Search Results: "js"

24 July 2024

Kentaro Hayashi: apt-upgrade-canary - PoC apt JSON hook use case

apt-upgrade-canary is a helper program to alert when upgrading packages via apt. If there are some packages which causes a critical or serious bug, it shows warnings for terminal. Then you can stay on current version of package by canceling upgrades. This program is aimed to help not to installing problematic packages via manual upgrades. Usually, you should delegate package upgrade to unattended-upgrades and apt-listbugs. apt-listbugs kindly warns if there are known bugs. In most cases it is enough safer. But there is one exception, it is not true that always apt-listbugs can follow very latest critical or serious bugs in timely manner. apt-upgrade-canary checks UDD mirror database (it take into account to cache query not to throw redundant one frequently)

Getting started
  1. Install required packages.
$ sudo apt install -y make ruby-pg ruby-json ruby-term-ansicolor
  1. Clone https://salsa.debian.org/kenhys/apt-upgrade-canary.
  2. Just sudo make install.

Use case in action If there is no serious bugs which is reported against target packages, apt-upgrade-canary reports no error.
apt-upgrade-canary: no problem
If there are something weird happen, it reports matched bugs.
apt-upgrade-canary: serious case
So you can stay on.

17 July 2024

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp 1.0.13 on CRAN: Some Updates

rcpp logo The Rcpp Core Team is once again pleased to announce a new release (now at 1.0.13) of the Rcpp package. It arrived on CRAN earlier today, and has since been uploaded to Debian. Windows and macOS builds should appear at CRAN in the next few days, as will builds in different Linux distribution and of course r2u should catch up tomorrow too. The release was uploaded last week, but not only does Rcpp always gets flagged because of the grandfathered .Call(symbol) but CRAN also found two packages regressing which then required them to take five days to get back to us. One issue was known; another did not reproduce under our tests against over 2800 reverse dependencies leading to the eventual release today. Yay. Checks are good and appreciated, and it does take time by humans to review them. This release continues with the six-months January-July cycle started with release 1.0.5 in July 2020. As a reminder, we do of course make interim snapshot dev or rc releases available via the Rcpp drat repo as well as the r-universe page and repo and strongly encourage their use and testing I run my systems with these versions which tend to work just as well, and are also fully tested against all reverse-dependencies. Rcpp has long established itself as the most popular way of enhancing R with C or C++ code. Right now, 2867 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further, along with 256 in BioConductor. On CRAN, 13.6% of all packages depend (directly) on Rcpp, and 59.9% of all compiled packages do. From the cloud mirror of CRAN (which is but a subset of all CRAN downloads), Rcpp has been downloaded 86.3 million times. The two published papers (also included in the package as preprint vignettes) have, respectively, 1848 (JSS, 2011) and 324 (TAS, 2018) citations, while the the book (Springer useR!, 2013) has another 641. This release is incremental as usual, generally preserving existing capabilities faithfully while smoothing our corners and / or extending slightly, sometimes in response to changing and tightened demands from CRAN or R standards. The move towards a more standardized approach for the C API of R leads to a few changes; Kevin did most of the PRs for this. Andrew Johnsom also provided a very nice PR to update internals taking advantage of variadic templates. The full list below details all changes, their respective PRs and, if applicable, issue tickets. Big thanks from all of us to all contributors!

Changes in Rcpp release version 1.0.13 (2024-07-11)
  • Changes in Rcpp API:
    • Set R_NO_REMAP if not already defined (Dirk in #1296)
    • Add variadic templates to be used instead of generated code (Andrew Johnson in #1303)
    • Count variables were switches to size_t to avoid warnings about conversion-narrowing (Dirk in #1307)
    • Rcpp now avoids the usage of the (non-API) DATAPTR function when accessing the contents of Rcpp Vector objects where possible. (Kevin in #1310)
    • Rcpp now emits an R warning on out-of-bounds Vector accesses. This may become an error in a future Rcpp release. (Kevin in #1310)
    • Switch VECTOR_PTR and STRING_PTR to new API-compliant RO variants (Kevin in #1317 fixing #1316)
  • Changes in Rcpp Deployment:
    • Small updates to the CI test containers have been made (#1304)

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

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

Gunnar Wolf: Script for weather reporting in Waybar

While I was living in Argentina, we (my family) found ourselves checking for weather forecasts almost constantly weather there can be quite unexpected, much more so that here in Mexico. So it took me a bit of tinkering to come up with a couple of simple scripts to show the weather forecast as part of my Waybar setup. I haven t cared to share with anybody, as I believe them to be quite trivial and quite dirty. But today, V ctor was asking for some slightly-related things, so here I go. Please do remember I warned: Dirty. Forecast I am using OpenWeather s open API. I had to register to get an APPID, and it allows me for up to 1,000 API calls per day, more than plenty for my uses, even if I am logged in at my desktops at three different computers (not an uncommon situation). Having that, I set up a file named /etc/get_weather/, that currently reads: 
# Home, Mexico City
LAT=19.3364
LONG=-99.1819
# # Home, Paran , Argentina
# LAT=-31.7208
# LONG=-60.5317
# # PKNU, Busan, South Korea
# LAT=35.1339
#LONG=129.1055
APPID=SomeLongRandomStringIAmNotSharing
Then, I have a simple script, /usr/local/bin/get_weather, that fetches the current weather and the forecast, and stores them as /run/weather.json and /run/forecast.json: 
#!/usr/bin/bash
CONF_FILE=/etc/get_weather
if [ -e "$CONF_FILE" ]; then
    . "$CONF_FILE"
else
    echo "Configuration file $CONF_FILE not found"
    exit 1
fi
if [ -z "$LAT" -o -z "$LONG" -o -z "$APPID" ]; then
    echo "Configuration file must declare latitude (LAT), longitude (LONG) "
    echo "and app ID (APPID)."
    exit 1
fi
CURRENT=/run/weather.json
FORECAST=/run/forecast.json
wget -q "https://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather?lat=$ LAT &lon=$ LONG &units=metric&appid=$ APPID " -O "$ CURRENT "
wget -q "https://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/forecast?lat=$ LAT &lon=$ LONG &units=metric&appid=$ APPID " -O "$ FORECAST "
This script is called by the corresponding systemd service unit, found at /etc/systemd/system/get_weather.service: 
[Unit]
Description=Get the current weather
[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/get_weather
And it is run every 15 minutes via the following systemd timer unit, /etc/systemd/system/get_weather.timer: 
[Unit]
Description=Get the current weather every 15 minutes
[Timer]
OnCalendar=*:00/15:00
Unit=get_weather.service
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
(yes, it runs even if I m not logged in, wasting some of my free API calls but within reason) Then, I declare a "custom/weather" module in the desired position of my ~/.config/waybar/waybar.config, and define it as: 
"custom/weather":  
    "exec": "while true;do /home/gwolf/bin/parse_weather.rb;sleep 10; done",
"return-type": "json",
 ,
This script basically morphs a generic weather JSON description into another set of JSON bits that display my weather in the way I prefer to have it displayed as: 
#!/usr/bin/ruby
require 'json'
Sources =  :weather => '/run/weather.json',
           :forecast => '/run/forecast.json'
           
Icons =  '01d' => ' ', # d   day
         '01n' => ' ', # n   night
         '02d' => ' ',
         '02n' => ' ',
         '03d' => ' ',
         '03n' => ' ',
         '04d'  => ' ',
         '04n' => ' ',
         '09d' => ' ',
         '10n' =>  '  ',
         '10d' => ' ',
         '13d' => ' ',
         '50d' => ' '
         
ret =  'text': nil, 'tooltip': nil, 'class': 'weather', 'percentage': 100 
# Current weather report: Main text of the module
begin
  weather = JSON.parse(open(Sources[:weather],'r').read)
  loc_name = weather['name']
  icon = Icons[weather['weather'][0]['icon']]   ' ' + f['weather'][0]['icon'] + f['weather'][0]['main']
  temp = weather['main']['temp']
  sens = weather['main']['feels_like']
  hum = weather['main']['humidity']
  wind_vel = weather['wind']['speed']
  wind_dir = weather['wind']['deg']
  portions =  
  portions[:loc] = loc_name
  portions[:temp] = '%s  %2.2f C (%2.2f)' % [icon, temp, sens]
  portions[:hum] = '  %2d%%' % hum
  portions[:wind] = ' %2.2fm/s %d ' % [wind_vel, wind_dir]
  ret['text'] = [:loc, :temp, :hum, :wind].map   p  portions[p] .join(' ')
rescue => err
  ret['text'] = 'Could not process weather file (%s   %s: %s)' % [Sources[:weather], err.class, err.to_s]
end
# Weather prevision for the following hours/days
begin
  cast = []
  forecast = JSON.parse(open(Sources[:forecast], 'r').read)
  min = ''
  max = ''
  day=Time.now.strftime('%Y.%m.%d')
  by_day =  
  forecast['list'].each_with_index do  f,i 
    by_day[day]  = []
    time = Time.at(f['dt'])
    time_lbl = '%02d:%02d' % [time.hour, time.min]
    icon = Icons[f['weather'][0]['icon']]   ' ' + f['weather'][0]['icon'] + f['weather'][0]['main']
    by_day[day] << f['main']['temp']
    if time.hour == 0
      min = '%2.2f' % by_day[day].min
      max = '%2.2f' % by_day[day].max
      cast << '          min: <b>%s C</b> max: <b>%s C</b>' % [min, max]
      day = time.strftime('%Y.%m.%d')
      cast << '        <b>%04d.%02d.%02d</b>  ' %
              [time.year, time.month, time.day]
    end
    cast << '%s   %2.2f C    %2d%%   %s %s' % [time_lbl,
                                                f['main']['temp'],
                                                f['main']['humidity'],
                                                icon,
                                                f['weather'][0]['description']
                                               ]
  end
  cast << '          min: <b>%s</b> C max: <b>%s C</b>' % [min, max]
  ret['tooltip'] = cast.join("\n")
  
rescue => err
  ret['tooltip'] = 'Could not process forecast file (%s   %s)' % [Sources[:forecast], err.class, err.to_s]
end
# Print out the result for Waybar to process
puts ret.to_json
The end result? Nothing too stunning, but definitively something I find useful and even nicely laid out: Screenshot Do note that it seems OpenWeather will return the name of the closest available meteorology station with (most?) recent data for my home, I often get Ciudad Universitaria, but sometimes Coyoac n or even San ngel Inn.

7 July 2024

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppSimdJson 0.1.12 on CRAN: Maintenance

A new maintenance release 0.1.12 of the RcppSimdJson package is now on CRAN. RcppSimdJson wraps the fantastic and genuinely impressive simdjson library by Daniel Lemire and collaborators. Via very clever algorithmic engineering to obtain largely branch-free code, coupled with modern C++ and newer compiler instructions, it results in parsing gigabytes of JSON parsed per second which is quite mindboggling. The best-case performance is faster than CPU speed as use of parallel SIMD instructions and careful branch avoidance can lead to less than one cpu cycle per byte parsed; see the video of the talk by Daniel Lemire at QCon. This release responds to another CRAN request, this time to accomodate compilation under C++20 with g++-14. As this was alreadt addressed upstream in simdjson it was simply a matter of upgrading to the current upstream which Daniel did in a PR. The (once again very short) NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in version 0.1.12 (2024-07-05)
  • Updated benchmarks now include 'yyjsonr'
  • simdjson was upgraded to version 3.95 (Daniel in #92 fixing #91)
  • Additional small update for C++20 compilation under g++-14

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

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

Niels Thykier: Improving packaging file detection in Debian

Debian packaging consists of a directory (debian/) containing a number of "hard-coded" filenames such as debian/control, debian/changelog, debian/copyright. In addition to these, many packages will also use a number of optional files that are named via a pattern such as debian/ PACKAGE .install. At a high level the patterns looks deceptively simple. However, if you start working on trying to automatically classify files in debian/ (which could be helpful to tell the user they have a typo in the filename), you will quickly realize these patterns are not machine friendly at all for this purpose.
The patterns deconstructed To appreciate the problem fully, here is a primer on the pattern and all its issues. If you are already well-versed in these, you might want to skip the section. The most common patterns are debian/package.stem or debian/stem and usually the go to example is the install stem ( a concrete example being debian/debhelper.install). However, the full pattern consists of 4 parts where 3 of them are optional.
  • The package name followed by a period. Optional, but must be the first if present.
  • The name segment followed by a period. Optional, but must appear between the package name (if present) and the stem. If the package name is not present, then the name segment must be first.
  • The stem. Mandatory.
  • An architecture restriction prefixed by a period. Optional, must appear after the stem if present.
To visualize it with [foo] to mark optional parts, it looks like debian/[PACKAGE.][NAME.]STEM[.ARCH] Detecting whether a given file is in fact a packaging file now boils down to reverse engineering its name against this pattern. Again, so far, it might still look manageable. One major complication is that every part (except ARCH) can contain periods. So a trivial "split by period" is not going to cut it. As an example:
debian/g++-3.0.user.service
This example is deliberately crafted to be ambiguous and show this problem in its full glory. This file name can be in multiple ways:
  • Is the stem service or user.service? (both are known stems from dh_installsystemd and dh_installsystemduser respectively). In fact, it can be both at the same time with "clever" usage of --name=user passed to dh_installsystemd.
  • The g++-3.0 can be a package prefix or part of the name segment. Even if there is a g++-3.0 package in debian/control, then debhelper (until compat 15) will still happily match this file for the main package if you pass --name=g++-3.0 to the helper. Side bar: Woe is you if there is a g++-3 and a g++-3.0 package in debian/control, then we have multiple options for the package prefix! Though, I do not think that happens in practice.
Therefore, there are a lot of possible ways to split this filename that all matches the pattern but with vastly different meaning and consequences.
Making detection practical To make this detection practical, lets look at the first problems that we need to solve.
  1. We need the possible stems up front to have a chance at all. When multiple stems are an option, go for the longest match (that is, the one with most periods) since --name is rare and "code golfing" is even rarer.
  2. We can make the package prefix mandatory for files with the name segment. This way, the moment there is something before the stem, we know the package prefix will be part of it and can cut it. It does not solve the ambiguity if one package name is a prefix of another package name (from the same source), but it still a lot better. This made its way into debhelper compat 15 and now it is "just" a slow long way to a better future.
A simple solution to the first problem could be to have a static list of known stems. That will get you started but the debhelper eco-system strive on decentralization, so this feels like a mismatch. There is also a second problem with the static list. Namely, a given stem is only "valid" if the command in question is actually in use. Which means you now need to dumpster dive into the mess that is Turning-complete debhelper configuration file known as debian/rules to fully solve that. Thanks to the Turning-completeness, we will never get a perfect solution for a static analysis. Instead, it is time to back out and instead apply some simplifications. Here is a sample flow:
  1. Check whether the dh sequencer is used. If so, use some heuristics to figure out which addons are used.
  2. Delegate to dh_assistant to figure out which commands will be used and which debhelper config file stems it knows about. Here we need to know which sequences are in use from step one (if relevant). Combine this with any other sources for stems you have.
  3. Deconstruct all files in debian/ against the stems and known package names from debian/control. In theory, dumpster diving after --name options would be helpful here, but personally I skipped that part as I want to keep my debian/rules parsing to an absolute minimum.
With this logic, you can now:
  • Provide typo detection of the stem (debian/foo.intsall -> debian/foo.install) provided to have adequate handling of the corner cases (such as debian/*.conf not needing correction into debian/*.config)
  • Detect possible invalid package prefix (debian/foo.install without foo being a package). Note this has to be a weak warning unless the package is using debhelper compat 15 or you dumpster dived to validate that dh_install was not passed dh_install --name foo. Agreed, no one should do that, but they can and false positives are the worst kind of positives for a linting tool.
  • With some limitations, detect files used without the relevant command being active. As an example, the some integration modes of debputy removes dh_install, so a debian/foo.install would not be used.
  • Associate a given file with a given command to assist users with the documentation look up. Like debian/foo.user.service is related to dh_installsystemduser, so man dh_installsystemduser is a natural start for documentation.
I have added the logic for all these features in debputy though the documentation association is currently not in a user facing command. All the others are now diagnostics emitted by debputy in its editor support mode (debputy lsp server) or via debputy lint. In the editor mode, the diagnostics are currently associated with the package name in debian/control due to technical limitations of how the editor integration works. Some of these features will the latest version of debhelper (moving target at times). Check with debputy lsp features for the Extra dh support feature, which will be enabled if you got all you need. Note: The detection is currently (mostly) ignoring files with architecture restrictions. That might be lifted in the future. However, architecture restricted config files tend to be rare, so they were not a priority at this point. Additionally, debputy for technical reasons ignores stem typos with multiple matches. That sadly means that typos of debian/docs will often be unreported due to its proximity to debian/dirs and vice versa.
Diving a bit deeper on getting the stems To get the stems, debputy has 3 primary sources:
  1. Its own plugins can provide packager provided files. These are only relevant if the package is using debputy.
  2. It is als possible to provide a debputy plugin that identifies packaging files (either static or named ones). Though in practice, we probably do not want people to roll their own debputy plugin for this purpose, since the detection only works if the plugin is installed. I have used this mechanism to have debhelper provide a debhelper-documentation plugin to enrich the auto-detected data and we can assume most people interested in this feature would have debhelper installed.
  3. It asks dh_assistant list-guessed-dh-config-files for config files, which is covered below.
The dh_assistant command uses the same logic as dh to identify the active add-ons and loads them. From there, it scans all commands mentioned in the sequence for the PROMISE: DH NOOP WITHOUT ...-hint and a new INTROSPECTABLE: CONFIG-FILES ...-hint. When these hints reference a packaging file (as an example, via pkgfile(foo)) then dh_assistant records that as a known packaging file for that helper. Additionally, debhelper now also tracks commands that were removed from the sequence. Several of the dh_assistant subcommand now use this to enrich their (JSON) output with notes about these commands being known but not active.
The end result With all of this work, you now get: 
$ apt satisfy 'dh-debputy (>= 0.1.43~), debhelper (>= 13.16~), python3-lsprotocol, python3-levenshtein'
# For demo purposes, pull two known repos (feel free to use your own packages here)
$ git clone https://salsa.debian.org/debian/debhelper.git -b debian/13.16
$ git clone https://salsa.debian.org/debian/debputy.git -b debian/0.1.43
$ cd debhelper
$ mv debian/debhelper.install debian/debhelper.intsall
$ debputy lint
warning: File: debian/debhelper.intsall:1:0:1:0: The file "debian/debhelper.intsall" is likely a typo of "debian/debhelper.install"
    File-level diagnostic
$ mv debian/debhelper.intsall debian/debhleper.install
$ debputy lint
warning: File: debian/debhleper.install:1:0:1:0: Possible typo in "debian/debhleper.install". Consider renaming the file to "debian/debhelper.debhleper.install" or "debian/debhelper.install" if it is intended for debhelper
    File-level diagnostic
$ cd ../debputy
$ touch debian/install
$ debputy lint --no-warn-about-check-manifest
warning: File: debian/install:1:0:1:0: The file debian/install is related to a command that is not active in the dh sequence with the current addons
    File-level diagnostic
As mentioned, you also get these diagnostics in the editor via the debputy lsp server feature. Here the diagnostics appear in debian/control over the package name for technical reasons. The editor side still needs a bit more work. Notably, changes to the filename is not triggered automatically and will first be caught on the next change to debian/control. Likewise, changes to debian/rules to add --with to dh might also have some limitations depending on the editor. Saving both files and then triggering an edit of debian/control seems to work reliable but ideally it should not be that involved. The debhelper side could also do with some work to remove the unnecessary support for the name segment with many file stems that do not need them and announce that to debputy. Anyhow, it is still a vast improvement over the status quo that was "Why is my file silently ignored!?".

2 July 2024

Colin Watson: Free software activity in June 2024

My Debian contributions this month were all sponsored by Freexian. You can support my work directly via Liberapay.

2 June 2024

Colin Watson: Free software activity in May 2024

My Debian contributions this month were all sponsored by Freexian. The bulk of my Debian time this month went towards trying to haul more Python packages up to current versions, but I got a few other bits and pieces done as well. You can support my work directly via Liberapay.

22 May 2024

Evgeni Golov: Upgrading CentOS Stream 8 to CentOS Stream 9 using Leapp

Warning to the Planet Debian readers: the following post might shock you, if you're used to Debian's smooth upgrades using only the package manager. Leapp?! Contrary to distributions like Debian and Fedora, RHEL can't be upgraded using the package manager alone. Instead there is a tool called Leapp that takes care of orchestrating the update and also includes a set of checks whether a system can be upgraded at all. Have a look at the RHEL documentation about upgrading if you want more details on the process itself. You might have noticed that the title of this post says "CentOS Stream" but here I am talking about RHEL. This is mostly because Leapp was originally written with RHEL in mind. Upgrading CentOS 7 to EL8 When people started pondering upgrading their CentOS 7 installations, AlmaLinux started the ELevate project to allow upgrading CentOS 7 to CentOS Stream 8 but also to AlmaLinux 8, Rocky 8 or Oracle Linux 8. ELevate was essentially Leapp with patches to allow working on CentOS, which has different package signature keys, different OS release versioning, etc. Sadly these patches were never merged back into Leapp. Making Leapp work with CentOS Stream 8 (and other distributions) At some point I noticed that things weren't moving and EL8 to EL9 upgrades were coming closer (and I had my own systems that I wanted to be able to upgrade in place). Annoyed-Evgeni-Development is best development? Not sure, but it produced a set of patches that allowed some movement: However, this is not yet the end of the story. At least convert dot-less CentOS versions to X.999 is open, and another followup would be needed if we go that route. But I don't expect this to be merged soon, as the patch is technically wrong - yet it makes things mostly work. The big problem here is that CentOS Stream doesn't have X.Y versioning, just X as it's a constant stream with no point releases. Leapp however relies on X.Y versioning to know which package changes it needs to perform. Pretending CentOS Stream 8 is "RHEL" 8.999 works if you assume that Stream is always ahead of RHEL. This is however a CentOS only problem. I still need to properly test that, but I'd expect things to work fine with upstream Leapp on AlmaLinux/Rocky if you feed it the right signature and repository data. Actually upgrading CentOS Stream 8 to CentOS Stream 9 using Leapp Like I've already teased in my HPE rant, I've actually used that code to upgrade virt01.conova.theforeman.org to CentOS Stream 9. I've also used it to upgrade a server at home that's responsible for running important containers like Home Assistant and UniFi. So it's absolutely battle tested and production grade! It's also hungry for kittens. As mentioned above, you can't just use upstream Leapp, but I have a Copr: evgeni/leapp. 
# dnf copr enable evgeni/leapp
# dnf install leapp leapp-upgrade-el8toel9
Apart from the software, we'll also need to tell it which repositories to use for the upgrade. 
# vim /etc/leapp/files/leapp_upgrade_repositories.repo
[c9-baseos]
name=CentOS Stream $releasever - BaseOS
metalink=https://mirrors.centos.org/metalink?repo=centos-baseos-9-stream&arch=$basearch&protocol=https,http
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-centosofficial
gpgcheck=1
repo_gpgcheck=0
metadata_expire=6h
countme=1
enabled=1
[c9-appstream]
name=CentOS Stream $releasever - AppStream
metalink=https://mirrors.centos.org/metalink?repo=centos-appstream-9-stream&arch=$basearch&protocol=https,http
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-centosofficial
gpgcheck=1
repo_gpgcheck=0
metadata_expire=6h
countme=1
enabled=1
Depending on the setup and installed packages, more repositories might be needed. Just make sure that the $stream substitution is not used as Leapp doesn't override that and you'd end up with CentOS Stream 8 repos again. Once all that is in place, we can call leapp preupgrade and let it analyze the system. Ideally, the output will look like this: 
# leapp preupgrade
 
============================================================
                      REPORT OVERVIEW                       
============================================================
Reports summary:
    Errors:                      0
    Inhibitors:                  0
    HIGH severity reports:       0
    MEDIUM severity reports:     0
    LOW severity reports:        3
    INFO severity reports:       3
Before continuing consult the full report:
    A report has been generated at /var/log/leapp/leapp-report.json
    A report has been generated at /var/log/leapp/leapp-report.txt
============================================================
                   END OF REPORT OVERVIEW                   
============================================================
But trust me, it won't ;-) As mentioned above, Leapp analyzes the system before the upgrade. Some checks can completely inhibit the upgrade, while others will just be logged as "you better should have a look". Firewalld Configuration AllowZoneDrifting Is Unsupported EL7 and EL8 shipped with AllowZoneDrifting=yes, but since EL9 this is not supported anymore. As this can potentially break the networking of the system, the upgrade gets inhibited. Newest installed kernel not in use Admit it, you also don't reboot into every new kernel available! Well, Leapp won't let that pass and inhibits the upgrade. Cannot perform the VDO check of block devices In EL8 there are two ways to manage VDO: using the dedicated vdo tool and via LVM. If your system uses LVM (it should!) but not VDO, you probably don't have the vdo package installed. But then Leapp can't check if your LVM devices really aren't VDO without the vdo tooling and will inhibit the upgrade. So you gotta install vdo for it to find out that you don't use VDO LUKS encrypted partition detected Yeah. Sorry. Using LUKS? Straight into the inhibit corner! But hey, if you don't use LUKS for / you can probably get away by deleting the inhibitwhenluks actor. That worked for me, but remember the kittens! Really upgrading CentOS Stream 8 to CentOS Stream 9 using Leapp The headings are getting silly, huh? Anyway, once leapp preupgrade is happy and doesn't throw any inhibitors anymore, the actual (real?) upgrade can be done by calling leapp upgrade. This will download all necessary packages and create an intermediate initramfs that contains all the things needed for the upgrade and ask you to reboot. Once booted, the upgrade itself takes somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes. Then another minute or 5 to relabel your disks with the new SELinux policy. And three reboots (into the upgrade initramfs, into SELinux relabel, into real OS) of a ProLiant DL325 - 5 minutes each? And then for good measure another one, to flip SELinux from permissive to enforcing. Are we done yet? Nope. There are a few post-upgrade tasks you get to do yourself. Yes, the switching of SELinux back to enforcing is one of them. Please don't forget it. Using the system after the upgrade A customer once said "We're not running those systems for the sake of running systems, but for the sake of running some application ontop of them". This is very true. libvirt doesn't support Spice/QXL In EL9, support for Spice/QXL was dropped, so if you try to boot a VM using it, libvirt will nicely error out with 
Error starting domain: unsupported configuration: domain configuration does not support video model 'qxl'
Interestingly, because multiple parts of the VM are invalid, you can't edit it in virt-manager (at least the one in Fedora 39) as removing/fixing one part requires applying the new configuration which is still invalid. So virsh edit <vm> it is! Look for entries like 
    <channel type='spicevmc'>
      <target type='virtio' name='com.redhat.spice.0'/>
      <address type='virtio-serial' controller='0' bus='0' port='2'/>
    </channel>
    <graphics type='spice' autoport='yes'>
      <listen type='address'/>
    </graphics>
    <audio id='1' type='spice'/>
    <video>
      <model type='qxl' ram='65536' vram='65536' vgamem='16384' heads='1' primary='yes'/>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x01' function='0x0'/>
    </video>
    <redirdev bus='usb' type='spicevmc'> 
      <address type='usb' bus='0' port='2'/> 
    </redirdev> 
    <redirdev bus='usb' type='spicevmc'> 
      <address type='usb' bus='0' port='3'/> 
    </redirdev>
and either just delete the or (better) replace them with VNC/cirrus 
    <graphics type='vnc' port='-1' autoport='yes'>
      <listen type='address'/>
    </graphics>
    <audio id='1' type='none'/>
    <video>
      <model type='cirrus' vram='16384' heads='1' primary='yes'/>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x01' function='0x0'/>
    </video>
Podman needs re-login to private registries One of the machines I've updated runs Podman and pulls containers from GitHub which are marked as private. To do so, I have a personal access token that I've used to login to ghcr.io. After the CentOS Stream 9 upgrade (which included an upgrade to Podman 5), pulls stopped working with authentication/permission errors. No idea what exactly happened, but a simple podman login fixed this issue quickly. 
$ echo ghp_token   podman login ghcr.io -u <user> --password-stdin
shim has an el8 tag One of the documented post-upgrade tasks is to verify that no EL8 packages are installed, and to remove those if there are any. However, when you do this, you'll notice that the shim-x64 package has an EL8 version: shim-x64-15-15.el8_2.x86_64. That's because the same build is used in both CentOS Stream 8 and CentOS Stream 9. Confusing, but should really not be uninstalled if you want the machine to boot ;-) Are we done yet? Yes! That's it. Enjoy your CentOS Stream 9!

14 May 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, April 2024 (by Roberto C. S nchez)

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In April, 19 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 0.5h (out of 0.0h assigned and 14.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 13.5h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 35.75h (out of 17.25h assigned and 40.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 22.0h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 25.0h (out of 25.0h assigned).
  • Ben Hutchings did 24.0h (out of 9.0h assigned and 15.0h from previous period).
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Daniel Leidert did 10.0h (out of 10.0h assigned).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 46.0h (out of 12.0h assigned and 34.0h from previous period).
  • Guilhem Moulin did 14.75h (out of 20.0h assigned), thus carrying over 5.25h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 51.25h (out of 0.0h assigned and 60.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.75h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 22.5h (out of 19.5h assigned and 4.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 1.5h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 11.0h (out of 9.25h assigned and 2.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 1.0h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
  • Sean Whitton did 9.5h (out of 4.5h assigned and 5.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 0.5h to the next month.
  • Stefano Rivera did 1.5h (out of 0.0h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.5h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 12.5h (out of 22.75h assigned and 35.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 45.25h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 10.0h (out of 12.0h assigned), thus carrying over 2.0h to the next month.
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 3.25h (out of 28.5h assigned and 29.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 54.5h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In April, we have released 28 DLAs. During the month of April, there was one particularly notable security update made in LTS. Guilhem Moulin prepared DLA-3782-1 for util-linux (part of the set of base packages and containing a number of important system utilities) in order to address a possible information disclosure vulnerability. Additionally, several contributors prepared updates for oldstable (bullseye), stable (bookworm), and unstable (sid), including:
  • ruby-rack: prepared for oldstable, stable, and unstable by Adrian Bunk
  • wpa: prepared for oldstable, stable, and unstable by Bastien Roucari s
  • zookeeper: prepared for stable by Bastien Roucari s
  • libjson-smart: prepared for unstable by Bastien Roucari s
  • ansible: prepared for stable and unstable, including autopkgtest fixes to increase future supportability, by Lee Garrett
  • wordpress: prepared for oldstable and stable by Markus Koschany
  • emacs and org-mode: prepared for oldstable and stable by Sean Whitton
  • qtbase-opensource-src: prepared for oldstable and stable by Thorsten Alteholz
  • libjwt: prepared for oldstable by Thorsten Alteholz
  • libmicrohttpd: prepared for oldstable by Thorsten Alteholz
These fixes were in addition to corresponding updates in LTS. Another item to highlight in this month s report is an update to the distro-info-data database by Stefano Rivera. This update ensures that Debian buster systems have the latest available information concerning the end-of-life dates and other related information for all releases of Debian and Ubuntu. As announced on the debian-lts-announce mailing list, it is worth to point out that we are getting close to the end of support of Debian 10 as LTS. After June 30th, no new security updates will be made available on security.debian.org. However, Freexian and its team of paid Debian contributors will continue to maintain Debian 10 going forward for the customers of the Extended LTS offer. If you still have Debian 10 servers to keep secure, it s time to subscribe!

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

12 May 2024

Daniel Lange: htop and PCP have a new home at Hack Club

After the unfortunate and somewhat surprising shutdown of the Open Collective Foundation (OCF), htop and Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) have migrated to Hack Club. Initially founded to improve STEM education, support high school computer science clubs and firmly founded in the hacker culture, Hack Club have created a US IRS approved 501(c)(3) charity that provides what Open Collective did/does1 and more at a flat 7% fee of the project income. Nathan Scott organized these moves with Paul Spitler. Many thanks! We considered other options for the projects, e.g. Gentoo has moved to Software in the Public Interest (SPI) and I know SPI quite well as they were created initially to host Debian. But PCP moved from SPI to OCF in 2021. Open Collective has a European branch that seems independent of the dissolved US foundation. But all-in-all Hack Club seemed the best fit. You can find the new fiscal sponsorship and donation landing pages at:
htophttps://hcb.hackclub.com/htop/https://hcb.hackclub.com/donations/start/htop
PCPhttps://hcb.hackclub.com/pcp/https://hcb.hackclub.com/donations/start/pcp
  1. Open Collective as in the fancy "manage your project donations and reimbursements" website still continues to run but the foundation of the same name that provided the actual fiscal sponsorship (i.e. managing the funds) got dissolved. It's ... complicated.

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Salsa CI updates, OpenSSH option review, and more! (by Utkarsh Gupta)

Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services. P.S. We ve completed over a year of writing these blogs. If you have any suggestions on how to make them better or what you d like us to cover, or any other opinions/reviews you might have, et al, please let us know by dropping an email to us. We d be happy to hear your thoughts. :)

Salsa CI updates & GSoC candidacy, by Santiago Ruano Rincon In the context of Google Summer of Code (GSoC), Santiago continued the mentoring work, following the applications of three of the candidates. This work started in March, but Aquila Macedo, Ahmed Siam and Piyush Raj continued in April to propose and review MRs. For example, Update CI pipeline to utilize specific blhc image per release and Remove references to buster-backports by Aquila, or the reviews the candidates made to Document the structure of the different components of the pipeline (see below). Unfortunately, the Salsa CI project didn t get any slot from the GSoC program in the end. Along with the Salsa CI related work, Santiago improved the documentation of Salsa CI, to make it easier for newcomers (as the GSoC candidates) or people willing to fork the project to understand its internals. Documentation is an aspect where a lot of improvements can be made.

OpenSSH option review, by Colin Watson In light of last month s xz-utils backdoor, Colin did an extensive review of some of the choices in Debian s OpenSSH packaging. Some work on this has already been done (removing uses of libsystemd and reducing tcp-wrappers linkage); the next step is likely to be to start work on the plan to split out GSS-API key exchange again.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Utkarsh Gupta started to put together and kickstart the bursary team ahead of DebConf 24, to be held in Busan, South Korea.
  • Utkarsh Gupta reviewed some MRs and docs for the bursary team for the DC24 website.
  • Helmut Grohne sent patches for 19 cross build failures and submitted a gcc patch removing LIMITS_H_TEST upstream.
  • Helmut sent 8 bug reports with 3 patches related to the /usr-move.
  • Helmut diagnosed why /dev/stdout is not accessible in sbuild --mode=unshare.
  • Helmut diagnosed the time64-induced glibc FTBFS.
  • Helmut sent patches for fixing initramfs triggers on firmware removal.
  • Thorsten Alteholz uploaded foo2zjs and fixed two bugs, one related to /usr-merge. Likewise the upload of cups-filters (from the 1.x branch) fixed three bugs. In order to fix an RC bug in cpdb-backends-cups, which was updated to the 2.x branch, the new package libcupsfilters has been introduced. Last but not least an upload of hplip fixed one RC bug and an upload of gutenprint fixed two of them. All of these RC bugs were more or less related to the time_t transition.
  • Santiago continued to work in the DebConf organization tasks, including some for the DebConf 24 Content Team, and looking to build a local community for DebConf 25.
  • Stefano Rivera made a couple of uploads of dh-python to Debian, and a few other general package update uploads.
  • Stefano did some winding up of DebConf 23 finances, including closing bursary claims and recording the amounts spent on travel bursaries.
  • Stefano opened DebConf 24 registration, which always requires some last-minute work on the website.
  • Colin released man-db 2.12.1.
  • Colin fixed a regression in groff s PDF output.
  • In the Python team, Colin fixed build/autopkgtest failures in seven packages, and updated ten packages to new upstream versions.

9 May 2024

Vincent Sanders: Bee to the blossom, moth to the flame; Each to his passion; what's in a name?

I like the sentiment of Helen Hunt Jackson in that quote and it generally applies double for computer system names. However I like to think when I named the first NetSurf VM host server phoenix fourteen years ago I captured the nature of its continuous cycle of replacement.
Image of the fourth phoenix server
We have been very fortunate to receive a donated server to replace the previous every few years and the very generous folks at Collabora continue to provide hosting for it.Recently I replaced the server for the third time. We once again were given a replacement by Huw Jones in the form of a SuperServer 6017R-TDAF system with dual Intel Xeon Ivy Bridge E5-2680v2 processors. There were even rack rails!

The project bought some NVMe drives and an adaptor cards and I attempted to arrange to swap out the server in January.

The old phoenixiii server being replaced
Here we come to the slight disadvantage of an informal arrangement where access to the system depends upon a busy third party. Unfortunately it took until May to arrange access (I must thank Vivek again for coming in on a Saturday to do this)

In the intervening time, once I realised access was going to become increasingly difficult, I decided to obtain as good a system as I could manage to reduce requirements for future access.

I turned to eBay and acquired a slightly more modern SuperServer with dual Intel Xeon Haswell E5-2680v3 processors which required purchase of 64G of new memory (Haswell is a DDR4 platform).

I had wanted to use Broadwell processors but this exceeded my budget and would only be a 10% performance uplift (The chassis, motherboard and memory cost 180 and another 50 for processors was just too much, maybe next time)

graph of cpu mark improvements in the phoenix servers over time
While making the decision on the processor selection I made a quick chart of previous processing capabilities (based on a passmark comparison) of phoenix servers and was startled to discover I needed a logarithmic vertical axis. Multi core performance of processors has improved at a startling rate in the last decade.

When the original replacement was donated I checked where the performance was limited and noticed it was mainly in disc access which is what prompted the upgrade to NVMe (2 gigabytes a second peek read throughput) which moved the bottleneck to the processors where, even with the upgrades, it remains.

I do not really know if there is a conclusion here beyond noting NetSurf is very fortunate as a project to have some generous benefactors both for donating hardware and hosting for which I know all the developers are grateful.

Now I just need to go and migrate a huge bunch of virtual machines and associated sysadmin to make use of these generous donations.

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in April 2024

FTP master This month I accepted 386 and rejected 39 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 386.

I also added lots of +moreinfo tags to some RM bugs. Is it that hard to check the reverse dependencies on your own? Debian LTS This was my hundred-eighteenth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. During my allocated time I uploaded:

1 May 2024

Colin Watson: Free software activity in April 2024

My Debian contributions this month were all sponsored by Freexian. You can support my work directly via Liberapay.

Guido G nther: Free Software Activities April 2024

A short status update of what happened on my side last month. Maintenance and code review keep to be the top time sinks (in a positive way). If you want to support my work see donations.

28 April 2024

Evgeni Golov: Running Ansible Molecule tests in parallel

Or "How I've halved the execution time of our tests by removing ten lines". Catchy, huh? Also not exactly true, but quite close. Enjoy! Molecule?! "Molecule project is designed to aid in the development and testing of Ansible roles." No idea about the development part (I have vim and mkdir), but it's really good for integration testing. You can write different test scenarios where you define an environment (usually a container), a playbook for the execution and a playbook for verification. (And a lot more, but that's quite unimportant for now, so go read the docs if you want more details.) If you ever used Beaker for Puppet integration testing, you'll feel right at home (once you've thrown away Ruby and DSLs and embraced YAML for everything). I'd like to point out one thing, before we continue. Have another look at the quote above. "Molecule project is designed to aid in the development and testing of Ansible roles." That's right. The project was started in 2015 and was always about roles. There is nothing wrong about that, but given the Ansible world has moved on to collections (which can contain roles), you start facing challenges. Challenges using Ansible Molecule in the Collections world The biggest challenge didn't change since the last time I looked at the topic in 2020: running tests for multiple roles in a single repository ("monorepo") is tedious. Well, guess what a collection is? Yepp, a repository with multiple roles in it. It did get a bit better though. There is pytest-ansible now, which has integration for Molecule. This allows the execution of Molecule and even provides reasonable logging with something as short as: 
% pytest --molecule roles/
That's much better than the shell script I used in 2020! However, being able to execute tests is one thing. Being able to execute them fast is another one. Given Molecule was initially designed with single roles in mind, it has switches to run all scenarios of a role (--all), but it has no way to run these in parallel. That's fine if you have one or two scenarios in your role repository. But what if you have 10 in your collection? "No way?!" you say after quickly running molecule test --help, "But there is " 
% molecule test --help
Usage: molecule test [OPTIONS] [ANSIBLE_ARGS]...
 
  --parallel / --no-parallel      Enable or disable parallel mode. Default is disabled.
Yeah, that switch exists, but it only tells Molecule to place things in separate folders, you still need to parallelize yourself with GNU parallel or pytest. And here our actual journey starts! Running Ansible Molecule tests in parallel To run Molecule via pytest in parallel, we can use pytest-xdist, which allows pytest to run the tests in multiple processes. With that, our pytest call becomes something like this: 
% MOLECULE_OPTS="--parallel" pytest --numprocesses auto --molecule roles/
What does that mean? However, once we actually execute it, we see: 
% MOLECULE_OPTS="--parallel" pytest --numprocesses auto --molecule roles/
 
WARNING  Driver podman does not provide a schema.
INFO     debian scenario test matrix: dependency, cleanup, destroy, syntax, create, prepare, converge, idempotence, side_effect, verify, cleanup, destroy
INFO     Performing prerun with role_name_check=0...
WARNING  Retrying execution failure 250 of: ansible-galaxy collection install -vvv --force ../..
ERROR    Command returned 250 code:
 
OSError: [Errno 39] Directory not empty: 'roles'
 
FileExistsError: [Errno 17] File exists: b'/home/user/namespace.collection/collections/ansible_collections/namespace/collection'
 
FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: b'/home/user/namespace.collection//collections/ansible_collections/namespace/collection/roles/my_role/molecule/debian/molecule.yml'
You might see other errors, other paths, etc, but they all will have one in common: they indicate that either files or directories are present, while the tool expects them not to be, or vice versa. Ah yes, that fine smell of race conditions. I'll spare you the wild-goose chase I went on when trying to find out what the heck was calling ansible-galaxy collection install here. Instead, I'll just point at the following line: 
INFO     Performing prerun with role_name_check=0...
What is this "prerun" you ask? Well "To help Ansible find used modules and roles, molecule will perform a prerun set of actions. These involve installing dependencies from requirements.yml specified at the project level, installing a standalone role or a collection." Turns out, this step is not --parallel-safe (yet?). Luckily, it can easily be disabled, for all our roles in the collection: 
% mkdir -p .config/molecule
% echo 'prerun: false' >> .config/molecule/config.yml
This works perfectly, as long as you don't have any dependencies. And we don't have any, right? We didn't define any in a molecule/collections.yml, our collection has none. So let's push a PR with that and see what our CI thinks. 
OSError: [Errno 39] Directory not empty: 'tests'
Huh? 
FileExistsError: [Errno 17] File exists: b'remote.sh' -> b'/home/runner/work/namespace.collection/namespace.collection/collections/ansible_collections/ansible/posix/tests/utils/shippable/aix.sh'
What? 
ansible_compat.errors.InvalidPrerequisiteError: Found collection at '/home/runner/work/namespace.collection/namespace.collection/collections/ansible_collections/ansible/posix' but missing MANIFEST.json, cannot get info.
Okay, okay, I get the idea But why? Well, our collection might not have any dependencies, BUT MOLECULE HAS! When using Docker containers, it uses community.docker, when using Podman containers.podman, etc So we have to install those before running Molecule, and everything should be fine. We even can use Molecule to do this! 
$ molecule dependency --scenario <scenario>
And with that knowledge, the patch to enable parallel Molecule execution on GitHub Actions using pytest-xdist becomes: 
diff --git a/.config/molecule/config.yml b/.config/molecule/config.yml
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..32ed66d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.config/molecule/config.yml
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+prerun: false
diff --git a/.github/workflows/test.yml b/.github/workflows/test.yml
index 0f9da0d..df55a15 100644
--- a/.github/workflows/test.yml
+++ b/.github/workflows/test.yml
@@ -58,9 +58,13 @@ jobs:
       - name: Install Ansible
         run: pip install --upgrade https://github.com/ansible/ansible/archive/$  matrix.ansible  .tar.gz
       - name: Install dependencies
-        run: pip install molecule molecule-plugins pytest pytest-ansible
+        run: pip install molecule molecule-plugins pytest pytest-ansible pytest-xdist
+      - name: Install collection dependencies
+        run: cd roles/repository && molecule dependency -s suse
       - name: Run tests
-        run: pytest -vv --molecule roles/
+        run: pytest -vv --numprocesses auto --molecule roles/
+        env:
+          MOLECULE_OPTS: --parallel
   ansible-lint:
     runs-on: ubuntu-latest
But you promised us to delete ten lines, that's just a +7-2 patch! Oh yeah, sorry, the +10-20 (so a net -10) is the foreman-operations-collection version of the patch, that also migrates from an ugly bash script to pytest-ansible. And yes, that cuts down the execution from ~26 minutes to ~13 minutes. In the collection I originally tested this with, it's a more moderate "from 8-9 minutes to 5-6 minutes", which is still good though :)

26 April 2024

Russell Coker: Convergence vs Transference

I previously wrote a blog post titled Considering Convergence [1] about the possible ways of using a phone as a laptop. While I still believe what I wrote there I m now considering the possibility of ease of movement of work in progress as a way of addressing some of the same issues. Currently the expected use is that if you have web pages open on Chrome on Android it s possible to instruct Chrome on the desktop to open the same page if both instances of Chrome are signed in to the same GMail account. It s also possible to view the Chrome history with CTRL-H, select tabs from other devices and load things that were loaded on other devices some time ago. This is very minimal support for moving work between devices and I think we can do better. Firstly for web browsing the Chrome functionality is barely adequate. It requires having a heavyweight login process on all browsers that includes sharing stored passwords etc which isn t desirable. There are many cases where moving work is desired without sharing such things, one example is using a personal device to research something for work. Also the Chrome method of sending web pages is slow and unreliable and the viewing history method gets all closed tabs when the common case is get the currently open tabs from one browser window without wanting the dozens of web pages that turned out not to be interesting and were closed. This could be done with browser plugins to allow functionality similar to KDE Connect for sending tabs and also the option of emailing a list of URLs or a JSON file that could be processed by a browser plugin on the receiving end. I can send email between my home and work addresses faster than the Chrome share to another device function can send a URL. For documents we need a way of transferring files. One possibility is to go the Chromebook route and have it all stored on the web. This means that you rely on a web based document editing system and the FOSS versions are difficult to manage. Using Google Docs or Sharepoint for everything is not something I consider an acceptable option. Also for laptop use being able to run without Internet access is a good thing. There are a range of distributed filesystems that have been used for various purposes. I don t think any of them cater to the use case of having a phone/laptop and a desktop PC (or maybe multiple PCs) using the same files. For a technical user it would be an option to have a script that connects to a peer system (IE another computer with the same accounts and access control decisions) and rsync a directory of working files and the shell history, and then opens a shell with the HISTFILE variable, current directory, and optionally some user environment variables set to match. But this wouldn t be the most convenient thing even for technical users. For programs that are integrated into the desktop environment it s possible for them to be restarted on login if they were active when the user logged out. The session tracking for that has about 1/4 the functionality needed for requesting a list of open files from the application, closing the application, transferring the files, and opening it somewhere else. I think that this would be a good feature to add to the XDG setup. The model of having programs and data attached to one computer or one network server that terminals of some sort connect to worked well when computers were big and expensive. But computers continue to get smaller and cheaper so we need to think of a document based use of computers to allow things to be easily transferred as convenient. With convenience being important so the hacks of rsync scripts that can work for technical users won t work for most people.
Related posts:
  1. Considering Convergence What is Convergence In 2013 Kyle Rankin (at the time...
  2. Google Chrome the Security Implications Google have announced a new web browser Chrome [1]....
  3. Bugs in Google Chrome I m currently running google-chrome-beta version 5.0.375.55-r47796 on Debian/Unstable. It s the...

20 April 2024

Bastian Venthur: Help needed: creating a WSDL file to interact with debbugs

I am upstream and Debian package maintainer of python-debianbts, which is a Python library that allows for querying Debian s Bug Tracking System (BTS). python-debianbts is used by reportbug, the standard tool to report bugs in Debian, and therefore the glue between the reportbug and the BTS. debbugs, the software that powers Debian s BTS, provides a SOAP interface for querying the BTS. Unfortunately, SOAP is not a very popular protocol anymore, and I m facing the second migration to another underlying SOAP library as they continue to become unmaintained over time. Zeep, the library I m currently considering, requires a WSDL file in order to work with a SOAP service, however, debbugs does not provide one. Since I m not familiar with WSDL, I need help from someone who can create a WSDL file for debbugs, so I can migrate python-debianbts away from pysimplesoap to zeep. How did we get here? Back in the olden days, reportbug was querying the BTS by parsing its HTML output. While this worked, it tightly coupled the user-facing presentation of the BTS with critical functionality of the bug reporting tool. The setup was fragile, prone to breakage, and did not allow changing anything in the BTS frontend for fear of breaking reportbug itself. In 2007, I started to work on reportbug-ng, a user-friendly alternative to reportbug, targeted at users not comfortable using the command line. Early on, I decided to use the BTS SOAP interface instead of parsing HTML like reportbug did. 2008, I extracted the code that dealt with the BTS into a separate Python library, and after some collaboration with the reportbug maintainers, reportbug adopted python-debianbts in 2011 and has used it ever since. 2015, I was working on porting python-debianbts to Python 3. During that process, it turned out that its major dependency, SoapPy was pretty much unmaintained for years and blocking the Python3 transition. Thanks to the help of Gaetano Guerriero, who ported python-debianbts to pysimplesoap, the migration was unblocked and could proceed. In 2024, almost ten years later, pysimplesoap seems to be unmaintained as well, and I have to look again for alternatives. The most promising one right now seems to be zeep. Unfortunately, zeep requires a WSDL file for working with a SOAP service, which debbugs does not provide. How can you help? reportbug (and thus python-debianbts) is used by thousands of users and I have a certain responsibility to keep things working properly. Since I simply don t know enough about WSDL to create such a file for debbugs myself, I m looking for someone who can help me with this task. If you re familiar with SOAP, WSDL and optionally debbugs, please get in touch with me. I don t speak Pearl, so I m not really able to read debbugs code, but I do know some things about the SOAP requests and replies due to my work on python-debianbts, so I m sure we can work something out. There is a WSDL file for a debbugs version used by GNU, but I don t think it s official and it currently does not work with zeep. It may be a good starting point, though. The future of debbugs API While we can probably continue to support debbugs SOAP interface for a while, I don t think it s very sustainable in the long run. A simpler, well documented REST API that returns JSON seems more appropriate nowadays. The queries and replies that debbugs currently supports are simple enough to design a REST API with JSON around it. The benefit would be less complex libraries on the client side and probably easier maintainability on the server side as well. debbugs maintainer seemed to be in agreement with this idea back in 2018. I created an attempt to define a new API (HTML render), but somehow we got stuck and no progress has been made since then. I m still happy to help shaping such an API for debbugs, but I can t really implement anything in debbugs itself, as it is written in Perl, which I m not familiar with.

18 April 2024

Jonathan McDowell: Sorting out backup internet #2: 5G modem

Having setup recursive DNS it was time to actually sort out a backup internet connection. I live in a Virgin Media area, but I still haven t forgiven them for my terrible Virgin experiences when moving here. Plus it involves a bigger contractual commitment. There are no altnets locally (though I m watching youfibre who have already rolled out in a few Belfast exchanges), so I decided to go for a 5G modem. That gives some flexibility, and is a bit easier to get up and running. I started by purchasing a ZTE MC7010. This had the advantage of being reasonably cheap off eBay, not having any wifi functionality I would just have to disable (it s going to plug it into the same router the FTTP connection terminates on), being outdoor mountable should I decide to go that way, and, finally, being powered via PoE. For now this device sits on the window sill in my study, which is at the top of the house. I printed a table stand for it which mostly does the job (though not as well with a normal, rather than flat, network cable). The router lives downstairs, so I ve extended a dedicated VLAN through the study switch, down to the core switch and out to the router. The PoE study switch can only do GigE, not 2.5Gb/s, but at present that s far from the limiting factor on the speed of the connection. The device is 3 branded, and, as it happens, I ve ended up with a 3 SIM in it. Up until recently my personal phone was with them, but they ve kicked me off Go Roam, so I ve moved. Going with 3 for the backup connection provides some slight extra measure of resiliency; we now have devices on all 4 major UK networks in the house. The SIM is a preloaded data only SIM good for a year; I don t expect to use all of the data allowance, but I didn t want to have to worry about unexpected excess charges. Performance turns out to be disappointing; I end up locking the device to 4G as the 5G signal is marginal - leaving it enabled results in constantly switching between 4G + 5G and a significant extra latency. The smokeping graph below shows a brief period where I removed the 4G lock and allowed 5G: Smokeping 4G vs 5G graph (There s a handy zte.js script to allow doing this from the device web interface.) I get about 10Mb/s sustained downloads out of it. EE/Vodafone did not lead to significantly better results, so for now I m accepting it is what it is. I tried relocating the device to another part of the house (a little tricky while still providing switch-based PoE, but I have an injector), without much improvement. Equally pinning the 4G to certain bands provided a short term improvement (I got up to 40-50Mb/s sustained), but not reliably so. speedtest.net results This is disappointing, but if it turns out to be a problem I can look at mounting it externally. I also assume as 5G is gradually rolled out further things will naturally improve, but that might be wishful thinking on my part. Rather than wait until my main link had a problem I decided to try a day working over the 5G connection. I spend a lot of my time either in browser based apps or accessing remote systems via SSH, so I m reasonably sensitive to a jittery or otherwise flaky connection. I picked a day that I did not have any meetings planned, but as it happened I ended up with an adhoc video call arranged. I m pleased to say that it all worked just fine; definitely noticeable as slower than the FTTP connection (to be expected), but all workable and even the video call was fine (at least from my end). Looking at the traffic graph shows the expected ~ 10Mb/s peak (actually a little higher, and looking at the FTTP stats for previous days not out of keeping with what we see there), and you can just about see the ~ 3Mb/s symmetric use by the video call at 2pm: 4G traffic during the work day The test run also helped iron out the fact that the content filter was still enabled on the SIM, but that was easily resolved. Up next, vaguely automatic failover.

12 April 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: SSO Authentication for jitsi.debian.social, /usr-move updates, and more! (by Utkarsh Gupta)

Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services. P.S. We ve completed over a year of writing these blogs. If you have any suggestions on how to make them better or what you d like us to cover, or any other opinions/reviews you might have, et al, please let us know by dropping an email to us. We d be happy to hear your thoughts. :)

SSO Authentication for jitsi.debian.social, by Stefano Rivera Debian.social s jitsi instance has been getting some abuse by (non-Debian) people sharing sexually explicit content on the service. After playing whack-a-mole with this for a month, and shutting the instance off for another month, we opened it up again and the abuse immediately re-started. Stefano sat down and wrote an SSO Implementation that hooks into Jitsi s existing JWT SSO support. This requires everyone using jitsi.debian.social to have a Salsa account. With only a little bit of effort, we could change this in future, to only require an account to open a room, and allow guests to join the call.

/usr-move, by Helmut Grohne The biggest task this month was sending mitigation patches for all of the /usr-move issues arising from package renames due to the 2038 transition. As a result, we can now say that every affected package in unstable can either be converted with dh-sequence-movetousr or has an open bug report. The package set relevant to debootstrap except for the set that has to be uploaded concurrently has been moved to /usr and is awaiting migration. The move of coreutils happened to affect piuparts which hard codes the location of /bin/sync and received multiple updates as a result.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Stefano Rivera uploaded a stable release update to python3.11 for bookworm, fixing a use-after-free crash.
  • Stefano uploaded a new version of python-html2text, and updated python3-defaults to build with it.
  • In support of Python 3.12, Stefano dropped distutils as a Build-Dependency from a few packages, and uploaded a complex set of patches to python-mitogen.
  • Stefano landed some merge requests to clean up dead code in dh-python, removed the flit plugin, and uploaded it.
  • Stefano uploaded new upstream versions of twisted, hatchling, python-flexmock, python-authlib, python mitogen, python-pipx, and xonsh.
  • Stefano requested removal of a few packages supporting the Opsis HDMI2USB hardware that DebConf Video team used to use for HDMI capture, as they are not being maintained upstream. They started to FTBFS, with recent sdcc changes.
  • DebConf 24 is getting ready to open registration, Stefano spent some time fixing bugs in the website, caused by infrastructure updates.
  • Stefano reviewed all the DebConf 23 travel reimbursements, filing requests for more information from SPI where our records mismatched.
  • Stefano spun up a Wafer website for the Berlin 2024 mini DebConf.
  • Roberto C. S nchez worked on facilitating the transfer of upstream maintenance responsibility for the dormant Shorewall project to a new team led by the current maintainer of the Shorewall packages in Debian.
  • Colin Watson fixed build failures in celery-haystack-ng, db1-compat, jsonpickle, libsdl-perl, kali, knews, openssh-ssh1, python-json-log-formatter, python-typing-extensions, trn4, vigor, and wcwidth. Some of these were related to the 64-bit time_t transition, since that involved enabling -Werror=implicit-function-declaration.
  • Colin fixed an off-by-one error in neovim, which was already causing a build failure in Ubuntu and would eventually have caused a build failure in Debian with stricter toolchain settings.
  • Colin added an sshd@.service template to openssh to help newer systemd versions make containers and VMs SSH-accessible over AF_VSOCK sockets.
  • Following the xz-utils backdoor, Colin spent some time testing and discussing OpenSSH upstream s proposed inline systemd notification patch, since the current implementation via libsystemd was part of the attack vector used by that backdoor.
  • Utkarsh reviewed and sponsored some Go packages for Lena Voytek and Rajudev.
  • Utkarsh also helped Mitchell Dzurick with the adoption of pyparted package.
  • Helmut sent 10 patches for cross build failures.
  • Helmut partially fixed architecture cross bootstrap tooling to deal with changes in linux-libc-dev and the recent gcc-for-host changes and also fixed a 64bit-time_t FTBFS in libtextwrap.
  • Thorsten Alteholz uploaded several packages from debian-printing: cjet, lprng, rlpr and epson-inkjet-printer-escpr were affected by the newly enabled compiler switch -Werror=implicit-function-declaration. Besides fixing these serious bugs, Thorsten also worked on other bugs and could fix one or the other.
  • Carles updated simplemonitor and python-ring-doorbell packages with new upstream versions.
  • Santiago is still working on the Salsa CI MRs to adapt the build jobs so they can rely on sbuild. Current work includes adapting the images used by the build job, implementing the basic sbuild support the related jobs, and adjusting the support for experimental and *-backports releases..
    Additionally, Santiago reviewed some MR such as Make timeout action explicit in the logs and the subsequent Implement conditional timeout verbosity, and the batch of MRs included in https://salsa.debian.org/salsa-ci-team/pipeline/-/merge_requests/482.
  • Santiago also reviewed applications for the improving Salsa CI in Debian GSoC 2024 project. We received applications from four very talented candidates. The selection process is currently ongoing. A huge thanks to all of them!
  • As part of the DebConf 24 organization, Santiago has taken part in the Content team discussions.

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