Search Results: "ag"

5 August 2022

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in July 2022

FTP master This month I accepted 420 and rejected 44 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 422. I am sad to write the following lines, but unfortunately there are people who rather take advantage of others instead of doing a proper maintenance of their packages. So, in order to find time slots for as much packages in NEW as possible, I no longer write a debian/copyright for others. I know it is a boring task to collect the copyright information, but our policy still requires this. Of course nobody is perfect and certainly one or the other license or copyright holder can be overlooked. Luckily most of the contributors maintain their debian/copyright very thouroughly with a terrific result. On the other hand some contributors upload only some crap and demand that I exactly list what is missing. I am no longer willing to do this. I am going to stop processing after I found a few missing things and reject the package. When I see repeatedly uploads containing only improvements with things I pointed out, I will process this package only after all others from NEW are done. Debian LTS This was my ninety-seventh month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This month my all in all workload has been 35.75h. Unfortunately Stretch LTS has moved to Stretch ELTS and Buster LTS was not yet opened in July. So I think this is the first month I did not work all assigned hours. Besides things on security-master, I only worked 20h on moving the LTS documentation to their new destination. At the moment the documentation is spread over several locations. As searching over all those locations is not possible, it shall be collected at one place. Debian ELTS This month was the forty-eighth ELTS month. During my allocated time I uploaded: I also started to work on mod-wsgi and my patch was already approved by the maintainer. Now I am waiting for the security team to decide whether it will be uploaded as DSA or via PU. Last but not least I did some days of frontdesk duties. Other stuff This month I uploaded new upstream versions or improved packaging of:

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppXts 0.0.5 on CRAN: Routine Refreshment

A full eight and half years (!!) since its 0.0.4 release, version 0.0.5 of RcppXts is now on CRAN. The RcppXts package demonstrates how to access the export C API of xts which we contributed a looong time ago. This release contains an accumulated small set of updates made as the CRAN Policies evolved. We now register and use the shared library routines (updates in both src/init.c and NAMESPACE), turned on continuous integration, switched it from the now disgraces service to another, adopted our portable r-ci along with r2, added badges to the README.md, updated to https URLs, and made sure the methods package (from base R) was actually imported (something Rcpp has a need for at startup). That latter part now triggered a recent email from the CRAN maintainers which prompted this release. The NEWS entries follow.

Changes in version 0.0.5 (2022-08-05)
  • Depends on xts 0.9-6 now on CRAN
  • Exports (and documents) a number of additional functions
  • Switch CI use to r-ci and r2u
  • README.md, DESCRIPTION and NEWS.Rd were updated and expanded
  • NAMESPACE import of the shared library uses registration

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. A bit more information about the package is available here as well as at the GitHub repo. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

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

4 August 2022

Jamie McClelland: Fine tuning Thunderbird's end-to-end encryption

I love that Thunderbird really tackled OpenPGP head on and incorporated it directly into the client. I know it s been a bit rough for some users, but I think it s a good long term investment. And to demonstrate I ll now complain about a minor issue :). I replied to an encrypted message but couldn t send the response using encryption. I got an error message indicating that End-to-end encryption requires resolving certificate issues for and it listed the recipient email address. Screen shot of error message saying: End-to-end encryption requires resolving certificate issues for I spent an enormous amount of time examining the recipient s OpenPGP key. I made sure it was not expired. I made sure it was actually in my Thunderbird key store not just in my OpenPGP keychain. I made sure I had indicated that I trust it enough to use. I re-downloaded it. I eventually gave up and didn t send the email. Then I responded to another encrypted email and it worked. What!?!? I spent more time comparing the recipients before I realized the problem was the sending address, not the recipient address. I have an OpenPGP key that lists several identities. I have a Thunderbird Account that uses the Identities feature to add several from addresses. And, it turns out that in Thunderbird, you need to indicate which OpenPGP key to use for your main account but also for each identity. When you drill down to Manage Identities for your account, you are able to indicate which OpenPGP key you want to use for each identity. Once I indicated that each identity should use my OpenPGP key, the issue was resolved. And here s my Thunderbird bug asking for an error message pointing to the sender address, not the recipient address.

Jamie McClelland: Fine tuning Thunderbird's end-to-end encryption

I love that Thunderbird really tackled OpenPGP head on and incorporated it directly into the client. I know it s been a bit rough for some users, but I think it s a good long term investment. And to demonstrate I ll now complain about a minor issue :). I replied to an encrypted message but couldn t send the response using encryption. I got an error message indicating that End-to-end encryption requires resolving certificate issues for and it listed the recipient email address. “Screen shot of error message saying: End-to-end encryption requires resolving certificate issues for [blacked out email address]” I spent an enormous amount of time examining the recipient s OpenPGP key. I made sure it was not expired. I made sure it was actually in my Thunderbird key store not just in my OpenPGP keychain. I made sure I had indicated that I trust it enough to use. I re-downloaded it. I eventually gave up and didn t send the email. Then I responded to another encrypted email and it worked. What!?!? I spent more time comparing the recipients before I realized the problem was the sending address, not the recipient address. I have an OpenPGP key that lists several identities. I have a Thunderbird Account that uses the Identities feature to add several from addresses. And, it turns out that in Thunderbird, you need to indicate which OpenPGP key to use for your main account but also for each identity. When you drill down to Manage Identities for your account, you are able to indicate which OpenPGP key you want to use for each identity. Once I indicated that each identity should use my OpenPGP key, the issue was resolved. And here s my Thunderbird bug asking for an error message pointing to the sender address, not the recipient address.

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in July 2022

Welcome to the July 2022 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In our reports we attempt to outline the most relevant things that have been going on in the past month. As a brief introduction, the reproducible builds effort is concerned with ensuring no flaws have been introduced during this compilation process by promising identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.

Reproducible Builds summit 2022 Despite several delays, we are pleased to announce that registration is open for our in-person summit this year: November 1st November 3rd
The event will happen in Venice (Italy). We intend to pick a venue reachable via the train station and an international airport. However, the precise venue will depend on the number of attendees. Please see the announcement email for information about how to register.

Is reproducibility practical? Ludovic Court s published an informative blog post this month asking the important question: Is reproducibility practical?:
Our attention was recently caught by a nice slide deck on the methods and tools for reproducible research in the R programming language. Among those, the talk mentions Guix, stating that it is for professional, sensitive applications that require ultimate reproducibility , which is probably a bit overkill for Reproducible Research . While we were flattered to see Guix suggested as good tool for reproducibility, the very notion that there s a kind of reproducibility that is ultimate and, essentially, impractical, is something that left us wondering: What kind of reproducibility do scientists need, if not the ultimate kind? Is reproducibility practical at all, or is it more of a horizon?
The post goes on to outlines the concept of reproducibility, situating examples within the context of the GNU Guix operating system.

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility. Not only can it locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, it can provide human-readable diffs from many kinds of binary formats. This month, Chris Lamb prepared and uploaded versions 218, 219 and 220 to Debian, as well as made the following changes:
  • New features:
  • Bug fixes:
    • Fix a regression introduced in version 207 where diffoscope would crash if one directory contained a directory that wasn t in the other. Thanks to Alderico Gallo for the testcase. [ ]
    • Don t traceback if we encounter an invalid Unicode character in Haskell versioning headers. [ ]
  • Output improvements:
  • Codebase improvements:
    • Space out a file a little. [ ]
    • Update various copyright years. [ ]

Mailing list On our mailing list this month:
  • Roland Clobus posted his Eleventh status update about reproducible [Debian] live-build ISO images, noting amongst many other things! that all major desktops build reproducibly with bullseye, bookworm and sid.
  • Santiago Torres-Arias announced a Call for Papers (CfP) for a new SCORED conference, an academic workshop around software supply chain security . As Santiago highlights, this new conference invites reviewers from industry, open source, governement and academia to review the papers [and] I think that this is super important to tackle the supply chain security task .

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. This month, however, we submitted the following patches:

Reprotest reprotest is the Reproducible Builds project s end-user tool to build the same source code twice in widely and deliberate different environments, and checking whether the binaries produced by the builds have any differences. This month, the following changes were made:
  • Holger Levsen:
    • Uploaded version 0.7.21 to Debian unstable as well as mark 0.7.22 development in the repository [ ].
    • Make diffoscope dependency unversioned as the required version is met even in Debian buster. [ ]
    • Revert an accidentally committed hunk. [ ]
  • Mattia Rizzolo:
    • Apply a patch from Nick Rosbrook to not force the tests to run only against Python 3.9. [ ]
    • Run the tests through pybuild in order to run them against all supported Python 3.x versions. [ ]
    • Fix a deprecation warning in the setup.cfg file. [ ]
    • Close a new Debian bug. [ ]

Reproducible builds website A number of changes were made to the Reproducible Builds website and documentation this month, including:
  • Arnout Engelen:
  • Chris Lamb:
    • Correct some grammar. [ ]
  • Holger Levsen:
    • Add talk from FOSDEM 2015 presented by Holger and Lunar. [ ]
    • Show date of presentations if we have them. [ ][ ]
    • Add my presentation from DebConf22 [ ] and from Debian Reunion Hamburg 2022 [ ].
    • Add dhole to the speakers of the DebConf15 talk. [ ]
    • Add raboof s talk Reproducible Builds for Trustworthy Binaries from May Contain Hackers. [ ]
    • Drop some Debian-related suggested ideas which are not really relevant anymore. [ ]
    • Add a link to list of packages with patches ready to be NMUed. [ ]
  • Mattia Rizzolo:
    • Add information about our upcoming event in Venice. [ ][ ][ ][ ]

Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project runs a significant testing framework at tests.reproducible-builds.org, to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. This month, Holger Levsen made the following changes:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Create graphs displaying existing .buildinfo files per each Debian suite/arch. [ ][ ]
    • Fix a typo in the Debian dashboard. [ ][ ]
    • Fix some issues in the pkg-r package set definition. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Improve the builtin-pho HTML output. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Temporarily disable all live builds as our snapshot mirror is offline. [ ]
  • Automated node health checks:
    • Detect dpkg failures. [ ]
    • Detect files with bad UNIX permissions. [ ]
    • Relax a regular expression in order to detect Debian Live image build failures. [ ]
  • Misc changes:
    • Test that FreeBSD virtual machine has been updated to version 13.1. [ ]
    • Add a reminder about powercycling the armhf-architecture mst0X node. [ ]
    • Fix a number of typos. [ ][ ]
    • Update documentation. [ ][ ]
    • Fix Munin monitoring configuration for some nodes. [ ]
    • Fix the static IP address for a node. [ ]
In addition, Vagrant Cascadian updated host keys for the cbxi4pro0 and wbq0 nodes [ ] and, finally, node maintenance was also performed by Mattia Rizzolo [ ] and Holger Levsen [ ][ ][ ].

Contact As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

Abhijith PA: Trip to misty mountains in Munnar

Munnar is a hill station in Idukki district of Kerala, India. Home to 2nd largest tea plantation in the country. Lot of people visit here on summer and in winter as well. I live in the neighboring district of Munnar though I never made a visit. In my mind I pictured Munnar as a Tourist trap with lots of garbage lying around. I recently made a visit and it changed my perception of this place. Munnar!

Little background I never liked tea much. I am also not a coffee person either. But if I have to choose over two that will be coffee because of the strong aroma. Going to relatives house, they always offered hot tea defacto. I always find difficult say no to their friendly gesture. But I hate tea. A generation before me drinks lot of tea here at my place. You can see tea stalls in every corner and people sipping tea. I always wondered why people drink lot of tea on a hot country like India. The book I am currently trying to read has a chapter about Munnar and how it became a Tea plantation under the British rule. Well, around the same time. I watched a documentary program about the tea and Munnar.

Munnar Munnar on early evening Too much word here and there I decided to do a visit. I took a motorbike and started a journey to Munnar. Due to covid restrictions there weren t much tourists, so this was to my advantage. There are many water falls on the way to Munnar. Some are very close to road and some are far away but can be spotted. Munnar travel is just not about the destination because its never been a single spot. Enjoying the journey that the ride has to offer. I stayed at a hotel, little far away from town, though I never recommend hotels in Munnar. Try to find home stays and small establishments away from the town. There are British Era bungalows inside the plantations still maintained in good condition which can be booked per room or entire property. The lush greenery on the Mountains of tea plantation is very refreshing and feast to our eyes. The mornings and evenings of Munnar is something to watch, mountains wrapped in mist slowly uncovering with sunlight and again slipping to mist by dark evening. I planned only to visit places which are less explored by tourists. People here live a simple life. Most of them are plantation workers. The native people of Munnar are actually tribal folks but since the plantation boom many people from Tamil Nadu(neighboring state) and other parts of Kerala settled here. The houses of this plantation workers resembled Hobbit homes in Shire from Lord of the Rings as they are in the hill slides. The Kannan Devan hills, the biggest hill in area covers more than half of Munnar. Hobbit homes Two famous Tea companies from Munnar are Tata Tea and KDHP(Kanan Devan Hills Plantations Company (P) Limited) tea. KDHP is actually an employee owned Tea company ie a good share of this company is owned by the employees working there. This was interesting to me, so I bought a bag of speciality tea from KDHP store on my return. I don t drink tea on a daily basis but I will try it on special occasions.

1 August 2022

Sergio Talens-Oliag: Using Git Server Hooks on GitLab CE to Validate Tags

Since a long time ago I ve been a gitlab-ce user, in fact I ve set it up on three of the last four companies I ve worked for (initially I installed it using the omnibus packages on a debian server but on the last two places I moved to the docker based installation, as it is easy to maintain and we don t need a big installation as the teams using it are small). On the company I work for now (kyso) we are using it to host all our internal repositories and to do all the CI/CD work (the automatic deployments are triggered by web hooks in some cases, but the rest is all done using gitlab-ci). The majority of projects are using nodejs as programming language and we have automated the publication of npm packages on our gitlab instance npm registry and even the publication into the npmjs registry. To publish the packages we have added rules to the gitlab-ci configuration of the relevant repositories and we publish them when a tag is created. As the we are lazy by definition, I configured the system to use the tag as the package version; I tested if the contents of the package.json where in sync with the expected version and if it was not I updated it and did a force push of the tag with the updated file using the following code on the script that publishes the package: 
# Update package version & add it to the .build-args
INITIAL_PACKAGE_VERSION="$(npm pkg get version tr -d '"')"
npm version --allow-same --no-commit-hooks --no-git-tag-version \
  "$CI_COMMIT_TAG"
UPDATED_PACKAGE_VERSION="$(npm pkg get version tr -d '"')"
echo "UPDATED_PACKAGE_VERSION=$UPDATED_PACKAGE_VERSION" >> .build-args
# Update tag if the version was updated or abort
if [ "$INITIAL_PACKAGE_VERSION" != "$UPDATED_PACKAGE_VERSION" ]; then
  if [ -n "$CI_GIT_USER" ] && [ -n "$CI_GIT_TOKEN" ]; then
    git commit -m "Updated version from tag $CI_COMMIT_TAG" package.json
    git tag -f "$CI_COMMIT_TAG" -m "Updated version from tag"
    git push -f -o ci.skip origin "$CI_COMMIT_TAG"
  else
    echo "!!! ERROR !!!"
    echo "The updated tag could not be uploaded."
    echo "Set CI_GIT_USER and CI_GIT_TOKEN or fix the 'package.json' file"
    echo "!!! ERROR !!!"
    exit 1
  fi
fi
This feels a little dirty (we are leaving commits on the tag but not updating the original branch); I thought about trying to find the branch using the tag and update it, but I drop the idea pretty soon as there were multiple issues to consider (i.e. we can have tags pointing to commits present in multiple branches and even if it only points to one the tag does not have to be the HEAD of the branch making the inclusion difficult). In any case this system was working, so we left it until we started to publish to the NPM Registry; as we are using a token to push the packages that we don t want all developers to have access to (right now it would not matter, but when the team grows it will) I started to use gitlab protected branches on the projects that need it and adjusting the .npmrc file using protected variables. The problem then was that we can no longer do a standard force push for a branch (that is the main point of the protected branches feature) unless we use the gitlab api, so the tags with the wrong version started to fail. As the way things were being done seemed dirty anyway I thought that the best way of fixing things was to forbid users to push a tag that includes a version that does not match the package.json version. After thinking about it we decided to use githooks on the gitlab server for the repositories that need it, as we are only interested in tags we are going to use the update hook; it is executed once for each ref to be updated, and takes three parameters:
  • the name of the ref being updated,
  • the old object name stored in the ref,
  • and the new object name to be stored in the ref.
To install our hook we have found the gitaly relative path of each repo and located it on the server filesystem (as I said we are using docker and the gitlab s data directory is on /srv/gitlab/data, so the path to the repo has the form /srv/gitlab/data/git-data/repositories/@hashed/xx/yy/hash.git). Once we have the directory we need to:
  • create a custom_hooks sub directory inside it,
  • add the update script (as we only need one script we used that instead of creating an update.d directory, the good thing is that this will also work with a standard git server renaming the base directory to hooks instead of custom_hooks),
  • make it executable, and
  • change the directory and file ownership to make sure it can be read and executed from the gitlab container
On a console session: 
$ cd /srv/gitlab/data/git-data/repositories/@hashed/xx/yy/hash.git
$ mkdir custom_hooks
$ edit_or_copy custom_hooks/update
$ chmod 0755 custom_hooks/update
$ chown --reference=. -R custom_hooks
The update script we are using is as follows: 
#!/bin/sh
set -e
# kyso update hook
#
# Right now it checks version.txt or package.json versions against the tag name
# (it supports a 'v' prefix on the tag)
# Arguments
ref_name="$1"
old_rev="$2"
new_rev="$3"
# Initial test
if [ -z "$ref_name" ]    [ -z "$old_rev" ]   [ -z "$new_rev" ]; then
  echo "usage: $0 <ref> <oldrev> <newrev>" >&2
  exit 1
fi
# Get the tag short name
tag_name="$ ref_name##refs/tags/ "
# Exit if the update is not for a tag
if [ "$tag_name" = "$ref_name" ]; then
  exit 0
fi
# Get the null rev value (string of zeros)
zero=$(git hash-object --stdin </dev/null   tr '0-9a-f' '0')
# Get if the tag is new or not
if [ "$old_rev" = "$zero" ]; then
  new_tag="true"
else
  new_tag="false"
fi
# Get the type of revision:
# - delete: if the new_rev is zero
# - commit: annotated tag
# - tag: un-annotated tag
if [ "$new_rev" = "$zero" ]; then
  new_rev_type="delete"
else
  new_rev_type="$(git cat-file -t "$new_rev")"
fi
# Exit if we are deleting a tag (nothing to check here)
if [ "$new_rev_type" = "delete" ]; then
  exit 0
fi
# Check the version against the tag (supports version.txt & package.json)
if git cat-file -e "$new_rev:version.txt" >/dev/null 2>&1; then
  version="$(git cat-file -p "$new_rev:version.txt")"
  if [ "$version" = "$tag_name" ]   [ "$version" = "$ tag_name#v " ]; then
    exit 0
  else
    EMSG="tag '$tag_name' and 'version.txt' contents '$version' don't match"
    echo "GL-HOOK-ERR: $EMSG"
    exit 1
  fi
elif git cat-file -e "$new_rev:package.json" >/dev/null 2>&1; then
  version="$(
    git cat-file -p "$new_rev:package.json"   jsonpath version   tr -d '\[\]"'
  )"
  if [ "$version" = "$tag_name" ]   [ "$version" = "$ tag_name#v " ]; then
    exit 0
  else
    EMSG="tag '$tag_name' and 'package.json' version '$version' don't match"
    echo "GL-HOOK-ERR: $EMSG"
    exit 1
  fi
else
  # No version.txt or package.json file found
  exit 0
fi
Some comments about it:
  • we are only looking for tags, if the ref_name does not have the prefix refs/tags/ the script does an exit 0,
  • although we are checking if the tag is new or not we are not using the value (in gitlab that is handled by the protected tag feature),
  • if we are deleting a tag the script does an exit 0, we don t need to check anything in that case,
  • we are ignoring if the tag is annotated or not (we set the new_rev_type to tag or commit, but we don t use the value),
  • we test first the version.txt file and if it does not exist we check the package.json file, if it does not exist either we do an exit 0, as there is no version to check against and we allow that on a tag,
  • we add the GL-HOOK-ERR: prefix to the messages to show them on the gitlab web interface (can be tested creating a tag from it),
  • to get the version on the package.json file we use the jsonpath binary (it is installed by the jsonpath ruby gem) because it is available on the gitlab container (initially I used sed to get the value, but a real JSON parser is always a better option).
Once the hook is installed when a user tries to push a tag to a repository that has a version.txt file or package.json file and the tag does not match the version (if version.txt is present it takes precedence) the push fails. If the tag matches or the files are not present the tag is added if the user has permission to add it in gitlab (our hook is only executed if the user is allowed to create or update the tag).

31 July 2022

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities July 2022

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration
  • Debian BTS: unarchive/reopen/triage bugs for reintroduced packages
  • Debian servers: check full disks, ping users of excessive disk usage, restart a hung service
  • Debian wiki: approve accounts

Communication
  • Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors The SPTAG, SIMDEverywhere, cwidget, aptitude, tldextract work was sponsored. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

Russell Coker: Links July 2022

Darren Hayes wrote an interesting article about his battle with depression and his journey to accepting being gay [1]. Savage Garden had some great songs, Affirmation is relevant to this topic. Rorodi wrote an interesting article about the biggest crypto lending company being a Ponzi scheme [2]. One thing I find particularly noteworthy is how obviously scammy it is, even to the extent of having an ex porn star as an executive! Celsuis is now in the process of going bankrupt, 7 months after that article was published. Quora has an interesting discussion about different type casts in C++ [3]. C style casts shouldn t be used! MamaMia has an interesting article about Action Faking which means procrastination by doing tasks marginally related to the end goal [3]. This can mean include excessive study about the topic, excessive planning for the work, and work on things that aren t on the critical path first (EG thinking of a name for a project). Apple has a new Lockdown Mode to run an iPhone in a more secure configuration [4]. It would be good if more operating systems had a feature like this. Informative article about energy use of different organs [5]. The highest metabolic rates (in KCal/Kg/day) are for the heart and kidneys. The brain is 3rd on the list and as it s significantly more massive than the heart and kidneys it uses more energy, however this research was done on people who were at rest. Scientific American has an interesting article about brain energy use and exhaustion from mental effort [6]. Apparently it s doing things that aren t fun that cause exhaustion, mental effort that s fun can be refreshing.
Related posts:
  1. Links June 2022 Google did some interesting research on the impact of discrimination...
  2. Links March 2022 Anarcat wrote a great blog post about switching from OpenNTP...
  3. Links Jan 2022 Washington Post has an interesting article on how gender neutral...

Joachim Breitner: The Via Alpina red trail through Slovenia

This July my girlfriend and I hiked the Slovenian part of the Red Trail of the Via Alpina, from the edge of the Julian Alps to Trieste, and I d like to share some observations and tips that we might have found useful before our trip.
Our most favorite camp spot Our most favorite camp spot

Getting there As we traveled with complete camping gear and wanted to stay in our tent, we avoided the high alpine parts of the trail and started just where the trail came down from the Alps and entered the Karst. A great way to get there is to take the night train from Zurich or Munich towards Ljubljana, get off at Jesenice, have breakfast, take the local train to Podbrdo and you can start your tour at 9:15am. From there you can reach the trail at Pedrovo Brdo within 1 h.

Finding the way We did not use any paper maps, and instead relied on the OpenStreetMap data, which is very good, as well as the official(?) GPX tracks on Komoot, which are linked from the official route descriptions. We used OsmAnd. In general, trails are generally very well marked (red circle with white center, and frequent signs), but the signs rarely tell you which way the Via Alpina goes, so the GPS was needed. Sometimes the OpenStreetMap trail and the Komoot trail disagreed on short segments. We sometimes followed one and other times the other.

Variants We diverged from the trail in a few places:
  • We did not care too much about the horses in Lipica and at least on the map it looked like a longish boringish and sun-exposed detour, so we cut the loop and hiked from Prelo e pri Lokvi up onto the peak of the Veliko Gradi e (which unfortunately is too overgrown to provide a good view).
  • When we finally reached the top of Mali Kras and had a view across the bay of Trieste, it seemed silly to walk to down to Dolina, and instead we followed the ridge through Socerb, essentially the Alpe Adria Trail.
  • Not really a variant, but after arriving in Muggia, if one has to go to Trieste, the ferry is a probably nicer way to finish a trek than the bus.

Pitching a tent We used our tent almost every night, only in Idrija we got a room (and a shower ). It was not trivial to find good camp spots, because most of the trail is on hills with slopes, and the flat spots tend to have housed built on them, but certainly possible. Sometimes we hid in the forest, other times we found nice small and freshly mowed meadows within the forest.

Water Since this is Karst land, there is very little in terms of streams or lakes along the way, which is a pity. The Idrijca river right south of Idrija was very tempting to take a plunge. Unfortunately we passed there early in the day and we wanted to cover some ground first, so we refrained. As for drinking water, we used the taps at the bathrooms of the various touristic sites, a few (but rare) public fountains, and finally resorted to just ringing random doorbells and asking for water, which always worked.

Paths A few stages lead you through very pleasant narrow forest paths with a sight, but not all. On some days you find yourself plodding along wide graveled or even paved forest roads, though.

Landscape and sights The view from Nanos is amazing and, with this high peak jutting out over a wide plain, rather unique. It may seem odd that the trail goes up and down that mountain on the same day when it could go around, but it is certainly worth it. The Karst is mostly a cultivated landscape, with lots of forestry. It is very hilly and green, which is pretty, but some might miss some craggedness. It s not the high alps, after all, but at least they are in sight half the time. But the upside is that there are few sights along the way that are worth visiting, in particular the the Franja Partisan Hospital hidden in a very narrow gorge, the Predjama Castle and the kocjan Caves

Russell Coker: Workstations With ECC RAM

The last new PC I bought was a Dell PowerEdge T110II in 2013. That model had been out for a while and I got it for under $2000. Since then the CPI has gone up by about 20% so it s probably about $2000 in today s money. Currently Dell has a special on the T150 tower server (the latest replacement for the T110II) which has a G6405T CPU that isn t even twice as fast as the i3-3220 (3746 vs 2219) in the T110II according to passmark.com (AKA cpubenchmark.net). The special price is $2600. I can t remember the details of my choices when purchasing the T110II but I recall that CPU speed wasn t a priority and I wanted a cheap reliable server for storage and for light desktop use. So it seems that the current entry model in the Dell T1xx server line is less than twice as fast as fast as it was in 2013 while costing about 25% more! An option is to spend an extra $989 to get a Xeon E-2378 which delivers a reasonable 18,248 in that benchmark. The upside of a T150 is that is uses buffered DDR4 ECC RAM which is pretty cheap nowadays, you can get 32G for about $120. For systems sold as workstations (as opposed to T1xx servers that make great workstations but aren t described as such) Dell has the Precision line. The Precision 3260 Compact Workstation currently starts at $1740, it has a fast CPU but takes SO-DIMMs and doesn t come with ECC RAM. So to use it as a proper workstation you need to discard the RAM and buy DDR5 unbuffered/unregistered ECC SO-DIMMS which don t seem to be on sale yet. The Precision 3460 is slightly larger, slightly more expensive, and also takes SO-DIMMs. The Precision 3660 starts at $2550 and takes unbuffered DDR5 ECC RAM which is available and costs half as much as the SO-DIMM equivalent would cost (if you could even buy it), but the general trend in RAM prices is that unbuffered ECC RAM is more expensive than buffered ECC RAM. The upside to Precision workstations is that the range of CPUs available is significantly faster than for the T150. The HP web site doesn t offer prices on their Z workstations and is generally worse than the Dell web site in most ways. Overall I m disappointed in the range of workstations available now. As an aside if anyone knows of any other company selling workstations in Australia that support ECC RAM then please let me know.
Related posts:
  1. ECC RAM in a Cheap Machine In a comment on my previous post about ECC RAM...
  2. Dell PowerEdge T105 Today I received a Dell PowerEDGE T105 for use by...
  3. Advice on Buying a PC A common topic of discussion on computer users group mailing...

30 July 2022

Mike Hommey: Announcing git-cinnabar 0.5.10

Git-cinnabar is a git remote helper to interact with mercurial repositories. It allows to clone, pull and push from/to mercurial remote repositories, using git. Get it on github. These release notes are also available on the git-cinnabar wiki. What s new since 0.5.9?

Ian Jackson: chiark s skip-skip-cross-up-grade

Two weeks ago I upgraded chiark from Debian jessie i386 to bullseye amd64, after nearly 30 years running Debian i386. This went really quite well, in fact! Background chiark is my colo - a server I run, which lives in a data centre in London. It hosts ~200 users with shell accounts, various websites and mailing lists, moderators for a number of USENET newsgroups, and countless other services. chiark s internal setup is designed to enable my users to do a maximum number of exciting things with a minimum of intervention from me. chiark s OS install dates to 1993, when I installed Debian 0.93R5, the first version of Debian to advertise the ability to be upgraded without reinstalling. I think that makes it one of the oldest Debian installations in existence. Obviously it s had several new hardware platforms too. (There was a prior install of Linux on the initial hardware, remnants of which can maybe still be seen in some obscure corners of chiark s /usr/local.) chiark s install is also at the very high end of the installation complexity, and customisation, scale: reinstalling it completely would be an enormous amount of work. And it s unique. chiark s upgrade history chiark s last major OS upgrade was to jessie (Debian 8, released in April 2015). That was in 2016. Since then we have been relying on Debian s excellent security support posture, and the Debian LTS and more recently Freexian s Debian ELTS projects and some local updates, The use of ELTS - which supports only a subset of packages - was particularly uncomfortable. Additionally, chiark was installed with 32-bit x86 Linux (Debian i386), since that was what was supported and available at the time. But 32-bit is looking very long in the tooth. Why do a skip upgrade So, I wanted to move to the fairly recent stable release - Debian 11 (bullseye), which is just short of a year old. And I wanted to crossgrade (as its called) to 64-bit. In the past, I have found I have had greater success by doing direct upgrades, skipping intermediate releases, rather than by following the officially-supported path of going via every intermediate release. Doing a skip upgrade avoids exposure to any packaging bugs which were present only in intermediate release(s). Debian does usually fix bugs, but Debian has many cautious users, so it is not uncommon for bugs to be found after release, and then not be fixed until the next one. A skip upgrade avoids the need to try to upgrade to already-obsolete releases (which can involve messing about with multiple snapshots from snapshot.debian.org. It is also significantly faster and simpler, which is important not only because it reduces downtime, but also because it removes opportunities (and reduces the time available) for things to go badly. One downside is that sometimes maintainers aggressively remove compatibility measures for older releases. (And compatibililty packages are generally removed quite quickly by even cautious maintainers.) That means that the sysadmin who wants to skip-upgrade needs to do more manual fixing of things that haven t been dealt with automatically. And occasionally one finds compatibility problems that show up only when mixing very old and very new software, that no-one else has seen. Crossgrading Crossgrading is fairly complex and hazardous. It is well supported by the low level tools (eg, dpkg) but the higher-level packaging tools (eg, apt) get very badly confused. Nowadays the system is so complex that downloading things by hand and manually feeding them to dpkg is impractical, other than as a very occasional last resort. The approach, generally, has been to set the system up to want to be the new architecture, run apt in a download-only mode, and do the package installation manually, with some fixing up and retrying, until the system is coherent enough for apt to work. This is the approach I took. (In current releases, there are tools that will help but they are only in recent releases and I wanted to go direct. I also doubted that they would work properly on chiark, since it s so unusual.) Peril and planning Overall, this was a risky strategy to choose. The package dependencies wouldn t necessarily express all of the sequencing needed. But it still seemed that if I could come up with a working recipe, I could do it. I restored most of one of chiark s backups onto a scratch volume on my laptop. With the LVM snapshot tools and chroots. I was able to develop and test a set of scripts that would perform the upgrade. This was a very effective approach: my super-fast laptop, with local caches of the package repositories, was able to do many edit, test, debug cycles. My recipe made heavy use of snapshot.debian.org, to make sure that it wouldn t rot between testing and implementation. When I had a working scheme, I told my users about the planned downtime. I warned everyone it might take even 2 or 3 days. I made sure that my access arrangemnts to the data centre were in place, in case I needed to visit in person. (I have remote serial console and power cycler access.) Reality - the terrible rescue install My first task on taking the service down was the check that the emergency rescue installation worked: chiark has an ancient USB stick in the back, which I can boot to from the BIOS. The idea being that many things that go wrong could be repaired from there. I found that that install was too old to understand chiark s storage arrangements. mdadm tools gave very strange output. So I needed to upgrade it. After some experiments, I rebooted back into the main install, bringing chiark s service back online. I then used the main install of chiark as a kind of meta-rescue-image for the rescue-image. The process of getting the rescue image upgraded (not even to amd64, but just to something not totally ancient) was fraught. Several times I had to rescue it by copying files in from the main install outside. And, the rescue install was on a truly ancient 2G USB stick which was terribly terribly slow, and also very small. I hadn t done any significant planning for this subtask, because it was low-risk: there was little way to break the main install. Due to all these adverse factors, sorting out the rescue image took five hours. If I had known how long it would take, at the beginning, I would have skipped it. 5 hours is more than it would have taken to go to London and fix something in person. Reality - the actual core upgrade I was able to start the actual upgrade in the mid-afternoon. I meticulously checked and executed the steps from my plan. The terrifying scripts which sequenced the critical package updates ran flawlessly. Within an hour or so I had a system which was running bullseye amd64, albeit with many important packages still missing or unconfigured. So I didn t need the rescue image after all, nor to go to the datacentre. Fixing all the things Then I had to deal with all the inevitable fallout from an upgrade. Notable incidents: exim4 has a new tainting system This is to try to help the sysadmin avoid writing unsafe string interpolations. ( Little Bobby Tables. ) This was done by Exim upstream in a great hurry as part of a security response process. The new checks meant that the mail configuration did not work at all. I had to turn off the taint check completely. I m fairly confident that this is correct, because I am hyper-aware of quoting issues and all of my configuration is written to avoid the problems that tainting is supposed to avoid. One particular annoyance is that the approach taken for sqlite lookups makes it totally impossible to use more than one sqlite database. I think the sqlite quoting operator which one uses to interpolate values produces tainted output? I need to investigate this properly. LVM now ignores PVs which are directly contained within LVs by default chiark has LVM-on-RAID-on-LVM. This generally works really well. However, there was one edge case where I ended up without the intermediate RAID layer. The result is LVM-on-LVM. But recent versions of the LVM tools do not look at PVs inside LVs, by default. This is to help you avoid corrupting the state of any VMs you have on your system. I didn t know that at the time, though. All I knew was that LVM was claiming my PV was unusable , and wouldn t explain why. I was about to start on a thorough reading of the 15,000-word essay that is the commentary in the default /etc/lvm/lvm.conf to try to see if anything was relevant, when I received a helpful tipoff on IRC pointing me to the scan_lvs option. I need to file a bug asking for the LVM tools to explain why they have declared a PV unuseable. apache2 s default config no longer read one of my config files I had to do a merge (of my changes vs the maintainers changes) for /etc/apache2/apache2.conf. When doing this merge I failed to notice that the file /etc/apache2/conf.d/httpd.conf was no longer included by default. My merge dropped that line. There were some important things in there, and until I found this the webserver was broken. dpkg --skip-same-version DTWT during a crossgrade (This is not a fix all the things - I found it when developing my upgrade process.) When doing a crossgrade, one often wants to say to dpkg install all these things, but don t reinstall things that have already been done . That s what --skip-same-version is for. However, the logic had not been updated as part of the work to support multiarch, so it was wrong. I prepared a patched version of dpkg, and inserted it in the appropriate point in my prepared crossgrade plan. The patch is now filed as bug #1014476 against dpkg upstream Mailman Mailman is no longer in bullseye. It s only available in the previous release, buster. bullseye has Mailman 3 which is a totally different system - requiring basically, a completely new install and configuration. To even preserve existing archive links (a very important requirement) is decidedly nontrivial. I decided to punt on this whole situation. Currently chiark is running buster s version of Mailman. I will have to deal with this at some point and I m not looking forward to it. Python Of course that Mailman is Python 2. The Python project s extremely badly handled transition includes a recommendation to change the meaning of #!/usr/bin/python from Python 2, to Python 3. But Python 3 is a new language, barely compatible with Python 2 even in the most recent iterations of both, and it is usual to need to coinstall them. Happily Debian have provided the python-is-python2 package to make things work sensibly, albeit with unpleasant imprecations in the package summary description. USENET news Oh my god. INN uses many non-portable data formats, which just depend on your C types. And there are complicated daemons, statically linked libraries which cache on-disk data, and much to go wrong. I had numerous problems with this, and several outages and malfunctions. I may write about that on a future occasion.
(edited 2022-07-20 11:36 +01:00 and 2022-07-30 12:28+01:00 to fix typos)


comment count unavailable comments

29 July 2022

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 220 released

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 220. This version includes the following changes: 
* Support Haskell 9.x series files and update the test files to match. Thanks
  to Scott Talbert for the relevant info about the new format.
  (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#309)
* Fix a regression introduced in diffoscope version 207 where diffoscope
  would crash if one directory contained a directory that wasn't in the
  other. Thanks to Alderico Gallo for the report and the testcase.
  (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#310)
You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

28 July 2022

Matthew Garrett: UEFI rootkits and UEFI secure boot

Kaspersky describes a UEFI-implant used to attack Windows systems. Based on it appearing to require patching of the system firmware image, they hypothesise that it's propagated by manually dumping the contents of the system flash, modifying it, and then reflashing it back to the board. This probably requires physical access to the board, so it's not especially terrifying - if you're in a situation where someone's sufficiently enthusiastic about targeting you that they're reflashing your computer by hand, it's likely that you're going to have a bad time regardless.

But let's think about why this is in the firmware at all. Sophos previously discussed an implant that's sufficiently similar in some technical details that Kaspersky suggest they may be related to some degree. One notable difference is that the MyKings implant described by Sophos installs itself into the boot block of legacy MBR partitioned disks. This code will only be executed on old-style BIOS systems (or UEFI systems booting in BIOS compatibility mode), and they have no support for code signatures, so there's no need to be especially clever. Run malicious code in the boot block, patch the next stage loader, follow that chain all the way up to the kernel. Simple.

One notable distinction here is that the MBR boot block approach won't be persistent - if you reinstall the OS, the MBR will be rewritten[1] and the infection is gone. UEFI doesn't really change much here - if you reinstall Windows a new copy of the bootloader will be written out and the UEFI boot variables (that tell the firmware which bootloader to execute) will be updated to point at that. The implant may still be on disk somewhere, but it won't be run.

But there's a way to avoid this. UEFI supports loading firmware-level drivers from disk. If, rather than providing a backdoored bootloader, the implant takes the form of a UEFI driver, the attacker can set a different set of variables that tell the firmware to load that driver at boot time, before running the bootloader. OS reinstalls won't modify these variables, which means the implant will survive and can reinfect the new OS install. The only way to get rid of the implant is to either reformat the drive entirely (which most OS installers won't do by default) or replace the drive before installation.

This is much easier than patching the system firmware, and achieves similar outcomes - the number of infected users who are going to wipe their drives to reinstall is fairly low, and the kernel could be patched to hide the presence of the implant on the filesystem[2]. It's possible that the goal was to make identification as hard as possible, but there's a simpler argument here - if the firmware has UEFI Secure Boot enabled, the firmware will refuse to load such a driver, and the implant won't work. You could certainly just patch the firmware to disable secure boot and lie about it, but if you're at the point of patching the firmware anyway you may as well just do the extra work of installing your implant there.

I think there's a reasonable argument that the existence of firmware-level rootkits suggests that UEFI Secure Boot is doing its job and is pushing attackers into lower levels of the stack in order to obtain the same outcomes. Technologies like Intel's Boot Guard may (in their current form) tend to block user choice, but in theory should be effective in blocking attacks of this form and making things even harder for attackers. It should already be impossible to perform attacks like the one Kaspersky describes on more modern hardware (the system should identify that the firmware has been tampered with and fail to boot), which pushes things even further - attackers will have to take advantage of vulnerabilities in the specific firmware they're targeting. This obviously means there's an incentive to find more firmware vulnerabilities, which means the ability to apply security updates for system firmware as easily as security updates for OS components is vital (hint hint if your system firmware updates aren't available via LVFS you're probably doing it wrong).

We've known that UEFI rootkits have existed for a while (Hacking Team had one in 2015), but it's interesting to see a fairly widespread one out in the wild. Protecting against this kind of attack involves securing the entire boot chain, including the firmware itself. The industry has clearly been making progress in this respect, and it'll be interesting to see whether such attacks become more common (because Secure Boot works but firmware security is bad) or not.

[1] As we all remember from Windows installs overwriting Linux bootloaders
[2] Although this does run the risk of an infected user booting another OS instead, and being able to see the implant

comment count unavailable comments

27 July 2022

Vincent Bernat: ClickHouse SF Bay Area Meetup: Akvorado

Here are the slides I presented for a ClickHouse SF Bay Area Meetup in July 2022, hosted by Altinity. They are about Akvorado, a network flow collector and visualizer, and notably on how it relies on ClickHouse, a column-oriented database.
Slides in PDF format
The meetup was recorded and available on YouTube. Here is the part relevant to my presentation, with subtitles:1
I got a few questions about how to get information from the higher layers, like HTTP. As my use case for Akvorado was at the network edge, my answers were mostly negative. However, as sFlow is extensible, when collecting flows from Linux servers instead, you could embed additional data and they could be exported as well. I also got a question about doing aggregation in a single table. ClickHouse can aggregate automatically data using TTL. My answer for not doing that is partial. There is another reason: the retention periods of the various tables may overlap. For example, the main table keeps data for 15 days, but even in these 15 days, if I do a query on a 12-hour window, it is faster to use the flows_1m0s aggregated table, unless I request something about ports and IP addresses.
  1. To generate the subtitles, I have used Amazon Transcribe, the speech-to-text solution from Amazon AWS. Unfortunately, there is no en-FR language available, which would have been useful for my terrible accent. While the subtitles were 100% accurate when the host, Robert Hodge from Altinity, was speaking, the success rate on my talk was quite lower. I had to rewrite almost all sentences. However, using speech-to-text is still useful to get the timings, as it is also something requiring a lot of work to do manually.

26 July 2022

Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, June 2022

A Debian LTS logo
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering. Debian project funding No any major updates on running projects.
Two 1, 2 projects are in the pipeline now.
Tryton project is in a review phase. Gradle projects is still fighting in work. In June, we put aside 2254 EUR to fund Debian projects. We re looking forward to receive more projects from various Debian teams! Learn more about the rationale behind this initiative in this article. Debian LTS contributors In June, 15 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available: Evolution of the situation In June we released 27 DLAs.

This is a special month, where we have two releases (stretch and jessie) as ELTS and NO release as LTS. Buster is still handled by the security team and will probably be given in LTS hands at the beginning of the August. During this month we are updating the infrastructure, documentation and improve our internal processes to switch to a new release.
Many developers have just returned back from Debconf22, hold in Prizren, Kosovo! Many (E)LTS members could meet face-to-face and discuss some technical and social topics! Also LTS BoF took place, where the project was introduced (link to video).
Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold. We are pleased to welcome Alter Way where their support of Debian is publicly acknowledged at the higher level, see this French quote of Alterway s CEO.

Michael Ablassmeier: Added remote capability to virtnbdbackup

Latest virtnbdbackup version now supports backing up remote libvirt hosts, too. No installation on the hypervisor required anymore: 
virtnbdbackup -U qemu+ssh://usr@hypervisor/system -d vm1 -o /backup/vm1
Same applies for restore operations, other enhancements are: Next up: add TLS support for remote NBD connections.

25 July 2022

Bits from Debian: DebConf22 closes in Prizren and DebConf23 dates announced

DebConf22 group photo - click to enlarge On Sunday 24 July 2022, the annual Debian Developers and Contributors Conference came to a close. Hosting 260 attendees from 38 different countries over a combined 91 event talks, discussion sessions, Birds of a Feather (BoF) gatherings, workshops, and activities, DebConf22 was a large success. The conference was preceded by the annual DebCamp held 10 July to 16 July which focused on individual work and team sprints for in-person collaboration towards developing Debian. In particular, this year there have been sprints to advance development of Mobian/Debian on mobile, reproducible builds and Python in Debian, and a BootCamp for newcomers, to get introduced to Debian and have some hands-on experience with using it and contributing to the community. The actual Debian Developers Conference started on Sunday 17 July 2022. Together with activities such as the traditional 'Bits from the DPL' talk, the continuous key-signing party, lightning talks and the announcement of next year's DebConf (DebConf23 in Kochi, India), there were several sessions related to programming language teams such as Python, Perl and Ruby, as well as news updates on several projects and internal Debian teams, discussion sessions (BoFs) from many technical teams (Long Term Support, Android tools, Debian Derivatives, Debian Installer and Images team, Debian Science...) and local communities (Debian Brasil, Debian India, the Debian Local Teams), along with many other events of interest regarding Debian and free software. The schedule was updated each day with planned and ad-hoc activities introduced by attendees over the course of the entire conference. Several activities that couldn\'t be organized in past years due to the COVID pandemic returned to the conference\'s schedule: a job fair, open-mic and poetry night, the traditional Cheese and Wine party, the group photos and the Day Trip. For those who were not able to attend, most of the talks and sessions were recorded for live streams with videos made, available through the Debian meetings archive website. Almost all of the sessions facilitated remote participation via IRC messaging apps or online collaborative text documents. The DebConf22 website will remain active for archival purposes and will continue to offer links to the presentations and videos of talks and events. Next year, DebConf23 will be held in Kochi, India, from September 10 to September 16, 2023. As tradition follows before the next DebConf the local organizers in India will start the conference activites with DebCamp (September 03 to September 09, 2023), with particular focus on individual and team work towards improving the distribution. DebConf is committed to a safe and welcome environment for all participants. See the web page about the Code of Conduct in DebConf22 website for more details on this. Debian thanks the commitment of numerous sponsors to support DebConf22, particularly our Platinum Sponsors: Lenovo, Infomaniak, ITP Prizren and Google. About Debian The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of volunteers from all over the world work together to create and maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal operating system. About DebConf DebConf is the Debian Project's developer conference. In addition to a full schedule of technical, social and policy talks, DebConf provides an opportunity for developers, contributors and other interested people to meet in person and work together more closely. It has taken place annually since 2000 in locations as varied as Scotland, Argentina, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. More information about DebConf is available from https://debconf.org/. About Lenovo As a global technology leader manufacturing a wide portfolio of connected products, including smartphones, tablets, PCs and workstations as well as AR/VR devices, smart home/office and data center solutions, Lenovo understands how critical open systems and platforms are to a connected world. About Infomaniak Infomaniak is Switzerland\'s largest web-hosting company, also offering backup and storage services, solutions for event organizers, live-streaming and video on demand services. It wholly owns its datacenters and all elements critical to the functioning of the services and products provided by the company (both software and hardware). About ITP Prizren Innovation and Training Park Prizren intends to be a changing and boosting element in the area of ICT, agro-food and creatives industries, through the creation and management of a favourable environment and efficient services for SMEs, exploiting different kinds of innovations that can contribute to Kosovo to improve its level of development in industry and research, bringing benefits to the economy and society of the country as a whole. About Google Google is one of the largest technology companies in the world, providing a wide range of Internet-related services and products such as online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, software, and hardware. Google has been supporting Debian by sponsoring DebConf for more than ten years, and is also a Debian partner sponsoring parts of Salsa's continuous integration infrastructure within Google Cloud Platform. Contact Information For further information, please visit the DebConf22 web page at https://debconf22.debconf.org/ or send mail to press@debian.org.

23 July 2022

Wouter Verhelst: Planet Grep now running PtLink

Almost 2 decades ago, Planet Debian was created using the "planetplanet" RSS aggregator. A short while later, I created Planet Grep using the same software. Over the years, the blog aggregator landscape has changed a bit. First of all, planetplanet was abandoned, forked into Planet Venus, and then abandoned again. Second, the world of blogging (aka the "blogosphere") has disappeared much, and the more modern world uses things like "Social Networks", etc, making blogs less relevant these days. A blog aggregator community site is still useful, however, and so I've never taken Planet Grep down, even though over the years the number of blogs that was carried on Planet Grep has been reducing. In the past almost 20 years, I've just run Planet Grep on my personal server, upgrading its Debian release from whichever was the most recent stable release in 2005 to buster, never encountering any problems. That all changed when I did the upgrade to Debian bullseye, however. Planet Venus is a Python 2 application, which was never updated to Python 3. Since Debian bullseye drops support for much of Python 2, focusing only on Python 3 (in accordance with python upstream's policy on the matter), that means I have had to run Planet Venus from inside a VM for a while now, which works as a short-term solution but not as a long-term one. Although there are other implementations of blog aggregation software out there, I wanted to stick with something (mostly) similar. Additionally, I have been wanting to add functionality to it to also pull stuff from Social Networks, where possible (and legal, since some of these have... scary Terms Of Use documents). So, as of today, Planet Grep is no longer powered by Planet Venus, but instead by PtLink. Rather than Python, it was written in Perl (a language with which I am more familiar), and there are plans for me to extend things in ways that have little to do with blog aggregation anymore... There are a few other Planets out there that also use Planet Venus at this point -- Planet Debian and Planet FSFE are two that I'm currently already aware of, but I'm sure there might be more, too. At this point, PtLink is not yet on feature parity with Planet Venus -- as shown by the fact that it can't yet build either Planet Debian or Planet FSFE successfully. But I'm not stopping my development here, and hopefully I'll have something that successfully builds both of those soon, too. As a side note, PtLink is not intended to be bug compatible with Planet Venus. For one example, the configuration for Planet Grep contains an entry for Frederic Descamps, but somehow Planet Venus failed to fetch his feed. With the switch to PtLink, that seems fixed, and now some entries from Frederic seem to appear. I'm not going to be "fixing" that feature... but of course there might be other issues that will appear. If that's the case, let me know. If you're reading this post through Planet Grep, consider this a public service announcement for the possibility (hopefully a remote one) of minor issues.

Next.

Previous.