Search Results: "ana"

2 March 2020

Antoine Beaupr : Moving dconf entries to git

I've been managing my UNIX $HOME repository with version control for almost two decades now (first under CVS, then with git). Once in a while, I find a little hack to make this work better. Today, it's dconf/gsettings, or more specifically, Workrave that I want to put in git. I noticed my laptop was extremely annoying compared with my office workstation and realized I never figured out how to write Workrave's configuration to git. The reason is that its configuration is stored in dconf, a binary database format, but, blissfully, I had forgotten about this and tried to figure out where the heck its config was. I was about to give up when I re-remembered this, when I figured I would just do a quick search ("dconf commit to git") and that brought me to Josh Triplett's Debconf 14 talk about this exact topic. The slides are... a little terse, but I could figure out the gist of it. The key is to change the DCONF_PROFILE environment to point to a new config file (say in your .bashrc): 
export DCONF_PROFILE=$HOME/.config/dconf/profile
That file (~/.config/dconf/profile) should be created with the following content: 
user-db:user
service-db:keyfile/user
  1. The first line is the default: store everything in this huge binary file.
  2. The second is the magic: it stores configuration in a precious text file, in .config/dconf/user.txt specifically.
Then the last step was to migrate config between the two. For that I need a third config file, a DCONF_PROFILE that has only the text database so settings are forcibly written there, say ~/.config/dconf/profile-edit: 
service-db:keyfile/user
And then I can migrate my workrave configuration with: 
gsettings list-recursively org.workrave   while read schema key val ; do DCONF_PROFILE=~/.config/dconf/profile-edit gsettings set "$schema" "$key" "$val" ; done
Of course, a bunch of those settings are garbage and do not differ from the default. Unfortuantely, there doesn't seem to be a way to tell gsettings to only list non-default settings, so I had to do things by hand from there, by comparing my generated config with: 
DCONF_PROFILE=/dev/null gsettings list-recursively org.workrave
I finally ended up with the following user.txt, which is now my workrave config: 
[org/workrave/timers/daily-limit]
snooze=1800
limit=25200
[org/workrave/timers/micro-pause]
auto-reset=10
snooze=150
limit=900
[org/workrave/timers/rest-break]
auto-reset=600
snooze=1800
limit=10800
[org/workrave/breaks/micro-pause]
max-preludes=0
That's a nice setup: "YOLO" settings end up in the binary database that I don't care about tracking in git, and a precious few snowflakes get tracked in a text file. Triplett also made a command to change settings in the text file, but I don't think I need to bother with that. It's more critical to copy settings between the two, in my experience, as I rarely have this moment: "oh I know exactly the key setting I want to change and i'll write it down". What actually happens is that I'm making a change in a GUI and later realize it should be synchronized over. (It looks like Triplett does have a tool to do those diffs and transitions, but unfortunately git://joshtriplett.org/git/home doesn't respond at this time so I can't find that source code.) (Update: that git repository can be downloaded with: 
git clone https://joshtriplett.org/git/home
It looks like dconfc is designed to copy settings between the two databases. So my above loop would be more easily written as: 
dconf dump /org/workrave/   DCONF_PROFILE=~/.config/dconf/profile-edit dconf load /org/workrave/
Certainly simplifies things. dconfd is also nice although it relies on the above dconfe script which makes it (IMHO) needlessly hard to deploy.) Now if only Firefox bookmarks were reasonable again...

1 March 2020

Ulrike Uhlig: Conflict as a clash of strategies and a vector for change

Map of conflict I've been practising Non-Violent Communication (NVC) for several years. It helps me to better understand my feelings and needs. The concepts of NVC can also help to look at conflicts. I would like to introduce a way to look at conflict using the basic concepts of NVC:
  1. Humans have needs. (I would add that this applies to other sentient beings, too).
  2. It's okay to have needs.
  3. When needs are satisfied, we experience pleasant feelings (joy, love, happiness, etc.).
  4. When needs are unsatisfied, we experience unpleasant feelings (sadness, anger, grief, etc.)
  5. To satisfy our needs, we employ strategies. (Example. Need = well-being. Possible strategies = sauna, sleeping, walk in nature, etc.)
  6. When conflict occurs between two parties, it's not the needs that conflict, but the strategies that are employed to satisfy the needs.
An example. May has issues doing all the work they're supposed to do and seeks to talk to their manager about it. The manager repeatedly refuses to receive them, as the manager is very busy. May had the hope to be able to sort their issues out with the manager but now they feel frustrated, and helpless, on top of feeling stressed out. Week after week, May tries to get in touch with the manager, as they don't know how to solve their issue alone. But as their demands become more pressing, the manager starts to feel annoyed, tense, and insecure, and keeps ignoring May's requests. May's needs: communication, cooperation, being understood, being seen, autonomy.
Manager's needs: efficacy, independence, respect, autonomy. Both their needs are legit. Some of them even overlap. The conflict occurs at the level of their strategies: the manager makes the conscious decision to deny May's discussion requests, effectively denying them to voice their concerns and worries, which makes May feel helpless, frustrated, and angry. When May chooses to make their demands more explicit, the manager starts to feel more and more insecure. Working on our strategies There are always different strategies to satisfy our needs. Out of habit, we sometimes fail to see them, and keep using the ever same strategies. How could May deal with the situation differently? When we are aware of the need strategies dynamics, we can work on strategies without compromising our needs. When we are not, we are running in circles, effectively worsening the situation. The manager could also employ different strategies as they start noticing that they are feeling tense and insecure. Which ones could that be? There are also inappropriate strategies, and if not aware, the manager could well end up employing one of those: What would be appropriate strategies for the manager? Transforming organizations Working on strategies is a good first step. But generally the emotional work effectively lies on the shoulders of the individual with lower rank in the organization who lacks control and corresponding privileges to deal with the conflict. I believe that when conflict occurs in the workplace, it is important to draw further conclusions that would benefit the organization as a whole. In the above example, such conclusions could be: These are just some ideas for a fictitious conflict, but you get the idea.
Conflicts effectively are chances for the organization, or the involved parties, to grow in maturity.
More about working with conflict and conflict mapping tools in this great publication.

29 February 2020

Chris Lamb: Free software activities in February 2020

Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world during February 2020 (previous month): For the Tails privacy-oriented operating system, I uploaded the following packages to Debian:
Reproducible builds One of the original promises of open source software is that distributed peer review and transparency of process results in enhanced end-user security. However, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free and open source software for malicious flaws, almost all software today is distributed as pre-compiled binaries. This allows nefarious third-parties to compromise systems by injecting malicious code into ostensibly secure software during the various compilation and distribution processes. The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to provide the ability to demonstrate these binaries originated from a particular trusted source release: if identical results are generated from a given source in all circumstances, reproducible builds provides the means for multiple third-parties to reach a consensus on whether a build was compromised via distributed checksum validation or some other scheme. The initiative is proud to be a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy, a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) charity focused on ethical technology and user freedom. Conservancy acts as a corporate umbrella allowing projects to operate as non-profit initiatives without managing their own corporate structure. If you like the work of the Conservancy or the Reproducible Builds project, please consider becoming an official supporter. This month, I: In our tooling, I also made the following changes to diffoscope, our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, including uploading version 137 to Debian:
Debian I submitted a Request for Package (RFP) bug for hsd, a blockchain-based top-level domain DNS protocol implementation that underpins Handshake and worked on some initial packaging. (#952472)
Debian LTS This month I have worked 18 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS) and 12 hours on its sister Extended LTS project. You can find out more about the project via the following video:
Uploads Finally, I made a non-maintainer upload of adminer (4.7.6-1) on behalf of Alexandre Rossi.

23 November 2017

Sean Whitton: Using Propellor to provision your Debian development laptop

sbuild is a tool used by those maintaining packages in Debian, and derived distributions such as Ubuntu. When used correctly, it can catch a lot of categories of bugs before packages are uploaded. It does this by building the package in a clean environment, and then running the package through the Lintian, piuparts, adequate and autopkgtest tools. However, configuring sbuild so that it makes use of all of these tools is cumbersome. In response to this complexity, I wrote a module for the Propellor configuration management system to prepare a system such that a user can just go ahead and run the sbuild(1) command. This module is useful on one s development laptop if you need to reinstall your OS, you don t have to look up the instructions for setting up sbuild again. But it s also useful on throwaway build boxes. I can instruct propellor to provision a new virtual machine to build packages with sbuild, and all the different tools mentioned above will be connected together for me. I just uploaded Propellor version 5.1.0 to Debian unstable. The version overhauls the API and internals of the Sbuild module to take better advantage of Propellor s design. I won t get into those details in this post. What I d like to do is demonstrate how you can set up sbuild on your own machines, using Propellor. Getting started with Propellor apt-get install propellor, and then propellor --init. You ll be offered two setups, options A and B. I suggest starting with option B. If you never use Propellor for anything other than provisioning sbuild, you can stick with option B. If this tutorial makes you want to check out more features of Propellor, you might consider switching to option A and importing your old configuration. Open ~/.propellor/config.hs. You will see something like this: 
-- The hosts propellor knows about.
hosts :: [Host]
hosts =
        [ mybox
        ]
-- An example host.
mybox :: Host
mybox = host "mybox.example.com" $ props
        & osDebian Unstable X86_64
        & Apt.stdSourcesList
        & Apt.unattendedUpgrades
        & Apt.installed ["etckeeper"]
        & Apt.installed ["ssh"]
        & User.hasSomePassword (User "root")
        & File.dirExists "/var/www"
        & Cron.runPropellor (Cron.Times "30 * * * *")
You ll want to customise this so that it reflects your computer. My laptop is called iris, so I might replace the above with this: 
-- The hosts propellor knows about.
hosts :: [Host]
hosts =
        [ iris
        ]
-- My laptop.
iris :: Host
iris = host "iris.silentflame.com" $ props
        & osDebian Testing X86_64
The list of lines beginning with & are the properties of the host iris. Here, I ve removed all properties except the osDebian property, which informs propellor that iris runs Debian testing and has the amd64 architecture. The effect of this is that Propellor will not try to change anything about iris. In this tutorial, we are not going to let Propellor configure anything about iris other than setting up sbuild. (The osDebian property is a pure info property, which means that it tells Propellor information about the host to which other properties might refer, but it doesn t itself change anything about iris.) Telling Propellor to configure sbuild First, add to the import lines at the top of config.hs the lines: 
import qualified Propellor.Property.Sbuild as Sbuild
import qualified Propellor.Property.Schroot as Schroot
to enable use of the Sbuild module. Here is the full config for iris, which I ll go through line-by-line: 
-- The hosts propellor knows about.
hosts :: [Host]
hosts =
        [ iris
        ]
-- My laptop.
iris :: Host
iris = host "iris.silentflame.com" $ props
        & osDebian Testing X86_64
        & Apt.useLocalCacher
        & sidSchrootBuilt
        & Sbuild.usableBy (User "spwhitton")
        & Schroot.overlaysInTmpfs
        & Cron.runPropellor (Cron.Times "30 * * * *")
  where
        sidSchrootBuilt = Sbuild.built Sbuild.UseCcache $ props
                & osDebian Unstable X86_64
                & Sbuild.update  period  Daily
                & Sbuild.useHostProxy iris
Running Propellor to configure your laptop propellor iris.silentflame.com. In this configuration, you don t need to worry about whether the hostname iris.silentflame.com actually resolves to your laptop. However, it must be possible to ssh root@localhost. This should be enough that spwhitton can: 
$ sbuild -A --run-lintian --run-autopkgtest --run-piuparts foo.dsc
Further configuration It is easy to add new schroots; for example, for building backports: 
        ...
        & stretchSchrootBuilt
        ...
  where
        ...
        stretchSchrootBuilt = Sbuild.built Sbuild.UseCcache $ props
                & osDebian (Stable "stretch") X86_64
                & Sbuild.update  period  Daily
                & Sbuild.useHostProxy iris
You can also add additional properties to configure your chroot. Perhaps on your LAN you need sbuild to install packages via https, and you already have an apt cacher available. You can replace the apt-cacher-ng configuration like this: 
  where
        sidSchrootBuilt = Sbuild.built Sbuild.UseCcache $ props
                & osDebian Unstable X86_64
                & Sbuild.update  period  Daily
                & Apt.mirror "https://foo.mirror/debian/"
                & Apt.installed ["apt-transport-https"]
Thanks Thanks to Propellor s author, Joey Hess, for help navigating Propellor s type system while performing the overhaul included in version 5.1.0. Also for a conversation at DebConf17 which enabled this work by clearing some misconceptions of mine.

Jonathan Dowland: Concreate and Red Hat JBoss OpenShift image sources

Last year I wrote about some tools for working with Docker images. Since then, we've deprecated the dogen tool for our own images and have built a successor called Concreate. Concreate takes a container image definition described in a YAML document and generates an output image. To do so, it generates an intermediate Dockerfile, along with the scripts and artefacts you references in the YAML file, and by default invokes docker build on the result. However, it can use other builders, such as the OpenShift Build Service, which is what we use for our production images. Concreate can also manage running tests against the image. As with the Container Testing Framework that I mentioned last time, these tests are defined using the Behave system. In related news is that we have published the sources for all of our images. You can now go and read the image.yaml file for EAP 7 on OpenShift to give you an example of what a real image using Concreate looks like.

22 November 2017

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: DebConf Videoteam sprint report - day 3

Erf, I'm tired and it is late so this report will be short and won't include dank memes or funny cat pictures. Come back tomorrow for that. tumbleweed Stefano worked all day long on the metadata project and on YouTube uploads. I think the DebConf7 videos have just finished being uploaded, check them out! RattusRattus Apart from the wonderful lasagna he baked for us, Andy continued working on the scraping scheme, helping tumbleweed. nattie Nattie has been with us for a few days now, but today she did some great QA work on our metadata scraping of the video archive. ivodd More tests, more bugs! Ivo worked quite a bit on the Opsis board today and it seems everything is ready for the mini-conf. \0/ olasd Nicolas built the streaming network today and wrote some Ansible roles to manage TLS cert creation through Let's Encrypt. He also talked with DSA some more about our long term requirements. wouter I forgot to mention it yesterday because he could not come to Cambridge, but Wouter has been sprinting remotely, working on the reviewing system. Everything with regards to reviewing should be in place for the mini-conf. He also generated the intro and outro slides for the videos for us. KiBi and Julien KiBi and Julien arrived late in the evening, but were nonetheless of great assistance. Neither are technically part of the videoteam, but their respective experience with Debian-Installer and general DSA systems helped us a great deal. pollo I'm about 3/4 done documenting our ansible roles. Once I'm done, I'll try to polish some obvious hacks I've seen while documenting.

20 November 2017

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: DebConf Videoteam sprint report - day 1

Another videoteam report! We've now been hacking for a full day and we are slowly starting to be productive. It's always hard to get back in a project when you haven't touched it in a while... Anyway, let's start this report with some important announcement: we finally have been able to snap a good picture of the airbnb's cat! The airbnb's cat No more nagging me about the placeholder image from Wikipedia I used in yesterday's report! Set up Our hacking space Here's what the team did today: tumbleweed Stefano started the day by hacking away on our video archive. We eventually want to upload all our videos to YouTube to give them exposure, but sadly our archive metadata is in a pretty poor shape. With the script tumbleweed wrote, we can scrape the archive for matches against the old DebConf's pentabarf XML we have. tumbleweed also helped Ivo with the ansible PXE setup he's working on. Some recent contributions from a collaborator implemented new features (like a nice menu to choose from) but also came with a few annoying bugs. ivodd Ivo continued working on the PXE setup today. He also tried to break our ansible setup by using fresh installs with different user cases (locales, interfaces, etc.), with some success. The reason he and Stefano are working so hard on the PXE boot is that we had a discussion about the future of our USB install method. The general consensus on this was although we would not remove it, we would not actively maintain it anymore. PXE is less trouble for multiple machines. For single machines or if you don't control the DHCP server, using ansible manually on a fresh Debian install will be the recommended way. olasd After a very long drive, olasd arrived late in the evening with all our gear. Hurray! We were thus able to set up some test boxes and start wiring the airbnb properly. Tomorrow will certainly be more productive with all this stuff at our disposition. pollo Today I mainly worked on setting up our documentation website. After some debate, we decided that sphinx was the right tool for the job. I am a few pages in and if I work well I think we'll have something to show for at the end of the sprint! I also was thrown back into ansible after witnessing a bug in the locale management. I'm still rusty, but it's slowly coming back to me. Let's end this blog post with a picture of the neon pineapple that sits on the wall of the solarium. Upside down this picture is even more troubling

19 November 2017

Joey Hess: custom ARM disk image generation with propellor

Following up on propelling disk images, Propellor can now build custom ARM disk images for a variety of different ARM boards. The disk image build can run on a powerful laptop or server, so it's super fast and easy compared with manually installing Debian on an ARM board. Here's a simple propellor config for a Olimex LIME board, with ssh access and a root password: 
lime :: Host
lime = host "lime.example.com" $ props
    & osDebian Unstable ARMHF
    & Machine.olimex_A10_OLinuXino_LIME
    & hasPartition (partition EXT4  mountedAt  "/"  setSize  MegaBytes 8192)
        & hasPassword (User "root")
        & Ssh.installed
    & Ssh.permitRootLogin (RootLogin True)
To make a disk image for that board, I only have to add this property to my laptop: 
& imageBuiltFor lime
    (RawDiskImage "/srv/lime.img")
    (Debootstrapped mempty)
Propellor knows what kernel to install and how to make the image bootable for a bunch of ARM boards, including the Olimex LIME, the SheevaPlug, Banana Pi, and CubieTruck. To build the disk image targeting ARM, propellor uses qemu. So it's helpful that, after the first build, propellor incrementally updates disk images, quite quickly and efficiently. Once the board has the image installed, you can run propellor on it to further maintain it, and if there's a hardware problem, you can quickly replace it with an updated image.
computer tower that I will be maintaining with propellor
It's fairly simple to teach propellor about other ARM boards, so it should be quite easy to keep propellor knowing about all ARM boards supported by Debian (and other distros). Here's how I taught it about the Olimex LIME: 
olimex_A10_OLinuXino_LIME :: Property (HasInfo + DebianLike)
olimex_A10_OLinuXino_LIME = FlashKernel.installed "Olimex A10-OLinuXino-LIME"
     requires  sunixi "A10-OLinuXino-Lime"
     requires  armmp
My home server is a CubieTruck which serves as a wireless access point, solar panel data collector, and git-annex autobuilder. It's deployed from a disk image built by propellor, using this config. I've been involved with building disk image for ARM boards for a long time -- it was part of my job for five years -- and this is the first time I've been entirely happy with the process.

18 November 2017

Matthieu Caneill: MiniDebconf in Toulouse

I attended the MiniDebconf in Toulouse, which was hosted in the larger Capitole du Libre, a free software event with talks, presentation of associations, and a keysigning party. I didn't expect the event to be that big, and I was very impressed by its organization. Cheers to all the volunteers, it has been an amazing week-end! Here's a sum-up of the talks I attended. Du logiciel libre la monnaie libre Speaker: lo s The first talk I attended was, translated to English, "from free software to free money". lo s compared the 4 freedoms of free software with money, and what properties money needs to exhibit in order to be considered free. He then introduced 1, a project of free (as in free speech!) money, started in the region around Toulouse. Contrary to some distributed ledgers such as Bitcoin, 1 isn't based on an hash-based proof-of-work, but rather around a web of trust of people certifying each other, hence limiting the energy consumption required by the network to function. YunoHost Speaker: Jimmy Monin I then attended a presentation of YunoHost. Being an happy user myself, it was very nice to discover the future expected features, and also meet two of the developers. YunoHost is a Debian-based project, aimed at providing all the tools necessary to self-host applications, including email, website, calendar, development tools, and dozens of other packages. Premiers pas dans l'univers de Debian Speaker: Nicolas Dandrimont For the first talk of the MiniDebConf, Nicolas Dandrimont introduced Debian, its philosophy, and how it works with regards to upstreams and downstreams. He gave many details on the teams, the infrastructure, and the internals of Debian. Trusting your computer and system Speaker: Jonas Smedegaard Jonas introduced some security concepts, and how they are abused and often meaningless (to quote his own words, "secure is bullshit"). He described a few projects which lean towards a more secure and open hardware, for both phones and laptops. Automatiser la gestion de configuration de Debian avec Ansible Speaker: J r my Lecour J r my, from Evolix, introduced Ansible, and how they use it to manage hundreds of Debian servers. Ansible is a very powerful tool, and a huge ecosystem, in many ways similar to Puppet or Chef, except it is agent-less, using only ssh connections to communicate with remote machines. Very nice to compare their use of Ansible with mine, since that's the software I use at work for deploying experiments. Making Debian for everybody Speaker: Samuel Thibault Samuel gave a talk about accessibility, and the general availability of the tools in today's operating systems, including Debian. The lesson to take home is that we often don't do enough in this domain, particularly when considering some issues people might have that we don't always think about. Accessibility on computers (and elsewhere) should be the default, and never require complex setups. Retour d'exp rience : mise jour de milliers de terminaux Debian Speaker: Cyril Brulebois Cyril described a problem he was hired for, an update of thousands of Debian servers from wheezy to jessie, which he discovered afterwards was worse than initially thought, since the machines were running the out-of-date squeeze. Since they were not always administered with the best sysadmin practices, they were all exhibiting different configurations and different packages lists, which raised many issues and gave him interesting challenges. They were solved using Ansible, which also had the effect of standardizing their system administration practices. Retour d'exp rience : utilisation de Debian chez Evolix Speaker: Gr gory Colpart Gr gory described Evolix, a company which manages servers for their clients, and how they were inspired by Debian, for both their internal tools and their practices. It is very interesting to see that some of the Debian values can be easily exported for a more open and collaborative business. Lightning talks To close the conference, two lightning talks were presented, describing the switch from Windows XP to Debian in an ecologic association near Toulouse; and how snapshot.debian.org can be used with bisections to find the source of some regressions. Conclusion A big thank you to all the organizers and the associations who contributed to make this event a success. Cheers!

17 November 2017

Jonathan Carter: I am now a Debian Developer

It finally happened On the 6th of April 2017, I finally took the plunge and applied for Debian Developer status. On 1 August, during DebConf in Montr al, my application was approved. If you re paying attention to the dates you might notice that that was nearly 4 months ago already. I was trying to write a story about how it came to be, but it ended up long. Really long (current draft is around 20 times longer than this entire post). So I decided I d rather do a proper bio page one day and just do a super short version for now so that someone might end up actually reading it. How it started In 1999 no wait, I can t start there, as much as I want to, this is a short post, so In 2003, I started doing some contract work for the Shuttleworth Foundation. I was interested in collaborating with them on tuXlabs, a project to get Linux computers into schools. For the few months before that, I was mostly using SuSE Linux. The open source team at the Shuttleworth Foundation all used Debian though, which seemed like a bizarre choice to me since everything in Debian was really old and its boot-floppies installer program kept crashing on my very vanilla computers.

SLUG (Schools Linux Users Group) group photo. SLUG was founded to support the tuXlab schools that ran Linux.

My contract work then later turned into a full-time job there. This was a big deal for me, because I didn t want to support Windows ever again, and I didn t ever think that it would even be possible for me to get a job where I could work on free software full time. Since everyone in my team used Debian, I thought that I should probably give it another try. I did, and I hated it. One morning I went to talk to my manager, Thomas Black, and told him that I just don t get it and I need some help. Thomas was a big mentor to me during this phase. He told me that I should try upgrading to testing, which I did, and somehow I ended up on unstable, and I loved it. Before that I used to subscribe to a website called freshmeat that listed new releases of upstream software and then, I would download and compile it myself so that I always had the newest versions of everything. Debian unstable made that whole process obsolete, and I became a huge fan of it. Early on I also hit a problem where two packages tried to install the same file, and I was delighted to find how easily I could find package state and maintainer scripts and fix them to get my system going again. Thomas told me that anyone could become a Debian Developer and maintain packages in Debian and that I should check it out and joked that maybe I could eventually snap up highvoltage@debian.org . I just laughed because back then you might as well have told me that I could run for president of the United States, it really felt like something rather far-fetched and unobtainable at that point, but the seed was planted :) Ubuntu and beyond

Ubuntu 4.10 default desktop Image from distrowatch

One day, Thomas told me that Mark is planning to provide official support for Debian unstable. The details were sparse, but this was still exciting news. A few months later Thomas gave me a CD with just warty written on it and said that I should install it on a server so that we can try it out. It was great, it used the new debian-installer and installed fine everywhere I tried it, and the software was nice and fresh. Later Thomas told me that this system is going to be called Ubuntu and the desktop edition has naked people on it. I wasn t sure what he meant and was kind of dumbfounded so I just laughed and said something like Uh ok . At least it made a lot more sense when I finally saw the desktop pre-release version and when it got the byline Linux for Human Beings . Fun fact, one of my first jobs at the foundation was to register the ubuntu.com domain name. Unfortunately I found it was already owned by a domain squatter and it was eventually handled by legal. Closer to Ubuntu s first release, Mark brought over a whole bunch of Debian developers that was working on Ubuntu over to the foundation and they were around for a few days getting some sun. Thomas kept saying Go talk to them! Go talk to them! , but I felt so intimidated by them that I couldn t even bring myself to walk up and say hello. In the interest of keeping this short, I m leaving out a lot of history but later on, I read through the Debian packaging policy and really started getting into packaging and also discovered Daniel Holbach s packaging tutorials on YouTube. These helped me tremendously. Some day (hopefully soon), I d like to do a similar video series that might help a new generation of packagers. I ve also been following DebConf online since DebConf 7, which was incredibly educational for me. Little did I know that just 5 years later I would even attend one, and another 5 years after that I d end up being on the DebConf Committee and have also already been on a local team for one.

DebConf16 Organisers, Photo by Jurie Senekal.

It s been a long journey for me and I would like to help anyone who is also interested in becoming a Debian maintainer or developer. If you ever need help with your package, upload it to https://mentors.debian.net and if I have some spare time I ll certainly help you out and sponsor an upload. Thanks to everyone who have helped me along the way, I really appreciate it!

Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, October 2017

A Debian LTS logoLike each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In October, about 197 work hours have been dispatched among 13 paid contributors. Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation The number of sponsored hours increased slightly to 183 hours per month. With the increasing number of security issues to deal with, and with the number of open issues not really going down, I decided to bump the funding target to what amounts to 1.5 full-time position. The security tracker currently lists 50 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file 36 (we re a bit behind in CVE triaging apparently). Thanks to our sponsors New sponsors are in bold.

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15 November 2017

Steinar H. Gunderson: Introducing Narabu, part 6: Performance

Narabu is a new intraframe video codec. You probably want to read part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4 and part 5 first. Like I wrote in part 5, there basically isn't a big splashy ending where everything is resolved here; you're basically getting some graphs with some open questions and some interesting observations. First of all, though, I'll need to make a correction: In the last part, I wrote that encoding takes 1.2 ms for 720p luma-only on my GTX 950, which isn't correct I remembered the wrong number. The right number is 2.3 ms, which I guess explains even more why I don't think it's acceptable at the current stage. (I'm also pretty sure it's possible to rearchitect the encoder so that it's much better, but I am moving on to other video-related things for the time being.) I encoded a picture straight off my DSLR (luma-only) at various resolutions, keeping the aspect. Then I decoded it a bunch of times on my GTX 950 (low-end last-generation NVIDIA) and on my HD 4400 (ultraportable Haswell laptop) and measured the times. They're normalized for megapixels per second decoded; remember that doubling width (x axis) means quadruple the pixels. Here it is: Narabu decoding performance graph I'm not going to comment much beyond two observations: Encoding only contains the GTX 950 because I didn't finish the work to get that single int64 divide off: Narabu encoding performance graph This is interesting. I have few explanations. Probably more benchmarking and profiling would be needed to make sense of any of it. In fact, it's so strange that I would suspect a bug, but it does indeed seem to create a valid bitstream that is decoded by the decoder. Do note, however, that seemingly even on the smallest resolutions, there's a 1.7 ms base cost (you can't see it on the picture, but you'd see it in an unnormalized graph). I don't have a very good explanation for this either (even though there are some costs that are dependent on the alphabet size instead of the number of pixels), but figuring it out would probably be a great start for getting the performance up. So that concludes the series, on a cliffhanger. :-) Even though it's not in a situation where you can just take it and put it into something useful, I hope it was an interesting introduction to the GPU! And in the meantime, I've released version 1.6.3 of Nageru, my live video mixer (also heavily GPU-based) with various small adjustments and bug fixes found before and during Tr ndisk. And Movit is getting compute shaders for that extra speed boost, although parts of it is bending my head. Exciting times in GPU land :-)

Russ Allbery: Review: The Piper's Son

Review: The Piper's Son, by Melina Marchetta
Series: Francesca #2
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Copyright: 2010
Printing: 2011
ISBN: 0-7636-5458-2
Format: Kindle
Pages: 330
Tom Mackee's family has fallen apart. The impetus was the death of his uncle Joe in the London tube terrorist bombings, but that was only the start. He destroyed his chances with the only woman he really loved. His father's drinking got out of control, his mother left with his younger sister to live in a different city, and he refused to go with them and abandon his father. But then, six months later, his father abandoned him anyway. As this novel opens, Tom collapses while performing a music set, high on drugs and no sleep, and wakes up to discover his roommates have been fired from their jobs for stealing, and in turn have thrown him out of their apartment. He's at rock bottom. The one place he can turn for a place to stay is his aunt Georgie, the second (although less frequent) viewpoint character of this book. She was the one who took the trip to the UK to try to find out what happened and retrieve her brother's body, and the one who had to return to Australia with nothing. Her life isn't in much better shape than Tom's. She's kept her job, but she's pregnant by her ex-boyfriend but barely talking to him, since he now has a son by another woman he met during their separation. And she's not even remotely over her grief. The whole Finch/Mackee family is, in short, a disaster. But they have a few family relationships left that haven't broken, some underlying basic decency, and some patient and determined friends. I should warn up-front, despite having read this book without knowing this, that this is a sequel to Saving Francesca, set five years later and focusing on secondary characters from the original novel. I've subsequently read that book as well, though, and I don't think reading it first is necessary. This is one of the rare books where being a sequel made it a better stand-alone novel. I never felt a gap of missing story, just a rich and deep background of friendships and previous relationships that felt realistic. People are embedded in networks of relationships even when they feel the most alone, and I really enjoyed seeing that surface in this book. All those patterns from Tom's past didn't feel like information I was missing. They felt like glimpses of what you'd see if you looked into any other person's life. The plot summary above might make The Piper's Son sound like a depressing drama fest, but Marchetta made an excellent writing decision: the worst of this has already happened before the start of the book, and the rest is in the first chapter. This is not at all a book about horrible things happening to people. It's a book about healing. An authentic, prickly, angry healing that doesn't forget and doesn't turn into simple happily-ever-after stories, but does involve a lot of recognition that one has been an ass, and that it's possible to be less of an ass in the future, and maybe some things can be fixed. A plot summary might fool you into thinking that this is a book about a boy and his father, or about dealing with a drunk you still love. It's not. The bright current under this whole story is not father-son bonding. It's female friendships. Marchetta pulls off a beautiful double-story, writing a book that's about Tom, and Georgie, and the layered guilt and tragedy of the Finch/Mackee family, but whose emotional heart is their friends. Francesca, Justine, absent Siobhan. Georgie's friend Lucia. Ned, the cook, and his interactions with Tom's friends. And Tara Finke, also mostly absent, but perfectly written into the story in letters and phone calls. Marchetta never calls unnecessary attention to this, keeping the camera on Tom and Georgie, but the process of reading this book is a dawning realization of just how much work friendship is doing under the surface, how much back-channel conversation is happening off the page, and how much careful and thoughtful and determined work went into providing Tom a floor, a place to get his feet under him, and enough of a shove for him to pull himself together. Pulling that off requires a deft and subtle authorial touch, and I'm in awe at how well it worked. This is a beautifully written novel. Marchetta never belabors an emotional point, sticking with a clear and spare description of actions and thoughts, with just the right sentences scattered here and there to expose the character's emotions. Tom's family is awful at communication, which is much of the reason why they start the book in the situation they're in, but Marchetta somehow manages to write that in a way that didn't just frustrate me or make me want to start banging their heads together. She somehow conveys the extent to which they're trying, even when they're failing, and adds just the right descriptions so that the reader can follow the wordless messages they send each other even when they can't manage to talk directly. I usually find it very hard to connect with people who can only communicate by doing things rather than saying them. It's a high compliment to the author that I felt I understood Tom and his family as well as I did. One bit of warning: while this is not a story of a grand reunion with an alcoholic father where all is forgiven because family, thank heavens, there is an occasional wiggle in that direction. There is also a steady background assumption that one should always try to repair family relationships, and a few tangential notes about the Finches and Mackees that made me think there was a bit more abuse here than anyone involved wants to admit. I don't think the book is trying to make apologies for this, and instead is trying to walk the fine line of talking about realistically messed up families, but I also don't have a strong personal reaction to that type of story. If you have an aversion to "we should all get along because faaaaamily" stories, you may want to skip this book, or at least go in pre-warned. That aside, the biggest challenge I had in reading this book was not breaking into tears. The emotional arc is just about perfect. Tom and Georgie never stay stuck in the same emotional cycle for too long, Marchetta does a wonderful job showing irritating characters from a slightly different angle and having them become much less irritating, and the interactions between Tom, Tara, and Francesca are just perfect. I don't remember reading another book that so beautifully captures that sensation of knowing that you've been a total ass, knowing that you need to stop, but realizing just how much work you're going to have to do, and how hard that work will be, once you own up to how much you fucked up. That point where you keep being an ass for a few moments longer, because stopping is going to hurt so much, but end up stopping anyway because you can't stand yourself any more. And stopping and making amends is hard and hurts badly, and yet somehow isn't quite as bad as you thought it was going to be. This is really great stuff. One final complaint, though: what is it with mainstream fiction and the total lack of denouement? I don't read very much mainstream fiction, but this is the second really good mainstream book I've read (after The Death of Bees) that hits its climax and then unceremoniously dumps the reader on the ground and disappears. Come back here! I wasn't done with these people! I don't need a long happily-ever-after story, but give me at least a handful of pages to be happy with the characters after crying with them for hours! ARGH. But, that aside, the reader does get that climax, and it's note-perfect to the rest of the book. Everyone is still themselves, no one gets suddenly transformed, and yet everything is... better. It's the kind of book you can trust. Highly, highly recommended. Rating: 9 out of 10

12 November 2017

Lars Wirzenius: Unit and integration testing: an analogy with cars

A unit is a part of your program you can test in isolation. You write unit tests to test all aspects of it that you care about. If all your unit tests pass, you should know that your unit works well. Integration tests are for testing that when your various well-tested, high quality units are combined, integrated, they work together. Integration tests test the integration, not the individual units. You could think of building a car. Your units are the ball bearings, axles, wheels, brakes, etc. Your unit tests for the ball bearings might test, for example, that they can handle a billion rotations, at various temperatures, etc. Your integration test would assume the ball bearings work, and should instead test that the ball bearings are installed in the right way so that the car, as whole, can run a kilometers, and accelerate and brake every kilometer, uses only so much fuel, produces only so much pollution, and doesn't kill passengers in case of a crash.

Sven Hoexter: Offering a Simtec Entropy Key

Since I started to lean a bit towards the concept of minimalism I've got rid of stuff, including all stationary computers. So for now I'm left with just my laptop and that's something where I do not want to attach an USB entropy key permanently. That's why I've a spare Simtec Entropy Key I no longer use, and I'm willing to sell. In case someone is interested, I'm willing to give it away for 20EUR + shipping. If you can convince me it'll be of use for the Debian project (end up on a DSA managed machine for example) I'm willing to give it away for less. If you're located in Cologne, Copenhagen or Barcelona we might be able, depending on the timing, to do a personal handover (with or without keysigning). Otherwise I guess shipping is mainly interesting for someone also located in Europe. You can use sven at stormbind dot net or hoexter at debian dot org to contact me and use GPG key 0xA6DC24D9DA2493D1.

10 November 2017

Paulo Santana: Hello world

I'm Debian Maintainer since january 2017.

Norbert Preining: ScalaFX: dynamic update of context menu of table rows

Context menus are useful to exhibit additional functionality. For my TLCockpit program I am listing the packages, updates, and available backups in a TreeTableView. The context for each row should be different depending on the status of the content displayed.
My first try, taken from searches on the web, was to add the context menu via the rowFactory of the TreeTableView: 
table.rowFactory =   p =>
  val row = new TreeTableRow[SomeObject]  
  val infoMI = new MenuItem("Info")   onAction = /* use row.item.value */  
  val installMI = new MenuItem("Install")   onAction = /* use row.item.value */  
  val removeMI = new MenuItem("Remove")   onAction = /* use row.item.value */  
  val ctm = new ContextMenu(infoMI, installMI, removeMI)
  row.contextMenu = ctm
  row
This worked nicely until I tried to disable/enable some items based on the status of the displayed package: 
  ...
  val pkg: SomeObject = row.item.value
  val isInstalled: Boolean = /* determine installation status of pkg */
  val installMI = new MenuItem("Install")   
    disable = isInstalled
    onAction = /* use row.item.value */
What I did here is just pull the shown package, get its installation status, and disable the Install context menu entry if it is already installed. All good and fine I thought, but somehow reality was different. First there where NullPointerExceptions (rare occurrence in Scala for me), and then somehow that didn t work out at all. The explanation is quite simple to be found by printing something in the rowFactory function. There are only as many rows made as fit into the current screen size (plus a bit), and their content is dynamically updated when one scrolls. But the enable/disable status of the context menu entries were not properly updated. To fix this one needs to add a callback on the displayed item, which is exposed in row.item. So the correct code is (assuming that a SomeObject has a BooleanProperty installed): 
table.rowFactory =   p =>
  val row = new TreeTableRow[SomeObject]  
  val infoMI = new MenuItem("Info")   onAction = /* use row.item.value */  
  val installMI = new MenuItem("Install")   onAction = /* use row.item.value */   
  val removeMI = new MenuItem("Remove")   onAction = /* use row.item.value */  
  val ctm = new ContextMenu(infoMI, installMI, removeMI)
  row.item.onChange   (_,_,newContent) =>
    if (newContent != null)  
      val isInstalled: /* determine installation status from newContent */
      installMI.disable = is_installed
      removeMI.disable = !is_installed
     
   
  row.contextMenu = ctm
  row
The final output then gives me:
That s it, the context menus are now correctly adapted to the displayed content. If there is a simpler way, please let me know.

8 November 2017

Dirk Eddelbuettel: R / Finance 2018 Call for Papers

The tenth (!!) annual annual R/Finance conference will take in Chicago on the UIC campus on June 1 and 2, 2018. Please see the call for papers below (or at the website) and consider submitting a paper. We are once again very excited about our conference, thrilled about who we hope may agree to be our anniversary keynotes, and hope that many R / Finance users will not only join us in Chicago in June -- and also submit an exciting proposal. So read on below, and see you in Chicago in June!

Call for Papers R/Finance 2018: Applied Finance with R
June 1 and 2, 2018
University of Illinois at Chicago, IL, USA The tenth annual R/Finance conference for applied finance using R will be held June 1 and 2, 2018 in Chicago, IL, USA at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The conference will cover topics including portfolio management, time series analysis, advanced risk tools, high-performance computing, market microstructure, and econometrics. All will be discussed within the context of using R as a primary tool for financial risk management, portfolio construction, and trading. Over the past nine years, R/Finance has includedattendeesfrom around the world. It has featured presentations from prominent academics and practitioners, and we anticipate another exciting line-up for 2018. We invite you to submit complete papers in pdf format for consideration. We will also consider one-page abstracts (in txt or pdf format) although more complete papers are preferred. We welcome submissions for both full talks and abbreviated "lightning talks." Both academic and practitioner proposals related to R are encouraged. All slides will be made publicly available at conference time. Presenters are strongly encouraged to provide working R code to accompany the slides. Data sets should also be made public for the purposes of reproducibility (though we realize this may be limited due to contracts with data vendors). Preference may be given to presenters who have released R packages. Please submit proposals online at http://go.uic.edu/rfinsubmit. Submissions will be reviewed and accepted on a rolling basis with a final submission deadline of February 2, 2018. Submitters will be notified via email by March 2, 2018 of acceptance, presentation length, and financial assistance (if requested). Financial assistance for travel and accommodation may be available to presenters. Requests for financial assistance do not affect acceptance decisions. Requests should be made at the time of submission. Requests made after submission are much less likely to be fulfilled. Assistance will be granted at the discretion of the conference committee. Additional details will be announced via the conference website at http://www.RinFinance.com/ as they become available. Information on previous years'presenters and their presentations are also at the conference website. We will make a separate announcement when registration opens. For the program committee:
Gib Bassett, Peter Carl, Dirk Eddelbuettel, Brian Peterson,
Dale Rosenthal, Jeffrey Ryan, Joshua Ulrich

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RQuantLib 0.4.4: Several smaller updates

A shiny new (mostly-but-not-completely maintenance) release of RQuantLib, now at version 0.4.4, arrived on CRAN overnight, and will get to Debian shortly. This is the first release in over a year, and it it contains (mostly) a small number of fixes throughout. It also includes the update to the new DateVector and DatetimeVector classes which become the default with the upcoming Rcpp 0.12.14 release (just like this week's RcppQuantuccia release). One piece of new code is due to Fran ois Cocquemas who added support for discrete dividends to both European and American options. See below for the complete set of changes reported in the NEWS file. As with release 0.4.3 a little over a year ago, we will not have new Windows binaries from CRAN as I apparently have insufficient powers of persuasion to get CRAN to update their QuantLib libraries. So we need a volunteer. If someone could please build a binary package for Windows from the 0.4.4 sources, I would be happy to once again host it on the GHRR drat repo. Please contact me directly if you can help. Changes are listed below:

Changes in RQuantLib version 0.4.4 (2017-11-07)
  • Changes in RQuantLib code:
    • Equity options can now be analyzed via discrete dividends through two vectors of dividend dates and values (Francois Cocquemas in #73 fixing #72)
    • Some package and dependency information was updated in files DESCRIPTION and NAMESPACE.
    • The new Date(time)Vector classes introduced with Rcpp 0.12.8 are now used when available.
    • Minor corrections were applied to BKTree, to vanilla options for the case of intraday time stamps, to the SabrSwaption documentation, and to bond utilities for the most recent QuantLib release.

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the this release. As always, more detailed information is on the RQuantLib page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rquantlib-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page. Issue tickets can be filed at the GitHub repo.

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

7 November 2017

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #132

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday October 29 and Saturday November 4 2017: Past events Upcoming events Reproducible work in other projects Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed Reviews of unreproducible packages 7 package reviews have been added, 43 have been updated and 47 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by: Documentation updates diffoscope development Version 88 was uploaded to unstable by Mattia Rizzolo. It included contributions (already covered by posts of the previous weeks) from: strip-nondeterminism development Version 0.040-1 was uploaded to unstable by Mattia Rizzolo. It included contributions already covered by posts of the previous weeks, as well as new ones from:
Version 0.5.2-2 was uploaded to unstable by Holger Levsen. It included contributions already covered by posts of the previous weeks, as well as new ones from: reprotest development buildinfo.debian.net development tests.reproducible-builds.org Misc. This week's edition was written by Bernhard M. Wiedemann, Chris Lamb, Mattia Rizzolo & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

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