I want my 7drl game Scroll to have lots of interesting spells. So, as I'm designing its spell system, I've been looking at the types, and considering the whole universe of possible spells that fit within the constraints of the types. My first throught was that a spell would be a function from World -> World. That allows any kind of spell that manipulates the game map. Like, for instance a "whiteout" that projects a stream of whitespace from the player's mouth. Since Scroll has a state monad, I quickly generalized that; making spell actions a state monad M (), which lets spells reuse other monadic actions, and affect the whole game state, including the player. Now I could write a spell like "teleport", or "grow". But it quickly became apparent this was too limiting: While spells could change the World map, the player, and even change the list of supported spells, they had no way to prompting for input. I tried a few types of the Event -> M () variety, but they were all too limiting. Finally, I settled on this type for spell actions: M NextStep -> M NextStep. And then I spent 3 hours exploring the universe of spells that type allows! To understand them, it helps to see what a NextStep is: Since NextStep is a continuation, spells take the original continuation, and can not only modify the game state, but can return an altered continuation. Such as one that prompts for input before performing the spell, and then calls the original continuation to get on with the game. That let me write "new", a most interesting spell, that lets the player add a new way to cast an existing spell. Spells are cast using ingredients, and so this prompts for a new ingredient to cast a spell. (I hope that "new farming" will be one mode of play to possibly win Scroll.) And, it lets me write spells that fail in game-ending ways. (Ie, "genocide @"). A spell can cause the game to end by returning a continuation that has Nothing as its next step. Even better, I could write spells that return a continuation that contains a forked background task, using the 66 line contiuation based threading system I built in day 3. This allows writing lots of fun spells that have an effect that lasts for a while. Things like letting the player quickly digest letters they eat, or slow down the speed of events. And then I thought of "dream". This spell stores the input continuation and game state, and returns a modified continuation that lets the game continue until it ends, and then restores from the point it saved. So, the player dreams they're playing, and wakes back up where they cast the spell. A wild spell, which can have different variants, like precognitive dreams where the same random numbers are used as will be used upon awaking, or dreams where knowledge carries back over to the real world in different ways. (Supports Inception too..) Look how easy it was to implement dreaming, in this game that didn't have any notion of "save" or "restore"! I imagine that, if I were not using Haskell, I'd have just made the spell be an action, that can do IO in arbitrary ways. Such a spell system can of course do everything I described above and more. But, I think that using a general IO action is so broad that it hides the interesting possibilities like "dream". By starting with a limited type for spells, and exploring toward more featureful types, I was able to think about the range of possibilities of spells that each type allowed, be inspired with interesting ideas, and implement them quickly. Just what I need when writing a roguelike in just 7 days!

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Fun comment thread on reddit

My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donators (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me. Debian LTS This month I have been paid to work 14.5 hours on Debian LTS. I worked mostly on CVE triage (41 commits in the security tracker) and organizational issues. One maintainer complained that he had not been kept in the loop for an LTS update of his package. After some discussion, I decided to change the way I did CVE triage so that any time that I add a package to our list of packages needing an update, I also send a mail to the maintainer, thus offering him the opportunity to step in. To make this sustainable, I wrote a small helper script that will generate a mail out of a template. And to kickstart the process I mailed all maintainers of packages that were already listed in our queue of packages to update. To improve the email generated, I requested a JSON export of the security tracker data (see discussions in #761859). In the mean time, Holger worked on this already and after a few iterations we did converge on an output format that will be really useful both for my needs in terms of CVE triage but also for the Package Tracker to be able to display the list of security vulnerabilities affecting each release (see #761730). Last but not least, I don t want to be the only one doing CVE triage for our LTS release so I documented the process in our wiki page. As a side note, I sponsored an e2fsprogs update prepared by Nguyen Cong and I sent the DLA for the embargoed samba update that had been prepared by Ivo de Decker (thanks to both of them!). Tryton Like last month, I invested again a copious amount of time on Tryton, fixing some bugs that were affecting me and improving the French chart of accounts to properly manage purchases and sales within the European Union. Here are some links for more details:

• #4523: Change account 58 into a real non-view account
• Preserve the user-supplied date on account moves when it s valid
• #4532: Rename some tax codes hosting base amounts to avoid having two codes with the same name
• #4568: Fix the credit note base tax code and tax code for the sales in France (took quite some discussion to double check this with an accountant)
• #4569: Track the amount invoiced in sales outside Europe
• #4570: Properly handle EU-sales and EU-purchases in the VAT report (this was by far the most complicated issue I dealt with, it took several days and multiple tries to get it right).

Debian I did some work on Distro Tracker, I fixed #777453 (password reset not working because the generated email was using an invalid From email) and #779247 (obsolete build reproducibility action items were not dropped). I also started to work on restructuring the mail handling in distro-tracker (cf #754913) but it s not public yet. While I have no plans to stop contributing to Debian (it s part of my day job!), I reduced my non-work related involvement by officially recognizing that I was no longer properly assuming some of my responsibilities and that I was following too many mailing lists and RSS feeds. The most notable changes are that I removed myself from the maintenance of dpkg, developers-reference, quilt, sql-ledger, and a few perl/python modules. Misc Voting software. Part of the reason why I m reducing my involvement in Debian is that I got more involved in Nouvelle Donne (a French political party) and in particular in the handling of its digital infrastructure (currently running on Ubuntu, doh!). As part of this, I was looking for free software to handle secure votes and elections (and if possible adhering to the principles of liquid democracy). There s no perfect solution and no clear winner. That said I started following the evolution of AgoraVoting because it seems to have a good momentum and has some interesting features (it already supports votes with ranked choices, supports good crypto, has been used for elections involving large numbers of voters in the context of Podemos in Spain). But it still has some ways to go to establish itself as a truly international and community-backed project. GDM bug. Due to my work on Kali, I filed a bug against GDM (this one has been quickly fixed upstream, it s still open in Debian) and another one against accountsservice to request the possibility to define the default graphical session. Dirvish formula for Salt. I contributed another formula to manage backups with dirvish. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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The new release 0.11.5 of Rcpp just reached the CRAN network for GNU R, and a Debian package has also been be uploaded. Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing GNU R with C++ code. As of today, 345 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analyses go faster and further; BioConductor adds another 41 packages, and casual searches on GitHub suggests dozens mores. This release continues the 0.11.* release cycle, adding another large number of small bug fixes, polishes and enhancements. Since the previous release in January, we incorporated a number of pull requests and changes from several contributors. This time, JJ deserves a special mention as he is responsible for a metric ton of the changes listed below, making Rcpp Attributes even more awesome. As always, you can follow the development via the GitHub repo and particularly the Issue tickets and Pull Requests. And any discussions, questions, ... regarding Rcpp are always welcome at the rcpp-devel mailing list. See below for a detailed list of changes extracted from the NEWS file.

Changes in Rcpp version 0.11.5 (2015-03-04)

Changes in Rcpp API:

• An error handler for tinyformat was defined to prevent the assert() macro from spilling.
• The Rcpp::warning function was added as a wrapper for Rf_warning.
• The XPtr class was extended with new checked_get and release functions as well as improved behavior (throw an exception rather than crash) when a NULL external pointer is dereferenced.
• R code is evaluated within an R_toplevelExec block to prevent user interrupts from bypassing C++ destructors on the stack.
• The Rcpp::Environment constructor can now use a supplied parent environment.
• The Rcpp::Function constructor can now use a supplied environment or namespace.
• The attributes_hidden macro from R is used to shield internal functions; the R_ext/Visibility.h header is now included as well.
• A Rcpp::print function was added as a wrapper around Rf_PrintValue.

Changes in Rcpp Attributes:

• The pkg_types.h file is now included in RcppExports.cpp if it is present in either the inst/include or src.
• sourceCpp was modified to allow includes of local files (e.g. #include "foo.hpp"). Implementation files (.cc; .cpp) corresponding to local includes are also automatically built if they exist.
• The generated attributes code was simplified with respect to RNGScope and now uses RObject and its destructor rather than SEXP protect/unprotect.
• Support addition of the rng parameter in Rcpp::export to suppress the otherwise automatic inclusion of RNGScope in generated code.
• Attributes code was made more robust and can e.g. no longer recurse.
• Version 3.2 of the Rtools is now correctly detected as well.
• Allow 'R' to come immediately after '***' for defining embedded R code chunks in sourceCpp.
• The attributes vignette has been updated with documentation on new features added over the past several releases.

Changes in Rcpp tests:

• On Travis CI, all build dependencies are installed as binary .deb packages resulting in faster tests.

Thanks to CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release As always, even fuller details are on the Rcpp Changelog page and the Rcpp page which also leads to the downloads page, the browseable doxygen docs and zip files of doxygen output for the standard formats. A local directory has source and documentation too. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

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

In May, the DebConf15 Team held a competition to design the logo for DebConf15, which will take place in Heidelberg, Germany. We received many great entries, and after a week-long voting period, this logo by Valessio Brito was selected: The lion depicted is the Kurpf lzer L we , which makes up Heidelberg s coat of arms. Valessio is Brazilian, graduated in Communication and Advertising, and specialised in Free Software Development. He is currently a consultant to UI Design of the Secretariat-General of the Presidency of the Republic, living in Brasilia, Brazil. He has been a Debian user since 2000, contributing to local communities, Inkscape and the Debian project. Valessio has a tattoo of the red spiral! His personal website is valessiobrito.com.br (pt_BR). He invites you to visit www.DebianArt.org to discover the work of other artists and designs that contribute to the Debian project. Thanks very much Valessio for your great contribution!

After starting with Joey Hess, we continue with Paul Wise. What makes his star to shine are many things such as being a DSA (Debian System Administrator), a helpful hand on mailings list, encouraging people to join Debian teams but most of all - he has encyclopedia knowledge on Debian as a whole which he gladly shares with anyone who asks (very fast response on IRC channels). It is almost impossible for any single person to count all Debian teams, work and places - to know most of those things, you can image the vast knowledge which Paul has. The legend says that his brain has better and faster search engine algorithm on Debian related queries than all other engines combined. So lets see what he has to share with world. me: Who are you? pabs: Paul Wise (pabs) and I have to say that I'm no-where near as knowledgeable as your intro suggests. me: How did you start programming? pabs: Messing around with fractals and graphics things in MS BASIC. me: How would you now advise others to start programming? pabs: Pick an issue in a tool you use, investigate how the tool works and how you can change it, fix that and contribute the change back to the project that created that tool. In the process you will learn skills, interact with the community and contribute to the project. me: Setup of your development machine? pabs: Lenovo Thinkpad with external monitor, Debian testing and some tweaks me What is your preferable language (for hacking)? Why? How do you compare it to other languages? pabs: I currently prefer Python for its readability. It still has some rough edges though the documentation covers them fairly well. I generally pick up new languages when working on projects written in them. Haskell is next on the horizon due to Nikki and the Robots. me: Describe your current most memorable situation as software developer/hacker? pabs: I had a great time creating fractals in BASIC, learning about the Mandelbrot set, L-systems and more. My days and nights of hacking on frhed (a GPLed hex editor for Windows) to help me cheat at Civilisation were pretty memorable. frhed led to my work on reverse engineering the CHM file format (a documentation format for Windows programs). A stand-out moment during my time with Debian was hacking on the derivates census patch generation code during the Debian UK BBQ weekend, surrounded by geeks playing Portal, cooking things, hacking on Debian and generally having a good time (thanks Steve!). me: Some memorable moments from Debian conferences? pabs: There are so many; meeting Debian folks, playing Mao once and then never again, late night games of werewolf, both delectably delicious and hideously disgusting cheeses, fried insects, day trips to beautiful landscapes, inspiring keynotes, exciting BoFs, secret IRC channels for planning surprise birthday parties, blue hair, wet air, blocks of fried cheese, a vast quantity of icecream, pants, geeks in the surf, volcanoes, hiking, a wonderful view, a uni-cycling stormtrooper & more. me: How do you see future of Debian development? pabs: I hope we will continue to exist and uphold our principles for the foreseeable future. I don't have any crystal balls though. me: You recently became member of Debian DSA - what is that like, what roles do you have and what tasks are in front of DSA? pabs: We wrote a bit of text about that for DPN recently. me: You have large knowledge on Debian and you share it with anyone who wants to know more. What motivates you to do so? pabs: I want the operating system I personally rely on to exist into the future, helping folks work on and join Debian can help with that. me: Why should developers and users join Debian community? What makes Debian a great and happy place? pabs: Every Debian contributor has different reasons for joining the community. Personally the Social Contract, the DFSG and the spirit and culture behind them are the main reason to be involved. I also like our many efforts towards technical excellence and correctness. Of course I've made a number of good friends over the years, especially as a result of attending DebConf every year since 2007. me: You are member of Debian publicity team which writes Debian news - do you need more people to join that team and how can they start? pabs: Since there is an infinite amount of work to do, pretty much every part of Debian always needs help, that includes the publicity team. We published a post about ways to help here. me: If someone wants to contribute to Debian in terms of packaging, can they do it anonymously (for example over Tor network, does Debian have .onion address)? pabs: Due to Debian's penchant for transparency it is harder but there are definitely package maintainers who have built up a reputation for good work under a pseudonym over the years and become Debian contributors as a result. I'm not aware of completely anonymous package maintainers but there are definitely people who file bugs using one-off pseudonyms, which is almost the same thing as anonymously. There are definitely Debian contributors and members who use Tor while contributing to Debian. In fact, as Debian is very highly dependent on OpenPGP and the best practices for OpenPGP include refreshing your keyring slowly over Tor, so probably quite a number of Debian contributors use Tor. As far as I know Debian itself does not run any Tor relays or onion services. me: What are places that non-packaging developers and people could join and help spread Debian even more? pabs: There are many ways to help Debian, including non-technical ones. Unfortunately our web page about helping Debian isn't quite up-to-date with all of them but a few more are to volunteer at DebConf, helo with artwork requests, speak about Debian at events or even come up with ideas for projects. Whatever skills you have, Debian can probably make use of them. If you aren't sure where to start, jump on the debian-mentors mailing list or IRC channel and we can probably guide you to the right place within Debian. Don't worry about not being skilled enough, everyone starts somewhere. me: How do you see Debian will manage webapps? pabs: Personally I prefer locally installed software, standard data formats and standard data transfer protocols to the wild webapps world but I understand they are becoming very popular to produce and use due to the ubiquity of the web browser platform. Antonio Terceiro is mentoring a project for this year's newcomer mentorship programs (outreachy/gsoc) that aims to improve support for installing web apps on Debian installations. I hope it succeeds as it could help make Debian more popular on servers and home servers in particular. me: How would you advise Debian (and other FLOSS users) to setup their machine in terms of security and anonymity? pabs: All technology has upsides and downsides. I would advise anyone to analyse their situation and protect themselves accordingly. For example if you have a bad memory, full disk encryption, which is based on pass-phrases might lead to data loss and physical security might be a better choice for protecting your data. The right choices around technology are very much a personal thing. me: Is it better to setup xmonad (because it is Haskell based WM) with small dependency chain or GNOME (because it is getting sandboxed apps) in term of security and privacy implications? pabs: Again, the right choices around technology are very much a personal thing. Due to the design of X11, both of these are approximately equivalent from a window-manager security properties point of view, that is to say, pretty bad. Wayland is one of the possible X11 successors and offers much better security properties. GNOME folks are working on switching to Wayland. Ultimately though it comes down to how each person uses their window manager and which software they run under it. me: Should Debian join Tor project as distro that installs Tor relays by default - should it offer that as option in installer in Debian 9? pabs: Running a Tor relay requires a reasonably fast and reliable Internet connection and should be a conscious decision on behalf of the sysadmin for a computer so Debian probably shouldn't install them by default. If tasksel gets support for installing tasks from Debian Pure Blends, then we could add a Tor relay task to the Debian Sanctuary Pure Blend. me: Have you ever considered joining initiatives such as FreedomBox? pabs: I was quite moved by Eben Moglen's talk at DebConf10 in New York and the resulting BoF. It seemed like a very ambitious project but I didn't really have the knowledge, skills or time to contribute yet. me: Are you a gamer? Valve Steam games are offered for free to Debian Developers - do you use steam and play Valve games? Your thoughts on Steam and non-free Linux gaming? pabs: I play computer games occasionally, all from Debian main or ones that I'm packaging. 0ad is my current go-to for a bit of gaming. I don't have any experience with Steam or non-free games on Linux. me: Is there something you would change in FLOSS ecosystem? pabs: Various folks have highlighted new and ongoing challenges for the FLOSS ecosystem in various places in recent years. Something that I would like to highlight that does not get talked about enough is the choices we make around our digital artefacts. This is the discussion around "preferred form for modification" or "source". The "source" for a particular digital artefact is a deliberate choice on behalf of the authors. Often generated files are distributed alongside the "source" without any instructions for reproducing the generated files from the "source". It sometimes happens that FLOSS contributors forget to distriute what they have chosen as "source", instead just distributing the generated files. This is a fairly well known issue but still happens. What isn't thought about quite as much is that the choice of "source" has consequences for future development possibilities of that "source". Some forms of "source" are more expressive than others, can be modified in a wider variety of ways and are better choices in general. Sometimes the consequences of choosing less expressive forms are mild and other times they are quite important. I hope more people will start to think about these choices. Some examples where, in my opinion, various people could have made better choices are listed in the mail I sent to the games team list last year. Another thing I would like to highlight is the work that organisations like Software Freedom Conservancy and Software in the Public Interest do to protect, defend, promote and support FLOSS projects. It is very important work that needs our interest and support. me: Can FLOSS world create great alternatives to Viber, Dropbox, WhatsUp, Facebook, Skype and other non-free services? pabs: I think that the FLOSS world has already created alternatives to all of those. The success of non-free services doesn't take these alternatives away but it does mean some of them are less useful because some of them are the kind of tools that become more useful with a larger amount of people using them. I don't know what it would take for the FLOSS alternatives to achieve similar success as network effects are hard to overcome. Hopefully mako is right and the network effects are overrated. me: Your thoughts and compare Cloud, IaaS, PaaS, SaaSS? To what should the FLOSS world pay more attention and energy? pabs: Initially I dismissed these as buzzwords and a threat to Free Software. These days I view them as potential opportunities for Free Software. Cloud-related technologies such as OpenStack and virtual machines can make private compute farm hardware more flexible and useful to their owners. IaaS providers can be used to run Debian more simply and cheaply and therefore bring Debian to more people than possible with hardware. PaaS providers can be used to run Free Software services. SaaSS can be based entirely on Free Software and respect users. Of course, just like running Free Software on hardware (proprietary or libre), cloud technology, IaaS, PaaS and SaaSS all come with downsides. The FLOSS world should aim to inform users of our software of these downsides. For example, the Debian installer could note that it is running on Intel CPUs with a proprietary BIOS and various proprietary software running, that it is running on a mobile phone with a locked bootloader, that it is running in a Xen VM on machines owned by Amazon. Free Software services could note they are running on Google App Engine etc. Free Software web browsers, chat clients etc could note when they are connecting to proprietary network services. All these notes could inform users about the downsides present in the particular situation encountered. There is also much work to be done making it easier to run Free Software on top of or use Free Software to connect to all manner of platforms from lowRISC to UEFI to VMware to Google App Engine to GitHub to Facebook. The more places Free Software can reach, the more people will be exposed to the philosophy behind it and the more potential there is for folks to join the community. While co-option of the FLOSS world is a dangerous certainty, co-option of proprietary platforms might be able to expand the reach of the philosophy behind Free Software. me: Your thoughts on Purism (the open hardware laptop initiative that got recently funded on CrowdSupply)? pabs: I don't know enough about that to comment but personally I am more interested in a laptop based on a libre CPU architecture. The RISC-V ISA and the lowRISC project seems to be one of the more promising possibilities at this point in time. me: Did you watch Citizenfour - comments on it? pabs: I've seen the trailer and look forward to watching it at some point, I read there might be a screening at DebConf15.

I've been using distributed version control systems for a good while, started with TLA back in 2001, when it was still a bunch of shell scripts and was simply called "Arch". I jumped the Git bandwagon quite early too, sometime around May 2005, I believe, though it was only something to test and play with on the side: I didn't migrate my projects over yet. There are many reasons why I preferred these over the systems I used in the past (RCS and CVS; never considered Subversion an option), most of those reasons have been discussed at length over the years, and there's no reason to do so again.The reason for this post, is because I read a blog post about why Git and the other DVCSes fall short. There are a number of things in that article that I find... well, lets just say misinformed. I'll try to explain why.But here's the rub

I have wanted to have the full history while offline a grand total of maybe about six times. And this is merely going down over time as bandwidth gets ever more readily available. If you work as a field tech, or on a space station, or in a submarine or something, then okay, sure, this is a huge feature for you. But for the rest of us, I am going to assert that this is not the use case you need to optimize for when choosing a VCS.

I'm neither a field tech, nor do I work on a space station or a submarine. Yet, having the full history available locally has been crucial for my work for at least the past six years. Initially, I worked offline primarily, because my internet connection was incredibly limited (slow, expensive and unreliable), yet, I had a habit of committing small changes often. I needed a full clone to work effectively, and conveniently. Throw-away branches and all that - I needed them local, I didn't have the resources to push them online every time I wanted a merge.But now that I have fast and reliable internet, why do I need the full history on my own computer? I do, because I do much more research than I do development. The vast majority of my work between 2010 and 2012 involved reading histories, cherry picking and so on. About six hours a day, I was reading the past. Having the full history locally is a terrific aid when your job involves digging through it.Between 2013 and 2014, the amount of history reading dropped significantly, but I still worked with long-lived branches a lot, branches where history matters, where having easy and fast access to them is indispensable. I still had to find changes based on content (not commit message, branch, date or anything - content) on a daily basis. Hitting the network for each and every search would have wasted not only tremendous bandwidth and processing power on the server, but also a significant amount of time.If you do more maintenance and research, or follow a good number of branches (or forks), with the intent to merge and cherry-pick actively from them, having all the histories available locally is a huge improvement. I'm happy to pay the price of "wasting" disk space to have this available. I couldn't work otherwise. Without full, local history, the things I did for syslog-ng would not have been possible. No maintenance, none of the features I implemented, none of the fixes I found. Why? Because I rely on the project's history to aid me in learning the whys, not just the hows.Thank you, but - perhaps unlike others - I like to learn from the past, and prefer doing it efficiently.Say goodbye to blobs (or your sanity (and sometimes both))

You know what kind of external binary asset management system works really well? Subversion. Turns out it works tolerably for source control, too. Maybe you should take a look at it.

Sure, some systems are better at managing binary assets. Git - and usually DVCSes - are terrible at it. There's nothing stopping anyone from using two systems: one for source, another for data. Mind you, I am extremely happy with git-annex. I disagree with Subversion being tolerable for source control. I'd turn this assertion around instead: You know what kind of system works really well for source code? Git. Turns out it works tolerably as an external binary assest management system, too. Maybe you should take a look at it.But then, I rarely need to work with blobs, so I'm likely not the best person to disagree here.Say goodbye to sane version synchronizationOkay, so this part of the article is ill-titled, I believe. Large repositories and version synchronisation are two different, not necessarily related topic. Granted DVCSes may not be the best fit for large repositories, but neither are centralised version control systems, based on my past experience. I had the misfortune of working with a roughly 3-4Gb (checked out) project, with extensive history, managed with a centralised version control system, without local history. It was terrible (and blame was so slow and expensive that we were told never to use it, because it crashed the server). While the system allowed us to have a reasonable overview over the whole project, but it utterly failed at allowing us to work at the component level. How do I see which version of component X we had in project release A? Or the version of component Y we had two weeks ago? Or what if we have component M, made up from components J and K, and belonging to component Z? Good luck managing that in a single repository.With TLA, we had configs, which were a bit cumbersome to use, but captured most of the essential parts of managing component bundling and hierarchical versioning far better than any other solution I've seen so far. I've yet to find an acceptable solution, but I'm convinced it will not have anything to do with centralised systems. You can't capture the delicate relations there.Say what again, I dare you, I double dare you

All of the above might be almost tolerable if DVCSes were easier to use than traditional SCMs, but they aren t.

I'm sorry, but have you tried managing a decently sized project, with a large history, built from multiple components with a traditional SCM? Because that is a colossal pain in the backside.Does Git's UI suck? Yes. But so did CVS's and Subversion's. If you rely on the command-line tools, you're going to feel the pain. That is why you use the IDE integration you surely have, which makes the most common tasks a breeze. That may sound like a git-apology, but remember, we did the same with every other version control system, because smart people prefer integration, and want the computer to work for them.

And yet, when someone dares to say that Git is harder than other SCMs, they inevitably get yelled at, in what I can only assume is a combination of Stockholm syndrome and groupthink run amok by overdosing on five-hour energy buckets.

If you feel the need to understand the innards of Git - then yes, it is harder than traditional SCMs. It is distributed, and different than what you're used to. If you do not have prior knowledge though, the difference in learning the internal working of Git and - say - Subversion all that different. And if you do not care how it works down below (and I dare say, a lot of developers should not, and do not care), then there is nothing to learn, apart from your IDE integration, which ain't different from a traditional SCM's.Mind you, I found it both interesting, and beneficial to learn Git's inner workings. Not only because it allowed me to make better use of my VCS, but because it taught me a bunch of things I could make use of elsewhere. I learned nothing from traditional SCMs.Do you hear the people sing, singing the song of angry men

There is one last major argument that I hear all the time about why DVCSes are superior, which is that they somehow enable more democratic code development.

The reason Git and other tools make code contribution easier is not GitHub pull requests (although, for drive-by contributions those are pretty useful too). The reason they make contribution easier is because you have your own copy of the full history. You can create your own branches easily, you can work with it as if you were the owner. For one-off contributions, that is no real advantage, I'll give you that. It takes more effort to fork & do a PR on GitHub, than to send a patch, I'll also agree with that.But once you start working with a project for more than a few patches, when you want to work with its history too, once you have long-lived branches, the local copy quickly becomes a great asset. Once you want to submit more than a few changes, you won't have to repeat a all steps. And not only that: since you have the full history, merging upstream changes (or just cherry picking from them), rebasing your work, and many other tasks become simpler.That is what it buys you, that is why it makes contribution easier. GitHub pull requests are an icing over the cake at best (and there are a good number of cases where the icing is completely unnecessary, because it doesn't go well with the cake).In closingIn closing, I'd like to highlight that different projects have different requirements. For example, I understand why Facebook, Google and a number of others use a single, huge repository. I happen to hate that setup, and would find working in such an environment horrible. But luckily, I don't work for those companies, and they don't listen to me, either, so everyone's happy. That does not mean I would go out and tell them they're wrong to use such a centralised, single-repository setup. For their use, in their situation, for their requirements, that may be the better option. For mine, not so much.In the end, what we need to realise is that there is no single tool that will fit all needs. There are tasks where Git is a terrible choice, but that does not make it terrible for all cases. Similarly, there are cases where Subversion is superior (I assume - I didn't have the misfortune of meeting with such a case).Instead of bashing the DVCS world, and assuming the Big Company use cases are all that matter, and that everyone uses the tools the same way, accept that some use it to achieve things you didn't think of, jobs you didn't consider.

Gammu 1.35.0 has been just released. This is just bugfix release to fix some major issues introduced in 1.34.0. Full list of changes:

• Fixed encoding of UTF-8 for higher code points.
• Improved provided udev rules.
• Fixed possible lock while getting network status in SMSD.
• Various localization updates.

You can download it from http://wammu.eu/download/. I will not make any promises for future releases (if there will be any) as the tool is not really in active development.

Filed under: English Gammu Wammu 0 comments Flattr this!

Recently, the Google protobuf developers announced a migration of their project's source code from an svn repository to a git repository. Up until this point, the Debian protobuf package repository had only tracked upstream development by embedding upstream release tarballs using gbp import-orig with pristine-tar. It would be nice to smoothly migrate the packaging repository to additionally make use of the --upstream-vcs-tag option to gbp import-orig, the advantages of which have been well described by Russ Allbery. This turned out to be harder than expected, so for reference I documented the steps I took below. Note that this packaging repository uses the default gbp import-orig repository layout, where upstream sources are placed on a branch named upstream, and the Debian branch is named master. Add an upstream remote configured to track the upstream repository's master branch and tags.

$ git remote add --tags --track master upstream https://github.com/google/protobuf.git

The upstream remote shouldn't be confused with our upstream branch. Note that git-remotes are local to the repository, so the upstream remote should probably be documented in the debian/README.source file. Fetch the upstream branch and tags.

$ git fetch upstream
warning: no common commits
remote: Counting objects: 5210, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (861/861), done.
remote: Total 5210 (delta 3869), reused 5194 (delta 3855)
Receiving objects: 100% (5210/5210), 3.57 MiB   1.43 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (3869/3869), done.
From https://github.com/google/protobuf
 * [new branch]      master     -> upstream/master
 * [new tag]         v2.6.0     -> v2.6.0
$

We now have a git-remote upstream, a remote-tracking branch upstream/master which corresponds to the master branch that upstream makes releases from, and a release tag v2.6.0. Note that the remote-tracking branch upstream/master shouldn't be confused with our master branch. Up until this point, our upstream branch has been synthetically generated by importing upstream's release tarballs with gbp import-orig. We need to merge this synthetic history with upstream/master. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a way to do this without using a temporary branch.

$ git checkout -b tmp upstream/master
Branch tmp set up to track remote branch master from upstream.
Switched to a new branch 'tmp'
$ git merge -s ours -m \
  "Merge the original 'upstream' branch with upstream's new master branch" upstream
Merge made by the 'ours' strategy.
$ git checkout upstream
Switched to branch 'upstream'
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/upstream'.
$ git merge --ff-only tmp
Updating 7ed940b..9ba221e
Fast-forward
 CHANGES.txt                                                          49 +-
 COPYING.txt => LICENSE                                                0
 Makefile.am                                                          64 +-
 Makefile.in                                                        1041 --
 README.txt => README.md                                              49 +-
[...many more lines...]
$ git branch -D tmp
Deleted branch tmp (was 5f18f02).
$

There are now an additional 400 or so commits on our upstream branch, corresponding to the new git repository history published by upstream. Import the 2.6.0 release tarball against the upstream v2.6.0 tag, using the --upstream-vcs-tag option.

$ git checkout master
Switched to branch 'master'
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
$ gbp import-orig -u 2.6.0 --upstream-vcs-tag=v2.6.0 ~/debian/tarballs/protobuf_2.6.0.orig.tar.gz
gbp:info: Importing '/home/edmonds/debian/tarballs/protobuf_2.6.0.orig.tar.gz' to branch 'upstream'...
gbp:info: Source package is protobuf
gbp:info: Upstream version is 2.6.0
pristine-tar: committed protobuf_2.6.0.orig.tar.gz.delta to branch pristine-tar
gbp:info: Merging to 'master'
gbp:info: Successfully imported version 2.6.0 of /home/edmonds/debian/tarballs/protobuf_2.6.0.orig.tar.gz
$

The upstream branch now contains a mixture of the original series of release tarball content imported by plain gbp import-orig and the upstream/master branch as published by upstream. Updating the Debian packaging repository when new upstream releases occur only requires a git fetch to pull down upstream's updated git history and release tag and using the --upstream-vcs-tag option when importing the release tarball with gbp import-orig.

Edit: Now translated to Chinese. Thanks zhang wei! There is really hardly a better way to open a series of interviewing with developers behind Free Libre Open Source Software project, then with incredible mind such as Joey Hess. To write his contributions to Free software ecosystem, especially in Debian, would be a book by itself. His impact exceeds even his projects - people literally follow his blog posts to see what he is doing and how is he living. A hacker from cabin. If you really need to have a picture of true hacker, then Joey is the one. As this isn't a book I will just mention few projects that he has been behind - git-annex, ikiwiki, etckeeper, debian installer, parts of dpkg, debhelper, devscripts, taskel. So without further waiting here it is. me: Who are you? joeyh: I'm Joey -- https://joeyh.name/ me: How did you start programming? joeyh: Atari 130XE which came with BASIC and a boring word processor and not much else. No other friends had one, so the only way to get software was to type in demo programs from manual and then begin to change and write my own. So, the easy way to learn. Also some Logo in school. me: How would you now advise others to start programming? joeyh: Difficult question, it seems much harder to get an intimate understanding of things than when I started, and much harder to be motivated to program when there's so much stuff easily available. Maybe simple bare-metal systems like Arduino coupled with real-world interaction are the answer. I've recently been mentoring my nephew who is learning python and Python the Hard Way has gotten him far impressively fast. me: Setup of your development machine? joeyh: Lenovo laptop de-spywared with Debian unstable, xmonad, xfce, vim. me: Your thoughts on Purism (the open hardware laptop initiative that got recently funded on CrowdSupply)? joeyh: I don't know much about that one, but it seems that consumer level hardware has gotten so low quality, and so closed and untrustworthy that it makes sense to either build alternatives that are open, or pick out, as a community, the stuff we can adapt to our needs and concentrate on it. Several projects are trying, I hope they succeed. me: How do you see future of Debian development? joeyh: Well, I've mostly stopped worrying about it. If you look back at my presentations at the past 2 or 3 DebConfs, you'll find my best thoughts on the matter. me: You retired as Debian developer - do you intend sometime soon to come back and/or do you plan to join some other communities? joeyh: It would be glorious to come back, wouldn't it? But I don't think I will. Can't step in the same river twice, and all. Instead, Debian will probably have to put up with me as an annoying upstream author who doesn't ship tarballs, but does ship debian/ directories, and as a bug reporter who enjoys reporting amusing bugs like -0 NaN. I seem to have more time to spend in other online communities since I left Debian, but in a more diffuse way. Maybe that's just what it's like, to be involved in Free Software but not in the embrace of a big project like Debian. me: Some memorable moments from Debian conferences? joeyh: There are so many! Picnicing on berries and tamales at the Portland farmer's market right outside the venue; rainbows and bonfire in Switzerland after crazy busy days; impromptu pipe organ repair in a weird night venue in Edinburgh; walking through Porto Alegre at night with Ian Murdock and how humble he was about what he'd started; hacking all night in Spain; failing to sleep through midnight sun and incessent partying Finland; hanging out in the hotel lobby in Atlanta where we designed Build-Depends. me: Are you a gamer? Valve Steam games are offered for free to Debian Developers - do you use steam and play Valve games? joeyh: I've played through Half Life and Portal, but nethack has claimed more of my time. I mostly enjoy short, indie games, or games that tell us something new about the medium of games, A recent favorite was A Dark Room. But really, I have more pure fun playing real world Tabletop games with friends, like Carcassanne Discovery and Hive. In March, I am going to try to write a roguelike game in one week, in Haskell, for the Seven Day Roguelike Challenge and I'll be blogging about my progress daily. me: You are nowdays a Haskell hacker (git-annex) - what would you like to say about this language and how does it compare to Python, C, JavaScript, Ruby and Perl? joeyh: Not just git-annex; all my current projects are written in Haskell. I think it's amazing how much we expect programmers to keep in their heads while writing code. Is that buffer going to overflow? Is changing the value of that global variable going to break some other part of the code? Is that input sanitized yet? Did that interface change? Haskell solves some of these outright, but more, it makes you start noticing this kind of pervasive issue, and it provides ways to completely eliminate a class of problems from your code. For example http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/making_propellor_safer_with_GADTs_and_type_families/. The class of bugs I avoided there had never affected my code even once, but it was still worth preventing that whole class of bugs, so I don't have to worry about them ever again. me: Would you suggest Haskell as first language to learn especially for those that have an itch for mathematics? joeyh: I think that can work well. Or it can go other the way -- I had an affinity to mathematics when I was young, but it got knocked out of me in the way that happens to many people, and languages like perl and C don't do much to make you want to learn more about higher-order math. I've been picking up a bit more here and there via Haskell. me: How do you compare your productivity in Haskell compared to your Perl days? joeyh: It's very different; I'm a very different programmer now. I probably would bang out quick hacks more quickly when I was writing Perl. But, they tended to stay quick hacks. Now, I might take a little longer to get there, but the code seems a lot more solid, while also being more malleable to turn into larger or different programs. I'm also a lot more drawn toward writing software libraries. me: Can you describe your philosophy of life (you live in cabin, in forest, using a lot of solar power - many people are intrigued (including myself) what drives you towards that kind of life and how does it impact your overall quality of life and happiness. Looking the todays modern predator capitalistic society, in which you could easily earn more then $10.000 a month, you seem to be an anarchist and very humble human)? joeyh: I want to build worthwhile things that might last. Which is super hard in the world of software, both because it's hard to think far ahead at all, and because most jobs don't emphasize that kind of real value. I've been lucky and bootstrapped up to a point where I've been able to work full time on free software for years, and I'm willing to forgo a lot to continue that. Living in the woods without modern conveniences is great, because it's quiet and you can think as much as you like; the internet is just as close as it is anywhere else (maybe a bit slower); and when you've spent too much time quietly thinking you'll need to go chop wood, or haul water, or jump in the river to cool off, depending on the season. (Humble? Like most programmers, I am internally a flaming tower of ego...)
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My recent Debian LTS activities

Over the past months, my employer credativ has sponsored some of my work time to keep PostgreSQL updated for squeeze-lts. Version 8.4 of PostgreSQL was declared end-of-life by the upstream PostgreSQL Global Development Group (PGDG) last summer, around the same time official squeeze support ended and squeeze-lts took over. Together with my colleagues Christoph Berg (who is on the PostgreSQL package maintainer team) and Bernd Helmle, we continued backpatching changes to 8.4. We tried our best to continue the PGDG backpatching policy and looked only at commits at the oldest still maintained branch, REL9_0_STABLE.

Our work is publicly available as a separate REL8_4_LTS branch on Github. The first release (called 8.4.22lts1) happened this month mostly coinciding with the official 9.0, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3 and 9.4 point releases. Christoph Berg has uploaded the postgresql-8.4 Debian package for squeeze-lts and release tarballs can be found on Github here (scroll down past the release notes for the tarballs).

We intend to keep the 8.4 branch updated on a best-effort community basis for the squeeze-lts lifetime. If you have not yet updated from 8.4 to a more recent version of PostgreSQL, you probably should. But if you are stuck on squeeze, you should use our LTS packages. If you have any questions or comments concerning PostgreSQL for squeeze-lts, contact me.

A coworker and I debugged a fascinating problem today. They had a tomcat7 installation with a couple of webapps, and one of the bundled libraries was logging in German. Everything else was logging in English (the webapps themselves, and the things the other bundled libraries did). We searched around a bit, and eventually found that the wrongly-logging library (something jaxb/jax-ws) was using, after unravelling another few layers of library bundling another library as convenience copy (gah, Java!), com.sun.xml.ws.resources.WsservletMessages which contains quite a few com.sun.istack.localization.Localizable members. Looking at the other classes in that package, in particular Localizer, showed that it defaults to the java.util.Locale.getDefault() value for the language. Which is set from the environment. Looking at /proc/pid-of-JVM-running-tomcat7/environ showed nothing, of course . The system locale was, properly, set to English. (We mostly use en_GB.UTF-8 for better paper sizes and the metric system (unless the person requesting the machine, or the admin creating it, still likes the system to speak German *shudder*), but that one still had en_US.UTF-8.) Browsing the documentation for java.util.Locale proved more fruitful: it also contains a setDefault method, which sets the new default locale JVM-wide. Turns out another of the webapps used that for some sort of internal localisation. Clearly, the containment of tomcat7 is incomplete in this case. Documenting for the larger net, in case someone else runs into this. It s not as if things like this would be showing up in the USA, where the majority of development appears to happen.

Akonadi client example After many failed attemps I have managed to build a C++ akonadi client. It has felt like one of the most frustrating programming experiences of my whole life, so I'm sharing the results hoping to spare others from all the suffering. First thing first, akonadi client libraries are not in libakonadi-dev but in kdepimlibs5-dev, even if kdepimlibs5-dev does not show in apt-cache search akonadi. Then, kdepimlibs is built with Qt4. If your application uses Qt5 (mine was) you need to port it back to Qt4 if you want to talk to Akonadi. Then, kdepimlibs does not seem to support qmake and does not ship pkg-config .pc files, and if you want to use kdepimlibs your build system needs to be cmake. I ported by code from qmake to cmake, and now qtcreator wants me to run cmake by hand every time I change the CMakeLists.txt file, and it stopped allowing to add, rename or delete sources. Finally, most of the code / build system snippets found on the internet seem flawed in a way or another, because the build toolchain of Qt/KDE applications has undergone several redesignins during time, and the network is littered with examples from different eras. The way to obtain template code to start a Qt/KDE project is to use kapptemplate. I have found no getting started tutorial on the internet that said "do not just copy the snippets from here, run kapptemplate instead so you get them up to date". kapptemplate supports building an "Akonadi Resource" and an "Akonadi Serializer", but it does not support generating template code for an akonadi client. That left me with the feeling that I was dealing with some software that wants to be developed but does not want to be used. Anyway, now an example of how to interrogate Akonadi exists as is on the internet. I hope that all the tears of blood that I cried this morning have not been cried in vain.

Hello Thanks to Devel::NYTProf, I ve realized that Module::CoreList was used in a not optimal way (to say the least) in Config::Model::Dpkg::Dependency when checking the dependency between Perl packages. (Note that only Perl packages with many dependencies were affected by this lack of performance) After a rework, the performance are much better. Here s an example comparing check time before and after the modification of libconfig-model-dpkg-perl. With libconfig-model-dpkg-perl 2.059:
$ time cme check dpkg
Using Dpkg
loading data
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
checking data
check done real 0m10.235s
user 0m10.136s
sys 0m0.088s With libconfig-model-dpkg-perl 2.060:
$ time cme check dpkg
Using Dpkg
loading data
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
checking data
check done real 0m1.565s
user 0m1.468s
sys 0m0.092s All in all, a 8x performance improvement on the dependency check. Note that, due to the freeze, the new version of libconfig-model-dpkg-perl is available only in experimental. All the best
Tagged: Config::Model, debian, dpkg, package

So blah blah Superfish blah blah trivial MITM everything's broken.

Lenovo deserve criticism. The level of incompetence involved here is so staggering that it wouldn't be a gross injustice for the company to go under as a result[1]. But let's not pretend that this is some sort of isolated incident. As an industry, we don't care about user security. We will gladly ship products with known security failings and no plans to update them. We will produce devices that are locked down such that it's impossible for anybody else to fix our failures. We will hide behind vague denials, we will obfuscate the impact of flaws and we will deflect criticisms with announcements of new and shinier products that will make everything better.

It'd be wonderful to say that this is limited to the proprietary software industry. I would love to be able to argue that we respect users more in the free software world. But there are too many cases that demonstrate otherwise, even where we should have the opportunity to prove the benefits of open development. An obvious example is the smartphone market. Hardware vendors will frequently fail to provide timely security updates, and will cease to update devices entirely after a very short period of time. Fortunately there's a huge community of people willing to produce updated firmware. Phone manufacturer is never going to fix the latest OpenSSL flaw? As long as your phone can be unlocked, there's a reasonable chance that there's an updated version on the internet.

But this is let down by a kind of callous disregard for any deeper level of security. Almost every single third-party Android image is either unsigned or signed with the "test keys", a set of keys distributed with the Android source code. These keys are publicly available, and as such anybody can sign anything with them. If you configure your phone to allow you to install these images, anybody with physical access to your phone can replace your operating system. You've gained some level of security at the application level by giving up any real ability to trust your operating system.

This is symptomatic of our entire ecosystem. We're happy to tell people to disable security features in order to install third-party software. We're happy to tell people to download and build source code without providing any meaningful way to verify that it hasn't been tampered with. Install methods for popular utilities often still start "curl sudo bash". This isn't good enough.

We can laugh at proprietary vendors engaging in dreadful security practices. We can feel smug about giving users the tools to choose their own level of security. But until we're actually making it straightforward for users to choose freedom without giving up security, we're not providing something meaningfully better - we're just providing the same shit sandwich on different bread.

[1] I don't see any way that they will, but it wouldn't upset me

comments

I had the mixed pleasure of doing a partial rewrite of lintian s reporting framework. It started as a problem with generating the graphs, which turned out to be not enough memory . On the plus side, I am actually quite pleased with the end result. I managed to scope-creep myself quite a bit and I ended up getting rid of a lot of old issues. The major changes in summary:

• A lot of logic was moved out of harness, meaning it is now closer to becoming a simple dumb task scheduler. With the logic being moved out in separate processes, harness now hogs vastly less memory that I cannot convince perl to release to the OS. On lilburn.debian.org vastly less is on the order of reducing 700ish MB to 32 MB .
• All important metadata was moved into the harness state-cache , which is a simple YAML file. This means that Lintian laboratory is no longer a data store. This change causes a lot of very positive side effects.
• With all metadata now stored in a single file, we can now do atomic updates of the data store. That said, this change itself does not enable us to run multiple lintian s in parallel.
• As the lintian laboratory is no longer a data store, we can now do our processing in throw away laboratories like the regular lintian user does. As the permanent laboratory is the primary source of failure, this removes an entire class of possible problems.

There are also some nice minor features :

• Packages can now be up to date in the generated reports. Previously, they would always be listed as out of date even if they were up to date. This is the only end user/website-visitor visible change in all of this (besides the graphs are now working again \o/).
• The size of the harness work list is no longer based on the number of changes to the archive.
• The size of the harness work list can now be changed with a command line option and is no longer hard coded to 1024. However, the time limit remains hard coded for now.
• The full run (and clean run ) now simply marks everything out-of-date and processes its (new) backlog over the next (many) harness runs. Accordingly, a full-run no longer causes lintian to run 5-7 days on lilburn.d.o before getting an update to the website. Instead we now get incremental updates.
• The harness.log now features status updates from lintian as they happen with processed X successfully or error processing Y plus a little wall time benchmark. With this little feature I filed no less than 3 bugs against lintian 2 of which are fixed in git. The last remains unfixed but can only be triggered in Debian stable.
• It is now possible with throw-away labs to terminate the lintian part of a reporting run early with minimal lost processing. Since the lintian-harness is regular fed status updates from lintian, we can now mark successfully completed entries as done even if lintian does not complete its work list. Caveat: There may be minor inaccuracies in the generated report for the particular package lintian was processing when it was interrupted. This will fix itself when the package is reprocessed again.
• It is now vastly easier to collect new meta data to be used in the reports. Previously, they had to be included in the laboratory and extracted from there. Now, we just have to fit it into a YAML file. In fact, I have been considering to add the wall time and make a top X slowest page.
• It is now possible to generate the html pages with only a state-cache and the lintian.log file. Previously, it also required a populated lintian laboratory.

As you can probably tell, I am quite pleased with the end result. The reporting framework lacks behind in development, since it just sits there and takes care of itself . Also with the complete lack of testing, it also suffers from the if it is not broken, then do not fix it paradigm (because we will not notice if we broke until it is too late). Of course, I managed to break the setup a couple of times in the process. However, a bonus feature of the reporting setup is that if you break it, it simply leaves an outdated report on the website. Anyway, enjoy. :)
Filed under: Debian, Lintian

Weblate 2.2 has been released today. It comes with improved search, user interface cleanup and various other fixes. Full list of changes for 2.2:

• Performance improvements.
• Fulltext search on location and comments fields.
• New SVG/javascript based activity charts.
• Support for Django 1.8.
• Support for deleting comments.
• Added own SVG badge.
• Added support for Google Analytics.
• Improved handling of translation file names.
• Added support for monolingual JSON translations.
• Record component locking in a history.
• Support for editing source (template) language for monolingual translations.
• Added basic support for Gerrit.

You can find more information about Weblate on http://weblate.org, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. You can login there with demo account using demo password or register your own user. Weblate is also being used https://hosted.weblate.org/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, Gammu, Weblate itself and other projects. If you are free software project which would like to use Weblate, I'm happy to help you with set up or even host Weblate for you. Further development of Weblate would not be possible without people providing donations, thanks to everybody who have helped so far! PS: The roadmap for next release is just being prepared, you can influence this by expressing support for individual issues either by comments or by providing bounty for them.

Filed under: English phpMyAdmin SUSE Weblate 0 comments Flattr this!

Over the past year or so various people have been automating kernel builds with the aim of both setting the standard that things should build reliably and using the resulting builds for automated testing. This has been having good results, it s especially nice to compare the results for older stable kernel builds with current ones and notice how much happier everything is. One of the challenges with doing this is that for good coverage you really need to include allmodconfig or allyesconfig builds to ensure coverage of as much kernel code as possible but that s fairly resource intensive given the size of the kernel, especially when you want to cover several architectures. It s also fairly important to get prompt results, development trees are changing all the time and the longer the gap between a problem appearing and it being identified the more likely the report is to be redundant. Since I was looking at my own setup and I know of several people who ve done similar benchmarking I thought I d publish some ballpark numbers for from scratch allmodconfig builds on a single architecture:

i7-4770 with SSD	20 minutes
linode 2048	1.25 hours
EC2 m3.medium	1.5 hours
EC2 c3.large	2 hours
Cubietruck with SSD	20 hours
Intel Celeron N2940	1.75 hours

All with the number of tasks spawned by make set to the number of execution threads the system has and no speedups from anything like ccache. I may keep this updated in future with further results. Obviously there s tradeoffs beyond the time, especially for someone like me doing this at home with their own resources my desktop is substantially faster than anything else I ve tried but I m also using it interactively for my work, it s not easily accessible when not at home and the fans spin up during builds while EC2 starts to cost noticeable money to use as you add more builds.

I d like to share a few tips that were useful to strengthen my personal email organization. Most of what follows is probably not very new nor special, but hey, let s document it anyway. Many people have an inbox folder that just grow over time. It s actually similar to a twitter or RSS feed (except they probably agree that they are supposed to read more of their email feed ). When I send an email to them, it sometimes happen that they don t notice it, if the email arrives at a bad time. Of course, as long as they don t receive too many emails, and there aren t too many people relying on them, it might just work. But from time to time, it s super-painful for those interacting with them, when they miss an email and they need to be pinged again. So let s try not to be like them. :-) Tip #1: do Inbox Zero (or your own variant of it) Inbox Zero is an email management methodology inspired from David Allen s Getting Things Done book. It s best described in this video. The idea is to turn one s Inbox into an area that is only temporary storage, where every email will get processed at some point. Processing can mean deleting an email, archiving it, doing the action described in the email (and replying to it), etc. Put differently, it basically means implementing the Getting Things Done workflow on one s email. Tip #1.1: archive everything One of the time-consuming decisions in the original GTD workflow is to decide whether something should be eliminated (deleted) or stored for reference. Given that disk space is quite cheap, it s much easier to never decide about that, and just archive everything (by duplicating the email to an archive folder when it is received). To retrieve archived emails when needed, I then use notmuch within mutt to easily search through recent (< 2 year) archives. I use archivemail to archive older email in compressed mboxes from time to time, and grepmail to search through those mboxes when needed. I don t archive most Debian mailing lists though, as they are easy to fetch from master.d.o with the following script:

#!/bin/sh
rsync -vP master.debian.org:~debian/*/*$1/*$1.$ 2:-$(date +%Y%m) * .

Then I can fetch a specific list archive with getlist devel 201502, or a set of archives with e.g. getlist devel 2014, or the current month with e.g. getlist devel. Note that to use grepmail on XZ-compressed archives, you need libmail-mbox-messageparser-perl version 1.5002-3 (only in unstable I was using a locally-patched version for ages, but finally made a patch last week, which Gregor kindly uploaded). Tip #1.2: split your inbox (Yes, this one looks obvious but I m always surprised at how many people don t do that.) Like me, you probably receive various kinds of emails:

• emails about your day job
• emails about Debian
• personal emails
• mailing lists about your day job
• mailing lists about Debian
• etc.

Splitting those into separate folders has several advantages:

• I can adjust my default action based on the folder I am in (e.g. delete after reading for most mailing lists, as it s archived already)
• I can adjust my level of focus depending on the folder (I might not want to pay a lot of attention to each and every email from a mailing list I am only remotely interested in; while I should definitely pay attention to each email in my DPL folder)
• When busy, I can skip the less important folders for a few days, and still be responsive to emails sent in my more important folders

I ve seen some people splitting their inbox into too many folders. There s not much point in having a per-sender folder organization (unless there s really a recurring flow of emails from a specific person), as it increases the risk of missing an email. I use procmail to organize my email into folders. I know that there are several more modern alternatives, but I haven t looked at them since procmail does the job for me. Resulting organization I use one folder for my day-job email, one for my DPL email, one for all other email directed or Cced to me. Then, I have a few folders for automated notifications of stuff. My Debian mailing list folders are auto-managed by procmail s $MATCH:

:0:
 * ^X-Mailing-List: <.*@lists\.debian\.org>
 * ^X-Mailing-List: <debian-\/[^@]*
 .ml.debian.$MATCH/

Some other mailing lists are in they separate folders, and there s a catch-all folder for the remaining ones. Ah, and since I use feed2imap, I have folders for the RSS/Atom feeds I follow. I have two different commands to start mutt. One only shows a restricted number of (important) folders. The other one shows the full list of (non-empty) folders. This is a good trick to avoid spending time reading email when I am supposed to do something more important. :) As for many people probably, my own organization is loosely based on GTD and Inbox Zero. It sometimes happen that some emails stay in my Inbox for several days or weeks, but I very rarely have more than 20 or 30 emails in one of my main inbox folders. I also do reviews of the whole content of my main inbox folders once or twice a week, to ensure that I did not miss an email that could be acted on quickly. A last trick is that I have a special folder replies, where procmail copies emails that are replies to a mail I sent, but which do not Cc me. That s useful to work-around Debian s no Cc on reply to mailing list posts policy. I receive email using offlineimap (over SSH to my mail server), and send it using nullmailer (through a SSH tunnel). The main advantage of offlineimap over using IMAP directly in mutt is that using IMAP to a remote server feels much more sluggish. Another advantage is that I only need SSH access to get my full email setup to work. Tip #2: tracking sent emails Two recurring needs I had was:

• Get an overview of emails I sent to help me write the day-to-day DPL log
• Easily see which emails got an answer, or did not (which might mean that they need a ping)

I developed a short script to address that. It scans the content of my Sent maildir and my archive maildirs, and, for each email address I use, displays (see example output in README) the list of emails sent with this address (one email per line). It also detects if an email was replied to ( R column after the date), and abbreviates common parts in email addresses (debian-project@lists.debian.org becomes d-project@l.d.o). It also generates a temporary maildir with symlinks to all emails, so that I can just open the maildir if needed.