Candy from Strangers
A few days ago I gave a talk at ESC
https://www.endsummercamp.org/ about some reasons why I think that using software and especially libraries from the packages of a community managed distribution is important and much better than alternatives such as pypi, nmp etc. This article is a translation of what I planned to say before forgetting bits of it and luckily adding it back as an answer to a question :)
When I was young, my parents taught me not to accept candy from strangers, unless they were present and approved of it, because there was a small risk of very bad things happening. It was of course a simplistic rule, but it had to be easy enough to follow for somebody who wasn't proficient (yet) in the subtleties of social interactions.
One of the reasons why it worked well was that following it wasn't a big burden: at home candy was plenty and actual offers were rare: I only remember missing one piece of candy because of it, and while it may have been a great one, the ones I could have at home were also good.
Contrary to candy, offers of gratis software from random strangers are quite common: from suspicious looking websites to legit and professional looking ones, to platforms that are explicitly designed to allow developers to publish their own software with little or no checks.
Just like candy, there is also a source of trusted software in the Linux distributions, especially those lead by a community: I mention mostly Debian because it's the one I know best, but the same principles apply to Fedora and, to some measure, to most of the other distributions. Like good parents, distributions can be wrong, and they do leave room for older children (and proficient users) to make their own choices, but still provide a safe default.
Among the unsafe sources there are many different cases and while they do share some of the risks, they have different targets with different issues; for brevity the scope of this article is limited to the ones that mostly concern software developers: language specific package managers and software distribution platforms like PyPi, npm and rubygems etc.
These platforms are extremely convenient both for the writers of libraries, who are enabled to publish their work with minor hassles, and for the people who use such libraries, because they provide an easy way to install and use an huge amount of code. They are of course also an excellent place for distributions to find new libraries to package and distribute, and this I agree is a good thing.
What I however believe is that getting code from such sources and using it without carefully checking it is even more risky than accepting candy from a random stranger on the street in an unfamiliar neighbourhood.
The risk aren't trivial: while you probably won't be taken as an hostage for ransom, your data could be, or your devices and the ones who run your programs could be used in some criminal act causing at least some monetary damage both to yourself and to society at large.
If you're writing code that should be maintained in time there are also other risks even when no malice is involved, because each package on these platform has a different policy with regards to updates, their backwards compatibility and what can be expected in case an old version is found to have security issues.
The very fact that everybody can publish anything on such platforms is both their biggest strength and their main source of vulnerability: while most of the people who publish their libraries do so with good intentions, attacks have been described and publicly tested, such as the fun typo-squatting
http://incolumitas.com/2016/06/08/typosquatting-package-managers/ one (archived on
http://web.archive.org/web/20160801161807/http://incolumitas.com/2016/06/08/typosquatting-package-managers) that published harmless malicious code under common typos for famous libraries.
Contrast this with Debian, where everybody can contribute, but before they are allowed full unsupervised access to the archive they have to establish a relationship with the rest of the community, which includes meeting other developers in real life, at the very least to get their gpg keys signed.
This doesn't prevent malicious people from introducing software, but raises significantly the effort required to do so, and once caught people can usually be much more effectively prevented from repeating it than a simple ban on an online-only account can do.
It is true that not every Debian maintainer actually does a full code review of everything that they allow in the archive, and in some cases it would be unreasonable to expect it, but in most cases they are at least reasonably familiar with the code to do at least bug triage, and most importantly they are in an excellent position to establish a relationship of mutual trust with the upstream authors.
Additionally, package maintainers don't work in isolation: a growing number of packages are being maintained by a team of people, and most importantly there are aspects that involve potentially the whole community, from the fact that new packages that enter the distribution are publicity announced on a mailing list to the various distribution-wide QA efforts.
Going back to the language specific distribution platforms, sometimes even the people who manage the platform themselves can't be fully trusted to do the right thing: I believe everybody in the field remembers the npm fiasco
https://lwn.net/Articles/681410/ where a lawyer letter requesting the removal of a package started a series of events that resulted in potentially breaking a huge amount of automated build systems.
Here some of the problems were caused by some technical policies that caused the whole ecosystem to be especially vulnerable, but one big issue was the fact that the managers of the npm platform are a private entity with no oversight from the user community.
Here not all distributions are equal, but contrast this with Debian, where the distribution is managed by a community that is based on a social contract
https://www.debian.org/social_contract and is governed via democratic procedures established in its
https://www.debian.org/devel/constitution.
Additionally, the long history of the distribution model means that many issues have already been met, the errors have already been done, and there are established technical procedures to deal with them in a better way.
So, shouldn't we use language specific distribution platforms at all? No! As developers we aren't children, we are adults who have the skills to distinguish between safe and unsafe libraries just as well as the average distribution maintainer can do. What I believe we should do is stop treating them as a safe source that can be used blindly and reserve that status to actual trustful sources like Debian, falling back to the language specific platforms only when strictly needed, and in that case:
actually check carefully what we are using, both by reading the code and by analysing the development and community practices of the authors;
if possible, share that work by becoming ourselves maintainers of that library in our favourite distribution, to prevent duplication of effort and to give back to the community whose work we get advantage from.
Edit: fixed broken typosquatting url
Finding a Libc for tiny embedded ARM systems
You'd think this problem would have been solved a long time ago. All I
wanted was a C library to use in small embedded systems -- those with
a few kB of flash and even fewer kB of RAM.
Small system requirements
A small embedded system has a different balance of needs:
So, once again I had a box that had been installed with the kind-of-wrong
Debian architecture, in this case, powerpc (32 bit, bigendian), while I
wanted ppc64 (64 bit, bigendian). So, crossgrade time.
If you want to follow this, be aware that I use sysvinit. I doubt this can
be done this way with systemd installed, because systemd has a lot more
dependencies for PID 1, and there is also a dbus daemon involved that
cannot be upgraded without a reboot.
To make this a bit more complicated, ppc64 is an unofficial port, so it is
even less synchronized across architectures than sid normally is (I would
have used jessie, but there is no jessie for ppc64).
Step 1: Be Prepared
To work around the archive synchronisation issues, I installed pbuilder and
created 32 and 64 bit base.tgz archives:
Falling off the cliff is always a surprise. I know it's there; I've been
living next to it for months. I chart its outline daily. Avoiding it has
become routine, and so comfortable, and so failing to avoid it surprises.
Monday evening around 10 pm, the laptop starts draining down from 100%.
House battery, which has been steady around 11.5-10.8 volts since well
before Winter solstice, and was in the low 10's, has plummeted to 8.5 volts.
With the old batteries, the cliff used to be at 7 volts, but now, with
new batteries but fewer, it's in a surprising place, something like
10 volts, and I fell off it.
Weather forecast for the week ahead is much like the previous week:
Maybe a couple sunny afternoons, but mostly no sun at all.
Falling off the cliff is not all bad. It shakes things up. It's a good
opportunity to disconnect, to read paper books, and think long
winter thoughts. It forces some flexability.
I have an auxillary battery for these situations. With its own little
portable solar panel, it can charge the laptop and run it for around 6
hours. But it takes it several days of winter sun to charge back up.
That's enough to get me through the night. Then I take a short trip, and
glory in one sunny afternoon. But I know that won't get me out of the hole,
the batteries need a sunny week to recover. This evening, I expect to lose
power again, and probably tomorrow evening too.
Luckily, my goal for the week was to write slides for two talks, and I've
been able to do that despite being mostly offline, and sometimes
decomputered.
And, in a few days I will be jetting off to Australia! That should give
the batteries a perfect chance to recover.
Previously: 
My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for 
A Safe and Happy New Year to all.
So that was 2016! Here s a summary of what I got up to on my computer(s) in December, a check of how I went against my plan, and the TODO list for the next month or so.
With a short holiday to Oslo, Christmas holidays, Christmas parties (at work and with Alexander at school, football etc.), travelling to Brussels with work, birthdays (Alexander & Antje), I missed a lot of deadlines, and failed to reach most of my Free Software goals (including my goals for new & updated packages in Debian Stretch the soft freeze is in a couple of days). To top it all off, I lost my grandmother at the ripe old age of 93. Rest in peace Nana. I wish I could have made it to the funeral, but it is sometimes tough living on the other side of the world to your family.
Debian
Something I was used to and which came as standard on wheezy if you installed acpi-support was screen locking when you where suspending, hibernating, ... This is something that I still haven't found on Jessie and which somebody had point me to solve via /lib/systemd/system-sleep/whatever hacking, but that didn't seem quite right, so I gave it a look again and this time I was able to add some config files at /etc/systemd and then a script which does what acpi-support used to do before Edit: Michael Biebl has sugested on my google+ post that this is an ugly hack and that one shouldn't use this solution and instead what we should use are solutions with direct support for logind like desktops with built in support or xss-lock, the reasons for this being ugly are pointed at 
Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you re interested in Android, Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you.
Debian Android
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Since I've got a few weeks off I've decided I need to find a project, or
two, to occupy me. Happily the baby is settling in well, mostly he
sleeps for 4-5 hours, then eats, before the cycle repeats. It could
have been so much worse.
My plan is to start exploring Arduino-related projects. It has been years
since I touched hardware, with the exception of building a new PC for myself
every 12-48 months.
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