Search Results: "cts"

1 August 2022

Sergio Talens-Oliag: Using Git Server Hooks on GitLab CE to Validate Tags

Since a long time ago I ve been a gitlab-ce user, in fact I ve set it up on three of the last four companies I ve worked for (initially I installed it using the omnibus packages on a debian server but on the last two places I moved to the docker based installation, as it is easy to maintain and we don t need a big installation as the teams using it are small). On the company I work for now (kyso) we are using it to host all our internal repositories and to do all the CI/CD work (the automatic deployments are triggered by web hooks in some cases, but the rest is all done using gitlab-ci). The majority of projects are using nodejs as programming language and we have automated the publication of npm packages on our gitlab instance npm registry and even the publication into the npmjs registry. To publish the packages we have added rules to the gitlab-ci configuration of the relevant repositories and we publish them when a tag is created. As the we are lazy by definition, I configured the system to use the tag as the package version; I tested if the contents of the package.json where in sync with the expected version and if it was not I updated it and did a force push of the tag with the updated file using the following code on the script that publishes the package:

# Update package version & add it to the .build-args
INITIAL_PACKAGE_VERSION="$(npm pkg get version tr -d '"')"
npm version --allow-same --no-commit-hooks --no-git-tag-version \
  "$CI_COMMIT_TAG"
UPDATED_PACKAGE_VERSION="$(npm pkg get version tr -d '"')"
echo "UPDATED_PACKAGE_VERSION=$UPDATED_PACKAGE_VERSION" >> .build-args
# Update tag if the version was updated or abort
if [ "$INITIAL_PACKAGE_VERSION" != "$UPDATED_PACKAGE_VERSION" ]; then
  if [ -n "$CI_GIT_USER" ] && [ -n "$CI_GIT_TOKEN" ]; then
    git commit -m "Updated version from tag $CI_COMMIT_TAG" package.json
    git tag -f "$CI_COMMIT_TAG" -m "Updated version from tag"
    git push -f -o ci.skip origin "$CI_COMMIT_TAG"
  else
    echo "!!! ERROR !!!"
    echo "The updated tag could not be uploaded."
    echo "Set CI_GIT_USER and CI_GIT_TOKEN or fix the 'package.json' file"
    echo "!!! ERROR !!!"
    exit 1
  fi
fi

This feels a little dirty (we are leaving commits on the tag but not updating the original branch); I thought about trying to find the branch using the tag and update it, but I drop the idea pretty soon as there were multiple issues to consider (i.e. we can have tags pointing to commits present in multiple branches and even if it only points to one the tag does not have to be the HEAD of the branch making the inclusion difficult). In any case this system was working, so we left it until we started to publish to the NPM Registry; as we are using a token to push the packages that we don t want all developers to have access to (right now it would not matter, but when the team grows it will) I started to use gitlab protected branches on the projects that need it and adjusting the .npmrc file using protected variables. The problem then was that we can no longer do a standard force push for a branch (that is the main point of the protected branches feature) unless we use the gitlab api, so the tags with the wrong version started to fail. As the way things were being done seemed dirty anyway I thought that the best way of fixing things was to forbid users to push a tag that includes a version that does not match the package.json version. After thinking about it we decided to use githooks on the gitlab server for the repositories that need it, as we are only interested in tags we are going to use the update hook; it is executed once for each ref to be updated, and takes three parameters:

the name of the ref being updated,
the old object name stored in the ref,
and the new object name to be stored in the ref.

To install our hook we have found the gitaly relative path of each repo and located it on the server filesystem (as I said we are using docker and the gitlab s data directory is on /srv/gitlab/data, so the path to the repo has the form /srv/gitlab/data/git-data/repositories/@hashed/xx/yy/hash.git). Once we have the directory we need to:

create a custom_hooks sub directory inside it,
add the update script (as we only need one script we used that instead of creating an update.d directory, the good thing is that this will also work with a standard git server renaming the base directory to hooks instead of custom_hooks),
make it executable, and
change the directory and file ownership to make sure it can be read and executed from the gitlab container

On a console session:

$ cd /srv/gitlab/data/git-data/repositories/@hashed/xx/yy/hash.git
$ mkdir custom_hooks
$ edit_or_copy custom_hooks/update
$ chmod 0755 custom_hooks/update
$ chown --reference=. -R custom_hooks

The update script we are using is as follows:

#!/bin/sh
set -e
# kyso update hook
#
# Right now it checks version.txt or package.json versions against the tag name
# (it supports a 'v' prefix on the tag)
# Arguments
ref_name="$1"
old_rev="$2"
new_rev="$3"
# Initial test
if [ -z "$ref_name" ]    [ -z "$old_rev" ]   [ -z "$new_rev" ]; then
  echo "usage: $0 <ref> <oldrev> <newrev>" >&2
  exit 1
fi
# Get the tag short name
tag_name="$ ref_name##refs/tags/ "
# Exit if the update is not for a tag
if [ "$tag_name" = "$ref_name" ]; then
  exit 0
fi
# Get the null rev value (string of zeros)
zero=$(git hash-object --stdin </dev/null   tr '0-9a-f' '0')
# Get if the tag is new or not
if [ "$old_rev" = "$zero" ]; then
  new_tag="true"
else
  new_tag="false"
fi
# Get the type of revision:
# - delete: if the new_rev is zero
# - commit: annotated tag
# - tag: un-annotated tag
if [ "$new_rev" = "$zero" ]; then
  new_rev_type="delete"
else
  new_rev_type="$(git cat-file -t "$new_rev")"
fi
# Exit if we are deleting a tag (nothing to check here)
if [ "$new_rev_type" = "delete" ]; then
  exit 0
fi
# Check the version against the tag (supports version.txt & package.json)
if git cat-file -e "$new_rev:version.txt" >/dev/null 2>&1; then
  version="$(git cat-file -p "$new_rev:version.txt")"
  if [ "$version" = "$tag_name" ]   [ "$version" = "$ tag_name#v " ]; then
    exit 0
  else
    EMSG="tag '$tag_name' and 'version.txt' contents '$version' don't match"
    echo "GL-HOOK-ERR: $EMSG"
    exit 1
  fi
elif git cat-file -e "$new_rev:package.json" >/dev/null 2>&1; then
  version="$(
    git cat-file -p "$new_rev:package.json"   jsonpath version   tr -d '\[\]"'
  )"
  if [ "$version" = "$tag_name" ]   [ "$version" = "$ tag_name#v " ]; then
    exit 0
  else
    EMSG="tag '$tag_name' and 'package.json' version '$version' don't match"
    echo "GL-HOOK-ERR: $EMSG"
    exit 1
  fi
else
  # No version.txt or package.json file found
  exit 0
fi

Some comments about it:

we are only looking for tags, if the ref_name does not have the prefix refs/tags/ the script does an exit 0,
although we are checking if the tag is new or not we are not using the value (in gitlab that is handled by the protected tag feature),
if we are deleting a tag the script does an exit 0, we don t need to check anything in that case,
we are ignoring if the tag is annotated or not (we set the new_rev_type to tag or commit, but we don t use the value),
we test first the version.txt file and if it does not exist we check the package.json file, if it does not exist either we do an exit 0, as there is no version to check against and we allow that on a tag,
we add the GL-HOOK-ERR: prefix to the messages to show them on the gitlab web interface (can be tested creating a tag from it),
to get the version on the package.json file we use the jsonpath binary (it is installed by the jsonpath ruby gem) because it is available on the gitlab container (initially I used sed to get the value, but a real JSON parser is always a better option).

Once the hook is installed when a user tries to push a tag to a repository that has a version.txt file or package.json file and the tag does not match the version (if version.txt is present it takes precedence) the push fails. If the tag matches or the files are not present the tag is added if the user has permission to add it in gitlab (our hook is only executed if the user is allowed to create or update the tag).

30 July 2022

Ian Jackson: chiark s skip-skip-cross-up-grade

Two weeks ago I upgraded chiark from Debian jessie i386 to bullseye amd64, after nearly 30 years running Debian i386. This went really quite well, in fact! Background chiark is my colo - a server I run, which lives in a data centre in London. It hosts ~200 users with shell accounts, various websites and mailing lists, moderators for a number of USENET newsgroups, and countless other services. chiark s internal setup is designed to enable my users to do a maximum number of exciting things with a minimum of intervention from me. chiark s OS install dates to 1993, when I installed Debian 0.93R5, the first version of Debian to advertise the ability to be upgraded without reinstalling. I think that makes it one of the oldest Debian installations in existence. Obviously it s had several new hardware platforms too. (There was a prior install of Linux on the initial hardware, remnants of which can maybe still be seen in some obscure corners of chiark s /usr/local.) chiark s install is also at the very high end of the installation complexity, and customisation, scale: reinstalling it completely would be an enormous amount of work. And it s unique. chiark s upgrade history chiark s last major OS upgrade was to jessie (Debian 8, released in April 2015). That was in 2016. Since then we have been relying on Debian s excellent security support posture, and the Debian LTS and more recently Freexian s Debian ELTS projects and some local updates, The use of ELTS - which supports only a subset of packages - was particularly uncomfortable. Additionally, chiark was installed with 32-bit x86 Linux (Debian i386), since that was what was supported and available at the time. But 32-bit is looking very long in the tooth. Why do a skip upgrade So, I wanted to move to the fairly recent stable release - Debian 11 (bullseye), which is just short of a year old. And I wanted to crossgrade (as its called) to 64-bit. In the past, I have found I have had greater success by doing direct upgrades, skipping intermediate releases, rather than by following the officially-supported path of going via every intermediate release. Doing a skip upgrade avoids exposure to any packaging bugs which were present only in intermediate release(s). Debian does usually fix bugs, but Debian has many cautious users, so it is not uncommon for bugs to be found after release, and then not be fixed until the next one. A skip upgrade avoids the need to try to upgrade to already-obsolete releases (which can involve messing about with multiple snapshots from snapshot.debian.org. It is also significantly faster and simpler, which is important not only because it reduces downtime, but also because it removes opportunities (and reduces the time available) for things to go badly. One downside is that sometimes maintainers aggressively remove compatibility measures for older releases. (And compatibililty packages are generally removed quite quickly by even cautious maintainers.) That means that the sysadmin who wants to skip-upgrade needs to do more manual fixing of things that haven t been dealt with automatically. And occasionally one finds compatibility problems that show up only when mixing very old and very new software, that no-one else has seen. Crossgrading Crossgrading is fairly complex and hazardous. It is well supported by the low level tools (eg, dpkg) but the higher-level packaging tools (eg, apt) get very badly confused. Nowadays the system is so complex that downloading things by hand and manually feeding them to dpkg is impractical, other than as a very occasional last resort. The approach, generally, has been to set the system up to want to be the new architecture, run apt in a download-only mode, and do the package installation manually, with some fixing up and retrying, until the system is coherent enough for apt to work. This is the approach I took. (In current releases, there are tools that will help but they are only in recent releases and I wanted to go direct. I also doubted that they would work properly on chiark, since it s so unusual.) Peril and planning Overall, this was a risky strategy to choose. The package dependencies wouldn t necessarily express all of the sequencing needed. But it still seemed that if I could come up with a working recipe, I could do it. I restored most of one of chiark s backups onto a scratch volume on my laptop. With the LVM snapshot tools and chroots. I was able to develop and test a set of scripts that would perform the upgrade. This was a very effective approach: my super-fast laptop, with local caches of the package repositories, was able to do many edit, test, debug cycles. My recipe made heavy use of snapshot.debian.org, to make sure that it wouldn t rot between testing and implementation. When I had a working scheme, I told my users about the planned downtime. I warned everyone it might take even 2 or 3 days. I made sure that my access arrangemnts to the data centre were in place, in case I needed to visit in person. (I have remote serial console and power cycler access.) Reality - the terrible rescue install My first task on taking the service down was the check that the emergency rescue installation worked: chiark has an ancient USB stick in the back, which I can boot to from the BIOS. The idea being that many things that go wrong could be repaired from there. I found that that install was too old to understand chiark s storage arrangements. mdadm tools gave very strange output. So I needed to upgrade it. After some experiments, I rebooted back into the main install, bringing chiark s service back online. I then used the main install of chiark as a kind of meta-rescue-image for the rescue-image. The process of getting the rescue image upgraded (not even to amd64, but just to something not totally ancient) was fraught. Several times I had to rescue it by copying files in from the main install outside. And, the rescue install was on a truly ancient 2G USB stick which was terribly terribly slow, and also very small. I hadn t done any significant planning for this subtask, because it was low-risk: there was little way to break the main install. Due to all these adverse factors, sorting out the rescue image took five hours. If I had known how long it would take, at the beginning, I would have skipped it. 5 hours is more than it would have taken to go to London and fix something in person. Reality - the actual core upgrade I was able to start the actual upgrade in the mid-afternoon. I meticulously checked and executed the steps from my plan. The terrifying scripts which sequenced the critical package updates ran flawlessly. Within an hour or so I had a system which was running bullseye amd64, albeit with many important packages still missing or unconfigured. So I didn t need the rescue image after all, nor to go to the datacentre. Fixing all the things Then I had to deal with all the inevitable fallout from an upgrade. Notable incidents: exim4 has a new tainting system This is to try to help the sysadmin avoid writing unsafe string interpolations. ( Little Bobby Tables. ) This was done by Exim upstream in a great hurry as part of a security response process. The new checks meant that the mail configuration did not work at all. I had to turn off the taint check completely. I m fairly confident that this is correct, because I am hyper-aware of quoting issues and all of my configuration is written to avoid the problems that tainting is supposed to avoid. One particular annoyance is that the approach taken for sqlite lookups makes it totally impossible to use more than one sqlite database. I think the sqlite quoting operator which one uses to interpolate values produces tainted output? I need to investigate this properly. LVM now ignores PVs which are directly contained within LVs by default chiark has LVM-on-RAID-on-LVM. This generally works really well. However, there was one edge case where I ended up without the intermediate RAID layer. The result is LVM-on-LVM. But recent versions of the LVM tools do not look at PVs inside LVs, by default. This is to help you avoid corrupting the state of any VMs you have on your system. I didn t know that at the time, though. All I knew was that LVM was claiming my PV was unusable , and wouldn t explain why. I was about to start on a thorough reading of the 15,000-word essay that is the commentary in the default /etc/lvm/lvm.conf to try to see if anything was relevant, when I received a helpful tipoff on IRC pointing me to the scan_lvs option. I need to file a bug asking for the LVM tools to explain why they have declared a PV unuseable. apache2 s default config no longer read one of my config files I had to do a merge (of my changes vs the maintainers changes) for /etc/apache2/apache2.conf. When doing this merge I failed to notice that the file /etc/apache2/conf.d/httpd.conf was no longer included by default. My merge dropped that line. There were some important things in there, and until I found this the webserver was broken. dpkg --skip-same-version DTWT during a crossgrade (This is not a fix all the things - I found it when developing my upgrade process.) When doing a crossgrade, one often wants to say to dpkg install all these things, but don t reinstall things that have already been done . That s what --skip-same-version is for. However, the logic had not been updated as part of the work to support multiarch, so it was wrong. I prepared a patched version of dpkg, and inserted it in the appropriate point in my prepared crossgrade plan. The patch is now filed as bug #1014476 against dpkg upstream Mailman Mailman is no longer in bullseye. It s only available in the previous release, buster. bullseye has Mailman 3 which is a totally different system - requiring basically, a completely new install and configuration. To even preserve existing archive links (a very important requirement) is decidedly nontrivial. I decided to punt on this whole situation. Currently chiark is running buster s version of Mailman. I will have to deal with this at some point and I m not looking forward to it. Python Of course that Mailman is Python 2. The Python project s extremely badly handled transition includes a recommendation to change the meaning of #!/usr/bin/python from Python 2, to Python 3. But Python 3 is a new language, barely compatible with Python 2 even in the most recent iterations of both, and it is usual to need to coinstall them. Happily Debian have provided the python-is-python2 package to make things work sensibly, albeit with unpleasant imprecations in the package summary description. USENET news Oh my god. INN uses many non-portable data formats, which just depend on your C types. And there are complicated daemons, statically linked libraries which cache on-disk data, and much to go wrong. I had numerous problems with this, and several outages and malfunctions. I may write about that on a future occasion.

(edited 2022-07-20 11:36 +01:00 and 2022-07-30 12:28+01:00 to fix typos)

comments

28 July 2022

Dominique Dumont: How I investigated connection hogs on Kubernetes

Hi My name is Dominhique Dumont, DevOps freelance in Grenoble, France. My goal is to share my experience regarding a production issue that occurred last week where my client complained that the applications was very slow and sometime showed 5xx errors. The production service is hosted on a Kubernetes cluster on Azure and use a MongoDB on ScaleGrid. I reproduced the issue on my side and found that the API calls were randomly failing due to timeouts on server side. The server logs were showing some MongoDB disconnections and reconnections and some time-out on MongoDB connections, but did not give any clue on why some connections to MongoDB server were failing. Since there was not clue in the cluster logs, I looked at ScaleGrid monitoring. There was about 2500 connections on MongoDB:

That seemed quite a lot given the low traffic at that time, but not necessarily a problem. Then, I went to the Azure console, and I got the first hint about the origin of the problem: the SNATs were exhausted on some nodes of the clusters.

SNATs are involved in connections from the cluster to the outside world, i.e. to our MongoDB server and are quite limited: only 1024 SNAT ports are available per node. This was consistent with the number of used connections on MongoDB. OK, then the number of used connections on MongoDB was a real problem. The next question was: which pods and how many connections ? First I had to filter out the pods that did not use MongoDB. Fortunately, all our pods have labels so I could list all pods using MongoDB:

$ kubectl -n prod get pods -l db=mongo   wc -l
236

Hmm, still quite a lot. Next problem is to check which pod used too many MongoDB connections. Unfortunately, the logs mentioned that a connection to MongoDB was opened, but that did not give a clue on how many were used. Netstat is not installed on the pods, and cannot be installed since the pods are running as root (which is a good idea for security reasons) Then, my Debian Developer experience kicked in and I remembered that /proc file system on Linux gives a lot of information on consumed kernel resources, including resources consumed by each process. The trick is to know the PID of the process using the connections. In our case, Docker files are written in a way so the main process of a pod using NodeJS is 1, so, the command to list the connections of pod is:

$ kubectl -n prod exec redacted-pod-name-69875496f8-8bj4f -- cat /proc/1/net/tcp
  sl  local_address rem_address   st tx_queue rx_queue tr tm->when retrnsmt   uid  timeout inode                                                     
   0: AC00F00A:C9FA C2906714:6989 01 00000000:00000000 02:00000DA9 00000000  1001        0 376439162 2 0000000000000000 21 4 0 10 -1                 
   1: AC00F00A:CA00 C2906714:6989 01 00000000:00000000 02:00000E76 00000000  1001        0 376439811 2 0000000000000000 21 4 0 10 -1                 
   2: AC00F00A:8ED0 C2906714:6989 01 00000000:00000000 02:000004DA 00000000  1001        0 445806350 2 0000000000000000 21 4 30 10 -1                
   3: AC00F00A:CA02 C2906714:6989 01 00000000:00000000 02:000000DD 00000000  1001        0 376439812 2 0000000000000000 21 4 0 10 -1                 
   4: AC00F00A:C9FE C2906714:6989 01 00000000:00000000 02:00000DA9 00000000  1001        0 376439810 2 0000000000000000 21 4 0 10 -1                 
   5: AC00F00A:8760 C2906714:6989 01 00000000:00000000 02:00000810 00000000  1001        0 375803096 2 0000000000000000 21 4 0 10 -1                 
   6: AC00F00A:C9FC C2906714:6989 01 00000000:00000000 02:00000DA9 00000000  1001        0 376439809 2 0000000000000000 21 4 0 10 -1                 
   7: AC00F00A:C56C C2906714:6989 01 00000000:00000000 02:00000DA9 00000000  1001        0 376167298 2 0000000000000000 21 4 0 10 -1                 
   8: AC00F00A:883C C2906714:6989 01 00000000:00000000 02:00000734 00000000  1001        0 375823415 2 0000000000000000 21 4 30 10 -1

OK, that s less appealing that netstat output. The trick is that rem_address and port are expressed in hexa. A quick calculation confirms the port 0x6989 is indeed port 27017, which is the listening port of MongoDB server. So the number of opened MongoDB connections is given by:

$ kubectl -n prod exec redacted-pod-name-69875496f8-8bj4f -- cat /proc/1/net/tcp   grep :6989   wc -l
9

What s next ? The ideal solution would be to fix the NodeJS code to handle correctly the termination of the connections, but that would have taken too long to develop. So I ve written a small Perl script to:

list the pods using MongoDB using kubectl -n prod get pods -l db=mongo
find the pods using more that 10 connections using the kubectl exec command shown above
compute the deployment name of these pods (which was possible given the naming convention used with our pods and deployments)
restart the deployment of these pods with a kubectl rollout restart deployment command

Why restart a deployment instead of simply deleting the gluttonous pods? I wanted to avoid downtime if all pods of a deployment were to be killed. There s no downtime when applying rollout restart command on deployments. This script is now run regularly until the connections issue is fixed for good in NodeJS code. Thanks to this script, there s no need to rush a code modification. All in all, working around this connections issues was made somewhat easier thanks to:

the monitoring tools provided by the hosting services.
a good knowledge of Linux internals
consistent labels on our pods
the naming conventions used for our kubernetes artifacts

26 July 2022

Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, June 2022

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering. Debian project funding No any major updates on running projects.
Two 1, 2 projects are in the pipeline now.
Tryton project is in a review phase. Gradle projects is still fighting in work. In June, we put aside 2254 EUR to fund Debian projects. We re looking forward to receive more projects from various Debian teams! Learn more about the rationale behind this initiative in this article. Debian LTS contributors In June, 15 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:

Abhijith PA did 14.00h (out of 14.00h assigned).
Andreas R nnquist did 14.50h (out of 14.50h assigned and 10.50h from previous period, thus carrying over 10.50h to the next month).
Anton Gladky did 16.00h (out of 16.00h assigned).
Ben Hutchings did 16.00h (out of 0.00h assigned and 16.00h from previous period).
Chris Lamb did 18.00h (out of 18.00h assigned).
Dominik George did 1.83h (out of 6.00h assigned and 18.00h from previous period, thus carrying over 22.17h to the next month).
Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 30.25h (out of 9.25h assigned and 21.00h from previous period).
Enrico Zini did 8.00h (out of 9.50h assigned and 6.50h from previous period, thus carrying over 8.00h to the next month).
Markus Koschany did 30.25h (out of 30.25h assigned).
Ola Lundqvist did nothing (out of 12.00 available hours, thus carrying them over to the next month).
Roberto C. S nchez did 27.50h (out of 11.75h assigned and 18.50h from previous period, thus carrying over 2.75h to the next month).
Stefano Rivera did 8.00h (out of 30.25h assigned, thus carrying over 20.75h to the next month).
Sylvain Beucler did 30.25h (out of 13.75h assigned and 16.50h from previous period).
Thorsten Alteholz did 30.25h (out of 30.25h assigned).
Utkarsh Gupta did not report back about their work so we assume they did nothing (out of 30.25 available hours, thus carrying them over to the next month).

Evolution of the situation In June we released 27 DLAs.

This is a special month, where we have two releases (stretch and jessie) as ELTS and NO release as LTS. Buster is still handled by the security team and will probably be given in LTS hands at the beginning of the August. During this month we are updating the infrastructure, documentation and improve our internal processes to switch to a new release.
Many developers have just returned back from Debconf22, hold in Prizren, Kosovo! Many (E)LTS members could meet face-to-face and discuss some technical and social topics! Also LTS BoF took place, where the project was introduced (link to video).

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold. We are pleased to welcome Alter Way where their support of Debian is publicly acknowledged at the higher level, see this French quote of Alterway s CEO.

Platinum sponsors:
- TOSHIBA (for 82 months)
- GitHub (for 73 months)
- Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) (for 50 months)
Gold sponsors:
- Roche Diagnostics International AG (for 93 months)
- Linode (for 87 months)
- Babiel GmbH (for 76 months)
- Plat Home (for 76 months)
- University of Oxford (for 32 months)
- Deveryware (for 19 months)
- VyOS Inc (for 14 months)
- EDF SA (for 3 months)
Silver sponsors:
- Domeneshop AS (for 98 months)
- The Positive Internet Company (for 98 months)
- Nantes M tropole (for 92 months)
- Univention GmbH (for 83 months)
- Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 83 months)
- Ribbon Communications, Inc. (for 77 months)
- Exonet B.V. (for 67 months)
- Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 61 months)
- CINECA (for 50 months)
- Minist re de l Europe et des Affaires trang res (for 45 months)
- Cloudways Ltd (for 34 months)
- Dinahosting SL (for 32 months)
- Bauer Xcel Media Deutschland KG (for 26 months)
- Platform.sh (for 26 months)
- Moxa Intelligence Co., Ltd. (for 20 months)
- sipgate GmbH (for 17 months)
- Tilburg University (for 16 months)
- OVH US LLC (for 15 months)
- GSI Helmholtzzentrum f r Schwerionenforschung GmbH (for 7 months)
- Soliton Systems K.K. (for 4 months)
Bronze sponsors:
- Evolix (for 98 months)
- Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 98 months)
- Intevation GmbH (for 95 months)
- Linuxhotel GmbH (for 95 months)
- Daevel SARL (for 94 months)
- Bitfolk LTD (for 92 months)
- Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 92 months)
- NUMLOG (for 92 months)
- Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 91 months)
- WinGo AG (for 91 months)
- Ecole Centrale de Nantes LHEEA (for 87 months)
- Entr ouvert (for 82 months)
- Adfinis AG (for 80 months)
- GNI MEDIA (for 74 months)
- Laboratoire LEGI UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 74 months)
- Tesorion (for 74 months)
- Bearstech (for 66 months)
- LiHAS (for 65 months)
- Catalyst IT Ltd (for 60 months)
- Supagro (for 55 months)
- Demarcq SAS (for 54 months)
- Universit Grenoble Alpes (for 40 months)
- TouchWeb SAS (for 32 months)
- SPiN AG (for 29 months)
- CoreFiling (for 24 months)
- Institut des sciences cognitives Marc Jeannerod (for 19 months)
- Observatoire des Sciences de l Univers de Grenoble (for 16 months)
- Tem Innovations GmbH (for 11 months)
- WordFinder.pro (for 10 months)
- CNRS DT INSU R sif (for 9 months)
- Alter Way

25 July 2022

Bits from Debian: DebConf22 closes in Prizren and DebConf23 dates announced

DebConf22 group photo - click to enlarge

On Sunday 24 July 2022, the annual Debian Developers and Contributors Conference came to a close. Hosting 260 attendees from 38 different countries over a combined 91 event talks, discussion sessions, Birds of a Feather (BoF) gatherings, workshops, and activities, DebConf22 was a large success. The conference was preceded by the annual DebCamp held 10 July to 16 July which focused on individual work and team sprints for in-person collaboration towards developing Debian. In particular, this year there have been sprints to advance development of Mobian/Debian on mobile, reproducible builds and Python in Debian, and a BootCamp for newcomers, to get introduced to Debian and have some hands-on experience with using it and contributing to the community. The actual Debian Developers Conference started on Sunday 17 July 2022. Together with activities such as the traditional 'Bits from the DPL' talk, the continuous key-signing party, lightning talks and the announcement of next year's DebConf (DebConf23 in Kochi, India), there were several sessions related to programming language teams such as Python, Perl and Ruby, as well as news updates on several projects and internal Debian teams, discussion sessions (BoFs) from many technical teams (Long Term Support, Android tools, Debian Derivatives, Debian Installer and Images team, Debian Science...) and local communities (Debian Brasil, Debian India, the Debian Local Teams), along with many other events of interest regarding Debian and free software. The schedule was updated each day with planned and ad-hoc activities introduced by attendees over the course of the entire conference. Several activities that couldn\'t be organized in past years due to the COVID pandemic returned to the conference\'s schedule: a job fair, open-mic and poetry night, the traditional Cheese and Wine party, the group photos and the Day Trip. For those who were not able to attend, most of the talks and sessions were recorded for live streams with videos made, available through the Debian meetings archive website. Almost all of the sessions facilitated remote participation via IRC messaging apps or online collaborative text documents. The DebConf22 website will remain active for archival purposes and will continue to offer links to the presentations and videos of talks and events. Next year, DebConf23 will be held in Kochi, India, from September 10 to September 16, 2023. As tradition follows before the next DebConf the local organizers in India will start the conference activites with DebCamp (September 03 to September 09, 2023), with particular focus on individual and team work towards improving the distribution. DebConf is committed to a safe and welcome environment for all participants. See the web page about the Code of Conduct in DebConf22 website for more details on this. Debian thanks the commitment of numerous sponsors to support DebConf22, particularly our Platinum Sponsors: Lenovo, Infomaniak, ITP Prizren and Google. About Debian The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of volunteers from all over the world work together to create and maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal operating system. About DebConf DebConf is the Debian Project's developer conference. In addition to a full schedule of technical, social and policy talks, DebConf provides an opportunity for developers, contributors and other interested people to meet in person and work together more closely. It has taken place annually since 2000 in locations as varied as Scotland, Argentina, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. More information about DebConf is available from https://debconf.org/. About Lenovo As a global technology leader manufacturing a wide portfolio of connected products, including smartphones, tablets, PCs and workstations as well as AR/VR devices, smart home/office and data center solutions, Lenovo understands how critical open systems and platforms are to a connected world. About Infomaniak Infomaniak is Switzerland\'s largest web-hosting company, also offering backup and storage services, solutions for event organizers, live-streaming and video on demand services. It wholly owns its datacenters and all elements critical to the functioning of the services and products provided by the company (both software and hardware). About ITP Prizren Innovation and Training Park Prizren intends to be a changing and boosting element in the area of ICT, agro-food and creatives industries, through the creation and management of a favourable environment and efficient services for SMEs, exploiting different kinds of innovations that can contribute to Kosovo to improve its level of development in industry and research, bringing benefits to the economy and society of the country as a whole. About Google Google is one of the largest technology companies in the world, providing a wide range of Internet-related services and products such as online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, software, and hardware. Google has been supporting Debian by sponsoring DebConf for more than ten years, and is also a Debian partner sponsoring parts of Salsa's continuous integration infrastructure within Google Cloud Platform. Contact Information For further information, please visit the DebConf22 web page at https://debconf22.debconf.org/ or send mail to press@debian.org.

18 July 2022

Bits from Debian: DebConf22 welcomes its sponsors!

DebConf22 is taking place in Prizren, Kosovo, from 17th to 24th July, 2022. It is the 23rd edition of the Debian conference and organizers are working hard to create another interesting and fruitful event for attendees. We would like to warmly welcome the sponsors of DebConf22, and introduce you to them. We have four Platinum sponsors. Our first Platinum sponsor is Lenovo. As a global technology leader manufacturing a wide portfolio of connected products, including smartphones, tablets, PCs and workstations as well as AR/VR devices, smart home/office and data center solutions, Lenovo understands how critical open systems and platforms are to a connected world. Infomaniak is our second Platinum sponsor. Infomaniak is Switzerland's largest web-hosting company, also offering backup and storage services, solutions for event organizers, live-streaming and video on demand services. It wholly owns its datacenters and all elements critical to the functioning of the services and products provided by the company (both software and hardware). The ITP Prizren is our third Platinum sponsor. ITP Prizren intends to be a changing and boosting element in the area of ICT, agro-food and creatives industries, through the creation and management of a favourable environment and efficient services for SMEs, exploiting different kinds of innovations that can contribute to Kosovo to improve its level of development in industry and research, bringing benefits to the economy and society of the country as a whole. Google is our fourth Platinum sponsor. Google is one of the largest technology companies in the world, providing a wide range of Internet-related services and products such as online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, software, and hardware. Google has been supporting Debian by sponsoring DebConf for more than ten years, and is also a Debian partner sponsoring parts of Salsa's continuous integration infrastructure within Google Cloud Platform. Our Gold sponsors are: Roche, a major international pharmaceutical provider and research company dedicated to personalized healthcare. Microsoft, enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Ipko Telecommunications, provides telecommunication services and it is the first and the most dominant mobile operator which offers fast-speed mobile internet 3G and 4G networks in Kosovo. Ubuntu, the Operating System delivered by Canonical. U.S. Agency for International Development, leads international development and humanitarian efforts to save lives, reduce poverty, strengthen democratic governance and help people progress beyond assistance. Our Silver sponsors are: Pexip, is the video communications platform that solves the needs of large organizations. Deepin is a Chinese commercial company focusing on the development and service of Linux-based operating systems. Hudson River Trading, a company researching and developing automated trading algorithms using advanced mathematical techniques. Amazon Web Services (AWS), is one of the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platforms, offering over 175 fully featured services from data centers globally. The Bern University of Applied Sciences with near 7,800 students enrolled, located in the Swiss capital. credativ, a service-oriented company focusing on open-source software and also a Debian development partner. Collabora, a global consultancy delivering Open Source software solutions to the commercial world. Arm: with the world s Best SoC Design Portfolio, Arm powered solutions have been supporting innovation for more than 30 years and are deployed in over 225 billion chips to date. GitLab, an open source end-to-end software development platform with built-in version control, issue tracking, code review, CI/CD, and more. Two Sigma, rigorous inquiry, data analysis, and invention to help solve the toughest challenges across financial services. Starlabs, builds software experiences and focus on building teams that deliver creative Tech Solutions for our clients. Solaborate, has the world s most integrated and powerful virtual care delivery platform. Civil Infrastructure Platform, a collaborative project hosted by the Linux Foundation, establishing an open source base layer of industrial grade software. Matanel Foundation, operates in Israel, as its first concern is to preserve the cohesion of a society and a nation plagued by divisions. Bronze sponsors: bevuta IT, Kutia, Univention, Freexian. And finally, our Supporter level sponsors: Altus Metrum, Linux Professional Institute, Olimex, Trembelat, Makerspace IC Prizren, Cloud68.co, Gandi.net, ISG.EE, IPKO Foundation, The Deutsche Gesellschaft f r Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH. Thanks to all our sponsors for their support! Their contributions make it possible for a large number of Debian contributors from all over the globe to work together, help and learn from each other in DebConf22.

17 July 2022

Russ Allbery: Review: Trang

Review: Trang, by Mary Sisson

Series:	Trang #1
Publisher:	Mary Sisson
Copyright:	2011
Printing:	December 2013
ASIN:	B004I6DAQ8
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	374

In 2113, a radio mapping satellite near the Titan station disappeared. It then reappeared five days later, apparently damaged and broadcasting a signal that made computers crash. The satellite was immediately sent back to the Space Authority base in Beijing for careful examination, but the techs on the station were able to decode the transmission: a request for the contents of databases. The general manager of the station sent a probe to the same location and it too vanished, returning two days later with a picture of a portal, followed shortly by an alien probe. Five years later, Philippe Trang has been assigned as the first human diplomat to an alien space station in intergalactic space at the nexus of multiple portals. Humans will apparently be the eighth type of intelligent life to send a representative to the station. He'll have a translation system, a security detail, and the groundwork of five years of audiovisual communications with the aliens, including one that was able to learn English. But he'll be the first official diplomatic representative physically there. The current style in SF might lead you to expect a tense thriller full of nearly incomprehensible aliens, unexplained devices, and creepy mysteries. This is not that sort of book. The best comparison point I could think of is James White's Sector General novels, except with a diplomat rather than a doctor. The aliens are moderately strange (not just humans in prosthetic makeup), but are mostly earnest, well-meaning, and welcoming. Trang's security escort is more military than he expects, but that becomes a satisfying negotiation rather than an ongoing problem. There is confusion, misunderstandings, and even violence, but most of it is sorted out by earnest discussion and attempts at mutual understanding. This is, in other words, diplomat competence porn (albeit written by someone who is not a diplomat, so I wouldn't expect too much realism). Trang defuses rather than confronts, patiently sorts through the nuances of a pre-existing complex dynamic between aliens without prematurely picking sides, and has the presence of mind to realize that the special forces troops assigned to him are another culture he needs to approach with the same skills. Most of the book is low-stakes confusion, curiosity, and careful exploration, which could have been boring but wasn't. It helps that Sisson packs a lot of complexity into the station dynamics and reveals it in ways that I found enjoyably unpredictable. Some caveats: This is a self-published first novel (albeit by an experienced reporter and editor) and it shows. The book has a sort of plastic Technicolor feel that I sometimes see in self-published novels, where the details aren't quite deep enough, the writing isn't quite polished, and the dialog isn't quite as tight as I'm used to. It also meanders in a way that few commercial novels do, including slice-of-life moments and small asides that don't go anywhere. This can be either a bug or a feature depending on what you're in the mood for. I found it relaxing and stress-relieving, which is what I was looking for, but you may have a different experience. I will warn that the climax features a sudden escalation of stakes that I don't think was sufficiently signaled by the tone of the writing, and thus felt a bit unreal. Sisson also includes a couple deus ex machina twists that felt a bit predictable and easy, and I didn't find the implied recent history of one of the alien civilizations that believable. The conclusion is therefore not the strongest part of the book; if you're not enjoying the journey, it probably won't get better. But, all that said, this was fun, and I've already bought the second book in the series. It's low-stakes, gentle SF with a core of discovery and exploration rather than social dynamics, and I haven't run across much of that recently. The worst thing in the book is some dream glimpses at a horrific event in Trang's past that's never entirely on camera. It's not as pacifist as James White, but it's close. Recommended, especially if you liked Sector General. White's series is so singular that I previously would have struggled to find a suggestion for someone who wanted more exactly like that (but without the Bewitched-era sexism). Now I have an answer. Score another one for Susan Stepney, who is also how I found Julie Czerneda. Trang is also currently free for Kindle, so you can't beat the price. Followed by Trust. Rating: 8 out of 10

16 July 2022

Russ Allbery: INN 2.7.0

This is the first major release of the INN news server package since 2015. It incorporates tons of work on just about every part of INN, ranging from a brand new overview backend contributed by Bo Lindbergh through Cancel-Lock support contributed by Julien LIE to numerous smaller changes in configuration files, protocol support, and overall simplification. Since this represents seven years of development, there are too many major changes to summarize in a short blog post, so I'll simply link to the INN 2.7.0 NEWS file for all of the details, including breaking changes to watch out for when upgrading. INN 2.7 is now the stable branch, and will be maintained on the 2.7 Git branch. The main branch is now open for development targeting 2.8.0. (I'm still hoping to get to the build system overhaul before 2.8.0 is released.) As of tonight, if all goes well, the nightly stable snapshots will be generated from the 2.7 branch instead of the 2.6 branch, so be aware that you will need to pay close attention to the upgrade if you're using a snapshot. As always, thanks to Julien LIE for preparing this release and doing most of the maintenance work on INN! You can get the latest version from the official ISC download page or from my personal INN pages. The latter also has links to the other INN documentation.

15 July 2022

Steve Kemp: So we come to Lisp

Recently I've been working with simple/trivial scripting languages, and I guess I finally reached a point where I thought "Lisp? Why not". One of the reasons for recent experimentation was thinking about the kind of minimalism that makes implementing a language less work - being able to actually use the language to write itself. FORTH is my recurring example, because implementing it mostly means writing a virtual machine which consists of memory ("cells") along with a pair of stacks, and some primitives for operating upon them. Once you have that groundwork in place you can layer the higher-level constructs (such as "for", "if", etc). Lisp allows a similar approach, albeit with slightly fewer low-level details required, and far less tortuous thinking. Lisp always feels higher-level to me anyway, given the explicit data-types ("list", "string", "number", etc). Here's something that works in my toy lisp:

;; Define a function,  fact , to calculate factorials (recursively).
(define fact (lambda (n)
  (if (<= n 1)
    1
      (* n (fact (- n 1))))))
;; Invoke the factorial function, using apply
(apply (list 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10)
  (lambda (x)
    (print "%s! => %s" x (fact x))))

The core language doesn't have helpful functions to filter lists, or build up lists by applying a specified function to each member of a list, but adding them is trivial using the standard car, cdr, and simple recursion. That means you end up writing lots of small functions like this:

(define zero? (lambda (n) (if (= n 0) #t #f)))
(define even? (lambda (n) (if (zero? (% n 2)) #t #f)))
(define odd?  (lambda (n) (! (even? n))))
(define sq    (lambda (x) (* x x)))

Once you have them you can use them in a way that feels simple and natural:

(print "Even numbers from 0-10: %s"
  (filter (nat 11) (lambda (x) (even? x))))
(print "Squared numbers from 0-10: %s"
  (map (nat 11) (lambda (x) (sq x))))

This all feels very sexy and simple, because the implementations of map, apply, filter are all written using the lisp - and they're easy to write. Lisp takes things further than some other "basic" languages because of the (infamous) support for Macros. But even without them writing new useful functions is pretty simple. Where things struggle? I guess I don't actually have a history of using lisp to actually solve problems - although it's great for configuring my editor.. Anyway I guess the journey continues. Having looked at the obvious "minimal core" languages I need to go further afield:

I'll make an attempt to look at some of the esoteric programming languages, and see if any of those are fun to experiment with.

13 July 2022

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in June 2022

Welcome to the June 2022 report from the Reproducible Builds project. In these reports, we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a quick recap, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, almost all software is distributed to end users as pre-compiled binaries.

Save the date! Despite several delays, we are pleased to announce dates for our in-person summit this year: November 1st 2022 November 3rd 2022
The event will happen in/around Venice (Italy), and we intend to pick a venue reachable via the train station and an international airport. However, the precise venue will depend on the number of attendees. Please see the announcement mail from Mattia Rizzolo, and do keep an eye on the mailing list for further announcements as it will hopefully include registration instructions.

News David Wheeler filed an issue against the Rust programming language to report that builds are not reproducible because full path to the source code is in the panic and debug strings . Luckily, as one of the responses mentions: the `--remap-path-prefix` solves this problem and has been used to great effect in build systems that rely on reproducibility (Bazel, Nix) to work at all and that there are efforts to teach cargo about it here .
The Python Security team announced that:
The `ctx` hosted project on PyPI was taken over via user account compromise and replaced with a malicious project which contained runtime code which collected the content of `os.environ.items()` when instantiating Ctx objects. The captured environment variables were sent as a base64 encoded query parameter to a Heroku application [ ]
As their announcement later goes onto state, version-pinning using hash-checking mode can prevent this attack, although this does depend on specific installations using this mode, rather than a prevention that can be applied systematically.
Developer vanitasvitae published an interesting and entertaining blog post detailing the blow-by-blow steps of debugging a reproducibility issue in PGPainless, a library which aims to make using OpenPGP in Java projects as simple as possible . Whilst their in-depth research into the internals of the `.jar` may have been unnecessary given that diffoscope would have identified the, it must be said that there is something to be said with occasionally delving into seemingly low-level details, as well describing any debugging process. Indeed, as vanitasvitae writes:
Yes, this would have spared me from 3h of debugging But I probably would also not have gone onto this little dive into the JAR/ZIP format, so in the end I m not mad.

Kees Cook published a short and practical blog post detailing how he uses reproducibility properties to aid work to replace one-element arrays in the Linux kernel. Kees approach is based on the principle that if a (small) proposed change is considered equivalent by the compiler, then the generated output will be identical but only if no other arbitrary or unrelated changes are introduced. Kees mentions the fantastic diffoscope tool, as well as various kernel-specific build options (eg. `KBUILD_BUILD_TIMESTAMP`) in order to prepare my build with the known to disrupt code layout options disabled .
Stefano Zacchiroli gave a presentation at GDR S curit Informatique based in part on a paper co-written with Chris Lamb titled Increasing the Integrity of Software Supply Chains. (Tweet)

Debian In Debian in this month, 28 reviews of Debian packages were added, 35 were updated and 27 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Two issue types were added: `nondeterministic_checksum_generated_by_coq` and `nondetermistic_js_output_from_webpack`. After Holger Levsen found hundreds of packages in the bookworm distribution that lack `.buildinfo` files, he uploaded 404 source packages to the archive (with no meaningful source changes). Currently bookworm now shows only 8 packages without `.buildinfo` files, and those 8 are fixed in unstable and should migrate shortly. By contrast, Debian unstable will always have packages without `.buildinfo` files, as this is how they come through the NEW queue. However, as these packages were not built on the official build servers (ie. they were uploaded by the maintainer) they will never migrate to Debian testing. In the future, therefore, testing should never have packages without `.buildinfo` files again. Roland Clobus posted yet another in-depth status report about his progress making the Debian Live images build reproducibly to our mailing list. In this update, Roland mentions that all major desktops build reproducibly with bullseye, bookworm and sid but also goes on to outline the progress made with automated testing of the generated images using openQA.

GNU Guix Vagrant Cascadian made a significant number of contributions to GNU Guix:

Submitted patches to fix reproducibility issues in keyutils and isl as well as reported two bugs affecting reproducibility testing [ ][ ].

23 specific fixes related to reproducibility. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]

Proposed setting `FORCE_SOURCE_DATE=1` in the environment of all builds in order to fix numerous timestamp issues in documentation generation tools.

Identified reproducibility issues in the `maradns` package as it appears to embed a random prime number. (Patch)

Responded in a thread to point out that GNU Guix already has the infrastructure in place to verify the reproducibility of downloaded substitutes for the vast majority of packages.

Lastly, Vagrant performed an evaluation of the unreproducible packages that remain in the distribution.

Elsewhere in GNU Guix, Ludovic Court s published a paper in the journal The Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming called Building a Secure Software Supply Chain with GNU Guix:
This paper focuses on one research question: how can [Guix]((https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/) and similar systems allow users to securely update their software? [ ] Our main contribution is a model and tool to authenticate new Git revisions. We further show how, building on Git semantics, we build protections against downgrade attacks and related threats. We explain implementation choices. This work has been deployed in production two years ago, giving us insight on its actual use at scale every day. The Git checkout authentication at its core is applicable beyond the specific use case of Guix, and we think it could benefit to developer teams that use Git.
A full PDF of the text is available.

openSUSE In the world of openSUSE, SUSE announced at SUSECon that they are preparing to meet SLSA level 4. (SLSA (Supply chain Levels for Software Artifacts) is a new industry-led standardisation effort that aims to protect the integrity of the software supply chain.) However, at the time of writing, timestamps within RPM archives are not normalised, so bit-for-bit identical reproducible builds are not possible. Some in-toto provenance files published for SUSE s SLE-15-SP4 as one result of the SLSA level 4 effort. Old binaries are not rebuilt, so only new builds (e.g. maintenance updates) have this metadata added. Lastly, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted his usual monthly openSUSE reproducible builds status report.

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility. Not only can it locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, it can provide human-readable diffs from many kinds of binary formats. This month, Chris Lamb prepared and uploaded versions `215`, `216` and `217` to Debian unstable. Chris Lamb also made the following changes:

New features:

Print profile output if we were called with `--profile` and we were killed via a `TERM` signal. This should help in situations where diffoscope is terminated due to some sort of timeout. [ ]

Support both PyPDF 1.x and 2.x. [ ]

Bug fixes:

Also catch `IndexError` exceptions (in addition to `ValueError`) when parsing `.pyc` files. (#1012258)

Correct the logic for supporting different versions of the `argcomplete` module. [ ]

Output improvements:

Don t leak the (likely-temporary) pathname when comparing PDF documents. [ ]

Logging improvements:

Update test fixtures for GNU readelf 2.38 (now in Debian unstable). [ ][ ]

Be more specific about the minimum required version of `readelf` (ie. binutils), as it appears that this patch level version change resulted in a change of output, not the minor version. [ ]

Use our `@skip_unless_tool_is_at_least` decorator (NB. `at_least`) over `@skip_if_tool_version_is` (NB. `is`) to fix tests under Debian stable. [ ]

Emit a warning if/when we are handling a UNIX `TERM` signal. [ ]

Codebase improvements:

Clarify in what situations the main `finally` block gets called with respect to `TERM` signal handling. [ ]

Clarify control flow in the `diffoscope.profiling` module. [ ]

Correctly package the `scripts/` directory. [ ]

In addition, Edward Betts updated a broken link to the RSS on the diffoscope homepage and Vagrant Cascadian updated the diffoscope package in GNU Guix [ ][ ][ ].

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

Bernhard M. Wiedemann:

`build-compare` caused a regression for a few days.

`python-fasttext` (CPU-related issue).

Chris Lamb:

#1012614 filed against `node-dommatrix`.

#1012766 filed against `rtpengine`.

#1012790 filed against `sphinxcontrib-mermaid`.

#1012792 filed against `yaru-theme`.

#1012836 filed against `mapproxy` (forwarded upstream).

#1013257 filed against `libxsmm`.

#1014041 filed against `yt-dlp` (forwarded upstream).

#891263 was filed against puppet in February 2018 and the patch was finally proposed for inclusion upstream.

Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project runs a significant testing framework at tests.reproducible-builds.org, to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. This month, the following changes were made:

Holger Levsen:

Add a package set for packages that use the R programming language [ ] as well as one for Rust [ ].

Improve package set matching for Python [ ] and font-related [ ] packages.

Install the `lz4`, `lzop` and `xz-utils` packages on all nodes in order to detect running kernels. [ ]

Improve the cleanup mechanisms when testing the reproducibility of Debian Live images. [ ][ ]

In the automated node health checks, deprioritise the generic kernel warning . [ ]

Roland Clobus (Debian Live image reproducibility):

Add various maintenance jobs to the Jenkins view. [ ]

Cleanup old workspaces after 24 hours. [ ]

Cleanup temporary workspace and resulting directories. [ ]

Implement a number of fixes and improvements around publishing files. [ ][ ][ ]

Don t attempt to preserve the file timestamps when copying artifacts. [ ]

And finally, node maintenance was also performed by Mattia Rizzolo [ ].

Mailing list and website On our mailing list this month:

David Wheeler started a thread stating his desire that reproducible builds and GitBOM are able to work together simultaneously. David first describes the goals of both GitBOM and reproducibility, outlines the potential problems and even outlines a number of prospective solutions.

In a similar vein, David Wheeler also posted about the problems with Profile-Guided Optimisation (PGO) in relation to reproducible builds.

Roland Clobus copied in our mailing list with a question about whether enabling link-time optimisations (LTO) in Debian as a whole might cause reproducibility problems.

Mattia Rizzolo posted a request for assistance regarding the translations of our website.

Lastly, Chris Lamb updated the main Reproducible Builds website and documentation in a number of small ways, but primarily published an interview with Hans-Christoph Steiner of the F-Droid project. Chris Lamb also added a Coffeescript example for parsing and using the `SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH` environment variable [ ]. In addition, Sebastian Crane very-helpfully updated the screenshot of salsa.debian.org s request access button on the How to join the Salsa group. [ ]

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

IRC: `#reproducible-builds` on `irc.oftc.net`.

Twitter: @ReproBuilds

Mailing list: `rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org`

9 July 2022

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp 1.0.9 on CRAN: Regular Updates

The Rcpp team is please to announce the newest release 1.0.9 of Rcpp which hit CRAN late yesterday, and has been uploaded to Debian as well. Windows and macOS builds should appear at CRAN in the next few days, as will builds in different Linux distribution and of course at r2u. The release was prepared om July 2, but it took a few days to clear a handful of spurious errors as false positives with CRAN this can when the set of reverse dependencies is so large, and the CRAN team remains busy. This release continues with the six-months cycle started with release 1.0.5 in July 2020. (This time, CRAN had asked for an interim release to silence a C++ warning; we then needed a quick follow-up to tweak tests.) As a reminder, interim dev or rc releases should generally be available in the Rcpp drat repo. These rolling release tend to work just as well, and are also fully tested against all reverse-dependencies. Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing R with C or C++ code. Right now, around 2559 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further, along with 252 in BioConductor. On CRAN, 13.9% of all packages depend (directly) on CRAN, and 58.5% of all compiled packages do. From the cloud mirror of CRAN (which is but a subset of all CRAN downloads), Rcpp has been downloaded 61.5 million times. This release is incremental and extends Rcpp with a number of small improvements all detailed in the NEWS file as well as below. We want to highlight the external contributions: a precious list tag is cleared on removal, and a move constructor and assignment for strings has been added (thanks to Dean Scarff), and (thanks to Bill Denney and Marco Colombo) two minor errors are corrected in the vignette documentation. A big Thank You! to everybody who contributed pull request, opened or answered issues, or questions at StackOverflow or on the mailing list. The full list of details follows.

Changes in Rcpp hotfix release version 1.0.9 (2022-07-02)

Changes in Rcpp API:

Accomodate C++98 compilation by adjusting attributes.cpp (Dirk in #1193 fixing #1192)

Accomodate newest compilers replacing deprecated std::unary_function and std::binary_function with std::function (Dirk in #1202 fixing #1201 and CRAN request)

Upon removal from precious list, the tag is set to null (I aki in #1205 fixing #1203)

Move constructor and assignment for strings have been added (Dean Scarff in #1219).

Changes in Rcpp Documentation:

Adjust one overflowing column (Bill Denney in #1196 fixing #1195)

Correct a typo in the FAQ (Marco Colombo in #1217)

Changes in Rcpp Deployment:

Accomodate four digit version numbers in unit test (Dirk)

Do not run complete test suite to limit test time to CRAN preference (Dirk in #1206)

Small updates to the CI test containers have been made

Some of changes also applied to an interim release 1.0.8.3 made for CRAN on 2022-03-14.

Thanks to my CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page. Bugs reports are welcome at the GitHub issue tracker as well (where one can also search among open or closed issues); questions are also welcome under rcpp tag at StackOverflow which also allows searching among the (currently) 2886 previous questions. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

7 July 2022

Jonathan Dowland: Musick To Play In The Dark 2

This took a while to arrive! After the success of the reissue of Coil's Musick To Play In The Dark, it was inevitable that the second edition would also be reissued. The pre-order opened late November 2021 and mine arrived in late April this year.

I was toying with the idea of ordering one of the most exclusive editions direct from DAIS Records, in particular the glow in the dark one, but with international shipping the cost was pretty high. I went with a UK distributor (Boomkat) instead, who had their own exclusive edition: black-in-purple-in-clear.

I'm happy with my decision: it's one of the most interesting variants I own, and from what I've read, glow in the dark vinyl never sounds great anyway. (I think I have at least one glow in the dark 7" single somewhere) Stand-out track: Tiny Golden Books Since I didn't say so last time, the stand-out track on volume one is Red Birds Will Fly Out of the East and Destroy Paris in a Night, but both volumes are full of really interesting moments ( One day, your eggs are going to hatch and some very strange birds are going to emerge. )

6 July 2022

Russ Allbery: Review: A Master of Djinn

Review: A Master of Djinn, by P. Dj l Clark

Series:	Dead Djinn Universe #1
Publisher:	Tordotcom
Copyright:	2021
ISBN:	1-250-26767-6
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	391

A Master of Djinn is the first novel in the Dead Djinn Universe, but (as you might guess from the series title) is a direct sequel to the novelette "A Dead Djinn in Cairo". The novelette is not as good as the novel, but I recommend reading it first for the character introductions and some plot elements that carry over. Reading The Haunting of Tram Car 015 first is entirely optional. In 1912 in a mansion in Giza, a secret society of (mostly) British men is meeting. The Hermetic Brotherhood of Al-Jahiz is devoted to unlocking the mysteries of the Soudanese mystic al-Jahiz. In our world, these men would likely be colonialist plunderers. In this world, they still aspire to that role, but they're playing catch-up. Al-Jahiz bored into the Kaf, releasing djinn and magic into the world and making Egypt a world power in its own right. Now, its cities are full of clockwork marvels, djinn walk the streets as citizens, and British rule has been ejected from India and Africa by local magic. This group of still-rich romantics and crackpots hopes to discover the knowledge lost when al-Jahiz disappeared. They have not had much success. This will not save their lives. Fatma el-Sha'arawi is a special investigator for the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities. Her job is sorting out the problems caused by this new magic, such as a couple of young thieves with a bottle full of sleeping djinn whose angry reaction to being unexpectedly woken has very little to do with wishes. She is one of the few female investigators in a ministry that is slowly modernizing with the rest of society (Egyptian women just got the vote). She's also the one called to investigate the murder of a secret society of British men and a couple of Cairenes by a black-robed man in a golden mask. The black-robed man claims to be al-Jahiz returned, and proves to be terrifyingly adept at manipulating crowds and sparking popular dissent. Fatma and the Ministry's first attempt to handle him is a poorly-judged confrontation stymied by hostile crowds, the man's duplicating bodyguard, and his own fighting ability. From there, it's a race between Fatma's pursuit of linear clues and the black-robed man's efforts to destabilize society. This, like the previous short stories, is a police procedural, but it has considerably more room to breathe at novel length. That serves it well, since as with "A Dead Djinn in Cairo" the procedural part is a linear, reactive vehicle for plot exposition. I was more invested in Fatma's relationships with the supporting characters. Since the previous story, she's struck up a romance with Siti, a highly competent follower of the old Egyptian gods (Hathor in particular) and my favorite character in the book. She's also been assigned a new partner, Hadia, a new graduate and another female agent. The slow defeat of Fatma's irritation at not being allowed to work alone by Hadia's cheerful competence and persistence (and willingness to do paperwork) adds a lot to the characterization. The setting felt a bit less atmospheric than The Haunting of Tram Car 015, but we get more details of international politics, and they're a delight. Clark takes obvious (and warranted) glee in showing how the reintroduction of magic has shifted the balance of power away from the colonial empires. Cairo is a bustling steampunk metropolis and capital of a world power, welcoming envoys from West African kingdoms alongside the (still racist and obnoxious but now much less powerful) British and other Europeans. European countries were forced to search their own mythology for possible sources of magic power, which leads to the hilarious scene of the German Kaiser carrying a sleepy goblin on his shoulder to monitor his diplomacy. The magic of the story was less successful for me, although still enjoyable. The angels from "A Dead Djinn in Cairo" make another appearance and again felt like the freshest bit of world-building, but we don't find out much more about them. I liked the djinn and their widely-varied types and magic, but apart from them and a few glimpses of Egypt's older gods, that was the extent of the underlying structure. There is a significant magical artifact, but the characters are essentially handed an instruction manual, use it according to its instructions, and it then does what it was documented to do. It was a bit unsatisfying. I'm the type of fantasy reader who always wants to read the sourcebook for the magic system, but this is not that sort of a book. Instead, it's the kind of book where the investigator steadily follows a linear trail of clues and leads until they reach the final confrontation. Here, the confrontation felt remarkably like cut scenes from a Japanese RPG: sudden vast changes in scale, clockwork constructs, massive monsters, villains standing on mobile platforms, and surprise combat reversals. I could almost hear the fight music and see the dialog boxes pop up. This isn't exactly a complaint I love Japanese RPGs but it did add to the feeling that the plot was on rails and didn't require many decisions from the protagonist. Clark also relies on an overused plot cliche in the climactic battle, which was a minor disappointment. A Master of Djinn won the Nebula for best 2021 novel, I suspect largely on the basis of its setting and refreshingly non-European magical system. I don't entirely agree; the writing is still a bit clunky, with unnecessary sentences and stock phrases showing up here and there, and I think it suffers from the typical deficiencies of SFF writers writing mysteries or police procedurals without the plot sophistication normally found in that genre. But this is good stuff for a first novel, with fun supporting characters (loved the librarian) and some great world-building. I would happily read more in this universe. Rating: 7 out of 10

5 July 2022

Alberto Garc a: Running the Steam Deck s OS in a virtual machine using QEMU

Introduction The Steam Deck is a handheld gaming computer that runs a Linux-based operating system called SteamOS. The machine comes with SteamOS 3 (code name holo ), which is in turn based on Arch Linux. Although there is no SteamOS 3 installer for a generic PC (yet), it is very easy to install on a virtual machine using QEMU. This post explains how to do it. The goal of this VM is not to play games (you can already install Steam on your computer after all) but to use SteamOS in desktop mode. The Gamescope mode (the console-like interface you normally see when you use the machine) requires additional development to make it work with QEMU and will not work with these instructions. A SteamOS VM can be useful for debugging, development, and generally playing and tinkering with the OS without risking breaking the Steam Deck. Running the SteamOS desktop in a virtual machine only requires QEMU and the OVMF UEFI firmware and should work in any relatively recent distribution. In this post I m using QEMU directly, but you can also use virt-manager or some other tool if you prefer, we re emulating a standard x86_64 machine here. General concepts SteamOS is a single-user operating system and it uses an A/B partition scheme, which means that there are two sets of partitions and two copies of the operating system. The root filesystem is read-only and system updates happen on the partition set that is not active. This allows for safer updates, among other things. There is one single /home partition, shared by both partition sets. It contains the games, user files, and anything that the user wants to install there. Although the user can trivially become root, make the root filesystem read-write and install or change anything (the pacman package manager is available), this is not recommended because

it increases the chances of breaking the OS, and
any changes will disappear with the next OS update.

A simple way for the user to install additional software that survives OS updates and doesn t touch the root filesystem is Flatpak. It comes preinstalled with the OS and is integrated with the KDE Discover app. Preparing all necessary files The first thing that we need is the installer. For that we have to download the Steam Deck recovery image from here: https://store.steampowered.com/steamos/download/?ver=steamdeck&snr= Once the file has been downloaded, we can uncompress it and we ll get a raw disk image called steamdeck-recovery-4.img (the number may vary). Note that the recovery image is already SteamOS (just not the most up-to-date version). If you simply want to have a quick look you can play a bit with it and skip the installation step. In this case I recommend that you extend the image before using it, for example with truncate -s 64G steamdeck-recovery-4.img or, better, create a qcow2 overlay file and leave the original raw image unmodified: qemu-img create -f qcow2 -F raw -b steamdeck-recovery-4.img steamdeck-recovery-extended.qcow2 64G But here we want to perform the actual installation, so we need a destination image. Let s create one: $ qemu-img create -f qcow2 steamos.qcow2 64G Installing SteamOS Now that we have all files we can start the virtual machine:

$ qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -smp cores=4 -m 8G \
    -device usb-ehci -device usb-tablet \
    -device intel-hda -device hda-duplex \
    -device VGA,xres=1280,yres=800 \
    -drive if=pflash,format=raw,readonly=on,file=/usr/share/ovmf/OVMF.fd \
    -drive if=virtio,file=steamdeck-recovery-4.img,driver=raw \
    -device nvme,drive=drive0,serial=badbeef \
    -drive if=none,id=drive0,file=steamos.qcow2

Note that we re emulating an NVMe drive for steamos.qcow2 because that s what the installer script expects. This is not strictly necessary but it makes things a bit easier. If you don t want to do that you ll have to edit ~/tools/repair_device.sh and change DISK and DISK_SUFFIX. SteamOS installer shortcuts

Once the system has booted we ll see a KDE Plasma session with a few tools on the desktop. If we select Reimage Steam Deck and click Proceed on the confirmation dialog then SteamOS will be installed on the destination drive. This process should not take a long time. Now, once the operation finishes a new confirmation dialog will ask if we want to reboot the Steam Deck, but here we have to choose Cancel . We cannot use the new image yet because it would try to boot into the Gamescope session, which won t work, so we need to change the default desktop session. SteamOS comes with a helper script that allows us to enter a chroot after automatically mounting all SteamOS partitions, so let s open a Konsole and make the Plasma session the default one in both partition sets:

$ sudo steamos-chroot --disk /dev/nvme0n1 --partset A
# steamos-readonly disable
# echo '[Autologin]' > /etc/sddm.conf.d/zz-steamos-autologin.conf
# echo 'Session=plasma.desktop' >> /etc/sddm.conf.d/zz-steamos-autologin.conf
# steamos-readonly enable
# exit
$ sudo steamos-chroot --disk /dev/nvme0n1 --partset B
# steamos-readonly disable
# echo '[Autologin]' > /etc/sddm.conf.d/zz-steamos-autologin.conf
# echo 'Session=plasma.desktop' >> /etc/sddm.conf.d/zz-steamos-autologin.conf
# steamos-readonly enable
# exit

After this we can shut down the virtual machine. Our new SteamOS drive is ready to be used. We can discard the recovery image now if we want. Booting SteamOS and first steps To boot SteamOS we can use a QEMU line similar to the one used during the installation. This time we re not emulating an NVMe drive because it s no longer necessary.

$ cp /usr/share/OVMF/OVMF_VARS.fd .
$ qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -smp cores=4 -m 8G \
   -device usb-ehci -device usb-tablet \
   -device intel-hda -device hda-duplex \
   -device VGA,xres=1280,yres=800 \
   -drive if=pflash,format=raw,readonly=on,file=/usr/share/ovmf/OVMF.fd \
   -drive if=pflash,format=raw,file=OVMF_VARS.fd \
   -drive if=virtio,file=steamos.qcow2 \
   -device virtio-net-pci,netdev=net0 \
   -netdev user,id=net0,hostfwd=tcp::2222-:22

(the last two lines redirect tcp port 2222 to port 22 of the guest to be able to SSH into the VM. If you don t want to do that you can omit them) If everything went fine, you should see KDE Plasma again, this time with a desktop icon to launch Steam and another one to Return to Gaming Mode (which we should not use because it won t work). See the screenshot that opens this post. Congratulations, you re running SteamOS now. Here are some things that you probably want to do:

(optional) Change the keyboard layout in the system settings (the default one is US English)
Set the password for the deck user: run passwd on a terminal
Enable / start the SSH server: sudo systemctl enable sshd and/or sudo systemctl start sshd .
SSH into the machine: ssh -p 2222 deck@localhost

Updating the OS to the latest version The Steam Deck recovery image doesn t install the most recent version of SteamOS, so now we should probably do a software update.

First of all ensure that you re giving enought RAM to the VM (in my examples I run QEMU with -m 8G). The OS update might fail if you use less.
(optional) Change the OS branch if you want to try the beta release: sudo steamos-select-branch beta (or main, if you want the bleeding edge)
Check the currently installed version in /etc/os-release (see the BUILD_ID variable)
Check the available version: steamos-update check
Download and install the software update: steamos-update

Note: if the last step fails after reaching 100% with a post-install handler error then go to Connections in the system settings, rename Wired Connection 1 to something else (anything, the name doesn t matter), click Apply and run steamos-update again. This works around a bug in the update process. Recent images fix this and this workaround is not necessary with them. As we did with the recovery image, before rebooting we should ensure that the new update boots into the Plasma session, otherwise it won t work:

$ sudo steamos-chroot --partset other
# steamos-readonly disable
# echo '[Autologin]' > /etc/sddm.conf.d/zz-steamos-autologin.conf
# echo 'Session=plasma.desktop' >> /etc/sddm.conf.d/zz-steamos-autologin.conf
# steamos-readonly enable
# exit

After this we can restart the system. If everything went fine we should be running the latest SteamOS release. Enjoy! Reporting bugs SteamOS is under active development. If you find problems or want to request improvements please go to the SteamOS community tracker. Edit 06 Jul 2022: Small fixes, mention how to install the OS without using NVMe.

4 July 2022

Russ Allbery: Review: She Who Became the Sun

Review: She Who Became the Sun, by Shelley Parker-Chan

Series:	Radiant Emperor #1
Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	2021
Printing:	2022
ISBN:	1-250-62179-8
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	414

In 1345 in Zhongli village, in fourth year of a drought, lived a man with his son and his daughter, the last surviving of seven children. The son was promised by his father to the Wuhuang Monastery on his twelfth birthday if he survived. According to the fortune-teller, that son, Zhu Chongba, will be so great that he will bring a hundred generations of pride to the family name. When the girl dares ask her fate, the fortune-teller says, simply, "Nothing." Bandits come looking for food and kill their father. Zhu goes catatonic rather than bury his father, so the girl digs a grave, only to find her brother dead inside it with her father. It leaves her furious: he had a great destiny and he gave it up without a fight, choosing to become nothing. At that moment, she decides to seize his fate for her own, to become Zhu so thoroughly that Heaven itself will be fooled. Through sheer determination and force of will, she stays at the gates of Wuhuang Monastery until the monks are impressed enough with her stubbornness that they let her in under Zhu's name. That puts her on a trajectory that will lead her to the Red Turbans and the civil war over the Mandate of Heaven. She Who Became the Sun is historical fiction with some alternate history and a touch of magic. The closest comparison I can think of is Guy Gavriel Kay: a similar touch of magic that is slight enough to have questionable impact on the story, and a similar starting point of history but a story that's not constrained to follow the events of our world. Unlike Kay, Parker-Chan doesn't change the names of places and people. It's therefore not difficult to work out the history this story is based on (late Yuan dynasty), although it may not be clear at first what role Zhu will play in that history. The first part of the book focuses on Zhu, her time in the monastery, and her (mostly successful) quest to keep her gender secret. The end of that part introduces the second primary protagonist, the eunuch general Ouyang of the army of the Prince of Henan. Ouyang is Nanren, serving a Mongol prince or, more precisely, his son Esen. On the surface, Ouyang is devoted to Esen and serves capably as his general. What lies beneath that surface is far darker and more complicated. I think how well you like this book will depend on how well you get along with the characters. I thought Zhu was a delight. She spends the first half of the book proving herself to be startlingly competent and unpredictable while outwitting Heaven and pursuing her assumed destiny. A major hinge event at the center of the book could have destroyed her character, but instead makes her even stronger, more relaxed, and more comfortable with herself. Her story's exploration of gender identity only made that better for me, starting with her thinking of herself as a woman pretending to be a man and turning into something more complex and self-chosen (and, despite some sexual encounters, apparently asexual, which is something you still rarely see in fiction). I also appreciated how Parker-Chan varies Zhu's pronouns depending on the perspective of the narrator. That said, Zhu is not a good person. She is fiercely ambitious to the point of being a sociopath, and the path she sees involves a lot of ruthlessness and some cold-blooded murder. This is less of a heroic journey than a revenge saga, where the target of revenge is the entire known world and Zhu is as dangerous as she is competent. If you want your protagonist to be moral, this may not work for you. Zhu's scenes are partly told from her perspective and partly from the perspective of a woman named Ma who is a good person, and who is therefore intermittently horrified. The revenge story worked for me, and as a result I found Ma somewhat irritating. If your tendency is to agree with Ma, you may find Zhu too amoral to root for. Ouyang's parts I just hated, which is fitting because Ouyang loathes himself to a degree that is quite difficult to read. He is obsessed with being a eunuch and therefore not fully male. That internal monologue is disturbing enough that it drowned out the moderately interesting court intrigue that he's a part of. I know some people like reading highly dramatic characters who are walking emotional disaster zones. I am not one of those people; by about three quarters of the way through the book I was hoping someone would kill Ouyang already and put him out of everyone's misery. One of the things I disliked about this book is that, despite the complex gender work with Zhu, gender roles within the story have a modern gloss while still being highly constrained. All of the characters except Zhu (and the monk Xu, who has a relatively minor part but is the most likable character in the book) feel like they're being smothered in oppressive gender expectations. Ouyang has a full-fledged case of toxic masculinity to fuel his self-loathing, which Parker-Chan highlights with some weirdly disturbing uses of BDSM tropes. So, I thought this was a mixed bag, and I suspect reactions will differ. I thoroughly enjoyed Zhu's parts despite her ruthlessness and struggled through Ouyang's parts with a bad taste in my mouth. I thought the pivot Parker-Chan pulls off in the middle of the book with Zhu's self-image and destiny was beautifully done and made me like the character even more, but I wish the conflict between Ma's and Zhu's outlooks hadn't been so central. Because of that, the ending felt more tragic than triumphant, which I think was intentional but which wasn't to my taste. As with Kay's writing, I suspect there will be some questions about whether She Who Became the Sun is truly fantasy. The only obvious fantastic element is the physical manifestation of the Mandate of Heaven, and that has only a minor effect on the plot. And as with Kay, I think this book needed to be fantasy, not for the special effects, but because it needs the space to take fate literally. Unlike Kay, Parker-Chan does not use the writing style of epic fantasy, but Zhu's campaign to assume a destiny which is not her own needs to be more than a metaphor for the story to work. I enjoyed this with some caveats. For me, the Zhu portions made up for the Ouyang portions. But although it's clearly the first book of a series, I'm not sure I'll read on. I felt like Zhu's character arc reached a satisfying conclusion, and the sequel seems likely to be full of Ma's misery over ethical conflicts and more Ouyang, neither of which sound appealing. So far as I can tell, the sequel I assume is coming has not yet been announced. Rating: 7 out of 10

2 July 2022

Russ Allbery: Review: Overdue

Review: Overdue, by Amanda Oliver

Publisher:	Chicago Review Press
Copyright:	2022
ISBN:	1-64160-534-0
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	190

Like many lifetime readers, I adored the public library. I read my way through three different children's libraries at the rate of a grocery sack of books per week, including numerous re-readings, and then moved on to the adult section as my introduction to science fiction. But once I had a regular job, I discovered the fun of filling shelves with books without having to return them or worry about what the library had available. I've always supported my local library, but it's been decades since I spent much time in it. When I last used one heavily, the only computers were at the checkout desk and the only books were physical, normally hardcovers. Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library therefore caught my eye when I saw a Twitter thread about it before publication. It promised to be a picture of the modern public library and its crises from the perspective of the librarian. The author's primary topic was the drafting of public libraries as de facto homeless service centers, but I hoped it would also encompass technological change, demand for new services, and the shifting meaning of what a public library is for. Overdue does... some of that. The author was a children's librarian in a Washington DC public school and then worked at a downtown branch of the Washington DC public library, and the book includes a few anecdotes from both experiences. Most of the book, though, is Oliver's personal memoir of how she got into field, why she chose to leave it, and how she is making sense of her feelings about the profession. Intermixed with that memoir is wide-ranging political commentary on topics ranging from gentrification to mental health care. This material is relevant to the current challenges libraries face, but it wandered far afield from what I was hoping to get from the book. I think of non-fiction books as coming in a few basic shapes. One is knowledge from an expert: the author has knowledge about a topic that is not widely shared, and they write a book to share it. Another is popularization: an author, possibly without prior special expertise in the topic, does research the reader could have done but doesn't have time to do and then summarizes the results in a format that's easier to understand than the original material. And a third is memoir, in which the author tells the story of their own life. This is a variation of the first type, since the author is obviously an expert in their own life, but most people's lives are not interesting. (Mine certainly isn't!) Successful memoir therefore depends on either having an unusual life or being a compelling storyteller, and ideally both. Many non-fiction books fall into multiple categories, but it's helpful for an author to have a clear idea of which of these goals they're pursuing since they result in different books. If the author is writing primarily from a position of special expertise, the book should focus on that expertise. I am interested in librarians and libraries and would like to know more about that job, so I will read with interest your personal stories about being a librarian. I am somewhat interested in your policy suggestions for how to make libraries work better, although more so if you can offer context and analysis beyond your personal experiences. I am less interested in your opinions on, say, gentrification. That's not because I doubt it is a serious problem (it is) or that it impacts libraries (it does). It's because working in a library doesn't provide any special expertise in gentrification beyond knowing that it exists, something that I can see by walking around the corner. If I want to know more, I will read books by urban planners, sociologists, and housing rights activists. This is a long-winded way of saying that I wish Overdue had about four times as many stories about libraries, preferably framed by general research and background that extended beyond the author's personal experience, or at least more specific details of the politics of the Washington DC library system. The personal memoir outside of the library stories failed to hold my interest. This is not intended as a slam on the author. Oliver seems like a thoughtful and sincere person who is struggling with how to do good in the world without burning out, which is easy for me to sympathize with. I suspect I broadly agree with her on many political positions. But I have read all of this before, and personally lived through some of the same processing, and I don't think Oliver offered new insight. The library stories were memorable enough to form the core of a good book, but the memoir structure did nothing for them and they were strangled by the unoriginal and too-general political analysis. At the risk of belaboring a negative review, there are two other things in Overdue that I've also seen in other writing and seem worth commenting on. The first is the defensive apology that the author may not have the best perspective to write the book. It's important to be clear: I am glad that the Oliver has thought about the ways her experiences as a white woman may not be representative of other people. This is great; the world is a better place when more people consider that. I'm less fond of putting that observation in the book, particularly at length. As the author, rather than writing paragraphs vaguely acknowledging that other people have different experiences, she could instead fix the problem: go talk to librarians of other ethnic and social backgrounds and put their stories in this book. The book would then represent broader experiences and not require the apology. Overdue desperately needed more library-specific content, so that would have improved the book in more than one way. Or if Oliver is ideologically opposed to speaking for other people (she makes some comments to that effect), state up-front, once, that this is a personal memoir and, as a memoir, represents only her own experience. But the author should do something with this observation other than dump its awkwardness on the reader, if for no other reason than that lengthy disclaimers about the author's limited perspective are boring. The second point is about academic jargon and stock phrasing. I work in a field that relies on precise distinctions of meaning (between identity, authentication, and authorization, for example), and therefore I rely on jargon. Its purpose is to make those types of fine distinctions. But authors who read heavily in fields with jargon tend to let that phrasing slip into popular writing where it's not necessary. The result is, to quote Orwell, "gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else." The effect may be small in a single sentence but, when continued throughout a book, the overuse of jargon is leaden, belabored, and confusing. Any example I choose will be minor since the effect is cumulative, but one of several I noticed in Overdue is "lived experience." This is jargon from philosophy that, within the field, draws a useful distinction between one's direct experiences of living in the world, and academic or scientific experience with a field. Both types of experience are valuable in different situations, but they're not equivalent. This is a useful phrase when the distinction matters and is unclear. When the type of experience one is discussing is obvious in context (the case in at least three of the four uses in this book), the word "lived" adds nothing but verbosity. If too much of this creeps into writing, it becomes clunky and irritating to read. The best (and not coincidentally the least clunky) part of this book is Oliver's stories of the patrons and other employees of the Northwest One branch of the Washington DC library system and her experiences with them. The picture was not as vivid as I was hoping for, but I came away with some new understanding of typical interactions and day-to-day difficulties. The same was true to a lesser extent for her experiences as a school librarian. For both, I wish there had been more context and framing so that I could see how her experiences fit into a whole system, but those parts of the book were worth reading. Unfortunately, they weren't enough of those parts in the book for me to recommend Overdue. But I'm still interested in reading the book I hoped I was getting! Rating: 5 out of 10

29 June 2022

Aigars Mahinovs: Long travel in an electric car

Since the first week of April 2022 I have (finally!) changed my company car from a plug-in hybrid to a fully electic car. My new ride, for the next two years, is a BMW i4 M50 in Aventurine Red metallic. An ellegant car with very deep and memorable color, insanely powerful (544 hp/795 Nm), sub-4 second 0-100 km/h, large 84 kWh battery (80 kWh usable), charging up to 210 kW, top speed of 225 km/h and also very efficient (which came out best in this trip) with WLTP range of 510 km and EVDB real range of 435 km. The car also has performance tyres (Hankook Ventus S1 evo3 245/45R18 100Y XL in front and 255/45R18 103Y XL in rear all at recommended 2.5 bar) that have reduced efficiency. So I wanted to document and describe how was it for me to travel ~2000 km (one way) with this, electric, car from south of Germany to north of Latvia. I have done this trip many times before since I live in Germany now and travel back to my relatives in Latvia 1-2 times per year. This was the first time I made this trip in an electric car. And as this trip includes both travelling in Germany (where BEV infrastructure is best in the world) and across Eastern/Northen Europe, I believe that this can be interesting to a few people out there. Normally when I travelled this trip with a gasoline/diesel car I would normally drive for two days with an intermediate stop somewhere around Warsaw with about 12 hours of travel time in each day. This would normally include a couple bathroom stops in each day, at least one longer lunch stop and 3-4 refueling stops on top of that. Normally this would use at least 6 liters of fuel per 100 km on average with total usage of about 270 liters for the whole trip (or about 540 just in fuel costs, nowadays). My (personal) quirk is that both fuel and recharging of my (business) car inside Germany is actually paid by my employer, so it is useful for me to charge up (or fill up) at the last station in Gemany before driving on. The plan for this trip was made in a similar way as when travelling with a gasoline car: travelling as fast as possible on German Autobahn network to last chargin stop on the A4 near G rlitz, there charging up as much as reasonable and then travelling to a hotel in Warsaw, charging there overnight and travelling north towards Ionity chargers in Lithuania from where reaching the final target in north of Latvia should be possible. How did this plan meet the reality? Travelling inside Germany with an electric car was basically perfect. The most efficient way would involve driving fast and hard with top speed of even 180 km/h (where possible due to speed limits and traffic). BMW i4 is very efficient at high speeds with consumption maxing out at 28 kWh/100km when you actually drive at this speed all the time. In real situation in this trip we saw consumption of 20.8-22.2 kWh/100km in the first legs of the trip. The more traffic there is, the more speed limits and roadworks, the lower is the average speed and also the lower the consumption. With this kind of consumption we could comfortably drive 2 hours as fast as we could and then pick any fast charger along the route and in 26 minutes at a charger (50 kWh charged total) we'd be ready to drive for another 2 hours. This lines up very well with recommended rest stops for biological reasons (bathroom, water or coffee, a bit of movement to get blood circulating) and very close to what I had to do anyway with a gasoline car. With a gasoline car I had to refuel first, then park, then go to bathroom and so on. With an electric car I can do all of that while the car is charging and in the end the total time for a stop is very similar. Also not that there was a crazy heat wave going on and temperature outside was at about 34C minimum the whole day and hitting 40C at one point of the trip, so a lot of power was used for cooling. The car has a heat pump standard, but it still was working hard to keep us cool in the sun. The car was able to plan a charging route with all the charging stops required and had all the good options (like multiple intermediate stops) that many other cars (hi Tesla) and mobile apps (hi Google and Apple) do not have yet. There are a couple bugs with charging route and display of current route guidance, those are already fixed and will be delivered with over the air update with July 2022 update. Another good alterantive is the ABRP (A Better Route Planner) that was specifically designed for electric car routing along the best route for charging. Most phone apps (like Google Maps) have no idea about your specific electric car - it has no idea about the battery capacity, charging curve and is missing key live data as well - what is the current consumption and remaining energy in the battery. ABRP is different - it has data and profiles for almost all electric cars and can also be linked to live vehicle data, either via a OBD dongle or via a new Tronity cloud service. Tronity reads data from vehicle-specific cloud service, such as MyBMW service, saves it, tracks history and also re-transmits it to ABRP for live navigation planning. ABRP allows for options and settings that no car or app offers, for example, saying that you want to stop at a particular place for an hour or until battery is charged to 90%, or saying that you have specific charging cards and would only want to stop at chargers that support those. Both the car and the ABRP also support alternate routes even with multiple intermediate stops. In comparison, route planning by Google Maps or Apple Maps or Waze or even Tesla does not really come close. After charging up in the last German fast charger, a more interesting part of the trip started. In Poland the density of high performance chargers (HPC) is much lower than in Germany. There are many chargers (west of Warsaw), but vast majority of them are (relatively) slow 50kW chargers. And that is a difference between putting 50kWh into the car in 23-26 minutes or in 60 minutes. It does not seem too much, but the key bit here is that for 20 minutes there is easy to find stuff that should be done anyway, but after that you are done and you are just waiting for the car and if that takes 4 more minutes or 40 more minutes is a big, perceptual, difference. So using HPC is much, much preferable. So we put in the Ionity charger near Lodz as our intermediate target and the car suggested an intermediate stop at a Greenway charger by Katy Wroclawskie. The location is a bit weird - it has 4 charging stations with 150 kW each. The weird bits are that each station has two CCS connectors, but only one parking place (and the connectors share power, so if two cars were to connect, each would get half power). Also from the front of the location one can only see two stations, the otehr two are semi-hidden around a corner. We actually missed them on the way to Latvia and one person actually waited for the charger behind us for about 10 minutes. We only discovered the other two stations on the way back. With slower speeds in Poland the consumption goes down to 18 kWh/100km which translates to now up to 3 hours driving between stops. At the end of the first day we drove istarting from Ulm from 9:30 in the morning until about 23:00 in the evening with total distance of about 1100 km, 5 charging stops, starting with 92% battery, charging for 26 min (50 kWh), 33 min (57 kWh + lunch), 17 min (23 kWh), 12 min (17 kWh) and 13 min (37 kW). In the last two chargers you can see the difference between a good and fast 150 kW charger at high battery charge level and a really fast Ionity charger at low battery charge level, which makes charging faster still. Arriving to hotel with 23% of battery. Overnight the car charged from a Porsche Destination Charger to 87% (57 kWh). That was a bit less than I would expect from a full power 11kW charger, but good enough. Hotels should really install 11kW Type2 chargers for their guests, it is a really significant bonus that drives more clients to you. The road between Warsaw and Kaunas is the most difficult part of the trip for both driving itself and also for charging. For driving the problem is that there will be a new highway going from Warsaw to Lithuanian border, but it is actually not fully ready yet. So parts of the way one drives on the new, great and wide highway and parts of the way one drives on temporary roads or on old single lane undivided roads. And the most annoying part is navigating between parts as signs are not always clear and the maps are either too old or too new. Some maps do not have the new roads and others have on the roads that have not been actually build or opened to traffic yet. It's really easy to loose ones way and take a significant detour. As far as charging goes, basically there is only the slow 50 kW chargers between Warsaw and Kaunas (for now). We chose to charge on the last charger in Poland, by Suwalki Kaufland. That was not a good idea - there is only one 50 kW CCS and many people decide the same, so there can be a wait. We had to wait 17 minutes before we could charge for 30 more minutes just to get 18 kWh into the battery. Not the best use of time. On the way back we chose a different charger in Lomza where would have a relaxed dinner while the car was charging. That was far more relaxing and a better use of time. We also tried charging at an Orlen charger that was not recommended by our car and we found out why. Unlike all other chargers during our entire trip, this charger did not accept our universal BMW Charging RFID card. Instead it demanded that we download their own Orlen app and register there. The app is only available in some countries (and not in others) and on iPhone it is only available in Polish. That is a bad exception to the rule and a bad example. This is also how most charging works in USA. Here in Europe that is not normal. The normal is to use a charging card - either provided from the car maker or from another supplier (like PlugSufring or Maingau Energy). The providers then make roaming arrangements with all the charging networks, so the cards just work everywhere. In the end the user gets the prices and the bills from their card provider as a single monthly bill. This also saves all any credit card charges for the user. Having a clear, separate RFID card also means that one can easily choose how to pay for each charging session. For example, I have a corporate RFID card that my company pays for (for charging in Germany) and a private BMW Charging card that I am paying myself for (for charging abroad). Having the car itself authenticate direct with the charger (like Tesla does) removes the option to choose how to pay. Having each charge network have to use their own app or token bring too much chaos and takes too much setup. The optimum is having one card that works everywhere and having the option to have additional card or cards for specific purposes. Reaching Ionity chargers in Lithuania is again a breath of fresh air - 20-24 minutes to charge 50 kWh is as expected. One can charge on the first Ionity just enough to reach the next one and then on the second charger one can charge up enough to either reach the Ionity charger in Adazi or the final target in Latvia. There is a huge number of CSDD (Road Traffic and Safety Directorate) managed chargers all over Latvia, but they are 50 kW chargers. Good enough for local travel, but not great for long distance trips. BMW i4 charges at over 50 kW on a HPC even at over 90% battery state of charge (SoC). This means that it is always faster to charge up in a HPC than in a 50 kW charger, if that is at all possible. We also tested the CSDD chargers - they worked without any issues. One could pay with the BMW Charging RFID card, one could use the CSDD e-mobi app or token and one could also use Mobilly - an app that you can use in Latvia for everything from parking to public transport tickets or museums or car washes. We managed to reach our final destination near Aluksne with 17% range remaining after just 3 charging stops: 17+30 min (18 kWh), 24 min (48 kWh), 28 min (36 kWh). Last stop we charged to 90% which took a few extra minutes that would have been optimal. For travel around in Latvia we were charging at our target farmhouse from a normal 3 kW Schuko EU socket. That is very slow. We charged for 33 hours and went from 17% to 94%, so not really full. That was perfectly fine for our purposes. We easily reached Riga, drove to the sea and then back to Aluksne with 8% still in reserve and started charging again for the next trip. If it were required to drive around more and charge faster, we could have used the normal 3-phase 440V connection in the farmhouse to have a red CEE 16A plug installed (same as people use for welders). BMW i4 comes standard with a new BMW Flexible Fast Charger that has changable socket adapters. It comes by default with a Schucko connector in Europe, but for 90 one can buy an adapter for blue CEE plug (3.7 kW) or red CEE 16A or 32A plugs (11 kW). Some public charging stations in France actually use the blue CEE plugs instead of more common Type2 electric car charging stations. The CEE plugs are also common in camping parking places. On the way back the long distance BEV travel was already well understood and did not cause us any problem. From our destination we could easily reach the first Ionity in Lithuania, on the Panevezhis bypass road where in just 8 minutes we got 19 kWh and were ready to drive on to Kaunas, there a longer 32 minute stop before the charging desert of Suwalki Gap that gave us 52 kWh to 90%. That brought us to a shopping mall in Lomzha where we had some food and charged up 39 kWh in lazy 50 minutes. That was enough to bring us to our return hotel for the night - Hotel 500W in Strykow by Lodz that has a 50kW charger on site, while we were having late dinner and preparing for sleep, the car easily recharged to full (71 kWh in 95 minutes), so I just moved it from charger to a parking spot just before going to sleep. Really easy and well flowing day. Second day back went even better as we just needed an 18 minute stop at the same Katy Wroclawskie charger as before to get 22 kWh and that was enough to get back to Germany. After that we were again flying on the Autobahn and charging as needed, 15 min (31 kWh), 23 min (48 kWh) and 31 min (54 kWh + food). We started the day on about 9:40 and were home at 21:40 after driving just over 1000 km on that day. So less than 12 hours for 1000 km travelled, including all charging, bio stops, food and some traffic jams as well. Not bad. Now let's take a look at all the apps and data connections that a technically minded customer can have for their car. Architecturally the car is a network of computers by itself, but it is very secured and normally people do not have any direct access. However, once you log in into the car with your BMW account the car gets your profile info and preferences (seat settings, navigation favorites, ...) and the car then also can start sending information to the BMW backend about its status. This information is then available to the user over multiple different channels. There is no separate channel for each of those data flow. The data only goes once to the backend and then all other communication of apps happens with the backend. First of all the MyBMW app. This is the go-to for everything about the car - seeing its current status and location (when not driving), sending commands to the car (lock, unlock, flash lights, pre-condition, ...) and also monitor and control charging processes. You can also plan a route or destination in the app in advance and then just send it over to the car so it already knows where to drive to when you get to the car. This can also integrate with calendar entries, if you have locations for appointments, for example. This also shows full charging history and allows a very easy export of that data, here I exported all charging sessions from June and then trimmed it back to only sessions relevant to the trip and cut off some design elements to have the data more visible. So one can very easily see when and where we were charging, how much power we got at each spot and (if you set prices for locations) can even show costs. I've already mentioned the Tronity service and its ABRP integration, but it also saves the information that it gets from the car and gathers that data over time. It has nice aspects, like showing the driven routes on a map, having ways to do business trip accounting and having good calendar view. Sadly it does not correctly capture the data for charging sessions (the amounts are incorrect). Update: after talking to Tronity support, it looks like the bug was in the incorrect value for the usable battery capacity for my car. They will look into getting th eright values there by default, but as a workaround one can edit their car in their system (after at least one charging session) and directly set the expected battery capacity (usable) in the car properties on the Tronity web portal settings. One other fun way to see data from your BMW is using the BMW integration in Home Assistant. This brings the car as a device in your own smart home. You can read all the variables from the car current status (and Home Asisstant makes cute historical charts) and you can even see interesting trends, for example for remaining range shows much higher value in Latvia as its prediction is adapted to Latvian road speeds and during the trip it adapts to Polish and then to German road speeds and thus to higher consumption and thus lower maximum predicted remaining range. Having the car attached to the Home Assistant also allows you to attach the car to automations, both as data and event source (like detecting when car enters the "Home" zone) and also as target, so you could flash car lights or even unlock or lock it when certain conditions are met. So, what in the end was the most important thing - cost of the trip? In total we charged up 863 kWh, so that would normally cost one about 290 , which is close to half what this trip would have costed with a gasoline car. Out of that 279 kWh in Germany (paid by my employer) and 154 kWh in the farmhouse (paid by our wonderful relatives :D) so in the end the charging that I actually need to pay adds up to 430 kWh or about 150 . Typically, it took about 400 in fuel that I had to pay to get to Latvia and back. The difference is really nice! In the end I believe that there are three different ways of charging:

incidental charging - this is wast majority of charging in the normal day-to-day life. The car gets charged when and where it is convinient to do so along the way. If we go to a movie or a shop and there is a chance to leave the car at a charger, then it can charge up. Works really well, does not take extra time for charging from us.
fast charging - charging up at a HPC during optimal charging conditions - from relatively low level to no more than 70-80% while you are still doing all the normal things one would do in a quick stop in a long travel process: bio things, cleaning the windscreen, getting a coffee or a snack.
necessary charging - charging from a whatever charger is available just enough to be able to reach the next destination or the next fast charger.

The last category is the only one that is really annoying and should be avoided at all costs. Even by shifting your plans so that you find something else useful to do while necessary charging is happening and thus, at least partially, shifting it over to incidental charging category. Then you are no longer just waiting for the car, you are doing something else and the car magically is charged up again. And when one does that, then travelling with an electric car becomes no more annoying than travelling with a gasoline car. Having more breaks in a trip is a good thing and makes the trips actually easier and less stressfull - I was more relaxed during and after this trip than during previous trips. Having the car air conditioning always be on, even when stopped, was a godsend in the insane heat wave of 30C-38C that we were driving trough. Final stats: 4425 km driven in the trip. Average consumption: 18.7 kWh/100km. Time driving: 2 days and 3 hours. Car regened 152 kWh. Charging stations recharged 863 kWh. Questions? You can use this i4talk forum thread or this Twitter thread to ask them to me.

27 June 2022

Russ Allbery: Tie::ShadowHash 2.00

This is a small Perl module that combines multiple key/value sources of data into a "shadow hash" that acts as if all of the underlying data sources have been merged. Any modifications made to the shadow hash are stored in an overlay and reflected in further accesses to the shadow hash, but the underlying data sources are read-only and are not changed. It had been 12 years since the last release of this small module, so it was overdue for some modernization and cleanup. I also removed the new() class method since shadow hashes should always be created with tie(), and documented a few more edge cases. You can get the latest version from CPAN or from the Tie::ShadowHash distribution page.

Russ Allbery: Review: Light from Uncommon Stars

Review: Light from Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki

Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	2021
ISBN:	1-250-78907-9
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	371

Katrina Nguyen is an young abused transgender woman. As the story opens, she's preparing to run away from home. Her escape bag is packed with meds, clothes, her papers, and her violin. The note she is leaving for her parents says that she's going to San Francisco, a plausible lie. Her actual destination is Los Angeles, specifically the San Gabriel Valley, where a man she met at a queer youth conference said he'd give her a place to sleep. Shizuka Satomi is the Queen of Hell, the legendary uncompromising violin teacher responsible for six previous superstars, at least within the limited world of classical music. She's wealthy, abrasive, demanding, and intimidating, and unbeknownst to the rest of the world she has made a literal bargain with Hell. She has to deliver seven souls, seven violin players who want something badly enough that they'll bargain with Hell to get it. Six have already been delivered in spectacular fashion, but she's running out of time to deliver the seventh before her own soul is forfeit. Tamiko Grohl, an up-and-coming violinist from her native Los Angeles, will hopefully be the seventh. Lan Tran is a refugee and matriarch of a family who runs Starrgate Donut. She and her family didn't flee another unstable or inhospitable country. They fled the collapsing Galactic Empire, securing their travel authorization by promising to set up a tourism attraction. Meanwhile, she's careful to give cops free donuts and to keep their advanced technology carefully concealed. The opening of this book is unlikely to be a surprise in general shape. Most readers would expect Katrina to end up as Satomi's student rather than Tamiko, and indeed she does, although not before Katrina has a very difficult time. Near the start of the novel, I thought "oh, this is going to be hurt/comfort without a romantic relationship," and it is. But it then goes beyond that start into a multifaceted story about complexity, resilience, and how people support each other. It is also a fantastic look at the nuance and intricacies of being or supporting a transgender person, vividly illustrated by a story full of characters the reader cares about and without the academic abstruseness that often gets in the way. The problems with gender-blindness, the limitations of honoring someone's gender without understanding how other people do not, the trickiness of privilege, gender policing as a distraction and alienation from the rest of one's life, the complications of real human bodies and dysmorphia, the importance of listening to another person rather than one's assumptions about how that person feels it's all in here, flowing naturally from the story, specific to the characters involved, and never belabored. I cannot express how well-handled this is. It was a delight to read. The other wonderful thing Aoki does is set Satomi up as the almost supernaturally competent teacher who in a sense "rescues" Katrina, and then invert the trope, showing the limits of Satomi's expertise, the places where she desperately needs human connection for herself, and her struggle to understand Katrina well enough to teach her at the level Satomi expects of herself. Teaching is not one thing to everyone; it's about listening, and Katrina is nothing like Satomi's other students. This novel is full of people thinking they finally understand each other and realizing there is still more depth that they had missed, and then talking through the gap like adults. As you can tell from any summary of this book, it's an odd genre mash-up. The fantasy part is a classic "magician sells her soul to Hell" story; there are a few twists, but it largely follows genre expectations. The science fiction part involving Lan is unfortunately weaker and feels more like a random assortment of borrowed Star Trek tropes than coherent world-building. Genre readers should not come to this story expecting a well-thought-out science fiction universe or a serious attempt to reconcile metaphysics between the fantasy and science fiction backgrounds. It's a quirky assortment of parts that don't normally go together, defy easy classification, and are often unexplained. I suspect this was intentional on Aoki's part given how deeply this book is about the experience of being transgender. Of the three primary viewpoint characters, I thought Lan's perspective was the weakest, and not just because of her somewhat generic SF background. Aoki uses her as a way to talk about the refugee experience, describing her as a woman who brings her family out of danger to build a new life. This mostly works, but Lan has vastly more power and capabilities than a refugee would normally have. Rather than the typical Asian refugee experience in the San Gabriel valley, Lan is more akin to a US multimillionaire who for some reason fled to Vietnam (relative to those around her, Lan is arguably even more wealthy than that). This is also a refugee experience, but it is an incredibly privileged one in a way that partly undermines the role that she plays in the story. Another false note bothered me more: I thought Tamiko was treated horribly in this story. She plays a quite minor role, sidelined early in the novel and appearing only briefly near the climax, and she's portrayed quite negatively, but she's clearly hurting as deeply as the protagonists of this novel. Aoki gives her a moment of redemption, but Tamiko gets nothing from it. Unlike every other injured and abused character in this story, no one is there for Tamiko and no one ever attempts to understand her. I found that profoundly sad. She's not an admirable character, but neither is Satomi at the start of the book. At least a gesture at a future for Tamiko would have been appreciated. Those two complaints aside, though, I could not put this book down. I was able to predict the broad outline of the plot, but the specifics were so good and so true to characters. Both the primary and supporting cast are unique, unpredictable, and memorable. Light from Uncommon Stars has a complex relationship with genre. It is squarely in the speculative fiction genre; the plot would not work without the fantasy and (more arguably) the science fiction elements. Music is magical in a way that goes beyond what can be attributed to metaphor and subjectivity. But it's also primarily character story deeply rooted in the specific location of the San Gabriel valley east of Los Angeles, full of vivid descriptions (particularly of food) and day-to-day life. As with the fantasy and science fiction elements, Aoki does not try to meld the genre elements into a coherent whole. She lets them sit side by side and be awkward and charming and uneven and chaotic. If you're the sort of SF reader who likes building a coherent theory of world-building rules, you may have to turn that desire off to fully enjoy this book. I thought this book was great. It's not flawless, but like its characters it's not trying to be flawless. In places it is deeply insightful and heartbreakingly emotional; in others, it's a glorious mess. It's full of cooking and food, YouTube fame, the disappointments of replicators, video game music, meet-cutes over donuts, found family, and classical music drama. I wish we'd gotten way more about the violin repair shop and a bit less warmed-over Star Trek, but I also loved it exactly the way it was. Definitely the best of the 2022 Hugo nominees that I've read so far. Content warning for child abuse, rape, self-harm, and somewhat explicit sex work. The start of the book is rather heavy and horrific, although the author advertises fairly clearly (and accurately) that things will get better. Rating: 9 out of 10

25 June 2022

Jamie McClelland: Deleting an app won't bring back Roe v Wade

In some ways it feels like 2016 all over again. I m seeing panic-stricken calls for everyone to delete their period apps, close their Facebook accounts, de-Google their cell phones and, generally speaking, turn their entire online lives upside down to avoid the techno-surveillance dragnet unleashed by the overturning of Roe v. Wade. I m sympathetic and generally agree that many of us should do most of those things on any given day. But, there is a serious problem with this cycle of repression and panic: it s very bad for organizing. In our rush to give people concrete steps they can take to feel safer, we re fueling a frenzy of panic and fear, which seriously inhibits activism. Now is the time to remind people that, over the last 20 years, a growing movement of organizers and technologists have been building user-driven, privacy-respecting, consentful technology platforms as well as organizations and communities to develop them. We have an entire eco system of:

technology platform cooperatives,
movement aligned Internet providers that pre-date the founding of Twitter and are still going strong (May First, Riseup, and Autistici just to name a few),
the fediverse, a well developed, de-centralized alterntiave to corporate social media (try Social.coop if you want to get started),
powerful open source, privacy respecting software geared for organizing and movement providers hosting it (see CiviCRM and Progressive Technology Project),
multi-year campaigns targeting poor tech practices of corporate technology giants (see Mijente s No Tech for ICE),
so many more examples, far too numerous to name.

All of these projects need our love and support over the long haul. Please help spread the word - rather then just deleting an app, let s encourage people to join an organziation or try out a new kind of technology that will serve us down the road when we may need it even more then today.

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