Sings-to-Trees had hair the color of sunlight and ashes, delicately pointed ears, and eyes the translucent green of new leaves. His shirt was off, he had the sort of tanned muscle acquired from years of healthy outdoor living, and you could have sharpened a sword on his cheekbones. He was saved from being a young maiden's fantasy unless she was a very peculiar young maiden by the fact that he was buried up to the shoulder in the unpleasant end of a heavily pregnant unicorn.

Sings-to-Trees gazed off in the middle distance with a vague, pleasant expression, the way that most people do when present at other people's minor domestic disputes, and after a moment, the stag had stopped rattling, and the doe had turned back and rested her chin trustingly on Sings-to-Trees' shoulder. This would have been a touching gesture, if her chin hadn't been made of painfully pointy blades of bone. It was like being snuggled by an affectionate plow.

Farmer Protests While I was hoping to write about RCEP exclusively, just today farmer protests have happened against three farm laws which had been passed by our Govt. about a month ago without consulting anybody. The bills benefit only big business houses at the cost of farmers. This has been amply shared by an open letter to one of the biggest business house which will benefit the most. Now while that is a national experience and what it tells, let me share, some experience from the State I come from, Maharashtra. About 4-5 years back Maharashtra delisted fruit and vegetables from the APMC market. But till date, the APMC market is working, why, the reasons are many. However, what it did was it forced the change to sugarcane, a water guzzling crop much more than previously. This has resulted in lowering the water table in Maharashtra and put them more into debt trap and later they had to commit suicide. Now let us see why the Punjab farmers have been so agitated that they are walking all the way to Delhi. They are right now, somewhere between Haryana-Delhi border. The reason is that because even their experiments with contract farming have not been good. This is why they are struggling to go to Delhi to make their collective voices heard and get the farm bills rolled back. Even the farmers from Gujarat were sued, but because of elections were put back, the intentions though are clear. This has also happened in Uttar Pradesh and for sugarcane and that too by Bajaj Company. At the end of the day, the laws made by the Govt. leaves our farmer at the mercy of big corporations. It is preposterous to believe that the farmer, with their small land holdings will be able to stand up to the Corporation. Add to that, they cannot go to Court. It is the SDM (Sub-Divisonal Magistrate) who will decide on the matters and has the last word. If this is allowed, in a couple of years there will be only few farmers or corporations who would have large hand-holdings, and they would be easily co-opted by the Government in power. Just in A gentleman who turned off water cannon being shot at farmers has been charged for murder Currently, the Government procures rice in vast quantities and the farmers are assured at least some basic income, in the states of Punjab and Haryana

Procurement of Rice by Various States

Recently there was also an article in Indian Express which shares the farmer s apprehensions and does share that it s a complex problem with no easy solutions. The solution can only be dialogue between the two parties. This was also shared by Vivek Kaul, who is far more knowledgable than me on the subject and made a long read on the subject.

The Canada Way Recently, while sparring on the Internet, came to know of the Canada way. Here, the Government makes the farmer a corporation and the Government helps them. But the Canada way seems to largely work as the Canadian Government owns the majority of the lands in question. And yes, Indians have benefited from it but that is also due to a. the currency differential between Canadian dollar and Indian Rupee and the 99-year land lease. There may be other advantages that the Canadian Government bestows and that is the reason possibly that most Punjabi farmers go to Canada and UK to farm. While looking at it, I also came across the situation in the United States and it seems the situation there seems to be becoming even more grim.

RCEP RCEP stands for Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. We were supposed to be part of this partnership. Now why didn t we join, for two reasons, our judicial infrastructure is the worst. It took 8 years to decide on a tax retrospective case (Vodafone) and that too finally outside India. And that decision, by no means an end. The other thing is all those who have joined RCEP have lesser duties, tariffs then India. What this means is that they are much more competitive than India. While there is fear that perhaps that China may take over its assets as it has done with few countries around the world, the opportunity for those countries was too good to pass up even with the dangers. But, then even India has taken loans from the Asian Infrastructure Investment (AIIB) Bank where China is the biggest shareholder. So it doesn t make sense to be insecure on that front. And again, it is up to India or any other sovereign country to decide to take loans from some country, some multilateral organization or any other way and on what terms.

What China has done and doing is similar to what IMF (being used primarily by the United States) had done in its past. The only difference is that time it was the United States, now it is China. America co-opted Governments, and got assets, China doing the same, no difference in tactics, more or less the same. There has also been a somewhat interesting paper which discusses how the RCEP may unfold in different circumstances. In short, it tells that the partners will benefit, some more than others. It also does compare the RCEP to CPTPP (The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership). While the study is a bit academic in nature as the United States has walked out and the new president-elect Joe Biden hasn t made any moves and is unlikely to make any moves as there is deep divide and resentment about multilateral trade partnerships domestically within the United States. This news and understanding was quite shocking to me as it shows that unlike the United States of the past, which was supposed to be a beacon of capitalism and seemed to enjoy capitalism, it seems to be an opportunist only. There is also this truth that under Biden, there is only so many things on which he would need and can spend his political capital on.

Statistica Chart of differences between Republicans and Democrats

As can be seen, economy at least for the democrats, this time around is pretty far round the corner. He has a host of battles and would have to choose which to fight and which to ignore. In the end, we are left to our own devices. At the moment, India does not know when it s economy will recover

PTI News, Nov 27, 2020

There has been another worrying bit of news, now all newspapers will need to get some sort of permission, certification from Govt. of India about any news of the world. This is harking back on the 1970 s, 1980 s era

Gradle and Kotlin in Debian Few months back, I was looking at where Gradle and Kotlin were in Debian. They still seem to be a work in progress. I found the Android-tools salsa repo which tells me the state of things. While there has been movement on both, a bit more on Kotlin, it still seems it would take a while. For kotlin, the wiki page is most helpful as well as the android-tool salsa kotlin board page . Ironically, some of the more important info. is shared in a blog post which ideally should also have been reflected in kotlin board page . I did see some of the bugs so know it s pretty much dependency hell. I can only congratulate and encourage Samyak Jain and Raman Sarda. I also played a bit with the google-android-emulator-installer which is basically a hook which downloads the binary from google. I do not know what the plans are, but perhaps in the future they also might be build locally, who knows. Just sharing/stating here so it s part of my notes whenever I wanna see what s happening

Women in India I am sure some of you might remember my blog post from last year. It is almost close to a year 2020 now and the question to be asked is, has much changed ? After a lot or hue and cry the Government of India shared the NCRB data of crimes against women and caste crimes. The report shared that crimes against women had risen by 7.3% in a year, similarly crimes against lower castes also went by similar percentage . With the 2020 pandemic, I am sure the number has gone up more. And there is a possibility that just like last year, next year the Government would cite the pandemic and say no data. This year they have done it for migrant deaths during lockdown , for job losses due to the pandemic and so on and so forth. So, it will be no surprise if the Govt. says about NCRB data next year as well. Although media has been showing some in spite of the regular threats to the journalists as shared in the last blog post. There is also data that shows that women participation in labor force has fallen sharply especially in the last few years and the Government seems to have no neither idea nor do they seem to care for the same. There aren t any concrete plans to bring back the balance even a little bit.

Few Court judgements But all hope is not lost. There have been a couple of good judgements, one from the CIC (Chief Information Commissioner) wherein in specific cases a wife can know salary details of her husband, especially if there is some kind of maintenance due from the husband. There was so much of hue and cry against this order that it was taken down from the livelaw RTI corner. Luckily, I had downloaded it, hence could upload and share it. Another one was a case/suit about a legally matured women who had decided to marry without parental consent. In this case, the Delhi High Court had taken women s side and stated she can marry whom she wants. Interestingly, about a week back Uttar Pradesh (most notorious about crime against women) had made laws called Love Jihad and 2 -3 states have followed them. The idea being to create an atmosphere of hate against Muslims and women have no autonomy about what they want. This is when in a separate suit/case against Sudharshan TV (a far-right leaning channel promoting hate against Muslims) , the Government of India itself put an affidavit stating that Tablighis (a sect of Muslims who came from Malaysia to India for religious discourse and assembly) were not responsible for dissemination of the virus and some media has correctly portrayed the same. Of course, those who are on the side of the Govt. on this topic think a traitor has written. They also thought that the Govt. had taken a wrong approach but couldn t tell of a better approach to the matter. There are too many matters in the Supreme Court of women asking for justice to tell all here but two instances share how the SC has been buckling under the stress of late, one is a webinar which was chaired by Justice Subramaniam where he shared how the executive is using judicial appointments to do what it wants. The gulf between the executive and the SC has been since Indira Gandhi days, especially the judicial orders which declared that the Emergency is valid by large, it has fallen much more recently and the executive has been muscling in which have resulted in more regressive decisions than progressive.

This observation is also in tune with another study which came to the same result although using data. The raw data from the study could give so much more than what has been shared. For e.g. as an idea for the study, of the ones cited, how many have been in civil law, personal law, criminal or constitutional law. This would give a better understanding of things. Also what is shocking is none of our court orders have been cited in the west in the recent past, when there used to be a time when the west used to take guidance from Indian jurisprudence sometimes and cite the orders to reach similar conclusion or if not conclusion at least be used as a precedent. I guess those days are over.

Government giving Corporate ownership to Private Sector Banks There was an Internal Working Group report to review extant ownership guidelines and Corporate Structure for Indian Private Sector Banks. This is the actual title of the report. Now there were and are concerns about the move which were put forth by Dr. Raghuram Rajan and Viral Acharya. While Dr. Rajan had been the 23rd Governor of RBI from 4th September 2013 to 4th September 2016. His most commendable work which largely is unknown to most people was the report A hundred small steps which you buy from sage publications. Viral Acharya was the deputy governor from 23rd January 2017 23rd July 2019. Mr. Acharya just recently published his book Quest for Restoring Financial Stability in India which can be bought from the same publication house as well. They also wrote a three page article stating that does India need corporates in banking? More interestingly, he shares two points from history both world war 1 and world war 2. In both cases, the allies had to cut down the businesses who had owned banks. In Germany, it was the same and in Japan, the zaibatsu s dissolution, both of which were needed to make the world safe again. Now, if we don t learn lessons from history it is our fault, not history s. What was also shared that this idea was taken up in 2013 but was put into cold-storage. He also commented on the pressure on RBI as all co-operative banks have come under its ambit in the last few months. RBI has had a patchy record, especially in the last couple of years, with big scams like ILFS, Yes Bank, PMC Bank, Laxmi Vilas Bank among others. The LVB Bank being the most recent one. If new banking licenses have to be given they can be given to good NBFC s who have been in the market for a long time and have shown maturity while dealing with public money. What is the hurry for giving it to Corporate/business houses ? There are many other good points in the report with which both Mr. Rajan and Mr. Acharya are in agreement and do hope the other points/suggestions/proposals are implemented. There was and is an interesting report by Reserve Bank of India called financial sector legislative reforms commission report volume 1 . If and when it gets deleted from RBI, I have put up a copy at my WordPress account, so we shall always have one. Interestingly, while looking through the people who were part of the committee was a somewhat familiar name Murmu . This is perhaps the first time you see people from a sort of political background being in what should be a cut and dry review which have people normally from careers in finance or Accounts. It also turns out that only one person was in favor of banks going to corporates, all the rest were against. It seems that the specific person hadn t heard the terms self-lending , connected-lending and conflict of interest. One of the more interesting comments in the report is if a corporate has a bank, then why would he go to Switzerland, he would just wash the money in his own bank. And if banks were to become to big to fail like it happened in the United States, it would be again private gains, public losses. There was also a Washington Post article which shares some of the reasons that Indian banks fail. I think we need to remind ourselves once again, how things can become
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gK3s5j7PgA

Positive News at end At the end I do not want to end on a sour notes, hence sharing a YouTube channel of Films Division India where you can see of the very classic works and interviews of some of the greats in Indian art cinema.

https://www.youtube.com/user/FilmsDivision/videos Also sharing a bit of funny story I came to know about youtube-dl, apparently it was taken off from github but thanks to efforts from EFF, Hackernews and others, it is now back in action.

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import nftables
import json
nft = nftables.Nftables()
nft.set_json_output(True)
rc, output, error = nft.cmd("list ruleset")
print(json.loads(output))

• import the nftables & json modules
• init the libnftables instance
• configure library behavior
• run commands and parse the output (ideally using JSON)

flush ruleset
add table inet mytable
add chain inet mytable mychain
add rule inet mytable mychain tcp dport 22 accept

  "nftables": [
      "flush":   "ruleset": null  ,
      "add":   "table":  
        "family": "inet",
        "name": "mytable"
     ,
      "add":   "chain":  
        "family": "inet",
        "table": "mytable",
        "chain": "mychain"
     
      "add":   "rule":  
        "family": "inet",
        "table": "mytable",
        "chain": "mychain",
        "expr": [
              "match":  
                "left":   "payload":  
                    "protocol": "tcp",
                    "field": "dport"
                 ,
                "right": 22
             ,
              "accept": null  
        ]
     
] 

What does this mean? Over the coming weeks, I will:

• transition packages to be team-maintained where it makes sense
• remove myself from the Uploaders field on packages with other maintainers
• orphan packages where I am the sole maintainer

I will try to keep up best-effort maintenance of the manpages.debian.org service and the codesearch.debian.net service, but any help would be much appreciated. For all intents and purposes, please treat me as permanently on vacation. I will try to be around for administrative issues (e.g. permission transfers) and questions addressed directly to me, permitted they are easy enough to answer.

Why? When I joined Debian, I was still studying, i.e. I had luxurious amounts of spare time. Now, over 5 years of full time work later, my day job taught me a lot, both about what works in large software engineering projects and how I personally like my computer systems. I am very conscious of how I spend the little spare time that I have these days. The following sections each deal with what I consider a major pain point, in no particular order. Some of them influence each other for example, if changes worked better, we could have a chance at transitioning packages to be more easily machine readable.

Change process in Debian The last few years, my current team at work conducted various smaller and larger refactorings across the entire code base (touching thousands of projects), so we have learnt a lot of valuable lessons about how to effectively do these changes. It irks me that Debian works almost the opposite way in every regard. I appreciate that every organization is different, but I think a lot of my points do actually apply to Debian. In Debian, packages are nudged in the right direction by a document called the Debian Policy, or its programmatic embodiment, lintian. While it is great to have a lint tool (for quick, local/offline feedback), it is even better to not require a lint tool at all. The team conducting the change (e.g. the C++ team introduces a new hardening flag for all packages) should be able to do their work transparent to me. Instead, currently, all packages become lint-unclean, all maintainers need to read up on what the new thing is, how it might break, whether/how it affects them, manually run some tests, and finally decide to opt in. This causes a lot of overhead and manually executed mechanical changes across packages. Notably, the cost of each change is distributed onto the package maintainers in the Debian model. At work, we have found that the opposite works better: if the team behind the change is put in power to do the change for as many users as possible, they can be significantly more efficient at it, which reduces the total cost and time a lot. Of course, exceptions (e.g. a large project abusing a language feature) should still be taken care of by the respective owners, but the important bit is that the default should be the other way around. Debian is lacking tooling for large changes: it is hard to programmatically deal with packages and repositories (see the section below). The closest to sending out a change for review is to open a bug report with an attached patch. I thought the workflow for accepting a change from a bug report was too complicated and started mergebot, but only Guido ever signaled interest in the project. Culturally, reviews and reactions are slow. There are no deadlines. I literally sometimes get emails notifying me that a patch I sent out a few years ago (!!) is now merged. This turns projects from a small number of weeks into many years, which is a huge demotivator for me. Interestingly enough, you can see artifacts of the slow online activity manifest itself in the offline culture as well: I don t want to be discussing systemd s merits 10 years after I first heard about it. Lastly, changes can easily be slowed down significantly by holdouts who refuse to collaborate. My canonical example for this is rsync, whose maintainer refused my patches to make the package use debhelper purely out of personal preference. Granting so much personal freedom to individual maintainers prevents us as a project from raising the abstraction level for building Debian packages, which in turn makes tooling harder. How would things look like in a better world?

1. As a project, we should strive towards more unification. Uniformity still does not rule out experimentation, it just changes the trade-off from easier experimentation and harder automation to harder experimentation and easier automation.
2. Our culture needs to shift from this package is my domain, how dare you touch it to a shared sense of ownership, where anyone in the project can easily contribute (reviewed) changes without necessarily even involving individual maintainers.

To learn more about how successful large changes can look like, I recommend my colleague Hyrum Wright s talk Large-Scale Changes at Google: Lessons Learned From 5 Yrs of Mass Migrations .

Fragmented workflow and infrastructure Debian generally seems to prefer decentralized approaches over centralized ones. For example, individual packages are maintained in separate repositories (as opposed to in one repository), each repository can use any SCM (git and svn are common ones) or no SCM at all, and each repository can be hosted on a different site. Of course, what you do in such a repository also varies subtly from team to team, and even within teams. In practice, non-standard hosting options are used rarely enough to not justify their cost, but frequently enough to be a huge pain when trying to automate changes to packages. Instead of using GitLab s API to create a merge request, you have to design an entirely different, more complex system, which deals with intermittently (or permanently!) unreachable repositories and abstracts away differences in patch delivery (bug reports, merge requests, pull requests, email, ). Wildly diverging workflows is not just a temporary problem either. I participated in long discussions about different git workflows during DebConf 13, and gather that there were similar discussions in the meantime. Personally, I cannot keep enough details of the different workflows in my head. Every time I touch a package that works differently than mine, it frustrates me immensely to re-learn aspects of my day-to-day. After noticing workflow fragmentation in the Go packaging team (which I started), I tried fixing this with the workflow changes proposal, but did not succeed in implementing it. The lack of effective automation and slow pace of changes in the surrounding tooling despite my willingness to contribute time and energy killed any motivation I had.

Old infrastructure: package uploads When you want to make a package available in Debian, you upload GPG-signed files via anonymous FTP. There are several batch jobs (the queue daemon, unchecked, dinstall, possibly others) which run on fixed schedules (e.g. dinstall runs at 01:52 UTC, 07:52 UTC, 13:52 UTC and 19:52 UTC). Depending on timing, I estimated that you might wait for over 7 hours (!!) before your package is actually installable. What s worse for me is that feedback to your upload is asynchronous. I like to do one thing, be done with it, move to the next thing. The current setup requires a many-minute wait and costly task switch for no good technical reason. You might think a few minutes aren t a big deal, but when all the time I can spend on Debian per day is measured in minutes, this makes a huge difference in perceived productivity and fun. The last communication I can find about speeding up this process is ganneff s post from 2008. How would things look like in a better world?

1. Anonymous FTP would be replaced by a web service which ingests my package and returns an authoritative accept or reject decision in its response.
2. For accepted packages, there would be a status page displaying the build status and when the package will be available via the mirror network.
3. Packages should be available within a few minutes after the build completed.

Old infrastructure: bug tracker I dread interacting with the Debian bug tracker. debbugs is a piece of software (from 1994) which is only used by Debian and the GNU project these days. Debbugs processes emails, which is to say it is asynchronous and cumbersome to deal with. Despite running on the fastest machines we have available in Debian (or so I was told when the subject last came up), its web interface loads very slowly. Notably, the web interface at bugs.debian.org is read-only. Setting up a working email setup for reportbug(1) or manually dealing with attachments is a rather big hurdle. For reasons I don t understand, every interaction with debbugs results in many different email threads. Aside from the technical implementation, I also can never remember the different ways that Debian uses pseudo-packages for bugs and processes. I need them rarely enough to establish a mental model of how they are set up, or working memory of how they are used, but frequently enough to be annoyed by this. How would things look like in a better world?

1. Debian would switch from a custom bug tracker to a (any) well-established one.
2. Debian would offer automation around processes. It is great to have a paper-trail and artifacts of the process in the form of a bug report, but the primary interface should be more convenient (e.g. a web form).

Old infrastructure: mailing list archives It baffles me that in 2019, we still don t have a conveniently browsable threaded archive of mailing list discussions. Email and threading is more widely used in Debian than anywhere else, so this is somewhat ironic. Gmane used to paper over this issue, but Gmane s availability over the last few years has been spotty, to say the least (it is down as I write this). I tried to contribute a threaded list archive, but our listmasters didn t seem to care or want to support the project.

Debian is hard to machine-read While it is obviously possible to deal with Debian packages programmatically, the experience is far from pleasant. Everything seems slow and cumbersome. I have picked just 3 quick examples to illustrate my point. debiman needs help from piuparts in analyzing the alternatives mechanism of each package to display the manpages of e.g. psql(1). This is because maintainer scripts modify the alternatives database by calling shell scripts. Without actually installing a package, you cannot know which changes it does to the alternatives database. pk4 needs to maintain its own cache to look up package metadata based on the package name. Other tools parse the apt database from scratch on every invocation. A proper database format, or at least a binary interchange format, would go a long way. Debian Code Search wants to ingest new packages as quickly as possible. There used to be a fedmsg instance for Debian, but it no longer seems to exist. It is unclear where to get notifications from for new packages, and where best to fetch those packages.

Complicated build stack See my Debian package build tools post. It really bugs me that the sprawl of tools is not seen as a problem by others.

Developer experience pretty painful Most of the points discussed so far deal with the experience in developing Debian, but as I recently described in my post Debugging experience in Debian , the experience when developing using Debian leaves a lot to be desired, too.

I have more ideas At this point, the article is getting pretty long, and hopefully you got a rough idea of my motivation. While I described a number of specific shortcomings above, the final nail in the coffin is actually the lack of a positive outlook. I have more ideas that seem really compelling to me, but, based on how my previous projects have been going, I don t think I can make any of these ideas happen within the Debian project. I intend to publish a few more posts about specific ideas for improving operating systems here. Stay tuned. Lastly, I hope this post inspires someone, ideally a group of people, to improve the developer experience within Debian.

Measurements Keep in mind that these are one-time measurements. They should be indicative of actual performance, but your experience may vary.

ack (small Perl program)

distribution	package manager	data	wall-clock time	rate
Fedora	dnf	114 MB	33s	3.4 MB/s
Debian	apt	16 MB	10s	1.6 MB/s
NixOS	Nix	15 MB	5s	3.0 MB/s
Arch Linux	pacman	6.5 MB	3s	2.1 MB/s
Alpine	apk	10 MB	1s	10.0 MB/s

qemu (large C program)

distribution	package manager	data	wall-clock time	rate
Fedora	dnf	226 MB	4m37s	1.2 MB/s
Debian	apt	224 MB	1m35s	2.3 MB/s
Arch Linux	pacman	142 MB	44s	3.2 MB/s
NixOS	Nix	180 MB	34s	5.2 MB/s
Alpine	apk	26 MB	2.4s	10.8 MB/s

(Looking for older measurements? See Appendix B (2019). The difference between the slowest and fastest package managers is 30x! How can Alpine s apk and Arch Linux s pacman be an order of magnitude faster than the rest? They are doing a lot less than the others, and more efficiently, too.

Pain point: too much metadata For example, Fedora transfers a lot more data than others because its main package list is 60 MB (compressed!) alone. Compare that with Alpine s 734 KB APKINDEX.tar.gz. Of course the extra metadata which Fedora provides helps some use case, otherwise they hopefully would have removed it altogether. The amount of metadata seems excessive for the use case of installing a single package, which I consider the main use-case of an interactive package manager. I expect any modern Linux distribution to only transfer absolutely required data to complete my task.

Pain point: no concurrency Because they need to sequence executing arbitrary package maintainer-provided code (hooks and triggers), all tested package managers need to install packages sequentially (one after the other) instead of concurrently (all at the same time). In my blog post Can we do without hooks and triggers? , I outline that hooks and triggers are not strictly necessary to build a working Linux distribution.

Thought experiment: further speed-ups Strictly speaking, the only required feature of a package manager is to make available the package contents so that the package can be used: a program can be started, a kernel module can be loaded, etc. By only implementing what s needed for this feature, and nothing more, a package manager could likely beat apk s performance. It could, for example:

• skip archive extraction by mounting file system images (like AppImage or snappy)
• use compression which is light on CPU, as networks are fast (like apk)
• skip fsync when it is safe to do so, i.e.:
  • package installations don t modify system state
  • atomic package installation (e.g. an append-only package store)
  • automatically clean up the package store after crashes

Current landscape Here s a table outlining how the various package managers listed on Wikipedia s list of software package management systems fare:

name	scope	package file format	hooks/triggers
AppImage	apps	image: ISO9660, SquashFS	no
snappy	apps	image: SquashFS	yes: hooks
FlatPak	apps	archive: OSTree	no
0install	apps	archive: tar.bz2	no
nix, guix	distro	archive: nar. bz2,xz	activation script
dpkg	distro	archive: tar. gz,xz,bz2 in ar(1)	yes
rpm	distro	archive: cpio. bz2,lz,xz	scriptlets
pacman	distro	archive: tar.xz	install
slackware	distro	archive: tar. gz,xz	yes: doinst.sh
apk	distro	archive: tar.gz	yes: .post-install
Entropy	distro	archive: tar.bz2	yes
ipkg, opkg	distro	archive: tar ,.gz	yes

Conclusion As per the current landscape, there is no distribution-scoped package manager which uses images and leaves out hooks and triggers, not even in smaller Linux distributions. I think that space is really interesting, as it uses a minimal design to achieve significant real-world speed-ups. I have explored this idea in much more detail, and am happy to talk more about it in my post Introducing the distri research linux distribution".

Appendix A: related work There are a couple of recent developments going into the same direction:

• Revisiting How We Put Together Linux Systems describes mounting app bundles
• Android Q uses ext4 loopback images
• The Haiku Operating System s package manager Haiku Depot uses images

Appendix C: measurement details (2020)

ack You can expand each of these:

Fedora s dnf takes almost 33 seconds to fetch and unpack 114 MB.

% docker run -t -i fedora /bin/bash
[root@62d3cae2e2f9 /]# time dnf install -y ack
Fedora 32 openh264 (From Cisco) - x86_64     1.9 kB/s   2.5 kB     00:01
Fedora Modular 32 - x86_64                   6.8 MB/s   4.9 MB     00:00
Fedora Modular 32 - x86_64 - Updates         5.6 MB/s   3.7 MB     00:00
Fedora 32 - x86_64 - Updates                 9.9 MB/s    23 MB     00:02
Fedora 32 - x86_64                            39 MB/s    70 MB     00:01
[ ]
real	0m32.898s
user	0m25.121s
sys	0m1.408s

NixOS s Nix takes a little over 5s to fetch and unpack 15 MB.

% docker run -t -i nixos/nix
39e9186422ba:/# time sh -c 'nix-channel --update && nix-env -iA nixpkgs.ack'
unpacking channels...
created 1 symlinks in user environment
installing 'perl5.32.0-ack-3.3.1'
these paths will be fetched (15.55 MiB download, 85.51 MiB unpacked):
  /nix/store/34l8jdg76kmwl1nbbq84r2gka0kw6rc8-perl5.32.0-ack-3.3.1-man
  /nix/store/9df65igwjmf2wbw0gbrrgair6piqjgmi-glibc-2.31
  /nix/store/9fd4pjaxpjyyxvvmxy43y392l7yvcwy1-perl5.32.0-File-Next-1.18
  /nix/store/czc3c1apx55s37qx4vadqhn3fhikchxi-libunistring-0.9.10
  /nix/store/dj6n505iqrk7srn96a27jfp3i0zgwa1l-acl-2.2.53
  /nix/store/ifayp0kvijq0n4x0bv51iqrb0yzyz77g-perl-5.32.0
  /nix/store/w9wc0d31p4z93cbgxijws03j5s2c4gyf-coreutils-8.31
  /nix/store/xim9l8hym4iga6d4azam4m0k0p1nw2rm-libidn2-2.3.0
  /nix/store/y7i47qjmf10i1ngpnsavv88zjagypycd-attr-2.4.48
  /nix/store/z45mp61h51ksxz28gds5110rf3wmqpdc-perl5.32.0-ack-3.3.1
copying path '/nix/store/34l8jdg76kmwl1nbbq84r2gka0kw6rc8-perl5.32.0-ack-3.3.1-man' from 'https://cache.nixos.org'...
copying path '/nix/store/czc3c1apx55s37qx4vadqhn3fhikchxi-libunistring-0.9.10' from 'https://cache.nixos.org'...
copying path '/nix/store/9fd4pjaxpjyyxvvmxy43y392l7yvcwy1-perl5.32.0-File-Next-1.18' from 'https://cache.nixos.org'...
copying path '/nix/store/xim9l8hym4iga6d4azam4m0k0p1nw2rm-libidn2-2.3.0' from 'https://cache.nixos.org'...
copying path '/nix/store/9df65igwjmf2wbw0gbrrgair6piqjgmi-glibc-2.31' from 'https://cache.nixos.org'...
copying path '/nix/store/y7i47qjmf10i1ngpnsavv88zjagypycd-attr-2.4.48' from 'https://cache.nixos.org'...
copying path '/nix/store/dj6n505iqrk7srn96a27jfp3i0zgwa1l-acl-2.2.53' from 'https://cache.nixos.org'...
copying path '/nix/store/w9wc0d31p4z93cbgxijws03j5s2c4gyf-coreutils-8.31' from 'https://cache.nixos.org'...
copying path '/nix/store/ifayp0kvijq0n4x0bv51iqrb0yzyz77g-perl-5.32.0' from 'https://cache.nixos.org'...
copying path '/nix/store/z45mp61h51ksxz28gds5110rf3wmqpdc-perl5.32.0-ack-3.3.1' from 'https://cache.nixos.org'...
building '/nix/store/m0rl62grplq7w7k3zqhlcz2hs99y332l-user-environment.drv'...
created 49 symlinks in user environment
real	0m 5.60s
user	0m 3.21s
sys	0m 1.66s

Debian s apt takes almost 10 seconds to fetch and unpack 16 MB.

% docker run -t -i debian:sid
root@1996bb94a2d1:/# time (apt update && apt install -y ack-grep)
Get:1 http://deb.debian.org/debian sid InRelease [146 kB]
Get:2 http://deb.debian.org/debian sid/main amd64 Packages [8400 kB]
Fetched 8546 kB in 1s (8088 kB/s)
[ ]
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  ack libfile-next-perl libgdbm-compat4 libgdbm6 libperl5.30 netbase perl perl-modules-5.30
0 upgraded, 8 newly installed, 0 to remove and 23 not upgraded.
Need to get 7341 kB of archives.
After this operation, 46.7 MB of additional disk space will be used.
[ ]
real	0m9.544s
user	0m2.839s
sys	0m0.775s

Arch Linux s pacman takes a little under 3s to fetch and unpack 6.5 MB.

% docker run -t -i archlinux/base
[root@9f6672688a64 /]# time (pacman -Sy && pacman -S --noconfirm ack)
:: Synchronizing package databases...
 core            130.8 KiB  1090 KiB/s 00:00
 extra          1655.8 KiB  3.48 MiB/s 00:00
 community         5.2 MiB  6.11 MiB/s 00:01
resolving dependencies...
looking for conflicting packages...
Packages (2) perl-file-next-1.18-2  ack-3.4.0-1
Total Download Size:   0.07 MiB
Total Installed Size:  0.19 MiB
[ ]
real	0m2.936s
user	0m0.375s
sys	0m0.160s

Alpine s apk takes a little over 1 second to fetch and unpack 10 MB.

% docker run -t -i alpine
fetch http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.12/main/x86_64/APKINDEX.tar.gz
fetch http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.12/community/x86_64/APKINDEX.tar.gz
(1/4) Installing libbz2 (1.0.8-r1)
(2/4) Installing perl (5.30.3-r0)
(3/4) Installing perl-file-next (1.18-r0)
(4/4) Installing ack (3.3.1-r0)
Executing busybox-1.31.1-r16.trigger
OK: 43 MiB in 18 packages
real	0m 1.24s
user	0m 0.40s
sys	0m 0.15s

qemu You can expand each of these:

Fedora s dnf takes over 4 minutes to fetch and unpack 226 MB.

% docker run -t -i fedora /bin/bash
[root@6a52ecfc3afa /]# time dnf install -y qemu
Fedora 32 openh264 (From Cisco) - x86_64     3.1 kB/s   2.5 kB     00:00
Fedora Modular 32 - x86_64                   6.3 MB/s   4.9 MB     00:00
Fedora Modular 32 - x86_64 - Updates         6.0 MB/s   3.7 MB     00:00
Fedora 32 - x86_64 - Updates                 334 kB/s    23 MB     01:10
Fedora 32 - x86_64                            33 MB/s    70 MB     00:02
[ ]
Total download size: 181 M
Downloading Packages:
[ ]
real	4m37.652s
user	0m38.239s
sys	0m6.321s

NixOS s Nix takes almost 34s to fetch and unpack 180 MB.

% docker run -t -i nixos/nix
83971cf79f7e:/# time sh -c 'nix-channel --update && nix-env -iA nixpkgs.qemu'
unpacking channels...
created 1 symlinks in user environment
installing 'qemu-5.1.0'
these paths will be fetched (180.70 MiB download, 1146.92 MiB unpacked):
[ ]
real	0m 33.64s
user	0m 16.96s
sys	0m 3.05s

Debian s apt takes over 95 seconds to fetch and unpack 224 MB.

% docker run -t -i debian:sid
root@b7cc25a927ab:/# time (apt update && apt install -y qemu-system-x86)
Get:1 http://deb.debian.org/debian sid InRelease [146 kB]
Get:2 http://deb.debian.org/debian sid/main amd64 Packages [8400 kB]
Fetched 8546 kB in 1s (5998 kB/s)
[ ]
Fetched 216 MB in 43s (5006 kB/s)
[ ]
real	1m25.375s
user	0m29.163s
sys	0m12.835s

Arch Linux s pacman takes almost 44s to fetch and unpack 142 MB.

% docker run -t -i archlinux/base
[root@58c78bda08e8 /]# time (pacman -Sy && pacman -S --noconfirm qemu)
:: Synchronizing package databases...
 core          130.8 KiB  1055 KiB/s 00:00
 extra        1655.8 KiB  3.70 MiB/s 00:00
 community       5.2 MiB  7.89 MiB/s 00:01
[ ]
Total Download Size:   135.46 MiB
Total Installed Size:  661.05 MiB
[ ]
real	0m43.901s
user	0m4.980s
sys	0m2.615s

Alpine s apk takes only about 2.4 seconds to fetch and unpack 26 MB.

% docker run -t -i alpine
/ # time apk add qemu-system-x86_64
fetch http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.10/main/x86_64/APKINDEX.tar.gz
fetch http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.10/community/x86_64/APKINDEX.tar.gz
[ ]
OK: 78 MiB in 95 packages
real	0m 2.43s
user	0m 0.46s
sys	0m 0.09s

Appendix B: measurement details (2019)

ack You can expand each of these:

Fedora s dnf takes almost 30 seconds to fetch and unpack 107 MB.

% docker run -t -i fedora /bin/bash
[root@722e6df10258 /]# time dnf install -y ack
Fedora Modular 30 - x86_64            4.4 MB/s   2.7 MB     00:00
Fedora Modular 30 - x86_64 - Updates  3.7 MB/s   2.4 MB     00:00
Fedora 30 - x86_64 - Updates           17 MB/s    19 MB     00:01
Fedora 30 - x86_64                     31 MB/s    70 MB     00:02
[ ]
Install  44 Packages
Total download size: 13 M
Installed size: 42 M
[ ]
real	0m29.498s
user	0m22.954s
sys	0m1.085s

NixOS s Nix takes 14s to fetch and unpack 15 MB.

% docker run -t -i nixos/nix
39e9186422ba:/# time sh -c 'nix-channel --update && nix-env -i perl5.28.2-ack-2.28'
unpacking channels...
created 2 symlinks in user environment
installing 'perl5.28.2-ack-2.28'
these paths will be fetched (14.91 MiB download, 80.83 MiB unpacked):
  /nix/store/57iv2vch31v8plcjrk97lcw1zbwb2n9r-perl-5.28.2
  /nix/store/89gi8cbp8l5sf0m8pgynp2mh1c6pk1gk-attr-2.4.48
  /nix/store/gkrpl3k6s43fkg71n0269yq3p1f0al88-perl5.28.2-ack-2.28-man
  /nix/store/iykxb0bmfjmi7s53kfg6pjbfpd8jmza6-glibc-2.27
  /nix/store/k8lhqzpaaymshchz8ky3z4653h4kln9d-coreutils-8.31
  /nix/store/svgkibi7105pm151prywndsgvmc4qvzs-acl-2.2.53
  /nix/store/x4knf14z1p0ci72gl314i7vza93iy7yc-perl5.28.2-File-Next-1.16
  /nix/store/zfj7ria2kwqzqj9dh91kj9kwsynxdfk0-perl5.28.2-ack-2.28
copying path '/nix/store/gkrpl3k6s43fkg71n0269yq3p1f0al88-perl5.28.2-ack-2.28-man' from 'https://cache.nixos.org'...
copying path '/nix/store/iykxb0bmfjmi7s53kfg6pjbfpd8jmza6-glibc-2.27' from 'https://cache.nixos.org'...
copying path '/nix/store/x4knf14z1p0ci72gl314i7vza93iy7yc-perl5.28.2-File-Next-1.16' from 'https://cache.nixos.org'...
copying path '/nix/store/89gi8cbp8l5sf0m8pgynp2mh1c6pk1gk-attr-2.4.48' from 'https://cache.nixos.org'...
copying path '/nix/store/svgkibi7105pm151prywndsgvmc4qvzs-acl-2.2.53' from 'https://cache.nixos.org'...
copying path '/nix/store/k8lhqzpaaymshchz8ky3z4653h4kln9d-coreutils-8.31' from 'https://cache.nixos.org'...
copying path '/nix/store/57iv2vch31v8plcjrk97lcw1zbwb2n9r-perl-5.28.2' from 'https://cache.nixos.org'...
copying path '/nix/store/zfj7ria2kwqzqj9dh91kj9kwsynxdfk0-perl5.28.2-ack-2.28' from 'https://cache.nixos.org'...
building '/nix/store/q3243sjg91x1m8ipl0sj5gjzpnbgxrqw-user-environment.drv'...
created 56 symlinks in user environment
real	0m 14.02s
user	0m 8.83s
sys	0m 2.69s

Debian s apt takes almost 10 seconds to fetch and unpack 16 MB.

% docker run -t -i debian:sid
root@b7cc25a927ab:/# time (apt update && apt install -y ack-grep)
Get:1 http://cdn-fastly.deb.debian.org/debian sid InRelease [233 kB]
Get:2 http://cdn-fastly.deb.debian.org/debian sid/main amd64 Packages [8270 kB]
Fetched 8502 kB in 2s (4764 kB/s)
[ ]
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  ack ack-grep libfile-next-perl libgdbm-compat4 libgdbm5 libperl5.26 netbase perl perl-modules-5.26
The following packages will be upgraded:
  perl-base
1 upgraded, 9 newly installed, 0 to remove and 60 not upgraded.
Need to get 8238 kB of archives.
After this operation, 42.3 MB of additional disk space will be used.
[ ]
real	0m9.096s
user	0m2.616s
sys	0m0.441s

Arch Linux s pacman takes a little over 3s to fetch and unpack 6.5 MB.

% docker run -t -i archlinux/base
[root@9604e4ae2367 /]# time (pacman -Sy && pacman -S --noconfirm ack)
:: Synchronizing package databases...
 core            132.2 KiB  1033K/s 00:00
 extra          1629.6 KiB  2.95M/s 00:01
 community         4.9 MiB  5.75M/s 00:01
[ ]
Total Download Size:   0.07 MiB
Total Installed Size:  0.19 MiB
[ ]
real	0m3.354s
user	0m0.224s
sys	0m0.049s

Alpine s apk takes only about 1 second to fetch and unpack 10 MB.

% docker run -t -i alpine
/ # time apk add ack
fetch http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.10/main/x86_64/APKINDEX.tar.gz
fetch http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.10/community/x86_64/APKINDEX.tar.gz
(1/4) Installing perl-file-next (1.16-r0)
(2/4) Installing libbz2 (1.0.6-r7)
(3/4) Installing perl (5.28.2-r1)
(4/4) Installing ack (3.0.0-r0)
Executing busybox-1.30.1-r2.trigger
OK: 44 MiB in 18 packages
real	0m 0.96s
user	0m 0.25s
sys	0m 0.07s

qemu You can expand each of these:

Fedora s dnf takes over a minute to fetch and unpack 266 MB.

% docker run -t -i fedora /bin/bash
[root@722e6df10258 /]# time dnf install -y qemu
Fedora Modular 30 - x86_64            3.1 MB/s   2.7 MB     00:00
Fedora Modular 30 - x86_64 - Updates  2.7 MB/s   2.4 MB     00:00
Fedora 30 - x86_64 - Updates           20 MB/s    19 MB     00:00
Fedora 30 - x86_64                     31 MB/s    70 MB     00:02
[ ]
Install  262 Packages
Upgrade    4 Packages
Total download size: 172 M
[ ]
real	1m7.877s
user	0m44.237s
sys	0m3.258s

NixOS s Nix takes 38s to fetch and unpack 262 MB.

% docker run -t -i nixos/nix
39e9186422ba:/# time sh -c 'nix-channel --update && nix-env -i qemu-4.0.0'
unpacking channels...
created 2 symlinks in user environment
installing 'qemu-4.0.0'
these paths will be fetched (262.18 MiB download, 1364.54 MiB unpacked):
[ ]
real	0m 38.49s
user	0m 26.52s
sys	0m 4.43s

Debian s apt takes 51 seconds to fetch and unpack 159 MB.

% docker run -t -i debian:sid
root@b7cc25a927ab:/# time (apt update && apt install -y qemu-system-x86)
Get:1 http://cdn-fastly.deb.debian.org/debian sid InRelease [149 kB]
Get:2 http://cdn-fastly.deb.debian.org/debian sid/main amd64 Packages [8426 kB]
Fetched 8574 kB in 1s (6716 kB/s)
[ ]
Fetched 151 MB in 2s (64.6 MB/s)
[ ]
real	0m51.583s
user	0m15.671s
sys	0m3.732s

Arch Linux s pacman takes 1m2s to fetch and unpack 124 MB.

% docker run -t -i archlinux/base
[root@9604e4ae2367 /]# time (pacman -Sy && pacman -S --noconfirm qemu)
:: Synchronizing package databases...
 core       132.2 KiB   751K/s 00:00
 extra     1629.6 KiB  3.04M/s 00:01
 community    4.9 MiB  6.16M/s 00:01
[ ]
Total Download Size:   123.20 MiB
Total Installed Size:  587.84 MiB
[ ]
real	1m2.475s
user	0m9.272s
sys	0m2.458s

Alpine s apk takes only about 2.4 seconds to fetch and unpack 26 MB.

% docker run -t -i alpine
/ # time apk add qemu-system-x86_64
fetch http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.10/main/x86_64/APKINDEX.tar.gz
fetch http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.10/community/x86_64/APKINDEX.tar.gz
[ ]
OK: 78 MiB in 95 packages
real	0m 2.43s
user	0m 0.46s
sys	0m 0.09s

Motivation Over the last few months, I have been developing a new index format for Debian Code Search. This required a lot of careful refactoring, re-implementation, debug tool creation and debugging. Multiple factors motivated my work on a new index format:

1. The existing index format has a 2G size limit, into which we have bumped a few times, requiring manual intervention to keep the system running.
2. Debugging the existing system required creating ad-hoc debugging tools, which made debugging sessions unnecessarily lengthy and painful.
3. I wanted to check whether switching to a different integer compression format would improve performance (it does not).
4. I wanted to check whether storing positions with the posting lists would improve performance of identifier queries (= queries which are not using any regular expression features), which make up 78.2% of all Debian Code Search queries (it does).

I figured building a new index from scratch was the easiest approach, compared to refactoring the existing index to increase the size limit (point ). I also figured it would be a good idea to develop the debugging tool in lock step with the index format so that I can be sure the tool works and is useful (point ).

Integer compression: TurboPFor As a quick refresher, search engines typically store document IDs (representing source code files, in our case) in an ordered list ( posting list ). It usually makes sense to apply at least a rudimentary level of compression: our existing system used variable integer encoding. TurboPFor, the self-proclaimed Fastest Integer Compression library, combines an advanced on-disk format with a carefully tuned SIMD implementation to reach better speeds (in micro benchmarks) at less disk usage than Russ Cox s varint implementation in github.com/google/codesearch. If you are curious about its inner workings, check out my TurboPFor: an analysis . Applied on the Debian Code Search index, TurboPFor indeed compresses integers better:

Disk space

8.9G codesearch varint index

5.5G TurboPFor index Switching to TurboPFor (via cgo) for storing and reading the index results in a slight speed-up of a dcs replay benchmark, which is more pronounced the more i/o is required.

Query speed (regexp, cold page cache)

18s codesearch varint index

14s TurboPFor index (cgo)

Query speed (regexp, warm page cache)

15s codesearch varint index

14s TurboPFor index (cgo) Overall, TurboPFor is an all-around improvement in efficiency, albeit with a high cost in implementation complexity.

Positional index: trade more disk for faster queries This section builds on the previous section: all figures come from the TurboPFor index, which can optionally support positions. Conceptually, we re going from:

type docid uint32
type index map[trigram][]docid

to:

type occurrence struct  
    doc docid
    pos uint32 // byte offset in doc
 
type index map[trigram][]occurrence

The resulting index consumes more disk space, but can be queried faster:

1. We can do fewer queries: instead of reading all the posting lists for all the trigrams, we can read the posting lists for the query s first and last trigram only.
   This is one of the tricks described in the paper AS-Index: A Structure For String Search Using n-grams and Algebraic Signatures (PDF), and goes a long way without incurring the complexity, computational cost and additional disk usage of calculating algebraic signatures.
2. Verifying the delta between the last and first position matches the length of the query term significantly reduces the number of files to read (lower false positive rate).
3. The matching phase is quicker: instead of locating the query term in the file, we only need to compare a few bytes at a known offset for equality.
4. More data is read sequentially (from the index), which is faster.

Disk space A positional index consumes significantly more disk space, but not so much as to pose a challenge: a Hetzner EX61-NVME dedicated server ( 64 /month) provides 1 TB worth of fast NVMe flash storage.

6.5G non-positional

123G positional

93G positional (posrel) The idea behind the positional index (posrel) is to not store a (doc,pos) tuple on disk, but to store positions, accompanied by a stream of doc/pos relationship bits: 1 means this position belongs to the next document, 0 means this position belongs to the current document. This is an easy way of saving some space without modifying the TurboPFor on-disk format: the posrel technique reduces the index size to about . With the increase in size, the Linux page cache hit ratio will be lower for the positional index, i.e. more data will need to be fetched from disk for querying the index. As long as the disk can deliver data as fast as you can decompress posting lists, this only translates into one disk seek s worth of additional latency. This is the case with modern NVMe disks that deliver thousands of MB/s, e.g. the Samsung 960 Pro (used in Hetzner s aforementioned EX61-NVME server). The values were measured by running dcs du -h /srv/dcs/shard*/full without and with the -pos argument.

Bytes read A positional index requires fewer queries: reading only the first and last trigram s posting lists and positions is sufficient to achieve a lower (!) false positive rate than evaluating all trigram s posting lists in a non-positional index. As a consequence, fewer files need to be read, resulting in fewer bytes required to read from disk overall. As an additional bonus, in a positional index, more data is read sequentially (index), which is faster than random i/o, regardless of the underlying disk.

1.2G

19.8G

21.0G regexp queries

4.2G (index)

10.8G (files)

15.0G identifier queries The values were measured by running iostat -d 25 just before running bench.zsh on an otherwise idle system.

Query speed Even though the positional index is larger and requires more data to be read at query time (see above), thanks to the C TurboPFor library, the 2 queries on a positional index are roughly as fast as the n queries on a non-positional index ( 4s instead of 3s). This is more than made up for by the combined i/o matching stage, which shrinks from 18.5s (7.1s i/o + 11.4s matching) to 1.3s.

3.3s (index)

7.1s (i/o)

11.4s (matching)

21.8s regexp queries

3.92s (index)

1.3s

5.22s identifier queries Note that identifier query i/o was sped up not just by needing to read fewer bytes, but also by only having to verify bytes at a known offset instead of needing to locate the identifier within the file.

Conclusion The new index format is overall slightly more efficient. This disk space efficiency allows us to introduce a positional index section for the first time. Most Debian Code Search queries are positional queries (78.2%) and will be answered much quicker by leveraging the positions. Bottomline, it is beneficial to use a positional index on disk over a non-positional index in RAM.

• What is mentors.debian.net
• How to setup debexpo development environment
• One example to hack debexpo (Showing "In Debian" flag)

• How to hack debexpo (mentors.debian.net), 2020

Arnab Goswami This particular gentleman is a class apart. He is the editor as well as Republic TV, a right-leaning channel which demonizes the minority, women whatever is antithesis to the Central Govt. of India. As a result there have been a spate of cases against him in the past few months. But surprisingly, in each of them he got hearing the day after the suit was filed. This is unique in Indian legal history so much so that a popular legal site which publishes on-going cases put up a post sharing how he was getting prompt hearings. That post itself needs to be updated as there have been 3 more hearings which have been done back to back for him. This is unusual as there have been so many cases pending for the SC attention, some arguably more important than this gentleman . So many precedents have been set which will send a wrong message. The biggest one, that even though a trial is taking place in the sessions court (below High Court) the SC can interject on matters. What this will do to the morale of both lawyers as well as judges of the various Sessions Court is a matter of speculation and yet as shared unprecedented. The saddest part was when Justice Chandrachud said

Justice Chandrachud If you don t like a channel then don t watch it. 11th November 2020 .

This is basically giving a free rope to hate speech. How can a SC say like that ? And this is the Same Supreme Court which could not take two tweets from Shri Prashant Bhushan when he made remarks against the judiciary .

J&K pleas in Supreme Court pending since August 2019 (Abrogation 370) After abrogation of 370, citizens of Jammu and Kashmir, the population of which is 13.6 million people including 4 million Hindus have been stuck with reduced rights and their land being taken away due to new laws. Many of the Hindus which regionally are a minority now rue the fact that they supported the abrogation of 370A . Imagine, a whole state whose answers and prayers have not been heard by the Supreme Court and the people need to move a prayer stating the same.

100 Journalists, activists languishing in Jail without even a hearing 55 Journalists alone have been threatened, booked and in jail for reporting of pandemic . Their fault, they were bring the irregularities, corruption made during the pandemic early months. Activists such as Sudha Bharadwaj, who giving up her American citizenship and settling to fight for tribals is in jail for 2 years without any charges. There are many like her, There are several more petitions lying in the Supreme Court, for e.g. Varavara Rao, not a single hearing from last couple of years, even though he has taken part in so many national movements including the emergency as well as part-responsible for creation of Telengana state out of Andhra Pradesh .

Then there is Devangana kalita who works for gender rights. Similar to Sudha Bharadwaj, she had an opportunity to go to UK and settle here. She did her master s and came back. And now she is in jail for the things that she studied. While she took part in Anti-CAA sittings, none of her speeches were incendiary but she still is locked up under UAPA (Unlawful Practises Act) . I could go on and on but at the moment these should suffice.

Petitions for Hate Speech which resulted in riots in Delhi are pending, Citizen s Amendment Act (controversial) no hearings till date. All of the best has been explained in a newspaper article which articulates perhaps all that I wanted to articulate and more. It is and was amazing to see how in certain cases Article 32 is valid and in many it is not. Also a fair reading of Justice Bobde s article tells you a lot how the SC is functioning. I would like to point out that barandbench along with livelawindia makes it easier for never non-lawyers and public to know how arguments are done in court, what evidences are taken as well as give some clue about judicial orders and judgements. Both of these resources are providing an invaluable service and more often than not, free of charge.

Student Suicide and High Cost of Education
For quite sometime now, the cost of education has been shooting up. While I have visited this topic earlier as well, recently a young girl committed suicide because she was unable to pay the fees as well as additional costs due to pandemic. Further investigations show that this is the case with many of the students who are unable to buy laptops. Now while one could think it is limited to one college then it would be wrong. It is almost across all India and this will continue for months and years. People do know that the pandemic is going to last a significant time and it would be a long time before R value becomes zero . Even the promising vaccine from Pfizer need constant refrigeration which is sort of next to impossible in India. It is going to make things very costly.

Last Nail on Indian Media Just today the last nail on India has been put. Thankfully Freedom Gazette India did a much better job so just pasting that

Information and Broadcasting Ministry bringing OTT services as well as news within its ambit.

With this, projects like Scam 1992, The Harshad Mehta Story or Bad Boy Billionaires:India, Test Case, Delhi Crime, Laakhon Mein Ek etc. etc. such kind of series, investigative journalism would be still-births. Many of these web-series also shared tales of woman empowerment while at the same time showed some of the hard choices that women had to contend to live with. Even western media may be censored where it finds the political discourse not to its liking. There had been so many accounts of Mr. Ravish Kumar, the winner of Ramon Magsaysay, how in his shows the electricity was cut in many places. I too have been the victim when the BJP governed in Maharashtra as almost all Puneities experienced it. Light would go for just half or 45 minutes at the exact time. There is another aspect to it. The U.S. elections showed how independent media was able to counter Mr. Trump s various falsehoods and give rise to alternative ideas which lead the team of Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, Biden now being the President-elect while Kamala Harris being the vice-president elect. Although the journey to the white house seems as tough as before. Let s see what happens. Hopefully 2021 will bring in some good news. Update On 27th November 2020 Martin who runs the planet got an e-mail/notice by a Mr. Nikhil Sethi who runs the wikibio.com property. Mr. Sethi asked to remove the link pointing Devangana Kalita from my blog post to his site as he has used the no follow link. On inquiring further, the gentleman stated that it is an Updated mandate (his exact quote) from Google algorithm. To further understand the issue, I went to SERP as they are one of the more known ones on the subject. I also looked it up on Google as well. Found that the gentleman was BSing the whole time. The page basically talks about weightage of a page/site and authoritativeness which is known and yet highly contested ideas. In any case, the point for me was for whatever reason (could be fear, could be something else entirely), Mr. Sethi did not want me to link the content. Hence, I have complied above. I could have dragged it out but I do not wish Mr. Sethi any ill-being or/and further harm unduly and unintentionally caused by me. Hence, have taken down the link.

• Abhijith PA did 16.0h (out of 14h assigned and 2h from September).
• Adrian Bunk did 7h (out of 20.75h assigned and 5.75h from September), thus carrying over 19.5h to November.
• Ben Hutchings did 11.5h (out of 6.25h assigned and 9.75h from September), thus carrying over 4.5h to November.
• Brian May did 10h (out of 10h assigned).
• Chris Lamb did 18h (out of 18h assigned).
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 20.75h (out of 20.75h assigned).
• Holger Levsen did 7.0h coordinating/managing the LTS team.
• Markus Koschany did 20.75h (out of 20.75h assigned).
• Mike Gabriel gave back the 8h he was assigned. See below
• Ola Lundqvist did 10.5h (out of 8h assigned and 2.5h from September).
• Roberto C. S nchez did 13.5h (out of 20.75h assigned) and gave back 7.25h to the pool.
• Sylvain Beucler did 20.75h (out of 20.75h assigned).
• Thorsten Alteholz did 20.75h (out of 20.75h assigned).
• Utkarsh Gupta did 20.75h (out of 20.75h assigned).

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• Cloudways Ltd (for 13 months)
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• Bronze sponsors:
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Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.10.1.2.0 (2020-11-15)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 10.1.2 (Orchid Ambush)
• Remove three unused int constants (#313)
• Include main armadillo header using quotes instead of brackets
• Rewrite version number use in old-school mode because gcc 4.8.5
• Skipping parts of sparse conversion on Windows as win-builder fails

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

Changes in version 0.0.17 (2020-11-15)

• Upgrade to Annoy 1.17, but default to serial use.
• Add new header file to regroup includes and defines.
• Upgrade CI script to use R with bspm on focal.

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

openssl genrsa -out cakey.pem 2048
openssl req -x509 -new -nodes -key cakey.pem -sha256 -days 1024 -out cacert.pem

• You will be prompted to enter some information about your certificate authoirty. Provide the minimum information - i.e., only overwrite the defaults. So, provide a value for Country, State or Province, and Organization Name and leave the rest blank.
• You probably want to leave the password blank if this is a development/testing environment.

openssl x509 -text -noout -in cacert.pem 

mkdir demoCA

touch demoCA/index.txt

export subjectAltName=DNS:example.org

export subjectAltName=DNS:example.org,DNS:www.example.org

openssl req -new -nodes -out new.csr -keyout new.key

openssl req -in new.csr -text -noout 

openssl ca -keyfile cakey.pem -cert cacert.pem -out new.crt -outdir . -rand_serial -infiles new.csr

openssl verify -no-CApath -CAfile cacert.pem new.crt 

cp cacert.pem /usr/local/share/ca-certificates/cacert.crt
sudo dpkg-reconfigure ca-certificates

gnutls-cli --print-cert $domainName

curl https://$domainName
wget https://$domainName -O-

curl --cacert /path/to/your/cacert.pem --capath /tmp

• [DLA 2415-1] freetype security update for one CVE
• [DLA 2419-1] dompurify.js security update for two CVEs
• [DLA 2418-1] libsndfile security update for eight CVEs
• [DLA 2421-1] cimg security update for eight CVEs

• ELA-289-2 for python3.4
• ELA-304-1 for freetype
• ELA-305-1 for libsndfile