Search Results: "jam"

13 September 2015

Russ Allbery: Accumulated haul

I haven't posted one of these in a while, but now that I'm finally caught up with writing reviews (although not posting them yet), I've been feeling about reading again. And of course the backlog always grows. Let's see if I can figure out what I've picked up since the last post. Catherine Asaro The Phoenix Code (sff)
Annie Bellet Justice Calling (sff)
Annie Bellet Murder of Crows (sff)
Annie Bellet Pack of Lies (sff)
Zen Cho Sorcerer to the Crown (sff)
J.J. Gribble Steel Victory (sff)
Judith L. Herman Trauma and Recovery (non-fiction)
Janis Ian & Mike Resnick Stars: The Anthology (sff anthology)
Megg Jensen Hidden (sff)
T. Kingfisher Bryony and Roses (sff)
T. Kingfisher The Seventh Bride (sff)
Nancy Kress Crossfire (sff)
Edmond Lau The Effective Engineer (non-fiction)
Yoon Ha Lee The Fox's Tower and Other Tales (sff collection)
Lozzi Roma Rome and the Vatican (non-fiction)
Elizabeth Lynn The Dancers of Arun (sff)
Elizabeth Lynn The Northern Girl (sff)
Rhonda Mason Empress Game (sff)
Vonda N. McIntyre Starfarers (sff)
Linda Nagata Memory (sff)
Jody Lynn Nye Strong Arm Tactics (sff)
Cat Rambo Near + Far (sff)
Kristine Kathryn Rusch The Diving Bundle (sff collection)
Kristine Kathryn Rusch Recovering Apollo 8 (sff)
L. Shelby Serendipity's Tide (sff)
L. Shelby Treachery's Harbor (sff)
L. Shelby Fealty's Shore (sff)
K.B. Spangler Digital Divide (sff)
Judith Tarr Forgotten Suns (sff)
Greg van Eekhout California Bones (sff) Hm, that's quite a lot. Most of it is various ebooks I picked up from various places, including a Humble Bundle. I've been impulse-buying a lot of stuff based on James Nicoll's reviews. The travel guide was a gift from a friend from a vacation in Italy.

1 September 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 18 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Aur lien Jarno uploaded glibc/2.21-0experimental1 which will fix the issue were locales-all did not behave exactly like locales despite having it in the Provides field. Lunar rebased the pu/reproducible_builds branch for dpkg on top of the released 1.18.2. This made visible an issue with udebs and automatically generated debug packages. The summary from the meeting at DebConf15 between ftpmasters, dpkg mainatainers and reproducible builds folks has been posted to the revelant mailing lists. Packages fixed The following 70 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: activemq-activeio, async-http-client, classworlds, clirr, compress-lzf, dbus-c++, felix-bundlerepository, felix-framework, felix-gogo-command, felix-gogo-runtime, felix-gogo-shell, felix-main, felix-shell-tui, felix-shell, findbugs-bcel, gco, gdebi, gecode, geronimo-ejb-3.2-spec, git-repair, gmetric4j, gs-collections, hawtbuf, hawtdispatch, jack-tools, jackson-dataformat-cbor, jackson-dataformat-yaml, jackson-module-jaxb-annotations, jmxetric, json-simple, kryo-serializers, lhapdf, libccrtp, libclaw, libcommoncpp2, libftdi1, libjboss-marshalling-java, libmimic, libphysfs, libxstream-java, limereg, maven-debian-helper, maven-filtering, maven-invoker, mochiweb, mongo-java-driver, mqtt-client, netty-3.9, openhft-chronicle-queue, openhft-compiler, openhft-lang, pavucontrol, plexus-ant-factory, plexus-archiver, plexus-bsh-factory, plexus-cdc, plexus-classworlds2, plexus-component-metadata, plexus-container-default, plexus-io, pytone, scolasync, sisu-ioc, snappy-java, spatial4j-0.4, tika, treeline, wss4j, xtalk, zshdb. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: Chris Lamb also noticed that binaries shipped with libsilo-bin did not work. Documentation update Chris Lamb and Ximin Luo assembled a proper specification for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in the hope to convince more upstreams to adopt it. Thanks to Holger it is published under a non-Debian domain name. Lunar documented easiest way to solve issues with file ordering and timestamps in tarballs that came with tar/1.28-1. Some examples on how to use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH have been improved to support systems without GNU date. reproducible.debian.net armhf is finally being tested, which also means the remote building of Debian packages finally works! This paves the way to perform the tests on even more architectures and doing variations on CPU and date. Some packages even produce the same binary Arch:all packages on different architectures (1, 2). (h01ger) Tests for FreeBSD are finally running. (h01ger) As it seems the gcc5 transition has cooled off, we schedule sid more often than testing again on amd64. (h01ger) disorderfs has been built and installed on all build nodes (amd64 and armhf). One issue related to permissions for root and unpriviliged users needs to be solved before disorderfs can be used on reproducible.debian.net. (h01ger) strip-nondeterminism Version 0.011-1 has been released on August 29th. The new version updates dh_strip_nondeterminism to match recent changes in debhelper. (Andrew Ayer) disorderfs disorderfs, the new FUSE filesystem to ease testing of filesystem-related variations, is now almost ready to be used. Version 0.2.0 adds support for extended attributes. Since then Andrew Ayer also added support to reverse directory entries instead of shuffling them, and arbitrary padding to the number of blocks used by files. Package reviews 142 reviews have been removed, 48 added and 259 updated this week. Santiago Vila renamed the not_using_dh_builddeb issue into varying_mtimes_in_data_tar_gz_or_control_tar_gz to align better with other tag names. New issue identified this week: random_order_in_python_doit_completion. 37 FTBFS issues have been reported by Chris West (Faux) and Chris Lamb. Misc. h01ger gave a talk at FrOSCon on August 23rd. Recordings are already online. These reports are being reviewed and enhanced every week by many people hanging out on #debian-reproducible. Huge thanks!

Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (July and August 2015)

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months: The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months: Congratulations!

28 August 2015

Dimitri John Ledkov: Go enjoy Python3

Given a string, get a truncated string of length up to 12.

The task is ambiguous, as it doesn't say anything about whether or not 12 should include terminating null character or not. None the less, let's see how one would achieve this in various languages.
Let's start with python3 

import sys
print(sys.argv[1][:12])
Simple enough, in essence given first argument, print it up to length 12. As an added this also deals with unicode correctly that is if passed arg is , it will correctly print . (note these are just random Unicode strings to me, no idea what they stand for).

In C things are slightly more verbose, but in essence, I am going to use strncpy function: 

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
void main(int argc, char *argv[])  
 char res[12];
 strncpy(res,argv[1],12);
 printf("%s\n",res);
This treats things as byte-array instead of unicode, thus for unicode test it will end up printing just . But it is still simple enough.
Finally we have Go 
package main

import "os"
import "fmt"
import "math"

func main()  
 fmt.Printf("%s\n", os.Args[1][:int(math.Min(12, float64(len(os.Args[1]))))])
This similarly treats argument as a byte array, and one needs to cast the argument to a rune to get unicode string handling. But there are quite a few caveats. One cannot take out of bounds slices. Thus a na ve os.Args[1][:12] can result in a runtime panic that slice bounds are out of range. Or if a string is known at compile time, a compile time error. Hence one needs to calculate length, and do a min comparison. And there lies the next caveat, math.Min() is only defined for float64 type, and slice indexes can only be integers and thus we end up writing ]))))])...

12 points for python3, 8 points for C, and Go receives nul points Eurovision style.

EDIT: Andreas R ssland and James Hunt are full of win. Both suggesting fmt.Printf("%.12s\n", os.Args[1]) for go. I like that a lot, as it gives simplicity & readability without compromising the default safety against out of bounds access. Hence the scores are now: 14 points for Go, 12 points for python3 and 8 points for C.

EDIT2: I was pointed out much better C implementation by Keith Thompson - http://pastebin.com/5i7rFmMQ in essence it uses strncat() which has much better null termination semantics. And Ben posted a C implementation which handles wide characters http://www.decadent.org.uk/ben/blog/truncating-a-string-in-c.html. I regret to inform you that this blog post got syndicated onto hacker news and has now become the top viewed post on my blog of all time, overnight. In retrospect, I regret awarding points at the end of the blog post, as that's just was merely an expression of opinion and is highly subjective measure. But this problem statement did originate from me reviewing go code that did "if/then/else" comparison and got it wrong to truncate a string and I thought surely one can just do [:12] which has lead me down the rabbit hole of discovering a lot about Go; it's compile and runtime out of bounds access safeguards; lack of universal Min() function; runes vs strings handling and so on. I'm only a beginner go programmer and I am very sorry for wasting everyone's time on this. I guess people didn't have much to do on a Throwback Thursday.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent Intel s positions, strategies, or opinions.

16 August 2015

Benjamin Drung: DebConf 15

I am still alive and currently attending DebConf 15. Feel free to grab me for a talk. I am just shy, not antisocial.

10 August 2015

Mirco Bauer: Smuxi 1.0 "Finally" Release

RSS Atom
Smuxi - IRC Client Smuxi 1.0 with message persistence, counters
And here we go again! We're proud to announce the new version of Smuxi, release 1.0 "Finally". During the development, 20 bug reports and 10 feature requests in 285 commits were worked on.

Finally 1.0 Smuxi is celebrating its 10th anniversary! 10 years ago, Mirco Bauer made the first commit to the Smuxi source code repository and is still very committed to it. He started the Gnosmirc project in 2005 when the only way a 24/7 "always-on" experience with IRC meant you had to use a console based IRC client like bitchx, irssi or epic combined with screen and SSH. This looks very practical at first and is a powerful Unix-ish way of accomplishing that job, but it has the big downside that it doesn't integrate with a desktop environment like GNOME. A bit later the Gnosmirc project was renamed to Smuxi when the new code architecture allowed other frontend implementations besides the GNOME one. The ncurses/STFL based text frontend was later implemented and is considered stable and useful enough for day to day use, but still has some rough edges. WinForms and WPF frontends also exist but need more work to reach a usable state. At this point Smuxi 1.0 contains all features that we could have imagined and even goes beyond with very advanced features like message patterns or language agnostic scripting.

Changes since Smuxi 0.11

Message Persistence One of the biggest drawbacks of the IRC protocol ever was that messages can't be retrieved from the IRC server because the IRC server is simply relaying messages to the connected clients. So, if an IRC client is freshly started and connects it starts to receive new messages, but all message you had received before are no longer available. This always made IRC in a way "volatile" unlike other communication systems like email where messages are relayed and stored on the client side. One common approach for IRC clients is to store log files in a text file. This is a simple feature and gives the user the possibility to read older conversations. Smuxi also supports text file logging like other IRC clients but it has a big user experience drawback as you need to open the file from the disk outside of the IRC client. In Smuxi 1.0 messages sent and received are now stored on the disk in a way they can automatically be retrieved/loaded when you restart Smuxi. It is like you have never closed Smuxi! This feature was already available in Smuxi for some time as a technical preview and it used the Db4o object database, but we were never happy about the performance neither with the stability so it always stayed an optional feature you need to enable. This year we tried a new message buffer backend using the famous SQLite database and it works much faster and stable as a rock. So finally we can enable this feature by default because it just works and enhanced your experience. We hope you enjoy it. Documentation of how you can change Smuxi message buffer backend and behavior can be found here. For instructions how to convert your existing db4o history to SQLite can be found in the "smuxi-message-buffer tool" section.

User Interface Enhancements
  • Synced message markers: the position of of the seen/unseen messages marker is pushed to the smuxi-server and remembered when the frontend reconnects. (Sebastian Poeplau)
  • Persistent message markers: the message marker position is also remembered across Smuxi(-server) restarts.
  • Message Counter: in addition to the highlight counter next to a chat new/unseen messages are also counted. This makes it easy to identify chats with much traffic.
  • Single application instance support. If you start Smuxi again from the menu it will bring the existing instance into the foreground. This makes the Ubuntu Messaging Menu much nicer.
  • The command/message entry is alignment with the messages. (Lex Berezhny)

Text Frontend Enhancements
  • The console background color can now be configured using: /config set STFL/Interface/TerminalBackgroundColor = #000000 (Ond ej Ho ek)
  • The text color contrast if nicks with the background is now ensured (Ond ej Ho ek) #1033
  • Messages containing images will not be skipped but their alternative text is shown instead (Ond ej Ho ek) #1035

New smuxi-message-buffer tool This is a new commandline tool that allows you to convert and export the message history of Smuxi message buffer files. This can be used to convert your existing Db4o history to SQLite like this for example: 
for DB_DB4O in $HOME/.local/share/smuxi/buffers/*/*/*/*.db4o; do
    DB_SQLITE=$ DB_DB4O/.db4o/.sqlite3 
    smuxi-message-buffer convert $DB_DB4O $DB_SQLITE
done
Smuxi shouldn't be running when using this tool.

Scripting Enhancements

New Hook Points Smuxi 1.0 supports with the following new hook points:
  • engine/protocol-manager/on-presence-status-changed/ This hook point is raised when the presence status of a protocol manager changes. This happens for example when an IRC connection toggles the away state.
  • engine/session/on-event-message/ This hook point raises event messages that usually begin with "-!-". This can be useful to track state changes that are shown as a message without having a dedicated hook point for it.
  • engine/session/command-$cmd/ This hook point is raised on the engine side for commands, e.g. /some_command that isn't handled by the frontend or engine built-in commands. This is useful for commands that should be available for all frontends and isn't specific to the frontend environment.

New Plugins The following new plugins are supported by Smuxi 1.0:
  • topic-diff: Shows the word differences of the topic after topic changes. (meebey)
  • away-nick: Automatically appends and removes $AWAY_SUFFIX to/from the nick name when you go away using the /away command or by disconnecting all frontends from the smuxi-server. (meebey)
  • system-info: Shows system info. Includes system kernel version, distro name, and CPU vendor information. (AK0)
  • now-playing: This plugin is not new but was rewritten in Python to get rid of the spaghetti code monster which was written in Bash. (jamesaxl)

IRC Enhancements
  • NICKSERV support Notices from Nick/ChanServ are no longer shown on all channels as they like to send greeting messages and other spam which is annoying to see on all channels. #868
  • Automatic rejoin of channels protected with a key works as expected again
  • Connecting to irc.gitter.im is now supported. Gitter's IRCd implementation has a bug in the IRC protocol which is now tolerated.

Twitter Enhancements
  • The /search command shows tweets as live stream
  • Added /delete, /favorite and /unfavorite commands

Behind the Scenes
  • Re-licensed smuxi-common from GPLv2 to MIT/X11

Contributors Contributors to this release are the following people:
  • Mirco Bauer (199 commits)
  • Carlos Mart n Nieto (15 commits)
  • Andr s G. Aragoneses (14 commits)
  • Piotr Dr g (12 commits)
  • Ond ej Ho ek (11 commits)
  • Oliver Schneider (5 commits)
  • Calvin B (4 commits)
  • Victor Seva (3 commits)
  • Will Johansson (2 commits)
  • Sebastian Poeplau (2 commits)
  • Julian Taylor (2 commits)
  • James Axl (2 commits)
  • Daniel Mustieles (2 commits)
  • Christopher James Halse Rogers (2 commits)
  • . Uzun (1 commit)
  • Lex Berezhny (1 commit)
  • Kalle Kaitala (1 commit)
  • Jordi Mas (1 commit)
  • Joe Hansen (1 commit)
  • Jimmie Elvenmark (1 commit)
  • Dimitris Spingos (1 commit)
  • Dean Lee (1 commit)
  • Cl ment Bourgeois (1 commit)
  • Carlos Hernandez (1 commit)
Thank you very much for your contributions to Smuxi! Want this? Go here and grab it right now!

Posted Sun Aug 9 17:48:18 2015

3 August 2015

Jamie McClelland: Docker: evil spawn or useful tool

There are plenty of criticisms of docker, the system for building a container-based virtual machine running just a single application. I've read many of them have have consistently been either in agreement or at least amused. The most relevant criticism is about the basic approach of building single-application virtual machines. To understand this criticism, let's remember - in traditional application deployment there are at least three distinct jobs: These three groups have lived in happy tension for years. Now we have containers. The problem with containers is that suddenly the system administrators are out entirely and the distribution developers' role may have been dramatically minimized or circumvented altogether. Meanwhile, the application developer is both liberated from any constraints imposed by either the system administrator or the distribution developers (hooray!) but is also sadled with the enormous responsibilities of these two roles - which may not be apparent to the application developer at first. I have practically no distribution developer experience and have considerable experience as a system administrator and an application developer. And, it took me months to sort through how to properly develop and deploy an application using docker in a way that I thought was responsible and secure. I started by learning about how docker wants you to deploy images - by downloading them from their shared regisry. As I mentioned, I have very little experience in the realm of distribution development, but I at least know enough about Debian to know that a lot of time and thought has gone into cryptographically verifying packages that I install, which apparently is not done at all with Docker images. Is that obvious to everyone using Docker?? Fortunately, you can work around this problem by creating your own base image which is trivially easy. So, now I build all images, from scratch, locally. That helps put Debian developers back into the mix. Next, I started looking at Docker Files that I could use to construct my images and discovered something else troubling. Take, for example, the official nginx Docker image. It is based on Debian Jessie (hooray - our distribution developers are in the mix!). However, it then proceeds to install nginx from the nginx repository, not the debian repository. Well, I guess if you are nginx you want to have full control, but still, the Debian developers version of nginx has been vetted to ensure it works with Debian Jessie, so you are really losing something here. So... my next break from Docker convention is to use all Debian packages in my Docker files. Once my images were built and my application was tested and running, I was done, right? Wrong. Well, I would have been done if I didn't care about upgrading my systems, backing up my data or running cron jobs. Remember those things? Those are things that distribution developers and system administrators have been perfecting for decades. And, they are not trivial. I then built a series of scripts to help alert me when a image I am using has updates (you can't just use cron-apt any more since cron isn't running in your container) and help me update the image and deploy it to all my applications (which involves restarting the application). Backing up data is a whole different can of worms - sometimes involving interacting with your container (if it's a database container, you have to launch a database dump) or simply copying files from the host, assuming you got the right Docker volume strategy (which took me days to fully understand). Lastly, I had to run a cron job from the host that then runs whatever commands are needed on each of my containers. This was complicated. In the end, was it worth it? Yes, I think so. However, not because it was simple, which seems to be the Docker mantra. I think it's worth it because I can run 100 instances of my application using significantly less resources than when I was using full virtualization and because I can more easily and flexibly adjust the resource allocation. However, check in with me in a year and I'll probably have a different opinion.

Jamie McClelland: Agents, the kinds that work for us.

I recently decided I wanted to adjust how long my gpg password cache lasts and realized I had no idea how either my ssh-agent or gpg-agent was being launched or even which programs were being used as the agent for which protocol. While I appreciate that everthing just works based on blind faith, I decided to investigate more closely. I started by reading the man pages for ssh-agent and gpg-agent and discovered that gpg-agent could be used for providing ssh-agent. Since I run openbox, I decided to dig through my ~/.config/openbox/autostart file and discovered that I was also launching gnome-keyring-daemon, which provides both an ssh-agent and a gpg-agent. This is getting confusing. I then examined the output of ps -eFH and found this: 
jamie    28499 28489  0  1082  1516   1 10:06 tty1     00:00:00     /bin/sh /usr/bin/startx
jamie    28542 28499  0  3987  1912   1 10:06 tty1     00:00:00       xinit /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc -- /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc :0 vt1 -auth /tmp/serverauth.gn3C5pYbPc
root     28543 28542  0 58065 25036   3 10:06 tty1     00:00:05         /usr/bin/X -nolisten tcp :0 vt1 -auth /tmp/serverauth.gn3C5pYbPc
jamie    28548 28542  0 69563 19980   0 10:06 tty1     00:00:00         /usr/bin/openbox --startup /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/openbox-autostart OPENBOX
jamie    28604 28548  0  2774   348   1 10:06 ?        00:00:00           /usr/bin/ssh-agent /usr/bin/gpg-agent --daemon --sh --write-env-file=/home/jamie/.gnupg/gpg-agent-info-animal /usr/bin/dbus-launch --exit-with-session /usr/bin/monkeysphere-validation-agent /usr/bin/im-launch /home/jamie/.xsession
jamie    28605 28548  0  4915   248   0 10:06 ?        00:00:00           /usr/bin/gpg-agent --daemon --sh --write-env-file=/home/jamie/.gnupg/gpg-agent-info-animal /usr/bin/dbus-launch --exit-with-session /usr/bin/monkeysphere-validation-agent /usr/bin/im-launch /home/jamie/.xsession
jamie    28610 28548  0 22402 34456   0 10:06 tty1     00:00:00           /usr/bin/perl -wT /usr/bin/monkeysphere-validation-agent /usr/bin/im-launch /home/jamie/.xsession
Further down (and not nested under the xinit process), I found my gnome-keyring-daemon process. I started by removing my own call to gnome-keyring-daemon and realized that everything still worked fine (both gpg and ssh). I must have added that line before things were configured system-wide to run automatically. Then, I saw that the gpg-agent was being launched without the --enable-ssh-support option (and ssh-agent was running), so looks like ssh is handled by ssh-agent and gpg is handled by gpg-agent. So far so good. Now, how do they get launched?? I start my graphical session by logging in at a console and running exec startx. In my home directory, I have ~/.xsession which contains the line exec /usr/bin/openbox-session. Therefore, I started by scouring all things openbox on my system and couldn't find any reference to these agents. Next, I turned my attention to X. Based on my ps -eFH output, I started with /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc, which led me to /etc/X11/Xsession which led me to /etc/X11/Xsession.d and presto, I found my answer: a series of shell scripts that modify a global variable STARTUP which is executed by X. Thanks Debian developers for making it all work out of the box!

2 August 2015

Benjamin Mako Hill: Understanding Hydroplane Races for the New Seattleite

It s Seafair weekend in Seattle. As always, the centerpiece is the H1 Unlimited hydroplane races on Lake Washington. EllstromManufacturingHydroplaneIn my social circle, I m nearly the only person I know who grew up in area. None of the newcomers I know had heard of hydroplane racing before moving to Seattle. Even after I explain it to them i.e., boats with 3,000+ horse power airplane engines that fly just above the water at more than 320kph (200mph) leaving 10m+ (30ft) wakes behind them! most people seem more puzzled than interested. I grew up near the shore of Lake Washington and could see (and hear!) the races from my house. I don t follow hydroplane racing throughout the year but I do enjoy watching the races at Seafair. Here s my attempt to explain and make the case for the races to new Seattleites. Before Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, etc., there were basically three major Seattle industries: (1) logging and lumber based industries like paper manufacturing; (2) maritime industries like fishing, shipbuilding, shipping, and the navy; (3) aerospace (i.e., Boeing). Vintage hydroplane racing represented the Seattle trifecta: Wooden boats with airplane engines! The wooden U-60 Miss Thriftway circa 1955 (Thriftway is a Washinton-based supermarket that nobody outside has heard of) below is a picture of old-Seattle awesomeness. Modern hydroplanes are now made of fiberglass but two out of three isn t bad. miss_thriftwayAlthough the boats are racing this year in events in Indiana, San Diego, and Detroit in addition to the two races in Washington, hydroplane racing retains deep ties to the region. Most of the drivers are from the Seattle area. Many or most of the teams and boats are based in Washington throughout the year. Many of the sponsors are unknown outside of the state. This parochialness itself cultivates a certain kind of appeal among locals. In addition to old-Seattle/new-Seattle cultural divide, there s a class divide that I think is also worth challenging. Although the demographics of hydro-racing fans is surprisingly broad, it can seem like Formula One or NASCAR on the water. It seems safe to suggest that many of the demographic groups moving to Seattle for jobs in the tech industry are not big into motorsports. Although I m no follower of motorsports in general, I ve written before cultivated disinterest in professional sports, and it remains something that I believe is worth taking on. It s not all great. In particular, the close relationship between Seafair and the military makes me very uneasy. That said, even with the military-heavy airshow, I enjoy the way that Seafair weekend provides a little pocket of old-Seattle that remains effectively unchanged from when I was a kid. I d encourage others to enjoy it as well!

Benjamin Mako Hill: Understanding Hydroplane Races for the New Seattleite

It s Seafair weekend in Seattle. As always, the centerpiece is the H1 Unlimited hydroplane races on Lake Washington. EllstromManufacturingHydroplaneIn my social circle, I m nearly the only person I know who grew up in area. None of the newcomers I know had heard of hydroplane racing before moving to Seattle. Even after I explain it to them i.e., boats with 3,000+ horse power airplane engines that fly just above the water at more than 320kph (200mph) leaving 10m+ (30ft) wakes behind them! most people seem more puzzled than interested. I grew up near the shore of Lake Washington and could see (and hear!) the races from my house. I don t follow hydroplane racing throughout the year but I do enjoy watching the races at Seafair. Here s my attempt to explain and make the case for the races to new Seattleites. Before Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, etc., there were basically three major Seattle industries: (1) logging and lumber based industries like paper manufacturing; (2) maritime industries like fishing, shipbuilding, shipping, and the navy; (3) aerospace (i.e., Boeing). Vintage hydroplane racing represented the Seattle trifecta: Wooden boats with airplane engines! The wooden U-60 Miss Thriftway circa 1955 (Thriftway is a Washinton-based supermarket that nobody outside has heard of) below is a picture of old-Seattle awesomeness. Modern hydroplanes are now made of fiberglass but two out of three isn t bad. miss_thriftwayAlthough the boats are racing this year in events in Indiana, San Diego, and Detroit in addition to the two races in Washington, hydroplane racing retains deep ties to the region. Most of the drivers are from the Seattle area. Many or most of the teams and boats are based in Washington throughout the year. Many of the sponsors are unknown outside of the state. This parochialness itself cultivates a certain kind of appeal among locals. In addition to old-Seattle/new-Seattle cultural divide, there s a class divide that I think is also worth challenging. Although the demographics of hydro-racing fans is surprisingly broad, it can seem like Formula One or NASCAR on the water. It seems safe to suggest that many of the demographic groups moving to Seattle for jobs in the tech industry are not big into motorsports. Although I m no follower of motorsports in general, I ve written before cultivated disinterest in professional sports, and it remains something that I believe is worth taking on. It s not all great. In particular, the close relationship between Seafair and the military makes me very uneasy. That said, even with the military-heavy airshow, I enjoy the way that Seafair weekend provides a little pocket of old-Seattle that remains effectively unchanged from when I was a kid. I d encourage others to enjoy it as well!

26 July 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 13 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes akira uploaded a new version of doxygen in the experimental reproducible repository incorporating upstream patch for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH, and now producing timezone independent timestamps. Dhole updated Peter De Wachter's patch on ghostscript to use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH and use UTC as a timezone. A modified package is now being experimented. Packages fixed The following 14 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: bino, cfengine2, fwknop, gnome-software, jnr-constants, libextractor, libgtop2, maven-compiler-plugin, mk-configure, nanoc, octave-splines, octave-symbolic, riece, vdr-plugin-infosatepg. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: reproducible.debian.net Packages identified as failing to build from source with no bugs filed and older than 10 days are scheduled more often now (except in experimental). (h01ger) Package reviews 178 obsolete reviews have been removed, 59 added and 122 updated this week. New issue identified this week: random_order_in_ruby_rdoc_indices. 18 new bugs for packages failing to build from sources have been reported by Chris West (Faux), and h01ger.

22 July 2015

James McCoy: porterbox-logins

Some time ago, pabs documented his setup for easily connecting to one of Debian's porterboxes based on the desired architecture. Similarly, he submitted a wishlist bug against devscripts specifying some requirements for a script to make this functionality generally accessible to the developer community. I have yet to follow up on that request mainly due to ENOTIME for developing new scripts outright. I also have my own script I had been using to get information on available Debian machines. Recently, this came up again on IRC and jwilk decided to actually implement pabs' DNS alias idea. Now, one can use $arch-porterbox.debian.net to connect to a porterbox of the specified architecture. Preference is given to debian.org domains when there are both debian.org and debian.net porterboxes, and it's a simple use first listed machine if there are multiple available porterboxes. This is all well and good, but if you have SSH's StrictHostKeyChecking enabled, SSH will rightly refuse to connect. However, OpenSSH 6.5 added a feature called hostname canonicalization which can help. The below ssh_config snippet allows one to run ssh $arch-porterbox or ssh $arch-porterbox.debian.net and connect to one of the porterboxes, verifying the host key against the canonical host name. 
Host *-porterbox
  HostName %h.debian.net
Match host *-porterbox.debian.net
  CanonicalizeHostname yes
  CanonicalizePermittedCNAMEs *-porterbox.debian.net:*.debian.org

19 July 2015

Gregor Herrmann: RC bugs 2015/17-29

after the release is before the release. or: long time no RC bug report. after the jessie release I spent most of my Debian time on work in the Debian Perl Group. we tried to get down the list of new upstream releases (from over 500 to currently 379; unfortunately the CPAN never sleeps), we were & still are busy preparing for the Perl 5.22 transition (e.g. we uploaded something between 300 & 400 packages to deal with Module::Build & CGI.pm being removed from perl core; only team-maintained packages so far), & we had a pleasant & productive sprint in Barcelona in May. & I also tried to fix some of the RC bugs in our packages which popped up over the previous months. yesterday & today I finally found some time to help with the GCC 5 transition, mostly by making QA or Non-Maintainer Uploads with patches that already were in the BTS. a big thanks especially to the team at HP which provided a couple dozens patches! & here's the list of RC bugs I've worked on in the last 3 months:

17 July 2015

Simon Kainz: DUCK challenge: week 2

Just a litte update on the DUCK challenge: In the last week, the following packages were fixed and uploaded into unstable: Last week we had 10 packages uploaded & fixed, the current week resulted in 15 fixed packages. So there are currently 25 packages fixed by 20 different uploaders. I really hope i can meet you all at DebConf15!! The list of the fixed and updated packages is availabe here. I will try to update this ~daily. If I missed one of your uploads, please drop me a line. A big "Thank You" to you. There is still lots of time till the end of DebConf15 and the end of the DUCK Challenge, so please get involved. And rememeber: debcheckout fails? FIX MORE URLS

12 July 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 11 in Stretch cycle

Debian is undertaking a huge effort to develop a reproducible builds system. I'd like to thank you for that. This could be Debian's most important project, with how badly computer security has been going.

PerniciousPunk in Reddit's Ask me anything! to Neil McGovern, DPL. What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes More tools are getting patched to use the value of the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable as the current time:

In the reproducible experimental toolchain which have been uploaded: Johannes Schauer followed up on making sbuild build path deterministic with several ideas. Packages fixed The following 311 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies : 4ti2, alot, angband, appstream-glib, argvalidate, armada-backlight, ascii, ask, astroquery, atheist, aubio, autorevision, awesome-extra, bibtool, boot-info-script, bpython, brian, btrfs-tools, bugs-everywhere, capnproto, cbm, ccfits, cddlib, cflow, cfourcc, cgit, chaussette, checkbox-ng, cinnamon-settings-daemon, clfswm, clipper, compton, cppcheck, crmsh, cupt, cutechess, d-itg, dahdi-tools, dapl, darnwdl, dbusada, debian-security-support, debomatic, dime, dipy, dnsruby, doctrine, drmips, dsc-statistics, dune-common, dune-istl, dune-localfunctions, easytag, ent, epr-api, esajpip, eyed3, fastjet, fatresize, fflas-ffpack, flann, flex, flint, fltk1.3, fonts-dustin, fonts-play, fonts-uralic, freecontact, freedoom, gap-guava, gap-scscp, genometools, geogebra, git-reintegrate, git-remote-bzr, git-remote-hg, gitmagic, givaro, gnash, gocr, gorm.app, gprbuild, grapefruit, greed, gtkspellmm, gummiboot, gyp, heat-cfntools, herold, htp, httpfs2, i3status, imagetooth, imapcopy, imaprowl, irker, jansson, jmapviewer, jsdoc-toolkit, jwm, katarakt, khronos-opencl-man, khronos-opengl-man4, lastpass-cli, lava-coordinator, lava-tool, lavapdu, letterize, lhapdf, libam7xxx, libburn, libccrtp, libclaw, libcommoncpp2, libdaemon, libdbusmenu-qt, libdc0, libevhtp, libexosip2, libfreenect, libgwenhywfar, libhmsbeagle, libitpp, libldm, libmodbus, libmtp, libmwaw, libnfo, libpam-abl, libphysfs, libplayer, libqb, libsecret, libserial, libsidplayfp, libtime-y2038-perl, libxr, lift, linbox, linthesia, livestreamer, lizardfs, lmdb, log4c, logbook, lrslib, lvtk, m-tx, mailman-api, matroxset, miniupnpd, mknbi, monkeysign, mpi4py, mpmath, mpqc, mpris-remote, musicbrainzngs, network-manager, nifticlib, obfsproxy, ogre-1.9, opal, openchange, opensc, packaging-tutorial, padevchooser, pajeng, paprefs, pavumeter, pcl, pdmenu, pepper, perroquet, pgrouting, pixz, pngcheck, po4a, powerline, probabel, profitbricks-client, prosody, pstreams, pyacidobasic, pyepr, pymilter, pytest, python-amqp, python-apt, python-carrot, python-django, python-ethtool, python-mock, python-odf, python-pathtools, python-pskc, python-psutil, python-pypump, python-repoze.tm2, python-repoze.what, qdjango, qpid-proton, qsapecng, radare2, reclass, repsnapper, resource-agents, rgain, rttool, ruby-aggregate, ruby-albino, ruby-archive-tar-minitar, ruby-bcat, ruby-blankslate, ruby-coffee-script, ruby-colored, ruby-dbd-mysql, ruby-dbd-odbc, ruby-dbd-pg, ruby-dbd-sqlite3, ruby-dbi, ruby-dirty-memoize, ruby-encryptor, ruby-erubis, ruby-fast-xs, ruby-fusefs, ruby-gd, ruby-git, ruby-globalhotkeys, ruby-god, ruby-hike, ruby-hmac, ruby-integration, ruby-jnunemaker-matchy, ruby-memoize, ruby-merb-core, ruby-merb-haml, ruby-merb-helpers, ruby-metaid, ruby-mina, ruby-net-irc, ruby-net-netrc, ruby-odbc, ruby-ole, ruby-packet, ruby-parseconfig, ruby-platform, ruby-plist, ruby-popen4, ruby-rchardet, ruby-romkan, ruby-ronn, ruby-rubyforge, ruby-rubytorrent, ruby-samuel, ruby-shoulda-matchers, ruby-sourcify, ruby-test-spec, ruby-validatable, ruby-wirble, ruby-xml-simple, ruby-zoom, rumor, rurple-ng, ryu, sam2p, scikit-learn, serd, shellex, shorewall-doc, shunit2, simbody, simplejson, smcroute, soqt, sord, spacezero, spamassassin-heatu, spamprobe, sphinxcontrib-youtube, splitpatch, sratom, stompserver, syncevolution, tgt, ticgit, tinyproxy, tor, tox, transmissionrpc, tweeper, udpcast, units-filter, viennacl, visp, vite, vmfs-tools, waffle, waitress, wavtool-pl, webkit2pdf, wfmath, wit, wreport, x11proto-input, xbae, xdg-utils, xdotool, xsystem35, yapsy, yaz. Please note that some packages in the above list are falsely reproducible. In the experimental toolchain, debhelper exported TZ=UTC and this made packages capturing the current date (without the time) reproducible in the current test environment. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Ben Hutchings upstreamed several patches to fix Linux reproducibility issues which were quickly merged. Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Uploads that should fix packages not in main: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: reproducible.debian.net A new package set has been added for lua maintainers. (h01ger) tracker.debian.org now only shows reproducibility issues for unstable. Holger and Mattia worked on several bugfixes and enhancements: finished initial test setup for NetBSD, rewriting more shell scripts in Python, saving UDD requests, and more debbindiff development Reiner Herrmann fixed text comparison of files with different encoding. Documentation update Juan Picca added to the commands needed for a local test chroot installation of the locales-all package. Package reviews 286 obsolete reviews have been removed, 278 added and 243 updated this week. 43 new bugs for packages failing to build from sources have been filled by Chris West (Faux), Mattia Rizzolo, and h01ger. The following new issues have been added: timestamps_in_manpages_generated_by_ronn, timestamps_in_documentation_generated_by_org_mode, and timestamps_in_pdf_generated_by_matplotlib. Misc. Reiner Herrmann has submitted patches for OpenWrt. Chris Lamb cleaned up some code and removed cruft in the misc.git repository. Mattia Rizzolo updated the prebuilder script to match what is currently done on reproducible.debian.net.

8 July 2015

Sven Hoexter: F5 BigIP and 1K DH parameter vs SSL Labs

So as a consequence of the weakdh issue(s) Qualys SSL Labs started to cap the rating at a B level if you provide DH cipher suites with 1K DH parameter. Now if you're terminating your TLS connections on F5s BigIP you're currently not able to change the DH parameter (they're random but of a fixed size). Finally there is a public comment from F5 written by Brian McHenry which is worth reading if you're running those boxes. As a side note, what most people running on TMOS 11.6.x should've already done is preferring ECDHE over DHE, which would look like this: 
ciphers "!LOW:!SSLv3:!MD5:!RC4-SHA:!EXPORT:ECDHE+AES-GCM:ECDHE+AES:DHE+AES-GCM:DHE+AES:DHE+3DES:AES-GCM+RSA:RSA+AES:RSA+3DES"
That of course does not bring back the somewhat overrated A grade on the SSL Labs site. That boils down to choosing to provide DHE with 1K DH parameter or let everyone else, who does not yet support ECDHE, use RSA with your 2K public key. Honestly, for a public portal with a very wide range of users, I'm far from sure which one is the better choice. Looking at the weakest link "RSA+3DES" with TLSv1.0 is nothing that can convince the paranoid, but this cipher setting would bring you back the A grade: 
ciphers "!LOW:!SSLv3:!MD5:!RC4-SHA:!EXPORT:ECDHE+AES-GCM:ECDHE+AES:AES-GCM+RSA:RSA+AES:RSA+3DES"

7 July 2015

Petter Reinholdtsen: MPEG LA on "Internet Broadcast AVC Video" licensing and non-private use

After asking the Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK) why they can broadcast and stream H.264 video without an agreement with the MPEG LA, I was wiser, but still confused. So I asked MPEG LA if their understanding matched that of NRK. As far as I can tell, it does not. I started by asking for more information about the various licensing classes and what exactly is covered by the "Internet Broadcast AVC Video" class that NRK pointed me at to explain why NRK did not need a license for streaming H.264 video:
According to a MPEG LA press release dated 2010-02-02, there is no charge when using MPEG AVC/H.264 according to the terms of "Internet Broadcast AVC Video". I am trying to understand exactly what the terms of "Internet Broadcast AVC Video" is, and wondered if you could help me. What exactly is covered by these terms, and what is not? The only source of more information I have been able to find is a PDF named AVC Patent Portfolio License Briefing, which states this about the fees:
  • Where End User pays for AVC Video
    • Subscription (not limited by title) 100,000 or fewer subscribers/yr = no royalty; > 100,000 to 250,000 subscribers/yr = $25,000; >250,000 to 500,000 subscribers/yr = $50,000; >500,000 to 1M subscribers/yr = $75,000; >1M subscribers/yr = $100,000
    • Title-by-Title - 12 minutes or less = no royalty; >12 minutes in length = lower of (a) 2% or (b) $0.02 per title
  • Where remuneration is from other sources
    • Free Television - (a) one-time $2,500 per transmission encoder or (b) annual fee starting at $2,500 for > 100,000 HH rising to maximum $10,000 for >1,000,000 HH
    • Internet Broadcast AVC Video (not title-by-title, not subscription) no royalty for life of the AVC Patent Portfolio License
Am I correct in assuming that the four categories listed is the categories used when selecting licensing terms, and that "Internet Broadcast AVC Video" is the category for things that do not fall into one of the other three categories? Can you point me to a good source explaining what is ment by "title-by-title" and "Free Television" in the license terms for AVC/H.264? Will a web service providing H.264 encoded video content in a "video on demand" fashing similar to Youtube and Vimeo, where no subscription is required and no payment is required from end users to get access to the videos, fall under the terms of the "Internet Broadcast AVC Video", ie no royalty for life of the AVC Patent Portfolio license? Does it matter if some users are subscribed to get access to personalized services? Note, this request and all answers will be published on the Internet.
The answer came quickly from Benjamin J. Myers, Licensing Associate with the MPEG LA:
Thank you for your message and for your interest in MPEG LA. We appreciate hearing from you and I will be happy to assist you. As you are aware, MPEG LA offers our AVC Patent Portfolio License which provides coverage under patents that are essential for use of the AVC/H.264 Standard (MPEG-4 Part 10). Specifically, coverage is provided for end products and video content that make use of AVC/H.264 technology. Accordingly, the party offering such end products and video to End Users concludes the AVC License and is responsible for paying the applicable royalties. Regarding Internet Broadcast AVC Video, the AVC License generally defines such content to be video that is distributed to End Users over the Internet free-of-charge. Therefore, if a party offers a service which allows users to upload AVC/H.264 video to its website, and such AVC Video is delivered to End Users for free, then such video would receive coverage under the sublicense for Internet Broadcast AVC Video, which is not subject to any royalties for the life of the AVC License. This would also apply in the scenario where a user creates a free online account in order to receive a customized offering of free AVC Video content. In other words, as long as the End User is given access to or views AVC Video content at no cost to the End User, then no royalties would be payable under our AVC License. On the other hand, if End Users pay for access to AVC Video for a specific period of time (e.g., one month, one year, etc.), then such video would constitute Subscription AVC Video. In cases where AVC Video is delivered to End Users on a pay-per-view basis, then such content would constitute Title-by-Title AVC Video. If a party offers Subscription or Title-by-Title AVC Video to End Users, then they would be responsible for paying the applicable royalties you noted below. Finally, in the case where AVC Video is distributed for free through an "over-the-air, satellite and/or cable transmission", then such content would constitute Free Television AVC Video and would be subject to the applicable royalties. For your reference, I have attached a .pdf copy of the AVC License. You will find the relevant sublicense information regarding AVC Video in Sections 2.2 through 2.5, and the corresponding royalties in Section 3.1.2 through 3.1.4. You will also find the definitions of Title-by-Title AVC Video, Subscription AVC Video, Free Television AVC Video, and Internet Broadcast AVC Video in Section 1 of the License. Please note that the electronic copy is provided for informational purposes only and cannot be used for execution. I hope the above information is helpful. If you have additional questions or need further assistance with the AVC License, please feel free to contact me directly.
Having a fresh copy of the license text was useful, and knowing that the definition of Title-by-Title required payment per title made me aware that my earlier understanding of that phrase had been wrong. But I still had a few questions:
I have a small followup question. Would it be possible for me to get a license with MPEG LA even if there are no royalties to be paid? The reason I ask, is that some video related products have a copyright clause limiting their use without a license with MPEG LA. The clauses typically look similar to this:
This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer to (a) encode video in compliance with the AVC standard ("AVC video") and/or (b) decode AVC video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a personal and non-commercial activity and/or AVC video that was obtained from a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No license is granted or shall be implied for any other use. additional information may be obtained from MPEG LA L.L.C.
It is unclear to me if this clause mean that I need to enter into an agreement with MPEG LA to use the product in question, even if there are no royalties to be paid to MPEG LA. I suspect it will differ depending on the jurisdiction, and mine is Norway. What is MPEG LAs view on this?
According to the answer, MPEG LA believe those using such tools for non-personal or commercial use need a license with them:
With regard to the Notice to Customers, I would like to begin by clarifying that the Notice from Section 7.1 of the AVC License reads: THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSE FOR THE PERSONAL USE OF A CONSUMER OR OTHER USES IN WHICH IT DOES NOT RECEIVE REMUNERATION TO (i) ENCODE VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE AVC STANDARD ("AVC VIDEO") AND/OR (ii) DECODE AVC VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED BY A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL ACTIVITY AND/OR WAS OBTAINED FROM A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE AVC VIDEO. NO LICENSE IS GRANTED OR SHALL BE IMPLIED FOR ANY OTHER USE. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION MAY BE OBTAINED FROM MPEG LA, L.L.C. SEE HTTP://WWW.MPEGLA.COM The Notice to Customers is intended to inform End Users of the personal usage rights (for example, to watch video content) included with the product they purchased, and to encourage any party using the product for commercial purposes to contact MPEG LA in order to become licensed for such use (for example, when they use an AVC Product to deliver Title-by-Title, Subscription, Free Television or Internet Broadcast AVC Video to End Users, or to re-Sell a third party's AVC Product as their own branded AVC Product). Therefore, if a party is to be licensed for its use of an AVC Product to Sell AVC Video on a Title-by-Title, Subscription, Free Television or Internet Broadcast basis, that party would need to conclude the AVC License, even in the case where no royalties were payable under the License. On the other hand, if that party (either a Consumer or business customer) simply uses an AVC Product for their own internal purposes and not for the commercial purposes referenced above, then such use would be included in the royalty paid for the AVC Products by the licensed supplier. Finally, I note that our AVC License provides worldwide coverage in countries that have AVC Patent Portfolio Patents, including Norway. I hope this clarification is helpful. If I may be of any further assistance, just let me know.
The mentioning of Norwegian patents made me a bit confused, so I asked for more information:
But one minor question at the end. If I understand you correctly, you state in the quote above that there are patents in the AVC Patent Portfolio that are valid in Norway. This make me believe I read the list available from <URL: http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx > incorrectly, as I believed the "NO" prefix in front of patents were Norwegian patents, and the only one I could find under Mitsubishi Electric Corporation expired in 2012. Which patents are you referring to that are relevant for Norway?
Again, the quick answer explained how to read the list of patents in that list:
Your understanding is correct that the last AVC Patent Portfolio Patent in Norway expired on 21 October 2012. Therefore, where AVC Video is both made and Sold in Norway after that date, then no royalties would be payable for such AVC Video under the AVC License. With that said, our AVC License provides historic coverage for AVC Products and AVC Video that may have been manufactured or Sold before the last Norwegian AVC patent expired. I would also like to clarify that coverage is provided for the country of manufacture and the country of Sale that has active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents. Therefore, if a party offers AVC Products or AVC Video for Sale in a country with active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents (for example, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, etc.), then that party would still need coverage under the AVC License even if such products or video are initially made in a country without active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents (for example, Norway). Similarly, a party would need to conclude the AVC License if they make AVC Products or AVC Video in a country with active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents, but eventually Sell such AVC Products or AVC Video in a country without active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents.
As far as I understand it, MPEG LA believe anyone using Adobe Premiere and other video related software with a H.264 distribution license need a license agreement with MPEG LA to use such tools for anything non-private or commercial, while it is OK to set up a Youtube-like service as long as no-one pays to get access to the content. I still have no clear idea how this applies to Norway, where none of the patents MPEG LA is licensing are valid. Will the copyright terms take precedence or can those terms be ignored because the patents are not valid in Norway?

6 July 2015

Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, June 2015

This was my seventh month working on Debian LTS. I was assigned 14.75 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative. p7zip I did not receive any feedback from upstream for my proposed fix for CVE-2015-1038 mentioned last month, so I went ahead and uploaded it based on my own testing. (I also uploaded the fix to wheezy-security, jessie-security and sid.) Afterwards, I received a request from upstream for a patch against their latest release (even the version in sid is quite a long way behind that), so I ported the fix forward to that. linux-2.6 I backported further security fixes, but had to give up on one (CVE-2014-8172, AIO soft lockup) as the fix depends on wide-ranging changes. For CVE-2015-1805 (pipe iovec overrun leading to memory corruption), the upstream fix was also not applicable, but this looked so serious that we needed to fix it anyway. Red Hat had already fixed this in their 2.6.32-based kernel and they didn't have overlapping changes to the pipe implementation, so I was able to extract this fix from their source tarball. I uploaded and issued DLA-246-1. Unfortunately, I failed to notice that Linux 2.6.32.66 had introduced two regressions that were fixed in 2.6.32.67. While these didn't appear in my testing, one of them did affect several users that were quick to upgrade. I applied the upstream fixes, made a second upload and issued DLA-246-2. I also triaged the issues that are still unfixed, and I spent some time working on a fix for CVE-2015-1350 (unprivileged chown removes setcap attribute), but I haven't yet completed the backport to 2.6.32 or tested it. openssl I looked at OpenSSL, which is still marked as affected by CVE-2015-4000 (encryption downgrade aka Logjam). After discussion with the LTS team I made a note of the current situation, which is that a full fix (rejecting Diffie-Hellman keys shorter than 1024 bits) must wait until more servers have been upgraded.

2 July 2015

Norbert Preining: An amusing lintian error Lenna

Well, there we are, trying to build another round of TeX Live packages for Debian, just to realize that the lintian error that should have been downgraded to warning (or removed) is still around, due to doubts about the license. Ok. Well, anyway, but what I found is even more funny: 
E: texlive-extra source: license-problem-non-free-img-lenna texmf-dist/doc/latex/reflectgraphics/lenna.jpg
which is about one of the most used images in images processing courses, Lenna: who-is-lenna
Without comments, I just quote the lintian error it is a whole lot of fun to read.
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna, https://www.debian.org/vote/2012/vote_002, #771191
Info: The given source file is cropped from playboy centerfold. This image is a picture of Lena S derberg, shot by photographer Dwight Hooker, cropped from the centerfold of the November 1972 issue of Playboy magazine. According to Hutchison, Jamie (May June 2001). Culture, Communication, and an Information Age Madonna (PDF). IEEE Professional Communication Society Newsletter 45 (3). (page 5 second column second paragraph), this image is distributable but not free. Moreover, Lenna photo has been pointed to as an example of sexism in the sciences, reinforcing gender stereotypes. Please use well known and free test image. Please also submit md5sum, sha1sum, and sha256 of this file as a bug report for lintian.
How fortunate our generation is that we don t have anything else to care about Anyway, back to rebuilding orig.tars, source packages, and binary packages!

29 June 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 9 in Stretch cycle

What happened about the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Norbert Preining uploaded texinfo/6.0.0.dfsg.1-2 which makes texinfo indices reproducible. Original patch by Chris Lamb. Lunar submitted recently rebased patches to make the file order of files inside .deb stable. akira filled #789843 to make tex4ht stop printing timestamps in its HTML output by default. Dhole wrote a patch for xutils-dev to prevent timestamps when creating gzip compresed files. Reiner Herrmann sent a follow-up patch for wheel to use UTC as timezone when outputing timestamps. Mattia Rizzolo started a discussion regarding the failure to build from source of subversion when -Wdate-time is added to CPPFLAGS which happens when asking dpkg-buildflags to use the reproducible profile. SWIG errors out because it doesn't recognize the aforementioned flag. Trying to get the .buildinfo specification to more definitive state, Lunar started a discussion on storing the checksums of the binary package used in dpkg status database. akira discovered while proposing a fix for simgrid that CMake internal command to create tarballs would record a timestamp in the gzip header. A way to prevent it is to use the GZIP environment variable to ask gzip not to store timestamps, but this will soon become unsupported. It's up for discussion if the best place to fix the problem would be to fix it for all CMake users at once. Infrastructure-related work Andreas Henriksson did a delayed NMU upload of pbuilder which adds minimal support for build profiles and includes several fixes from Mattia Rizzolo affecting reproducibility tests. Neils Thykier uploaded lintian which both raises the severity of package-contains-timestamped-gzip and avoids false positives for this tag (thanks to Tomasz Buchert). Petter Reinholdtsen filled #789761 suggesting that how-can-i-help should prompt its users about fixing reproducibility issues. Packages fixed The following packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: autorun4linuxcd, libwildmagic, lifelines, plexus-i18n, texlive-base, texlive-extra, texlive-lang. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Untested uploaded as they are not in main: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: debbindiff development debbindiff/23 includes a few bugfixes by Helmut Grohne that result in a significant speedup (especially on larger files). It used to exhibit the quadratic time string concatenation antipattern. Version 24 was released on June 23rd in a hurry to fix an undefined variable introduced in the previous version. (Reiner Herrmann) debbindiff now has a test suite! It is written using the PyTest framework (thanks Isis Lovecruft for the suggestion). The current focus has been on the comparators, and we are now at 93% of code coverage for these modules. Several problems were identified and fixed in the process: paths appearing in output of javap, readelf, objdump, zipinfo, unsqusahfs; useless MD5 checksum and last modified date in javap output; bad handling of charsets in PO files; the destination path for gzip compressed files not ending in .gz; only metadata of cpio archives were actually compared. stat output was further trimmed to make directory comparison more useful. Having the test suite enabled a refactoring of how comparators were written, switching from a forest of differences to a single tree. This helped removing dust from the oldest parts of the code. Together with some other small changes, version 25 was released on June 27th. A follow up release was made the next day to fix a hole in the test suite and the resulting unidentified leftover from the comparator refactoring. (Lunar) Documentation update Ximin Luo improved code examples for some proposed environment variables for reference timestamps. Dhole added an example on how to fix timestamps C pre-processor macros by adding a way to set the build date externally. akira documented her fix for tex4ht timestamps. Package reviews 94 obsolete reviews have been removed, 330 added and 153 updated this week. Hats off for Chris West (Faux) who investigated many fail to build from source issues and reported the relevant bugs. Slight improvements were made to the scripts for editing the review database, edit-notes and clean-notes. (Mattia Rizzolo) Meetings A meeting was held on June 23rd. Minutes are available. The next meeting will happen on Tuesday 2015-07-07 at 17:00 UTC. Misc. The Linux Foundation announced that it was funding the work of Lunar and h01ger on reproducible builds in Debian and other distributions. This was further relayed in a Bits from Debian blog post.

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