Leonardo and I are happy to annunce that a new version 0.3.8 of our nanotime package arrived on CRAN today. It is the first release in over 1 1/2 years. nanotime relies on the RcppCCTZ package (as well as the RcppDate package for additional C++ operations) and offers efficient high(er) resolution time parsing and formatting up to nanosecond resolution, using the bit64 package for the actual integer64 arithmetic. Initially implemented using the S3 system, it has benefitted greatly from a rigorous refactoring by Leonardo who not only rejigged nanotime internals in S4 but also added new S4 types for periods, intervals and durations. This release responds to a number of enhancements including a new paramter accurate for POSIXct to nanotime conversions, a vector date converter, a switch to double return value when durations objects are dividded as well as a small battery of CRAN requests for changes and updates. This started with a move away from the now non-API function SET_S4_OBJECT which has been replaced by use of Rf_asS4. We also no longer need a custom compiler flag on Windows (where for some reasons nobody understands or remembers, bitfields are not packed) to small enhancements of manual page formatting and last-but-not-least avoidance of some new UBSAN warnings. The NEWS snippet has the full details.

Changes in version 0.3.8 (2024-06-19)

• Time format documentation now has a reference to RcppCCTZ
• The package no longer sets a default C++ compilation standard of C++11 (Dirk initially in #114, and later switched to C++17)
• New accurate parameter for conversion from POSIXct to nanotime (Davor Josipovic and Leonardo in #116 closing #115)
• The as.Date() function is now vectorized and can take a TZ argument (Leonardo and Dirk in #119 closing #118)
• Use of internal function SET_S4_OBJECT has been replaced by API function Rf_asS4 (Leonardo in #121 closing #120)
• An nanoduration / nanoduration expression now returns a double (Leonardo in #122 closing #117)
• Bitfield calculations no longer require an Windows-only compiler switch (Leonardo in #124)
• A simple manual page format nag involving has been addressed (Dirk in #126 fixing #125)
• An set of tests tickling an UBSAN issue via Rcpp code no longer run unless CI is set (Dirk in #127 fixing #123)

Thanks to my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report for this release. More details and examples are at the nanotime page; code, issue tickets etc at the GitHub repository and all documentation is provided at the nanotime documentation site. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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.

I am still here, busy as ever, I just haven t found the inspiration to blog. So soon after the loss of my son, I have lost my only brother a couple weeks ago. It has been a tough year for our family. Thank you everyone for you love and support during this difficult time. I will do my best in re-capping my work, there has been quite a bit as I am keeping busy with work so I don t dwell to much on the sadness. KDE Snaps: Trying to debug the unable to save files breakage in the latest Krita builds without luck. KisOpenGLCanvas
Renderer::reportFailedShaderCompilation\[0m: Shad
er Compilation Failure: "Failed to add vertex sh
ader source from file: matrix_transform.vert - Ca
use: " I have implemented everything from https://snapcraft.io/docs/gpu-support , it has worked for years and now suddenly it just stopped. I have had to put it on hold for now, it is unpaid work and I simply don t have time. With the help of my GSOC student we are improving the Qt6 snap MR: https://invent.kde.org/neon/snap-packaging/kde-qt6-core-sdk/-/merge_requests/3 and many improvements on top of that. This exposed many issues with the kf6 snap and the linking to static libs. Those are being worked on now. Updated qt to 6.7.1 Qt6 apps in the works: okular, ark, gwenview, kwrited, elisa Kubuntu: So many SRu s for the Noble release, I will probably miss a few. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ark/+bug/2068491 Ark cannot open 7-zip files. Sadly the patches were for qt6, waiting for a qt5 port upstream. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/noble/+source/merkuro/+bug/2065063 Crash due to missing qml. Fix is in git, no upload rights. Requested sponsor. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/tellico/+bug/2065915 Several applications no longer work on architectures that are not amd64 due to hard coded paths. All fixed in git. Several uploaded to oracular, several sponsorship has been requested. Noble updates rejected despite SRU, going to retry. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/sddm/+bug/2066275 The dreaded black screen on second boot bug is fixed in git and oracular. Noble was rejected despite the SRU. Will retry. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kubuntu-meta/+bug/2066028 Broken systray submenus. Fixed in git and oracular. Noble rejected despite SRU. Will retry. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/plasma-workspace/+bug/2067747 Long standing bug with plasma not loading with lightdm. Fixed in git and oracular. Noble rejected will retry. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/plasma-workspace/+bug/2067742 CVE-2024-36041Fixed in git and oracular, noble rejected, will retry. And many more I am applying for MOTU in hopes it will reduce all of my uploading issues. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/scarlettmoore/MOTUApplication Debian: kf6-knotifications and kapidox. Will jump into Plasma 6 next week ! Misc: Went to LinuxFest Northwest with Valorie! We had a great time and it was a huge success, we had many people stop by our booth.

As usual, if you like my work and want to see Plasma 6 in Kubuntu it all depends on you! Kubuntu will be out of funds soon and needs donations! Thank you for your consideration. https://kubuntu.org/donate/ Personal: Support for my grandson: https://www.gofundme.com/f/in-loving-memory-of-william-billy-dean-scalf

I am getting increasingly frustrated by Fira Mono's lack of italic support so I am looking at alternative fonts again.

Commit Mono This time I seem to be settling on either Commit Mono or Space Mono. For now I'm using Commit Mono because it's a little more compressed than Fira and does have a italic version. I don't like how Space Mono's parenthesis (()) is "squarish", it feels visually ambiguous with the square brackets ([]), a big no-no for my primary use case (code). So here I am using a new font, again. It required changing a bunch of configuration files in my home directory (which is in a private repository, sorry) and Emacs configuration (thankfully that's public!). One gotcha is I realized I didn't actually have a global font configuration in Emacs, as some Faces define their own font family, which overrides the frame defaults. This is what it looks like, before:

Fira Mono

After:

Commit Mono

(Notice how those screenshots are not sharp? I'm surprised too. The originals look sharp on my display, I suspect this is something to do with the Wayland transition. I've tried with both grim and flameshot, for what its worth.) They are pretty similar! Commit Mono feels a bit more vertically compressed maybe too much so, actually -- the line height feels too low. But it's heavily customizable so that's something that's relatively easy to fix, if it's really a problem. Its weight is also a little heavier and wider than Fira which I find a little distracting right now, but maybe I'll get used to it. All characters seem properly distinguishable, although, if I'd really want to nitpick I'd say the and are too different, with the latter (REGISTERED SIGN) being way too small, basically unreadable here. Since I see this sign approximately never, it probably doesn't matter at all. I like how the ampersand (&) is more traditional, although I'll miss the exotic one Fira produced... I like how the back quotes ( , GRAVE ACCENT) drop down low, nicely aligned with the apostrophe. As I mentioned before, I like how the bar on the "f" aligns with the other top of letters, something in Fira mono that really annoys me now that I've noticed it (it's not aligned!).

A UTF-8 test file Here's the test sheet I've made up to test various characters. I could have sworn I had a good one like this lying around somewhere but couldn't find it so here it is, I guess.

US keyboard coverage:
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 1234567890-=[]\;',./
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ~!@#$%^&*()_+ :"<>?
latin1 coverage:  
EURO SIGN, TRADE MARK SIGN:  
ambiguity test:
e coC0ODQ iI71lL! 
b6G&0B83  []() /\. 
zs$S52Z%   '" 
all characters in a sentence, uppercase:
the quick fox jumps over the lazy dog
THE QUICK FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG
same, in french:
Portez ce vieux whisky au juge blond qui fume.
d s no l, o  un z phyr ha  me v t de gla ons w rmiens, je d ne
d exquis r tis de b uf au kir,   l a  d ge m r, &c tera.
D S NO L, O  UN Z PHYR HA  ME V T DE GLA ONS W RMIENS, JE D NE
D EXQUIS R TIS DE B UF AU KIR,   L A  D GE M R, &C TERA.
Ligatures test:
-<< -< -<- <-- <--- <<- <- -> ->> --> ---> ->- >- >>-
=<< =< =<= <== <=== <<= <= => =>> ==> ===> =>= >= >>=
<-> <--> <---> <----> <=> <==> <===> <====> :: ::: __
<~~ </ </> /> ~~> == != /= ~= <> === !== !=== =/= =!=
<: := *= *+ <* <*> *> <  < >  > <. <.> .> +* =* =: :>
(* *) /* */ [   ]     ++ +++ \/ /\  - -  <!-- <!---
Box drawing alignment tests:
                                                                    
                                 
                           
                                                   
                                       
                                                 
                               
                                
Dashes alignment test:
HYPHEN-MINUS, MINUS SIGN, EN, EM DASH, HORIZONTAL BAR, LOW LINE
--------------------------------------------------
 
 
 
 
__________________________________________________

Update: here is another such sample sheet, it's pretty good and has support for more languages while being still relatively small. So there you have it, got completely nerd swiped by typography again. Now I can go back to writing a too-long proposal again. Sources and inspiration for the above:

• the unicode(1) command, to lookup individual characters to disambiguate, for example, - (U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS, the minus sign next to zero on US keyboards) and (U+2212 MINUS SIGN, a math symbol)
• searchable list of characters and their names - roughly equivalent to the unicode(1) command, but in one page, amazingly the /usr/share/unicode database doesn't have any one file like this
• bits/UTF-8-Unicode-Test-Documents - full list of UTF-8 characters
• UTF-8 encoded plain text file - nice examples of edge cases, curly quotes example and box drawing alignment test which, incidentally, showed me I needed specific faces customisation in Emacs to get the Markdown code areas to display properly, also the idea of comparing various dashes
• sample sentences in many languages - unused, "Sentences that contain all letters commonly used in a language"
• UTF-8 sampler - unused, similar

Other fonts In my previous blog post about fonts, I had a list of alternative fonts, but it seems people are not digging through this, so I figured I would redo the list here to preempt "but have you tried Jetbrains mono" kind of comments. My requirements are:

• no ligatures: yes, in the previous post, I wanted ligatures but I have changed my mind. after testing this, I find them distracting, confusing, and they often break the monospace nature of the display
• monospace: this is to display code
• italics: often used when writing Markdown, where I do make use of italics... Emacs falls back to underlining text when lacking italics which is hard to read
• free-ish, ultimately should be packaged in Debian

Here is the list of alternatives I have considered in the past and why I'm not using them:

• agave: recommended by tarzeau, not sure I like the lowercase a, a bit too exotic, packaged as fonts-agave
• Cascadia code: optional ligatures, multilingual, not liking the alignment, ambiguous parenthesis (look too much like square brackets), new default for Windows Terminal and Visual Studio, packaged as fonts-cascadia-code
• Fira Code: ligatures, was using Fira Mono from which it is derived, lacking italics except for forks, interestingly, Fira Code succeeds the alignment test but Fira Mono fails to show the X signs properly! packaged as fonts-firacode
• Hack: no ligatures, very similar to Fira, italics, good alternative, fails the X test in box alignment, packaged as fonts-hack
• Hermit: no ligatures, smaller, alignment issues in box drawing and dashes, packaged as fonts-hermit somehow part of cool-retro-term
• IBM Plex: irritating website, replaces Helvetica as the IBM corporate font, no ligatures by default, italics, proportional alternatives, serifs and sans, multiple languages, partial failure in box alignment test (X signs), fancy curly braces contrast perhaps too much with the rest of the font, packaged in Debian as fonts-ibm-plex
• Inconsolata: no ligatures, maybe italics? more compressed than others, feels a little out of balance because of that, packaged in Debian as fonts-inconsolata
• Intel One Mono: nice legibility, no ligatures, alignment issues in box drawing, not packaged in Debian
• Iosevka: optional ligatures, italics, multilingual, good legibility, has a proportional option, serifs and sans, line height issue in box drawing, fails dash test, not in Debian
• Jetbrains Mono: (mandatory?) ligatures, good coverage, originally rumored to be not DFSG-free (Debian Free Software Guidelines) but ultimately packaged in Debian as fonts-jetbrains-mono
• Monoid: optional ligatures, feels much "thinner" than Jetbrains, not liking alignment or spacing on that one, ambiguous 2Z, problems rendering box drawing, packaged as fonts-monoid
• Mononoki: no ligatures, looks good, good alternative, suggested by the Debian fonts team as part of fonts-recommended, problems rendering box drawing, em dash bigger than en dash, packaged as fonts-mononoki
• Source Code Pro: italics, looks good, but dash metrics look whacky, not in Debian
• spleen: bitmap font, old school, spacing issue in box drawing test, packaged as fonts-spleen
• sudo: personal project, no ligatures, zero originally not dotted, relied on metrics for legibility, spacing issue in box drawing, not in Debian

So, if I get tired of Commit Mono, I might probably try, in order:

1. Hack
2. Jetbrains Mono
3. IBM Plex Mono

Iosevka, Monoki and Intel One Mono are also good options, but have alignment problems. Iosevka is particularly disappointing as the EM DASH metrics are just completely wrong (much too wide). This was tested using the Programming fonts site which has all the above fonts, which cannot be said of Font Squirrel or Google Fonts, amazingly. Other such tools:

• Coding Font (broken in Firefox as of 2024-05-30)
• dev fonts comparator
• Font Squirrel
• Google Fonts
• Programming fonts

Joachim Breitner wrote about a Convenient sandboxed development environment and thus reminded me to blog about MicroVM. I ve toyed around with it a little but not yet seriously used it as I m currently not coding. MicroVM is a nix based project to configure and run minimal VMs. It can mount and thus reuse the hosts nix store inside the VM and thus has a very small disk footprint. I use MicroVM on a debian system using the nix package manager. The MicroVM author uses the project to host production services. Otherwise I consider it also a nice way to learn about NixOS after having started with the nix package manager and before making the big step to NixOS as my main system. The guests root filesystem is a tmpdir, so one must explicitly define folders that should be mounted from the host and thus be persistent across VM reboots. I defined the VM as a nix flake since this is how I started from the MicroVM projects example:

 
  description = "Haskell dev MicroVM";
  inputs.impermanence.url = "github:nix-community/impermanence";
  inputs.microvm.url = "github:astro/microvm.nix";
  inputs.microvm.inputs.nixpkgs.follows = "nixpkgs";
  outputs =   self, impermanence, microvm, nixpkgs  :
    let
      persistencePath = "/persistent";
      system = "x86_64-linux";
      user = "thk";
      vmname = "haskell";
      nixosConfiguration = nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem  
          inherit system;
          modules = [
            microvm.nixosModules.microvm
            impermanence.nixosModules.impermanence
            ( pkgs, ...  :  
            environment.persistence.$ persistencePath  =  
                hideMounts = true;
                users.$ user  =  
                  directories = [
                    "git" ".stack"
                  ];
                 ;
               ;
              environment.sessionVariables =  
                TERM = "screen-256color";
               ;
              environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
                ghc
                git
                (haskell-language-server.override   supportedGhcVersions = [ "94" ];  )
                htop
                stack
                tmux
                tree
                vcsh
                zsh
              ];
              fileSystems.$ persistencePath .neededForBoot = nixpkgs.lib.mkForce true;
              microvm =  
                forwardPorts = [
                    from = "host"; host.port = 2222; guest.port = 22;  
                    from = "guest"; host.port = 5432; guest.port = 5432;   # postgresql
                ];
                hypervisor = "qemu";
                interfaces = [
                    type = "user"; id = "usernet"; mac = "00:00:00:00:00:02";  
                ];
                mem = 4096;
                shares = [  
                  # use "virtiofs" for MicroVMs that are started by systemd
                  proto = "9p";
                  tag = "ro-store";
                  # a host's /nix/store will be picked up so that no
                  # squashfs/erofs will be built for it.
                  source = "/nix/store";
                  mountPoint = "/nix/.ro-store";
                   
                  proto = "virtiofs";
                  tag = "persistent";
                  source = "~/.local/share/microvm/vms/$ vmname /persistent";
                  mountPoint = persistencePath;
                  socket = "/run/user/1000/microvm-$ vmname -persistent";
                 
                ];
                socket = "/run/user/1000/microvm-control.socket";
                vcpu = 3;
                volumes = [];
                writableStoreOverlay = "/nix/.rwstore";
               ;
              networking.hostName = vmname;
              nix.enable = true;
              nix.nixPath = ["nixpkgs=$ builtins.storePath <nixpkgs> "];
              nix.settings =  
                extra-experimental-features = ["nix-command" "flakes"];
                trusted-users = [user];
               ;
              security.sudo =  
                enable = true;
                wheelNeedsPassword = false;
               ;
              services.getty.autologinUser = user;
              services.openssh =  
                enable = true;
               ;
              system.stateVersion = "24.11";
              systemd.services.loadnixdb =  
                description = "import hosts nix database";
                path = [pkgs.nix];
                wantedBy = ["multi-user.target"];
                requires = ["nix-daemon.service"];
                script = "cat $ persistencePath /nix-store-db-dump nix-store --load-db";
               ;
              time.timeZone = nixpkgs.lib.mkDefault "Europe/Berlin";
              users.users.$ user  =  
                extraGroups = [ "wheel" "video" ];
                group = "user";
                isNormalUser = true;
                openssh.authorizedKeys.keys = [
                  "ssh-rsa REDACTED"
                ];
                password = "";
               ;
              users.users.root.password = "";
              users.groups.user =  ;
             )
          ];
         ;
    in  
      packages.$ system .default = nixosConfiguration.config.microvm.declaredRunner;
     ;
 

I start the microVM with a templated systemd user service:

[Unit]
Description=MicroVM for Haskell development
Requires=microvm-virtiofsd-persistent@.service
After=microvm-virtiofsd-persistent@.service
AssertFileNotEmpty=%h/.local/share/microvm/vms/%i/flake/flake.nix
[Service]
Type=forking
ExecStartPre=/usr/bin/sh -c "[ /nix/var/nix/db/db.sqlite -ot %h/.local/share/microvm/nix-store-db-dump ]   nix-store --dump-db >%h/.local/share/microvm/nix-store-db-dump"
ExecStartPre=ln -f -t %h/.local/share/microvm/vms/%i/persistent/ %h/.local/share/microvm/nix-store-db-dump
ExecStartPre=-%h/.local/state/nix/profile/bin/tmux new -s microvm -d
ExecStart=%h/.local/state/nix/profile/bin/tmux new-window -t microvm: -n "%i" "exec %h/.local/state/nix/profile/bin/nix run --impure %h/.local/share/microvm/vms/%i/flake"

The above service definition creates a dump of the hosts nix store db so that it can be imported in the guest. This is necessary so that the guest can actually use what is available in /nix/store. There is an effort for an overlayed nix store that would be preferable to this hack. Finally the microvm is started inside a tmux session named microvm . This way I can use the VM with SSH or through the console and also access the qemu console. And for completeness the virtiofsd service:

[Unit]
Description=serve host persistent folder for dev VM
AssertPathIsDirectory=%h/.local/share/microvm/vms/%i/persistent
[Service]
ExecStart=%h/.local/state/nix/profile/bin/virtiofsd \
 --socket-path=$ XDG_RUNTIME_DIR /microvm-%i-persistent \
 --shared-dir=%h/.local/share/microvm/vms/%i/persistent \
 --gid-map :995:%G:1: \
 --uid-map :1000:%U:1:

Finally there is a thing people can agree on:

• 2023-08-28, OSNews: The end of the Googleverse
• 2023-07-28, Cory Doctorow: Microincentives and Enshittification
• 2023-10-03, Cory Doctorow: Google s enshittification memos
• 2024-01-15, Tim Bray: Mourning Google

Apparently, Google Search is not good anymore. And I m not the only one thinking about decentralization to fix it: Honey I federated the search engine - finding stuff online post-big tech - a lightning talk at the recent chaos communication congress The speaker however did not mention, that there have already been many attempts at building distributed search engines. So why do I think that such an attempt could finally succeed?

• More people are searching for alternatives to Google.
• Mainstream hard discs are incredibly big.
• Mainstream internet connection is incredibly fast.
• Google is bleeding talent.
• Most of the building blocks are available as free software.
• Success depends on your definition

My definition of success is:

A mildly technical computer user (able to install software) has access to a search engine that provides them with superior search results compared to Google for at least a few predefined areas of interest.

The exact algorithm used by Google Search to rank websites is a secret even to most Googlers. Still it is clear, that it relies heavily on big data: billions of queries, a comprehensive web index and user behaviour data. - All this is not available to us. A distributed search engine however can instead rely on user input. Every admin of one node seeds the node ranking with their personal selection of trusted sites. They connect their node with nodes of people they trust. This results in a web of (transitive) trust much like pgp. For comparison, imagine you are searching for something in a world without computers: You ask the people around you. They probably forward your question to their peers. I already had a look at YaCy. It is active, somewhat usable and has a friendly maintainer. Unfortunately I consider the codebase to show its age. It takes a lot of time for a newcomer to find their way around and it contains a lot of cruft. Nevertheless, YaCy is a good example that a decentralized search software can be done even by a small team or just one person. I myself started working on a software in Haskell and keep my notes here: Populus:DezInV. Since I m learning Haskell along the way, there is nothing there to see yet. Additionally I took a yak shaving break to learn nix. By the way: DuckDuckGo is not the alternative. And while I would encourage you to also try Yandex for a second opinion, I don t consider this a solution.

After much procrastination, I have gotten around to complete my DebConf23 (DC23), Kochi blog post. I lost the original etherpad which was started before DebConf23, for jotting down things. Now, I have started afresh with whatever I can remember, months after the actual conference ended. So things might be as accurate as my memory. DebConf23, the 24th annual Debian Conference, happened in Infopark, Kochi, India from 10th September to 17th September 2023. It was preceded by DebCamp from 3rd September to 9th September 2023. First formal bid to host DebConf in India was made during DebConf18 in Hsinchu, Taiwan by Raju Dev, which didn t came our way. In next DebConf, DebConf19 in Curitiba, Brazil, another bid was made by him with help and support from Sruthi, Utkarsh and the whole team.This time, India got the opportunity to host DebConf22, which eventually became DebConf23 for the reasons you all know. I initially met the local team on the sidelines of DebConf20, which was also my first DebConf. Having recently switched to Debian, DC20 introduced me to how things work in Debian. Video team s call for volunteers email pulled me in. Things stuck, and I kept hanging out and helping the local Indian DC team with various stuff. We did manage to organize multiple events leading to DebConf23 including MiniDebConf India 2021 Online, MiniDebConf Palakkad 2022, MiniDebConf Tamil Nadu 2023 and DebUtsav Kochi 2023, which gave us quite a bit of experience and workout. Many local organizers from these conferences later joined various DebConf teams during the conference to help out. For DebConf23, originally I was part of publicity team because that was my usual thing. After a team redistribution exercise, Sruthi and Praveen moved me to sponsorship team, as anyhow we didn t had to do much publicity and sponsorship was one of those things I could get involved remotely. Sponsorship team had to take care of raising funds by reaching out to sponsors, managing invoices and fulfillment. Praveen joined as well in sponsorship team. We also had international sponsorship team, Anisa, Daniel and various Debian Trusted Organizations (TO)s which took care of reaching out to international organizations, and we took care of reaching out to Indian organizations for sponsorship. It was really proud moment when my present employer, Unmukti (makers of hopbox) came aboard as Bronze sponsor. Though fundraising seem to be hit hard from tech industry slowdown and layoffs. Many of our yesteryear sponsors couldn t sponsor. We had biweekly local team meetings, which were turned to weekly as we neared the event. This was done in addition to biweekly global team meeting. To describe the conference venue, it happened in InfoPark, Kochi with the main conference hall being Athulya Hall and food, accommodation and two smaller halls in Four Point Hotel, right outside Infopark. We got Athulya Hall as part of venue sponsorship from Infopark. The distance between both of them was around 300 meters. Halls were named Anamudi, Kuthiran and Ponmudi based on hills and mountain areas in host state of Kerala. Other than Annamudi hall which was the main hall, I couldn t remember the names of the hall, I still can t. Four Points was big and expensive, and we had, as expected, cost overruns. Due to how DebConf function, an Indian university wasn t suitable to host a conference of this scale. I landed in Kochi on the first day of DebCamp on 3rd September. As usual, met Abraham first, and the better part of the next hour was spent on meet and greet. It was my first IRL DebConf so met many old friends and new folks. I got a room to myself. Abraham lived nearby and hadn t taken the accommodation, so I asked him to join. He finally joined from second day onwards. All through the conference, room 928 became in-famous for various reasons, and I had various roommates for company. In DebCamp days, we would get up to have breakfast and go back to sleep and get active only past lunch for hacking and helping in the hack lab for the day, followed by fun late night discussions and parties. The team even managed to get a press conference arranged as well, and we got an opportunity to go to Press Club, Ernakulam. Sruthi and Jonathan gave the speech and answered questions from journalists. The event was covered by media as well due to this. During the conference, every night the team use to have 9 PM meetings for retrospection and planning for next day, which was always dotted with new problems. Every day, we used to hijack Silent Hacklab for the meeting and gently ask the only people there at the time to give us space. DebConf, it itself is a well oiled machine. Network was brought up from scratch. Video team built the recording, audio mixing, live-streaming, editing and transcoding infrastructure on site. A gaming rig served as router and gateway. We got internet uplinks, a 1 Gbps sponsored leased line from Kerala Vision and a paid backup 100 Mbps connection from a different provider. IPv6 was added through HE s Tunnelbroker. Overall the network worked fine as additionally we had hotel Wi-Fi, so the conference network wasn t stretched much. I must highlight, DebConf is my only conference where almost everything and every piece of software in developed in-house, for the conference and modified according to need on the fly. Even event recording cameras, audio check, direction, recording and editing is all done on in-house software by volunteer-attendees (in some cases remote ones as well), all trained on the sideline of the conference. The core recording and mixing equipment is owned by Debian and travels to each venue. The rest is sourced locally. It was fun seeing how almost all the things were coordinated over text on Internet Relay Chat (IRC). If a talk/event was missing a talkmeister or a director or a camera person, a quick text on #debconf channel would be enough for someone to volunteer. Video team had a dedicated support channel for each conference venue for any issues and were quick to respond and fix stuff. It rained for the initial days, which gave us a cool weather. Swag team had decided to hand out umbrellas in swag kit which turned out to be quite useful. The swag kit was praised for quality and selection - many thanks to Anupa, Sruthi and others. It was fun wearing different color T-shirts, all designed by Abraham. Red for volunteers, light green for Video team, green for core-team i.e. staff and yellow for conference attendees. We were already acclimatized by the time DebConf really started as we had been talking, hacking and hanging out since last 7 days. Rush really started with the start of DebConf. More people joined on the first and second day of the conference. As has been the tradition, an opening talk was prepared by the Sruthi and local team (which I highly recommend watching to get more insights of the process). DebConf day 1 also saw job fair, where Canonical and FOSSEE, IIT Bombay had stalls for community interactions, which judging by the crowd itself turned out to be quite a hit. For me, association with DebConf (and Debian) started due to volunteering with video team, so anyhow I was going to continue doing that this conference as well. I usually volunteer for talks/events which anyhow I m interested in. Handling the camera, talkmeister-ing and direction are fun activities, though I didn t do sound this time around. Sound seemed difficult, and I didn t want to spoil someone s stream and recording. Talk attendance varied a lot, like in Bits from DPL talk, the hall was full but for some there were barely enough people to handle the volunteering tasks, but that s what usually happens. DebConf is more of a place to come together and collaborate, so talk attendance is an afterthought sometimes. I didn t submit any talk proposals this time around, as just being in the orga team was too much work already, and I knew, the talk preparation would get delayed to the last moment and I would have to rush through it. From Day 2 onward, more sponsor stalls were introduced in the hallway area. Hopbox by Unmukti , MostlyHarmless and Deeproot (joint stall) and FOSEE. MostlyHarmless stall had nice mechanical keyboards and other fun gadgets. Whenever I got the time, I would go and start typing racing to enjoy the nice, clicky keyboards. As the DebConf tradition dictates, we had a Cheese and Wine party. Everyone brought in cheese and other delicacies from their region. Then there was yummy Sadya. Sadya is a traditional vegetarian Malayalis lunch served over banana leaves. There were loads of different dishes served, the names of most I couldn t pronounce or recollect properly, but everything was super delicious. Day 4 was day trip and I chose to go to Athirappilly Waterfalls and Jungle safari. Pictures would describe the beauty better than words. The journey was bit long though.
Late that day, we heard the news of Abraham gone missing. We lost Abraham. He had worked really hard all through the years for Debian and making this conference possible. Talks were cancelled for the next day and Jonathan addressed everyone. We went to Abraham s home the next day to meet his family. Team had arranged buses to Abraham s place. It was an unfortunate moment that I only got an opportunity to visit his place after he was gone. Days went by slowly after that. The last day was marked by a small conference dinner. Some of the people had already left. All through the day and next, we kept saying goodbye to friends, with whom we spent almost a fortnight together. This was 2nd trip to Kochi. Vistara Airway s UK886 has become the default flight now. I have almost learned how to travel in and around Kochi by Metro, Water Metro, Airport Shuttle and auto. Things are quite accessible in Kochi but metro is a bit expensive compared to Delhi. I left Kochi on 19th. My flight was due to leave around 8 PM, so I had the whole day to myself. A direct option would have taken less than 1 hour, but as I had time and chose to take the long way to the airport. First took an auto rickshaw to Kakkanad Water Metro station. Then sailed in the water metro to Vyttila Water Metro station. Vyttila serves as intermobility hub which connects water metro, metro, bus at once place. I switched to Metro here at Vyttila Metro station till Aluva Metro station. Here, I had lunch and then boarded the Airport feeder bus to reach Kochi Airport. All in all, I did auto rickshaw > water metro > metro > feeder bus to reach Airport. I was fun and scenic. I must say, public transport and intermodal integration is quite good and once can transition seamlessly from one mode to next.
DebConf23 served its purpose of getting existing Debian people together, as well as getting new people interested and contributing to Debian. People who came are still contributing to Debian, and that s amazing. The conference wasn t without its fair share of troubles. There were multiple money transfer woes, and being in India didn t help. Many thanks to multiple organizations who were proactive in helping out. On top of this, there was conference visa uncertainty and other issues which troubled visa team a lot. Kudos to everyone who made this possible. Surely, I m going to miss the name, so thank you for it, you know how much you have done to make this event possible. Now, DebConf24 is scheduled for Busan, South Korea, and work is already in full swing. As usual, I m helping with the fundraising part and plan to attend too. Let s see if I can make it or not. In the end, we kept on saying, no DebConf at this scale would come back to India for the next 10 or 20 years. It s too much trouble to be frank. It was probably the peak that we might not reach again. I would be happy to be proven wrong though :)

Today I've updated an HPE ProLiant DL325 G10 from CentOS Stream 8 to CentOS Stream 9 (details on that to follow) and realized that hponcfg was broken afterwards. As I do not have a support contract with HPE, I couldn't just yell at them in private, so I am doing this in public now ;-) Welp, what the heck? But wait, 5.6.0 from 2020 looks old, let's update this first! hponcfg is part of the "Management Component Pack" (at least if you're not running RHEL or SLES where you get it via the "Service Pack for ProLiant" which requires a support contract) and can be downloaded from the Software Delivery Repository. The Software Delivery Repository tells you to configure it in /etc/yum.repos.d/mcp.repo as gpgcheck=0? Suuure! Plain HTTP? Suuure! But it gets better! When you look at https://downloads.linux.hpe.com/repo/mcp/centos/ (you have to substitute dist with your distribution!) you'll see that there is no 9 folder and thus no packages for CentOS (Stream) 9. There are however folders for Oracle, Rocky and Alma. Phew. Let's take one of these! dnf upgrade hponcfg updates it to hponcfg-6.0.0-0.x86_64 and: Fuck. ldd doesn't show hponcfg being linked to libssl, do they dlopen() at runtime and fucked something up? ltrace to the rescue! WAT? They run strings /bin/openssl grep 'OpenSSL' and compare the result with "OpenSSL 3.0"?! Sure, OpenSSL 3.2 in EL9 is rather fresh and didn't hit RHEL/Oracle/Alma/Rocky yet, but surely there are better ways to check for a compatible version of OpenSSL than THIS?! Anyway, I am not going to downgrade my OpenSSL. Neither will I patch it to pretend to be 3.0. But I can patch the hponcfg binary! Yes, I used vim. Yes, it works. No, I won't guarantee this won't kill a kitten somewhere. For comparison, here is the diff --text output: Pretty sure it won't apply like this with patch, but you get the idea. And yes, double-giggles for the fact that the error message says "Install latest SSL library to use HPONCFG" and the issues is because I have the latest SSL library installed

This year's Wikimedia Hackathon was held in early May in Tallinn, Estonia. Like last year, it was a great opportunity to both see people I work with regularly, including people in my own team that I had not seen in person before, and to work with and help people that I have had very limited interactions with before. I presented a session about Puppet (slides), the configuration management tool used on Wikimedia infrastructure (and some other projects I've been involved on) which I think went quite well. I also organized (read: picked a spot for in the schedule) the cuteness meetup. In addition to the sessions, the main focus of the event was, of course, hacking. As usual, I didn't make any major plans beforehand, and instead ended up working on several smaller projects as they popped up. Here is a list of things I can remember working on:

• I fixed several small issues in LibUp that makes it pass on more MediaWiki repositories (including core.git). James and I also migrated the LibUp configuration to GitLab.
• I finished up an MR to grunt-banana-checker to add support for automatically fixing some common issues that were causing LibUp failures and to fix some minor bugs.
• I worked with Piotr to get some of my patches to the OATHAuth and WebAuthn MediaWiki extensions merged. This is a part of my project to add support for more than one two-factor authentication device at a time that I was also working on during the Wikimania 2023 hackathon. Next up on this project is writing some UI code.
• I fixed Wikimedia Gerrit twice after it had some issues that needed SRE intervention.
• I sent a patch to Wikimedia's Phabricator/Phorge fork to add a new fox token. This ended up being deployed on Sunday and I got to showcase this during the hackathon showcase.
• Reedy and I implemented support for foxes in WikiLove. I also wrote a bot to spam foxes to Sammy's talk pages on the beta cluster.¹ (This also involved a fun side quest to get a working thumbnail for the fox image we used to show up on Beta since the thumbnailing there is broken.)
• I removed some deprecated code from core to earn the MediaWiki track T-shirt. I also reviewed a bunch of patches by others trying to earn that T-shirt.²
• I found and reported some bugs relating to Parsoid read views on Commons.
• I processed some Toolforge account approval requests and Cloud VPS project requests. I also helped some people debug some Cloud VPS issues.
• I helped Bryan debug and fix an issue with HTTP/1.1 streams through the Toolforge front proxy.
• I made some queries on the Wiki Replicas accidentally very slow and then fixed them to be fast again on the next day.
• Got a 100% helpful, harmless, useful, etc. patch merged to something. I will provide no more details on this one.

Finally, a conversation I had at the hackathon resulted in me nominating Novem Linguae for mediawiki/* +2 access a few days after the hackathon. I had a great time, and the ferry trip to Tallinn was much nicer than the very early flight I had last year. I can't wait to see you all again :-) Disclosure: I am currently a Wikimedia Foundation contractor, and the Foundation did pay for my travel to Tallinn. This is my personal blog and these are my own opinions.

I have not been able to walk since February 18, 2023. When people ask me how I'm doing, this is the first thing that comes to mind. "Well, you know, the usual, but also I still can't walk," I think to myself. If I dream at night, I often see myself walking or running. In conversation, if I talk about going somewhere, I'll imagine walking there. Even though it's been over a year, I remember walking to the bus, riding to see my friends, going out for brunch, cooking community dinners. But these days, I can't manage going anywhere except by car, and I can't do the driving, and I can't dis/assemble and load my chair. When I'm resting in bed and follow a guided meditation, I might be asked to imagine walking up a staircase, step by step. Sometimes, I do. Other times, I imagine taking a little elevator in my chair, or wheeling up ramps. I feel like there is little I can say that can express the extent of what this illness has taken from me, but it's worth trying. To an able-bodied person, seeing me in a power wheelchair is usually "enough." One of my acquaintances cried when they last saw me in person. But frankly, I love my wheelchair. I am not "wheelchair-bound" I am bed-bound, and the wheelchair gets me out of bed. My chair hasn't taken anything from me. *** In October of 2022, I was diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis. Scientists and doctors don't really know what myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) is. Diseases like it have been described for over 200 years.¹ It primarily affects women between the ages of 10-39, and the primary symptom is "post-exertional malaise" or PEM: debilitating, disproportionate fatigue following activity, often delayed by 24-72 hours and not relieved by sleep. That fatigue has earned the illness the misleading name of "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome" or CFS, as though we're all just very tired all the time. But tired people respond to exercise positively. People with ME/CFS do not.² Given the dearth of research and complete lack of on-label treatments, you may think this illness is at least rare, but it is actually quite common: in the United States, an estimated 836k-2.5m people³ have ME/CFS. It is frequently misdiagnosed, and it is estimated that as many as 90% of cases are missed,⁴ due to mild or moderate symptoms that mimic other diseases. Furthermore, over half of Long COVID cases likely meet the diagnostic criteria for ME,⁵ so these numbers have increased greatly in recent years. That is, ME is at least as common as rheumatoid arthritis,⁶ another delightful illness I have. But while any doctor knows what rheumatoid arthritis is, not enough⁷ have heard of "myalgic encephalomylitis." Despite a high frequency and disease burden, post-viral associated conditions (PASCs) such as ME have been neglected for medical funding for decades.⁸ Indeed, many people, including medical care workers, find it hard to believe that after the acute phase of illness, severe symptoms can persist. PASCs such as ME and Long COVID defy the typical narrative around common illnesses. I was always told that if I got sick, I should expect to rest for a bit, maybe take some medications, and a week or two later, I'd get better, right? But I never got better. These are complex, multi-system diseases that do not neatly fit into the Western medical system's specializations. I have seen nearly every specialty because ME/CFS affects nearly every system of the body: cardiology, nephrology, pulmonology, neurology, opthalmology, and, many, many more. You'd think they'd hand out frequent flyer cards, or a medical passport with fun stamps, but nope. Just hundreds of pages of medical records. And when I don't fit neatly into one particular specialist's box, then I'm sent back to my primary care doctor to regroup while we try to troubleshoot my latest concerning symptoms. "Sorry, can't help you. Not my department." With little available medical expertise, a lot of my disease management has been self-directed in partnership with primary care. I've read hundreds of articles, papers, publications, CME material normally reserved for doctors. It's truly out of necessity, and I'm certain I would be much worse off if I lacked the skills and connections to do this; there are so few ME/CFS experts in the US that there isn't one in my state or any adjacent state.⁹ So I've done a lot of my own work, much of it while barely being able to read. (A text-to-speech service is a real lifesaver.) To facilitate managing my illness, I've built a mental model of how my particular flavour of ME/CFS works based on the available research I've been able to read and how I respond to treatments. Here is my best attempt to explain it:

• After a severe (non-COVID) infection, an ongoing interaction between my immune system and my metabolism have stopped my body from being able to do aerobic respiration.¹⁰
• I don't know why or how, but my mitochondria don't work properly anymore.¹¹
• This means that if I use too much energy, my body isn't able to make enough energy to catch up, and I have severe symptoms over the next few days as my body tries to manage the consequences.
• Those symptoms aren't limited to fatigue: I've developed flu-like symptoms and even fevers, limbs so heavy they felt paralyzed, tachycardia in response to even the slightest activity.

The best way I have learned to manage this is to prevent myself from doing activities where I will exceed that aerobic threshold by wearing a heartrate monitor,¹² but the amount of activity that permits in my current state of health is laughably restrictive. Most days I'm unable to spend more than one to two hours out of bed. Over time, this has meant worsening from a persistent feeling of tiredness all the time and difficulty commuting into an office or sitting at a desk, to being unable to sit at a desk for an entire workday even while working from home and avoiding physically intense chores or exercise without really understanding why, to being unable to leave my apartment for days at a time, and finally, being unable to stand for more than a minute or two or walk. But it's not merely that I can't walk. Many folks in wheelchairs are able to live excellent lives with adaptive technology. The problem is that I am so fatigued, any activity can destroy my remaining quality of life. In my worst moments, I've been unable to read, move my arms or legs, or speak aloud. Every single one of my limbs burned, as though I had caught fire. Food sat in my stomach for hours, undigested, while my stomach seemingly lacked the energy to do its job. I currently rely on family and friends for full-time caretaking, plus a paid home health aide, as I am unable to prep meals, shower, or leave the house independently. This assistance has helped me slowly improve from my poorest levels of function. While I am doing better than I was at my worst, I've had to give up essentially all of my hobbies with physical components. These include singing, cooking, baking, taking care of my houseplants, cross-stitching, painting, and so on. Doing any of these result in post-exertional malaise so I've had to stop; this reduction of activity to prevent worsening the illness is referred to as "pacing." I've also had to cut back essentially all of my volunteering and work in open source; I am only cleared by my doctor to work 15h/wk (from bed) as of writing. *** CW: severe illness, death, and suicide (skip this section) The difficulty of living with a chronic illness is that there's no light at the end of the tunnel. Some diseases have a clear treatment path: you take the medications, you complete the procedures, you hit all the milestones, and then you're done, perhaps with some long-term maintenance work. But with ME, there isn't really an end in sight. The median duration of illness reported in one 1997 study was over 6 years, with some patients reporting 20 years of symptoms.¹³ While a small number of patients spontaneously recover, and many improve, the vast majority of patients are unable to regain their baseline function.¹⁴ My greatest fear since losing the ability to walk is getting worse still. Because, while I already require assistance with nearly every activity of daily living, there is still room for decline. The prognosis for extremely ill patients is dismal, and many require feeding tubes and daily nursing care. This may lead to life-threatening malnutrition;¹⁵ a number of these extremely severe patients have died, either due to medical neglect or suicide.¹⁶ Extremely severe patients cannot tolerate light, sound, touch, or cognitive exertion,¹⁷ and often spend most of their time lying flat in a darkened room with ear muffs or an eye mask.¹⁸ This is all to say, my prognosis is not great. But while I recognize that the odds aren't exactly in my favour, I am also damn stubborn. (A friend once cheerfully described me as "stubbornly optimistic!") I only get one shot at life, and I do not want to spend the entirety of it barely able to perceive what's going on around me. So while my prognosis is uncertain, there's lots of evidence that I can improve somewhat,¹⁹ and there's also lots of evidence that I can live 20+ years with this disease. It's a bitter pill to swallow, but it also means I might have the gift of time something that not all my friends with severe complex illnesses have had. I feel like I owe it to myself to do the best I can to improve; to try to help others in a similar situation; and to enjoy the time that I have. I already feel like my life has been moving in slow motion for the past 4 years there's no need to add more suffering. Finding joy, as much as I can, every day, is essential to keep up my strength for this marathon. Even if it takes 20 years to find a cure, I am convinced that the standard of care is going to improve. All the research and advocacy that's been happening over the past decade is plenty to feel hopeful about.²⁰ Hope is a discipline,²¹ and I try to remind myself of this on the hardest days. *** I'm not entirely sure why I decided to write this. Certainly, today is International ME/CFS Awareness Day, and I'm hoping this post will raise awareness in spaces that aren't often thinking about chronic illnesses. But I think there is also a part of me that wants to share, reach out in some way to the people I've lost contact with while I've been treading water, managing the day to day of my illness. I experience this profound sense of loss, especially when I think back to the life I had before. Everyone hits limitations in what they can do and accomplish, but there is so little I can do with the time and energy that I have. And yet, I understand even this precious little could still be less. So I pace myself. Perhaps I can inspire you to take action on behalf of those of us too fatigued to do the advocacy we need and deserve. Should you donate to a charity or advocacy organization supporting ME/CFS research? In the US, there are many excellent organizations, such as ME Action, the Open Medicine Foundation, SolveME, the Bateman Horne Center, and the Workwell Foundation. I am also happy to match any donations through the end of May 2024 if you send me your receipts. But charitable giving only goes so far, and I think this problem deserves the backing of more powerful organizations. Proportionate government funding and support is desperately needed. It's critical for us to push governments²² to provide the funding required for research that will make an impact on patients' lives now. Many organizers are running campaigns around the world, advocating for this investment. There is a natural partnership between ME advocacy and Long COVID advocacy, for example, and we have an opportunity to make a great difference to many people by pushing for research and resources inclusive of all PASCs. Some examples I'm aware of include:

• [US] A Long COVID "moonshot" effort, drafted in April 2024 by Senator Sanders. Contact your representatives and encourage them to support it. Ask them to ensure the effort includes support for ME/CFS and other related conditions and PASCS.
• [Canada] National ME/FM Action recommended participation in public budget consultation processes and made a submission. Though the 2024 consultation is closed, you can still contact your MP to improve awareness and advocate for budgetary support. It may also be worth contacting your MLA to advocate for better PASC care in provincial clinics.
• [UK] Action for ME is advocating for a cross-Government Delivery Plan for ME/CFS care in England. Contact your MP and encourage them to support it.
• [Other] MEAction also regularly hosts government advocacy campaigns in the US, UK, and Scotland.

But outside of collective organizing, there are a lot of sick individuals out there that need help, too. Please, don't forget about us. We need you to visit us, care for us, be our confidantes, show up as friends. There are a lot of people who are very sick out here and need your care. I'm one of them.

After the unfortunate and somewhat surprising shutdown of the Open Collective Foundation (OCF), htop and Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) have migrated to Hack Club. Initially founded to improve STEM education, support high school computer science clubs and firmly founded in the hacker culture, Hack Club have created a US IRS approved 501(c)(3) charity that provides what Open Collective did/does¹ and more at a flat 7% fee of the project income. Nathan Scott organized these moves with Paul Spitler. Many thanks! We considered other options for the projects, e.g. Gentoo has moved to Software in the Public Interest (SPI) and I know SPI quite well as they were created initially to host Debian. But PCP moved from SPI to OCF in 2021. Open Collective has a European branch that seems independent of the dissolved US foundation. But all-in-all Hack Club seemed the best fit. You can find the new fiscal sponsorship and donation landing pages at:

htop	https://hcb.hackclub.com/htop/	https://hcb.hackclub.com/donations/start/htop
PCP	https://hcb.hackclub.com/pcp/	https://hcb.hackclub.com/donations/start/pcp

Welcome to the April 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In our reports, we attempt to outline what we have been up to over the past month, as well as mentioning some of the important things happening more generally in software supply-chain security. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. Table of contents:

1. New backseat-signed tool to validate distributions source inputs
2. NixOS is not reproducible
3. Certificate vulnerabilities in F-Droid s fdroidserver
4. Website updates
5. Reproducible Builds and Insights from an Independent Verifier for Arch Linux
6. libntlm now releasing minimal source-only tarballs
7. Distribution work
8. Mailing list news
9. diffoscope
10. Upstream patches
11. reprotest
12. Reproducibility testing framework

---

New backseat-signed tool to validate distributions source inputs kpcyrd announced a new tool called backseat-signed, after:

I figured out a somewhat straight-forward way to check if a given git archive output is cryptographically claimed to be the source input of a given binary package in either Arch Linux or Debian (or both).

Elaborating more in their announcement post, kpcyrd writes:

I believe this to be the reproducible source tarball thing some people have been asking about. As explained in the README, I believe reproducing autotools-generated tarballs isn t worth everybody s time and instead a distribution that claims to build from source should operate on VCS snapshots instead of tarballs with 25k lines of pre-generated shell-script.

Indeed, many distributions packages already build from VCS snapshots, and this trend is likely to accelerate in response to the xz incident. The announcement led to a lengthy discussion on our mailing list, as well as shorter followup thread from kpcyrd about bootstrapping Autotools projects.

NixOS is not reproducible Morten Linderud posted an post on his blog this month, provocatively titled, NixOS is not reproducible . Although quickly admitting that his title is indeed clickbait , Morten goes on to clarify the precise guarantees and promises that NixOS provides its users. Later in the most, Morten mentions that he was motivated to write the post because:

I have heavily invested my free-time on this topic since 2017, and met some of the accomplishments we have had with Doesn t NixOS solve this? for just as long and I thought it would be of peoples interest to clarify[.]

Certificate vulnerabilities in F-Droid s fdroidserver In early April, Fay Stegerman announced a certificate pinning bypass vulnerability and Proof of Concept (PoC) in the F-Droid fdroidserver tools for managing builds, indexes, updates, and deployments for F-Droid repositories to the oss-security mailing list.

We observed that embedding a v1 (JAR) signature file in an APK with minSdk >= 24 will be ignored by Android/apksigner, which only checks v2/v3 in that case. However, since fdroidserver checks v1 first, regardless of minSdk, and does not verify the signature, it will accept a fake certificate and see an incorrect certificate fingerprint. [ ] We also realised that the above mentioned discrepancy between apksigner and androguard (which fdroidserver uses to extract the v2/v3 certificates) can be abused here as well. [ ]

Later on in the month, Fay followed up with a second post detailing a third vulnerability and a script that could be used to scan for potentially affected .apk files and mentioned that, whilst upstream had acknowledged the vulnerability, they had not yet applied any ameliorating fixes.

Website updates There were a number of improvements made to our website this month, including Chris Lamb updating the archive page to recommend -X and unzipping with TZ=UTC [ ] and adding Maven, Gradle, JDK and Groovy examples to the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH page [ ]. In addition Jan Zerebecki added a new /contribute/opensuse/ page [ ] and Sertonix fixed the automatic RSS feed detection [ ][ ].

Reproducible Builds and Insights from an Independent Verifier for Arch Linux Joshua Drexel, Esther H nggi and Iy n M ndez Veiga of the School of Computer Science and Information Technology, Hochschule Luzern (HSLU) in Switzerland published a paper this month entitled Reproducible Builds and Insights from an Independent Verifier for Arch Linux. The paper establishes the context as follows:

Supply chain attacks have emerged as a prominent cybersecurity threat in recent years. Reproducible and bootstrappable builds have the potential to reduce such attacks significantly. In combination with independent, exhaustive and periodic source code audits, these measures can effectively eradicate compromises in the building process. In this paper we introduce both concepts, we analyze the achievements over the last ten years and explain the remaining challenges.

What is more, the paper aims to:

contribute to the reproducible builds effort by setting up a rebuilder and verifier instance to test the reproducibility of Arch Linux packages. Using the results from this instance, we uncover an unnoticed and security-relevant packaging issue affecting 16 packages related to Certbot [ ].

A PDF of the paper is available.

libntlm now releasing minimal source-only tarballs Simon Josefsson wrote on his blog this month that, going forward, the libntlm project will now be releasing what they call minimal source-only tarballs :

The XZUtils incident illustrate that tarballs with files that are not included in the git archive offer an opportunity to disguise malicious backdoors. [The] risk of hiding malware is not the only motivation to publish signed minimal source-only tarballs. With pre-generated content in tarballs, there is a risk that GNU/Linux distributions [ship] generated files coming from the tarball into the binary *.deb or *.rpm package file. Typically the person packaging the upstream project never realized that some installed artifacts was not re-built[.]

Simon s post goes into further details how this was achieved, and describes some potential caveats and counters some expected responses as well. A shorter version can be found in the announcement for the 1.8 release of libntlm.

Distribution work In Debian this month, Helmut Grohne filed a bug suggesting the removal of dh-buildinfo, a tool to generate and distribute .buildinfo-like files within binary packages. Note that this is distinct from the .buildinfo generation performed by dpkg-genbuildinfo. By contrast, the entirely optional dh-buildinfo generated a debian/buildinfo file that would be shipped within binary packages as /usr/share/doc/package/buildinfo_$arch.gz. Adrian Bunk recently asked about including source hashes in Debian s .buildinfo files, which prompted Guillem Jover to refresh some old patches to dpkg to make this possible, which revealed some quirks Vagrant Cascadian discovered when testing. In addition, 21 reviews of Debian packages were added, 22 were updated and 16 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. A number issue types have been added, such as new random_temporary_filenames_embedded_by_mesonpy and timestamps_added_by_librime toolchain issues. In openSUSE, it was announced that their Factory distribution enabled bit-by-bit reproducible builds for almost all parts of the package. Previously, more parts needed to be ignored when comparing package files, but now only the signature needs to be deleted. In addition, Bernhard M. Wiedemann published theunreproduciblepackage as a proper .rpm package which it allows to better test tools intended to debug reproducibility. Furthermore, it was announced that Bernhard s work on a 100% reproducible openSUSE-based distribution will be funded by NLnet. He also posted another monthly report for his reproducibility work in openSUSE. In GNU Guix, Janneke Nieuwenhuizen submitted a patch set for creating a reproducible source tarball for Guix. That is to say, ensuring that make dist is reproducible when run from Git. [ ] Lastly, in Fedora, a new wiki page was created to propose a change to the distribution. Titled Changes/ReproduciblePackageBuilds , the page summarises itself as a proposal whereby A post-build cleanup is integrated into the RPM build process so that common causes of build irreproducibility in packages are removed, making most of Fedora packages reproducible.

Mailing list news On our mailing list this month:

• Continuing a thread started in March 2024 about the Arch Linux minimal container now being 100% reproducible, John Gilmore followed up with a post about the practical and philosophical distinctions of local vs. remote storage of the various artifacts needed to build packages.
• Chris Lamb asked the list which conferences readers are attending these days: After peak Covid and other industry-wide changes, conferences are no longer the must attend events they previously were especially in the area of software supply-chain security. In rough, practical terms, it seems harder to justify conference travel today than it did in mid-2019. The thread generated a number of responses which would be of interest to anyone planning travel in Q3 and Q4 of 2024.
• James Addison wrote to the list about a quirk in Git related to its core.autocrlf functionality, thus helpfully passing on a slightly off-topic and perhaps not of direct relevance to anyone on the list today note that might still be the kind of issue that is useful to be aware of if-and-when puzzling over unexpected git content / checksum issues (situations that I do expect people on this list encounter from time-to-time) .

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made a number of changes such as uploading versions 263, 264 and 265 to Debian and made the following additional changes:

• Don t crash on invalid .zip files, even if we encounter their badness halfway through the file and not at the time of their initial opening. [ ]
• Prevent odt2txt tests from always being skipped due to an (impossibly) new version requirement. [ ]
• Avoid parens-in-parens in test skipping messages. [ ]
• Ensure that tests with >=-style version constraints actually print the tool name. [ ]

In addition, Fay Stegerman fixed a crash when there are (invalid) duplicate entries in .zip which was originally reported in Debian bug #1068705). [ ] Fay also added a user-visible note to a diff when there are duplicate entries in ZIP files [ ]. Lastly, Vagrant Cascadian added an external tool pointer for the zipdetails tool under GNU Guix [ ] and proposed updates to diffoscope in Guix as well [ ] which were merged as [264] [265], fixed a regression in test coverage and increased verbosity of the test suite[ ].

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:

• Chris Lamb:
  • #1068173 filed against pg-gvm.
  • #1068176 filed against goldendict-ng.
  • #1068372 filed against grokevt.
  • #1068374 filed against ttconv.
  • #1068375 filed against ludevit.
  • #1068795 filed against pympress.
  • #1069168 filed against sagemath-database-conway-polynomials.
  • #1069169 filed against gap-polymaking.
  • #1069663 filed against dub.
  • #1069709 filed against dpb.
  • #1069784 filed against python-itemloaders.
  • #1069822 filed against python-gvm.
• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • metis (fix build with nocheck)
  • musique (fix a date-related issue)
  • orthanc-volview (fix an issue with mtimes and sorting)
  • go1.13, go1.14, go1.15 (fix a parallelism-related issue)
  • postfish (disable compile-time benchmarking)
  • geany/glfw (toolchain, random)
  • edk2/ovmf/tianocore (with Joey Li: fix a date-related issue)
  • dlib (report an issue with compile-time-CPU-detection)
  • lua-lmod (fix a date-related issue)
  • gitui (fix a date-related issue)
  • openssl-3 (report an issue with random output)
  • gcc14 (FTBFS-2038)
  • nebula (FTBFS-2027-11-11)
• Jan Zerebecki:
  • rpm (Support reproducible automatic rebuilds, etc.)
  • openSUSE-release-tools (Create changelog for generated package sources for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH)
  • pesign-obs-integration (Create changelog for generated package sources for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH)
  • openSUSE post-build-checks (Set SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH)
  • obs-build (Fix changelog timezone handling)
  • obs-service-tar_scm (When generating changelog from Git, create the file if it does not exist.)
• Thomas Goirand:
  • oslo.messaging (fix a hostname-related issue)

reprotest reprotest is our tool for building the same source code twice in different environments and then checking the binaries produced by each build for any differences. This month, reprotest version 0.7.27 was uploaded to Debian unstable) by Vagrant Cascadian who made the following additional changes:

• Enable specific number of CPUs using --vary=num_cpus.cpus=X. [ ]
• Consistently use 398 days for time variation, rather than choosing randomly each time. [ ]
• Disable builds of arch:any packages. [ ]
• Update the description for the build_path.path option in README.rst. [ ]
• Update escape sequences for compatibility with Python 3.12. (#1068853). [ ]
• Remove the generic upstream signing-key [ ] and update the packages signing key with the currently active team members [ ].
• Update the packaging Standards-Version to 4.7.0. [ ]

In addition, Holger Levsen fixed some spelling errors detected by the spellintian tool [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian updated reprotest in GNU Guix to 0.7.27.

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework running primarily at tests.reproducible-builds.org in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In April, an enormous number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:

• Debian-related changes:
  • Adjust for changed internal IP addresses at Codethink. [ ]
  • Automatically cleanup failed diffoscope user services if there are too many failures. [ ][ ]
  • Configure two new nodes at infomanik.cloud. [ ][ ]
  • Schedule Debian experimental even less. [ ][ ]
• Breakage detection:
  • Exclude currently building packages from breakage detection. [ ]
  • Be more noisy if diffoscope crashes. [ ]
  • Health check: provide clickable URLs in jenkins job log for failed pkg builds due to diffoscope crashes. [ ]
  • Limit graph to about the last 100 days of breakages only. [ ]
  • Fix all found files with bad permissions. [ ]
  • Prepare dealing with diffoscope timeouts. [ ]
  • Detect more cases of failure to debootstrap base system. [ ]
  • Include timestamps of failed job runs. [ ]
• Documentation updates:
  • Document how to access arm64 nodes at Codethink. [ ]
  • Document how to use infomaniak.cloud. [ ]
  • Drop notes about long stalled LeMaker HiKey960 boards sponsored by HPE and hosted at ETH. [ ]
  • Mention osuosl4 and osuosl5 and explain their usage. [ ]
  • Mention that some packages are built differently. [ ][ ]
  • Improve language in a comment. [ ]
  • Add more notes how to query resource usage from infomaniak.cloud. [ ]
• Node maintenance:
  • Add ionos4 and ionos14 to THANKS. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Deprecate Squid on ionos1 and ionos10. [ ]
  • Drop obsolete script to powercycle arm64 architecture nodes. [ ]
  • Update system_health_check for new proxy nodes. [ ]
• Misc changes:
  • Make the update_jdn.sh script more robust. [ ][ ]
  • Update my SSH public key. [ ]

In addition, Mattia Rizzolo added some new host details. [ ]

---

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:

• IRC: #reproducible-builds on irc.oftc.net.
• Twitter: @ReproBuilds
• Mastodon: @reproducible_builds@fosstodon.org
• Mailing list: rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org

This post is a review for Computing Reviews for Hacks, leaks and revelations The art of analyzing hacked and leaked data , a book published in No Starch Press

Imagine you ve come across a trove of files documenting a serious deed and you feel the need to blow the whistle. Or maybe you are an investigative journalist and this whistleblower trusts you and wants to give you said data. Or maybe you are a technical person, trusted by said journalist to help them do things right not only to help them avoid being exposed while leaking the information, but also to assist them in analyzing the contents of the dataset. This book will be a great aid for all of the above tasks. The author, Micah Lee, is both a journalist and a computer security engineer. The book is written entirely from his experience handling important datasets, and is organized in a very logical and sound way. Lee organized the 14 chapters in five parts. The first part the most vital to transmitting the book s message, in my opinion begins by talking about the care that must be taken when handling a sensitive dataset: how to store it, how to communicate it to others, sometimes even what to redact (exclude) so the information retains its strength but does not endanger others (or yourself). The first two chapters introduce several tools for encrypting information and keeping communication anonymous, not getting too deep into details and keeping it aimed at a mostly nontechnical audience. Something that really sets this book apart from others like it is that Lee s aim is not only to tell stories about the hacks and leaks he has worked with, or to present the technical details on how he analyzed them, but to teach readers how to do the work. From Part 2 onward the book adopts a tutorial style, teaching the reader numerous tools for obtaining and digging information out of huge and very timely datasets. Lee guides the reader through various data breaches, all of them leaked within the last five years: BlueLeaks, Oath Keepers email dumps, Heritage Foundation, Parler, Epik, and Cadence Health. He guides us through a tutorial on using the command line (mostly targeted at Linux, but considering MacOS and Windows as well), running Docker containers, learning the basics of Python, parsing and filtering structured data, writing small web applications for getting at the right bits of data, and working with structured query language (SQL) databases. The book does an excellent job of fulfilling its very ambitious aims, and this is even more impressive given the wide range of professional profiles it is written for; that being said, I do have a couple critiques. First, the book is ideologically loaded: the datasets all exhibit the alt-right movement that has gained strength in the last decade. Lee takes the reader through many instances of COVID deniers, rioters for Donald Trump during the January 2021 attempted coup, attacks against Black Lives Matter activists, and other extremism research; thus this book could alienate right-wing researchers, who might also be involved in handling important whistleblowing cases. Second, given the breadth of the topic and my 30-plus years of programming experience, I was very interested in the first part of each chapter but less so in the tutorial part. I suppose a journalist reading through the same text might find the sections about the importance of data handling and source protection to be similarly introductory. This is unavoidable, of course, given the nature of this work. However, while Micah Lee is an excellent example of a journalist with the appropriate technical know-how to process the types of material he presents as examples, expecting any one person to become a professional in both fields is asking too much. All in all, this book is excellent. The writing style is informal and easy to read, the examples are engaging, and the analysis is very good. It will certainly teach you something, no matter your background, and it might very well complement your professional skills.

Note: I've been awfully silent here for the past ... (checks notes) oh dear, 3 months! But that's not because I've been idle, quite the contrary, I've been very busy but just didn't have time to write about anything. So I've taken it upon myself to write something about my work this week, and published this post on the Tor blog which I copy here for a broader audience. Let me know if you like this or not.

Tor has finally completed a long migration from legacy Git infrastructure (Gitolite and GitWeb) to our self-hosted GitLab server. Git repository addresses have therefore changed. Many of you probably have made the switch already, but if not, you will need to change:

https://git.torproject.org/

to:

https://gitlab.torproject.org/

In your Git configuration. The GitWeb front page is now an archived listing of all the repositories before the migration. Inactive git repositories were archived in GitLab legacy/gitolite namespace and the gitweb.torproject.org and git.torproject.org web sites now redirect to GitLab. Best effort was made to reproduce the original gitolite repositories faithfully and also avoid duplicating too much data in the migration. But it's possible that some data present in Gitolite has not migrated to GitLab. User repositories are particularly at risk, because they were massively migrated, and they were "re-forked" from their upstreams, to avoid wasting disk space. If a user had a project with a matching name it was assumed to have the right data, which might be inaccurate. The two virtual machines responsible for the legacy service (cupani for git-rw.torproject.org and vineale for git.torproject.org and gitweb.torproject.org) have been shutdown. Their disks will remain for 3 months (until the end of July 2024) and their backups for another year after that (until the end of July 2025), after which point all the data from those hosts will be destroyed, with only the GitLab archives remaining. The rest of this article expands on how this was done and what kind of problems we faced during the migration.

Where is the code? Normally, nothing should be lost. All repositories in gitolite have been either explicitly migrated by their owners, forcibly migrated by the sysadmin team (TPA), or explicitly destroyed at their owner's request. An exhaustive rewrite map translates gitolite projects to GitLab projects. Some of those projects actually redirect to their parent in cases of empty repositories that were obvious forks. Destroyed repositories redirect to the GitLab front page. Because the migration happened progressively, it's technically possible that commits pushed to gitolite were lost after the migration. We took great care to avoid that scenario. First, we adopted a proposal (TPA-RFC-36) in June 2023 to announce the transition. Then, in March 2024, we locked down all repositories from any further changes. Around that time, only a handful of repositories had changes made after the adoption date, and we examined each repository carefully to make sure nothing was lost. Still, we built a diff of all the changes in the git references that archivists can peruse to check for data loss. It's large (6MiB+) because a lot of repositories were migrated before the mass migration and then kept evolving in GitLab. Many other repositories were rebuilt in GitLab from parent to rebuild a fork relationship which added extra references to those clones. A note to amateur archivists out there, it's probably too late for one last crawl now. The Git repositories now all redirect to GitLab and are effectively unavailable in their original form. That said, the GitWeb site was crawled into the Internet Archive in February 2024, so at least some copy of it is available in the Wayback Machine. At that point, however, many developers had already migrated their projects to GitLab, so the copies there were already possibly out of date compared with the repositories in GitLab. Software Heritage also has a copy of all repositories hosted on Gitolite since June 2023 and have continuously kept mirroring the repositories, where they will be kept hopefully in eternity. There's an issue where the main website can't find the repositories when you search for gitweb.torproject.org, instead search for git.torproject.org. In any case, if you believe data is missing, please do let us know by opening an issue with TPA.

Why? This is an old project in the making. The first discussion about migrating from gitolite to GitLab started in 2020 (almost 4 years ago). But going further back, the first GitLab experiment was in 2016, almost a decade ago. The current GitLab server dates from 2019, replacing Trac for issue tracking in 2020. It was originally supposed to host only mirrors for merge requests and issue trackers but, naturally, one thing led to another and eventually, GitLab had grown a container registry, continuous integration (CI) runners, GitLab Pages, and, of course, hosted most Git repositories. There were hesitations at moving to GitLab for code hosting. We had discussions about the increased attack surface and ways to mitigate that, but, ultimately, it seems the issues were not that serious and the community embraced GitLab. TPA actually migrated its most critical repositories out of shared hosting entirely, into specific servers (e.g. the Puppet Git repository is just on the Puppet server now), leveraging Git's decentralized nature and removing an entire attack surface from our infrastructure. Some of those repositories are mirrored back into GitLab, but the authoritative copy is not on GitLab. In any case, the proposal to migrate from Gitolite to GitLab was effectively just formalizing a fait accompli.

How to migrate from Gitolite / cgit to GitLab The progressive migration was a challenge. If you intend to migrate between hosting platforms, we strongly recommend to make a "flag day" during which you migrate all repositories at once. This ensures a smoother transition and avoids elaborate rewrite rules. When Gitolite access was shutdown, we had repositories on both GitLab and Gitolite, without a clear relationship between the two. A priori, the plan then was to import all the remaining Gitolite repositories into the legacy/gitolite namespace, but that seemed wasteful, particularly for large repositories like Tor Browser which uses nearly a gigabyte of disk space. So we took special care to avoid duplicating repositories. When the mass migration started, only 71 of the 538 Gitolite repositories were Migrated to GitLab in the gitolite.conf file. So, given that we had hundreds of repositories to migrate:, we developed some automation to "save time". We already automate similar ad-hoc tasks with Fabric, so we used that framework here as well. (Our normal configuration management tool is Puppet, which is a poor fit here.) So a relatively large amount of Python code was produced to basically do the following:

1. check if all on-disk repositories are listed in gitolite.conf (and vice versa) and either add missing repositories or delete them from disk if garbage
2. for each repository in gitolite.conf, if its category is marked Migrated to GitLab, skip, otherwise;
3. find a matching GitLab project by name, prompt the user for multiple matches
4. if a match is found, redirect if the repository is non-empty
   • we have GitLab projects that look like the real thing, but are only present to host migrated Trac issues
   • in such cases we cloned the Gitolite project locally and pushed to the existing repository instead
5. otherwise, a new repository is created in the legacy/gitolite namespace, using the "import" mechanism in GitLab to automatically import the repository from Gitolite, creating redirections and updating gitolite.conf to document the change

User repositories (those under the user/ directory in Gitolite) were handled specially. First, the existing redirection map was checked to see if a similarly named project was migrated (so that, e.g. user/dgoulet/tor is properly treated as a fork of tpo/core/tor). Then the parent project was forked in GitLab and the Gitolite project force-pushed to the fork. This allows us to show the fork relationship in GitLab and, more importantly, benefit from the "pool" feature in GitLab which deduplicates disk usage between forks. Sometimes, we found no such relationships. Then we simply imported multiple repositories with similar names in the legacy/gitolite namespace, sometimes creating forks between user repositories, on a first-come-first-served basis from the gitolite.conf order. The code used in this migration is now available publicly. We encourage other groups planning to migrate from Gitolite/GitWeb to GitLab to use (and contribute to) our fabric-tasks repository, even though it does have its fair share of hard-coded assertions. The main entry point is the gitolite.mass-repos-migration task. A typical migration job looked like:

anarcat@angela:fabric-tasks$ fab -H cupani.torproject.org gitolite.mass-repos-migration 
[...]
INFO: skipping project project/help/infra in category Migrated to GitLab
INFO: skipping project project/help/wiki in category Migrated to GitLab
INFO: skipping project project/jenkins/jobs in category Migrated to GitLab
INFO: skipping project project/jenkins/tools in category Migrated to GitLab
INFO: searching for projects matching fastlane
INFO: Successfully connected to https://gitlab.torproject.org
import gitolite project project/tor-browser/fastlane into gitlab legacy/gitolite/project/tor-browser/fastlane with desc 'Tor Browser app store and deployment configuration for Fastlane'? [Y/n] 
INFO: importing gitolite project project/tor-browser/fastlane into gitlab legacy/gitolite/project/tor-browser/fastlane with desc 'Tor Browser app store and deployment configuration for Fastlane'
INFO: building a new connect to cupani
INFO: defaulting name to fastlane
INFO: importing project into GitLab
INFO: Successfully connected to https://gitlab.torproject.org
INFO: loading group legacy/gitolite/project/tor-browser
INFO: archiving project
INFO: creating repository fastlane (fastlane) in namespace legacy/gitolite/project/tor-browser from https://git.torproject.org/project/tor-browser/fastlane into https://gitlab.torproject.org/legacy/gitolite/project/tor-browser/fastlane
INFO: migrating Gitolite repository project/tor-browser/fastlane to GitLab project legacy/gitolite/project/tor-browser/fastlane
INFO: uploading 399 bytes to /srv/git.torproject.org/repositories/project/tor-browser/fastlane.git/hooks/pre-receive
INFO: making /srv/git.torproject.org/repositories/project/tor-browser/fastlane.git/hooks/pre-receive executable
INFO: adding entry to rewrite_map /home/anarcat/src/tor/tor-puppet/modules/profile/files/git/gitolite2gitlab.txt
INFO: modifying gitolite.conf to add: "config gitweb.category = Migrated to GitLab"
INFO: rewriting gitolite config /home/anarcat/src/tor/gitolite-admin/conf/gitolite.conf to change project project/tor-browser/fastlane to category Migrated to GitLab
INFO: skipping project project/bridges/bridgedb-admin in category Migrated to GitLab
[...]

In the above, you can see migrated repositories skipped then the fastlane project being archived into GitLab. Another example with a later version of the script, processing only user repositories and showing the interactive prompt and a force-push into a fork:

$ fab -H cupani.torproject.org  gitolite.mass-repos-migration --include 'user/.*' --exclude '.*tor-?browser.*'
INFO: skipping project user/aagbsn/bridgedb in category Migrated to GitLab
[...]
INFO: skipping project user/phw/atlas in category Migrated to GitLab
INFO: processing project user/phw/obfsproxy (Philipp's obfsproxy repository) in category Users' development repositories (Attic)
INFO: Successfully connected to https://gitlab.torproject.org
INFO: user repository detected, trying to find fork phw/obfsproxy
WARNING: no existing fork found, entering user fork subroutine
INFO: found 6 GitLab projects matching 'obfsproxy' (https://gitweb.torproject.org/user/phw/obfsproxy.git)
0 legacy/gitolite/debian/obfsproxy
1 legacy/gitolite/debian/obfsproxy-legacy
2 legacy/gitolite/user/asn/obfsproxy
3 legacy/gitolite/user/ioerror/obfsproxy
4 tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/obfsproxy
5 tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/obfsproxy-legacy
select parent to fork from, or enter to abort: ^G4
INFO: repository is not empty: in-pack: 2104, packs: 1, size-pack: 414
fork project tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/obfsproxy into legacy/gitolite/user/phw/obfsproxy^G [Y/n] 
INFO: loading project tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/obfsproxy
INFO: forking project user/phw/obfsproxy into namespace legacy/gitolite/user/phw
INFO: waiting for fork to complete...
INFO: fork status: started, sleeping...
INFO: fork finished
INFO: cloning and force pushing from user/phw/obfsproxy to legacy/gitolite/user/phw/obfsproxy
INFO: deleting branch protection: <class 'gitlab.v4.objects.branches.ProjectProtectedBranch'> =>  'id': 2723, 'name': 'master', 'push_access_levels': [ 'id': 2864, 'access_level': 40, 'access_level_description': 'Maintainers', 'deploy_key_id': None ], 'merge_access_levels': [ 'id': 2753, 'access_level': 40, 'access_level_description': 'Maintainers' ], 'allow_force_push': False 
INFO: cloning repository git-rw.torproject.org:/srv/git.torproject.org/repositories/user/phw/obfsproxy.git in /tmp/tmp6orvjggy/user/phw/obfsproxy
Cloning into bare repository '/tmp/tmp6orvjggy/user/phw/obfsproxy'...
INFO: pushing to GitLab: https://gitlab.torproject.org/legacy/gitolite/user/phw/obfsproxy
remote: 
remote: To create a merge request for bug_10887, visit:        
remote:   https://gitlab.torproject.org/legacy/gitolite/user/phw/obfsproxy/-/merge_requests/new?merge_request%5Bsource_branch%5D=bug_10887        
remote: 
[...]
To ssh://gitlab.torproject.org/legacy/gitolite/user/phw/obfsproxy
 + 2bf9d09...a8e54d5 master -> master (forced update)
 * [new branch]      bug_10887 -> bug_10887
[...]
INFO: migrating repo
INFO: migrating Gitolite repository https://gitweb.torproject.org/user/phw/obfsproxy.git to GitLab project https://gitlab.torproject.org/legacy/gitolite/user/phw/obfsproxy
INFO: adding entry to rewrite_map /home/anarcat/src/tor/tor-puppet/modules/profile/files/git/gitolite2gitlab.txt
INFO: modifying gitolite.conf to add: "config gitweb.category = Migrated to GitLab"
INFO: rewriting gitolite config /home/anarcat/src/tor/gitolite-admin/conf/gitolite.conf to change project user/phw/obfsproxy to category Migrated to GitLab
INFO: processing project user/phw/scramblesuit (Philipp's ScrambleSuit repository) in category Users' development repositories (Attic)
INFO: user repository detected, trying to find fork phw/scramblesuit
WARNING: no existing fork found, entering user fork subroutine
WARNING: no matching gitlab project found for user/phw/scramblesuit
INFO: user fork subroutine failed, resuming normal procedure
INFO: searching for projects matching scramblesuit
import gitolite project user/phw/scramblesuit into gitlab legacy/gitolite/user/phw/scramblesuit with desc 'Philipp's ScrambleSuit repository'?^G [Y/n] 
INFO: checking if remote repo https://git.torproject.org/user/phw/scramblesuit exists
INFO: importing gitolite project user/phw/scramblesuit into gitlab legacy/gitolite/user/phw/scramblesuit with desc 'Philipp's ScrambleSuit repository'
INFO: importing project into GitLab
INFO: Successfully connected to https://gitlab.torproject.org
INFO: loading group legacy/gitolite/user/phw
INFO: creating repository scramblesuit (scramblesuit) in namespace legacy/gitolite/user/phw from https://git.torproject.org/user/phw/scramblesuit into https://gitlab.torproject.org/legacy/gitolite/user/phw/scramblesuit
INFO: archiving project
INFO: migrating Gitolite repository https://gitweb.torproject.org/user/phw/scramblesuit.git to GitLab project https://gitlab.torproject.org/legacy/gitolite/user/phw/scramblesuit
INFO: adding entry to rewrite_map /home/anarcat/src/tor/tor-puppet/modules/profile/files/git/gitolite2gitlab.txt
INFO: modifying gitolite.conf to add: "config gitweb.category = Migrated to GitLab"
INFO: rewriting gitolite config /home/anarcat/src/tor/gitolite-admin/conf/gitolite.conf to change project user/phw/scramblesuit to category Migrated to GitLab
[...]

Acute eyes will notice the bell used as a notification mechanism as well in this transcript. A lot of the code is now useless for us, but some, like "commit and push" or is-repo-empty live on in the git module and, of course, the gitlab module has grown some legs along the way. We've also found fun bugs, like a file descriptor exhaustion in bash, among other oddities. The retirement milestone and issue 41215 has a detailed log of the migration, for those curious. This was a challenging project, but it feels nice to have this behind us. This gets rid of 2 of the 4 remaining machines running Debian "old-old-stable", which moves a bit further ahead in our late bullseye upgrades milestone. Full transparency: we tested GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and other large language models to see if they could answer the question "write a set of rewrite rules to redirect GitWeb to GitLab". This has become a standard LLM test for your faithful writer to figure out how good a LLM is at technical responses. None of them gave an accurate, complete, and functional response, for the record. The actual rewrite rules as of this writing follow, for humans that actually like working answers provided by expert humans instead of artificial intelligence which currently seem to be, glorified, mansplaining interns.

git.torproject.org rewrite rules Those rules are relatively simple in that they rewrite a single URL to its equivalent GitLab counterpart in a 1:1 fashion. It relies on the rewrite map mentioned above, of course.

RewriteEngine on
# this RewriteMap connects the gitweb projects to their GitLab
# equivalent
RewriteMap gitolite2gitlab "txt:/etc/apache2/gitolite2gitlab.txt"
# if this becomes a performance bottleneck, convert to a DBM map with:
#
#  $ httxt2dbm -i mapfile.txt -o mapfile.map
#
# and:
#
# RewriteMap mapname "dbm:/etc/apache/mapfile.map"
#
# according to reports lavamind found online, we hit such a
# performance bottleneck only around millions of entries, which is not our case
# those two rules can go away once all the projects are
# migrated to GitLab
#
# this matches the request URI so we can check the RewriteMap
# for a match next
#
# WARNING: this won't match URLs without .git in them, which
# *do* work now. one possibility would be to match the request
# URI (without query string!) with:
#
# /git/(.*)(.git)?/(((branches hooks info objects/).*) git-.* upload-pack receive-pack HEAD config description)?.
#
# I haven't been able to figure out the actual structure of
# those URLs, so it's really hard to figure out the boundaries
# of the project name here. I stopped after pouring around the
# http-backend.c code in git
# itself. https://www.git-scm.com/docs/http-protocol is also
# kind of incomplete and unsatisfying.
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI  ^/(git/)?(.*).git/.*$
# this makes the RewriteRule match only if there's a match in
# the rewrite map
RewriteCond $ gitolite2gitlab:%2 NOT_FOUND  !NOT_FOUND
RewriteRule ^/(git/)?(.*).git/(.*)$ https://gitlab.torproject.org/$ gitolite2gitlab:$2 .git/$3 [R=302,L]
# Fallback everything else to GitLab
RewriteRule (.*) https://gitlab.torproject.org [R=302,L]

gitweb.torproject.org rewrite rules Those are the vastly more complicated GitWeb to GitLab rewrite rules. Note that we say "GitWeb" but we were actually not running GitWeb but cgit, as the former didn't actually scale for us.

RewriteEngine on
# this RewriteMap connects the gitweb projects to their GitLab
# equivalent
RewriteMap gitolite2gitlab "txt:/etc/apache2/gitolite2gitlab.txt"
# special rule to process targets of the old spec.tpo site and
# bring them to the right redirect on the new spec.tpo site. that should turn, for example:
#
# https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/address-spec.txt
#
# into:
#
# https://spec.torproject.org/address-spec
RewriteRule ^/torspec.git/tree/(.*).txt$ https://spec.torproject.org/$1 [R=302]
# list of endpoints taken from cgit's cmd.c
# those two RewriteCond are necessary because we don't move
# all repositories at once. once the migration is completed,
# they can be removed.
#
# and yes, they are copied all over the place below
#
# create a match for the project name to check if the project
# has been moved to GitLab
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI  ^/(.*).git(/.*)?$
# this makes the RewriteRule match only if there's a match in
# the rewrite map
RewriteCond $ gitolite2gitlab:%1 NOT_FOUND  !NOT_FOUND
# main project page, like summary below
RewriteRule ^/(.*).git/?$ https://gitlab.torproject.org/$ gitolite2gitlab:$1 / [R=302,L]
# summary
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI  ^/(.*).git/.*$
RewriteCond $ gitolite2gitlab:%1 NOT_FOUND  !NOT_FOUND
RewriteRule ^/(.*).git/summary/?$ https://gitlab.torproject.org/$ gitolite2gitlab:$1 / [R=302,L]
# about
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI  ^/(.*).git/.*$
RewriteCond $ gitolite2gitlab:%1 NOT_FOUND  !NOT_FOUND
RewriteRule ^/(.*).git/about/?$ https://gitlab.torproject.org/$ gitolite2gitlab:$1 / [R=302,L]
# commit
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI  ^/(.*).git/.*$
RewriteCond $ gitolite2gitlab:%1 NOT_FOUND  !NOT_FOUND
RewriteCond "% QUERY_STRING " "(.*(?:^ &))id=([^&]*)(&.*)?$"
RewriteRule ^/(.*).git/commit/? https://gitlab.torproject.org/$ gitolite2gitlab:$1 /-/commit/%2 [R=302,L,QSD]
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI  ^/(.*).git/.*$
RewriteCond $ gitolite2gitlab:%1 NOT_FOUND  !NOT_FOUND
RewriteRule ^/(.*).git/commit/? https://gitlab.torproject.org/$ gitolite2gitlab:$1 /-/commits/HEAD [R=302,L]
# diff, incomplete because can diff arbitrary refs and files in cgit but not in GitLab, hard to parse
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI  ^/(.*).git/.*$
RewriteCond $ gitolite2gitlab:%1 NOT_FOUND  !NOT_FOUND
RewriteCond % QUERY_STRING  id=([^&]*)
RewriteRule ^/(.*).git/diff/? https://gitlab.torproject.org/$ gitolite2gitlab:$1 /-/commit/%1 [R=302,L,QSD]
# patch
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI  ^/(.*).git/.*$
RewriteCond $ gitolite2gitlab:%1 NOT_FOUND  !NOT_FOUND
RewriteCond % QUERY_STRING  id=([^&]*)
RewriteRule ^/(.*).git/patch/? https://gitlab.torproject.org/$ gitolite2gitlab:$1 /-/commit/%1.patch [R=302,L,QSD]
# rawdiff, incomplete because can show only one file diff, which GitLab cannot
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI  ^/(.*).git/.*$
RewriteCond $ gitolite2gitlab:%1 NOT_FOUND  !NOT_FOUND
RewriteCond % QUERY_STRING  id=([^&]*)
RewriteRule ^/(.*).git/rawdiff/?$ https://gitlab.torproject.org/$ gitolite2gitlab:$1 /-/commit/%1.diff [R=302,L,QSD]
# log
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI  ^/(.*).git/.*$
RewriteCond $ gitolite2gitlab:%1 NOT_FOUND  !NOT_FOUND
RewriteCond % QUERY_STRING  h=([^&]*)
RewriteRule ^/(.*).git/log/?$ https://gitlab.torproject.org/$ gitolite2gitlab:$1 /-/commits/%1 [R=302,L,QSD]
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI  ^/(.*).git/.*$
RewriteCond $ gitolite2gitlab:%1 NOT_FOUND  !NOT_FOUND
RewriteRule ^/(.*).git/log/?$ https://gitlab.torproject.org/$ gitolite2gitlab:$1 /-/commits/HEAD [R=302,L]
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI  ^/(.*).git/.*$
RewriteCond $ gitolite2gitlab:%1 NOT_FOUND  !NOT_FOUND
RewriteRule ^/(.*).git/log(/?.*)$ https://gitlab.torproject.org/$ gitolite2gitlab:$1 /-/commits/HEAD$2 [R=302,L]
# atom
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI  ^/(.*).git/.*$
RewriteCond $ gitolite2gitlab:%1 NOT_FOUND  !NOT_FOUND
RewriteCond % QUERY_STRING  h=([^&]*)
RewriteRule ^/(.*).git/atom/?$ https://gitlab.torproject.org/$ gitolite2gitlab:$1 /-/commits/%1 [R=302,L,QSD]
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI  ^/(.*).git/.*$
RewriteCond $ gitolite2gitlab:%1 NOT_FOUND  !NOT_FOUND
RewriteRule ^/(.*).git/atom/?$ https://gitlab.torproject.org/$ gitolite2gitlab:$1 /-/commits/HEAD [R=302,L,QSD]
# refs, incomplete because two pages in GitLab, defaulting to "tags"
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI  ^/(.*).git/.*$
RewriteCond $ gitolite2gitlab:%1 NOT_FOUND  !NOT_FOUND
RewriteRule ^/(.*).git/refs/?$ https://gitlab.torproject.org/$ gitolite2gitlab:$1 /-/tags [R=302,L]
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI  ^/(.*).git/.*$
RewriteCond $ gitolite2gitlab:%1 NOT_FOUND  !NOT_FOUND
RewriteCond % QUERY_STRING  h=([^&]*)
RewriteRule ^/(.*).git/tag/? https://gitlab.torproject.org/$ gitolite2gitlab:$1 /-/tags/%1 [R=302,L,QSD]
# tree
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI  ^/(.*).git/.*$
RewriteCond $ gitolite2gitlab:%1 NOT_FOUND  !NOT_FOUND
RewriteCond % QUERY_STRING  id=([^&]*)
RewriteRule ^/(.*).git/tree(/?.*)$ https://gitlab.torproject.org/$ gitolite2gitlab:$1 /-/tree/%1$2 [R=302,L,QSD]
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI  ^/(.*).git/.*$
RewriteCond $ gitolite2gitlab:%1 NOT_FOUND  !NOT_FOUND
RewriteRule ^/(.*).git/tree(/?.*)$ https://gitlab.torproject.org/$ gitolite2gitlab:$1 /-/tree/HEAD$2 [R=302,L]
# /-/tree has no good default in GitLab, revert to HEAD which is a good
# approximation (we can't assume "master" here anymore)
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI  ^/(.*).git/.*$
RewriteCond $ gitolite2gitlab:%1 NOT_FOUND  !NOT_FOUND
RewriteRule ^/(.*).git/tree/?$ https://gitlab.torproject.org/$ gitolite2gitlab:$1 /-/tree/HEAD [R=302,L]
# plain
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI  ^/(.*).git/.*$
RewriteCond $ gitolite2gitlab:%1 NOT_FOUND  !NOT_FOUND
RewriteCond % QUERY_STRING  h=([^&]*)
RewriteRule ^/(.*).git/plain(/?.*)$ https://gitlab.torproject.org/$ gitolite2gitlab:$1 /-/raw/%1$2 [R=302,L,QSD]
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI  ^/(.*).git/.*$
RewriteCond $ gitolite2gitlab:%1 NOT_FOUND  !NOT_FOUND
RewriteRule ^/(.*).git/plain(/?.*)$ https://gitlab.torproject.org/$ gitolite2gitlab:$1 /-/raw/HEAD$2 [R=302,L]
# blame: disabled
#RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI  ^/(.*).git/.*$
#RewriteCond $ gitolite2gitlab:%1 NOT_FOUND  !NOT_FOUND
#RewriteCond % QUERY_STRING  h=([^&]*)
#RewriteRule ^/(.*).git/blame(/?.*)$ https://gitlab.torproject.org/$ gitolite2gitlab:$1 /-/blame/%1$2 [R=302,L,QSD]
# same default as tree above
#RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI  ^/(.*).git/.*$
#RewriteCond $ gitolite2gitlab:%1 NOT_FOUND  !NOT_FOUND
#RewriteRule ^/(.*).git/blame(/?.*)$ https://gitlab.torproject.org/$ gitolite2gitlab:$1 /-/blame/HEAD/$2 [R=302,L]
# stats
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI  ^/(.*).git/.*$
RewriteCond $ gitolite2gitlab:%1 NOT_FOUND  !NOT_FOUND
RewriteRule ^/(.*).git/stats/?$ https://gitlab.torproject.org/$ gitolite2gitlab:$1 /-/graphs/HEAD [R=302,L]
# still TODO:
# repolist: once migration is complete
#
# cannot be done:
# atom: needs a feed token, user must be logged in
# blob: no direct equivalent
# info: not working on main cgit website?
# ls_cache: not working, irrelevant?
# objects: undocumented?
# snapshot: pattern too hard to match on cgit's side
# special case, we keep a copy of the main index on the archive
RewriteRule ^/?$ https://archive.torproject.org/websites/gitweb.torproject.org.html [R=302,L]
# Fallback: everything else to GitLab
RewriteRule .* https://gitlab.torproject.org [R=302,L]

The reference copy of those is available in our (currently private) Puppet git repository.

The eleventh release of the qlcal package arrivied at CRAN today. qlcal delivers the calendaring parts of QuantLib. It is provided (for the R package) as a set of included files, so the package is self-contained and does not depend on an external QuantLib library (which can be demanding to build). qlcal covers over sixty country / market calendars and can compute holiday lists, its complement (i.e. business day lists) and much more. Examples are in the README at the repository, the package page, and course at the CRAN package page. This releases synchronizes qlcal with the QuantLib release 1.34 and contains more updates to 2024 calendars.

Changes in version 0.0.11 (2024-04-27)

• Synchronized with QuantLib 1.34
• Calendar updates for Brazil, India, Singapore, South Africa, Thailand, United States
• Minor continuous integration update

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report for this release. See the project page and package documentation for more details, and more examples. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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.

It s been around 6 months since the GNOME Foundation was joined by our new Executive Director, Holly Million, and the board and I wanted to update members on the Foundation s current status and some exciting upcoming changes.

Finances As you may be aware, the GNOME Foundation has operated at a deficit (nonprofit speak for a loss ie spending more than we ve been raising each year) for over three years, essentially running the Foundation on reserves from some substantial donations received 4-5 years ago. The Foundation has a reserves policy which specifies a minimum amount of money we have to keep in our accounts. This is so that if there is a significant interruption to our usual income, we can preserve our core operations while we work on new funding sources. We ve now hit the buffers of this reserves policy, meaning the Board can t approve any more deficit budgets to keep spending at the same level we must increase our income. One of the board s top priorities in hiring Holly was therefore her experience in communications and fundraising, and building broader and more diverse support for our mission and work. Her goals since joining as well as building her familiarity with the community and project have been to set up better financial controls and reporting, develop a strategic plan, and start fundraising. You may have noticed the Foundation being more cautious with spending this year, because Holly prepared a break-even budget for the Board to approve in October, so that we can steady the ship while we prepare and launch our new fundraising initiatives.

Strategy & Fundraising The biggest prerequisite for fundraising is a clear strategy we need to explain what we re doing and why it s important, and use that to convince people to support our plans. I m very pleased to report that Holly has been working hard on this and meeting with many stakeholders across the community, and has prepared a detailed and insightful five year strategic plan. The plan defines the areas where the Foundation will prioritise, develop and fund initiatives to support and grow the GNOME project and community. The board has approved a draft version of this plan, and over the coming weeks Holly and the Foundation team will be sharing this plan and running a consultation process to gather feedback input from GNOME foundation and community members. In parallel, Holly has been working on a fundraising plan to stabilise the Foundation, growing our revenue and ability to deliver on these plans. We will be launching a variety of fundraising activities over the coming months, including a development fund for people to directly support GNOME development, working with professional grant writers and managers to apply for government and private foundation funding opportunities, and building better communications to explain the importance of our work to corporate and individual donors.

Board Development Another observation that Holly had since joining was that we had, by general nonprofit standards, a very small board of just 7 directors. While we do have some committees which have (very much appreciated!) volunteers from outside the board, our officers are usually appointed from within the board, and many board members end up serving on multiple committees and wearing several hats. It also means the number of perspectives on the board is limited and less representative of the diverse contributors and users that make up the GNOME community. Holly has been working with the board and the governance committee to reduce how much we ask from individual board members, and improve representation from the community within the Foundation s governance. Firstly, the board has decided to increase its size from 7 to 9 members, effective from the upcoming elections this May & June, allowing more voices to be heard within the board discussions. After that, we re going to be working on opening up the board to more participants, creating non-voting officer seats to represent certain regions or interests from across the community, and take part in committees and board meetings. These new non-voting roles are likely to be appointed with some kind of application process, and we ll share details about these roles and how to be considered for them as we refine our plans over the coming year.

Elections We re really excited to develop and share these plans and increase the ways that people can get involved in shaping the Foundation s strategy and how we raise and spend money to support and grow the GNOME community. This brings me to my final point, which is that we re in the run up to the annual board elections which take place in the run up to GUADEC. Because of the expansion of the board, and four directors coming to the end of their terms, we ll be electing 6 seats this election. It s really important to Holly and the board that we use this opportunity to bring some new voices to the table, leading by example in growing and better representing our community. Allan wrote in the past about what the board does and what s expected from directors. As you can see we re working hard on reducing what we ask from each individual board member by increasing the number of directors, and bringing additional members in to committees and non-voting roles. If you re interested in seeing more diverse backgrounds and perspectives represented on the board, I would strongly encourage you consider standing for election and reach out to a board member to discuss their experience. Thanks for reading! Until next time. Best Wishes,
Rob
President, GNOME Foundation Update 2024-04-27: It was suggested in the Discourse thread that I clarify the interaction between the break-even budget and the 1M EUR committed by the STF project. This money is received in the form of a contract for services rather than a grant to the Foundation, and must be spent on the development areas agreed during the planning and application process. It s included within this year s budget (October 23 September 24) and is all expected to be spent during this fiscal year, so it doesn t have an impact on the Foundation s reserves position. The Foundation retains a small % fee to support its costs in connection with the project, including the new requirement to have our accounts externally audited at the end of the financial year. We are putting this money towards recruitment of an administrative assistant to improve financial and other operational support for the Foundation and community, including the STF project and future development initiatives. (also posted to GNOME Discourse, please head there if you have any questions or comments)

With the work that has been done in the debian-installer/netcfg merge-proposal !9 it is possible to install a standard Debian system, using the normal Debian-Installer (d-i) mini.iso images, that will come pre-installed with Netplan and all network configuration structured in /etc/netplan/. In this write-up, I d like to run you through a list of commands for experiencing the Netplan enabled installation process first-hand. For now, we ll be using a custom ISO image, while waiting for the above-mentioned merge-proposal to be landed. Furthermore, as the Debian archive is going through major transitions builds of the unstable branch of d-i don t currently work. So I implemented a small backport, producing updated netcfg and netcfg-static for Bookworm, which can be used as localudebs/ during the d-i build. Let s start with preparing a working directory and installing the software dependencies for our virtualized Debian system:

$ mkdir d-i_bookworm && cd d-i_bookworm
$ apt install ovmf qemu-utils qemu-system-x86

Now let s download the custom mini.iso, linux kernel image and initrd.gz containing the Netplan enablement changes, as mentioned above.

$ wget https://people.ubuntu.com/~slyon/d-i/bookworm/mini.iso
$ wget https://people.ubuntu.com/~slyon/d-i/bookworm/linux
$ wget https://people.ubuntu.com/~slyon/d-i/bookworm/initrd.gz

Next we ll prepare a VM, by copying the EFI firmware files, preparing some persistent EFIVARs file, to boot from FS0:\EFI\debian\grubx64.efi, and create a virtual disk for our machine:

$ cp /usr/share/OVMF/OVMF_CODE_4M.fd .
$ cp /usr/share/OVMF/OVMF_VARS_4M.fd .
$ qemu-img create -f qcow2 ./data.qcow2 5G

Finally, let s launch the installer using a custom preseed.cfg file, that will automatically install Netplan for us in the target system. A minimal preseed file could look like this:

# Install minimal Netplan generator binary
d-i preseed/late_command string in-target apt-get -y install netplan-generator

For this demo, we re installing the full netplan.io package (incl. Python CLI), as the netplan-generator package was not yet split out as an independent binary in the Bookworm cycle. You can choose the preseed file from a set of different variants to test the different configurations:

• Netplan + systemd-resolved configuration
  • https://people.ubuntu.com/~slyon/d-i/bookworm/netplan-preseed+networkd.cfg
• Netplan + NetworkManager configuration
  • https://people.ubuntu.com/~slyon/d-i/bookworm/netplan-preseed+nm.cfg

We re using the custom linux kernel and initrd.gz here to be able to pass the preseed URL as a parameter to the kernel s cmdline directly. Launching this VM should bring up the normal debian-installer in its netboot/gtk form:

$ export U=https://people.ubuntu.com/~slyon/d-i/bookworm/netplan-preseed+networkd.cfg
$ qemu-system-x86_64 \
	-M q35 -enable-kvm -cpu host -smp 4 -m 2G \
	-drive if=pflash,format=raw,unit=0,file=OVMF_CODE_4M.fd,readonly=on \
	-drive if=pflash,format=raw,unit=1,file=OVMF_VARS_4M.fd,readonly=off \
	-device qemu-xhci -device usb-kbd -device usb-mouse \
	-vga none -device virtio-gpu-pci \
	-net nic,model=virtio -net user \
	-kernel ./linux -initrd ./initrd.gz -append "url=$U" \
	-hda ./data.qcow2 -cdrom ./mini.iso;

Now you can click through the normal Debian-Installer process, using mostly default settings. Optionally, you could play around with the networking settings, to see how those get translated to /etc/netplan/ in the target system.

After you confirmed your partitioning changes, the base system gets installed. I suggest not to select any additional components, like desktop environments, to speed up the process.

During the final step of the installation (finish-install.d/55netcfg-copy-config) d-i will detect that Netplan was installed in the target system (due to the preseed file provided) and opt to write its network configuration to /etc/netplan/ instead of /etc/network/interfaces or /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/.

Done! After the installation finished, you can reboot into your virgin Debian Bookworm system. To do that, quit the current Qemu process, by pressing Ctrl+C and make sure to copy over the EFIVARS.fd file that was written by grub during the installation, so Qemu can find the new system. Then reboot into the new system, not using the mini.iso image any more:

$ cp ./OVMF_VARS_4M.fd ./EFIVARS.fd
$ qemu-system-x86_64 \
        -M q35 -enable-kvm -cpu host -smp 4 -m 2G \
        -drive if=pflash,format=raw,unit=0,file=OVMF_CODE_4M.fd,readonly=on \
        -drive if=pflash,format=raw,unit=1,file=EFIVARS.fd,readonly=off \
        -device qemu-xhci -device usb-kbd -device usb-mouse \
        -vga none -device virtio-gpu-pci \
        -net nic,model=virtio -net user \
        -drive file=./data.qcow2,if=none,format=qcow2,id=disk0 \
        -device virtio-blk-pci,drive=disk0,bootindex=1
        -serial mon:stdio

Finally, you can play around with your Netplan enabled Debian system! As you will find, /etc/network/interfaces exists but is empty, it could still be used (optionally/additionally). Netplan was configured in /etc/netplan/ according to the settings given during the d-i installation process.

In our case, we also installed the Netplan CLI, so we can play around with some of its features, like netplan status:

Thank you for following along the Netplan enabled Debian installation process and happy hacking! If you want to learn more, join the discussion at Salsa:installer-team/netcfg and find us at GitHub:netplan.

Time really flies when you are really busy you have fun! Our Montr al Debian User Group met on Sunday March 31st and I only just found the time to write our report :) This time around, 9 of us we met at EfficiOS's offices¹ to chat, hang out and work on Debian and other stuff! Here is what we did: pollo:

• did some clerical work for the DebConf videoteam
• tried to book a plane ticket for DC24
• triaged #1067620 (dependency problem with whipper)
• closed #1067121 (flaky test in supysonic)
• closed #1065514 (qpdfview crossbuilding)

tvaz:

• organized his custom Application Manager stuff in a private repo
• did some coding for the New Maintainers website to make sure applicants agree with the Debian Code of Conduct alongside the SC/DFSG/DMUP
• closed #1057910 (new apticron upload)

tassia:

• planned & brainstormed for the upcoming Debian usability tests
• mentored a student/new contributor (justin)
• babysat a future contributor!
• closed #1067649
• learnt about fabre.debian.net & element.debian.social (thanks, pollo!)

viashimo:

• uploaded puppet-strings 4.1.2-1 to unstable
• updated various services in personal infra
• cleaned vagrant-hostmanager and worked on packaging the new upstream release (1.8.10)
• extended GPG key expiry
• looked at options for a new backup machine

lavamind:

• updated puppetdb to 8.4.1

justin:

• opened #1068152 after a misfortune with #1068151
• created new contributor accounts (salsa & wiki)

Pictures Here are pictures of the event. Well, one picture (thanks Tassia!) of the event itself and another one of the crisp Italian lager I drank at the bar after the event :)

Review: Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett

Series:	Discworld #37
Publisher:	Harper
Copyright:	October 2009
Printing:	November 2014
ISBN:	0-06-233500-6
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	517

Unseen Academicals is the 37th Discworld novel and includes many of the long-standing Ankh-Morpork cast, but mostly as supporting characters. The main characters are a new (and delightful) bunch with their own concerns. You arguably could start reading here if you really wanted to, although you would risk spoiling several previous books (most notably Thud!) and will miss some references that depend on familiarity with the cast. The Unseen University is, like most institutions of its sort, funded by an endowment that allows the wizards to focus on the pure life of the mind (or the stomach). Much to their dismay, they have just discovered that an endowment that amounts to most of their food budget requires that they field a football team. Glenda runs the night kitchen at the Unseen University. Given the deep and abiding love that wizards have for food, there is both a main kitchen and a night kitchen. The main kitchen is more prestigious, but the night kitchen is responsible for making pies, something that Glenda is quietly but exceptionally good at. Juliet is Glenda's new employee. She is exceptionally beautiful, not very bright, and a working class girl of the Ankh-Morpork streets down to her bones. Trevor Likely is a candle dribbler, responsible for assisting the Candle Knave in refreshing the endless university candles and ensuring that their wax is properly dribbled, although he pushes most of that work off onto the infallibly polite and oddly intelligent Mr. Nutt. Glenda, Trev, and Juliet are the sort of people who populate the great city of Ankh-Morpork. While the people everyone has heard of have political crises, adventures, and book plots, they keep institutions like the Unseen University running. They read romance novels, go to the football games, and nurse long-standing rivalries. They do not expect the high mucky-mucks to enter their world, let alone mess with their game. I approached Unseen Academicals with trepidation because I normally don't get along as well with the Discworld wizard books. I need not have worried; Pratchett realized that the wizards would work better as supporting characters and instead turns the main plot (or at least most of it; more on that later) over to the servants. This was a brilliant decision. The setup of this book is some of the best of Discworld up to this point. Trev is a streetwise rogue with an uncanny knack for kicking around a can that he developed after being forbidden to play football by his dear old mum. He falls for Juliet even though their families support different football teams, so you may think that a Romeo and Juliet spoof is coming. There are a few gestures of one, but Pratchett deftly avoids the pitfalls and predictability and instead makes Juliet one of the best characters in the book by playing directly against type. She is one of the characters that Pratchett is so astonishingly good at, the ones that are so thoroughly themselves that they transcend the stories they're put into. The heart of this book, though, is Glenda.

Glenda enjoyed her job. She didn't have a career; they were for people who could not hold down jobs.

She is the kind of person who knows where she fits in the world and likes what she does and is happy to stay there until she decides something isn't right, and then she changes the world through the power of common sense morality, righteous indignation, and sheer stubborn persistence. Discworld is full of complex and subtle characters fencing with each other, but there are few things I have enjoyed more than Glenda being a determinedly good person. Vetinari of course recognizes and respects (and uses) that inner core immediately. Unfortunately, as great as the setup and characters are, Unseen Academicals falls apart a bit at the end. I was eagerly reading the story, wondering what Pratchett was going to weave out of the stories of these individuals, and then it partly turned into yet another wizard book. Pratchett pulled another of his deus ex machina tricks for the climax in a way that I found unsatisfying and contrary to the tone of the rest of the story, and while the characters do get reasonable endings, it lacked the oomph I was hoping for. Rincewind is as determinedly one-note as ever, the wizards do all the standard wizard things, and the plot just isn't that interesting. I liked Mr. Nutt a great deal in the first part of the book, and I wish he could have kept that edge of enigmatic competence and unflappableness. Pratchett wanted to tell a different story that involved more angst and self-doubt, and while I appreciate that story, I found it less engaging and a bit more melodramatic than I was hoping for. Mr. Nutt's reactions in the last half of the book were believable and fit his background, but that was part of the problem: he slotted back into an archetype that I thought Pratchett was going to twist and upend. Mr. Nutt does, at least, get a fantastic closing line, and as usual there are a lot of great asides and quotes along the way, including possibly the sharpest and most biting Vetinari speech of the entire series.

The Patrician took a sip of his beer. "I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I'm sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature's wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining on mother and children. And that's when I first learned about evil. It is built into the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior."

My dissatisfaction with the ending prevents Unseen Academicals from rising to the level of Night Watch, and it's a bit more uneven than the best books of the series. Still, though, this is great stuff; recommended to anyone who is reading the series. Followed in publication order by I Shall Wear Midnight. Rating: 8 out of 10

With the release of Libntlm version 1.8 the release tarball can be reproduced on several distributions. We also publish a signed minimal source-only tarball, produced by git-archive which is the same format used by Savannah, Codeberg, GitLab, GitHub and others. Reproducibility of both tarballs are tested continuously for regressions on GitLab through a CI/CD pipeline. If that wasn t enough to excite you, the Debian packages of Libntlm are now built from the reproducible minimal source-only tarball. The resulting binaries are reproducible on several architectures. What does that even mean? Why should you care? How you can do the same for your project? What are the open issues? Read on, dear reader This article describes my practical experiments with reproducible release artifacts, following up on my earlier thoughts that lead to discussion on Fosstodon and a patch by Janneke Nieuwenhuizen to make Guix tarballs reproducible that inspired me to some practical work. Let s look at how a maintainer release some software, and how a user can reproduce the released artifacts from the source code. Libntlm provides a shared library written in C and uses GNU Make, GNU Autoconf, GNU Automake, GNU Libtool and gnulib for build management, but these ideas should apply to most project and build system. The following illustrate the steps a maintainer would take to prepare a release:

git clone https://gitlab.com/gsasl/libntlm.git
cd libntlm
git checkout v1.8
./bootstrap
./configure
make distcheck
gpg -b libntlm-1.8.tar.gz

The generated files libntlm-1.8.tar.gz and libntlm-1.8.tar.gz.sig are published, and users download and use them. This is how the GNU project have been doing releases since the late 1980 s. That is a testament to how successful this pattern has been! These tarballs contain source code and some generated files, typically shell scripts generated by autoconf, makefile templates generated by automake, documentation in formats like Info, HTML, or PDF. Rarely do they contain binary object code, but historically that happened. The XZUtils incident illustrate that tarballs with files that are not included in the git archive offer an opportunity to disguise malicious backdoors. I blogged earlier how to mitigate this risk by using signed minimal source-only tarballs. The risk of hiding malware is not the only motivation to publish signed minimal source-only tarballs. With pre-generated content in tarballs, there is a risk that GNU/Linux distributions such as Trisquel, Guix, Debian/Ubuntu or Fedora ship generated files coming from the tarball into the binary *.deb or *.rpm package file. Typically the person packaging the upstream project never realized that some installed artifacts was not re-built through a typical autoconf -fi && ./configure && make install sequence, and never wrote the code to rebuild everything. This can also happen if the build rules are written but are buggy, shipping the old artifact. When a security problem is found, this can lead to time-consuming situations, as it may be that patching the relevant source code and rebuilding the package is not sufficient: the vulnerable generated object from the tarball would be shipped into the binary package instead of a rebuilt artifact. For architecture-specific binaries this rarely happens, since object code is usually not included in tarballs although for 10+ years I shipped the binary Java JAR file in the GNU Libidn release tarball, until I stopped shipping it. For interpreted languages and especially for generated content such as HTML, PDF, shell scripts this happens more than you would like. Publishing minimal source-only tarballs enable easier auditing of a project s code, to avoid the need to read through all generated files looking for malicious content. I have taken care to generate the source-only minimal tarball using git-archive. This is the same format that GitLab, GitHub etc offer for the automated download links on git tags. The minimal source-only tarballs can thus serve as a way to audit GitLab and GitHub download material! Consider if/when hosting sites like GitLab or GitHub has a security incident that cause generated tarballs to include a backdoor that is not present in the git repository. If people rely on the tag download artifact without verifying the maintainer PGP signature using GnuPG, this can lead to similar backdoor scenarios that we had for XZUtils but originated with the hosting provider instead of the release manager. This is even more concerning, since this attack can be mounted for some selected IP address that you want to target and not on everyone, thereby making it harder to discover. With all that discussion and rationale out of the way, let s return to the release process. I have added another step here:

make srcdist
gpg -b libntlm-1.8-src.tar.gz

Now the release is ready. I publish these four files in the Libntlm s Savannah Download area, but they can be uploaded to a GitLab/GitHub release area as well. These are the SHA256 checksums I got after building the tarballs on my Trisquel 11 aramo laptop:

91de864224913b9493c7a6cec2890e6eded3610d34c3d983132823de348ec2ca  libntlm-1.8-src.tar.gz
ce6569a47a21173ba69c990965f73eb82d9a093eb871f935ab64ee13df47fda1  libntlm-1.8.tar.gz

So how can you reproduce my artifacts? Here is how to reproduce them in a Ubuntu 22.04 container:

podman run -it --rm ubuntu:22.04
apt-get update
apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends autoconf automake libtool make git ca-certificates
git clone https://gitlab.com/gsasl/libntlm.git
cd libntlm
git checkout v1.8
./bootstrap
./configure
make dist srcdist
sha256sum libntlm-*.tar.gz

You should see the exact same SHA256 checksum values. Hooray! This works because Trisquel 11 and Ubuntu 22.04 uses the same version of git, autoconf, automake, and libtool. These tools do not guarantee the same output content for all versions, similar to how GNU GCC does not generate the same binary output for all versions. So there is still some delicate version pairing needed. Ideally, the artifacts should be possible to reproduce from the release artifacts themselves, and not only directly from git. It is possible to reproduce the full tarball in a AlmaLinux 8 container replace almalinux:8 with rockylinux:8 if you prefer RockyLinux:

podman run -it --rm almalinux:8
dnf update -y
dnf install -y make wget gcc
wget https://download.savannah.nongnu.org/releases/libntlm/libntlm-1.8.tar.gz
tar xfa libntlm-1.8.tar.gz
cd libntlm-1.8
./configure
make dist
sha256sum libntlm-1.8.tar.gz

The source-only minimal tarball can be regenerated on Debian 11:

podman run -it --rm debian:11
apt-get update
apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends make git ca-certificates
git clone https://gitlab.com/gsasl/libntlm.git
cd libntlm
git checkout v1.8
make -f cfg.mk srcdist
sha256sum libntlm-1.8-src.tar.gz 

As the Magnus Opus or chef-d uvre, let s recreate the full tarball directly from the minimal source-only tarball on Trisquel 11 replace docker.io/kpengboy/trisquel:11.0 with ubuntu:22.04 if you prefer.

podman run -it --rm docker.io/kpengboy/trisquel:11.0
apt-get update
apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends autoconf automake libtool make wget git ca-certificates
wget https://download.savannah.nongnu.org/releases/libntlm/libntlm-1.8-src.tar.gz
tar xfa libntlm-1.8-src.tar.gz
cd libntlm-v1.8
./bootstrap
./configure
make dist
sha256sum libntlm-1.8.tar.gz

Yay! You should now have great confidence in that the release artifacts correspond to what s in version control and also to what the maintainer intended to release. Your remaining job is to audit the source code for vulnerabilities, including the source code of the dependencies used in the build. You no longer have to worry about auditing the release artifacts. I find it somewhat amusing that the build infrastructure for Libntlm is now in a significantly better place than the code itself. Libntlm is written in old C style with plenty of string manipulation and uses broken cryptographic algorithms such as MD4 and single-DES. Remember folks: solving supply chain security issues has no bearing on what kind of code you eventually run. A clean gun can still shoot you in the foot. Side note on naming: GitLab exports tarballs with pathnames libntlm-v1.8/ (i.e.., PROJECT-TAG/) and I ve adopted the same pathnames, which means my libntlm-1.8-src.tar.gz tarballs are bit-by-bit identical to GitLab s exports and you can verify this with tools like diffoscope. GitLab name the tarball libntlm-v1.8.tar.gz (i.e., PROJECT-TAG.ARCHIVE) which I find too similar to the libntlm-1.8.tar.gz that we also publish. GitHub uses the same git archive style, but unfortunately they have logic that removes the v in the pathname so you will get a tarball with pathname libntlm-1.8/ instead of libntlm-v1.8/ that GitLab and I use. The content of the tarball is bit-by-bit identical, but the pathname and archive differs. Codeberg (running Forgejo) uses another approach: the tarball is called libntlm-v1.8.tar.gz (after the tag) just like GitLab, but the pathname inside the archive is libntlm/, otherwise the produced archive is bit-by-bit identical including timestamps. Savannah s CGIT interface uses archive name libntlm-1.8.tar.gz with pathname libntlm-1.8/, but otherwise file content is identical. Savannah s GitWeb interface provides snapshot links that are named after the git commit (e.g., libntlm-a812c2ca.tar.gz with libntlm-a812c2ca/) and I cannot find any tag-based download links at all. Overall, we are so close to get SHA256 checksum to match, but fail on pathname within the archive. I ve chosen to be compatible with GitLab regarding the content of tarballs but not on archive naming. From a simplicity point of view, it would be nice if everyone used PROJECT-TAG.ARCHIVE for the archive filename and PROJECT-TAG/ for the pathname within the archive. This aspect will probably need more discussion. Side note on git archive output: It seems different versions of git archive produce different results for the same repository. The version of git in Debian 11, Trisquel 11 and Ubuntu 22.04 behave the same. The version of git in Debian 12, AlmaLinux/RockyLinux 8/9, Alpine, ArchLinux, macOS homebrew, and upcoming Ubuntu 24.04 behave in another way. Hopefully this will not change that often, but this would invalidate reproducibility of these tarballs in the future, forcing you to use an old git release to reproduce the source-only tarball. Alas, GitLab and most other sites appears to be using modern git so the download tarballs from them would not match my tarballs even though the content would. Side note on ChangeLog: ChangeLog files were traditionally manually curated files with version history for a package. In recent years, several projects moved to dynamically generate them from git history (using tools like git2cl or gitlog-to-changelog). This has consequences for reproducibility of tarballs: you need to have the entire git history available! The gitlog-to-changelog tool also output different outputs depending on the time zone of the person using it, which arguable is a simple bug that can be fixed. However this entire approach is incompatible with rebuilding the full tarball from the minimal source-only tarball. It seems Libntlm s ChangeLog file died on the surgery table here. So how would a distribution build these minimal source-only tarballs? I happen to help on the libntlm package in Debian. It has historically used the generated tarballs as the source code to build from. This means that code coming from gnulib is vendored in the tarball. When a security problem is discovered in gnulib code, the security team needs to patch all packages that include that vendored code and rebuild them, instead of merely patching the gnulib package and rebuild all packages that rely on that particular code. To change this, the Debian libntlm package needs to Build-Depends on Debian s gnulib package. But there was one problem: similar to most projects that use gnulib, Libntlm depend on a particular git commit of gnulib, and Debian only ship one commit. There is no coordination about which commit to use. I have adopted gnulib in Debian, and add a git bundle to the *_all.deb binary package so that projects that rely on gnulib can pick whatever commit they need. This allow an no-network GNULIB_URL and GNULIB_REVISION approach when running Libntlm s ./bootstrap with the Debian gnulib package installed. Otherwise libntlm would pick up whatever latest version of gnulib that Debian happened to have in the gnulib package, which is not what the Libntlm maintainer intended to be used, and can lead to all sorts of version mismatches (and consequently security problems) over time. Libntlm in Debian is developed and tested on Salsa and there is continuous integration testing of it as well, thanks to the Salsa CI team. Side note on git bundles: unfortunately there appears to be no reproducible way to export a git repository into one or more files. So one unfortunate consequence of all this work is that the gnulib *.orig.tar.gz tarball in Debian is not reproducible any more. I have tried to get Git bundles to be reproducible but I never got it to work see my notes in gnulib s debian/README.source on this aspect. Of course, source tarball reproducibility has nothing to do with binary reproducibility of gnulib in Debian itself, fortunately. One open question is how to deal with the increased build dependencies that is triggered by this approach. Some people are surprised by this but I don t see how to get around it: if you depend on source code for tools in another package to build your package, it is a bad idea to hide that dependency. We ve done it for a long time through vendored code in non-minimal tarballs. Libntlm isn t the most critical project from a bootstrapping perspective, so adding git and gnulib as Build-Depends to it will probably be fine. However, consider if this pattern was used for other packages that uses gnulib such as coreutils, gzip, tar, bison etc (all are using gnulib) then they would all Build-Depends on git and gnulib. Cross-building those packages for a new architecture will therefor require git on that architecture first, which gets circular quick. The dependency on gnulib is real so I don t see that going away, and gnulib is a Architecture:all package. However, the dependency on git is merely a consequence of how the Debian gnulib package chose to make all gnulib git commits available to projects: through a git bundle. There are other ways to do this that doesn t require the git tool to extract the necessary files, but none that I found practical ideas welcome! Finally some brief notes on how this was implemented. Enabling bootstrappable source-only minimal tarballs via gnulib s ./bootstrap is achieved by using the GNULIB_REVISION mechanism, locking down the gnulib commit used. I have always disliked git submodules because they add extra steps and has complicated interaction with CI/CD. The reason why I gave up git submodules now is because the particular commit to use is not recorded in the git archive output when git submodules is used. So the particular gnulib commit has to be mentioned explicitly in some source code that goes into the git archive tarball. Colin Watson added the GNULIB_REVISION approach to ./bootstrap back in 2018, and now it no longer made sense to continue to use a gnulib git submodule. One alternative is to use ./bootstrap with --gnulib-srcdir or --gnulib-refdir if there is some practical problem with the GNULIB_URL towards a git bundle the GNULIB_REVISION in bootstrap.conf. The srcdist make rule is simple:

git archive --prefix=libntlm-v1.8/ -o libntlm-1.8-src.tar.gz HEAD

Making the make dist generated tarball reproducible can be more complicated, however for Libntlm it was sufficient to make sure the modification times of all files were set deterministically to the timestamp of the last commit in the git repository. Interestingly there seems to be a couple of different ways to accomplish this, Guix doesn t support minimal source-only tarballs but rely on a .tarball-timestamp file inside the tarball. Paul Eggert explained what TZDB is using some time ago. The approach I m using now is fairly similar to the one I suggested over a year ago. If there are problems because all files in the tarball now use the same modification time, there is a solution by Bruno Haible that could be implemented. Side note on git tags: Some people may wonder why not verify a signed git tag instead of verifying a signed tarball of the git archive. Currently most git repositories uses SHA-1 for git commit identities, but SHA-1 is not a secure hash function. While current SHA-1 attacks can be detected and mitigated, there are fundamental doubts that a git SHA-1 commit identity uniquely refers to the same content that was intended. Verifying a git tag will never offer the same assurance, since a git tag can be moved or re-signed at any time. Verifying a git commit is better but then we need to trust SHA-1. Migrating git to SHA-256 would resolve this aspect, but most hosting sites such as GitLab and GitHub does not support this yet. There are other advantages to using signed tarballs instead of signed git commits or git tags as well, e.g., tar.gz can be a deterministically reproducible persistent stable offline storage format but .git sub-directory trees or git bundles do not offer this property. Doing continous testing of all this is critical to make sure things don t regress. Libntlm s pipeline definition now produce the generated libntlm-*.tar.gz tarballs and a checksum as a build artifact. Then I added the 000-reproducability job which compares the checksums and fails on mismatches. You can read its delicate output in the job for the v1.8 release. Right now we insists that builds on Trisquel 11 match Ubuntu 22.04, that PureOS 10 builds match Debian 11 builds, that AlmaLinux 8 builds match RockyLinux 8 builds, and AlmaLinux 9 builds match RockyLinux 9 builds. As you can see in pipeline job output, not all platforms lead to the same tarballs, but hopefully this state can be improved over time. There is also partial reproducibility, where the full tarball is reproducible across two distributions but not the minimal tarball, or vice versa. If this way of working plays out well, I hope to implement it in other projects too. What do you think? Happy Hacking!