after see attic introduced in a discussion about bup, i figured out i could give it a try. it was answering two of my biggest concerns with bup:

• backup removal
• encryption

and seemed to magically out of nowhere and basically do everything i need, with an inline manual on top of it.

disclaimer Note: this is not a real benchmark! i would probably need to port bup and attic to liw's seivot software to report on this properly (and that would amazing and really interesting, but it's late now). even worse, this was done on a production server with other stuff going on so take results with a grain of salt.

procedure and results Here's what I did. I setup backups of my ridiculously huge ~/src directory on the external hard drive where I usually make my backups. I ran a clean backup with attic, than redid it, then I ran a similar backup with bup, then redid it. Here are the results:

anarcat@marcos:~$ sudo apt-get install attic # this installed 0.13 on debian jessie amd64
[...]
anarcat@marcos:~$ attic init /mnt/attic-test:
Initializing repository at "/media/anarcat/calyx/attic-test"
Encryption NOT enabled.
Use the "--encryption=passphrase keyfile" to enable encryption.
anarcat@marcos:~$ time attic create --stats /mnt/attic-test::src ~/src/
Initializing cache...
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Archive name: src
Archive fingerprint: 7bdcea8a101dc233d7c122e3f69e67e5b03dbb62596d0b70f5b0759d446d9ed0
Start time: Tue Nov 18 00:42:52 2014
End time: Tue Nov 18 00:54:00 2014
Duration: 11 minutes 8.26 seconds
Number of files: 283910
                       Original size      Compressed size    Deduplicated size
This archive:                6.74 GB              4.27 GB              2.99 GB
All archives:                6.74 GB              4.27 GB              2.99 GB
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
311.60user 68.28system 11:08.49elapsed 56%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 122824maxresident)k
15279400inputs+6788816outputs (0major+3258848minor)pagefaults 0swaps
anarcat@marcos:~$ time attic create --stats /mnt/attic-test::src-2014-11-18 ~/src/
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Archive name: src-2014-11-18
Archive fingerprint: be840f1a49b1deb76aea1cb667d812511943cfb7fee67f0dddc57368bd61c4bf
Start time: Tue Nov 18 00:05:57 2014
End time: Tue Nov 18 00:06:35 2014
Duration: 38.15 seconds
Number of files: 283910
                       Original size      Compressed size    Deduplicated size
This archive:                6.74 GB              4.27 GB            116.63 kB
All archives:               13.47 GB              8.54 GB              3.00 GB
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
30.60user 4.66system 0:38.38elapsed 91%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 104688maxresident)k
18264inputs+258696outputs (0major+36892minor)pagefaults 0swaps
anarcat@marcos:~$ sudo apt-get install bup # this installed bup 0.25
anarcat@marcos:~$ free && sync && echo 3   sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches && free # flush caches
anarcat@marcos:~$ export BUP_DIR=/mnt/bup-test
anarcat@marcos:~$ bup init
D p t Git vide initialis  dans /mnt/bup-test/
anarcat@marcos:~$ time bup index ~/src
Indexing: 345249, done.
56.57user 14.37system 1:45.29elapsed 67%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 85236maxresident)k
699920inputs+104624outputs (4major+25970minor)pagefaults 0swaps
anarcat@marcos:~$ time bup save -n src ~/src
Reading index: 345249, done.
bloom: creating from 1 file (200000 objects).
bloom: adding 1 file (200000 objects).
bloom: creating from 3 files (600000 objects).
Saving: 100.00% (6749592/6749592k, 345249/345249 files), done.
bloom: adding 1 file (126005 objects).
383.08user 61.37system 10:52.68elapsed 68%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 194256maxresident)k
14638104inputs+5944384outputs (50major+299868minor)pagefaults 0swaps
anarcat@marcos:attic$ time bup index ~/src
Indexing: 345249, done.
56.13user 13.08system 1:38.65elapsed 70%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 133848maxresident)k
806144inputs+104824outputs (137major+38463minor)pagefaults 0swaps
anarcat@marcos:attic$ time bup save -n src2 ~/src
Reading index: 1, done.
Saving: 100.00% (0/0k, 1/1 files), done.
bloom: adding 1 file (1 object).
0.22user 0.05system 0:00.66elapsed 42%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 17088maxresident)k
10088inputs+88outputs (39major+15194minor)pagefaults 0swaps

Disk usage is comparable:

anarcat@marcos:attic$ du -sc /mnt/*attic*
2943532K        /mnt/attic-test
2969544K        /mnt/bup-test

People are encouraged to try and reproduce those results, which should be fairly trivial.

Observations Here are interesting things I noted while working with both tools:

• attic is Python3: i could compile it, with dependencies, by doing apt-get build-dep attic and running setup.py - i could also install it with pip if i needed to (but i didn't)
• bup is Python 2, and has a scary makefile
• both have an init command that basically does almost nothing and takes little enough time that i'm ignoring it in the benchmarks
• attic backups are a single command, bup requires me to know that i first want to index and then save, which is a little confusing
• bup has nice progress information, especially during save (because when it loaded the index, it knew how much was remaining) - just because of that, bup "feels" faster
• bup, however, lets me know about its deep internals (like now i know it uses a bloom filter) which is probably barely understandable by most people
• on the contrary, attic gives me useful information about the size of my backups, including the size of the current increment
• it is not possible to get that information from bup, even after the fact - you need to du before and after the backup
• attic modifies the files access times when backing up, while bup is more careful (there's a pull request to fix this in attic, which is how i found out about this)
• both backup systems seem to produce roughly the same data size from the same input

Summary attic and bup are about equally fast. bup took 30 seconds less than attic to save the files, but that's not counting the 1m45s it took indexing them, so on the total run time, bup was actually slower. attic is also (almost) two times faster on the second run as well. but this could be within the margin of error of this very quick experiment, so my provisional verdict for now would be that they are about as fast. bup may be more robust (for example it doesn't modify the atimes), but this has not been extensively tested and is more based with my familiarity with the "conservatism" of the bup team rather than actual tests. considering all the features promised by attic, it makes for a really serious contender to the already amazing bup.

Next steps The properly do this, we would need to:

• include other software (thinking of Zbackup, Burp, ddar, obnam, rdiff-backup and duplicity)
• bench attic with the noatime patch
• bench dev attic vs dev bup
• bench data removal
• bench encryption
• test data recovery
• run multiple backup runs, on different datasets, on a cleaner environment
• ideally, extend seivot to do all of that

Note that the Burp author already did an impressive comparative benchmark of a bunch of those tools for the burp2 design paper, but it unfortunately doesn't include attic or clear ways to reproduce the results.

Self signed SSL certificates are nice, but only provide encryption of retrieved data. Nobody knows who is really sending the data. If one buys an SSL certificate for a website, the browser doesn t complain as much as with a self signed certificate. But can you really trust the other side? Almost every commercial CA has some kind of fast validation or domain validation, issued in minutes , which is done by email or phone. So if required, within minutes everybody might become you. Even with putting money on the table your users can not be sure whether this server really belongs to the right guy. Well, why wasting time and money? Just create your own Root CA and tell users that they need to add something in order to avoid some error messages. In Debian we basically have five packages who claim to be able to manage some kind of CA.

• easy-rsa
• FreeIPA
• gnomint
• tinyCA
• xca

easy-rsa is mainly needed to manage certificates used by openVPN. Within this use case it works like a charm, but I don t want to manage a more complex CA with it. gnomint is dead upstream and only uses SHA1 as signature algorithm. This will cause lots of problems as Mircrosoft and Google want to deprecate SHA1 in their products by 2017. Besides, this package is already orphaned and maybe it can disappear now. tinyCA uses more signature algorithms, unfortunately SHA1 seems to be the best it can. There are some patches to support up to SHA512, but they don t work for all parts of the software yet. For example Sub-CAs still use SHA1 despite of choosing something different in the GUI. So nice, but not (yet) usable in Jessie. FreeIPA seems to be great, but didn t make it into Jessie in time. Unfortunately the Release Team has reasons to not unblock it. So nice, but not usable in Jessie. xca is based on QT4. As announced in the 15th DPN of 2014 the deprecated QT4 will be removed from Debian Stretch (= Jessie+1). Apart from this, the software meets all my requirements.

If you have a cadence sensor on your bike such as the Garmin GSC-10, you can approximate the number of pedal turns you made on the bike ride using the following script (requires GPSBabel): ... then call with: Unfortunately the Garmin .fit format doesn't store the actual number of pedal turns, only the average for each particular second. However, it should be reasonably accurate given that one keeps a reasonably steady cadence. As a bonus, using a small amount of shell plumbing you can then sum an entire year's worth of riding like so:

I have recently moved to Lausanne, Switzerland. Broadband Internet access is not as cheap as in France. Free, a French ISP, is providing an FTTH access with a bandwith of 1 Gbps¹ for about 38 (including TV and phone service), Swisscom is providing roughly the same service for about 200 ². Swisscom fiber access was available for my appartment and I chose the 40 Mbps contract without phone service for about 80 . Like many ISP, Swisscom provides an Internet box with an additional box for TV. I didn t unpack the TV box as I have no use for it. The Internet box comes with some nice features like the ability to setup firewall rules, a guest wireless access and some file sharing possibilities. No shell access! I have bought a small PC to act as router and replace the Internet box. I have loaded the upcoming Debian Jessie on it. You can find the whole software configuration in a GitHub repository. This blog post only covers the Swisscom-specific setup (and QoS). Have a look at those two blog posts for related topics:

• Staging a Netfilter ruleset in a network namespace
• Intel Wireless 7260 as an access point

Ethernet The Internet box is packed with a Siligence-branded 1000BX SFP³. This SFP receives and transmits data on the same fiber using a different wavelength for each direction. Instead of using a network card with an SFP port, I bought a Netgear GS110TP which comes with 8 gigabit copper ports and 2 fiber SFP ports. It is a cheap switch bundled with many interesting features like VLAN and LLDP. It works fine if you don t expect too much from it.

IPv4 IPv4 connectivity is provided over VLAN 10. A DHCP client is mandatory. Moreover, the DHCP vendor class identifier option (option 60) needs to be advertised. This can be done by adding the following line to /etc/dhcp/dhclient.conf when using the ISC DHCP client:

send vendor-class-identifier "100008,0001,,Debian";

The first two numbers are here to identify the service you are requesting. I suppose this can be read as requesting the Swisscom residential access service. You can put whatever you want after that. Once you get a lease, you need to use a browser to identify yourself to Swisscom on the first use.

IPv6 Swisscom provides IPv6 access through the 6rd protocol. This is a tunneling mechanism to facilitate IPv6 deployment accross an IPv4 infrastructure. This kind of tunnel is natively supported by Linux since kernel version 2.6.33. To setup IPv6, you need the base IPv6 prefix and the 6rd gateway. Some ISP are providing those values through DHCP (option 212) but this is not the case for Swisscom. The gateway is 6rd.swisscom.com and the prefix is 2a02:1200::/28. After appending the IPv4 address to the prefix, you still get 4 bits for internal subnets. Swisscom doesn t provide a fixed IPv4 address. Therefore, it is not possible to precompute the IPv6 prefix. When installed as a DHCP hook (in /etc/dhcp/dhclient-exit-hooks.d/6rd), the following script configures the tunnel:

sixrd_iface=internet6
sixrd_mtu=1472                  # This is 1500 - 20 - 8 (PPPoE header)
sixrd_ttl=64
sixrd_prefix=2a02:1200::/28     # No way to guess, just have to know it.
sixrd_br=193.5.29.1             # That's "6rd.swisscom.com"
sixrd_down()  
    ip tunnel del $ sixrd_iface    true
 
sixrd_up()  
    ipv4=$ new_ip_address:-$old_ip_address 
    sixrd_subnet=$(ruby <<EOF
require 'ipaddr'
prefix = IPAddr.new "$ sixrd_prefix ", Socket::AF_INET6
prefixlen = $ sixrd_prefix#*/ 
ipv4 = IPAddr.new "$ ipv4 ", Socket::AF_INET
ipv6 = IPAddr.new (prefix.to_i + (ipv4.to_i << (64 + 32 - prefixlen))), Socket::AF_INET6
puts ipv6
EOF
)
    # Let's configure the tunnel
    ip tunnel add $ sixrd_iface  mode sit local $ipv4 ttl $sixrd_ttl
    ip tunnel 6rd dev $ sixrd_iface  6rd-prefix $ sixrd_prefix 
    ip addr add $ sixrd_subnet 1/64 dev $ sixrd_iface 
    ip link set mtu $ sixrd_mtu  dev $ sixrd_iface 
    ip link set $ sixrd_iface  up
    ip route add default via ::$ sixrd_br  dev $ sixrd_iface 
 
case $reason in
    BOUND REBOOT)
        sixrd_down
        sixrd_up
        ;;
    RENEW REBIND)
        if [ "$new_ip_address" != "$old_ip_address" ]; then
            sixrd_down
            sixrd_up
        fi
        ;;
    STOP EXPIRE FAIL RELEASE)
        sixrd_down
        ;;
esac

The computation of the IPv6 prefix is offloaded to Ruby instead of trying to use the shell for that. Even if the ipaddr module is pretty basic , it suits the job. Swisscom is using the same MTU for all clients. Because some of them are using PPPoE, the MTU is 1472 instead of 1480. You can easily check your MTU with this handy online MTU test tool. It is not uncommon that PMTUD is broken on some parts of the Internet. While not ideal, setting up TCP MSS will alievate any problem you may run into with a MTU less than 1500:

ip6tables -t mangle -A POSTROUTING -o internet6 \
          -p tcp --tcp-flags SYN,RST SYN \
          -j TCPMSS --clamp-mss-to-pmtu

QoS UPDATED: Unfortunately, this section is incorrect, including its premise. Have a look at Dave Taht comment for more details. Once upon a time, QoS was a tacky subject. The Wonder Shaper was a common way to get a somewhat working setup. Nowadays, thanks to the work of the Bufferbloat project, there are two simple steps to get something quite good:

1. Reduce the queue of your devices to something like 32 packets. This helps TCP to detect congestion and act accordingly while still being able to saturate a gigabit link.

   ip link set txqueuelen 32 dev lan
   ip link set txqueuelen 32 dev internet
   ip link set txqueuelen 32 dev wlan
   

2. Change the root qdisc to fq_codel. A qdisc receives packets to be sent from the kernel and decide how packets are handled to the network card. Packets can be dropped, reordered or rate-limited. fq_codel is a queuing discipline combining fair queuing and controlled delay. Fair queuing means that all flows get an equal chance to be served. Another way to tell it is that a high-bandwidth flow won t starve the queue. Controlled delay means that the queue size will be limited to ensure the latency stays low. This is achieved by dropping packets more aggressively when the queue grows.

   tc qdisc replace dev lan root fq_codel
   tc qdisc replace dev internet root fq_codel
   tc qdisc replace dev wlan root fq_codel
   

---

1. Maximum download speed is 1 Gbps, while maximum upload speed is 200 Mbps.
2. This is the standard Vivo XL package rated at CHF 169. plus the 1 Gbps option at CHF 80. .
3. There are two references on it: SGA 441SFP0-1Gb and OST-1000BX-S34-10DI. It transmits to the 1310 nm wave length and receives on the 1490 nm one.

A new package RcppAnnoy is now on CRAN. It wraps the small, fast, and lightweight C++ template header library Annoy written by Erik Bernhardsson for use at Spotify. While Annoy is setup for use by Python, RcppAnnoy offers the exact same functionality from R via Rcpp. A new page for RcppAnnoy provides some more detail, example code and further links. See a recent blog post by Erik for a performance comparison of different approximate nearest neighbours libraries for Python.

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

If you re someone who doesn t like Debian s policy of automatically starting on install (or its heinous cousin, the RUN or ENABLE variable in /etc/default/<service>), then running an init system other than systemd should work out nicely.

Some of you may already be aware of the gift tag which has been used for a while to indicate bugs which are suitable for new contributors to use as an entry point to working on specific packages. Unfortunately, some of us (including me!) were unaware that this tag even existed. Luckily, Lucas Nussbaum clued me in to the existence of this tag, and after a brief bike-shed-naming thread, and some voting using pocket_devotee we decided to name the new tag newcomer, and I have now added this tag to the BTS documentation, and tagged all of the bugs which were user tagged "gift" with this tag. If you have bugs in your package which you think are ideal for new contributors to Debian (or your package) to fix, please tag them newcomer. If you're getting started in Debian, and working on bugs to fix, please search for the newcomer tag, grab the helm, and contribute to Debian.

A mini Debian conference happened at the weekend in Cambridge at which I was asked to present. Rather than go with an old talk I decided to try something new. I attempted to cover the topic of application life cycle for open source projects.

The presentation abstract tried to explain this:

A software project that is developed by more than a single person starts requiring more than just the source code. From revision control systems through to continuous integration and issue tracking, all these services need deploying and maintaining.

This presentation takes a look at what a services a project ought to have, what options exist to fulfil those requirements and a practical look at an open source projects actual implementation.

I presented on Sunday morning but got a good audience and I am told I was not completely dreadful. The talk was recorded and is publicly available along with all the rest of the conference presentations.

Unfortunately due to other issues in my life right now I did not prepare well enough in advance and my slide deck was only completed on Saturday so I was rather less familiar with the material than I would have preferred.

The rest of the conference was excellent and I managed to see many of the presentations on a good variety of topics without an overwhelming attention to Debian issues. My youngest son brought himself along on both days and "helped" with front desk. He was also the only walk out in my presentation, he insists it was just because he "did not understand a single thing I was saying" but perhaps he just knew who the designated driver was.

I would like thank everyone who organised and sponsored this event for an enjoyable weekend and look forward to the next one.

Generating data with entropy, or random number generation (RNG), is a well-known difficult problem. Many crypto algorithms and protocols assumes random data is available. There are many implementations out there, including /dev/random in the BSD and Linux kernels and API calls in crypto libraries such as GnuTLS or OpenSSL. How they work can be understood by reading the source code. The quality of the data depends on actual hardware and what entropy sources were available the RNG implementation itself is deterministic, it merely convert data with supposed entropy from a set of data sources and then generate an output stream. In some situations, like on virtualized environments or on small embedded systems, it is hard to find sources of sufficient quantity. Rarely are there any lower-bound estimates on how much entropy there is in the data you get. You can improve the RNG issue by using a separate hardware RNG, but there is deployment complexity in that, and from a theoretical point of view, the problem of trusting that you get good random data merely moved from one system to another. (There is more to say about hardware RNGs, I ll save that for another day.) For some purposes, the available solutions does not inspire enough confidence in me because of the high complexity. Complexity is often the enemy of security. In crypto discussions I have said, only half-jokingly, that about the only RNG process that I would trust is one that I can explain in simple words and implement myself with the help of pen and paper. Normally I use the example of rolling a normal six-sided dice (a D6) several times. I have been thinking about this process in more detail lately, and felt it was time to write it down, regardless of how silly it may seem. A dice with six sides produces a random number between 1 and 6. It is relatively straight forward to intuitively convinced yourself that it is not clearly biased: inspect that it looks symmetric and do some trial rolls. By repeatedly rolling the dice, you can generate how much data you need, time permitting. I do not understand enough thermodynamics physics to know how to estimate the amount of entropy of a physical process, so I need to resort to intuitive arguments. It would be easy to just assume that a dice produces 3 bits of entropy, because 2^3=6 which matches the number of possible outcomes. At least I find it easy to convince myself that 3 bits is the upper bound. I suspect that most dice have some form of defect, though, which leads to a very small bias that could be found with a large number of rolls. Thus I would propose that the amount of entropy of most D6 s are slightly below 3 bits on average. Further, to establish a lower bound, and intuitively, it seems easy to believe that if the entropy of particular D6 would be closer to 2 bits than to 3 bits, this would be noticeable fairly quickly by trial rolls. That assumes the dice does not have complex logic and machinery in it that would hide the patterns. With the tinfoil hat on, consider a dice with a power source and mechanics in it that allowed it to decide which number it would land on: it could generate seamingly-looking random pattern that still contained 0 bits of entropy. For example, suppose a D6 is built to produce the pattern 4, 1, 4, 2, 1, 3, 5, 6, 2, 3, 1, 3, 6, 3, 5, 6, 4, this would mean it produces 0 bits of entropy (compare the numbers with the decimals of sqrt(2)). Other factors may also influence the amount of entropy in the output, consider if you roll the dice by just dropping straight down from 1cm/1inch above the table. With this discussion as background, and for simplicity, going forward, I will assume that my D6 produces 3 bits of entropy on every roll. We need to figure out how many times we need to roll it. I usually find myself needing a 128-bit random number (16 bytes). Crypto algorithms and protocols typically use power-of-2 data sizes. 64 bits of entropy results in brute-force attacks requiring about 2^64 tests, and for many operations, this is feasible with today s computing power. Performing 2^128 operations does not seem possible with today s technology. To produce 128 bits of entropy using a D6 that produces 3 bits of entropy per roll, you need to perform ceil(128/3)=43 rolls. We also need to design an algorithm to convert the D6 output into the resulting 128-bit random number. While it would be nice from a theoretical point of view to let each and every bit of the D6 output influence each and every bit of the 128-bit random number, this becomes difficult to do with pen and paper. For simplicity, my process will be to write the binary representation of the D6 output on paper in 3-bit chunks and then read it up as 8-bit chunks. After 8 rolls, there are 24 bits available, which can be read up as 3 distinct 8-bit numbers. So let s do this for the D6 outputs of 3, 6, 1, 1, 2, 5, 4, 1:

3   6   1   1   2   5   4   1
011 111 001 001 010 101 010 001
01111100 10010101 01010001
124 0x7C 149 0x95 81 0x51

After 8 rolls, we have generated the 3 byte hex string 7C9551 . I repeat the process 5 more times, concatenating the strings, resulting in a hex string with 15 bytes of data. To get the last byte, I only need to roll the D6 three more times, where the two high bits of the last roll is used and the lowest bit is discarded. Let s say the last D6 outputs were 4, 2, 3, this would result in:

4   2   3
100 010 011
10001001
137 0x89

So the 16 bytes of random data is 7C9551..89 with .. replaced by the 5 pieces of 3-byte chunks of data. So what s the next step? Depends on what you want to use the random data for. For some purposes, such as generating a high-quality 128-bit AES key, I would be done. The key is right there. To generate a high-quality ECC private key, you need to generate somewhat more randomness (matching the ECC curve size) and do a couple of EC operations. To generate a high-quality RSA private key, unfortunately you will need much more randomness, at the point where it makes more sense to implement a PRNG seeded with a strong 128-bit seed generated using this process. The latter approach is the general solution: generate 128 bits of data using the dice approach, and then seed a CSPRNG of your choice to get large number of data quickly. These steps are somewhat technical, and you lose the pen-and-paper properties, but code to implement these parts are easier to verify compared to verifying that you get good quality entropy out of your RNG implementation.

Originally published on politi.kov I have been asked by a bunch of friends from outside of Brazil for my opinion regarding the recent elections we had in Brazil, and it is a bit complicated to explain it without some background, so I decided to write this piece providing a bit of history so that people can understand my opinion. The elections this year were a rematch of our traditional polarization between the workers party (PT) and the social democracy party (PSDB), which has been going on since 1994. PT and PSDB used to be allies. In the 80s, when the dictatorship dropped the law that forbade more than 2 parties, the opposition party, MDB, began breaking up in several smaller ones. PSDB was founded by politicians and intelectuals who were inspired by Europe s social democracy and political systems. Parliamentarism, for instance, is one of the historical causes of the party. The workers party had a more grassroots origin, with union leaders, marxist intelectuals and marxist-inspired catholic priests being the main founders. They drew their inspiration from the USSR and Cuba, and were very close to social movements. Some people have celebrated the reelection of Dilma Roussef as a victory of the left against the right. In my opinion that view is wrong for several reasons. First, because I disagree that PSDB and A cio Neves in particular are right-wing, both in terms of economics and social/moral issues. Second, because I believe Dilma s first government has taken a quite severe turn to the right in several topics that matter a lot to me. Since comparisons with PSDB s government during the 90s has been one of the main strategies of the campaign this year, I ll argue why I think it was actually a pretty good government with a lot of left in it. Unlike what happens in most other places, Brazil does not really have an actual right-wing party, economics-wise. Although we might see the birth of a couple in the near future, no current party is really against public health, education and social security being provided by the state as rights, or wants to decrease state size and lower taxes significantly. It should come as no surprise that even though it has undergone a lot of liberal reforms over the last 20 years, Brazil is still a very closed country, with very high import tariffs and a huge presence of the state in the economy. There is a certain consensus about all of that, with disagreements being essentially on implementation details, not goals. On the other hand, and contrary to popular belief, when it comes to social and moral issues we are a very conservative people. Ironically, the two parties which have been in power over the last 20 years are quite progressive, being historically proponents of diversity, minorities rights, reproductive rights. They have had to compromise on those causes to become viable alternatives, given the conservative nature of the majority of the voters. Despite their different origins and beliefs, both parties share socialist inclinations and were allies from the onset. That changed in 1992, when president Collor, who had been elected on a runoff against Lula (who PSDB supported), was impeached by Congress for corruption. With no formal political support and a chaotic situation in his hands, Itamar Franco, the vice president, called for a national union government to go through the last two years of his term. PSDB answered the call, but the workers party decided against being part of the government. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a sociologist who was one of the leaders of PSDB was chosen to lead the Foreign Relations Ministry, but a few months later got nominated to the Economy. At the time, Brazil lived under hyperinflation of close to 1000% a year, and several stabilization plans had been attempted. Economy Ministers did not last very much in office at the time. FHC gathered a team of economists and sponsored their stabilization plan, which turned out to be highly successful: the Plano Real ( Real Plan ). In addition to introducing a new currency, something that was becoming pretty common to Brazilians by then, it also attacked the structural causes of inflation. Lula was counting on the failure of the Plano Real when he ran against FHC in 1994, but the plan succeeded, giving FHC two terms as president. During those two terms, FHC introduced several institutional changes that made Brazil a saner country. In addition to the hyperinflation, Brazil had lived a debt crises for decades and was still in default. FHC s team renegotiated the debts, reopened lines of credit, but most importantly, introduced reforms that made the Brazilian finances and financial system credible. The problem was not even that Brazil had a fiscal d ficit, it just did not have any control whatsoever of money supply and budget. Banks, regardless of whether they were private or public, had very little regulation and took advantage of the hyperinflation to hide monstrous holes in their balances. When inflation was gone and regulation became more strict, those became apparent, and it was pretty clear that the system would collapse if nothing was done. Some people like to say that FHC was a president who ruled for the rich and didn t care about the poor. I think the way the potential collapse of the banking system was handled is a great counter-example of that. The government passed laws that made the owners of the banks responsible for the financial problems, regardless of whether caused by mismanagement or fraud. If a bank went under, the central bank intervened and added enough money to protect the deposits, but that money was a loan that had to be repaid by the owners of the bank, and the owners properties were added as collateral to the loan. As a brazilian journalist once said, the people did not risk losing their deposits, the bankers did risk losing the banks, though. Today, we have a separate fund, filled with money from the banks, that does what the central bank did back then when required. Compare that to countries where the banking system was saved with tax payer money and executives kept getting huge bonuses regardless, while owners kept their profits. It is hard to find an initiative that is more focused on the public interest against the interest of the rich people who caused the problem. This legislation, called PROER, is still in place today, and it came along with solid regulation of the banking system. It should come as no surprise that Brazil went through the financial crisis of 2008 with not a single hiccup of the banking system and no fear of bank runs. Despite having been against PROER back in the day, Lula celebrated its existence in 2008, when it was clear it was one of the reasons we would not suffer much. He even advertised it as something that should be adopted by the US and Europe. It is also pretty common to hear that under FHC social questions were not a priority. I believe it is pretty simple to see that that was not the case both by inspecting the growth of social spending and the improvement of social indicators for the period, such as UN s human development index. One area in which people are particularly critical of the FHC government is the investment on higher education, and they are actually quite right. Brazil has free Federal universities and those did not get a lot of priority in the 90s. However, I would argue that while it is a matter of priorities, it is not one of education versus something else, but rather of what to invest on inside education. The reality is basic education was the priority. When FHC came to power, Brazil had a significant number of children who were not going to school at all. The goal was to make access to schools universal for young children, and that goal was reached. Every child has been going to school since the early 2000s, and that is a significant achievement which reaches the poorest. While the federal universities are attended essentially by the Brazilian elite, given the difficulty of passing the exams and the relative lack of quality of free public schools compared to private ones, which is still a reality to this day, investment on getting children to even go to school for the early years has a significant impact on the lives of the poorest. It is important to remember that getting every child to go to school is also what gave birth to one of the most celebrated programs from the Lula era: Bolsa Fam lia ( Family Allowance ) is a direct money transfer to poor families, particularly those who have children and has been an important contribution to lowering inequality and getting people out of extreme poverty. To get the money, the families need to ensure their children are 1) attending school and 2) getting vaccinated. That program comes from the FHC government, in which it was created with the name Bolsa Escola ( School Allowance ), in its turn inspired by a program of the same name by governor Cristovam Buarque, from PT. What Lula did, and he deserves a lot of credit for this, was to merge a series of smaller programs with Bolsa Escola, and then expand the program to ensure it got to more and more people. Interestingly, during the announcement of the program he credited the idea of doing that to a state governor from PSDB. You can see why I think these two should be allies again. When faced with all these arguments, people will eventually say that FHC was bad because he privatized companies and used orthodox economic policies. Well, if that is what it takes, then we ll have to take Lula down with him, because his first term was essentially a continuation of FHC s second term: orthodox economic policies to keep inflation down, along with privatization of several state-owned companies and banks. But Lula, whom I voted for and whose government I believe was a good one, is not my subject: Dilma is. On Lula s second term, Dilma gained a lot of power when other major leaders of PT went down for corruption. She became second in command and started leading several programs. A big believer in developmentalism, she started pushing for a bigger role of the state in the coordination of the productive sector, with a clear focus on growing the industrial base. One of the initiatives she sponsored was a sizable increase on the number and size of subsidized loans given out by the national development bank (BNDES). Brazil started an unnofficial national champions program, where the government elected a few big companies to get a huge amount of subsidized credit. The goal was for these selected firms to get big enough to be competitive on the global market. The criteria for the choices is completely opaque, if it even exists, and includes handing out milions in subsidized credit for Eike Batista, who became Brazil s richest enterpreneur for a while, and lost pretty much everything when it became clear the oil would not be pumping out of his camps after all, sinking with them a huge amount of public funds invested by BNDES. The way this policy was enacted, it is unclear how much it really costs in terms of public funds: the Brazilian treasury emits debt to capitalize, lends that money to BNDES with higher than market interest, and BNDES then lends it out to the big companies with a lower than market interest rate. Although it is obviously unsustainable, the problem does not yet show in the balance because the grace period for BNDES debt with the treasury is 2040. The fact that this has a cost and, perhaps more importantly, a huge opportunity cost is not clear because it is not part of the government budget. Why are we putting money in this rather than quadrupling Bolsa Fam lia, which studies show generates 1,78 reais in GDP for every 1 real invested? Worse, why are we not even updating Bolsa Fam lia enough to cover inflation? When Dilma got elected in 2010, the first signs were pretty bad. She was already seen as someone who did not care much for the environment, and on her first month in power she made good on that promise by pushing to get the Belo Monte Dam building started as soon as possible regardless of conditionalities being satisfied. To this day there are several issues with how the building of the dam is going: the handling of the indigenous people and the small city nearby are lacking, conditionalities are not met. Beyond Belo Monte, indigenous leaders are being assassinated, deforestation in the Amazon forest has increased by 122% in 2014 alone. Dilma s answer to people who question her on these kinds of issues is essentially: would you rather not have electric power? Her populist authoritarian nature and obsession with industry are also pretty evident when it comes to her policies in the energy area as a whole. She showed up in national tv on the eve of our independence day celebration to announce a reduction in electric tariffs, mainly for industry, but also for homes. Nobody really knew how. The following week she sent a fast-track project to Congress to automatically renew concessions of power grid operators, requiring those who accepted it to lower tariffs, instead of doing an auction, which was already necessary anyway because the concessions were up on 2015. There was no discussion with stakeholders, there was just a populist announcement and a great deal of rhethoric to paint anyone who opposed as being against the people. And now, everything went into the crapper because that represented a breach of contract that required indemnification, and we had a pretty bad drought that made power more expensive given the need to turn on the thermal generators. Combining the costs of the thermal generation, indemnity, and financial fallout that the grid operators suffered, we are already at 105 billion reais and counting, nobody knows how high the cost will reach. Any reduction in tariffs has long been invalidated. And the fact that industry has lowered production significantly ends up being good news, we would probably be under rationing already if that was not the case. You would expect someone who fought a dictatorship to be pretty good in terms of human and civil rights. What we see in reality is a lack of respect for those things. During the world cup, Dilma has put the army on the streets and has supported arbitrary behaviour from state polices throughout the country. They jailed a bunch of demonstrators preemptively. No shit. The would be demonstrators were kept in jail throghout the tournament under false accusations. Dilma s Minister of Justice said several times that the case against them was solid and that the arrests were legal, but it turned out the case simply did not exist. Just this week we had a number of executions orchestrated by policemen in the state of Par and there is zero reaction from the federal government. In the oil industry, Dilma has enacted a policy of subsidizing gas prices by using a fixed price that used to be lower than the international prices (it is no longer the case with the fall in international prices). That would not be a problem if Brazil was selfsufficient in oild and gas, which we are not: we had to import a significant amount of both. The implicit subsidy cost Petrobr s a huge amount of cash the more gas it sold, the bigger the losses. This lead not only to decreasing the company s market value (it is a state-controlled, but open company), but to reducing its capacity of investment as well. That is more problematic than it sounds because, with our current concession model, every single oil camp needs to have Petrobr s as a member of the consortium. Limiting the company s investment capacity limits the rate at which our pre-salt oil camps can be explored and thus the speed at which we can become selfsufficient. Chicken and egg anyone? To make things worse, Dilma has made policies that lowered taxes on car production, used to foster economic activity during the crisis in 2008-2010, essentially permanent. This lead to a significant increase in traffic and polution on Brazilian cities, while at the same time increasing the pressure on Petrobr s, which had to import more and more gas. Meanwhile, Brazilian cities suffer from a severe lack of mobility infrastructure. A recent study has shown that Brazil has spend almost twice as much subsidized money on pro-car policies than on pro-mass transit projects. Talk about good usage of public funds. One of the only remaining good news the government was still able to mention was the constant reduction in extreme poverty. Dilma was actually ellected promising to erradicate extreme poverty and changed the government s slogan to A rich country is a country with no poverty (Pa s rico pa s sem pobreza). Well, it turns out all of these policies caused inequality and extreme poverty both to stop falling as of 2013. And given the policies were actually deepened in 2014, I believe it is very likely we ll see an increase in both when we get the data for 2014, next year. Other than that, her policies ended up being a complete failure. Despite giving tax benefits to several sectors, investment has fallen, growth has fallen and inflation is quite high at 6,6% for the last 12 months. In terms of minorities, her government has been a severe set back, with the government going back on educational material against homophoby saying it would not do advertisement of sexual choice , and going back on a decree that allowed the public health system to perform abortions on the cases allowed by the law (essentially if the woman has been raped). Looking at Dilma s policies, I really can t see that much of the left, honestly. So why, you might ask, has this victory been deemed a victory of the left over the right? My explanation is the aura the workers party still manages to keep over itself. There s a notion that whatever PT does, it will still be more to the left than PSDB, which I think is just crazy. There is also a fair amount of idealizing Dilma just because she is Lula s proteg . People will forgive anything, provided it is the workers party doing it. Thankfully, the number of people aligned on the left that supported the candidate from PSDB this election tells me this is changing quite rapidly. Hopefully that leads to PT having to reinvent itself, and get in touch with the left again.

A new release of BH, our package providing Boost headers for use by R is now on CRAN. This release was triggered via a request by Ben Goodrich as noted below who asked for Boost Circular Buffer which RStan uses. No other changes were made.

Changes in version 1.54.0-5 (2014-11-09)

• Added Boost Circular Buffer requested by Ben Goodrich for RStan

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release Comments and suggestions are welcome via the mailing list or the issue tracker at the GitHubGitHub 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.

I posted this on debian-devel today. I am also posting it here, because I believe it is important to more than just Debian developers. Good afternoon, This message comes on the heels of Sam Hartman s wonderful plea for compassion [1] and the sad news of Joey Hess s resignation from Debian [2]. I no longer frequently post to this list, but when you ve been a Debian developer for 18 years, and still care deeply about the community and the project, perhaps you have a bit of perspective to share. Let me start with this: Debian is not a Free Software project. Debian is a making-the-world-better project, a caring for people project, a freedom-spreading project. Free Software is our tool. As many of you, hopefully all of you, I joined Debian because I enjoyed working on this project. We all did, didn t we? We joined Debian because it was fun, because we were passionate about it, because we wanted to make the world a better place and have fun doing it. In short, Debian is life-giving, both to its developers and its users. As volunteers, it is healthy to step back every so often, and ask ourselves two questions: 1) Is this activity still life-giving for me? 2) Is it life-giving for others? I have my opinions about init. Strong ones, in fact. [3] They re not terribly relevant to this post. Because I can see that they are not really all that relevant. 14 years ago, I proposed what was, until now anyhow, one of the most controversial GRs in Debian history. It didn t go the way I hoped. I cared about it deeply then, and still care about the principles. I had two choices: I could be angry and let that process ruin my enjoyment of Debian. Or I could let it pass, and continue to have fun working on a project that I love. I am glad I chose the latter. Remember, for today, one way or another, jessie will still boot. 18 years ago when I joined Debian, our major concerns were helping newbies figure out how to compile their kernels, finding manuals for monitors so we could set the X modelines properly, finding some sort of Free web browser, finding some acceptable Office-type software. Wow. We WON, didn t we? Not just Debian, but everyone. Freedom won. I promise you 18 years from now, it will not matter what init Debian chose in 2014. It will probably barely matter in 3 years. This is not key to our goals of making the world a better place. Jessie will still boot. I say that even though my system runs out of memory every few days because systemd-logind has a mysterious bug [4]. It will be fixed. I say that even though I don t know what init system it will use, or how much choice there will be. I say that because it is simply true. We are Debian. We will make it work, one way or another. I don t post much on this list anymore because my personal passion isn t with posting on this list anymore. I make liberal use of my Delete Thread keybinding on -vote these days, because although I care about the GR, I don t care about it enough to read all the messages about it. I have not yet decided if I will spend the time researching it in order to vote. Instead of debating the init GR, sometimes I sit on the sofa with my wife. Sometimes I go out and fly the remote-control airplane I m learning to fly. Sometimes I repair my plane after a flight that was shorter than planned. Sometimes I play games with my boys, or help them with homework, or share my 8-year-old s delight as a text file full of facts about the Titanic that he wrote in Emacs comes spitting out of the printer. Sometimes I write code or play with the latest Linux filesystems or build a new server for my basement. All these things matter more to me than init. I have been using Debian at home for almost 20 years, at various workplaces for almost that long, and it is not going to stop being a part of my life any time soon. Perhaps I will have to learn how to administer a new init system. Well, so be it; I enjoy learning new things. Or perhaps I will have to learn to live with some desktop limitations with an old init system. Well, so be it; it won t bother me much anyhow. Either way, I m still going to be using what is, to me, the best operating system in the world, made by one of the world s foremost Freedom projects. My hope is that all of you may also have the sense of peace I do, that you may have your strong convictions, but may put them all in perspective. That we as a project realize that the enemy isn t the lovers of the other init, but the people that would use law and technology to repress people all over the world. We are but one shining beacon on a hill, but the world will be worse off if our beacon winked out. My plea is that we each may get angry at what matters, and let go of the smaller frustrations in life; that we may each find something more important than init/systemd to derive enjoyment and meaning from. [5] May you each find that airplane to soar freely in the skies, to lift your soul so that the joy of using Free Software to make the world a better place may still be here, regardless of what /sbin/init is. [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2014/11/msg00002.html [2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2014/11/msg00174.html [3] A hint might be that in my more grumpy moments, I realize I haven t ever quite figured out why the heck this dbus thing is on so many of my systems, or why I have to edit XML to configure it ;-) [4] #765870 [5] No disrespect meant to the init/systemd maintainers. Keep enjoying what you do, too!

I ve been working on a significant rearchitecture of Debian Code Search during the last few months (off and on, as time permits). This will enable us to provide a couple of features that have been often requested but were not possible with the old architecture, such as grouping search results by Debian source package (#1 feature request) and performing queries that take a longer time than the default execution limit of a minute (#2 feature request). Oh, and it also will be a lot faster :-). All of this (unfortunately?) also requires a redesign of the user interface as the old way of displaying results is just fundamentally incompatible with the new architecture. This is why it s taking longer than I d like (never redesign both backend and frontend at the same time), but I m implementing various nice improvements along the way and I think the result will be worth the wait. Lea has helped me a lot re-designing the visual appearence of the search results page, and the new look (of the upcoming group by package feature!) is what I want to share in this blog post. If you have any comments, please let me know (via email to my debian address, stapelberg@). Enjoy:

Docker is the well-known tool for building, distributing, and launching containers. I use it personally to run a chat-server, a graphite instance, and I distribute some of my applications with Dockerfiles too, to ease deployment. Here are some brief notes on things that might not be obvious. For a start when you create a container it is identified by a 64-byte ID. This ID is truncated and used as the hostname of the new guest - but if you ever care you can discover the full ID from within the guest:

~# awk -F/ ' print $NF ' /proc/self/cgroup
9d16624a313bf5bb9eb36f4490b5c2b7dff4f442c055e99b8c302edd1bf26036

Compare that with the hostname:

~# hostname
9d16624a313b

Assigning names to containers is useful, for example:

$ docker run -d -p 2222:22 --name=sshd skxskx/sshd

However note that names must be removed before they can be reused:

#!/bin/sh
# launch my ssh-container - removing the name first
docker rm  sshd   true
docker run --name=sshd -d -p 2222:22 skxskx/sshd

The obvious next step is to get the IP of the new container, and setup a hostname for it sshd.docker. Getting the IP is easy, via either the name of the ID:

~$ docker inspect --format '  .NetworkSettings.IPAddress  ' sshd
172.17.0.2

The only missing step is the ability to do that magically. You'd hope there would be a hook that you could run when a container has started - unfortunately there is no such thing. Instead you have two choices:

• Write a script which parses the output of "docker events" and fires appropriately when a guest is created/destroyed.
• Write a wrapper script for launching containers, and use that to handle the creation.

I wrote a simple watcher to fire when events are created, which lets me do the job. But running a deamon just to watch for events seems like the wrong way to go. Instead I've switched to running via a wrapper dock-run:

$ dock-run --name=sshd -d -p 2222:22 skxskx/sshd

This invokes run-parts on the creation directory, if present, and that allows me to update DNS. So "sshd.docker.local" will point to the IP of the new image. The wrapper was two minutes work, but it does work, and if you like you can find it here. That concludes my notes on docker - although you can read articles I wrote on docker elsewhere.

While I don't consider myself part of the science fiction community directly (my con-going days are probably over), I do follow it across a wide variety of blogs. There are a lot of hard conversations and considerable soul-searching going on right now concerning an on-line commentator in that community who had been nasty and vicious to people, but originally for reasons that many people thought were good causes. (I had been one of those people. It's always very, very tempting to appreciate a good vitriolic rant from someone who shares your world view. And very easy to lose track of the people those rants are aimed at, or the excesses to which those rants go.) I'm not going to go into the details of the SF community issues here, since I have no context other than what I've read, and it's something to work out within that community. But I've been taking it as a useful reminder that abusive behavior is not acceptable, even if it comes from people who are arguably on your side. Anger is important. Anger is often how the world changes. But anger and abuse are not the same thing. I wrote something a little bit ago in a different context. Given that reminder, and given some of the arguments that are going on in the free software community as well, it seemed like a good idea to post a somewhat edited version of it in a more public place: None of us should be willing to continue to participate in a project in which we're expected to tolerate being abused and attacked, and all consequences of that abuse are our problem to deal with. It is simply not fun, and not motivating, and not interesting, and does not lead to us doing good work. I say this from lots of hard-won personal experience. I was deeply involved in Usenet governance for many years. I have made all the same arguments that I see today in favor of "blunt" speech, vitriol, and attacks. I have been a passionate advocate for the "free speech" approach. I have told other people to just filter and use killfiles. I have said that words aren't worth getting worked up about, and it's easy to ignore people. I was wrong. It took a long time for me to figure out that I was wrong, not just for other people, but for myself as well. It took me much longer to walk away from Usenet governance for good because the environment was too toxic. It remains one of the best decisions I have ever made in my life. It was the best bit of self-care that I ever did. I learned from that experience, and earlier this year, I walked away from a job for related reasons. I enjoyed the work, the job was much easier than the job that I have now, and I had a lot of time to work on free software and on Debian, but the emotional environment was toxic. (It was not as openly abusive, but it was an environment of disrespect, hierarchical dominance games, fear, blame, and emotional blackmail.) As a result, I've had to shift priorities considerably, but I'm a much happier person. It's worth having less time for things that I was previously enjoying to not to have to deal with an emotionally negative and confrontational environment. Life is too short, and I have the luxury of having choices. Both of those incidents taught me that it's very easy for me to leave that sort of situation to fester for too long, and that I underestimate how much of an improvement it is for my quality of life to walk away from abusive and negative emotional situations. I am belatedly learning how to be more ready and willing to do this. I very much understand the people who are concerned with ensuring there is space for strongly-worded opinions and heartfelt anger. But we have to draw a line, and that line needs to rule out emotional abuse of people in our community even in the name of passionate polemics about something that's important. We have to enforce that line, and if that means ejecting people from our community, that's what we have to do. Because, if we don't, we're also ejecting people from our community: the quiet people, the people who are just trying to get work done, or the people who have had past experience with abusive environments and understand the need to bail when an environment starts going in that direction. I'm not going to put up with the sort of environment I put up with when doing Big Eight newsgroup creation. I'm not saying this as some sort of threat -- I'm saying this to try to be very clear that not standing up for the members of our community and not supporting each other against abuse and emotional attacks also has consequences, and will destroy that community for a lot of us. I'm saying that I am not interested in living in an environment of fear and blame. And one should never underestimate the human power of giving people space and community in which they can be comfortable, relaxed, and truly happy. Walking the line between this stance and the "tone argument," in which people who are being abused or disenfranchised are attacked for being angry, is very difficult. There are some helpful rules of thumb, such as distinguishing between punching up and punching down, but those rules of thumb can fail or be distorted, as the SF community is learning. It's important that people be able to express anger. It's also important that people be able to name names and identify specific behaviors that they believe are worthy of that anger. But when that anger escalates into attacks, there is a real danger that passionate righteousness turns into passionate abusiveness, a danger of losing the sense of community in our own sense of righteousness. And that's not something we can or should accept. It's going to take a lot of hard work, a lot of open conversation, and a lot of empathy and care to find that line. There are many things in the world right now that should provoke anger, and with that anger comes power for good. But with that anger can also come a destructive blindness. The anger I want is the anger that drives us to change the world together, the anger that leads to confronting others with a reflection of their own better natures and challenging them to become better, more compassionate people. The anger that leads a man to feed the homeless in the true meaning of civil disobedience. Not the anger that crushes our enemies.

A new release of RcppRedis is now on CRAN. It contains additional commands for hashes and sets, all contributed by John Laing and Whit Armstrong.

Changes in version 0.1.2 (2014-11-06)

• New commands execv, hset, hget, sadd, srem, and smembers contributed by John Laing and Whit Armstrong over several pull requests.

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release. As always, more detailed information is on the RcppRedis page page.

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

Today, i uploaded GnuPG 2.1.0 into debian's experimental suite. It's built for amd64 and i386 and powerpc already. You can monitor its progress on the buildds to see when it's available for your architecture. ChangesGnuPG 2.1 offers many new and interesting features, but one of the most important changes is the introduction of elliptic curve crypto (ECC). While GnuPG 2.1 discourages the creation of ECC keys by default, it's important that we have the ability to verify ECC signatures and to encrypt to ECC keys if other people are using this tech. It seems likely, for example, that Google's End-To-End Chrome OpenPGP extension will use ECC. GnuPG users who don't have this capability available won't be able to communicate with End-To-End users. There are many other architectural changes, including a move to more daemonized interactions with the outside world, including using dirmngr to talk to the keyservers, and relying more heavily on gpg-agent for secret key access. The gpg-agent change is a welcome one -- the agent now holds the secret key material entirely and never releases it -- as of 2.1 gpg2 never has any asymmetric secret key material in its process space at all. One other nice change for those of us with large keyrings is the new keybox format for public key material. This provides much faster indexed access to the public keyring. I've been using GnuPG 2.1.0 betas regularly for the last month, and i think that for the most part, they're ready for regular use. Timing for debian The timing between the debian freeze and the GnuPG upstream is unfortunate, but i don't think i'm prepared to push for this as a jessie transition yet, without more backup. I'm talking to other members of the GnuPG packaging team to see if they think this is worth even bringing to the attention of the release team, but i'm not pursuing it at the moment. If you really want to see this in debian jessie, please install the experimental package and let me know how it works for you. Long term migration concerns GnuPG upstream is now maintaining three branches concurrently: modern (2.1.x), stable (2.0.x), and classic (1.4.x). I think this is stretches the GnuPG upstream development team too thin, and we should do what we can to help them transition to supporting fewer releases concurrently. In the long-term, I'd ultimately like to see gnupg 2.1.x to replace all use of gpg 1.4.x and gpg 2.0.x in debian, but unlikely to to happen right now. In particular, the following two bugs make it impossible to use my current, common monkeysphere workflow:

• export-reset-subkey-passwd doesn't work, which breaks monkeysphere subkey-to-ssh-agent.
• pluggable keyserver transports no longer work, which means that i can't use hkpms:// access to keyservers.

And GnuPG 2.1.0 drops support for the older, known-weak OpenPGPv3 key formats. This is an important step for simplification, but there are a few people who probably still need to use v3 keys for obscure/janky reasons, or have data encrypted to a v3 key that they need to be able to decrypt. Those people will want to have GnuPG 1.4 around. Call for testing Anyway, if you use debian testing or unstable, and you are interested in these features, i invite you to install gnupg2 and its friends from experimental. If you want to be sensibly conservative, i recommend backing up ~/.gnupg before trying to use it:

cp -aT .gnupg .gnupg.bak
sudo apt install -t experimental gnupg2 gnupg-agent dirmngr gpgsm gpgv2 scdaemon

If you find issues, please file them via the debian BTS as usual. I (or other members of the pkg-gnupg team) will help you triage them to upstream as needed. Tags: ecc, experimental, gnupg

Weblate 2.0 has been released today. It comes with lot of improvements in backend and completely new user interface. Full list of changes for 2.0:

• New responsive UI using Bootstrap.
• Rewritten VCS backend.
• Documentation improvements.
• Added whiteboard for site wide messages.
• Configurable strings priority.
• Added support for JSON file format.
• Fixed generating mo files in certain cases.
• Added support for GitLab notifications.
• Added support for disabling translation suggestions.
• Django 1.7 support.
• ACL projects now have user management.
• Extended search possibilites.
• Give more hints to translators about plurals.
• Fixed Git repository locking.
• Compatibility with older Git versions.
• Improved ACL support.
• Added buttons for per language quotes and other special chars.
• Support for exporting stats as JSONP.

You can find more information about Weblate on http://weblate.org, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. You can login there with demo account using demo password or register your own user. Ready to run appliances will be soon available in SUSE Studio Gallery. Weblate is also being used https://hosted.weblate.org/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, Gammu, Weblate itself and others. If you are free software project which would like to use Weblate, I'm happy to help you with set up or even host Weblate for you. Further development of Weblate would not be possible without people providing donations, thanks to everybody who have helped so far!

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or Why do I not see any update notifications on my brand-new Debian Jessie installation?? This is a short explanation of the status quo, and also explains the no update notifications issue in a slightly more detailed way, since I am already getting bug reports for that. As you might know, GNOME provides GNOME-Software for installation of applications via PackageKit. In order to work properly, GNOME-Software needs AppStream metadata, which is not yet available in Debian. There was a GSoC student working on the necessary code for that, but the code is not yet ready and doesn t produce good results yet. Therefore, I postponed AppStream integration to Jessie+1, with an option to include some metadata for GNOME and KDE to use via a normal .deb package. Then, GNOME was updated to 3.14. GNOME 3.14 moved lots of stuff into GNOME-Software, including the support for update-notifications (which have been in g-s-d before). GNOME-Software is also the only thing which can edit the application groups in GNOME-Shell, at least currently. So obviously, there was no a much stronger motivation to support GNOME-Software in Jessie. The appstream-glib library, which GNOME-Software uses exclusively to read AppStream metadata, didn t support the DEP-11 metadata format which Debian uses in place of the original AppSTream XML for a while, but does so in it s current development branch. So that component had to be packaged first. Later, GNOME-Software was uploaded to the archive as well, but still lacked the required metadata. That data was provided by me as a .deb package later, locally generated using the current code by my SoC student (the data isn t great, but better than nothing). So far with the good news. But there are multiple issues at time. First of all, the appstream-data package didn t pass NEW so far, due to it s complex copyright situation (nothing we can t resolve, since app-install-data, which appstream-data would replace, is in Debian as well). Also, GNOME-Software is exclusively using offline-updates (more information also on [1] and [2]) at time. This isn t always working at the moment, since I haven t had the time to test it properly and I didn t expect it to be used in Debian Jessie as well[3]. Furthermore, the offline-updates feature requires systemd (which isn t an issue in itself, I am quite fine with that, but people not using it will get unexpected results, unless someone does the work to implement offline-updates with sysvinit). Since we are in freeze at time, and obviously this stuff is not ready yet, GNOME is currently without update notifications and without a way to change the shell application groups. So, how can we fix this? One way would of course be to patch notification support back into g-s-d, if the new layout there allows doing that. But that would not give us the other features GNOME-Software provides, like application-group-editing. Implementing that differently and patching it to make it work would be more or at least the same amount of work like making GNOME-Software run properly. I therefore prefer getting GNOME-Software to run, at least with basic functionality. That would likely mean hiding things like the offline-update functionality, and using online-updates with GNOME-PackageKit instead. Obviously, this approach has it s own issues, like doing most of the work post-freeze, which kind of defeats the purpose of the freeze and would need some close coordination with the release-team. So, this is the status quo at time. It is kind of unfortunate that GNOME moved crucial functionality into a new component which requires additional integration work by the distributors so quickly, but that s something which isn t worth to talk about. We need a way forward to bring update-notifications back, and there is currently work going on to do that. For all Debian users: Please be patient while we resolve the situation, and sorry for the inconvenience. For all developers: If you would like to help, please contact me or Laurent Bigonville, there are some tasks which could use some help.
As a small remark: If you are using KDE, you are lucky Apper provides the notification support like it always did, and thanks to improvements in aptcc and PackageKit, it even is a bit faster now. For the Xfce and <other_desktop> people, you need to check if your desktop provides integration with PackageKit for update-checking. At least Xfce doesn t, but after GNOME-PackageKit removed support for it (which was moved to gnome-settings-daemon and now to GNOME-Software) nobody stepped up to implement it yet (so if you want to do it it s not super-complicated, but knowledge of C and GTK+ is needed). - [3]: It looks like dpkg tries to ask a debconf question for some reason, or an external tool like apt-listchanges is interfering with the process, which must run completely unsupervised. There is some debugging needed to resolve these Debian-specific issues.