Search Results: "spa"

13 November 2016

Andrew Cater: Debian Miniconf, ARM Cambridge 10/11/16 - post 3

Quiet room with occasional outbursts of talking. One of my problems with radio gear down to broken cable so that's OK-ish - I have spares.

And suddenly it's 1720 and we need to leave at about 1730.

2 x radio receivers tried: 2 x transmitters working ready for talk on Saturday.

Spare huge bag of cables appreciated by others - it's amazing how often you find someone else needs stuff :)

Andrew Cater: Debian Miniconf, ARM, Cambridge 10/11/16 - Post 1

More or less just getting going: there are eight of us here.

Release team are round one desk and a couple of others of us are on adjacent tables. Coffee is good, as ever :)

ARM very helpful as ever: they have been able to provide a disabled space for me though parking here is really, really tight

10 November 2016

Ritesh Raj Sarraf: apt-offline 1.7.2 released

I am happy to announce the release of apt-offline 1.7.2. This has turned out in time for the next release of Debian, i.e. Debian Stretch. A long standing cosmetic issue in CLI of the progress bar total item count has been fixed. There are also a bunch of other bug fixes, for which the specifics are present in the git logs. Also, in this release, we've tried to catch-up on the Graphical Interface, adding the GUI equivalent of the features, that were added to apt-offline in the recent past. In 1.7.1, we added the changelog option, and in this release, we've added the GUI equivalent of it.

The 'set' command had had many new options. So in this release the 'set' command's GUI has those options added.

I hope you like this release. Please test and file bug reports in time so that we have a bug free version for Debian Stretch. Future tasks now will focus on porting the GUI to PyQt5 first and then apt-offline to Python3. Any help is welcome. You can download apt-offline from the github page or the alioth page. For Debian users, the package will show up in the repository soon. PS: What is apt-offline ?

Description: offline APT package manager
 apt-offline is an Offline APT Package Manager.
 .
 apt-offline can fully update and upgrade an APT based distribution without
 connecting to the network, all of it transparent to APT.
 .
 apt-offline can be used to generate a signature on a machine (with no network).
 This signature contains all download information required for the APT database
 system. This signature file can be used on another machine connected to the
 internet (which need not be a Debian box and can even be running windows) to
 download the updates.
 The downloaded data will contain all updates in a format understood by APT and
 this data can be used by apt-offline to update the non-networked machine.
 .
 apt-offline can also fetch bug reports and make them available offline.

Categories:
Debian-Blog
Computing
Tools

Keywords:
apt
apt-offline
apt-offline-gui

RHUT

9 November 2016

Russ Allbery: Some thoughts on the US elections

I apparently am not going to get anything done today until I write this. Some thoughts, in no particular order.

The most heart-breaking thing for me this morning, and last night, is the reactions from people I know who are not white, not male. Who are LGBT, or immigrants, or Muslim. They're hurt, and they're scared, and they feel like the United States just slammed the door in their faces. A lot of Trump supporters will be offended by this, or dismissive of it. A lot of Trump supporters don't feel like that was what the campaign was about at all. And I strongly believe that many, many people voted for Trump for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with sexism or racism. But whether or not you believe Trump supported the alt-right, the alt-right supported Trump, and a lot of people are really scared this morning. That feeling is real. To all of those people, all I can say is this: the most meaningful inclusiveness is how we all treat each other on a day-to-day basis. How we, as individuals, act towards other individuals. Governments can change a lot of things that matter a great deal in terms of legal recognitions and legal protections, but they can't take away our individual determination to see each other as fellow humans and to treat every person with respect and open-hearted welcome. If you believe, as I do, in welcoming and supporting every single person, regardless of race, creed, gender, sexuality, or any other such distinction, now is a really good time to say so, and to act like it. To your friends, to your co-workers, to the people you meet in stores, to the people you see on the street. Whoever you voted for. People are scared. People are hurt. People need to hear that they're not alone, that the world didn't turn on them last night. As a well-off white man, a member of, supposedly, the winning demographic class of this election last night, I want to say to everyone in the US who is angry and scared and despairing today: I have your back. Nothing has changed for me. Nothing has changed in how I'm going to see you. To the extent that I can contribute to this, the US will continue to become more inclusive, more welcoming, and more supportive at the level of day-to-day interactions between all of us. Workplaces that have a true ethical committment to diversity will continue to support that. Multicultural, diverse cities that have welcomed everyone in all their wonderful variety will continue to do so. An election can cause a lot of damage. I'm scared too. But no matter what, I believe in tolerance, I believe in diversity, I believe love wins, and there are a lot of people out there like me. A lot. And we'll continue to act in accordance with those principles no matter what government is elected.
There is going to be a lot of ink spilled over the next few days dissecting this election, and a lot of theories put forward for why it went the way it did. A lot of that is going to come in the form of blaming people, and a lot of that analysis is going to be more of the same insider political horse race analysis. I think we should question that. Sharply. Going all the way back to the US primaries, and also looking at votes in other countries like Brexit in the UK, a much more foundational theme leaps out at me. The status quo is not working for people. Technocratic government by political elites is not working for people. Business as usual is not working for people. Minor tweaks to increasingly arcane systems is not working for people. People are feeling lost in bureaucracy, disaffected by elections that do not present a clear alternate vision, and depressed by a slow slide into increasingly dismal circumstances. Government is not doing what we want it to do for us. And people are getting left behind. The left in the United States (of which I'm part) has for many years been very concerned about the way blacks and other racial minorities are systematically pushed to the margins of our economy, and how women are pushed out of leadership roles. Those problems are real. But the loss of jobs in the industrial heartland, the inability of a white, rural, working-class man to support his family the way his father supported him, the collapse of once-vibrant communities into poverty and despair: those problems are real too. The status quo is not working for anyone except for a few lucky, highly-educated people on the coasts. People, honestly, like me, and like many of the other (primarily white and male) people who work in tech. We are one of the few beneficiaries of a system that is failing the vast majority of people in this country. I don't think right now is the best time to talk about the solutions I favor. For good or bad, the US just asked Trump to try his approach. We'll see how that goes. But I think it's very important to see how important this failure of our institutions and our economy was in the outcome of this election, and to see the echoes of that in Sanders's campaign on the Democratic side, and to think hard about what that means. This is something that unites us as a country. The status quo is not working for the vast majority of people in this country, whether black or white or Latinx, whether urban or rural, of any gender. Let me talk for a moment to the left in the US. The temptation in human psychology, when one is scared and angry, is to fall back on zero-sum thinking. To try to get back what we feel like was stolen from us by "those people." The left has been criticizing the right in the US for that type of thinking for years now. But you will see the same style of thinking on the left this morning because it's just human psychology. So here's the test. Do we really believe in inclusiveness and in finding a way to escape the zero-sum trap? If so, the way forward isn't to write off half the country as racist, or ignorant, or duped, or otherwise to react out of anger and create more divisions. It's to regroup and rebuild on top of something that unites us. The status quo isn't working. We all need something better than incremental tweaks of a broken system by elitist technocrats funded by inherited money and multinational corporations.
The result of this election was a huge surprise largely because the voices of a substantial portion of Americans were not heard by the polls. If you talk to those Americans, you will quickly find that they're unsurprised, because they don't feel heard by anything else in our society either. This sort of failure is possible because we're not talking to each other. Many Clinton voters do not know a single Trump voter. Many Trump voters do not know a single Clinton voter. There are many causes for this, but as someone who works in tech, I think we have to own a large part of this failure. We, as the people who write modern communication tools, have failed our country, and are failing the world. The two communication mediums on the rise, the ones that are replacing traditional newspapers and TV news as the source of information for a vast number of Americans, are Facebook and Twitter. Both of them, whatever their merits for other uses, are absolutely awful for our political discussions, for our understanding of each other, and for our democracy. Facebook is a closed bubble of people who think like you. It is optimized and designed to expose you to your people: to the people you are the most connected to, to the people you therefore probably agree with, to the people who think the same way and react to the same things. Everything from reactions by your friends down to the news you see on Facebook is filtered to align with your implicit biases as best as Facebook's algorithms can determine them. It isolates you from disagreement by design. You can, of course, reach out intentionally, and families will always cut across political divides to some extent, but Facebook will default you into a bubble in which you are not having thoughtful, intelligent discussions with people who disagree with you. Twitter, by contrast, is a public screaming match. To express any controversial political opinion on Twitter, left or right, is to invite an onslaught by a raging mob. A small number of people can manage to heavily filter that environment and have some semblance of a conversation. Almost no one is going to bother. It feels profoundly dangerous. It's terrifying to say something that might attract real attention. Only very unusual people are able to risk opening up their heart and mind on Twitter and being vulnerable enough to possibly change their minds. We have to do better than this. I don't know how to do better than this. I don't have any grand plan. I'm not the person to start a project. I don't have a start-up idea, or a free software concept. But if we, as programmers and designers and free software developers, cannot do better than this, who will? We have to have a way to enable thoughtful conversations between people with real and profound political disagreements in an environment where there is some mutual respect, some foundation of politeness, and a sufficiently supportive environment that people are willing to risk being convinced. And it has to somehow bypass the filter bubble and allow us to come into contact with people who do not think like us, do not come from the same walk of life, the same region, the same race, the same religion, the same economic circumstances. This is a profound challenge. But the news media is not going to suddenly revive. TV news is not going to magically become a venue for intelligent and thoughtful discussion. And people largely do not change their minds through being preached at by "thought leaders." People change their minds through contact with other people, through having their assumptions and conclusions questioned in an environment that supports enough of a foundational level of decency that they can get out of the trap of being afraid and defensive. We don't have that platform. We need it. Or I fear we're in for a continual whipsaw of zero-sum voting, as factions with no communication channels to each other whip up xenophobia in an attempt to outvote each other.

I don't have any profound conclusions. I'm honestly pretty upset. And pretty scared. But we have to talk to each other. And we have to listen to each other. And we have to persaude each other. And we have to be willing to be persuaded. And please go tell someone this morning that you have their back.

Enrico Zini: On SPF

I woke up this morning with some Django server error mails in my inbox:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc5 in position 9: ordinal not in range(128)
 
 'REMOTE_USER': u' -guest@users.alioth.debian.org',

I did what one does in cases like these, I tried to fix the bug and mailed -guest@users.alioth.debian.org asking them to try again and let me know if it works. I get a bounce:

  <Actual user's email>
    (generated from  -guest@users.alioth.debian.org)
    SMTP error from remote mail server after MAIL FROM:<enrico@enricozini.org> SIZE=3948:
    host   [ ]: 550 Please see http://www.openspf.org/Why?id=enrico%40enricozini.org&ip=2001%3a41c8%3a1000%3a21%3a%3a21%3a21&receiver=bq :
    Reason: mechanism

I resent the mail to the actual user's address, and it went through. Job done, at least until they get back to me telling me that my fix didn't work. Lessons learnt:

Activating SPF checks breaks receiving email via a forwarding address.
Activating SPF checks breaks hiding an email address behind a forwarding address.

8 November 2016

Uwe Kleine-K nig: Installing Debian Stretch on an Omnia Turris

Recently I got "my" Omnia Turris and it didn't take long to replace the original firmware with Debian. If you want to reproduce, here is what you have to do: Open the case of the Omnia Turris, connect the hacker pack (or an RS232-to-TTL adapter) to access the U-Boot prompt (see Turris Omnia: How to use the "Hacker pack"). Then download the installer and device tree:

# cd /srv/tftp
# wget https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/armhf/daily/netboot/vmlinuz
# wget https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/armhf/daily/netboot/initrd.gz
# wget https://www.kleine-koenig.org/tmp/armada-385-turris-omnia.dtb

(The latter is not included yet in Debian, but I'm working on that.) and after connecting the Omnia Turris's WAN to a dhcp managed network start it in U-Boot:

dhcp
setenv serverip 192.168.1.17
tftpboot 0x01000000 vmlinuz
tftpboot 0x02000000 armada-385-turris-omnia.dtb
tftpboot 0x03000000 initrd.gz
bootz 0x01000000 0x03000000:$filesize 0x02000000

With 192.168.1.17 being the IPv4 of the machine you have the tftp server running. I suggest to use btrfs as rootfs because that works well with U-Boot. Before finishing the installation put the dtb in the rootfs as /boot/dtb. To then boot into Debian do in U-Boot:

setenv mmcboot=btrload mmc 0 0x01000000 boot/vmlinuz\; btrload mmc 0 0x02000000 boot/dtb\; btrload mmc 0 0x03000000 boot/initrd.img\; bootz 0x01000000 0x03000000:$filesize 0x02000000
setenv bootargs console=ttyS0,115200 rootfstype=btrfs rootdelay=2 root=/dev/mmcblk0p1 rootflags=commit=5 rw
saveenv
boot

Known issues:

rtc doesn't work (workaround: mw 0xf10184a0 0xfd4d4cfa in U-Boot)
SFP and switch don't work, MAC addresses are random
wifi fails to probe

If you have problems, don't hesitate to contact me.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: anytime 0.1.0: New features, some fixes

A new release of anytime is now on CRAN following the four releases in September and October. anytime aims to convert anything in integer, numeric, character, factor, ordered, ... format to POSIXct (or Date) objects -- and does so without requiring a format string. See the anytime page for a few examples. Release 0.1.0 adds several new features. New functions utctime() and utcdate() parse to coordinated universal time (UTC). Several new formats were added. Digit-only formats like 'YYYYMMDD' with or without 'HHMMSS' (or even with fractional secodns 'HHMMSS.ffffff') are supported more thoroughly. Some examples:

R> library(anytime)
R> anytime("20161107 202122")   ## all digits
[1] "2016-11-07 20:21:22 CST"
R> utctime("2016Nov07 202122")  ## UTC parse example
[1] "2016-11-07 14:21:22 CST"
R>

The NEWS file summarises the release:

Changes in anytime version 0.1.0 (2016-11-06)

New functions utctime() and utcdate() were added to parse input as coordinated universal time; the functionality is also available in anytime() and anydate() via a new argument asUTC (PR #22)

New (date)time format for RFC822-alike dates, and expanded existing datetime formats to all support fractional seconds (PR #21)

Extended functionality to support not only YYYYMMDD (without a separator, and not covered by Boost) but also with HHMM , HHMMSS and HHMMSS.ffffff (PR #30 fixing issue #29)

Extended functionality to support HHMMSS[.ffffff] following other date formats.

Documentation and tests have been expanded; typos corrected

New (unexported) helper functions setTZ, testOutput, setDebug

The testFormat (and testOutput) functions cannot be called under RStudio (PR #27 fixing issue #25).

More robust support for non-finite values such as NA, NaN or Inf (Fixing issue #16)

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a comparison to the previous release. More information is on the anytime page. For questions or comments use the 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.

7 November 2016

Jaldhar Vyas: New Laptop / Problems with Windows part 896,324

I had mentioned previously that I had been forced to purchase a new laptop. I decided that I didn't want another Thinkpad. The Lenovo ones no longer have the high quality they had in the IBM days and while support is still pretty good by todays dismal standards it's not worth the premium price. (If I'm buying it with my own money that is.) I had heard good thing about Dells' Linux support so I looked into their offerings and ended up buying a Precision 7510. Mind you this model came with Windows 7 installed but I didn't mind. As I wanted to install Debian according to my own specs anyway, I was ok with just knowing that the hardware would be compatible. So I prepared a Jessie USB installation stick (This model doesn't have a CD/DVD drive.) and shrunk down the Windows installation (but not deleted it altogether for reasons to be explained below.) At this point it is traditional to give a long, tortured account of how Heaven and Earth had to be moved to get Linux installed. But that is a thing of the past. The combination of good hardware and the excellent work of the debian-installer team, made the setup a breeze with only a couple of minor bumps in the road. One is that the kernel on the Jessie cd was not quite up to snuff. Downloading 4.6.0 from backports did the trick. Post-install, to get the most out of my nifty new 4K display, I needed the latest, alas non-free, nvidia-drivers. And for stable wifi (I always install over ethernet for this reason) I had to install the firmware-iwlwifi package. Everything else even my printer either "just worked" or needed only minor fiddling around. Having used this machine for a while, the biggest problem I have is with the keyboard. It is nowhere near as tactile and comfortable to use as the old IBM Thinkpads. Even Lenovo Thinkpad keyboards are better. I'm a hunt-and-peck type myself but it is annoying. I think a real touch typist would hate it. The cursor and home, end, page up, page down etc. keys are in the wrong place and home and end are actually function keys. There is a pointer and a trackpad and two sets of mouse buttons which seems like a waste of space. In fact much space is wasted everywhere, space which could be used to improve the keyboard. Other than that I like it. The battery life is not the best but fairly good. It's a bit heavier than I was used to but I've gotten used to it. Although I didn't go with the SSD option, it is not that noisy; again you can get used to it. All in all, I think it is worth it for the price.
I installed Debian but I only really use it as a base to run VMWare Workstation. I occasionally have to support software across multiple platforms but I don't want the hassle or expense of multiple computers so I have Windows (the original installation upgraded to Windows 10) and Mac OS X running in VMs. Plus I have another VM running Kubuntu LTS for my day to day computing, another Debian install running sid for packaging, and Minix. Backups are as simple as making a snapshot of the VM. If something accidently gets screwed up, I can easily revert it back to a known good state. Ideally, I would like to replace VMWare with a free solution such as qemu or virtualbox etc. but as far as I know VMWare is far ahead in emulation capabilities (OpenGL support for example.) which is vital for efficiently using the proprietary OS's. Things were going swimmingly until a few days ago which brings me to part two of this post. I booted into the Windows 10 VM only to be greeted by a message from the Windows boot manager that "A component of the operating system has expired." I tried going back to a snapshot from September (when this definitely was working) but I still got the same thing. A bit of googling revealed this has happened to others and the advice seemed to be to reset the computers date and reinstall Windows 10. It took several tries but I finally got that done, completed the task I needed to do and shut it down. At the end of the day I shut the whole laptop down and thought no more of it. The next day I boot up and...where is grub? It seems that during the Windows reinstall, it had overwritten grub with the Windows boot loader. And while grub is nice enough to add an entry for Windows when detected, Windows does not extend the same courtesy to Linux. Ok time to bring out my trusty USB stick again and reinstall grub. Oops I've wiped it off to store other things. No matter, download another image and do it again. Reboot and...back in Windows. Fiddle around in the EFI settings until I can get it to boot from USB. Now i'm in the shell provided by debian-installer so I can mount and chroot my Linux partition and reinstall grub. Except no I can't because it is Luks encrypted. Ok apt-get install cryptsetup, open it with my passphrase and now I can mount the partion, chroot into and reinstall grub. Except no I can't because it is a logical volume group. Back to apt-get, install lvm2, vgscan (because of course I've forgotten the name of the group,) vgchange and now I can mount, chroot, etc. etc. Except no I can't.


# mount /dev/mapper/vg00-root /mnt
# chroot /mnt
# grub-install /dev/sda
error: cannot find a device for /boot/grub (is /dev mounted?).

sigh


# mount /dev/sda5 /boot
special device /dev/sda5 does not exist.

Well, /dev is mounted but it does indeed not contain a device called sda5.


# /etc/init.d/udev start
udev requires a mounted procfs.  not started.

Very well then.


# mount -t proc none /proc
# /etc/init.d/udev start

Nope. proc needs sysfs.


# mount -t sysfs none /sys
# /etc/init.d/udev start

Still no. You get a warning about how it is a bad idea to run udev from an interactive shell and there is still not /dev/sda5. Time to start googling again. It turns out what I should have done is open another shell from the installer environment and do...


# mount --bind /dev/ /mnt/dev

Now I can mount /boot/grub and reinstall grub and it should all work right? I should be so lucky. Ok back to square one. I now did what I should have done in the first place and searched the Debian wiki. Sure enough there is a page which deals exactly with my predicament. Finally I get everything installed correctly and triumphantly reboot into Linux. Of course now Windows doesn't work again...

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: week 80 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday October 30 and Saturday November 5 2016: Upcoming events

Chris Lamb and Holger Levsen will be presenting at MiniDebConfCambridge 2016 in Cambridge, United Kingdom on November 10th-13th.
Vagrant Cascadian will be presenting Introduction to Reproducible Builds at the SeaGL.org Conference in Seattle, USA on November 12th.
The next IRC meeting will be held on November 15th.
Reproducible Debian Hackathon - A small hackathon organized in Boston, USA on December 3rd and 4th. If you are interested in attending, please contact Valerie Young (spectranaut in the #debian-reproducible IRC channel on irc.oftc.net.)
The second Reproducible Builds World Summit will be held in Berlin, Germany on December 13th-15th.

Reproducible work in other projects

Patches to GCC to generate reproducible output independently of the build-path were submitted by Ximin Luo.
The new Firefox Security Roadmap includes Reproducible Builds (via a tweet by Debian Developer Sylvestre).

Bugs filed

#842708 filed against haskell-devscripts by Chris Lamb.
#842864 filed against aewan by Reiner Herrmann.
#842865 filed against atanks by Reiner Herrmann.
#842867 filed against i3status by Reiner Herrmann.
#842868 filed against gip by Reiner Herrmann.
#842875 filed against lastpass-cli by Reiner Herrmann.
#842986 filed against zathura-pdf-poppler by Reiner Herrmann.
#842988 filed against masscan by Reiner Herrmann.
#842991 filed against python-axolotl-curve25519 by Reiner Herrmann.
#842992 filed against pyephem by Reiner Herrmann.
#843097 filed against spacenavd by Reiner Herrmann.
#843100 filed against python-clips by Reiner Herrmann.
#843101 filed against python-hiredis by Reiner Herrmann.
#843109 filed against zathura-ps by Reiner Herrmann.
#843110 filed against greenbone-security-assistant by Reiner Herrmann.
#843234 filed against vdr-plugin-sudoku by Reiner Herrmann.
#843235 filed against vdr-plugin-spider by Reiner Herrmann.
#843245 filed against distorm3 by Reiner Herrmann.

Reviews of unreproducible packages 81 package reviews have been added, 14 have been updated and 43 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 3 issue types have been updated:

1 issue type has been removed:

unsorted_pdl_output

1 issue type has been updated:

document some reseach on docbook-to-man

Weekly QA work During of reproducibility testing, some FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by:

Chris Lamb (17)

diffoscope development

diffoscope 62 was uploaded to unstable by Mattia Rizzolo:
- Add rudimentary support for OpenDocumentFormat files. (Michel Messerschmidt)
- Detect JSON order-only differences and print them nicely. (Mattia Rizzolo)

buildinfo.debian.net development

Chris Lamb continued work on our proof-of-concept .buildinfo file server:

tests.reproducible-builds.org Reproducible Debian:

With thanks to Profitbricks continued sponsorship, Holger setup two new amd64 build nodes (and the associated Jenkins jobs) with 15/16 cores and 48GB RAM each for a total of four such amd64 nodes to double the build capacity of our amd64 build network.

Misc. Also with thanks to Profitbricks sponsoring the "hardware" resources, Holger created a 13 core machine with 24GB RAM and 100GB SSD based storage so that Ximin can do further tests and development on GCC and other software on a fast machine. This week's edition was written by Chris Lamb, Ximin Luo, Vagrant Cascadian, Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.

6 November 2016

Niels Thykier: Improvements in apt-file 3.1.2

Yesterday, I just uploaded apt-file 3.1.2 into unstable, which comes with a few things I would like to highlight.

We fixed an issue where apt-file would not show top-level files in source packages. (bug#676642). Thanks to Paul Wise for the proposed solution.
Paul Wise also fixed a bug where apt-file list -I dsc <source-pkg> would fail to list all files in the source package if said file was also in other packages.
We added filter-suites / filter-origins options that can be used to narrow the search space. Example: apt-file search --filter-suites unstable lintian/checks/

You can also set defaults in the config file if you want to always search in unstable, simply do:

# echo 'apt-file::Search-Filter::Suite "unstable";' >> /etc/apt/apt-file.conf

For the suite filter, either a code name ( sid ) or a suite name ( unstable ) will work. Please note that the filters are case-sensitive suites/code names generally use all lowercase, whereas origins appear to use title-case (i.e. unstable vs. Debian ).
Filed under: apt-file, Debian

5 November 2016

Russ Allbery: podlators 4.09

This package contains the Pod::Man and Pod::Text formatters for Perl. This is a bug-fix release that fixes a long-standing problem with Pod::Text on EBCDIC systems. The code to handle non-breaking spaces and soft hyphens hard-coded the ASCII code points and deleted the open bracket character on EBCDIC systems. The fix here adopts the same fix that was done in Pod::Simple (but with backward compatibility to older versions of Pod::Simple). I also made a bit more progress on modernizing the test suite. All of the Pod::Man tests now use a modern coding style, and most of them have been moved to separate snippets, which makes it easier to look at the intended input and output and to create new tests. You can get the latest version from the podlators distribution page.

3 November 2016

Iain R. Learmonth: PATHspider Plugins

This post is cross-posted on the MAMI Project blog here. In today s Internet we see an increasing deployment of middleboxes. While middleboxes provide in-network functionality that is necessary to keep networks manageable and economically viable, any packet mangling whether essential for the needed functionality or accidental as an unwanted side effect makes it more and more difficult to deploy new protocols or extensions of existing protocols. For the evolution of the protocol stack, it is important to know which network impairments exist and potentially need to be worked around. While classical network measurement tools are often focused on absolute performance values, PATHspider performs A/B testing between two different protocols or different protocol extensions to perform controlled experiments of protocol-dependent connectivity problems as well as differential treatment. PATHspider 1.0.1 has been released today and is now available from GitHub, PyPI and Debian unstable. This is a small stable update containing a documentation fix for the example plugin. PATHspider now contains 3 built-in plugins for measuring path transparency to explicit congestion notification, DiffServ code points and TCP Fast Open. It s easy to write your own plugins, and if they re good enough, they may be included in the PATHspider distribution at the next feature release. We have a GitHub repository you can fork that has a premade directory structure for new plugins. You ll need to implement logic for performing the two connections, for the A and the B tests. Once you ve verified your connection logic is working with Wireshark, you can move on to writing Observer functions to analyse the connections made in real time as PATHspider runs. The final step is to merge the results of the connection logic (e.g. did the operating system report a timeout?) with the results of your observer functions (e.g. was ECN successfully negotiated?) and write out the final result. We have dedicated a section of the manual to the development of plugins and we really see plugins as first-class citizens in the PATHspider ecosystem. While future releases of PATHspider may contain new plugins, we re also making it easier to write plugins by providing reusable library functions such as the tcp_connect() function of the SynchronisedSpider that allows for easy A/B testing of TCP connections with any globally configured state set. We also provide reusable observer functions for simple tasks such as determining if a 3-way handshake completed or if there was an ICMP unreachable message received.

If you d like to check out PATHspider, you can find the website at https://pathspider.net/. Current development of PATHspider is supported by the European Union s Horizon 2020 project MAMI. This project has received funding from the European Union s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 688421. The opinions expressed and arguments employed reflect only the authors view. The European Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of that information.

Norbert Preining: Debian/TeX Live 2016.20161103-1

This month s update falls onto a national holiday in Japan. My recent start as a normal company employee in Japan doesn t leave me enough time during normal days to work on Debian, so things have to wait for holidays. There have been a few notable changes in the current packages, and above all I wanted to fix an RC bug and on the way fixed also several other (sometimes rather old) bugs.
texlive2016-debian

From the list of new packages I want to pick apxproof: I have written something myself for one of my rather long papers (with proofs about 60pp), where at times I had to factor out the proofs into an appendix. I did this my own way, but I would have preferred to have a nice package! Another interesting change is the upstream merge of collection-mathextra (which translated to the Debian package texlive-math-extra) and collection-science (Debian: texlive-science) into a new collection collection-mathscience. Since introducing new packages and phasing out old ones is generally a pain in Debian, I decided to digress from the upstream naming convention and use texlive-science for the new collection-mathscience. In the end Mathematics is the most important science of all

Finally also a word about removals: Several ConTeXt packages have been removed due to the fact that they are outdated. These removals will find their way in an update of the Debian ConTeXt package in near future. The TeX Live packages lost voss-mathmode, which was retracted by the author due to various reasons. He is working on an updated version that will hopeful reappear in both TeX Live and Debian in near future. Well, that s it for now. Here now the full list with links. Enjoy. New packages apxproof, bangorexam, biblatex-gb7714-2015, biblatex-lni, biblatex-sbl, context-cmscbf, context-cmttbf, context-inifile, context-layout, delimset, latex2nemeth, latexbangla, latex-papersize, ling-macros, notex-bst, platex-tools, testidx, uppunctlm, wtref, xcolor-material. Removed packages voss-mathmode. Updated packages apa6, autoaligne, babel-german, biblatex-abnt, biblatex-anonymous, biblatex-apa, biblatex-manuscripts-philology, biblatex-nature, biblatex-realauthor, bibtex, bidi, boondox, bxcjkjatype, chickenize, churchslavonic, cjk-gs-integrate, context-filter, cooking-units, ctex, denisbdoc, dvips, europasscv, fixme, glossaries, gzt, handout, imakeidx, ipaex-type1, jsclasses, jslectureplanner, kpathsea, l3build, l3experimental, l3kernel, l3packages, latexindent, latexmk, listofitems, luatexja, marginnote, mcf2graph, minted, multirow, nameauth, newpx, newtx, noto, nucleardata, optidef, overlays, pdflatexpicscale, pst-eucl, reledmac, repere, scanpages, semantic-markup, tableaux, tcolorbox, tetex, texlive-scripts, ticket, todonotes, tracklang, tudscr, turabian-formatting, updmap-map, uspace, visualtikz, xassoccnt, xecjk, yathesis.

2 November 2016

Sandro Tosi: Debian source package name from the binary name

it looks like i forgot all the times how to do that, and apparently i'm not able to use google good enough to find it out quickly, let's write down one way to get the source package name from the binary package name:

dpkg-query -W -f='$ source:package \n' <list of bin pkgs>

(since it accepts a list of packages, you can xargs it).

there are probably another million ways to do that, so dont be shy and comment this post if you want to share your method

Enrico Zini: schroot connector for ansible

I accidentally made an ansible connector plugin for schroot. I haven't even used ansible yet, so I have no idea what I am doing. You can choose the chroot type by setting something like schroot_type: jessie in your variables. You can install this locally as connection_plugins/schroot.py.

# Based on chroot.py (c) 2013, Maykel Moya <mmoya@speedyrails.com>
# Based on chroot.py (c) 2015, Toshio Kuratomi <tkuratomi@ansible.com>
# (c) 2016, Enrico Zini <enrico@debian.org>
#
# This is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
# (at your option) any later version.
#
# Ansible is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
# GNU General Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
# along with Ansible.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
from __future__ import (absolute_import, division, print_function)
__metaclass__ = type
import distutils.spawn
import os
import os.path
import pipes
import subprocess
import traceback
from ansible import constants as C
from ansible.errors import AnsibleError
from ansible.plugins.connection import ConnectionBase, BUFSIZE
from ansible.module_utils.basic import is_executable
from ansible.utils.unicode import to_bytes
try:
    from __main__ import display
except ImportError:
    from ansible.utils.display import Display
    display = Display()
class Connection(ConnectionBase):
    ''' Local chroot based connections '''
    transport = 'schroot'
    has_pipelining = True
    # su currently has an undiagnosed issue with calculating the file
    # checksums (so copy, for instance, doesn't work right)
    # Have to look into that before re-enabling this
    become_methods = frozenset(C.BECOME_METHODS).difference(('su',))
    def __init__(self, play_context, new_stdin, *args, **kwargs):
        super(Connection, self).__init__(play_context, new_stdin, *args, **kwargs)
        self.chroot = self._play_context.remote_addr
        #if os.geteuid() != 0:
            #raise AnsibleError("chroot connection requires running as root")
        # we're running as root on the local system so do some
        # trivial checks for ensuring 'host' is actually a chroot'able dir
        #if not os.path.isdir(self.chroot):
        #    raise AnsibleError("%s is not a directory" % self.chroot)
        #chrootsh = os.path.join(self.chroot, 'bin/sh')
        ## Want to check for a usable bourne shell inside the chroot.
        ## is_executable() == True is sufficient.  For symlinks it
        ## gets really complicated really fast.  So we punt on finding that
        ## out.  As long as it's a symlink we assume that it will work
        #if not (is_executable(chrootsh) or (os.path.lexists(chrootsh) and os.path.islink(chrootsh))):
        #    raise AnsibleError("%s does not look like a chrootable dir (/bin/sh missing)" % self.chroot)
        self.chroot_cmd = distutils.spawn.find_executable('schroot')
        if not self.chroot_cmd:
            raise AnsibleError("chroot command not found in PATH")
        self.chroot_id = "session:" + self.chroot
        self.chroot_type = "stable"
        existing = subprocess.check_output([self.chroot_cmd, "--list", "--all"])
        self.chroot_exists = False
        for line in existing.splitlines():
            if line == self.chroot_id:
                self.chroot_exists = True
    def set_host_overrides(self, host, hostvars=None):
        super(Connection, self).set_host_overrides(host, hostvars)
        self.chroot_type = hostvars.get("schroot_type", self.chroot_type)
    def _connect(self):
        ''' connect to the chroot; nothing to do here '''
        super(Connection, self)._connect()
        if not self._connected:
            if not self.chroot_exists:
                self.chroot_id = subprocess.check_output([self.chroot_cmd, "-b", "-c", self.chroot_type, "-n", self.chroot]).strip()
                subprocess.check_call([self.chroot_cmd, "-r", "-c", self.chroot_id, "-u", "root", "--", "apt-get", "update"])
                subprocess.check_call([self.chroot_cmd, "-r", "-c", self.chroot_id, "-u", "root", "--", "apt-get", "-y", "install", "python"])
            display.vvv("THIS IS A LOCAL CHROOT DIR", host=self.chroot)
            self._connected = True
    def _buffered_exec_command(self, cmd, stdin=subprocess.PIPE):
        ''' run a command on the chroot.  This is only needed for implementing
        put_file() get_file() so that we don't have to read the whole file
        into memory.
        compared to exec_command() it looses some niceties like being able to
        return the process's exit code immediately.
        '''
        executable = C.DEFAULT_EXECUTABLE.split()[0] if C.DEFAULT_EXECUTABLE else '/bin/sh'
        local_cmd = [self.chroot_cmd, "-r", "-c", self.chroot_id, "-u", "root", "--", executable, '-c', cmd]
        display.vvv("EXEC %s" % (local_cmd), host=self.chroot)
        local_cmd = [to_bytes(i, errors='strict') for i in local_cmd]
        p = subprocess.Popen(local_cmd, shell=False, stdin=stdin,
                stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
        return p
    def exec_command(self, cmd, in_data=None, sudoable=False):
        ''' run a command on the chroot '''
        super(Connection, self).exec_command(cmd, in_data=in_data, sudoable=sudoable)
        p = self._buffered_exec_command(cmd)
        stdout, stderr = p.communicate(in_data)
        return (p.returncode, stdout, stderr)
    def _prefix_login_path(self, remote_path):
        ''' Make sure that we put files into a standard path
            If a path is relative, then we need to choose where to put it.
            ssh chooses $HOME but we aren't guaranteed that a home dir will
            exist in any given chroot.  So for now we're choosing "/" instead.
            This also happens to be the former default.
            Can revisit using $HOME instead if it's a problem
        '''
        if not remote_path.startswith(os.path.sep):
            remote_path = os.path.join(os.path.sep, remote_path)
        return os.path.normpath(remote_path)
    def put_file(self, in_path, out_path):
        ''' transfer a file from local to chroot '''
        super(Connection, self).put_file(in_path, out_path)
        display.vvv("PUT %s TO %s" % (in_path, out_path), host=self.chroot)
        out_path = pipes.quote(self._prefix_login_path(out_path))
        try:
            with open(to_bytes(in_path, errors='strict'), 'rb') as in_file:
                try:
                    p = self._buffered_exec_command('dd of=%s bs=%s' % (out_path, BUFSIZE), stdin=in_file)
                except OSError:
                    raise AnsibleError("chroot connection requires dd command in the chroot")
                try:
                    stdout, stderr = p.communicate()
                except:
                    traceback.print_exc()
                    raise AnsibleError("failed to transfer file %s to %s" % (in_path, out_path))
                if p.returncode != 0:
                    raise AnsibleError("failed to transfer file %s to %s:\n%s\n%s" % (in_path, out_path, stdout, stderr))
        except IOError:
            raise AnsibleError("file or module does not exist at: %s" % in_path)
    def fetch_file(self, in_path, out_path):
        ''' fetch a file from chroot to local '''
        super(Connection, self).fetch_file(in_path, out_path)
        display.vvv("FETCH %s TO %s" % (in_path, out_path), host=self.chroot)
        in_path = pipes.quote(self._prefix_login_path(in_path))
        try:
            p = self._buffered_exec_command('dd if=%s bs=%s' % (in_path, BUFSIZE))
        except OSError:
            raise AnsibleError("chroot connection requires dd command in the chroot")
        with open(to_bytes(out_path, errors='strict'), 'wb+') as out_file:
            try:
                chunk = p.stdout.read(BUFSIZE)
                while chunk:
                    out_file.write(chunk)
                    chunk = p.stdout.read(BUFSIZE)
            except:
                traceback.print_exc()
                raise AnsibleError("failed to transfer file %s to %s" % (in_path, out_path))
            stdout, stderr = p.communicate()
            if p.returncode != 0:
                raise AnsibleError("failed to transfer file %s to %s:\n%s\n%s" % (in_path, out_path, stdout, stderr))
    def close(self):
        ''' terminate the connection; nothing to do here '''
        super(Connection, self).close()
        #subprocess.check_command([self.chroot_cmd, "-e", "-c", self.chroot_id])
        self._connected = False

Raphaël Hertzog: My Free Software Activities in October 2016

My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donors (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 LTS Last month I started to work on tiff3 but had not enough time to complete an update, it turns out the issues were hairy enough that nobody else picked up the package. So this month I started again with tiff3 and tiff and I ended up spending my 13h on those two packages. I filed bugs for issues that were not yet reported to the BTS (#842361 for CVE-2016-5652, #842046 for CVE-2016-5319/CVE-2016-3633/CVE-2015-8668). I marked many CVE as not affecting tiff3 as this source package does not ship the tools (the tiff source package does). Since upstream decided to drop many tools instead of fixing the corresponding security issues, I opted to remove the tools as well. Before doing this, I looked up reverse dependencies of libtiff-tools to ensure that none of the tools removed are used by other packages (the maintainer seems to agree too). I backported upstream patches for CVE-2016-6223 and CVE-2016-5652. But the bulk of the time, I spent on CVE-2014-8128, CVE-2015-7554 and CVE-2016-5318. I believe they are all variants of the same problem and upstream seems to agree since he opened a sort of meta-bug to track them. I took inspiration from a patch suggested in ticket #2499 and generalized it a bit by trying to add the tag data for all tags manipulated by the various tools. It was a tiresome process as there are many tags used in multiple places. But in the end, it works as expected. I can no longer reproduce any of the segfaults with the problematic files. I asked for review/test on the mailing list but did not get much feedback. I m going to upload the updated packages soon. Distro Tracker I noticed a sudden raise in the number of email addresses being automatically unsubscribed from the Debian Package Tracker and I got a few request of bounces. It turns out the BTS has been relaying lots of spam with executables files and those are bounced by Google (and not silently discarded). This is all very unfortunate the spam flood is unlikely to stop soon and I can t expect Google to change either, so I had little choice except trying to make the bounce handler smarter. That s what I did: I have a list of regular expression that will discard a bounce. In other words, once matched the bounce won t count towards the limit that triggers the automatic unsubscription. Misc Debian work Bugs filed. In #839403, I suggest the possibility to set the default pin priority for a source in the sources.list file directly. In #840436 I ask the selenium-firefoxdriver maintainer to do what is required to get this non-free package auto-built. Packaging. I sponsored puppet-lint 2.0.2-0.1 and I reviewed the rozofs package (wihch I just sponsored into experimental for a start). Publicity. I m maintaining the Debian account on Twitter and Facebook. I have been using twitterfeed.com up to now but it s closing down. I followed their recommendations and switched to dlvr.it to automatically post entries out of the micronews.debian.org feed. In #841165, I reported that the chroots created by sbuild-createchroot are lacking the usual IPv6 entries created by netbase. In #841503, I report a very common cryptsetup upgrade failure that I saw multiple times (both in Debian and in Kali). Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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1 November 2016

Jonathan Wiltshire: Reflecting on a year of regular, public IRC meetings

The release team first started holding a regular, public planning and status meeting a little over a year ago, in September 2015. At that time, FTP masters had experimented along similar lines and I took some inspiration from that, including the keeping of proper minutes that anyone can look at. I wanted to open up our discussion processes and allow other developers and users to see (and perhaps influence) our plans for the release taking shape month by month, and how we reached certain decisions with a lot of mature discussion and not just on a whim. A secondary aim, since we are quite geographically distributed and getting together for same-room meetings is hard, was to bring more accountability to ourselves when we decided something ought to happen; if it s in the minutes, there s no escaping someone asking so what happened to ? . That s worked better for us on some topics than on others. Finally, public minutes mean that anyone who might be interested in joining the team can see easily what we re up to and how we shape the release throughout the cycle. That might help lower the barrier to entry, which can only be good for the team. I had hoped that regular meetings would inspire other teams to do similar; I haven t seen any indication of that to date (though perhaps it s just down to awareness). The Reproducible Builds contributors held fortnightly meetings for a period in 2015, though not inspired by ours, and I heard recent talk of starting those again. I still think that there is plenty of scope to improve the transparency of core teams in general in Debian, but also that regular meetings aren t going to work for every team. A regular slot which is not varied except when absolutely necessary, is essential for avoiding the temptation to just push it back another week when things are busy. In our office we have an allegedly-regular Thursday afternoon slot for technical demonstrations, which has suffered from exactly that problem for a long time now, and I wanted to avoid that issue. We have a calendar to remind us when each meeting is due, along with other important events like freeze milestones. Our slot is the fourth Wednesday of the month, a fairly arbitrary choice which seems to have worked out quite well. Time zones are more of an issue, even within Europe. We have mostly used a European evening time, but that s not very helpful further West where it s in the middle of the working day, or the middle of the night if you re further East (that one fortunately isn t an issue for us so far). Even within Europe it s difficult, as we have to try and balance commuting time in the UK with dinner on the continent, or dinner with late evening, or adjust for saving changes, or you get the idea. If we gained a far-eastern team member one day, this would be a real issue. We use Meetbot for recording the minutes. I have heard criticism that it publicly archives IRC logs to the web essentially forever, but for us that s the whole point. With a little practice and discipline it does generate really nice minutes, with a bullet summary of the important parts, a summary of actions agreed and a log of the conversation for detailed reference. Anybody reading them can see how we reached a conclusion, and I m of the view that goes some way to avoiding a reputation for cabal-ism. It does pay to use the #info, #agree and #action tags liberally, but other things are slightly unnatural like always remembering to use a URL at the beginning of a line and not in the middle of a sentence, or Meetbot doesn t notice it. Practice goes a long way. I ve naturally fallen into chairing most meetings, for better or worse the consistency seems beneficial, but I worry that I m dominating the discussion sometimes. Discipline in making sure everybody has been included is something I ve had to get better at. It s essential to have a public agenda and to stick to it, and it should include some stock items at the start and end (including making sure the URL to the previous minutes has been given, reviewing outstanding actions, and arranging the next meeting before ending the current one). There is some skill in judging the agenda length and deciding which items can be deferred to make sure it doesn t drag on too late we ve found anything more than an hour is far too long, and between 45 and 60 minutes is pushing it. Getting some easy topics out of the way before starting one which is more contentious can be helpful to avoid having to defer them later. I circulate the URL to the minutes and the date of the next meeting publicly on the mailing list immediately after each meeting, or as soon as possible. With little feedback, I have no idea if our meetings are helpful to those outside the team or not. We do still hold in-person meetings from time to time when we re all together, because they re useful for some circumstances (like some genuinely private topics we occasionally need to discuss, or for sprinting). I would hope that public meetings inspire confidence that we re on top of the release process, that they show we have a mature and transparent decision making process (for example, in deciding to move the freeze date to accommodate an external release schedule as a one-off, and subsequently deciding to not move it back when circumstances changed), and mostly that other teams might benefit for the same reasons. But I can also see that they make more sense in a team with a defined project cycle than they might in one which is more administrative or where work is more sporadic (no point holding a meeting for the sake of it, after all).

Jaldhar Vyas: Sal Mubarak 2073!

Wishing every one a happy Gujarati New Year, Vikram Samvat 2073 named Kilaka and hoping the upcoming year will be yuuge for you. These next couple of paragraphs are totally not an excuse for why it will take a few more days for me to reach seven blog posts. Reading reports about Diwali in the American press, I see a bit of confusion whether Diwali is one day or five. Well, technically it is just one (Sunday 30th this year.) but there are a number of other observances around it which could be classed as subsidiaries if you want to look at it that way. The season commenced last Wednesday with Rama Ekadashi. (where the Gujarati name is different I'll use that and put the Sanskrit name in parentheses.) That's a fast day and therefore not much fun. Thursday was Vagh Barash (vyaghra dvadashi) which as the name suggests is something to do with tigers but we don't in my experience particularly do anything special that day. Friday, things began in earnest with Dhan Terash (dhana trayodashi) when Lakshmi the Goddess of prosperity is worshipped. It is also a good day to buy gold. Saturday was Kali Chaudash (Kali Chaturdashi or Naraka Chaturdashi) On this day many Gujarati families including mine worship their Kuladevi (patron Goddess of the family) even if She is not an aspect of Kali. (Others observe this on the Ashtami of Navaratri.) The day is also associated with the God Hanuman. Some people say it is His Jayanti (birthday) though we observe it in Chaitra (March-April.) It is also the best day for learning mantras and I initiated a couple of people including my son into a mantra I know. Sunday was Diwali (Deepavali) proper. As a Brahmana I spent much of the day signing blessings in the account books of shopkeepers. Well, nowadays only a few old people have actual account books so usually the print out a spreadsheet and I sign that. But home is where the main action is. Lights are lit, fireworks are set off, and prayers are offered to Lakshmi. But most important of all, this is the day good boys and girls get presents. Unfortunately I have nothing interesting to report; just the usual utilitarian items of clothing. Fireworks by the way are technically illegal in New Jersey not that that ever stopped anyone from getting them. The past few years, Jersey City has attempted to compromise by allowing a big public fireworks display. Although it was nice and sunny all day, by nighttime we had torrential rain and the firework display got washed out. So I'm glad I rebelled against the system with my small cache of sparklers. Today (or yesterday by the time this gets posted.) was the Gujarati New Years Day. There is also the commemoration of the time the God Krishna lifted up Mt Govardhan with one finger which every mandir emulates by making an annakuta or mountain of food. Tuesday is Bhai Beeja (Yama Dvitiya in Sanskrit or Bhai Duj in Hindi) when sisters cook a meal for their brothers. My son is also going to make something (read: microwave something) for his sister. So those are the five days of Diwali. Though many will not consider it to be truly over until this Saturday, the lucky day of Labh Pancham (Labha panchami.) And if I still haven't managed to write seven blog posts by then, there is always Deva Diwali...

31 October 2016

Chris Lamb: Free software activities in October 2016

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

Made a large number of improvements to travis.debian.net, my hosted service for projects that host their Debian packaging on GitHub to use the Travis CI continuous integration platform to test builds on every code change:
- Enabled the use of Git submodules. Thanks to @unera & @hosiet. (#30)
- Managed a contribution from @xhaakon to allow adding an extra repository for custom dependencies. (#17)
- Fixed an issue where builds did not work under Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu Trusty due to a call to dpkg-buildpackage --show-field. (#28)
- Fixed an issue where TRAVIS_DEBIAN_EXTRA_REPOSITORY was accidentally required. (#27)
- Made a number of miscellaneous cosmetic improvements. (f7e5b080 & 037de91cc, etc.)
Submitted a pull request to Alabaster, the default theme for the Python Sphinx documentation system, to ensure that "extra navigation links" are rendered reproducibly. (#90)
Improved my Chrome extension for the FastMail web interface:
- Managed a pull request from @jlerner to add an optional confirmation dialogue before sending any message. (#10)
- Added an optional Ctrl+Enter alias for Alt+Enter to limit searches to the current folder; the latter shortcut is already mapped by my window manager. (d691b07)
- Various cosmetic changes to the options page. (7b95e887 & 833ff0fe)
Submitted two pull requests to mypy, an experimental static type checker for Python:
- Ensure that the output of --usage is reproducible. (#2234)
- Update the --usage output to match the now-reproducible output. (#2235)
Updated django-slack, my library to easily post messages to the Slack group-messaging utility:
- Merged a feature from @lvpython to add an option to post the message as the authenticated user rather than the specified one. (#59)
- Merged a documentation update from @ataylor32 regarding the new method of generating access tokens. (#58)
Made a number of cosmetic improvements to AptFs, my FUSE-based filesystem that provides a view on unpacked Debian source packages as regular folders.
Updated the SSL certificate for try.diffoscope.org, a hosted version of the diffoscope in-depth and content-aware diff utility. Continued thanks to Bytemark for sponsoring the hardware.

Debian & Reproducible builds

Whilst anyone can inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, most GNU/Linux distributions provide binary (or "compiled") packages to end users. The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to allow verification that no flaws have been introduced either maliciously and accidentally during this compilation process by promising identical binary packages are always generated from a given source.

Presented a talk entitled "Reproducible Builds" talk at Software Freedom Kosova, in Prishtina, Republic of Kosovo.
I filed my 2,500th bug in the Debian BTS: #840972: golang-google-appengine: accesses the internet during build.
In order to build packages reproducibly, one not only needs identical sources but also some external and sharable definition of the environment used for a particular build, stipulating such things such as the version numbers of the required build-dependencies. It is not currently clear how to handle these .buildinfo files after the archive software has processed them and how to make them available to the world so I started development on a proof-of-concept server to see what issues arise in practice. It is available at buildinfo.debian.net.
Chaired an IRC meeting and ran a poll to determine a regular time .
Submitted two design proposals to our wiki page.
Improvements to our tests.reproducible-builds.org testing framework:
- Move regular "Scheduled in..." messages to the #debian-reproducible-changes IRC channel.
- Use our log_info method instead of manual echo calls.
- Correct an "all sources packages" "all source packages" typo.
- Submit .buildinfo files to buildinfo.debian.net.
- Create GPG key on nodes for buildinfo.debian.net at deploy time, not "lazily".

My work in the Reproducible Builds project was also covered in our weekly reports. (#75, #76, #77 & #78).

I also submitted 14 patches to fix specific reproducibility issues in bio-eagle, cf-python, fastx-toolkit, fpga-icestorm, http-icons, lambda-align, mypy, playitslowly, seabios, stumpwm, sympa, tj3, wims-help & xotcl.

Debian LTS

This month I have been paid to work 13 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS). In that time I did the following:

Seven days of "frontdesk" duties, triaging CVEs, etc.
Issued DLA 647-1 for freeimage correcting an out-of-bounds write vulnerability in the XMP image handling functionality.
Issued DLA 649-1 for python-django fixing a possible CSRF protection bypass on sites that use Google Analytics.
Issued DLA 654-1 for libxfixes preventing an integer overflow when a malicious client sent INT_MAX as a "length".
Issued DLA 662-1 for quagga correcting a programming error where two constants were confused that could cause stack overrun in IPv6 routing code.
Issued DLA 688-1 for cairo to prevent a DoS attack where a malicious SVG could generate invalid pointers.

Patches contributed

python-debian: Missing chardet from setup.py depends
lintian: Drop double spaces in includes-maintscript paragraph
db5.3: maintscript includes "maint-script parameters"
dracut: maintscript includes "maint-script parameters"

Uploads

gunicorn:
- 19.6.0-7 Set supplementary groups when changing uid, add an example systemd .service file to gunicorn-examples, and expand README.Debian to make it clearer what to do now that /etc/gunicorn.d has been removed.
- 19.6.0-8 Correct previous supplementary groups patch to be compatible with Python 3.
redis:
- 3:3.2.4-2 Ensure that sentinel's configuration actually writes to a pidfile location so that systemd can detect that the daemon has started.
- 3:3.2.5-1 New upstream release.
libfiu:
- 0.94-8 Fix FTBFS under Bash due to lack of && in debian/rules.
- 0.94-9 Ensure the build is reproducible by sorting injected modules.
aptfs (2:0.8-2) Minor cosmetic changes.

29 October 2016

Jaldhar Vyas: Dawkins Weasel

Happy Dhanteras from Bappy Lahiri
It's already Dhan Terash so I better pick up the pace if I want to beat my blogging challenge before Diwali so in this post I'll discuss a program I wrote earlier this year.
I dread to look up anything on Wikipedia because I always end up going down a rabbit hole and surfacing hours later on a totally unrelated topic. Case in point, some months ago, I ended up on the page of the title. This is an interesting little experiment illustrating how random selection can result in the evolution of a specific form. The algorithm is:

Start with a random string of 28 characters.
Make 100 copies of this string, with a 5% chance per character of that character being replaced with a random character.
Compare each new string with "METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL", and give each a score (the number of letters in the string that are correct and in the correct position).
If any of the new strings has a perfect score (== 28), halt.
Otherwise, take the highest scoring string, and go to step 2.

I had to try this myself so I wrote a little implementation in C++. A sample run looks like this:

  
$ ./weasel
0000 DNCFICBLUZVC JF KKNVJJASCJRW (0)
0001 DNIFICOLUZVC JFLIKNVAJASCJEW (6)
0002 DNNWICKSUZVCRSFLIKNVA ASCJEL (11)
0003 DNNWICKSUZVCRSFLIKNVA ASCJEL (11)
0004 MNNVICKSQZVCRSFLIKNVA WSCJEL (13)
0005 MENVICKSQZVCRSFLIKNVA WSCJEL (14)
0006 MENVISKS ZTCRSFLIKNVA WLCJEL (16)
0007 MENVISKS ZTCRSFLIKNVA WLCJEL (16)
0008 MEDHISKS ZTCISFLIKNVA WLCJEL (18)
0009 MEDHISKS ZTCISFLIKNVA WLCJEL (18)
0010 MEDHISKS ZTCISFLIKNVA WLCJEL (18)
0011 MEDHISKS ZTCIS LIKTKA WLCZEL (19)
0012 MEDHISKS ZTCIS LIKTKA WLCZEL (19)
0013 MEDHISKS ZTCIS LIKT A WLCZEL (20)
0014 MEDHISKS ZTCIS LIKT A WLCZEL (20)
0015 MEDHISKS ZTCIS LIKE A WLAZEL (22)
0016 MEDHIGKS ITCIS LIKE A WLAZEL (23)
0017 MEDHIGKS ITCIS LIKE A WLAZEL (23)
0018 MEDHIGKS ITCIS LIKE A WLAZEL (23)
0019 MEDHIGKS ITCIS LIKE A WLAZEL (23)
0020 MEDHIGKS ITCIS LIKE A WLAZEL (23)
0021 MEDHIGKS ITCIS LIKE A WLAZEL (23)
0022 METHINKS ITCIS LIKE A WLASEL (26)
0023 METHINKS ITCIS LIKE A WLASEL (26)
0024 METHINKS ITCIS LIKE A WLASEL (26)
0025 METHINKS ITCIS LIKE A WEASEL (27)
0026 METHINKS ITCIS LIKE A WEASEL (27)
0027 METHINKS ITCIS LIKE A WEASEL (27)
0028 METHINKS ITCIS LIKE A WEASEL (27)
0029 METHINKS ITCIS LIKE A WEASEL (27)
0030 METHINKS ITCIS LIKE A WEASEL (27)
0031 METHINKS ITCIS LIKE A WEASEL (27)
0032 METHINKS ITCIS LIKE A WEASEL (27)
0033 METHINKS ITCIS LIKE A WEASEL (27)
0034 METHINKS ITCIS LIKE A WEASEL (27)
0035 METHINKS ITCIS LIKE A WEASEL (27)
0036 METHINKS ITCIS LIKE A WEASEL (27)
0037 METHINKS ITCIS LIKE A WEASEL (27)
0038 METHINKS ITCIS LIKE A WEASEL (27)
0039 METHINKS ITCIS LIKE A WEASEL (27)
0040 METHINKS ITCIS LIKE A WEASEL (27)
0041 METHINKS ITCIS LIKE A WEASEL (27)
0042 METHINKS ITCIS LIKE A WEASEL (27)
0043 METHINKS ITCIS LIKE A WEASEL (27)
0044 METHINKS ITCIS LIKE A WEASEL (27)
0045 METHINKS ITCIS LIKE A WEASEL (27)
0046 METHINKS ITCIS LIKE A WEASEL (27)
0047 METHINKS ITCIS LIKE A WEASEL (27)
0048 METHINKS ITCIS LIKE A WEASEL (27)
0049 METHINKS ITCIS LIKE A WEASEL (27)
0050 METHINKS ITCIS LIKE A WEASEL (27)
0051 METHINKS ITCIS LIKE A WEASEL (27)
0052 METHINKS ITCIS LIKE A WEASEL (27)
0053 METHINKS ITCIS LIKE A WEASEL (27)
0054 METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL (28)

My program lets you adjust the input string, the number of copies, and the mutation threshold. I also thought it might be interesting to implement the Generator design pattern. In C++ this is done by making a class which implements begin() and end() methods and atleast a forward iterator. You can find the source code on Github.

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