Search Results: "ana"

14 August 2016

Russ Allbery: Summer haul

The reality is that I've just not been reading very much, as you can probably tell from the lack of reviews here. Lots of other things have been occupying my time, including rather too much on-line political reading eating into my off-line book reading. But hope springs eternal, so more books have been acquired in the interim. Since I use these posts to keep myself from buying duplicates, in the absence of a real database that I've not yet written or set up, here they are: Mishell Baker Borderline (sff)
Curtis C. Chen Waypoint Kangaroo (sff)
Mark Forster Secrets of Productive People (nonfiction)
Yoon Ha Lee Ninefox Gambit (sff)
Seanan McGuire Every Heart a Doorway (sff)
Don Norman The Design of Everyday Things (nonfiction)
Kristina Rizga Mission High (nonfiction)
John Scalzi Lock In (sff) This a pretty random collection of things from authors I know I like, non-fiction that looked really interesting from on-line reviews, the next book for book club reading for work (The Design of Everyday Things, which I've somehow never managed to read), and the first SF novel by an old college friend of mine (Waypoint Kangaroo by Curtis Chen).

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: week 68 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday August 7 and Saturday August 13 2016: GSoC and Outreachy updates Reproducible work in other projects Thomas Schmitt scdbackup@gmx.net implemented a new -as mkisofs option: 
--set_all_file_dates timestring
Set mtime, atime, and ctime of all files and directories to  the
given time.
Valid  timestring  formats  are:  'Nov  8  14:51:13  CET  2007',
110814512007.13, 2007110814511300. See also --modification-date=
and man xorriso, Examples of input timestrings.
This  action  stays  delayed until mkisofs emulation ends. Up to
then it  can  be  revoked  by  --set_all_file_dates  with  empty
timestring.   In  any  case  files  which get into the ISO after
mkisofs emulation ended will not  be  affected,  unless  another
mkisofs emulation applies --set_all_file_date again.
LEDE developer Jonas Gorski submitted a patch to fix build times in their kernel: 
kernel: allow reproducable builds
Similar how we fix the file times in the filesystems, fix the build time
of the kernel, and make the build number static. This should allow the
kernel build to be reproducable when combined with setting the
KERNEL\_BUILD\_USER and \_DOMAIN in case of different machines.
The reproducability only applies to non-initramfs kernels, those still
require additional changes.
Signed-off-by: Jonas Gorski <jonas.gorski@gmail.com>
Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed Patches have been submitted by: Package reviews 28 reviews have been added, 4 have been updated and 7 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Issue types have been added/updated: Weekly QA work FTBFS bugs have been reported by: diffoscope development strip-nondeterminism development tests.reproducible-builds.org Misc. Chris started to ping old bugs with patches and no maintainer reaction so far. This week's edition was written by Chris Lamb and Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.

David Moreno: I quit

I just recently quit my job at the startup company I had been working in for almost five years. In startup terms, such long time might be a whole lifetime, but in my case, I grew liking it more and more as the years came, I had evolved from being just another engineer, to lead a team of seven great developers, with decision-making tasks and strategy planning for our technical infrastructure. It s been such a great long teaching journey that I m nothing but pleased with my own performance, learned lessons and skills and all I provided and was provided by the project. Leaving a city like New York is not an easy task. You have it all there, you start making a life and suddenly, before you know it, you already have a bunch of ties to the place, people, leases, important dates, all kinds of shit. Seriously, all kinds of crazy ass shit start to fill up your baggage. You wake up everyday to get into the subway and commute surrounded by all of this people that are just like you: so similar yet so immensely different. No, leaving the city is not an easy task, it s not something to take lightly. You know how people just say my cycle has ended in this place as an euphemism not to end in bad terms with anyone? Well, ending a cycle is indeed a reality, I got to a point where I felt like I needed to head into a different direction, take on new challenges and overall, peace out and hope the best to everyone, specially to myself. This was me, on my last day at work, last Friday of June: (Some) people seem to be anxious to know what I m doing next, and my answer is, go mind your own fucking business. However, life is short and I would love to do any of the following: Decisions, decisions For the time being, I m chilling with my people, friends and family in beautiful Mexico City. I ve been doing so for the entire month of July and I couldn t be more content. August will see my 28th birthday and as I approach thirty, I believe I need to continue moving forward. This stupid world is a tiny place and our lives are short, I for one, will definitively try to take the bull by the horns. Thanks for reading, more updates soon. Peace.

12 August 2016

Markus Koschany: My Free Software Activities in July 2016

Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report that covers what I have been doing for Debian. Debian Android Debian Games Debian Java Debian LTS This was my sixth month as a paid contributor and I have been paid to work 14,7 hours on Debian LTS. In that time I did the following: Misc and QA

10 August 2016

Norbert Preining: Suki Kim Without You, There Is No Us

A book that goes further behind the walls that surround North Korea than anything else I have seen. Suki Kim managed to squeeze herself, American-Korean, into a English teaching job at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, and reports her experiences during two visits there. suki-kim_without-you Most of us in the connected world are well aware about the incredibly backwardness of North Korea, and the harsh living conditions despite the praise that is bombarded onto us through the official channels. But reading about the incredibly underdeveloped students at PUST, Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, the elite of the country, who never heard about the most basic techniques, is still surprising.
Time there seemed to pass differently. When you are shut off from the world, every day is exactly the same as the one before. This sameness has a way of wearing down your soul until you become nothing but a breathing, toiling, consuming thing that awakes to the sun and sleeps at the dawning of the dark.
Another very disturbing part of this book are the short but intensive looks into the country side, when excursions or shopping trips were scheduled. They lay open a barren land, with Gulag like working conditions and permanent shortage of proper food. I have been aware about the situation in North Korea, but reading about it from a very special perspective gave me the shivers.

9 August 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 67 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday July 31 and Saturday August 6 2016: Toolchain development and fixes Packages fixed and bugs filed The following 24 packages have become reproducible - in our current test setup - due to changes in their build-dependencies: alglib aspcud boomaga fcl flute haskell-hopenpgp indigo italc kst ktexteditor libgroove libjson-rpc-cpp libqes luminance-hdr openscenegraph palabos petri-foo pgagent sisl srm-ifce vera++ visp x42-plugins zbackup The following packages have become reproducible after being fixed: The following newly-uploaded packages appear to be reproducible now, for reasons we were not able to figure out. (Relevant changelogs did not mention reproducible builds.) Some uploads have addressed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Package reviews and QA These are reviews of reproduciblity issues of Debian packages. 276 package reviews have been added, 172 have been updated and 44 have been removed in this week. 7 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb. Reproducibility tools Test infrastructure For testing the impact of allowing variations of the buildpath (which up until now we required to be identical for reproducible rebuilds), Reiner Herrmann contribed a patch which enabled build path variations on testing/i386. This is possible now since dpkg 1.18.10 enables the --fixdebugpath build flag feature by default, which should result in reproducible builds (for C code) even with varying paths. So far we haven't had many results due to disturbances in our build network in the last days, but it seems this would mean roughly between 5-15% additional unreproducible packages - compared to what we see now. We'll keep you updated on the numbers (and problems with compilers and common frameworks) as we find them. lynxis continued work to test LEDE and OpenWrt on two different hosts, to include date variation in the tests. Mattia and Holger worked on the (mass) deployment scripts, so that the - for space reasons - only jenkins.debian.net GIT clone resides in ~jenkins-adm/ and not anymore in Holger's homedir, so that soon Mattia (and possibly others!) will be able to fully maintain this setup, while Holger is doing siesta. Miscellaneous Chris, dkg, h01ger and Ximin attended a Core Infrastricture Initiative summit meeting in New York City, to discuss and promote this Reproducible Builds project. 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. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo and Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.

Shirish Agarwal: Doha and the Supreme Court of DFSG Free

Hi, I am in two minds of what to write about Doha. My job has been vastly simplified by a friend when he shared with me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdrAd-44LW0 . That video is more relevant and more closer to the truth than whatever I can share. As can be seen it is funny but more sad the way Qatarians are trying to figure out how things will be and as can be seen it seems to heading towards a real estate bubble . They would have to let go of the Sharia if they are thinking of wealthy westerners coming to stay put. I am just sad to know that many of my country-men are stuck there and although I hope the best for them, I dread it may turn out the way it has turned out for many people of Indians, and especially from Kerala in Saudi Arabia. I would touch about the Kerala situation probably in another blog post as this time is exclusively for legal aspects which were discussed in Debconf. A bit of backgrounder here, one part of my family is lawyers which means I have somewhat notion of law as practiced in our land. As probably everybody knows, India was ruled by the British for around 150 odd years. One of the things that they gave while leaving was/is the IPC (Indian Penal Code) and is practiced with the common law concept. The concept means precedence of any judgement goes quite some way in framing rulings and law of the land as time goes on besides the lobbying and the politics which happens in any democracy. Free software would not have been there without the GPL The General Public License. And the license is as much a legal document as it s something that the developers can work without becoming deranged, as it is one of the more simpler licenses to work with. My own understanding of the legal, ethical and moral issues around me were framed by two-three different TV shows, books (fiction and non-fiction alike) apart from what little news I heard in family. One was M*A*S*H* (with Alan Alda and his frailness, anarchism, humanism, civil rights), the Practise and Boston Legal which does lay bare the many grey areas that lawyers have to deal with ( The Practice also influenced a lot of civil rights understanding and First amendment, but as it is a TV show, how much of it is actually practiced for lawyers and how much moral dilemma they are can only be guessed at.) . In books it is artists like John Grisham, Michael Connelly as well as Perry Mason Agatha Christie. In non-fiction look at the treasures under bombayhighcourt e-books corner and series of Hamlyn Lectures. I would have to warn that all of the above are major time-sinks but rewarding in their own way. Also haven t read all of them as time and interests are constrained but do know they are good for understanding bit of our history. I do crave for a meetup kind of scenario when non-lawyers can read and discuss about facets of law . All that understanding was vastly amplified by Groklaw.net which made non-lawyers at the very least be able to decipher and understand what is going on in the free software world. After PJ (Pamela Jones) closed it in 2013 due to total surveillance by the Free World (i.e. the United States of America, NSA) we have been thirsty. We do get occasionally somewhat mildly interesting articles in lwn.net or arstechnica.net but nowhere the sheer brilliance of groklaw. So, it was a sheer stroke of luck that I met Mr. Bradley M. Kuhn who works with Karen Sandler on Software Conservancy. While I wanted to be there for his presentation, it was just one of those days which doesn t go as planned. However, as we met socially and over e-mail there were two basic questions which I asked him which also imbibes why we need to fight for software freedom in the court of law. Below is a re-wording of what he shared . Q1. why do people think that GPL still needs to be challenged in the court of law while there are gpl-violations which has been more or less successfully defended in the court of law ? Bradley Kuhn the GPL violations is basically a violation of one or more clauses of the GPL license and not the GPL license as a whole and my effort during my lifetime would be to make/have such precedents that the GPL is held as a valid license in the court of law. Q2. Let s say IF GPL is held to be valid in the court of law, would FSF benefit monetarily, at least to my mind it might be so, as more people and comapnies could be convinced to use strong copyleft licenses such as GPLv3 or AGPLv3 . Bradley Kuhn It may or may not. It is possible that even after winning, that people and especially companies may go for weak copyleft licenses if it suits them. The only benefit would probably would be to those people who are already using GPLv3 as the law could be used to protect them as well. Although we would want and welcome companies who would use strong copyleft license such as the GPL, the future is in future and hence uncertain. Both possibilities co-exist. While Bradley didn t say it, I would add further here it probably would mean also moving from being a more offensive mode (which GPL-violations is based upon where a violation occurs and somebody either from the victim s side or a by-stander notices the violation, brings it to the notice of the victim and the GPL-volations team.) to perhaps it being defended by the DMCA people themselves, once GPL is held as a valid license in the eyes of law. Although should you use the DMCA or not is a matter of choice, personal belief system as well as your legal recourses. I have to share that the FSF and the GPL-violations team are probably very discerning when they take up the fight as most of the work done by them is pro-bono (i.e. they don t make a single penny/paisa from the work done therein.) and hence in view of scarce resources, it makes sense to go only for the biggest violators in the hopes that you can either make them agree to compensate and agree to the terms of license of any software/hardware combination or sue them and take a bigger share of the reward/compensation awarded by the Court to help the defendant and maybe some of the proceeds donated by the defendant and people like you and me to make sure that Conservancy and the GPL-violations team is still around to help the next time something similar happens.
Bradley Kuhn presenting at #Debconf 16

Bradley Kuhn presenting at #Debconf 16

Now, as far as his presentation is concerned, whose video can be seen at http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2016/debconf16/The_Supreme_Court_of_DFSGFree.webm , I thought it was tame. While he talked about gaming the system in some sense, he was sharing that the system debian-legal works (most-of-the-time). The list actually works because many far more brilliant people than me take time to understand the intricacies of various licenses and how they should be interpreted through the excellently written Debian Free Software Guidelines and whether the license under discussion contravenes the DFSG or is part of it. I do agree with his point though that the ftp-master/s and the team may not be the right person to judge the license in adherence to the DFSG, or her/is not giving a reason for rejecting a package to not entering into the package archive. I actually asked the same question on debian-legal and while I had guessed, it seems there is enough review of the licenses per-se as answer from Paul Wise shows. Charles Pessley also shared an idea he has documented which probably didn t get much traction as involves more work on DD s without any benefit to show for it. All in all I hope it sheds some light on why there is need to be more aware of law in software freedom. Two Organizations which work on software freedom from legal standpoint are SFLC (Delhi) headed by the charming Mr. Eben Moglen and ALF (Bangalore). I do hope more people, especially developers take a bit more interest in some of the resources mentioned above.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #Alternative Law Forum, #bombayhighcourt e-library, #Common Law, #Debconf16, #Fiction, #Hewlyn lectures, #India, #Jurispudence, #legal fiction, #real estate bubble, #SFLC.in, #Software Freedom, #timesink, Doha, Law

5 August 2016

Arturo Borrero Gonz lez: Spawning a new blog with jekyllrb


I have been delighted with git for several years now. It's a very powerful tool and I use it every day.
I try to use git in all possible tasks: bind servers, configurations, firewalls, and other personal stuff.

However, there has been always a thing in my git-TODO: a blog managed with git.

After a bit of searching, I found an interesting technology: jekyllrb hosted at github pages. Jekyll looked easy to manage and easy to learn for a newbie like me.
There are some very good looking blogs out there using this combination, for example: https://rsms.me/

But I was lazy to migrate this 'ral-arturo' blog from blogger to jekyll, so I decided to create a new blog from scratch.

This time, the new blog in written in Spanish and is about adventures, nature, travels and outdoor sports.
Perhaps you noticed this article about the Mulhacen mountain (BTW, we did it! :-))
The new blog is called alfabravo.org,

I like the workflow with git & jekyll & github:


Who knows, perhaps this 'ral-arturo' blog ends being migrated to the new system as well.

3 August 2016

Daniel Kahn Gillmor: Changes for GnuPG in Debian

The GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG) upstream team maintains three branches of development: 1.4 ("classic"), 2.0 ("stable"), and 2.1 ("modern").They differ in various ways: software architecture, supported algorithms, network transport mechanisms, protocol versions, development activity, co-installability, etc.Debian currently ships two versions of GnuPG in every maintained suite -- in particular, /usr/bin/gpg has historically always been provided by the "classic" branch.That's going to change!Debian unstable will soon be moving to the "modern" branch for providing /usr/bin/gpg. This will give several advantages for Debian and its users in the future, but it will require a transition. Hopefully we can make it a smooth one.

What are the benefits?Compared to "classic", The "modern" branch has:
  • updated crypto (including elliptic curves)
  • componentized architecture (e.g. libraries, some daemonized processes)
  • improved key storage
  • better network access (including talking to keyservers over tor)
  • stronger defaults
  • more active upstream development
  • safer info representation (e.g. no more key IDs, fingerprints easier to copy-and-paste)
If you want to try this out, the changes are already made in experimental. Please experiment!

What does this mean for end users?If you're an end user and you don't use GnuPG directly, you shouldn't notice much of a change once the packages start to move through the rest of the archive.Even if you do use GnuPG regularly, you shouldn't notice too much of a difference. One of the main differences is that all access to your secret key will be handled through gpg-agent, which should be automatically launched as needed. This means that operations like signing and decryption will cause gpg-agent to prompt the the user to unlock any locked keys directly, rather than gpg itself prompting the user.If you have an existing keyring, you may also notice a difference based on a change of how your public keys are managed, though again this transition should ideally be smooth enough that you won't notice unless you care to investigate more deeply.If you use GnuPG regularly, you might want to read the NEWS file that ships with GnuPG and related packages for updates that should help you through the transition.If you use GnuPG in a language other than English, please install the gnupg-l10n package, which contains the localization/translation files. For versions where those files are split out of the main package, gnupg explicitly Recommends: gnupg-l10n already, so it should be brought in for new installations by default.If you have an archive of old data that depends on known-broken algorithms, PGP3 keys, or other deprecated material, you'll need to have "classic" GnuPG around to access it. That will be provided in the gnupg1 package

What does this mean for package maintainers?If you maintain a package that depends on gnupg: be aware that the gnupg package in debian is going through this transition.A few general thoughts:
  • If your package Depends: gnupg for signature verification only, you might prefer to have it Depends: gpgv instead. gpgv is a much simpler tool that the full-blown GnuPG suite, and should be easier to manage. I'm happy to help with such a transition (we've made it recently with apt already)
  • If your package Depends: gnupg and expects ~/.gnupg/ to be laid out in a certain way, that's almost certainly going to break at some point. ~/.gnupg/ is GnuPG's internal storage, and it's not recommended to rely on any specific data structures there, as they may change. gpg offers commands like --export, --import, and --delete for manipulating its persistent storage. please use them instead!
  • If your package depends on parsing or displaying gpg's output for the user, please make sure you use its special machine-readable form (--with-colons). Parsing the human-readable text is not advised and may change from version to version.
If you maintain a package that depends on gnupg2 and tries to use gpg2 instead of gpg, that should stay ok. However, at some point it'd be nice to get rid of /usr/bin/gpg2 and just have one expected binary (gpg). So you can help with that:
  • Look for places where your package expects gpg2 and make it try gpg instead. If you can make your code fall back cleanly
  • Change your dependencies to indicate gnupg (>= 2)
  • Patch lintian to encourage other people to make this switch ;)

What specifically needs to happen?The last major step for this transition was renaming the source package for "classic" GnuPG to be gnupg1. This transition is currently in the ftp-master's NEW queue. Once it makes it through that queue, and both gnupg1 and gnupg2 have been in experimental for a few days without reports of dangerous breakage, we'll upload both gnupg1 and gnupg2 to unstable.We'll also need to do some triage on the BTS, reassigning some reports which are really only relevant for the "classic" branch.Please report bugs via the BTS as usual! You're also welcome to ask questions and make suggestions on #debian-gnupg on irc.oftc.net, or to mail the Debian GnuPG packaging team at pkg-gnupg-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org.Happy hacking!Tags: gnupg

Elena 'valhalla' Grandi: The Cat Model of Package Ownership

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.

Guido G nther: Debian Fun in July 2016

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: Other Debian stuff

John Goerzen: All Aboard

Aaaaaall Aboard! *chug* *chug* And so began a trip aboard our hotel train in Indianapolis, conducted by our very own Jacob and Oliver. IMG_20160703_101438 Because, well, what could be more fun than spending a few days in the world s only real Pullman sleeping car, on its original service track, inside a hotel? IMG_20160703_101520 We were on a family vacation to Indianapolis, staying in what two railfan boys were sure to enjoy: a hotel actually built into part of the historic Indianapolis Union Station complex. This is the original train track and trainshed. They moved in the Pullman cars, then built the hotel around them. Jacob and Oliver played for hours, acting as conductors and engineers, sending their train all across the country to pick up and drop off passengers. Opa! Have you ever seen a kid s face when you introduce them to something totally new, and they think it is really exciting, but a little scary too? That was Jacob and Oliver when I introduced them to saganaki (flaming cheese) at a Greek restaurant. The conversation went a little like this: Our waitress will bring out some cheese. And she will set it ON FIRE right by our table! Will it burn the ceiling? No, she ll be careful. Will it be a HUGE fire? About a medium-sized fire. Then what will happen? She ll yell OPA! and we ll eat the cheese after the fire goes out. Does it taste good? Oh yes. My favorite! It turned out several tables had ordered saganaki that evening, so whenever I saw it coming out, I d direct their attention to it. Jacob decided that everyone should call it opa instead of saganaki because that s what the waitstaff always said. Pretty soon whenever they d see something appear in the window from the kitchen, there d be craning necks and excited jabbering of maybe that s our opa! And when it finally WAS our opa , there were laughs of delight and I suspect they thought that was the best cheese ever. Giggling Elevators IMG_20160703_205544 Fun times were had pressing noses against the glass around the elevator. Laura and I sat on a nearby sofa while Jacob and Oliver sat by the elevators, anxiously waiting for someone to need to go up and down. They point and wave at elevators coming down, and when elevator passengers waved back, Oliver would burst out giggling and run over to Laura and me with excitement. Some history IMG_20160704_161550 We got to see the grand hall of Indianapolis Union Station what a treat to be able to set foot in this magnificent, historic space, the world s oldest union station. We even got to see the office where Thomas Edison worked, and as a hotel employee explained, was fired for doing too many experiments on the job. Water and walkways Indy has a system of elevated walkways spanning quite a section of downtown. It can be rather complex navigating them, and after our first day there, I offered to let Jacob and Oliver be the leaders. Boy did they take pride in that! They stopped to carefully study maps and signs, and proudly announced this way or turn here and were usually correct. 20160702_164754_Richtone(HDR) And it was the same in the paddleboat we took down the canal. Both boys wanted to be in charge of steering, and we only scared a few other paddleboaters. Fireworks IMG_20160704_220332 Our visit ended with the grand fireworks show downtown, set off from atop a skyscraper. I had been scouting for places to watch from, and figured that a bridge-walkway would be great. A couple other families had that thought too, and we all watched the 20-minute show in the drizzle. Loving brothers By far my favorite photo from the week is this one, of Jacob and Oliver asleep, snuggled up next to each other under the covers. They sure are loving and caring brothers, and had a great time playing together. IMG_20160702_071015

1 August 2016

Shirish Agarwal: Doha and the past year in APT

A week has gone by and another small sharing about Doha and one package that quite a few of us use everyday but don t think much of them. Let s start with Doha with these two pictures which tells/shares a bit about what the Doha of today is like qatar-1 qatar-2 While I have more than a dozen snapshots of Doha, all of them show same thing, all are huge skyscrapers and overall Doha seems to be aping Dubai and is in a frenzy as World Cup 2022 is around the corner. We did see a few of the older places but these seemed to be more done for tourists rather than the real thing. We saw stuff like wooden_ship This was a picture taken by Ritesh Raj Saraff, a friend and a DD whom I met while I was going to Debconf. The place where this picture has been taken is known as a Souk or what we know as market-place. This was a place where you could get spices. Quite a few of the spices that we get and use in India were bought from Middle-East in the olden times. In fact, it has been argued that the whole Mughlai food that is part of Indian culture was imported from Middle-East when we were trading them before India or Akhand Bharat was invaded. What was interesting to both of us is that we could perceive that most of the buildings had a sort of fakeness to it, they tried to show that it had a lot of detailed work on the buildings but we could see it was all done recently so not that old as being led to believe. One of the other interesting bits that we came to know throughout our stay in Qatar that almost 80-90% of the staff we met inside Qatar airport as well as in the Souk were people from Asian sub-continent and more specifically from South India. I had few interesting conversations with some of the people who were managing the shops were that almost of them were just employees while the owners were Qataris . I could understand this as the distance and flight between Qatar and India is hardly 3 hours. It seemed very similar to how Mexicans look for work in United States. The most expensive thing there was water as it s desert other than housing and most workers seemed to have shared accommodation from anywhere between 5-15 people in one room. It s only the relative strength of the Qatari Rial which probably compels them to be there. The temperature was around 45 degrees with a bit of humidity as it s next to the Ocean. For all the money in the world, I wouldn t work there. It is true that you know your city s worth only when you go outside:) I do have some more stories about Qatar but that would have to wait for another day now. Also, I really don t want to talk much about this part as it s part depressing but probably would explore it a bit in a further blog-post. One of the more interesting topics that I attended was the apt talk . There are 3-4 tools in the Debian world i.e. apt, aptitude, apt-get, dpkg and dselect. More often than not people know aptitude and apt-get whereas the rest of the packages are not thought so much about. What I somewhat suspected about the history of apt was revealed to be true today, courtesy David K. julias-andreas-klose-year-in-apt You can see the talk/video about apt at http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2016/debconf16/The_past_year_in_APT.webm. I had been curious about apt,libapt,dpkg and the entire tool-chain which goes into updating packages and like. I had a couple of conversations here in India before on mail, in person and IRC as well as couple of conversations in South Africa as well before the APT talk where it was told that packages are not signed or it s not easy to figure out the integrity. Being a Debian fan-boy I could not believe this to be true. Hence I asked and to my dismay found it to be true . I also then asked the same with a bit more background on the mailing list as well and got to know that this has been a concern since 2005. As I do not have the requisite skills and the person would require probably knowledge of dpkg internals as well as have probably good social skills to have at least 1-2 DD s help her/im to work on it and have probably some server space where even some partial archive is re-built using debian packages which use dpkg-sig . I also had some concerns that even if somebody did do the work, it might come in the way of the reproducible builds concept where Neils shared ways in which it could be overcome. Having said the above, it is totally doable if somebody has the will, skills and the patience to do it. Just look at the amazing work done by the team which re-built almost all the archive using clang. See clang.debian.net for the amazing work that they have done. Now, one of the issues in India which comes in popularizing Debian or in fact any free software distribution in India is the bandwidth issue or rather the lack of it or how expensive it is. The situation for better lack of term is pathetic . While nothing can be done till the time the Govt. gives limited term oligopoly licenses to telecom operators and they have a cabal (cabal closed team where decisions and policies are made without any knowledge of and to other stakeholders.) we need to find ways to make the best of the situation. Anyways, while there are some ideas to tackle that but that s a long-term goal and I will share some aspects of it in probably another blog post. In the interim somethings can definitely be made better. Now one of the issues that is there for most people is getting the package updates. Before updating the packages, the package index needs to be updated. Now, both in home and work environments most people are cautious to update the package index. But many times, either due to bandwidth issues or some other issue which is outside your control, your package index is corrupted. I have put both the possible reasons of why and how the package index corruption takes place and a probable work-around of in the deity mail post. I do hope to put in a more coherent state by probably making smaller bug issues so they could be tackled or answered one by one. Any improvements would be better for stability of debian infrastructure only. If anybody does do the required work and need a guinea pig for testing, count me in. Just holler and share you will be working on this aspect and at least one of my workstations would definitely take part in seeing if its better or not. Even if you are able to just provide a way to make a copy of /var/lib/apt/lists after every successful update and do the comparison with time-stamp on next run and only change the copy when a successful update occurs, that will be a huge help in itself. Look forward to hearing form one and all.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #Debconf16, #feature-request, #Julian Andreas Klose, #shell-script ?, apt, aptitude

Arturo Borrero Gonz lez: Huge work in the iptables debian package


Before I started contributing to the iptables package back in December 2015 it suffered from a numbers of problems so the package was clearly in very bad shape.

One of the first problems was the lack of VCS for the package, no git, not even svn. Of course this was easy to solve and I did it straight away importing iptables 1.4.21-2 into a git repository.

The 1.4.21-2 version was dated in May 2014. This is a lot of time for a package which is active upstream and which is installed in almost all the Debian systems out there.

The number of Debian bugs opened for the package was simply huge, and I cleaned the bugtracker as reported in the blogpost "Current status of iptables & nftables in Debian".

Netfilter project upstream released version 1.6.0 which includes the nftables-compat stuff (iptables on top of the nftables kernel engine, and also the translation tools). Adding this was not an easy task given the overall state of the package.

Also, users were asking for normal things, like Multi-Arch support (see #776041). Adding Multi-Arch support to iptables has been my personal packaging nightmare for a couple of months.

Michael Biebl, who is systemd Debian maintainer, required some changes in the iptables package as well (see #787480). This change asked for a package split to libiptc, libip4tc, libip6tc and libxtables-dev (instead of iptables-dev).
This binary package split was also required for a proper Multi-Arch support.

The situation has been clearly a huge challenge for me,: I made a lot of mistakes, I discovered how little I know about complex packaging, and I had to learn a lot about several stuff.
Probably some experts and experienced DD's could have solved the situation with more solvency, but at the end I enjoyed all the work and the learning :-)

All this changes required me about 60 commits to complete, in several uploads. The last one is 1.6.0-3 which is now in the NEW queue.

I would like to note that both Ana Guerrero and Michael Biebl invested a lot of time in reviewing and sponsoring the packages. Thanks you!

There are still work to be done, of course.

Petter Reinholdtsen: Techno TV broadcasting live across Norway and the Internet (#debconf16, #nuug) on @frikanalen

Did you know there is a TV channel broadcasting talks from DebConf 16 across an entire country? Or that there is a TV channel broadcasting talks by or about Linus Torvalds, Tor, OpenID, Common Lisp, Civic Tech, EFF founder John Barlow, how to make 3D printer electronics and many more fascinating topics? It works using only free software (all of it available from Github), and is administrated using a web browser and a web API. The TV channel is the Norwegian open channel Frikanalen, and I am involved via the NUUG member association in running and developing the software for the channel. The channel is organised as a member organisation where its members can upload and broadcast what they want (think of it as Youtube for national broadcasting television). Individuals can broadcast too. The time slots are handled on a first come, first serve basis. Because the channel have almost no viewers and very few active members, we can experiment with TV technology without too much flack when we make mistakes. And thanks to the few active members, most of the slots on the schedule are free. I see this as an opportunity to spread knowledge about technology and free software, and have a script I run regularly to fill up all the open slots the next few days with technology related video. The end result is a channel I like to describe as Techno TV - filled with interesting talks and presentations. It is available on channel 50 on the Norwegian national digital TV network (RiksTV). It is also available as a multicast stream on Uninett. And finally, it is available as a WebM unicast stream from Frikanalen and NUUG. Check it out. :)

Chris Lamb: Free software activities in July 2016

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


Debian
  • Created a proof-of-concept wrapper for pymysql to reduce the diff between Ubuntu and Debian's packaging of python-django. (tree)
  • Improved the NEW queue HTML report to display absolute timestamps when placing the cursor over relative times as well as to tidy the underlying HTML generation.
  • Tidied and pushed for the adoption of a patch against dak to also send mails to the signer of an uploaded package on security-master. (#796784)
LTS

This month I have been paid to work 14 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS). In that time I did the following:
  • "Frontdesk" duties, triaging CVEs, etc.
  • Improved the bin/lts-cve-triage.py script to ignore packages that have been marked as unsupported.
  • Improved the bin/contact-maintainers script to print a nicer error message if you mistype the package name.
  • Issued the following advisories:
    • DLA 541-1 for libvirt making the password policy consistent across the QEMU and VNC backends with respect to empty passwords.
    • DLA 574-1 for graphicsmagick fixing two denial-of-service vulnerabilities.
    • DLA 548-1 and DLA 550-1 for drupal7 fixing an open HTTP redirect vulnerability and a privilege escalation issue respectfully.
    • DLA 557-1 for dietlibc removing the current directory from the current path.
    • DLA 577-1 for redis preventing the redis-cli tool creating world-readable history files.
Uploads
  • redis:
    • 3.2.1-2 Avoiding race conditions in upstream test suite.
    • 3.2.1-3 Correcting world_readable ~/.rediscli_history files.
    • 3.2.1-4 Preventing a race condition in the previous upload's patch.
    • 3.2.2-1 New upstream release.
    • 3.2.1-4~bpo8+1 Backport to jessie-backports.
  • strip-nondeterminism:
    • 0.020-1 Improved the PNG handler to not blindly trust chunk sizes, rewriting most of the existing code.
    • 0.021-1 Correcting a regression in the PNG handler where it would leave temporary files in the generated binaries.
    • 0.022-1 Correcting a further regression in the PNG handler with respect to IEND chunk detection.
  • python-redis (2.10.5-1~bpo8+1) Backport to jessie-backports.
  • reprotest (0.2) Sponsored upload.
Patches contributed


I submitted patches to fix faulty initscripts in lm-sensors, rsync, sane-backends & vsftpd.

In addition, I submitted 7 patches to fix typos in debian/rules against cme:, gnugk: incorrect reference to dh_install_init, php-sql-formatter, python-django-crispy-forms, libhook-lexwrap-perl, mknbi & ruby-unf-ext.

I also submitted 6 patches to fix reproducible toolchain issues (ie. ensuring the output is reproducible rather than the package itself) against libextutils-parsexs-perl: Please make the output reproducible, perl, naturaldocs, python-docutils, ruby-ronn & txt2tags.

Lastly, I submitted 65 patches to fix specific reproducibility issues in amanda, boolector, borgbackup, cc1111, cfingerd, check-all-the-things, cobbler, ctop, cvs2svn, eb, eurephia, ezstream, feh, fonts-noto, fspy, ftplib, fvwm, gearmand, gngb, golang-github-miekg-pkcs11, gpick, gretl, hibernate, hmmer, hocr, idjc, ifmail, ironic, irsim, lacheck, libmemcached-libmemcached-perl, libmongoc, libwebsockets, minidlna, mknbi, nbc, neat, nfstrace, nmh, ntopng, pagekite, pavuk, proftpd-dfsg, pxlib, pysal, python-kinterbasdb, python-mkdocs, sa-exim, speech-tools, stressapptest, tcpflow, tcpreen, ui-auto, uisp, uswsusp, vtun, vtwm, why3, wit, wordgrinder, xloadimage, xmlcopyeditor, xorp, xserver-xorg-video-openchrome & yersinia.

RC bugs

I also filed 68 RC bugs for packages that access the internet during build against betamax, curl, django-localflavor, django-polymorphic, dnspython, docker-registry, elasticsearch-curator, elib.intl, elib.intl, elib.intl, fabulous, flask-restful, flask-restful, flask-restful, foolscap, gnucash-docs, golang-github-azure-go-autorest, golang-github-fluent-fluent-logger-golang, golang-github-franela-goreq, golang-github-mesos-mesos-go, golang-github-shopify-sarama, golang-github-unknwon-com, golang-github-xeipuuv-gojsonschema, htsjdk, lemonldap-ng, libanyevent-http-perl, libcommons-codec-java, libfurl-perl, libgravatar-url-perl, libgravatar-url-perl, libgravatar-url-perl, libgravatar-url-perl, libgravatar-url-perl, libhttp-async-perl, libhttp-oai-perl, libhttp-proxy-perl, libpoe-component-client-http-perl, libuv, libuv1, licenseutils, licenseutils, licenseutils, musicbrainzngs, node-oauth, node-redis, nodejs, pycurl, pytest, python-aiohttp, python-asyncssh, python-future, python-guacamole, python-latexcodec, python-pysnmp4, python-qtawesome, python-simpy, python-social-auth, python-structlog, python-sunlight, python-webob, python-werkzeug, python-ws4py, testpath, traitlets, urlgrabber, varnish-modules, webtest & zurl.


Finally, I filed 100 FTBFS bugs against abind, backup-manager, boot, bzr-git, cfengine3, chron, cloud-sptheme, cookiecutter, date, django-uwsgi, djangorestframework, docker-swarm, ekg2, evil-el, fasianoptions, fassets, fastinfoset, fest-assert, fimport, ftrading, gdnsd, ghc-testsuite, golang-github-magiconair-properties, golang-github-mattn-go-shellwords, golang-github-mitchellh-go-homedir, gplots, gregmisc, highlight.js, influxdb, jersey1, jflex, jhdf, kimwitu, libapache-htpasswd-perl, libconfig-model-itself-perl, libhtml-tidy-perl, liblinux-prctl-perl, libmoox-options-perl, libmousex-getopt-perl, libparanamer-java, librevenge, libvirt-python, license-reconcile, louie, mako, mate-indicator-applet, maven-compiler-plugin, mgt, mgt, mgt, misc3d, mnormt, nbd, ngetty, node-xmpp, nomad, perforate, pyoperators, pyqi, python-activipy, python-bioblend, python-cement, python-gevent, python-pydot-ng, python-requests-toolbelt, python-ruffus, python-scrapy, r-cran-digest, r-cran-getopt, r-cran-lpsolve, r-cran-rms, r-cran-timedate, resteasy, ruby-berkshelf-api-client, ruby-fog-libvirt, ruby-grape-msgpack, ruby-jquery-rails, ruby-kramdown-rfc2629, ruby-moneta, ruby-parser, ruby-puppet-forge, ruby-rbvmomi, ruby-redis-actionpack, ruby-unindent, ruby-web-console, scalapack-doc, scannotation, snow, sorl-thumbnail, svgwrite, systemd-docker, tiles-request, torcs, utf8proc, vagrant-libvirt, voms-api-java, wcwidth, xdffileio, xmlgraphics-commons & yorick.
FTP Team

As a Debian FTP assistant I ACCEPTed 114 packages: apertium-isl-eng, apertium-mk-bg, apertium-urd-hin, apprecommender, auto-apt-proxy, beast-mcmc, caffe, caffe-contrib, debian-edu, dh-make-perl, django-notification, dpkg-cross, elisp-slime-nav, evil-el, fig2dev, file, flightgear-phi, friendly-recovery, fwupd, gcc-5-cross, gdbm, gnustep-gui, golang-github-cznic-lldb, golang-github-dghubble-sling, golang-github-docker-leadership, golang-github-rogpeppe-fastuuid, golang-github-skarademir-naturalsort, golang-glide, gtk+2.0, gtranscribe, kdepim4, kitchen, lepton, libcgi-github-webhook-perl, libcypher-parser, libimporter-perl, liblist-someutils-perl, liblouis, liblouisutdml, libneo4j-client, libosinfo, libsys-cpuaffinity-perl, libtest2-suite-perl, linux, linux-grsec, lua-basexx, lua-compat53, lua-fifo, lua-http, lua-lpeg-patterns, lua-mmdb, lua-openssl, mash, mysql-5.7, node-quickselect, nsntrace, nvidia-graphics-drivers, nvidia-graphics-drivers-legacy-304xx, nvidia-graphics-drivers-legacy-340xx, openorienteering-mapper, oslo-sphinx, p4est, patator, petsc, php-mailparse, php-yaml, pykdtree, pypass, python-bioblend, python-cotyledon, python-jack-client, python-mido, python-openid-cla, python-os-api-ref, python-pydotplus, python-qtconsole, python-repoze.sphinx.autointerface, python-vispy, python-zenoss, r-cran-bbmle, r-cran-corpcor, r-cran-ellipse, r-cran-minpack.lm, r-cran-rglwidget, r-cran-rngtools, r-cran-scatterd3, r-cran-shinybs, r-cran-tibble, reproject, retext, ring, ruby-github-api, ruby-rails-assets-jquery-ui, ruby-swd, ruby-url-safe-base64, ruby-vmstat, ruby-webfinger, rustc, shadowsocks-libev, slepc, staticsite, steam, straight.plugin, svgwrite, tasksh, u-msgpack-python, ufo2otf, user-mode-linux, utf8proc, vizigrep, volk, wchartype, websockify & wireguard.

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 65 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday July 17 and Saturday July 23 2016: GSoC and Outreachy updates Valerie Young wrote an update about her Outreachy progress on tests.reproducible.org. Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed Patches have been submitted by: Package reviews 17 package reviews have been added and 4 have been updated. adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Some issues have been updated: Weekly QA work FTBFS bugs have been reported by: diffoscope development strip-nondeterminism development reprotest development tests.reproducible-builds.org Misc. This week's edition was written by Chris Lamb and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible builds folks on IRC.

31 July 2016

Joey Hess: PocketCHIP quick review

PocketCHIP is the pocket sized Linux terminal I always used to want. Which is to say, it runs (nearly) stock Debian, X, etc, it has a physical keyboard, and the hardware and software is (nearly) non-proprietary and very hackable. Best of all, it's fun and it encourages playful learning. It's also clunky and flawed and constructed out of cheap components. This keeps it from being something I'd actually carry around in my pocket and use regularly. The smart thing they've done though is embrace these limitations, targeting it at the hobbiest, and not trying to compete with smart phones. The PocketCHIP is its own little device in its own little niche. PocketCHIP front, side, and back views Unless you're into hardware hacking and want to hook wires up to the GPIO pins, the best hardware feature is the complete keyboard, with even Escape and Control and arrow keys. You can ssh around and run vi on it, run your favorite REPL (I use ghci) to do quick programming, etc. The keyboard is small and a little strange, but you get used to it quickly; your QWERTY muscle memory is transferrable to it. I had fun installing nethack on it and handing it to my sister who had never played nethack before, to watch her learn to play. The screen resolution is 480x272, which is pretty tiny. And, it's a cheap resistive touchscreen, with a bezil around it. This makes it very hard to use scroll bars and icons near the edge of the screen. The customized interface that ships with it avoids these problems, and so I've been using that for now. When I have time, I plan to put a fullscreen window manager on it, and write a pdmenu menu configuration for it, so everything can be driven using the keyboard. I also have not installed Debian from scratch on it yet. This would be tricky because it uses a somewhat patched kernel (to support the display and wifi). The shipped distribution is sadly not entirely free software. There are some nonfree drivers and firmwares. And, they included a non-free gaming environment on it (a very nice one for part of the audience, that allows editing the games, but non-free nevertheless). They did do a good job of packaging up all the custom software they include on it, although they don't seem to have published source packages for everything. (They might be infringing my GPL copyright of flash-kernel by distributing a modified version without source. I say "might" because flash-kernel is a pile of shell scripts, so you could probably extract the (probably trivial) modifications. Still.. Also, they seem to have patched network-manager in some way and I wasn't able to find the corresponding source.) The battery life is around 5 hours. Unfortunately the "sleep" mode only turns off the backlight and maybe wifi, and leaves the rest of the system running. This and the slightly awkward form factor too big to really comfortably fit in a pocket limit the use of PocketCHIP quite a bit. Perhaps the sleeping will get sorted out, and perhaps I'll delete the GPIO breakout board from the top of mine to make it more pocket sized.

Enrico Zini: Links for August 2016

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."

29 July 2016

Luciano Prestes Cavalcanti: Contributing with Debian Recommendation System

Hi, my name is Luciano Prestes, I am participating in the program Google Summer of Code (GSoC), my mentor is Antonio Terceiro, and my co-mentor is Tassia Camoes, both are Debian Developers. The project that I am contributing is the AppRecommender, which is a package recommender for Debian systems, my goal is to add a new strategy of recommendation to AppRecommender, to make it recommend packages after the user installs a new package with 'apt'.
At principle AppRecommender has three recommendation strategies, being them, content-based, collaborative and hybrid. To my work on GSoC this text explains two of these strategies, content-based and collaborative. Content-based strategy get the user packages and analyzes yours descriptions to find another Debian packages that they are similar to the user packages, so AppRecommender uses the content of user packages to recommender similar packages to user. The collaborative strategy compare the user packages with the packages of another users, and then recommends packages that users with similar profile have, where a profile of user is your packages. On her work, Tassia Camoes uses the popularity-contest data to compare the users profiles on the collaborative strategy, the popularity-contest is an application that get the users packages into a submission and send to the popularity-contest server and generates statistical data analyzing the users packages.
I have been working with a classmate on our bachelor thesis since August 2015, in our work we created new strategies to AppRecommender, one using machine-learning and another using a deterministic method to generates the recommendation, another feature that we implemented its improve the user profile using the recently used packages to makes the profile. During our work we study the collaborative strategy and analyzed that strategy and remove it from AppRecommender, because this implementation of collaborative strategy needs to get the popularity-contest submissions on the user's pc, and this is against the privacy policy of popularity-contest.
My work on Google Summer of Code is create a new strategy on AppRecommender, as described above, where this strategy should be able to get an referenced package, or a list of referenced packages, then analyze the users packages making a recommendation using the referenced packages such as base, example: if users run "$ sudo apt install vim", the AppRecommender use "vim" as referenced package, and should recommender packages with relation between "vim" and the other packages that user has installed. This new strategy can be implemented like a content-based strategy, or the collaborative strategy.
The first month of Google Summer of Code its destined to students knows the community of the project, so I talk with the Debian community about my project, to get feedback and ideas about the project. I talk with Debian community on IRC channels, and then came the idea to use the data of popularity-contest to improve the recommendations. Talking with my mentors, they approve the idea of usage popularity-contest data, so we started a discussion about how to use the popularity-contest data on AppRecommender without broken the privacy policy of popularity-contest.
Now my work on Google Summer of Code is create the new strategy for AppRecommender that can makes recommendation using a list of packages as reference, so as explained above, when user install packages like "sudo apt install vim vagrant", AppRecommender should recommends packages with relation between the packages "vim" and "vagrant", and this recommendation should be relation with the user profile. The other work its use the popularity-contest data to improve the recommendations of AppRecommender using a new model of collaborative strategies.

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