of village life. Somehow the feelings of irritation and exasperation fade once you understand people's motives and see more sides to their character. There is a lot more Nanny Ogg in this book than there has been in the last few, and that reminded me of how much I love her character. She has a completely different approach than Granny Weatherwax, but it's just as effective in different ways. She's also the perfect witch to have around when you've stumbled into a stylized love story that you don't want to be a part of, and yet find oddly fascinating. It says something about the skill of Pratchett's characterization that I could enjoy a book this much while having no interest in the main plot. The Witches have always been great characters, but somehow they're even better when seen through Tiffany's perspective. Good stuff; if you liked any of the other Tiffany Aching books, you will like this as well. Followed by Making Money in publication order. The next Tiffany Aching novel is I Shall Wear Midnight. Rating: 8 out of 10

21 December 2023

Russell Coker: Links December 2023

David Brin wrote an insightful blog post about the latest round of UFO delusion [1]. There aren t a heap of scientists secretly working on UFOs. David Brin wrote an informative and insightful blog post about rich doomsday preppers who want to destroy democracy [2]. Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting article about how ChatGPT helps people write letters and how that decreases the value of the letter [3]. What can we do to show that letters mean something? Hand deliver them? Pay someone to hand deliver them? Cory concentrates on legal letters and petitions but this can apply to other things too. David Brin wrote an informative blog post about billionaires prepping for disaster and causing the disaster [4]. David Brin wrote an insightful Wired article about ways of dealing with potential rogue AIs [5]. David Brin has an interesting take on government funded science [6]. Bruce Schneier wrote an insightful article about AI Risks which is worth reading [7]. Ximion wrote a great blog post about how tp use AppStream metadata to indicate what type of hardware/environment is required to use an app [8]. This is great for the recent use of Debian on phones and can provide real benefits for more traditional uses (like all those servers that accidentally got LibreOffice etc installed). Also for Convergence it will be good to have the app launcher take note of this, when your phone isn t connected to a dock there s no point offering to launch apps that require a full desktop screen. Russ Albery wrote an interesting summary of the book Going Infinite about the Sam Bankman-Fried FTX fiasco [9]. That summary really makes Sam sound Autistic. Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful article Microincentives and Enshittification explaining why Google search has to suck [10]. Charles Stross posted the text of a lecture he gave titles We re Sorry We Created the Torment Nexus [11] about sci-fi ideas that shouldn t be implemented. The Daily WTF has many stories of corporate computer stupidity, but The White Appliphant is one of the most epic [12]. The Verge has an informative article on new laws in the US and the EU to give a right to repair and how this explains the sudden change to 7 year support for Pixel phones [13].
Related posts:
  1. Links September 2020 MD5 cracker, find plain text that matches MD5 hash [1]....
  2. Links December 2022 Charles Stross wrote an informative summary of the problems with...
  3. Links May 2023 Petter Reinholdtsen wrote an interesting blog post about their work...

Russ Allbery: Review: The Box

Review: The Box, by Marc Levinson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Copyright: 2006, 2008
Printing: 2008
ISBN: 0-691-13640-8
Format: Trade paperback
Pages: 278
The shipping container as we know it is only about 65 years old. Shipping things in containers is obviously much older; we've been doing that for longer than we've had ships. But the standardized metal box, set on a rail car or loaded with hundreds of its indistinguishable siblings into an enormous, specially-designed cargo ship, became economically significant only recently. Today it is one of the oft-overlooked foundations of global supply chains. The startlingly low cost of container shipping is part of why so much of what US consumers buy comes from Asia, and why most complex machinery is assembled in multiple countries from parts gathered from a dizzying variety of sources. Marc Levinson's The Box is a history of container shipping, from its (arguable) beginnings in the trailer bodies loaded on Pan-Atlantic Steamship Corporation's Ideal-X in 1956 to just-in-time international supply chains in the 2000s. It's a popular history that falls on the academic side, with a full index and 60 pages of citations and other notes. (Per my normal convention, those pages aren't included in the sidebar page count.) The Box is organized mostly chronologically, but Levinson takes extended detours into labor relations and container standardization at the appropriate points in the timeline. The book is very US-centric. Asian, European, and Australian shipping is discussed mostly in relation to trade with the US, and Africa is barely mentioned. I don't have the background to know whether this is historically correct for container shipping or is an artifact of Levinson's focus. Many single-item popular histories focus on something that involves obvious technological innovation (paint pigments) or deep cultural resonance (salt) or at least entertaining quirkiness (punctuation marks, resignation letters). Shipping containers are important but simple and boring. The least interesting chapter in The Box covers container standardization, in which a whole bunch of people had boring meetings, wrote some things done, discovered many of the things they wrote down were dumb, wrote more things down, met with different people to have more meetings, published a standard that partly reflected the fixations of that one guy who is always involved in standards discussions, and then saw that standard be promptly ignored by the major market players. You may be wondering if that describes the whole book. It doesn't, but not because of the shipping containers. The Box is interesting because the process of economic change is interesting, and container shipping is almost entirely about business processes rather than technology. Levinson starts the substance of the book with a description of shipping before standardized containers. This was the most effective, and probably the most informative, chapter. Beyond some vague ideas picked up via cultural osmosis, I had no idea how cargo shipping worked. Levinson gives the reader a memorable feel for the sheer amount of physical labor involved in loading and unloading a ship with mixed cargo (what's called "breakbulk" cargo to distinguish it from bulk cargo like coal or wheat that fills an entire hold). It's not just the effort of hauling barrels, bales, or boxes with cranes or raw muscle power, although that is significant. It's also the need to touch every piece of cargo to move it, inventory it, warehouse it, and then load it on a truck or train. The idea of container shipping is widely attributed, including by Levinson, to Malcom McLean, a trucking magnate who became obsessed with the idea of what we now call intermodal transport: using the same container for goods on ships, railroads, and trucks so that the contents don't have to be unpacked and repacked at each transfer point. Levinson uses his career as an anchor for the story, from his acquisition of Pan-American Steamship Corporation to pursue his original idea (backed by private equity and debt, in a very modern twist), through his years running Sea-Land as the first successful major container shipper, and culminating in his disastrous attempted return to shipping by acquiring United States Lines. I am dubious of Great Man narratives in history books, and I think Levinson may be overselling McLean's role. Container shipping was an obvious idea that the industry had been talking about for decades. Even Levinson admits that, despite a few gestures at giving McLean central credit. Everyone involved in shipping understood that cargo handling was the most expensive and time-consuming part, and that if one could minimize cargo handling at the docks by loading and unloading full containers that didn't have to be opened, shipping costs would be much lower (and profits higher). The idea wasn't the hard part. McLean was the first person to pull it off at scale, thanks to some audacious economic risks and a willingness to throw sharp elbows and play politics, but it seems likely that someone else would have played that role if McLean hadn't existed. Container shipping didn't happen earlier because achieving that cost savings required a huge expenditure of capital and a major disruption of a transportation industry that wasn't interested in being disrupted. The ships had to be remodeled and eventually replaced; manufacturing had to change; railroad and trucking in theory had to change (in practice, intermodal transport; McLean's obsession, didn't happen at scale until much later); pricing had to be entirely reworked; logistical tracking of goods had to be done much differently; and significant amounts of extremely expensive equipment to load and unload heavy containers had to be designed, built, and installed. McLean's efforts proved the cost savings was real and compelling, but it still took two decades before the shipping industry reconstructed itself around containers. That interim period is where this history becomes a labor story, and that's where Levinson's biases become somewhat distracting. In the United States, loading and unloading of cargo ships was done by unionized longshoremen through a bizarre but complex and long-standing system of contract hiring. The cost savings of container shipping comes almost completely from the loss of work for longshoremen. It's a classic replacement of labor with capital; the work done by gangs of twenty or more longshoreman is instead done by a single crane operator at much higher speed and efficiency. The longshoreman unions therefore opposed containerization and launched numerous strikes and other labor actions to delay use of containers, force continued hiring that containers made unnecessary, or win buyouts and payoffs for current longshoremen. Levinson is trying to write a neutral history and occasionally shows some sympathy for longshoremen, but they still get the Luddite treatment in this book: the doomed reactionaries holding back progress. Longshoremen had a vigorous and powerful union that won better working conditions structured in ways that look absurd to outsiders, such as requiring that ships hire twice as many men as necessary so that half of them could get paid while not working. The unions also had a reputation for corruption that Levinson stresses constantly, and theft of breakbulk cargo during loading and warehousing was common. One of the interesting selling points for containers was that lossage from theft during shipping apparently decreased dramatically. It's obvious that the surface demand of the longshoremen unions, that either containers not be used or that just as many manual laborers be hired for container shipping as for earlier breakbulk shipping, was impossible, and that the profession as it existed in the 1950s was doomed. But beneath those facts, and the smoke screen of Levinson's obvious distaste for their unions, is a real question about what society owes workers whose jobs are eliminated by major shifts in business practices. That question of fairness becomes more pointed when one realizes that this shift was massively subsidized by US federal and local governments. McLean's Sea-Land benefited from direct government funding and subsidized navy surplus ships, massive port construction in New Jersey with public funds, and a sweetheart logistics contract from the US military to supply troops fighting the Vietnam War that was so generous that the return voyage was free and every container Sea-Land picked up from Japanese ports was pure profit. The US shipping industry was heavily government-supported, particularly in the early days when the labor conflicts were starting. Levinson notes all of this, but never draws the contrast between the massive support for shipping corporations and the complete lack of formal support for longshoremen. There are hard ethical questions about what society owes displaced workers even in a pure capitalist industry transformation, and this was very far from pure capitalism. The US government bankrolled large parts of the growth of container shipping, but the only way that longshoremen could get part of that money was through strikes to force payouts from private shipping companies. There are interesting questions of social and ethical history here that would require careful disentangling of the tendency of any group to oppose disruptive change and fairness questions of who gets government support and who doesn't. They will have to wait for another book; Levinson never mentions them. There were some things about this book that annoyed me, but overall it's a solid work of popular history and deserves its fame. Levinson's account is easy to follow, specific without being tedious, and backed by voluminous notes. It's not the most compelling story on its own merits; you have to have some interest in logistics and economics to justify reading the entire saga. But it's the sort of history that gives one a sense of the fractal complexity of any area of human endeavor, and I usually find those worth reading. Recommended if you like this sort of thing. Rating: 7 out of 10

20 December 2023

Ulrike Uhlig: How volunteer work in F/LOSS exacerbates pre-existing lines of oppression, and what that has to do with low diversity

This is a post I wrote in June 2022, but did not publish back then. After first publishing it in December 2023, a perfectionist insecure part of me unpublished it again. After receiving positive feedback, i slightly amended and republish it now. In this post, I talk about unpaid work in F/LOSS, taking on the example of hackathons, and why, in my opinion, the expectation of volunteer work is hurting diversity. Disclaimer: I don t have all the answers, only some ideas and questions.

Previous findings In 2006, the Flosspols survey searched to explain the role of gender in free/libre/open source software (F/LOSS) communities because an earlier [study] revealed a significant discrepancy in the proportion of men to women. It showed that just about 1.5% of F/LOSS community members were female at that time, compared with 28% in proprietary software (which is also a low number). Their key findings were, to name just a few:
  • that F/LOSS rewards the producing code rather than the producing software. It thereby puts most emphasis on a particular skill set. Other activities such as interface design or documentation are understood as less technical and therefore less prestigious.
  • The reliance on long hours of intensive computing in writing successful code means that men, who in general assume that time outside of waged labour is theirs , are freer to participate than women, who normally still assume a disproportionate amount of domestic responsibilities. Female F/LOSS participants, however, seem to be able to allocate a disproportionate larger share of their leisure time for their F/LOSS activities. This gives an indication that women who are not able to spend as much time on voluntary activities have difficulties to integrate into the community.
We also know from the 2016 Debian survey, published in 2021, that a majority of Debian contributors are employed, rather than being contractors, and rather than being students. Also, 95.5% of respondents to that study were men between the ages of 30 and 49, highly educated, with the largest groups coming from Germany, France, USA, and the UK. The study found that only 20% of the respondents were being paid to work on Debian. Half of these 20% estimate that the amount of work on Debian they are being paid for corresponds to less than 20% of the work they do there. On the other side, there are 14% of those who are being paid for Debian work who declared that 80-100% of the work they do in Debian is remunerated.

So, if a majority of people is not paid, why do they work on F/LOSS? Or: What are the incentives of free software? In 2021, Louis-Philippe V ronneau aka Pollo, who is not only a Debian Developer but also an economist, published his thesis What are the incentive structures of free software (The actual thesis was written in French). One very interesting finding Pollo pointed out is this one:
Indeed, while we have proven that there is a strong and significative correlation between the income and the participation in a free/libre software project, it is not possible for us to pronounce ourselves about the causality of this link.
In the French original text:
En effet, si nous avons prouv qu il existe une corr lation forte et significative entre le salaire et la participation un projet libre, il ne nous est pas possible de nous prononcer sur la causalit de ce lien.
Said differently, it is certain that there is a relationship between income and F/LOSS contribution, but it s unclear whether working on free/libre software ultimately helps finding a well paid job, or if having a well paid job is the cause enabling work on free/libre software. I would like to scratch this question a bit further, mostly relying on my own observations, experiences, and discussions with F/LOSS contributors.

Volunteer work is unpaid work We often hear of hackathons, hack weeks, or hackfests. I ve been at some such events myself, Tails organized one, the IETF regularly organizes hackathons, and last week (June 2022!) I saw an invitation for a hack week with the Torproject. This type of event generally last several days. While the people who organize these events are being paid by the organizations they work for, participants on the other hand are generally joining on a volunteer basis. Who can we expect to show up at this type of event under these circumstances as participants? To answer this question, I collected some ideas:
  • people who have an employer sponsoring their work
  • people who have a funder/grant sponsoring their work
  • people who have a high income and can take time off easily (in that regard, remember the Gender Pay Gap, women often earn less for the same work than men)
  • people who rely on family wealth (living off an inheritance, living on rights payments from a famous grandparent - I m not making these situations up, there are actual people in such financially favorable situations )
  • people who don t need much money because they don t have to pay rent or pay low rent (besides house owners that category includes people who live in squats or have social welfare paying for their rent, people who live with parents or caretakers)
  • people who don t need to do care work (for children, elderly family members, pets. Remember that most care work is still done by women.)
  • students who have financial support or are in a situation in which they do not yet need to generate a lot of income
  • people who otherwise have free time at their disposal
So, who, in your opinion, fits these unwritten requirements? Looking at this list, it s pretty clear to me why we d mostly find white men from the Global North, generally with higher education in hackathons and F/LOSS development. ( Great, they re a culture fit! ) Yes, there will also always be some people of marginalized groups who will attend such events because they expect to network, to find an internship, to find a better job in the future, or to add their participation to their curriculum. To me, this rings a bunch of alarm bells.

Low diversity in F/LOSS projects a mirror of the distribution of wealth I believe that the lack of diversity in F/LOSS is first of all a mirror of the distribution of wealth on a larger level. And by wealth I m referring to financial wealth as much as to social wealth in the sense of Bourdieu: Families of highly educated parents socially reproducing privilege by allowing their kids to attend better schools, supporting and guiding them in their choices of study and work, providing them with relations to internships acting as springboards into well paid jobs and so on. That said, we should ask ourselves as well:

Do F/LOSS projects exacerbate existing lines of oppression by relying on unpaid work? Let s look again at the causality question of Pollo s research (in my words):
It is unclear whether working on free/libre software ultimately helps finding a well paid job, or if having a well paid job is the cause enabling work on free/libre software.
Maybe we need to imagine this cause-effect relationship over time: as a student, without children and lots of free time, hopefully some money from the state or the family, people can spend time on F/LOSS, collect experience, earn recognition - and later find a well-paid job and make unpaid F/LOSS contributions into a hobby, cementing their status in the community, while at the same time generating a sense of well-being from working on the common good. This is a quite common scenario. As the Flosspols study revealed however, boys often get their own computer at the age of 14, while girls get one only at the age of 20. (These numbers might be slightly different now, and possibly many people don t own an actual laptop or desktop computer anymore, instead they own mobile devices which are not exactly inciting them to look behind the surface, take apart, learn, appropriate technology.) In any case, the above scenario does not allow for people who join F/LOSS later in life, eg. changing careers, to find their place. I believe that F/LOSS projects cannot expect to have more women, people of color, people from working class backgrounds, people from outside of Germany, France, USA, UK, Australia, and Canada on board as long as volunteer work is the status quo and waged labour an earned privilege.

Wait, are you criticizing all these wonderful people who sacrifice their free time to work towards common good? No, that s definitely not my intention, I m glad that F/LOSS exists, and the F/LOSS ecosystem has always represented a small utopia to me that is worth cherishing and nurturing. However, I think we still need to talk more about the lack of diversity, and investigate it further.

Some types of work are never being paid Besides free work at hacking events, let me also underline that a lot of work in F/LOSS is not considered payable work (yes, that s an oxymoron!). Which F/LOSS project for example, has ever paid translators a decent fee? Which project has ever considered that doing the social glue work, often done by women in the projects, is work that should be paid for? Which F/LOSS projects pay the people who do their Debian packaging rather than relying on yet another already well-paid white man who can afford doing this work for free all the while holding up how great the F/LOSS ecosystem is? And how many people on opensourcedesign jobs are looking to get their logo or website done for free? (Isn t that heart icon appealing to your altruistic empathy?) In my experience even F/LOSS projects which are trying to do the right thing by paying everyone the same amount of money per hour run into issues when it turns out that not all hours are equal and that some types of work do not qualify for remuneration at all or that the rules for the clocking of work are not universally applied in the same way by everyone.

Not every interaction should have a monetary value, but Some of you want to keep working without being paid, because that feels a bit like communism within capitalism, it makes you feel good to contribute to the greater good while not having the system determine your value over money. I hear you. I ve been there (and sometimes still am). But as long as we live in this system, even though we didn t choose to and maybe even despise it - communism is not about working for free, it s about getting paid equally and adequately. We may not think about it while under the age of 40 or 45, but working without adequate financial compensation, even half of the time, will ultimately result in not being able to care for oneself when sick, when old. And while this may not be an issue for people who inherit wealth, or have an otherwise safe economical background, eg. an academic salary, it is a huge problem and barrier for many people coming out of the working or service classes. (Oh and please, don t repeat the neoliberal lie that everyone can achieve whatever they aim for, if they just tried hard enough. French research shows that (in France) one has only 30% chance to become a class defector , and change social class upwards. But I managed to get out and move up, so everyone can! - well, if you believe that I m afraid you might be experiencing survivor bias.)

Not all bodies are equally able We should also be aware that not all of us can work with the same amount of energy either. There is yet another category of people who are excluded by the expectation of volunteer work, either because the waged labour they do already eats all of their energy, or because their bodies are not disposed to do that much work, for example because of mental health issues - such as depression-, or because of physical disabilities.

When organizing events relying on volunteer work please think about these things. Yes, you can tell people that they should ask their employer to pay them for attending a hackathon - but, as I ve hopefully shown, that would not do it for many people, especially newcomers. Instead, you could propose a fund to make it possible that people who would not normally attend can attend. DebConf is a good example for having done this for many years.

Conclusively I would like to urge free software projects that have a budget and directly pay some people from it to map where they rely on volunteer work and how this hurts diversity in their project. How do you or your project exacerbate pre-existing lines of oppression by granting or not granting monetary value to certain types of work? What is it that you take for granted? As always, I m curious about your feedback!

Worth a read These ideas are far from being new. Ashe Dryden s well-researched post The ethics of unpaid labor and the OSS community dates back to 2013 and is as important as it was ten years ago.

Ryan Kavanagh: Battery charge start and stop threshold on OpenBSD

I often use my laptops as portable desktops: they are plugged into AC power and an external monitor/keyboard 95% of time. Unfortunately, continuous charging is hard on the battery. To mitigate this, ThinkPads have customizable start and stop charging thresholds, such that the battery will only start charging if its level falls below the start threshold, and it will stop charging as soon as it reaches the stop threshold. Suggested thresholds from Lenovo s battery team can be found in this comment. You can set these thresholds on Linux using tlp-stat(8), and you can make the values persist across reboots by setting START_CHARGE_THRESH_BAT0 and STOP_CHARGE_THERSH_BAT0 in /etc/tlp.conf. I recently installed OpenBSD on my work ThinkPad, but struggled to find any information on how to set the thresholds under OpenBSD. After only finding a dead-end thread from 2021 on misc@, I started digging around on how to implement it myself. The acpithinkpad and acpibat drivers looked promising, and a bit of Google-fu lead me to the following small announcement in the OpenBSD 7.4 release notes:
New sysctl(2) nodes for battery management, hw.battery.charge*. Support them with acpithinkpad(4) and aplsmc(4).
Lo and behold, setting the start and stop threshold in OpenBSD is simply a matter of setting hw.battery.chargestart and hw.battery.chargestop with sysctl. The documentation was not committed in time for the 7.4 release, but you can read it in -CURRENT s sysctl(2). I personally set the following values in /etc/sysctl.conf: 
hw.battery.chargestart=40
hw.battery.chargestop=60

Melissa Wen: The Rainbow Treasure Map Talk: Advanced color management on Linux with AMD/Steam Deck.

Last week marked a major milestone for me: the AMD driver-specific color management properties reached the upstream linux-next! And to celebrate, I m happy to share the slides notes from my 2023 XDC talk, The Rainbow Treasure Map along with the individual recording that just dropped last week on youtube talk about happy coincidences!

Steam Deck Rainbow: Treasure Map & Magic Frogs While I may be bubbly and chatty in everyday life, the stage isn t exactly my comfort zone (hallway talks are more my speed). But the journey of developing the AMD color management properties was so full of discoveries that I simply had to share the experience. Witnessing the fantastic work of Jeremy and Joshua bring it all to life on the Steam Deck OLED was like uncovering magical ingredients and whipping up something truly enchanting. For XDC 2023, we split our Rainbow journey into two talks. My focus, The Rainbow Treasure Map, explored the new color features we added to the Linux kernel driver, diving deep into the hardware capabilities of AMD/Steam Deck. Joshua then followed with The Rainbow Frogs and showed the breathtaking color magic released on Gamescope thanks to the power unlocked by the kernel driver s Steam Deck color properties.

Packing a Rainbow into 15 Minutes I had so much to tell, but a half-slot talk meant crafting a concise presentation. To squeeze everything into 15 minutes (and calm my pre-talk jitters a bit!), I drafted and practiced those slides and notes countless times. So grab your map, and let s embark on the Rainbow journey together! Slide 1: The Rainbow Treasure Map - Advanced Color Management on Linux with AMD/SteamDeck Intro: Hi, I m Melissa from Igalia and welcome to the Rainbow Treasure Map, a talk about advanced color management on Linux with AMD/SteamDeck. Slide 2: List useful links for this technical talk Useful links: First of all, if you are not used to the topic, you may find these links useful.
  1. XDC 2022 - I m not an AMD expert, but - Melissa Wen
  2. XDC 2022 - Is HDR Harder? - Harry Wentland
  3. XDC 2022 Lightning - HDR Workshop Summary - Harry Wentland
  4. Color management and HDR documentation for FOSS graphics - Pekka Paalanen et al.
  5. Cinematic Color - 2012 SIGGRAPH course notes - Jeremy Selan
  6. AMD Driver-specific Properties for Color Management on Linux (Part 1) - Melissa Wen
Slide 3: Why do we need advanced color management on Linux? Context: When we talk about colors in the graphics chain, we should keep in mind that we have a wide variety of source content colorimetry, a variety of output display devices and also the internal processing. Users expect consistent color reproduction across all these devices. The userspace can use GPU-accelerated color management to get it. But this also requires an interface with display kernel drivers that is currently missing from the DRM/KMS framework. Slide 4: Describe our work on AMD driver-specific color properties Since April, I ve been bothering the DRM community by sending patchsets from the work of me and Joshua to add driver-specific color properties to the AMD display driver. In parallel, discussions on defining a generic color management interface are still ongoing in the community. Moreover, we are still not clear about the diversity of color capabilities among hardware vendors. To bridge this gap, we defined a color pipeline for Gamescope that fits the latest versions of AMD hardware. It delivers advanced color management features for gamut mapping, HDR rendering, SDR on HDR, and HDR on SDR. Slide 5: Describe the AMD/SteamDeck - our hardware AMD/Steam Deck hardware: AMD frequently releases new GPU and APU generations. Each generation comes with a DCN version with display hardware improvements. Therefore, keep in mind that this work uses the AMD Steam Deck hardware and its kernel driver. The Steam Deck is an APU with a DCN3.01 display driver, a DCN3 family. It s important to have this information since newer AMD DCN drivers inherit implementations from previous families but aldo each generation of AMD hardware may introduce new color capabilities. Therefore I recommend you to familiarize yourself with the hardware you are working on. Slide 6: Diagram with the three layers of the AMD display driver on Linux The AMD display driver in the kernel space: It consists of three layers, (1) the DRM/KMS framework, (2) the AMD Display Manager, and (3) the AMD Display Core. We extended the color interface exposed to userspace by leveraging existing DRM resources and connecting them using driver-specific functions for color property management. Slide 7: Three-layers diagram highlighting AMD Display Manager, DM - the layer that connects DC and DRM Bridging DC color capabilities and the DRM API required significant changes in the color management of AMD Display Manager - the Linux-dependent part that connects the AMD DC interface to the DRM/KMS framework. Slide 8: Three-layers diagram highlighting AMD Display Core, DC - the shared code The AMD DC is the OS-agnostic layer. Its code is shared between platforms and DCN versions. Examining this part helps us understand the AMD color pipeline and hardware capabilities, since the machinery for hardware settings and resource management are already there. Slide 9: Diagram of the AMD Display Core Next architecture with main elements and data flow The newest architecture for AMD display hardware is the AMD Display Core Next. Slide 10: Diagram of the AMD Display Core Next where only DPP and MPC blocks are highlighted In this architecture, two blocks have the capability to manage colors:
  • Display Pipe and Plane (DPP) - for pre-blending adjustments;
  • Multiple Pipe/Plane Combined (MPC) - for post-blending color transformations.
Let s see what we have in the DRM API for pre-blending color management. Slide 11: Blank slide with no content only a title 'Pre-blending: DRM plane' DRM plane color properties: This is the DRM color management API before blending. Nothing! Except two basic DRM plane properties: color_encoding and color_range for the input colorspace conversion, that is not covered by this work. Slide 12: Diagram with color capabilities and structures in AMD DC layer without any DRM plane color interface (before blending), only the DRM CRTC color interface for post blending In case you re not familiar with AMD shared code, what we need to do is basically draw a map and navigate there! We have some DRM color properties after blending, but nothing before blending yet. But much of the hardware programming was already implemented in the AMD DC layer, thanks to the shared code. Slide 13: Previous Diagram with a rectangle to highlight the empty space in the DRM plane interface that will be filled by AMD plane properties Still both the DRM interface and its connection to the shared code were missing. That s when the search begins! Slide 14: Color Pipeline Diagram with the plane color interface filled by AMD plane properties but without connections to AMD DC resources AMD driver-specific color pipeline: Looking at the color capabilities of the hardware, we arrive at this initial set of properties. The path wasn t exactly like that. We had many iterations and discoveries until reached to this pipeline. Slide 15: Color Pipeline Diagram connecting AMD plane degamma properties, LUT and TF, to AMD DC resources The Plane Degamma is our first driver-specific property before blending. It s used to linearize the color space from encoded values to light linear values. Slide 16: Describe plane degamma properties and hardware capabilities We can use a pre-defined transfer function or a user lookup table (in short, LUT) to linearize the color space. Pre-defined transfer functions for plane degamma are hardcoded curves that go to a specific hardware block called DPP Degamma ROM. It supports the following transfer functions: sRGB EOTF, BT.709 inverse OETF, PQ EOTF, and pure power curves Gamma 2.2, Gamma 2.4 and Gamma 2.6. We also have a one-dimensional LUT. This 1D LUT has four thousand ninety six (4096) entries, the usual 1D LUT size in the DRM/KMS. It s an array of drm_color_lut that goes to the DPP Gamma Correction block. Slide 17: Color Pipeline Diagram connecting AMD plane CTM property to AMD DC resources We also have now a color transformation matrix (CTM) for color space conversion. Slide 18: Describe plane CTM property and hardware capabilities It s a 3x4 matrix of fixed points that goes to the DPP Gamut Remap Block. Both pre- and post-blending matrices were previously gone to the same color block. We worked on detaching them to clear both paths. Now each CTM goes on its own way. Slide 19: Color Pipeline Diagram connecting AMD plane HDR multiplier property to AMD DC resources Next, the HDR Multiplier. HDR Multiplier is a factor applied to the color values of an image to increase their overall brightness. Slide 20: Describe plane HDR mult property and hardware capabilities This is useful for converting images from a standard dynamic range (SDR) to a high dynamic range (HDR). As it can range beyond [0.0, 1.0] subsequent transforms need to use the PQ(HDR) transfer functions. Slide 21: Color Pipeline Diagram connecting AMD plane shaper properties, LUT and TF, to AMD DC resources And we need a 3D LUT. But 3D LUT has a limited number of entries in each dimension, so we want to use it in a colorspace that is optimized for human vision. It means in a non-linear space. To deliver it, userspace may need one 1D LUT before 3D LUT to delinearize content and another one after to linearize content again for blending. Slide 22: Describe plane shaper properties and hardware capabilities The pre-3D-LUT curve is called Shaper curve. Unlike Degamma TF, there are no hardcoded curves for shaper TF, but we can use the AMD color module in the driver to build the following shaper curves from pre-defined coefficients. The color module combines the TF and the user LUT values into the LUT that goes to the DPP Shaper RAM block. Slide 23: Color Pipeline Diagram connecting AMD plane 3D LUT property to AMD DC resources Finally, our rockstar, the 3D LUT. 3D LUT is perfect for complex color transformations and adjustments between color channels. Slide 24: Describe plane 3D LUT property and hardware capabilities 3D LUT is also more complex to manage and requires more computational resources, as a consequence, its number of entries is usually limited. To overcome this restriction, the array contains samples from the approximated function and values between samples are estimated by tetrahedral interpolation. AMD supports 17 and 9 as the size of a single-dimension. Blue is the outermost dimension, red the innermost. Slide 25: Color Pipeline Diagram connecting AMD plane blend properties, LUT and TF, to AMD DC resources As mentioned, we need a post-3D-LUT curve to linearize the color space before blending. This is done by Blend TF and LUT. Slide 26: Describe plane blend properties and hardware capabilities Similar to shaper TF, there are no hardcoded curves for Blend TF. The pre-defined curves are the same as the Degamma block, but calculated by the color module. The resulting LUT goes to the DPP Blend RAM block. Slide 27: Color Pipeline Diagram with all AMD plane color properties connect to AMD DC resources and links showing the conflict between plane and CRTC degamma Now we have everything connected before blending. As a conflict between plane and CRTC Degamma was inevitable, our approach doesn t accept that both are set at the same time. Slide 28: Color Pipeline Diagram connecting AMD CRTC gamma TF property to AMD DC resources We also optimized the conversion of the framebuffer to wire encoding by adding support to pre-defined CRTC Gamma TF. Slide 29: Describe CRTC gamma TF property and hardware capabilities Again, there are no hardcoded curves and TF and LUT are combined by the AMD color module. The same types of shaper curves are supported. The resulting LUT goes to the MPC Gamma RAM block. Slide 30: Color Pipeline Diagram with all AMD driver-specific color properties connect to AMD DC resources Finally, we arrived in the final version of DRM/AMD driver-specific color management pipeline. With this knowledge, you re ready to better enjoy the rainbow treasure of AMD display hardware and the world of graphics computing. Slide 31: SteamDeck/Gamescope Color Pipeline Diagram with rectangles labeling each block of the pipeline with the related AMD color property With this work, Gamescope/Steam Deck embraces the color capabilities of the AMD GPU. We highlight here how we map the Gamescope color pipeline to each AMD color block. Slide 32: Final slide. Thank you! Future works: The search for the rainbow treasure is not over! The Linux DRM subsystem contains many hidden treasures from different vendors. We want more complex color transformations and adjustments available on Linux. We also want to expose all GPU color capabilities from all hardware vendors to the Linux userspace. Thanks Joshua and Harry for this joint work and the Linux DRI community for all feedback and reviews. The amazing part of this work comes in the next talk with Joshua and The Rainbow Frogs! Any questions?
References:
  1. Slides of the talk The Rainbow Treasure Map.
  2. Youtube video of the talk The Rainbow Treasure Map.
  3. Patch series for AMD driver-specific color management properties (upstream Linux 6.8v).
  4. SteamDeck/Gamescope color management pipeline
  5. XDC 2023 website.
  6. Igalia website.

19 December 2023

Matthew Garrett: Making SSH host certificates more usable

Earlier this year, after Github accidentally committed their private RSA SSH host key to a public repository, I wrote about how better support for SSH host certificates would allow this sort of situation to be handled in a user-transparent way without any negative impact on security. I was hoping that someone would read this and be inspired to fix the problem but sadly that didn't happen so I've actually written some code myself.

The core part of this is straightforward - if a server presents you with a certificate associated with a host key, then make the trust in that host be whoever signed the certificate rather than just trusting the host key. This means that if someone needs to replace the host key for any reason (such as, for example, them having published the private half), you can replace the host key with a new key and a new certificate, and as long as the new certificate is signed by the same key that the previous certificate was, you'll trust the new key and key rotation can be carried out without any user errors. Hurrah!

So obviously I wrote that bit and then thought about the failure modes and it turns out there's an obvious one - if an attacker obtained both the private key and the certificate, what stops them from continuing to use it? The certificate isn't a secret, so we basically have to assume that anyone who possesses the private key has access to it. We may have silently transitioned to a new host key on the legitimate servers, but a hostile actor able to MITM a user can keep on presenting the old key and the old certificate until it expires.

There's two ways to deal with this - either have short-lived certificates (ie, issue a new certificate every 24 hours or so even if you haven't changed the key, and specify that the certificate is invalid after those 24 hours), or have a mechanism to revoke the certificates. The former is viable if you have a very well-engineered certificate issuing operation, but still leaves a window for an attacker to make use of the certificate before it expires. The latter is something SSH has support for, but the spec doesn't define any mechanism for distributing revocation data.

So, I've implemented a new SSH protocol extension that allows a host to send a key revocation list to a client. The idea is that the client authenticates to the server, receives a key revocation list, and will no longer trust any certificates that are contained within that list. This seems simple enough, but a naive implementation opens the client to various DoS attacks. For instance, if you simply revoke any key contained within the received KRL, a hostile server could revoke any certificates that were otherwise trusted by the client. The easy way around this is for the client to ensure that any revoked keys are associated with the same CA that signed the host certificate - that way a compromised host can only revoke certificates associated with that CA, and can't interfere with anyone else.

Unfortunately that still means that a single compromised host can still trigger revocation of certificates inside that trust domain (ie, a compromised host a.test.com could push a KRL that invalidated the certificate for b.test.com), because there's no way in the KRL format to indicate that a given revocation is associated with a specific hostname. This means we need a mechanism to verify that the KRL update is legitimate, and the easiest way to handle that is to sign it. The KRL format specifies an in-band signature but this was deprecated earlier this year - instead KRLs are supposed to be signed with the sshsig format. But we control both the server and the client, which means it's easy enough to send a detached signature as part of the extension data.

Putting this all together: you ssh to a server you've never contacted before, and it presents you with a host certificate. Instead of the host key being added to known_hosts, the CA key associated with the certificate is added. From now on, if you ssh to that host and it presents a certificate signed by that CA, it'll be trusted. Optionally, the host can also send you a KRL and a signature. If the signature is generated by the CA key that you already trust, any certificates in that KRL associated with that CA key will be incorporated into local storage. The expected flow if a key is compromised is that the owner of the host generates a new keypair, obtains a new certificate for the new key, and adds the old certificate to a KRL that is signed with the CA key. The next time the user connects to that host, they receive the new key and new certificate, trust it because it's signed by the same CA key, and also receive a KRL signed with the same CA that revokes trust in the old certificate.

Obviously this breaks down if a user is MITMed with a compromised key and certificate immediately after the host is compromised - they'll see a legitimate certificate and won't receive any revocation list, so will trust the host. But this is the same failure mode that would occur in the absence of keys, where the attacker simply presents the compromised key to the client before trust in the new key has been created. This seems no worse than the status quo, but means that most users will seamlessly transition to a new key and revoke trust in the old key with no effort on their part.

The work in progress tree for this is here - at the point of writing I've merely implemented this and made sure it builds, not verified that it actually works or anything. Cleanup should happen over the next few days, and I'll propose this to upstream if it doesn't look like there's any showstopper design issues.

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Jonathan Dowland: William Basinski, Gateshead, 2022

I was looking over the list of live music I'd seen this year and realised that avante-garde composer William Basinski was actually last year and I had forgotten to write about it! In November 2022, Basinski headlined a night of performances which otherwise featured folk from the venue's "Arists in Residence" programme, with some affiliation to Newcastle's DIY music scene. Unfortunately we arrived too late to catch any of the other acts: partly because of the venue's sometimes doggiest insistence that people can only enter or leave the halls during intervals, and partly because the building works surrounding it had made the southern entrance effectively closed, so we had to walk to the north side of the building to get in1. Basinski was performing work from Lamentations. Basinski himself presented very unexpectedly to how I imagined him: he's got the Texas drawl, mediated through a fair amount of time spent in New York; very camp, in a glittery top; he kicked off the gig complaining about how tired he was, before a mini rant about the state of the world, riffing on a title from the album: Please, This Shit Has Got To Stop. We were in Hall 1, the larger of the two, and it was sparsely attended; a few people walked out mid performance. My gig-buddy Rob (a useful barometer for me on how things have gone) remarked that it was one of the most unique and unusual gigs he'd been to. I recognised snatches of the tracks from the album, but I'm hard-placed to name or sequence them, and they flowed into each other. I don't know how much of what we were hearing was "live" or what, if anything, was being decided during the performance, but Basinski's set-up included what looked like archaic tape equipment, with exposed loops of tape running between spools that could be interfered with by other tools. The encore was a unique, unreleased mix of Melancholia (II), which (making no apologies) Basinski hit play on before retiring backstage. I didn't take any photos. From memory, I think the venue had specifically stated filming or photos were not allowed for this performance. People at prior shows in New York and London filmed some of their shows; which were substantially similar: I've included embeds of them above. Lots of Basinski's work is on Bandcamp; the three pieces I particularly enjoy are Lamentations, Lamentations by William Basinski On Time Out of Time, On Time Out of Time by William Basinski and his best-known work, The Disintegration Loops. The Disintegration Loops by William Basinski
  1. I don't want to speak ill of the venue, though: The Sage, as it was, and the Glasshouse, as it is now known, has ended up being the venue I've attended most this year (2023), and it's such a civilised place: plenty of bars, great drinks selection (both alcoholic and not, hot and cold), loads of clean toilets, a free cloakroom, fantastic accoustics, polite staff; the list goes on.

Antoine Beaupr : (Re)introducing screentest

I have accidentally rewritten screentest, an old X11/GTK2 program that I was previously using to, well, test screens.

Screentest is dead It was removed from Debian in May 2023 but had already missed two releases (Debian 11 "bullseye" and 12 "bookworm") due to release critical bugs. The stated reason for removal was:
The package is orphaned and its upstream is no longer developed. It depends on gtk2, has a low popcon and no reverse dependencies.
So I had little hope to see this program back in Debian. The git repository shows little activity, the last being two years ago. Interestingly, I do not quite remember what it was testing, but I do remember it to find dead pixels, confirm native resolution, and various pixel-peeping. Here's a screenshot of one of the screentest screens: screentest screenshot showing a white-on-black checkered background, with some circles in the corners, shades of gray and colors in the middle Now, I think it's safe to assume this program is dead and buried, and anyways I'm running wayland now, surely there's something better? Well, no. Of course not. Someone would know about it and tell me before I go on a random coding spree in a fit of procrastination... riiight? At least, the Debconf video team didn't seem to know of any replacement. They actually suggested I just "invoke gstreamer directly" and "embrace the joy of shell scripting".

Screentest reborn So, I naively did exactly that and wrote a horrible shell script. Then I realized the next step was to write an command line parser and monitor geometry guessing, and thought "NOPE, THIS IS WHERE THE SHELL STOPS", and rewrote the whole thing in Python. Now, screentest lives as a ~400-line Python script, half of which is unit test data and command-line parsing.

Why screentest Some smarty pants is going to complain and ask why the heck one would need something like that (and, well, someone already did), so maybe I can lay down a list of use case:
  • testing color output, in broad terms (answering the question of "is it just me or this project really yellow?")
  • testing focus and keystone ("this looks blurry, can you find a nice sharp frame in that movie to adjust focus?")
  • test for native resolution and sharpness ("does this projector really support 4k for 30$? that sounds like bullcrap")
  • looking for dead pixels ("i have a new monitor, i hope it's intact")

What does screentest do? Screentest displays a series of "patterns" on screen. The list of patterns is actually hardcoded in the script, copy-pasted from this list from the videotestsrc gstreamer plugin, but you can pass any pattern supported by your gstreamer installation with --patterns. A list of patterns relevant to your installation is available with the gst-inspect-1.0 videotestsrc command. By default, screentest goes through all patterns. Each pattern runs indefinitely until the you close the window, then the next pattern starts. You can restrict to a subset of patterns, for example this would be a good test for dead pixels: 
screentest --patterns black,white,red,green,blue
This would be a good sharpness test: 
screentest --patterns pinwheel,spokes,checkers-1,checkers-2,checkers-4,checkers-8
A good generic test is the classic SMPTE color bars and is the first in the list, but you can run only that test with: 
screentest --patterns smpte
(I will mention, by the way, that as a system administrator with decades of experience, it is nearly impossible to type SMPTE without first typing SMTP and re-typing it again a few times before I get it right. I fully expect this post to have numerous typos.)
Here's an example of the SMPTE pattern from Wikipedia: SMPTE color bars For multi-monitor setups, screentest also supports specifying which output to use as a native resolution, with --output. Failing that, it will try to look at the outputs and use the first it will find. If it fails to find anything, you can specify a resolution with --resolution WIDTHxHEIGHT. I have tried to make it go full screen by default, but stumbled a bug in Sway that crashes gst-launch. If your Wayland compositor supports it, you can possibly enable full screen with --sink waylandsink fullscreen=true. Otherwise it will create a new window that you will have to make fullscreen yourself. For completeness, there's also an --audio flag that will emit the classic "drone", a sine wave at 440Hz at 40% volume (the audiotestsrc gstreamer plugin. And there's a --overlay-name option to show the pattern name, in case you get lost and want to start with one of them again.

How this works Most of the work is done by gstreamer. The script merely generates a pipeline and calls gst-launch to show the output. That both limits what it can do but also makes it much easier to use than figuring out gst-launch. There might be some additional patterns that could be useful, but I think those are better left to gstreamer. I, for example, am somewhat nostalgic of the Philips circle pattern that used to play for TV stations that were off-air in my area. But that, in my opinion, would be better added to the gstreamer plugin than into a separate thing. The script shows which command is being ran, so it's a good introduction to gstreamer pipelines. Advanced users (and the video team) will possibly not need screentest and will design their own pipelines with their own tools. I've previously worked with ffmpeg pipelines (in another such procrastinated coding spree, video-proxy-magic), and I found gstreamer more intuitive, even though it might be slightly less powerful. In retrospect, I should probably have picked a new name, to avoid crashing the namespace already used by the project, which is now on GitHub. Who knows, it might come back to life after this blog post; it would not be the first time. For now, the project lives along side the rest of my scripts collection but if there's sufficient interest, I might move it to its own git repositories. Comments, feedback, contributions are as usual welcome. And naturally, if you know something better for this kind of stuff, I'm happy to learn more about your favorite tool! So now I have finally found something to test my projector, which will likely confirm what I've already known all along: that it's kind of a piece of crap and I need to get a proper one.

16 December 2023

Thomas Lange: Adding a writeable data partition to an ISO image

Some years ago a customer needed a live ISO containing a customized FAI environment (not for installing but for extended hardware stress tests), but on an USB stick with the possibility to store the logs of the tests on the USB stick. But an ISO file system (iso9660) remains read-only, even when put onto an USB stick. I had the idea to add another partition onto the USB stick after the ISO was written to it (using cp or dd). You can use fdisk with an ISO file, add a new partition, loop mount the ISO and format this partition. That's all. This worked perfect for my customer. I forgot this idea for a while but a few weeks ago I remembered it. What could be possible when my FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) image would also provide such a partition? Which things could be provided on this partition? Could I provide a FAI ISO and my users would be able to easily put their own .deb package onto it without remastering the ISO or building an ISO on their own? Now here's the shell script, that extends an ISO or an USB stick with an ext4 or exFAT partition and set the file system label to MY-DATA. https://github.com/faiproject/fai/blob/master/bin/mk-data-partition Examples how to use mk-data-partition 
Add a data partition of size 1G to the Debian installer ISO using an ext4 partition
# mk-data-partition -s 1G debian-12.2.0-amd64-netinst.iso
Create the data partition using an exFAT file system on USB named /dev/sdb.
First copy (or dd) the ISO onto the USB stick. Then add the data partition
to the USB stick.
# cp faicd64-large_6.0.3.iso /dev/sdb
# mk-data-partition -F /dev/sdb
Create the data partition and copy directories A and B to it
# mk-data-partition -c debian-12.2.0-amd64-netinst.iso A B
The next FAI version will use this in different parts of an installation. A blog post about this will follow. A new idea for our Debian installer ISO Here are my ideas how the Debian installer could use such a partition if it automatically detects and mounts it (by it's file system label): The advantage of this approach is that there's no need for the user to remaster the official Debian installer ISO, which is not easy for end users. We only have to extend the installer to use files from this data partition in some portions of the installation. Additional udebs, packages or firmware could automatically be used by the installer. Companies could easily create an OEM installer of Debian. What do you think about this idea? Please send feedback to lange@debian.org

15 December 2023

Scarlett Gately Moore: KDE: Snaps, KDEneon, Debian and my future.

First I want to thank KDE for this wonderful write up on LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kde_akademy-2023-over-a-million-reasons-why-activity-7139965489153208320-PNem?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop It made my heart explode with happiness as I prepped for my interview on Monday. I didn t get the job ( Just the usual we were very impressed with your experience, but we went with another candidate ). I think the cosmos is determined for me to hold out for the project even though it is only part time work, it is work and if I have learned nothing else this year, I have learned how to live on a very tight budget! It turns out many of the things we think we need, we don t. So with hard work of Kevin Ottens ( Thank you!!!! ), this should be finalized after the first of the year. This plan also allows me time for KDEneon and Debian work. I am happy with it and look forward to the coming year and the exciting things to come. My holiday plans are to help the Debian KDE team with the KF6 packaging, On-going KDEneon efforts, and continue to make sure the snaps Qt6 transition is a painless as possible. I will also be working on the qt6 kde-neon extension. In closing, despite my terrible luck with job-hunting, I am in an amazing community and I am truly grateful to each and every one of you. It has been a great year and I have added many new things to my skillset and I look forward to many more next year. As usual, it is that time of month where I have not raised enough to pay my internet bill ( phone company taking an extra 200.00 didn t help ) If you can spare any change ( any amount helps! ) please consider a donation https://gofund.me/b74e4c6f Thank you! I hope everyone has a wonderful <insert your holiday here> !!!!! ~ Scarlett

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