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Contributing to Debian is part of
Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest
achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made
possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support
contracts and consulting services.
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.
This is the first monthly report in 2023.
As many of you know, I work at UNAM, Mexico s largest university. My
work is split in two parts: My full-time job is to be the systems
and network administrator at the Economics Research
Institute, and I do some hours of teaching
at the Engineering Faculty.
At the Institute, my role is academic but although I have tried to
frame my works in a way amenable to analysis grounded on the Social
Sciences (Construcci n Colaborativa del
Conocimiento, Hecho con Creative
Commons, Mecanismos de privacidad y
anonimato), so far, I have not taken
part of academic collaboration with my coworkers Economics is a
field very far from my interests, to somehow illustrate it. I was very
happy when I was invited to be a part of a Seminar on The Digital
Economy in the age of Artificial Intelligence . I talked with the
coordinator, and we agreed we have many Economic Science experts but
understanding what does Artificial Intelligence mean eludes then, so
I will be writing one of the introductory chapters to this analysis.
But Hey, I m no expert in Artificial Intelligence. If anything, I
could be categorized as an AI-skeptical! Well, at least I might be the
closest thing at hand in the Institute So I have been thinking
about what I will be writing, and finding and reading material to
substantiate what I ll be writing.
One of the readings I determined early on I would be going back to is
Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores 1986 book, Understanding
Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for
Design (oh, were
you expecting a link to buy
it
instead of reading it online?)
I first came across this book by mere chance. Back in the last day of
year 2000, my friend Ariel invited me and my then-girlfriend to tag
along and travel by land to the USA to catch some just-after-Christmas
deals in San Antonio. I was not into shopping, but have always enjoyed
road trips, so we went together. We went, yes, to the never-ending
clothing shops, but we also went to some big libraries And the
money I didn t spend at other shops, I spent there. And then some
more.
There was a little, somewhat oldish book that caught my eye. And I ll
be honest: I looked at this book only because it was obviously
produced by the LaTeX typesetting
system (the basics of which I learnt
in 1983, and with which I have written well, basically everything
substantial I ve ever done).
I remember I read this book with most interest back in that year, and
finished it with a Wow, that was a strange trip! And Although I
have never done much that could be considered AI-related, this has
always been my main reference. But not for explaining what is a
perceptron, how is an expert system to ponder the weight of given
information, or whether a neural network is convolutional or
recurrent, or how to turn from a network trained to recognize feature
x into a generational network. No, our book is not
technical. Well Not in that sense.
This book tackles cognition. But in order to discuss cognition, it
must first come to a proper definition of it. And to do so, it has to
base itself on philosophy, starting by noting the author s
disagreement with what they term as the rationalistic tradition:
what we have come to term valid reasoning in Western
countries. Their main claim is that the rationalistic tradition
cannot properly explain a process as complex as cognition (how much
bolder can you be than proposing something like this?). So, this book
presents many constructs of Heidggerian origin, aiming to explain what
it is understanding and being. In doing so, it follows Humberto
Maturana s work. Maturana is also a philosopher, but comes from a
background in biology he published works on animal neurophysiology
that are also presented here.
Writing this, I must ensure you I am not a philosopher, and lack
field-specific knowledge to know whether this book is so unique. I
know from the onset it does not directly help me to write the chapter
I will be writing (but it will surely help me write some important
caveats that will make the chapter much more interesting and different
to what anybody with a Web browser could write about artificial
intelligence).
One last note: Although very well written, and notable for bringing
hard to grasp concepts to mere technical staff as myself, this is
not light, easy reading. I started re-reading this book a couple of
weeks ago, and have just finished chapter 5 (page 69). As some
reviewers state, this is one of those books you have to go back a
paragraph or two over and over. But it is a most enjoyable and
interesting reading.
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.
sudo apt install libboost-dev -t experimental
In my four most recent posts, I went over the memoirs and biographies, the non-fiction, the fiction and the 'classic' fiction I enjoyed reading in 2022.
But in the very last of my roundup posts and in relatively less detail I'll be quickly sketching out the favourite movies that were new to me in 2022:
La Ronde (1950) An all-knowing narrator (Adolf Wohlbr ck) guides us through a series of vignettes in 1900s Vienna a soldier meets an eager young lady of the evening, and later he has an affair with a young lady who becomes a maid and who then does similarly with the young man of the house. On and on it goes, spinning on the carousel of life. A wonderfully beguiling movie, and a reminder that 'innocent' and 'charming' doesn't always imply 'childish'.
A Man Escaped (1956) A Man Escaped is the story of a WW2 resistance fighter who wishes to escape from a prison. Filmed in Robert Bresson's quasi-minimalistic style (and touching on his usual themes of Christian redemption), this deceptively simple-looking film rewards deeper analysis.
The Music Room (1958) In The Music Room, Satyajit Ray (best known for his Apu Trilogy) tells the story of a wealthy landlord who lives a decadent life with his wife and son. His passion is for music, however, and he spends a significant portion of his fortune on concerts held for the locals in his magnificent music room (or 'jalsaghar). However, his obsession for music (and its attendant quest for respect from his peers) is his eventual undoing, as he sacrifices both his family and wealth whilst trying to retain it. Indeed, The Music Room is less of an examination of a single rich man (or of the hypnotic sitar music by Vilayat Khan) than of the dying Bengali landowning class, which I read as symbolic of what was about to vanish from Indian culture in the post-Independence drive toward modernity. Still, this is a multi-layered and textured film, as this is also an intensely moving portrait of a highly-detached man as well.
The Hustler (1961) 'Fast Eddie' Felson is a small-time pool hustler with a lot of talent but a self-destructive attitude. His bravado causes him to challenge the legendary Minnesota Fats to a high-stakes match. The stakes are always much bigger than just money though, as Fast Eddie's ego is on the line. Despite not caring so much about the game, I was completely gripped by Paul Newman's superb performance. Almost certainly the best film about pool ever made, and probably the best sports film as well.
Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) One Valentine's Day in early-1900s Australia, an upper-class school takes its girls on a field trip to a scenic volcanic formation in the middle of the brush. Despite all the rules against it, however, several of the girls venture off onto the rock, and it's not until the end of the day that the group realises some of the girls and one of the teachers have disappeared without a trace. A mesmerising film about colonialism, sexual repression and Antonioni-esque alienation, Picnic at Hanging Rock's dreamlike aesthetic is haunting.
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1976) Jeanne Dielman is a three-and-a-half-hour film that shows a widowed housewife doing her daily chores and taking care of her apartment. Yet in its uncompromising nature, it raises the tedium of her life to the level of profundity. I watched this radically political film a few months before it was recently voted as the 'greatest of all time'), but despite its relentless rigorous nature (and long running time), the conclusion when it comes is shattering.
Raise the Red Lantern (1991) Set in China during the 1920s, Raise the Red Lantern tells the story of a young woman who has become the new concubine of a wealthy man. However, as he has three wives already (each living in a separate house within his castle) she becomes are engaged in an extremely complicated competition attention and the privileges that come with it. Richly colourful, both in its visuals and symbolism, this is film both specifically about China at the time and human universals.
Moonlight (2016) A heartbreaking story of a young man's struggle to find himself, told across three defining chapters in his life as he experiences the pain and beauty of falling in love, whilst grappling with his own sexuality within the ambient weather of race and class in the United States. Absolutely spellbinding and visually stunning.
Drive My Car (2021) Yusuke Kafuku is a stage director who is unable to cope with the loss of his wife, and has therefore accepted an invitation to direct Anton Chekhov's [Uncle Vanya][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Vanya] at a festival in Hiroshima, Japan. Yet whilst many reviewers have focused on the compelling relationship between Yusuke and Misaki (the introverted young woman who has been appointed to drive his car), what I found devastating was the embedded meditation on language, communication, understanding and empathy, especially concerning what happens when these break down or are no longer possible. Drive My Car touches on the limits of each of these phenomena connecting to the next: being able to speak the same language as another doesn't mean you can communicate with them; and being able to communicate doesn't mean you can understand someone, let alone empathise with them. All of this through the near-ungraspable emotion of grief as well, and the portion of this film where the actress was silently employing Korean Sign Language was the most moving thing I saw this year.
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.
This is the report for the Debian Python Team remote sprint
that took place on December 2-3-4 2022.
Many thanks to those who participated, namely:
pybuild to
make it possible to automatically run the upstream test suite as autopkgtests.
This feature has now been merged and uploaded to unstable. Although you can
find out more about it in the pybuild-autopkgtest manpage, an email
providing more details should be sent to the debian-python mailing list
relatively soon.
Fixing packages that run tests via python3 setup.py test
Last August, Stefano Rivera poked the team about the deprecation
of the python3 setup.py test command to run tests in pybuild. Although this
feature has been deprecated upstream for 6 years now, many packages
in the archive still use it to run the upstream test suite during build.
Around 29 of the 67 packages that are team-maintained by the Debian Python Team
were fixed during the sprint. Ideally, all of them would be before the feature
is removed from pybuild.
if a package you maintain still runs this command, please consider fixing it!
Fixing packages that use nose
nose, provided by the python3-nose package, is an obsolete testing
framework for Python and has been unmaintained since 2015.
During the sprint, people worked on fixing some of the many bugs filled against
packages still running tests via nose, but there are still around 240
packages affected by this issue in the archive.
Again, if a package you maintain still runs this command, please consider
fixing it!
Removal of the remaining Python2 packages
With the upload of dh-python 5.20221202, Stefano Rivera officially removed
support for dh_python2 and dh_pypy, thus closing the "Python2 removal in
sid/bullseye" bug.
It seems some work still needs to be done for complete Python2
removal from Sid, but I expect this will be done in time for the
Bookworm release.
Working on Lintian tags for the Team
During the sprint, I managed to work on some Lintian issues that we had
targeted, namely:
distutils
library.
Patching distro-tracker (tracker.debian.org) to show pending team MRs
It's often hard to have a good overview of pending merge requests when working
with team-maintained packages, as by default, Salsa doesn't notify anyone when
a MR is opened.
Although our workflow typically does not involve creating merge requests, some
people still do and they end up sitting there, unnoticed.
During the sprint, Kurt Kremitzki worked on solving this issue by having
distro-tracker show the pending MRs on our team's tracker page.
Sadly, it seems little progress was made, as the removal of
python3-django-jsonfield from the archive and breaking changes in
python3-selenium has broken the test suite.
Migrate packages building with the flit plugin to the generic pyproject one
pybuild has been supporting building with PEP-517 style pyproject.toml files
via a generic plugin (pybuild-plugin-pyproject) for a while now.
As this plugin supersedes the old flit plugin, we've been thinking of
deprecating it in time for the Bookworm release.
To make this possible, most of the packages in the archive that still used this
plugin were migrated to the generic one and I opened bugs on the last handful
of packages that were not team-maintained.
Other work
Many other things were done during the sprint, such as:
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.
The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:
Next.