TL;DR: procmail is a security liability and has been abandoned upstream for the last two decades. If you are still using it, you should probably drop everything and at least remove its SUID flag. There are plenty of alternatives to chose from, and conversion is a one-time, acceptable trade-off.

Procmail is unmaintained procmail is unmaintained. The "Final release", according to Wikipedia, dates back to September 10, 2001 (3.22). That release was shipped in Debian since then, all the way back from Debian 3.0 "woody", twenty years ago. Debian also ships 25 uploads on top of this, with 3.22-21 shipping the "3.23pre" release that has been rumored since at least the November 2001, according to debian/changelog at least:

procmail (3.22-1) unstable; urgency=low
  * New upstream release, which uses the  standard' format for Maildir
    filenames and retries on name collision. It also contains some
    bug fixes from the 3.23pre snapshot dated 2001-09-13.
  * Removed  sendmail' from the Recommends field, since we already
    have  exim' (the default Debian MTA) and  mail-transport-agent'.
  * Removed suidmanager support. Conflicts: suidmanager (<< 0.50).
  * Added support for DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS in the source package.
  * README.Maildir: Do not use locking on the example recipe,
    since it's wrong to do so in this case.
 -- Santiago Vila <sanvila@debian.org>  Wed, 21 Nov 2001 09:40:20 +0100

All Debian suites from buster onwards ship the 3.22-26 release, although the maintainer just pushed a 3.22-27 release to fix a seven year old null pointer dereference, after this article was drafted. Procmail is also shipped in all major distributions: Fedora and its derivatives, Debian derivatives, Gentoo, Arch, FreeBSD, OpenBSD. We all seem to be ignoring this problem. The upstream website (http://procmail.org/) has been down since about 2015, according to Debian bug #805864, with no change since. In effect, every distribution is currently maintaining its fork of this dead program. Note that, after filing a bug to keep Debian from shipping procmail in a stable release again, I was told that the Debian maintainer is apparently in contact with the upstream. And, surprise! they still plan to release that fabled 3.23 release, which has been now in "pre-release" for all those twenty years. In fact, it turns out that 3.23 is considered released already, and that the procmail author actually pushed a 3.24 release, codenamed "Two decades of fixes". That amounts to 25 commits since 3.23pre some of which address serious security issues, but none of which address fundamental issues with the code base.

Procmail is insecure By default, procmail is installed SUID root:mail in Debian. There's no debconf or pre-seed setting that can change this. There has been two bug reports against the Debian to make this configurable (298058, 264011), but both were closed to say that, basically, you should use dpkg-statoverride to change the permissions on the binary. So if anything, you should immediately run this command on any host that you have procmail installed on:

dpkg-statoverride --update --add root root 0755 /usr/bin/procmail

Note that this might break email delivery. It might also not work at all, thanks to usrmerge. Not sure. Yes, everything is on fire. This is fine. In my opinion, even assuming we keep procmail in Debian, that default should be reversed. It should be up to people installing procmail to assign it those dangerous permissions, after careful consideration of the risk involved. The last maintainer of procmail explicitly advised us (in that null pointer dereference bug) and other projects (e.g. OpenBSD, in [2]) to stop shipping it, back in 2014. Quote:

Executive summary: delete the procmail port; the code is not safe and should not be used as a basis for any further work.

I just read some of the code again this morning, after the original author claimed that procmail was active again. It's still littered with bizarre macros like:

#define bit_set(name,which,value) \
  (value?(name[bit_index(which)] =bit_mask(which)):\
  (name[bit_index(which)]&=~bit_mask(which)))

... from regexp.c, line 66 (yes, that's a custom regex engine). Or this one:

#define jj  (aleps.au.sopc)

It uses insecure functions like strcpy extensively. malloc() is thrown around gotos like it's 1984 all over again. (To be fair, it has been feeling like 1984 a lot lately, but that's another matter entirely.) That null pointer deref bug? It's fixed upstream now, in this commit merged a few hours ago, which I presume might be in response to my request to remove procmail from Debian. So while that's nice, this is the just tip of the iceberg. I speculate that one could easily find an exploitable crash in procmail if only by running it through a fuzzer. But I don't need to speculate: procmail had, for years, serious security issues that could possibly lead to root privilege escalation, remotely exploitable if procmail is (as it's designed to do) exposed to the network. Maybe I'm overreacting. Maybe the procmail author will go through the code base and do a proper rewrite. But I don't think that's what is in the cards right now. What I expect will happen next is that people will start fuzzing procmail, throw an uncountable number of bug reports at it which will get fixed in a trickle while never fixing the underlying, serious design flaws behind procmail.

Procmail has better alternatives The reason this is so frustrating is that there are plenty of modern alternatives to procmail which do not suffer from those problems. Alternatives to procmail(1) itself are typically part of mail servers. For example, Dovecot has its own LDA which implements the standard Sieve language (RFC 5228). (Interestingly, Sieve was published as RFC 3028 in 2001, before procmail was formally abandoned.) Courier also has "maildrop" which has its own filtering mechanism, and there is fdm (2007) which is a fetchmail and procmail replacement. Update: there's also mailprocessing, which is not an LDA, but processing an existing folder. It was, however, specifically designed to replace complex Procmail rules. But procmail, of course, doesn't just ship procmail; that would just be too easy. It ships mailstat(1) which we could probably ignore because it only parses procmail log files. But more importantly, it also ships:

• lockfile(1) - conditional semaphore-file creator
• formail(1) - mail (re)formatter

lockfile(1) already has a somewhat acceptable replacement in the form of flock(1), part of util-linux (which is Essential, so installed on any normal Debian system). It might not be a direct drop-in replacement, but it should be close enough. formail(1) is similar: the courier maildrop package ships reformail(1) which is, presumably, a rewrite of formail. It's unclear if it's a drop-in replacement, but it should probably possible to port uses of formail to it easily.

Update: the maildrop package ships a SUID root binary (two, even). So if you want only reformail(1), you might want to disable that with:

dpkg-statoverride --update --add root root 0755 /usr/bin/lockmail.maildrop 
dpkg-statoverride --update --add root root 0755 /usr/bin/maildrop

It would be perhaps better to have reformail(1) as a separate package, see bug 1006903 for that discussion.

The real challenge is, of course, migrating those old .procmailrc recipes to Sieve (basically). I added a few examples in the appendix below. You might notice the Sieve examples are easier to read, which is a nice added bonus.

Conclusion There is really, absolutely, no reason to keep procmail in Debian, nor should it be used anywhere at this point. It's a great part of our computing history. May it be kept forever in our museums and historical archives, but not in Debian, and certainly not in actual release. It's just a bomb waiting to go off. It is irresponsible for distributions to keep shipping obsolete and insecure software like this for unsuspecting users. Note that I am grateful to the author, I really am: I used procmail for decades and it served me well. But now, it's time to move, not bring it back from the dead.

Appendix

Previous work It's really weird to have to write this blog post. Back in 2016, I rebuilt my mail setup at home and, to my horror, discovered that procmail had been abandoned for 15 years at that point, thanks to that LWN article from 2010. I would have thought that I was the only weirdo still running procmail after all those years and felt kind of embarrassed to only "now" switch to the more modern (and, honestly, awesome) Sieve language. But no. Since then, Debian shipped three major releases (stretch, buster, and bullseye), all with the same vulnerable procmail release. Then, in early 2022, I found that, at work, we actually had procmail installed everywhere, possibly because userdir-ldap was using it for lockfile until 2019. I sent a patch to fix that and scrambled to remove get rid of procmail everywhere. That took about a day. But many other sites are now in that situation, possibly not imagining they have this glaring security hole in their infrastructure.

Procmail to Sieve recipes I'll collect a few Sieve equivalents to procmail recipes here. If you have any additions, do contact me. All Sieve examples below assume you drop the file in ~/.dovecot.sieve.

deliver mail to "plus" extension folder Say you want to deliver user+foo@example.com to the folder foo. You might write something like this in procmail:

MAILDIR=$HOME/Maildir/
DEFAULT=$MAILDIR
LOGFILE=$HOME/.procmail.log
VERBOSE=off
EXTENSION=$1            # Need to rename it - ?? does not like $1 nor 1
:0
* EXTENSION ?? [a-zA-Z0-9]+
        .$EXTENSION/

That, in sieve language, would be:

require ["variables", "envelope", "fileinto", "subaddress"];
########################################################################
# wildcard +extension
# https://doc.dovecot.org/configuration_manual/sieve/examples/#plus-addressed-mail-filtering
if envelope :matches :detail "to" "*"  
  # Save name in $ name  in all lowercase
  set :lower "name" "$ 1 ";
  fileinto "$ name ";
  stop;
 

Subject into folder This would file all mails with a Subject: line having FreshPorts in it into the freshports folder, and mails from alternc.org mailing lists into the alternc folder:

:0
## mailing list freshports
* ^Subject.*FreshPorts.*
.freshports/
:0
## mailing list alternc
* ^List-Post.*mailto:.*@alternc.org.*
.alternc/

Equivalent Sieve:

if header :contains "subject" "FreshPorts"  
    fileinto "freshports";
  elsif header :contains "List-Id" "alternc.org"  
    fileinto "alternc";
 

Mail sent to root to a reports folder This double rule:

:0
* ^Subject: Cron
* ^From: .*root@
.rapports/

Would look something like this in Sieve:

if header :comparator "i;octet" :contains "Subject" "Cron"  
  if header :regex :comparator "i;octet"  "From" ".*root@"  
        fileinto "rapports";
   
 

Note that this is what the automated converted does (below). It's not very readable, but it works.

Bulk email I didn't have an equivalent of this in procmail, but that's something I did in Sieve:

if header :contains "Precedence" "bulk"  
    fileinto "bulk";
 

Any mailing list This is another rule I didn't have in procmail but I found handy and easy to do in Sieve:

if exists "List-Id"  
    fileinto "lists";
 

This or that I wouldn't remember how to do this in procmail either, but that's an easy one in Sieve:

if anyof (header :contains "from" "example.com",
           header :contains ["to", "cc"] "anarcat@example.com")  
    fileinto "example";
 

You can even pile up a bunch of options together to have one big rule with multiple patterns:

if anyof (exists "X-Cron-Env",
          header :contains ["subject"] ["security run output",
                                        "monthly run output",
                                        "daily run output",
                                        "weekly run output",
                                        "Debian Package Updates",
                                        "Debian package update",
                                        "daily mail stats",
                                        "Anacron job",
                                        "nagios",
                                        "changes report",
                                        "run output",
                                        "[Systraq]",
                                        "Undelivered mail",
                                        "Postfix SMTP server: errors from",
                                        "backupninja",
                                        "DenyHosts report",
                                        "Debian security status",
                                        "apt-listchanges"
                                        ],
           header :contains "Auto-Submitted" "auto-generated",
           envelope :contains "from" ["nagios@",
                                      "logcheck@",
                                      "root@"])
     
    fileinto "rapports";
 

Automated script There is a procmail2sieve.pl script floating around, and mentioned in the dovecot documentation. It didn't work very well for me: I could use it for small things, but I mostly wrote the sieve file from scratch.

Progressive migration Enrico Zini has progressively migrated his procmail setup to Sieve using a clever way: he hooked procmail inside sieve so that he could deliver to the Dovecot LDA and progressively migrate rules one by one, without having a "flag day". See this explanatory blog post for the details, which also shows how to configure Dovecot as an LMTP server with Postfix.

Other examples The Dovecot sieve examples are numerous and also quite useful. At the time of writing, they include virus scanning and spam filtering, vacation auto-replies, includes, archival, and flags.

Harmful considered harmful I am aware that the "considered harmful" title has a long and controversial history, being considered harmful in itself (by some people who are obviously not afraid of contradictions). I have nevertheless deliberately chosen that title, partly to make sure this article gets maximum visibility, but more specifically because I do not have doubts at this moment that procmail is, clearly, a bad idea at this moment in history.

Developing story I must also add that, incredibly, this story has changed while writing it. This article is derived from this bug I filed in Debian to, quite frankly, kick procmail out of Debian. But filing the bug had the interesting effect of pushing the upstream into action: as mentioned above, they have apparently made a new release and merged a bunch of patches in a new git repository. This doesn't change much of the above, at this moment. If anything significant comes out of this effort, I will try to update this article to reflect the situation. I am actually happy to retract the claims in this article if it turns out that procmail is a stellar example of defensive programming and survives fuzzing attacks. But at this moment, I'm pretty confident that will not happen, at least not in scope of the next Debian release cycle.

Testing Picolibc with the glibc tests Picolibc has a bunch of built-in tests, but more testing is always better, right? I decided to see how hard it would be to run some of the tests provided in the GNU C Library (glibc). Parallel meson build files Similar to how Picolibc uses meson build files to avoid modifying the newlib autotools infrastructure, I decided to take the glibc code and write meson build rules that would compile the tests against Picolibc header files and link against Picolibc libraries. I decided to select a single target for this project so I could focus on getting things building and not worry too much about making it portable. I wanted to pick something that had hardware floating point so that I would have rounding modes and exception support, so I picked the ARM Cortex M7 with hard float ABI:

$ arm-none-eabi-gcc -mcpu=cortex-m7 -mfloat-abi=hard

It should be fairly easy to extend this to other targets, but for now, that's what I've got working. There's a cross-cortex-m7.txt file containing all of the cross compilation details which is used when running meson setup. All of the Picolibc-specific files live in a new picolibc directory so they are isolated from the main glibc code. Pre-loading a pile of hacks Adapt Picolibc to support the Glibc test code required a bunch of random hacks, from providing _unlocked versions of the stdio macros to stubbing out various unsupportable syscalls (like sleep and chdir). Instead of modifying the Glibc code, I created a file called hacks.h which is full of this stuff and used the gcc -include parameter to read that into the compiler before starting compilation on all of the files. Supporting command line parameters The glibc tests all support a range of command line parameters, some of which turned out to be quite useful for this work. Picolibc had limited semihosting support for accessing the command line, but that required modifying applications to go fetch the command line using a special semihosting function. To make this easier, I added a new crt0 variant for picolibc called (oddly) semihost. This extends the existing hosted variant by adding a call to the semihosting library to fetch the current command line and splitting that into words at each space. It doesn't handle any quoting, but it's sufficient for the needs here. Avoiding glibc headers The glibc tests use some glibc-specific extensions to the standard POSIX C library, so I needed to include those in the test builds. Headers for those extensions are mixed in with the rest of the POSIX standard headers, which conflict with the Picolibc versions. To work around this, I stuck stub #include files in the picolibc directory which directly include the appropriate headers for the glibc API extensions. This includes things like argp.h and array_length.h. For other headers which weren't actually needed for picolibc, I created empty files. Adding more POSIX to Picolibc At this point, code was compiling but failing to find various standard POSIX functions which aren't available in Picolibc. That included some syscalls which could be emulated using semihosting, like gettimeofday and getpagesize. It also included some generally useful additions, like replacing ecvtbuf and fcvtbuf with ecvt_r and fcvt_r. The _r variants provide a target buffer size instead of assuming that it was large enough as the Picolibc buf variants did. Which tests are working? So far, I've got some of the tests in malloc, math, misc and stdio-common running. There are a lot of tests in the malloc directory which cover glibc API extensions or require POSIX syscalls not supported by semihosting. I think I've added all of the tests which should be supported. For the math tests, I'm testing the standard POSIX math APIs in both float and double forms, except for the Bessel and Gamma functions. Picolibc's versions of those are so bad that they violate some pretty basic assumptions about error bounds built into the glibc test code. Until Picolibc gets better versions of these functions, we'll have to skip testing them this way. In the misc directory, I've only added tests for ecvt, fcvt, gcvt, dirname and hsearch. I don't think there are any other tests there which should work. Finally, for stdio-common, almost all of the tests expect a fully functioning file system, which semihosting really can't support. As a result, we're only able to run the printf, scanf and some of the sprintf tests. All in all, we're running 78 of the glibc test programs, which is a small fraction of the total tests, but I think it's the bulk of the tests which cover APIs that don't depend too much on the underlying POSIX operating system. Bugs found and fixed in Picolibc This exercise has resulted in 17 fixes in Picolibc, which can be classified as:

1. Math functions taking sNaN and not raising FE_INVALID and returning qNaN. Almost any operation on an sNaN value is supposed to signal an invalid operand and replace that with a qNaN so that further processing doesn't raise another exception. This was fairly easy to fix, just need to use return x + x; instead of return x;.
2. Math functions failing to set errno. I'd recently restructured the math library to get rid of the separate IEEE version of the functions which didn't set errno and missed a couple of cases that needed to use the errno-setting helper functions.
3. Corner cases in string/float conversion, including the need to perform round-to-even for '%a' conversions in printf and supporting negative decimal values for fcvt. This particular exercise led to replacing the ecvtbuf and fcvtbuf APIs with glibc's ecvt_r and fcvt_r versions as those pass explicit buffer lengths, making overflow prevention far more reliable.
4. A bunch of malloc entry points were not handling failure correctly; allocation values close to the maximum possible size caused numerous numeric wrapping errors with the usual consequences (allocations "succeed", but return a far smaller buffer than requested). Also, realloc was failing to check the return value from malloc before copying the old data, which really isn't a good idea.
5. Tinystdio's POSIX support code was returning an error instead of EOF at end of file.
6. Error bounds for the Picolibc math library aren't great; I had to generate Picolibc-specific ulps files. Most functions are between 0 and 3 ulps, but for some reason, the float version of erfc (ercf) has errors as large as 64 ulps. That needs investigation.

Tests added to Picolibc With all of the fixes applied to Picolibc, I added some tests to verify them without relying on running the glibc tests, that includes sNaN vs qNaN tests for math functions, testing fopen and mktemp, checking the printf %a rounding support and adding a ecvt/fcvt tests. I also discovered that the github-based CI system was compiling but not testing when using clang with a riscv target, so that got added in. Where's the source code? The Picolibc changes are sitting on the glibc-testing branch. I'll merge them once the current CI pass finishes. The hacked-up Glibc bits are in a glibc mirror at github in the picolibc project on the picolibc-testing branch. It would be interesting to know what additional tests should be usable in this environment. And, perhaps, finding a way to use this for picolibc CI testing in the future. Concluding thoughts Overall, I'm pretty pleased with these results. The bugs in malloc are fairly serious and could easily result in trouble, but the remaining issues are mostly minor and shouldn't have a big impact on applications using Picolibc. I'll get the changes merged and start thinking about doing another Picolibc release.

This is a short statement on what I understand about Covid-19 and the current situation so that I can refer to it in other posts and don t need to repeat myself. What I do, think and eventually write is heavily influenced by this understanding, as outlined futher below. Also I want to set a counterpoint to the people that still publicly proclaim the official narrative. On November 15th 2020 I already wrote an email to debian-private@ with the subject Basic information about Corona in German that referred to my information collection on that topic. Since then my understanding has refined but not fundamentally changed:

• The western capitalistic system has finally reached end-of-life in 2019 after it almost collapsed already in 2008.
• The western oligarchs as organised in the World Economic Forum were well aware of this and planned a Great Reset of the system through a medical emergency. The goal is to create a new system where the old elite will remain in power.
• There has been no pandemic in 2020 but only a PCR-test that created cases . Age-normalized mortality in most countries was unspectacular in 2020.
• The so called Covid-19 vaccines are extremely dangerous in some batches with harmless batches in between to not raise suspicion: How Bad is My Batch.

I m happy to talk in detail about this topic and provide pointers. Right now a comprehensive overview is available at Grand-Jury.net. Why is this relevant? The internet in its current state is an instrument of control and suppression. This becomes especially obvious in the increase in censorship and the introduction of vaccine-passports which are planned to become universal passports for all aspects of our life. Therefor I want to work on initiatives for a free internet for the people. Right now I think about the freedombox, distributed search engines, re-decentralization in general and especially a decentralized alternative to Wikipedia.

Review: Elder Race, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Publisher:	Tordotcom
Copyright:	November 2021
ISBN:	1-250-76871-3
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	199

(It's a shame that a lot of people will be reading this novella on a black-and-white ebook reader, since the Emmanuel Shiu cover is absolutely spectacular. There's a larger image without the words at the bottom of that article.) When reports arrive at the court about demons deep in the forest that are taking over animals and humans and bending them to their will, the queen doesn't care. It's probably some unknown animal, and regardless, the forest kingdom is a rival anyway. Lynesse Fourth Daughter disagrees vehemently, but she has no power at court. Even apart from her lack of seniority, her love of stories and daring and adventures is a source of endless frustration to her mother. That is why this novella opens with her climbing the mountain path to the Tower of Nyrgoth Elder, the last of the ancient wizards, to seek his help. Nyr Illim Tevitch is an anthropologist second class of Earth's Explorer Corps, part of the second wave of Earth's outward expansion through the galaxy. In the first wave, colonies were seeded on habitable planets, only to be left stranded when Earth's civilization collapsed in an ecological crisis. Nyr was a member of a team of four, sent to make careful and limited contact with one of those lost colonies as part of Earth's second flourishing with more advanced technology. When the team lost contact with Earth, the other three went back while Nyr stayed to keep their field observations going. It's now 291 years of intermittent suspended animation later. Nyr's colleagues never came back, and there have been no messages from Earth. Elder Race is a Prime Directive anthropology story, a subgenre so long-standing that it has its own conventions and variations. Variations of the theme have been written by everyone from Eleanor Arnason to Iain M. Banks (linking to the book I have in mind is arguably a spoiler). Per the dedication, Tchaikovsky's take is based on Gene Wolfe's story "Trip, Trap," which I have not read but whose plot looks very similar. To that story structure, Tchaikovsky brings two major twists. First, Nyr is cut off from his advanced civilization, and has considerable reason to believe that civilization no longer exists. Do noninterference rules still have any meaning if Nyr is stranded and the civilization that made the rules is gone? Second, Nyr has already broken those rules rather spectacularly. More than a hundred years previously, he had ridden with Astresse Regent, a warrior queen and Lynesse's ancestor, to defeat a local warlord who had found control codes for abandoned advanced machinery and was using it as weaponry. In the process, he fell in love and made a rash promise to come to the aid of any of her descendants if he were needed. Lynesse has come to collect on the promise. Elder Race is told in alternating chapters between Nyr and Lynesse's viewpoints: first person for Nyr and tight third person for Lynesse. The core of the story is this doubled perspective, one from a young woman who wants to live in a fantasy novel and one from a deeply depressed anthropologist torn between wanting human contact, wanting to follow the rules of his profession, and wanting to explain to Lynesse that he is not a wizard. Nyr talks himself into helping with another misuse of advanced technology using the same logic he used a hundred years earlier: he's protecting Lynesse's pre-industrial society from interference rather than causing it. But the demons Lynesse wants him to fight are something entirely unexpected. This parallel understanding is a great story structure. What worked less for me was Tchaikovsky's reliance on linguistic barriers to prevent shared understanding. Whenever Nyr tries to explain something, Lynesse hears it in terms of magic and high fantasy, and often exactly backwards from how Nyr intended it. This is where my suspension of disbelief failed me, even though I normally don't have suspension of disbelief problems in SF stories. I was unable to map Lynesse's misunderstandings to any realistic linguistic model. Lynesse's language is highly complex (a realistic development within an isolated population), and Nyr complains about his inability to speak it properly given it's blizzard of complex modifiers. This is entirely believable. What is far less believable is that Lynesse perceives him as fluent in her language, but often saying the precise opposite of what he's trying to say. One chapter in the middle of the book gives Nyr's intended story side-by-side with Lynesse's understanding. This is a brilliant way to show the divide, but I found the translation errors unbelievable. If Nyr is failing that profoundly to communicate his meaning, he should be making more egregious sentence-level errors, occasionally saying something bizarre or entirely nonsensical, referring to a person as an animal or a baby, or otherwise not fluently telling a coherent story that's fundamentally different than the one he thinks he's telling. If you can put that aside, though, this is a fun story. Nyr has serious anxiety and depression made worse by his isolation, and copes by using an implanted device called a Dissociative Cognition System that lets him temporarily turn off his emotions at the cost of letting them snowball. He has a wealth of other augments and implants, including horns, which Lynesse sees as evidence that he's a different species of magical being and which he sees as occasionally irritating field equipment with annoying visual menus. The key to writing a story like this is for both perspectives to be correct given their own assumptions, and to offer insight that the other perspective is missing. I thought the linguistic part of that was unsuccessful, but the rest of it works. One of the best parts of novellas is that they don't wear out their welcome. This is a fun spin on well-trodden ground that tells a complete story in under 200 pages. I wish the ending had been a bit more satisfying and the linguistics had been more believable, but I enjoyed the time I spent in this world. Content warning for some body horror. Rating: 7 out of 10

Review: Children of Earth and Sky, by Guy Gavriel Kay

Publisher:	New American Library
Copyright:	2016
ISBN:	0-698-18327-4
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	572

Nine hundred years have passed since the events of Lord of Emperors. Twenty-five years ago, Sarantium, queen of cities, fell to the Osmanlis, who have renamed it Asharias in honor of their Asherite faith. The repercussions are still echoing through the western world, as the Osmanlis attempt each spring to push farther west and the forces of Rodolfo, Holy Emperor in Obravic and defender of the Jaddite faith, hold them back. Seressa and Dubrava are city-state republics built on the sea trade. Seressa is the larger and most renown, money-lenders to Rodolfo and notorious for their focus on business and profit, including willingness to trade with the Osmanlis. Dubrava has a more tenuous position: smaller, reliant on trade and other assistance from Seressa, but also holding a more-favored trading position with Asharias. Both are harassed by piracy from Senjan, a fiercely Jaddite raiding city north up the coast from Dubrava and renown for its bravery against the Asherites. The Senjani are bad for business. Seressa would love to wipe them out, but they have the favor of the Holy Emperor. They settled for attempting to starve the city with a blockade. As Children of Earth and Sky opens, Seressa is sending out new spies. One is a woman named Leonora Valeri, who will present herself as the wife of a doctor that Seressa is sending to Dubrava. She is neither his wife nor Seressani, but this assignment gets her out of the convent to which her noble father exiled her after an unapproved love affair. The other new spy is the young artist Pero Villani, a minor painter whose only notable work was destroyed by the woman who commissioned it for being too revealing. Pero's destination is farther east: Grand Khalif Gur u the Destroyer, the man whose forces took Sarantium, wants to be painted in the western style. Pero will do so, and observe all he can, and if the opportunity arises to do more than that, well, so much the better. Pero and Leonora are traveling on a ship owned by Marin Djivo, the younger son of a wealthy Dubravan merchant family, when their ship is captured by Senjani raiders. Among the raiders is Danica Gradek, the archer who broke the Seressani blockade of Senjan. This sort of piracy, while tense, should be an economic transaction: some theft, some bargaining, some ransom, and everyone goes on their way. That is not what happens. Moments later, two men lie dead, and Danica's life has become entangled with Dubravan merchants and Seressani spies. Children of Earth and Sky is in some sense a sequel to the Sarantine Mosaic, and knowing the events of that series adds some emotional depth and significant moments to this story, but you can easily read it as a stand-alone novel. (That said, I recommend the Sarantine Mosaic regardless.) As with nearly all of Kay's work, it's historical fiction with the names changed (less this time than in most of this books) and a bit of magic added. The setting is the middle of the 15th century. Seressa is, of course, Venice. The Osmanlis are the Ottoman Turks, and Asharias is Istanbul, the captured Constantinople. Rodolfo is a Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor, holding court in an amalgam of northern cities that (per the afterward) is primarily Prague. Dubrava, which is central to much of this book, is Dubrovnik in Croatia. As usual with Kay's novels, you don't need to know this to enjoy the story, but it may spark some fun secondary reading. The touch of magic is present in several places, but comes primarily from Danica, whose grandfather resides as a voice in her head. He is the last of her family that she is in contact with. Her father and older brother were killed by Osmanli raiders, and her younger brother taken as a slave to be raised as a djanni warrior in the khalif's infantry. (Djannis are akin to Mamluks in our world.) Damaz, as he is now known, is the remaining major viewpoint character I've not mentioned. There are a couple of key events in the book that have magic at the center, generally involving Danica or Damaz, but most of the story is straight historical fiction (albeit with significant divergences from our world). I'd talked myself out of starting this novel several times before I finally picked it up. Like most of Kay's, it's a long book, and I wasn't sure if I was in the mood for epic narration and a huge cast. And indeed, I found it slow at the start. Once the story got underway, though, I was as enthralled as always. There is a bit of sag in the middle of the book, in part because Kay didn't follow up on some relationships that I wish were more central to the plot and in part because he overdoes the narrative weight in one scene, but the ending is exceptional. Guy Gavriel Kay is the master of a specific type of omniscient tight third person narration, one in which the reader sees what a character is thinking but also gets narrative commentary, foreshadowing, and emotional emphasis apart from the character's thoughts. It can feel heavy-handed; if something is important, Kay tells you, explicitly and sometimes repetitively, and the foreshadowing frequently can be described as portentous. But in return, Kay gets fine control of pacing and emphasis. The narrative commentary functions like a soundtrack in a movie. It tells you when to pay close attention and when you can relax, what moments are important, where to slow down, when to brace yourself, and when you can speed up. That in turn requires trust; if you're not in the mood for the author to dictate your reading pace to the degree Kay is attempting, it can be irritating. If you are in the mood, though, it makes his novels easy to relax into. The narrator will ensure that you don't miss anything important, and it's an effective way to build tension. Kay also strikes just the right balance between showing multiple perspectives on a single moment and spending too much time retelling the same story. He will often switch viewpoint characters in the middle of a scene, but he avoids the trap of replaying the scene and thus losing the reader's interest. There is instead just a moment of doubled perspective or retrospective commentary, just enough information for the reader to extrapolate the other character's experience backwards, and then the story moves on. Kay has an excellent feel for when I badly wanted to see another character's perspective on something that just happened. Some of Kay's novels revolve around a specific event or person. Children of Earth and Sky is not one of those. It's a braided novel following five main characters, each with their own story. Some of those stories converge; some of them touch for a while and then diverge again. About three-quarters of the way through, I wasn't sure how Kay would manage a satisfying conclusion for the numerous separate threads that didn't feel rushed, but I need not have worried. The ending had very little of the shape that I had expected, focused more on the small than the large (although there are some world-changing events here), but it was an absolute delight, with some beautiful moments of happiness that took the rest of the novel to set up. This is not the sort of novel with a clear theme, but insofar as it has one, it's a story about how much of the future shape and events of the world are unknowable. All we can control is our own choices, and we may never know their impact. Each individual must decide who they want to be and attempt to live their life in accordance with that decision, hopefully with some grace towards others in the world. The novel does, alas, still have some of Kay's standard weaknesses. There is (at last!) an important female friendship, and I had great hopes for a second one, but sadly it lasted only a scant handful of pages. Men interact with each other and with women; women interact almost exclusively with men. Kay does slightly less awarding of women to male characters than in some previous books (although it still happens), but this world is still weirdly obsessed with handing women to men for sex as a hospitality gesture. None of this is too belabored or central to the story, or I would be complaining more, but as soon as one sees how regressive the gender roles typically are in a Kay novel, it's hard to unsee. And, as always for Kay, the sex in this book is weirdly off-putting to me. I think this goes hand in hand with Kay's ability to write some of the best conversations in fantasy. Kay's characters spar and thrust with every line and read nuance into small details of wording. Frequently, the turn of the story rests on the outcome of a careful conversation. This is great reading; it's the part of Kay's writing I enjoy the most. But I'm not sure he knows how to turn it off between characters who love and trust each other. The characters never fully relax; sex feels like another move in ongoing chess games, which in turn makes it feel weirdly transactional or manipulative instead of open-hearted and intimate. It doesn't help that Kay appears to believe that arousal is a far more irresistible force for men than I do. Those problems did get in the way of my enjoyment occasionally, but I didn't think they ruined the book. The rest of the story is too good. Danica in particular is a wonderful character: thoughtful, brave, determined, and deeply honest with herself in that way that is typical of the best of Kay's characters. I wanted to read the book where Danica's and Leonora's stories stayed more entwined; alas, that's not the story Kay was writing. But I am in awe at Kay's ability to write characters who feel thoughtful and insightful even when working at cross purposes, in a world that mostly avoids simple villains, with a plot that never hinges on someone doing something stupid. I love reading about these people. Their triumphs, when they finally come, are deeply satisfying. Children of Earth and Sky is probably not in the top echelon of Kay's works with the Sarantine Mosaic and Under Heaven, but it's close. If you like his other writing, you will like this as well. Highly recommended. Rating: 9 out of 10

John Grisham The King of Torts Lots of things have been happening and I have been unable to be on top of things. There are so many things that happen and keep on happening and a lot of it is just not in control. For those who are watching Brexit, India is going through the same/similar phenomena just without Brexit. I would not like to delve much into Indian happenings as there is no sweet story to tell. Mum is in hospital (diabetic foot) so a lot of time to read books. So I have been making use of the time and at the same time learning or making connections from what I know of the history of the world which goes on enriching what I read all the time. For e.g. in this book, opens up with people who are on Crack. Now while the book is set in 2003, it is still relevant today for a lot of things. There have been rumors and whatnot that the President of the United States, Ronald Reagan supplied a lot of cocaine to black folks in the early 1980s. While that has never been proved, it has been proved somewhat that the CIA and even people in the state department were part of providing crack cocaine to African Americans (as they refer to blacks) in those days. Whether this was because of black power rising or non-profits like ACLU or other organizations is beyond me. I had also read that the GOP (Republicans/Grand Old Party) in the 1970s itself when computers became fast and could do a lot of processing, came to know if education would be as it is, then soon they would no voters. hence they decided to defund education in America, the end result being massive education loans to prospective students and perhaps partly the reason why China produces more than enough STEM graduates than the total number of Americans who become graduates. It is a shame nonetheless, that education in the U.S. is never top . This is somewhat from a Republican perspective. That is also the reason they are much anti-science.

Tort Cases India doesn t have either class-action suits or tort cases. But before we go headlong, this is what tort means. The book however is not about general tort cases but medical tort cases. The idea is that medical companies often produce medicines claiming they solve x or y issues but more often than not they take short-cuts to get approval from FDA and other regulators. And sooner or later those medicines can and do have harmful effects on the body, sometimes resulting in death. One of the more interesting articles that I read and probably also shared is the work done by Mr. Rob Bilott. While it is a typical David and Goliath story once you read the book, you realize that there are and were many difficulties in Mr. Rob s path that are never fully appreciated or even worked out. The biggest issue is the 8 years that he paid out of his own pocket to get the hundreds and thousands of people tested. How many of us would do that? And this is before proving causation of any disease, illness or anything to a particular environment, pollution etc. is hard even then and even now. Whatever money the victims receive afterward and whatever went to Mr. Rob Bilott would never compensate for the stress faced by him. And lawyers have to be careful, if they ask too little, they are not hurting the company and there is no change in its behavior. If they ask too much, the company can declare Chapter 11, bankruptcy so they have to keep the balance. There is also a lot of greed shown by the tort lawyer and while at the end he does tell about a company s nefarious activities that he suspects he could share his opinion only after giving up his law career. There is and was talk of tort-reform in the book but as can be seen if you reform tort there is just no way to punish such companies but that is in the U.S. There is also some observations that I have shared over the years, for e.g. Europe bans far more drugs than the U.S. does. A major part of it is perhaps due to the fact that Europe has 26/27 independent medical regulators and one country bans medicine for one or the other reason, the rest of Europe also bans the same. In the U.S. it is only the FDA. I have read they have had both funding and staffing issues for years and this is from before the pandemic. The Indian regulators are much worse. One could follow Priyanka Pulla s articles in Mint and others where she has shared how the regulator is corrupt and lazy and a combo of both. And all of this is besides how doctors are corrupted in India by marketing executives of pharma companies. That would be a whole article in itself. In short, when you read this book, there are so many thoughts that come alive when you are reading the book. The sad part is the book doesn t offer any solutions at all. John Grisham s books are usually legal thrillers and courtroom exchanges, this one though is and was very different. This one sadly doesn t take one to any conclusion apart from the fact that we live in an imperfect world and there don t seem to be any solutions. This was even shared by Rep. Katie Porter in her pinned tweet. The Abbvie s of the world will continue to take common people like you and me for a ride.

The RcppSimdJson package was updated to release 0.1.7 today. CRAN had sent a note overnight that it triggered LENGTH_1 error (where boolean comparisons happen with longer vectors). That may be debatable in the two cases flagged if one looks at the commit but life being too short to debate this so we just fixed it. The email came in at 04:50h-ish when I was sound asleep, but four hours later the fixed version was on CRAN thanks to the automated processing: RcppSimdJson wraps the fantastic and genuinely impressive simdjson library by Daniel Lemire and collaborators. Via very clever algorithmic engineering to obtain largely branch-free code, coupled with modern C++ and newer compiler instructions, it results in parsing gigabytes of JSON parsed per second which is quite mindboggling. The best-case performance is faster than CPU speed as use of parallel SIMD instructions and careful branch avoidance can lead to less than one cpu cycle per byte parsed; see the video of the talk by Daniel Lemire at QCon (also voted best talk). The very short NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in version 0.1.7 (2022-02-18)

• Two URLs were updated in 'README.md', and Travis artifacts and badges have been removed (Dirk).
• One unit test file was updated to not trigger a 'LENGTH_1' warning (Dirk closing #76).

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. For questions, suggestions, or issues please use the issue tracker at the GitHub repo. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

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

Hi everyone! In today s blog post I will be talking about the progress i have made , the hurdles I encountered and how my current progress differs from my original expectations. I applied to Debian community with a particular timeline and expected it to go that way, but after starting out i realized i had alot to learn in Ruby and the codebase. So far i have worked on issues i am proud of and when i use Debci i see some of the changes i added for example the self-service form remembering values that was filled after an error message / it reloads. Another milestone for me is writing test cases, I learnt about test driven development which is an awesome process is developing software. Looking back at the beginning before the internship started I can see how much experience i have gained and also improvement I made.

Road block Some tasks took longer than expected for example writing the test cases as i was new to this way of building and also i had to refactor some code, I was very careful doing this as i wanted to make sure i do it the right way.

The journey continues I had to modify my initial expectations and my mentors have been so supportive. I hope to add more features to Debci and also write more tests. So far, it has been a great experience. Till next time!

I recently wrote that managing an external display on Linux shouldn t be this hard. I went down a path of trying out some different options before finally landing at an unexpected place: KDE. I say unexpected because I find tiling window managers are just about a necessity. Background: xmonad Until a few months ago, I d been using xmonad for well over a decade. Configurable, minimal, and very nice; it suited me well. However, xmonad is getting somewhat long in the tooth. xmobar, which is commonly used with it, barely supports many modern desktop environments. I prefer DEs for the useful integrations they bring: everything from handling mount of USB sticks to display auto-switching and sound switching. xmonad itself can t run with modern Gnome (whether or not it runs well under KDE 5 seems to be a complicated question, according to wikis, but in any case, there is no log applet for KDE 5). So I was left with XFCE and such, but the isues I identified in the shouldn t be this hard article were bad enough that I just could not keep going that way. An attempt: Gnome and PaperWM So I tried Gnome under Wayland, reasoning that Wayland might stand a chance of doing things well where X couldn t. There are several tiling window extensions available for the Gnome 3 shell. Most seemed to be rather low-quality, but an exception was PaperWM and I eventually decided on it. I never quite decided if I liked its horizontal tape of windows or not; it certainly is unique in any case. I was willing to tolerate my usual list of Gnome problems for the sake of things working. For instance:

• The Windows-like settings are spread out in three different programs and some of them require editing the registry[dconf] . Finding all the options for keybindings and power settings was a real chore, but done.
• Some file dialog boxes (such as with the screenshot-taking tool) just do not let me type in a path to save a file, insisting that I first navigate to a directory and then type in a name.
• General lack of available settings or hiding settings from people.
• True focus-follows-mouse was incompatible with keyboard window switching (PaperWM or no); with any focus-follows-mouse enabled, using Alt-Tab or any other method to switch to other windows would instantly have focus returned to whatever the mouse was over.

Under Wayland, I found a disturbing lack of logs. There was nothing like /var/log/Xorg.0.log, nothing like ~/.xsession-errors, just nothing. Searching for answers on this revealed a lot of Wayland people saying it s a Gnome issue and the trail going cold at that point. And there was a weird problem that I just could not solve. After the laptop was suspended and we-awakened, I would be at a lock screen. I could type in my password, but when hitting Enter, the thing would then tend to freeze. Why, I don t know. It seemed related to Gnome shell; when I switched Gnome from Wayland to X11, it would freeze but eventually return to the unlock screen, at which point I d type in my password and it would freeze again. I spent a long time tracking down logs to see what was happening, but I couldn t figure it out. All those hard resets were getting annoying. Enter KDE So I tried KDE. I had seen mentions of kwin-tiling, a KDE extension for tiling windows. I thought I d try this setup. I was really impressed by KDE s quality. Not only did it handle absolutely every display-related interaction correctly by default, with no hangs ever, all relevant settings were clearly presented in one place. The KDE settings screens were a breath of fresh air lots of settings available, all at one place, and tons of features I hadn t seen elsewhere. Here are some of the things I was pleasantly surprised by with KDE:

• Applications can declare classes of notifications. These can be managed Android-style in settings. Moreover, you can associate a shell command to run with a notification in any class. People use this to do things like run commands when a display locks and so forth.
• KDE Connect is a seriously impressive piece of software. It integrates desktops with Android devices in a way that s reminiscent of non-free operating systems and with 100% Free Software (the phone app is even in F-Droid!). Notifications from the phone can appear on the desktop, and their state is synchronized; dismiss it on the desktop and it dismisses on the phone, too. Get a SMS or Signal message on the phone? You can reply directly from the desktop. Share files in both directions, mount a directory tree from the phone on the desktop, find my phone , use the phone as a presentation remote for the desktop, shared clipboard, sending links between devices, control the phone media player from the desktop Really, really impressive.
• The shortcut settings in KDE really work and are impressive. Unlike Gnome, if you try to assign the same shortcut to multiple things, you are warned and prevented from doing this. As with Gnome, you can also bind shorcuts to arbitrary actions.
• This shouldn t be exciting, but I was just using Gnome, so The panel! I can put things wherever I want them! I can put it at the top of the screen, the bottom, or even the sides! It lets all my regular programs (eg, Nextcloud) put their icons up there without having to install two different extensions, each of which handles a different set of apps! I shouldn t be excited about all this, because Gnome actually used to have these features years ago [gripe gripe]
• Initially I was annoyed that Firefox notifications weren t showing up in the notification history as they did in Gnome but that was, of course, a setting, easily fixed!
• There is a Plasma Integration plugin for Firefox (and other browsers including Chrome). It integrates audio and video playback, download status, etc. with the rest of KDE and KDE Connect. Result: if you like, when a call comes in to your phone, Youtube is paused. Or, you can right-click to share a link to your phone via KDE Connect, and so forth. You can right click on a link, and share via Bluetooth, Nextcloud (it must have somehow registered with KDE), KDE Connect, email, etc.

Tiling So how about the tiling system, kwin-tiling? The out of the box experience is pretty nice. There are fewer built-in layouts than with xmonad, but the ones that are there are doing a decent job for me, and in some cases are more configurable (those that have a large window pane are configurable on its location, not forcing it to be on the left as with many systems.) What s more, thanks to the flexibility in the KDE shortcut settings, I can configure it to be nearly keystroke-identical to xmonad! Issues Encountered I encountered a few minor issues:

• There appears to be no way to tell it to power down the display immediately after it is locked, every time instead of waiting for some timeout to elapse. This is useful when I want to switch monitor inputs to something else.
• Firefox ESR seems to have some rendering issues under KDE for some reason, but switching to the latest stable release direct from Mozilla seems to fix that.

In short, I m very impressed.

About a month later than I probably should have posted it, here s a recap of my Free Software activities in 2021. For previous years see 2019 + 2020. Again, this year had fewer contributions than I d like thanks to continuing fatigue about the state of the world, and trying to work on separation between work and leisure while working from home. I ve made some effort to improve that balance but it s still a work in progress.

Conferences No surprise, I didn t attend any in-person conferences in 2021. I find virtual conferences don t do a lot for me (a combination of my not carving time out for them in the same way, because not being at the conference means other things will inevitably intrude, and the lack of the social side) but I did get to attend a few of the DebConf21 talks, which was nice. I m hoping to make it to DebConf22 this year in person.

Debian Most of my contributions to Free software continue to happen within Debian. As part of the Data Protection Team I responded to various inbound queries to that team. Some of this involved chasing up other project teams who had been slow to respond - folks, if you re running a service that stores personal data about people then you need to be responsive to requests about it. Some of this was dealing with what look like automated scraping tools which send no information about the person making the request, and in all the cases we ve seen so far there s been no indication of any data about that person on any systems we have access to. Further team time was wasted dealing with the Princeton-Radboud Study on Privacy Law Implementation (though Matthew did the majority of the work on this). The Debian Keyring was possibly my largest single point of contribution. We re in a roughly 3 month rotation of who handles the keyring updates, and I handled 2021.03.24, 2021.04.09, 2021.06.25, 2021.09.25 + 2021.12.24 For Debian New Members I m mostly inactive as an application manager - we generally seem to have enough available recently. If that changes I ll look at stepping in to help, but I don t see that happening. I continue to be involved in Front Desk, having various conversations throughout the year with the rest of the team, but there s no doubt Mattia and Pierre-Elliott are the real doers at present. I did take part in an NM Committee appeals process. In terms of package uploads I continued to work on gcc-xtensa-lx106, largely doing uploads to deal with updates to the GCC version or packaging (8 + 9). sigrok had a few minor updates, libsigkrok 0.5.2-3, pulseview 0.4.2-3 as well as a new upstream release of sigrok CLI 0.7.2-1. There was a last minute pre-release upload of libserialport 0.1.1-4 thanks to a kernel change in v5.10.37 which removed termiox support. Despite still not writing any VHDL these days I continue to keep an eye on ghdl, because I found it a useful tool in the past. Last year that was just a build fix for LLVM 11.1.0 - 1.0.0+dfsg+5. Andreas Bombe has largely taken over more proactive maintenance, which is nice to see. I uploaded OpenOCD 0.11.0~rc1-2, cleaning up some packaging / dependency issues. This was followed by 0.11.0~rc2-1 as a newer release candidate. Sadly 0.11.0 did not make it in time for bullseye, but rc2 was fairly close and I uploaded 0.11.0-1 once bullseye was released. Finally I did a drive-by upload for garmin-forerunner-tools 0.10repacked-12, cleaning up some packaging issues and uploading it to salsa. My Forerunner 305 has died (after 11 years of sterling service) and the Forerunner 45 I ve replaced it with uses a different set of tools, so I decided it didn t make sense to pick up longer term ownership of the package.

Linux My Linux contributions continued to revolve around pushing MikroTik RB3011 support upstream. There was a minor code change to Set FIFO sizes for ipq806x (which fixed up the allowed MTU for the internal switch + VLANs). The rest was DTS related - adding ADM DMA + NAND definitions now that the ADM driver was merged, adding tsens details, adding USB port info and adding the L2CC and RPM details for IPQ8064. Finally I was able to update the RB3011 DTS to enable NAND + USB. With all those in I m down to 4 local patches against a mainline kernel, all of which are hacks that aren t suitable for submission upstream. 2 are for patching in details of the root device and ethernet MAC addresses, one is dealing with the fact the IPQ8064 has some reserved memory that doesn t play well with AUTO_ZRELADDR (there keeps being efforts to add some support for this via devicetree, but unfortunately it gets shot down every time), and the final one is a hack to turn off the LCD backlight by treating it as an LED (actually supporting the LCD properly is on my TODO list).

Personal projects 2021 didn t see any releases of onak. It s not dead, just resting, but Sequoia PGP is probably where you should be looking for a modern OpenPGP implementation. I continued work on my Desk Viking project, which is an STM32F103 based debug tool inspired by the Bus Pirate. The main addtion was some CCLib support (forking it in the process to move to Python 3 and add some speed ups) to allow me to program my Zigbee dongles, but I also added some 1-Wire search logic and some support for Linux emulation mode with VCD output to allow for a faster development cycle. I really want to try and get OpenOCD JTAG mode supported at some point, and have vague plans for an STM32F4 based version that have suffered from a combination of a silicon shortage and a lack of time. That wraps up 2021. I d like to say I m hoping to make more Free Software contributions this year, but I don t have a concrete plan yet for how that might happen, so I ll have to wait and see.

Welcome to the January 2022 report from the Reproducible Builds project. In our reports, we try outline the most important things that have been happening in the past month. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.
An interesting blog post was published by Paragon Initiative Enterprises about Gossamer, a proposal for securing the PHP software supply-chain. Utilising code-signing and third-party attestations, Gossamer aims to mitigate the risks within the notorious PHP world via publishing attestations to a transparency log. Their post, titled Solving Open Source Supply Chain Security for the PHP Ecosystem goes into some detail regarding the design, scope and implementation of the system.
This month, the Linux Foundation announced SupplyChainSecurityCon, a conference focused on exploring the security threats affecting the software supply chain, sharing best practices and mitigation tactics. The conference is part of the Linux Foundation s Open Source Summit North America and will take place June 21st 24th 2022, both virtually and in Austin, Texas.

Debian There was a significant progress made in the Debian Linux distribution this month, including:

• Roland Clobus continued work on reproducible live images in the past month, and some of his work was merged into live-build itself. The ReproducibleInstalls/LiveImages page on the Debian Wiki as well as the existing/custom Jenkins hooks were updated to match.
• Related to this, it is now possible to create a bit-by-bit reproducible chroots using mmdebstrap when SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH is set. As of Debian 11 Bullseye, this works for all variants, except for the variant that includes all so-called Priority: standard packages where fontconfig caches, *.pyc files and man-db index.db are unreproducible. (These issues have been addressed in Tails and live-build by removing *.pyc files, in addition to removing index.db files as well. (Whilst index.db files can be regenerated, there is no straightforward method to re-creating *.pyc files, and the resulting installation will suffer from reduced performance of Python scripts. Ideally, no removal would be necessary as all files would be created reproducibly in the first place.)
• Further to this work, Roland wrote up a comprehensive status update about live-build ISO images to our mailing list as well.
• The PackageRebuilder instance running at beta.tests.reproducible-builds.org is now aware/capable of building packages for Debian bookworm.
• A longstanding issue around fontconfig s cache files being unreproducible saw some progress this month. Debian bug number #864082 (originally filed in June 2017) was NMU d by josch, although this resulted in a small number of minor side-effects which have already been addressed with a follow-up patch.
• 120 reviews of Debian packages were added, 272 were updated and 31 were removed this month, all adding to our index of identified issues. A number of issue types were updated too [ ][ ][ ][ ].
• kpcyrd blogged this month about Debian binary NMUs and .buildinfo files in a post entitled, Reproducible Builds: Debian and the case of the missing version string.

Other distributions kpcyrd reported on Twitter about the release of version 0.2.0 of pacman-bintrans, an experiment with binary transparency for the Arch Linux package manager, pacman. This new version is now able to query rebuilderd to check if a package was independently reproduced.
In the world of openSUSE, however, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted his monthly reproducible builds status report.

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility. Not only can it locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, it can provide human-readable diffs from many kinds of binary formats. This month, Chris Lamb prepared and uploaded versions 199, 200, 201 and 202 to Debian unstable (that were later backported to Debian bullseye-backports by Mattia Rizzolo), as well as made the following changes to the code itself:

• New features:
  • First attempt at incremental output support with a timeout. Now passing, for example, --timeout=60 will mean that diffoscope will not recurse into any sub-archives after 60 seconds total execution time has elapsed. Note that this is not a fixed/strict timeout due to implementation issues. [ ][ ]
  • Support both variants of odt2txt, including the one provided by the unoconv package. [ ]
• Bug fixes:
  • Do not return with a UNIX exit code of 0 if we encounter with a file whose human-readable metadata matches literal file contents. [ ]
  • Don t fail if comparing a nonexistent file with a .pyc file (and add test). [ ][ ]
  • If the debian.deb822 module raises any exception on import, re-raise it as an ImportError. This should fix diffoscope on some Fedora systems. [ ]
  • Even if a Sphinx .inv inventory file is labelled The remainder of this file is compressed using zlib, it might not actually be. In this case, don t traceback and simply return the original content. [ ]
• Documentation:
  • Improve documentation for the new --timeout option due to a few misconceptions. [ ]
  • Drop reference in the manual page claiming the ability to compare non-existent files on the command-line. (This has not been possible since version 32 which was released in September 2015). [ ]
  • Update X has been modified after NT_GNU_BUILD_ID has been applied messages to, for example, not duplicating the full filename in the diffoscope output. [ ]
• Codebase improvements:
  • Tidy some control flow. [ ]
  • Correct a recompile typo. [ ]

In addition, Alyssa Ross fixed the comparison of CBFS names that contain spaces [ ], Sergei Trofimovich fixed whitespace for compatibility with version 21.12 of the Black source code reformatter [ ] and Zbigniew J drzejewski-Szmek fixed JSON detection with a new version of file [ ].

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

• Fr d ric Pierret (fepitre):
  • Add Debian bookworm to package set creation. [ ]
• Holger Levsen:
  • Install the po4a package where appropriate, as it is needed for the Reproducible Builds website job [ ]. In addition, also run the i18n.sh and contributors.sh scripts [ ].
  • Correct some grammar in Debian live image build output. [ ]
  • Shell monitor improvements:
    • Only show the offline node section if there are offline nodes. [ ]
    • Colorise offline nodes. [ ]
    • Shrink screen usage. [ ][ ][ ]
  • Node health check improvements:
    • Detect if live package builds encounter incomplete snapshots. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Detect if a host is running with today s date (when it should be set artificially in the future). [ ]
  • Use the devscripts package from bullseye-backports on Debian nodes. [ ]
  • Use the Munin monitoring package bullseye-backports on Debian nodes too. [ ]
  • Update New Year handling, needed to be able to detect real and fake dates. [ ][ ]
  • Improve the error message of the script that powercycles the arm64 architecture nodes hosted by Codethink. [ ]
• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Use the new --timeout option added in diffoscope version 202. [ ]
• Roland Clobus:
  • Update the build scripts now that the hooks for live builds are now maintained upstream in the live-build repository. [ ]
  • Show info lines in Jenkins when reproducible hooks have been active. [ ]
  • Use unique folders for the artifacts from each live Debian version. [ ]
• Vagrant Cascadian:
  • Switch the Debian armhf architecture nodes to use new proxy. [ ]
  • Misc. node maintenance. [ ].

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. In January, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:

• Leonidas Spyropoulos:
  • freeplane (timestamps, file order)
  • opensearch (timestamps, file order)
• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • cosign (date)
  • gnome-todo (discover fix for single-CPU build failure)
  • gstreamer-plugins-good (build fails without debuginfo)
  • jogl2 (parallelism-related issue)
  • libkolabxml (ASLR)
  • monero-gui (CPU)
  • python-pyudev (date)
  • rekor (date)
  • rivet (FTBFS-j1 has unreleased fix upstream)
  • skaffold (date)
• Chris Lamb:
  • #1003159 filed against dh-raku.
  • #1003203 filed against libgtkdatabox.
  • #1003385 filed against qcelemental.
  • #1003646 filed against node-ramda.
  • #1003929 filed against ncurses.
  • #1004391 filed against python-fluids (forwarded upstream).
  • #1004676 filed against node-istanbul.
• Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues:
  • MR !9 filed against dash
  • #1004557 filed against dpkg.
  • #1004558 filed against python3.10.
• Roland Clobus:
  • #1003449 filed against texlive-base.
• Vagrant Cascadian:
  • #1003316 filed against python-cooler.
  • #1003319 filed against insighttoolkit5.
  • #1003368 filed against dino-im.
  • #1003370 filed against libxtrxll.
  • #1003371 filed against libavif.
  • #1003373 filed against go-for-it.
  • #1003375 filed against clfft.
  • #1003379 filed against last-align.
  • #1003430 filed against gkrellm-leds.
  • #1003488 and #1003489 filed against last-align.
  • #1003494 filed against binutils-xtensa-lx106.
  • #1003495 filed against gcc-xtensa-lx106.
  • #1003500 and #1003501 filed against gcc-sh-elf.
  • #1003787 filed against pesign.
  • #1003802 filed against upb.
  • #1003803 filed against paho.mqtt.c.
  • #1003804 filed against imath.
  • #1003808 filed against libvcflib.
  • #1003809 filed against pkg-js-tools.
  • #1003912 filed against vdeplug4.
  • #1003914 filed against kget.
  • #1003915 filed against mathgl.
  • #1003919 filed against apulse.
  • #1003920 filed against akonadi.
  • #1003922 filed against recastnavigation.
  • #1003923 filed against soundkonverter.
  • #1003924 filed against indi.
  • #1003978 filed against akonadi-mime.
  • #1003980 filed against akonadi-import-wizard.
  • #1003992 filed against akonadi-contacts.
  • #1003993 filed against cryptominisat.
  • #1003995 filed against hipercontracer.
  • #1003997 filed against libksba.
  • #1003999 filed against leatherman.
  • #1004002 filed against segyio.
  • #1004004 filed against darkradiant.
  • #1004005 filed against openmm.
  • #1004034 filed against bagel.
  • #1004053 filed against kallisto.
  • #1004057 filed against evolution-ews.

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

• IRC: #reproducible-builds on irc.oftc.net.
• Twitter: @ReproBuilds
• Mailing list: rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org

FTP master This month I accepted 342 and rejected 57 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 366. Lately I was asked: Is it ftpmaster s opinion and policy that there is no difference in NEW queue review process between bin and src? This is a yes/no-question and in this generality the answer is clearly: Every package in NEW needs a full review. Of course there are circumstances with exceptions. For example after an upload of -1, which would get a full review, the upload of -2 afterwards, introducing a new binary package, would get a much faster review. In this case it would make sense to ping on IRC and draw attention to this. Nevertheless the evaluation of a light review might differ between the maintainer and the person doing the review. Debian LTS This was my ninety-first month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This month my all in all workload has been 40h. During that time I did LTS and normal security uploads of:

• [DLA 2882-1] sphinxsearch security update for one CVE
• [DLA 2890-1] libspf2 security update for two CVEs
• [DLA 2897-1] apr security update for one CVE
• [DLA 2900-1] lrzsz security update for one CVE
• [DLA 2901-1] libxfont security update for one CVE
• [DLA 2902-1] graphicsmagick security update for one CVE
• [#1004049] buster-pu: package zziplib/0.13.62-3.2+deb10u1
• [#1004050] bullseye-pu: package zziplib/0.13.62-3.3+deb11u1
• [#1004055] buster-pu: package raptor2/2.0.14-1.1~deb10u2

I also started to work on security support for golang packages. Though this sounds like an easy task, the devel is in the details.
As CVEs need to be fixed in unstable first, at the moment it looks like this is the most time consuming task. I will report later on my journey to fix open CVEs in golang-github-russellhaering-goxmldsig Further I worked on packages in NEW on security-master and injected missing sources. Last but not least I did some days of frontdesk duties and attended an LTS meeting on IRC. Debian ELTS This month was the forty-third ELTS month. During my allocated time I uploaded:

• ELA-544-1 for libspf2
• ELA-549-1 for apr
• ELA-552-1 for lrzsz
• ELA-553-1 for libxfont

Further I worked on an update for apache2 Last but not least I did some days of frontdesk duties. Debian Printing I was finally able to upload a new version of hplip and Ubuntu is now able to build new snaps for their next release.
Altogether I uploaded new upstream versions or improved packaging of:

• pappl
• rasterview
• cjet
• epson-inkjet-printer-escpr
• cups-filters
• lprint
• hplip

Now the dashboard looks rather good and my next task for February is an update of cups. Debian Astro As there was a release of version 1.9.4 of INDI and indi-3rdparty, I also uploaded the new version of all INDI drivers and releated libs from indi-3rdparty. Other stuff This month I uploaded lots of new upstream releases of golang packages.

Starting just after Christmas, I have been working on CI for all the kernel team's packages on Salsa. The salsa-ci-team has done great work on producing a common pipeline that is usable for most packages with minimal configuration. However, for some packages a lot more work was required. Linux I started with the most important package, linux itself. This now has about 1.1 GiB of source spread over 76,000 source files. That turns out to be a problem for the pipeline which currently puts unpacked source in artifacts - it is far beyond the limits of what Salsa allows. I worked around this by using a modified version of the extract-source and build jobs that use packed source package as the artifacts. The output of the build job is compatible with the common test jobs. The linux package also takes a lot of resources to build; around 80 minutes on the fastest PC I have at home (if ccache is not primed). Salsa's shared CI runners seem to be about 10 times slower than that, so it is completely unfeasible to even one full build in CI. Instead I defined a new build profile that includes only the smallest kernel configuration, without debug info, and the user-space packages. This still takes over an hour with the Salsa CI runners, but I don't think we can improve this much without losing a lot of code coverage. Our Git repository for linux also does not contain the upstream source, so the extract-source job has to fetch that. The common extract-source job uses origtargz to do that, and in case the orig tarball is not already in the archive this will run uscan. That led me to a new problem: our debian/watch file could only find tarballs linked from the front of www.kernel.org, and we're sometimes working with different upstream versions. There is actually no single page listing all tarball releases of Linux, and tarballs for release candidates are dynamically generated by CGit and unsigned. So I changed debian/watch to fetch from Git, which is what we were already doing with our own genorig.py script. Unfortunately, running uscan against a Git upstream, with some files excluded (as there are still a few upstream files we consider non-free), is about twice as slow as it could be. Since I had to modify the extract-source job anyway, I've continued using genorig.py there. A full build log for linux is over 200 MiB, and even with the reduced build profile it would be much longer than Salsa's limit of 2 4 MiB. I therefore opted to use the 'terse' build option (which translates to V=0), but made the builds of user-space tools ignore this option so that blhc could still do its work. (The kernel itself cannot use the same hardening options, so blhc is not useful there.) Finally, with the CI pipeline running, blhc and lintian showed a lot of problems that we hadn't been attending to. I've fixed all the blhc errors (with some careful suppressions), all the lintian errors, and the most straightforward lintian warnings. firmware-nonfree The firmware-nonfree package also has huge "source" (about 560 MB) and needed some of the same modifications, but is quick to build so did not require a special build profile. Running lintian over firmware-nonfree reminded me that I needed to sort out the unsuual and inconistent handling of machine-readable copyright information in this source package. I had already done most of that work on a private branch in 2020, so this is mostly ready but I still need to resolve a licensing issue with AppStream metadata. Other packages For kernel-handbook, there was already a trivial "CI" pipeline used to push static pages to the web site. I've replaced this with the common pipeline plus a job that will push the pages from each build on the master branch. For everything else, it was straightforward to enable the common pipeline with a little bit of configuration.

I have a backlog of digital stuff to upload to archive.org that I'm finally starting to flush. I'd had some difficulties in getting uploads to work until I tried using the excellent ia CLI tool, which is packaged in Debian. In January 2022 I uploaded: two sets of multitracks from the 1981 album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno and David Byrne, "A Secret Life" and "Help Me Somebody"; 28 cover disks from late 80s/early 90s issues of PC Plus, Pc Today, PC Zone and Personal Computing; and a LEGO Land Billund brochure from 1993. I try to keep a record of my amateur archiving work (and related TODO items) at archiving. In January I also discovered that, late last year, the nine inch nails live archive project have had their download links forcibly removed by their ISP. I've been watching this project for a while because I thought it was "at risk". Years ago the project's creator, Ryan, created a series of torrents covering all the material at the time, although there had been a number of changes since the last one. However, this issue with his ISP spurred him on to create up-to-date torrents. It seems to me that archive.org would be a good place for this material, but there are two problems: the most natural collection would be the Live Music Archive, but it has a rule that musicians must have given explicit permission for live recordings to be deposited there (inherited from the earlier etree.org days) and in this case no such permission exists. The second problem is that ninlive's owner/creator, Ryan, has always resisted the idea. For now the best I can think to do is simply to continue to seed the torrent.

Welcome to the 35th post in the ravishingly rabiant R recommendations, or R⁴. Today s post is about apt and R tools. Many of us have been running RStudio off our local machines for as long as binaries have been provided. Which is by now probably a bit over a decade. Time flies. And as nice it is to have matching binaries, in my case in the .deb format used on Debian or Ubuntu, it is wee bit a painful to manually download a file and then install it. Twice the pain if you are lucky enough to be on a system where you can also run RStudio Server. And now three times as painful as you may need a matching quarto-cli binary for the nice quarto service. So wouldn t it be nice to have an apt-getable repo? And to autoMAGICall get updated versions when they are available? Oh yes. And I had been bugging JJ from day one. And JJ would almost listen intendly, nod briefly and firmly, and issue an assured we will look into it. Well, they are still looking Luckily, years ago, Carl wrote a helper script for our use in Rocker. I promptly adopted these and kept them in the littler examples directory as a pair of script getRStudioDesktop.r and getRStudioServer.r, later complemented by getQuartoCli.r. And I used these for years, somewhere between weekly and monthly. But it is still very manual: three script calls, one sudo dpkg -i call. And as our good friends at RStudio don t seem to be coming forward with a repo, I created one at GitHub thinking I could serve the files via GitHub Pages. Which of course I cannot as the .deb file for rstudio is well above the 100mb limit. So that seemed to be a bit of a setback. But after a bit of pondering, and recognizing that I am now in the fortunate position to have symmetric broadband access at home, I reckoned that until the bandwidth use gets excessive I will serve this as truly personal package archive (or tPPA) from here. Note that this is calibrated for my use so Ubuntu amd64 it is. Nothing else. And that it installs dailies . Which may cause issues for some people. You have warned. Reading tis paragraphs signifies agreement with the terms and limitations. Just kidding. A quick screenshot from an update earlier is here. Note that I use the fabulous wajig wrapper by Graham Williams here as my frontend to apt, dpkg and more as I have for even longer than I have use RStudio. Its use is tangential here; sudo apt upgrade would have done the same (and is essentially being called). And it demonstrates the main benefit: we are now automated as the cron scheduler launches an update of the PPA at which ever frequency you chose (currently twice a week for me) and after that it becomes part of the normal apt updates we do anyway (and which I do about daily). So that s main gist: automated apt upgrades of rstudio, rstudio-server, and quarto-cli. And you can find the underlying code in the GitHub repo ppa-rstudio which I put together a good week ago. I am currently updating the tPPA twice a week from crontab and have had two full upgrades already. And who knows, maybe with a bid of prodding RStudio may come around. One can always hope. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

Review: The Story of the Treasure Seekers, by E. Nesbit

Publisher:	Amazon
Copyright:	1899
Printing:	May 2012
ASIN:	B0082ZBXSI
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	136

The Story of the Treasure Seekers was originally published in 1899 and is no longer covered by copyright. I read the free Amazon Kindle version because it was convenient. My guess is that Amazon is republishing the Project Gutenberg version, but they only credit "a community of volunteers." There are six Bastable children: Dora, Oswald, Dicky, the twins Alice and Noel, and Horace Octavius (H.O.), the youngest. Their mother is dead and the family's finances have suffered in the wake of her death (or, as the first-person narrator puts it, "the fortunes of the ancient House of Bastable were really fallen"), which means that their father works long hours and is very absorbed with his business. That leaves the six kids largely to fend for themselves, since they can't afford school. Clearly the solution is to find treasure. This is a fix-up novel constructed from short stories that were originally published in various periodicals, reordered and occasionally rewritten for the collected publication. To be honest, calling it a fix-up novel is generous; there are some references to previous events, but the first fourteen chapters can mostly stand alone. The last two chapters are closely related and provide an ending. More on that in a moment. What grabs the reader's attention from the first paragraph is the writing style:

This is the story of the different ways we looked for treasure, and I think when you have read it you will see that we were not lazy about the looking. There are some things I must tell before I begin to tell about the treasure-seeking, because I have read books myself, and I know how beastly it is when a story begins, "Alas!" said Hildegarde with a deep sigh, "we must look our last on this ancestral home" and then some one else says something and you don't know for pages and pages where the home is, or who Hildegarde is, or anything about it.

The first-person narrator of The Story of the Treasure Seekers is one of the six kids.

It is one of us that tells this story but I shall not tell you which: only at the very end perhaps I will.

The narrator then goes on to elaborately praise one of the kids, occasionally accidentally uses "I" instead of their name, and then remembers and tries to hide who is telling the story again. It's beautifully done and had me snickering throughout the book. It's not much of a mystery (you will figure out who is telling the story very quickly), but Nesbit captures the writing style of a kid astonishingly well without making the story poorly written. Descriptions of events have a headlong style that captures a child's sense of adventure and heedless immortality mixed with quiet observations that remind the reader that kids don't miss as much as people think they do. I think the most skillful part of this book is the way Nesbit captures a kid's disregard of literary convention. The narrator in a book written by an adult tends to fit into a standard choice of story-telling style and follow it consistently. Even first-person narrators who break some of those rules feel like intentionally constructed characters. The Story of the Treasure Seekers is instead half "kid telling a story" and half "kid trying to emulate the way stories are told in books" and tends to veer wildly between the two when the narrator gets excited, as if they're vaguely aware of the conventions they're supposed to be following but are murky on the specifics. It feels exactly like the sort of book a smart and well-read kid would write (with extensive help from an editor). The other thing that Nesbit handles exceptionally well is the dynamic between the six kids. This is a collection of fairly short stories, so there isn't a lot of room for characterization. The kids are mostly sketched out with one or two memorable quirks. But Nesbit puts a lot of effort into the dynamics that arise between the children in a tight-knit family, properly making the group of kids as a whole and in various combinations a sort of character in their own right. Never for a moment does either the reader or the kids forget that they have siblings. Most adventures involve some process of sorting out who is going to come along and who is going to do other things, and there's a constant but unobtrusive background rhythm of bickering, making up, supporting each other, being frustrated by each other, and getting exasperated at each other's quirks. It's one of the better-written sibling dynamics that I've read. I somehow managed to miss Nesbit entirely as a kid, probably because she didn't write long series and child me was strongly biased towards books that were part of long series. (One book was at most a pleasant few hours; there needed to be a whole series attached to get any reasonable amount of reading out of the world.) This was nonetheless a fun bit of nostalgia because it was so much like the books I did read: kids finding adventures and making things up, getting into various trouble but getting out of it by being honest and kind, and only occasional and spotty adult supervision. Reading as an adult, I can see the touches of melancholy of loss that Nesbit embeds into this quest for riches, but part of the appeal of the stories is that the kids determinedly refuse to talk about it except as a problem to be solved. Nesbit was a rather famous progressive, but this is still a book of its time, which means there's one instance of the n-word and the kids have grown up playing the very racist version of cowboys and indians. The narrator also does a lot of stereotyping of boys and girls, although Nesbit undermines that a bit by making Alice a tomboy. I found all of this easier to ignore because the story is narrated by one of the kids who doesn't know any better, but your mileage may vary. I am always entertained by how anyone worth writing about in a British children's novel of this era has servants. You know the Bastables have fallen upon hard times because they only have one servant. The kids don't have much respect for Eliza, which I found a bit off-putting, and I wondered what this world looks like from her perspective. She clearly did a lot of the work of raising these motherless kids, but the kids view her as the hired help or an obstacle to be avoided, and there's not a lot of gratitude present. As the stories unfold, it becomes more and more clear that there's a quiet conspiracy of surrounding adults to watch out for these kids, which the kids never notice. This says good things about society, but it does undermine the adventures a little, and by the end of the book the sameness of the stories was wearing a bit thin. The high point of the book is probably chapter eight, in which the kids make their own newspaper, the entirety of which is reproduced in the book and is a note-perfect recreation of what an enterprising group of kids would come up with. In the last two stories, Nesbit tacks on an ending that was probably obligatory, but which I thought undermined some of the emotional subtext of the rest of the book. I'm not sure how else one could have put an ending on this book, but the ending she chose emphasized the degree to which the adventures really were just play, and the kids are rewarded in these stories for their ethics and their circumstances rather than for anything they concretely do. It's a bit unsatisfying. This is mostly a nostalgia read, but I'm glad I read it. If this book was not part of your childhood, it's worth reading if only for how well Nesbit captures a child's narrative voice. Rating: 7 out of 10

Washington Post has an interesting article on how gender neutral language is developing in different countries [1]. pimaker has an interesting blog post about how they wrote a RISCV CPU emulator to boot a Linux kernel in a pixel shader in the VR Chat platform [2]. ZD has an interesting article about the new Solo Bumblebee platform for writing EBPF programs to run inside the Linux kernel [3]. EBPF is an interesting platform and it s good to have new tools to help people develop for it. Big Think has an interesting article about augmented reality suggesting that it could be worse than social media for driving disputes [4]. Some people would want tags of racial status on all people they see. Vice has an insightful article making the case for 8 hours of work per week [5]. The Guardian has an insightful article about how our attention is being stolen by modern technology [6]. Interesting article about the Ilobleed rootkit that targets the HP ILO server management system [7], it s apparently designed for persistent attacks as it bypasses the firmware upgrade process and updates only the version number so anyone who thinks that a firmware update will fix it is horribly mislead. Nick Bostrom wrote an insightful and disturbing article for Aeon titles None of Our Technologies has Managed to Destroy Humanity Yet [8] about the existential risk of new technologies and how they might be mitigated, much of which involves authoritarian governments unlike any we have seen before. As a counterpoint the novel A Deepness in the Sky claims that universal surveillance would be as damaging to the future of a society as planet-buster bombs. Euronews has an informative article about eco-fascism [9]. The idea that the solution to ecological problems is to have less people in the world and particularly less non-white people is a gateway from green politics to fascism. The developer of the colors and faker npm libraries (for NodeJS) recently uploaded corrupted versions of those libraries as a protest against companies that use them without paying him [10]. This is the wrong way to approach the issue, but it does demonstrate a serious problem with systems like NPM that allow automatic updates. It gives a better result to just use software packaged by a distribution which has QA checks applied including on security updates. VentureBeat has an interesting article on the way that AI is taking over jobs [11]. Lots of white collar jobs can be replaced by machine learning systems, we need to plan for the ways this will change the economy. The Atlantic has an interesting article about tapeworms that infect some ants [12]. The tapeworms make the ants live longer and produce pheromones to make the other ants serve them. This increases the chance that the ants will be eaten by birds which is the next stage in the tapeworm lifecycle.

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/vvfn585
• [2] https://blog.pimaker.at/texts/rvc1/
• [3] https://tinyurl.com/y33zt9go
• [4] https://tinyurl.com/yg3xkooj
• [5] https://tinyurl.com/y5ftjvdm
• [6] https://tinyurl.com/y2tde92y
• [7] https://tinyurl.com/y39hk7pl
• [8] https://tinyurl.com/y7jsf6gp
• [9] https://tinyurl.com/y8pye3jx
• [10] https://tinyurl.com/y568myp3
• [11] https://tinyurl.com/yy5gp55d
• [12] https://tinyurl.com/ygrkssd8

TLDR: we are making progress on the Rust implementation of the GNU coreutils. Well, it is an understatement to say my previous blog post interested many people. Many articles, blog posts and some podcasts talked about it! As we pushed coreutils 0.0.12 a few days ago and getting closer to the 10 000 stars on github, it is now time to give an update! This has brought a lot of new contributors to this project. Instead of 30 to 60 patches per month, we jumped to 400 to 472 patches every month. Similarly, we saw an increase in the number of contributors (20 to 50 per month from 3 to 8). Two new maintainers (Michael Debertol & Terts Diepraam) stepped in and have been doing a much better job than myself as reviewers now! As a silly metric, according to github, we had 5 561 clones of the repository over the last 2 weeks! The new contributors focused on:

• Performances. Now, some binaries are significantly faster than GNU (ex: head, cut, etc)
• Adding missing binaries or options (see below)
• Improve the testsuite: we grew the overall code coverage from 55% to 75% (in general, we consider that a 80% code coverage on a project is excellent).
• Refactoring the code to simplify the maintenance. Examples:
  • Using the same code for permissions for chgrp and chown
  • Managing error the same way in the various binaries - (Kudos to Jeffrey Finkelstein for the huge work)
  • Improving the GNU compatibility (thanks to Jan Verbeek, Jan Scheer, kimono-koans and many others)
  • Move to clap 3. Upgrade by Terts which unblocks us on various problems.
• ...

Closing the gap with GNU As far as I know, we are only missing stty (change and print terminal line settings) as a program. Thanks to some heroes, basenc, pr, chcon and runcon have been implemented. For example, for the two last programs, Koutheir Attouchi wrote new crates to manage SELinux properly. This crate has been used for some other utilities like cp, ls or id. Leveraging the GNU testsuite to test this implementation Because the GNU testsuite is excellent, we now have a proper CI using it to run the tests. It is pretty long on the Github action CI (almost two hours to run it) but it is an amazing improvement to the way we work. It was a joint work from a bunch of folks (James Robson, Roy Ivy III, etc). To achieve this, we also made it easier to run the GNU testsuite locally with the Rust implementation but also to ignore some tests or adjust some error messages (see build-gnu.sh and run-gnu-test.sh). Following a suggestion of Brian G, a colleague at Mozilla (he did the same for some Firefox major change), we are now collecting the history of fail/pass/error into a separate repository and generating a daily graph showing the evolution of regression. At this date, we have, with GNU/Coreutils 9.0:

Total	611 tests
Pass	214
Skip	84
Fail	298
Error	15

We are now automatically identifying new passing tests and regressions in the CI. For example:
Warning: Congrats! The gnu test tests/chmod/c-option is now passing!
<br />Warning: Congrats! The gnu test tests/chmod/silent is now passing!
<br />Warning: Congrats! The gnu test tests/chmod/umask-x is now passing!
<br />Error: GNU test failed: tests/du/long-from-unreadable. tests/du/long-from-unreadable is passing on 'master'. Maybe you have to rebase?
[...]
<br />Warning: Changes from master: PASS +4 / FAIL +0 / ERROR -4 / SKIP +0
This is also beneficial to GNU as, by implementing some options, Michael Debertol noticed some incorrect behaviors (with sort and cat) or an uninitialized variable (with chmod). Documentations Every day, we are generating the user documentation and of the internal coreutils. User documentation: https://uutils.github.io/coreutils-docs/user/ Example: ls or cp The internal documentation can be seen on: https://uutils.github.io/coreutils-docs/dev/uucore/
For example, the backup style is documented here: https://uutils.github.io/coreutils-docs/dev/uucore/backup_control/index.html More? Besides my work on Debian/Ubuntu, I have also noticed that more and more operating systems are starting to look at this:

• Brew is proposing coreutils (with the latest version) https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/pull/93404
• Sandro is working to be able to run NixOS on Rust/Coreutils. See https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/116274 for the interesting discussions there.
• Apertis (Linux distro for the automotive industry) has forked my Debian patches to make it the default coreutils https://gitlab.apertis.org/pkg/rust-coreutils/-/tree/apertis/v2023dev1/debian
• I also noticed an interest from Redox OS.

In parallel, https://github.com/uutils/findutils/, a rust dropped-in replacement for find, is getting more attention lately! Here, the graph showing the evolution of the program using the BFS testsuite (much better than GNU's). What is next?

1. stty needs to be implemented
2. Improve the GNU compatibility on key programs and reduce the gap
3. Investigate how to reduce the size of the binaries
4. Allow Debian and Ubuntu to switch by default without tricky manipulation

How to help? I have been maintaining a list of good first bugs for new comers in the repo! Don't hesitate to contribute, it is much easier than it seems and a terrific way to learn Rust!

Review: I Didn't Do the Thing Today, by Madeleine Dore

Publisher:	Avery
Copyright:	2022
ISBN:	0-593-41914-6
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	291

At least from my narrow view of it, the world of productivity self-help literature is a fascinating place right now. The pandemic overturned normal work patterns and exacerbated schedule inequality, creating vastly different experiences for the people whose work continued to be in-person and the people whose work could become mostly or entirely remote. Self-help literature, which is primarily aimed at the more affluent white-collar class, primarily tracked the latter disruption: newly-remote work, endless Zoom meetings, the impossibility of child care, the breakdown of boundaries between work and home, and the dawning realization that much of the mechanics of day-to-day office work are neither productive nor defensible. My primary exposure these days to the more traditional self-help productivity literature is via Cal Newport. The stereotype of the productivity self-help book is a collection of life hacks and list-making techniques that will help you become a more efficient capitalist cog, but Newport has been moving away from that dead end for as long as I've been reading him, and his recent work focuses more on structural issues with the organization of knowledge work. He also shares with the newer productivity writers a willingness to tell people to use the free time they recover via improved efficiency on some life goal other than improved job productivity. But he's still prickly and defensive about the importance of personal productivity and accomplishing things. He gives lip service on his podcast to the value of the critique of productivity, but then usually reverts to characterizing anti-productivity arguments as saying that productivity is a capitalist invention to control workers. (Someone has doubtless said this on Twitter, but I've never seen a serious critique of productivity make this simplistic of an argument.) On the anti-productivity side, as it's commonly called, I've seen a lot of new writing in the past couple of years that tries to break the connection between productivity and human worth so endemic to US society. This is not a new analysis; disabled writers have been making this point for decades, it's present in both Keynes and in Galbraith's The Affluent Society, and Kathi Weeks's The Problem with Work traces some of its history in Marxist thought. But what does feel new to me is its widespread mainstream appearance in newspaper articles, viral blog posts, and books such as Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing and Devon Price's Laziness Does Not Exist. The pushback against defining life around productivity is having a moment. Entering this discussion is Madeleine Dore's I Didn't Do the Thing Today. Dore is the author of the Extraordinary Routines blog and host of the Routines and Ruts podcast. Extraordinary Routines began as a survey of how various people organize their daily lives. I Didn't Do the Thing Today is, according to the preface, a summary of the thoughts Dore has had about her own life and routines as a result of those interviews. As you might guess from the subtitle (Letting Go of Productivity Guilt), Dore's book is superficially on the anti-productivity side. Its chapters are organized around gentle critiques of productivity concepts, with titles like "The Hopeless Search for the Ideal Routine," "The Myth of Balance," or "The Harsh Rules of Discipline." But I think anti-productivity is a poor name for this critique; its writers are not opposed to being productive, only to its position as an all-consuming focus and guilt-generating measure of personal worth. Dore structures most chapters by naming an aspect, goal, or concern of a life defined by productivity, such as wasted time, ambition, busyness, distraction, comparison, or indecision. Each chapter sketches the impact of that idea and then attempts to gently dismantle the grip that it may have on the reader's life. All of these discussions are nuanced; it's rare for Dore to say that one of these aspects has no value, and she anticipates numerous objections. But her overarching goal is to help the reader be more comfortable with imperfection, more willing to live in the moment, and less frustrated with the limitations of life and the human brain. If striving for productivity is like lifting weights, Dore's diagnosis is that we've tried too hard for too long, and have overworked that muscle until it is cramping. This book is a gentle massage to induce the muscle to relax and let go. Whether this will work is, as with all self-help books, individual. I found it was best read in small quantities, perhaps a chapter per day, since it otherwise began feeling too much the same. I'm also not the ideal audience; Dore is a creative freelancer and primarily interviewed other creative people, which I think has a different sort of productivity rhythm than the work that I do. She's also not a planner to the degree that I am; more on that below. And yet, I found this book worked on me anyway. I can't say that I was captivated all the way through, but I found myself mentally relaxing while I was reading it, and I may re-read some chapters from time to time. How does this relate to the genre of productivity self-help? With less conflict than I think productivity writers believe, although there seems to be one foundational difference of perspective. Dore is not opposed to accomplishing things, or even to systems that help people accomplish things. She is more attuned than the typical productivity writer to the guilt and frustration that can accumulate when one has a day in which one does not do the thing, but her goal is not to talk you out of attempting things. It is, instead, to convince you to hold those attempts and goals more lightly, to allow them to move and shift and change, and to not treat a failure to do the thing today as a reason for guilt. This is wholly compatible with standard productivity advice. It's adding nuance at one level of abstraction higher: how tightly to cling to productivity goals, and what to do when they don't work out. Cramping muscles are not strong muscles capable of lifting heavy things. If one can massage out the cramp, one's productivity by even the strict economic definition may improve. Where I do see a conflict is that most productivity writers are planners, and Dore is not. This is, I think, a significant blind spot in productivity self-help writing. Cal Newport, for example, advocates time-block planning, where every hour of the working day has a job. David Allen advocates a complex set of comprehensive lists and well-defined next actions. Mark Forster builds a flurry of small systems for working through lists. The standard in productivity writing is to to add structure to your day and cultivate the self-discipline required to stick to that structure. For many people, including me, this largely works. I'm mostly a planner, and when my life gets chaotic, adding more structure and focusing on that structure helps me. But the productivity writers I've read are quite insistent that their style of structure will work for everyone, and on that point I am dubious. Newport, for example, advocates time-block planning for everyone without exception, insisting that it is the best way to structure a day. Dore, in contrast, describes spending years trying to perfect a routine before realizing that elastic possibilities work better for her than routines. For those who are more like Dore than Newport, I Didn't Do the Thing Today is more likely to be helpful than Newport's instructions. This doesn't make Newport's ideas wrong; it simply makes them not universal, something that the productivity self-help genre seems to have trouble acknowledging. Even for readers like myself who prefer structure, I Didn't Do the Thing Today is a valuable corrective to the emphasis on every-better systems. For those who never got along with too much structure, I think it may strike a chord. The standard self-help caveat still applies: Dore has the most to say to people who are in a similar social class and line of work as her. I'm not sure this book will be of much help to someone who has to juggle two jobs with shift work and child care, where the problem is more sharp external constraints than internalized productivity guilt. But for its target audience, I think it's a valuable, calming message. Dore doesn't have a recipe to sort out your life, but may help you feel better about the merits of life unsorted. Rating: 7 out of 10

In my last article i showed how to use the new features included in Debian Bullseye to easily create backups of your libvirt managed domains. A few years ago as this topic came to my interest, i also implemented a rather small utility (POC) to create full and incremental backups from standalone qemu processes: qmpbackup The workflow for this is a little bit different from the approach i have taken with virtnbdbackup. While with libvirt managed virtual machines, the libvirt API provides all necessary API calls to create backups, a running qemu process only provides the QMP protocol socket to get things going. Using the QMP protocol its possible to create bitmaps for the attached disks and make Qemu push the contents of the bitmaps to a specified target directory. As the bitmaps keep track of the changes on the attached block devices, you can create incremental backups too. The nice thing here is that the Qemu process actually does this all by itself and you dont have to care about which blocks are dirty, like you would have to do with the Pull based approach. So how does it work? The utility requires to start your qemu process with an active QMP socket attached, like so:

 qemu-system-<arch> <options> -qmp unix:/tmp/socket,server,nowait

Now you can easily make qemu push the latest data for a created bitmap to a given target directory:

# qmpbackup --socket /tmp/socket backup --level full --target /tmp/backup/
[2022-01-27 19:41:33,819]    INFO  Version: 0.10
[2022-01-27 19:41:33,819]    INFO  Qemu version: [5.0.2] [Debian 1:5.2+dfsg-11+deb11u1]
[2022-01-27 19:41:33,825]    INFO  Guest Agent socket connected
[2022-01-27 19:41:33,825]    INFO  Trying to ping guest agent
[2022-01-27 19:41:38,827] WARNING  Unable to reach Guest Agent: cant freeze file systems.
[2022-01-27 19:41:38,828]    INFO  Backup target directory: /tmp/backup/
[2022-01-27 19:41:38,828]    INFO  FULL Backup operation: "/tmp/backup//ide0-hd0/FULL-1643308898"
[2022-01-27 19:41:38,836]    INFO  Wrote Offset: 0% (0 of 2147483648)
[2022-01-27 19:41:39,838]    INFO  Wrote Offset: 25% (541065216 of 2147483648)
[2022-01-27 19:41:40,840]    INFO  Wrote Offset: 33% (701890560 of 2147483648)
[2022-01-27 19:41:41,841]    INFO  Wrote Offset: 40% (867041280 of 2147483648)
[2022-01-27 19:41:42,844]    INFO  Wrote Offset: 50% (1073741824 of 2147483648)
[2022-01-27 19:41:43,846]    INFO  Wrote Offset: 59% (1269760000 of 2147483648)
[2022-01-27 19:41:44,847]    INFO  Wrote Offset: 75% (1610612736 of 2147483648)
[2022-01-27 19:41:45,848]    INFO  Saved disk: [ide0-hd0]

The resulting directory now contains a full backup image of the disk attached. From this point on, its possible to create further incremental backups:

# qmpbackup  --socket /tmp/socket backup --level inc --target /tmp/backup/
[2022-01-27 19:42:03,930]    INFO  Version: 0.10
[2022-01-27 19:42:03,931]    INFO  Qemu version: [5.0.2] [Debian 1:5.2+dfsg-11+deb11u1]
[2022-01-27 19:42:03,933]    INFO  Guest Agent socket connected
[2022-01-27 19:42:03,933]    INFO  Trying to ping guest agent
[2022-01-27 19:42:08,938] WARNING  Unable to reach Guest Agent: cant freeze file systems.
[2022-01-27 19:42:08,939]    INFO  Backup target directory: /tmp/backup/
[2022-01-27 19:42:08,939]    INFO  INC Backup operation: "/tmp/backup//ide0-hd0/INC-1643308928"
[2022-01-27 19:42:08,953]    INFO  Wrote Offset: 0% (0 of 1835008)
[2022-01-27 19:42:09,957]    INFO  Saved disk: [ide0-hd0]

The target directory will now have multiple data backups:

/tmp/backup/ide0-hd0/
  FULL-1643308898
  INC-1643308928

Restoring the image Using the qmprebase utility you can now rebase the images to the latest state. The --dry-run option gives an good impression which command sequences are required, if one wants only rebase to a specific incremental backup, thats possible using the --until option.

# qmprebase rebase --dir /tmp/backup/ide0-hd0/ --dry-run
[2022-01-27 17:18:08,790]    INFO  Version: 0.10
[2022-01-27 17:18:08,790]    INFO  Dry run activated, not applying any changes
[2022-01-27 17:18:08,790]    INFO  qemu-img check /tmp/backup/ide0-hd0/INC-1643308928
[2022-01-27 17:18:08,791]    INFO  qemu-img rebase -b "/tmp/backup/ide0-hd0/FULL-1643308898" "/tmp/backup/ide0-hd0/INC-1643308928" -u
[2022-01-27 17:18:08,791]    INFO  qemu-img commit "/tmp/backup/ide0-hd0/INC-1643308928"
[2022-01-27 17:18:08,791]    INFO  Rollback of latest [FULL]<-[INC] chain complete, ignoring older chains
[2022-01-27 17:18:08,791]    INFO  Image files rollback successful.

Filesystem consistency The backup utility also supports to freeze and thaw the virtual machines file system in case qemu is started with a guest agent socket and the guest agent is reachable during backup operation. Check out the README for the full feature set.