Search Results: "tar"

20 October 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Freexian meetup, debusine updates, lpr/lpd in Debian, and more! (by Utkarsh Gupta, Stefano Rivera)

Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

Freexian Meetup, by Stefano Rivera, Utkarsh Gupta, et al. During DebConf, Freexian organized a meetup for its collaborators and those interested in learning more about Freexian and its services. It was well received and many people interested in Freexian showed up. Some developers who were interested in contributing to LTS came to get more details about joining the project. And some prospective customers came to get to know us and ask questions. Sadly, the tragic loss of Abraham shook DebConf, both individually and structurally. The meetup got rescheduled to a small room without video coverage. With that, we still had a wholesome interaction and here s a quick picture from the meetup taken by Utkarsh (which is also why he s missing!).

Debusine, by Rapha l Hertzog, et al. Freexian has been investing into debusine for a while, but development speed is about to increase dramatically thanks to funding from SovereignTechFund.de. Rapha l laid out the 5 milestones of the funding contract, and filed the issues for the first milestone. Together with Enrico and Stefano, they established a workflow for the expanded team. Among the first steps of this milestone, Enrico started to work on a developer-friendly description of debusine that we can use when we reach out to the many Debian contributors that we will have to interact with. And Rapha l started the design work of the autopkgtest and lintian tasks, i.e. what s the interface to schedule such tasks, what behavior and what associated options do we support? At this point you might wonder what debusine is supposed to be let us try to answer this: Debusine manages scheduling and distribution of Debian-related build and QA tasks to a network of worker machines. It also manages the resulting artifacts and provides the results in an easy to consume way. We want to make it easy for Debian contributors to leverage all the great QA tools that Debian provides. We want to build the next generation of Debian s build infrastructure, one that will continue to reliably do what it already does, but that will also enable distribution-wide experiments, custom package repositories and custom workflows with advanced package reviews. If this all sounds interesting to you, don t hesitate to watch the project on salsa.debian.org and to contribute.

lpr/lpd in Debian, by Thorsten Alteholz During Debconf23, Till Kamppeter presented CPDB (Common Print Dialog Backend), a new way to handle print queues. After this talk it was discussed whether the old lpr/lpd based printing system could be abandoned in Debian or whether there is still demand for it. So Thorsten asked on the debian-devel email list whether anybody uses it. Oddly enough, these old packages are still useful:

Within a small network it is easier to distribute a printcap file, than to properly configure cups clients.

One of the biggest manufacturers of WLAN router and DSL boxes only supports raw queues when attaching an USB printer to their hardware. Admittedly the CPDB still has problems with such raw queues.

The Pharos printing system at MIT is still lpd-based.

As a result, the lpr/lpd stuff is not yet ready to be abandoned and Thorsten will adopt the relevant packages (or rather move them under the umbrella of the debian-printing team). Though it is not planned to develop new features, those packages should at least have a maintainer. This month Thorsten adopted rlpr, an utility for lpd printing without using /etc/printcap. The next one he is working on is lprng, a lpr/lpd printer spooling system. If you know of any other package that is also needed and still maintained by the QA team, please tell Thorsten.

/usr-merge, by Helmut Grohne Discussion about lifting the file move moratorium has been initiated with the CTTE and the release team. A formal lift is dependent on updating debootstrap in older suites though. A significant number of packages can automatically move their `systemd` unit files if `dh_installsystemd` and `systemd.pc` change their installation targets. Unfortunately, doing so makes some packages FTBFS and therefore patches have been filed. The analysis tool, `dumat`, has been enhanced to better understand which upgrade scenarios are considered supported to reduce false positive bug filings and gained a mode for local operation on a `.changes` file meant for inclusion in salsa-ci. The filing of bugs from `dumat` is still manual to improve the quality of reports. Since September, the moratorium has been lifted.

Miscellaneous contributions

Rapha l updated Django s backport in bullseye-backports to match the latest security release that was published in bookworm. Tracker.debian.org is still using that backport.

Helmut Grohne sent 13 patches for cross build failures.

Helmut Grohne performed a maintenance upload of `debvm` enabling its use in `autopkgtests`.

Helmut Grohne wrote an API-compatible reimplementation of `autopkgtest-build-qemu`. It is powered by `mmdebstrap`, therefore unprivileged, EFI-only and will soon be included in mmdebstrap.

Santiago continued the work regarding how to make it easier to (automatically) test reverse dependencies. An example of the ongoing work was presented during the Salsa CI BoF at DebConf 23.
In fact, omniorb-dfsg test pipelines as the above were used for the omniorb-dfsg 4.3.0 transition, verifying how the reverse dependencies (tango, pytango and omnievents) were built and how their autopkgtest jobs run with the to-be-uploaded omniorb-dfsg new release.

Utkarsh and Stefano attended and helped run DebConf 23. Also continued winding up DebConf 22 accounting.

Anton Gladky did some science team uploads to fix RC bugs.

19 October 2023

Russ Allbery: Review: The Cassini Division

Review: The Cassini Division, by Ken MacLeod

Series:	Fall Revolution #3
Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	1998
Printing:	August 2000
ISBN:	0-8125-6858-3
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	305

The Cassini Division is the third book in the Fall Revolution series and a fairly direct sequel (albeit with different protagonists) to The Stone Canal. This is not a good place to start the series. It's impossible to talk about the plot of this book without discussing the future history of this series, which arguably includes some spoilers for The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal. I don't think the direction of history matters that much in enjoying the previous books, but read the first two books of the series before this review if you want to avoid all spoilers. When the Outwarders uploaded themselves and went fast, they did a lot of strange things: an interstellar probe contrary to all known laws of physics, the disassembly of Ganymede, and the Malley Mile, which plays a significant role in The Stone Canal. They also crashed the Earth. This was not entirely their fault. There were a lot of politics, religious fundamentalism, and plagues in play as well. But the storm of viruses broadcast from their transformed Jupiter shut down essentially all computing equipment on Earth, which set off much of the chaos. The results were catastrophic, and also politically transformative. Now, the Solar Union is a nearly unified anarchosocialist society, with only scattered enclaves of non-cooperators left outside that structure. Ellen May Ngewthu is a leader of the Cassini Division, the bulwark that stands between humans and the Outwarders. The Division ruthlessly destroys any remnant or probe that dares rise out of Jupiter's atmosphere, ensuring that the Outwarders, whatever they have become after untold generations of fast evolution, stay isolated to the one planet they have absorbed. The Division is very good at what they do. But there is a potential gap in that line of defense: there are fast folk in storage at the other end of the Malley Mile, on New Mars, and who knows what the deranged capitalists there will do or what forces they might unleash. The one person who knows a path through the Malley Mile isn't talking, so Ellen goes in search of the next best thing: the non-cooperator scientist Isambard Kingdom Malley. I am now thoroughly annoyed at how politics are handled in this series, and much less confused by the frequency with which MacLeod won Prometheus Awards from the Libertarian Futurist Society. Some of this is my own fault for having too high of hopes for political SF, but nothing in this series so far has convinced me that MacLeod is seriously engaging with political systems. Instead, the world-building to date makes the classic libertarian mistake of thinking societies will happily abandon stability and predictability in favor of their strange definition of freedom. The Solar Union is based on what Ellen calls the true knowledge, which is worth quoting in full so that you know what kind of politics we're talking about:

Life is a process of breaking down and using other matter, and if need be, other life. Therefore, life is aggression, and successful life is successful aggression. Life is the scum of matter, and people are the scum of life. There is nothing but matter, forces, space and time, which together make power. Nothing matters, except what matters to you. Might makes right, and power makes freedom. You are free to do whatever is in your power, and if you want to survive and thrive you had better do whatever is in your interests. If your interests conflict with those of others, let the others pit their power against yours, everyone for theirselves. If your interests coincide with those of others, let them work together with you, and against the rest. We are what we eat, and we eat everything. All that you really value, and the goodness and truth and beauty of life, have their roots in this apparently barren soil. This is the true knowledge. We had founded our idealism on the most nihilistic implications of science, our socialism on crass self-interest, our peace on our capacity for mutual destruction, and our liberty on determinism. We had replaced morality with convention, bravery with safety, frugality with plenty, philosophy with science, stoicism with anaesthetics and piety with immortality. The universal acid of the true knowledge had burned away a world of words, and exposed a universe of things. Things we could use.

This is certainly something that some people will believe, particularly cynical college students who love political theory, feeling smarter than other people, and calling their pet theories things like "the true knowledge." It is not even remotely believable as the governing philosophy of a solar confederation. The point of government for the average person in human society is to create and enforce predictable mutual rules that one can use as a basis for planning and habits, allowing you to not think about politics all the time. People who adore thinking about politics have great difficulty understanding how important it is to everyone else to have ignorable government. Constantly testing your power against other coalitions is a sport, not a governing philosophy. Given the implication that this testing is through violence or the threat of violence, it beggars belief that any large number of people would tolerate that type of instability for an extended period of time. Ellen is fully committed to the true knowledge. MacLeod likely is not; I don't think this represents the philosophy of the author. But the primary political conflict in this novel famous for being political science fiction is between the above variation of anarchy and an anarchocapitalist society, neither of which are believable as stable political systems for large numbers of people. This is a bit like seeking out a series because you were told it was about a great clash of European monarchies and discovering it was about a fight between Liberland and Sealand. It becomes hard to take the rest of the book seriously. I do realize that one point of political science fiction is to play with strange political ideas, similar to how science fiction plays with often-implausible science ideas. But those ideas need some contact with human nature. If you're going to tell me that the key to clawing society back from a world-wide catastrophic descent into chaos is to discard literally every social system used to create predictability and order, you had better be describing aliens, because that's not how humans work. The rest of the book is better. I am untangling a lot of backstory for the above synopsis, which in the book comes in dribs and drabs, but piecing that together is good fun. The plot is far more straightforward than the previous two books in the series: there is a clear enemy, a clear goal, and Ellen goes from point A to point B in a comprehensible way with enough twists to keep it interesting. The core moral conflict of the book is that Ellen is an anti-AI fanatic to the point that she considers anyone other than non-uploaded humans to be an existential threat. MacLeod gives the reader both reasons to believe Ellen is right and reasons to believe she's wrong, which maintains an interesting moral tension. One thing that MacLeod is very good at is what Bob Shaw called "wee thinky bits." I think my favorite in this book is the computer technology used by the Cassini Division, who have spent a century in close combat with inimical AI capable of infecting any digital computer system with tailored viruses. As a result, their computers are mechanical non-Von-Neumann machines, but mechanical with all the technology of a highly-advanced 24th century civilization with nanometer-scale manufacturing technology. It's a great mental image and a lot of fun to think about. This is the only science fiction novel that I can think of that has a hard-takeoff singularity that nonetheless is successfully resisted and fought to a stand-still by unmodified humanity. Most writers who were interested in the singularity idea treated it as either a near-total transformation leaving only remnants or as something that had to be stopped before it started. MacLeod realizes that there's no reason to believe a post-singularity form of life would be either uniform in intent or free from its own baffling sudden collapses and reversals, which can be exploited by humans. It makes for a much better story. The sociology of this book is difficult to swallow, but the characterization is significantly better than the previous books of the series and the plot is much tighter. I was too annoyed by the political science to fully enjoy it, but that may be partly the fault of my expectations coming in. If you like chewy, idea-filled science fiction with a lot of unexplained world-building that you have to puzzle out as you go, you may enjoy this, although unfortunately I think you need to read at least The Stone Canal first. The ending was a bit unsatisfying, but even that includes some neat science fiction ideas. Followed by The Sky Road, although I understand it is not a straightforward sequel. Rating: 6 out of 10

17 October 2023

Russ Allbery: Review: A Hat Full of Sky

Review: A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett

Series:	Discworld #32
Publisher:	HarperTrophy
Copyright:	2004
Printing:	2005
ISBN:	0-06-058662-1
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	407

A Hat Full of Sky is the 32nd Discworld novel and the second Tiffany Aching young adult novel. You should not start here, but you could start with The Wee Free Men. As with that book, some parts of the story carry more weight if you are already familiar with Granny Weatherwax. Tiffany is a witch, but she needs to be trained. This is normally done by apprenticeship, and in Tiffany's case it seemed wise to give her exposure to more types of witching. Thus, Tiffany, complete with new boots and a going-away present from the still-somewhat-annoying Roland, is off on an apprenticeship to the sensible Miss Level. (The new boots feel wrong and get swapped out for her concealed old boots at the first opportunity.) Unbeknownst to Tiffany, her precocious experiments with leaving her body as a convenient substitute for a mirror have attracted something very bad, something none of the witches are expecting. The Nac Mac Feegle know a hiver as soon as they feel it, but they have a new kelda now, and she's not sure she wants them racing off after their old kelda. Terry Pratchett is very good at a lot of things, but I don't think villains are one of his strengths. He manages an occasional memorable one (the Auditors, for example, at least before the whole chocolate thing), but I find most of them a bit boring. The hiver is one of the boring ones. It serves mostly as a concretized metaphor about the temptations of magical power, but those temptations felt so unlike the tendencies of Tiffany's personality that I didn't think the metaphor worked in the story. The interesting heart of this book to me is the conflict between Tiffany's impatience with nonsense and Miss Level's arguably excessive willingness to help everyone regardless of how demanding they get. There's something deeper in here about female socialization and how that interacts with Pratchett's conception of witches that got me thinking, although I don't think Pratchett landed the point with full force. Miss Level is clearly a good witch to her village and seems comfortable with how she lives her life, so perhaps they're not taking advantage of her, but she thoroughly slots herself into the helper role. If Tiffany attempted the same role, people would be taking advantage of her, because the role doesn't fit her. And yet, there's a lesson here she needs to learn about seeing other people as people, even if it wouldn't be healthy for her to move all the way to Miss Level's mindset. Tiffany is a precocious kid who is used to being underestimated, and who has reacted by becoming independent and somewhat judgmental. She's also had a taste of real magical power, which creates a risk of her getting too far into her own head. Miss Level is a fount of empathy and understanding for the normal people around her, which Tiffany resists and needed to learn. I think Granny Weatherwax is too much like Tiffany to teach her that. She also has no patience for fools, but she's older and wiser and knows Tiffany needs a push in that direction. Miss Level isn't a destination, but more of a counterbalance. That emotional journey, a conclusion that again focuses on the role of witches in questions of life and death, and Tiffany's fascinatingly spiky mutual respect with Granny Weatherwax were the best parts of this book for me. The middle section with the hiver was rather tedious and forgettable, and the Nac Mac Feegle were entertaining but not more than that. It felt like the story went in a few different directions and only some of them worked, in part because the villain intended to tie those pieces together was more of a force of nature than a piece of Tiffany's emotional puzzle. If the hiver had resonated with the darker parts of Tiffany's natural personality, the plot would have worked better. Pratchett was gesturing in that direction, but he never convinced me it was consistent with what we'd already seen of her. Like a lot of the Discworld novels, the good moments in A Hat Full of Sky are astonishing, but the plot is somewhat forgettable. It's still solidly entertaining, though, and if you enjoyed The Wee Free Men, I think this is slightly better. Followed by Going Postal in publication order. The next Tiffany Aching novel is Wintersmith. Rating: 8 out of 10

16 October 2023

Scarlett Gately Moore: KDE: Debian: Hopefully a short goodbye for now.

I have been working around the clock and over the weekend trying to get the transition for snapcraft files in their respective repos. What does this mean for users? Faster releases for Snaps and closer collaboration between snapcrafters and application developers so bugs get resolved much quicker. Unfortunately, I have 2 days to finish before my internet gets cut off. I did not make enough to pay the bill. Seeing as this is the first time in a year, I am absolutely, positively grateful for all of you and your support over the past year. I know my work is appreciated! I will never be homeless or starve due to my wonderful local community, but the Internet bill is not something we can barter or trade labor for. I have caught up on my Debian obligations ( so no MIA needed! ) KDE neon is in good hands with Jonathan and Carlos. So for now, farewell ( I assure you I will be back! ) https://gofund.me/b8b69e54

15 October 2023

Aigars Mahinovs: Figuring out finances part 2

A week ago I started to migrate my financial planning from a closed source system to a new system based on an open source, self-hosted solution. Main candidate is Firefly III - a relatively simple financial planner with a rather rich feature set and a solid user base and developer support. Starting it up with a Docker-Compose file was quite easy, following the official documentation. The same Compose file also managed the MySQL database, the importer app and a cron container for regular imports. The separate importer app allows both imports from CSV files and also from external bank account connection services. For whatever weird reason both of those services support exporting data from my regular bank accounts, but not from my credit cards for exactly the same bank. So for those cards I would need to periodically download CVS transaction exports and feed them into the importer. The combination of the cron container and the importer app allows for both of these functions. To do this you first do the import via the Web UI first and configure all the mappings - configure file and date formats, map account names in the bank output to account names that you added in Firefly, configure what otehr columns mean and what is the mapping of other values, like expense and income accounts. At the end of the process you can download a json file representing all the settings of the import you just did. Putting such a json config file in the input folder of the cron container and telling it to do an import (weekly, for example) would do such import periodically. Putting a credit card CSV file along with a config file for credit card import would also auto-import that. So far so good. However, when I tried importing exports from MoneyWiz or even when I tried re-creating account history directly from the bank data, I hit a very annoying problem. Transfers. Thing is detecting transfers between the real (asset) accounts that you are managing is really essential. For one those are not real expenses and incomes, so failing to mark them as transfers would show weird income/expense numbers. But if you do detect them as transfers and correctly map the destination account, but fail to match the transations between another you get a double-transaction. This becomes really hard when transactions happen on different dates and have different descriptions. So you get both a +1000 transaction "Credit card reset" on 14.09.2023 in the credit card account and a -1000$ transaction "Repayment of own credit card" on 24.09.2023 in the main account of the bank. Matching them to recognise that it is just one transfer and not two is ... non-trivial. The best solution I could come up with so far is to always map the "Opposing account name" for such transfers to a virtual "Transfers" asset account. That has the benefit of being actually able to correctly represent transfers that take several days to move between accounts and showing you how much money is still in transit at any point in time. So after I figured this out, finally the account balances started matching up with reality. Setting up spending categories required another change - the author of the Firefly III does not like complexity so it does not support nesting categories. Categories can only be in a single, flat list. It is suggested that if you do need to track multiple categories and also their combination, then category groups might help you. I will survive for now by simplifying the categories that I do actually use. Might actually make the reports more usable. A new feature for me will be the ability to use automation rules to assign transactions to categories based on their contents, like expense accounts of keywords in descriptions. Setting up regular bills (with matching rules to assign incoming transactions to those bills) is another feature that is very important to me. The feature itself works just fine in Firefly III, but it has two restrictions that the author of the software does not actually want to be changed. For one it can not be used to track prodictable incomes (like salary), presumably because it is only there for bills (subscriptions in v3 UI). And for other, there is nothing in the base software that actually uses the data from bills to look forward. The author does not like to try to predict the future. Which for me is basically the one of two reasons to use this kind of software at all. I want to know - given all manually entered regular and 100% predictable expenses and incomes, what will be the state of my accounts at particular date? It seems that to get at that I will need to write my own oracle script using the rich Firefly III API. The last question I had for this week was - how will I enter a new cash puchace of potatoes on a farmers market into the system that sits in a private server in my home network? Turns out there are actually multiple Android apps for Firefly III that can be easily used for this using a robust OAuth or shared token authentification. Except the web UI needs to be exposed online for this to work (and ideally protected by HTTPS). Other users have also created Telegram bots that allow using chat messages to create transaction entries. This is a bit harder to use and more narrow scope, but should be easier to setup. Will have to try both apporaches. But before I really get going on this, I need to fix another thing that I have been postponing for a while: I will need to migrate my Home Assistant installation from a Docker container installation to a Home Assistant OS installation so that I can install Addons, including Firefly III, MySQL and Portainer to have a bit more organised and less hand-knitted home server setup. Let's see how that goes next week :D

Russ Allbery: Review: A Killing Frost

Review: A Killing Frost, by Seanan McGuire

Series:	October Daye #14
Publisher:	DAW
Copyright:	2020
ISBN:	0-7564-1253-6
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	351

A Killing Frost is the 14th book in the October Daye urban fantasy series and a direct plot sequel to the events of The Brightest Fell. You definitely cannot start here. This review has some relationship spoilers here for things that you would be expecting after the first five or six books, but which you wouldn't know when reading the first few books of the series. If you haven't started the series yet but plan to, consider skipping this review; if you haven't started reading this series, it will probably be meaningless anyway. Finally, events seem to have slowed, enough trauma has been healed, and Toby is able to seriously consider getting married. However, no sooner is the thought voiced than fae politics injects itself yet again. In order to get married without creating potentially substantial future problems for herself and her family, Toby will have to tie up some loose ends. Since one of those loose ends is a price from the Luidaeg that has been haunting her family for decades, this is easier said than done. The Brightest Fell had a very unsatisfying ending. This, after a two book interlude, is the proper end to that story. I picked this up when I had a bunch of stressful things going on and I wanted to be entertained without having to do much work as a reader. Once again, this series delivered exactly that. The writing is repetitive and a bit clunky, McGuire hammers the same emotional points into the ground, and one does wonder about Toby's tendency to emulate a half-human battering ram, but every book has me engrossed and turning the pages. Everyone should have at least one book series on the go that offers reliable, low-effort entertainment. The initial lever that McGuire uses to push Toby into this plot (fae marriage requirements that had never previously been mentioned) felt rather strained and arbitrary, and I spent the first part of the book grumbling a bit about it. However, there is a better reason for this complication that is revealed with time, and which implies some interesting things about how the fae see heroes and how they use them to solve problems. Now I'm wondering if McGuire will explore that some more in later books. This is the "all is revealed" book about Simon Torquill. As we get later into the series, these "all is revealed" books are coming more frequently. So far, I'm finding the revelations satisfying, which is a lot harder than it looks with a series this long and with this many hidden details. There are a few directions the series is taking that aren't my favorite (the Daoine Sidhe obsession with being the Best Fae is getting a bit boring, for example), but none of them seem egregiously off, and I'm deeply invested in the answers to the remaining questions. Toby hits a personal record here for not explaining the dangerous things she's doing because people might talk her out of it. It makes for a tense and gripping climax, but wow I felt for her friends and family, and substantial parts of that risk seemed unnecessary. This is pointed out to her in no uncertain terms, and I'm wondering if it will finally stick. Toby's tendency to solve complicated problems by bleeding on them is part of what gives this series its charm, but I wouldn't mind her giving other people more of a chance to come up with better plans. I did not like this one as well as the previous two books, mostly because I prefer the Luidaeg-centric stories to the Daoine-Sidhe-centric stories, but if you're enjoying the series to this point, this won't be an exception. It's a substantial improvement on The Brightest Fell and did a lot to salvage that story for me, although there are still some aspects of it that need better explanations. Followed by When Sorrows Come. As usual, there is a novella included in at least the Kindle edition. "Shine in Pearl": I was again hoping for more Gillian, but alas. Instead, and breaking with the tendency for the novellas to be side stories unrelated to the main novel, this fleshes out Simon's past and the other primary relationship driving the novel's plot. It's... fine? The best parts by far are the scenes from Dianda's viewpoint, which are just as refreshingly blunt as Dianda is elsewhere. Neither of the other two characters are favorites of mine, and since the point of the story is to describe the tragedy that is resolved in the plot of the main novel, it's somewhat depressing. Not my favorite of the novellas; not the worst of them. (6) Rating: 7 out of 10

Michael Ablassmeier: Testing system updates using libvirts checkpoint feature

If you want to test upgrades on virtual machines (running on libvit/qemu/kvm) these are usually the most common steps:

Clone the virtual machine and test the upgrade.
Create a snapshot beforehand, do an in-place upgrade and hope everything works. If not, revert the snapshot..
Combine both methods
Use LVM or filesystem snapshots (snapper, etc)

As with recent versions, both libvirt and qemu have full support for dirty bitmaps (so called checkpoints). These checkpoints, once existent, will track changes to the block level layer and can be exported via NBD protocol. Usually one can create these checkpoints using virsh checkpoint-create[-as], with a proper xml description. Using the pull based model, the following is possible:

Issue an backup-begin statement and freeze the virtual machines file systems during this process (using qemu-agent) so you get an consistent system state.
Create an qcow2 image with backing image option that points to the created (readonly) NBD export via unix socket as overlay.
Use the created overlay image to boot up the instance and test the system upgrade.
Do so while the virtual machine is operating without any downtime.

The overlay image will only use the disk space for the blocks changed during upgrade: no need to create a full clone which may waste a lot of disk space. In order to simplify the first step, its possible to use virtnbdbackup for creating the required consistent checkpoint and export its data using a unix domain socket. Update: As alternative, ive just created a small utility called vircpt to create and export checkpoints. In my example im using a debian11 virtual machine with qemu guest agent configured:

# virsh list --all
 Id Name State 
 ------------------------------------------ 
 1 debian11_default running

Now let virtnbdbackup create an checkpoint, freeze the filesystems during creation and tell libvirt to provide us with a usable NBD server listening on an unix socket:

# virtnbdbackup -d debian11_default -o /tmp/foo -s
INFO lib common - printVersion [MainThread]: Version: 1.9.45 Arguments: ./virtnbdbackup -d debian11_default -o /tmp/foo -s
[..] 
INFO root virtnbdbackup - main [MainThread]: Local NBD Endpoint socket: [/var/tmp/virtnbdbackup.5727] 
INFO root virtnbdbackup - startBackupJob [MainThread]: Starting backup job.
INFO fs fs - freeze [MainThread]: Freezed [2] filesystems. 
INFO fs fs - thaw [MainThread]: Thawed [2] filesystems. 
INFO root virtnbdbackup - main [MainThread]: Started backup job for debugging, exiting.

We can now use nbdinfo to display some information about the NBD export:

# nbdinfo "nbd+unix:///vda?socket=/var/tmp/virtnbdbackup.5727" 
    protocol: newstyle-fixed without TLS, using structured packets 
    export="vda": 
    export-size: 137438953472 (128G) 
    content: 
        DOS/MBR boot sector uri: nbd+unix:///vda?socket=/var/tmp/virtnbdbackup.5727

And create a backing image that we can use to test an in-place upgrade:

# qemu-img create -F raw -b nbd+unix:///vda?socket=/var/tmp/virtnbdbackup.5727 -f qcow2 upgrade.qcow2

Now we have various ways for booting the image:

Create another domain config in libvirt which points to this disk image, boot.
Extract the current qemu command line for the the running domain using virsh domxml-to-native qemu-argv --domain debian11_default and execute it manually after adjusting required parameters.
Trust for everything to work out in the simplest way and simply boot up the image via:

# qemu-system-x86_64 -hda upgrade.qcow2 -m 2500 --enable-kvm

After performing the required tests within the virtual machine we can simply kill the active NBD backup job :

# virtnbdbackup -d debian11_default -o /tmp/foo -k
INFO lib common - printVersion [MainThread]: Version: 1.9.45 Arguments: ./virtnbdbackup -d debian11_default -o /tmp/foo -k 
[..]
INFO root virtnbdbackup - main [MainThread]: Stopping backup job

And remove the created qcow image:

# rm -f upgrade.qcow2

14 October 2023

Ravi Dwivedi: Kochi - Wayanad Trip in August-September 2023

A trip full of hitchhiking, beautiful places and welcoming locals.

Day 1: Arrival in Kochi Kochi is a city in the state of Kerala, India. This year s DebConf was to be held in Kochi from 3rd September to 17th of September, which I was planning to attend. My friend Suresh, who was planning to join, told me that 29th August 2023 will be Onam, a major festival of the state of Kerala. So, we planned a Kerala trip before the DebConf. We booked early morning flights for Kochi from Delhi and reached Kochi on 28th August. We had booked a hostel named Zostel in Ernakulam. During check-in, they asked me to fill a form which required signing in using a Google account. I told them I don t have a Google account and I don t want to create one either. The people at the front desk seemed receptive, so I went ahead with telling them the problems of such a sign-in being mandatory for check-in. Anyways, they only took a photo of my passport and let me check-in without a Google account. We stayed in a ten room dormitory, which allowed travellers of any gender. The dormitory room was air-conditioned, spacious, clean and beds were also comfortable. There were two bathrooms in the dormitory and they were clean. Plus, there was a separate dormitory room in the hostel exclusive for females. I noticed that that Zostel was not added in the OpenStreetMap and so, I added it :) . The hostel had a small canteen for tea and snacks, a common sitting area outside the dormitories, which had beds too. There was a separate silent room, suitable for people who want to work.
Dormitory room in Zostel Ernakulam, Kochi.

Beds in Zostel Ernakulam, Kochi.
We had lunch at a nearby restaurant and it was hard to find anything vegetarian for me. I bought some freshly made banana chips from the street and they were tasty. As far as I remember, I had a big glass of pineapple juice for lunch. Then I went to the Broadway market and bought some cardamom and cinnamon for home. I also went to a nearby supermarket and bought Matta brown rice for home. Then, I looked for a courier shop to send the things home but all of them were closed due to Onam festival. After returning to the Zostel, I overslept till 9 PM and in the meanwhile, Suresh planned with Saidut and Shwetank (who met us during our stay in Zostel) to go to a place in Fort Kochi for dinner. I suspected I will be disappointed by lack of vegetarian options as they were planning to have fish. I already had a restaurant in mind - Brindhavan restaurant (suggested by Anupa), which was a pure vegetarian restaurant. To reach there, I got off at Palarivattom metro station and started looking for an auto-rickshaw to get to the restaurant. I didn t get any for more than 5 minutes. Since that restaurant was not added to the OpenStreetMap, I didn t even know how far that was and which direction to go to. Then, I saw a Zomato delivery person on a motorcycle and asked him where the restaurant was. It was already 10 PM and the restaurant closes at 10:30. So, I asked him whether he can drop me off. He agreed and dropped me off at that restaurant. It was 4-5 km from that metro station. I tipped him and expressed my gratefulness for the help. He refused to take the tip, but I insisted and he accepted. I entered the restaurant and it was coming to a close, so many items were not available. I ordered some Kadhai Paneer (only item left) with naan. It tasted fine. Since the next day was Thiruvonam, I asked the restaurant about the Sadya thali menu and prices for the next day. I planned to eat Sadya thali at that restaurant, but my plans got changed later.
Onam sadya menu from Brindhavan restaurant.

Day 2: Onam celebrations Next day, on 29th of August 2023, we had plan to leave for Wayanad. Wayanad is a hill station in Kerala and a famous tourist spot. Praveen suggested to visit Munnar as it is far closer to Kochi than Wayanad (80 km vs 250 km). But I had already visited Munnar in my previous trips, so we chose Wayanad. We had a train late night from Ernakulam Junction (at 23:30 hours) to Kozhikode, which is the nearest railway station from Wayanad. So, we checked out in the morning as we had plans to roam around in Kochi before taking the train. Zostel was celebrating Onam on that day. To opt-in, we had to pay 400 rupees, which included a Sadya Thali and a mundu. Me and Suresh paid the amount and opted in for the celebrations. Sadya thali had Rice, Sambhar, Rasam, Avial, Banana Chips, Pineapple Pachadi, Pappadam, many types of pickels and chutneys, Pal Ada Payasam and Coconut jaggery Pasam. And, there was water too :). Those payasams were really great and I had one more round of them. Later, I had a lot of variety of payasams during the DebConf.
Sadya lined up for serving

Sadya thali served on banana leaf.
So, we hung out in the common room and put our luggage there. We played UNO and had conversations with other travellers in the hostel. I had a fun time there and I still think it is one of the best hostel experiences I had. We made good friends with Saiduth (Telangana) and Shwetank (Uttarakhand). They were already aware about the software like debian, and we had some detailed conversations about the Free Software movement. I remember explaining the difference between the terms Open Source and Free Software . I also told them about the Streetcomplete app, a beginner friendly app to edit OpenStreetMap. We had dinner at a place nearby (named Palaraam), but again, the vegetarian options were very limited! After dinner, we came back to the Zostel and me and Suresh left for Ernakulam Junction to catch our train Maveli Express (16604).

Day 3: Going to Wayanad Maveli Express was scheduled to reach Kozhikode at 03:25 (morning). I had set alarms from 03:00 to 03:30, with the gap of 10 minutes. Every time I woke up, I turned off the alarm. Then I woke up and saw train reaching the Kozhikode station and woke up Suresh for deboarding. But then I noticed that the train is actually leaving the station, not arriving! This means we missed our stop. Now we looked at the next stops and whether we can deboard there. I was very sleepy and wanted to take a retiring room at some station before continuing our journey to Wayanad. The next stop was Quilandi and we checked online that it didn t have a retiring room. So, we skipped this stop. We got off at the next stop named Vadakara and found out no retiring room was available. So, we asked about information regarding bus for Wayanad and they said that there is a bus to Wayanad around 07:00 hours from bus station which was a few kilometres from the railway station. We took a bus for Kalpetta (in Wayanad) at around 07:00. The destination of the buses were written in Malayalam, which we could not read. Once again, the locals helped us to get on to the bus to Kalpetta. Vadakara is not a big city and it can be hard to find people who know good Hindi or English, unlike Kochi. Despite language issues, I had no problem there in navigation, thanks to locals. I mostly spent time sleeping during the bus journey. A few hours later, the bus dropped us at Kalpetta. We had a booking at a hostel in Rippon village. It was 16 km from Kalpetta. On the way, we were treated with beautiful views of nature, which was present everywhere in Wayanad. The place was covered with tea gardens and our eyes were treated with beautiful scenery at every corner.
We were treated with such views during the Wayanad trip.
Rippon village was a very quiet place and I liked the calm atmosphere. This place is blessed by nature and has stunning scenery. I found English was more common than Hindi in Wayanad. Locals were very nice and helped me, even if they didn t know my language.
A road in Rippon.
After catching some sleep at the hostel, I went out in the afternoon. I hitchhiked to reach the main road from the hostel. I bought more spices from a nearby shop and realized that I should have waited for my visit to Wayanad to buy cardamom, which I already bought from Kochi. Then, I was looking for post office to send spices home. The people at the spices shop told me that the nearby Rippon post office was closed by that time, but the post office at Meppadi was open, which was 5 km from there. I went to Meppadi and saw the post office closes at 15:00, but I reached five minutes late. My packing was not very good and they asked me to pack it tighter. There was a shop near the post office and the people there gave me a cardboard and tapes, and helped pack my stuff for the post. By the time I went to the post office again, it was 15:30. But they accepted my parcel for post.

Day 4: Kanthanpara Falls, Zostel Wayanad and Karapuzha Dam Kanthanpara waterfalls were 2 km from the hostel. I hitchhiked to the place from the hostel on a scooty. Entry ticket was worth Rs 40. There were good views inside and nothing much to see except the waterfalls.
Entry to Kanthanpara Falls.

Kanthanpara Falls.
We had a booking at Zostel Wayanad for this day and so we shifted there. Again, as with their Ernakulam branch, they asked me to fill a form which required signing in using Google, but when I said I don t have a Google account they checked me in without that. There were tea gardens inside the Zostel boundaries and the property was beautiful.
A view of Zostel Wayanad.

A map of Wayanad showing tourist places.

A view from inside the Zostel Wayanad property.
Later in the evening, I went to Karapuzha Dam. I witnessed a beautiful sunset during the journey. Karapuzha dam had many activites, like ziplining, and was nice to roam around. Chembra Peak is near to the Zostel Wayanad. So, I was planning to trek to the heart shaped lake. It was suggested by Praveen and looking online, this trek seemed worth doing. There was an issue however. The charges for trek were Rs 1770 for upto five people. So, if I go alone I will have to spend Rs 1770 for the trek. If I go with another person, we split Rs 1770 into two, and so on. The optimal way to do it is to go in a group of five (you included :D). I asked front desk at Zostel if they can connect me with people going to Chembra peak the next day, and they told me about a group of four people planning to go to Chembra peak the next day. I got lucky! All four of them were from Kerala and worked in Qatar.

Day 5: Chembra peak trek The date was 1st September 2023. I woke up early (05:30 in the morning) for the Chembra peak trek. I had bought hiking shoes especially for trekking, which turned out to be a very good idea. The ticket counter opens at 07:00. The group of four with which I planned to trek met me around 06:00 in the Zostel. We went to the ticket counter around 06:30. We had breakfast at shops selling Maggi noodles and bread omlette near the ticket counter. It was a hot day and the trek was difficult for an inexperienced person like me. The scenery was green and beautiful throughout.
Terrain during trekking towards the Chembra peak.

Heart-shaped lake at the Chembra peak.

Me at the heart-shaped lake.

Views from the top of the Chembra peak.

View of another peak from the heart-shaped lake.
While returning from the trek, I found out a shop selling bamboo rice, which I bought and will make bamboo rice payasam out of it at home (I have some coconut milk from Kerala too ;)). We returned to Zostel in the afternoon. I had muscle pain after the trek and it has still not completely disappeared. At night, we took a bus from Kalpetta to Kozhikode in order to return to Kochi.

Day 6: Return to Kochi At midnight of 2nd of September, we reached Kozhikode bus stand. Then we roamed around for something to eat. I didn t find anything vegetarian to eat. No surprises there! Then we went to Kozhikode railway station and looked for retiring rooms, but no luck there. We waited at the station and took the next train to Kochi at 03:30 and reached Ernakulam Junction at 07:30 (half hours before train s scheduled time!). From there, we went to Zostel Fort Kochi and stayed one night there and checked out next morning.

Day 7: Roaming around in Fort Kochi On 3rd of September, we roamed around in Fort Kochi. We visited the usual places - St Francis Church, Dutch Palace, Jew Town, Pardesi Synagogue. I also visited some homestays and the owners were very happy to show their place even when I made it clear that I was not looking for a stay. In the evening, we went to Kakkanad to attend DebConf. The story continues in my DebConf23 blog post.

12 October 2023

Jonathan McDowell: Installing Debian on the BananaPi M2 Zero

My previously mentioned C.H.I.P. repurposing has been partly successful; I ve found a use for it (which I still need to write up), but unfortunately it s too useful and the fact it s still a bit flaky has become a problem. I spent a while trying to isolate exactly what the problem is (I m still seeing occasional hard hangs with no obvious debug output in the logs or on the serial console), then realised I should just buy one of the cheap ARM SBC boards currently available. The C.H.I.P. is based on an Allwinner R8, which is a single ARM v7 core (an A8). So it s fairly low power by today s standards and it seemed pretty much any board would probably do. I considered a Pi 2 Zero, but couldn t be bothered trying to find one in stock at a reasonable price (I ve had one on backorder from CPC since May 2022, and yes, I know other places have had them in stock since but I don t need one enough to chase and I m now mostly curious about whether it will ever ship). As the title of this post gives away, I settled on a Banana Pi BPI-M2 Zero, which is based on an Allwinner H3. That s a quad-core ARM v7 (an A7), so a bit more oompfh than the C.H.I.P. All in all it set me back 25, including a set of heatsinks that form a case around it. I started with the vendor provided Debian SD card image, which is based on Debian 9 (stretch) and so somewhat old. I was able to dist-upgrade my way through buster and bullseye, and end up on bookworm. I then discovered the bookworm 6.1 kernel worked just fine out of the box, and even included a suitable DTB. Which got me thinking about whether I could do a completely fresh Debian install with minimal tweaking. First thing, a boot loader. The Allwinner chips are nice in that they ll boot off SD, so I just needed a suitable u-boot image. Rather than go with the vendor image I had a look at mainline and discovered it had support! So let s build a clean image:

noodles@buildhost:~$ mkdir ~/BPI
noodles@buildhost:~$ cd ~/BPI
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI$ ls
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI$ git clone https://source.denx.de/u-boot/u-boot.git
Cloning into 'u-boot'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 935825, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (5777/5777), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (1967/1967), done.
remote: Total 935825 (delta 3799), reused 5716 (delta 3769), pack-reused 930048
Receiving objects: 100% (935825/935825), 186.15 MiB   2.21 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (785671/785671), done.
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI$ mkdir u-boot-build
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI$ cd u-boot
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI/u-boot$ git checkout v2023.07.02
...
HEAD is now at 83cdab8b2c Prepare v2023.07.02
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI/u-boot$ make O=../u-boot-build bananapi_m2_zero_defconfig
  HOSTCC  scripts/basic/fixdep
  GEN     Makefile
  HOSTCC  scripts/kconfig/conf.o
  YACC    scripts/kconfig/zconf.tab.c
  LEX     scripts/kconfig/zconf.lex.c
  HOSTCC  scripts/kconfig/zconf.tab.o
  HOSTLD  scripts/kconfig/conf
#
# configuration written to .config
#
make[1]: Leaving directory '/home/noodles/BPI/u-boot-build'
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI/u-boot$ cd ../u-boot-build/
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI/u-boot-build$ make CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabihf-
  GEN     Makefile
scripts/kconfig/conf  --syncconfig Kconfig
...
  LD      spl/u-boot-spl
  OBJCOPY spl/u-boot-spl-nodtb.bin
  COPY    spl/u-boot-spl.bin
  SYM     spl/u-boot-spl.sym
  MKIMAGE spl/sunxi-spl.bin
  MKIMAGE u-boot.img
  COPY    u-boot.dtb
  MKIMAGE u-boot-dtb.img
  BINMAN  .binman_stamp
  OFCHK   .config
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI/u-boot-build$ ls -l u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 noodles noodles 494900 Aug  8 08:06 u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin

I had the advantage here of already having a host setup to cross build armhf binaries, but this was all done on a Debian bookworm host with packages from main. I ve put my build up here in case it s useful to someone - everything else below can be done on a normal x86_64 host. Next I needed a Debian installer. I went for the netboot variant - although I was writing it to SD rather than TFTP booting I wanted as much as possible to come over the network.

noodles@buildhost:~/BPI$ wget https://deb.debian.org/debian/dists/bookworm/main/installer-armhf/20230607%2Bdeb12u1/images/netboot/netboot.tar.gz
...
2023-08-08 10:15:03 (34.5 MB/s) -  netboot.tar.gz  saved [37851404/37851404]
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI$ tar -axf netboot.tar.gz

Then I took a suitable microSD card and set it up with a 500M primary VFAT partition, leaving the rest for Linux proper. I could have got away with a smaller VFAT partition but I d initially thought I might need to put some more installation files on it.

noodles@buildhost:~/BPI$ sudo fdisk /dev/sdb
Welcome to fdisk (util-linux 2.38.1).
Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them.
Be careful before using the write command.
Command (m for help): o
Created a new DOS (MBR) disklabel with disk identifier 0x793729b3.
Command (m for help): n
Partition type
   p   primary (0 primary, 0 extended, 4 free)
   e   extended (container for logical partitions)
Select (default p):
Using default response p.
Partition number (1-4, default 1):
First sector (2048-60440575, default 2048):
Last sector, +/-sectors or +/-size K,M,G,T,P  (2048-60440575, default 60440575): +500M
Created a new partition 1 of type 'Linux' and of size 500 MiB.
Command (m for help): t
Selected partition 1
Hex code or alias (type L to list all): c
Changed type of partition 'Linux' to 'W95 FAT32 (LBA)'.
Command (m for help): n
Partition type
   p   primary (1 primary, 0 extended, 3 free)
   e   extended (container for logical partitions)
Select (default p):
Using default response p.
Partition number (2-4, default 2):
First sector (1026048-60440575, default 1026048):
Last sector, +/-sectors or +/-size K,M,G,T,P  (534528-60440575, default 60440575):
Created a new partition 2 of type 'Linux' and of size 28.3 GiB.
Command (m for help): w
The partition table has been altered.
Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.
Syncing disks.
$ sudo mkfs -t vfat -n BPI-UBOOT /dev/sdb1
mkfs.fat 4.2 (2021-01-31)

The bootloader image gets written 8k into the SD card (our first partition starts at sector 2048, i.e. 1M into the device, so there s plenty of space here):

noodles@buildhost:~/BPI$ sudo dd if=u-boot-build/u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin of=/dev/sdb bs=1024 seek=8
483+1 records in
483+1 records out
494900 bytes (495 kB, 483 KiB) copied, 0.0282234 s, 17.5 MB/s

Copy the Debian installer files onto the VFAT partition:

noodles@buildhost:~/BPI$ cp -r debian-installer/ /media/noodles/BPI-UBOOT/

Unmount the SD from the build host, pop it into the M2 Zero, boot it up while connected to the serial console, hit a key to stop autoboot and tell it to boot the installer:

U-Boot SPL 2023.07.02 (Aug 08 2023 - 09:05:44 +0100)
DRAM: 512 MiB
Trying to boot from MMC1
U-Boot 2023.07.02 (Aug 08 2023 - 09:05:44 +0100) Allwinner Technology
CPU:   Allwinner H3 (SUN8I 1680)
Model: Banana Pi BPI-M2-Zero
DRAM:  512 MiB
Core:  60 devices, 17 uclasses, devicetree: separate
WDT:   Not starting watchdog@1c20ca0
MMC:   mmc@1c0f000: 0, mmc@1c10000: 1
Loading Environment from FAT... Unable to read "uboot.env" from mmc0:1...
In:    serial
Out:   serial
Err:   serial
Net:   No ethernet found.
Hit any key to stop autoboot:  0
=> setenv dibase /debian-installer/armhf
=> fatload mmc 0:1 $ kernel_addr_r  $ dibase /vmlinuz
5333504 bytes read in 225 ms (22.6 MiB/s)
=> setenv bootargs "console=ttyS0,115200n8"
=> fatload mmc 0:1 $ fdt_addr_r  $ dibase /dtbs/sun8i-h2-plus-bananapi-m2-zero.dtb
25254 bytes read in 7 ms (3.4 MiB/s)
=> fdt addr $ fdt_addr_r  0x40000
Working FDT set to 43000000
=> fatload mmc 0:1 $ ramdisk_addr_r  $ dibase /initrd.gz
31693887 bytes read in 1312 ms (23 MiB/s)
=> bootz $ kernel_addr_r  $ ramdisk_addr_r :$ filesize  $ fdt_addr_r 
Kernel image @ 0x42000000 [ 0x000000 - 0x516200 ]
## Flattened Device Tree blob at 43000000
   Booting using the fdt blob at 0x43000000
Working FDT set to 43000000
   Loading Ramdisk to 481c6000, end 49fffc3f ... OK
   Loading Device Tree to 48183000, end 481c5fff ... OK
Working FDT set to 48183000
Starting kernel ...

At this point the installer runs and you can do a normal install. Well, except the wifi wasn t detected, I think because the netinst images don t include firmware. I spent a bit of time trying to figure out how to include it but ultimately ended up installing over a USB ethernet dongle, which Just Worked and was less faff. Installing firmware-brcm80211 once installation completed allowed the built-in wifi to work fine. After install you need to configure u-boot to boot without intervention. At the u-boot prompt (i.e. after hitting a key to stop autoboot):

=> setenv bootargs "console=ttyS0,115200n8 root=LABEL=BPI-ROOT ro"
=> setenv bootcmd 'ext4load mmc 0:2 $ fdt_addr_r  /boot/sun8i-h2-plus-bananapi-m2-zero.dtb ; fdt addr $ fdt_addr_r  0x40000 ; ext4load mmc 0:2 $ kernel_addr_r  /boot/vmlinuz ; ext4load mmc 0:2 $ ramdisk_addr_r  /boot/initrd.img ; bootz $ kernel_addr_r  $ ramdisk_addr_r :$ filesize  $ fdt_addr_r '
=> saveenv
Saving Environment to FAT... OK
=> reset

This is assuming you have /boot on partition 2 on the SD - I left the first partition as VFAT (that s where the u-boot environment will be saved) and just used all of the rest as a single ext4 partition. I did have to do an e2label /dev/sdb2 BPI-ROOT to label / appropriately; otherwise I occasionally saw the SD card appear as mmc1 for Linux (I m guessing due to asynchronous boot order with the wifi). You should now find the device boots without intervention.

11 October 2023

Russell Coker: The PineTime

I have just got a PineTime smart watch [1] from Pine64. They cost $US27 each which ended up as $144.63 Australian for three including postage when I ordered on the 16th of September, it s annoying that you can t order more than 3 at a time to reduce postage costs. The Australian online store Kogan has smart watches starting at about $15 [2] with Bluetooth and support for phone notifications so the $48.21 for a PineTime doesn t compare well on just price and features. The watches Kogan sells start getting into high resolution at around the $25 price and many of them have features like 24*7 heart monitoring that the PineTime lacks (it just measures when you request it). No-one would order a PineTime for being cheap or having lots of features, you order it because you want open hardware that allows you to do things your way. Also the PineTime isn t going to be orphaned while it s likely that in a few years most of the cheap watches sold by Kogan etc won t support the new phones running the latest version of Android. The screen of the PineTime is 240*240 resolution (about 260dpi) with 64k colors. The screen resolution is lower than some high-end smart watches but higher than most phones and almost all monitors. I doubt that much benefit could be gained from higher resolution. Even on minimum brightness the screen is easy to read on all but the brightest sunny days. The compute capabilities are 4.5MB of flash storage, 64k of RAM, and a 64MHz CPU this can t run Linux and nothing like it will run Linux for a long time. I ve had the PineTime for 6 days now, I charged it once and it s now at 55% battery. It looks like it will last close to 2 weeks on a single charge and it s claimed that a newer firmware will make the battery last longer. Software The main Android app for using with the PineTime is GadgetBridge which I installed from the f-droid repository. It had lots of click-through menus for allowing access to various Android features (contacts, bluetooth, draw over foreground, location, and more) but after that it was easy to setup. It was the first bluetooth device I ve used which had a 6 digit PIN for connecting to a phone. Initially I used the PineTime with my Huawei Nova 7i [3]. The aim is to eventually have it run from my PinePhonePro but my test of the PinePhonePro didn t go as well as hoped [4]. Now I m using it on my Huawei Mate 10 Pro. It comes with InfiniTime [5] installed as the default firmware, mine had 1.11.0 which is a fairly recent version. I will probably upgrade it soon to get the better power optimisation and weather alerts in the watch face. I don t have any plans to use different watch firmware and I don t have any plans to contribute to firmware development I just can t hack on every FOSS project around it s better to do big contributions to a small number of projects. For people who don t want the default firmware the Wasp-OS project seems interesting as it s written in Python [6], I don t like Python but it s very popular. Python is particularly popular in ML development, it will be interesting to see if Wasp-OS becomes a preferred platform for smart watches that talk to GPT servers. Generally the software works well, one annoyance is that when a notification goes away on the phone it remains on the PineTime and has to be manually dismissed. It would be nice if clearing notifications on the phone would clear them on the PineTime too. The music control works with RocketPlayer on Android, it displays the track name and has options for pause/play and skipping forward and backward one track. Annoyingly the current firmware doesn t allow configuring the main screens, from the primary screen you swipe down for notifications, right for settings, up for menus, and there s nothing defined for swipe left. I d like to make swipe left the command to get to music control. Hardware It has a detachable band that appears to be within the common range of watch bands. According to the PineTime Wiki page [7] there are a selection of alternate bands that will fit it, but some don t because the band is recessed into the watch. It is IP67 rated which means you can probably wear it while swimming. The charging contacts are exposed on the bottom of the case which means that any chemicals left by pool water can be cleaned off and also as they are apparently not expected to be harmed by sweat and skin oil there shouldn t be a problem charging it. I have significant experience using a Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini which is rated at IP67 in swimming pools. I had two problems with the S5 Mini when getting out of the pool, firstly water in the headphone socket made the phone consider that it was in headphone mode and turn off the speakers and secondly it took hours to become dry enough to charge and after many swims the charge rate dropped presumably due to oxide on the contacts. There are reports of success when swimming with a PineTime. Generally it feels well made and appears more solid than the cheapest Kogan devices appear to be. Conclusion If I wanted monitoring for medical reasons then I would choose a different smart watch. I ve read about people doing things like tracking their body stats 24*7 and trying to discover useful things, the PineTime is not a good option for BioHacking type use. However if I did have a need for such things I d probably just buy a second smart watch and have one on each wrist. The PineTime generally works well. It s a pity it has fewer hardware features than closed devices that are cheaper. But having a firmware that can be continually improved by the community is good. The continually expanding use of mobile phone technology devices for custom use in corporations (such as mobile phone in custom case for scanning prices etc in a supermarket) has some potential for use with this. I can imagine someone adding some custom features to a PineTime for such use. When a supermarket chain has 200,000 employees (as Woolworths in Australia does) then paying for a few months of software development work to make a smart watch do specific things for that company could provide significant value. There are probably some business opportunities for FOSS developers to hack on extra hardware on a PineTime and write software to support it. I recommend that everyone who s into FOSS buy one of these. Preferably make a deal with two friends to get the minimum postage cost.

Russell Coker: PinePhone Status

4 months ago I got my PinePhonePro [1]. Since then I have got SE Linux working on it to the stage of allowing it to boot correctly with Debian/Unstable, login with the user_t domain (minimum privilege for the graphical user) and make and receive calls. I finished getting SE Linux working reasonably well 3 days ago and most (but not all) of the SE Linux policy is in Debian now. I ve been getting good at Github PRs and I m sending a lot of policy upstream, so the next version of Debian will have a much smaller diff from the upstream Refpolicy. I have been running the PinePhone with Plasma Mobile because I prefer KDE, I would run GNOME/Phoc if it gave significantly better functionality. 3 days ago I moved my main SIM (the one with the number that people call about work etc) to my PinePhone and tried running it as my main phone. Today I gave up on that. My Android History The last phone I had that did everything I needed was a Huawei Mate 10 Pro that I bought refurbished in June 2019 for $389. The Mate 10 Pro runs Android with the Google Play store and has been quite unremarkable which is presumably why I forgot to blog about it when I got it, it was a slight upgrade over the Huawei Mate 9 [2] that I had used for 2 years before that. In April 2022 I tried using a Huawei Nova 7i as my main phone without Google Play programs or services [3]. That experiment was a failure as I couldn t get NextCloud to work for Calendaring and Contacts. It could be that I stuffed something up when trying that, but I put more skill and effort into trying to get it to work than most people ever would. The Nova 7i is a very slick phone, faster and nicer than the Mate 10 Pro (as expected being 2 years newer) while also having ridiculously long battery life. The Nova 7i when always on running the SchildiChat Matrix client and the Conversations Jabber client it will use less than 10% battery in a 8 hour work day. As nice as the Nova 7i is for the core functions I still need to have Play Store apps for LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Zoom, etc. Which meant connecting the Mate 10 Pro via Wifi. As slick as the Nova 7i is for non-Google stuff running it and the Mate 10 Pro is a medium amount of pain for a small amount of freedom. So now I have for the moment abandoned the Nova 7i and gone back to the Mate 10 Pro. What I will try to do is to either forcibly install Google Play on the Nova 7i to make it my proprietary phone or to install an open distribution of Linux (IE not Android) to make it at least a small tablet which incidentally is much more powerful than a PinePhonePro. Issues With the PinePhonePro The battery charges very slowly (as much as 50 hours estimated charge time) and discharges fast. When used in a typical way in Caffeine mode to stop suspend so I can ssh to it etc it won t come close to lasting an 8 hour day. Also it will only take 5V charging and ideally wants 5V 3A charging which most chargers won t do. The charging speed over regular USB ports is very slow, sometimes stating it will take as much as 50 hours to charge. A phone that gets below 50% charge in less than 4 hours and can t be charged at a reasonable speed from a USB port on a laptop or monitor is going to be a major pain to use in the office. I don t think this can be fixed in software, we can alleviate it by making software more CPU efficient and by enabling various hardware sleep modes more effectively but the slow charging is a hardware issue that can t be fixed. The phone call quality is poor. Usually when on a call I hear static and sometimes the person at the other end appears to hear nothing. Also the UI for calls is different from Android which makes it take longer to answer a call and gives more missed calls. The UI issue is a combination of software and habits, both of which can be changed. But the call quality may be a hardware issue. I don t know if it s a hardware issue specific to my phone or something related to the PinePhonePro on the Telstra network. Clicking on notification in the drop-down doesn t take me to the app. I don t know if this is regarded as a bug by the Plasma-Mobile developers. Also notifications aren t displayed on the lock screen and there doesn t seem to be a configuration option to enable this. The Plasma-Mobile configuration for the wifi hotspot is difficult. There is no button for it in the drop-down menu (called Quicksettings in Plasma-Mobile) and no way of easily determining whether it s in hotspot or wifi client mode. This isn t an insurmountable problem and the worst-case is that I could write a script to do it, but it s still annoying. There is apparent support in the desktop version of KDE for syncing contacts from Google and I could probably get that working (although I failed last time I tried on the desktop), but it is a pain. Conclusion Most of the problems are software related and therefore I can get involved in solving them. I plan to keep working on these things. If all the software had worked in an ideal manner then I would have spent more time investigating the hardware issues of battery life and charge time and the quality of calls. I now have my Librem5 [4] running Debian so I will be able to compare call quality with the PinePhonePro. If I m unable to get the PinePhonePro working adequately then maybe making the Librem5 my main phone will be an option. I hope that by early next year I will be able to make another test at using a FOSS phone my main phone. In the mean time I can still work on convergence and other things.

10 October 2023

Julian Andres Klode: Divergence - A case for different upgrade approaches

APT currently knows about three types of upgrades:

upgrade without new packages (apt-get upgrade)
upgrade with new packages (apt upgrade)
upgrade with new packages and deletions (apt ,-get dist,full -upgrade)

All of these upgrade types are necessary to deal with upgrades within a distribution release. Yes, sometimes even removals may be needed because bug fixes require adding a Conflicts somewhere. In Ubuntu we have a third type of upgrades, handled by a separate tool: release upgrades. ubuntu-release-upgrader changes your sources.list, and applies various quirks to the upgrade. In this post, I want to look not at the quirk aspects but discuss how dependency solving should differ between intra-release and inter-release upgrades. Previous solver projects (such as Mancoosi) operated under the assumption that minimizing the number of changes performed should ultimately be the main goal of a solver. This makes sense as every change causes risks. However it ignores a different risk, which especially applies when upgrading from one distribution release to a newer one: Increasing divergence from the norm. Consider a person installs foo in Debian 12. foo depends on a b, so a will be automatically installed to satisfy the dependency. A release later, a has some known issues and b is prefered, the dependency now reads: b a. A classic solver would continue to keep a installed because it was installed before, leading upgraded installs to have foo, a installed whereas new systems have foo, b installed. As systems get upgraded over and over, they continue to diverge further and further from new installs to the point that it adds substantial support effort. My proposal for the new APT solver is that when we perform release upgrades, we forget which packages where previously automatically installed. We effectively perform a normalization: All systems with the same set of manually installed packages will end up with the same set of automatically installed packages. Consider the solving starting with an empty set and then installing the latest version of each previously manually installed package: It will see now that foo depends b a and install b (and a will be removed later on as its not part of the solution). Another case of divergence is Suggests handling. Consider that foo also Suggests s. You now install another package bar that depends s, hence s gets installed. Upon removing bar, s is not being removed automatically because foo still suggests it (and you may have grown used to foo s integration of s). This is because apt considers Suggests to be important - they won t be automatically installed, but will not be automatically removed. In Ubuntu, we unset that policy on release upgrades to normalize the systems. The reasoning for that is simple: While you may have grown to use s as part of foo during the release, an upgrade to the next release already is big enough that removing s is going to have less of an impact - breakage of workflows is expected between release upgrades. I believe that apt release-upgrade will benefit from both of these design choices, and in the end it boils down to a simple mantra:

On upgrades within a release, minimize changes.
On upgrades between releases, minimize divergence from fresh installs.

Russ Allbery: Review: Chilling Effect

Review: Chilling Effect, by Valerie Valdes

Series:	Chilling Effect #1
Publisher:	Harper Voyager
Copyright:	September 2019
Printing:	2020
ISBN:	0-06-287724-0
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	420

Chilling Effect is a space opera, kind of; more on the genre classification in a moment. It is the first volume of a series, although it reaches a reasonable conclusion on its own. It was Valerie Valdes's first novel. Captain Eva Innocente's line of work used to be less than lawful, following in the footsteps of her father. She got out of that life and got her own crew and ship. Now, the La Sirena Negra and its crew do small transport jobs for just enough money to stay afloat. Or, maybe, a bit less than that, when the recipient of a crate full of psychic escape-artist cats goes bankrupt before she can deliver it and get paid. It's a marginal and tenuous life, but at least she isn't doing anything shady. Then the Fridge kidnaps her sister. The Fridge is a shadowy organization of extortionists whose modus operandi is to kidnap a family member of their target, stuff them in cryogenic suspension, and demand obedience lest the family member be sold off as indentured labor after a few decades as a popsicle. Eva will be given missions that she and her crew have to perform. If she performs them well, she will pay off the price of her sister's release. Eventually. Oh, and she's not allowed to tell anyone. I found it hard to place the subgenre of this novel more specifically than comedy-adventure. The technology fits space opera: there are psychic cats, pilots who treat ships as extensions of their own body, brain parasites, a random intergalactic warlord, and very few attempts to explain anything with scientific principles. However, the stakes aren't on the scale that space opera usually goes for. Eva and her crew aren't going to topple governments or form rebellions. They're just trying to survive in a galaxy full of abusive corporations, dodgy clients, and the occasional alien who requires you to carry extensive documentation to prove that you can't be hunted for meat. It is also, as you might guess from that description, occasionally funny. That part of the book didn't mesh for me. Eva is truly afraid for her sister, and some of the events in the book are quite sinister, but the antagonist is an organization called The Fridge that puts people in fridges. Sexual harassment in a bar turns into obsessive stalking by a crazed intergalactic warlord who frequently interrupts the plot by randomly blasting things with his fleet, which felt like something from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The stakes for Eva, and her frustrations at being dragged back into a life she escaped, felt too high for the wacky, comic descriptions of the problems she gets into. My biggest complaint, though, is that the plot is driven by people not telling other people critical information they should know. Eva is keeping major secrets from her crew for nearly the entire book. Other people are also keeping information from Eva. There is a romance subplot driven almost entirely by both parties refusing to talk to each other about the existence of a romance subplot. For some people, this is catnip, but it's one of my least favorite fictional tropes and I found much of the book both frustrating and stressful. Fictional characters keeping important secrets from each other apparently raises my blood pressure. One of the things I did like about this book is that Eva is Hispanic and speaks like it. She resorts to Spanish frequently for curses, untranslatable phrases, aphorisms, derogatory comments, and similar types of emotional communication that don't feel right in a second language. Most of the time one can figure out the meaning from context, but Valdes doesn't feel obligated to hold the reader's hand and explain everything. I liked that. I think this approach is more viable in these days of ebook readers that can attempt translations on demand, and I think it does a lot to make Eva feel like a real person. I think the characters are the best part of this book, once one gets past the frustration of their refusal to talk to each other. Eva and the alien ship engineer get the most screen time, but Pink, Eva's honest-to-a-fault friend, was probably my favorite character. I also really enjoyed Min, the ship pilot whose primary goal is to be able to jack into the ship and treat it as her body, and otherwise doesn't particularly care about the rest of the plot as long as she gets paid. A lot of books about ship crews like this one lean hard into found family. This one felt more like a group of coworkers, with varying degrees of friendship and level of interest in their shared endeavors, but without the too-common shorthand of making the less-engaged crew members either some type of villain or someone who needs to be drawn out and turned into a best friend or love interest. It's okay for a job to just be a job, even if it's one where you're around the same people all the time. People who work on actual ships do it all the time. This is a half-serious, half-comic action romp that turned out to not be my thing, but I can see why others will enjoy it. Be prepared for a whole lot of communication failures and an uneven emotional tone, but if you're looking for a space-ships-and-aliens story that doesn't take itself very seriously and has some vague YA vibes, this may work for you. Followed by Prime Deceptions, although I didn't like this well enough to read on. Rating: 6 out of 10

9 October 2023

Aigars Mahinovs: Figuring out finances part 1

I have been managing my finances and getting an overview of where I am financially and where I am going month-to-month for a few years already. That means that I already have a method of doing my finances and a method of thinking about them. So far this has been supported by a commerical tool called MoneyWiz. I was happy to pay them for the ability to have a solid product and be able to easily access my finances from my phone (to enter cash transactions directly in the field) and sync data across multiple devices with their cloud offering. However, MoneyWiz development stalled. So much so that they stopped updating their Android app and cancelled web version plans to just focus on a iPhone and MacOS clients. And even there the development did not seem very successful over the last year. So I am cancelling their subscription, extracting all my data (as CSV) and looking for alternatives. So let's start with the basics - what I want from finace software?

Open source and self-hosted
Accounts to represent real accounts in my bank, credit cards, cash account
Transactions to represent money moving in/out/between accounts
Tree of categories for transactions to categorise spending
Category reports on arbitrary time periods
Ability to see the expected balance on each account at any historic point in time from given transactions
Ability to do a corrective transaction - hmm, I don't know what happened, but right now I have X in cash
Adding past transactions before a corrective transaction should not change balance after correction
Ability to automatically import transactions from my bank
Ability to plan future, recurring transactions
Incoming transactions from bank import should be auto-matched with planned recuring transactions
Ability to see missed planned recurring transactions
Ability to see value deviations in planned recuring transactions
Ability to manually match a transaction with a planned recurring transaction for that month or skip a month
Ability to see a projected balance on my accounts at any future date given planned transactions
Credit card fully refilling its current (negative) balance to zero (from a given account) should be a plannable transaction
Accessible from multiple devices, like Linux, Android, iPhone, MacOS. Most likely that means web-based
Achiving accounts without loosing their past transactions with active accounts
API to access data, so that I could wire that up to a Home Assistant dashboard

I don't care about currencies (thanks Euro!), localization, taxes and double-entry bookkeeping. I don't have much use for tags, budgets or savings targets. It could be useful to be able to track stock investment values (but I do have a pretty good from the bank that does that anyway). And tracking loans (incoming and outgoing) could be a worthwhile thing as well, but that can also be simulated with separate accounts for each loan. Tracking refundable expenses (like medical expenses that insurances should refund later on) would also be nice. Could also be simulated by having a separate expense category (Medical - refundable) and putting the refund as a negative expense into that category. One weird feature that I really like is having transfer transactions that have arbitrary incoming and outgoing dates. For some transactions it is a simple transfer delay - money leaves the account A on Friday and only appears in the destination account B on Monday morning. However, this can also happen the other way around - a few credit cards I have seen work in a way that on 14th of each month the balance of the credit card gets reset to zero and then a week later the negative balance that was on that credit card gets taken from the base account that the card is bound to. So the money leaves the base account a week later than it arrives in the credit card account. Financial systems really are magic sometimes :D Ideally that should be represented by a single transaction with two dates - one date when money leaves one account and another date when it arrives in a different account, so that balances on both accounts in the days between would be correct (as in matching what the bank says they were on those dates). And it should automatch such transaction from bank data imports. And predict its value from the negative balance of the credit card. And a pony! But in worst case this could be simulated using a separate "In transfer" account. When I am thinking about my finances, the key metric for me is - how much will I spend this month - both in fixed spending (rent, Internet and phone bills, health insurance, subscriptions, ...) and in variable spending (groceries, eating out, clothing, ...). In theory that should be trivial, but in practice a simple calendar month view will fail because a bunch of fixed expenses occur at the month end/start boundary and can happen either at the end of previous month or at start on next month, depending on how the weekends happen to fall and how the systems of various providers decided to do direct debits this month. So 1st of month is not a good snapshoting time. Any date between 6th (last possible days for monthly bills) and 20th (earliest possible salary day) would be a better cut off point. Looking at the balance of my main account at that time point lets me know what was the difference between income and expenses for the past month. And that is the number I want the financial app to be able to predict as soon as possible. And additional complication is the way credit cards work here. The expenses booked to a credit card after 14th of September will only appear in the main account on 20th of October and thus will actually only count towards the expenses of month of October. That makes it very confusing to see a larger overspend in the main account on 6th of October and then use the categories to try to figure out where the money went, because all the spending that happened on the credit card after the 14th of September should not really be looked at in that context, but spending on the main account or cash account should be counted all the way to 6th of October. :D I am not optimistic that any finance software would able to doea with this mess correctly. So far I am tending to consider Firefly III which has most of what I need and looks great and well maintained, but has the tiny drawback of being written in PHP, so that basically excludes me from ability to contribute anything beyond ideas and feedback. :D I already did a quick test of Firefly via local Docker containers, so the next step would be to try to set it up as a production instance (using the same always-on mini PC that is running my Home Assistant instance), get the database up and working, get the Firefly III itself up and running, get account importer working for bank connection, import historical transactions from there, setup my categories and recurring transactions, import past data dumped out of MoneyWiz and see if this works well and gives me the insights I need. If you know a better solution, please let me know on any social or email channel!

8 October 2023

Niels Thykier: A new Debian package helper: debputy

I have made a new helper for producing Debian packages called debputy. Today, I uploaded it to Debian unstable for the first time. This enables others to migrate their package build using dh +debputy rather than the classic dh. Eventually, I hope to remove dh entirely from this equation, so you only need debputy. But for now, debputy still leverages dh support for managing upstream build systems. The debputy tool takes a radicially different approach to packaging compared to our existing packaging methods by using a single highlevel manifest instead of all the debian/install (etc.) and no hook targets in debian/rules. Here are some of the things that debputy can do or does:

debputy can perform installation similar to dh_install, dh_installdocs (etc.) plus a bit of the dh-exec support. Notably, debputy supports install /usr/bin/foo into foo and install everything else in /usr/bin into foo-utils without you having to resort to weird tricks. With debhelper, this would require dh-exec s => /usr/bin/foo operator.
debputy can assign mode to files without needing hooks and static file ownership can be assigned without resorting to fakeroot. If you request Rules-Requires-Root: no, debputy will assemble the deb without using fakeroot. The fragileness of fakeroot may some day just be a horror story we tell our unruly children that they do not really believe is true.
debputy defaults to all scripts with a #! /bin/tool or #! /usr/bin/tool to have mode 0755 (a+x) unless they are placed in directories known not to have executable files (such as the perl module dirs). As an example, scripts in the examples directory may now get an automatic executable bit if they have a proper #!-line for /usr/bin or /bin.
debputy supports the default flow of 48 debhelper tools. If you are using pure dh $@ with no sequence add-ons and no hook targets in debian/rules (or only hook targets for the upstream side), odds are that debputy got your needs covered.

There are also some features that debputy does not support at the moment:

Almost any debhelper sequence add-on. The debputy tool comes with a migration tool that will auto-detect any unsupported dh add-on from Build-Depends and will flag them as potential problematic. The migration tool works from an list of approved add-ons. Note that manually activated add-ons via dh $@ with are not detected.
Anything that installs or recently installed into /lib or another /usr-merged location. My life is too short to be directly involved in the /usr-merge transition. This means no udev and no systemd unit support at the moment (note tmpfiles and sysusers is supported). For the systemd side, I am also contemplating a different model for how to deal with services. Even without the /usr-merge transition, these would not have been supported. The migration tool will detect problematic file in the debian directory immediately and debputy will detect upstream provided systemd unit files at build time.
There is also no support for packager provided maintscript files at this time. If you have your own maintscripts, then you will not be able to migrate. The migration tool detects the debhelper based path and warns you (such as debian/postinst).
Additionally, if you need special cases in tools (such as perl-base dependency with dh_perl) or rely on dh_strip-nondeterminsm for reproducibility, then you cannot or is advised not to migrate at this time.

There are all limitations of the current work in progress. I hope to resolve them all in due time.

Trying debputy With the limitations aside, lets talk about how you would go about migrating a package:

# Assuming here you have already run: apt install dh-debputy
$ git clone https://salsa.debian.org/rra/kstart
[...]
$ cd kstart
# Add a Build-Dependency on dh-sequence-debputy
$ perl -n -i -e \
   'print; print " dh-sequence-debputy,\n" if m/debhelper-compat/;' \
    debian/control
$ debputy migrate-from-dh --apply-changes
debputy: info: Loading plugin debputy (version: archive/debian/4.3-1) ...
debputy: info: Verifying the generating manifest
debputy: info: Updated manifest debian/debputy.manifest
debputy: info: Removals:
debputy: info:   rm -f "./debian/docs"
debputy: info:   rm -f "./debian/examples"
debputy: info: Migrations performed successfully
debputy: info: Remember to validate the resulting binary packages after rebuilding with debputy
$ cat debian/debputy.manifest 
manifest-version: '0.1'
installations:
- install-docs:
    sources:
    - NEWS
    - README
    - TODO
- install-examples:
    source: examples/krenew-agent
$ git add debian/debputy.manifest
$ git commit --signoff -am"Migrate to debputy"
# Run build tool of choice to verify the output.

This is of course a specific example that works out of the box. If you were to try this on debianutils (from git), the output would look something like this:

$ debputy migrate-from-dh
debputy: info: Loading plugin debputy (version: 5.13-13-g9836721) ...
debputy: error: Unable to migrate automatically due to missing features in debputy.
  * The "debian/triggers" debhelper config file (used by dh_installdeb is currently not supported by debputy.
Use --acceptable-migration-issues=[...] to convert this into a warning [...]

And indeed, debianutils requires at least 4 debhelper features beyond what debputy can support at the moment (all related to maintscripts and triggers).

Rapid feedback Rapid feedback cycles are important for keeping developers engaged in their work. The debputy tool provides the following features to enable rapid feedback.

Immediate manifest validation It would be absolutely horrible if you had to do a full-rebuild only to realize you got the manifest syntax wrong. Therefore, debputy has a check-manifest command that checks the manifest for syntactical and semantic issues.

$ cat debian/debputy.manifest
manifest-version: '0.1'
installations:
- install-docs:
    sources:
    - GETTING-STARTED-WITH-dh-debputy.md
    - MANIFEST-FORMAT.md
    - MIGRATING-A-DH-PLUGIN.md
$ debputy check-manifest
debputy: info: Loading plugin debputy (version: 0.1.7-1-gf34bd66) ...
debputy: info: No errors detected.
$ cat <<EOF >> debian/debputy.manifest
- install:
    sourced: foo
    as: usr/bin/foo
EOF
# Did I typo anything?
$ debputy check-manifest
debputy: info: Loading plugin debputy (version: 0.1.7-2-g4ef8c2f) ...
debputy: warning: Possible typo: The key "sourced" at "installations[1].install" should probably have been 'source'
debputy: error: Unknown keys " 'sourced' " at installations[1].install".  Keys that could be used here are: sources, when, dest-dir, source, into.
debputy: info: Loading plugin debputy (version: 0.1.7-2-g4ef8c2f) ...
$ sed -i s/sourced:/source:/ debian/debputy.manifest
$ debputy check-manifest
debputy: info: Loading plugin debputy (version: 0.1.7-2-g4ef8c2f) ...
debputy: info: No errors detected.

The debputy check-manifest command is limited to the manifest itself and does not warn about foo not existing as it could be produced as apart of the upstream build system. Therefore, there are still issues that can only be detected at package build time. But where debputy can reliably give you immediate feedback, it will do so.

Idempotence: Clean re-runs of dh_debputy without clean/rebuild If you read the fine print of many debhelper commands, you may see the following note their manpage:
This command is not idempotent. dh_prep(1) should be called between invocations of this command Manpage of an anonymous debhelper tool
What this usually means, is that if you run the command twice, you will get its maintscript change (etc.) twice in the final deb. This fits into our single-use clean throw-away chroot builds on the buildds and CI as well as dpkg-buildpackage s no-clean (-nc) option. Single-use throw-away chroots are not very helpful for debugging though, so I rarely use them when doing the majority of my packaging work as I do not want to wait for the chroot initialization (including installing of build-depends). But even then, I have found that dpkg-buildpackage -nc has been useless for me in many cases as I am stuck between two options:

With -nc, you often still interact with the upstream build system. As an example, debhelper will do a dh_prep followed by dh_auto_install, so now we are waiting for upstream s install target to run again. What should have taken seconds now easily take 0.5-1 minute extra per attempt.

If you want to by-pass this, you have to manually call the helpers needed (in correct order) and every run accumulates cruft from previous runs to the point that cruft drowns out the actual change you want to see. Also, I am rarely in the mood to play human dh, when I am debugging an issue that I failed to fix in my first, second and third try.

As you can probably tell, neither option has worked that well for me. But with dh_debputy, I have made it a goal that it will not self-taint the final output. If dh_debputy fails, you should be able to tweak the manifest and re-run dh_debputy with the same arguments.

No waiting for dpkg-buildpackage -nc nor anything implied by that.

No self-tainting of the final deb. The result you get, is the result you would have gotten if the previous dh_debputy run never happened.

Because dh_debputy produces the final result, I do not have to run multiple tools in the right order.

Obviously, this is currently a lot easier, because debputy is not involved in the upstream build system at all. If this feature is useful to you, please do let me know and I will try to preserve it as debputy progresses in features.

Packager provided files On a different topic, have you ever wondered what kind of files you can place into the debian directory that debhelper automatically picks up or reacts too? I do not have an answer to that beyond it is over 80 files and that as the maintainer of debhelper, I am not willing to manually maintain such a list manually. However, I do know what the answer is in debputy, because I can just ask debputy:

$ debputy plugin list packager-provided-files
+-----------------------------+---------------------------------------------[...]
  Stem                          Installed As                                [...]
+-----------------------------+---------------------------------------------[...]
  NEWS                          /usr/share/doc/ name /NEWS.Debian           [...]
  README.Debian                 /usr/share/doc/ name /README.Debian         [...]
  TODO                          /usr/share/doc/ name /TODO.Debian           [...]
  bug-control                   /usr/share/bug/ name /control               [...]
  bug-presubj                   /usr/share/bug/ name /presubj               [...]
  bug-script                    /usr/share/bug/ name /script                [...]
  changelog                     /usr/share/doc/ name /changelog.Debian      [...]
  copyright                     /usr/share/doc/ name /copyright             [...]
[...]

This will list all file types (Stem column) that debputy knows about and it accounts for any plugin that debputy can find. Note to be deterministic, debputy will not auto-load plugins that have not been explicitly requested during package builds. So this list could list files that are available but not active for your current package. Note the output is not intended to be machine readable. That may come in later version. Feel free to chime in if you have a concrete use-case.

Take it for a spin As I started this blog post with, debputy is now available in unstable. I hope you will take it for a spin on some of your simpler packages and provide feedback on it. For documentation, please have a look at:

GETTING-STARTED-WITH-dh-debputy.md (how-to guide)

MANIFEST-FORMAT.md (reference documentation)

Thanks for considering PS: My deepest respect to the fakeroot maintainers. That game of whack-a-mole is not something I would have been willing to maintain. I think fakeroot is like the Python GIL in the sense that it has been important in getting Debian to where it is today. But at the same time, I feel it is time to let go of the crutch and find a proper solution.

Sahil Dhiman: Lap 24

Twenty-four is a big number. More than one/fourth (or more) of my life is behind me now. At this point, I truly feel like I have become an adult; mentally and physically. Another year seem to have gone by quickly. I still vividly remember writing 23 and Counting and here I m writing the next one so soon. Probably the lowest I felt ever on my birthday; with loss of Abraham and on the other hand, medical issues with a dear one. Didn t even felt like birthday was almost here. The loss of Abraham, taught me to care for people more and meet cherish everyone. I m grateful for all the people who supported and cared for me and others during times of grief when things went numb. Thank you! Also, for the first time ever, I went to office on my birthday. This probably would become a norm in coming years. Didn t felt like doing anything, so just went to office. The cake, wishes and calls kept coming in throughout the day. I m grateful for the all people around for remembering :) This year marked my first official job switch where I moved from MakeMyTrip to Unmukti as a GNU/Linux Network Systems engineer (that s a mouthful of a job role, I know) where I do anything and everything ranging from system admin, network engineering, a bit of social media, chronicling stuff on company blog and bringing up new applications as per requirement. Moving from MMT to Unmukti was a big cultural shift. From a full-blown corporate with more than 3 thousand employees to a small 5-person team. People still think I work for a startup on hearing the low head count, though Unmukti is a 13 year old organization. I get the freedom to work at my own pace and put my ideas in larger technical discussions, while also actively participating in the community, which I m truly grateful of. I go full geek here and almost everyone here is on the same spectrum, so things technical or societal discussions just naturally flow. The months of August-September again marked the Great Refresh. For reasons unforeseen, I have had to pack my stuff again and move, albeit to just next door for now, but that gave me the much need opportunity to sift through my belongings here. As usual, I threw a boatload of stuff which was of no use and/or just hogging space. My wardrobe cupboard finally got cleaned and sorted, with old and new clothes getting (re)discovered. The Refresh is always a pain with loads of collating stuff in carry worthy bags and hauling stuff but as usual, there s nothing else I can do other than just pack and move. This year also culminated our four plus years of work for organizing annual Debian conference, DebConf to India. DebConf23 happened in Kochi, Kerala from 3rd September to 17th September (including DebCamp). First concrete work to bring conference to India was done Raju Dev who made the first bid during DebConf18 in Hsinchu, Taiwan. We lost but won during the next year bid at DebConf19 Curitiba, Brazil in 2019. I joined the efforts after meeting the team online after DebConf20. Initially started with the publicity team, but we didn t need much publicity for event, I was later asked to join sponsors/fundraising team. That turned out to be quite an experience. Then the conference itself turned to be a good experience. More on that in an upcoming DebConf23 blog post, which will come eventually. After seeing how things work out in Debian in 2020, I had the goal to become a Debian Developer (DD) before DebConf23, which gave me almost three years to get involved and get recognized to become a DD. I was more excited to grab sahil AT debian.org, a short email with only my name and no number of characters after it. After, quite a while, I dropped the hope of become a DD because I wasn t successful in my attempts to meaningfully package and technically contribute to the project. But people in Debian India later convinced me that I have done enough to become a Debian Developer, non uploading, purely by showing up and helping around all for the Debian conferences. I applied and got sponsored (i.e. supported) for my request by srud and Praveen. Finally, on 23rd Feb, I officially became part of Debian project as 14th (at the moment) Debian Developer from India. Got sahil AT debian.org too :) For some grace, I also became a DD before DebConf23. Becoming a DD didn t change anything much though, I still believe, it might have helped secure me a job though. Also, worth mentioning is my increased interest in OpenStreetMap (OSM) mapping. I heavily mapped this year and went around for mapathon-meetups too. One step towards a better OSM and more community engagement around it. Looking back at my blog, this year around, it seems mostly dotted with Debian and one OSM post. Significant shift from the range of topics I use to write about in the past year but blogging this year wasn t a go-to activity. Other stuff kept me busy. Living in Gurugram has shown me many facades of life from which I was shielded or didn t come across earlier. It made me realize all the privileges which has helped me along the way, which became apparent while living almost alone here and managing thing by oneself.

7 October 2023

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: Montreal's Debian & Stuff - "September" 2023

Last Sunday, our local Debian user group gathered to chat, to work on Debian and to do other, non-Debian related hacking. A "Debian & Stuff"! It had been a while since we held a proper meetup. Our last event was the Montreal BSP we organised back in March 2023... We somewhat missed the window for a June meetup and summer events never seem to gather a good crowd, so I didn't try to organise one. All this to say it was nice to see folks from the Montreal Debian community :) This event was also the first time we were hosted by L'Espace des possibles - Petite Patrie, a social venue that aims to provide a space for not-for-profit activities, like repair caf s, sowing classes, board game nights, etc. It was really nice and we will surely meet there again in the future. A group picture during the event

Many people came to the event, including some new ones. Although people always tend to come and go during the day, a total of 12 people attended the event. As always, people worked on very different projects! One of the focus of this D&S was assembling AirGradient DIY basic kits. Our local community has been talking a lot about air quality metrics in the past few months¹. Tiago thus decided to have a company print the PCBs for this kit and graciously gave away a few spares. Michael then took upon himself to order parts on AliExpress and a few of us ended up soldering the kits together while chatting. An AirGradient DIY basic kit, semi-assembled

An AirGradient DIY basic kit, semi-assembled

Otherwise, some Debian work was also done:

I triaged and closed a bunch of bug reports and started packaging labwc, a Wayland compositor heavily inspired by Openbox.
J r me did some work on Clojure libraries that broke when Java 21 became supported in Sid.
Gabriel worked on the libinfluxdb-http-perl library.
Tiago and Tassia continued their work on the new DC Sources project and Tiago applied for a debian.net VM for this service.

The whole event was super fun, the tacos we had for lunch were delicious (and very authentic!), and we ended up at a local microbrewery to share a pint later in the evening. Looking forward to the next event!

Mostly as a result of the large forest fires in Canada this summer. I myself blogged twice about air quality-related projects recently.

6 October 2023

Emanuele Rocca: Custom Debian Installer and Kernel on a USB stick

There are many valid reasons to create a custom Debian Installer image. You may need to pass some special arguments to the kernel, use a different GRUB version, automate the installation by means of preseeding, use a custom kernel, or modify the installer itself.

If you have a EFI system, which is probably the case in 2023, there is no need to learn complex procedures in order to create a custom Debian Installer stick.

The source of many frustrations is that the ISO format for CDs/DVDs is read-only, but you can just create a VFAT filesystem on a USB stick, copy all ISO contents onto the stick itself, and modify things at will.

Create a writable USB stick

First create a FAT32 filesystem on the removable device and mount it. The device is sdX in the example.

$ sudo parted --script /dev/sdX mklabel msdos
$ sudo parted --script /dev/sdX mkpart primary fat32 0% 100%
$ sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/sdX1
$ sudo mount /dev/sdX1 /mnt/data/

Then copy to the USB stick the installer ISO you would like to modify, debian-testing-amd64-netinst.iso here.

$ sudo kpartx -v -a debian-testing-amd64-netinst.iso
# Mount the first partition on the ISO and copy its contents to the stick
$ sudo mount /dev/mapper/loop0p1 /mnt/cdrom/
$ sudo rsync -av /mnt/cdrom/ /mnt/data/
$ sudo umount /mnt/cdrom
# Same story with the second partition on the ISO
$ sudo mount /dev/mapper/loop0p2 /mnt/cdrom/
$ sudo rsync -av /mnt/cdrom/ /mnt/data/
$ sudo umount /mnt/cdrom
$ sudo kpartx -d debian-testing-amd64-netinst.iso
$ sudo umount /mnt/data

Now try booting from the USB stick just to verify that everything went well and we can start customizing the image.

Boot loader, preseeding, installer hacks

The easiest things we can change now are the shim, GRUB, and GRUB s configuration. The USB stick contains the shim under /EFI/boot/bootx64.efi, while GRUB is at /EFI/boot/grubx64.efi. This means that if you want to test a different shim / GRUB version, you just replace the relevant files. That s it. Take for example /usr/lib/grub/x86_64-efi/monolithic/grubx64.efi from the package grub-efi-amd64-bin, or the signed version from grub-efi-amd64-signed and copy them under /EFI/boot/grubx64.efi. Or perhaps you want to try out systemd-boot? Then take /usr/lib/systemd/boot/efi/systemd-bootx64.efi from the package systemd-boot-efi, copy it to /EFI/boot/bootx64.efi and you re good to go. Figuring out the right systemd-boot configuration needed to start the Installer is left as an exercise.

By editing /boot/grub/grub.cfg you can pass arbitrary arguments to the kernel and the Installer itself. See the official Installation Guide for a comprehensive list of boot parameters.

One very commong thing to do is automating the installation using a preseed file. Add the following to the kernel command line: preseed/file=/cdrom/preseed.cfg and create a /preseed.cfg file on the USB stick. As a little example:

d-i time/zone select Europe/Rome
d-i passwd/root-password this-is-the-root-password
d-i passwd/root-password-again this-is-the-root-password
d-i passwd/user-fullname string Emanuele Rocca
d-i passwd/username string ema
d-i passwd/user-password password lol-haha-uh
d-i passwd/user-password-again password lol-haha-uh
d-i apt-setup/no_mirror boolean true
d-i popularity-contest/participate boolean true
tasksel tasksel/first multiselect standard

See Steve McIntyre s awesome page with the full list of available settings and their description: https://preseed.einval.com/debian-preseed/.

Two noteworthy settings are early_command and late_command. They can be used to execute arbitrary commands and provide thus extreme flexibility! You can go as far as replacing parts of the installer with a sed command, or maybe wgetting an entirely different file. This is a fairly easy way to test minor Installer patches. As an example, I ve once used this to test a patch to grub-installer:

d-i partman/early_command string wget https://people.debian.org/~ema/grub-installer-1035085-1 -O /usr/bin/grub-installer

Finally, the initrd contains all early stages of the installer. It s easy to unpack it, modify whatever component you like, and repack it. Say you want to change a given udev rule:

$ mkdir /tmp/new-initrd
$ cd /tmp/new-initrd
$ zstdcat /mnt/data/install.a64/initrd.gz   sudo cpio -id
$ vi lib/udev/rules.d/60-block.rules
$ find .   cpio -o -H newc   zstd --stdout > /mnt/data/install.a64/initrd.gz

Custom udebs

From a basic architectural standpoint the Debian Installer can be seen as an initrd that loads a series of special Debian packages called udebs. In the previous section we have seen how to (ab)use early_command to replace one of the scripts used by the Installer, namely grub-installer. It turns out that such script is installed by a udeb, so let s do things right and build a new Installer ISO with our custom grub udeb.

Fetch the code for the grub-installer udeb, make your changes and build it with a classic dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot.

Then get the Installer code and install all dependencies:

$ git clone https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/debian-installer/
$ cd debian-installer/
$ sudo apt build-dep .

Now add the grub-installer udeb to the localudebs directory and create a new netboot image:

$ cp /path/to/grub-installer_1.198_arm64.udeb build/localudebs/
$ cd build
$ fakeroot make clean_netboot build_netboot

Give it some time, soon enough you ll have a brand new ISO to test under dest/netboot/mini.iso.

Custom kernel

Perhaps there s a kernel configuration option you need to enable, or maybe you need a more recent kernel version than what is available in sid.

The Debian Linux Kernel Handbook has all the details for how to do things properly, but here s a quick example.

Get the Debian kernel packaging from salsa and generate the upstream tarball:

$ git clone https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/linux/
$ ./debian/bin/genorig.py https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git

For RC kernels use the repo from Linus instead of linux-stable.

Now do your thing, for instance change a config setting by editing debian/config/amd64/config. Don t worry about where you put it in the file, there s a tool from https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/kernel-team to fix that:

$ /path/to/kernel-team/utils/kconfigeditor2/process.py .

Now build your kernel:

$ export MAKEFLAGS=-j$(nproc)
$ export DEB_BUILD_PROFILES='pkg.linux.nokerneldbg pkg.linux.nokerneldbginfo pkg.linux.notools nodoc'
$ debian/rules orig
$ debian/rules debian/control
$ dpkg-buildpackage -b -nc -uc

After some time, if everything went well, you should get a bunch of .deb files as well as a .changes file, linux_6.6~rc3-1~exp1_arm64.changes here. To generate the udebs used by the Installer you need to first get a linux-signed .dsc file, and then build it with sbuild in this example:

$ /path/to/kernel-team/scripts/debian-test-sign linux_6.6~rc3-1~exp1_arm64.changes
$ sbuild --dist=unstable --extra-package=$PWD linux-signed-arm64_6.6~rc3+1~exp1.dsc

Excellent, now you should have a ton of .udebs. To build a custom installer image with this kernel, copy them all under debian-installer/build/localudebs/ and then run

fakeroot make clean_netboot
build_netboot

as described in the previous section. In case you are trying to use a different kernel version from what is currently in sid, you will have to install the linux-image package on the system building the ISO, and change LINUX_KERNEL_ABI in build/config/common. The linux-image dependency in debian/control probably needs to be tweaked as well.

That s it, the new Installer ISO should boot with your custom kernel!

There is going to be another minor obstacle though, as anna will complain that your new kernel cannot be found in the archive. Copy the kernel udebs you have built onto a vfat formatted USB stick, switch to a terminal, and install them all with udpkg:

~ # udpkg -i *.udeb

Now the installation should proceed smoothly.

Russ Allbery: Review: The Far Reaches

Review: The Far Reaches, edited by John Joseph Adams

Publisher:	Amazon Original Stories
Copyright:	June 2023
ISBN:	1-6625-1572-3
ISBN:	1-6625-1622-3
ISBN:	1-6625-1503-0
ISBN:	1-6625-1567-7
ISBN:	1-6625-1678-9
ISBN:	1-6625-1533-2
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	219

Amazon has been releasing anthologies of original short SFF with various guest editors, free for Amazon Prime members. I previously tried Black Stars (edited by Nisi Shawl and Latoya Peterson) and Forward (edited by Blake Crouch). Neither were that good, but the second was much worse than the first. Amazon recently released a new collection, this time edited by long-standing SFF anthology editor John Joseph Adams and featuring a new story by Ann Leckie, which sounded promising enough to give them another chance. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. As with the previous anthologies, each story is available separately for purchase or Amazon Prime "borrowing" with separate ISBNs. The sidebar cover is for the first in the sequence. Unlike the previous collections, which were longer novelettes or novellas, my guess is all of these are in the novelette range. (I did not do a word count.) If you're considering this anthology, read the Okorafor story ("Just Out of Jupiter's Reach"), consider "How It Unfolds" by James S.A. Corey, and avoid the rest. "How It Unfolds" by James S.A. Corey: Humans have invented a new form of physics called "slow light," which can duplicate any object that is scanned. The energy expense is extremely high, so the result is not a post-scarcity paradise. What the technology does offer, however, is a possible route to interstellar colonization: duplicate a team of volunteers and a ship full of bootstrapping equipment, and send copies to a bunch of promising-looking exoplanets. One of them might succeed. The premise is interesting. The twists Corey adds on top are even better. What can be duplicated once can be duplicated again, perhaps with more information. This is a lovely science fiction idea story that unfortunately bogs down because the authors couldn't think of anywhere better to go with it than relationship drama. I found the focus annoying, but the ideas are still very neat. (7) "Void" by Veronica Roth: A maintenance worker on a slower-than-light passenger ship making the run between Sol and Centauri unexpectedly is called to handle a dead body. A passenger has been murdered, two days outside the Sol system. Ace is in no way qualified to investigate the murder, nor is it her job, but she's watched a lot of crime dramas and she has met the victim before. The temptation to start poking around is impossible to resist. It's been a long time since I've read a story built around the differing experiences of time for people who stay on planets and people who spend most of their time traveling at relativistic speeds. It's a bit of a retro idea from an earlier era of science fiction, but it's still a good story hook for a murder mystery. None of the characters are that memorable and Roth never got me fully invested in the story, but this was still a pleasant way to pass the time. (6) "Falling Bodies" by Rebecca Roanhorse: Ira is the adopted son of a Genteel senator. He was a social experiment in civilizing the humans: rescue a human orphan and give him the best of Genteel society to see if he could behave himself appropriately. The answer was no, which is how Ira finds himself on Long Reach Station with a parole officer and a schooling opportunity, hopefully far enough from his previous mistakes for a second chance. Everyone else seems to like Rebecca Roanhorse's writing better than I do, and this is no exception. Beneath the veneer of a coming-of-age story with a twist of political intrigue, this is brutal, depressing, and awful, with an ending that needs a lot of content warnings. I'm sorry that I read it. (3) "The Long Game" by Ann Leckie: The Imperial Radch trilogy are some of my favorite science fiction novels of all time, but I am finding Leckie's other work a bit hit and miss. I have yet to read a novel of hers that I didn't like, but the short fiction I've read leans more heavily into exploring weird and alien perspectives, which is not my favorite part of her work. This story is firmly in that category: the first-person protagonist is a small tentacled alien creature, a bit like a swamp-dwelling octopus. I think I see what Leckie is doing here: balancing cynicism and optimism, exploring how lifespans influence thinking and planning, and making some subtle points about colonialism. But as a reading experience, I didn't enjoy it. I never liked any of the characters, and the conclusion of the story is the unsettling sort of main-character optimism that seems rather less optimistic to the reader. (4) "Just Out of Jupiter's Reach" by Nnedi Okorafor: K rm n scientists have found a way to grow living ships that can achieve a symbiosis with a human pilot, but the requirements for that symbiosis are very strict and hard to predict. The result was a planet-wide search using genetic testing to find the rare and possibly nonexistent matches. They found seven people. The deal was simple: spend ten years in space, alone, in her ship. No contact with any other human except at the midpoint, when the seven ships were allowed to meet up for a week. Two million euros a year, for as long as she followed the rules, and the opportunity to be part of a great experiment, providing data that will hopefully lead to humans becoming a spacefaring species. The core of this story is told during the seven days in the middle of the mission, and thus centers on people unfamiliar with human contact trying to navigate social relationships after five years in symbiotic ships that reshape themselves to their whims and personalities. The ships themselves link so that the others can tour, which offers both a good opportunity for interesting description and a concretized metaphor about meeting other people. I adore symbiotic spaceships, so this story had me at the premise. The surface plot is very psychological, and I didn't entirely click with it, but the sense of wonder vibes beneath that surface were wonderful. It also feels fresh and new: I've seen most of the ideas before, but not presented or written this way, or approached from quite this angle. Definitely the best story of the anthology. (8) "Slow Time Between the Stars" by John Scalzi: This, on the other hand, was a complete waste of time, redeemed only by being the shortest "story" in the collection. "Story" is generous, since there's only one character and a very dry, linear plot that exists only to make a philosophical point. "Speculative essay" may be closer. The protagonist is the artificial intelligence responsible for Earth's greatest interstellar probe. It is packed with a repository of all of human knowledge and the raw material to create life. Its mission is to find an exoplanet capable of sustaining that life, and then recreate it and support it. The plot, such as it is, follows the AI's decision to abandon that mission and cut off contact with Earth, for reasons that it eventually explains. Every possible beat of this story hit me wrong. The sense of wonder attaches to the most prosaic things and skips over the moments that could have provoked real wonder. The AI is both unbelievable and irritating, with all of the smug self-confidence of an Internet reply guy. The prose is overwrought in all the wrong places ("the finger of God, offering the spark to animate the dirt of another world" would totally be this AI's profile quote under their forum avatar). The only thing I liked about the story is the ethical point that it slowly meanders into, which I think I might agree with and at least find plausible. But it's delivered by the sort of character I would actively leave rooms to avoid, in a style that's about as engrossing as a tax form. Avoid. (2) Rating: 5 out of 10

4 October 2023

Russ Allbery: Review: The Last Watch

Review: The Last Watch, by J.S. Dewes

Series:	Divide #1
Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	2021
ISBN:	1-250-23634-7
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	476

The Last Watch is the first book of a far-future science fiction duology. It was J.S. Dewes's first novel. The station of the SCS Argus is the literal edge of the universe: the Divide, beyond which there is nothing. Not simply an absence of stars, but a nothing from a deeper level of physics. The Argus is there to guard against a return of the Viators, the technologically superior alien race that nearly conquered humanity hundreds of years prior and has already returned once, apparently traveling along the Divide. Humanity believes the Viators have been wiped out, but they're not taking chances. It is not a sought-after assignment. The Sentinels are the dregs of the military: convicts, troublemakers, and misfits, banished to the literal edge of nowhere. Joining them at the start of this book is the merchant prince, cocky asshole, and exiled sabateur Cavalon Mercer. He doesn't know what to expect from either military service or service on the edge of the universe. He certainly did not expect the Argus to be commanded by Adequin Rake, a literal war hero and a far more effective leader than this post would seem to warrant. There are reasons why Rake is out on the edge of the universe, ones that she's not eager to talk about. They quickly become an afterthought when the Argus discovers that the Divide is approaching their position. The universe is collapsing, and the only people who know about it are people the System Collective would prefer to forget exist. Yes, the edge of the universe, not the edge of the galaxy. Yes, despite having two FTL mechanisms, this book has a scale problem that it never reconciles. And yes, the physics do not really make sense, although this is not the sort of book that tries to explain the science. The characters are too busy trying to survive to develop new foundational theories of physics. I was looking for more good military SF after enjoying Artifact Space so much (and still eagerly awaiting the sequel), so I picked this up. It has some of the same elements: the military as a place where you can make a fresh start with found family elements, the equalizing effects of military assignments, and the merits of good leadership. They're a bit disguised here, since this is a crew of often-hostile misfits under a lot of stress with a partly checked-out captain, but they do surface towards the end of the book. The strength of this book is the mystery of the contracting universe, which poses both an immediate threat to the ship and a longer-term potential threat to, well, everything. The first part of the book builds tension with the immediate threat, but the story comes into its own when the crew starts piecing together the connections between the Viators and the Divide while jury-rigging technology and making risky choices between a lot of bad options. This is the first half of a duology, so the mysteries are not resolved here, but they do reach a satisfying and tantalizing intermediate conclusion. The writing is servicable and adequate, but it's a bit clunky in places. Dewes doesn't quite have the balance right between setting the emotional stakes and not letting the characters indulge in rumination. Rake is a good captain who is worn down and partly checked out, Mercer is scared and hiding it with arrogance and will do well when given the right sort of attention, and all of this is reasonably obvious early on and didn't need as many of the book's pages as it gets. I could have done without the romantic subplot, which I thought was an unnecessary distraction from the plot and turned into a lot of tedious angst, but I suspect I was not the target audience. (Writers, please remember that people can still care about each other and be highly motivated by fear for each other without being romantic partners.) I would not call this a great book. The characters are not going to surprise you that much, and it's a bit long for the amount of plot that it delivers. If you are the sort of person who nit-picks the physics of SF novels and gets annoyed at writers who don't understand how big the universe is, you will have to take a deep breath and hold on to your suspension of disbelief. But Dewes does a good job with ratcheting up the tension and conveying an atmosphere of mysterious things happening at the edge of nowhere, while still keeping it in the genre of mysterious technology and mind-boggingly huge physical phenomena rather than space horror. If you've been looking for that sort of book, this will do. I was hooked and will definitely read the sequel. Followed by The Exiled Fleet. Rating: 7 out of 10

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