The Cat Model of Package Ownership

Debian has been moving away from strong ownership of packages by package maintainers and towards encouraging group maintainership, for very good reasons: single maintainers have a bad bus factor and a number of other disadvantages.

When single maintainership is changed into maintainership by a small , open group of people who can easily communicate and sync with each other, everything is just better: there is an easy way to gradually replace people who want to leave, but there is also no duplication of efforts (because communication is easy), there are means to always have somebody available for emergency work and generally package quality can only gain from it.

Unfortunately, having such group of maintainers for every package would require more people than are available and willing to work on it, and while I think it's worth doing efforts to have big and important packages managed that way, it may not be so for the myriad of small ones that make up the long tail of a distribution.

Many of those packages may end up being maintained in a big team such as the language-based ones, which is probably better than remaining with a single maintainer, but can lead to some problems.

My experience with the old OpenEmbedded, back when it was still using monotone instead of git and everybody was maintaining everything, however, leads me to think that this model has a big danger of turning into nobody maintains anything, because when something needs to be done everybody is thinking that somebody else will do it.

As a way to prevent that, I have been thinking in the general direction of a Cat Model of Package Ownership, which may or may not be a way to prevent some risks of both personal maintainership and big teams.

The basic idea is that the my in my packages is not the my in my toys , but the my in my Cat, to whom I am a servant .

As in the case of a cat, if my package needs a visit to the vet, it's my duty to do so. Other people may point me to the need of such a visit, e.g. by telling me that they have seen the cat leaving unhealty stools, that there is a bug in the package, or even that upstream released a new version a week ago, did you notice?, but the actual putting the package in a cat carrier and bringing it to the vet falls on me.

Whether you're allowed to play with or pet the cat is her decision, not mine, and giving her food or doing changes to the package is usually fine, but please ask first: a few cats have medical issues that require a special diet.

And like cats, sometimes the cat may decide that I'm not doing a good enough job of serving her, and move away to another maintainer; just remember that there is a difference between a lost cat who wants to go back to her old home and a cat that is looking for a new one. When in doubt, packages usually wear a collar with contact informations, trying to ping those is probably a good idea.

This is mostly a summer afternoon idea and will probably require some refinement, but I think that the basic idea can have some value. Comments are appreciated on the federated social networks where this post is being published, via email (valid addresses are on my website http://www.trueelena.org/computers/articles/the_cat_model_of_package_ownership.html and on my GPG key http://www.trueelena.org/about/gpg.html) or with a post on a blog that appears on planet debian http://planet.debian.org/.

how small is small depends a lot on the size of the package, the amount of work it requires, how easy it is to parallelize it and how good are the people involved at communicating, so it would be quite hard to put a precise number here.

I've moved away from it because the boards I was using could run plain Debian, but I've heard that after the move to git there have been a number of workflow changes (of which I've seen the start) and everything now works much better.

Debian LTS July marked the fifteenth month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. As usual I spent the 8 hours working on these LTS things:

• Updated QEMU and QEMU-KVM packages to fix CVE-2016-5403, CVE-2016-4439, CVE-2016-4020, CVE-2016-2857 and CVE-2015-5239 resulting in DLA-573-1 and DLA-574-1
• Updated icedove to 45.2.0 fixing CVE-2016-2818 resulting in DLA-574-1
• Reviewed and uploaded xen 4.1.6.lts1-1. The update itself was prepared by Bastian Blank.
• The little bit of remaining time I spent on further work the ruby-active model,record -3.2 and ruby-actionpack-3.2 (aka rails) CVEs. Although I have fixes for most of the CVEs already there are still some left where I'm not yet clear if the packages are affected.
• Added some trivial autopkgtest for qemu-img (#832982) (on non LTS time)

Other Debian stuff

• Fixed CVE-2016-5008 by uploading libvirt 2.0.0 to sid and 1.2.9-9+deb8u3 to stable-p-u
• Uploaded libvirt 2.1.0~rc1 to experimental
• Uploaded libvirt-python 2.0.0 to sid
• Uploaded libosinfo 0.3.1 to sid preparing for the upcoming upstream package split
• Uploaded virt-manager 1.4.0 to sid
• Uploaded network-manager-iodine 1.2.0 to sid
• Uploaded cups-pk-helper 0.2.6 to sid
• Triaged apparmor related bugs in libvirt most notably the one affecting hotplugging of disks (#805002) which turned out to be rooted in the kernel not reloading profiles properly.
• Uploaded git-buildpackage 0.8.0, 0.8.1 to experimental adding additional tarball support to gbp import-orig among other things

This is a repost and update of my retirement letter sent privately to Debian last month, July 10, 2016. At that time I received many notes of appreciation and good wishes which I treasure. Now, I d like to say goodbye to the broader Debian community and, as well, indicate which of the cleanup items have since been addressed in strikethrough style and with annotations. Also, I d like to stay in touch with many of you, so I have added some comments oriented towards those of you who are interested in doing that after the letter.

When in 1995, on a tip from a friend, I installed Debian on my 386 at work and was enthralled with the results, I could not have foreseen that two years later, friends I had made on channel #debian would nudge me to become a Debian developer. Nor when that happened did I have any idea that twenty years later, I d consider Debian to be like family, the greatest free software community in the world, and would still be promoting it and helping people with it whenever I could. Debian quietly, unexpectedly became a part of what defines me. My priorities in life have changed over that time, though. I have shifted my attention to things that are more important to me in life, such as my family, my health and well-being physically and spiritually, and bringing all I can to bear on the task of preserving our local wilderness areas and trails. In the latter area, I m now bringing all of what Debian has helped shaped me to be to the table, launching some ambitious projects I hope will bear fruit in the coming years, and make a measurable contribution to help us hang onto our precious natural preserves where I live. Unfortunately, as I ve poured more time and energy into these things, I ve increasingly not been giving my packages the care they need. Nor do I have any roles or goals now for any of the Debian projects I was previously involved in. So, after much careful deliberation, and as much as it pains me to say it, it s time to retire as a Debian developer. It has been a great privilege to work with you, and to meet many of you in New York at Debconf 10. I plan to be around online, and will continue to take an interest in Debian, lending a hand when I can. Thanks for all of the fun times, for all that I ve learned, and for the privilege to make awesome things with you. I ll treasure this forever. So much for the soppy bits. Now, business. These things remain to clean up upon my departure, and I d appreciate help from QA, and anyone else who can lend a hand. My packages are effectively orphaned, but I haven t the time to do any of the cleanup myself, so please speak up if you can help.

1. Debian Jr.
   • O: junior-doc. The junior-doc package has been awaiting an overhaul by whoever revives the project since I gave it up years ago. I m still listed as maintainer and that should be changed to Debian Junior Maintainers <debianjr-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org> if they want it. Otherwise, it is orphaned.
   • I should also be dropped from Uploaders from debian-junior, the metapackages source. Fixed in git.
2. Tux Paint. This is a very special package that deserves to go to someone who will love it and care for it well. There are three source packages in all:
   • O: tuxpaint
   • O: tuxpaint-config
   • O: tuxpaint-stamps
3. O: xletters. This is a cute little typing practice game and needs a new maintainer.
4. XPilot is co-maintained by Phil Brooke <pjb@debian.org>, so he should replace me as Maintainer. Phil said he ll pick up xpilot-ng and will also look at xpilot-extra.
   • xpilot-ng
   • O: xpilot-extra (recently removed from testing due to my neglect, and not co-maintained by Phil; it s unclear if anyone really uses this anymore)
5. GTypist is co-maintained by Daniel Leidert <dleidert@debian.org> and should replace me as Maintainer.
6. My ruby packages. A group of packages that I brought into Debian as dependencies of taskwarrior-web, which I never completed. Maybe they ll be useful in and of themselves, and maybe not. In any case, they are maintained by pkg-ruby-extras-maintainers, but I m the sole developer in Uploaders and should be removed: Fixed in git.
   • ruby-blockenspiel
   • ruby-parseconfig
   • ruby-rack-flash3
   • ruby-simple-navigation
   • ruby-sinatra-simple-navigation
   • ruby-term-ansicolor
   • ruby-versionomy
7. Debian Live stuff: I am listed in Uploaders for live-manual (fixed in git) and debian-installer-launcher (fixed in git) and need to be removed.
8. O: eeepc-acpi-scripts. The defunct Debian EeePC project has just this one package. Recently, the mailing list was asked about its status, and it was recently NMU d. To my knowledge, nobody from the original team remains to take care of it, so it needs a new maintainer. I should be removed from Uploaders, and since the Debian Eee PC Team no longer exists, it should be removed as maintainer. It is effectively orphaned unless someone speaks up.

There are also some Alioth projects / lists that are defunct that I ll need to talk to the Alioth admins about cleaning up in the coming days. One of these is <debian-eeepc-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org> and since it is still listed as the maintainer of eeepc-acpi-scripts, that needs to be sorted out before the list can be closed. Thanks again, and see you around!
Ben

Stay in touch For those of you who would like to stay in touch, here are some ways to do that:

• Follow my blog: http://syn.theti.ca
  If you already do that, great! If not, welcome to my blog! For the past couple of years you may have noticed a decrease in technical content and increase in local trails and conservation oriented posts. You can expect more of the latter.
• Say hi to me on irc: SynrG (also SynrGy) on irc.oftc.net (irc.debian.org) or irc.freenode.net.
  I still intend to hang out and offer support when I can, just no longer as a developer. Channel #debian-offtopic on either network is a good place to catch up with me socially.
• Follow me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SynrG
  For better or worse, a lot of the trails and conservation folks hang out here, and many of you in the Debian community are already my Facebook friends.
• Look for my Bluff Trail posts on their site: https://wrweo.ca
  Providing tech support to this organization is where much of my time and energy is going these days. I post here once in a while, but do most of my work behind the scenes as a volunteer and, newly this year, as a board member.

Here is my monthly update covering a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world (previously):

• Presented "Reproducible Builds status update" at DebConf16, the annual Debian GNU/Linux developer conference.
• Attended a Core Infrastricture Initiative summit meeting. The CII was set up in the wake of the Heartbleed SSL vulnerability to support software projects that are critical to the functioning of the internet.

• Ensured that the Webconverger web kiosk operating system builds reproducibly. I may rework some of the patches to libisoburn and libisofs before sending them upstream. This work was sponsored by Webconverger.
• Proposed a pull request for Regex Replace (a Chrome extension to automatically replace text on webpages) to ensure that the rules were correctly HTML encoded on the options page. (#3)
• Proposed a change to ronn, a documentation generator that "is the opposite of roff", to make the output reproducible. (#98)
• Fixed an issue in django-enumfield, a custom Django web development field for type-safe named constants, to make the Enum.get interface more consistent. (#36)
• Proposed a change to txt2tags to make the output use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH and non-timezone timestamps. (#204).

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First post with the new link collection feature of staticsite!

Heavy Metal and Natural Language Processing [archived]

Natural language processing and Metal lyrics, including the formula for the "metalness" of a word and a list of the most and least metal words.

Confirming all use of an SSH agent [archived]

For a long time I ve wanted an ssh-agent setup that would ask me before every use, so I could slightly more comfortably forward authentication over SSH without worrying that my session might get hijacked somewhere at the remote end (I often find myself wanting to pull authenticated git repos on remote hosts). I m at DebConf this week, which is an ideal time to dig further into these things, so I did so today. As is often the case it turns out this is already possible, if you know how.

Why We Don t Report It [archived]

Why don t you report it? It s up there on every list I ve seen of things you shouldn t say to sexual assault survivors, yet I keep hearing it

Voltron, an extensible debugger UI toolkit written in Python

Multi-panel display built from various gdb outputs.

Notmuch, offlineimap and Sieve setup [archived]

Nice description of a notmuch+offlineimap+sieve setup, for when I feel like rethinking my email setup.

Wikipedia:Unusual articles

An endless source of weird and wonderful.

ZERO: no linked HIV transmissions [archived]

The results provide a dataset to question whether transmission with an undetectable viral load is actually possible. They should help normalise HIV and challenge stigma and discrimination.

TV pickup

Someone once in the UK told me that it was a big enough problem that so many people turn on their electric kettles during the endtitles of Eastenders, that there's an employee in a hydro plant that needs to watch it to ramp up the power at the right time. I've finally found a wikipedia page about it.

Amazon isn't saying if Echo has been wiretapped [archived]

"We may never know if the feds have hijacked Amazon Echo. In case you didn't know, Echo is an always-on device, which, when activated, can return search queries, as well as read audiobooks and report sports, traffic, and weather. It can even control smart home devices."

I recently attended Snappy Sprint Heidelberg, the first Snappy sprint focused on upstream and cross-distribution collaboration.

Snappy is a technology with an interesting history: initially started to provide App Store-like semantics (atomicity, declarative security) for the Ubuntu Phone project, it has since expanded to be a platform for desktop application deployment (e.g. VLC), as well as server applications and the IoT space.

There were a number of productive discussions with people working on Snappy itself, as well as folks from Fedora, elementary OS, KDE, and elsewhere.

At the start of the week, Snappy was technically usable in several different distributions, but only shipped fully-featured (in the main distribution repositories, with confinement, etc) in Ubuntu. Some great progress was made on AppArmor confinement in Arch Linux, and there is currently beta support for confinement via SELinux.

Providing a full-featured Snappy experience in Debian has its challenges, mostly relating to the lack of a default LSM. While AppArmor in Debian is supported and there's desire to have it be the default in "buster", Ubuntu carries a number of patches that add additional functionality not yet present upstream. I'm not sure whether pursuing getting those patches merged is more viable than waiting for SELinux support in snapd, however.

I've agreed to co-maintain the snapd package in Debian, and am excited to see intentions to support building snaps on a variety of distribution bases. While I do not expect Snappy (or Flatpak, or AppImage) to replace distribution-maintained software in the foreseeable future, nor do I feel that's a desirable outcome, I do think offering users freedom to choose to use software via these systems in a safe manner is critical.

Talks have been finished, and as a special present to the participants, Pavneet has organized an excursion that probably was one of the best I ever had. First we visited the Toronto Reference Library where we were treated to a delicious collection of rare books (not to mention all the other books and architecture), and then a trip through the Ismaili Centre Toronto and the Aga Khan Museum.
(Kelmscott press edition from 1892 of William Morris A Dream of John Ball.) All these places were great pieces of architecture with excellent samples of the writing and printing art. And after all that and not to be mentioned, the conference dinner evening cruise! Our first stop was the Toronto Reference Library. Designed by Raymond Moriyama, it features a large open atrium with skylights, and it gives the library an open and welcoming feeling. We were told that it resembles a tea cup that needs to be filled with knowledge.
The library also features running water at several places the architect had the idea that natural ambient noise is more natural for a library than the eclectic silence that anyway never happens. Originally there were lots of greens hanging down into the Atrium, resembling the Hanging Gardens, but they have been scrapped due to financial reasons. But there are still green oasis like this beautiful green wall in a corner of the library.
We were guided first to the fifth floor where the special collection is housed. And what a special collection. The librarian in charge has laid out about 20 exquisite books starting from early illuminated manuscripts over incunabula to high pieces of printing art from the 18th and 19th century. Here we have a illuminated script in Carolingian minuscule.
What was really surprising for all of us in this special collection that all these books were simply laid out in front of us, that the librarian touched and used it without gloves, and above all, that he told us that if one wants it is common practice to check out these books for study sessions and enjoy them on the spot in the reading room. I don t know any other library that allows you to actually handle these rare and beauty specimens! The library not only featured lots of great books, it also had some art installation like these light rods.
In one of the books I found by chance a map of my hometown of Vienna. Looking at this map from very old times, the place where I grew up is still uninhabited somewhere in the far upper right corner of the map. Times have changed.
After we left this open and welcoming treasure house of beautiful books, we moved to the Aga Khan Museum and Ismaili Centre Toronto, which are standing face-to-face separated by some water ponds in the Aga Khan park a bit outside of central Toronto. Here we see the Ismaili Centre from the Aga Khan Museum entrance. The big glass dome is the central prayer room, and is illuminated at night. Just one detail one can see in the outer wall one part that looks like glass, too. This is the prayer alcove in the back of the prayer hall, and is made from huge slabs of Onyx that are also lit up in the night.
The Ismaili Centre, designed by Charles Correa combines modern functional and simple style with the wonderful ornamental art of the Islam heritage. The inside of the Ismaili Centre features many pieces of exquisite art calligraphy, murals, stone work, etc here is a medallion made from precious stone and set onto a hand-carved wall.
A calligraphy on the wall in the Ismaili Centre
Following the Ismaili Centre we turned to the Aga Khan museum which documents Islamic art, science, and history with an extensive collection. We didn t have much time, and in addition I had to do some fire-fighting over the phone, but the short trip through the permanent collection with samples of excellent calligraphy was amazing.
After returning from this lovely excursion and a short break, we set off for the last stop for tonight, the dinner cruise. After a short bus ride we could board our ship and off we go. Although the beer selection was not on par with what we are used from carft breweries, the perfectly sized boat with two decks and lots of places to hang around invited us to many discussions and chitchats. And finally I could enjoy also the skyline of Toronto.
After the dinner we had some sweets, one of which was a specially made cake with the TUG 2016 logo on it. I have to say, it was not only this cake but the whole excellent and overboarding food we had during all these days, that will make me go on diet when I am back in Japan. Pavneet organized for the lunch breaks three different style of kitchens (Thai, Indian, Italian), then the excursions to local brewers and and and If it wouldn t be for TeX, I would call it a Mastkur .
During the cruise we also had a little ceremony thanking Jim for his work as president of the TUG, but above all Pavneet for this incredible well organized conference. I think everyone agreed that this was the best TUG conference since long.
During the ceremony, Pavneet also announced the winners of the TUG 2016 fountain pen auction. These pens have a long history/travel behind them, see details on the linked page, and were presented to the special guests of the conference. Two remaining pens were auctioned with funds going to the TUG. The first one was handed over to Steve Grathwohl, and to my utter surprise the second one to myself. So now I am a happy owner of a TUG 2016 fountain pen. What a special feature! Just one more detail about these pens: They are traditional style, so without ink capsules, but one needs to insert the ink with a syringe. I guess I need to stack up a bit at home, and more importantly, train my really ugly hand-writing, otherwise it would be a shame to use this exquisite tool. We returned to the harbor around 10pm, and back to the hotel, where there was much greeting and thanking, as many people will return the following day.
I will also leave on Friday morning to meet with friends, thus I will not be participating in (and not reporting on) the last excursion of the TUG 2016. I will leave Toronto and the TUG 2016 with (nearly) exclusively good memories of excellent talks, great presentations, wonderful excursions, and lots of things I have learned. I hope to see all of the participants on next year s TUG meeting and I hope I will be able to attend it. Thanks a lot to Pavneet, you have done an incredible job. And last but not least, thanks to your lovely wife for letting you do all this, I know how much time we did steal from her. A few more photos can be found at the album Day 4 Books, ooh books.

The last day of TUG 2016, or at least the last day of talks, brought four one-hour talks from special guests, and several others, where many talks told us personal stories and various histories.
A great finish of a great conference. Jennifer Claudio The case for justified text Due to a strange timezone bug in my calendar program, I completely overslept a morning meeting and breakfast, as well as the first talk, so unfortunately I don t have anything to report about this surely intersting talk comparing justification in various word processors and TeX. Leyla Akhmadeeva, Rinat Gizatullin, Boris Veytsman Are justification and hyphenation good or bad for the reader? Still half dizzy and without coffee, I couldn t really follow this talk, and only woke up till the end when there was a lot of interesting discussion about speed reading and its non-existence (because it is simply skimming over text), and improvements on reading comprehension. Charles Bigelow Looking for legibility Another special guest, Charles Bigelow, presented a huge pool of research and work into readability, and how attitude and usage of fonts change over time. A very involving and well laid out talk, full of interesting background images and personal opinions and thoughts. Charles also touched onto topics of readability on modern devices like e-readers and mobiles. He compared the recent developments in font design for mobile devices with their work on Lucida 20+ years ago, and concluded that both arrived at the same solutions. A very educating and amusing talk packed full with information on readability. I surely will revisit the recording in a study session. David Walden Some notes on the history of digital typography David touches on many topics of the history of digital typography which he has experienced himself over the years: First the development of newspaper production and printing, then the evolvement of editors from simple text editors over word processors to full-fledged DTP programs. Finally he touches on various algorithmic problems that appear in the publishing business. Tim Inkster The beginning of my career Tim, our fanatastic guide through his print shop the Procupine s Quill on the second excursion day, talked about his private ups and downs in the printing business, all filled with an infinite flow of funny stories and surprising anecdotes. Without slides and anything but his voice and his stories, he kept us hanging on his lips without a break. I recommend watching the recording of his talk because one cannot convey the funny comments and great stories he shared with us in this simple blog. Joe Clark Type and tiles on the TTC Joe unveils the history of rise and fall of the underground types and
tiles in Toronto. It is surprising to me that a small metro network as in Toronto can have such a long history of changes of design, layout, presentation. Some of the photos completely stymed me how can anyone put up signs like that? I was thinking. To quote Joe (hopefully I remember correctly):

You see what happens without adult supervision.

Abdelouahad Bayar Towards an operational (La)TeX package supporting optical scaling of dynamic mathematical symbols A technical talk about a trial in providing optical scaling of mathematical symbols. As far as I understand it tries to improve on the TeX way of doing extensible math symbols by glueing things together. It seems to be highly involved and technically interesting project, but I couldn t completely grasp the aim of it. Michael Cohen, Blanca Mancilla, John Plaice Zebrackets: A score of years and delimiters John introduced us to Zebrackets, stripped parentheses and brackets, to help us keep track of pairing of those beasts. But as we know, Zebras are very elusive animals, and so we saw lots of stripped brackets around. The idea of better markup of matching parentheses is definitely worth developing. Charles Bigelow Probably approximately not quite correct: Revise, repeat The second talk of Charles, this time on the history of the Lucida fonts, from the early beginnings drawn on graph paper to recent developments using FontLab producing OpenType fonts. A truly unique crash course through the development of one of the very big families of fonts, and one of the first outside Computer Modern that had also support for proper math typesetting in TeX.

Aggressively legible!

One of the key phrases that popped up again and again was aggressively legible, mostly in negative connotations as far to fat symbols or far to big Arabic letters. But for me this font family is still close to my heart. I purchased it back than from Y&Y for my PhD thesis, and since then have upgraded to the TUG version including the OpenType fonts, and I use them for most of my presentation. Maybe I like the aggressive legibility! Chuck slided in lots of nice comments about Kris Holmes, the development practice in their cooperation, stories of business contacts, and many more, making this talk a very lively and amusing, and at the same time very educating talk.

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This concluded the TUG conference talks, and we thanked Pavneet for his excellent organization. But since we still have up to two days of excursions, many people dispersed quickly, just to meet again for a optional Type and Tile Tour 3-5 subway stops with discussion of typesetting This guided tour through the underground of Toronto, guided by Joe Clark who spoke in the morning about this topic, was attended by far too many participants. I think there were around 25 when we left. I thought that this will not work out properly, and so decided to leave the group and wander around alone. The last program point for today was dinner with a blues music concert in the near by Jazz Bistro:
Excellent life music in a bit schick/sophisticated atmosphere was a good finish for this excellent day. With Herb from MacTeX and his wife we killed two bottles of red wine, before slowly tingling back to the hotel. A great finishing day of talks.

The second day of TUG 2016 was again full of interesting talks spanning from user experiences to highly technical details about astrological chart drawing, and graphical user interfaces to TikZ to the invited talk by Robert Bringhurst on the Palatino family of fonts. With all these interesting things there is only one thing to compain I cannot get out of the dark basement and enjoy the city After a evening full of sake and a good night s sleep we were ready to dive into the second day of TUG. Kaveh Bazargan A graphical user interface for TikZ The opening speaker of Day 2 was Kaveh. He first gave us a quick run-down on what he is doing for business and what challenges publishers are facing in these times. After that he introduced us to his new development of a command line graphical user interface for TikZ. I wrote command line on purpose, because the editing operations are short commands issued on a kind of command line, which will give an immediate graphical feedback. Basic of the technique is a simplified TikZ-like meta language that is not only easy to write, but also easy to parse. While the amount of supported commands and features of TikZ is still quite small, I think the basic idea is a good one, and there is a good potential in it. Matthew Skala Astrological charts with horoscop and starfont Next up was Matthew who introduced us to the involved task of typesetting astrological charts. He included comparisons with various commercial and open source solutions, where Matthew of course, but me too, felt that his charts came of quite well! As an extra bonus we got some charts of famous singers, as well as the TUG 2016 horoscope. David Tulett Development of an e-textbook using LaTeX and PStricks David reported on his project to develop an e-textbook on decision modeling (lots of math!) using LaTeX and PStricks. His e-book is of course a PDF. There were a lot of very welcoming feedback free (CC-BY-NC-ND) textbooks for sciences are rare and we need more of them. Christian Gagn An Emacs-based writing workflow inspired by TeX and WEB, targeting the Web Christian s talk turned around editing and publishing using org-mode of Emacs and the various levels of macros one can use in this setup. He finished with a largely incomprehensible vision of a future equational logic based notation mode. I have used equational logic in my day-in-day-out job, and I am not completely convinced that this is a good approach for typesetting and publishing but who knows, I am looking forward to a more logic-based approach! Barbara Beeton, Frank Mittelbach In memoriam: Sebastian Rahtz (1955-2016) Frank recalled Sebastian s many contribution to a huge variety of fields, and recalled our much missed colleague with many photos and anecdotes. Jim Hefferon A LaTeX reference manual Jim reported about the current state of a LaTeX reference manual, which tries to provide a documentation orthogonally to the many introduction and user guides available, by providing a straight down-to-earth reference manual with all the technical bells and whistles necessary. As I had to write myself a reference manual for a computer language, it was very interested to see how they dealt with many of the same problems I am facing. Arthur Reutenauer, Mojca Miklavec Hyphenation past and future: hyph-utf8 and patgen Arthur reports about the current statue of the hyphenation pattern project, and in particular the license and usage hell they recently came into with large cooperations simply grabbing the patterns without proper attribution. In a second part he gave a rough sketch of his shot at a reimplementation of patgen. Unfortunately he wrote in rather unreadable hand-writing on a flip-chart, which made only the first line audience to actually see what he was writing. Federico Garcia-De Castro TeXcel? As an artist organizing large festivals Federico has to fight with financial planning and reports. He seemed not content with the abilities of the usual suspects, so he developed a way to do Excel like book-keeping in TeX. Nice idea, I hope I can use that system for the next conference I have to organize! Jennifer Claudio A brief reflection on TeX and end-user needs Last speaker in the morning session was Jennifer who gave us a new and end-user s view onto the TeX environment, and the respective needs. These kind of talks are a very much welcomed contrast to technical talks and hopefully all of us developers take home some of her suggestions. Sungmin Kim, Jaeyoung Choi, Geunho Jeong MFCONFIG: Metafont plug-in module for the Freetype rasterizer Jaeyoung reported about an impressive project to make Metafont fonts available to fontconfig and thus windowing systems. He also explained their development of a new font format Stemfont, which is a Metafont-like system that can work also for CJK fonts, and which they envisage to be built into all kind of mobile devices. Michael Sharpe New font offerings Cochineal, Nimbus15 and LibertinusT1Math Michael reports about his last font projects. The first two being extensions of the half-made half-butchered rereleased URW fonts, as well as his first (?) math font project. I talked to him over lunch one day, and asked him how many man-days he need for these fonts, and his answer was speaking a lot: For the really messed up new URW fonts, like Cochineal, he guessed about 5 man-months of work, while other fonts only needed a few days. I think we all can be deeply thankful to all the work he is investing into all these font projects. Robert Bringhurst The evolution of the Palatino tribe The second invited talk was Robert Bringhurst, famous for his wide contributions to typpography, book culture in general, as well as poetry. He gave a quick historic overview on the development of the Palatino tribe of fonts, with lots of beautiful photos. I was really looking forward to Robert s talk, and my expectations were extremely high. And unfortunately I must say I was quite disappointed. Maybe it is his style of presentation, but the feeling he transfered to me (the audience?) was that he was going through a necessary medical check, not much enjoying the presentation. Also, the content itself was not really full of his own ideas or thoughts, but a rather superficial listing of historical facts. Of course, a person like Robert Bringhurst is so full of anecdotes and background knowledge still was a great pleasure to listen and lots of things to learn, I only hoped for a bit more enthusiasm. TUG Annual General Meeting The afternoon session finished with the TUG Annual General Meeting, reports will be sent out soon to all TUG members. Herbert Schulz Optional workshop: TeXShop tips & tricks After the AGM, Herbert from MacTeX and TeXShop gave an on-the-spot workshop on TeXShop. Since I am not a Mac user, I skipped on that.

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Another late afternoon program consisted of an excursion to Eliot s bookshop, where many of us stacked up on great books. This time again I skipped and took a nap. In the evening we had a rather interesting informal dinner in the food court of some building, where only two shops were open and all of us lined up in front of the Japanese Curry shop, and then gulped down from plastic boxes. Hmm, not my style I have to say, not even for informal dinner. But at least I could meet up with a colleague from Debian and get some gpg key signing done. And of course, talking to all kind of people around. The last step for me was in the pub opposite the hotel, with beer and whiskey/scotch selected by specialists in the field.

I have a long overdue blog entry about what happened in recent times. People that follow my tweets did catch some things. Most noteworthy there was the Trans*Inter*Congress in Munich at the start of May. It was an absolute blast. I met so many nice and great people, talked and experienced so many great things there that I'm still having a great motivational push from it every time I think back. It was also the time when I realized that I in fact do have body dysphoria even though I thought I'm fine with my body in general: Being tall is a huge issue for me. Realizing that I have a huge issue (yes, pun intended) with my length was quite relieving, even though it doesn't make it go away. It's something that makes passing and transitioning for me harder. I'm well aware that there are tall women, and that there are dedicated shops for lengthy women, but that's not the only thing that I have trouble with. What bothers me most is what people read into tall people: that they are always someone they can lean on for comfort, that tall people are always considered to be self confident and standing up for themselves (another pun, I know ... my bad). And while I'm fine with people coming to me for leaning on to, I rarely get the chance to do so myself. And people don't even consider it. When I was there in Munich, talking with another great (... pun?) trans woman who was as tall as me I finally had the possibility to just rest my head on her shoulder and finally feel the comfort I need just as much as everyone else out there, too. Probably that's also the reason why I'm so touchy and do go Free Hugging as often as possible. But being tall also means that you are usually only the big spoon when cuddling up. Having a small mental breakdown because of realizing that didn't change the feeling directly but definitely helped with looking for what I could change to fix that for myself. Then, at the end of may, the movie FtWTF - female to what the fuck came to cinema. It's a documentary about six people who got assigned female at birth. And it's absolutely charming, and has great food for thoughts in it. If you ever get the chance to watch it you definitely should. And then came debconf16 in Capetown. The flight to there was canceled and we had to get rebooked. The first offer was to go through Dubai, and gladly a colleague did point out to the person behind the desk that that wouldn't be safe for myself and thus out of scope. In the end we managed to get to Capetown quite nice, and even though it was winter when the sun was shining it was quite nice. Besides the cold nights that is. Or being stuck on the way up to table mountain because a colleague had cramps in his lags and we had to call mountain rescue. Gladly the night was clear, and when the mountain rescue finally got us to top and it was night already we had one of the nicest views from up there most people probably never will experience. And then ... I got invited to a trans meetup in Capetown. I was both excited and nervous about it, what to expect there. But it was simply great. The group there was simply outstandingly great. The host gave update information on progress on clinical support within south Africa, from what I took with me is that there is only one clinic there for SRS which manages only two people a year which is simply ... yuck. Guess you can guess how many years (yes, decades) the waiting line is ... I was blown away though by the diversity of the group, on so many levels, most notably on the age spectrum. It was a charm to meet you all there! If you ever stop by in Capetown and you are part of the LGBTIQ community, make sure you get in contact with the Triangle Project. But, about the real reason to write this entry: I was approached at Debconf by at least two people who asked me what I thought about creating an LGBTIQA+ group within Debian, and if I'd like to push for that. Actually I think it would be a good idea to have some sort of exchange between people on the queer spectrum (and I hope I don't offend anyone with just saying queer for LGBTIQA+ people). Given that I'm quite outspoken people approach me every now and then so I'm aware that there is a fair amount of people that would fall into that category. On the other hand some of them wouldn't want to have it publicly known because it shouldn't matter and isn't really the business of others. So I'm uncertain. If we follow that path I guess something that is closed or at least offers the possibility to have a closed communication would be needed to not out someone by just joining in the discussion. It's was easier with Debian Women where it was (somewhat) clear that male participants are allies supporting the cause and not considered being women themselves, but often enough (mostly cis hetero male) people are afraid to join a dedicated LGBTIQA+ group because they have the fear of having their identity judged. These things should be considered before creating such a place so that people can feel comfortable when joining and know what to expect beforehand. For the time being I created #debian-diversity on irc.debian.org to discuss how to move forward. Please bear in mind that even the channel name is up for discussion. Acronyms might not be the way to go in my opinion, just read back up the discussion that lead to the Diversity Statement of Debian where the original approach was to start listing groups for inclusiveness but it was quickly clear that it can get outdated too easily. I am willing to be part of that effort, but right now I have some personal things to deal which eat up a fair amount of my time. My kid starts school in September (yes, it's that long already, time flies ...). And it looks like I'll have to move a second time in the near future: I'll have to leave my current flat by the end of the year and the Que[e]rbau I'm moving into won't be ready by that time to host me yet ... F*ck. :(

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The first day of the real conference started with an excellent overview of what one can do with TeX, spanning from traditional scientific journal styles to generating router configuration for cruising ships.
All this was crowned with an invited talk my Kevin Larson from Microsoft s typography department on how to support reading comprehension. Pavneet Aurora Opening: Passport to the TeX canvas Pavneet, our never-sleeping host and master of organization, opened the conference with a very philosophical introduction, touching upon a wide range of topics ranging from Microsoft, Twitter to the beauty of books, pages, and type. I think at some point he even mentioned TeX, but I can t remember for sure. His words put up a very nice and all-inclusive stage, a community that is open to all kind of influences with any disregard or prejudice. Let us hope that is reflects reality. Thanks Pavneet. Geoffrey Poore Advances in PythonTeX Our first regular talk was by Geoffrey reporting on recent advances in PythonTeX, a package that allows including python code in your TeX document. Starting with an introduction to PythonTeX, Geoggrey reports about an improved verbatim environment, fvextra, which patches fancyvrb, and improved interaction between tikz and PythonTeX. As I am a heavy user of listings for my teaching on algebraic specification languages, I will surely take a look at this package and see how it compares to listings. Stefan Kottwitz TeX in industry I: Programming Cisco network switches using TeX Next was Stefan from Lufthansa Industry Solutions, who reported first about his working environment, Cruise Ships with a very demanding IT infrastructure he has to design and implement. Then he introduced us to his way of generating IP configurations for all the devices using TeX. The reason he chose this method is that it allows him to generate at the same time proper documentation. It was surprising for me to hear that by using TeX he could far more efficiently and quicker produce well designed and easily accessible documentation, which helped both the company as well as made the clients happy! Stefan Kottwitz TeX in industry II: Designing converged network solutions After a coffee break, Stefan continued his exploration into industrial usage of TeX, this time about using tikz to generate graphics representing the network topology on the ships. Boris Veytsman Making ACM LaTeX styles Next up was Boris which brought us back to traditional realms of TeX when he guided us into the abyss of ACM LaTeX styles he tried to maintain for some time, until he plunged into a complete rewrite of the styles. Frank Mittelbach Alice goes floating global optimized pagination including picture placements The last talk before lunch (probably a strategic placement, otherwise Frank would continue for hours and hours) was Frank on global optimization of page breaks. Frank showed us what can and can not be done with current LaTeX, and how to play around with global optimization of pagination, using Alice in Wonderland as running example. We can only hope that his package is soon available in an easily consumable version to play around. Thai lunch Pavneet has organized three different lunch-styles for the three days of the conference, today s was Thai with spring rools, fried noodles, one kind of very interesting orange noodles, and chicken something. Michael Doob baseball rules summary After lunch Michael gave us an accessible explanation of the most arcane rules a game can have the baseball rules by using pseudo code. I think the total number of loc needed to explain the overall rules would fill more pages than the New York phonebook, so I am deeply impressed by all those who can understand these rules. Some of us even wandered off in the late afternoon to see a match with life explanations of Michael. Amartyo Banerjee, S.K. Venkatesan A Telegram bot for printing LaTeX files Next up was Amartyo who showed a Telegram (as in messenger application) bot running on a Raspberry Pi, that receives (La)TeX files and sends back compiled PDF files. While it is not ready for consumption (If you sneeze the bot will crash!), it looks like a promising application. Furthermore, it is nice to see how open APIs (like Telegram) can spur development of useful tools, while closed APIs (including threatening users, like WhatApp) hinders it. Norbert Preining Security improvements in the TeX Live Manager and installer Next up was my own talk about beefing up the security of TeX Live by providing integrity and authenticity checks via GnuPG, a feature that has been introduced with the recent release of TeX Live 2016. The following discussion gave me several good idea on how to further improve security and usability. Arthur Reutenauer -The TeX Live M sub-project (and open discussion) Arthur presented the TeX Live M (where the M stands supposedly for Mojca, who couldn t attend unfortunately) project: Their aim is to provide a curated and quality verified sub-part of TeX Live that is sufficiently complete for many applications, and easier for distributors and packagers. We had a lively discussion after Arthur s short presentation, mostly about why TeX Live does not have a on-the-fly installation like MikTeX. I insisted that this is already possible, using the tex-on-the-fly package which uses the mktextex infrastructure, but also caution against using it by default due to delays induced by repeatably reading the TeX Live database. I think this is a worth-while project for someone interested in learning the internals of TeX Live, but I am not sure whether I want to invest time into this feature. Another discussion point was about a testing infrastructure, which I am currently working on. This is in fact high on my list, to have some automatic minimal functionality testing a LaTeX package should at least load! Kevin Larson Reading between the lines: Improving comprehension for students Having a guest from Microsoft is rather rare in our quite Unix-centered environment, so big thanks to Pavneet again for setting up this contact, and big thanks to Kevin for coming. Kevin gave us a profound introduction to reading disabilities and how to improve reading comprehension. Starting with an excursion into what makes a font readable and how Microsoft develops optimally readable fonts, he than turned to reading disabilities like dyslexia, and how markup of text can increase students comprehension rate. He also toppled my long-term believe that dyslexia is connected to the similar shape of letters which are somehow visually malprocessed this was the scientific status from the 1920ies till the 70ies, but since then all researchers have abandoned this interpretation and dyslexia is now linked to problems linking shape to phonems. Kevin did an excellent job with a slightly difficult audience some people picking about grammer differences between British and US English and permanently derailing the discussion, and even more the high percentage of typographically somehow specially tasted participants. After the talk I had a lengthy discussion with Kevin about if/how this research can be carried over to non-Roman writing systems, in particular Kanji/Hanzi based writing systems, where dyslexia shows itself probably in different context. Kevin also mentioned that they want to add interword space to Chinese to help learners of Chinese (children, foreigners) to better parse, and studies showed that this helps a lot in comprehension. On a meta-level, this talk bracketed with the morning introduction by Pavneet, describing an open environment with stimulus back and forth in all directions. I am very happy that Kevin took the pain to come in his tight schedule, and I hope that the future will bring better cooperation at the end we are all working somehow on the same front only the the tools differ.

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After the closing of the session, one part of our group went off to the baseball match, while another group dived into a Japanese-style Izakaya where we managed to kill huge amounts of sake and quite an amount of food. The photo shows me after the first bottle of sake, while just seeping on an intermediate small amount of genshu (kind of strong undiluted sake) before continuing to the next bottle. An interesting and stimulating first day of TUG, and I am sure that everyone was looking forward to day 2.

Author: ceridwen reprotest 0.2 is available in PyPi and should hit Debian soon. I have tested null (no container, build on the host system), schroot, and qemu, but it's likely that chroot, Linux containers (lxc/lxd), and quite possibly ssh are also working. I haven't tested the autopkgtest code on a non-Debian system, but again, it probably works. At this point, reprotest is not quite a replacement for the prebuilder script because I haven't implemented all the variations yet, but it offers better virtualization because it supports qemu, and it can build non-Debian software because it doesn't rely on pbuilder. With HW42's help, I fixed the schroot/disorderfs/autopkgtest permission error and got pip/setuptools to install the autopkgtest code from virt/. The permission error came from autopkgtest automatically running all commands on a testbed as root, if it can run commands as root, which caused schroot to mount disorderfs as root. This caused the build artifact to be owned by root, but unlike qemu, a chroot shares the same file system, so it would then try to copy this root-owned file with a process running with ordinary user permissions. The fix was to mount disorderfs with --multi-user=yes when the container has root permissions, allowing a user process to access it even when it's mounted by root. The fix for setuptools is an ugly hack: including the virt/ scripts as non-code data with include reprotest/virt/* in MANIFEST.in works. (According to the documentation, graft reprotest/virt/, which I also tried, ought to work, but in my testing it doesn't.) This still uses sys.path hacking as a consequence of autopkgtest's design choices. For the next release, I want to finish all the remaining variations, which at this point are build path, domain, host, group, shell, and user. I also want to ensure that reprotest runs on non-Debian and possibly non-Linux systems. For now, what I need most is more real-world testing. If you have any interest in reproducible builds, please try reprotest out! There's a README included which describes how to set up appropriate containers and run the tests.

The second pre-conference day was dedicated to books and beers, with a visit to an exquisite print studio, and a beer tasting session at one of the craft breweries in Canada. In addition we could grab a view into the Canadian lifestyle by visiting Pavneet s beautiful house in the countryside, as well as enjoying traditional style pastries from a bakery.
In short, a perfect combination for us typography and beer savvy freaks! This morning we had somehow an early start from the hotel. Soon the bus left downtown Toronto and entered countryside Ontario, large landscapes filled with huge (for my Japanese feeling) estates and houses, separated by fields, forests and wild landscape. Very beautiful and inviting to live there. On our way to the printing workshop we stopped at Pavneet s house for a very short visit of the exterior, which includes mathematics in the bricking. According to Pavneet, his kids hate to see math on the wall I would be proud to have it.
A bit further on we entered into Erin, where the Porcupine s Quill is located. A small building along the street, one could easily oversee that rare jewel! In addition considering that according to the owners, Google Maps has a bad error which would lead you to a completely different location. This printing workshop, led by Tim and Elke Inkster, is producing books in a traditional style using an old Heidelberg Offset printing machine.
Elke introduced us to the sewing of folded signatures together with a lovely old sewing machine. It was the first time I actually saw one in action.
Tim, the head master of the printing shop, first entertained us with stories about Chinese publishers visiting them in the old cold-war times, before diving into explanations of the actual machines around, like the Heidelberg offset printing machine.
In the back of the basement of the little studio there is also a huge folding machine, which cuts up the big signatures of 16 pages and folds them into bundles. An impressive example of tricky engineering.
Due to the small size of the printing studio, our groups were actually split into two groups, and while the other group got its guided tour, we grabbed coffee and traditional cookies and pastries from the nearby Holtom s bakery. Loads of nice pastries with various filling, my favorite being the slightly salty cherry pie, and above all the rhubarb-raspberry pie.
To my absolute astonishment I also found there a Viennese Kaisersemmel , called Kaiser bun here, but keeping the shape and the idea (but unfortunately not the crispy cracky quality of the original in Vienna). Of course I got two of them, together with a nice jam from the region, and enjoyed these Viennese breakfast the next day morning.
Leaving the Quill we headed for a lunch in a nice pizzeria (I got Pizza Toscana) which also served excellent local beer how would I like to have something like this over in Japan! Our last stop on this excursion was Stone Hammer Brewery, ne of the most famous craft breweries in Canada.
Although they wont win a prize for typography (besides one page of a coaster there that carried a nice pun), their beers are exquisite. We got five different beers to taste, plus extensive explanations on brewing methods and differences. Now I finally understand why most of the new craft breweries in Japan are making Ales: Ales don t need a long process and are ready for sale in rather short time, compared to e.g. lagers.)
Also at the Stone Hammer Brewery I spotted this very nice poster on the wall of the toilet. And I cannot agree more, everything can easily be discussed over a good beer it calms down aversions, makes even the worst enemies friends, and is healthy for both the mind and body. Filled with excellent beer, some of us (notably an unnamed US TeXnician and politician), stacked up on beers to carry home. I was very tempted to get a huge batch, but putting cans into an airplane seems to be not the optimal idea. Since we are talking cans, I was surprised to hear that many craft beer brewers nowadays prefer cans due to their better protection of the beer from light and oxygen, both killers of good beer. Before leaving we took a last look at the Periodic Table of Beer Types, which left me in awe about how much I don t know and I probably never will know. In particular, I heard the first time of a Vienna style beer Vienna is not really famous for beer, better to say, it is infamous. So maybe this is a different Vienna than my home town that is meant here.
Another two hour bus ride brought us back to Toronto, where we met with other participants at the reception in a restaurant of Mediterranean cuisine, where I could enjoy for the first time in years a good Tahina and Humus. All around another excellent day, now I only would like to have two days of holidays, guess I need to relax in the lectures starting from tomorrow.

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I think my demands for a terminal emulator are pretty basic but none the less I run into trouble every now and then. This time it was a new laptop and starting from scratch with an empty $HOME and the current Debian/testing instead of good old Jessie. For the last four or five years I've been a happy user of gnome-terminal, configured a mono space font, a light grey background with black text color, create new tabs with Ctrl-n, navigate the tabs with Ctrl-Left and Ctrl-Right, show no menubar, select URLs with double click. Suited me well with my similarly configured awesome window manager, where I navigate with Mod4-Left and Mod4-Right between the desktops on the local screen and only activate a handful of the many default tiling modes. While I could get back most of my settings, somehow all cited gconf kung-foo to reconfigure the URL selection pattern in gnome-terminal failed, and copy&pasting URLs from the terminal was a pain in the ass. Long story short I now followed the advice of a coworker to just use the xfce4-terminal. That still required a few tweaks to get back to do what I want it to do. To edit the keybindings you've to know that you've to use the GTK way and edit them within in the menu while selecting the menu entry. But you've to allow that first (why oh why?):

echo "gtk-can-change-accels=1" >> ~/.gtkrc-2.0

Fair enough that is documented. Changing the keybinding generates fancy things in ~/.config/xfce4/terminal/accels.scm in case you plan to hand edit a few more of them. I also edited a few things in ~/.config/xfce4/terminal/terminalrc:

MiscAlwaysShowTabs=TRUE
MiscMenubarDefault=FALSE

So I guess I can remove gnome-terminal for now and stay with another GTK2 application. Doesn't feel that good but well at least it works.

seems I've neglected both my blog & my RC bug fixing activities in the last months. anyway, since I still keep track of RC bugs I worked on, I thought I might as well publish the list:

• #798023 src:cssutils: "cssutils: FTBFS with Python 3.5"
  sponsor NMU by Chris Knadle, upload to DELAYED/2
• #800303 src:libipc-signal-perl: "libipc-signal-perl: Please migrate a supported debhelper compat level"
  bump debhelper compat level, upload to DELAYED/5
• #808331 src:libpgplot-perl: "libpgplot-perl: needs manual rebuild for Perl 5.22 transition"
  manually build+upload packages (pkg-perl)
• #809056 src:xca: "xca: FTBFS due to CPPFLAGS containing spaces"
  sponsor NMU by Chris Knadle, upload to DELAYED/5
• #810017 src:psi4: "psi4: FTBFS with perl 5.22"
  propose a patch
• #810707 src:libdbd-sqlite3-perl: "libdbd-sqlite3-perl: FTBFS: t/virtual_table/21_perldata_charinfo.t (Wstat: 512 Tests: 4 Failed: 1)"
  investigate a bit (pkg-perl)
• #810710 src:libdata-objectdriver-perl: "libdata-objectdriver-perl: FTBFS: t/02-basic.t (Wstat: 256 Tests: 67 Failed: 1)"
  add patch to handle sqlite 3.10 in test suite's version comparison (pkg-perl)
• #810900 libanyevent-rabbitmq-perl: "libanyevent-rabbitmq-perl: Can't locate object method "bind_exchange" via package "AnyEvent::RabbitMQ::Channel""
  add info, versioned close (pkg-perl)
• #810910 libmath-bigint-gmp-perl: "libmath-bigint-gmp-perl: FTBFS: test failures with newer libmath-bigint-perl"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #810912 libx11-xcb-perl: "libx11-xcb-perl: missing dependency on libxs-object-magic-perl"
  update dependencies (pkg-perl)
• #813420 src:libnet-server-mail-perl: "libnet-server-mail-perl: FTBFS: error: Can't call method "peerhost" on an undefined value at t/starttls.t line 78."
  close, as the underlying problem is fixed (pkg-perl)
• #814730 src:libmath-mpfr-perl: "libmath-mpfr-perl: FTBFS on most architectures"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #815775 zeroc-ice: "Build-Depends on unavailable packages mono-gmcs libmono2.0-cil"
  sponsor NMU by Chris Knadle, upload to DELAYED/2
• #816527 src:libtest-file-contents-perl: "libtest-file-contents-perl: FTBFS with Text::Diff 1.44"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #816638 mhonarc: "mhonarc: fails to run with perl5.22"
  propose a patch in the BTS
• #817528 src:libemail-foldertype-perl: "libemail-foldertype-perl: Removal of debhelper compat 4"
  raise debhelper compat level, upload to DELAYED/2
• #817529 src:libimage-base-bundle-perl: "libimage-base-bundle-perl: Removal of debhelper compat 4"
  raise debhelper compat level, upload to DELAYED/2
• #817530 src:liberror-perl: "liberror-perl: Removal of debhelper compat 4"
  raise debhelper compat level, upload to DELAYED/2
• #817531 src:libimage-info-perl: "libimage-info-perl: Removal of debhelper compat 4"
  raise debhelper compat level, upload to DELAYED/2
• #817647 src:randomplay: "randomplay: Removal of debhelper compat 4"
  raise debhelper compat level, upload to DELAYED/2
• #818924 libjson-webtoken-perl: "libjson-webtoken-perl: missing dependency on libmodule-runtime-perl"
  add missing (build) dependency (pkg-perl)
• #819787 libdbix-class-schema-loader-perl: "libdbix-class-schema-loader-perl: FTBFS: t/10_01sqlite_common.t failure"
  close bug, works again with recent sqlite3 (pkg-perl)
• #821412 libnet-rblclient-perl: "libnet-rblclient-perl: Net::DNS 1.01 breaks Net::RBLClient"
  add patch (pkg-perl)
• #823310 libnanomsg-raw-perl: "libnanomsg-raw-perl: FTBFS: test failures"
  add patch from upstream git repo (pkg-perl)
• #824046 src:libtkx-perl: "libtkx-perl: FTBFS: Tcl error 'Foo at /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/perl5/5.22/Tcl.pm line 585.\n' while invoking scalar result call"
  first investigation (pkg-perl)
• #824143 libperinci-sub-normalize-perl: "libperinci-sub-normalize-perl: FTBFS: Can't locate Sah/Schema/Rinci.pm in @INC"
  upload new upstream version (pkg-perl)
• #825366 src:libdist-zilla-plugin-ourpkgversion-perl: "libdist-zilla-plugin-ourpkgversion-perl: FTBFS: Can't locate Path/Class.pm in @INC"
  add missing dependency (pkg-perl)
• #825424 libdist-zilla-plugin-test-podspelling-perl: "libdist-zilla-plugin-test-podspelling-perl: FTBFS: Can't locate Path/Class.pm in @INC"
  first triaging, forward upstream, import new release (pkg-perl)
• #825608 libnet-jifty-perl: "libnet-jifty-perl: FTBFS: t/006-uploads.t failure"
  triaging, mark unreproducible (pkg-perl)
• #825629 src:libgd-perl: "libgd-perl: FTBFS: Could not find gdlib-config in the search path. "
  first triaging, forward upstream (pkg-perl)
• #829064 libparse-debianchangelog-perl: "libparse-debianchangelog-perl: FTBFS with new tidy version"
  patch TML template (pkg-perl)
• #829066 libparse-plainconfig-perl: "FTBFS: Can't modify constant item in scalar assignment"
  new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #829176 src:libapache-htpasswd-perl: "libapache-htpasswd-perl: FTBFS: dh_clean: Please specify the compatibility level in debian/compat"
  add debian/compat, upload to DELAYED/2
• #829409 src:libhtml-tidy-perl: "libhtml-tidy-perl: FTBFS: Failed 7/21 test programs. 8/69 subtests failed."
  apply patches from Simon McVittie (pkg-perl)
• #829668 libparse-debianchangelog-perl: "libparse-debianchangelog-perl: FTBFS: Failed test 'Output of dpkg_str equal to output of dpkg-parsechangelog'"
  add patch for compatibility with new dpkg (pkg-perl)
• #829746 src:license-reconcile: "license-reconcile: FTBFS: Failed 7/30 test programs. 11/180 subtests failed."
  versioned close, already fixed in latest upload (pkg-perl)
• #830275 src:libgravatar-url-perl: "libgravatar-url-perl: accesses the internet during build"
  skip test which needs internet access (pkg-perl)
• #830324 src:libhttp-async-perl: "libhttp-async-perl: accesses the internet during build"
  add patch to skip tests with DNS queries (pkg-perl)
• #830354 src:libhttp-proxy-perl: "libhttp-proxy-perl: accesses the internet during build"
  skip tests which need internet access (pkg-perl)
• #830355 src:libanyevent-http-perl: "libanyevent-http-perl: accesses the internet during build"
  skip tests which need internet access (pkg-perl)
• #830356 src:libhttp-oai-perl: "libhttp-oai-perl: accesses the internet during build"
  add patch to skip tests with DNS queries (pkg-perl)
• #830476 src:libpoe-component-client-http-perl: "libpoe-component-client-http-perl: accesses the internet during build"
  update existing patch (pkg-perl)
• #831233 src:libmongodb-perl: "libmongodb-perl: build hangs with sbuild and libeatmydata"
  lower severity (pkg-perl)
• #832361 src:libmousex-getopt-perl: "libmousex-getopt-perl: FTBFS: Failed 2/22 test programs. 2/356 subtests failed."
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)

Review: The Run of His Life, by Jeffrey Toobin

Publisher:	Random House
Copyright:	1996, 1997
Printing:	2015
ISBN:	0-307-82916-2
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	498

The O.J. Simpson trial needs little introduction to anyone who lived through it in the United States, but a brief summary for those who didn't. O.J. Simpson is a Hall of Fame football player and one of the best running backs to ever play the game. He's also black, which is very relevant much of what later happened. After he retired from professional play, he became a television football commentator and a spokesperson for various companies (particularly Hertz, a car rental business). In 1994, he was arrested for the murder of two people: his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ron Goldman (a friend of Nicole's). The arrest happened after a bizarre low-speed police chase across Los Angeles in a white Bronco that was broadcast live on network television. The media turned the resulting criminal trial into a reality TV show, with live cable television broadcasts of all of the court proceedings. After nearly a full year of trial (with the jury sequestered for nine months more on that later), a mostly black jury returned a verdict of not guilty after a mere four hours of deliberation. Following the criminal trial, in an extremely unusual legal proceeding, Simpson was found civilly liable for Ron Goldman's death in a lawsuit brought by his family. Bizarre events surrounding the case continued long afterwards. A book titled If I Did It (with "if" in very tiny letters on the cover) was published, ghost-written but allegedly with Simpson's input and cooperation, and was widely considered a confession. Another legal judgment let the Goldman family get all the profits from that book's publication. In an unrelated (but also bizarre) incident in Las Vegas, Simpson was later arrested for kidnapping and armed robbery and is currently in prison until at least 2017. It is almost impossible to have lived through the O.J. Simpson trial in the United States and not have formed some opinion on it. I was in college and without a TV set at the time, and even I watched some of the live trial coverage. Reactions to the trial were extremely racially polarized, as you might have guessed. A lot of black people believed at the time that Simpson was innocent (probably fewer now, given subsequent events). A lot of white people thought he was obviously guilty and was let off by a black jury for racial reasons. My personal opinion, prior to reading this book, was a common "third way" among white liberals: Simpson almost certainly committed the murders, but the racist Los Angeles police department decided to frame him for a crime that he did commit by trying to make the evidence stronger. That's a legitimate reason in the US justice system for finding someone innocent: the state has an obligation to follow correct procedure and treat the defendant fairly in order to get a conviction. I have a strong bias towards trusting juries; frequently, it seems that the media second-guesses the outcome of a case that makes perfect sense as soon as you see all the information the jury had (or didn't have). Toobin's book changed my mind. Perhaps because I wasn't watching all of the coverage, I was greatly underestimating the level of incompetence and bad decision-making by everyone involved: the prosecution, the defense, the police, the jury, and the judge. This court case was a disaster from start to finish; no one involved comes away looking good. Simpson was clearly guilty given the evidence presented, but the case was so badly mishandled that it gave the jury room to reach the wrong verdict. (It's telling that, in the far better managed subsequent civil case, the jury had no trouble reaching a guilty verdict.) The Run of His Life is a very detailed examination of the entire Simpson case, from the night of the murder through the end of the trial and (in an epilogue) the civil case. Toobin was himself involved in the media firestorm, breaking some early news of the defense's decision to focus on race in The New Yorker and then involved throughout the trial as a legal analyst, and he makes it clear when he becomes part of the story. But despite that, this book felt objective to me. There are tons of direct quotes, lots of clear description of the evidence, underlying interviews with many of the people involved to source statements in the book, and a comprehensive approach to the facts. I think Toobin is a bit baffled by the black reaction to the case, and that felt like a gap in the comprehensiveness and the one place where he might be accused of falling back on stereotypes and easy judgments. But other than hole, Toobin applies his criticism even-handedly and devastatingly to all parties. I won't go into all the details of how Toobin changed my mind. It was a cumulative effect across the whole book, and if you're curious, I do recommend reading it. A lot was the detailed discussion of the forensic evidence, which was undermined for the jury at trial but looks very solid outside the hothouse of the case. But there is one critical piece that I would hope would be handled differently today, twenty years later, than it was by the prosecutors in that case: Simpson's history of domestic violence against Nicole. With what we now know about patterns of domestic abuse, the escalation to murder looks entirely unsurprising. And that history of domestic abuse was exceedingly well-documented: multiple external witnesses, police reports, and one actual prior conviction for spousal abuse (for which Simpson did "community service" that was basically a joke). The prosecution did a very poor job of establishing this history and the jury discounted it. That was a huge mistake by both parties. I'll mention one other critical collection of facts that Toobin explains well and that contradicted my previous impression of the case: the relationship between Simpson and the police. Today, in the era of Black Lives Matter, the routine abuse of black Americans by the police is more widely known. At the time of the murders, it was less recognized among white Americans, although black Americans certainly knew about it. But even in 1994, the Los Angeles police department was notorious as one of the most corrupt and racist big-city police departments in the United States. This is the police department that beat Rodney King. Mark Fuhrman, one of the police officers involved in the case (although not that significantly, despite his role at the trial), was clearly racist and had no business being a police officer. It was therefore entirely believable that these people would have decided to frame a black man for a murder he actually committed. What Toobin argues, quite persuasively and with quite a lot of evidence, is that this analysis may make sense given the racial tensions in Los Angeles but ignores another critical characteristic of Los Angeles politics, namely a deference to celebrity. Prior to this trial, O.J. Simpson largely followed the path of many black athletes who become broadly popular in white America: underplaying race and focusing on his personal celebrity and connections. (Toobin records a quote from Simpson earlier in his life that perfectly captures this approach: "I'm not black, I'm O.J.") Simpson spent more time with white businessmen than the black inhabitants of central Los Angeles. And, more to the point, the police treated him as a celebrity, not as a black man. Toobin takes some time to chronicle the remarkable history of deference and familiarity that the police showed Simpson. He regularly invited police officers to his house for parties. The police had a long history of largely ignoring or downplaying his abuse of his wife, including not arresting him in situations that clearly seemed to call for that, showing a remarkable amount of deference to his side of the story, not pursuing clear violations of the court judgment after his one conviction for spousal abuse, and never showing much inclination to believe or protect Nicole. Even on the night of the murder, they started following a standard playbook for giving a celebrity advance warning of investigations that might involve them before the news media found out about them. It seems clear, given the evidence that Toobin collected, that the racist Los Angeles police didn't focus that animus at Simpson, a wealthy celebrity living in Brentwood. He wasn't a black man in their eyes; he was a rich Hall of Fame football player and a friend. This obviously raises the question of how the jury could return an innocent verdict. Toobin provides plenty of material to analyze that question from multiple angles in his detailed account of the case, but I can tell you my conclusion: Judge Lance Ito did a horrifically incompetent job of managing the case. He let the lawyers wander all over the case, interacted bizarrely with the media coverage (and was part of letting the media turn it into a daytime drama), was not crisp or clear about his standards of evidence and admissibility, and, perhaps worst of all, let the case meander on at incredible length. With a fully sequestered jury allowed only brief conjugal visits and no media contact (not even bookstore shopping!). Quite a lot of anger was focused on the jury after the acquittal, and I do think they reached the wrong conclusion and had all the information they would have needed to reach the correct one. But Toobin touches on something that I think would be very hard to comprehend without having lived through it. The jury and alternate pool essentially lived in prison for nine months, with guards and very strict rules about contact with the outside world, in a country where compensation for jury duty is almost nonexistent. There were a lot of other factors behind their decision, including racial tensions and the sheer pressure from judging a celebrity case about which everyone has an opinion, but I think it's nearly impossible to underestimate the psychological tension and stress from being locked up with random other people under armed guard for three quarters of a year. It's hard for jury members to do an exhaustive and careful deliberation in a typical trial that takes a week and doesn't involve sequestration. People want to get back to their lives and families. I can only imagine the state I would be in after nine months of this, or how poor psychological shape I would be in to make a careful and considered decision. Similarly, for those who condemned the jury for profiting via books and media appearances after the trial, the current compensation for jurors is $15 per day (not hour). I believe at the time it was around $5 per day. There are a few employers who will pay full salary for the entire jury service, but only a few; many cap the length at a few weeks, and some employers treat all jury duty as unpaid leave. The only legal requirement for employers in the United States is that employees that serve on a jury have their job held for them to return to, but compensation is pathetic, not tied to minimum wage, and employers do not have to supplement it. I'm much less inclined to blame the jurors than the system that badly mistreated them. As you can probably tell from the length of this review, I found The Run of His Life fascinating. If I had followed the whole saga more closely at the time, this may have been old material, but I think my vague impressions and patchwork of assumptions were more typical than not among people who were around for the trial but didn't invest a lot of effort into following it. If you are like me, and you have any interest in the case or the details of how the US criminal justice system works, this is a fascinating case study, and Toobin does a great job with it. Recommended. Rating: 8 out of 10

I recently mentioned that I'd forked Antirez's editor and added lua to it. I've been working on it, on and off, for the past week or two now. It's finally reached a point where I'm content:

• The undo-support is improved.
• It has buffers, such that you can open multiple files and switch between them.
  • This allows this to work "kilua *.txt", for example.
• The syntax-highlighting is improved.
  • We can now change the size of TAB-characters.
  • We can now enable/disable highlighting of trailing whitespace.
• The default configuration-file is now embedded in the body of the editor, so you can run it portably.
• The keyboard input is better, allowing multi-character bindings.
  • The following are possible, for example ^C, M-!, ^X^C, etc.

Most of the obvious things I use in Emacs are present, such as the ability to customize the status-bar (right now it shows the cursor position, the number of characters, the number of words, etc, etc). Anyway I'll stop talking about it now :)

• https://github.com/skx/kilua

I ll be at HOPE 11 this year - if anyone else will be around, feel free to send me an email! I won t have a phone on me (so texting only works if you use Signal!) Looking forward for a chance to see everyone soon!

I just published the videos from Solskogen 2016 on Youtube; you can find them all in this playlist. The are basically exactly what was being sent out on the live stream, frame for frame, except that the audio for the live shader compos has been remastered, and of course a lot of dead time has been cut out (the stream was sending over several days, but most of the time, only the information loop from the bigscreen). YouTube doesn't really support the variable 50/60 Hz frame rate we've been using well as far as I can tell, but mostly it seems to go to some 60 Hz upconversion, which is okay enough, because the rest of your setup most likely isn't free-framerate anyway. Solskogen is interesting in that we're trying to do a high-quality stream with essentially zero money allocated to it; where something like Debconf can use 2500 for renting and transporting equipment (granted, for two or three rooms and not our single stream), we're largely dependent on personal equipment as well as borrowing things here and there. (I think we borrowed stuff from more or less ten distinct places.) Furthermore, we're nowhere near the situation of two cameras, a laptop, perhaps a few microphones ; not only do you expect to run full 1080p60 to the bigscreen and switch between that and information slides for each production, but an Amiga 500 doesn't really have an HDMI port, and Commodore 64 delivers an infamously broken 50.12 Hz signal that you really need to deal with carefully if you want it to not look like crap. These two factors together lead to a rather eclectic setup; here, visualized beautifully from my ASCII art by ditaa: Of course, for me, the really interesting part here is near the end of the chain, with Nageru, my live video mixer, doing the stream mixing and encoding. (There's also Cubemap, the video reflector, but honestly, I never worry about that anymore. Serving 150 simultaneous clients is just not something to write home about anymore; the only adjustment I would want to make would probably be some WebSockets support to be able to deal with iOS without having to use a secondary HLS stream.) Of course, to make things even more complicated, the live shader compo needs two different inputs (the two coders' laptops) live on the bigscreen, which was done with two video capture cards, text chroma-keyed on top from Chroma, and OBS, because the guy controlling the bigscreen has different preferences from me. I would take his screen in as a dirty feed and then put my own stuff around it, like this: (Unfortunately, I forgot to take a screenshot of Nageru itself during this run.) Solskogen was the first time I'd really used Nageru in production, and despite super-extensive testing, there's always something that can go wrong. And indeed there was: First of all, we discovered that the local Internet line was reduced from 30/10 to 5/0.5 (which is, frankly, unusable for streaming video), and after we'd half-way fixed that (we got it to 25/4 or so by prodding the ISP, of which we could reserve about 2 for video demoscene content is really hard to encode, so I'd prefer a lot more) Nageru started crashing. It wasn't even crashes I understood anything of. Generally it seemed like the NVIDIA drivers were returning GL_OUT_OF_MEMORY on things like creating mipmaps; it's logical that they'd be allocating memory, but we had 6 GB of GPU memory and 16 GB of CPU memory, and lots of it was free. (The PC we used for encoding was much, much faster than what you need to run Nageru smoothly, so we had plenty of CPU power left to run x264 in, although you can of course always want more.) It seemed to be mostly related to zoom transitions, so I generally avoided those and ran that night's compos in a more static fashion. It wasn't until later that night (or morning, if you will) that I actually understood the bug (through the godsend of the NVX_gpu_memory_info extension, which gave me enough information about the GPU memory state that I understood I wasn't leaking GPU memory at all); I had set Nageru to lock all of its memory used in RAM, so that it would never ever get swapped out and lose frames for that reason. I had set the limit for lockable RAM based on my test setup, with 4 GB of RAM, but this setup had much more RAM, a 1080p60 input (which uses more RAM, of course) and a second camera, all of which I hadn't been able to test before, since I simply didn't have the hardware available. So I wasn't hitting the available RAM, but I was hitting the amount of RAM that Linux was willing to lock into memory for me, and at that point, it'd rather return errors on memory allocations (including the allocations the driver needed to make for its texture memory backings) than to violate the never swap contract. Once I fixed this (by simply increasing the amount of lockable memory in limits.conf), everything was rock-stable, just like it should be, and I could turn my attention to the actual production. Often during compos, I don't really need the mixing power of Nageru (it just shows a single input, albeit scaled using high-quality Lanczos3 scaling on the GPU to get it down from 1080p60 to 720p60), but since entries come in using different sound levels (I wanted the stream to conform to EBU R128, which it generally did) and different platforms expect different audio work (e.g., you wouldn't put a compressor on an MP3 track that was already mastered, but we did that on e.g. SID tracks since they have nearly zero ability to control the overall volume), there was a fair bit of manual audio tweaking during some of the compos. That, and of course, the live 50/60 Hz switches were a lot of fun: If an Amiga entry was coming up, we'd 1. fade to a camera, 2. fade in an overlay saying we were switching to 50 Hz so have patience, 3. set the camera as master clock (because the bigscreen's clock is going to go away soon), 4. change the scaler from 60 Hz to 50 Hz (takes two clicks and a bit of waiting), 5. change the scaler input in Nageru from 1080p60 to 1080p50, 6. steps 3,2,1 in reverse. Next time, I'll try to make that slightly smoother, especially as the lack of audio during the switch (it comes in on the bigscreen SDI feed) tended to confuse viewers. So, well, that was a lot of fun, and it certainly validated that you can do a pretty complicated real-life stream with Nageru. I have a long list of small tweaks I want to make, though; nothing beats actual experience when it comes to improving processes. :-)