Search Results: "Martin"

11 December 2015

Antonio Terceiro: Bits from the Debian Continuous Integration project

It s been almost 2 years since the Debian Continuous Integration project has been launched, and it has proven to be a useful resource for the development of Debian. I have previously made a an introductory post, and this this is an update on the latest developments. Infrastructure upgrade Back in early 2014 when Debian CI was launched, there were less than 200 source packages with declared test suite metadata, and using a single worker machine polling the archive for updates and running tests sequentially in an infinite loop ( the simplest thing that could possibly work ) was OK-ish. Then our community started an incredible, slow and persistent effort to prepare source packages for automated testing, and we now have almost 5,000 of them. The original, over-simplistic design had to be replaced. The effort of transforming debci in a distributed system was started by Martin Pitt, who did an huge amount of work. In the latest months I was able to complete that work, to a point where I am confident in letting it run (mostly) unatended. We also had lots of contributions to the web UI from Brandon Fairchild, who was a GSOC intern in 2014, and continues to contribute to this date. All this work culminated in the migration from a single-worker model to a master/workers setup, currently with 10 worker nodes. On busy periods all of those worker nodes will go on for days with full utilization, but even then the turnaround between package upload and a test run is now a lot faster than it used to. Debian members can inspect the resource usage on those systems, as well as the length of the processing queue, by browsing to the corresponding munin instance (requires authentication via a SSL client certificated issued by sso.debian.org). The system is currenly being hosted on a Amazon EC2 account sponsored by Amazon. The setup is fully automated and reproducible. It is not fully (or at all) documented yet, but those interested should feel free to get in touch on IRC (OFTC, #debci) Testing backend changed from schroot to lxc Together with the infrastructure updates, we also switched to using lxc instead of schroot as backend. Most test suites should not be affected by this, but the default lxc settings might cause some very specific issues in a few packages. See for example #806542 ( liblinux-prctl-perl: autopkgtest failures: seccomp, capbset ) Adding support for KVM is also in the plans, and we will get to that at some point. Learn more If you want to learn more on how you can add tests for your package, a good first start is the debci online documentation (which is also available locally if you install debci ). You might also be interested in watching the live tutorial (WebM, 469 MB!) that has been presented at Debconf 15 earlier this year, full of tips and real examples from the archive. It would be awesome if someone wanted to transcribe that into a text tutorial ;-) How to get involved There are a few ways you can contribute: autodep8. if you are knowledgeable on a subset of packages that are very similar and can have their tests executed in a similar way, such as $Language libraries , you might consider writing a test metadata generator so that each package does not need to declare a debian/tests/control file explicitly, requiring only The Testsuite: header in debian/control. Ruby and Perl are already covered, and there is initial support for NodeJS. Adding support for new types of packages is very easy. See the source repository. If you manage to add support for your favorite language, please get in touch so we can discuss whitelisting the relavant packages in ci.debian.net so that they will get their tests executed even before being uploaded with the proper Testsuite: control field. autopkgtest. autopkgtest is responsible for actually running your tests, and you can use it to reproduce test runs locally. debci. debci is the system running in ci.debian.net (version 1.0, currently in testing, is exactly what is running up there, minus a version number and a changelog entry). It can also be used to have private clones of ci.debian.net, e.g. for derivatives or internal Debian-related development. See for example the Ubuntu autopkgtest site. Getting in touch For maintainer queries and general discussion: For the development of debci/autopkgtest/autodep8

28 October 2015

Martin-Éric Racine: xf86-video-geode: Last call, dernier s vice

I guess that the time has finally come to admit that, as far as upstream development is concerned, the Geode X.Org driver is reaching retirement age:
While there have indeed been recent contributions by a number of developers to keep it compilable against recent X releases, the Geode driver has accumulated too much cruft from the Cyrix and NSC days, and it hasn't seen any active contribution from AMD in a long time. Besides, nowadays, Xserver pretty much assumes that its runs on an X driver that leverages its matching kernel driver and thus won't require root priviledges to launch. This isn't the case with the Geode driver, since it directly probes FBDEV and MSR, both of which reside in /dev and require root priviledges to access.
On Debian, as a stopgap measure, the package now Recommends a legacy wrapper that enforces operation as root. Meanwhile, other distributions are mercilessly droping all X drivers that don't leverage KMS. Basically, unless a miracle happens really quick, Geode will soon become unusable on X.
Back when AMD was still involved, a concensus had been reached that, since the Geode series doesn't offer any sort of advanced graphic capabilities, the most sensible option would indeed be to make a KMS driver and let Xserver use its generic modeline driver on top of that, then drop the Geode X driver entirely. Amazingly enough, someone did start working on a KMS driver for Geode LX, but it never made it as far as the Linux kernel tree (additionally, Gitorious seems to be down, but I have a copy of the driver's Git tree on hand, if anyone is interested). While I'll still be accepting and merging patches to the Geode X driver, our best long-term option would be to finalize the KMS driver and have it merged into Linux ASAP.

18 October 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 25 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Niko Tyni wrote a new patch adding support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in Pod::Man. This would complement or replace the previously implemented POD_MAN_DATE environment variable in a more generic way. Niko Tyni proposed a fix to prevent mtime variation in directories due to debhelper usage of cp --parents -p. Packages fixed The following 119 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: aac-tactics, aafigure, apgdiff, bin-prot, boxbackup, calendar, camlmix, cconv, cdist, cl-asdf, cli-common, cluster-glue, cppo, cvs, esdl, ess, faucc, fauhdlc, fbcat, flex-old, freetennis, ftgl, gap, ghc, git-cola, globus-authz-callout-error, globus-authz, globus-callout, globus-common, globus-ftp-client, globus-ftp-control, globus-gass-cache, globus-gass-copy, globus-gass-transfer, globus-gram-client, globus-gram-job-manager-callout-error, globus-gram-protocol, globus-gridmap-callout-error, globus-gsi-callback, globus-gsi-cert-utils, globus-gsi-credential, globus-gsi-openssl-error, globus-gsi-proxy-core, globus-gsi-proxy-ssl, globus-gsi-sysconfig, globus-gss-assist, globus-gssapi-error, globus-gssapi-gsi, globus-net-manager, globus-openssl-module, globus-rsl, globus-scheduler-event-generator, globus-xio-gridftp-driver, globus-xio-gsi-driver, globus-xio, gnome-control-center, grml2usb, grub, guilt, hgview, htmlcxx, hwloc, imms, kde-l10n, keystone, kimwitu++, kimwitu-doc, kmod, krb5, laby, ledger, libcrypto++, libopendbx, libsyncml, libwps, lprng-doc, madwimax, maria, mediawiki-math, menhir, misery, monotone-viz, morse, mpfr4, obus, ocaml-csv, ocaml-reins, ocamldsort, ocp-indent, openscenegraph, opensp, optcomp, opus, otags, pa-bench, pa-ounit, pa-test, parmap, pcaputils, perl-cross-debian, prooftree, pyfits, pywavelets, pywbem, rpy, signify, siscone, swtchart, tipa, typerep, tyxml, unison2.32.52, unison2.40.102, unison, uuidm, variantslib, zipios++, zlibc, zope-maildrophost. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Packages which could not be tested: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: Lunar reported that test strings depend on default character encoding of the build system in ongl. reproducible.debian.net The 189 packages composing the Arch Linux core repository are now being tested. No packages are currently reproducible, but most of the time the difference is limited to metadata. This has already gained some interest in the Arch Linux community. An explicit log message is now visible when a build has been killed due to the 12 hours timeout. (h01ger) Remote build setup has been made more robust and self maintenance has been further improved. (h01ger) The minimum age for rescheduling of already tested amd64 packages has been lowered from 14 to 7 days, thanks to the increase of hardware resources sponsored by ProfitBricks last week. (h01ger) diffoscope development diffoscope version 37 has been released on October 15th. It adds support for two new file formats (CBFS images and Debian .dsc files). After proposing the required changes to TLSH, fuzzy hashes are now computed incrementally. This will avoid reading entire files in memory which caused problems for large packages. New tests have been added for the command-line interface. More character encoding issues have been fixed. Malformed md5sums will now be compared as binary files instead of making diffoscope crash amongst several other minor fixes. Version 38 was released two days later to fix the versioned dependency on python3-tlsh. strip-nondeterminism development strip-nondeterminism version 0.013-1 has been uploaded to the archive. It fixes an issue with nonconformant PNG files with trailing garbage reported by Roland Rosenfeld. disorderfs development disorderfs version 0.4.1-1 is a stop-gap release that will disable lock propagation, unless --share-locks=yes is specified, as it still is affected by unidentified issues. Documentation update Lunar has been busy creating a proper website for reproducible-builds.org that would be a common location for news, documentation, and tools for all free software projects working on reproducible builds. It's not yet ready to be published, but it's surely getting there. Homepage of the future reproducible-builds.org website Who's involved? page of the future reproducible-builds.org website Package reviews 103 reviews have been removed, 394 added and 29 updated this week. 72 FTBFS issues were reported by Chris West and Niko Tyni. New issues: random_order_in_static_libraries, random_order_in_md5sums.

15 October 2015

Wouter Verhelst: On Planet Debian and the Code of Conduct

I am not going to talk about Norbert Preining's continuous ranting against Debian's Code of Conduct. Suffice to say that it annoys me, and that I think he is wrong. I am, however going to mention that contrary to his statements (penultimate paragraph), yes, the Code of Conduct is supposed to apply to Planet Debian as well. Its introductory paragraph states:
The Debian Project, the producers of the Debian system, have adopted a code of conduct for participants to its mailinglists, IRC channels and other modes of communication within the project.
Note the "other modes of communication within the project" bit. Planet Debian is planet.debian.org. If your blog is aggregated there, you are communicating within the project. At least that's my interpretation of it.

14 October 2015

Norbert Preining: On Lars Wirzenius, Mart n Ferrari, and Debian

Now that the tsunami that followed my recent blog post has passed, I can read through all the nice comments and blogs of other people. I didn t expect that just writing up some links to posts on LKML, plus adding my personal opinion on what has happened and about my interpretation concerning Debian could gather so much attention. Anyway, let us look at the blog posts written in the aftermath. debian-newspeak-coc In particular do I want to answer to two blogs: Lars Wirzenius blog and Mart n Ferrari s blog, both of which are excellent examples of insults. I also want to mention that although the previous two are bad examples, there are fortunately also those who are able to resist primitive insults, in particular Gunnar Wolf (direct link to the blog does not work), and Miriam Ruiz blog, which contradict my blog and propose a different view, without pulling the knife. Lars Wirzenius Let us start with Lars (ah sorry, I have to call him Wirzenius here, strange custom has suddenly popped up in Debian!):
I think Preining mis-characterises what happens on the Linux kernel mailing list, and in Debian, in free software development in general, and what Sarah Sharp has said and done. I continue to think he is wrong about everything on this topic.
I am very surprised that Lars^WWirzenius is in possession of a crystal ball that allows him to see and evaluate my attitude towards all these items, considering that I have presented links to posts on the LKML, and yes, my interpretation of the matter. Mind that the whole text amounts to about 130 lines on my screen, while my personal opinion was stated in two paragraphs of total 9 lines plus some interspersed comments. And in these maybe 20 lines I didn t make general statements about open source, kernel development etc etc. Lars, I know you have closed your blog for comments so I couldn t ask you but please, can you send me one of your crystal balls if you have more of them? At least he has managed to keep a bit of proper writing and disagreed with my statement on Debian (whether there is fun or not in Debian). He is of course free to do that, but please, don t rob me the right to state that I think Debian has changed. All this dispute centers around people not being capable to distinguish two things: One, being against the Code of Conduct due to the inclusion of administrative actions without clear definitions, and Two, being pro offensive behavior and and insults. Now, dear Lars^WWirzenius, please listen: I never advocated abusive behavior or insults, nor do I defend it. (Did you hear that!) I simply opposed the Code of Conduct as ruling instrument. And what kind of emails I got due to my opposition was far outside the Code of Conduct you are so strongly defending. So please, stay at the facts, and stop insulting me. Thanks. Mart n Ferrari Concerning Mart n I don t have much to say but please, stop spreading lies. You stated:
Once again, he s complaining about how the fun from Debian has been lost because making sexist jokes, or treating other people like shit is not allowed any more.
Could you please come up with a reference to this? Or are you just interpreting? I am very disappointed about this level of discussion between Debian Developers. You not even cared to answer my comment on your blog. Should I say something clear here you should be happy that this has not been written on a Debian mailing list, otherwise I hope the Code of Conduct hammer would hit you.
So yes, it seems that at least these two blogs underline exactly what my opinion is: Communication culture in Debian has changed to be more company-like. Probably due to the ever increasing amount of developers that are paid for their work on Debian (Ubuntu), the pressure to follow US company codes has taken a firm grip, so firm that even stating my diverging opinion is already enough to get branded. Good Future!

1 October 2015

Mike Gabriel: My FLOSS activities in August/September 2015

Here comes my "monthly" FLOSS report for August and September 2015. As 50% of August 2015 had been dedicated to taking some time off (spending time in Sweden with the family), it happened that even more workload had to be processed in September 2015. Received Sponsorship My monthly 8h portion of working for the Debian LTS project I had to dispatch from August into September. Thus, I received 16h of paid work for working on Debian LTS in September 2015. For details, see below. Thanks to Raphael Hertzog for having me on the team [1]. Thanks to all the people and companies sponsoring the Debian LTS Team's work. The development of GOsa Plugin SchoolManager (for details, see below) was done on contract for a school in Nothern Germany. The code will be released under the same license as the GOsa software itself. Completion of MATE 1.10 in Debian testing/unstable and Ubuntu 15.10 In the first half of September all MATE 1.10 packages finally landed in Debian testing (aka stretch). Martin Wimpress handled most of the packaging changes, whereas my main job was being reviewer and uploader of his efforts. Thanks to John Paul Adrian Glaubitz for jumping in as reviewer and uploader during my vacation time. read more

24 September 2015

Joachim Breitner: The Incredible Proof Machine

In a few weeks, I will have the opportunity to offer a weekend workshop to selected and motivated high school students1 to a topic of my choice. My idea is to tell them something about logic, proofs, and the joy of searching and finding proofs, and the gratification of irrevocable truths. While proving things on paper is already quite nice, it is much more fun to use an interactive theorem prover, such as Isabelle, Coq or Agda: You get immediate feedback, you can experiment and play around if you are stuck, and you get lots of small successes. Someone2 once called interactive theorem proving the worlds most geekiest videogame . Unfortunately, I don t think one can get high school students without any prior knowledge in logic, or programming, or fancy mathematical symbols, to do something meaningful with a system like Isabelle, so I need something that is (much) easier to use. I always had this idea in the back of my head that proving is not so much about writing text (as in normally written proofs) or programs (as in Agda) or labeled statements (as in Hilbert-style proofs), but rather something involving facts that I have proven so far floating around freely, and way to combine these facts to new facts, without the need to name them, or put them in a particular order or sequence. In a way, I m looking for labVIEW wrestled through the Curry-Horward-isomorphism. Something like this:
A proof of implication currying

A proof of implication currying

So I set out, rounded up a few contributors (Thanks!), implemented this, and now I proudly present: The Incredible Proof Machine3 This interactive theorem prover allows you to do perform proofs purely by dragging blocks (representing proof steps) onto the paper and connecting them properly. There is no need to learn syntax, and hence no frustration about getting that wrong. Furthermore, it comes with a number of example tasks to experiment with, so you can simply see it as a challenging computer came and work through them one by one, learning something about the logical connectives and how they work as you go. For the actual workshop, my plan is to let the students first try to solve the tasks of one session on their own, let them draw their own conclusions and come up with an idea of what they just did, and then deliver an explanation of the logical meaning of what they did. The implementation is heavily influenced by Isabelle: The software does not know anything about, say, conjunction ( ) and implication ( ). To the core, everything is but an untyped lambda expression, and when two blocks are connected, it does unification4 of the proposition present on either side. This general framework is then instantiated by specifying the basic rules (or axioms) in a descriptive manner. It is quite feasible to implement other logics or formal systems on top of this as well. Another influence of Isabelle is the non-linear editing: You neither have to create the proof in a particular order nor have to manually manage a proof focus . Instead, you can edit any bit of the proof at any time, and the system checks all of it continuously. As always, I am keen on feedback. Also, if you want to use this for your own teaching or experimenting needs, let me know. We have a mailing list for the project, the code is on GitHub, where you can also file bug reports and feature requests. Contributions are welcome! All aspects of the logic are implemented in Haskell and compiled to JavaScript using GHCJS, the UI is plain hand-written and messy JavaScript code, using JointJS to handle the graph interaction. Obviously, there is still plenty that can be done to improve the machine. In particular, the ability to create your own proof blocks, such as proof by contradiction, prove them to be valid and then use them in further proofs, is currently being worked on. And while the page will store your current progress, including all proofs you create, in your browser, it needs better ways to save, load and share tasks, blocks and proofs. Also, we d like to add some gamification, i.e. achievements ( First proof by contradiction , 50 theorems proven ), statistics, maybe a share theorem on twitter button. As the UI becomes more complicated, I d like to investigating moving more of it into Haskell world and use Functional Reactive Programming, i.e. Ryan Trickle s reflex, to stay sane. Customers who liked The Incredible Proof Machine might also like these artifacts, that I found while looking whether something like this exists:
  1. Students with migration background supported by the START scholarship
  2. Does anyone know the reference?
  3. We almost named it Proofcraft , which would be a name our current Minecraft-wild youth would appreciate, but it is alreay taken by Gerwin Kleins blog. Also, the irony of a theorem prover being in-credible is worth something.
  4. Luckily, two decades ago, Tobias Nipkow published a nice implementation of higher order pattern unification as ML code, which I transliterated to Haskell for this project.

9 September 2015

Mike Gabriel: MATE 1.10 has fully arrived in Debian unstable

Yesterday, I uploaded the last missing piece for fully having MATE Desktop Environment 1.10 in Debian unstable and soon in Debian stretch and Ubuntu 15.10. Providing MATE in Debian is, in the first place, a team effort. People from four Linux distributions plus the developers from upstream work on providing the MATE experience to the users of Debian. There are many people to thank. This time I will only mention two of them. Two guys that have worked really hard on the MATE 1.10 release in Debian: Martin Wimpress (from the Ubuntu MATE team, aka flexiondotorg) and Vlad Orlov (from MATE upstream, aka monsta). May the MATE Desktop Environment be of use to all of you... light+love,
Mike (aka sunweaver)

1 September 2015

Raphaël Hertzog: My Free Software Activities in August 2015

My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donators (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me. Debian LTS This month I have been paid to work 6.5 hours on Debian LTS. In that time I did the following: Apart from that, I also gave a talk about Debian LTS at DebConf 15 in Heidelberg and also coordinated a work session to discuss our plans for Wheezy. Have a look at the video recordings: DebConf 15 I attended DebConf 15 with great pleasure after having missed DebConf 14 last year. While I did not do lots of work there, I participated in many discussions and I certainly came back with a renewed motivation to work on Debian. That s always good. :-) For the concrete work I did during DebConf, I can only claim two schroot uploads to fix the lack of support of the new overlay filesystem that replaces aufs in the official Debian kernel, and some Distro Tracker work (fixing an issue that some people had when they were logged in via Debian s SSO). While the numerous discussions I had during DebConf can t be qualified as work , they certainly contribute to build up work plans for the future: As a Kali developer, I attended multiple sessions related to derivatives (notably the Debian Derivatives Panel). I was also interested by the Debian in the corporate IT BoF led by Michael Meskes (Credativ s CEO). He pointed out a number of problems that corporate users might have when they first consider using Debian and we will try to do something about this. Expect further news and discussions on the topic. Martin Kraff, Luca Filipozzi, and me had a discussion with the Debian Project Leader (Neil) about how to revive/transform the Debian s Partner program. Nothing is fleshed out yet, but at least the process initiated by the former DPL (Lucas) is again moving forward. Other Debian work Sponsorship. I sponsored an NMU of pep8 by Daniel Stender as it was a requirement for prospector which I also sponsored since all the required dependencies are now available in Debian. \o/ Packaging. I NMUed libxml2 2.9.2+really2.9.1+dfsg1-0.1 fixing 3 security issues and a RC bug that was breaking publican. Since there s no upstream fix for more than 8 months, I went back to the former version 2.9.1. It s in line with the new requirement of release managers a package in unstable should migrate to testing reasonably quickly, it s not acceptable to keep it unfixed for months. With this annoying bug fixed, I could again upload a new upstream release of publican so I prepared and uploaded 4.3.2-1. It was my first source only upload. This release was more work than I expected and I filed no less than 3 bug to upstream (new bash-completion install path, request to provide sources of a minified javascript file, drop a .po file for an invalid language code). GPG issues with smartcard. Back from DebConf, when I wanted to sign some key, I stumbled again upon the problem which makes it impossible for me to use my two smartcards one after the other without first deleting the stubs for the private key. It s not a new issue but I decided that it was time to report it upstream, so I did it: #2079 on bugs.gnupg.org. Some research helped me to find a way to work-around the problem. Later in the month, after a dist-upgrade and a reboot, I was no longer able to use my smartcard as a SSH authentication key again it was already reported but there was no clear analysis, so I tried to do my own one and added the results of my investigation in #795368. It looks like the culprit is pinentry-gnome3 not working when started by the gpg-agent which is started before the DBUS session. Simple fix is to restart the gpg-agent in the session but I have no idea yet of what the proper fix should be (letting systemd manage the graphical user session and start gpg-agent would be my first answer, but that doesn t solve the issue for users of other init systems so it s not satisfying). Distro Tracker. I merged two patches from Orestis Ioannou fixing some bugs tagged newcomer. There are more such bugs (I even filed two: #797096 and #797223), go grab them and do a first contribution to Distro Tracker like Orestis just did! I also merged a change from Christophe Siraut who presented Distro Tracker at DebConf. I implemented in Distro Tracker the new authentication based on SSL client certificates that was recently announced by Enrico Zini. It s working nice, and this authentication scheme is far easier to support. Good job, Enrico! tracker.debian.org broke during DebConf, it stopped being updated with new data. I tracked this down to a problem in the archive (see #796892). Apparently Ansgar Burchardt changed the set of compression tools used on some jessie repositorie, replacing bz2 by xz. He dropped the old Packages.bz2 but missed some Sources.bz2 which were thus stale and APT reported Hashsum mismatch on the uncompressed content. Misc. I pushed some small improvement to my Salt formulas: schroot-formula and sbuild-formula. They will now auto-detect which overlay filesystem is available with the current kernel (previously aufs was hardcoded). Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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30 August 2015

DebConf team: DebConf15: Farewell, and thanks for all the Fisch (Posted by DebConf Team)

A week ago, we concluded our biggest DebConf ever! It was a huge success. Handwritten feedback note We are overwhelmed by the positive feedback, for which we re very grateful. We want to thank you all for participating in the talks; speakers and audience alike, in person or live over the global Internet it wouldn t be the fantastic DebConf experience without you! Many of our events were recorded and streamed live, and are now available for viewing, as are the slides and photos. To share a sense of the scale of what all of us accomplished together, we ve compiled a few statistics: Our very own designer Valessio Brito made a lovely video of impressions and images of the conference.
We re collecting impressions from attendees as well as links to press articles, including Linux Weekly News coverage of specific sessions of DebConf. If you find something not yet included, please help us by adding links to the wiki.
DebConf15 group photo (by Aigars Mahinovs)
We tried a few new ideas this year, including a larger number of invited and featured speakers than ever before. On the Open Weekend, some of our sponsors presented their career opportunities at our job fair, which was very well attended. And a diverse selection of entertainment options provided the necessary breaks and ample opportunity for socialising. On the last Friday, the Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour was screened, with some introductory remarks by Jacob Appelbaum and a remote address by its director, Laura Poitras, and followed by a long Q&A session by Jacob. DebConf15 was also the first DebConf with organised childcare (including a Teckids workshop for kids of age 8-16), which our DPL Neil McGovern standardised for the future: it s a thing now, he said. The participants used the week before the conference for intensive work, sprints and workshops, and throughout the main conference, significant progress was made on Debian and Free Software. Possibly the most visible was the endeavour to provide reproducible builds, but the planning of the next stable release stretch received no less attention. Groups like the Perl team, the diversity outreach programme and even DebConf organisation spent much time together discussing next steps and goals, and hundreds of commits were made to the archive, as well as bugs closed. DebConf15 was an amazing conference, it brought together hundreds of people, some oldtimers as well as plenty of new contributors, and we all had a great time, learning and collaborating with each other, says Margarita Manterola of the organiser team, and continues: The whole team worked really hard, and we are all very satisfied with the outcome. Another organiser, Martin Krafft adds: We mainly provided the infrastructure and space. A lot of what happened during the two weeks was thanks to our attendees. And that s what makes DebConf be DebConf. Photo of hostel staff wearing DebConf15 staff t-shirts (by Martin Krafft) Our organisation was greatly supported by the staff of the conference venue, the Jugendherberge Heidelberg International, who didn t take very long to identify with our diverse group, and who left no wishes untried. The venue itself was wonderfully spacious and never seemed too full as people spread naturally across the various conference rooms, the many open areas, the beergarden, the outside hacklabs and the lawn. The network installed specifically for our conference in collaboration with the nearby university, the neighbouring zoo, and the youth hostel provided us with a 1 Gbps upstream link, which we managed to almost saturate. The connection will stay in place, leaving the youth hostel as one with possibly the fastest Internet connection in the state. And the kitchen catered high-quality food to all attendees and their special requirements. Regional beer and wine, as well as local specialities, were provided at the bistro. DebConf exists to bring people together, which includes paying for travel, food and accomodation for people who could not otherwise attend. We would never have been able to achieve what we did without the support of our generous sponsors, especially our Platinum Sponsor Hewlett-Packard. Thank you very much. See you next year in Cape Town, South Africa!
The DebConf16 logo with white background

16 August 2015

Ben Armstrong: McIntosh Run Hike the Greenbelt event, August 2015

Just came back from a wonderful time hiking with my daughter at the finale Hike the Greenbelt event at the Backlands/McIntosh Run! This photo slideshow is from my HP snapshot camera which unfortunately has dust in the lens. But I felt it was more important to get them up soon than to get them perfect, so please click the photo below to start the slideshow. I want to thank everyone who made this event a success, and not going to name specific names as I m sure I ll miss someone important. But thanks especially to Martin, the leader of our group. [slb_group]
Marcos Zentilli explaining geology of the region. Click photo to start slideshow.Marcos Zentilli explaining geology of the region. Click photo to start slideshow.
Barrens Barrens Barrens Barrens DIGITAL CAMERA Jack Pine in Jack Pine ;) DIGITAL CAMERA DIGITAL CAMERA DIGITAL CAMERA DIGITAL CAMERA Part of the waterway DIGITAL CAMERA DIGITAL CAMERA DIGITAL CAMERA DIGITAL CAMERA DIGITAL CAMERA DIGITAL CAMERA DIGITAL CAMERA DIGITAL CAMERA DIGITAL CAMERA DIGITAL CAMERA DIGITAL CAMERA DIGITAL CAMERA DIGITAL CAMERA
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5 August 2015

DebConf team: DebConf15 registrations temporarily closed due to immense popularity (Posted by Martin Krafft)

The interest to participate in DebConf15, which will start in 10 days, has been overwhelming. Thank you so much! We planned the conference for 350 people and we now expect more than 570. This is fantastic and a wonderful support and encouragement for Debian and its contributors. But we are getting to the point where we have to prioritise considerations about the capacity of the venue and the safety of our attendees. We ve therefore had to close registrations until we have evaluated further options for accomodating even more attendees. For those of you who did not register for DebConf on time, but still want to participate, please bear with us and make sure to check back soon.

26 July 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 13 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes akira uploaded a new version of doxygen in the experimental reproducible repository incorporating upstream patch for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH, and now producing timezone independent timestamps. Dhole updated Peter De Wachter's patch on ghostscript to use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH and use UTC as a timezone. A modified package is now being experimented. Packages fixed The following 14 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: bino, cfengine2, fwknop, gnome-software, jnr-constants, libextractor, libgtop2, maven-compiler-plugin, mk-configure, nanoc, octave-splines, octave-symbolic, riece, vdr-plugin-infosatepg. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: reproducible.debian.net Packages identified as failing to build from source with no bugs filed and older than 10 days are scheduled more often now (except in experimental). (h01ger) Package reviews 178 obsolete reviews have been removed, 59 added and 122 updated this week. New issue identified this week: random_order_in_ruby_rdoc_indices. 18 new bugs for packages failing to build from sources have been reported by Chris West (Faux), and h01ger.

24 July 2015

Martin Michlmayr: Congratulations to Stefano Zacchiroli

Stefano Zacchiroli receiving the O'Reilly Open Source Award I attended OSCON's closing sessions today and was delighted to see my friend Stefano Zacchiroli (Zack) receive an O'Reilly Open Source Award. Zack acted as Debian Project Leader for three years, is working on important activities at the Open Source Initiative and the Free Software Foundation, and is generally an amazing advocate for free software. Thanks for all your contributions, Zack, and congratulations!

21 July 2015

Martin Michlmayr: Debian archive rebuild on ARM64 with GCC 5

I recently got access to several ProLiant m400 ARM64 servers at work. Since Debian is currently working on the migration to GCC 5, I thought it would be nice to rebuild the Debian archive on ARM64 to see if GCC 5 is ready. Fortunately, I found no obvious compiler errors. During the process, I noticed several areas where ARM64 support can be improved. First, a lot of packages failed to build due to missing dependencies. Some missing dependencies are libraries or tools that have not been ported to ARM64 yet, but the majority was due to the lack of popular programming languages on ARM64. This requires upstream porting work, which I'm sure is going on already in many cases. Second, over 160 packages failed to build due to out-of-date autoconf and libtool scripts. Most of these bugs have been reported over a year ago by the ARM64 porters (Matthias Klose from Canonical/Ubuntu and Wookey from ARM/Linaro) and the PowerPC porters, but unfortunately they haven't been fixed yet. Finally, I went through all packages that list specific architectures in debian/control and filed wishlist bugs on those that looked relevant to ARM64. This actually prompted some Debian and upstream developers to implement ARM64 support, which is great!

19 July 2015

Gregor Herrmann: RC bugs 2015/17-29

after the release is before the release. or: long time no RC bug report. after the jessie release I spent most of my Debian time on work in the Debian Perl Group. we tried to get down the list of new upstream releases (from over 500 to currently 379; unfortunately the CPAN never sleeps), we were & still are busy preparing for the Perl 5.22 transition (e.g. we uploaded something between 300 & 400 packages to deal with Module::Build & CGI.pm being removed from perl core; only team-maintained packages so far), & we had a pleasant & productive sprint in Barcelona in May. & I also tried to fix some of the RC bugs in our packages which popped up over the previous months. yesterday & today I finally found some time to help with the GCC 5 transition, mostly by making QA or Non-Maintainer Uploads with patches that already were in the BTS. a big thanks especially to the team at HP which provided a couple dozens patches! & here's the list of RC bugs I've worked on in the last 3 months:

17 July 2015

John Goerzen: First steps with smartcards under Linux and Android hard, but it works

Well this has been an interesting project. It all started with a need to get better password storage at work. We wound up looking heavily at a GPG-based solution. This prompted the question: how can we make it even more secure? Well, perhaps, smartcards. The theory is this: a smartcard holds your private keys in a highly-secure piece of hardware. The PC can never actually access the private keys. Signing and decrypting operations are done directly on the card to prevent the need to export the private key material to the PC. There are lots of standards to choose from (PKCS#11, PKCS#15, and OpenPGP card specs) that are relevant here. And there are ways to use SSH and OpenVPN with some of these keys too. Access to the card is protected by a passphrase (called a PIN in smartcard lingo, even though it need not be numeric). These smartcards might be USB sticks, or cards you pop into a reader. In any case, you can pop them out when not needed, pop them in to use them, and well, pretty nice, eh? So that s the theory. Let s talk a bit of reality. First of all, it is hard for a person like me to evaluate how secure my data is in hardware. There was a high-profile bug in the OpenPGP JavaCard applet used by Yubico that caused the potential to use keys without a PIN, for instance. And how well protected is the key in the physical hardware? Granted, in most of these cards you re talking serious hardware skill to compromise them, but still, this is unknown in absolute terms. Here s the bigger problem: compatibility. There are all sorts of card readers, but compatibility with pcsc-tools and pcscd on Linux seems pretty good. But the cards themselves oh my. PKCS#11 defines an interface API, but each vendor would provide their own .so or .dll file to interface. Some cards (for instance, the ACOS5-64 mentioned on the Debian wiki!) are made by vendors that charge $50 for the privilege of getting the drivers needed to make them work and they re closed-source proprietary drivers at that. Some attempts I ordered several cards to evaluate: the OpenPGP card, specifically designed to support GPG; the ACOS5-64 card, the JavaCOS A22, the Yubikey Neo, and a simple reader listed on the GPG smartcard howto. The OpenPGP card and ACOS5-64 are the only ones in the list that support 4096-bit RSA keys due to the computational demands of them. The others all support 2048-bit RSA keys. The JavaCOS requires the user to install a JavaCard applet to the card to make it useable. The Yubico OpenPGP applet works here, along with GlobalPlatform to install it. I am not sure just how solid it is. The Yubikey Neo has yet to arrive; it integrates some interesting OAUTH and TOTP capabilities as well. I found that Debian s wiki page for smartcards lists a bunch of them that are not really useable using the tools in main. The ACOS5-64 was such a dud. But I got the JavaCOS A22 working quite nicely. It s also NFC-enabled and works perfectly with OpenKeyChain on Android (looking like a Yubikey Neo to it, once the OpenPGP applet is installed). I m impressed! Here s a way to be secure with my smartphone without revealing everything all the time. Really the large amount of time is put into figuring out how all this stuff fits together. I m getting there, but I ve got a ways to go yet. Update: Corrected to read signing and decrypting rather than signing and encrypting operations are being done on the card. Thanks to Beno t Allard for catching this error.

7 July 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 10 in Stretch cycle

What happened about the reproducible builds effort this week: Media coverage Daniel Stender published an English translation of the article which originally appeared in Linux Magazin in Admin Magazine. Toolchain fixes Fixes landed in the Debian archive: Lunar submitted to Debian the patch already sent upstream adding a --clamp-mtime option to tar. Patches have been submitted to add support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to txt2man (Reiner Herrmann), epydoc (Reiner Herrmann), GCC (Dhole), and Doxygen (akira). Dhole uploaded a new experimental debhelper to the reproducible repository which exports SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. As part of the experiment, the patch also sets TZ to UTC which should help with most timezone issues. It might still be problematic for some packages which would change their settings based on this. Mattia Rizzolo sent upstream a patch originally written by Lunar to make the generate-id() function be deterministic in libxslt. While that patch was quickly rejected by upstream, Andrew Ayer came up with a much better one which sadly could have some performance impact. Daniel Veillard replied with another patch that should be deterministic in most cases without needing extra data structures. It's impact is currently being investigated by retesting packages on reproducible.debian.net. akira added a new option to sbuild for configuring the path in which packages are built. This will be needed for the srebuild script. Niko Tyni asked Perl upstream about it using the __DATE__ and __TIME__ C processor macros. Packages fixed The following 143 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: alot, argvalidate, astroquery, blender, bpython, brian, calibre, cfourcc, chaussette, checkbox-ng, cloc, configshell, daisy-player, dipy, dnsruby, dput-ng, dsc-statistics, eliom, emacspeak, freeipmi, geant321, gpick, grapefruit, heat-cfntools, imagetooth, jansson, jmapviewer, lava-tool, libhtml-lint-perl, libtime-y2038-perl, lift, lua-ldoc, luarocks, mailman-api, matroxset, maven-hpi-plugin, mknbi, mpi4py, mpmath, msnlib, munkres, musicbrainzngs, nova, pecomato, pgrouting, pngcheck, powerline, profitbricks-client, pyepr, pylibssh2, pylogsparser, pystemmer, pytest, python-amqp, python-apt, python-carrot, python-crypto, python-darts.lib.utils.lru, python-demgengeo, python-graph, python-mock, python-musicbrainz2, python-pathtools, python-pskc, python-psutil, python-pypump, python-repoze.sphinx.autointerface, python-repoze.tm2, python-repoze.what-plugins, python-repoze.what, python-repoze.who-plugins, python-xstatic-term.js, reclass, resource-agents, rgain, rttool, ruby-aggregate, ruby-archive-tar-minitar, ruby-bcat, ruby-blankslate, ruby-coffee-script, ruby-colored, ruby-dbd-mysql, ruby-dbd-odbc, ruby-dbd-pg, ruby-dbd-sqlite3, ruby-dbi, ruby-dirty-memoize, ruby-encryptor, ruby-erubis, ruby-fast-xs, ruby-fusefs, ruby-gd, ruby-git, ruby-globalhotkeys, ruby-god, ruby-hike, ruby-hmac, ruby-integration, ruby-ipaddress, ruby-jnunemaker-matchy, ruby-memoize, ruby-merb-core, ruby-merb-haml, ruby-merb-helpers, ruby-metaid, ruby-mina, ruby-net-irc, ruby-net-netrc, ruby-odbc, ruby-packet, ruby-parseconfig, ruby-platform, ruby-plist, ruby-popen4, ruby-rchardet, ruby-romkan, ruby-rubyforge, ruby-rubytorrent, ruby-samuel, ruby-shoulda-matchers, ruby-sourcify, ruby-test-spec, ruby-validatable, ruby-wirble, ruby-xml-simple, ruby-zoom, ryu, simplejson, spamassassin-heatu, speaklater, stompserver, syncevolution, syncmaildir, thin, ticgit, tox, transmissionrpc, vdr-plugin-xine, waitress, whereami, xlsx2csv, zathura. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: reproducible.debian.net A new package set for the X Strike Force has been added. (h01ger) Bugs tagged with locale are now visible in the statistics. (h01ger) Some work has been done add tests for NetBSD. (h01ger) Many changes by Mattia Rizzolo have been merged on the whole infrastructure: debbindiff development Version 26 has been released on June 28th fixing the comparison of files of unknown format. (Lunar) A missing dependency identified in python-rpm affecting debbindiff installation without recommended packages was promptly fixed by Michal iha . Lunar also started a massive code rearchitecture to enhance code reuse and enable new features. Nothing visible yet, though. Documentation update josch and Mattia Rizzolo documented how to reschedule packages from Alioth. Package reviews 142 obsolete reviews have been removed, 344 added and 107 updated this week. Chris West (Faux) filled 13 new bugs for packages failing to build from sources. The following new issues have been added: snapshot_placeholder_replaced_with_timestamp_in_pom_properties, different_encoding, timestamps_in_documentation_generated_by_org_mode and timestamps_in_pdf_generated_by_matplotlib.

6 July 2015

Mike Gabriel: My FLOSS activities in June 2015

June 2015 has been mainly dedicated to these five fields of endeavour: Received Sponsorship Last month's contributions of mine (8h) to the Debian LTS project had been contracted by Freexian [1] again. Thanks to Raphael Hertzog for having me on the team. Thanks to all the people and companies sponsoring the Debian LTS Team's work. Also a big thanks to people from Hetzner GmbH for sponsoring my stay at X2Go: The Gathering 2015 @ Linuxhotel (in Essen, Germany). MATE 1.10 entering Debian experimental Together with Martin Wimpress from Ubuntu MATE and other people in the Debian MATE Packaging Team I managed to upload a great portion of the MATE 1.10 packages to Debian experimental. Please note that this is still work in progress. Not all MATE 1.10 packages have been uploaded yet and several packages from the MATE 1.10 series in Debian have grave bugs still (mostly packaging and installation issues). The plan is to make the complete MATE 1.10 stack available in Debian experimental by the end of July and also get all the open kinks fixed by then. Development nx-libs 3.6.x In June 2015, I have looked at various aspects of nx-libs development: read more

29 June 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 9 in Stretch cycle

What happened about the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Norbert Preining uploaded texinfo/6.0.0.dfsg.1-2 which makes texinfo indices reproducible. Original patch by Chris Lamb. Lunar submitted recently rebased patches to make the file order of files inside .deb stable. akira filled #789843 to make tex4ht stop printing timestamps in its HTML output by default. Dhole wrote a patch for xutils-dev to prevent timestamps when creating gzip compresed files. Reiner Herrmann sent a follow-up patch for wheel to use UTC as timezone when outputing timestamps. Mattia Rizzolo started a discussion regarding the failure to build from source of subversion when -Wdate-time is added to CPPFLAGS which happens when asking dpkg-buildflags to use the reproducible profile. SWIG errors out because it doesn't recognize the aforementioned flag. Trying to get the .buildinfo specification to more definitive state, Lunar started a discussion on storing the checksums of the binary package used in dpkg status database. akira discovered while proposing a fix for simgrid that CMake internal command to create tarballs would record a timestamp in the gzip header. A way to prevent it is to use the GZIP environment variable to ask gzip not to store timestamps, but this will soon become unsupported. It's up for discussion if the best place to fix the problem would be to fix it for all CMake users at once. Infrastructure-related work Andreas Henriksson did a delayed NMU upload of pbuilder which adds minimal support for build profiles and includes several fixes from Mattia Rizzolo affecting reproducibility tests. Neils Thykier uploaded lintian which both raises the severity of package-contains-timestamped-gzip and avoids false positives for this tag (thanks to Tomasz Buchert). Petter Reinholdtsen filled #789761 suggesting that how-can-i-help should prompt its users about fixing reproducibility issues. Packages fixed The following packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: autorun4linuxcd, libwildmagic, lifelines, plexus-i18n, texlive-base, texlive-extra, texlive-lang. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Untested uploaded as they are not in main: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: debbindiff development debbindiff/23 includes a few bugfixes by Helmut Grohne that result in a significant speedup (especially on larger files). It used to exhibit the quadratic time string concatenation antipattern. Version 24 was released on June 23rd in a hurry to fix an undefined variable introduced in the previous version. (Reiner Herrmann) debbindiff now has a test suite! It is written using the PyTest framework (thanks Isis Lovecruft for the suggestion). The current focus has been on the comparators, and we are now at 93% of code coverage for these modules. Several problems were identified and fixed in the process: paths appearing in output of javap, readelf, objdump, zipinfo, unsqusahfs; useless MD5 checksum and last modified date in javap output; bad handling of charsets in PO files; the destination path for gzip compressed files not ending in .gz; only metadata of cpio archives were actually compared. stat output was further trimmed to make directory comparison more useful. Having the test suite enabled a refactoring of how comparators were written, switching from a forest of differences to a single tree. This helped removing dust from the oldest parts of the code. Together with some other small changes, version 25 was released on June 27th. A follow up release was made the next day to fix a hole in the test suite and the resulting unidentified leftover from the comparator refactoring. (Lunar) Documentation update Ximin Luo improved code examples for some proposed environment variables for reference timestamps. Dhole added an example on how to fix timestamps C pre-processor macros by adding a way to set the build date externally. akira documented her fix for tex4ht timestamps. Package reviews 94 obsolete reviews have been removed, 330 added and 153 updated this week. Hats off for Chris West (Faux) who investigated many fail to build from source issues and reported the relevant bugs. Slight improvements were made to the scripts for editing the review database, edit-notes and clean-notes. (Mattia Rizzolo) Meetings A meeting was held on June 23rd. Minutes are available. The next meeting will happen on Tuesday 2015-07-07 at 17:00 UTC. Misc. The Linux Foundation announced that it was funding the work of Lunar and h01ger on reproducible builds in Debian and other distributions. This was further relayed in a Bits from Debian blog post.

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