Debian Contributions: 2025-01 Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

Python 3.13 is now the default Python 3 version in Debian, by Stefano Rivera and Colin Watson The Python 3.13 as default transition has now completed. The next step is to remove Python 3.12 from the archive, which should be very straightforward, it just requires rebuilding C extension packages in no particular order. Stefano fixed some miscellaneous bugs blocking the completion of the 3.13 as default transition.

Fixing qtpaths6 for cross compilation, by Helmut Grohne While Qt5 used to use qmake to query installation properties, Qt6 is moving more and more to CMake and to ease that transition it relies on more qtpaths. Since this tool is not naturally aware of the architecture it is called for, it tends to produce results for the build architecture. Therefore, more than 100 packages were picking up a multiarch directory for the build architecture during cross builds. In collaboration with the Qt/KDE team and Sandro Knau in particular (none affiliated with Freexian), we added an architecture-specific wrapper script in the same way qmake has one for Qt5 and Qt6 already. The relevant CMake module has been updated to prefer the triplet-prefixed wrapper. As a result, most of the KDE packages now cross build on unstable ready in time for the trixie release.

/usr-move, by Helmut Grohne In December, Emil S dergren reported that a live-build was not working for him and in January, Colin Watson reported that the proposed mitigation for debian-installer-utils would practically fail. Both failures were to be attributed to a wrong understanding of implementation-defined behavior in dpkg-divert. As a result, all M18 mitigations had to be reviewed and many of them replaced. Many have been uploaded already and all instances have received updated patches. Even though dumat has been in operation for more than a year, it gained recent changes. For one thing, analysis of architectures other than amd64 was requested. Chris Hofstaedler (not affiliated with Freexian) kindly provided computing resources for repeatedly running it on the larger set. Doing so revealed various cross-architecture undeclared file conflicts in gcc, glibc, and binutils-z80, but it also revealed a previously unknown /usr-move issue in rpi.rpi-common. On top of that, dumat produced false positive diagnostics and wrongly associated Debian bugs in some cases, both of which have now been fixed. As a result, a supposedly fixed python3-sepolicy issue had to be reopened.

rebootstrap, by Helmut Grohne As much as we think of our base system as stable, it is changing a lot and the architecture cross bootstrap tooling is very sensitive to such changes requiring permanent maintenance. A problem that recently surfaced was that building a binutils cross toolchain would result in a binutils-for-host package that would not be practically installable as it would depend on a binutils-common package that was not built. This turned into an examination of binutils-common and noticing that it actually differed across architectures even though it should not. Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues (not affiliated with Freexian) and Colin Watson kindly helped brainstorm possible solutions. Eventually, Helmut provided a patch to move gprofng bits out of binutils-common. Independently, Matthias Klose (not affiliated with Freexian) split out binutils-gold into a separate source package. As a result, binutils-common is now equal across architectures and can be marked Multi-Arch: foreign resolving the initial problem.

Salsa CI, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n Santiago continued the work about the sbuild support for Salsa CI, that was mentioned in the previous month report. The !568 merge request that created the new build image was merged, making it easier to test !569 with external projects. Santiago used a fork of the debusine repo to try the draft !569, and some issues were spotted, and part of them fixed. This is the last debusine pipeline run with the current !569: https://salsa.debian.org/santiago/debusine/-/pipelines/794233. One of the last improvements relates to how to enable projects to customize the pipeline, in an equivalent way than they currently do in the extract-source and build jobs. While this is work-in-progress, the results are rather promising. Next steps include deciding on introducing schroot support for bookworm, bookworm-security, and older releases, as they are done in the official debian buildd.

DebConf preparations, by Stefano Rivera and Santiago Ruano Rinc n DebConf will be happening in Brest, France, in July. Santiago continued the DebConf 25 organization work, looking for catering providers. Both Stefano and Santiago have been reaching out to some potential sponsors. DebConf depends on sponsors to cover the organization cost, if your company depends on Debian, please consider sponsoring DebConf. Stefano has been winding up some of the finances from previous DebConfs. Finalizing reimbursements to team members from DebConf 23, and handling some outstanding issues from DebConf 24. Stefano and the rest of the DebConf committee have been reviewing bids for DebConf 26, to select the next venue.

Ruby 3.3 is now the default Ruby interpreter, by Lucas Kanashiro Ruby 3.3 is about to become the default Ruby interpreter for Trixie. Many bugs were fixed by Lucas and the Debian Ruby team during the sprint hold in Paris during Jan 27-31. The next step is to remove support of Ruby 3.1, which is the alternative Ruby interpreter for now. Thanks to the Debian Release team for all the support, especially Emilio Pozuelo Monfort.

Rails 7 transition, by Lucas Kanashiro Rails 6 has been shipped by Debian since Bullseye, and as a WEB framework, many issues (especially security related issues) have been encountered and the maintainability of it becomes harder and harder. With that in mind, during the Debian Ruby team sprint last month, the transition to Rack 3 (an important dependency of rails containing many breaking changes) was started in Debian unstable, it is ongoing. Once it is done, the Rails 7 transition will take place, and Rails 7 should be shipped in Debian Trixie.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Stefano improved a poor ImportError for users of the turtle module on Python 3, who haven t installed the python3-tk package.
• Stefano updated several packages to new upstream releases.
• Stefano added the Python extension to the re2 package, allowing for the use of the Google RE2 regular expression library as a direct replacement for the standard library re module.
• Stefano started provisioning a new physical server for the debian.social infrastructure.
• Carles improved simplemonitor (documentation on systemd integration, worked with upstream for fixing a bug).
• Carles upgraded packages to new upstream versions: python-ring-doorbell and python-asyncclick.
• Carles did po-debconf translations to Catalan: reviewed 44 packages and submitted translations to 90 packages (via salsa merge requests or bugtracker bugs).
• Carles maintained po-debconf-manager with small fixes.
• Rapha l worked on some outstanding DEP-14 merge request and participated in the associated discussion. The discussions have been more contentious than anticipated, somewhat exacerbated by Otto s desire to conclude fast while the required tool support is not yet there.
• Rapha l, with the help of Philipp Kern from the DSA team, upgraded tracker.debian.org to use Django 4.2 (from bookworm-backports) which in turn enabled him to configure authentication via salsa.debian.org. It s now possible to login to tracker.debian.org with your salsa credentials!
• Rapha l updated zim a nice desktop wiki that is very handy to organize your day-to-day digital life to the latest upstream version (0.76).
• Helmut sent patches for 10 cross build failures.
• Helmut continued working on a tool for memory-based concurrency limit of builds.
• Helmut NMUed libtool, opensysusers and virtualbox.
• Enrico tried to support Helmut in working out tricky usrmerge situations
• Thorsten Alteholz uploaded a new upstream version of brlaser.
• Colin Watson upgraded 33 Python packages to new upstream versions, including fixes for CVE-2024-42353, CVE-2024-47532, and CVE-2025-22153.
• Emilio Pozuelo managed various transitions, and fixed various RC bugs (telepathy-glib, xorg, xserver-xorg-video-vesa, apitrace, mesa).
• Anupa attended the monthly team meeting for Debian publicity team and shared the social media stats.
• Anupa assisted Jean-Pierre Giraud in the point release announcement for Debian 12.9 and published the Micronews.
• Anupa took part in multiple Debian publicity team discussions regarding our presence in social media platforms.

POTA, Antennas and why do my toys not work? Having had my interest piqued by Ian at mastodon.radio, I looked online and spotted a couple of parks within stumbling distance of my house, that s good news! It looks like the list has been refactored and expanded since I last looked at it, so there are now more entities to activate and explore. My concerns about antennas noted last week rumbled on. There was a second strand to this concern too, my end fed 64:1 (or 49:1?!) transformer from MM0OPX sits in my mind as not having worked very well in Spain last year, and I want to get to the bottom of why. As with most things in my life, it s probably a me problem. I came up with a cunning plan - firstly, buy a new mast to replace the one I broke a few weeks back on Cat Law. Secondly, buy a couple of new connectors and some heatshrink to reterminate my cable that I m sure is broken. Spending more money on a problem never hurt anyone, right? Come Wednesday, the new toys arrived and I figured combining everything into one convenient night time walk and radio was a good plan. So I walk out to the nearest park with my LoRa APRS doofer going and see what happens: After circling a bit to find somewhere suitable (there appear to be construction works in the park!) I set up my gear in 2C with frost on the ground, called CQ, spotted and got nothing on either the end fed half wave or the cheap vertical. As it was too late for 20m, I tried 40 and a bit of 80 using the inbuilt tuner, but wasn t heard by stations I called or when calling independently. I packed everything up and lora-doofered my way home, mildly deflated.

Try it at home It still didn t sit with me that the end fed wasn t working, so come Friday night I set it up in the back garden/woods behind the house to try and diagnose why it wasn t working. Up it went, I worked some Irish stations pretty effortlessly, and down everything came. No complaints - the only things I did differently was have the feedpoint a little higher and check my power, limiting it to 10W. The G90 can do 20W, I wonder if running at that was saturating the core in the 64:1. At some point in the evening I stepped in some dog s shit too, and spent some time cleaning my boots outside to avoid further tramping the smell through the house. Win some, lose some.

Take it to the Hills On Friday, some of the other GM-ES Sota-ists had been out for an activity day. On account of me being busy in work, I couldn t go outside to play, but I figured a weekend of activity was on the books.

Saturday - A day above the clouds On Saturday I took myself up Tap O Noth, a favourite of mine for some reason, and Lord Arthur s Hill. Before I hit the hills, I took myself to the hackerspace and printed myself a K6ARK Winder and a guy ring for the mast, cut string, tied it together and wound the string on to the winder. I also took time to buzz out my wonky coax and it showed great continuity. Hmm, that can be continued later. I didn t quite get to crimping the radial network of the Aliexpress whip with a 12mm stud crimp, that can also be put on the TODO list.

Tap O Noth Once finally out, the weather was a bit cloudy with passing snow showers, but in between the showers I was above the clouds and the air was clear: After a mild struggle on 2m, I set up the end fed the first hill and got to work from the old hill fort: The end fed worked flawlessly. Exactly as promised, switching between 7MHz, 14MHz, 21MHz and 28MHz without a tuner was perfect, I chased hills on all the bands, and had a great time. Apart from 40m, where there was absolutely no space due to a contest. That wasn t such a fun time! My fingers were bitterly cold, so on went the big gloves for the descent and I felt like I was warm by the time I made it back to the car. It worked so well, in fact, I took the 1/4 wave cheap vertical out my bag and decided to brave it on the next activation.

Lord Arthur s Hill GM5ALX has posted a .gpx to sotlas which is shorter than the other ascent, but much sharper - I figured this would be a fun new way to try up the hill! It takes you right through the heart of the Littlewood Park estate, and I felt a bit uncomfortable walking straight past the estate cottages, especially when there were vehicles moving and active work happening. Presumably this is where Lord Arthur lived, at the foot of his hill. I cut through the woods to the west of the cottages, disturbing some deer and many, many pheasants, but I met the path fairly quickly. From there it was a 2km walk, 300m vertical ascent. Short and sharp! At the top, I was treated to a view of the hill I had activated only an hour or so before, which is a view that always makes me smile: To get some height for the feedpoint, I wrapped the coax around my winder a couple of turns and trapped it with the elastic while draping the coax over the trig. This bought me some more height and I felt clever because of it. Maybe a pole would be easier? From here, I worked inter-G on 40m and had a wee pile up, eventually working 15 or so European stations on 20m. Pleased with that! I had been considering a third hill, but home was the call in the failing light. Back to the car I walked to find my key didn t have any battery, so out came the Audi App and I used the Internet of Things to unlock my car. The modern world is bizarre.

Sunday - Cloudy Head // Head in the Clouds Sunday started off migraney, so I stayed within the confines of my house until I felt safe driving! After some back and forth in my cloudy head, I opted for the easier option of Ladylea Hill as I wasn t feeling up for major physical exertion. It was a long drive, after which I felt more wonky, but I hit the path eventually - I run to Hibby Standard Time, a few hours to a few days behind the rest of GM/ES. I was ready to bail if my head didn t improve, but it turns out, fresh cold air, silence and bloodflow helped. Ladylea Hill was incredibly quiet, a feature I really appreciated. It feels incredibly remote, with a long winding drive down Glenbuchat, which still has ice on the surface of the lochs and standing water. A brooding summit crowned with grey cloud in fantastic scenery that only revealed itself upon the clouds blowing through: I set up at the cairn and picked up 30 contacts overall, split between 40m and 20m, with some inter-g on 40 and a couple of continental surprises. 20 had longer skip today, so I saw Spain, Finland, Slovenia, Poland. On teardown, I managed to snap the top segment of my brand new mast with my cold, clumsy fingers, but thankfully sotabeams stock replacements. More money at the problem, again. Back to the car, no app needed, and homeward bound as the light faded. At the end of the weekend, I find myself finally over 100 activator points and over 400 chaser points. Somehow I ve collected more points this year already than last year, the winter bonuses really do stack up!

Addendum - OSMAnd & Open Street Map I ve been using OSMAnd on my iPhone quite extensively recently, I think offline mapping is super important if you re going out to get mildly lost in the hills. On more than one occasion, I have confidently set off in the wrong direction in the mist, and maps have saved my bacon! As you can download .gpx files, it s great to have them on the device and available for guidance in case you get lost, coupled with an offline map. Plus, as I drive around I love to have the dark red of a hill I ve walked appear on the map in my car dash or in my hand: This weekend I discovered it s possible to have height maps for nice 3d maps and contours marked on the map - you just need to download some additions for the maps. This is a really nice feature, it makes maps more pretty and more useful when you re in the middle of nowhere. Open Street Map also has designators for SOTA summits here and similar for POTA here GM5ALX has set to adding the summits around Scotland here. While the benefits aren t immediately obvious, it allows developers of mapping applications access to more data at no extra cost, really. It helps add depth to an already rich set of information, and allows us as radio amateurs to do more interesting things with maps and not be shackled to Apple/Google. Because it s open data, we can also fix things we find wrong as users. I like to fix road surfaces after I ve been cycling as that will feed forward to route planning through Komoot and data on my wahoo too, which can be modified with osm maps. In the future, it s possible to have an OSMAnd plugin highlighting local SOTA summits or mimicking features of sotl.as but offline. It s cool to be able to put open technologies to use like this in the field and really is the convergence point of all my favourite things!

I hope to write more next year. I've been thinking about a few posts I could write for work, about how things work behind the scenes at Tor, that could be informative for many people. We run a rather old setup, but things hold up pretty well for what we throw at it, and it's worth sharing that with the world...

A bad year for this blog 2024 was the second worst year ever in my blogging history, tied with 2009 at a measly 6 posts for the year:

anarcat@angela:anarc.at$ curl -sSL https://anarc.at/blog/   grep 'href="\./'   grep -o 20[0-9][0-9]   sort   uniq -c   sort -nr   grep -v 2025   tail -3
      6 2024
      6 2009
      3 2014

I did write about my work though, detailing the migration from Gitolite to GitLab we completed that year. But after August, total radio silence until now.

Loads of drafts It's not that I have nothing to say: I have no less than five drafts in my working tree here, not counting three actual drafts recorded in the Git repository here:

anarcat@angela:anarc.at$ git s blog
## main...origin/main
?? blog/bell-bot.md
?? blog/fish.md
?? blog/kensington.md
?? blog/nixos.md
?? blog/tmux.md
anarcat@angela:anarc.at$ git grep -l '\!tag draft'
blog/mobile-massive-gallery.md
blog/on-dying.mdwn
blog/secrets-recovery.md

I just don't have time to wrap those things up. I think part of me is disgusted by seeing my work stolen by large corporations to build proprietary large language models while my idols have been pushed to suicide for trying to share science with the world. Another part of me wants to make those things just right. The "tagged drafts" above are nothing more than a huge pile of chaotic links, far from being useful for anyone else than me, and even then. The on-dying article, in particular, is becoming my nemesis. I've been wanting to write that article for over 6 years now, I think. It's just too hard.

Writing elsewhere There's also the fact that I write for work already. A lot. Here are the top-10 contributors to our team's wiki:

anarcat@angela:help.torproject.org$ git shortlog --numbered --summary --group="format:%al"   head -10
  4272  anarcat
   423  jerome
   117  zen
   116  lelutin
   104  peter
    58  kez
    45  irl
    43  hiro
    18  gaba
    17  groente

... but that's a bit unfair, since I've been there half a decade. Here's the last year:

anarcat@angela:help.torproject.org$ git shortlog --since=2024-01-01 --numbered --summary --group="format:%al"   head -10
   827  anarcat
   117  zen
   116  lelutin
    91  jerome
    17  groente
    10  gaba
     8  micah
     7  kez
     5  jnewsome
     4  stephen.swift

So I still write the most commits! But to truly get a sense of the amount I wrote in there, we should count actual changes. Here it is by number of lines (from commandlinefu.com):

anarcat@angela:help.torproject.org$ git ls-files   xargs -n1 git blame --line-porcelain   sed -n 's/^author //p'   sort -f   uniq -ic   sort -nr   head -10
  99046 Antoine Beaupr 
   6900 Zen Fu
   4784 J r me Charaoui
   1446 Gabriel Filion
   1146 Jerome Charaoui
    837 groente
    705 kez
    569 Gaba
    381 Matt Traudt
    237 Stephen Swift

That, of course, is the entire history of the git repo, again. We should take only the last year into account, and probably ignore the tails directory, as sneaky Zen Fu imported the entire docs from another wiki there...

anarcat@angela:help.torproject.org$ find [d-s]* -type f -mtime -365   xargs -n1 git blame --line-porcelain 2>/dev/null   sed -n 's/^author //p'   sort -f   uniq -ic   sort -nr   head -10
  75037 Antoine Beaupr 
   2932 J r me Charaoui
   1442 Gabriel Filion
   1400 Zen Fu
    929 Jerome Charaoui
    837 groente
    702 kez
    569 Gaba
    381 Matt Traudt
    237 Stephen Swift

Pretty good! 75k lines. But those are the files that were modified in the last year. If we go a little more nuts, we find that:

anarcat@angela:help.torproject.org$ $ git-count-words-range.py    sort -k6 -nr   head -10
parsing commits for words changes from command: git log '--since=1 year ago' '--format=%H %al'
anarcat 126116 - 36932 = 89184
zen 31774 - 5749 = 26025
groente 9732 - 607 = 9125
lelutin 10768 - 2578 = 8190
jerome 6236 - 2586 = 3650
gaba 3164 - 491 = 2673
stephen.swift 2443 - 673 = 1770
kez 1034 - 74 = 960
micah 772 - 250 = 522
weasel 410 - 0 = 410

I wrote 126,116 words in that wiki, only in the last year. I also deleted 37k words, so the final total is more like 89k words, but still: that's about forty (40!) articles of the average size (~2k) I wrote in 2022. (And yes, I did go nuts and write a new log parser, essentially from scratch, to figure out those word diffs. I did get the courage only after asking GPT-4o for an example first, I must admit.) Let's celebrate that again: I wrote 90 thousand words in that wiki in 2024. According to Wikipedia, a "novella" is 17,500 to 40,000 words, which would mean I wrote about a novella and a novel, in the past year. But interestingly, if I look at the repository analytics. I certainly didn't write that much more in the past year. So that alone cannot explain the lull in my production here.

Arguments Another part of me is just tired of the bickering and arguing on the internet. I have at least two articles in there that I suspect is going to get me a lot of push-back (NixOS and Fish). I know how to deal with this: you need to write well, consider the controversy, spell it out, and defuse things before they happen. But that's hard work and, frankly, I don't really care that much about what people think anymore. I'm not writing here to convince people. I have stop evangelizing a long time ago. Now, I'm more into documenting, and teaching. And, while teaching, there's a two-way interaction: when you give out a speech or workshop, people can ask questions, or respond, and you all learn something. When you document, you quickly get told "where is this? I couldn't find it" or "I don't understand this" or "I tried that and it didn't work" or "wait, really? shouldn't we do X instead", and you learn. Here, it's static. It's my little soapbox where I scream in the void. The only thing people can do is scream back.

Collaboration So. Let's see if we can work together here. If you don't like something I say, disagree, or find something wrong or to be improved, instead of screaming on social media or ignoring me, try contributing back. This site here is backed by a git repository and I promise to read everything you send there, whether it is an issue or a merge request. I will, of course, still read comments sent by email or IRC or social media, but please, be kind. You can also, of course, follow the latest changes on the TPA wiki. If you want to catch up with the last year, some of the "novellas" I wrote include:

• TPA-RFC-33: Monitoring: Nagios to Prometheus conversion, see also the extensive Prometheus documentation we wrote
• TPA-RFC-45: email architecture: draft of long-term email services at torproject.org
• TPA-RFC-62: TPA password manager: switch to password-store
• TPA-RFC-63: storage server budget: buy a new backup storage server (5k$ + 100$/mth)
• TPA-RFC-65: PostgreSQL backups: switching from legacy to pgBackRest for database backups
• TPA-RFC-68: Idle canary servers: provision test servers that sit idle to monitor infrastructure and stage deployments
• TPA-RFC-71: Emergency email deployments, phase B: deploy a new sender-rewriting mail forwarder, migrate mailing lists off the legacy server to a new machine, migrate the remaining Schleuder list to the Tails server, upgrade eugeni.
• TPA-RFC-76: Puppet merge request workflow: how to mirror our private Puppet repo to GitLab safely
• TPA-RFC-79: General merge request workflows: how to use merge requests, assignees, reviewers, draft and threads on GitLab projects

(Well, no, you can't actually follow changes on a GitLab wiki. But we have a wiki-replica git repository where you can see the latest commits, and subscribe to the RSS feed.) See you there!

Passively lit coding

Personal history Looking back at my own old blog entries I find one from 10 years ago describing how I bought a Kobo eBook reader with the intent of using it as an external monitor for my laptop. It seems that I got a proof-of-concept setup working, using VNC, but it was tedious to set up, and I never actually used that. I subsequently noticed that the eBook reader is rather useful to read eBooks, and it has been in heavy use for that every since. Four years ago I gave this old idea another shot and bought an Onyx BOOX Max Lumi. This is an A4-sized tablet running Android and had the very promising feature of an HDMI input. So hopefully I d attach it to my laptop and it just works . Turns out that this never worked as well as I hoped: Even if I set the resolution to exactly the tablet s screen s resolution I got blurry output, and it also drained the battery a lot, so I gave up on this. I subsequently noticed that the tablet is rather useful to take notes, and it has been in sporadic use for that. Going off on this tangent: I later learned that the HDMI input of this device appears to the system like a camera input, and I don t have to use Boox s monitor app but could other apps like FreeDCam as well. This somehow managed to fix the resolution issues, but the setup still wasn t as convenient to be used regularly. I also played around with pure terminal approaches, e.g. SSH ing into a system, but since my usual workflow was never purely text-based (I was at least used to using a window manager instead of a terminal multiplexer like screen or tmux) that never led anywhere either.

VSCode, working remotely Since these attempts I have started a new job working on the Lean theorem prover, and working on or with Lean basically means using VSCode. (There is a very good neovim plugin as well, but I m using VSCode nevertheless, if only to make sure I am dogfooding our default user experience). My colleagues have said good things about using VSCode with the remote SSH extension to work on a beefy machine, so I gave this a try now as well, and while it s not a complete game changer for me, it does make certain tasks (rebuilding everything after a switching branches, running the test suite) very convenient. And it s a bit spooky to run these work loads without the laptop s fan spinning up. In this setup, the workspace is remote, but VSCode still runs locally. But it made me wonder about my old goal of being able to work reasonably efficient on my eInk tablet. Can I replicate this setup there? VSCode itself doesn t run on Android directly. There are project that run a Linux chroot or in termux on the Android system, and then you can VNC to connect to it (e.g. on Andronix) but that did not seem promising. It seemed fiddly, and I probably should take it easy on the tablet s system.

code-server, running remotely A more promising option is code-server. This is a fork of VSCode (actually of VSCodium) that runs completely on the remote machine, and the client machine just needs a browser. I set that up this weekend and found that I was able to do a little bit of work reasonably.

Access With code-server one has to decide how to expose it safely enough. I decided against the tunnel-over-SSH option, as I expected that to be somewhat tedious to set up (both initially and for each session) on the android system, and I liked the idea of being able to use any device to work in my environment. I also decided against the more involved reverse proxy behind proper hostname with SSL setups, because they involve a few extra steps, and some of them I cannot do as I do not have root access on the shared beefy machine I wanted to use. That left me with the option of using a code-server s built-in support for self-signed certificates and a password:

$ cat .config/code-server/config.yaml
bind-addr: 1.2.3.4:8080
auth: password
password: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
cert: true

With trust-on-first-use this seems reasonably secure. Update: I noticed that the browsers would forget that I trust this self-signed cert after restarting the browser, and also that I cannot install the page (as a Progressive Web App) unless it has a valid certificate. But since I don t have superuser access to that machine, I can t just follow the official recommendation of using a reverse proxy on port 80 or 431 with automatic certificates. Instead, I pointed a hostname that I control to that machine, obtained a certificate manually on my laptop (using acme.sh) and copied the files over, so the configuration now reads as follows:

bind-addr: 1.2.3.4:3933
auth: password
password: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
cert: .acme.sh/foobar.nomeata.de_ecc/foobar.nomeata.de.cer
cert-key: .acme.sh/foobar.nomeata.de_ecc/foobar.nomeata.de.key

(This is getting very specific to my particular needs and constraints, so I ll spare you the details.)

Service To keep code-server running I created a systemd service that s managed by my user s systemd instance:

~ $ cat ~/.config/systemd/user/code-server.service
[Unit]
Description=code-server
After=network-online.target
[Service]
Environment=PATH=/home/joachim/.nix-profile/bin:/nix/var/nix/profiles/default/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/local/games:/usr/games
ExecStart=/nix/var/nix/profiles/default/bin/nix run nixpkgs#code-server
[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

(I am using nix as a package manager on a Debian system there, hence the additional PATH and complex ExecStart. If you have a more conventional setup then you do not have to worry about Environment and can likely use ExecStart=code-server. For this to survive me logging out I had to ask the system administrator to run loginctl enable-linger joachim, so that systemd allows my jobs to linger.

Git credentials The next issue to be solved was how to access the git repositories. The work is all on public repositories, but I still need a way to push my work. With the classic VSCode-SSH-remote setup from my laptop, this is no problem: My local SSH key is forwarded using the SSH agent, so I can seamlessly use that on the other side. But with code-server there is no SSH key involved. I could create a new SSH key and store it on the server. That did not seem appealing, though, because SSH keys on Github always have full access. It wouldn t be horrible, but I still wondered if I can do better. I thought of creating fine-grained personal access tokens that only me to push code to specific repositories, and nothing else, and just store them permanently on the remote server. Still a neat and convenient option, but creating PATs for our org requires approval and I didn t want to bother anyone on the weekend. So I am experimenting with Github s git-credential-manager now. I have configured it to use git s credential cache with an elevated timeout, so that once I log in, I don t have to again for one workday.

$ nix-env -iA nixpkgs.git-credential-manager
$ git-credential-manager configure
$ git config --global credential.credentialStore cache
$ git config --global credential.cacheOptions "--timeout 36000"

To login, I have to https://github.com/login/device on an authenticated device (e.g. my phone) and enter a 8-character code. Not too shabby in terms of security. I only wish that webpage would not require me to press Tab after each character This still grants rather broad permissions to the code-server, but at least only temporarily

Android setup On the client side I could now open https://host.example.com:8080 in Firefox on my eInk Android tablet, click through the warning about self-signed certificates, log in with the fixed password mentioned above, and start working! I switched to a theme that supposedly is eInk-optimized (eInk by Mufanza). It s not perfect (e.g. git diffs are unhelpful because it is not possible to distinguish deleted from added lines), but it s a start. There are more eInk themes on the official Visual Studio Marketplace, but because code-server is a fork it cannot use that marketplace, and for example this theme isn t on Open-VSX. For some reason the F11 key doesn t work, but going fullscreen is crucial, because screen estate is scarce in this setup. I can go fullscreen using VSCode s command palette (Ctrl-P) and invoking the command there, but Firefox often jumps out of the fullscreen mode, which is annoying. I still have to pay attention to when that s happening; maybe its the Esc key, which I am of course using a lot due to me using vim bindings. A more annoying problem was that on my Boox tablet, sometimes the on-screen keyboard would pop up, which is seriously annoying! It took me a while to track this down: The Boox has two virtual keyboards installed: The usual Google ASOP keyboard, and the Onyx Keyboard. The former is clever enough to stay hidden when there is a physical keyboard attached, but the latter isn t. Moreover, pressing Shift-Ctrl on the physical keyboard rotates through the virtual keyboards. Now, VSCode has many keyboard shortcuts that require Shift-Ctrl (especially on an eInk device, where you really want to avoid using the mouse). And the limited settings exposed by the Boox Android system do not allow you configure that or disable the Onyx keyboard! To solve this, I had to install the KISS Launcher, which would allow me to see more Android settings, and in particular allow me to disable the Onyx keyboard. So this is fixed. I was hoping to improve the experience even more by opening the web page as a Progressive Web App (PWA), as described in the code-server FAQ. Unfortunately, that did not work. Firefox on Android did not recognize the site as a PWA (even though it recognizes a PWA test page). And I couldn t use Chrome either because (unlike Firefox) it would not consider a site with a self-signed certificate as a secure context, and then code-server does not work fully. Maybe this is just some bug that gets fixed in later versions. Now that I use a proper certificate, I can use it as a Progressive Web App, and with Firefox on Android this starts the app in full-screen mode (no system bars, no location bar). The F11 key still does t work, and using the command palette to enter fullscreen does nothing visible, but then Esc leaves that fullscreen mode and I suddenly have the system bars again. But maybe if I just don t do that I get the full screen experience. We ll see. I did not work enough with this yet to assess how much the smaller screen estate, the lack of colors and the slower refresh rate will bother me. I probably need to hide Lean s InfoView more often, and maybe use the Error Lens extension, to avoid having to split my screen vertically. I also cannot easily work on a park bench this way, with a tablet and a separate external keyboard. I d need at least a table, or some additional piece of hardware that turns tablet + keyboard into some laptop-like structure that I can put on my, well, lap. There are cases for Onyx products that include a keyboard, and maybe they work on the lap, but they don t have the Trackpoint that I have on my ThinkPad TrackPoint Keyboard II, and how can you live without that?

Conclusion After this initial setup chances are good that entering and using this environment is convenient enough for me to actually use it; we will see when it gets warmer. A few bits could be better. In particular logging in and authenticating GitHub access could be both more convenient and more safe I could imagine that when I open the page I confirm that on my phone (maybe with a fingerprint), and that temporarily grants access to the code-server and to specific GitHub repositories only. Is that easily possible?

This post is an unpublished review for ChatGPT is bullshit

    LD A,42
    LD C,4
    CALL 0x0005

    OUT (C),C
    RET

A:
ERA HELLO.COM
ERA HELLO.HEX
ERA HELLO.PRN
hello
ASM HELLO
LOAD HELLO
DDT HELLO.com
t
t
t
t
t
t
t
t
t
C-c
EXIT

• Erase "HELLO.COM", "HELLO.HEX", "HELLO.PRN"
• Invoke "hello[.com]" (which will fail, as we've just deleted it).
• Then we assemble "HELLO.ASM" to "HELLO.HEX", then to "HELLO.COM"
• Invoke DDT, the system debugger, and tell it to trace execution a bunch of times.
• Finally we exit the debugger with "Ctrl-C"
• And exit the emulator with "exit"

• A backward compatible deployment setup
• Migration of static text content pages
• Migration of dynamic pages (Incorporating existing perl scripts)
• Redirection for contents moved permanently (301)

...
aliases:
  - /index.fr.html
...

Changes in inline version 0.0.4 (2025-01-07)

• Dynamically linked compiled code is now registered in NAMESPACE
• The continuous integration setup was update several times
• The README was updated with current badges and URLs
• The DESCRIPTION file now uses Authors@R
• The configure and cleanup scripts use /bin/sh

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

• gavodachs
• matrix-synapse (uploaded by Andrej Shadura)
• Packaged multipart
• Converted python-wadllib to use the packaged version of multipart
• Made trac (build-)depend on python3-multipart, fixing build failures in trac-customfieldadmin and trac-wysiwyg

• audioread
• celery
• cloud-sptheme
• djangorestframework
• dominate
• fenics-basix (investigated and suggested a fix, although it hasn t yet been uploaded)
• ipykernel
• ipython
• jupyter-server (contributed upstream)
• mdp (contributed upstream)
• pastescript (contributed upstream)
• pypandoc (contributed upstream)
• python-aiosmtpd
• python-cheroot
• python-hjson
• python-miio
• python-pyramid
• python-trustme (uploaded by Robie Basak)
• rich (investigated and tested; uploaded by Sandro Tosi)
• supervisor
• tomopy

• alot
• dot2tex (contributed upstream)
• flask-paginate (contributed upstream)
• ipython
• klepto
• nose
• pathos
• pox
• ppft
• psycopg3
• pybindgen (contributed upstream)
• pyina
• pyrr (contributed upstream)
• pytest-mpi (contributed upstream)
• python-aiohttp-security (contributed upstream)
• python-aiohttp-session (contributed upstream)
• python-anyqt (contributed upstream)
• python-argon2
• python-cai (contributed upstream)
• python-django-analytical (contributed upstream)
• python-iptables (contributed upstream)
• python-nacl
• python-pygtrie
• python-proto-plus (contributed upstream)
• python-requests-toolbelt
• python-tinycss
• python-whoosh
• symmetrize (contributed upstream)
• vcr.py
• wtforms-components
• wtforms-test
• yoyo
• zope.deferredimport

• pyfribidi
• pylibmc
• python-mkdocs

• black
• datalad-next: #1080969 and #1088038 (contributed upstream)
• dipy (uploaded by Andreas Tille)
• pyfribidi
• pylibmc, fixing a build failure in cachelib
• pympress
• pytest-forked (contributed upstream)
• python-mongomock: c03f91b51048 and c485fb8fef23
• python-nox

• aioftp
• alot
• astroid
• buildbot
• cloudpickle (fixing a Python 3.13 failure)
• django-countries
• django-sass-processor
• djoser (fixing CVE-2024-21543)
• ipython
• jsonpickle
• lazr.delegates
• loguru (fixing a Python 3.13 failure)
• netmiko
• pydantic
• pydantic-core
• pydantic-settings
• pydoctor
• pygresql
• pylint (fixing Python 3.13 failures #1089758 and #1091029)
• pypandoc (fixing a Python 3.12 warning)
• python-aiohttp (fixing CVE-2024-52303 and CVE-2024-52304
• python-aiohttp-security
• python-argcomplete
• python-asyncssh
• python-click
• python-cytoolz
• python-jira (fixing a Python 3.13 failure)
• python-limits
• python-line-profiler
• python-mkdocs
• python-model-bakery
• python-pgspecial
• python-pyramid (fixing CVE-2023-40587)
• python-pythonjsonlogger
• python-semantic-release
• python-utils
• python-venusian
• pyupgrade
• pyzmq
• quart
• six
• sqlparse
• twisted
• vcr.py
• vulture
• yoyo
• zope.configuration
• zope.testrunner

• foolscap
• gnome-keysign
• magic-wormhole
• matrix-synapse
• python-autobahn
• python-testtools
• python-treq
• tahoe-lafs: Inconclusive investigation
• txtorcon

Know I adore you. Look out over the glow. The cities sundered, their machines inverted, mountains split and prairies blazing, that long foreseen Hereafter crowning fast. This calamity is a promise made to you. A prayer to you, and to your shadow which has become my second self, tucked behind my eye and growing in tandem with me, pressing outwards through the pupil, the smarter, truer, almost bursting reason for our wrath. Do not doubt me. Just look. Watch us rise as the sun comes up over the beauty. The future stains the bleakness so pink. When my violence subsides, we will have nothing, and be champions.

The girl sang, "Unalone toward dawn we go, toward the glory of the new morning." An enforcer shot her in the belly, and when she did not fall, her head.

We scaled the viny mountain jags at Montrose Barony's legal edge, the place where land was and wasn't Ignavia, Royston, and Drustland alike. There was a border but it was diffuse and hallucinatory, even more so than most. On legal papers and state maps there were harsh lines that squashed topography and sanded down the mountains into even hills in planter's rows, but here among the jutting rocks and craggy heather, the ground was lineless.

Conversation was fleeting. Perdita managed with whomever stood near her, chipper about every prettiness she saw, the flitting butterflies, the dappled light between the leaves, the lushness and the fragrance of untamed land, and her walking companions took turns sharing in her delight. It was infectious, how happy she was. She was going to slaughter millions. She was going to skip like this all the while.

She looked like a mythic princess from the old woodcuts, who ruled nature by force of goodness and faith and had no legal power.

• Uploaded 689 packages to Arch Linux
  • Most of which being reproducible, meaning I provably didn t abuse my position of compiling the binaries
  • 59 of those are signal-desktop
  • 34 of those are metasploit
• Made 28 commits in Alpine Linux aports
  • 24 of those being package releases
• Made 43 uploads to Debian
  • All of them being related to my work in the debian-rust team, that I ve been a part of since 2018
• Made 5 commits in NixOS nixpkgs
• Made 1 commit in homebrew-core
• Was one of the people involved in rolling out _FORTIFY_SOURCE=3 compiler hardening in Arch Linux, for the entire operating system. I wrote lists, tools, patches and my work got me quoted in an Additional Considerations section of the OpenSSF compiler hardening guide for C and C++. There are now more, stricter buffer-overflow checks at runtime that hopefully make your computer harder to exploit in 2025.
• Was one of the people behind the launch of reproduce.debian.net which is analogous to reproducible.archlinux.org that I also helped create 5 years ago. Reproducing these packages (and allowing anybody else to do the same) proves the binaries have not been backdoored by the build server (or whoever compiled them), and if there s a backdoor, you can likely find it in the source code.
• Integrated librustls, a memory safe TLS implementation, into Arch Linux C dynamic linking ecosystem and became one of the authors of the rustls curl TLS backend
• In response to the XZ Jia Tan incident I created whatsrc.org, a source code indexing project. It doesn t solve anything in itself, but it s framing the concept of source code inputs and how to reason about them in a way that I consider promising. It also documents and makes it very apparent what specifically is the source code we re putting into our computers, that would benefit from code reviews.
• Contributed to the Reproducible Builds mailing list 33 times
• Volunteered at a soldering workshop for beginners for the 3rd year in a row, with people describing me as a good teacher, giving very calm vibes and having endless patience
• Reverse engineered the signal username and QR-code feature
• Rewrote my tooling for apt.vulns.xyz to use repro-env, the .deb files can now be verified through reproducible builds, and I switched to static Rust binaries because I had trouble targeting multiple Debian/Ubuntu releases with my previous tooling
• Wrote 0 blog posts (besides this one)
• Wrote 5.937 messages in irc channels
• Got mentioned 1.664 times on irc
• Attended FOSDEM, Fusion, the Reproducible Builds summit, Hackjunta 2024#2 and 38c3
• Made and printed 8 new sticker designs, and a custom hoodie
• Mastered the art of pragmatic zaza cultivation and processing
• Got 2 new piercings and 2-3 new tattoos (depending on how you count them)

Rong explained that in a true Ponzi scheme, the organizer would have to handle the "fraud money." Instead, he gave the sneakers away and then only took a small cut of each trade. "The users are trading between each other. They are not going through me, right?" Rong said. Essentially, he was arguing that by downloading the Stepn app and walking to earn tokens, crypto bros were Ponzi'ing themselves.

Package mirror hierarchy Trace file was a good starting point for checking upstream for a package mirror in Debian. It resides at <URL>/debian/project/trace/_traces and shows flow of data. Sample trace file from jing.rocks s mirror. It showed, canonical source for packages is ftp-master.debian.org. Checking via https://db.debian.org/machines.cgi, showed it s fasolo.d.o hosted at Brown University, US. This serves as Master Archive Server , making it a Tier 0 mirror. It s entry mentions that it has 1 Gbps shared LAN connectivity (dated information?) but it only has to push to 3 other machines/sites. Side note - .d.o is .debian.org As shown on https://mirror-master.debian.org/status/mirror-hierarchy.html, the three sites are:

• syncproxy2.eu.debian.org ie smit.d.o hosted by University of Twente, Netherlands with 2x10 Gbps connectivity.
• syncproxy4.eu.debian.org ie schmelzer.d.o hosted by Conova in Austria with 2x10 Gbps connectivity.
• syncproxy2.wna.debian.org - https://db.debian.org/machines.cgi entry mentions it being hosted at UBC here, but IP seems to be pointing to OSUOSL IP range as of now. IIRC few months ago, syncproxy2.wna.d.o was made to point to other host due to some issue (?). mirror-osuosl.d.o seems to be serving as syncproxy2.wna.d.o now. Bandwidth isn t explicitly mentioned but from my experience seeing bandwidths which other free software projects hosted at OSUOSL have, it would be atleast 10 Gbps and maybe more for Debian.

                     syncproxy2.eu.d.o (NL) ---> to the world
                    /
ftp-master.d.o (US) -- syncproxy4.eu.d.o (AT)  --> to the world 
                    \
                     syncproxy2.wna.d.o (US) --> to the world

A visualation of flow of package from ftp-master.d.o

These form the Debian Tier 1 mirror network, as all the mirrors sync from them. So Debian has atleast 50 Gbps+ capacity at Tier 1. A normal Debian user might never directly interact with any of these 3 machines, but every Debian package they run/download/install flows through these machines. Though, I m unsure what wna stands for in syncproxy2.wna.d.o. NA probably is North America and W is west (coast)? If you know, do let me know. After Tier 1, there are a few more syncproxies (detailed below). There are atleast 45 mirrors at Tier 2, updates for which are directly pushed from the three Tier 1 sync proxies. Most country mirrors i.e. ftp..debian.org are at Tier 2 too (barring a few like ftp.au.d.o, ftp.nz.do etc). Coming back to Sync proxies at Tier 2:

• syncproxy3.wna.debian.org - gretchaninov.d.o which is marked as syncproxy2 on db.d.o (information dated). It s hosted in University of British Columbia, Canada, where a lot of Debian infrastructure including Salsa is hosted.
• syncproxy.eu.debian.org - Croatian Academic and Research Network managed machine. CNAME directs to debian.carnet.hr.
• syncproxy.au.debian.org - mirror-anu.d.o hosted by Australian National University with 100Mbps connectivity. Closest sync proxy for all Australian mirrors.
• syncproxy4.wna.debian.org - syncproxy-aws-wna-01.d.o hosted in AWS, in US (according to GeoIP). IPv6 only (CNAME to syncproxy-aws-wna-01.debian.org. which only has an AAAA record, no A record). A m6g.2xlarge instance which has speeds upto 10 Gbps.

Coming back to https://mirror-master.debian.org/status/mirror-hierarchy.html, one can see chain extend till Tier 6 like in case of this mirror in AU which should add some latency for the updates from being pushed at ftp-master.d.o to them. Ideally, which shouldn t be a problem as https://www.debian.org/mirror/ftpmirror#when mentions The main archive gets updated four times a day . In my case, I get my updates from NITC mirror, so my updates flows from US > US > TW > IN > me in IN. CDNs have to internally manage cache purging too unlike normal mirrors which directly serve static file. Both deb.debian.org (sponsored by Fastly) and cdn-aws.deb.debian.org (sponsored by Amazon Cloudfront) sync from following CDN backends:

• mirror.accumu.d.o hosted by Academic Computer Club in Ume , Sweden.
• mirror-skroutz.d.o hosted by Skroutz Internet Services in Greece.
• schmelzer.d.o hosted by Conovo in Austria.

See deb.d.o trace file and cdn-aws.deb.d.o trace file. (Thanks to Philipp Kern for the heads up here.)

CD image mirrors Hierarchy Till now, I have only talked about Debian package mirrors. When you see /debian directory on various mirrors, they re usually for package install and updates. If you want to grab the latest (and greatest) Debian ISO, you go to Debian CD (as they re still called) mirror site. casulana.d.o is mentioned as CD builder site hosted by Bytemark while pettersson-ng.d.o is mentioned as CD publishing server hosted at Academic Computer Club in Ume , Sweden. Primary download site for Debian CD when you click download on debian.org homepage is https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/ is hosted here as well. This essentially becomes Tier 0 mirror for Debian CD. All Debian CD mirrors are downstream to it.

pettersson-ng.d.o / cdimage.d.o (SE) ---> to the world

A visualation of flow of Debian CD from cdimage.d.o

Academic Computer Club s mirror setup uses a combination of multiple machines (called frontends and offloading servers) to load balance requests. Their document setup is a highly recommended read. Also, in that document, they mention , All machines are reachable via both IPv4 and IPv6 and connected with 10 or 25 gigabit Ethernet, external bandwidth available is 200 gigabit/s. For completeness sake, following mirror (or mirror systems) exists too for Debian:

• Debian Ports mirrors.
• Debian Archive mirrors to get old Debian versions.
• Debian Security has bunch official mirrors (as mentioned here) behind security.d.o. It resolves to Fastly IP ranges so could be Fastly or Debian operated mirrors. Taking a look at https://db.debian.org/machines.cgi tells seger.d.o in DE is security-master which I m assuming is source for all following mentioned security mirrors:
  • lobos.d.o in DE
  • mirror-csail.d.o in US
  • mirror-anu.d.o in AU
  • santoro.d.o in BR
  • schumann.d.o in DE
  • setoguchi.d.o in JP
  • villa.d.o in DE
  • wieck.d.o in DE

Debian heavily rely on various organizations to donate resources (hosting and hardware) to distribute and update Debian. Compiling above information made me thankful to all these organizations. Many thanks to DSA and mirror team as well for managing these stuffs. I relied heavily on https://db.debian.org/machines.cgi which seems to be manually updated, so things might have changed along the way. If anything looks amiss, feel free to ping.

This post is a review for Computing Reviews for The science of detecting LLM-generated text , a article published in Communications of the ACM