• #874657: pcmanfm: should have explicit recommends on lxpolkit polkit-1-auth-agent
• #874626: bin-nmu request to complete two transitions and bring back some packages in testing
• #875423: openssl: Please re-enable TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 (at least in testing)

No comment Liked this article? Click here. My blog is Flattr-enabled.

In the interests of keeping myself "honest" regarding F/LOSS activity, here's a report, sadly it's not very good.

Changes in RProtoBuf version 0.4.11 (2017-10-03)

• The RProtoBuf-intro and RProtoBuf-quickref vignettes were converted to Rmarkdown using the templates and style file from the pinp package.
• A few minor internal upgrades

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

Debian Long Term Support (LTS) This is my monthly Debian LTS report. I mostly worked on the git, git-annex and ruby packages this month but didn't have time to completely use my allocated hours because I started too late in the month.

Ruby I was hoping someone would pick up the Ruby work I submitted in August, but it seems no one wanted to touch that mess, understandably. Since then, new issues came up, and not only did I have to work on the rubygems and ruby1.9 package, but now the ruby1.8 package also had to get security updates. Yes: it's bad enough that the rubygems code is duplicated in one other package, but wheezy had the misfortune of having two Ruby versions supported. The Ruby 1.9 also failed to build from source because of test suite issues, which I haven't found a clean and easy fix for, so I ended up making test suite failures non-fatal in 1.9, which they were already in 1.8. I did keep a close eye on changes in the test suite output to make sure tests introduced in the security fixes would pass and that I wouldn't introduce new regressions as well. So I published the following advisories:

• ruby 1.8: DLA-1113-1, fixing CVE-2017-0898 and CVE-2017-10784. 1.8 doesn't seem affected by CVE-2017-14033 as the provided test does not fail (but it does fail in 1.9.1). test suite was, before patch:

  2199 tests, 1672513 assertions, 18 failures, 51 errors
  

  and after patch:

  2200 tests, 1672514 assertions, 18 failures, 51 errors
  

• rubygems: uploaded the package prepared in August as is in DLA-1112-1, fixing CVE-2017-0899, CVE-2017-0900, CVE-2017-0901. here the test suite passed normally.
• ruby 1.9: here I used the used 2.2.8 release tarball to generate a patch that would cover all issues and published DLA-1114-1 that fixes the CVEs of the two packages above. the test suite was, before patches:

  10179 tests, 2232711 assertions, 26 failures, 23 errors, 51 skips
  

  and after patches:

  1.9 after patches (B): 10184 tests, 2232771 assertions, 26 failures, 23 errors, 53 skips
  

Git I also quickly issued an advisory (DLA-1120-1) for CVE-2017-14867, an odd issue affecting git in wheezy. The backport was tricky because it wouldn't apply cleanly and the git package had a custom patching system which made it tricky to work on.

Git-annex I did a quick stint on git-annex as well: I was able to reproduce the issue and confirm an approach to fixing the issue in wheezy, although I didn't have time to complete the work before the end of the month.

Other free software work

New project: feed2exec I should probably make a separate blog post about this, but ironically, I don't want to spend too much time writing those reports, so this will be quick. I wrote a new program, called feed2exec. It's basically a combination of feed2imap, rss2email and feed2tweet: it allows you to fetch RSS feeds and send them in a mailbox, but what's special about it, compared to the other programs above, is that it is more generic: you can basically make it do whatever you want on new feed items. I have, for example, replaced my feed2tweet instance with it, using this simple configuration:

[anarcat]
url = https://anarc.at/blog/index.rss
output = feed2exec.plugins.exec
args = tweet "%(title)0.70s %(link)0.70s"

The sample configuration file also has examples to talk with Mastodon, Pump.io and, why not, a torrent server to download torrent files available over RSS feeds. A trivial configuration can also make it work as a crude podcast client. My main motivation to work on this was that it was difficult to extend feed2imap to do what I needed (which was to talk to transmission to download torrent files) and rss2email didn't support my workflow (which is delivering to feed-specific mail folders). Because both projects also seemed abandoned, it seemed like a good idea at the time to start a new one, although the rss2email community has now restarted the project and may produce interesting results. As an experiment, I tracked my time working on this project. It turns out it took about 45 hours to write that software. Considering feed2exec is about 1400 SLOC, that's 30 lines of code per hour. I don't know if that's slow or fast, but it's an interesting metric for future projects. It sure seems slow to me, but we need to keep in mind those 30 lines of code don't include documentation and repeated head banging on the keyboard. For example, I found two issues with the upstream feedparser package which I use to parse feeds which also seems unmaintained, unfortunately. Feed2exec is beta software at this point, but it's working well enough for me and the design is much simpler than the other programs of the kind. The main issue people can expect from it at this point is formatting issues or parse errors on exotic feeds, and noisy error messages on network errors, all of which should be fairly easy to fix in the test suite. I hope it will be useful for the community and, as usual, I welcome contributions, help and suggestions on how to improve the software.

More Python templates As part of the work on feed2exec, I did cleanup a few things in the ecdysis project, mostly to hook tests up in the CI, improve on the advancedConfig logger and cleanup more stuff. While I was there, it turns out that I built a pretty decent basic CI configuration for Python on GitLab. Whereas the previous templates only had a non-working Django example, you should now be able to chose a Python template when you configure CI on GitLab 10 and above, which should hook you up with normal Python setup procedures like setup.py install and setup.py test.

Selfspy I mentioned working on a monitoring tool in my last post, because it was a feature from Workrave missing in SafeEyes. It turns out there is already such a tool called selfspy. I did an extensive review of the software to make sure it wouldn't leak out confidential information out before using it, and it looks, well... kind of okay. It crashed on me at least once so far, which is too bad because then it loses track of the precious activity. I have used it at least once to figure out what the heck I worked on during the day, so it's pretty useful. I particularly used it to backtrack my work on feed2exec as I didn't originally track my time on the project. Unfortunately, selfspy seems unmaintained. I have proposed a maintenance team and hopefully the project maintainer will respond and at least share access so we don't end up in a situation like linkchecker. I also sent a bunch of pull requests to fix some issues like being secure by default and fixing the build. Apart from the crash, the main issue I have found with the software is that it doesn't detect idle time which means certain apps are disproportionatly represented in statistics. There are also some weaknesses in the crypto that should be adressed for people that encrypt their database. Next step is to package selfspy in Debian which should hopefully be simple enough...

Restic documentation security As part of a documentation patch on the Restic backup software, I have improved on my previous Perl script to snoop on process commandline arguments. A common flaw in shell scripts and cron jobs is to pass secret material in the environment (usually safe) but often through commandline arguments (definitely not safe). The challenge, in this peculiar case, was the env binary, but the last time I encountered such an issue was with the Drush commandline tool, which was passing database credentials in clear to the mysql binary. Using my Perl sniffer, I could get to 60 checks per second (or 60Hz). After reimplementing it in Python, this number went up to 160Hz, which still wasn't enough to catch the elusive env command, which is much faster at hiding arguments than MySQL, in large part because it simply does an execve() once the environment is setup. Eventually, I just went crazy and rewrote the whole thing in C which was able to get 700-900Hz and did catch the env command about 10-20% of the time. I could probably have rewritten this by simply walking /proc myself (since this is what all those libraries do in the end) to get better result, but then my point was made. I was able to prove to the restic author the security issues that warranted the warning. It's too bad I need to repeat this again and again, but then my tools are getting better at proving that issue... I suspect it's not the last time I have to deal with this issue and I am happy to think that I can come up with an even more efficient proof of concept tool the next time around.

Ansible 101 After working on documentation last month, I ended up writing my first Ansible playbook this month, converting my tasksel list to a working Ansible configuration. This was a useful exercise: it allow me to find a bunch of packages which have been removed from Debian and provides much better usability than tasksel. For example, it provides a --diff argument that shows which packages are missing from a given setup. I am still unsure about Ansible. Manifests do seem really verbose and I still can't get used to the YAML DSL. I could probably have done the same thing with Puppet and just run puppet apply on the resulting config. But I must admit my bias towards Python is showing here: I can't help but think Puppet is going to be way less accessible with its rewrite in Clojure and C (!)... But then again, I really like Puppet's approach of having generic types like package or service rather than Ansible's clunky apt/yum/dnf/package/win_package types...

Pat and Ham radio After responding (too late) to a request for volunteers to help in Puerto Rico, I realized that my amateur radio skills were somewhat lacking in the "packet" (data transmission in ham jargon) domain, as I wasn't used to operate a Winlink node. Such a node can receive and transmit actual emails over the airwaves, for free, without direct access to the internet, which is very useful in disaster relief efforts. Through summary research, I stumbled upon the new and very promising Pat project which provides one of the first user-friendly Linux-compatible Winlink programs. I provided improvements on the documentation and some questions regarding compatibility issues which are still pending. But my pet issue is the establishment of pat as a normal internet citizen by using standard protocols for receiving and sending email. Not sure how that can be implemented, but we'll see. I am also hoping to upload an official Debian package and hopefully write more about this soon. Stay tuned!

Random stuff I ended up fixing my Kodi issue by starting it as a standalone systemd service, instead of gdm3, which is now completely disabled on the media box. I simply used the following /etc/systemd/service/kodi.service file:

[Unit]
Description=Kodi Media Center
After=systemd-user-sessions.service network.target sound.target
[Service]
User=xbmc
Group=video
Type=simple
TTYPath=/dev/tty7
StandardInput=tty
ExecStart=/usr/bin/xinit /usr/bin/dbus-launch --exit-with-session /usr/bin/kodi-standalone -- :1 -nolisten tcp vt7
Restart=on-abort
RestartSec=5
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

The downside of this is that it needs Xorg to run as root, whereas modern Xorg can now run rootless. Not sure how to fix this or where... But if I put needs_root_rights=no in Xwrapper.config, I get the following error in .local/share/xorg/Xorg.1.log:

[  2502.533] (EE) modeset(0): drmSetMaster failed: Permission denied

After fooling around with iPython, I ended up trying the xonsh shell, which is supposed to provide a bash-compatible Python shell environment. Unfortunately, I found it pretty unusable as a shell: it works fine to do Python stuff, but then all my environment and legacy bash configuration files were basically ignored so I couldn't get working quickly. This is too bad because the project looked very promising... Finally, one of my TLS hosts using a Let's Encrypt certificate wasn't renewing properly, and I figured out why. It turns out the ProxyPass command was passing everything to the backend, including the /.well-known requests, which obviously broke ACME verification. The solution was simple enough, disable the proxy for that directory:

ProxyPass /.well-known/ !

Debian Long Term Support (LTS) This is my monthly Debian LTS report. I mostly worked on the git, git-annex and ruby packages this month but didn't have time to completely use my allocated hours because I started too late in the month.

Ruby I was hoping someone would pick up the Ruby work I submitted in August, but it seems no one wanted to touch that mess, understandably. Since then, new issues came up, and not only did I have to work on the rubygems and ruby1.9 package, but now the ruby1.8 package also had to get security updates. Yes: it's bad enough that the rubygems code is duplicated in one other package, but wheezy had the misfortune of having two Ruby versions supported. The Ruby 1.9 also failed to build from source because of test suite issues, which I haven't found a clean and easy fix for, so I ended up making test suite failures non-fatal in 1.9, which they were already in 1.8. I did keep a close eye on changes in the test suite output to make sure tests introduced in the security fixes would pass and that I wouldn't introduce new regressions as well. So I published the following advisories:

• ruby 1.8: DLA-1113-1, fixing CVE-2017-0898 and CVE-2017-10784. 1.8 doesn't seem affected by CVE-2017-14033 as the provided test does not fail (but it does fail in 1.9.1). test suite was, before patch:

  2199 tests, 1672513 assertions, 18 failures, 51 errors
  

  and after patch:

  2200 tests, 1672514 assertions, 18 failures, 51 errors
  

• rubygems: uploaded the package prepared in August as is in DLA-1112-1, fixing CVE-2017-0899, CVE-2017-0900, CVE-2017-0901. here the test suite passed normally.
• ruby 1.9: here I used the used 2.2.8 release tarball to generate a patch that would cover all issues and published DLA-1114-1 that fixes the CVEs of the two packages above. the test suite was, before patches:

  10179 tests, 2232711 assertions, 26 failures, 23 errors, 51 skips
  

  and after patches:

  1.9 after patches (B): 10184 tests, 2232771 assertions, 26 failures, 23 errors, 53 skips
  

Git I also quickly issued an advisory (DLA-1120-1) for CVE-2017-14867, an odd issue affecting git in wheezy. The backport was tricky because it wouldn't apply cleanly and the git package had a custom patching system which made it tricky to work on.

Git-annex I did a quick stint on git-annex as well: I was able to reproduce the issue and confirm an approach to fixing the issue in wheezy, although I didn't have time to complete the work before the end of the month.

Other free software work

New project: feed2exec I should probably make a separate blog post about this, but ironically, I don't want to spend too much time writing those reports, so this will be quick. I wrote a new program, called feed2exec. It's basically a combination of feed2imap, rss2email and feed2tweet: it allows you to fetch RSS feeds and send them in a mailbox, but what's special about it, compared to the other programs above, is that it is more generic: you can basically make it do whatever you want on new feed items. I have, for example, replaced my feed2tweet instance with it, using this simple configuration:

[anarcat]
url = https://anarc.at/blog/index.rss
output = feed2exec.plugins.exec
args = tweet "%(title)0.70s %(link)0.70s"

The sample configuration file also has examples to talk with Mastodon, Pump.io and, why not, a torrent server to download torrent files available over RSS feeds. A trivial configuration can also make it work as a crude podcast client. My main motivation to work on this was that it was difficult to extend feed2imap to do what I needed (which was to talk to transmission to download torrent files) and rss2email didn't support my workflow (which is delivering to feed-specific mail folders). Because both projects also seemed abandoned, it seemed like a good idea at the time to start a new one, although the rss2email community has now restarted the project and may produce interesting results. As an experiment, I tracked my time working on this project. It turns out it took about 45 hours to write that software. Considering feed2exec is about 1400 SLOC, that's 30 lines of code per hour. I don't know if that's slow or fast, but it's an interesting metric for future projects. It sure seems slow to me, but we need to keep in mind those 30 lines of code don't include documentation and repeated head banging on the keyboard. For example, I found two issues with the upstream feedparser package which I use to parse feeds which also seems unmaintained, unfortunately. Feed2exec is beta software at this point, but it's working well enough for me and the design is much simpler than the other programs of the kind. The main issue people can expect from it at this point is formatting issues or parse errors on exotic feeds, and noisy error messages on network errors, all of which should be fairly easy to fix in the test suite. I hope it will be useful for the community and, as usual, I welcome contributions, help and suggestions on how to improve the software.

More Python templates As part of the work on feed2exec, I did cleanup a few things in the ecdysis project, mostly to hook tests up in the CI, improve on the advancedConfig logger and cleanup more stuff. While I was there, it turns out that I built a pretty decent basic CI configuration for Python on GitLab. Whereas the previous templates only had a non-working Django example, you should now be able to chose a Python template when you configure CI on GitLab 10 and above, which should hook you up with normal Python setup procedures like setup.py install and setup.py test.

Selfspy I mentioned working on a monitoring tool in my last post, because it was a feature from Workrave missing in SafeEyes. It turns out there is already such a tool called selfspy. I did an extensive review of the software to make sure it wouldn't leak out confidential information out before using it, and it looks, well... kind of okay. It crashed on me at least once so far, which is too bad because then it loses track of the precious activity. I have used it at least once to figure out what the heck I worked on during the day, so it's pretty useful. I particularly used it to backtrack my work on feed2exec as I didn't originally track my time on the project. Unfortunately, selfspy seems unmaintained. I have proposed a maintenance team and hopefully the project maintainer will respond and at least share access so we don't end up in a situation like linkchecker. I also sent a bunch of pull requests to fix some issues like being secure by default and fixing the build. Apart from the crash, the main issue I have found with the software is that it doesn't detect idle time which means certain apps are disproportionatly represented in statistics. There are also some weaknesses in the crypto that should be adressed for people that encrypt their database. Next step is to package selfspy in Debian which should hopefully be simple enough...

Restic documentation security As part of a documentation patch on the Restic backup software, I have improved on my previous Perl script to snoop on process commandline arguments. A common flaw in shell scripts and cron jobs is to pass secret material in the environment (usually safe) but often through commandline arguments (definitely not safe). The challenge, in this peculiar case, was the env binary, but the last time I encountered such an issue was with the Drush commandline tool, which was passing database credentials in clear to the mysql binary. Using my Perl sniffer, I could get to 60 checks per second (or 60Hz). After reimplementing it in Python, this number went up to 160Hz, which still wasn't enough to catch the elusive env command, which is much faster at hiding arguments than MySQL, in large part because it simply does an execve() once the environment is setup. Eventually, I just went crazy and rewrote the whole thing in C which was able to get 700-900Hz and did catch the env command about 10-20% of the time. I could probably have rewritten this by simply walking /proc myself (since this is what all those libraries do in the end) to get better result, but then my point was made. I was able to prove to the restic author the security issues that warranted the warning. It's too bad I need to repeat this again and again, but then my tools are getting better at proving that issue... I suspect it's not the last time I have to deal with this issue and I am happy to think that I can come up with an even more efficient proof of concept tool the next time around.

Ansible 101 After working on documentation last month, I ended up writing my first Ansible playbook this month, converting my tasksel list to a working Ansible configuration. This was a useful exercise: it allow me to find a bunch of packages which have been removed from Debian and provides much better usability than tasksel. For example, it provides a --diff argument that shows which packages are missing from a given setup. I am still unsure about Ansible. Manifests do seem really verbose and I still can't get used to the YAML DSL. I could probably have done the same thing with Puppet and just run puppet apply on the resulting config. But I must admit my bias towards Python is showing here: I can't help but think Puppet is going to be way less accessible with its rewrite in Clojure and C (!)... But then again, I really like Puppet's approach of having generic types like package or service rather than Ansible's clunky apt/yum/dnf/package/win_package types...

Pat and Ham radio After responding (too late) to a request for volunteers to help in Puerto Rico, I realized that my amateur radio skills were somewhat lacking in the "packet" (data transmission in ham jargon) domain, as I wasn't used to operate a Winlink node. Such a node can receive and transmit actual emails over the airwaves, for free, without direct access to the internet, which is very useful in disaster relief efforts. Through summary research, I stumbled upon the new and very promising Pat project which provides one of the first user-friendly Linux-compatible Winlink programs. I provided improvements on the documentation and some questions regarding compatibility issues which are still pending. But my pet issue is the establishment of pat as a normal internet citizen by using standard protocols for receiving and sending email. Not sure how that can be implemented, but we'll see. I am also hoping to upload an official Debian package and hopefully write more about this soon. Stay tuned!

Random stuff I ended up fixing my Kodi issue by starting it as a standalone systemd service, instead of gdm3, which is now completely disabled on the media box. I simply used the following /etc/systemd/service/kodi.service file:

[Unit]
Description=Kodi Media Center
After=systemd-user-sessions.service network.target sound.target
[Service]
User=xbmc
Group=video
Type=simple
TTYPath=/dev/tty7
StandardInput=tty
ExecStart=/usr/bin/xinit /usr/bin/dbus-launch --exit-with-session /usr/bin/kodi-standalone -- :1 -nolisten tcp vt7
Restart=on-abort
RestartSec=5
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

The downside of this is that it needs Xorg to run as root, whereas modern Xorg can now run rootless. Not sure how to fix this or where... But if I put needs_root_rights=no in Xwrapper.config, I get the following error in .local/share/xorg/Xorg.1.log:

[  2502.533] (EE) modeset(0): drmSetMaster failed: Permission denied

After fooling around with iPython, I ended up trying the xonsh shell, which is supposed to provide a bash-compatible Python shell environment. Unfortunately, I found it pretty unusable as a shell: it works fine to do Python stuff, but then all my environment and legacy bash configuration files were basically ignored so I couldn't get working quickly. This is too bad because the project looked very promising... Finally, one of my TLS hosts using a Let's Encrypt certificate wasn't renewing properly, and I figured out why. It turns out the ProxyPass command was passing everything to the backend, including the /.well-known requests, which obviously broke ACME verification. The solution was simple enough, disable the proxy for that directory:

ProxyPass /.well-known/ !

• build-rdeps
  • Updated build-rdeps to work with compressed apt indices. (Debian bug #698240)
  • Added support for Build-Arch- Conflicts,Depends to build-rdeps. (adc87981)
  • Merged Andreas Henriksson's patch for setting remote.<name>.push-url when using debcheckout to clone a git repository. (Debian bug #753838)
• debsign
  • Updated bash completion for gpg keys to use gpg --with-colons, instead of manually parsing gpg -K output. Aside from being the Right Way to get machine parseable information out of gpg, it fixed completion when gpg is a 2.x version. (Debian bug #837380)

• Packaged the new upstream release (1.2.1)
• Basic package maintenance (-dbgsym package, policy update, enabled hardening flags).
• Uploaded 1.2.1-1

• Attempted to nudge lua-nvim's builds along on a couple architectures where they were waiting for neovim to be installable
  • x32: Temporarily removed lua-nvim Build-Depends to break the BD-Uninstallable cycle between lua-nvim and neovim.
  • powerpcspe: Temporarily removed luajit Build-Depends, reducing test scope, to fix the build.
    • If memory serves, the test failures are fixed upstream for the next release.
• Uploaded 0.2.0-4

• autobahn-cpp
• libdata-messagepack-perl
• ring

• Used the powerpc porterbox to debug and fix a 32-bit integer overflow that was causing test failures.
• Asked the vim-perl folks about getting updated runtime files to Bram, after Jakub Wilk filed Debian bug #873755. This had been fixed 4+ years earlier, but not yet merged back into Vim. Thanks to Rob Hoelz for pulling things together and sending the updates to Bram.
• I've continued to receive feedback from Debian users about their frustration with Vim's new "defaults.vim", both in regards to the actual default settings and its interaction with the system-wide vimrc file. While I still don't intend to deviate from upstream's behavior, I did push back some more on the existing behavior. I appreciate Christian Brabandt's effort, as always, to understand the issue at hand and have constructive discussions. His final suggestion seems like it will resolve the system vimrc interaction, so hopefully Bram is receptive to it.
• Uploaded 2:8.0.1144-1
• Thanks to a nudge from Salvatore Bonaccorso and Moritz M hlenhoff, I uploaded 2:8.0.0197-4+deb9u1 which fixes CVE-2017-11109. I had intended to do this much sooner, but it fell through the cracks. Due to Adam Barratt's quick responses, this should make it into the upcoming Stretch 9.2 release.

• Started work on updating the packaging
  • Converted to 3.0 (quilt) source format
  • Updated to debhelper 10 compat
  • Initial attempts at converting to a dh rules file
    • Running into various problems here and still trying to figure out whether they're in the upstream build system, Debian's patches, or both.

• Worked with Niko Dittmann to fix build failures Niko was experiencing on OpenBSD 6.1 #7298
• Merged upstream Vim patches into neovim from various contributors
  • Young Jean Han - #7233
  • KunMing Xie - #7258, #7311, #7309, #7310
  • James McCoy - #7325
• Discussed focus detection behavior after a recent change in the implementation (#7221)
  • While testing focus detection in various terminal emulators, I noticed pangoterm didn't support this. I submitted a merge request on libvterm to provide an API for reporting focus changes. If that's merged, it will be trivial for pangoterm to notify applications when the terminal has focus.
• Fixed a bug in our tooling around merging Vim patches, which was causing it to incorrectly drop certain files from the patches. #7328

Changes

• myrepos: mention related software
• icns: OpenJPEG 2 fixes (1 2 3 4), fix minor buffer overrun
• check-all-the-things: fix cwd usage, dependencies updates (1, 2), increased verbosity, TODO items (for errcheck, coccinelle, DR.CHECKER, RATS, qmllint, xmlpatternsvalidator, gfapy-validate, phpstan, psalm, ansible-lint)
• spelling dictionaries:
  • codespell: delte, defualt, Debiab, aiffer, syntesis, reprociblbe, thether, suport, mimimum, isssue, reseting
  • lintian: delte, Debiab, aiffer, syntesis, reprociblbe
• Debian Planets: add BCCD, Pardus
• Debian derivatives census: improve db handling
• Debian PTS: fix backports issue
• Debian member portfolio: https (1, 2, 3), drop alioth files, fix duck & lists search
• Debian security tracker: BlueBourne NFUs, u-boot issues, kanboard CVE list fixes, fix version typo
• Debian puppet: SSL exception (1, 2), comment fixes
• Debian website: add missing section title
• Debian wiki pages: AutomaticPackagingTools, CrossCompiling, DebianDevelopment, DebianLive/buster, DebianYeeloong/ko, Derivatives/Census (QA, BCCD, EmmabuntusDE (1, 2), ev3dev, Netrunner (1, 2), Pardus), DeveloperNews, Diagrams, EmDebian/CrossDebootstrap, InstallingDebianOn/Asus/Transformer T300 Chi/Stretch, IRC, JamesAmontgomery, JensKorte/reportbug-by-mail, LocalGroupsTemplate, Mobile, MultimediaFetchingTools, OfflineMasterKey (1, 2), Outreachy/Round15 (Projects/SocialEventAndConferenceCalendars), PaulWise/InterestingSoftware, PortTemplate, qa.debian.org, research/publications, RISC-V, Sprints/2017/DebianCloudOct2017, SystemBuildTools, Teams (Dpkg/FAQ, Publicity/micronews, ReleaseTeam/ReleaseCheckList), template
• File Formats wiki pages: ZED (1, 2)

Issues

• Crashes in firefox-esr, lugaru, minetest-mod-animals
• Conffile removal in fonts-beng-extra
• Upstream renamed openggsn
• Strictness in ftp.d.o
• Features in unattended-upgrades
• Missing hashes in caffeine-developers PPA
• Missing conffile removal in di-netboot-assistant
• Incorrect upgrades in unattended-upgrades
• Incorrect URL in reproducible-check
• Verbosity in github-backup
• Minor issues in unattended-upgrades
• Usability issue in Firefox
• Upstreaming needed for Hone Linux-Sensor
• New upstream version of samba

Review

• Spam: reported 1 LWN comment, 5 Debian bug reports and 338 Debian mailing list posts
• Debian packages: sponsored minetest-mod-unifieddyes 20170925-1
• Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month
• Debian screenshots:
  • approved banshee, blender, bsdgames, chromium, eficas, elpa-visual-fill-column, elpa-writegood-mode, glirc, gnome-builder, gnome-shell-extension-taskbar, gwenview, knocker, krita, ksysguard, masscan, mediainfo-gui, mousepad, mysql-workbench, nitrogen, ola, pavucontrol, qupzilla, tiger, transmission-gtk, virtualbox, vlc, wavemon, wfuzz
  • deleted mysql-workbench (ugly, Windows), udisks2 (of other software)
  • rejected elpa-* (MacOS and taken from upstream), 0ad (RPi logo), synaptic (weird overlaid stuff), dehydrated (hilarious but not a screenshot), di-netboot-assistant (of other software), wfuzz (help output)
  • approved deletion of udisks2 (of other software), scottfree (manual page), agenda.app (of other software)
  • rejected deletion of reportbug/abe/nlkt (bogus reason)

Administration

• icns: merged patches
• Debian: help guest user with access, investigate/escalate broken network, restart broken stunnels, investigate static.d.o storage, investigate weird RAID mails, ask hoster to investigate power issue,
• Debian mentors: lintian/security updates & reboot
• Debian wiki: merged & deployed patch, redirect DDTSS translator, redirect user support requests, whitelist email addresses, update email for accounts with bouncing email,
• Debian derivatives census: merged/deployed patches
• Debian PTS: debugged cron mails, deployed changes, reran scripts, fixed configuration file
• Openmoko: debug reboot issue, debug load issues

Communication

• Inform derivatives that are using Alioth about the pending shutdown
• Inquire about Netrunner, Pardus in the Debian derivatives census.
• Invite OB2D Linux to the Debian derivatives census
• Welcome Rohan Garg (of Netrunner), Aaron Weeden (of BCCD), Muhammet Kara (of Pardus) to the Debian derivatives census

Sponsors The samba bug was sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

• Submitted a pull request to Quadrapassel (the Gnome version of Tetris) to start a new game when the pause button is pressed outside of a game. This means you would no longer have to use the mouse to start a new game. [...]
• Made a large number of improvements to AptFS my FUSE-based filesystem that provides a view on unpacked Debian source packages as regular folders including moving away from manual parsing of package lists [...] and numerous code tidying/refactoring changes.
• Sent a small patch to django-sitetree, a Django library for menu and breadcrumb navigation elements to not mask test exit codes from the surrounding shell. [...]
• Updated travis.debian.net, my hosted service for projects that host their Debian packaging on GitHub to use the Travis CI continuous integration platform to test builds:
  • Add support for "sloppy" backports. Thanks to Bernd Zeimetz for the idea and ongoing testing. [...]
  • Merged a pull request from James McCoy to pass DEB_BUILD_PROFILES through to the build. [...]
  • Workaround Travis CI's HTTP proxy which does not appear to support SRV records. [...]
  • Run debc from devscripts if the build was successful [...] and output the .buildinfo file if it exists [...].
• Fixed a few issues in local-debian-mirror, my package to easily maintain and customise a local Debian mirror via the DebConf configuration tool:
  • Fix an issue where file permissions from the remote could result in a local archive that was impossible to access. [...]
  • Clear out empty directories on the local repository. [...]
• Updated django-staticfiles-dotd, my Django staticfiles adaptor to concatentate static media in .d-style directories to support Python 3.x by using bytes objects (commit) and move away from monkeypatch as it does not have a Python 3.x port yet (commit).
• I also posted a short essay to my blog entitled "Ask the Dumb Questions" as well as provided an update on the latest Lintian release.

# /etc/systemd/system/ddate.socket
[Unit]
Description=ddate service on port 55555
[Socket]
ListenStream=55555
Accept=true
[Install]
WantedBy=sockets.target

# /etc/systemd/system/ddate@.service
[Unit]
Description=Run ddate as a network service
[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/bin/sh -ec 'while true; do /usr/bin/ddate; sleep 1m; done'
StandardOutput=socket
StandardError=journal

$ systemctl list-units 'ddate@*'
  UNIT                                             LOAD   ACTIVE SUB     DESCRIPTION
  ddate@15-127.0.0.1:55555-127.0.0.1:36936.service loaded active running Run ddate as a network service (127.0.0.1:36936)
  ddate@16-127.0.0.1:55555-127.0.0.1:37002.service loaded active running Run ddate as a network service (127.0.0.1:37002)

$ systemctl status system-ddate.slice
  system-ddate.slice
   Loaded: loaded
   Active: active since Thu 2017-09-21 14:25:02 CEST; 9min ago
    Tasks: 4
   CGroup: /system.slice/system-ddate.slice
            ddate@15-127.0.0.1:55555-127.0.0.1:36936.service
              18214 /bin/sh -ec while true; do /usr/bin/ddate; sleep 1m; done
              18661 sleep 1m
            ddate@16-127.0.0.1:55555-127.0.0.1:37002.service
              18228 /bin/sh -ec while true; do /usr/bin/ddate; sleep 1m; done
              18670 sleep 1m

• man systemd.socket
• systemd for developers: socket activation
• template units

Changes in Rcpp version 0.12.13 (2017-09-24)

• Changes in Rcpp API:
  • New const iterators functions cbegin() and cend() have been added to several vector and matrix classes (Dan Dillon and James Balamuta in #748) starting to address #741).
• Changes in Rcpp Modules:
  • Misplacement of one parenthesis in macro LOAD_RCPP_MODULE was corrected (Lei Yu in #737)
• Changes in Rcpp Documentation:
  • Rewrote the macOS sections to depend on official documentation due to large changes in the macOS toolchain. (James Balamuta in #742 addressing issue #682).
  • Added a new vignette Rcpp-introduction based on new PeerJ preprint, renamed existing introduction to Rcpp-jss-2011 .
  • Transitioned all vignettes to the 'pinp' RMarkdown template (James Balamuta and Dirk Eddelbuettel in #755 addressing issue #604).
  • Added an entry on running 'compileAttributes()' twice to the Rcpp-FAQ (##745).

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

<provides/>

/usr/share/metainfo/com.latofonts.Lato.metainfo.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<component type="font">
  <id>com.latofonts.Lato</id>
  <metadata_license>FSFAP</metadata_license>
  <project_license>OFL-1.1</project_license>
  <name>Lato</name>
  <summary>A sanserif type face fam ily</summary>
  <description>
    <p>
      Lato is a sanserif type face fam ily designed in the Sum mer 2010 by Warsaw-based designer
       ukasz Dziedzic ( Lato  means  Sum mer  in Pol ish). In Decem ber 2010 the Lato fam ily
      was pub lished under the open-source Open Font License by his foundry tyPoland, with
      sup port from Google.
    </p>
  </description>
  <url type="homepage">http://www.latofonts.com/</url>
  <provides>
    <font>Lato Regular</font>
    <font>Lato Black Italic</font>
    <font>Lato Black</font>
    <font>Lato Bold Italic</font>
    <font>Lato Bold</font>
    <font>Lato Hairline Italic</font>
    ...
  </provides>
</component>

<font/>

<provides/>

<provides/>

<custom>
  <value key="FontIconText"> </value>
  <value key="FontSampleText">       ...         </value>
</custom>

• Fonts are hard
• I need to blog faster
• Please add metainfo files to your fonts and submit them upstream if you can!
• Fonts must have a metainfo file in order to show up in GNOME Software, KDE Discover, AppCenter, etc.
• The new font specification is backwards compatible to Richard s pioneer work in 2014
• The appstream-generator supports a few non-standard values to influence how font images are rendered that you might be interested in (maybe we can do something like that for appstream-builder as well)
• The appstream-generator does not (yet?) support the <extends/> logic Richard outlined in his blog post, mainly because it wasn t necessary in Debian/Ubuntu/Arch yet (which is asgen s primary audience), and upstream projects would rarely want to write multiple metainfo files.
• The metaInfo files are not supposed to replace the existing fontconfig files, and we can not generate them from existing metadata, sadly
• If you want a more detailed look at writing font metainfo files, take a look at the AppStream specification.
• Please write more font metadata

ps.monitor tor:1-1 master:1-2 auditd:1-1 cron:1-5 rsyslogd:1-1 dbus-daemon:1- sshd:1- watchdog:1-2

• [1] https://doc.coker.com.au/projects/etbe-mon/

The problem with crying in the woods, by the side of a white road that leads somewhere terrible, is that the reason for crying isn't inside your head. You have a perfectly legitimate and pressing reason for crying, and it will still be there in five minutes, except that your throat will be raw and your eyes will itch and absolutely nothing else will have changed.

From time to time, to make sure it s you who s using your Barclaycard online, we ll send you a text with a verification code for you to use on the Verified by Visa screen that ll pop up on your payment page.

• A WeMos Mini D1
  • Cost 3.00
  • ESP8266-powered board, which can be programmed easily in C++ and contains on-board WiFi as well as a bunch of I/O pins.
• A RDA5807M FM Radio chip.
  • Cost 37 cents.
  • With a crystal for support.

• Advantages: People who like to build stuff (we really like people who maintain/contribute to open source projects) (Wizer Research)
• You will: Incubate and contribute to open source projects (iguazio)
• The X factor significant contribution to an open-source community (unnamed startup)
• An example open source project our team released is CoreML (Apple)
• Job Responsibilities: Write open-source tools and contribute to open-source projects. (unnamed startup)
• We d like to talk to people who: Appreciate open-source culture and philosophy. (Seeking Alpha)