1. Login https://www.envertecportal.com/apiaccount/login - POST, sent userName and pwd containing your login name and password. The response JSON is very explicit if your login was not successful and why.
2. Store the session cookie called ASP.NET_SessionId for use on all subsequent requests.
3. Retrieve station info https://www.envertecportal.com/ApiStations/getStationInfo - POST, sent ASP.NET_SessionId and stationId with the ID of the station. Returns a JSON with an object named Data. The field Power contains the currently generated power as a float with two digits (e.g. 0.01).
4. Logout https://www.envertecportal.com/apiAccount/Logout - POST, sent ASP.NET_SessionId.

1. The portal truncates passwords at 16 chars.
2. The "Forget Password?" function mails you back the password in plain text (that's how I learned about 1.).
3. The login API endpoint reporting the exact reason why the login failed is somewhat out of fashion. Though this one is probably not a credential stuffing target because there is no money to make, so don't care.
4. The data logger reports the data to www.envertecportal.com at port 10013.
5. There is some checksuming done on the reported data, but the system is not replay safe. So you can sent it any valid data string at a later time and get wrong data recorded.
6. People at forum.fhem.de decoded some values but could not figure out the checksuming so far.

References in the wire format When the work on Candid began at DFINITY, the Internet Computer was still far away from being a thing, and many fundamental aspects about it were still in the air. I particular, there was still talk about embracing capabilities as a core feature of the application model, which would be implemented as opaque references on the system level, likely building on WebAssembly s host reference type proposal (which only landed recently), and could be used to model access permissions, custom tokens and many other things. So Candid is designed with that in mind, and you ll find that its wire format is not just a type table and a value table, but actually

a triple (T, M, R), where T ( type ) and M ( memory ) are sequences of bytes and R ( references ) is a sequence of references.

Also the wire format for values of function service tyeps have an extra byte to distinguish between public references (represented by a principal and possible a method name in the data part), and these opaque references. Alas, references never made it into the Internet Computer, so all Candid implementations simply ignore that part of the specification. But it s still in the spec, and if it confused you before, now you know why.

Hashed field names Candid record and variant types look like they have textual field names:

type T = record   syndactyle : nat; trustbuster: bool  

But that is actually only true superficially. The wire format for Candid only stores hashes of field names. So the above is actually equivalent to

type T = record   4260381820 : nat; 3504418361 : bool  

or, for that matter, to

type T = record   destroys : bool; rectum : nat  

(Yes, I used an english word list to find these hash collisions. There aren t that many actually.) The benefit of such hashing is that the messages are a bit smaller in most (not all) cases, but it is a big annoyance for dynamic uses of Candid. It s the reason why tools like dfx, if they don t know the Candid interface of a service, will print the result with just the numerical hash, letting you guess which field is which. It also complicates host languages that derive Candid types from the host language, like Motoko, as some records (e.g. record trustbuster: bool; destroys : int ) with field name hash collisions can not be represented in Candid, and either the host language s type system needs to be Candid aware now (as is the case of Motoko), or serialization/deserialization will fail at runtime, or odd bugs can happen. (More discussion of this issue).

Tuples Many languages have a built-in notion of a tuple type (e.g. (Int, Bool)), but Candid does not have such a type. The only first class product type is records. This means that tuples have to encoded as records somehow. Conveniently(?) record fields are just numbers after all, so the type (Int, Bool) would be mapped to the type

record   0 : int; 1 : bool  

So tuples can be expressed. But from my experience implementing the type mappings for Motoko and Haskell this is causing headaches. To get a good experience when importing from Candid, the tools have to try to reconstruct which records may have been tuples originally, and turn them into tuples. The main argument for the status quo is that Candid types should be canonical, and there should not be more than one product type, and records are fine, and there needs to be no anonymous product type. But that has never quite resonated with me, given the practical reality of tuple types in many host languages.

Argument sequences Did I say that Candid does not have tuple types? Turns out it does, sort of. There is no first class anonymous product, but since functions take sequences of arguments and results, there is a tuple type right there:

func foo : (bool, int) -> (int, bool)

Again, I found that ergonomic interaction with host languages becomes relatively unwieldy by requiring functions to take and return sequences of values. This is especially true for languages where functions take one argument value or return one result type (the latter being very common). Here, return sequences of length one are turned into that type directly, longer argument sequences turn into the host language s tuple type, and nullary argument sequences turn into the idiomatic unit type. But this means that the types (int, bool) -> () and (record 0: int, 1: bool ) -> () may be mapped to the same host language type, which causes problems when you hope to encode all necessary Candid type information in the host language. Another oddity with argument and result sequences is that you can give names to the entries, e.g. write

func hello : (last_name : text; first_name : text) -> ()

but these names are completely ignored! So while this looks like you can, for example, add new optional arguments in the middle, such as

func hello : (last_name : text; middle_name: opt text, first_name : text) -> ()

without breaking clients, this does not have the effect you think it has and will likely break. My suggestion is to never put names on function arguments and result values in Candid interfaces, and for anything that might be extended with new fields or where you want to name the arguments, use a single record type as the only argument:

func hello : (record   last_name : text; first_name : text ) -> ()

This allows you to add and remove arguments more easily and reliably.

Type shorthands The Candid specification defines a system of types, and then adds a number of syntactic short-hands . For example, if you write blob in a Candid type description, it ought to means the same as vec nat8. My qualm with that is that it doesn t always mean the same. A Candid type description is interpreted by a number of, say, consumers . Two such consumers are part of the Candid specification:

• The specification that defines the wire format for that type
• The upgrading (subtyping) rules

But there are more! For every host language, there is some mapping from Candid types to host language types, and also generic tools like Candid UI are consumers of the type algebra. If these were to take the Candid specification as gospel, they would be forced to treat blob and vec nat8 the same, but that would be quite unergonomic and might cause performance regressions (most language try to map blob to some compact binary data type, while vec t tends to turn into some form of array structure). So they need to be pragmatic and treat blob and vec nat8 differently. But then, for all practical purposes, blob is not just a short-hand of vec nat8. They are different types that just happens to have the same wire representations and subtyping relations. This affects not just blob, but also tuples (record blob; int; bool ) and field names , as discussed above.

The value text format For a while after defining Candid, the only implementation was in Motoko, and all the plumbing was automatic, so there was never a need for users to to explicitly handle Candid values, as all values were Motoko values. Still, for debugging and testing and such things, we eventually needed a way to print out Candid values, so the text format was defined ( To enable convenient debugging, the following grammar specifies a text format for values ). But soon the dfx tool learned to talk to canisters, and now users needed to enter Candid value on the command line, possibly even when talking to canisters for which the interface was not known to dfx. And, sure enough, the textual interface defined in the Candid spec was used. Unfortunately, since it was not designed for that use case, it is rather unwieldy:

• It is quite verbose. You have to write record , not just . Vectors are written vec ; instead of some conventional syntax like [ , ]. Variants are written as variant error = " " with braces that don t any value here, and something like #error " " might have worked as well. With a bit more care, a more concise and ergonomic syntax might have been possible.
• It wasn t designed to be sufficient to create a Candid value from it. If you write 5 it s unclear whether that s a nat or an int16 or what (and all of these have different wire representations). Type annotations were later added, but are relatively unwieldy, and don t cover all cases (e.g. a service reference with a recursive type cannot be represented in the textual format at the moment).
• Not really the fault of the textual format, but some useful information about the types is not reflected in the type description that s part of the wire format. In particular not the field names, and whether a value was intended to be binary data (blob) or a list of small numbers (vec nat8), so pretty-printing such values requires guesswork. The Haskell library even tries to brute-force the hash to guess the field name, if it is short or in a english word list!

In hindsight I think it was too optimistic to assume that correct static type information is always available, and instead of actively trying to discourage dynamic use, Candid might be better if we had taken these (unavoidable?) use cases into account.

Custom wire format At the beginning of this post, I have a Candid is list. The list is relatively long, and the actual wire format is just one bullet point. Yes, defining a wire format that works isn t rocket science, and it was easiest to just make one up. But since most of the interesting meat of Candid is in other aspects (subtyping rules, host language integration), I wonder if it would have been better to use an existing, generic wire format, such as CBOR, and build Candid as a layer on top. This would give us plenty of tools and libraries to begin with. And maybe it would have reduced barrier of entry for developers, which now led to the very strange situation that DFINITY advocates for the universal use of Candid on the Internet Computer, so that all services can smoothly interact, but two of the most important services on the Internet Computer (the registry and the ledger) use Protobuf as their primary interface format, with Candid interfaces missing or an afterthought.

Sideways Interface Evolution This is not a quirk of Candid itself, but rather an idiom of how you can use Candid that emerged from our solution for record extensions and upgrades. Consider our example from before, a service with interface

service   add_user : (record   login : text; name : text  ) -> ()  

where you want to add an age field, which should be a number. The official way of doing that is to add that field with an optional type:

service   add_user : (record   login : text; name : text; age : opt nat  ) -> ()  

As explained above, this will not break old clients, as the decoder will treat a missing argument as null. So far so good. But often when adding such a field you don t want to bother new clients with the fact that this age was, at some point in the past, not there yet. And you can do that! The trick is to distinguish between the interface you publish and the interface you implement. You can (for example in your documentation) state that the interface is

service   add_user : (record   login : text; name : text; age : nat  ) -> ()  

which is not a subtype of the old type, but it is the interface you want new clients to work with. And then your implementation uses the type with opt nat. Calls from old clients will come through as null, and calls from new clients will come through as opt 42. We can see this idiom used in the Management Canister of the Internet Computer. The current documented interface only mentions a controllers : vec principal field in the settings, but the implementation still can handle both the old controller : principal and the new controllers field. It s probably advisable to let your CI system check that new versions of your service continue to implement all published interfaces, including past interfaces. But as long as the actual implementation s interface is a subtype of all interfaces ever published, this works fine. This pattern is related to when your service implements, say, http_request (so its implemented interface is a subtype of that common interface), but does not include that method in the published documentation (because clients of your service don t need to call it).

Self-describing Services As you have noticed, Candid was very much designed assuming that all parties always have the service type of services they want to interact with. But the Candid specification does not define how one can obtain the interface of a given service, and there isn t really a an official way to do that on the Internet Computer. That is unfortunate, because many interesting features depend on that: Such as writing import C "ic:7e6iv-biaaa-aaaaf-aaada-cai" in your Motoko program, and having it s type right there. Or tools like ic.rocks, that allow you to interact with any canister right there. One reason why we don t really have that feature yet is because of disagreements about how dynamic that feature should be. Should you be able to just ask the canister for its interface (and allow the canister to vary the response, for example if it can change its functionality over time, even without changing the actual wasm code)? Or is the interface a static property of the code, and one should be able to query the system for that data, without the canister s active involvement. Or, completely different, should interfaces be distributed out of band, maybe together with API documentation, or in some canister registry somewhere else? I always leaned towards the first of these options, but not convincingly enough. The second options requires system assistance, so more components to change, more teams to be involved that maybe intrinsically don t care a lot about this feature. And the third might have emerged as the community matures and builds such infrastructure, but that did not happen yet. In the end I sneaked in an implementation of the first into Motoko, arguing that even if we don t know yet how this feature will be implemented eventually, we all want the feature to exist somehow, and we really really want to unblock all the interesting applications it enables (e.g. Candid UI). That s why every Motoko canister, and some rust canisters too, implements a method

__get_candid_interface_tmp_hack : () -> (text)

that one can use to get the Candid interface file. The name was chosen to signal that this may not be the final interface, but like all good provisional solutions, it may last longer than intended. If that s the case, I m not sorry. This concludes my blog post series about Candid, for now. If you want to know more, feel free to post your question on the DFINTY developer forum, and I ll probably answer.

 -# RULES
      "streamFilter fuse" forall f g xs.
          streamFilter f (streamFilter g xs) = streamFilter (f.g) xs
  #- 

-O -fenable-rewrite-rules -fforce-recomp

main = print (unStream (streamFilter (>3) (streamFilter (<10)
    (mkStream [0..20]))))

main
  = print
      ($fShow[] $fShowInteger)
      (unStream
         (streamFilter
            (let  
               ds
               ds = 3   in
             \ ds -> > $fOrdInteger ds ds)
            (streamFilter
               (let  
                  ds
                  ds = 10   in
                \ ds -> < $fOrdInteger ds ds)
               (mkStream (enumFromTo $fEnumInteger 0 20)))))

main
  = print
      ($fShow[] $fShowInteger)
      (unStream
         (streamFilter
            (\ x -> > $fOrdInteger x 3)
            (streamFilter
               (\ x -> < $fOrdInteger x 10)
               (mkStream (enumFromTo $fEnumInteger 0 20)))))

main  = hPutStr' stdout main1 True
main1 = $fShowInteger_$cshowList (catMaybes1 (main_go 0)) []
main_go
  = \ x ->
      case gtInteger# x 20 of  
        DEFAULT ->
          case ltInteger# x 10 of  
            DEFAULT -> main_go (plusInteger x 1);
            1# ->
              case gtInteger# x 3 of  
                DEFAULT -> main_go (plusInteger x 1);
                1# -> : (Just x) (main_go (plusInteger x 1))
               
           ;
        1# -> []
       

>>> from genie.conf.base import Device
>>> device = Device("router", os="iosxr")
>>> # Hack to parse outputs without connecting to a device
>>> device.custom.setdefault("abstraction",  )["order"] = ["os", "platform"]
>>> cmd = "show route ipv4 unicast"
>>> output = """
... Tue Oct 29 21:29:10.924 UTC
...
... O    10.13.110.0/24 [110/2] via 10.12.110.1, 5d23h, GigabitEthernet0/0/0/0.110
... """
>>> device.parse(cmd, output=output)
 'vrf':  'default':  'address_family':  'ipv4':  'routes':  '10.13.110.0/24':  'route': '10.13.110.0/24',
       'active': True,
       'route_preference': 110,
       'metric': 2,
       'source_protocol': 'ospf',
       'source_protocol_codes': 'O',
       'next_hop':  'next_hop_list':  1:  'index': 1,
          'next_hop': '10.12.110.1',
          'outgoing_interface': 'GigabitEthernet0/0/0/0.110',
          'updated': '5d23h' 

1. The data models used are dependent on the vendor and OS, despite the documentation saying otherwise. For example, the data model used for IPv4 interfaces is different between NX-OS and IOS-XR.
2. The parsers rely on line-by-line regular expressions to extract data and some Python code as glue. This is fragile and may break silently.

  Loopback10 is Up, ipv4 protocol is Up
    Vrf is default (vrfid 0x60000000)
    Internet protocol processing disabled
  Loopback30 is Up, ipv4 protocol is Down [VRF in FWD reference]
    Vrf is ran (vrfid 0x0)
    Internet address is 203.0.113.17/32
    MTU is 1500 (1500 is available to IP)
    Helper address is not set
    Directed broadcast forwarding is disabled
    Outgoing access list is not set
    Inbound  common access list is not set, access list is not set
    Proxy ARP is disabled
    ICMP redirects are never sent
    ICMP unreachables are always sent
    ICMP mask replies are never sent
    Table Id is 0x0

 
  "Loopback10":  
    "int_status": "up",
    "oper_status": "up",
    "vrf": "ran",
    "vrf_id": "0x0",
    "ipv4":  
      "203.0.113.17/32":  
        "ip": "203.0.113.17",
        "prefix_length": "32"
       ,
      "mtu": 1500,
      "mtu_available": 1500,
      "broadcast_forwarding": "disabled",
      "proxy_arp": "disabled",
      "icmp_redirects": "never sent",
      "icmp_unreachables": "always sent",
      "icmp_replies": "never sent",
      "table_id": "0x0"
     
   
 

• Introduction to Free Software and Debian,
• Packaging, policy, and Debian infrastructure,
• Systems administration, automation and orchestration,
• Cloud and containers,
• Security,
• Community, diversity, local outreach and social context,
• Internationalization, Localization and Accessibility,
• Embedded and Kernel,
• Debian Blends and Debian derived distributions,
• Debian in Arts and Science
• and other.

The record extension problem Initially, the upgrade rules of Candid were a straight-forward application of the canonical subtyping rules. This worked and was sound, but it forbid one very commonly requested use case: Extending records in argument position. The subtyping rule for records say that

   record   old_field : nat; new_field : int  
<: record   old_field : nat  

or, in words, that subtypes can have more field than supertypes. This makes intuitive sense: A user of a such a record value that only expects old_field to be there is not bothered if suddenly a new_field appears. But a user who expects new_field to be there is thrown off if it suddenly isn t anymore. Therefore it is ok to extend the records returned by a service with new fields, but not to extend the record in your methods s argument types. But users want to extend their record types over time, also in argument position! In fact, they often want to extend them in both positions. Consider a service with the following interface, where the CUser record appears both in argument and result position:

type CUser = record   login : text; name : text  ;
service C :  
  register_user : (CUser) -> ();
  get_user_data : (text) -> (CUser);
 

It seems quite natural to want to extend the record with a new field (say, the age of the user). But simply changing the definition of CUser to

type CUser = record   login : text; name : text; age : nat  

is not ok, because now register_user requires the age field, but old clients don t provide it. So how can we allow developers to make changes like this (because they really really want that), while keeping the soundness guarantees made by Candid (because we really really want that)? This question has bothered us for over two years, and we even created a meta issue that records the dozen approached we considered, discussed and eventually ditched.

Dynamic subtyping checks in opt I will spare you the history lesson, though, and explain the solution we eventually came up with. In the example above it seems unreasonable to let the developer add a field age of type nat. Since there may be old clients around, the service unavoidably has to deal with records that don t have an age field. If the code expects an age value, what should it do in that case? But one can argue that changing the record type to

type CUser = record   login : text; name : text; age : opt nat  

could work: If the age field is present, use the value. If the field is absent, inject a null value during decoding. In the first-order case, this rather obvious solution would work just fine, and we d be done. But Candid aims to solve the higher order case, and I said things get tricky here, didn t I? Consider another, independent service D with the following interface:

type DUser = record   login : text; name : text  ;
service D :  
  on_user_added : (func (DUser) -> ()) -> ()
 

This service has a method that takes a method reference, presumably with the intention of calling it whenever a new user was added to service D. And because the types line up nicely, we can compose these two services, by once calling D.on_user_added(C.register_user), so that from now on D calls C.register_user( ). These kind of service mesh-ups are central to the vision of the Internet Computer! But what happens if the services now evolve their types in different ways, e.g. towards

type CUser = record   login : text; name : text; age : opt nat  

and

type DUser = record   login : text; name : text; age : opt variant   under_age; adult  

Individually, these are type changes that we want to allow. But now the call from D to C may transmit a value of record ; age = opt variant under_age when C expects a natural number! This is precisely what we want to prevent by introducing types, and it seems we have lost soundness. The best solution we could find is to make the opt type somewhat special, and apply these extra rules when decoding at an expected type of opt t.

• If this was a record field, and the provided record value doesn t even have a field of that name, don t fail but instead treat this as null. This handles the first-order example above.
• If there is a value, look at its type (which, in Candid, is part of the message).
  • If it is opt t' and t' <: t, then decode as normal.
  • If it is opt t' but t' <: t does not hold, then treat that as null. This should only happen in these relatively obscure higher-order cases where services evolved differently and incompatibly, and makes sure that the calls that worked before the upgrades will continue to work afterwards. It is not advisable to actually use that rule when changing your service s interface. Tools that assist the developer with an upgrade check should prevent or warn about the use of this rule.
• Not strictly required here, but since we are making opt special anyways: If its type t' is not of the form opt , pretend it was opt t', and also pretend that the given value was wrapped in opt. This allows services to make record field in arguments that were required in the old version optional in a new version, e.g. as a way to deprecated them. So it is mildly useful, although I can report that it makes the meta-theory and implementation rather complex, in particular together with equirecursion and beasts like type O = opt O. See this discussion for a glimpse of that.

In the above I stress that we look at the type of the provided value, and not just the value. For example, if the sender sends the value opt vec at type opt vec nat, and the recipient expects opt vec bool, then this will decode as null, even though one could argue that the value opt vec could easily be understood at type opt vec bool. We initially had that, but then noticed that this still breaks soundness when there are references inside, and we have to do a full subtyping check in the decoder. This is very unfortunate, because it makes writing a Candid decoder a noticeably harder task that requires complicated graph algorithms with memoization (which I must admit Motoko has not implemented yet), but it s the least bad solution we could find so far.

Isn t that just dynamic typing? You might have noticed that with these rules, t <: opt t' holds for all types t and t'. In other words, every opt is a top type (like reserved), thus all optional types are equivalent. One could argue that we are throwing all of the benefits of static typing over board this way. But it s not quite as bad: It s true that decoding Candid values now involves a dynamic check inserting null values in certain situations, but as long as everyone plays by the rules (i.e. upgrades their services according to the Candid safe upgrade rules, and heeds the warning alluded to above), these certain situations will only happen in the obscurest of cases. It is, by the way, not material to this solution that the special subtyping behavior is applied to the opt type, and a neighboring point in the design space would be a dedicated upgraded t type constructor. That would allow developers to use the canonical opt type with the usual subtyping rules and communicate their intent ( clients should consider this field optional vs. old clients don t know about this field, but new clients should use it ) more cleanly at the expense of having more non-canonical types in the type system. To see why it is convenient if Candid has mostly just the normal types, read the next post, which will describe how Candid can be integrated into a host language.

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/ydrgflz4

Dual screen desktop running i3, Emacs, some terminals, including a Quake console, Firefox, Polybar as the status bar, and Dunst as the notification daemon.

i3: the window manager i3 aims to be a minimal tiling window manager. Its documentation can be read from top to bottom in less than an hour. i3 organize windows in a tree. Each non-leaf node contains one or several windows and has an orientation and a layout. This information arbitrates the window positions. i3 features three layouts: split, stacking, and tabbed. They are demonstrated in the below screenshot:

Demonstration of the layouts available in i3. The main container is split horizontally. The first child is split vertically. The second one is tabbed. The last one is stacking.

Tree representation of the previous screenshot.

Most of the other tiling window managers, including the awesome window manager, use predefined layouts. They usually feature a large area for the main window and another area divided among the remaining windows. These layouts can be tuned a bit, but you mostly stick to a couple of them. When a new window is added, the behavior is quite predictable. Moreover, you can cycle through the various windows without thinking too much as they are ordered. i3 is more flexible with its ability to build any layout on the fly, it can feel quite overwhelming as you need to visualize the tree in your head. At first, it is not unusual to find yourself with a complex tree with many useless nested containers. Moreover, you have to navigate windows using directions. It takes some time to get used to. I set up a split layout for Emacs and a few terminals, but most of the other workspaces are using a tabbed layout. I don t use the stacking layout. You can find many scripts trying to emulate other tiling window managers but I did try to get my setup pristine of these tentatives and get a chance to familiarize myself. i3 can also save and restore layouts, which is quite a powerful feature. My configuration is quite similar to the default one and has less than 200 lines.

i3 companion: the missing bits i3 philosophy is to keep a minimal core and let the user implements missing features using the IPC protocol:

Do not add further complexity when it can be avoided. We are generally happy with the feature set of i3 and instead focus on fixing bugs and maintaining it for stability. New features will therefore only be considered if the benefit outweighs the additional complexity, and we encourage users to implement features using the IPC whenever possible. Introduction to the i3 window manager

While this is not as powerful as an embedded language, it is enough for many cases. Moreover, as high-level features may be opinionated, delegating them to small, loosely coupled pieces of code keeps them more maintainable. Libraries exist for this purpose in several languages. Users have published many scripts to extend i3: automatic layout and window promotion to mimic the behavior of other tiling window managers, window swallowing to put a new app on top of the terminal launching it, and cycling between windows with Alt+Tab. Instead of maintaining a script for each feature, I have centralized everything into a single Python process, i3-companion using asyncio and the i3ipc-python library. Each feature is self-contained into a function. It implements the following components:

make a workspace exclusive to an application

When a workspace contains Emacs or Firefox, I would like other applications to move to another workspace, except for the terminal which is allowed to intrude into any workspace. The workspace_exclusive() function monitors new windows and moves them if needed to an empty workspace or to one with the same application already running.

implement a Quake console

The quake_console() function implements a drop-down console available from any workspace. It can be toggled with Mod+ . This is implemented as a scratchpad window.

back and forth workspace switching on the same output

With the workspace back_and_forth command, we can ask i3 to switch to the previous workspace. However, this feature is not restricted to the current output. I prefer to have one keybinding to switch to the workspace on the next output and one keybinding to switch to the previous workspace on the same output. This behavior is implemented in the previous_workspace() function by keeping a per-output history of the focused workspaces.

create a new empty workspace or move a window to an empty workspace

To create a new empty workspace or move a window to an empty workspace, you have to locate a free slot and use workspace number 4 or move container to workspace number 4. The new_workspace() function finds a free number and use it as the target workspace.

restart some services on output change

When adding or removing an output, some actions need to be executed: refresh the wallpaper, restart some components unable to adapt their configuration on their own, etc. i3 triggers an event for this purpose. The output_update() function also takes an extra step to coalesce multiple consecutive events and to check if there is a real change with the low-level library xcffib.

I will detail the other features as this post goes on. On the technical side, each function is decorated with the events it should react to:

@on(CommandEvent("previous-workspace"), I3Event.WORKSPACE_FOCUS)
async def previous_workspace(i3, event):
    """Go to previous workspace on the same output."""

The CommandEvent() event class is my way to send a command to the companion, using either i3-msg -t send_tick or binding a key to a nop command. The latter is used to avoid spawning a shell and a i3-msg process just to send a message. The companion listens to binding events and checks if this is a nop command.

bindsym $mod+Tab nop "previous-workspace"

There are other decorators to avoid code duplication: @debounce() to coalesce multiple consecutive calls, @static() to define a static variable, and @retry() to retry a function on failure. The whole script is a bit more than 1000 lines. I think this is worth a read as I am quite happy with the result.

dunst: the notification daemon Unlike the awesome window manager, i3 does not come with a built-in notification system. Dunst is a lightweight notification daemon. I am running a modified version with HiDPI support for X11 and recursive icon lookup. The i3 companion has a helper function, notify(), to send notifications using DBus. container_info() and workspace_info() uses it to display information about the container or the tree for a workspace.

Notification showing i3 s tree for a workspace

polybar: the status bar i3 bundles i3bar, a versatile status bar, but I have opted for Polybar. A wrapper script runs one instance for each monitor. The first module is the built-in support for i3 workspaces. To not have to remember which application is running in a workspace, the i3 companion renames workspaces to include an icon for each application. This is done in the workspace_rename() function. The icons are from the Font Awesome project. I maintain a mapping between applications and icons. This is a bit cumbersome but it looks great.

i3 workspaces in Polybar

For CPU, memory, brightness, battery, disk, and audio volume, I am relying on the built-in modules. Polybar s wrapper script generates the list of filesystems to monitor and they get only displayed when available space is low. The battery widget turns red and blinks slowly when running out of power. Check my Polybar configuration for more details.

Polybar displaying various information: CPU usage, memory usage, screen brightness, battery status, Bluetooth status (with a connected headset), network status (connected to a wireless network and to a VPN), notification status, and speaker volume.

For Bluetooh, network, and notification statuses, I am using Polybar s ipc module: the next version of Polybar can receive an arbitrary text on an IPC socket. The module is defined with a single hook to be executed at the start to restore the latest status.

[module/network]
type = custom/ipc
hook-0 = cat $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/i3/network.txt 2> /dev/null
initial = 1

It can be updated with polybar-msg action "#network.send.XXXX". In the i3 companion, the @polybar() decorator takes the string returned by a function and pushes the update through the IPC socket. The i3 companion reacts to DBus signals to update the Bluetooth and network icons. The @on() decorator accepts a DBusSignal() object:

@on(
    StartEvent,
    DBusSignal(
        path="/org/bluez",
        interface="org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties",
        member="PropertiesChanged",
        signature="sa sv as",
        onlyif=lambda args: (
            args[0] == "org.bluez.Device1"
            and "Connected" in args[1]
            or args[0] == "org.bluez.Adapter1"
            and "Powered" in args[1]
        ),
    ),
)
@retry(2)
@debounce(0.2)
@polybar("bluetooth")
async def bluetooth_status(i3, event, *args):
    """Update bluetooth status for Polybar."""

The middle of the bar is occupied by the date and a weather forecast. The latest also uses the IPC mechanism, but the source is a Python script triggered by a timer.

Current date and weather forecast for the day in Polybar. The data is retrieved with the OpenWeather API.

I don t use the system tray integrated with Polybar. The embedded icons usually look horrible and they all behave differently. A few years back, Gnome has removed the system tray. Most of the problems are fixed by the DBus-based Status Notifier Item protocol also known as Application Indicators or Ayatana Indicators for GNOME. However, Polybar does not support this protocol. In the i3 companion, The implementation of Bluetooth and network icons, including displaying notifications on change, takes about 200 lines. I got to learn a bit about how DBus works and I get exactly the info I want.

picom: the compositor I like having slightly transparent backgrounds for terminals and to reduce the opacity of unfocused windows. This requires a compositor.¹ picom is a lightweight compositor. It works well for me, but it may need some tweaking depending on your graphic card.² Unlike the awesome window manager, i3 does not handle transparency, so the compositor needs to decide by itself the opacity of each window. Check my configuration for details.

systemd: the service manager I use systemd to start i3 and the various services around it. My xsession script only sets some environment variables and lets systemd handles everything else. Have a look at this article from Micha G ral for the rationale. Notably, each component can be easily restarted and their logs are not mangled inside the ~/.xsession-errors file.³ I am using a two-stage setup: i3.service depends on xsession.target to start services before i3:

[Unit]
Description=X session
BindsTo=graphical-session.target
Wants=autorandr.service
Wants=dunst.socket
Wants=inputplug.service
Wants=picom.service
Wants=pulseaudio.socket
Wants=policykit-agent.service
Wants=redshift.service
Wants=spotify-clean.timer
Wants=ssh-agent.service
Wants=xiccd.service
Wants=xsettingsd.service
Wants=xss-lock.service

Then, i3 executes the second stage by invoking the i3-session.target:

[Unit]
Description=i3 session
BindsTo=graphical-session.target
Wants=wallpaper.service
Wants=wallpaper.timer
Wants=polybar-weather.service
Wants=polybar-weather.timer
Wants=polybar.service
Wants=i3-companion.service
Wants=misc-x.service

Have a look on my configuration files for more details.

rofi: the application launcher Rofi is an application launcher. Its appearance can be customized through a CSS-like language and it comes with several themes. Have a look at my configuration for mine.

Rofi as an application launcher

It can also act as a generic menu application. I have a script to control a media player and another one to select the wifi network. It is quite a flexible application.

Rofi to select a wireless network

xss-lock and i3lock: the screen locker i3lock is a simple screen locker. xss-lock invokes it reliably on inactivity or before a system suspend. For inactivity, it uses the XScreenSaver events. The delay is configured using the xset s command. The locker can be invoked immediately with xset s activate. X11 applications know how to prevent the screen saver from running. I have also developed a small dimmer application that is executed 20 seconds before the locker to give me a chance to move the mouse if I am not away.⁴ Have a look at my configuration script.

Demonstration of xss-lock, xss-dimmer and i3lock with a 4 speedup.

The remaining components

• autorandr is a tool to detect the connected display, match them against a set of profiles, and configure them with xrandr.
• inputplug executes a script for each new mouse and keyboard plugged. This is quite useful to load the appropriate the keyboard map. See my configuration.
• xsettingsd provides settings to X11 applications, not unlike xrdb but it notifies applications for changes. The main use is to configure the Gtk and DPI settings. See my article on HiDPI support on Linux with X11.
• Redshift adjusts the color temperature of the screen according to the time of day.
• maim is a utility to take screenshots. I use Prt Scn to trigger a screenshot of a window or a specific area and Mod+Prt Scn to capture the whole desktop to a file. Check the helper script for details.
• I have a collection of wallpapers I rotate every hour. A script selects them using advanced machine learning algorithms and stitches them together on multi-screen setups. The selected wallpaper is reused by i3lock.

---

1. Apart from the eye candy, a compositor also helps to get tear-free video playbacks.
2. My configuration works with both Haswell (2014) and Whiskey Lake (2018) Intel GPUs. It also works with AMD GPU based on the Polaris chipset (2017).
3. You cannot manage two different displays this way e.g. :0 and :1. In the first implementation, I did try to parametrize each service with the associated display, but this is useless: there is only one DBus user session and many services rely on it. For example, you cannot run two notification daemons.
4. I have only discovered later that XSecureLock ships such a dimmer with a similar implementation. But mine has a cool countdown!

• Firstly, Holger Levsen gave a talk titled Reproducible Buster, Bullseye & Bookworm - where we come from and where we are going (slides) which provided a high-level update on the status of reproducible builds within Debian, summing up the status in Debian Buster, Bullseye and then spoke about the outlook for Bookworm. This talk was also given at BornHack 2021 on the Danish island of Funen (schedule entry, video)
• Secondly, Vagrant Cascadian gave a talk titled Looking Forward to Reproducible Builds which mentions some historic blockers within Debian that have been solved, worked around or which are still in progress. It also touched on some recent developments, with an eye to what might happen as Debian embarks upon the new Bookworm development cycle after the release of Bullseye.
• Lastly, Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues & Fr d ric Pierret gave a joint talk on Making use of snapshot.debian.org for fun and profit about various tools they have developed to interact with the snapshot.debian.org wayback machine for Debian packages. In particular, they mention how they are using the service to reproduce and validate builds as well as touch on an alternative snapshot service that has been mentioned in previous reports.

Software development kpcyrd announced an interesting new project this month called I probably didn t backdoor this which is an attempt to be:

a practical attempt at shipping a program and having reasonably solid evidence there s probably no backdoor. All source code is annotated and there are instructions explaining how to use reproducible builds to rebuild the artifacts distributed in this repository from source. The idea is shifting the burden of proof from you need to prove there s a backdoor to we need to prove there s probably no backdoor . This repository is less about code (we re going to try to keep code at a minimum actually) and instead contains technical writing that explains why these controls are effective and how to verify them. You are very welcome to adopt the techniques used here in your projects. ( )

As the project s README goes on the mention: the techniques used to rebuild the binary artifacts are only possible because the builds for this project are reproducible . This was also announced on our mailing list this month in a thread titled i-probably-didnt-backdoor-this: Reproducible Builds for upstreams. kpcyrd also wrote a detailed blog post about the problems surrounding Linux distributions (such as Alpine and Arch Linux) that distribute compiled Python bytecode in the form of .pyc files generated during the build process.

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 made a number of changes, including releasing version 180), version 181) and version 182) as well as the following changes:

• New features:
  • Add support for extracting the signing block from Android APKs. [ ]
  • If we specify a suffix for a temporary file or directory within the code, ensure it starts with an underscore (ie. _ ) to make the generated filenames more human-readable. [ ]
  • Don t include short GCC lines that differ on a single prefix byte either. These are distracting, not very useful and are simply the strings(1) command s idea of the build ID, which is displayed elsewhere in the diff. [ ][ ]
  • Don t include specific .debug-like lines in the ELF-related output, as it is invariably a duplicate of the debug ID that exists better in the readelf(1) differences for this file. [ ]
• Bug fixes:
  • Add a special case to SquashFS image extraction to not fail if we aren t the superuser. [ ]
  • Only use java -jar /path/to/apksigner.jar if we have an apksigner.jar as newer versions of apksigner in Debian use a shell wrapper script which will be rejected if passed directly to the JVM. [ ]
  • Reduce the maximum line length for calculating Wagner-Fischer, improving the speed of output generation a lot. [ ]
  • Don t require apksigner in order to compare .apk files using apktool. [ ]
  • Update calls (and tests) for the new version of odt2txt. [ ]
• Output improvements:
  • Mention in the output if the apksigner tool is missing. [ ]
  • Profile diffoscope.diff.linediff and specialize. [ ][ ]
• Logging improvements:
  • Format debug-level messages related to ELF sections using the diffoscope.utils.format_class. [ ]
  • Print the size of generated reports in the logs (if possible). [ ]
  • Include profiling information in --debug output if --profile is not set. [ ]
• Codebase improvements:
  • Clarify a comment about the HUGE_TOOLS Python dictionary. [ ]
  • We can pass -f to apktool to avoid creating a strangely-named subdirectory. [ ]
  • Drop an unused File import. [ ]
  • Update the supported & minimum version of Black. [ ]
  • We don t use the logging variable in a specific place, so alias it to an underscore (ie. _ ) instead. [ ]
  • Update some various copyright years. [ ]
  • Clarify a comment. [ ]
• Test improvements:
  • Update a test to check specific contents of SquashFS listings, otherwise it fails depending on the test systems user ID to username passwd(5) mapping. [ ]
  • Assign seen and expected values to local variables to improve contextual information in failed tests. [ ]
  • Don t print an orphan newline when the source code formatting test passes. [ ]

In addition Santiago Torres Arias added support for Squashfs version 4.5 [ ] and Felix C. Stegerman suggested a number of small improvements to the output of the new APK signing block [ ]. Lastly, Chris Lamb uploaded python-libarchive-c version 3.1-1 to Debian experimental for the new 3.x branch python-libarchive-c is used by diffoscope.

Distribution work In Debian, 68 reviews of packages were added, 33 were updated and 10 were removed this month, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Two new issue types have been identified too: nondeterministic_ordering_in_todo_items_collected_by_doxygen and kodi_package_captures_build_path_in_source_filename_hash. kpcyrd published another monthly report on their work on reproducible builds within the Alpine and Arch Linux distributions, specifically mentioning rebuilderd, one of the components powering reproducible.archlinux.org. The report also touches on binary transparency, an important component for supply chain security. The @GuixHPC account on Twitter posted an infographic on what fraction of GNU Guix packages are bit-for-bit reproducible: Finally, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted his monthly reproducible builds status report for openSUSE.

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

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • awkward (timestamp issue)
  • ck (build fails in single-CPU mode)
  • cri-o (build ID issue related to Go parallelism)
  • kernel-obs-build (cpio metadata issue)
  • python-PyQt6 (.pyc-related issue)
  • python-dulwich (fails to build in 2023)
  • python-xkbgroup (.pyc-related issue)
  • rnp (fails to build in 2024)
• Bj rn Forsman:
  • dosfstools (from December 2018) was eventually merged.
• Chris Lamb:
  • #992039 filed against mapcache.
  • #992059 filed against spatialindex.
  • #992060 filed against pytsk.
  • #992061 filed against surgescript.
  • #992126 filed against rust-coreutils.
  • #992772 filed against translate.
  • #992773 filed against spirv-cross.
  • #992804 filed against numcodecs.
  • #993279 filed against tty-solitaire.
  • #993304 filed against samtools.
• Simon McVittie:
  • #992620 filed against pkg-config.
  • #992622 filed against pkgconf.
  • #992645 filed against ncftp.
  • #992647 filed against backuppc.
  • #992651 filed against sharutils.
  • #992662 filed against cfengine3.
  • #992702 filed against nbdkit.
  • #992722 filed against nbdkit.
  • #992775 filed against python3.9.
  • #992781 filed against supermin.
  • #992782 filed against virt-p2v.
  • #993249 filed against gnunet.
  • #993250 filed against mpb.
  • #993275 filed against ng.
• Vagrant Cascadian:
  • vlc (libvlccore.so.* embeds the build username and hostname).
  • #991926, #991927 and #991928 filed against grub2.

Elsewhere, it was discovered that when supporting various new language features and APIs for Android apps, the resulting APK files that are generated now vary wildly from build to build (example diffoscope output). Happily, it appears that a patch has been committed to the relevant source tree. This was also discussed on our mailing list this month in a thread titled Android desugaring and reproducible builds started by Marcus Hoffmann.

Website and documentation There were quite a few changes to the Reproducible Builds website and documentation this month, including:

• Felix C. Stegerman:
  • Update the website self-build process to not use the buster-backports suite now that Debian Bullseye is the stable release. [ ]
• Holger Levsen:
  • Add a new page documenting various package rebuilder solutions. [ ]
  • Add some historical talks and slides from DebConf20. [ ][ ]
  • Various improvements to the history page. [ ][ ][ ]
  • Rename the Comparison protocol documentation category to Verification . [ ]
  • Update links to F-Droid documentation. [ ]
• Ian Muchina:
  • Increase the font size of titles and de-emphasize event details on the talk page. [ ]
  • Rename the README file to README.md to improve the user experience when browsing the Git repository in a web browser. [ ]
• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Drop a position:fixed CSS statement that is negatively affecting with some width settings. [ ]
  • Fix the sizing of the elements inside the side navigation bar. [ ]
  • Show gold level sponsors and above in the sidebar. [ ]
  • Updated the documentation within reprotest to mention how ldconfig conflicts with the kernel variation. [ ]
• Roland Clobus:
  • Added a ticket number for the issue with the live Cinnamon image and diffoscope. [ ]

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

• Holger Levsen:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Make a large number of changes to support the new Debian bookworm release, including adding it to the dashboard [ ], start scheduling tests [ ], adding suitable Apache redirects [ ] etc. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Make the first build use LANG=C.UTF-8 to match the official Debian build servers. [ ]
    • Only test Debian Live images once a week. [ ]
    • Upgrade all nodes to use Debian Bullseye [ ] [ ]
    • Update README documentation for the Debian Bullseye release. [ ]
  • Other changes:
    • Only include rsync output if the $DEBUG variable is enabled. [ ]
    • Don t try to install mock, a tool used to build Fedora packages some time ago. [ ]
    • Drop an unused function. [ ]
    • Various documentation improvements. [ ][ ]
    • Improve the node health check to detect zombie jobs. [ ]
• Jessica Clarke (FreeBSD-related changes):
  • Update the location and branch name for the main FreeBSD Git repository. [ ]
  • Correctly ignore the source tarball when comparing build results. [ ]
  • Drop an outdated version number from the documentation. [ ]
• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Block F-Droid jobs from running whilst the setup is running. [ ]
  • Enable debugging for the rsync job related to Debian Live images. [ ]
  • Pass BUILD_TAG and BUILD_URL environment for the Debian Live jobs. [ ]
  • Refactor the master_wrapper script to use a Bash array for the parameters. [ ]
  • Prefer YAML s safe_load() function over the unsafe variant. [ ]
  • Use the correct variable in the Apache config to match possible existing files on disk. [ ]
  • Stop issuing HTTP 301 redirects for things that not actually permanent. [ ]
• Roland Clobus (Debian live image generation):
  • Increase the diffoscope timeout from 120 to 240 minutes; the Cinnamon image should now be able to finish. [ ]
  • Use the new snapshot service. [ ]
  • Make a number of improvements to artifact handling, such as moving the artifacts to the Jenkins host [ ] and correctly cleaning them up at the right time. [ ][ ][ ]
  • Where possible, link to the Jenkins build URL that created the artifacts. [ ][ ]
  • Only allow only one job to run at the same time. [ ]
• Vagrant Cascadian:
  • Temporarily disable armhf nodes for DebConf21. [ ][ ]

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

• IRC: #reproducible-builds on irc.oftc.net.
• Twitter (@ReproBuilds) and Mastodon (@reproducible_builds@fosstodon.org).
• Reddit: /r/ReproducibleBuilds
• Mailing list: rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org

Changes in RQuantLib version 0.4.13 (2021-09-02)

• Changes in RQuantLib code:
  • Small updates to DESCRIPTION and README.md
  • Switch CI use to r-ci
  • An eleven-year old typo was correct in a manual page (Dirk in #156 fixing #155 with thanks to @klin133)
  • Daycount convention calls deprecated in QuantLib 1.23 were updated (Dirk in #157)
  • Updated remaining http:// URLs in documentation to https://

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

error: symbol grub_is_lockdown not found

update-grub2

dpkg-reconfigure -plow grub-efi-amd64

Force extra installation to the EFI removable media path?

Some EFI-based systems are buggy and do not handle new bootloaders correctly. If you force an extra installation of GRUB to the EFI removable media path, this should ensure that this system will boot Debian correctly despite such a problem. However, it may remove the ability to boot any other operating systems that also depend on this path. If so, you will need to make sure that GRUB is configured successfully to be able to boot any other OS installations correctly.

Update NVRAM variables to automatically boot into Debian?

GRUB can configure your platform's NVRAM variables so that it boots into Debian automatically when powered on. However, you may prefer to disable this behavior and avoid changes to your boot configuration. For example, if your NVRAM variables have been set up such that your system contacts a PXE server on every boot, this would preserve that behavior.

eddy@aptonia:/ $ cat /etc/modules
# /etc/modules: kernel modules to load at boot time.
#
# This file contains the names of kernel modules that should be loaded
# at boot time, one per line. Lines beginning with "#" are ignored.
r8169

DRV_NAME=rtl8821ce
DRV_VERSION=v5.5.2_34066.20200325

cp -r . /usr/src/$ DRV_NAME -$ DRV_VERSION

dkms add -m $ DRV_NAME -v $ DRV_VERSION

dkms build -m $ DRV_NAME -v $ DRV_VERSION -k 5.10.0-0.bpo.8-amd64
dkms install -m $ DRV_NAME -v $ DRV_VERSION -k 5.10.0-0.bpo.8-amd64

dkms build rtl8821ce/v5.5.2_34066.20200325 -k 4.19.0-17-amd64
dkms install rtl8821ce/v5.5.2_34066.20200325 -k 4.19.0-17-amd64

Safe upgrades A central idea behind Candid is that services evolve over time, and so also their interfaces evolve. As they do, it is desirable to keep the interface usable by clients who have not been updated. In particular on a blockchainy platform like the Internet Computer, where some programs are immutable and cannot be changed to accommodate changes in the interface of the services they use, this is of importance. Therefore, Candid defines which changes to an interface are guaranteed to be backward compatible. Of course it s compatible to add new methods to a service, but some changes to a method signature can also be ok. For example, changing

service A1 :  
  get_value : (variant   current; previous : nat  )
    -> (record   value : int; last_change : nat  )
 

to

service A2 :  
  get_value : (variant   current; previous : nat; default  )
    -> (record   value : int; last_change : nat; committed : bool  )
 

is fine: It doesn t matter that clients that still use the old interface don t know about the new constructor of the argument variant. And the extra field in the result record will silently be ignored by old clients. In the Candid spec, this relation is written as A2 <: A1 (note the order!), and the formal footing this builds on is subtyping. We thus say that it is safe to upgrade a service to a subtype , and that A2 s interface is a subtype of A1 s. In small examples, I often use nat and int, because every nat is also a int, but some int values are not not nat values, namely the negative ones. We say nat is a subtype of int, nat <: int. So a function that in the first returns a int can in the new version return a nat without breaking old clients. But the other direction doesn t work: If the old version s method had a return type of nat, then changing that to int would be a breaking change, as old clients would not be prepared to handle negative numbers. Note that arguments of function types follow different rules. In fact, the rules are simply turned around, and in argument position (also called negative position ), we can evolve the interface to accept supertypes. Concretely, a function that originally expected an nat can be changed to expect an int, but the other direction doesn t work, because there might still be old clients around that send negative numbers. This reversing-of-the-rules is called contravariance. The vision is that the developer s tooling will warn the developer before they upgrade the code of a running service to a type that is not a subtype of the old interface. Let me stress, though, that all this is about not breaking existing clients that use the old interface. It does not mean that a client developer who fetches the new interface for your service won t have to change their code to make his programs compile again.

Higher order composition So far, we considered the simple case of one service with a bunch of clients, i.e. the first order situation. Things get much more interesting if we have multiple services that are composed, and that pass around references to each other, and we still want everything to be nicely typed and never fail even as we upgrade services. Therefore, Candid s type system can express that a service s method expects or a returns a reference to another service or method, and the type that this service or method should have. For example

service B :   add_listener : (text, func (int) -> ()) -> ()  

says that the service with interface B has a method called add_listener which takes two arguments, a plain value of type text and a reference to a function that itself expects a int-typed argument. The contravariance of the subtyping rules explained above also applies to the types of these function reference. And because the int in the above type is on the left of two function arrows, the subtyping rule direction flips twice, and it is therefore safe to upgrade the service to accept the following interface:

service B :   add_listener : (text, func (nat) -> ()) -> ()  

Soundness theorem and Coq proof The combination of these higher order features and the safe upgrade mechanism is maybe the unique selling point of Candid, but also what made its design quite tricky sometimes. And although the conventional subtyping rules work well, we wanted to do some less conventional things (more on that below), and more than once thought we had a good solution, only to notice that it did not hold water in complicated higher-order cases. But what does it mean to hold water? I felt the need to precisely define a soundness criteria for higher order interface description languages, which you can find in the document An IDL Soundness Proposition. This is a general framework which you can instantiate with your concrete IDL language and rules, and then it tells you what you have to prove to consider your language to be sound. Intuitively, it simulates all possible ways in which services can be defined and upgraded, and in which they can pass around references to each other, and the soundness property is that then that for all messages sent between services, they can always be understood. The document also shows, in general, that any system that builds on canonical subtyping in sound, as expected. That is still a generic theorem that you can instantiate with a concrete system, but now there is less to do. Because these proofs can get tricky in corner cases, it is valuable to mechanize them in an interactive theorem prover and have the computer check the proofs. So I have created a Coq formalization that defines the soundness criteria, including the reduction to canonical subtyping. It also defines MiniCandid, a greatly simplified variant of Candid, proves various properties about it (transitivity etc.) and finally instantiates the soundness theorem. I am particularly fond of the use of coinduction to model the equirecursive types, and the use of named cases, as we know them from Isabelle, to make the proofs a bit more readable and maintainable. I am less fond of how much work it seems to be to extend MiniCandid with more of Candid s types. Already adding vec was more work than it s worth it, and I defensively blame Coq s not-so-great support for nested recursion. The soundness relies on subtyping, and that is all fine and well as long as we stick to canonical rules. Unfortunately, practical considerations force us to deviate from these a bit, as we see in the next post of this series.

• a language to describe the interface of a service, with named methods, arguments and results,
• a type system for these arguments and results that maps to many possible implementation languages, thus enabling interoperability between these languages,
• a wire format (encoding) of values of these types,
• a notion of safe upgrade that allows service developers to evolve their interface with the assurance that no clients break, even in the presence of higher-order composition,
• a meta-theory of safe interface description languages and a formal proof that Candid has these properties, and
• a bunch of tools and libraries.

Blog post series overview

1. The rough idea (this post) Announcing the blog post series, and very briefly outlining what an Interface Description Language even is.
2. Safe higher-order upgrades Every can do first-order interface description languages. What makes Candid special is its support for higher-order service composition. This post also contains some general meta-theory and a Coq proof!
3. Opt is special Extending records in argument position is surprisingly tricky. Lean why, and how we solved it.
4. Language integration The point of Candid is inter-op, so let s look the various patterns of connecting Candid to your favorite programming language.
5. Quirks The maybe most interesting post in this series: Candid has a bunch of quirks (hashed field names, no tuples but sequnces, references that nobody used, and more). I ll explain some of them, why they are there, and what else we could have done. Beware: This post will be opinionated.

The rough idea The idea of an interface description language is easy to begin with. Something like

service A :  
  add : (int) -> ();
  get : () -> (int);
 

clearly communicates that a service called A provides two methods add and get, that add takes an integer as an argument, and that get returns such a number. Of course, this only captures the outer shape of the service, but not what it actually does we might assume it implements a counter of sorts, but that is not part of the Candid interface description. In order to now use the service, we also need a (low-level) transport mechanism. Candid itself does not specify that, but merely assumes that it exists, and is able to transport the name of the invoked method and a raw sequence of bytes to the service, and a response (again a raw sequence of bytes) back. Already on the Internet Computer we have two distinct transport mechanisms used are external calls via an HTTP-based RPC interface and on-chain inter-canister calls. Both are handled by the service in the same way. Here we can see that Candid succeeds in abstracting over differences in the low-level transport mechanism. Because of this abstraction, it is possible to use Candid over other transportation mechanisms as well (conventional HTTPS, E-Mail, avian carrier). I think Candid has potential there as well, so even if you are not interested in the Internet Computer, this post may be interesting to you. The translation of argument and result values (e.g. numbers of type int) to the raw sequence of bytes is specified by Candid, defining a wire format. For example, the type int denotes whole numbers of arbitrary size, and they are encoded using the LEB128 scheme. The Candid wire format also contains a magic number (DIDL, which is 0x4449444c in hex) and a type description (more on that later). So when passing the value 2342 to the add, the raw bytes transported will be 0x4449444c00017da612. Of course we want to transfer more data than just integers, and thus Candid supports a fairly complete set of common basic types (nat, int, nat8, nat16, nat32, nat64, int8, int16, int32, int64, float32, float64, bool, text, blob) and composite types (vectors, optional values , records and variants). The design goal is to provide a canonical set of types enough to express most data that you might want to pass, but no more than needed, so that different host languages can support these types easily. The Candid type system is structural. This means that two types are the same when they are defined the same way. Imagine two different services defining the same

type User = record   name : text; user_id : nat  

then although User is defined in two places, it s still the same type. In other words, these name type definitions are always just simple aliases, and what matters is their right-hand side. Because Candid types can be recursive (e.g. type Peano = opt Peano), this means we have an equirecursive type system, which makes some things relatively hard. So far, nothing too special about Candid compared to other interface definition languages (although a structural equirecursive type system is already something). In the next post we look at reference types, and how such higher order features make Candid an interesting technology.

LTS This is my sixth month of working for LTS. I was assigned 12 hrs and worked all of them.

Released DLAs

1. DLA 2742-1 ffmpeg_7:3.2.15-0+deb9u3
   • CVE-2020-22036: A heap-based Buffer Overflow vulnerability in filter_intra at libavfilter/vf_bwdif.c, which might lead to memory corruption and other potential consequences.
   • CVE-2020-22032: A heap-based Buffer Overflow vulnerability in gaussian_blur, which might lead to memory corruption and other potential consequences.
   • CVE-2020-22031: A Heap-based Buffer Overflow vulnerability in filter16_complex_low, which might lead to memory corruption and other potential consequences.
   • CVE-2020-22028: Buffer Overflow vulnerability in filter_vertically_8 at libavfilter/vf_avgblur.c, which could cause a remote Denial of Service.
   • CVE-2020-22026: Buffer Overflow vulnerability exists in the config_input function at libavfilter/af_tremolo.c, which could let a remote malicious user cause a Denial of Service.
   • CVE-2020-22025: A heap-based Buffer Overflow vulnerability exists in gaussian_blur at libavfilter/vf_edgedetect.c, which might lead to memory corruption and other potential consequences.
   • CVE-2020-22023: A heap-based Buffer Overflow vulnerabililty exists in filter_frame at libavfilter/vf_bitplanenoise.c, which might lead to memory corruption and other potential consequences.
   • CVE-2020-22022: A heap-based Buffer Overflow vulnerability exists in filter_frame at libavfilter/vf_fieldorder.c, which might lead to memory corruption and other potential consequences.
   • CVE-2020-22021: Buffer Overflow vulnerability at filter_edges function in libavfilter/vf_yadif.c, which could let a remote malicious user cause a Denial of Service.
   • CVE-2020-22020: Buffer Overflow vulnerability in the build_diff_map function in libavfilter/vf_fieldmatch.c, which could let a remote malicious user cause a Denial of Service.
   • CVE-2020-22016: A heap-based Buffer Overflow vulnerability at libavcodec/get_bits.h when writing .mov files, which might lead to memory corruption and other potential consequences.
   • CVE-2020-22015: Buffer Overflow vulnerability in mov_write_video_tag due to the out of bounds in libavformat/movenc.c, which could let a remote malicious user obtain sensitive information, cause a Denial of Service, or execute arbitrary code.
   • CVE-2020-21041: Buffer Overflow vulnerability exists via apng_do_inverse_blend in libavcodec/pngenc.c, which could let a remote malicious user cause a Denial of Service
   • CVE-2021-3566: The tty demuxer did not have a read_probe function assigned to it. By crafting a legitimate ffconcat file that references an image, followed by a file the triggers the tty demuxer, the contents of the second file will be copied into the output file verbatim (as long as the -vcodec copy option is passed to ffmpeg).
   • CVE-2021-38114: libavcodec/dnxhddec.c does not check the return value of the init_vlc function. Crafted DNxHD data can cause unspecified impact.
2. DLA 2742-2 ffmpeg_7:3.2.15-0+deb9u4 During the backporting of one of patches in CVE-2020-22021 one line was wrongly interpreted and it caused the regression during the deinterlacing process. Thanks to Jari Ruusu for the reporting the issue and for the testing of prepared update.

Other LTS-related work

• Analyzed CVE-2020-22027 and marked as ignored for stretch. Original patch is not appliable. The issue is reproducible though.
• Analyzed CVE-2020-22019 and marked as ignored for stretch.
• Analyzed CVE-2020-22017 and marked as ignored for stretch.
• Updated tomcat8-LTS-salsa-repo to tne newer 8.5.54-0+deb9u7 version.
• Minor WIKI update.
• Frontdesk duties CW33/2021. It was my fist attempt to do such kind of task. I triaged apache2 and gitit.
• Analyzed CVEs in firmware-nonfree.
• Started to work on rustc.

LTS-Meeting

• I attended the Debian LTS team Jitsi-meeting (though the connection was extremely bad).
• Partly participated in preparation of Debconf21 BoF Funding Projects to Improve Debian .

Debian Science Team

• Partly participated in Debconf21 Debian Science BoF.

Other FLOSS activities

• Reviewed many merge requests in Yade open source project, merge some of them.

The Debian Janitor is an automated system that commits fixes for (minor) issues in Debian packages that can be fixed by software. It gradually started proposing merges in early December. The first set of changes sent out ran lintian-brush on sid packages maintained in Git. This post is part of a series about the progress of the Janitor. Linux distributions like Debian fulfill an important function in the FOSS ecosystem - they are system integrators that take existing free and open source software projects and adapt them where necessary to work well together. They also make it possible for users to install more software in an easy and consistent way and with some degree of quality control and review. One of the consequences of this model is that the distribution package often lags behind upstream releases. This is especially true for distributions that have tighter integration and standardization (such as Debian), and often new upstream code is only imported irregularly because it is a manual process - both updating the package, but also making sure that it still works together well with the rest of the system. The process of importing a new upstream used to be (well, back when I started working on Debian packages) fairly manual and something like this:

• Go to the upstream s homepage, find the tarball and signature and verify the tarball
• Make modifications so the tarball matches Debian s format
• Diff the original and new upstream tarballs and figure out whether changes are reasonable and which require packaging changes
• Update the packaging, changelog, build and manually test the package
• Upload

Ecosystem Improvements However, there have been developments over the last decade that make it easier to import new upstream releases into Debian packages.

Uscan and debian QA watch Uscan and debian/watch have been around for a while and make it possible to find upstream tarballs. A debian watch file usually looks something like this:

1 2	version=4 http://somesite.com/dir/filenamewithversion.tar.gz

The QA watch service regularly polls all watch locations in the archive and makes the information available, so it s possible to know which packages have changed without downloading each one of them.

Git Git is fairly ubiquitous nowadays, and most upstream projects and packages in Debian use it. There are still exceptions that do not use any version control system or that use a different control system, but they are becoming increasingly rare. [1]

debian/upstream/metadata DEP-12 specifies a file format with metadata about the upstream project that a package was based on. In particular relevant for our case is the fact it has fields for the location of the upstream version control location. debian/upstream/metadata files look something like this:

1 2 3

--- Repository: https://www.dulwich.io/code/dulwich/ Repository-Browse: https://www.dulwich.io/code/dulwich/

While DEP-12 is still a draft, it has already been widely adopted - there are about 10000 packages in Debian that ship a debian/upstream/metadata file with Repository information.

Autopkgtest The Autopkgtest standard and associated tooling provide a way to run a defined set of tests against an installed package. This makes it possible to verify that a package is working correctly as part of the system as a whole. ci.debian.net regularly runs these tests against Debian packages to detect regressions.

Vcs-Git headers The Vcs-Git headers in debian/control are the equivalent of the Repository field in debian/upstream/metadata, but for the packaging repositories (as opposed to the upstream ones). They ve been around for a while and are widely adopted, as can be seen from zack s stats: The vcswatch service that regularly polls packaging repositories to see whether they have changed makes it a lot easier to consume this information in usable way.

Debhelper adoption Over the last couple of years, Debian has slowly been converging on a single build tool - debhelper s dh interface. Being able to rely on a single build tool makes it easier to write code to update packaging when upstream changes require it.

Debhelper DWIM Debhelper (and its helpers) increasingly can figure out how to do the Right Thing in many cases without being explicitly configured. This makes packaging less effort, but also means that it s less likely that importing a new upstream version will require updates to the packaging. With all of these improvements in place, it actually becomes feasible in a lot of situations to update a Debian package to a new upstream version automatically. Of course, this requires that all of this information is available, so it won t work for all packages. In some cases, the packaging for the older upstream version might not apply to the newer upstream version. The Janitor has attempted to import a new upstream Git snapshot and a new upstream release for every package in the archive where a debian/watch file or debian/upstream/metadata file are present. These are the steps it uses:

• Find new upstream version

  • If release, use debian/watch - or maybe tagged in upstream repository
  • If snapshot, use debian/upstream/metadata s Repository field
  • If neither is available, use guess-upstream-metadata from upstream-ontologist to guess the upstream Repository

• Merge upstream version into packaging repository, possibly importing tarballs using pristine-tar
• Update the changelog file to mention the new upstream version

• Run some checks to ensure there are no unintentional changes, e.g.:

  • Scan diff between old and new for surprising license changes

    • Today, abort if there are any - in the future, maybe update debian/copyright

  • Check for obvious compatibility breaks - e.g. sonames changing

• Attempt to update the packaging to reflect upstream changes

  • Refresh patches

• Attempt to build the package with deb-fix-build, to deal with any missing dependencies
• Run the autopkgtests with deb-fix-build to deal with missing dependencies, and abort if any tests fail

Results When run over all packages in unstable (sid), this process works for a surprising number of them.

Fresh Releases For fresh-releases (aka imports of upstream releases), processing all packages maintained in Git for which QA watch reports new releases (about 11,000): That means about 2300 packages updated, and about 4000 unchanged.

Fresh Snapshots For fresh-snapshots (aka imports of latest Git commit from upstream), processing all packages maintained in Git (about 26,000): Or 5100 packages updated and 2100 for which there was nothing to do, i.e. no upstream commits since the last Debian upload. As can be seen, this works for a surprising fraction of packages. It s possible to get the numbers up even higher, by both improving the tooling, the autopkgtests and the metadata that is provided by packages.

1
2
3
4
5
6

echo deb "[arch=amd64 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/debian-janitor-archive-keyring.gpg]" \
    https://janitor.debian.net/ fresh-snapshots main   sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/fresh-snapshots.list
echo deb "[arch=amd64 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/debian-janitor-archive-keyring.gpg]" \
    https://janitor.debian.net/ fresh-releases main   sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/fresh-releases.list
sudo curl -o /usr/share/keyrings/debian-janitor-archive-keyring.gpg https://janitor.debian.net/pgp_keys
apt update

1

apt install -t fresh-snapshots r-cran-roxygen2

• Abhijith PA did 5.0h (out of 7h assigned and 3h remaining), thus carrying over 5h to August.
• Anton Gladky did 12h (out of 12h assigned).
• Ben Hutchings did 12.75h (out of 16h assigned and 2.75h from June), thus carrying over 6h to August.
• Chris Lamb did 18h (out of 18h assigned).
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did not report back about their work so we assume they did nothing (out of 39.75h assigned plus 11h from June), thus is carrying over 50.75h for August.
• Holger Levsen s work was coordinating/managing the LTS team, he did 3.5h (out of 12h assigned) and gave back 8.5h to the pool.
• Markus Koschany did 30h (out of 30h assigned and 30h from June), thus carrying over 30h to August.
• Ola Lundqvist did nothing (out of 12h assigned plus 20h from June), thus is carrying over 32h for August.
• Roberto C. S nchez did 13.5h (out of 32h assigned and 20h from June), and gave back 38.5h to the pool.
• Sylvain Beucler did 30h (out of 30h assigned).
• Thorsten Alteholz did 30h (out of 30h assigned).
• Utkarsh Gupta did 39.75h (out of 39.75h assigned).

• Platinum sponsors:
  • TOSHIBA (for 71 months)
  • GitHub (for 62 months)
  • Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) (for 39 months)
• Gold sponsors:
  • Roche Diagnostics International AG (for 82 months)
  • Linode (for 76 months)
  • Babiel GmbH (for 65 months)
  • Plat Home (for 65 months)
  • University of Oxford (for 21 months)
  • Deveryware (for 8 months)
  • VyOS
• Silver sponsors:
  • The Positive Internet Company (for 87 months)
  • Domeneshop AS (for 86 months)
  • Nantes M tropole (for 80 months)
  • Univention GmbH (for 72 months)
  • Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 72 months)
  • Ribbon Communications, Inc. (for 66 months)
  • Exonet B.V. (for 56 months)
  • Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 50 months)
  • CINECA (for 39 months)
  • Minist re de l Europe et des Affaires trang res (for 33 months)
  • Cloudways Ltd (for 23 months)
  • Dinahosting SL (for 21 months)
  • Bauer Xcel Media Deutschland KG (for 15 months)
  • Platform.sh (for 15 months)
  • Moxa Intelligence Co., Ltd. (for 9 months)
  • sipgate GmbH (for 6 months)
  • OVH US LLC (for 4 months)
  • Tilburg University (for 4 months)
• Bronze sponsors:
  • Evolix (for 87 months)
  • Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 87 months)
  • Intevation GmbH (for 84 months)
  • Linuxhotel GmbH (for 84 months)
  • Daevel SARL (for 82 months)
  • Bitfolk LTD (for 81 months)
  • Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 81 months)
  • Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 80 months)
  • NUMLOG (for 80 months)
  • WinGo AG (for 80 months)
  • Ecole Centrale de Nantes LHEEA (for 76 months)
  • Entr ouvert (for 71 months)
  • Adfinis AG (for 68 months)
  • GNI MEDIA (for 63 months)
  • Laboratoire LEGI UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 63 months)
  • Tesorion (for 63 months)
  • Bearstech (for 54 months)
  • LiHAS (for 54 months)
  • People Doc (for 51 months)
  • Catalyst IT Ltd (for 49 months)
  • Demarcq SAS (for 43 months)
  • Universit Grenoble Alpes (for 29 months)
  • TouchWeb SAS (for 21 months)
  • SPiN AG (for 18 months)
  • CoreFiling (for 13 months)
  • Institut des sciences cognitives Marc Jeannerod (for 8 months)
  • Observatoire des Sciences de l Univers de Grenoble (for 5 months)