The sixth update in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp has arrived on the CRAN network for GNU R a few hours ago, and was just pushed to Debian. This 0.12.6 release follows the 0.12.0 release from late July, the 0.12.1 release in September, the 0.12.2 release in November, the 0.12.3 release in January, the 0.12.4 release in March, and the 0.12.5 release in May --- making it the tenth release at the steady bi-montly release frequency. Just like the previous release, this one is once again more of a refining maintenance release which addresses small bugs, nuisances or documentation issues without adding any major new features. That said, some nice features (such as caching support for sourceCpp() and friends) were added. Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing GNU R with C or C++ code. As of today, 703 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further. That is up by about fourty packages from the last release in May! Similar to the previous releases, we have contributions from first-time committers. Artem Klevtsov made na_omit run faster on vectors without NA values. Otherwise, we had many contributions from "regulars" like Kirill Mueller, James "coatless" Balamuta and Dan Dillon as well as from fellow Rcpp Core contributors. Some noteworthy highlights are encoding and string fixes, generally more robust builds, a new iterator-based approach for vectorized programming, the aforementioned caching for sourceCpp(), and several documentation enhancements. More details are below.

Changes in Rcpp version 0.12.6 (2016-07-18)

• Changes in Rcpp API:
  • The long long data type is used only if it is available, to avoid compiler warnings (Kirill M ller in #488).
  • The compiler is made aware that stop() never returns, to improve code path analysis (Kirill M ller in #487 addressing issue #486).
  • String replacement was corrected (Qiang in #479 following mailing list bug report by Masaki Tsuda)
  • Allow for UTF-8 encoding in error messages via RCPP_USING_UTF8_ERROR_STRING macro (Qin Wenfeng in #493)
  • The R function Rf_warningcall is now provided as well (as usual without leading Rf_) (#497 fixing #495)
• Changes in Rcpp Sugar:
  • Const-ness of min and max functions has been corrected. (Dan Dillon in PR #478 fixing issue #477).
  • Ambiguities for matrix/vector and scalar operations have been fixed (Dan Dillon in PR #476 fixing issue #475).
  • New algorithm header using iterator-based approach for vectorized functions (Dan in PR #481 revisiting PR #428 and addressing issue #426, with futher work by Kirill in PR #488 and Nathan in #503 fixing issue #502).
  • The na_omit() function is now faster for vectors without NA values (Artem Klevtsov in PR #492)
• Changes in Rcpp Attributes:
  • Add cacheDir argument to sourceCpp() to enable caching of shared libraries across R sessions (JJ in #504).
  • Code generation now deals correctly which packages containing a dot in their name (Qiang in #501 fixing #500).
• Changes in Rcpp Documentation:
  • A section on default parameters was added to the Rcpp FAQ vignette (James Balamuta in #505 fixing #418).
  • The Rcpp-attributes vignette is now mentioned more prominently in question one of the Rcpp FAQ vignette.
  • The Rcpp Quick Reference vignette received a facelift with new sections on Rcpp attributes and plugins begin added. (James Balamuta in #509 fixing #484).
  • The bib file was updated with respect to the recent JSS publication for RProtoBuf.

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

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

Author: ceridwen I now have working test environments set up for null (no container, build on the host system), schroot, and qemu. After fixing some bugs, null and qemu now pass all their tests! schroot still has a permission error related to disorderfs. Since the same code works for null and qemu and for schroot when disorderfs is disabled, it's something specific to disorderfs and/or its combination with schroot. The following is debug output that shows ls for the build directory on the testbed before and after the mock build, and stat for both the build directory and the mock build artifact itself. The first control run, without disorderfs, succeeds:

test.py: DBG: testbed command ['ls', '-l', '/tmp/autopkgtest.5oMipL/control/'], kind short, sout raw, serr raw, env []
total 20
drwxr-xr-x 2 user user 4096 Jul 15 23:43 __pycache__
-rwxr--r-- 1 user user 2340 Jun 28 18:43 mock_build.py
-rwxr--r-- 1 user user  175 Jun  3 15:42 mock_failure.py
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user  252 Jun 14 16:06 template.ini
-rwxr-xr-x 1 user user 1600 Jul 15 23:18 tests.py
test.py: DBG: testbed command exited with code 0
test.py: DBG: testbed command ['sh', '-ec', 'cd /tmp/autopkgtest.5oMipL/control/ ;\n python3 mock_build.py ;\n'], kind short, sout raw, serr pipe, env ['LANG=en_US.UTF-8', 'HOME=/nonexistent/first-build', 'VIRTUAL_ENV=~/code/reprotest/.tox/py35', 'PATH=~/code/reprotest/.tox/py35/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games:/snap/bin', 'PYTHONHASHSEED=559200286', 'TZ=GMT+12']
test.py: DBG: testbed command exited with code 0
test.py: DBG: testbed command ['ls', '-l', '/tmp/autopkgtest.5oMipL/control/'], kind short, sout raw, serr raw, env []
total 20
drwxr-xr-x 2 user user 4096 Jul 15 23:43 __pycache__
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    0 Jul 18 15:06 artifact
-rwxr--r-- 1 user user 2340 Jun 28 18:43 mock_build.py
-rwxr--r-- 1 user user  175 Jun  3 15:42 mock_failure.py
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user  252 Jun 14 16:06 template.ini
-rwxr-xr-x 1 user user 1600 Jul 15 23:18 tests.py
test.py: DBG: testbed command exited with code 0
test.py: DBG: testbed command ['stat', '/tmp/autopkgtest.5oMipL/control/'], kind short, sout raw, serr raw, env []
  File: '/tmp/autopkgtest.5oMipL/control/'
  Size: 4096        Blocks: 8          IO Block: 4096   directory
Device: 56h/86d Inode: 1351634     Links: 3
Access: (0755/drwxr-xr-x)  Uid: ( 1000/    user)   Gid: ( 1000/    user)
Access: 2016-07-18 15:06:31.105915342 -0400
Modify: 2016-07-18 15:06:31.089915352 -0400
Change: 2016-07-18 15:06:31.089915352 -0400
 Birth: -
test.py: DBG: testbed command exited with code 0
test.py: DBG: testbed command ['stat', '/tmp/autopkgtest.5oMipL/control/artifact'], kind short, sout raw, serr raw, env []
  File: '/tmp/autopkgtest.5oMipL/control/artifact'
  Size: 0           Blocks: 0          IO Block: 4096   regular empty file
Device: fc01h/64513d    Inode: 40767795    Links: 1
Access: (0644/-rw-r--r--)  Uid: (    0/    root)   Gid: (    0/    root)
Access: 2016-07-18 15:06:31.089915352 -0400
Modify: 2016-07-18 15:06:31.089915352 -0400
Change: 2016-07-18 15:06:31.089915352 -0400
 Birth: -
test.py: DBG: testbed command exited with code 0
test.py: DBG: sending command to testbed: copyup /tmp/autopkgtest.5oMipL/control/artifact /tmp/tmpw_mwks82/control_artifact
schroot: DBG: executing copyup /tmp/autopkgtest.5oMipL/control/artifact /tmp/tmpw_mwks82/control_artifact
schroot: DBG: copyup_shareddir: tb /tmp/autopkgtest.5oMipL/control/artifact host /tmp/tmpw_mwks82/control_artifact is_dir False downtmp_host /var/lib/schroot/mount/jessie-amd64-ac94881d-ae71-4f24-a004-1847889d5d52//tmp/autopkgtest.5oMipL
schroot: DBG: copyup_shareddir: tb(host) /var/lib/schroot/mount/jessie-amd64-ac94881d-ae71-4f24-a004-1847889d5d52/tmp/autopkgtest.5oMipL/control/artifact is not already at destination /tmp/tmpw_mwks82/control_artifact, copying
test.py: DBG: got reply from testbed: ok

That last bit indicates that copy command for the build artifact from the testbed to a temporary directory on the host succeeded. This is the debug output from the second run, with disorderfs enabled:

test.py: DBG: testbed command ['ls', '-l', '/tmp/autopkgtest.5oMipL/disorderfs/'], kind short, sout raw, serr raw, env []
total 20
drwxr-xr-x 2 user user 4096 Jul 15 23:43 __pycache__
-rwxr--r-- 1 user user 2340 Jun 28 18:43 mock_build.py
-rwxr--r-- 1 user user  175 Jun  3 15:42 mock_failure.py
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user  252 Jun 14 16:06 template.ini
-rwxr-xr-x 1 user user 1600 Jul 15 23:18 tests.py
test.py: DBG: testbed command exited with code 0
test.py: DBG: testbed command ['sh', '-ec', 'cd /tmp/autopkgtest.5oMipL/disorderfs/ ;\n umask 0002 ;\n linux64 --uname-2.6 python3 mock_build.py ;\n'], kind short, sout raw, serr pipe, env ['LC_ALL=fr_CH.UTF-8', 'CAPTURE_ENVIRONMENT=i_capture_the_environment', 'HOME=/nonexistent/second-build', 'VIRTUAL_ENV=~/code/reprotest/.tox/py35', 'PATH=~/code/reprotest/.tox/py35/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games:/snap/bin/i_capture_the_path', 'LANG=fr_CH.UTF-8', 'PYTHONHASHSEED=559200286', 'TZ=GMT-14']
test.py: DBG: testbed command exited with code 0
test.py: DBG: testbed command ['ls', '-l', '/tmp/autopkgtest.5oMipL/disorderfs/'], kind short, sout raw, serr raw, env []
total 20
drwxr-xr-x 2 user user 4096 Jul 15 23:43 __pycache__
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    0 Jul 18 15:06 artifact
-rwxr--r-- 1 user user 2340 Jun 28 18:43 mock_build.py
-rwxr--r-- 1 user user  175 Jun  3 15:42 mock_failure.py
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user  252 Jun 14 16:06 template.ini
-rwxr-xr-x 1 user user 1600 Jul 15 23:18 tests.py
test.py: DBG: testbed command exited with code 0
test.py: DBG: testbed command ['stat', '/tmp/autopkgtest.5oMipL/disorderfs/'], kind short, sout raw, serr raw, env []
  File: '/tmp/autopkgtest.5oMipL/disorderfs/'
  Size: 4096        Blocks: 8          IO Block: 4096   directory
Device: 58h/88d Inode: 1           Links: 3
Access: (0755/drwxr-xr-x)  Uid: ( 1000/    user)   Gid: ( 1000/    user)
Access: 2016-07-18 15:06:31.201915291 -0400
Modify: 2016-07-18 15:06:31.185915299 -0400
Change: 2016-07-18 15:06:31.185915299 -0400
 Birth: -
test.py: DBG: testbed command exited with code 0
test.py: DBG: testbed command ['stat', '/tmp/autopkgtest.5oMipL/disorderfs/artifact'], kind short, sout raw, serr raw, env []
  File: '/tmp/autopkgtest.5oMipL/disorderfs/artifact'
  Size: 0           Blocks: 0          IO Block: 4096   regular empty file
Device: 58h/88d Inode: 7           Links: 1
Access: (0644/-rw-r--r--)  Uid: (    0/    root)   Gid: (    0/    root)
Access: 2016-07-18 15:06:31.185915299 -0400
Modify: 2016-07-18 15:06:31.185915299 -0400
Change: 2016-07-18 15:06:31.185915299 -0400
 Birth: -
test.py: DBG: testbed command exited with code 0
test.py: DBG: sending command to testbed: copyup /tmp/autopkgtest.5oMipL/disorderfs/artifact /tmp/tmpw_mwks82/experiment_artifact
schroot: DBG: executing copyup /tmp/autopkgtest.5oMipL/disorderfs/artifact /tmp/tmpw_mwks82/experiment_artifact
schroot: DBG: copyup_shareddir: tb /tmp/autopkgtest.5oMipL/disorderfs/artifact host /tmp/tmpw_mwks82/experiment_artifact is_dir False downtmp_host /var/lib/schroot/mount/jessie-amd64-ac94881d-ae71-4f24-a004-1847889d5d52//tmp/autopkgtest.5oMipL
schroot: DBG: copyup_shareddir: tb(host) /var/lib/schroot/mount/jessie-amd64-ac94881d-ae71-4f24-a004-1847889d5d52/tmp/autopkgtest.5oMipL/disorderfs/artifact is not already at destination /tmp/tmpw_mwks82/experiment_artifact, copying
schroot: DBG: cleanup...
schroot: DBG: execute-timeout: schroot --run-session --quiet --directory=/ --chroot jessie-amd64-ac94881d-ae71-4f24-a004-1847889d5d52 --user=root -- rm -rf -- /tmp/autopkgtest.5oMipL
rm: cannot remove '/tmp/autopkgtest.5oMipL/disorderfs': Device or resource busy
schroot: DBG: execute-timeout: schroot --quiet --end-session --chroot jessie-amd64-ac94881d-ae71-4f24-a004-1847889d5d52
Unexpected error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "~/code/reprotest/reprotest/lib/VirtSubproc.py", line 708, in mainloop
    command()
  File "~/code/reprotest/reprotest/lib/VirtSubproc.py", line 646, in command
    r = f(c, ce)
  File "~/code/reprotest/reprotest/lib/VirtSubproc.py", line 584, in cmd_copyup
    copyupdown(c, ce, True)
  File "~/code/reprotest/reprotest/lib/VirtSubproc.py", line 469, in copyupdown
    copyupdown_internal(ce[0], c[1:], upp)
  File "~/code/reprotest/reprotest/lib/VirtSubproc.py", line 494, in copyupdown_internal
    copyup_shareddir(sd[0], sd[1], dirsp, downtmp_host)
  File "~/code/reprotest/reprotest/lib/VirtSubproc.py", line 408, in copyup_shareddir
    shutil.copy(tb, host)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.5/shutil.py", line 235, in copy
    copyfile(src, dst, follow_symlinks=follow_symlinks)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.5/shutil.py", line 114, in copyfile
    with open(src, 'rb') as fsrc:
PermissionError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/var/lib/schroot/mount/jessie-amd64-ac94881d-ae71-4f24-a004-1847889d5d52/tmp/autopkgtest.5oMipL/disorderfs/artifact'

ls shows that the artifact is created in the right place. However, when reprotest tries to copy it from the testbed to the host, it gets a permission error. The traceback is coming from virt/schroot, and it's a Python open() call that's failing. Note that the permissions are wrong for the second run, but that's expected because my schroot is stable so the umask bug isn't fixed yet; and that the rm error from disorderfs not being unmounted early enough (see below). I expect to see the umask test fail, though, not a crash in every test where the build succeeds. After a great deal of effort, I isolated the bug that was causing the process to hang not to my code or autopkgtest's code, but to CPython and contextlib. It's supposed to be fixed in CPython 3.5.3, but for now I've worked around the problem by monkey-patching the patch provided in the latter issue onto contextlib. Here is my current to-do list:

• Fix PyPi not installing the virt/ scripts correctly.
• Move the disorderfs unmount into the shell script. (When the virt/ scripts encounter an error, they try to delete a temporary directory, which fails if disorderfs is mounted, so the script needs to unmount it before that happens.)
• Find and fix the schroot/disorderfs permission error bug.
• Convert my notes on setting up for the tests into something useful for users.
• Write scripts to synch version numbers and documentation.
• Fix the headers in the autopkgtest code to conform to reprotest style.
• Add copyright information for the contextlib monkey-patch and the autopkgtest files I've changed.
• Close #829113 as wontfix.

And here are the questions I'd like to resolve before the second release:

• Is there any other documentation that's essential? Finishing the documentation will come later.
• Should I release before finishing the rest of the variation? This will slow down the release of the first version with something resembling full fuctionality.
• Do I need to write a chroot test now? Given the duplication with schroot, I'm unconvinced this is worthwhile.

A new release 0.4.4 of RProtoBuf is now on CRAN, and corresponds to the source archive for the Journal of Statistical Software paper about RProtoBuf as JSS vol71 issue 02. The paper is also included as a pre-print in the updated package. RProtoBuf provides R bindings for the Google Protocol Buffers ("Protobuf") data encoding library used and released by Google, and deployed as a language and operating-system agnostic protocol by numerous projects. This release brings small cleanups as well as build-system updates for the updated R 3.3.0 infrastructure based on g++ 4.9.*.

Changes in RProtoBuf version 0.4.4 (2016-07-10)

• New vignette based on our brand-new JSS publication (v71 i02)
• Some documentation enhancements were made, as well as other minor cleanups to file modes and operations
• Unit-test vignette no longer writes to /tmp per CRAN request
• The new Windows toolchain (based on g++ 4.9.*) is supported

CRANberries also provides a diff to the previous release. The RProtoBuf page has an older package vignette, a 'quick' overview vignette, a unit test summary vignette, and the pre-print for the JSS paper. Questions, comments etc should go to the GitHub issue tracker off the GitHub repo.

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

Earlier this morning, Rcpp reached another milestone: 701 packages on CRAN now depend on it (as measured by Depends, Imports and LinkingTo declarations). The graph is on the left depicts the growth of Rcpp usage over time. Rcpp cleared 300 packages in November 2014. It passed 400 packages in June of last year (when I only tweeted about it), 500 packages in late October and 600 packages exactly four months ago in March. The chart extends to the very beginning via manually compiled data from CRANberries and checked with crandb. Then next part uses manually saved entries, and the final and largest part of the data set was generated semi-automatically via a short script appending updates to a small file-based backend. A list of packages using Rcpp is kept on this page. Also displayed in the graph is the relative proportion of CRAN packages using Rcpp. The four per-cent hurdle was cleared just before useR! 2014 where I showed a similar graph (as two distinct graphs) in my invited talk. We passed five percent in December of 2014, six percent last July, seven percent just before Christmas and now criss-crosses 8 eight percent, or a little less than one in twelve R packages. 700 user packages is a really large and humbling number. This places quite some responsibility on us in the Rcpp team as we continue to try our best try to keep Rcpp as performant and reliable as it has been. So with that a very big Thank You! to all users and contributors of Rcpp for help, suggestions, bug reports, documentation or, of course, code.

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

Propellor is my second big Haskell program. I recently described the motivation for it like this, in a proposal for a Linux.Conf.Au talk:

The configuration of Linux hosts has become increasingly declarative, managed by tools like puppet and ansible, or by the composition of containers. But if a server is a collection of declarative properties, how do you make sure that changes to that configuration make sense? You can test them, but eventually it's 3 AM and you have an emergency fix that needs to go live immediately. Data types to the rescue! While data types are usually used to prevent eg, combining an Int and a Bool, they can be used at a much more abstract level, for example to prevent combining a property that needs a Debian system with a property that needs a Red Hat system. Propellor leverages Haskell's type system to prove the consistency of the properties it will apply to a host.

The real origin story though, is that I wanted to finally start using configuration management, but the tools for it all seemed very complicated and built on shaky foundations (like piles of yaml), and it seemed it would be easier to write my own than deal with that. Meanwhile, I had Haskell burning a hole in my pocket, ready to be used in a second large project after git-annex. Propellor has averaged around 2.5 contributions per month from users since it got started, but increasing numbers recently. That's despite having many fewer users than git-annex, which remember gets perhaps 1 patch per month. Of course, I've "cheated" by making sure that propellor's users know Haskell, or are willing to learn some. And, propellor is very compositional; adding a new property to it is not likely to be complicated by any of the existing code. So it's easy to extend, if you're able to use it. At this point propellor has a small community of regular contributors, and I spend some pleasant weekend afternoons reviewing and merging their work. Much of my best work on propellor has involved keeping the behavior of the program the same while making its types better, to prevent mistakes. Propellor's core data types have evolved much more than in any program I worked on before. That's exciting! Next: twenty years of free software -- part 13 past and future

Slightly later than on monthly schedule but Weblate 2.7 is out today. This release brings improvements to the API and is first to officially support wlc a command line client for Weblate. Full list of changes for 2.7:

• Removed Google web translate machine translation.
• Improved commit message when adding translation.
• Fixed Google Translate API for Hebrew language.
• Compatibility with Mercurial 3.8.
• Added import_json management command.
• Correct ordering of listed traslations.
• Show full suggestion text, not only a diff.
• Extend API (detailed repository status, statistics, ...).
• Testsuite no longer requires network access to test repositories.

If you are upgrading from older version, please follow our upgrading instructions. You can find more information about Weblate on https://weblate.org, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. You can login there with demo account using demo password or register your own user. Weblate is also being used https://hosted.weblate.org/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, OsmAnd, Aptoide, FreedomBox, Weblate itself and many other projects. Should you be looking for hosting of translations for your project, I'm happy to host them for you or help with setting it up on your infrastructure. Further development of Weblate would not be possible without people providing donations, thanks to everybody who have helped so far! The roadmap for next release is just being prepared, you can influence this by expressing support for individual issues either by comments or by providing bounty for them.

Filed under: Debian English SUSE Weblate 0 comments

Just over a month ago I ordered a new Nexus 6P [1]. I ve had it for over a month now and it s time to review it and the Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini I also bought. Security The first noteworthy thing about this phone is the fingerprint scanner on the back. The recommended configuration is to use your fingerprint for unlocking the phone which allows a single touch on the scanner to unlock the screen without the need to press any other buttons. To unlock with a pattern or password you need to first press the power button to get the phone s attention. I have been considering registering a fingerprint from my non-dominant hand to reduce the incidence of accidentally unlocking it when carrying it or fiddling with it. The phone won t complete the boot process before being unlocked. This is a good security feature. Android version 6 doesn t assign permissions to apps at install time, they have to be enabled at run time (at least for apps that support Android 6). So you get lots of questions while running apps about what they are permitted to do. Unfortunately there s no allow for the duration of this session option. A new Android feature prevents changing security settings when there is an overlay running . The phone instructs you to disable overlay access for the app in question but that s not necessary. All that is necessary is for the app to stop using the overlay feature. I use the Twilight app [2] to dim the screen and use redder colors at night. When I want to change settings at night I just have to pause that app and there s no need to remove the access from it note that all the web pages and online documentation saying otherwise is wrong. Another new feature is to not require unlocking while at home. This can be a convenience feature but fingerprint unlocking is so easy that it doesn t provide much benefit. The downside of enabling this is that if someone stole your phone they could visit your home to get it unlocked. Also police who didn t have a warrant permitting search of a phone could do so anyway without needing to compel the owner to give up the password. Design This is one of the 2 most attractive phones I ve owned (the other being the sparkly Nexus 4). I think that the general impression of the appearance is positive as there are transparent cases on sale. My phone is white and reminds me of EVE from the movie Wall-E. Cables This phone uses the USB Type-C connector, which isn t news to anyone. What I didn t realise is that full USB-C requires that connector at both ends as it s not permitted to have a data cable with USB-C at the device and and USB-A at the host end. The Nexus 6P ships with a 1M long charging cable that has USB-C at both ends and a ~10cm charging cable with USB-C at one end and type A at the other (for the old batteries and the PCs that don t have USB-C). I bought some 2M long USB-C to USB-A cables for charging my new phone with my old chargers, but I haven t yet got a 1M long cable. Sometimes I need a cable that s longer than 10cm but shorter than 2M. The USB-C cables are all significantly thicker than older USB cables. Part of that would be due to having many more wires but presumably part of it would be due to having thicker power wires for delivering 3A. I haven t measured power draw but it does seem to charge faster than older phones. Overall the process of converting to USB-C is going to be a lot more inconvenient than USB SuperSpeed (which I could basically ignore as non-SuperSpeed connectors worked). It will be good when laptops with USB-C support become common, it should allow thinner laptops with more ports. One problem I initially had with my Samsung Galaxy Note 3 was the Micro-USB SuperSpeed socket on the phone being more fiddly for the Micro-USB charging plug I used. After a while I got used to that but it was still an annoyance. Having a symmetrical plug that can go into the phone either way is a significant convenience. Calendars and Contacts I share most phone contacts with my wife and also have another list that is separate. In the past I had used the Samsung contacts system for the contacts that were specific to my phone and a Google account for contacts that are shared between our phones. Now that I m using a non-Samsung phone I got another Gmail account for the purpose of storing contacts. Fortunately you can get as many Gmail accounts as you want. But it would be nice if Google supported multiple contact lists and multiple calendars on a single account. Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini Shortly after buying the Nexus 6P I decided that I spend enough time in pools and hot tubs that having a waterproof phone would be a good idea. Probably most people wouldn t consider reading email in a hot tub on a cruise ship to be an ideal holiday, but it works for me. The Galaxy S5 Mini seems to be the cheapest new phone that s waterproof. It is small and has a relatively low resolution screen, but it s more than adequate for a device that I ll use for an average of a few hours a week. I don t plan to get a SIM for it, I ll just use Wifi from my main phone. One noteworthy thing is the amount of bloatware on the Samsung. Usually when configuring a new phone I m so excited about fancy new hardware that I don t notice it much. But this time buying the new phone wasn t particularly exciting as I had just bought a phone that s much better. So I had more time to notice all the annoyances of having to download updates to Samsung apps that I ll never use. The Samsung device manager facility has been useful for me in the past and the Samsung contact list was useful for keeping a second address book until I got a Nexus phone. But most of the Samsung apps and 3d party apps aren t useful at all. It s bad enough having to install all the Google core apps. I ve never read mail from my Gmail account on my phone. I use Fetchmail to transfer it to an IMAP folder on my personal mail server and I d rather not have the Gmail app on my Android devices. Having any apps other than the bare minimum seems like a bad idea, more apps in the Android image means larger downloads for an over-the-air update and also more space used in the main partition for updates to apps that you don t use. Not So Exciting In recent times there hasn t been much potential for new features in phones. All phones have enough RAM and screen space for all common apps. While the S5 Mini has a small screen it s not that small, I spent many years with desktop PCs that had a similar resolution. So while the S5 Mini was released a couple of years ago that doesn t matter much for most common use. I wouldn t want it for my main phone but for a secondary phone it s quite good. The Nexus 6P is a very nice phone, but apart from USB-C, the fingerprint reader, and the lack of a stylus there s not much noticeable difference between that and the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 I was using before. I m generally happy with my Nexus 6P, but I think that anyone who chooses to buy a cheaper phone probably isn t going to be missing a lot.

• [1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2016/06/01/i-just-ordered-a-nexus-6p/
• [2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.urbandroid.lux

My monthly report covers what I have been doing for Debian. I write it for Debian s Long Term Support sponsors but also for the wider free software community in the hope that it might inspire people to get more involved with Debian or free software in general. Debian Android

• We (the Android Tools Maintainers and our three GSoC students) started our regular IRC meetings on Thursday.
• I am mostly involved in answering packaging questions, reviewing package updates and uploading them to the archive.
• I sponsored new versions of android-platform-build, android-platform-external-libselinux, android-platform-external-libunwind, android-platform-frameworks-base, android-platform-system-core and android-platform-system-extras.
• I sponsored a new revision of apktool prepared by Chirayu Desai and myself that fixed the decoding issue from last month and three other bugs. Thanks to Paul Wise for the reports and Chirayu for fixing two bugs and creating a separate android-framework-res binary package on which we could depend on. It seems decoding works now as intended but we still need to tackle the building problem.

Debian Games

• I packaged CaveExpress and CavePacker for Debian. CaveExpress is a remake of the old Amiga classic Ugh! In this game you control a pedal-powered flying machine and pick up packages from your clients. An interesting aspect of CaveExpress is its physics-based gameplay. The packages must be delivered to a collection point and their movement is quite realistic thanks to the excellent Box2d physics engine. The other game, CavePacker, based on the same engine as CaveExpress is a Sokoban-like game. Both games feature dozens of levels and if you have nothing better to do, you should definitely check them out.
• This month I also packaged a new upstream release of Netpanzer. Apparently there is new upstream activity.
• Blockattack 2.0 was released and is now available in Debian.
• I also updated the following packages: kball, pathogen, ceferino, slimevolley, pangzero and airstrike.
• I adopted abe, berusky and berusky-data, updated the packages to use modern debian helpers and also packaged version 1.7 of berusky, a great Sokoban-like game by the way.
• June also saw a new release of debian-games, several metapackages that make it much easier to install a subset of games or even the finest.
• I sponsored RC-bug fixes for parsec47, tumiki-fighters, mu-cade and tatan all prepared by Peter De Wachter who keeps our D (yes, that s a language) games alive. But we will face more issues in the post Stretch future. Apparently the D language people intend to remove parts of their API and of course all our D-based games are affected. Peter has announced more information about that. I think all these games are pretty unique and real gems. If you know a little D and want to help out, please get involved.

Debian Java

• I sponsored a new package for Tobias Ilte, stegosuite, a steganography tool to hide information in image files.
• I packaged new upstream releases of jboss-logmanager, jboss-modules, jboss-xnio, activemq and undertow.
• Together with Emmanuel Bourg I prepared a security update for Tomcat 8 fixing 8 CVEs. (DSA-3609-1)
• I backported the lastest stable release of mysql-connector-java to Jessie to fix CVE-2015-2575. A DSA is pending.
• I blogged about the default Java switch in Wheezy.

Debian LTS This was my fifth month as a paid contributor and I have been paid to work 19,75 hours on Debian LTS. In that time I did the following:

• DLA-501-1. Salvatore Bonaccorso from Debian s Security Team discovered that the original fix for CVE-2015-7552 (DLA-450-1) was incomplete. I prepared and uploaded a new revision of gdk-pixbuf and issued the DLA.
• DLA-502-1. Issued a security update for graphicsmagick fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-504-1. Issued a security update for libxstream-java fixing 1 CVE which was prepared by Emmanuel Bourg.
• DLA-505-1. Issued a security update for libpdfbox-java fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-508-1. Issued a security update for expat fixing 2 CVE.
• DLA-511-1. Issued a security update for libtorrent-rasterbar fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-526-1. Issued a security update for mysql-connector-java fixing 1 CVE. I also prepared the update for Jessie which is still pending to be reviewed by the Security Team.
• DLA-528-1. Issued a security update for libcommons-fileupload-java fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-529-1. Issued a security update for tomcat7 fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-530-1. As previously announced I switched the default Java implementation from OpenJDK 6 to OpenJDK 7.
• DLA-537-1. Issued a security update for roundcube fixing 1 CVE. I triaged CVE-2016-5103, CVE-2015-2180 and CVE-2015-2181 and marked them as not-vulnerable .
• I triaged 22 CVEs for libarchive and marked two of them as not-vulnerable . You can find my preliminary work for libarchive on the wheezy branch in Debian s git repository. I expect a security update very soon.
• From 13 June to 19. June I was responsible for Wheezy s LTS frontdesk. It was a rather calm week on the debian-lts mailing list and in our IRC channel. I triaged CVE-2016-4970 (netty), CVE-2016-3189 (bzip2), CVE-2016-1621 (libvpx) and CVE-2016-4493, CVE-2016-4492, CVE-2016-4491, CVE-2016-4490, CVE-2016-4489, CVE-2016-4488, CVE-2016-4487, CVE-2016-2226 which were all minor issues in developer tools or in the gcc toolchain.
• I commented on Ola s question about open security issues in phpmyadmin.

QA uploads

• I fixed pygccxml that threatened to remove spring.
• I completely overhauled gl-117, fixed four bugs and closed two obsolete ones. gl-117 always reminds me a little of the Falcon series from the early 90ies.

check-all-the-things (aka cats, Meow!) is a tool that aims to make it easy to know which tools can be used to check a directory tree and to make it easy to run those tools on the directory tree. The tree could either be a source tree or a build tree or both. It aims to check as much of the tree as possible so the output can be very verbose and have many false positives. It is not for the busy, lazy or noise intolerant. It runs the checks by matching file names and MIME types against those registered for a list of checks. Each check has a set of dependencies, flags, filename wildcards, MIME type wildcards, comments and prerequisite commands. By default it:

• doesn't check file MIME types as this is slower
• shows which command is currently running
• limits check output to 10 lines
• hides checks that output nothing
• kills checks when interrupted with Ctrl+C
• exits when interrupted twice in quick succession
• outputs various remarks at the end

It runs all checks for the current distro/release except:

• dangerous ones that execute code in the current dir
• ones that modify files in the current dir
• ones that access the network (if there is no default route)
• ones that need work to be usable
• ones that need a human to run them

There are command-line options to customise the behaviour and automatic bash shell completion via argcomplete. There are 177 checks (including TODO ones) in 73 different categories. There are an additional 224 not-well-specified TODO items for new checks in comments. It is exceptionally easy to add new checks once one knows how to use the tool one wants to add. At this point in time it is probably not a good idea to run it in an untrusted directory tree for several reasons:

• there could be unknown vulnerabilities in the tools used
• there could be unknown interactions with interpreters (known ones worked around)
• there could be some commands doing unknown code execution
• there could be other weirdness in some layers
• there is no automatic sandboxing at all yet

The project initially started as really hacky wiki page full of commands to run. At some point I figured it was time to make this actually be maintainable and started on a project to do that. At around the same time Jakub Wilk was working on maquack to replace the wiki page. Somehow I found out about it and talked to him about it. It was vastly less hacky than my version so I ended up taking it over and continuing it under the check-all-the-things name. I polished it for the last two years and finally released it into Debian unstable during DebCamp16.

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between June 19th and June 25th 2016. Media coverage

• Holger Levsen gave a talk at openSUSE Conference 2016 explaining the general idea and status of Reproducible Builds. This talk is available as video recording.
• This was followed by Bernhard Wiedemannn, detailing his work on Reproducible Builds for openSUSE which is also available as video recording:
  • openSUSE uses SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH now too
  • How to create bit-for-bit identical RPMs
  • How strip-nondeterminism is Python and thus unsuitable for the openSUSE base system
• Mozilla awarded $77k to work on reproducible builds for Tails. The goal is to enable anyone (given sufficient technical skills and hardware resources) to rebuild from source a given Tails release, in order to independently verify that it matches the ISO image that was published. A substantial part of this work will be done in Debian: for example, to make the side-effects of some packages' post-installation scripts deterministic. On the longer term, this work should benefit other projects that want to make their own builds reproducible (e.g. operating system images for the cloud and embedded systems, operating system installation media, other Live systems).

GSoC and Outreachy updates

• Valerie Young published a report detailing what she did the last week regarding improving tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian.
• Ceridwen announced reprotest's arrival in the NEW queue and discussed autopkgtest's layout.

Toolchain fixes

• Anton Gladky uploaded an NMU of python-setuptools, which sorts entries in native_libs.txt files (#825857).

Other upstream fixes Emil Velikov searched on IRC for hints on how to guarantee unique values during build to invalidate shader caches in Mesa, when also no VCS information is available. A possible solution is a timestamp, which is unique enough for local builds, but can still be reproducible by allowing it to be overwritten with SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. Packages fixed The following 9 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: cclib librun-parts-perl llvm-toolchain-snapshot python-crypto python-openid r-bioc-shortread r-bioc-variantannotation ruby-hdfeos5 sqlparse The following packages have become reproducible after being fixed:

• allegro4.4/2:4.4.2-9 by Tobias Hansen, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• atomicparsley/0.9.6-1 by Jonas Smedegaard.
• dwarfutils/20160613-1 by Fabian Wolff, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• dwm/6.1-3 by Hugo Lefeuvre, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• funtools/1.4.6+git150811-3 by Ole Streicher, original patch by Alexis Bienven e.
• golang-github-appc-spec/0.8.4+dfsg-1 by Dmitry Smirnov.
• golang-github-appc-docker2aci/0.11.1+dfsg-1 Dmitry Smirnov.
• hdf-eos5/5.1.15.dfsg.1-7 by Alastair McKinstry.
• hmmer2/2.3.2-11 by Sascha Steinbiss, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• jpy/0.8-2 by Alastair McKinstry.
• lazarus/1.6+dfsg-4 by Paul Gevers.
• pgbackrest/1.02-2 by Adrian Vondendriesch.
• siege/4.0.2-1 by Josue Abarca.
• starlink-pal/0.5.0-4 by Ole Streicher, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• stylish-haskell/0.5.17.0-2 by Sean Whitton.
• xprobe/0.3-3 by Sophie Brun, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.

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

• hdfeos4/2.19v1.00+dfsg.1-5 by Alastair McKinstry.
• icu4j/57.1-2 by Tony Mancill, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• pari/2.7.6-1 by Bill Allombert,

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

• #827684 against cgoban by Chris Lamb: set SHELL to static value.
• #827731 against tin by Alexis Bienven e: drop patch which overwrites __DATE__/__TIME__ macros, since gcc can handle it now
• #827863 against swedish by Alexis Bienven e: use C locale for sorting.
• #827987 against glances by Chris Lamb: Use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH for embedded timestamp.
• #827994 against cmtk by Chris Lamb: use C locale for sorting.
• #828008 against aghermann by Chris Lamb: honour SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH for timestamps embedded into manpages.
• #828012 against bind9 by Chris Lamb: honour SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH for embedded timestamp.
• #828017 against frog by Chris Lamb: don't include pyc/pyo files in the package.
• #828021 against extra-cmake-modules by Scarlett Clark: normalize permission and file order in tarballs.
• #828060 against libffado by Chris Lamb: exclude file with test output from package.
• #828066 against gsmlib by Chris Lamb: honour SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH for timestamps embedded into manpages.
• #828067 against grib-api by Chris Lamb: exclude pyc files from package.
• #828122 against libxmlbird by Chris Lamb: sort list of globbed files.
• #828123 against magnum by Chris Lamb: use static value for embedded hostname.
• #828131 against pyjwt by Chris Lamb: exclude coverage data from package.
• #828145 against mkdocs by Chris Lamb: honour SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH for embedded timestamp.
• #828164 against zeal by Chris Lamb: use UTC for embedded timestamp.
• #828168 against x42-plugins by Daniel Shahaf: use printf instead of non-portable echo.

Package reviews 139 reviews have been added, 20 have been updated and 21 have been removed in this week. New issues found:

• timestamps_in_pdf_generated_by_reportlab
• r_base_appends_built_header_to_description_files
• timestamps_in_documentation_generated_by_mkdocs

53 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb, Santiago Vila and Mateusz ukasik. diffoscope development

• Satyam Zode added argument completion.
• Chris Lamb made the confusing "No differences found inside, yet data differs" message less confusing.

Quote of the week "My builds are so reproducible, they fail exactly every second time." Johannes Ziemke (@discordianfish) Misc. This week's edition was written by Chris Lamb (lamby), Reiner Herrmann and Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible builds folks on IRC.

A (forced) relaxation week This was an interesting week, much more so than I expected. The start of the week was the usual: on Monday a run, although at an easier pace after Sunday's longer indoor bike ride, on Tuesday a 30Km outside bike ride (flat, on road, with a mountain bike so not fast at all). On Wednesday however, I had a planned "intervention" at my dentist bone reconstruction (or regeneration, not sure what the right term is for the implantation of scaffolding). The dentist told me I won't be allowed to do sports, especially in the first few days after the procedure, so I knew I will have to take it easy; easy bike rides are fine, but not anything more (e.g. especially not running). The procedure went well and after that I went to work (the dentist looked at me in a funny way when I mentioned I'm not going home but instead back to work). There was a bit of pain a couple of hours after the local anaesthesia went away, but the painkillers did work, so I was able to function somewhat OK. Laughing was the only thing that caused pain, so I tried to be very serious; didn't work well On Thursday morning however, I did feel funny and when I looked into the mirror, I got a shock. The affected side of my face was heavily swollen, and I was feeling as bad as I looked. I had a followup checkup at the dentist, so I went there, and they told me Oh, this is normal. Bone reconstruction is much more difficult on the body as opposed to extraction, since the body actually has to rebuild stuff, instead of just healing the wound. And yes, you should just go back home and take the day off! . OK, logically that explanation makes sense, but my dental extraction had a very predictable pain/recovery curve (spike right at the extraction, plateau for that day, then slow recovery that went to faster recovery after a few days). This procedure was very different, with the first day easy, and the second day much worse. The dentist continued Oh, and by the way, expect this to be worse in the morning, as the body can work all night; also, this should go away by itself over the weekend, so let's meet again on Monday. At this point I realised than I'm not allowed to do sports is not by doctor's orders, but rather my condition doesn't allow me to do sport . Sad panda Friday was even worse; my face was swollen in a different way, such that I looked even more like a monster from the Witcher games. I had to stay at home again, not being able to do much, as the painkillers I got were mostly ineffective. From my usual ~10K steps a day (or more if I run), my Friday was a paltry sub-2K step day. The only thing I was able to do was watch anime. I found Log Horizon to be a pretty interesting anime, much more so than what the synopsis said; the ramification on politics and how to interaction between the two cultures unfolded was much more in-depth than I presumed. Didn't finish it yet, so this is a partial but very strong recommendation for it. Besides watching stuff, I also went to the shop to buy some food, which turned out to be an excuse for "junk food foraging!". The pain took my willpower away and instead of the planned and short grocery list, I found myself with lots of chocolate and ice cream on my hands. Funny how the brain works On Saturday I was a bit better; the swelling went partially away, so if you squinted you could pretend I look my normal-ugly, not the monster-ugly from before. I was able to go outside of the house, do some shopping, etc. so I was able to go back to a ~9K steps day. I also stopped taking painkillers since anyway they weren't of much help, and kept myself entertained with movies and other stuff (cough cough Grim Dawn , since it's a mindless click-kill-loot-repeat ARPG that one can play even when only partially functional). Today (Sunday) was swelling was slightly worse; however, I was feeling well enough to try to go back on the bike trainer (the first three days of "no sports" were over), and planned to do a slow/relaxing one hour Zwift ride. Right, as all the people who ever tried this, it works as long as only fast people overtake you (since you can't catch them anyway), or as long as you don't get to sprint sections. I did slightly improve my Watopia 300m sprint personal record (29.20s 28.29s), which was good enough. After the first lap I took it easier as in had to, since I was not really in shape. I was in any case very glad about ending my 4 days long break from sports! So, my dentist was right indeed. The swelling did by and large clear up over the weekend (although I'll have to see how tomorrow will be), and was also right about how much more difficult this was. On one hand makes sense (growing bone does sound complex), on the other hand, I couldn't imagine that the body works so hard that it puts you out. The dentist was however slightly wrong with the you should not do any strenuous activity, especially in the first three days ; they should have said, ha ha, you'll be flat out for the first days, take it easy and enjoy the painkillers instead. Looking forward now to get back into my regular routine; relaxation is good, but only when done by choice like most things in life

For a while now, I have wanted to test the Signal app, as it is said to provide end to end encrypted communication and several of my friends and family are already using it. As I by choice do not own a mobile phone, this proved to be harder than expected. And I wanted to have the source of the client and know that it was the code used on my machine. But yesterday I managed to get it working. I used the Github source, compared it to the source in the Signal Chrome app available from the Chrome web store, applied patches to use the production Signal servers, started the app and asked for the hidden "register without a smart phone" form. Here is the recipe how I did it. First, I fetched the Signal desktop source from Github, using

git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git

Next, I patched the source to use the production servers, to be able to talk to other Signal users:

cat <<EOF   patch -p0
diff -ur ./js/background.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js
--- ./js/background.js  2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
+++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js    2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
@@ -47,8 +47,8 @@
          );
      );
 
-    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org';
-    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com';
+    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org:4433';
+    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com';
     var messageReceiver;
     window.getSocketStatus = function()  
         if (messageReceiver)  
diff -ur ./js/expire.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js
--- ./js/expire.js      2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
+++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 ;(function()  
     'use strict';
-    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 0;
+    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 1474492690000;
 
     window.extension = window.extension    ;
 
EOF

The first part is changing the servers, and the second is updating an expiration timestamp. This timestamp need to be updated regularly. It is set 90 days in the future by the build process (Gruntfile.js). The value is seconds since 1970 times 1000, as far as I can tell. Based on a tip and good help from the #nuug IRC channel, I wrote a script to launch Signal in Chromium.

#!/bin/sh
cd $(dirname $0)
mkdir -p userdata
exec chromium \
  --proxy-server="socks://localhost:9050" \
  --user-data-dir= pwd /userdata --load-and-launch-app= pwd 

The script start the app and configure Chromium to use the Tor SOCKS5 proxy to make sure those controlling the Signal servers (today Amazon and Whisper Systems) as well as those listening on the lines will have a harder time location my laptop based on the Signal connections if they use source IP address. When the script starts, one need to follow the instructions under "Standalone Registration" in the CONTRIBUTING.md file in the git repository. I right clicked on the Signal window to get up the Chromium debugging tool, visited the 'Console' tab and wrote 'extension.install("standalone")' on the console prompt to get the registration form. Then I entered by land line phone number and pressed 'Call'. 5 seconds later the phone rang and a robot voice repeated the verification code three times. After entering the number into the verification code field in the form, I could start using Signal from my laptop. As far as I can tell, The Signal app will leak who is talking to whom and thus who know who to those controlling the central server, but such leakage is hard to avoid with a centrally controlled server setup. It is something to keep in mind when using Signal - the content of your chats are harder to intercept, but the meta data exposing your contact network is available to people you do not know. So better than many options, but not great. And sadly the usage is connected to my land line, thus allowing those controlling the server to associate it to my home and person. I would prefer it if only those I knew could tell who I was on Signal. There are options avoiding such information leakage, but most of my friends are not using them, so I am stuck with Signal for now.

My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donators (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me. Debian packaging Django and Python. I uploaded Django 1.9.7 and filed an upstream ticket (#26755) for a failure seen in its DEP-8 tests. I packaged/sponsored python-django-modeltranslation and python-paypal. I opened a pull request on model-translation to fix failing tests in the Debian package build. I packaged a new python-django-jsonfield (1.0.0), filed a bug and discovered some regression in its PostgreSQL support. I helped on the upstream ticket and I have been granted commit rights. I used this opportunity to do some bug triage and push a few fixes. I also discussed the future of the module and ended up starting a discussion on Django s developer list about the possibility to add a JSONField to the core. CppUTest. I uploaded a new upstream version (3.8) with more than a year of work. I found out that make install does not install a required header so I opened a ticket with a patch. The package ended up not compiling on quite a few architectures so I opened a ticket and prepared a fix for some of those failures with the help of the upstream developers. I also added a DEP-8 tests after having uploaded a broken (untested) package systemd support in net-snmp and postfix. I worked on adding native systemd service units to net-snmp (#782243) and postfix (#715188). In both cases, the maintainers have not been very reactive so far so I uploaded my changes as delayed NMU. pkg-security team. The team that I started quietly a few months ago is now growing, both with new members and new packages. I created the required Teams/pkg-security wiki page. I sponsored xprobe, hydra, made an upload of medusa to merge Kali changes into Debian (and at the same time submitting the patch to upstream). fontconfig. After having read Jonathan McDowell s analysis of a bug that I experienced multiple times (and that many Kali users had too), I opened bug #828037 to get it fixed once for all. Unfortunately, nothing happened yet. DebConf 16 I spent some time to prepare the 2 talks and the BoF that I will give/manage in Cape Town next week:

• Kali Linux s Experience https://debconf16.debconf.org/talks/39/
• 2 Years of Work of Paid Contributors in the Debian LTS Project https://debconf16.debconf.org/talks/40/
• Using Debian Money to Fund Debian Projects https://debconf16.debconf.org/talks/41/

Distro Tracker I continued to mentor Vladimir Likic who managed to finish his first patch. He is now working on documentation for new contributors based on his recent experience. I enhanced the tox configuration to run tests with Django 1.8 LTS with fatal warnings (python -Werror) so as to ensure that I m not relying on any deprecated feature and so that I can be sure that the codebase will work on the next Django LTS release (1.11). Thanks to this, I did discover quite a few places where I have been using deprecated API and I fixed them all (the JSONField update to 1.0.0 I mentionned above was precisely to fix such a warning). I also fixed a few more issues with folded mail headers that you can t inject back in a new Message object and with messages lacking the subject field. All those have been caught through real (spam) email generating exceptions wich are then mailed to me. Kali related work I uploaded a new live-boot (5.20160608) to Debian to fix a bug where the boot process was blocking on some timeout. I forwarded a Kali bug against libatk-wrapper-java (#827741) which turned out to be an OpenJDK bug. I filed #827749 against reprepro to request a way to remove selected internal file references. This is required if you want to be able to make a file disappear and if that file is part of a snapshot that you want to keep despite this. But in truth, my real need is to be able to replace the .orig.tar.gz used by Kali by the orig.tar.gz used by Debian those conflicts break the mirroring/import script. Salt I have been using salt to deploy a new service, and I developed patches for a few issues in salt formulas. I also created a new letsencrypt-sh formula to manage TLS certificates with the letsencrypt.sh ACME client. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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

• Updates to tickle-me-email, my Getting Things Done-inspired email toolbox:
  • Added the ability to inject arbitrary headers into draft messages. (#5)
  • Merged a documentation fix from Will Thompson. (#5)
• Improved my Chrome extension for the FastMail web interface:
  • Support appending arbitrary text in the Compose textarea to the subject via a context menu. (#4)
  • Avoid brittle parsing of the page and use the Javascript API instead. (diff)
• Updated my Strava Enhancement Suite, a Chrome extension that improves and fixes annoyances in the web interface of the Strava cycling and running tracker:
  • Merge support from Jeff Schuler to support "Flyby" activity defaults. (#50)
  • Correctly fallback to the default value after introducing a new value. (diff)
• Made a quick and dirty Kindle version of Derek Siver's book reviews. (repo)
• Improved my stravabot IRC bot to be more resilient on service failure. (diff)

---

The past few days I've been working on my mail client which has resulted in a lot of improvements to drawing, display and correctness. Since then I've been working on adding GPG-support. My naive attempt was to extract the signature, and the appropriate body-part from the message. Write them both to disk then I could validate via:

gpg --verify msg.sig msg

However that failed, and it took me a long to work out why. I downloaded the source to mutt, which can correctly verify an attached-signature, then hacked lib.c to neuter the mutt_unlink function. That left me with a bunch of files inside $TEMPFILE one of which provided the epiphany. A message which is to be validated is indeed written out to disk, just as I would have done, as is the signature. Ignoring the signature the message is interesting:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
On Mon, 27 Jun 2016 08:08:14 +0200
...
--=20
Bob Smith

The reason I'd failed to validate my message-body was because I'd already decoded the text of the MIME-part, and I'd also lost the prefixed two lines "Content-type:.." and Content-Transfer:.... I'm currently trying to work out if it is possible to get access to the RAW MIME-part-text in GMIME. Anyway that learning aside I've made a sleazy hack which just shells out to mimegpg, and this allows me to validate GPG signatures! That's not the solution I'd prefer, but that said it does work, and it works with inline-signed messages as well as messages with application/pgp-signature MIME-parts. Changing the subject now. I wonder how many people read to the end anyway? I've been in Finland for almost a year now. Recently I was looking over websites and I saw that the domain steve.fi was going to expire in a few weeks. So I started obsessively watching it. Today I claimed it. So I'll be slowly moving things from beneath steve.org.uk to use the new home steve.fi. I also setup a mini-portfolio/reference site at http://steve.kemp.fi/ - which was a domain I registered while I was unsure if I could get steve.fi. Finally now is a good time to share more interesting news:

• I've been reinstated as a Debian developer.
• We're having a baby.
  • Interesting times.

The past few days I've been working on my mail client which has resulted in a lot of improvements to drawing, display and correctness. Since then I've been working on adding GPG-support. My naive attempt was to extract the signature, and the appropriate body-part from the message. Write them both to disk then I could validate via:

gpg --verify msg.sig msg

However that failed, and it took me a long to work out why. I downloaded the source to mutt, which can correctly verify an attached-signature, then hacked lib.c to neuter the mutt_unlink function. That left me with a bunch of files inside $TEMPFILE one of which provided the epiphany. A message which is to be validated is indeed written out to disk, just as I would have done, as is the signature. Ignoring the signature the message is interesting:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
On Mon, 27 Jun 2016 08:08:14 +0200
...
--=20
Bob Smith

The reason I'd failed to validate my message-body was because I'd already decoded the text of the MIME-part, and I'd also lost the prefixed two lines "Content-type:.." and Content-Transfer:.... I'm currently trying to work out if it is possible to get access to the RAW MIME-part-text in GMIME. Anyway that learning aside I've made a sleazy hack which just shells out to mimegpg, and this allows me to validate GPG signatures! That's not the solution I'd prefer, but that said it does work, and it works with inline-signed messages as well as messages with application/pgp-signature MIME-parts. Changing the subject now. I wonder how many people read to the end anyway? I've been in Finland for almost a year now. Recently I was looking over websites and I saw that the domain steve.fi was going to expire in a few weeks. So I started obsessively watching it. Today I claimed it. So I'll be slowly moving things from beneath steve.org.uk to use the new home steve.fi. I also setup a mini-portfolio/reference site at http://steve.kemp.fi/ - which was a domain I registered while I was unsure if I could get steve.fi. Finally now is a good time to share more interesting news:

• I've been reinstated as a Debian developer.
• We're having a baby.
  • Interesting times.

The past few days I've been working on my mail client which has resulted in a lot of improvements to drawing, display and correctness. Since then I've been working on adding GPG-support. My naive attempt was to extract the signature, and the appropriate body-part from the message. Write them both to disk then I could validate via:

gpg --verify msg.sig msg

However that failed, and it took me a long to work out why. I downloaded the source to mutt, which can correctly verify an attached-signature, then hacked lib.c to neuter the mutt_unlink function. That left me with a bunch of files inside $TEMPFILE one of which provided the epiphany. A message which is to be validated is indeed written out to disk, just as I would have done, as is the signature. Ignoring the signature the message is interesting:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
On Mon, 27 Jun 2016 08:08:14 +0200
...
--=20
Bob Smith

The reason I'd failed to validate my message-body was because I'd already decoded the text of the MIME-part, and I'd also lost the prefixed two lines "Content-type:.." and Content-Transfer:.... I'm currently trying to work out if it is possible to get access to the RAW MIME-part-text in GMIME. Anyway that learning aside I've made a sleazy hack which just shells out to mimegpg, and this allows me to validate GPG signatures! That's not the solution I'd prefer, but that said it does work, and it works with inline-signed messages as well as messages with application/pgp-signature MIME-parts. Changing the subject now. I wonder how many people read to the end anyway? I've been in Finland for almost a year now. Recently I was looking over websites and I saw that the domain steve.fi was going to expire in a few weeks. So I started obsessively watching it. Today I claimed it. So I'll be slowly moving things from beneath steve.org.uk to use the new home steve.fi. I also setup a mini-portfolio/reference site at http://steve.kemp.fi/ - which was a domain I registered while I was unsure if I could get steve.fi. Finally now is a good time to share more interesting news:

• I've been reinstated as a Debian developer.
• We're having a baby.
  • Interesting times.

There once was a Kingdom strongly United, built on the honours of the people of Wessex, of Mercia, Northumbria and East Anglia who knew how to deal with the invasion of the Vikings from the east and of Normans from the south, to come to unify the territory under an umbrella of common intents. Today, however, 48% of them, while keeping solid traditions, still know how to look forward to the future, joining horizons and commercial developments along with the rest of Europe. The remaining 52%, however, look back and can not see anything in front of them if not a desire of isolation, breaking the European dream born on the shores of Ventotene island in 1944 by Altiero Spinelli, Ernesto Rossi and Ursula Hirschmann through the Manifesto for a free and united Europe . An incurable fracture in the country was born in a referendum on 23 June, in which just over half of the population asked to terminate his marriage to the great European family, bringing the UK back by 43 years of history. <Read More [by Fabio Marzocca]>