Search Results: "cts"

11 May 2020

Julien Danjou: Interview: The Performance of Python

Interview: The Performance of PythonEarlier this year, I was supposed to participate to dotPy, a one-day Python conference happening in Paris. This event has unfortunately been cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.Both Victor Stinner and me were supposed to attend that event. Victor had prepared a presentation about Python performances, while I was planning on talking about profiling.Rather than being completely discouraged, Victor and I sat down (remotely) with Anne Laure from Behind the Code (a blog ran by Welcome to the Jungle, the organizers of the dotPy conference).We discuss Python performance, profiling, speed, projects, problems, analysis, optimization and the GIL.You can read the interview here.
Interview: The Performance of Python

Gunnar Wolf: Certified printer fumes

After losing a fair bit of hair due to quality and reliability issues with our home laser multifunctional (Brother DCP1600-series, which we bought after checking it was meant to work on Linux And it does, but with a very buggy, proprietary driver Besides being the printer itself of quite low quality), we decided it was time to survey the market again, and get a color inkjet printer. I was not very much an enthusiast of the idea, until I found all of the major manufacturers now offer refillable ink tanks instead of the darn expensive cartridges of past decades. Lets see how it goes! Of course, with over 20 years of training, I did my homework. I was about to buy an Epson printer, but decided for an HP Ink Tank 410 Wireless printer. The day it arrived, not wanting to fuss around too much to get to see the results, I connected it to my computer using the USB cable. Everything ran smoothly and happily! No driver hunting needed, print quality is superb I hope, years from now, we stay with this impression. Next day, I tried to print over WiFi. Of course, it requires configuration. And, of course, configuration strongly wants you to do it from a Windows or MacOS machine which I don t have. OK, fall back to Android For which an app download is required (and does not thrill me, but what can I say. Oh and the app needs location services to even run. Why Maybe because it interacts with the wireless network in WiFi Direct, non-authenticated way?) Anyway, things seem to work. But they don t My computers can identify and connect with the printer from CUPS, but nothing ever comes out. Printer paused, they say. Entering the printer s web interface is somewhat ambiguous Following the old HP practices, I tried http://192.168.1.75:9100/ (no point in hiding my internal IP), and got a partial webpage sometimes (and nothing at all othertimes). Seeing the printer got detected over ipps://, my immediate reaction was to try pointing the browser to port 631. Seems to work! Got some odd messages But it seems I ll soon debug the issue away. I am not a familiar meddler in the dark lands of cups, our faithful print server, but I had to remember my toolkit.. 
# cupsenable HP_Ink_Tank_Wireless_410_series_C37468_ --release
Sucess in enabling, but self-auto-disabled right away lpstat -t was not more generous, reporting only it was still paused. Some hours later (mix in attending kids and whatnot), I finally remember to try cupsctl --debug-logging, and magically, /var/log/cups/error_log turns from being quiet to being quite chatty. And, of course, my first print job starts being processed: 
D [10/May/2020:23:07:20 -0500] Report: jobs-active=1
(...)
D [10/May/2020:23:07:25 -0500] [Job 174] Start rendering...
(...)
D [10/May/2020:23:07:25 -0500] [Job 174] STATE: -connecting-to-device
(...)
Everything looks fine and dandy so far! But, hey, given nothing came out of the printer keep reading one more second of logs (a couple dozen lines) 
D [10/May/2020:23:07:26 -0500] [Job 174] Connection is encrypted.
D [10/May/2020:23:07:26 -0500] [Job 174] Credentials are expired (Credentials have expired.)
D [10/May/2020:23:07:26 -0500] [Job 174] Printer credentials: HPC37468 / Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT / 28A59EF511A480A34798B6712DEEAE74
D [10/May/2020:23:07:26 -0500] [Job 174] No stored credentials.
D [10/May/2020:23:07:26 -0500] [Job 174] update_reasons(attr=0(), s=\"-cups-pki-invalid,cups-pki-changed,cups-pki-expired,cups-pki-unknown\")
D [10/May/2020:23:07:26 -0500] [Job 174] STATE: -cups-pki-expired
(...)
D [10/May/2020:23:08:00 -0500] [Job 174] envp[16]="CUPS_ENCRYPTION=IfRequested"
(...)
D [10/May/2020:23:08:00 -0500] [Job 174] envp[27]="PRINTER_STATE_REASONS=cups-pki-expired"
My first stabs were attempts to get CUPS not to care about expired certificates, but it seems to have been hidden or removed from its usual place. Anyway, I was already frustrated. WTF Well, yes, turns out that from the Web interface, I paid some attention to this the first time around, but let it pass (speaks wonders about my security practices!): Way, way, way too expired cert So, the self-signed certificate the printer issued at itself expired 116 years before even being issued. (is this maybe a Y2k38 bug? Sounds like it!) Interesting thing, my CUPS log mentions the printer credentials to expire at the beginning of the Unix Epoch (01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT). OK, lets clickety-click away on the Web interface Didn t take me long to get to Network Advanced settings Certificates: Can manage certs! However, clicking on Configure leads me to the not very reassuring Way, way, way too expired cert I don t remember what I did for the next couple of minutes. Kept fuming Until I parsed again the output of lpstat -t, and found that: 
# lpstat -t
(...)
device for HP_Ink_Tank_Wireless_410_series_C37468_: ipps://HPF43909C37468.local:443/ipp/print
(...)
Hmmmm CUPS is connecting using good ol port 443, as if it were a Web thingy What if I do the same? Now we are talking! Click on New self-signed certificate , click on Next, a couple of reloads And a very nice color print came out of the printer, yay! Now, it still baffles me (of course I checked!): The self-signed certificate is now said to come from Issuer : CN=HPC37468, L=Vancouver, ST=Washington, C=US, O=HP,OU=HP-IPG, alright not that it matters (I can import a more meaningful one if I really feel like it), but, why is it Issued On: 2019-06-14 and set to Expires On: 2029-06-11? Anyway, print quality is quite nice. I hope to keep the printer long enough to rant at the certificate being expired in the future!

Comments Jeff Epler (Adafruit) 2020-05-11 20:39:17 -0500 why is it Issued On: 2019-06-14 and set to Expires On: 2029-06-11? Because it s 3650 days Gunnar Wolf 2020-05-11 20:39:17 -0500 Nice catch! Thanks for doing the head-scratching for me

10 May 2020

Russell Coker: IT Asset Management

In my last full-time position I managed the asset tracking database for my employer. It was one of those things that someone needed to do, and it seemed that only way that someone wouldn t equate to no-one was for me to do it which was ok. We used Snipe IT [1] to track the assets. I don t have enough experience with asset tracking to say that Snipe is better or worse than average, but it basically did the job. Asset serial numbers are stored, you can have asset types that allow you to just add one more of the particular item, purchase dates are stored which makes warranty tracking easier, and every asset is associated with a person or listed as available. While I can t say that Snipe IT is better than other products I can say that it will do the job reasonably well. One problem that I didn t discover until way too late was the fact that the finance people weren t tracking serial numbers and that some assets in the database had the same asset IDs as the finance department and some had different ones. The best advice I can give to anyone who gets involved with asset tracking is to immediately chat to finance about how they track things, you need to know if the same asset IDs are used and if serial numbers are tracked by finance. I was pleased to discover that my colleagues were all honourable people as there was no apparent evaporation of valuable assets even though there was little ability to discover who might have been the last person to use some of the assets. One problem that I ve seen at many places is treating small items like keyboards and mice as assets . I think that anything that is worth less than 1 hour s pay at the minimum wage (the price of a typical PC keyboard or mouse) isn t worth tracking, treat it as a disposable item. If you hire a programmer who requests an unusually expensive keyboard or mouse (as some do) it still won t be a lot of money when compared to their salary. Some of the older keyboards and mice that companies have are nasty, months of people eating lunch over them leaves them greasy and sticky. I think that the best thing to do with the keyboards and mice is to give them away when people leave and when new people join the company buy new hardware for them. If a company can t spend $25 on a new keyboard and mouse for each new employee then they either have a massive problem of staff turnover or a lack of priority on morale.
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Russ Allbery: Review: Golden Gates

Review: Golden Gates, by Conor Dougherty
Publisher: Penguin
Copyright: 2020
ISBN: 0-525-56022-X
Format: Kindle
Pages: 249
This review, for reasons that will hopefully become clear later, starts with a personal digression. I have been interested in political theory my entire life. That sounds like something admirable, or at least neutral. It's not. "Interested" means that I have opinions that are generally stronger than my depth of knowledge warrants. "Interested" means that I like thinking about and casting judgment on how politics should be done without doing the work of politics myself. And "political theory" is different than politics in important ways, not the least of which is that political actions have rarely been a direct danger to me or my family. I have the luxury of arguing about politics as a theory. In short, I'm at high risk of being one of those people who has an opinion about everything and shares it on Twitter. I'm still in the process (to be honest, near the beginning of the process) of making something useful out of that interest. I've had some success when I become enough a part of a community that I can do some of the political work, understand the arguments at a level deeper than theory, and have to deal with the consequences of my own opinions. But those communities have been on-line and relatively low stakes. For the big political problems, the ones that involve governments and taxes and laws, those that decide who gets medical treatment and income support and who doesn't, to ever improve, more people like me need to learn enough about the practical details that we can do the real work of fixing them, rather than only making our native (and generally privileged) communities better for ourselves. I haven't found my path helping with that work yet. But I do have a concrete, challenging, local political question that makes me coldly furious: housing policy. Hence this book. Golden Gates is about housing policy in the notoriously underbuilt and therefore incredibly expensive San Francisco Bay Area, where I live. I wanted to deepen that emotional reaction to the failures of housing policy with facts and analysis. Golden Gates does provide some of that. But this also turns out to be a book about the translation of political theory into practice, about the messiness and conflict that results, and about the difficult process of measuring success. It's also a book about how substantial agreement on the basics of necessary political change can still founder on the shoals of prioritization, tribalism, and people who are interested in political theory. In short, it's a book about the difficulty of changing the world instead of arguing about how to change it. This is not a direct analysis of housing policy, although Dougherty provides the basics as background. Rather, it's the story of the political fight over housing told primarily through two lenses: Sonja Trauss, founder of BARF (the Bay Area Renters' Federation); and a Redwood City apartment complex, the people who fought its rent increases, and the nun who eventually purchased it. Around that framework, Dougherty writes about the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association and the history of California's Proposition 13, a fight over a development in Lafayette, the logistics challenge of constructing sufficient housing even when approved, and the political career of Scott Wiener, the hated opponent of every city fighting for the continued ability to arbitrarily veto any new housing. One of the things Golden Gates helped clarify for me is that there are three core interest groups that have to be part of any discussion of Bay Area housing: homeowners who want to limit or eliminate local change, renters who are vulnerable to gentrification and redevelopment, and the people who want to live in that area and can't (which includes people who want to move there, but more sympathetically includes all the people who work there but can't afford to live locally, such as teachers, day care workers, food service workers, and, well, just about anyone who doesn't work in tech). (As with any political classification, statements about collectives may not apply to individuals; there are numerous people who appear to fall into one group but who vote in alignment with another.) Dougherty makes it clear that housing policy is intractable in part because the policies that most clearly help one of those three groups hurt the other two. As advertised by the subtitle, Dougherty's focus is on the fight for more housing. Those who already own homes whose values have been inflated by artificial scarcity, or who want to preserve such stratified living conditions as low-density, large-lot single-family dwellings within short mass-transit commute of one of the densest cities in the United States, don't get a lot of sympathy or focus here except as opponents. I understand this choice; I also don't have much sympathy. But I do wish that Dougherty had spent more time discussing the unsustainable promise that California has implicitly made to homeowners: housing may be impossibly expensive, but if you can manage to reach that pinnacle of financial success, the ongoing value of your home is guaranteed. He does mention this in passing, but I don't think he puts enough emphasis on the impact that a single huge, illiquid investment that is heavily encouraged by government policy has on people's attitude towards anything that jeopardizes that investment. The bulk of this book focuses on the two factions trying to make housing cheaper: Sonja Trauss and others who are pushing for construction of more housing, and tenant groups trying to manage the price of existing housing for those who have to rent. The tragedy of Bay Area housing is that even the faintest connection of housing to the economic principle of supply and demand implies that the long-term goals of those two groups align. Building more housing will decrease the cost of housing, at least if you build enough of it over a long enough period of time. But in the short term, particularly given the amount of Bay Area land pre-emptively excluded from housing by environmental protection and the actions of the existing homeowners, building more housing usually means tearing down cheap lower-density housing and replacing it with expensive higher-density housing. And that destroys people's lives. I'll admit my natural sympathy is with Trauss on pure economic grounds. There simply aren't enough places to live in the Bay Area, and the number of people in the area will not decrease. To the marginal extent that growth even slows, that's another tale of misery involving "super commutes" of over 90 minutes each way. But the most affecting part of this book was the detailed look at what redevelopment looks like for the people who thought they had housing, and how it disrupts and destroys existing communities. It's impossible to read those stories and not be moved. But it's equally impossible to not be moved by the stories of people who live in their cars during the week, going home only on weekends because they have to live too far away from their jobs to commute. This is exactly the kind of politics that I lose when I take a superficial interest in political theory. Even when I feel confident in a guiding principle, the hard part of real-world politics is bringing real people with you in the implementation and mitigating the damage that any choice of implementation will cause. There are a lot of details, and those details matter. Without the right balance between addressing a long-term deficit and providing short-term protection and relief, an attempt to alleviate unsustainable long-term misery creates more short-term misery for those least able to afford it. And while I personally may have less sympathy for the relatively well-off who have clawed their way into their own mortgage, being cavalier with their goals and their financial needs is both poor ethics and poor politics. Mobilizing political opponents who have resources and vote locally isn't a winning strategy. Dougherty is a reporter, not a housing or public policy expert, so Golden Gates poses problems and tells stories rather than describes solutions. This book didn't lead me to a brilliant plan for fixing the Bay Area housing crunch, or hand me a roadmap for how to get effectively involved in local politics. What it did do is tell stories about what political approaches have worked, how they've worked, what change they've created, and the limitations of that change. Solving political problems is work. That work requires understanding people and balancing concerns, which in turn requires a lot of empathy, a lot of communication, and sometimes finding a way to make unlikely allies. I'm not sure how broad the appeal of this book will be outside of those who live in the region. Some aspects of the fight for housing generalize, but the Bay Area (and I suspect every region) has properties specific to it or to the state of California. It has also reached an extreme of housing shortage that is rivaled in the United States only by New York City, which changes the nature of the solutions. But if you want to seriously engage with Bay Area housing policy, knowing the background explained here is nearly mandatory. There are some flaws I wish Dougherty would have talked more about traffic and transit policy, although I realize that could be another book but this is an important story told well. If this somewhat narrow topic is within your interests, highly recommended. Rating: 8 out of 10

9 May 2020

Andrew Cater: CD / DVD image testing happening now - 202005091330

The usual suspects very much involved - Isy, myself, RattusRattus, schweer and Sledge. Image testing going on to good effect. Update pulses are starting to hit mirrors: just done a dist-upgrade on one of the machines here. All good

6 May 2020

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in April 2020

Welcome to the April 2020 report from the Reproducible Builds project. In our regular reports we outline the most important things that we and the rest of the community have been up to over the past month. What are reproducible builds? One of the original promises of open source software is that distributed peer review and transparency of process results in enhanced end-user security. But whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free and open source software for malicious flaws, almost all software today is distributed as pre-compiled binaries. This allows nefarious third-parties to compromise systems by injecting malicious code into seemingly secure software during the various compilation and distribution processes.

News It was discovered that more than 725 malicious packages were downloaded thousands of times from RubyGems, the official channel for distributing code for the Ruby programming language. Attackers used a variation of typosquatting and replaced hyphens and underscores (for example, uploading a malevolent atlas-client in place of atlas_client) that executed a script that intercepted Bitcoin payments. (Ars Technica report) Bernhard M. Wiedemann launched ismypackagereproducibleyet.org, a service that takes a package name as input and displays whether the package is reproducible in a number of distributions. For example, it can quickly show the status of Perl as being reproducible on openSUSE but not in Debian. Bernhard also improved the documentation of his unreproducible package to add some example patches for hash issues. [ ]. There was a post on Chaos Computer Club s website listing Ten requirements for the evaluation of Contact Tracing apps in relation to the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic. In particular:
4. Transparency and verifiability: The complete source code for the app and infrastructure must be freely available without access restrictions to allow audits by all interested parties. Reproducible build techniques must be used to ensure that users can verify that the app they download has been built from the audited source code.
Elsewhere, Nicolas Boulenguez wrote a patch for the Ada programming language component of the GCC compiler to skip -f.*-prefix-map options when writing Ada Library Information files. Amongst other properties, these .ali files embed the compiler flags used at the time of the build which results in the absolute build path being recorded via -ffile-prefix-map, -fdebug-prefix-map, etc. In the Arch Linux project, kpcyrd reported that they held their first rebuilder workshop . The session was held on IRC and participants were provided a document with instructions on how to install and use Arch s repro tool. The meeting resulted in multiple people with no prior experience of Reproducible Builds validate their first package. Later in the month he also announced that it was now possible to run independent rebuilders under Arch in a hands-off, everything just works solution to distributed package verification. Mathias Lang submitted a pull request against dmd, the canonical compiler for the D programming languageto add support for our SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable as well the other C preprocessor tokens such __DATE__, __TIME__ and __TIMESTAMP__ which was subsequently merged. SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH defines a distribution-agnostic standard for build toolchains to consume and emit timestamps in situations where they are deemed to be necessary. [ ] The Telegram instant-messaging platform announced that they had updated to version 5.1.1 continuing their claim that they are reproducible according to their full instructions and therefore verifying that its original source code is exactly the same code that is used to build the versions available on the Apple App Store and Google Play distribution platforms respectfully. Lastly, Herv Boutemy reported that 97% of the current development versions of various Maven packages appear to have a reproducible build. [ ]

Distribution work In Debian this month, 89 reviews of Debian packages were added, 21 were updated and 33 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Many issue types were noticed, categorised and updated by Chris Lamb, including: In addition, Holger Levsen filed a feature request against debrebuild, a tool for rebuilding a Debian package given a .buildinfo file, proposing to add --standalone or --one-shot-mode functionality.
In openSUSE, Bernhard M. Wiedemann made the following changes: In Arch Linux, a rebuilder instance has been setup at reproducible.archlinux.org that is rebuilding Arch s [core] repository directly. The first rebuild has led to approximately 90% packages reproducible contrasting with 94% on the Reproducible Build s project own ArchLinux status page on tests.reproducible-builds.org that continiously builds packages and does not verify Arch Linux packages. More information may be found on the corresponding wiki page and the underlying decisions were explained on our mailing list.

Software development

diffoscope Chris Lamb made the following changes to diffoscope, the Reproducible Builds project s in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues (including preparing and uploading versions 139, 140, 141, 142 and 143 to Debian which were subsequently uploaded to the backports repository):
  • Comparison improvements:
    • Dalvik .dex files can also serve as APK containers so restrict the narrower identification of .dex files to files ending with this extension and widen the identification of APK files to when file(1) discovers a Dalvik file. (#28)
    • Add support for Hierarchical Data Format (HD5) files. (#95)
    • Add support for .p7c and .p7b certificates. (#94)
    • Strip paths from the output of zipinfo(1) warnings. (#97)
    • Don t uselessly include the JSON similarity percentage if it is 0.0% . [ ]
    • Render multi-line difference comments in a way to show indentation. (#101)
  • Testsuite improvements:
    • Add pdftotext as a requirement to run the PDF test_metadata text. (#99)
    • apktool 2.5.0 changed the handling of output of XML schemas so update and restrict the corresponding test to match. (#96)
    • Explicitly list python3-h5py in debian/tests/control.in to ensure that we have this module installed during a test run to generate the fixtures in these tests. [ ]
    • Correct parsing of ./setup.py test --pytest-args arguments. [ ]
  • Misc:
    • Capitalise Ordering differences only in text comparison comments. [ ]
    • Improve documentation of FILE_TYPE_HEADER_PREFIX and FALLBACK_FILE_TYPE_HEADER_PREFIX to highlight that only the first 16 bytes are used. [ ]
Michael Osipov created a well-researched merge request to return diffoscope to using zipinfo directly instead of piping input via /dev/stdin in order to ensure portability to the BSD operating system [ ]. In addition, Ben Hutchings documented how --exclude arguments are matched against filenames [ ] and Jelle van der Waa updated the LLVM test fixture difference for LLVM version 10 [ ] as well as adding a reference to the name of the h5dump tool in Arch Linux [ ]. Lastly, Mattia Rizzolo also fixed in incorrect build dependency [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian enabled diffoscope to locate the openssl and h5dump packages on GNU Guix [ ][ ], and updated diffoscope in GNU Guix to version 141 [ ] and 143 [ ].

strip-nondeterminism strip-nondeterminism is our tool to remove specific non-deterministic results from a completed build. In April, Chris Lamb made the following changes:
  • Add deprecation plans to all handlers documenting how or if they could be disabled and eventually removed, etc. (#3)
  • Normalise *.sym files as Java archives. (#15)
  • Add support for custom .zip filename filtering and exclude two patterns of files generated by Maven projects in fork mode. (#13)

disorderfs disorderfs is our FUSE-based filesystem that deliberately introduces non-determinism into directory system calls in order to flush out reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb fixed a long-standing issue by not drop UNIX groups in FUSE multi-user mode when we are not root (#1) and uploaded version 0.5.9-1 to Debian unstable. Vagrant Cascadian subsequently refreshed disorderfs in GNU Guix to version 0.5.9 [ ].

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including: In addition, Bernhard informed the following projects that their packages are not reproducible:
  • acoular (report unknown non-determinism)
  • cri-o (report a date issue)
  • gnutls (report certtool being unable to extend certificates beyond 2049)
  • gnutls (report copyright year variation)
  • libxslt (report a bug about non-deterministic output from data corruption)
  • python-astropy (report a future build failure in 2021)

Project documentation This month, Chris Lamb made a large number of changes to our website and documentation in the following categories:
  • Community engagement improvements:
    • Update instructions to register for Salsa on our Contribute page now that the signup process has been overhauled. [ ]
    • Make it clearer that joining the rb-general mailing list is probably a first step for contributors to take. [ ]
    • Make our full contact information easier to find in the footer (#19) and improve text layout using bullets to separate sections [ ].
  • Accessibility:
    • To improve accessibility, make all links underlined. (#12)
    • Use an enhanced foreground/background contrast ratio of 7.04:1. (#11)
  • General improvements:
  • Internals:
    • Move to using jekyll-redirect-from over manual redirect pages [ ][ ] and add a redirect from /docs/buildinfo/ to /docs/recording/. (#23)
    • Limit the website self-check to not scan generated files [ ] and remove the old layout checker now that I have migrated all them [ ].
    • Move the news archive under the /news/ namespace [ ] and improve formatting of archived news links [ ].
    • Various improvements to the draft template generation. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
In addition, Holger Levsen clarified exactly which month we ceased to do weekly reports [ ] and Mattia Rizzolo adjusted the title style of an event page [ ]. Marcus Hoffman also started a discussion on our website s issue tracker asking for clarification on embedded signatures and Chris Lamb subsequently replied and asked Marcus to go ahead and propose a concrete change.

Testing framework We operate a large and many-featured Jenkins-based testing framework that powers tests.reproducible-builds.org that, amongst many other tasks, tracks the status of our reproducibility efforts as well as identifies any regressions that have been introduced.
  • Chris Lamb:
    • Print the build environment prior to executing a build. [ ]
    • Drop a misleading disorderfs-debug prefix in log output when we change non-disorderfs things in the file and, as it happens, do not run disorderfs at all. [ ]
    • The CSS for the package report pages added a margin to all <a> HTML elements under <li> ones, which was causing a comma/bullet spacing issue. [ ]
    • Tidy the copy in the project links sidebar. [ ]
  • Holger Levsen:
    • General:
    • Debian:
      • Reduce scheduling frequency of the buster distribution on the arm64 architecture, etc.. [ ][ ]
      • Show builds per day on a per-architecture basis for the last year on the Debian dashboard. [ ]
      • Drop the Subgraph OS package set as development halted in 2017 or 2018. [ ]
      • Update debrebuild to version from the latest version of devscripts. [ ][ ]
      • Add or improve various parts of the documentation. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Work on a Debian rebuilder:
      • Integrate sbuild. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
      • Select a random .buildinfo file and attempt to build and compare the result. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
      • Improve output and related output formatting. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
      • Outline next steps for the development of the tool. [ ][ ][ ]
      • Various refactoring and code improvements. [ ][ ][ ]
Lastly, Mattia Rizzolo fixed some log parsing code regarding potentially-harmless warnings from package installation [ ][ ] and the usual build node maintenance was performed by Holger Levsen [ ][ ][ ] and Mattia Rizzolo [ ][ ][ ].

Misc news On our mailing list this month, Santiago Torres asked whether we were still publishing releases of our tools to our website and Chris Lamb replied that this was not the case and fixed the issue. Later in the month Santiago also reported that the signature for the disorderfs package did not pass its GPG verification which was also fixed by Chris Lamb. Hans-Christoph Steiner of the Guardian Project asked whether there would be interest in making our website translatable which resulted in a WIP merge request being filed against the website and a discussion on how to track translation updates.
If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

This month s report was written by Bernhard M. Wiedemann, Chris Lamb, Daniel Shahaf, Holger Levsen, Jelle van der Waa, kpcyrd, Mattia Rizzolo and Vagrant Cascadian. It was subsequently reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC and the mailing list.

Russell Coker: About Reopening Businesses

Currently there is political debate about when businesses should be reopened after the Covid19 quarantine. Small Businesses One argument for reopening things is for the benefit of small businesses. The first thing to note is that the protests in the US say I need a haircut not I need to cut people s hair . Small businesses won t benefit from reopening sooner. For every business there is a certain minimum number of customers needed to be profitable. There are many comments from small business owners that want it to remain shutdown. When the government has declared a shutdown and paused rent payments and provided social security to employees who aren t working the small business can avoid bankruptcy. If they suddenly have to pay salaries or make redundancy payouts and have to pay rent while they can t make a profit due to customers staying home they will go bankrupt. Many restaurants and cafes make little or no profit at most times of the week (I used to be 1/3 owner of an Internet cafe and know this well). For such a company to be viable you have to be open most of the time so customers can expect you to be open. Generally you don t keep a cafe open at 3PM to make money at 3PM, you keep it open so people can rely on there being a cafe open there, someone who buys a can of soda at 3PM one day might come back for lunch at 1:30PM the next day because they know you are open. A large portion of the opening hours of a most retail companies can be considered as either advertising for trade at the profitable hours or as loss making times that you can t close because you can t send an employee home for an hour. If you have seating for 28 people (as my cafe did) then for about half the opening hours you will probably have 2 or fewer customers in there at any time, for about a quarter the opening hours you probably won t cover the salary of the one person on duty. The weekend is when you make the real money, especially Friday and Saturday nights when you sometimes get all the seats full and people coming in for takeaway coffee and snacks. On Friday and Saturday nights the 60 seat restaurant next door to my cafe used to tell customers that my cafe made better coffee. It wasn t economical for them to have a table full for an hour while they sell a few cups of coffee, they wanted customers to leave after dessert and free the table for someone who wants a meal with wine (alcohol is the real profit for many restaurants). The plans of reopening with social distancing means that a 28 seat cafe can only have 14 chairs or less (some plans have 25% capacity which would mean 7 people maximum). That means decreasing the revenue of the most profitable times by 50% to 75% while also not decreasing the operating costs much. A small cafe has 2-3 staff when it s crowded so there s no possibility of reducing staff by 75% when reducing the revenue by 75%. My Internet cafe would have closed immediately if forced to operate in the proposed social distancing model. It would have been 1/4 of the trade and about 1/8 of the profit at the most profitable times, even if enough customers are prepared to visit and social distancing would kill the atmosphere. Most small businesses are barely profitable anyway, most small businesses don t last 4 years in normal economic circumstances. This reopen movement is about cutting unemployment benefits not about helping small business owners. Destroying small businesses is also good for big corporations, kill the small cafes and restaurants and McDonald s and Starbucks will win. I think this is part of the motivation behind the astroturf campaign for reopening businesses. Forbes has an article about this [1]. Psychological Issues Some people claim that we should reopen businesses to help people who have psychological problems from isolation, to help victims of domestic violence who are trapped at home, to stop older people being unemployed for the rest of their lives, etc. Here is one article with advice for policy makers from domestic violence experts [2]. One thing it mentions is that the primary US federal government program to deal with family violence had a budget of $130M in 2013. The main thing that should be done about family violence is to make it a priority at all times (not just when it can be a reason for avoiding other issues) and allocate some serious budget to it. An agency that deals with problems that affect families and only has a budget of $1 per family per year isn t going to be able to do much. There are ongoing issues of people stuck at home for various reasons. We could work on better public transport to help people who can t drive. We could work on better healthcare to help some of the people who can t leave home due to health problems. We could have more budget for carers to help people who can t leave home without assistance. Wanting to reopen restaurants because some people feel isolated is ignoring the fact that social isolation is a long term ongoing issue for many people, and that many of the people who are affected can t even afford to eat at a restaurant! Employment discrimination against people in the 50+ age range is an ongoing thing, many people in that age range know that if they lose their job and can t immediately find another they will be unemployed for the rest of their lives. Reopening small businesses won t help that, businesses running at low capacity will have to lay people off and it will probably be the older people. Also the unemployment system doesn t deal well with part time work. The Australian system (which I think is similar to most systems in this regard) reduces the unemployment benefits by $0.50 for every dollar that is earned in part time work, that effectively puts people who are doing part time work because they can t get a full-time job in the highest tax bracket! If someone is going to pay for transport to get to work, work a few hours, then get half the money they earned deducted from unemployment benefits it hardly makes it worthwhile to work. While the exact health impacts of Covid19 aren t well known at this stage it seems very clear that older people are disproportionately affected, so forcing older people to go back to work before there is a vaccine isn t going to help them. When it comes to these discussions I think we should be very suspicious of people who raise issues they haven t previously shown interest in. If the discussion of reopening businesses seems to be someone s first interest in the issues of mental health, social security, etc then they probably aren t that concerned about such issues. I believe that we should have a Universal Basic Income [3]. I believe that we need to provide better mental health care and challenge the gender ideas that hurt men and cause men to hurt women [4]. I believe that we have significant ongoing problems with inequality not small short term issues [5]. I don t think that any of these issues require specific changes to our approach to preventing the transmission of disease. I also think that we can address multiple issues at the same time, so it is possible for the government to devote more resources to addressing unemployment, family violence, etc while also dealing with a pandemic.
Related posts:
  1. McDonalds Wifi Without Power I am writing this post at a small cafe while...
  2. Nando s Voucher Interpretation Every year my parents buy a book of vouchers for...
  3. economics of a computer store (why they don t stock what you want) In some mailing list discussions recently some people demonstrated a...

5 May 2020

Jonathan Dowland: Introducing Red Hat UBI OpenJDK runtime images

At Red Hat we've just shipped Universal Base Image (UBI) build images for OpenJDK. Download them with your favourite container manager, e.g.: 
podman pull registry.access.redhat.com/ubi8/openjdk-8
podman pull registry.access.redhat.com/ubi8/openjdk-11
UBI, announced a year ago, is an initiative where you can obtain, share and build upon official Red Hat container images without needing a Red Hat subscription. Unlike something like CentOS, they aren't modified in any way (e.g. to remove branding), they're exactly the same base images that Red Hat products are built upon, composed entirely of Open Source software. Your precise rights are covered in the EULA. I work on the Red Hat OpenJDK container images, which are designed primarily for use with OpenShift. We've been based upon the RHEL base images since inception. Although our containers are open source (of course), we haven't been able to distribute the binary images more widely than to Red Hat customers, until now. These are based upon the "minimal" flavour base image and add an OpenJDK runtime and development packages (either JDK8 or JDK11, as per the image name) as well as Maven and OpenShift integration scripts that allow the image to be used with Source To Image. If you give these a try, please let us know what you think! Comment here, on twitter, or file Issues or Pull Requests in the GitHub project.

3 May 2020

Iain R. Learmonth: Hetzner Dedicated Server Reverse DNS + Ansible

Continuing on the path towards all my stuff being managed by Ansible, I ve figured out a method of managing the reverse DNS entries for subnets on the Hetzner Dedicated Server. There s a bunch of Ansible modules for handling Hetzner Cloud, but these servers are managed in Robot which the Cloud API doesn t cover. Instead, you need to use the Robot Webservice. Ansible does have a module for doing pretty arbitrary things with web APIs though, so using that I ve got the following playbook figured out to keep the reverse DNS entries in sync: 
---
- hosts:
  - vmhost_vm1
  gather_facts: False
  tasks:
  - name: import hetzner webservice credentials
    include_vars:
      file: "hetzner_ws.yml"
  - name: set rdns for hetzner hosts
    block:
    - name: get current rdns entry
      uri:
        user: "  hetzner_ws_user  "
        password: "  hetzner_ws_password  "
        url: "https://robot-ws.your-server.de/rdns/  vmip4  "
        status_code: [200, 404]
      register: rdns_result
    - name: update incorrect rdns entry
      uri:
        user: "  hetzner_ws_user  "
        password: "  hetzner_ws_password  "
        url: "https://robot-ws.your-server.de/rdns/  vmip4  "
        method: "POST"
        body_format: form-urlencoded
        body:
          ptr: "  inventory_hostname  "
        status_code: [200, 201]
      when: '"rdns" not in rdns_result.json or inventory_hostname != rdns_result.json.rdns.ptr'
      changed_when: True
    delegate_to: localhost
The host groups this runs on are currently hardcoded as the VMs that live in the Hetzner Dedicated Server. A future iteration of this might use some inventory plugin to look up the subnets that are managed on Hetzner and create a group for all of those. Right now it won t be setting the reverse DNS for the router interface on that subnet, and won t automatically include new server s subnets. Gathering facts is disabled because all of these run locally. There is at least one VM running on this server that I can t log in to because I host it for someone else, so running locally is a necessity. The webservice credentials are stored in an Ansible Vault encrypted YAML file and loaded explicitly. An important note: the webservice username and password is not the same as your regular Robot username and password. You need to create a webservice user in Robot under Settings; Webservice and app settings . If you attempt to authenticate with an incorrect username and password 3 times in a row, your IP address will be blocked for 10 minutes. There are 6 hosts in this group, so I did this a few times before I realised there was a different user account I needed to create. I d suggest limiting to a single host while you re testing to get the authentication figured out. The actual calls to the webservice take place in a block just to avoid having to specify the delegate_to: localhost twice. The first step looks up the current PTR record, and accepts success if it gives either a 200 or 404 status code (it will be 404 if there is no existing pointer record). The result of this is used to conditionally create/update the PTR record in the next task. If nothing needs to be done, nothing will be changed and the second task will be skipped. If a change is needed, the second step is successful if either the PTR record is updated (status 200) or created (status 201). This was actually a lot easier than I thought it would be, and the uri module looks to be really flexible, so I bet there are other things that I could easily integrate into my Ansible playbooks.

Fran ois Marier: Backing up to a GnuBee PC 2

After installing Debian buster on my GnuBee, I set it up for receiving backups from my other computers.

Software setup I started by configuring it like a typical server but without a few packages that either take a lot of memory or CPU: I changed the default hostname:
  • /etc/hostname: foobar
  • /etc/mailname: foobar.example.com
  • /etc/hosts: 127.0.0.1 foobar.example.com vogar localhost
and then installed the avahi-daemon package to be able to reach this box using foobar.local. I noticed the presence of a world-writable directory and so I tightened the security of some of the default mount points by putting the following in /etc/rc.local: 
mount -o remount,nodev,nosuid /etc/network
mount -o remount,nodev,nosuid /lib/modules
chmod 755 /etc/network
exit 0

Hardware setup My OS drive (/dev/sda) is a small SSD so that the GnuBee can run silently when the spinning disks aren't needed. To hold the backup data on the other hand, I got three 4-TB drives drives which I setup in a RAID-5 array. If the data were valuable, I'd use RAID-6 instead since it can survive two drives failing at the same time, but in this case since it's only holding backups, I'd have to lose the original machine at the same time as two of the 3 drives, a very unlikely scenario. I created new gpt partition tables on /dev/sdb, /dev/sdbc, /dev/sdd and used fdisk to create a single partition of type 29 (Linux RAID) on each of them. Then I created the RAID array: 
mdadm /dev/md127 --create -n 3 --level=raid5 -a /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1
and waited more than 24 hours for that operation to finish. Next, I formatted the array: 
mkfs.ext4 -m 0 /dev/md127
and added the following to /etc/fstab: 
/dev/md127 /mnt/data/ ext4 noatime,nodiratime 0 2
To reduce unnecessary noise and reduce power consumption, I also installed hdparm: 
apt install hdparm
and configured all spinning drives to spin down after being idle for 10 minutes by putting the following in /etc/hdparm.conf: 
/dev/sdb  
       spindown_time = 120
 
/dev/sdc  
       spindown_time = 120
 
/dev/sdd  
       spindown_time = 120
and then reloaded the configuration: 
 /usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/95hdparm-apm resume
Finally I setup smartmontools by putting the following in /etc/smartd.conf: 
/dev/sda -a -o on -S on -s (S/../.././02 L/../../6/03)
/dev/sdb -a -o on -S on -s (S/../.././02 L/../../6/03)
/dev/sdc -a -o on -S on -s (S/../.././02 L/../../6/03)
/dev/sdd -a -o on -S on -s (S/../.././02 L/../../6/03)
and restarting the daemon: 
systemctl restart smartd.service

Backup setup I started by using duplicity since I have been using that tool for many years, but a 190GB backup took around 15 hours on the GnuBee with gigabit ethernet. After a friend suggested it, I took a look at restic and I have to say that I am impressed. The same backup finished in about half the time.

User and ssh setup After hardening the ssh setup as I usually do, I created a user account for each machine needing to backup onto the GnuBee: 
adduser machine1
adduser machine1 sshuser
adduser machine1 sftponly
chsh machine1 -s /bin/false
and then matching directories under /mnt/data/home/: 
mkdir /mnt/data/home/machine1
chown machine1:machine1 /mnt/data/home/machine1
chmod 700 /mnt/data/home/machine1
Then I created a custom ssh key for each machine: 
ssh-keygen -f /root/.ssh/foobar_backups -t ed25519
and placed it in /home/machine1/.ssh/authorized_keys on the GnuBee. On each machine, I added the following to /root/.ssh/config: 
Host foobar.local
    User machine1
    Compression no
    Ciphers aes128-ctr
    IdentityFile /root/backup/foobar_backups
    IdentitiesOnly yes
    ServerAliveInterval 60
    ServerAliveCountMax 240
The reason for setting the ssh cipher and disabling compression is to speed up the ssh connection as much as possible given that the GnuBee has avery small RAM bandwidth. Another performance-related change I made on the GnuBee was switching to the internal sftp server by putting the following in /etc/ssh/sshd_config: 
Subsystem      sftp    internal-sftp

Restic script After reading through the excellent restic documentation, I wrote the following backup script, based on my old duplicity script, to reuse on all of my computers: 
# Configure for each host
PASSWORD="XXXX"  # use  pwgen -s 64  to generate a good random password
BACKUP_HOME="/root/backup"
REMOTE_URL="sftp:foobar.local:"
RETENTION_POLICY="--keep-daily 7 --keep-weekly 4 --keep-monthly 12 --keep-yearly 2"
# Internal variables
SSH_IDENTITY="IdentityFile=$BACKUP_HOME/foobar_backups"
EXCLUDE_FILE="$BACKUP_HOME/exclude"
PKG_FILE="$BACKUP_HOME/dpkg-selections"
PARTITION_FILE="$BACKUP_HOME/partitions"
# If the list of files has been requested, only do that
if [ "$1" = "--list-current-files" ]; then
    RESTIC_PASSWORD=$PASSWORD restic --quiet -r $REMOTE_URL ls latest
    exit 0
# Show list of available snapshots
elif [ "$1" = "--list-snapshots" ]; then
    RESTIC_PASSWORD=$GPG_PASSWORD restic --quiet -r $REMOTE_URL snapshots
    exit 0
# Restore the given file
elif [ "$1" = "--file-to-restore" ]; then
    if [ "$2" = "" ]; then
        echo "You must specify a file to restore"
        exit 2
    fi
    RESTORE_DIR="$(mktemp -d ./restored_XXXXXXXX)"
    RESTIC_PASSWORD=$PASSWORD restic --quiet -r $REMOTE_URL restore latest --target "$RESTORE_DIR" --include "$2"   exit 1
    echo "$2 was restored to $RESTORE_DIR"
    exit 0
# Delete old backups
elif [ "$1" = "--prune" ]; then
    # Expire old backups
    RESTIC_PASSWORD=$PASSWORD restic --quiet -r $REMOTE_URL forget $RETENTION_POLICY
    # Delete files which are no longer necessary (slow)
    RESTIC_PASSWORD=$PASSWORD restic --quiet -r $REMOTE_URL prune
    exit 0
# Catch invalid arguments
elif [ "$1" != "" ]; then
    echo "Invalid argument: $1"
    exit 1
fi
# Check the integrity of existing backups
RESTIC_PASSWORD=$PASSWORD restic --quiet -r $REMOTE_URL check   exit 1
# Dump list of Debian packages
dpkg --get-selections > $PKG_FILE
# Dump partition tables from harddrives
/sbin/fdisk -l /dev/sda > $PARTITION_FILE
/sbin/fdisk -l /dev/sdb > $PARTITION_FILE
# Do the actual backup
RESTIC_PASSWORD=$PASSWORD restic --quiet --cleanup-cache -r $REMOTE_URL backup / --exclude-file $EXCLUDE_FILE
I run it with the following cronjob in /etc/cron.d/backups: 
30 8 * * *    root  ionice nice nocache /root/backup/backup-machine1-to-foobar
30 2 * * Sun  root  ionice nice nocache /root/backup/backup-machine1-to-foobar --prune
in a way that doesn't impact the rest of the system too much. Finally, I printed a copy of each of my backup script, using enscript, to stash in a safe place: 
enscript --highlight=bash --style=emacs --output=- backup-machine1-to-foobar   ps2pdf - > foobar.pdf
This is actually a pretty important step since without the password, you won't be able to decrypt and restore what's on the GnuBee.

2 May 2020

Jonathan Carter: Free Software Activities for 2020-04

Debian project leader This month contained the first week and a half or so of my term as Debian Project Leader. So far my focus has been getting up to speed and keeping the gears turning with day to day DPL tasks. The updates listed here will also be available on the DPL blog, where I aim to make more frequent updates. During May, Debian Brazil will host Debian talks throughout the month which they will stream to their YouTube channel. You can find the schedule in this git repository, most of the talks will be in Portuguese, but on the 4th of May at 21:00 UTC, I ll be covering some Debian project topics for an hour or so and take some questions if there s time left. 2020-04-19: Handover session with Sam, our outgoing DPL. We covered a lot of questions I had and main areas that the DPL works in. Thanks to Sam for having taken the time to do this. 2020-04-21: First day of term! Thank you to everybody who showed support and have offered to help! 2020-04-21: Request feedback from the trademark team on an ongoing trademark dispute. 2020-04-21: Join the GNOME Advisory Board as a representative from Debian. 2020-04-21: Reply on an ongoing community conflict issue. 2020-04-21: Update Debian project summary for SPI annual report. 2020-04-21: Received a great e-mail introduction from Debian France and followed up on that. 2020-04-21: Posted Bits from the new DPL to debian-devel-announce. 2020-04-22: Became Debian s OSI Affilliate representative. 2020-04-22: Reply to a bunch of media inquiries for interviews, will do them later when initial priorities are on track. 2020-04-23: Resign as Debian FTP team trainee and mailing list moderator. In both these areas there are enough people taking care of it and I intend to maximise available time for DPL and technical areas in the project. 2020-04-25: Review outgoing mail for trademark team. 2020-04-25: Answer some questions in preparation for DAM/Front Desk delegation updates. 2020-04-26: Initiated wiki documentation for delegation updates process. 2020-04-27: Update delegation for the Debian Front Desk team. 2020-04-29: Schedule video call with Debian treasurer team. 2020-04-29: OSI affiliate call. Learned about some Open Source projects including OpenDev, OpenSourceMatters, FOSS Responders and Democracy Labs.

Debian Social Work on the Debian Social project is progressing, we plan to start a separate blog syndicated to Planet Debian that contains progress and status updates. I ve been terrible at tracking the work we ve been doing on this, so for now, here are some micro updates:

MiniDebConf Online In the DebConf video team, we ve been wondering whether we have all the tools required to successfully host a DebConf (or even a mini DebConf) entirely online. There s really just one way to know for sure, so we re going to host MiniDebConf Online from 28 May to 31 May. The first two days will be an online MiniDebCamp, where we can try to hold online spints, meetings and general chit-chat. The last two days will be for talks and lightnight talks, with BoFs likely to take place throughout the 4 days (this will probably be decided once we have a content team). Announcements should go out within the next week, in the meantime, save the dates.

Debian package uploads 2020-04-07: Upload package flask-autoindex (0.6.6-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-04-07: Upload package gamemode (1.5.1-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-04-08: Accept MR#2 for live-tasks (add usbutils to live-task-standard). 2020-04-08: Upload package live-tasks (11.0.2) to Debian unstable (Closes: #955526, #944578, #942837, #942834). 2020-04-08: Close live-config bug #655198 (Only affects squeeze which is no longer supported). 2020-04-08: Upload package live-config (11.0.1) to Debian unstable. 2020-04-08: Upload package calamares (3.2.22-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-04-15: Upload package xabacus (8.2.6-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-04-16: Merge MR#1 for gnome-shell-extension-dashtodock (new upstream release). 2020-04-16: Upload package gnome-shell-extension-dashtodock (67+git20200225-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-04-16: Merge MR#1 for gnome-shell-extension-hard-disk-led (fix some lintian issues). 2020-04-16: Merge MR#1 for gnome-shell-extension-system-monitor (fix some lintian issues). 2020-04-17: Upload package calamares (3.2.23-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-04-17: Upload package catimg (2.6.0-1) to Debian unstable (Closes: #956150). 2020-04-17: Upload package fabulous (0.3.0+dfsg1-7) to Debian unstable (Closes: #952242). 2020-04-17: Upload package gnome-shell-extension-system-monitor (38+git20200414-32cc79e-1) to Debian unstable (Closes: #956656, #956171). 2020-04-17: Upload package gnome-shell-extension-arc-menu (45-1) to Debian unstable (Closes: #956168). 2020-04-18: Upload package toot (0.26.0-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-04-23: Update packaging for gnome-shell-extension-tilix-shortcut, upstream section needs some additional work before release is possible. 2020-04-23: Upload package xabacus (8.2.7-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-04-27: Upload package gnome-shell-extension-dash-to-panel (37-1) to Debian unstable (Closes: #956162, #954978). 2020-04-27: Upload package gnome-shell-extension-dash-to-panel (37-2) to Debian unstable. 2020-04-27: Upload package gnome-shell-extension-dashtodock (68-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-04-30: Merge MR#8 for gamemode (add symbol files) (Closes: #952425). 2020-04-30: Merge MR#9 for gamemode (reduce number of -dev packages generated). 2020-04-30: Merge MR#10 for gamemode (deal better with upgrades on a buggy version). 2020-04-30: Manually merge changes from MR#11 for gamemode (packaging fixes). 2020-04-30: Upload package gamemode (1.5.1-2) to Debian unstable.

1 May 2020

Utkarsh Gupta: FOSS Activites in April 2020

Here s my (seventh) monthly update about the activities I ve done in the F/L/OSS world.

Debian
It s been 14 months since I ve started contributing to Debian. And 4 months since I ve been a Debian Developer. And in this beautiful time, I had this opprotunity to do and learn lots of new and interesting things. And most importantly, meet and interact with lots of lovely people!
Debian is $home.

Uploads:

Other $things:
  • Attended Ruby team meeting. Logs here.
  • Attended Perl team LHF. Report here.
  • Sponsored a lot of uploads for William Desportes and Adam Cecile.
  • Mentoring for newcomers.
  • FTP Trainee reviewing.
  • Moderation of -project mailing list.
  • Applied for DUCI project for Google Summer of Code 2020.

Ruby2.7 Migration:
Ruby2.7 was recently released on 25th December, 2019. Santa s gift. Believe it or not. We, the Debian Ruby team, have been trying hard to make it migrate to testing. And it finally happened. The default version in testing is ruby2.7. Here s the news! \o/
Here s what I worked on this month for this transition.

Upstream: Opened several issues and proposed patches (in the form of PRs):
  • Issue #35 against encryptor for Ruby2.7 test failures.
  • Issue #28 against image_science for removing relative paths.
  • Issue #106 against ffi-yajl for Ruby2.7 test failures.
  • PR #5 against aggregate for simply using require.
  • PR #6 against aggregate for modernizing CI and adding Ruby 2.5 and 2.7 support.
  • Issue #13 against espeak-ruby for Ruby2.7 test failures.
  • Issue #4 against tty-which for test failures in general.
  • Issue #11 against packable for Ruby2.7 test failures. PR #12 has been proposed.
  • Issue #10 against growl for test failures and proposed an initial patch.

Downstream: I fixed and uploaded the following packages in Debian:

Debian LTS
Debian Long Term Support (LTS) is a project to extend the lifetime of all Debian stable releases to (at least) 5 years. Debian LTS is not handled by the Debian security team, but by a separate group of volunteers and companies interested in making it a success.
This was my seventh month as a Debian LTS paid contributor. I was assigned 24.00 hours and worked on the following things:

CVE Fixes and Announcements:

Other LTS Work:

Other(s)
Sometimes it gets hard to categorize work/things into a particular category.
That s why I am writing all of those things inside this category.
This includes two sub-categories and they are as follows.

Personal: This month I could get the following things done:
  • Most importantly, I finally migrated to a new website. Huge UI imporvement! \o/
    From Jekyll to Hugo, it was not easy. But it was worth it! Many thanks to Luiz for writing hugo-coder, Clement, and Samyak!
    If you find any flaws, issues and pull requests are welcomed at utkarsh2102/utkarsh2102.com
  • Wrote battery-alert, a mini-project of my own to show battery alerts at <10% and >90%.
    Written in shell, it brings me all the satisfaction as it has saved my life on many occasions.
    And guess what? It has more users than just myself!
    Reviews and patches are welcomed \o/
  • Mentored in HackOn Hackathon. Thanks to Manvi for reaching out!
    It was fun to see people developing some really nice projects.
  • Thanks to Ray and John, I became a GitLab Hero!
    (I am yet to figure out my role and responibility though)
  • Atteneded Intro Sec Con and had the most fun!
    Heard Ian s keynote and attended other talks and learned how to use WireShark!

Open Source: Again, this contains all the things that I couldn t categorize earlier.
Opened several issues and pull requests:
  • Issue #297 against hugo-coder, asking to enable RSS feed for blogs.
  • PR #316 for hugo-coder for fixing the above issue myself.
  • Issue #173 against arbre for requesting a release.
  • Issue #104 against combustion, asking to relax dependency on rubocop. Fixed in this commit.
  • Issue #16 against ffi-compiler for requesting to fix homepage and license.
  • Issue #57 against gographviz for requesting a release.
  • Issue #14 against crb-blast, suggesting compatability with bio 2.0.x.
  • Issue #58 against uniform_notifier for asking to drop the use of ruby-growl.
  • PR #2072 for polybar, adding installation instructions on Debian systems.
Until next time.
:wq for today.

30 April 2020

Chris Lamb: Free software activities in April 2020

Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world during April 2020 (previous month's report). Looking it over prior to publishing, I am surprised how much I got done this month I felt that I was not only failing to do all the extra things I had planned, but I was doing far less than normal. But let us go easy on ourselves; nobody is nailing this. In addition, I did more hacking on the Lintian static analysis tool for Debian packages:
Reproducible builds One of the original promises of open source software is that distributed peer review and transparency of process results in enhanced end-user security. However, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free and open source software for malicious flaws, almost all software today is distributed as pre-compiled binaries. This allows nefarious third-parties to compromise systems by injecting malicious code into ostensibly secure software during the various compilation and distribution processes. The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to ensure no flaws have been introduced during this compilation process by promising identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised. The initiative is proud to be a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy, a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) charity focused on ethical technology and user freedom. Conservancy acts as a corporate umbrella allowing projects to operate as non-profit initiatives without managing their own corporate structure. If you like the work of the Conservancy or the Reproducible Builds project, please consider becoming an official supporter. Elsewhere in our tooling, I made the following changes to diffoscope, our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, including preparing and uploading versions 139, 140, 141 and 142 to Debian: Lastly, I made a large number of changes to our website and documentation in the following categories:
Debian LTS This month I have contributed 18 hours to Debian Long Term Support (LTS) and 7 hours on its sister Extended LTS project. You can find out more about the project via the following video:
Debian I only filed three bugs in April, including one against snapshot.debian.org to report that a Content-Type HTTP header is missing when downloading .deb files (#956471) and to report build failures in the macs & ruby-enumerable-statistics packages:

Jonathan McDowell: Let's talk about work/life balance in lock down

A SYNCNI article passed by on my Twitter feed this morning, talking about balancing work life balance while working from home in these times of COVID-19 inspired lock down. The associated Twitter thread expressed an interest in some words of advice from men to other men (because of course the original article has the woman having to do all the balancing). This post does not contain the words of advice searched for, but it hopefully at least offers some reassurance that if you re finding all of this difficult you re not alone. From talking to others I don t think there s anything particularly special we re doing in this house; a colleague is taking roughly the same approach, and some of the other folk I ve spoken to in the local tech scene seem to be doing likewise. First, the situation. Like many households both my wife and I work full time. We have a small child (not even a year and a half old yet). I work for a software startup, my wife is an HR business partner for a large multinational, dealing with employees all over the UK and Ireland. We re both luckily able to work from home easily - our day to day work machines are laptops, our employers were already setup with the appropriate VPN / video conferencing etc facilities. Neither of us has seen any decrease in workload since lock down; there are always more features and/or bugs to work on when it comes to a software product, and, as I m sure you can imagine, there has been a lot more activity in the HR sphere over the past 6 weeks as companies try to work out what to do. On top of this our childcare arrangements, like everyone else s, are completely gone. Nursery understandably shut down around the same time as the schools (slightly later, but not by much) and contact with grandparents is obviously out (which they re finding hard). So we re left with trying to fit 2 full time jobs in with full time childcare, of a child who up until recently tried to go down stairs by continuing to crawl forward. Make no mistake, this is hard. I know we are exceptionally lucky in our situation, but that doesn t mean we re finding it easy. We ve adopted an approach of splitting the day up. I take the morning slot (previously I would have got up with our son anyway), getting him up and fed while my wife showers. She takes over for a bit while I shower and dress, then I take over again in time for her to take her daily 8am conference call. My morning is mostly taken up with childcare until nap time; I try to check in first thing to make sure there s nothing urgent, and get a handle on what I might have to work on later in the day. My local team mates know they re more likely to get me late morning and it s better to arrange meetings in the afternoon. Equally I work with a lot of folk on the US West coast, so shifting my hours to be a bit later is not a problem there. After nap time (which, if we re lucky, takes us to lunch) my wife takes over. As she deals with UK/Ireland folk she often ends up having to take calls even while looking after our son; generally important meetings can be moved to the morning and meetings with folk who understand there might be a lot of pot banging going on in the background can happen in the afternoon. Having started late I generally work late - past the point where I d normally get home; if I m lucky I pop my head in for bath time, but sometimes it s only for a couple of minutes. We alternate cooking; usually based on work load + meetings. For example tonight I m cooking while my wife catches up on some work after having put our son to bed. Last night I had a few meetings so my wife cooked. So what s worked for us? Splitting the day means we can plan with our co-workers. We always make sure we eat together in the evening, and that generally is the cut-off point for either of us doing any work. I m less likely to be online in the evening because my study has become the place I work. That means I m not really doing any of my personal projects - this definitely isn t a case of being at home during lock down and having lots of time to achieve new things. It s much more of case of trying to find a sustainable way to get through the current situation, however long it might last.

29 April 2020

Ian Jackson: subdirmk 1.0 - ergonomic preprocessing assistant for non-recursive make

I have made the 1.0 release of subdirmk. subdirmk is a tool to help with writing build systems in make, without use of recursive make. Why Peter Miller's 1997 essay Recursive Make Considered Harmful persuasively argues that it is better to arrange to have a single make invocation with the project's complete dependency tree, rather than the conventional $(MAKE) -C subdirectory approach. This has become much more relevant with modern projects which tend to be large and have deep directory trees. Invoking make separately for each of these subdirectories can be very slow. Nowadays everyone needs to run a parallel build, but with the recursive make approach great discipline is needed to avoid introducing races which cause the build to sometimes fail. There are various new systems which aim to replace make. My general impression of these is that they mostly threw away the good parts of make (often, they discard the flexibility, and the use of the shell command as the basic unit of execution, making them hard to extend), or make other unfortunate assumptions. And there are a lot of programming-language-specific systems - a very unsatisfactory development. Having said all that, I admit I haven't properly evaluated every make competitor. Other reasons for staying with make including that it is widely available, relatively widely understood, and has a model relatively free of high-level abstract concepts. (I like my languages with high-level concepts, but not my build systems.) But, with make, I found that actually writing a project's build system in non-recursive make was not very ergonomic. So with some help and prompting from Mark Wooding, I have made a tool to help. What subdirmk is a makefile preprocessor and aggregator, typically run from autoconf. subdirmk provides convenience syntaxes for references to per-directory variables and pathnames. It also helps by providing a little syntactic sugar for GNU make's macro facilities, which are awkward to use in raw make. subdirmk's features are triggered by the sigil &. The syntax is carefully designed to avoid getting in the way of makefile programming (and programming of shell commands in make rules). subdirmk is fully documented in the README. There is a demo in the example directory (which also serves as part of the test suite). What's new The version number. I have not felt the need to make any changes since releasing 0.4 in mid-February. The last non-docs change was a (backwards-compatible) extension, in late January, to pass through unaltered GNU make's new grouped multiple targets syntax. Advantages and disadvantages of subdirmk Compared to recursive make, subdirmk is easier and simpler, although you do have to decorate a lot of your variables and filenames with & to indicate that they are directory-local. It is much easier to avoid writing parallel make bugs. You naturally get properly working per-subdirectory targets. subdirmk-based nonrecursive make is much, much faster than recursive make. Compared to many other recent build system tools, subdirmk retains all the flexibility and extensibility of make, and operates at a fairly low level of abstraction. subdirmk-based makefiles can easily invoke other build systems. make knows it's not the only thing in the universe. You can adopt subdirmk incrementally or partially, gradually bringing your recursive submakefiles into the unified build. The build system code in subdirmk's Dir.sd.mk files will be readily navigable by most readers; much will be familiar. Because subdirmk is a small collection of (fairly simple) scripting and makefile code, there is no need to build it; you can simply ship it with your project using git-subtree. For an autoconf-based project, there need be no change to how your users and downstreams invoke your build. On the other hand the price you (continue to) pay is make's punctation soup, which subdirmk adds a new sigil to. subdirmk-based makefiles are terse and help you use make's facilities to abstract away repetition, but that can make them dense. The new & sigil will faze some readers. Currently, the provided mechanism for incorporating subdirmk into your project assumes you are using autoconf but not automake. It would be possible to use subdirmk with autoconf-less projects, or with automake-based ones, but I haven't done the glue work to make that easy. subdirmk does require GNU make and it assumes you have perl installed. But GNU make is very portable, and perl is very widely available. (The perl used is very conservative.) The make competitors are, themselves, even less standard build tools. I don't think a build-dependency on GNU make, or perl, is a significant barrier nowadays, for most projects. Note about comment moderation I have deliberately been vague about other build systems and avoided specific criticisms or references. I don't want the comments to become a build system advocacy debate. Comments may be screened and moderated accordingly. Pointers to other obscure build system tools are very welcome. If you want to write a survey of build tools, or a critique of subdirmk, please do so on your own blog; I would be happy to consider linking to it.

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Petter Reinholdtsen: GnuCOBOL, a free platform to learn and use COBOL - nice free software

The curiosity got the better of me when Slashdot reported that New Jersey was desperately looking for COBOL programmers, and a few days later it was reported that IBM tried to locate COBOL programmers. I thus decided to have a look at free software alternatives to learn COBOL, and had the pleasure to find GnuCOBOL was already in Debian. It used to be called Open Cobol, and is a "compiler" transforming COBOL code to C or C++ before giving it to GCC or Visual Studio to build binaries. I managed to get in touch with upstream, and was impressed with the quick response, and also was happy to see a new Debian maintainer taking over when the original one recently asked to be replaced. A new Debian upload was done as recently as yesterday. Using the Debian package, I was able to follow a simple COBOL introduction and make and run simple COBOL programs. It was fun to learn a new programming language. If you want to test for yourself, the GnuCOBOL Wikipedia page have a few simple examples to get you startet. As I do not have much experience with COBOL, I do not know how standard compliant it is, but it claim to pass most tests from COBOL test suite, which sound good to me. It is nice to know it is possible to learn COBOL using software without any usage restrictions, and I am very happy such nice free software project as this is available. If you as me is curious about COBOL, check it out. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

28 April 2020

Steve Kemp: I'm a contractor, available for work

For the foreseeable future I'm working for myself, as a contractor, here in sunny Helsinki, Finland. My existing contract only requires me to work 1.5-2.0 days a week, meaning my week looks something like this: It does mean that I'm available for work Wednesday-Friday though, in the event I can find projects to work upon, or companies who would be willing to accept my invoices. I think of myself as a sysadmin, but I know all about pipelines, automation, system administration, and coding in C, C++, Perl, Ruby, Golang, Lua, etc. On the off-chance anybody reading this has a need for small projects, services, daemons, or APIs to be implemented then don't hesitate to get in touch. I did manage to fill a few days over the past few weeks completing an online course from Helsinki Open University, Devops with Docker, it is possible I'll find some more courses to complete in the future. (There is an upcoming course Devops with Kubernetes which I'll definitely complete.)

Antoine Beaupr : Drowned my camera: dealing with liquid spills in electronics

Folks who acutely dig into this website might know that I have been taking more pictures recently, as I got a new camera since January 2018: a beautiful Fujifilm X-T2 that I really like. Recently, I went out on a photo shoot in the rain. It was intermittent, light rain when I left so I figured the "weather proofing" (dpreview.com calls this "environmentally sealed") would keep the camera secure. After an hour of walking outside, however, rain intensified and I was just quickly becoming more and more soaked. Still trusting the camera would function, I carried on. But after about 90 minutes of dutiful work, the camera just turned off and wouldn't power back on. It had drowned. I couldn't believe it; "but this is supposed to be waterproof! This can't be happening!", I thought. I tried swapping out the battery for a fresh one, which was probably a bad idea (even if I was smart enough to do this under cover): still no luck, yet I could still not believe it was dead, so I figured I would look at it later when I was home. I still eventually removed the battery after a while, remembering that it mattered. Turns out the camera was really dead. Even at home, it wouldn't power up, even with fresh batteries. After closer inspection, the camera was as soaked as I was...
Two Sandisk memory cards with water droplets on them ...even the SD cards were wet!
I was filled with despair! My precious camera! I had been waiting for litterally decades to find the right digital camera that was as close to the good old film cameras I was used to. I was even working on black and white "film" to get back to basics, which turned into a project to witness the impact of the coronavirus on city life! All that was lost, or at least stopped: amazingly, the SD cards were just absolutely fine and survived the flooding without problem.
A one-way sign broken, fallen on the side in a gray cityscape The last photo my camera took before it died
A good photographer friend told me that this was actually fairly common: "if you shoot outside, get used to this, it will happen". So I tried "the rice trick": plunge your camera in a pile of rice and let it rest there for a long time. It didn't work so well: I didn't have a big enough container to hold the camera and the rice. I was also worried about rice particles inserting themselves into the camera holes, as I had opened all the ports to let it dry. I could also not keep myself from inserting a battery and trying it out again: amazingly, it powered up, only once, and died again. After shopping in desperation for dessicators (who would have thought you should keep those little bags from the stuff you order online!), I ended up buying silica gel dehumidifier from Lee Valley (13$, the small one!) which comes in a neat little metal box. But that never arrived in time so I had to find another solution. My partner threw the idea out in jest, but the actual solution worked, and it was surprisingly simple!
My camera and lens drying in a food dehydrator, at 30 C with 22 hours left Tada! Turns out you can dehydrate hardware too!
We have a food dehydrator at home (a Sedna Express if you really want to know) since we do a lot of backpacking and canot-camping, but I never thought I would put electronics in there. Turns out a food dehydrator is perfect: it has a per degree temperature control that can go very low and a timer. I set it to 30 C for 24 hours. (I originally set it to 40 C but it smelled like plastic after a while so my partner turned it off thinking it was melting the camera.) And now the camera is back! I was so happy! There is probably some permanent damage to the delicate circuitry in the camera. And I will probably not go back out in heavy rain again with the camera, or at least not without a rainjacket (35$USD at B&H) on the camera. And I am now in a position to tell other people what to do if they suffer the same fate...

Tips for dealing with electronic liquid damage So, lessons learned...
  1. when you have a liquid spill over your electronics: IMMEDIATELY REMOVE ALL ELECTRIC POWER, including the battery! (this is another reason why all batteries should be removable)
  2. if the spill is "sticky" (e.g. coffee, beer, maple syrup, etc) or "salty", do try to wash it with water, yet without flooding it any further (delicate balance, I know) some devices are especially well adapted to this: I have washed a keyboard with a shower head and drowned the thing completely, it worked fine after drying.
  3. do NOT power it back on until you are certain the equipment is dry
  4. let the electronics device dry for 24 to 48 hours with all ports open in a humidity-absorbing environment: a bag of rice works, but a food dehydrator is best. make sure the rice doesn't get stuck inside the machine: use a small mesh bag if necessary
  5. once you are confident the device has dried, fiddle with the controls and see if water comes out: it might not have dried because it was stuck inside a button or dial. if dry, try powering it back on and watch the symptoms. if it's still weird, try drying it for another day.
  6. if you get tired of waiting and the machine doesn't come back up, you will have to send it to the repair shop or open it up yourself to see if there is soldering damage you can fix.
I hope it might help careless people who dropped their coffee or ran out in the rain, believing the hype of waterproof cameras. Amateur tip: waterproof cameras are not waterproof...

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.9.870.2.0

armadillo image Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language and is widely used by (currently) 705 other packages on CRAN. A new upstream release 9.870.2 of Armadillo was released a few days ago. We had tested two release candidates, and this caught one bug. The release was held up at CRAN for a few days as one package had an overly sensitive test depending on random input data; eventually we all convinced ourselves that there was no (Rcpp)Armadillo issue here. So morale: friends don t let friends have tests depend on random behavior. Changes in the new release are noted below.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.9.870.2.0 (2020-04-24)
  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 9.870.2 (Roasted Mocha Retox)
    • faster handling of matrix multiplication expressions by diagvec() and diagmat()
    • added trimatu_ind() and trimatl_ind()
    • more consistent detection of sparse vector expressions

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

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

26 April 2020

Russ Allbery: Review: The Last Goodbye

Review: The Last Goodbye, by Matt Potter
Publisher: Silvertail
Copyright: 2014-2016
Printing: 2016
ISBN: 1-909269-42-5
Format: Kindle
Pages: 308
In the contested space between the interested amateur and the trained expert lies the enthusiast. A topic has, for often inexplicable reasons, caught fire in their thoughts and become a mild obsession. They may not have formal training or systematic conceptual grounding beneath their interest, but they partly make up for that lack with sustained fascination. They research widely and obscurely about their particular focus, develop novel theories, see distinctions and classifications that few others would bother to investigate, and present their discoveries to anyone who will stand still long enough. And occasionally, when that interest happens to coincide with writing skill, they produce some surprisingly excellent essays or books. Matt Potter's enthusiasm is resignation letters.
Every damaging resignation letter, every cornered truth attack, every out-of-control speech by a former friend, is more than just an inconvenience, to be countered with positive spin and internal memos: it's an open challenge to the official version of the story, the perfectly controlled brand. They are breaks in an otherwise perfectly planned, smoothly executed narrative of the powerful. Holes in the program code. A rare, irresistible chance to hack into history's shiny, unstoppable operation.
The Last Goodbye: A History of the World in Resignation Letters is not, in truth, a history of the world. It is, first and foremost, a taxonomy, because there are types of resignation letters. The opening chapter, the truth bomb, is the type that one would expect upon discovering that someone wrote a book on the topic (that wasn't advice on how to write a good one). But there are other types, less heavy on the fireworks but just as fascinating. The unquotable expert construction. The knife in the back. The incoherent scream of rage. But also the surprisingly gentle and graceful conclusion.
It is the question that the letters themselves try in vain to answer, over and over again even as they explain, analyse, protest and bear witness to a million other details. The question is: Why? All the forces in the universe stack up against unburdening ourselves in a resignation letter. Professionally, it can be suicide. In practical terms, it is often self-defeating. Self-help books coach against unleashing its force; colleagues and confidantes urge caution, self-restraint. And yet we do it, and damn the consequences. We have no choice but to speak in sorrow, love, grief, cold anger, thirst for revenge, wounded pride, the pain of injustice, loyalty, pangs of regret, throes of vengeful madness, deluded righteousness, panic, black distress, isolation, ecstasies of martyrdom, and a million other shades of human extremity we need to say our piece even as we leave the stage.
The risk of the enthusiast's book is that the lack of structural grounding can leave the conclusions unsupported. A fair critique of this book is that it contains a lot of amateur sociology. Potter has a journalist's eye for motive and narrative, but some of his conclusions may not be warranted. But he compensates for the lack of rigor with, well, enthusiasm. Potter is fascinated by resignation letters and the insight they offer, and that fascination is irresistibly contagious. It's probably obvious that the chapters on truth bombs, fuck yous, and knives in the back have visceral appeal. The resignation letter as a force of truth-telling, as the revenge of a disregarded peon, as a crack in the alliance between the powerful that may let some truth shine through, is what got me to buy this book. And Potter doesn't disappoint; he quotes from both famous and nearly unknown examples, dissects the writing and the intent, and gives us a ringside seat to a few effective acts of revenge. That's not the best part of this book, though. The chapter that I will remember the longest is Potter's dissection of the constructed resignation letter. The carefully drafted public relations statement, the bland formality, the attempt to make a news story disappear. The conversation-ender. It's a truism that any area of human endeavor involves more expertise than those who have only observed it from the outside will realize, but I had never thought to apply that principle to the ghost-written resignation letter. The careful non-apology, the declaration that one has "become a distraction," the tell-tale phrasing of "spending more time with my family" is offensive in its bland dishonesty. But Potter shows that the blandness is expertly constructed to destroy quotability. Those statements are nearly impossible to remember or report on because they have been built that way: nouns carefully separated from verbs, all force dissipated by circuities and modifiers, and subtle grammatical errors introduced to discourage written news from including direct quotes. Potter's journalism background shines here because he can describe the effect on news reporting. He walks the reader through the construction to reveal that the writing is not incompetent but instead is skillfully bad in a way that causes one's attention to skitter off of it. The letter vanishes into its own vagueness. The goal is to smother the story in such mediocrity that it becomes forgettable. And it works. I've written several resignation letters of my own. Somewhat unusually, I've even sent several of them, although (as Potter says is typical) fewer than I've written. I've even written (and sent) the sort of resignation letter that every career advisor will say to never send. Potter's discussion of the motives and thought process behind those letters rang true for me. It's a raw and very human moment, one is never in as much control of it as one wishes, the cracks and emotions break through in the writing, and often those letters are trying to do far too many things at the same time. But it's also a moment in which one can say something important and have others listen, which can be weirdly challenging to do in the normal course of a job. Potter ends this book beautifully by looking at resignation letters that break or transcend the mold of most of the others he's examined: letters where the author seems to have found some peace and internal understanding and expresses that simply and straightforwardly. I found this surprisingly touching after the emotional roller-coaster of the rest of the book, and a lovely note on which to end. This is a great book. Potter has a good eye for language and the emotion encoded in it, a bracing preference for the common worker or employee over the manager or politician, and the skill to produce some memorable turns of phrase. Most importantly, he has the enthusiast's love of the topic. Even if you don't care about resignation letters going in, it will be hard to avoid some fascination with them by the end of this book. Recommended. This book was originally published as F*ck You and Goodbye in the UK. Rating: 8 out of 10

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