The Norwegian Unix User Group, where I am a member, and where people interested in free software, open standards and UNIX like operating systems like Linux and the BSDs come together, record our monthly technical presentations on video. The purpose is to document the talks and spread them to a wider audience. For this, the the Norwegian nationwide open channel Frikanalen is a useful venue. Since a few days ago, when I figured out the REST API to program the channel time schedule, the channel has been filled with NUUG talks, related recordings and some Creative Commons licensed TED talks (from archive.org). I fill all "leftover bits" on the channel with content from NUUG, which at the moment is almost 17 of 24 hours every day. The list of NUUG videos uploaded so far include things like a one hour talk by John Perry Barlow when he visited Oslo, a presentation of Haiku, the BeOS re-implementation, the history of FiksGataMi, the Norwegian version of FixMyStreet, the good old Warriors of the net video and many others. We have a large backlog of NUUG talks not yet uploaded to Frikanalen, and plan to upload every useful bit to the channel to spread the word there. I also hope to find useful recordings from the Chaos Computer Club and Debian conferences and spread them on the channel as well. But this require locating the videos and their meta information (title, description, license, etc), and preparing the recordings for broadcast, and I have not yet had the spare time to focus on this. Perhaps you want to help. Please join us on IRC, #nuug on irc.freenode.net if you want to help make this happen. But as I said, already the channel is already almost exclusively filled with technical topics, and if you want to learn something new today, check out the Ogg Theora web stream or use one of the other ways to get access to the channel. Unfortunately the Ogg Theora recoding for distribution still do not properly sync the video and sound. It is generated by recoding a internal MPEG transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to Ogg Theora / Vorbis, and we have not been able to find a way that produces acceptable quality. Help needed, please get in touch if you know how to fix it using free software.

I love reading Linux Weekly News. It's a great source of high quality Linux and FOSS journalism, and I've been a subscriber for years. One mild annoyance I have with the site is the way articles are cross-linked. All the article URIs are in the format /Article/531114/, which isn't particularly descriptive about that article's content. When faced with an article that links to another article, with perhaps a word of anchor text, it's hard to tell if the new article is worth opening in a tab, is indeed already open in a tab, or has been previously read. (Yes, the "visited link" colour can help to a small degree, but even then, it doesn't tell you which previously read article it is). This is what God the W3C invented the title attribute for. Back in April 2011, I emailed Jonathan Corbet and asked if his content management system could just do this, but it was apparently a bit tricky, and it got filed in the "feature request" bucket. I was sufficiently irritated by this deficiency last Monday, when doing some heavy reading on a topic, and so I decided to take matters into my own hands, and also learn how to write a Chrome Extension into the bargain. I was delighted to have scratched the itch under 24 hours later and developed something that solved my particular problem - lwn4chrome I'm calling it. I'm just finalising an icon for it, and then I'll have a stab at putting it in the Chrome Web Store as a freebie. I might even have a crack at writing a Firefox extension as well for completeness, but I suspect the bulk of LWN's readership is using Chrome or Chromium.

My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donators (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me. Debian LTS This month I have been paid to work 14.5 hours on Debian LTS. I worked mostly on CVE triage (41 commits in the security tracker) and organizational issues. One maintainer complained that he had not been kept in the loop for an LTS update of his package. After some discussion, I decided to change the way I did CVE triage so that any time that I add a package to our list of packages needing an update, I also send a mail to the maintainer, thus offering him the opportunity to step in. To make this sustainable, I wrote a small helper script that will generate a mail out of a template. And to kickstart the process I mailed all maintainers of packages that were already listed in our queue of packages to update. To improve the email generated, I requested a JSON export of the security tracker data (see discussions in #761859). In the mean time, Holger worked on this already and after a few iterations we did converge on an output format that will be really useful both for my needs in terms of CVE triage but also for the Package Tracker to be able to display the list of security vulnerabilities affecting each release (see #761730). Last but not least, I don t want to be the only one doing CVE triage for our LTS release so I documented the process in our wiki page. As a side note, I sponsored an e2fsprogs update prepared by Nguyen Cong and I sent the DLA for the embargoed samba update that had been prepared by Ivo de Decker (thanks to both of them!). Tryton Like last month, I invested again a copious amount of time on Tryton, fixing some bugs that were affecting me and improving the French chart of accounts to properly manage purchases and sales within the European Union. Here are some links for more details:

• #4523: Change account 58 into a real non-view account
• Preserve the user-supplied date on account moves when it s valid
• #4532: Rename some tax codes hosting base amounts to avoid having two codes with the same name
• #4568: Fix the credit note base tax code and tax code for the sales in France (took quite some discussion to double check this with an accountant)
• #4569: Track the amount invoiced in sales outside Europe
• #4570: Properly handle EU-sales and EU-purchases in the VAT report (this was by far the most complicated issue I dealt with, it took several days and multiple tries to get it right).

Debian I did some work on Distro Tracker, I fixed #777453 (password reset not working because the generated email was using an invalid From email) and #779247 (obsolete build reproducibility action items were not dropped). I also started to work on restructuring the mail handling in distro-tracker (cf #754913) but it s not public yet. While I have no plans to stop contributing to Debian (it s part of my day job!), I reduced my non-work related involvement by officially recognizing that I was no longer properly assuming some of my responsibilities and that I was following too many mailing lists and RSS feeds. The most notable changes are that I removed myself from the maintenance of dpkg, developers-reference, quilt, sql-ledger, and a few perl/python modules. Misc Voting software. Part of the reason why I m reducing my involvement in Debian is that I got more involved in Nouvelle Donne (a French political party) and in particular in the handling of its digital infrastructure (currently running on Ubuntu, doh!). As part of this, I was looking for free software to handle secure votes and elections (and if possible adhering to the principles of liquid democracy). There s no perfect solution and no clear winner. That said I started following the evolution of AgoraVoting because it seems to have a good momentum and has some interesting features (it already supports votes with ranked choices, supports good crypto, has been used for elections involving large numbers of voters in the context of Podemos in Spain). But it still has some ways to go to establish itself as a truly international and community-backed project. GDM bug. Due to my work on Kali, I filed a bug against GDM (this one has been quickly fixed upstream, it s still open in Debian) and another one against accountsservice to request the possibility to define the default graphical session. Dirvish formula for Salt. I contributed another formula to manage backups with dirvish. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

One comment Liked this article? Click here. My blog is Flattr-enabled.

The new release 0.11.5 of Rcpp just reached the CRAN network for GNU R, and a Debian package has also been be uploaded. Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing GNU R with C++ code. As of today, 345 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analyses go faster and further; BioConductor adds another 41 packages, and casual searches on GitHub suggests dozens mores. This release continues the 0.11.* release cycle, adding another large number of small bug fixes, polishes and enhancements. Since the previous release in January, we incorporated a number of pull requests and changes from several contributors. This time, JJ deserves a special mention as he is responsible for a metric ton of the changes listed below, making Rcpp Attributes even more awesome. As always, you can follow the development via the GitHub repo and particularly the Issue tickets and Pull Requests. And any discussions, questions, ... regarding Rcpp are always welcome at the rcpp-devel mailing list. See below for a detailed list of changes extracted from the NEWS file.

Changes in Rcpp version 0.11.5 (2015-03-04)

Changes in Rcpp API:

• An error handler for tinyformat was defined to prevent the assert() macro from spilling.
• The Rcpp::warning function was added as a wrapper for Rf_warning.
• The XPtr class was extended with new checked_get and release functions as well as improved behavior (throw an exception rather than crash) when a NULL external pointer is dereferenced.
• R code is evaluated within an R_toplevelExec block to prevent user interrupts from bypassing C++ destructors on the stack.
• The Rcpp::Environment constructor can now use a supplied parent environment.
• The Rcpp::Function constructor can now use a supplied environment or namespace.
• The attributes_hidden macro from R is used to shield internal functions; the R_ext/Visibility.h header is now included as well.
• A Rcpp::print function was added as a wrapper around Rf_PrintValue.

Changes in Rcpp Attributes:

• The pkg_types.h file is now included in RcppExports.cpp if it is present in either the inst/include or src.
• sourceCpp was modified to allow includes of local files (e.g. #include "foo.hpp"). Implementation files (.cc; .cpp) corresponding to local includes are also automatically built if they exist.
• The generated attributes code was simplified with respect to RNGScope and now uses RObject and its destructor rather than SEXP protect/unprotect.
• Support addition of the rng parameter in Rcpp::export to suppress the otherwise automatic inclusion of RNGScope in generated code.
• Attributes code was made more robust and can e.g. no longer recurse.
• Version 3.2 of the Rtools is now correctly detected as well.
• Allow 'R' to come immediately after '***' for defining embedded R code chunks in sourceCpp.
• The attributes vignette has been updated with documentation on new features added over the past several releases.

Changes in Rcpp tests:

• On Travis CI, all build dependencies are installed as binary .deb packages resulting in faster tests.

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

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

In May, the DebConf15 Team held a competition to design the logo for DebConf15, which will take place in Heidelberg, Germany. We received many great entries, and after a week-long voting period, this logo by Valessio Brito was selected: The lion depicted is the Kurpf lzer L we , which makes up Heidelberg s coat of arms. Valessio is Brazilian, graduated in Communication and Advertising, and specialised in Free Software Development. He is currently a consultant to UI Design of the Secretariat-General of the Presidency of the Republic, living in Brasilia, Brazil. He has been a Debian user since 2000, contributing to local communities, Inkscape and the Debian project. Valessio has a tattoo of the red spiral! His personal website is valessiobrito.com.br (pt_BR). He invites you to visit www.DebianArt.org to discover the work of other artists and designs that contribute to the Debian project. Thanks very much Valessio for your great contribution!

I think poor black people and white intellectuals using the same model is pretty telling, actually: the two most isolated sides of the spectrum, he said.

After starting with Joey Hess, we continue with Paul Wise. What makes his star to shine are many things such as being a DSA (Debian System Administrator), a helpful hand on mailings list, encouraging people to join Debian teams but most of all - he has encyclopedia knowledge on Debian as a whole which he gladly shares with anyone who asks (very fast response on IRC channels). It is almost impossible for any single person to count all Debian teams, work and places - to know most of those things, you can image the vast knowledge which Paul has. The legend says that his brain has better and faster search engine algorithm on Debian related queries than all other engines combined. So lets see what he has to share with world. me: Who are you? pabs: Paul Wise (pabs) and I have to say that I'm no-where near as knowledgeable as your intro suggests. me: How did you start programming? pabs: Messing around with fractals and graphics things in MS BASIC. me: How would you now advise others to start programming? pabs: Pick an issue in a tool you use, investigate how the tool works and how you can change it, fix that and contribute the change back to the project that created that tool. In the process you will learn skills, interact with the community and contribute to the project. me: Setup of your development machine? pabs: Lenovo Thinkpad with external monitor, Debian testing and some tweaks me What is your preferable language (for hacking)? Why? How do you compare it to other languages? pabs: I currently prefer Python for its readability. It still has some rough edges though the documentation covers them fairly well. I generally pick up new languages when working on projects written in them. Haskell is next on the horizon due to Nikki and the Robots. me: Describe your current most memorable situation as software developer/hacker? pabs: I had a great time creating fractals in BASIC, learning about the Mandelbrot set, L-systems and more. My days and nights of hacking on frhed (a GPLed hex editor for Windows) to help me cheat at Civilisation were pretty memorable. frhed led to my work on reverse engineering the CHM file format (a documentation format for Windows programs). A stand-out moment during my time with Debian was hacking on the derivates census patch generation code during the Debian UK BBQ weekend, surrounded by geeks playing Portal, cooking things, hacking on Debian and generally having a good time (thanks Steve!). me: Some memorable moments from Debian conferences? pabs: There are so many; meeting Debian folks, playing Mao once and then never again, late night games of werewolf, both delectably delicious and hideously disgusting cheeses, fried insects, day trips to beautiful landscapes, inspiring keynotes, exciting BoFs, secret IRC channels for planning surprise birthday parties, blue hair, wet air, blocks of fried cheese, a vast quantity of icecream, pants, geeks in the surf, volcanoes, hiking, a wonderful view, a uni-cycling stormtrooper & more. me: How do you see future of Debian development? pabs: I hope we will continue to exist and uphold our principles for the foreseeable future. I don't have any crystal balls though. me: You recently became member of Debian DSA - what is that like, what roles do you have and what tasks are in front of DSA? pabs: We wrote a bit of text about that for DPN recently. me: You have large knowledge on Debian and you share it with anyone who wants to know more. What motivates you to do so? pabs: I want the operating system I personally rely on to exist into the future, helping folks work on and join Debian can help with that. me: Why should developers and users join Debian community? What makes Debian a great and happy place? pabs: Every Debian contributor has different reasons for joining the community. Personally the Social Contract, the DFSG and the spirit and culture behind them are the main reason to be involved. I also like our many efforts towards technical excellence and correctness. Of course I've made a number of good friends over the years, especially as a result of attending DebConf every year since 2007. me: You are member of Debian publicity team which writes Debian news - do you need more people to join that team and how can they start? pabs: Since there is an infinite amount of work to do, pretty much every part of Debian always needs help, that includes the publicity team. We published a post about ways to help here. me: If someone wants to contribute to Debian in terms of packaging, can they do it anonymously (for example over Tor network, does Debian have .onion address)? pabs: Due to Debian's penchant for transparency it is harder but there are definitely package maintainers who have built up a reputation for good work under a pseudonym over the years and become Debian contributors as a result. I'm not aware of completely anonymous package maintainers but there are definitely people who file bugs using one-off pseudonyms, which is almost the same thing as anonymously. There are definitely Debian contributors and members who use Tor while contributing to Debian. In fact, as Debian is very highly dependent on OpenPGP and the best practices for OpenPGP include refreshing your keyring slowly over Tor, so probably quite a number of Debian contributors use Tor. As far as I know Debian itself does not run any Tor relays or onion services. me: What are places that non-packaging developers and people could join and help spread Debian even more? pabs: There are many ways to help Debian, including non-technical ones. Unfortunately our web page about helping Debian isn't quite up-to-date with all of them but a few more are to volunteer at DebConf, helo with artwork requests, speak about Debian at events or even come up with ideas for projects. Whatever skills you have, Debian can probably make use of them. If you aren't sure where to start, jump on the debian-mentors mailing list or IRC channel and we can probably guide you to the right place within Debian. Don't worry about not being skilled enough, everyone starts somewhere. me: How do you see Debian will manage webapps? pabs: Personally I prefer locally installed software, standard data formats and standard data transfer protocols to the wild webapps world but I understand they are becoming very popular to produce and use due to the ubiquity of the web browser platform. Antonio Terceiro is mentoring a project for this year's newcomer mentorship programs (outreachy/gsoc) that aims to improve support for installing web apps on Debian installations. I hope it succeeds as it could help make Debian more popular on servers and home servers in particular. me: How would you advise Debian (and other FLOSS users) to setup their machine in terms of security and anonymity? pabs: All technology has upsides and downsides. I would advise anyone to analyse their situation and protect themselves accordingly. For example if you have a bad memory, full disk encryption, which is based on pass-phrases might lead to data loss and physical security might be a better choice for protecting your data. The right choices around technology are very much a personal thing. me: Is it better to setup xmonad (because it is Haskell based WM) with small dependency chain or GNOME (because it is getting sandboxed apps) in term of security and privacy implications? pabs: Again, the right choices around technology are very much a personal thing. Due to the design of X11, both of these are approximately equivalent from a window-manager security properties point of view, that is to say, pretty bad. Wayland is one of the possible X11 successors and offers much better security properties. GNOME folks are working on switching to Wayland. Ultimately though it comes down to how each person uses their window manager and which software they run under it. me: Should Debian join Tor project as distro that installs Tor relays by default - should it offer that as option in installer in Debian 9? pabs: Running a Tor relay requires a reasonably fast and reliable Internet connection and should be a conscious decision on behalf of the sysadmin for a computer so Debian probably shouldn't install them by default. If tasksel gets support for installing tasks from Debian Pure Blends, then we could add a Tor relay task to the Debian Sanctuary Pure Blend. me: Have you ever considered joining initiatives such as FreedomBox? pabs: I was quite moved by Eben Moglen's talk at DebConf10 in New York and the resulting BoF. It seemed like a very ambitious project but I didn't really have the knowledge, skills or time to contribute yet. me: Are you a gamer? Valve Steam games are offered for free to Debian Developers - do you use steam and play Valve games? Your thoughts on Steam and non-free Linux gaming? pabs: I play computer games occasionally, all from Debian main or ones that I'm packaging. 0ad is my current go-to for a bit of gaming. I don't have any experience with Steam or non-free games on Linux. me: Is there something you would change in FLOSS ecosystem? pabs: Various folks have highlighted new and ongoing challenges for the FLOSS ecosystem in various places in recent years. Something that I would like to highlight that does not get talked about enough is the choices we make around our digital artefacts. This is the discussion around "preferred form for modification" or "source". The "source" for a particular digital artefact is a deliberate choice on behalf of the authors. Often generated files are distributed alongside the "source" without any instructions for reproducing the generated files from the "source". It sometimes happens that FLOSS contributors forget to distriute what they have chosen as "source", instead just distributing the generated files. This is a fairly well known issue but still happens. What isn't thought about quite as much is that the choice of "source" has consequences for future development possibilities of that "source". Some forms of "source" are more expressive than others, can be modified in a wider variety of ways and are better choices in general. Sometimes the consequences of choosing less expressive forms are mild and other times they are quite important. I hope more people will start to think about these choices. Some examples where, in my opinion, various people could have made better choices are listed in the mail I sent to the games team list last year. Another thing I would like to highlight is the work that organisations like Software Freedom Conservancy and Software in the Public Interest do to protect, defend, promote and support FLOSS projects. It is very important work that needs our interest and support. me: Can FLOSS world create great alternatives to Viber, Dropbox, WhatsUp, Facebook, Skype and other non-free services? pabs: I think that the FLOSS world has already created alternatives to all of those. The success of non-free services doesn't take these alternatives away but it does mean some of them are less useful because some of them are the kind of tools that become more useful with a larger amount of people using them. I don't know what it would take for the FLOSS alternatives to achieve similar success as network effects are hard to overcome. Hopefully mako is right and the network effects are overrated. me: Your thoughts and compare Cloud, IaaS, PaaS, SaaSS? To what should the FLOSS world pay more attention and energy? pabs: Initially I dismissed these as buzzwords and a threat to Free Software. These days I view them as potential opportunities for Free Software. Cloud-related technologies such as OpenStack and virtual machines can make private compute farm hardware more flexible and useful to their owners. IaaS providers can be used to run Debian more simply and cheaply and therefore bring Debian to more people than possible with hardware. PaaS providers can be used to run Free Software services. SaaSS can be based entirely on Free Software and respect users. Of course, just like running Free Software on hardware (proprietary or libre), cloud technology, IaaS, PaaS and SaaSS all come with downsides. The FLOSS world should aim to inform users of our software of these downsides. For example, the Debian installer could note that it is running on Intel CPUs with a proprietary BIOS and various proprietary software running, that it is running on a mobile phone with a locked bootloader, that it is running in a Xen VM on machines owned by Amazon. Free Software services could note they are running on Google App Engine etc. Free Software web browsers, chat clients etc could note when they are connecting to proprietary network services. All these notes could inform users about the downsides present in the particular situation encountered. There is also much work to be done making it easier to run Free Software on top of or use Free Software to connect to all manner of platforms from lowRISC to UEFI to VMware to Google App Engine to GitHub to Facebook. The more places Free Software can reach, the more people will be exposed to the philosophy behind it and the more potential there is for folks to join the community. While co-option of the FLOSS world is a dangerous certainty, co-option of proprietary platforms might be able to expand the reach of the philosophy behind Free Software. me: Your thoughts on Purism (the open hardware laptop initiative that got recently funded on CrowdSupply)? pabs: I don't know enough about that to comment but personally I am more interested in a laptop based on a libre CPU architecture. The RISC-V ISA and the lowRISC project seems to be one of the more promising possibilities at this point in time. me: Did you watch Citizenfour - comments on it? pabs: I've seen the trailer and look forward to watching it at some point, I read there might be a screening at DebConf15.

I just released NBD 3.9 When generating the changelog, I noticed that 3.8 happened two weeks shy of a year ago, which is far too long. As a result, the new release has many new features:

• AF_UNIX support
• New "treefiles" mode, which exports a gazillion of page-sized files; useful for exporting things which are stored on an SSHFS or amazon AWS (trough FUSE) or similar, where every write causes an upload to the backend storage
• New "cowdir" option, allowing to specify where copy-on-write files are written.
• Minor changes so that nbd-client can now also be compiled for the Android platform. This required removal of the -swap command line option, which requires the mlockall() system call, unavailable on Android.
• Protocol update: a reserved bit is used to avoid sending the 124 bytes of useless data at the beginning of the negotiation. The change is implemented so that things will still work with clients not supporting this option, however.
• gznbd is now built by the same build system, rather than a separate one. Note however that gznbd is still unmaintained; it should be considered a "contrib" feature.
• "nbd-server -V" will now output the nbd-server version number.
• Fixed test suite on non-GNU getopt() implementations
• Various fixes found through Coverity and the clang static analyzer, and lots of other minor things too small to mention here.

Get it at the usual place.

I've been using distributed version control systems for a good while, started with TLA back in 2001, when it was still a bunch of shell scripts and was simply called "Arch". I jumped the Git bandwagon quite early too, sometime around May 2005, I believe, though it was only something to test and play with on the side: I didn't migrate my projects over yet. There are many reasons why I preferred these over the systems I used in the past (RCS and CVS; never considered Subversion an option), most of those reasons have been discussed at length over the years, and there's no reason to do so again.The reason for this post, is because I read a blog post about why Git and the other DVCSes fall short. There are a number of things in that article that I find... well, lets just say misinformed. I'll try to explain why.But here's the rub

I have wanted to have the full history while offline a grand total of maybe about six times. And this is merely going down over time as bandwidth gets ever more readily available. If you work as a field tech, or on a space station, or in a submarine or something, then okay, sure, this is a huge feature for you. But for the rest of us, I am going to assert that this is not the use case you need to optimize for when choosing a VCS.

I'm neither a field tech, nor do I work on a space station or a submarine. Yet, having the full history available locally has been crucial for my work for at least the past six years. Initially, I worked offline primarily, because my internet connection was incredibly limited (slow, expensive and unreliable), yet, I had a habit of committing small changes often. I needed a full clone to work effectively, and conveniently. Throw-away branches and all that - I needed them local, I didn't have the resources to push them online every time I wanted a merge.But now that I have fast and reliable internet, why do I need the full history on my own computer? I do, because I do much more research than I do development. The vast majority of my work between 2010 and 2012 involved reading histories, cherry picking and so on. About six hours a day, I was reading the past. Having the full history locally is a terrific aid when your job involves digging through it.Between 2013 and 2014, the amount of history reading dropped significantly, but I still worked with long-lived branches a lot, branches where history matters, where having easy and fast access to them is indispensable. I still had to find changes based on content (not commit message, branch, date or anything - content) on a daily basis. Hitting the network for each and every search would have wasted not only tremendous bandwidth and processing power on the server, but also a significant amount of time.If you do more maintenance and research, or follow a good number of branches (or forks), with the intent to merge and cherry-pick actively from them, having all the histories available locally is a huge improvement. I'm happy to pay the price of "wasting" disk space to have this available. I couldn't work otherwise. Without full, local history, the things I did for syslog-ng would not have been possible. No maintenance, none of the features I implemented, none of the fixes I found. Why? Because I rely on the project's history to aid me in learning the whys, not just the hows.Thank you, but - perhaps unlike others - I like to learn from the past, and prefer doing it efficiently.Say goodbye to blobs (or your sanity (and sometimes both))

You know what kind of external binary asset management system works really well? Subversion. Turns out it works tolerably for source control, too. Maybe you should take a look at it.

Sure, some systems are better at managing binary assets. Git - and usually DVCSes - are terrible at it. There's nothing stopping anyone from using two systems: one for source, another for data. Mind you, I am extremely happy with git-annex. I disagree with Subversion being tolerable for source control. I'd turn this assertion around instead: You know what kind of system works really well for source code? Git. Turns out it works tolerably as an external binary assest management system, too. Maybe you should take a look at it.But then, I rarely need to work with blobs, so I'm likely not the best person to disagree here.Say goodbye to sane version synchronizationOkay, so this part of the article is ill-titled, I believe. Large repositories and version synchronisation are two different, not necessarily related topic. Granted DVCSes may not be the best fit for large repositories, but neither are centralised version control systems, based on my past experience. I had the misfortune of working with a roughly 3-4Gb (checked out) project, with extensive history, managed with a centralised version control system, without local history. It was terrible (and blame was so slow and expensive that we were told never to use it, because it crashed the server). While the system allowed us to have a reasonable overview over the whole project, but it utterly failed at allowing us to work at the component level. How do I see which version of component X we had in project release A? Or the version of component Y we had two weeks ago? Or what if we have component M, made up from components J and K, and belonging to component Z? Good luck managing that in a single repository.With TLA, we had configs, which were a bit cumbersome to use, but captured most of the essential parts of managing component bundling and hierarchical versioning far better than any other solution I've seen so far. I've yet to find an acceptable solution, but I'm convinced it will not have anything to do with centralised systems. You can't capture the delicate relations there.Say what again, I dare you, I double dare you

All of the above might be almost tolerable if DVCSes were easier to use than traditional SCMs, but they aren t.

I'm sorry, but have you tried managing a decently sized project, with a large history, built from multiple components with a traditional SCM? Because that is a colossal pain in the backside.Does Git's UI suck? Yes. But so did CVS's and Subversion's. If you rely on the command-line tools, you're going to feel the pain. That is why you use the IDE integration you surely have, which makes the most common tasks a breeze. That may sound like a git-apology, but remember, we did the same with every other version control system, because smart people prefer integration, and want the computer to work for them.

And yet, when someone dares to say that Git is harder than other SCMs, they inevitably get yelled at, in what I can only assume is a combination of Stockholm syndrome and groupthink run amok by overdosing on five-hour energy buckets.

If you feel the need to understand the innards of Git - then yes, it is harder than traditional SCMs. It is distributed, and different than what you're used to. If you do not have prior knowledge though, the difference in learning the internal working of Git and - say - Subversion all that different. And if you do not care how it works down below (and I dare say, a lot of developers should not, and do not care), then there is nothing to learn, apart from your IDE integration, which ain't different from a traditional SCM's.Mind you, I found it both interesting, and beneficial to learn Git's inner workings. Not only because it allowed me to make better use of my VCS, but because it taught me a bunch of things I could make use of elsewhere. I learned nothing from traditional SCMs.Do you hear the people sing, singing the song of angry men

There is one last major argument that I hear all the time about why DVCSes are superior, which is that they somehow enable more democratic code development.

The reason Git and other tools make code contribution easier is not GitHub pull requests (although, for drive-by contributions those are pretty useful too). The reason they make contribution easier is because you have your own copy of the full history. You can create your own branches easily, you can work with it as if you were the owner. For one-off contributions, that is no real advantage, I'll give you that. It takes more effort to fork & do a PR on GitHub, than to send a patch, I'll also agree with that.But once you start working with a project for more than a few patches, when you want to work with its history too, once you have long-lived branches, the local copy quickly becomes a great asset. Once you want to submit more than a few changes, you won't have to repeat a all steps. And not only that: since you have the full history, merging upstream changes (or just cherry picking from them), rebasing your work, and many other tasks become simpler.That is what it buys you, that is why it makes contribution easier. GitHub pull requests are an icing over the cake at best (and there are a good number of cases where the icing is completely unnecessary, because it doesn't go well with the cake).In closingIn closing, I'd like to highlight that different projects have different requirements. For example, I understand why Facebook, Google and a number of others use a single, huge repository. I happen to hate that setup, and would find working in such an environment horrible. But luckily, I don't work for those companies, and they don't listen to me, either, so everyone's happy. That does not mean I would go out and tell them they're wrong to use such a centralised, single-repository setup. For their use, in their situation, for their requirements, that may be the better option. For mine, not so much.In the end, what we need to realise is that there is no single tool that will fit all needs. There are tasks where Git is a terrible choice, but that does not make it terrible for all cases. Similarly, there are cases where Subversion is superior (I assume - I didn't have the misfortune of meeting with such a case).Instead of bashing the DVCS world, and assuming the Big Company use cases are all that matter, and that everyone uses the tools the same way, accept that some use it to achieve things you didn't think of, jobs you didn't consider.

This was my third month working on Debian LTS, and the first where I actually uploaded packages. I also worked on userland packages for the first time. In the middle of February I finished and uploaded a security update for the kernel package (linux-2.6 version 2.6.32-48squeeze11, DLA 155-1). I decided not to include the fix for CVE-2014-9419 and the large FPU/MMX/SSE/AVX state management changes it depends on, as they don't seem to be worth the risk. The old patch system used in linux-2.6 in squeeze still frustrates me, but I committed a script in the kernel subversion repository to simplify adding patches to it. This might be useful to any other LTS team members working on it. In the past week I uploaded security updates for cups (version 1.4.4-7+squeeze7, DLA 159-1) and sudo (1.7.4p4-2.squeeze.5, DLA 160-1). My work on the cups package was slowed down by its reliance on dpatch, which thankfully has been replaced in later versions. sudo is a more modern quilt/debhelper package, but upstream has an odd way of building manual pages. In the version used in squeeze the master format is Perl POD, while in wheezy it's mandoc, but in both cases the upstream source includes pre-generated manual pages and doesn't rebuild them by default. debian/rules is supposed to fix this but doesn't (#779363), so I had to regenerate 'by hand' and fold the changes into the respective patches. Finally, I started work on addressing the many remaining security issues in eglibc. Most of the patches applied to wheezy were usable with minimal adjustment, but I didn't have time left to perform any meaningful testing. I intend to upload what I've done to people.debian.org for testing by interested parties and then make an upload early in March (or let someone else on the LTS or glibc team do so). Update: I sent mail about the incomplete eglibc update to the debian-lts list.

Edit: Now translated to Chinese. Thanks zhang wei! There is really hardly a better way to open a series of interviewing with developers behind Free Libre Open Source Software project, then with incredible mind such as Joey Hess. To write his contributions to Free software ecosystem, especially in Debian, would be a book by itself. His impact exceeds even his projects - people literally follow his blog posts to see what he is doing and how is he living. A hacker from cabin. If you really need to have a picture of true hacker, then Joey is the one. As this isn't a book I will just mention few projects that he has been behind - git-annex, ikiwiki, etckeeper, debian installer, parts of dpkg, debhelper, devscripts, taskel. So without further waiting here it is. me: Who are you? joeyh: I'm Joey -- https://joeyh.name/ me: How did you start programming? joeyh: Atari 130XE which came with BASIC and a boring word processor and not much else. No other friends had one, so the only way to get software was to type in demo programs from manual and then begin to change and write my own. So, the easy way to learn. Also some Logo in school. me: How would you now advise others to start programming? joeyh: Difficult question, it seems much harder to get an intimate understanding of things than when I started, and much harder to be motivated to program when there's so much stuff easily available. Maybe simple bare-metal systems like Arduino coupled with real-world interaction are the answer. I've recently been mentoring my nephew who is learning python and Python the Hard Way has gotten him far impressively fast. me: Setup of your development machine? joeyh: Lenovo laptop de-spywared with Debian unstable, xmonad, xfce, vim. me: Your thoughts on Purism (the open hardware laptop initiative that got recently funded on CrowdSupply)? joeyh: I don't know much about that one, but it seems that consumer level hardware has gotten so low quality, and so closed and untrustworthy that it makes sense to either build alternatives that are open, or pick out, as a community, the stuff we can adapt to our needs and concentrate on it. Several projects are trying, I hope they succeed. me: How do you see future of Debian development? joeyh: Well, I've mostly stopped worrying about it. If you look back at my presentations at the past 2 or 3 DebConfs, you'll find my best thoughts on the matter. me: You retired as Debian developer - do you intend sometime soon to come back and/or do you plan to join some other communities? joeyh: It would be glorious to come back, wouldn't it? But I don't think I will. Can't step in the same river twice, and all. Instead, Debian will probably have to put up with me as an annoying upstream author who doesn't ship tarballs, but does ship debian/ directories, and as a bug reporter who enjoys reporting amusing bugs like -0 NaN. I seem to have more time to spend in other online communities since I left Debian, but in a more diffuse way. Maybe that's just what it's like, to be involved in Free Software but not in the embrace of a big project like Debian. me: Some memorable moments from Debian conferences? joeyh: There are so many! Picnicing on berries and tamales at the Portland farmer's market right outside the venue; rainbows and bonfire in Switzerland after crazy busy days; impromptu pipe organ repair in a weird night venue in Edinburgh; walking through Porto Alegre at night with Ian Murdock and how humble he was about what he'd started; hacking all night in Spain; failing to sleep through midnight sun and incessent partying Finland; hanging out in the hotel lobby in Atlanta where we designed Build-Depends. me: Are you a gamer? Valve Steam games are offered for free to Debian Developers - do you use steam and play Valve games? joeyh: I've played through Half Life and Portal, but nethack has claimed more of my time. I mostly enjoy short, indie games, or games that tell us something new about the medium of games, A recent favorite was A Dark Room. But really, I have more pure fun playing real world Tabletop games with friends, like Carcassanne Discovery and Hive. In March, I am going to try to write a roguelike game in one week, in Haskell, for the Seven Day Roguelike Challenge and I'll be blogging about my progress daily. me: You are nowdays a Haskell hacker (git-annex) - what would you like to say about this language and how does it compare to Python, C, JavaScript, Ruby and Perl? joeyh: Not just git-annex; all my current projects are written in Haskell. I think it's amazing how much we expect programmers to keep in their heads while writing code. Is that buffer going to overflow? Is changing the value of that global variable going to break some other part of the code? Is that input sanitized yet? Did that interface change? Haskell solves some of these outright, but more, it makes you start noticing this kind of pervasive issue, and it provides ways to completely eliminate a class of problems from your code. For example http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/making_propellor_safer_with_GADTs_and_type_families/. The class of bugs I avoided there had never affected my code even once, but it was still worth preventing that whole class of bugs, so I don't have to worry about them ever again. me: Would you suggest Haskell as first language to learn especially for those that have an itch for mathematics? joeyh: I think that can work well. Or it can go other the way -- I had an affinity to mathematics when I was young, but it got knocked out of me in the way that happens to many people, and languages like perl and C don't do much to make you want to learn more about higher-order math. I've been picking up a bit more here and there via Haskell. me: How do you compare your productivity in Haskell compared to your Perl days? joeyh: It's very different; I'm a very different programmer now. I probably would bang out quick hacks more quickly when I was writing Perl. But, they tended to stay quick hacks. Now, I might take a little longer to get there, but the code seems a lot more solid, while also being more malleable to turn into larger or different programs. I'm also a lot more drawn toward writing software libraries. me: Can you describe your philosophy of life (you live in cabin, in forest, using a lot of solar power - many people are intrigued (including myself) what drives you towards that kind of life and how does it impact your overall quality of life and happiness. Looking the todays modern predator capitalistic society, in which you could easily earn more then $10.000 a month, you seem to be an anarchist and very humble human)? joeyh: I want to build worthwhile things that might last. Which is super hard in the world of software, both because it's hard to think far ahead at all, and because most jobs don't emphasize that kind of real value. I've been lucky and bootstrapped up to a point where I've been able to work full time on free software for years, and I'm willing to forgo a lot to continue that. Living in the woods without modern conveniences is great, because it's quiet and you can think as much as you like; the internet is just as close as it is anywhere else (maybe a bit slower); and when you've spent too much time quietly thinking you'll need to go chop wood, or haul water, or jump in the river to cool off, depending on the season. (Humble? Like most programmers, I am internally a flaming tower of ego...)
Vote on Hacker News

I brought a dozen cupcakes. There were 3 carrot, 3 red velvet, 2 marble, 2 peanut butter fudge swirl, and 2 of some chocolate-chocolate-chocolate thing that I forgot the name of because it sounded so disgusting. He had a romcom fantasy about her a year before. She did not live up to his expectations, so things went sideways. Now she was having a romcom fantasy all by herself, waiting patiently for hours for him to do something in particular. You could have graphed her hopes falling. In the end, she left dejected. He didn't understand why. Then he left town. He was much more excited about the cupcakes than she was.

Following a debootstrap build of sid on one machine to complete the cross-compilation of mainline u-boot, I managed to get vanilla Debian installed on my Cubietruck

A USB-serial cable is a must for the install and for any subsequent major reconfiguration as the stock Debian installer does not have drivers for the video / audio. Various Cubietruck derivative distributions do - but the Sunxi kernel appears flaky

All was fine for a few days, then I decided to try and configure the Wifi by hand configuring /etc/network/interfaces and wpasupplicant files. I managed to break the network connectivity by doing things in a hurry and typing blind. I'd put it into the appropriate closed metal case so was rather stuck.

A friend carefully took the case apart by easing off the metal cover plates, removed two screws holding the whole thing together and precision drilled the metal cover plates on one side so that four screws can be undone and the entire inner part of the case can slide out as one while the other metal clover plate remains captive. He will follow this procedure with his two later.

Very pleased with the way it's turned out. The WiFi driver has non-free firmware but I now have a tiny, silent machine, drawing about 3W tops and both interfaces are now working.

The Norwegian nationwide open channel Frikanalen is still going strong. It allow everyone to send the video they want on national television. It is a TV station administrated completely using a web browser, running only Free Software, providing a REST api for administrators and members, and with distribution on the national DVB-T distribution network RiksTV. But only between 12:00 and 17:30 Norwegian time. This has finally changed, after many years with limited distribution. A few weeks ago, we set up a Ogg Theora stream via icecast to allow everyone with Internet access to check out the channel the rest of the day. This is presented on the Frikanalen web site now. And since a few days ago, the channel is also available via multicast on UNINETT, available for those using IPTV TVs and set-top boxes in the Norwegian National Research and Education network. If you want to see what is on the channel, point your media player to one of these sources. The first should work with most players and browsers, while as far as I know, the multicast UDP stream only work with VLC.

• http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv
• udp://@224.17.43.129:1234

The Ogg Theora / icecast stream is not working well, as the video and audio is slightly out of sync. We have not been able to figure out how to fix it. It is generated by recoding a internal MPEG transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to Ogg Theora / Vorbis, and the result is less then stellar. If you have ideas how to fix it, please let us know on frikanalen (at) nuug.no. We currently use this with ffmpeg2theora 0.29:

./ffmpeg2theora.linux <OBE_gemini_URL.ts> -F 25 -x 720 -y 405 \
 --deinterlace --inputfps 25 -c 1 -H 48000 --keyint 8 --buf-delay 100 \
 --nosync -V 700 -o -   oggfwd video.nuug.no 8000 <pw> /frikanalen.ogv

If you get the multicast UDP stream working, please let me know, as I am curious how far the multicast stream reach. It do not make it to my home network, nor any other commercially available network in Norway that I am aware of.

My current Lenovo X201 laptop has been with me for over four years. I ve been looking at new laptop models over the years thinking that I should upgrade. Every time, after checking performance numbers, I ve always reached the conclusion that it is not worth it. The most performant Intel Broadwell processor is the the Core i7 5600U and it is only about 1.5 times the performance of my current Intel Core i7 620M. Meanwhile disk performance has increased more rapidly, but changing the disk on a laptop is usually simple. Two years ago I upgraded to the Samsung 840 Pro 256GB disk, and this year I swapped that for the Samsung 850 Pro 1TB, and both have been good investments. Recently my laptop usage patterns have changed slightly, and instead of carrying one laptop around, I have decided to aim for multiple semi-permanent laptops at different locations, coupled with a mobile device that right now is just my phone. The X201 will remain one of my normal work machines. What remains is to decide on a new laptop, and there begins the fun. My requirements are relatively easy to summarize. The laptop will run a GNU/Linux distribution like Debian, so it has to work well with it. I ve decided that my preferred CPU is the Intel Core i7 5600U. The screen size, keyboard and mouse is mostly irrelevant as I never work longer periods of time directly on the laptop. Even though the laptop will be semi-permanent, I know there will be times when I take it with me. Thus it has to be as lightweight as possible. If there would be significant advantages in going with a heavier laptop, I might reconsider this, but as far as I can see the only advantage with a heavier machine is bigger/better screen, keyboard (all of which I find irrelevant) and maximum memory capacity (which I would find useful, but not enough of an argument for me). The sub-1.5kg laptops with the 5600U CPU on the market that I have found are:

Lenovo X250	1.42kg	12.5	1366 768
Lenovo X1 Carbon (3rd gen)	1.44kg	14	2560 1440
Dell Latitude E7250	1.25kg	12.5	1366 768
Dell XPS 13	1.26kg	13.3	3200 1800
HP EliteBook Folio 1040 G2	1.49kg	14	1920 1080
HP EliteBook Revolve 810 G3	1.4kg	11.6	1366 768

I find it interesting that Lenovo, Dell and HP each have two models that meets my 5600U/sub-1.5kg criteria. Regarding screen, possibly there exists models with other screen resolutions. The XPS 13, HP 810 and X1 models I looked had touch screens, the others did not. As screen is not important to me, I didn t evaluate this further. I think all of them would suffice, and there are only subtle differences. All except the XPS 13 can be connected to peripherals using one cable, which I find convenient to avoid a cable mess. All of them have DisplayPort, but HP uses DisplayPort Standard and the rest uses miniDP. The E7250 and X1 have HDMI output. The X250 boosts a 15-pin VGA connector, none of the others have it I m not sure if that is a advantage or disadvantage these days. All of them have 2 USB v3.0 ports except the E7250 which has 3 ports. The HP 1040, XPS 13 and X1 Carbon do not have RJ45 Ethernet connectors, which is a significant disadvantage to me. Ironically, only the smallest one of these, the HP 810, can be memory upgraded to 12GB with the others being stuck at 8GB. HP and the E7250 supports NFC, although Debian support is not certain. The E7250 and X250 have a smartcard reader, and again, Debian support is not certain. The X1, X250 and 810 have a 3G/4G card. Right now, I m leaning towards rejecting the XPS 13, X1 and HP 1040 because of lack of RJ45 ethernet port. That leaves me with the E7250, X250 and the 810. Of these, the E7250 seems like the winner: lightest, 1 extra USB port, HDMI, NFC, SmartCard-reader. However, it has no 3G/4G-card and no memory upgrade options. Looking for compatibility problems, it seems you have to be careful to not end up with the Dell Wireless card and the E7250 appears to come in a docking and non-docking variant but I m not sure what that means. Are there other models I should consider? Other thoughts?

Akonadi client example After many failed attemps I have managed to build a C++ akonadi client. It has felt like one of the most frustrating programming experiences of my whole life, so I'm sharing the results hoping to spare others from all the suffering. First thing first, akonadi client libraries are not in libakonadi-dev but in kdepimlibs5-dev, even if kdepimlibs5-dev does not show in apt-cache search akonadi. Then, kdepimlibs is built with Qt4. If your application uses Qt5 (mine was) you need to port it back to Qt4 if you want to talk to Akonadi. Then, kdepimlibs does not seem to support qmake and does not ship pkg-config .pc files, and if you want to use kdepimlibs your build system needs to be cmake. I ported by code from qmake to cmake, and now qtcreator wants me to run cmake by hand every time I change the CMakeLists.txt file, and it stopped allowing to add, rename or delete sources. Finally, most of the code / build system snippets found on the internet seem flawed in a way or another, because the build toolchain of Qt/KDE applications has undergone several redesignins during time, and the network is littered with examples from different eras. The way to obtain template code to start a Qt/KDE project is to use kapptemplate. I have found no getting started tutorial on the internet that said "do not just copy the snippets from here, run kapptemplate instead so you get them up to date". kapptemplate supports building an "Akonadi Resource" and an "Akonadi Serializer", but it does not support generating template code for an akonadi client. That left me with the feeling that I was dealing with some software that wants to be developed but does not want to be used. Anyway, now an example of how to interrogate Akonadi exists as is on the internet. I hope that all the tears of blood that I cried this morning have not been cried in vain.

The wonders of missing documentation Update: I have managed to build an example Akonadi client application. I'm new here, I want to make a simple C++ GUI app that pops up a QCalendarWidget which my local Akonadi has appointments. I open qtcreator, create a new app, hack away for a while, then of course I get undefined references for all Akonadi symbols, since I didn't tell the build system that I'm building with akonadi. Ok. How do I tell the build system that I'm building with akonadi? After 20 minutes of frantic looking around the internet, I still have no idea. There is a package called libakonadi-dev which does not seem to have anything to do with this. That page mentions everything about making applications with Akonadi except how to build them. There is a package called kdepimlibs5-dev which looks promising: it has no .a files but it does have haders and cmake files. However, qtcreator is only integrated with qmake, and I would really like the handholding of an IDE at this stage. I put something together naively doing just what looked right, and I managed to get an application that segfaults before main() is even called: I didn't achieve what I wanted, but I feel like I achieved something magical and beautiful after all. I shall now perform some haruspicy on those oscure cmake files to see if I can figure something out. But seriously, people?

Introduction The drat package was released earlier this month, and described in a first blog post. I received some helpful feedback about what works and what doesn't. For example, Jenny Bryan pointed out that I was not making a clear enough distinction between the role of using drat to publish code, and using drat to receive/install code. Very fair point, and somewhat tricky as R aims to blur the line between being a user and developer of statistical analyses, and hence packages. Many of us are both. Both the main point is well taken, and this note aims to clarify this issue a little by focusing on the former. Another point make by Jenny concerns the double use of repository. And indeed, I conflated repository (in the sense of a GitHub code repository) with repository for a package store used by a package manager. The former, a GitHub repository, is something we use to implement a personal drat with: A GitHub repository happens to be uniquely identifiable just by its account name, and given an (optional) gh-pages branch also offers a stable and performant webserver we use to deliver packages for R. A (personal) code repository on the other hand is something we implement somewhere---possibly via drat which supports local directories, possibly on a network share, as well as anywhere web-accessible, e.g. via a GitHub repository. It is a little confusing, but I will aim to make the distinction clearer.

Just once: Setting up a drat repository So let us for the remainder of this post assume the role of a code publisher. Assume you have a package you would like to make available, which may not be on CRAN and for which you would like to make installation by others easier via drat. The example below will use an interim version of drat which I pushed out yesterday (after fixing a bug noticed when pushing the very new RcppAPT package). For the following, all we assume (apart from having a package to publish) is that you have a drat directory setup within your git / GitHub repository. This is not an onerous restriction. First off, you don't have to use git or GitHub to publish via drat: local file stores and other web servers work just as well (and are documented). GitHub simply makes it easiest. Second, bootstrapping one is trivial: just fork my drat GitHub repository and then create a local clone of the fork. There is one additional requirement: you need a gh-pages branch. Using the fork-and-clone approach ensures this. Otherwise, if you know your way around git you already know how to create a gh-pages branch. Enough of the prerequisities. And on towards real fun. Let's ensure we are in the gh-pages branch:

edd@max:~/git/drat(master)$ git checkout gh-pages
Switched to branch 'gh-pages'
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/gh-pages'.
edd@max:~/git/drat(gh-pages)$ 

Publish: Run one drat command to insert a package Now, let us assume you have a package to publish. In my case this was version 0.0.1.2 of drat itself as it contains a fix for the very command I am showing here. So if you want to run this, ensure you have this version of drat as the CRAN version is currently behind at release 0.0.1 (though I plan to correct that in the next few days). To publish an R package into a code repository created via drat running on a drat GitHub repository, just run insertPackage(packagefile) which we show here with the optional commit=TRUE. The path to the package can be absolute are relative; the easists is often to go up one directory from the sources to where R CMD build ... has created the package file.

edd@max:~/git$ Rscript -e 'library(drat); insertPackage("drat_0.0.1.2.tar.gz", commit=TRUE)'
[gh-pages 0d2093a] adding drat_0.0.1.2.tar.gz to drat
 3 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 src/contrib/drat_0.0.1.2.tar.gz
Counting objects: 7, done.
Delta compression using up to 8 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (7/7), done.
Writing objects: 100% (7/7), 7.37 KiB   0 bytes/s, done.
Total 7 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0)
To git@github.com:eddelbuettel/drat.git
   206d2fa..0d2093a  gh-pages -> gh-pages
edd@max:~/git$ 

You can equally well run this as insertPackage("drat_0.0.1.2.tar.gz"), then inspect the repo and only then run the git commands add, commit and push. Also note that future versions of drat will most likely support git operations directly by relying on the very promising git2r package. But this just affect package internals, the user-facing call of e.g. insertPackage("drat_0.0.1.2.tar.gz", commit=TRUE) will remain unchanged. And in a nutshell that really is all there is to it. With the newly drat-ed package pushed to your GitHub repository with a single function call), it is available via the automatically-provided gh-pages webserver access to anyone in the world. All they need to do is to point R's package management code (which is built into R itself and used for e.g._ CRAN and BioConductor R package repositories) to the new repo---and that is also just a single drat command. We showed this in the first blog post and may expand on it again in a follow-up. So in summary, that really is all there is to it. After a one-time setup / ensuring you are on the gh-pages branch, all it takes is a single function call from the drat package to publish your package to your drat GitHub repository.

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 had the mixed pleasure of doing a partial rewrite of lintian s reporting framework. It started as a problem with generating the graphs, which turned out to be not enough memory . On the plus side, I am actually quite pleased with the end result. I managed to scope-creep myself quite a bit and I ended up getting rid of a lot of old issues. The major changes in summary:

• A lot of logic was moved out of harness, meaning it is now closer to becoming a simple dumb task scheduler. With the logic being moved out in separate processes, harness now hogs vastly less memory that I cannot convince perl to release to the OS. On lilburn.debian.org vastly less is on the order of reducing 700ish MB to 32 MB .
• All important metadata was moved into the harness state-cache , which is a simple YAML file. This means that Lintian laboratory is no longer a data store. This change causes a lot of very positive side effects.
• With all metadata now stored in a single file, we can now do atomic updates of the data store. That said, this change itself does not enable us to run multiple lintian s in parallel.
• As the lintian laboratory is no longer a data store, we can now do our processing in throw away laboratories like the regular lintian user does. As the permanent laboratory is the primary source of failure, this removes an entire class of possible problems.

There are also some nice minor features :

• Packages can now be up to date in the generated reports. Previously, they would always be listed as out of date even if they were up to date. This is the only end user/website-visitor visible change in all of this (besides the graphs are now working again \o/).
• The size of the harness work list is no longer based on the number of changes to the archive.
• The size of the harness work list can now be changed with a command line option and is no longer hard coded to 1024. However, the time limit remains hard coded for now.
• The full run (and clean run ) now simply marks everything out-of-date and processes its (new) backlog over the next (many) harness runs. Accordingly, a full-run no longer causes lintian to run 5-7 days on lilburn.d.o before getting an update to the website. Instead we now get incremental updates.
• The harness.log now features status updates from lintian as they happen with processed X successfully or error processing Y plus a little wall time benchmark. With this little feature I filed no less than 3 bugs against lintian 2 of which are fixed in git. The last remains unfixed but can only be triggered in Debian stable.
• It is now possible with throw-away labs to terminate the lintian part of a reporting run early with minimal lost processing. Since the lintian-harness is regular fed status updates from lintian, we can now mark successfully completed entries as done even if lintian does not complete its work list. Caveat: There may be minor inaccuracies in the generated report for the particular package lintian was processing when it was interrupted. This will fix itself when the package is reprocessed again.
• It is now vastly easier to collect new meta data to be used in the reports. Previously, they had to be included in the laboratory and extracted from there. Now, we just have to fit it into a YAML file. In fact, I have been considering to add the wall time and make a top X slowest page.
• It is now possible to generate the html pages with only a state-cache and the lintian.log file. Previously, it also required a populated lintian laboratory.

As you can probably tell, I am quite pleased with the end result. The reporting framework lacks behind in development, since it just sits there and takes care of itself . Also with the complete lack of testing, it also suffers from the if it is not broken, then do not fix it paradigm (because we will not notice if we broke until it is too late). Of course, I managed to break the setup a couple of times in the process. However, a bonus feature of the reporting setup is that if you break it, it simply leaves an outdated report on the website. Anyway, enjoy. :)
Filed under: Debian, Lintian

Weblate 2.2 has been released today. It comes with improved search, user interface cleanup and various other fixes. Full list of changes for 2.2:

• Performance improvements.
• Fulltext search on location and comments fields.
• New SVG/javascript based activity charts.
• Support for Django 1.8.
• Support for deleting comments.
• Added own SVG badge.
• Added support for Google Analytics.
• Improved handling of translation file names.
• Added support for monolingual JSON translations.
• Record component locking in a history.
• Support for editing source (template) language for monolingual translations.
• Added basic support for Gerrit.

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. Weblate is also being used https://hosted.weblate.org/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, Gammu, Weblate itself and other projects. 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! PS: The roadmap for next release is just being prepared, you can influence this by expressing support for individual issues either by comments or by providing bounty for them.

Filed under: English phpMyAdmin SUSE Weblate 0 comments Flattr this!