• Satyam blogged about his first experiences hacking on diffoscope.
• Ceridwen wrote about her first steps on reprotest, which now has a git repo.

• Paul Gevers uploaded fpc/3.0.0+dfsg-5 with a new helper script fp-fix-timestamps, which helps with reproducibility issues of PPU files in freepascal packages.
• Sascha Steinbiss uploaded a patched version of epydoc to our experimental repository to test a patch for the use_epydoc issue.

• Initial patch for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH support in Clang (emaste)

• aft/2:5.098-3 by Robert Lemmen, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• bbswitch/0.8-4 by Vincent Cheng, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• cgal/4.8-4 by Joachim Reichel.
• gnuplot/4.6.6-4 by Anton Gladky.
• jmodeltest/2.1.10+dfsg-2 by Andreas Tille.
• kball/0.0.20041216-9 by Markus Koschany, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• netmaze/0.81+jpg0.82-15 by John Goerzen, original patches by Chris Lamb (#778200) and Maria Valentina Marin (#793731).
• pacemaker/1.1.15~rc3-1 by Ferenc W gner.
• pam/1.1.8-3.3 by Laurent Bigonville, original patch by Juan Picca.
• plast/2.3.1+dfsg-4 by Sascha Steinbiss.
• prospector/0.11.7-7 by Daniel Stender.
• pymia/0.1.8-1 by Gert Wollny.
• python-cobra/0.4.1-2 by Sascha Steinbiss.
• python-latexcodec/1.0.3-3 by Sascha Steinbiss, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• pyx/0.12.1-5 by Stuart Prescott, original patch by Alexis Bienven e.
• rdp-readseq/2.0.2-2 by Sascha Steinbiss.
• stevedore/1.14.0-1 by Ond ej Nov .
• wise/2.4.1-18 by Sascha Steinbiss.

• binutils/2.26-10 by Matthias Klose, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• pyx3/0.14.1-2 by Stuart Prescott, based on original patch by Alexis Bienven e.

• h2database/1.4.192-1 by Emmanuel Bourg, which forces a specific locale to generate documentation.

• #825764 against docbook-ebnf by Chris Lamb: sort list of globbed files.
• #825857 against python-setuptools by Anton Gladky: sort list of files in native_libs.txt.
• #825968 against epydoc by Sascha Steinbiss: traverse lists in sorted order.
• #826051 against dh-lua by Reiner Herrmann: sort list of Lua versions embedded into control file.
• #826093 against osc by Alexis Bienven e: use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH for manpage date.
• #826158 against texinfo by Alexis Bienven : use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH for dates in makeinfo output.
• #826162 against slime by Alexis Bienven e: sort list of contributors locale-independently.
• #826209 against fastqtl by Chris Lamb: normalize permissions and order in tarball.
• #826309 against gnupg2 by intrigeri: don't embed hostname and timestamp into gpgv.exe.

• New issues:
  • date_added_by_ui_auto
  • timestamp_in_info_file_created_by_makeinfo
  • unsorted_lua_versions_in_control
  • random_order_in_native_libs_by_setuptools
  • ftbfs_build-indep_not_build_on_armhf

• diffoscope 53 was been released by Mattia Rizzolo, with:
  • various improvements on temporary file handling;
  • fix a crash when comparing directories with broken symlinks (#818856);
  • great improvement on the deb(5) support (#818414), by Reiner Herrmann;
  • add FreeBSD packages in --list-tools, by Ed Maste.
• diffoscope 54 (released shortly after) to address a regression involving --list-tools, where a syntax error prevented proper listing of all tools.

• Added pages with oldest logs per arch (h01ger)
• 3 new armhf hosts were added (vagrant)
  • setup and maintenance jobs added (h01ger)
  • 7 new builder jobs for armhf added (h01ger)
• HOME environment variation on tests.r-b.org and prebuilder (mattia), after Johannes Schauer discovered that this variation was not detected.
• 7 new package sets (for a total of 42) were added by h01ger:
  • mate
  • mate_build-depends
  • maint_debian-python
  • maint_debian-qa
  • maint_debian-science
  • maint_pkg-fonts-devel
  • maint_pkg-games-devel
• Improved rescheduling of packages in "depwait" state (h01ger)
• Use eatmydata on i386+armhf (h01ger) (doesn't work yet; needs unreleased pbuilder features)

• Implement end-to-end encryption
• Receive messages the moment they are sent without draining the battery

The biggest problem is that there is no easy way to send push messages between my app and your app. For me to send a push to one of your app s users on iOS, I must first obtain an APNs SSL certificate/key pair from you, and one of your user s push token that uniquely identifies their device to Apple. These push tokens are potentially sensitive information because they allow Apple to locate your device (in order to send it a push).

Debian Long Term Support (LTS) This is my 6th month working on Debian LTS, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This is my largest month so far, for which I had requested 20 hours of work.

Xen work I spent the largest amount of time working on the Xen packages. We had to re-roll the patches because it turned out we originally just imported the package from Ubuntu as-is. This was a mistake because that package forked off the Debian packaging a while ago and included regressions in the packaging itself, not just security fixes. So I went ahead and rerolled the whole patchset and tested it on Koumbit's test server. Brian May then completed the uploaded, which included about 40 new patches, mostly from Ubuntu.

Frontdesk duties Next up was the frontdesk duties I had taken this week. This was mostly uneventful, although I had forgotten how to do some of the work and thus ended up doing extensive work on the contributor's documentation. This is especially important since new contributors joined the team! I also did a lot of Debian documentation work in my non-sponsored work below. The triage work involved chasing around missing DLAs, triaging away OpenJDK-6 (for which, let me remind you, security support has ended in LTS), raised the question of Mediawiki maintenance.

Other LTS work I also did a bunch of smaller stuff. Of importance, I can note that I uploaded two advisories that were pending from April: NSS and phpMyAdmin. I also reviewed the patches for the ICU update, since I built the one for squeeze (but didn't have time to upload before squeeze hit end-of-life). I have tried to contribute to the NTP security support but that was way too confusing to me, and I have left it to the package maintainer which seemed to be on top of things, even if things mean complete chaos and confusion in the world of NTP. I somehow thought that situation had improved with the recent investments in ntpsec and ntimed, but unfortunately Debian has not switched to the ntpsec codebase, so it seems that the NTP efforts have diverged in three different projects instead of closing into a single, better codebase.

Future LTS work This is likely to be my last month of work on LTS until September. I will try to contribute a few hours in June, but July and August will be very busy for me outside of Debian, so it's unlikely that I contribute much to the project during the summer. My backlog included those packages which might be of interest to other LTS contributors:

• libxml2: no upstream fix, but needs fixing!
• tiff ,3 : same mess
• libgd2: maintainer contacted
• samba regression: mailed bug #821811 to try to revive the effort
• policykit-1: to be investigated
• p7zip: same

Other free software work

Debian documentation I wrote an detailed short guide to Debian package development, something I felt was missing from the existing corpus, which seems to be too focus in covering all alternatives. My guide is opinionated: I believe there is a right and wrong way of doing things, or at least, there are best practices, especially when just patching packages. I ended up retroactively publishing that as a blog post - now I can simply tag an item with blog and it shows up in the blog. (Of course, because of a mis-configuration on my side, I have suffered from long delays publishing to Debian planet, so all the posts dates are off in the Planet RSS feed. This will hopefully be resolved around the time this post is published, but this allowed me to get more familiar with the Planet Venus software, as detailed in that other article.) Apart from the guide, I have also done extensive research to collate information that allowed me to create workflow graphs of the various Debian repositories, which I have published in the Debian Release section of the Debian wiki. Here is the graph: It helps me understand how packages flow between different suites and who uploads what where. This emerged after I realized I didn't really understand how "proposed updates" worked. Since we are looking at implementing a similar process for the security queue, I figured it was useful to show what changes would happen, graphically. I have also published a graph that describes the relations between different software that make up the Debian archive. The idea behind this is also to provide an overview of what happens when you upload a package in the Debian archive, but it is more aimed at Debian developers trying to figure out why things are not working as expected. The graphs were done with Graphviz, which allowed me to link to various components in the graph easily, which is neat. I also prefered Graphviz over Dia or other tools because it is easier to version and I don't have to bother (too much) about the layout and tweaking the looks. The downside is, of course, that when Graphviz makes the wrong decision, it's actually pretty hard to make it do the right thing, but there are various workarounds that I have found that made the graphs look pretty good. The source is of course available in git but I feel all this documentation (including the guide) should go in a more official document somewhere. I couldn't quite figure out where. Advice on this would be of course welcome.

Ikiwiki I have made yet another plugin for Ikiwiki, called irker, which enables wikis to send notifications to IRC channels, thanks to the simple irker bot. I had trouble with Irker in the past, since it was not quite reliable: it would disappear from channels and not return when we'd send it a notification. Unfortunately, the alternative, the KGB bot is much heavier: each repository needs a server-side, centralized configuration to operate properly. Irker's design is simpler and more adapted to a simple plugin like this. Let's hope it will work reliably enough for my needs. I have also suggested improvements to the footnotes styles, since they looked like hell in my Debian guide. It turns out this was an issue with the multimarkdown plugin that doesn't use proper semantic markup to identify footnotes. The proper fix is to enable footnotes in the default Discount plugin, which will require another, separate patch. Finally, I have done some improvements (I hope!) on the layout of this theme. I made the top header much lighter and transparent to work around an issue where followed anchors would be hidden under the top header. I have also removed the top menu made out of the sidebar plugin because it was cluttering the display too much. Those links are all on the frontpage anyways and I suspect people were not using them so much. The code is, as before, available in this git repository although you may want to start from the new ikistrap theme that is based on Bootstrap 4 and that may eventually be merged in ikiwiki directly.

DNS diagnostics Through this interesting overview of various *ping tools, I got found out about the dnsdiag tool which currently allows users to do DNS traces, tampering detection and ping over DNS. In the hope of packaging it into Debian, I have requested clarifications regarding a modification to the DNSpython library the tool uses. But I went even further and boldly opened a discussion about replacing DNSstuff, the venerable DNS diagnostic tools that is now commercial. It is somewhat surprising that there is no software that has even been publicly released that does those sanity checks for DNS, given how old DNS is. Incidentally, I have also requested smtpping to be packaged in Debian as well but httping is already packaged.

Link checking In the process of writing this article, I suddenly remembered that I constantly make mistakes in the various links I post on my site. So I started looking at a link checker, another tool that should be well established but that, surprisingly, is not quite there yet. I have found this neat software written in Python called LinkChecker. Unfortunately, it is basically broken in Debian, so I had to do a non-maintainer upload to fix that old bug. I managed to force myself to not take over maintainership of this orphaned package but I may end up doing just that if no one steps up the next time I find issues in the package. One of the problems I had checking links in my blog is that I constantly refer to sites that are hostile to bots, like the Debian bugtracker and MoinMoin wikis. So I published a patch that adds a --no-robots flag to be able to crawl those sites effectively. I know there is the W3C tool but it's written in Perl, and there's probably zero chance for me to convince those guys to bypass robots exclusion rules, so I am sticking to Linkchecker.

Other Debian packaging work At my request, Drush has finally been removed from Debian. Hopefully someone else will pick up that work, but since it basically needs to be redone from scratch, there was no sense in keeping it in the next release of Debian. Similarly, Semanticscuttle was removed from Debian as well. I have uploaded new versions of tuptime, sopel and smokeping. I have also file a Request For Help for Smokeping. I am happy to report there was a quick response and people will be stepping up to help with the maintenance of that venerable monitoring software.

Background radiation Finally, here's the generic background noise of me running around like a chicken with his head cut off:

• Borg:
  • fix debian sid cross-reference in install docs
  • diff against existing files
• Debomatic:
  • finally got to play with it: it's nice and fast, but unfortunately, I am not sure I can trust it... After all, if the package is not reproducible, how do i know code isn't injected there? same could be said of the buildds, unfortunately.
  • suggested improvements to the docs nevertheless

Finally, I should mention that I will be less active in the coming months, as I will be heading outside as the summer finally came! I somewhat feel uncomfortable documenting publicly my summer here, as I am more protective of my privacy than I was before on this blog. But we'll see how it goes, maybe you'll hear non-technical articles here again soon!

• Synchronized scrolling for Markdown. It means that the preview area scrolls automatically to make sure the paragraph you are editing is visible.
• The multi-process mode. The text conversion now happens in a separate process so will never block the UI. As a result, the interface should be now more responsive when editing huge texts. This also required refactoring the PyMarkups library. ReText now depends on version 2.0 of it, which was released yesterday (or a newer version).

• The tags box was replaced with a new Formatting box with quick access to most Markdown features, such as headers, lists, links, images and so on. The initial version of this code was contributed by Donato Marrazzo.
• Images now can be pasted into ReText: first a save dialog for them will be presented, and then the valid Markdown or reStructuredText markup for them will be inserted. This was contributed by Bart Clephas and Maurice van der Pot.
• The basic CSS styling for tables has been added (to make sure they have borders visible). This applies only unless you have your own CSS.
• Added a button to quickly close the search bar, for those who prefer buttons over keyboard shortcuts.
• Hitting Return key twice now will close the itemized lists and remove the inserted list markers from the previous line.

<icon type="cached">foobar.png</icon>

Icons:
  cached: foobar.png

<icon type="cached" width="128" height="128">foobar.png</icon>

Icons:
  cached: name: foobar.png
          width: 128
          height: 128

Icons:
  cached: foobar.png
  cached2: name: foobar.png
          width: 128
          height: 128

<summary>File Manager</summary>
<summary xml:lang="bs">Upravitelj datoteka</summary>
<summary xml:lang="cs">Spr vce soubor </summary>
<summary xml:lang="da">Filh ndtering</summary>

Summary:
  C: File Manager
  bs: Upravitelj datoteka
  cs: Spr vce soubor 
  da: Filh ndtering

<description>
  <p>Dolphin is a lightweight file manager. It has been designed with ease of use and simplicity in mind, while still allowing flexibility and customisation. This means that you can do your file management exactly the way you want to do it.</p>
  <p xml:lang="de">Dolphin ist ein schlankes Programm zur Dateiverwaltung. Es wurde mit dem Ziel entwickelt, einfach in der Anwendung, dabei aber auch flexibel und anpassungsf hig zu sein. Sie k nnen daher Ihre Dateiverwaltungsaufgaben genau nach Ihren Bed rfnissen ausf hren.</p>
  <p>Features:</p>
  <p xml:lang="de">Funktionen:</p>
  <p xml:lang="es">Caracter sticas:</p>
  <ul>
  <li>Navigation (or breadcrumb) bar for URLs, allowing you to quickly navigate through the hierarchy of files and folders.</li>
  <li xml:lang="de">Navigationsleiste f r Adressen (auch editierbar), mit der Sie schnell durch die Hierarchie der Dateien und Ordner navigieren k nnen.</li>
  <li xml:lang="es">barra de navegaci n (o de ruta completa) para URL que permite navegar r pidamente a trav s de la jerarqu a de archivos y carpetas.</li>
  <li>Supports several different kinds of view styles and properties and allows you to configure the view exactly how you want it.</li>
  ....
  </ul>
</description>

• Embed the HTML markup in the file, and risk non-careful translators breaking the markup by e.g. not closing tags.
• Use Markdown, and risk people not writing the markup correctly when translating a really long string in Gettext.

Debian Long Term Support (LTS) This is my 5th month working on Debian LTS, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This is my largest month so far, in which I worked on completing the Xen and NSS packages updates from last month, but also spent a significant amount of time working on phpMyAdmin and libidn.

Updates to NSS and Xen completed This basically consisted on following up on the reviews from other security people. I basically continued building up on Brian's work and tested the package on a test server at Koumbit, which seems to have survived well the upgrade. The details are in this post to the debian-lts mailing list. As for NSS, the package was mostly complete, but I forgot to ship the tests for some reason, so I added them back. I also wrote the release team to see if it was possible to update NSS to the same version in all suites. Unfortunately, this issue is still pending, but I still hope we can find better ways of managing that package in the long term.

IDN and phpMyAdmin Most of my time this month was spent working on IDN and phpMyAdmin. Unfortunately, it turns out that someone else had worked on the libidn package. This is partly my fault: I forgot to check in the dsa-needed.txt file for assignment before working on the package. But considering how in flux the workflow currently is with the switch between the main security team and the LTS team for the wheezy maintenance, I don't feel too bad. Still, I prepared a package which was a bit more painful than it should have been because of GNUlib. I didn't even know about GNUlib before, oddly enough, and after that experience, I feel that it should just not exist at all anymore. I have filed a bug to remove that dependency at the very least, but I do not clearly see how such a tool is necessary on Debian at this point in time. But phpMyAdmin, no one had worked on that. And I understand why: even though it's a very popular package, there were quite a few outstanding issues (8!) in Wheezy, with 10-15 patches to be ported. Plus, it's ... well, PHP. And old PHP at that, with parts of it with modern autoloader classes, and other with mixed HTML and PHP content, require (and not require_once) and all sorts of nasty things you still find in the PHP universe. I nevertheless managed to produce a new Debian package for wheezy and test it on Koumbit's test servers. Hopefully, that can land into Wheezy soon.

Long term software support I am a little worried that we are, both in Jessie and Wheezy sitting in between stable releases for phpMyAdmin, something that is a recurring issue for a lot of packages in Debian stable or LTS. Sometimes, it just happens that the version that happens to be in Debian testing when it is released as stable is just not a supported release upstream. It's the case for phpMyAdmin in Jessie (4.3, whereas 4.0 and 4.4 are supported) and Wheezy (3.4, although it's unclear how long that was supported upstream). But even if the next Debian stable (Stretch), would pick a stable release upstream, there is actually no phpMyAdmin release that has a support window as long as Debian stable (roughly 3 years), let alone as long as Debian LTS (5 years). This is a similar problem with NSS: upstream is simply not supporting their product in the long term, or at least not in the terms we are used to in the Debian community (ie. only security fixes or regressions). This is, in my opinion, a real concern for the reliability and sustainability of the computing infrastructure we are creating. While some developers are of the opinion that software older than 18 months is too old, here we are shipping hardware and software in space or we have Solaris, which is supported for 16 years! Now that is a serious commitment and something we can rely on. 18 months is really, really, a tiny short time in the history of our civilization. I know computer programmers and engineers like to think of themselves in elitist terms, that they are changing the world every other year. But the truth is that things have not changed much in the last 4 decades where computing has existed, both in terms of security or functionality. Two quotes from my little quotes collection come to mind here:

Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster. - Wirth's law The future is already here it's just not very evenly distributed. - William Gibson

Because of course, the response to my claims that computing is not really advancing is "but look! we have supercomputers in our pockets now!" Yes, of course, we do have those fancy phones and they are super-connected, but they are a threat to our fundamental rights and freedom. And those glittering advances always pale in comparison to what could be done if we wouldn't be wasting our time rewriting the same software over and over again on different, often proprietary, platforms, simply because of the megalomaniac fantasies of egoistic programmers. It would be great to build something that lasts, for a while. Software that does not need to be updated every 16 months. You'd think that something as basic as a screensaver release could survive what is basically the range of human infancy. Yet it seems we like to run mindlessly in the minefield of software development, one generation following the other without questioning the underlying assumption of infinite growth that permeates our dying civilization. I have talked about this before of course, but working with the LTS project just unnerves me so bad that I just needed to let out another rant. (For the record, I really have a lot of respect for JWZ and all the work he has done in the free software world. I frequently refer to his "no-bullshit" backup guide and use Xscreensaver daily. But I do think he was wrong in this case: asking Debian to remove Xscreensaver is just too much. The response from the maintainer was exemplary of how to handle such issues in the future. I restarted Xscreensaver after the stable update, and the message is gone, and things are still all fine. Thanks JWZ and Tormod for keeping things rolling.)

Other free software work With that in mind, I obviously didn't stop doing other computing work this month. In fact, I did a lot of work to try to generally fix the internet, that endless and not-quite-gratifying hobby so many of us are destroying our bodies to accomplish.

Build tools I have experimented a bit more with different build tools. I got worried because at some point cowbuilder got orphaned and I figured I could refresh the way I build packages for LTS. I looked into sbuild, but that ended up not bringing much improvements over my current cowbuilder setup (which I really need to document better). I was asked by the new maintainer to open a bug report to make such setups easier by guessing the basepath better, so we'll see how that goes. I did enjoy the simplicity of gitpkg and discovered cowpoke which made it about 2 times faster to build packages because I could use another server to build larger packages. I also found that gitpkg doesn't use -n by default when calling gzip, which makes it harder to reproduce tarballs when they are themselves built reproducibly, which is the case for Github tarballs (really nice of them). So I filed bug #820842 about that. It would be pretty awesome if such buildds would be available for Debian Developers to do their daily tasks. It could simply be a machine that would spin up a chroot with cowbuilder or it could even be a full, temporary VM although that would take way more resources than a simple VM with a cowbuilder setup. In the meantime, I should probably look at whalebuilder as an alternative to cowbuilder. It is a tool that supports building packages within a Docker chroot, which means that packages are built from a clean environment like pbuilder, and using COW optimisations but also without privileges or network access, which is a huge plus especially when you build untrusted packages.

Ikiwiki admonitions I have done some work to implement Moinmoin-like admonitions in Ikiwiki, something I am quite happy about since it's something I was really missing about Moinmoin. Admonitions bring a really nice way to outline certain blocks with varying severity levels and distinct styles. For example:

Admonitions are great!

This was done with a macro, but basically, since Markdown allows more or less arbitrary HTML, this can also be done with the <div> tag. I like that we don't have a new weird markup here. Yet, I still liked the sub-parser feature of MoinMoin, something that can be implemented in Ikiwiki, but it's a little more clunky. Normally, you'd probably do this with the inline macro and subpages, but it's certainly less intuitive that directly inlined content.

Ereader I got a new e-reader! I was hesitant between the Kobo Aura H20 and the Kobo Glo HD, which were the ones available at Bestbuy. So I bought both and figured I would return the other. That was a painful decision! In the end, both machines are pretty nice:

• Aura H2O
  • Pros:
    • waterproof
    • larger screen (makes it easier to see web pages and better for the eyes)
    • naturally drawn to it
  • Cons:
    • heavier
    • larger (fits in outside pocket though)
    • port cover finicky
    • more expensive (180$) - prices may go down in future
• Aura Glo HD
  • Pros
    • smaller (fits in inside pocket of both coats)
    • better resolution in theory (can't notice in practice)
    • cheaper (100$)
    • may be less common on the future (larger models more common? just a guess)
  • Cons
    • no SD card
    • smaller screen
    • power button in the middle

... but in the end, I ended up settling down on the Glo, mostly for the price. Heck, I saved around 100$, so for that amount, I could have gotten two machines so that if one breaks I would still have the other. I have ordered a cover for it on Deal Extreme about two weeks ago, and it still hasn't arrived. I suspect it's going to take a few more months to get there, by which point I may have changed e-reader again. Note that both e-readers needed an update to calibre, so I started working on a calibre backport (#818309) which I will complete soon. So anyways, I looked into better ways of transferring articles from the web to the e-reader, something which I do quite a bit to avoid spending too much time on the computer. Since the bookmark manager I use (Bookie) is pretty much dead, I started looking at other alternatives. And partly inspired by Framasoft's choice of Wallabag for their bookmarking service (Framabag), I started to look into that software, especially since my friend who currently runs the Bookie instance is thinking of switching to Wallabag as well. It seems the simplest way to browse articles remotely through a standard protocol is by implementing OPDS support in Wallabag. OPDS is a standard developed in part by the Internet Archive and it allows for browsing book collections and downloading them. Articles and bookmarks would then be presented as individual books that would be accessible from any OPDS-compatible device. Unfortunately, the Kobo e-readers don't support OPDS out of the box: you need to setup some OPDS-compatible reader like Koreader. And that I found nearly impossible to do: I was able to setup KSM (the "start menu", not to be confused with that KSM), but not Koreader in KSM. Besides, I do not want a separate OS running here on the tablet: I just want to start Koreader every once in a while. KSM just starts another system when you reboot the e-reader, something which is not really convenient on the Kobo. Basically, I just want to add Koreader as a tile in the home screen on the e-reader. I found the documentation on that topic to be sparse and hard to follow. It is often dispersed across multiple forum threads and involves uploading random binaries, often proprietary, to the e-reader. It had been a long time since I was asked to "register my software" frenetically, and I hadn't missed that one bit. So I decided to stay away from this until that solution and its documentation matures a bit.

Streaming re-established I have worked a bit on my home radio stream. I simply turned the Liquidsoap stream back online, and did a few tweaks to the documentation that I had built back then. All that experimenting led me to do two NMUs. One was for gmpc-plugins to fix a FTBFS (bug #807735) and to properly kill the shout streamer when completing the playback (bug #820908). The other was to fix the ezstream manpage (bug #573928), a patch that had been sitting there for 5 years! This was to try to find an easy way to stream random audio (say from a microphone) to the Icecast server, something which is surprisingly difficult, consider how basic that functionality is. I was surprised to see that Darkice just completely fails to start (bug #821040) and I had to fallback to the simplest ices2 software to stream the audio. I am still having issues with Liquidsoap: it's really unstable! As a server, I would expect it to keep running for days if not years. Unfortunately, there's always something that makes it crash. I had assertion failed (bug #821112) and I keep seeing it crash after 2-3 days fairly reliably, a bug I reported 3 years ago and that is still not fixed (bug #727307). Switching back the stream to Vorbis (because I was having problems with the commandline mp3 players and ogg123 is much more lightweight) created another set of problems too, this time with the phone. It seems that Android cannot stream Vorbis at all, something that is even worse in Cyanogenmod... I also had to tweak my MPD config to make the Android client be able to load the larger playlists (see dmix buffer is full).

Android apps So I have also done quite a bit of work again on my phone. I finally was told how to access from Termux from adb shell which is pretty cool because now I can start a screen on my phone and then, when I'm tired of tapping to type, I can just reconnect to it when I plug in a USB cable on my laptop. I sent a pull request to fix the documentation regarding that. I also tried to see how my SMS and Signal situation could be improved. Right now, I have two different apps to do SMS on my phone: I use both Signal and the VoIP.ms SMS client, because I do not have a contract or SIM card in my phone. Both work well independently, but it's somewhat annoying to have to switch between the two. (In fact, I feel that Signal itself has an issue with how it depends on the network to send encrypted messages: I often have to "ping" people in clear text (and therefore in the other app) so that they connect to their data plan to fetch my "secure" signal messages...) Anyways, I figured it would be nice if at least there would be a SMS fallback in Signal that would allow me to send regular text messages from signal through Voip.MS. That was dismissed really fast. Moxie even closed the conversation completely, something I had never experienced before, and doesn't feel exactly pleasant. The Voip.MS side was of course not impressed and basically shrugged it off because Signal was not receptive. I also tried to clear up the Libresignal confusion: there are 3 different projects named "Libresignal", and I am not sure I figured out the right thing, even though the issue is now closed and there's a FAQ that is supposed to make all that clear. Nevertheless, I opened two distinct feature requests to try to steer the conversation into a more productive direction: GCM-less calls and GCM support. But I'm not sure neither will go anywhere. In the meantime, I am using the official signal client, which I downloaded using gplaycli and which I keep up to date with Aptoide. Even though the reliability of that site is definitely questionable, it seems that once you have a trusted version, it is safe to upgrade, regardless of the source because there is a trust path between you and the developer. I also filed a few issues with varying levels of success/response from the community:

• Green address feature requests: pin change and pin confirmation
• AntennaPod icons are reversed, but apparently, I'm the one that's backwards, go figure
• Asked for NYC support in the excellent Transportr app, it seems that's not going to happen until I find the space to run the Android dev environment...

Random background radiation And then there's of course the monthly background noise of all the projects I happened to not only stumble on, but also file bugs or patches against:

• neomutt credits improvements: Neomutt is an amazing effort to converge all the Mutt third party patches in a common tree
• request to improve acme comparison: acme is an interesting go client for Let's Encrypt
• a small set of issues and patches for borg, mostly documentation:
  • borg diff with files
  • mention jessie-backports in install docs
  • mention openbsd and OpenSUSE in install docs
• finally filed a bug report in debian about symlink support in ncdu
• internationalization SNAFUs:
  • gitweb should default to utf8 instead of latin1
  • Apache's AddCharset config should state more clearly which documentation to read
• classic "my printer is not working" never ending story: printing fails by default with "cannot open printer description file"
• small fixes to the tuptime project, which i mentionned before
• last nit-picking: znc homepage errors

Debian Long Term Support (LTS) This is my 4th month working on Debian LTS, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. I spent half of the month away on a vacation so little work was done, especially since I tried to tackle rather large uploads like NSS and Xen. I also worked on the frontdesk shift last week.

Frontdesk That work mainly consisted of figuring out how to best help the security team with the last uploads to the Wheezy release. For those who don't know, Debian 7 Wheezy, or "oldstable", is going to be unsupported by the security team starting end of april, and the Debian 6 Squeeze (the previous LTS) is now unsupported. The PGP signatures on the archived release have started yielding expiration errors which can be ignored but that are really a strong reminder that it is really time to upgrade. So the LTS team is now working towards backporting a few security issues from squeeze to wheezy, and this is what I focused on during triage work. I have identified the following high priority packages I will work on after I complete my work on the Xen and NSS packages (detailed below):

• libidn
• icu
• phpmyadmin
• tomcat6
• optipng
• srtp
• dhcpcd
• python-tornado

Updates to NSS and Xen I have spent a lot of time testing and building packages for NSS and Xen. To be fair, Brian May did most of the work on the Xen packages, and I merely did some work to test the packages on Koumbit's infrastructure, something which I will continue doing in the next month. For NSS, wheezy and jessie are in this weird state where patches were provided to the security team all the way back in November yet were never tested. Since then, yet more issues came up and I worked hard to review and port patches for those new security issues to wheezy. I'll followup on both packages in the following month.

Other free software work

Android TL;DR: there's an even longer version of this with the step-by-step procedures and that I will update as time goes on in my wiki. I somehow inherited an Android phone recently, on a loan from a friend because the phone broke one too many times and she got a new one from her provider. This phone is a HTC One S "Ville", which is fairly old, but good enough to play with and give me a mobile computing platform to listen to podcasts, play music, access maps and create GPS traces. I was previously doing this with my N900, but that device is really showing its age: very little development is happening on it, the SDK is closed source and the device itself is fairly big, compared to the "Ville". Plus, the SIM card actually works on the Ville so, even though I do not have an actual contract with a cell phone provider (too expensive, too invasive on my privacy), I can still make emergency phone calls (911)! Plus, since there is good wifi on the machine, I can use it to connect to the phone system with the built-in SIP client, send text messages through SMS (thanks to VoIP.ms SMS support) or Jabber. I have also played around with LibreSignal, the free software replacement for Signal, which uses proprietary google services. Yes, the VoIP.ms SMS app also uses GCM, but hopefully that can be fixed. (While I was writing this, another Debian Developer wrote a good review of Signal so I am happy to skip that step. Go read that.)

See also my apps list for a more complete list of the apps I have installed on the phone. I welcome recommendations on cool free software apps I should use!

I have replaced the stock firmware on the phone with Cyanogenmod 12.1, which was a fairly painful experience, partly because of the difficult ambiance on the #cyanogenmod channel on Freenode, where I had extreme experiences: a brave soul helped me through the first flashing process for around 2 hours, nicely holding my hand at every step. Other times, I have seen flames and obtuse comments from people being vulgar, brutal, obnoxious, if not sometimes downright homophobic and sexist from other users. It is clearly a community that needs to fix their attitude. I have documented everything I could in details in this wiki page, in case others want to resuscitate their old phones, but also because I ended up reinstalling the freaking phone about 4 times, and was getting tired of forgetting how to do it every time. I am somewhat fascinated by Android: here is the Linux-based device that should save us all from the proprietary Apple nightmares of fenced in gardens and censorship. Yet, public Android downloads are hidden behind license agreements, even though the code itself is free, which has led fellow Debian developers to work on making libre rebuilds of Androids to workaround this insanity. But worse: all phones are basically proprietary devices down to the core. You need custom firmware to be loaded on the machine for it to boot at all, from the bootloader all the way down to the GSM baseband and Wifi drivers. It is a minefield of closed source software, and trying to run free software on there is a bit of a delusion, especially since the baseband has so much power over the phone. Still, I think it is really interesting to run free software on those machines, and help people that are stuck with cell phones get familiar with software freedom. It seems especially important to me to make Android developers aware of software freedom considering how many apps are available for free yet on which it is not possible to contribute significantly because the source code is not published at all, or published only on the Google Store, instead of the more open and public F-Droid repository which publishes only free software. So I did contribute. This month, I am happy to announce that I contributed to the following free software projects on Android:

• listmyapps: feature request, patch
• Locker: bug report, added to f-droid
• Sensorium: bug report
• LibreSignal: feature request and testing

I have also reviewed the literature surrounding Telegram, a popular messaging app rival to Signal and Whatsapp. Oddly enough, my contributions to Wikipedia on that subject were promptly reverted which made me bring up the subject on the page's Talk page. This lead to an interesting response from the article's main editors which at least added that the "its security features have been contested by security researchers and cryptography experts". Considering the history of Telegram, I would keep people away from it and direct people to use Signal instead, even though Signal has similar metadata issues, mostly because Telegram's lack of response to the security issues that were outlined by fellow security researchers. Both systems suffer from a lack of federation as well, which is a shame in this era of increasing centralization. I am not sure I will put much more work in developing for Android for now. It seems like a fairly hostile platform to work on, and unless I have specific pain points I want to fix, it feels so much better to work on my own stuff in Debian. Which brings me to my usual plethora of free software projects I got stuck in this month.

IRC projects irssi-plugin-otr had a bunch of idiotic bugs lying around, and I had a patch that I hadn't submitted upstream from the Debian package, which needed a rebuild because the irssi version changed, which is a major annoyance. The version in sid is now a snapshot because upstream needs to make a new release but at least it should fix things for my friends running unstable and testing. Hopefully those silly uploads won't be necessary in the future. That's for the client side. On the server side, I have worked on updating the Atheme-services package to the latest version, which actually failed because the upstream libmowgli is missing release tags, which means the Debian package for it is not up-to-date either. Still, it is nice to have a somewhat newer version, even though it is not the latest and some bugs were fixed. I have also looked at making atheme reproducible but was surprised at the hostility of the upstream. In the end, it looks like they are still interested in patches, but they will be a little harder to deploy than for Charybdis, so this could take some time. Hopefully I will find time in the coming weeks to test the new atheme services daemon on the IRC network I operate.

Syncthing I have also re-discovered Syncthing, a file synchronization software. Amazingly, I was having trouble transferring a single file between two phones. I couldn't use Bluetooth (not sure why), the "Wifi sharing" app was available only on one phone (and is proprietary, and has a limit of 4MB files), and everything else requires an account, the cloud, or cabling. So. Just heading to f-droid, install syncthing, flash a few qr-codes around and voil : files are copied over! Pretty amazing: the files were actually copied over the local network, using IPv6 link-local addresses, encryption and the DHT. Which is a real geeky way of saying it's completely fast, secure and fast. Now, I found a few usability issues, so much that I wrote a whole usability story for the developers, which were really appreciative of my review. Some of the issues were already fixed, others were pretty minor. Syncthing has a great community, and it seems like a great project I encourage everyone to get familiar with.

Battery stats The battery-status project I mentionned previously has been merged with the battery-stats project (yes, the names are almost the same, which is confusing) and so I had to do some work to fix my Python graph script, which was accepted upstream and will be part of Debian officially from now on, which is cool. The previous package was unofficial. I have also noticed that my battery has a significantly than when I wrote the script. Whereas it was basically full back then, it seems now it has lost almost 15% of its capacity in about 6 months. According to the calculations of the script:

this battery will reach end of life (5%) in 935 days, 19:07:58.336480, on 2018-10-23 12:06:07.270290

Which is, to be fair, a good life: it will somewhat work for about three more years.

Playlist, git-annex and MPD in Python On top of my previously mentioned photos-import script, I have worked on two more small programs. One is called get-playlist and is an extension to git-annex to easily copy to the local git-annex repository all files present in a given M3U playlist. This is useful for me because my phone cannot possibly fit my whole MP3 collection, and I use playlists in GMPC to tag certain files, particularly the Favorites list which is populated by the "star" button in the UI. I had a lot of fun writing this script. I started using elpy as an IDE in Emacs. (Notice how Emacs got a new webpage, which is a huge improvement was had been basically unchanged since the original version, now almost 20 years old, and probably written by RMS himself.) I wonder how I managed to stay away from Elpy for so long, as it glues together key components of Emacs in an elegant and functional bundle:

• Company: the "vim-like" completion mode i had been waiting for forever
• Jedi: context-sensitive autocompletion for Python
• Flymake: to outline style and syntax errors (unfortunately not the more modern Flycheck)
• inline documentation...

In short, it's amazing and makes everything so much easier to work with that I wrote another script. The first program wouldn't work very well because some songs in the playlists had been moved, so I made another program, this time to repair playlists which refer to missing files. The script is simply called fix-playlists, and can operate transparently on multiple playlists. It has a bunch of heuristics to find files and uses a MPD server as a directory to search into. It can edit files in place or just act as a filter.

Useful snippets Writing so many scripts, so often, I figured I needed to stop wasting time always writing the same boilerplate stuff on top of every file, so I started publishing Yasnippet-compatible file snippets, in my snippets repository. For example, this report is based on the humble lts snippet. I also have a base license snippet which slaps the AGPLv3 license on top of a Python file. But the most interesting snippet, for me, is this simple script snippet which is a basic scaffolding for a commandline script that includes argument processing, logging and filtering of files, something which I was always copy-pasting around.

Other projects And finally, a list of interesting issues en vrac:

• there's a new Bootstrap 4 theme for Ikiwiki. It was delivering content over CDNs, which is bad for privacy issues, so I filed an issue which was almost immediately fixed by the author!
• I found out about BitHub, a tool to make payments with Bitcoins for patches submitted on OWS projects. It wasn't clear to me where to find the demo, but when I did, I quickly filed a PR to fix the documentation. Given the number of open PRs there and the lack of activity, I wonder if the model is working at all...
• a fellow Debian Developer shared his photos workflow, which was interesting to me because I have my own peculiar script, which I never mentionned here, but which I ended up sharing with the author

I farm bits and pieces out to the guys who are much more brilliant than I am. I say, "build me a laser", this. "Design me a molecular analyzer", that. They do, and I just stick 'em together. (Seth Brundle, "The Fly")

$ ./ssite new example --noedit --title "Cos  parl  Enrico"
/enrico-dev/staticsite/example/site/blog/2016/cosi-parlo-enrico.md

• Finalizing MATE uploads to Debian with regards to the Beta 1 Freeze of Ubuntu 16.04
• Work on RDP related packages in Debian
• Work on Debian Edu related packages
• Work on Debian LTS
• Work on nx-libs (NX v3)

• Work on the packages mate-dock-applet, topmenu-gtk and getting GIR-support back into libwnck has been sponsored by Martin Wimpress, the main driving force (AFAIK) behind Ubuntu MATE [1].
• Work on Debian LTS has been sponsored by the various Debian LTS sponsors proxied through Freexian SARL (thanks to Raphael Hertzog for organizing the paid LTS contributors team via his company) [2].
• Work on nx-libs has been sponsored by the Qindel Group [3].

• caja 1.12.4-2 [4]
• mate-menu 5.6.8-1 [5]
• mate-panel 1.12.2-1 [6]
• mate-dock-applet 0.67-3 (NEW) [7]
• mate-polkit 1.12.0-3 [8]
• eom 1.12.2-1 [9]
• pluma 1.12.2-1 [10]
• topmenu-gtk 0.2.1+git20151210.8c6108f-2 (NEW) [11]
• mate-tweak 3.5.7-1 (latest upload on 2nd of March) [12]

• Fix the gosa package in Debian unstable [20]
• Document a switch-over to systemd-networkd for Debian Edu jessie notebooks [21]
• Help out in fixing outstanding issues in ldap2bind [22]
• Upload a new shutdown-at-night package version to Debian unstable [23]
• Fix some icon issues in the italc package [24]
• Take a first glance at packaging terminal-quest [25]
• Playing with the Lego Mindstorm (NXT) tools

• Providing a .debdiff for gosa in Debian wheezy (addressing CVE-2015-8771 and CVE-2014-9760)
• Investigating an open issue in smarty3 (CVE-2014-8350) and providing a recommendation on how to handle that (which is: pick the latest smarty3 3.1.21-1 from Debian jessie and provide that to users of Debian wheezy)
• Taking a first look at pdns regarding a fix for CVE-2014-7210 in Debian wheezy

Debian Long Term Support (LTS) This is my third month working on Debian LTS, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This month was my first month working on the frontdesk duty and did a good bunch of triage. I also performed one upload and reviewed a few security issues.

Frontdesk duties I spent some time trying to get familiar with the frontdesk duty. I still need to document a bit of what I learned, which did involve asking around for parts of the process. The following issues were triaged:

• roundcube in squeeze was happily not vulnerable to CVE-2015-8794 and CVE-2015-8793, as the code affected was not present. roundcube is also not shipped with jessie but the backport is vulnerable
• the php-openid vulnerability was actually just a code sample, a bug report comment clarified all of CVE-2016-2049
• ffmpeg issues were closed, as it is not supported in squeeze
• libxml2 was marked as needing work (CVE-2016-2073)
• asterisk was triaged for all distros before i found out it is also unsupported in squeeze (CVEs coming up, AST-2016-001, AST-2016-001, AST-2016-001)
• libebml and libmatroska were marked as unsupported, although an upload of debian-security-support will be necessary to complete that work (bug #814557 filed)

Uploads and reviews I only ended up doing one upload, of the chrony package (CVE-2016-1567), thanks to the maintainer which provided the patch. I tried my best trying to sort through the issues with tiff (CVE-2015-8668 and CVE-2015-7554), which didn't have obvious fixes available. OpenSUSE seem to have patches, but it is really hard to find them through their issue trackers, which were timing out on me. Hopefully someone else can pick that one up. I also tried and failed to reproduce the cpio issue (CVE-2016-2037), which, at the time, didn't have a patch for a fix. This ended up being solved and Santiago took up the upload. I finally spent some time trying to untangle the mess that is libraw, or more precisely, all the packages that embed dcraw code instead of linking against libraw. Now I really feel even more strongly for the Debian policy section 4.13 which states that Debian packages should not ship with copies of other packages code. It made it really hard to figure out which packages were vulnerable, especially because it was hard to figure out which versions of libraw/dcraw were actually vulnerable to the bug, but also just plain figure out which packages were copying code from libraw. I wish I had found out about secure-testing/data/embedded-code-copies earlier... Still, it was interesting to get familiar with codesearch.debian.net to try to find copies of the vulnerable code, which was not working so well. Kudos to darktable 2.0 for getting rid of their embedded copy of libraw, by the way - it made it completely not vulnerable to the issue, the versions in stretch and sid not having the code at all and older versions having non-vulnerable copies of the code.

Issues with VMs again I still had problems running a squeeze VM - not wanting to use virtualbox because of the overhead, I got lost for a bit trying to use libvirt and KVM. A bunch of issues crept up: using virt-manager would just fail on startup with an error saying interface mtu value is improper, which is a very unhelpful error message (what is a proper value??) - and, for the record, the MTU on eth0 and wlan0 is the fairly standard 1500, while lo is at 65536 bytes, nothing unusual there as far as I know. Then the next problem was actually running a VM - I still somewhat expected to be able to boot off a chroot, something I should definitely forget about it seems like (boot loader missing? not sure). I ended up calling virt-install with the live ISO image I was previously using:

virt-install --virt-type kvm --name squeeze-amd64 --memory 512 --cdrom ~/iso/Debian/cdimage.debian.org_mirror_cdimage_archive_6.0.10_live_amd64_iso_hybrid_debian_live_6.0.10_amd64_gnome_desktop.iso --disk size=4 --os-variant debiansqueeze

At least now I have an installed squeeze VM, something I didn't get to do in Virtualbox (mostly because I didn't want to wait through the install, because it was so slow). Finally, I still have trouble getting a commandline console on the VM: somehow, running virtsh console squeeze-amd64 doesn't give me a login terminal, and worse, it actually freezes the terminal that I can actually get on virt-viewer squeeze-amd64, which definitely sounds like a bug. I documented a bit more of that setup in the Debian wiki KVM page so hopefully this will be useful for others.

Other free software work I continued my work on improving timetracking with ledger in my ledger-timetracking git repository, which now got a place on the new plaintextaccounting.org website, which acts as a portal for ledger-like software projects and documentation.

Darktable 2.0 I had the pleasure of trying the new Darktable 2.0 release, which only recently entered Debian. I built a backport for jessie, which works beautifully: much faster thumbnail rendering, no dropping of history when switching views... The new features are great, but I also appreciate how they are being very conservative in their approach. Darktable is great software: I may have trouble approaching the results other are having with lightroom and snapseed, but those are proprietary software that I can't use anyways. I also suspect that I just don't have enough of a clue of what I'm doing to get the results I need in Darktable. Maybe with hand-holding, one day, I will surpass the results I get with the JPEGs from my Canon camera. Until then, I turned off RAW exports in my camera to try and control the explosion of disk use I saw since I got that camera:

41M     2004
363M    2005
937M    2006
2,2G    2007
894M    2008
800M    2009
1,8G    2010
1,4G    2011
9,8G    2012
31G     2013
26G     2014
9,8G    2015

The drop in 2015 is mostly due to me taking less pictures in the last year, for some reason...

Markdown mode hacks I ended up writing some elisp for the markdown mode. It seems I am always writing links like [text](link) which seems more natural at first, but then the formatting looks messier, as paragraph wrapping is all off because of the long URLs. So I always ended up converting those links, which was a painful series of keystrokes. So I made a macro, and while I'm a it, why not rewrite it as a lisp function. Twice. Then I was told by the markdown-mode.el developers that they had already fixed that (in the 2.1 version, not in Debian jessie) and that the C-c C-a r key binding actually recognized existing links and conveniently converted them. I documented my adventures in bug #94, but it seems I wrote this code for nothing else than re-learning Emacs lisp, which was actually quite fun.

More emacs hacking Another thing I always wasted time doing by and is "rename file and buffer". Often, you visit a file but it's named wrong. My most common case is a .txt file that i rename to .mdwn. I would then have to do:

M-x rename-file <ret> newfile
M-x rename-buffer <ret> newfile
C-x C-s <ret> newfile

Really annoying. Turns out that set-visited-file-name actually does most of the job, but doesn't actually rename the file, which is really silly. So I wrote this small function instead:

(defun rename-file-and-buffer (newfname)
  "combine rename-file and rename-buffer
set-visited-file-name does most of the job, but unfortunately
doesn't actually rename the file. rename-file does that, but
doesn't rename the buffer. rename-buffer only renames the buffer,
which is pretty pointless.
only operates on current buffer because set-visited-file-name
also does so and we don't bother doing excursions around.
"
  (interactive "GRename file and bufer: ")
  (let ((oldfname (buffer-file-name)))
    (set-visited-file-name newfname nil t)
    (rename-file oldfname newfname)
    )
  )

Not bound to any key, really trivial, but doing this without that function is really non-trivial, especially since set-visited-file-name needs special arguments to not mark the file as modified.

IRC packages updates I updated the Sopel IRC bot package to the latest release, 6.3.0. They have finally switched to Requests, but apart from that, no change was necessary. I am glad to finally see SNI support working everywhere in the bot! I also update the Charydbis IRC server package to the latest 3.5.0 stable release. This release is great news, as I was able to remove 5 of the 7 patches I was dragging along the Debian package. The previous Charybdis stable release was over 3 years old, as 3.4.2 was released in (December) 2012! I spend a good chunk of time making the package reproducible. I filed a bug upstream and eventually made a patch to make it possible to hardcode a build timestamp, which seems to have been the only detectable change in the reproducible build infrastructure. Charybdis had been FTBS for a while in sid now, and the upload should fix that as well. Unfortunately, Charybdis still doesn't build with hardening flags - but hopefully a future update of the package should fix that. It is probably because CFLAGS are not passed around properly. There's really interesting stuff going on in the IRC world. Even though IRC is one of the oldest protocols still in operation (1988, even before the Web, but after SMTP and the even more venerable FTP), it is still being actively developed, with a working group drafting multiple extensions to the IRCv3 protocol defined in RFC 1459. For example, IRCv3.3 includes a Strict Transport Security extension, which tries to ensure users use encrypted channels as much as possible, through warnings and STARTTLS support. Charybdis goes even further by proposing a reversal of the +S ("secure channel" flag) where all channels are secure by default, and you need to deliberately mark a channel as insecure with the +U flag if you actually want to allow users on an clear-text connection to join the channel. A transition mechanism is also proposed.

Miscellaneous bug reports En vrac... I fell face-first in this amazing game that is endless-sky. I made a small pull request on the documentation, a bug report and a feature request. I forwarded a bug report, originally filed against monkeysign, to the pyqrencode maintainers. I filed a usability bug against tails-installer, which just entered Debian, mostly usability issues. I discovered the fim image viewer, which re-entered Debian recently. It seemed perfect to adjust my photos-import workflow, so I added it to my script, to be able to review photos prior to importing them into Darktable and git-annex.

if [ "$PEERDNS" != "no" ]  [ -n "$RESOLV_MODS" -a "$RESOLV_MODS" != "no" ]; then
   [ -n "$MS_DNS1" ] && DNS1=$MS_DNS1
   [ -n "$MS_DNS2" ] && DNS2=$MS_DNS2
      if [ -n "$DNS1" ] && ! grep -q "^nameserver $DNS1" /etc/resolv.conf &&
         tr=$(mktemp /tmp/XXXXXX) ; then
 ...

• systemd runs as PID 1
• ifupdown manages static network interfaces (eth0, etc.)
• NetworkManager manages wireless network interfaces
• for our customers we configured NetworkManager with a system-wide WiFi (WPA2-PSK) profile

• By default, network interface eth0 is managed by ifupdown (via /etc/network/interfaces):
  

  auto eth0
  iface eth0 inet dhcp
  

  Woe no. 1: In combination with systemd, this results in a 120sec delay at system startup.

• Changed Django's project/app templates to use a py-tpl suffix to workaround the 1.9 release series shipping invalid .py files that are used as templates. (#5735)
• Pushed a number of updates to my Strava Enhancement Suite Chrome extension:
  • Added the ability to sort starred segments first. (#42)
  • Added an option to display hidden segments by default. (#34)
  • Also hide "Yearly Goals" as part of hiding upcoming data. (#41)
  • Removed more "premium" badges. (#43)
  • Fixed an issue where removing feed entries didn't correctly cleanup subsequently-empty date headers. (commit)
• Released a work-in-progress django.contrib.staticfiles library to recursively transparently concatenate Javascript and CSS files using "Debian-style" .d directories. I had previously been doing this manually via the various release processes and bespoke views during development as the idea pre-dated the existence of the staticfiles framework. (Repo)
• Updated travis.debian.net, a hosted script to easily test and build Debian packages on Travis CI, to support the wheezy distribution and to improve error-handling in general. (Repo)
• Ensured that try.diffoscope.org, a hosted version of the diffoscope in-depth and content aware diff utility, periodically cleans up containers.
• Moved my personal music library to use dh-virtualenv and to deploy to its own server via Ansible. I also updated the codebase to the latest version of Django at the same time, taking advantage of a large number of new features and recommendations.
• Fixed a strange issue with empty IMAP messages in my tickle-me-email GTD email toolbox.
• It was also a month of significant bug reports and feature requests being sent to my private email.

Toolchain fixes David Bremner uploaded dh-elpa/0.0.18 which adds a --fix-autoload-date option (on by default) to take autoload dates from changelog. Lunar updated and sent the patch adding the generation of .buildinfo to dpkg.

Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: aggressive-indent-mode, circe, company-mode, db4o, dh-elpa, editorconfig-emacs, expand-region-el, f-el, geiser, hyena, js2-mode, markdown-mode, mono-fuse, mysql-connector-net, openbve, regina-normal, sml-mode, vala-mode-el. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• avrdude/6.2-5 by Milan Kupcevic.
• ca-certificates/20160104 by Michael Shuler, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• cryptsetup/2:1.7.0-1 uploaded by Jonas Meurer, original patches (#780864, #794106) by Dhole and Valentin Lorentz.
• gpaw/0.11.0.13004-3 by Graham Inggs.
• graphite2/1.3.4-2 uploaded by Rene Engelhard, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• manpages/4.04-0.1 uploaded by Tobias Quathamer, original patch by Lunar.
• medicalterms/20160103-1 uploaded by Tobias Quathamer, reported by Daniel Kahn Gillmor.
• metview/4.5.7-3 uploaded by Alastair McKinstry, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• oasis3/3.mct+dfsg.121022-7 uploaded by Alastair McKinstry, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• postgresql-9.5/9.5.0-1 by Christoph Berg.
• python-caja/1.12.0-1 uploaded by Mike Gabriel, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• qutemol/0.4.1~cvs20081111-5 by Graham Inggs.
• robocode/1.9.2.5-1 by Markus Koschany.
• rungetty/1.2-16 by Rhonda D'Vine, original patches (#777447, #793717) by Chris Lamb and akira.
• t-prot/3.4-4 by Rhonda D'Vine.
• tetrinet/0.11+CVS20070911-2 by Rhonda D'Vine, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• tworld/1.3.2-2 by Rhonda D'Vine, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• visp-images/3.0.0-2 uploaded by Fabien Spindler, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• xblast-tnt-levels/20050106-3 by Rhonda D'Vine, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• xblast-tnt-models/20050106-4 by Rhonda D'Vine, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• xblast-tnt-musics/20050106-3 by Rhonda D'Vine, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• xblast-tnt-sounds/20040429-3 by Rhonda D'Vine, original patch by Chris Lamb.

Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them:

• ace-of-penguins/1.5~rc1-1 by Markus Koschany, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• disque/1.0~rc1-4 by Chris Lamb.
• elki/0.7.0-4 by Erich Schubert.
• xnecview/1.35-8 by Tobias Frost, original patch by Chris Lamb.

Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #809780 on flask-restful by Chris Lamb: implement support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in the build system.
• #810259 on avfs by Chris Lamb: implement support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in the build system.
• #810509 on apt by Mattia Rizzolo: ensure a stable file order is given to the linker.

reproducible.debian.net Add 2 more armhf build nodes provided by Vagrant Cascadian. This added 7 more armhf builder jobs. We now run around 900 tests of armhf packages each day. (h01ger) The footer of each page now indicates by which Jenkins jobs build it. (h01ger)

diffoscope development diffoscope 45 has been released on January 4th. It features huge memory improvements when comparing large files, several fixes of squashfs related issues that prevented comparing two Tails images, and improve the file list of tar and cpio archive to be more precise and consistent over time. It also fixes a typo that prevented the Mach-O to work (Rainer M ller), improves comparisons of ELF files when specified on the command line, and solves a few more encoding issues.

Package reviews 134 reviews have been removed, 30 added and 37 updated in the previous week. 20 new fail to build from source issues were reported by Chris Lamb and Chris West. prebuilder will now skip installing diffoscope to save time if the build results are identical. (Reiner Herrmann)

Installing Docker

Pulling the Docker image Just in case you didn't, you need to (re)start docker to work with service docker restart

# docker pull ghost

Making Ghost (container image) run forever I did not like systemd in the first place for many reasons. But in some circumstances it makes sense. In case of handling a Docker container, using a systemd unit file makes life much easier.

# mkdir -p /srv/docker/ghost/
# cat > /etc/systemd/system/ghost.service << EOF
[Unit]
Description=GHost Service  
After=docker.service  
Requires=docker.service
[Service]
ExecStartPre=-/usr/bin/docker kill ghost  
ExecStartPre=-/usr/bin/docker rm ghost  
ExecStartPre=-/usr/bin/docker pull ghost  
ExecStart=/usr/bin/docker run  --name ghost --publish 2368:2368 --env 'NODE_ENV=production' --volume /srv/docker/ghost/:/var/lib/ghost ghost  
ExecStop=/usr/bin/docker stop ghost
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target  
EOF  
# systemctl enable ghost && systemctl daemon-reload && systemctl start ghost 

This will start your container on start and even is looking for a new Docker image and is fetching it, if needed. If you don't like this behavior, just comment out the line in the config and reread it with systemctl daemon-reload. Now you should have listening something on port 2368:

# netstat -tapn   grep 2368
tcp6       0      0 :::2368                 :::*                    LISTEN      7061/docker-proxy  

Update: Jo l Dinel did send me a mail, that starting your Docker container with --restart always will take care that it is brought up again if Docker or (even) the whole system will get restarted. For real I used that before and might be a lightweight solution, but I liked the systemd unit file solution a lot more.

Persistent Data Thanks to the Docker mount option you can find all your data in /srv/docker/ghost/. So your blog will still have content, even if the ghost Docker images is updated:

# ls /srv/docker/ghost/
apps  config.js  data  images  themes  

Accessing the container To kick your ghost into production, it might be useful if you make it available on port 80 at least. This can be done for example by changing your Docker publish configuration or adding a DNAT to your firewall. But I would recommand using a proxy in front of your Docker container. This might be part of one of my next articles.