Search Results: "tar"

27 June 2016

John Goerzen: I m switching from git-annex to Syncthing

I wrote recently about using git-annex for encrypted sync, but due to a number of issues with it, I ve opted to switch to Syncthing. I d been using git-annex with real but noncritical data. Among the first issues I noticed was occasional but persistent high CPU usage spikes, which once started, would persist apparently forever. I had an issue where git-annex tried to replace files I d removed from its repo with broken symlinks, but the real final straw was a number of issues with the gcrypt remote repos. git-remote-gcrypt appears to have a number of issues with possible race conditions on the remote, and at least one of them somehow caused encrypted data to appear in a packfile on a remote repo. Why there was data in a packfile there, I don t know, since git-annex is supposed to keep the data out of packfiles. Anyhow, git-annex is still an awesome tool with a lot of use cases, but I m concluding that live sync to an encrypted git remote isn t quite there yet enough for me. So I looked for alternatives. My main criteria were supporting live sync (via inotify or similar) and not requiring the files to be stored unencrypted on a remote system (my local systems all use LUKS). I found Syncthing met these requirements. Syncthing is pretty interesting in that, like git-annex, it doesn t require a centralized server at all. Rather, it forms basically a mesh between your devices. Its concept is somewhat similar to the proprietary Bittorrent Sync basically, all the nodes communicate about what files and chunks of files they have, and the changes that are made, and immediately propagate as much as possible. Unlike, say, Dropbox or Owncloud, Syncthing can actually support simultaneous downloads from multiple remotes for optimum performance when there are many changes. Combined with syncthing-inotify or syncthing-gtk, it has immediate detection of changes and therefore very quick propagation of them. Syncthing is particularly adept at figuring out ways for the nodes to communicate with each other. It begins by broadcasting on the local network, so known nearby nodes can be found directly. The Syncthing folks also run a discovery server (though you can use your own if you prefer) that lets nodes find each other on the Internet. Syncthing will attempt to use UPnP to configure firewalls to let it out, but if that fails, the last resort is a traffic relay server again, a number of volunteers host these online, but you can run your own if you prefer. Each node in Syncthing has an RSA keypair, and what amounts to part of the public key is used as a globally unique node ID. The initial link between nodes is accomplished by pasting the globally unique ID from one node into the add node screen on the other; the user of the first node then must accept the request, and from that point on, syncing can proceed. The data is all transmitted encrypted, of course, so interception will not cause data to be revealed. Really my only complaint about Syncthing so far is that, although it binds to localhost, the web GUI does not require authentication by default. There is an ITP open for Syncthing in Debian, but until then, their apt repo works fine. For syncthing-gtk, the trusty version of the webupd8 PPD works in Jessie (though be sure to pin it to a low priority if you don t want it replacing some unrelated Debian packages).

Alessio Treglia: A not exactly United Kingdom

Island of Ventotene Roman harbour

There once was a Kingdom strongly United, built on the honours of the people of Wessex, of Mercia, Northumbria and East Anglia who knew how to deal with the invasion of the Vikings from the east and of Normans from the south, to come to unify the territory under an umbrella of common intents. Today, however, 48% of them, while keeping solid traditions, still know how to look forward to the future, joining horizons and commercial developments along with the rest of Europe. The remaining 52%, however, look back and can not see anything in front of them if not a desire of isolation, breaking the European dream born on the shores of Ventotene island in 1944 by Altiero Spinelli, Ernesto Rossi and Ursula Hirschmann through the Manifesto for a free and united Europe . An incurable fracture in the country was born in a referendum on 23 June, in which just over half of the population asked to terminate his marriage to the great European family, bringing the UK back by 43 years of history. <Read More [by Fabio Marzocca]>

Bits from Debian: DebConf16 schedule available

DebConf16 will be held this and next week in Cape Town, South Africa, and we're happy to announce that the schedule is already available. Of course, it is still possible for some minor changes to happen! The DebCamp Sprints already started on 23 June 2016. DebConf will open on Saturday, 2 July 2016 with the Open Festival, where events of interest to a wider audience are offered, ranging from topics specific to Debian to a wider appreciation of the open and maker movements (and not just IT-related). Hackers, makers, hobbyists and other interested parties are invited to share their activities with DebConf attendees and the public at the University of Cape Town, whether in form of workshops, lightning talks, install parties, art exhibition or posters. Additionally, a Job Fair will take place on Saturday, and its job wall will be available throughout DebConf. The full schedule of the Debian Conference thorough the week is published. After the Open Festival, the conference will continue with more than 85 talks and BoFs (informal gatherings and discussions within Debian teams), including not only software development and packaging but also areas like translation, documentation, artwork, testing, specialized derivatives, maintenance of the community infrastructure, and other. There will also be also a plethora of social events, such as our traditional cheese and wine party, our group photo and our day trip. DebConf talks will be broadcast live on the Internet when possible, and videos of the talks will be published on the web along with the presentation slides. DebConf is committed to a safe and welcome environment for all participants. See the DebConf Code of Conduct and the Debian Code of Conduct for more details on this. Debian thanks the commitment of numerous sponsors to support DebConf16, particularly our Platinum Sponsor Hewlett Packard Enterprise. About Hewlett Packard Enterprise Hewlett Packard Enterprise actively participates in open source. Thousands of developers across the company are focused on open source projects, and HPE sponsors and supports the open source community in a number of ways, including: contributing code, sponsoring foundations and projects, providing active leadership, and participating in various committees.

Paul Tagliamonte: Hello, Sense!

A while back, I saw a Kickstarter for one of the most well designed and pretty sleep trackers on the market. I fell in love with it, and it has stuck with me since. A few months ago, I finally got my hands on one and started to track my data. Naturally, I now want to store this new data with the rest of the data I have on myself in my own databases. I went in search of an API, but I found that the Sense API hasn't been published yet, and is being worked on by the team. Here's hoping it'll land soon! After some subdomain guessing, I hit on api.hello.is. So, naturally, I went to take a quick look at their Android app and network traffic, lo and behold, there was a pretty nicely designed API. This API is clearly an internal API, and as such, it's something that should not be considered stable. However, I'm OK with a fragile API, so I've published a quick and dirty API wrapper for the Sense API to my GitHub.. I've published it because I've found it useful, but I can't promise the world, (since I'm not a member of the Sense team at Hello!), so here are a few ground rules of this wrapper: This module is currently Python 3 only. If someone really needs Python 2 support, I'm open to minimally invasive patches to the codebase using six to support Python 2.7. Working with the API: First, let's go ahead and log in using python -m sense. 
$ python -m sense
Sense OAuth Client ID: xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx
Sense OAuth Client Secret: xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx
Sense email: paultag@gmail.com
Sense password: 
Attempting to log into Sense's API
Success!
Attempting to query the Sense API
The humidity is **just right**.
The air quality is **just right**.
The light level is **just right**.
It's **pretty hot** in here.
The noise level is **just right**.
Success!
Now, let's see if we can pull up information on my Sense: 
>>> from sense import Sense
>>> sense = Sense()
>>> sense.devices()
 'senses': [ 'id': 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx', 'firmware_version': '11a1', 'last_updated': 1466991060000, 'state': 'NORMAL', 'wifi_info':  'rssi': 0, 'ssid': 'Pretty Fly for a WiFi (2.4 GhZ)', 'condition': 'GOOD', 'last_updated': 1462927722000 , 'color': 'BLACK' ], 'pills': [ 'id': 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx', 'firmware_version': '2', 'last_updated': 1466990339000, 'battery_level': 87, 'color': 'BLUE', 'state': 'NORMAL' ]
Neat! Pretty cool. Look, you can even see my WiFi AP! Let's try some more and pull some trends out. 
>>> values = [x.get("value") for x in sense.room_sensors()["humidity"]][:10]
>>> min(values)
45.73904
>>> max(values)
45.985928
>>>
I plan to keep maintaining it as long as it's needed, so I welcome co-maintainers, and I'd love to see what people build with it! So far, I'm using it to dump my room data into InfluxDB, pulling information on my room into Grafana. Hopefully more to come! Happy hacking!

26 June 2016

Steinar H. Gunderson: Nageru 1.3.0 released

I've just released version 1.3.0 of Nageru, my live software video mixer. Things have been a bit quiet on the Nageru front recently, for two reasons: First, I've been busy with moving (from Switzerland to Norway) and associated job change (from Google to MySQL/Oracle). Things are going well, but these kinds of changes tend to take, well, time and energy. Second, the highlight of Nageru 1.3.0 is encoding of H.264 streams meant for end users (using x264), not just the Quick Sync Video streams from earlier versions, which work more as a near-lossless intermediate format meant for transcoding to something else later. Like with most things video, hitting such features really hard (I've been doing literally weeks of continuous stream testing) tends to expose weaknesses in upstream software. In particular, I wanted x264 speed control, where the quality is tuned up and down live as the content dictates. This is mainly because the content I want to stream this summer (demoscene competitions) varies from the very simple to downright ridiculously complex (as you can see, YouTube just basically gives up and creates gray blocks). If you have only one static quality setting, you will have the choice between something that looks like crap for everything, and one that drops frames like crazy (or, if your encoding software isn't all that, like e.g. using ffmpeg(1) directly, just gets behind and all your clients' streams just stop) when the tricky stuff comes. There was an unofficial patch for speed control, but it was buggy, not suitable for today's hardware and not kept at all up to date with modern x264 versions. So to get speed control, I had to work that patch pretty heavily (including making it so that it could work in Nageru directly instead of requiring a patched x264) and then it exposed a bug in x264 proper that would cause corruption when changing between some presets, and I couldn't release 1.3.0 before that fix had at least hit git. Similarly, debugging this exposed an issue with how I did streaming with ffmpeg and the MP4 mux (which you need to be able to stream H.264 directly to HTML5 <video> without any funny and latency-inducing segmenting business); to know where keyframes started, I needed to flush the mux before each one, but this messes up interleaving, and if frames were ever dropped right in front of a keyframe (which they would on the most difficult content, even at speed control's fastest presets!), the duration field of the frame would be wrong, causing the timestamps to be wrong and even having pts < dts in some cases. (VLC has to deal with flushing in exactly the same way, and thus would have exactly the same issue, although VLC generally doesn't transcode variable-framerate content so well to begin with, so the heuristics would be more likely to work. Incidentally, I wrote the VLC code for this flushing back in the day, to be able to stream WebM for some Debconf.) I cannot take credit for the ffmpeg/libav fixes (that was all done by Martin Storsj ), but again, Nageru had to wait for the new API they introduce (that just signals to the application when a keyframe is about to begin, removing the need for flushing) to get into git mainline. Hopefully, both fixes will get into releases soon-ish and from there one make their way into stretch. Apart from that, there's a bunch of fixes as always. I'm still occasionally (about once every two weeks of streaming or so) hitting what I believe is a bug in NVIDIA's proprietary OpenGL drivers, but it's nearly impossible to debug without some serious help from them, and they haven't been responding to my inquiries. Every two weeks means that you could be hitting it in a weekend's worth of streaming, so it would be nice to get it fixed, but it also means it's really really hard to make a reproducible test case. :-) But the fact that this is currently the worst stability bug (and that you can work around it by using e.g. Intel's drivers) also shows that Nageru is pretty stable these days.

Iustin Pop: Random things of the week - brexit and the pretzel

Random things of the week In no particular order (mostly). Coming back from the US, it was easier dealing with the jet-lag this time; doing sports in the morning or at noon and eating light on the evening helps a lot. The big thing of the week, that has everybody talking, is of course brexit. My thoughts, as written before on a facebook comment: Direct democracy doesn't really work if it's done once in a blue moon. Wikipedia says there have been thirteen referendums in UK since 1975, but most of them (10) on devolution issues in individual countries, and only three were UK-wide referendums (quoting from the above page): the first on membership of the European Economic Community in 1975, the second on adopting the Alternative vote system in parliamentary elections in 2011, and the third one is the current one. Which means that a referendum is done every 13 years or so. At this frequency, people are not a) used to inform themselves on the actual issues, b) believing that your vote actually will change things, and most likely c) not taking the "direct-democracy" aspect seriously (thinking beyond the issue at hand and how will it play together with all the rest of the political decisions). The result is what we've seen, leave politicians already backpedalling on issues, and confusion that yes, leave votes actually counted. My prognosis for what's going to happen: We'll see what happens though. Reading comments on various websites still make me cringe at how small some people think: "independence" from the EU when the real issue is EU versus the other big blocks US, China, in the future India; and "versus" not necessarily in a conflict sense, but simply as negotiating power, economic treaties, etc. Back to more down-to-earth things: this week was quite a good week for me. Including commutes, my calendar turned out quite nice: Week calendar The downside was that most of those were short runs or bike sessions. My runs are now usually 6.5K, and I'll try to keep to that for a few weeks, in order to be sure that bone and ligaments have adjusted, and hopefully keep injuries away. On the bike front, the only significant thing was that I did as well the Zwift Canyon Ultimate Pretzel Mission, on the last day of the contest (today): 73.5Km in total, 3h:27m. I've done 60K rides on Zwift before, so the first 60K were OK, but the last ~5K were really hard. Legs felt like logs of wood, I was only pushing very weak output by the end although I did hydrate and fuel up during the ride. But, I was proud of the fact that on the last sprint (about 2K before the end of the ride), I had ~34s, compared to my all-time best of 29.2s. Was not bad after ~3h20m of riding and 1300 virtual meters of ascent. Strava also tells me I got 31 PRs on various segments, but that's because I rode on some parts of Watopia that I never rode before (mostly the reverse ones). Overall, stats for this week: ~160Km in total (virtual and real, biking and running), ~9 hours spent doing sports. Still much lower than the amount of time I was playing computer games, so it's a net win Have a nice start of the week everyone, and keep doing what moves you forward!

Michal &#268;iha&#345;: Troja bridge in Prague

I think it's time to renew tradition of photography posts on this blog. I will start with pictures taken few weeks ago on Troja bridge, which is the newest bridge over the Vltava river in Prague.

Filed under: Debian English Photography 0 comments

Vasudev Kamath: Integrating Cython extension with setuptools and unit testing

I was reviewing changes for indic-trans as part of GSoC 2016. The module is an improvisation for our original transliteration module which was doing its job by substitution. This new module uses machine learning of some sort and utilizes Cython, numpy and scipy. Student had kept pre-compiled shared library in the git tree to make sure it builds and passes the test. But this was not correct way. I started looking at way to build these files and remove it from the code base. There is a cython documentation for distutils but none for setuptools. Probably it is similar to other Python extension integration into setuptools, but this was first time for me so after a bit of searching and trial and error below is what I did. We need to use Extensions class from setuptools and give it path to modules we want to build. In my case beamsearch and viterbi are 2 modules. So I added following lines to setup.py 
from setuptools.extension import Extension
from Cython.Build import cythonize
extensions = [
 Extension(
     "indictrans._decode.beamsearch",
     [
         "indictrans/_decode/beamsearch.pyx"
     ],
     include_dirs=[numpy.get_include()]
 ),
 Extension(
     "indictrans._decode.viterbi",
     [
         "indictrans/_decode/viterbi.pyx"
     ],
     include_dirs=[numpy.get_include()]
 )
]
First argument to Extensions is the module name and second argument is a list of files to be used in building the module. The additional inculde_dirs argument is not normally necessary unless you are working in virtualenv. In my system the build used to work without this but it was failing in Travis CI, so added it to fix the CI builds. OTOH it did work without this on Circle CI. Next is provide this extensions to ext_modules argument to setup as shown below 
setup(
 setup_requires=['pbr'],
 pbr=True,
 ext_modules=cythonize(extensions)
)
And for the reference here is full setup.py after modifications. 
#!/usr/bin/env python
from setuptools import setup
from setuptools.extension import Extension
from Cython.Build import cythonize
import numpy
extensions = [
  Extension(
     "indictrans._decode.beamsearch",
     [
         "indictrans/_decode/beamsearch.pyx"
     ],
     include_dirs=[numpy.get_include()]
  ),
  Extension(
     "indictrans._decode.viterbi",
     [
         "indictrans/_decode/viterbi.pyx"
     ],
     include_dirs=[numpy.get_include()]
  )
]
setup(
  setup_requires=['pbr'],
  pbr=True,
  ext_modules=cythonize(extensions)
)
So now we can build the extensions (shared library) using following command. 
python setup.py build_ext
Another challenge I faced was missing extension when running test. We use pbr in above project and testrepository with subunit for running tests. Looks like it does not build extensions by default so I modified the Makefile to build the extension in place before running test. The travis target of my Makefile is as follows. 
travis:
     [ ! -d .testrepository ]   \
             find .testrepository -name "times.dbm*" -delete
     python setup.py build_ext -i
     python setup.py test --coverage \
             --coverage-package-name=indictrans
     flake8 --max-complexity 10 indictrans
I had to build the extension in place using -i switch. This is because other wise the tests won't find the indictrans._decode.beamsearch and indictrans._decode.viterbi modules. What basically -i switch does is after building shared library symlinks it to the module directory, in ourcase indictrans._decode The test for existence of .testrepository folder is over come this bug in testrepository which results in test failure when running tests using tox.

Kevin Avignon: Tech questions 1-9 : LINQ questions

Hey guys, This is a new series I will try to maintain to the best of my capabilities. I have this awesome blogger who happens to be also a Microsoft MVP called Iris Classon. After her first year of programming, she started to ask and get answers for what she d call stupid question . Why would Continue reading Tech questions 1-9 : LINQ questions

Clint Adams: A local script for local people

This isn't actually answering the question, but it's close. It's also horrible, so whoever adopts Enrico's script should also completely rewrite this or burn it along with the stack of pizza boxes and the grand piano. Input: 
#!/bin/zsh
set -e
PATHS=$(tempfile)
NEWKEYS=$(tempfile)
NEWKEYRING=$(tempfile)
FARTHEST_TEN=$(tempfile)
trap "rm -f $ PATHS  $ NEWKEYS  $ NEWKEYRING  $ FARTHEST_TEN " EXIT
keyring=$ 1:-ksp-dc16.gpg 
myfpr=$ 2:-2100A32C46F895AF3A08783AF6D3495BB0AE9A02 
#keyserver=$ 3:-http://pool.sks-keyservers.net:11371/ 
# this doesn't handle hokey fetch failures
#(for fpr in $(hkt list --keyring $ keyring  --output-format JSON   jq '.[].publickey.fpr')
#do
#  hokey fetch --keyserver "$ keyserver " --validation-method MatchPrimaryKeyFingerprint "$ (Q)fpr "
#done) >$ NEWKEYS 
#
#gpg2 --no-default-keyring --keyring $ NEWKEYRING  --import $ NEWKEYS 
cp "$ keyring " "$ NEWKEYRING "
gpg2 --no-default-keyring --keyring $ NEWKEYRING  --refresh
hkt findpaths --keyring $ NEWKEYRING  '' '' '' > $ PATHS 
id=$(awk -F, "/$ myfpr )\$/  sub(/\(/,BLANKY,\$1);print \$1; " $ PATHS )
grep -e ",\[$ id ," -e ",$ id \]" $ PATHS    sort -n   tail -n 10 > $ FARTHEST_TEN 
targetids=($ (f)"$ $((sed 's/^.*\[//;s/,.*$//;' $ FARTHEST_TEN ; sed 's/\])$//;s/.*,//;' $ FARTHEST_TEN )   sort -n -u   grep -v "^$ id $") " )
targetfprs=($(for i in $ targetids ; do awk -F, "/\($ i ,[^[]/  sub(/\)/,BLANKY,\$2); print \$2 " $ PATHS ; done))
gpg2 --no-default-keyring --keyring $ NEWKEYRING  --list-keys $ targetfprs
Output: 
pub   rsa4096/0x664F1238AA8F138A 2015-07-14 [SC]
      Key fingerprint = 3575 0B8F B6EF 95FF 16B8  EBC0 664F 1238 AA8F 138A
uid                   [ unknown] Daniel Lange <dl.ml1@usrlocal.de>
sub   rsa4096/0x03BEE1C11DB1954B 2015-07-14 [E]
pub   rsa4096/0xDF23DA3396978EB3 2014-09-05 [SC]
      Key fingerprint = BBBC 58B4 5994 CF9C CC56  BCDA DF23 DA33 9697 8EB3
uid                   [  undef ] Michael Meskes <michael@fam-meskes.de>
uid                   [  undef ] Michael Meskes <meskes@postgresql.org>
uid                   [  undef ] Michael Meskes <michael.meskes@credativ.com>
uid                   [  undef ] Michael Meskes <meskes@debian.org>
sub   rsa4096/0x85C3AFFECF0BF9B5 2014-09-05 [E]
sub   rsa4096/0x35D857C0BBCB3B25 2014-11-04 [S]
pub   rsa4096/0x1E953E27D4311E58 2009-07-12 [SC]
      Key fingerprint = C2FE 4BD2 71C1 39B8 6C53  3E46 1E95 3E27 D431 1E58
uid                   [  undef ] Chris Lamb <chris@chris-lamb.co.uk>
uid                   [  undef ] Chris Lamb <lamby@gnu.org>
uid                   [  undef ] Chris Lamb <lamby@debian.org>
sub   rsa4096/0x72B3DBA98575B3F2 2009-07-12 [E]
pub   rsa4096/0xDF6D76C44D696F6B 2014-08-15 [SC] [expires: 2017-06-03]
      Key fingerprint = 1A6F 3E63 9A44 67E8 C347  6525 DF6D 76C4 4D69 6F6B
uid                   [ unknown] Sven Bartscher <sven.bartscher@weltraumschlangen.de>
uid                   [ unknown] Sven Bartscher <svenbartscher@yahoo.de>
uid                   [ unknown] Sven Bartscher <kritzefitz@debian.org>
sub   rsa4096/0x9E83B071ED764C3A 2014-08-15 [E]
sub   rsa4096/0xAEB25323217028C2 2016-06-14 [S]
pub   rsa4096/0x83E33BD7D4DD4CA1 2015-11-12 [SC] [expires: 2017-11-11]
      Key fingerprint = 0B5A 33B8 A26D 6010 9C50  9C6C 83E3 3BD7 D4DD 4CA1
uid                   [ unknown] Jerome Charaoui <jerome@riseup.net>
sub   rsa4096/0x6614611FBD6366E7 2015-11-12 [E]
sub   rsa4096/0xDB17405204ECB364 2015-11-12 [A] [expires: 2017-11-11]
pub   rsa4096/0xF823A2729883C97C 2014-08-26 [SC]
      Key fingerprint = 8ED6 C3F8 BAC9 DB7F C130  A870 F823 A272 9883 C97C
uid                   [ unknown] Lucas Kanashiro <kanashiro@debian.org>
uid                   [ unknown] Lucas Kanashiro <kanashiro.duarte@gmail.com>
sub   rsa4096/0xEE6E5D1A9C2F5EA6 2014-08-26 [E]
pub   rsa4096/0x2EC0FFB3B7301B1F 2014-08-29 [SC] [expires: 2017-04-06]
      Key fingerprint = 76A2 8E42 C981 1D91 E88F  BA5E 2EC0 FFB3 B730 1B1F
uid                   [ unknown] Niko Tyni <ntyni@debian.org>
uid                   [ unknown] Niko Tyni <ntyni@cc.helsinki.fi>
uid                   [ unknown] Niko Tyni <ntyni@iki.fi>
sub   rsa4096/0x129086C411868FD0 2014-08-29 [E] [expires: 2017-04-06]
pub   rsa4096/0xAA761F51CC10C92A 2016-06-20 [SC] [expires: 2018-06-20]
      Key fingerprint = C9DE 2EA8 93EE 4C86 BE73  973A AA76 1F51 CC10 C92A
uid                   [ unknown] Roger Shimizu <rogershimizu@gmail.com>
sub   rsa4096/0x2C2EE1D5DBE7B292 2016-06-20 [E] [expires: 2018-06-20]
sub   rsa4096/0x05C7FD79DD03C4BB 2016-06-20 [S] [expires: 2016-09-18]
Note that this completely neglects potential victims who are unconnected within the KSP set.

Niels Thykier: Anti-declarative packaging top 15 build-helpers inserting maintscripts

Debian packages can run arbitrary code via maintainer scripts (sometimes shortened into maintscripts ) during installation/removal etc. While they certainly have their use cases, their failure modes causes exciting bugs like fails to install or the dreaded fails to remove . They also have other undesirable effects such as: Accordingly, I think we should aim for a more declarative packaging style. To help facilitate this, I have implemented 3 tracking tags in Lintian. With these, we were able to learn that 73.5% of all packages do not have any of these scripts. But I can now also produce a list of helpers that insert the most maintainer script snippets. The current top 15 is:
  1. dhpython with 3775 instances
    • This is an umbrella for all helpers using dh-python s python module, see #827774.
  2. dh_installmenu with 1861 instances
  3. dh_makeshlibs with 1396 remaining instances
  4. dh_installinit with 1224 instances
  5. dh_python2 with 1168 instances
  6. dh_installdebconf with 772 instances
  7. dh_installdeb with 754 instances
    • These are the dpkg-maintscript-helper snippets for rm_conffile , mv_conffile etc. Hopefully in the near future, dpkg will support these directly.
  8. dh_systemd_enable with 447 instances
  9. dh_installemacsen with 179 instances
  10. dh_icons with 165 instances
  11. dh_installtex with 137 instances
  12. dh_apache2 with 117 instances
  13. dh_installudev with 98 instances
  14. dh_installxfonts with 87 instances
  15. dh_systemd_start with 79 instances
With this list, it seems to me that some obvious focus areas would be: Eventually we will also have to dig through all the manual maintainer scripts. But I think we got plenty to start with.:) [1] For some, circular dependencies in itself is an issue. I can certainly appreciate them as being suboptimal, but most of the issues we have are probably caused by insufficient tooling rather than a theoretical issue (that is, if we remove all postinst scripts).
Filed under: Debhelper, Debian, Lintian

25 June 2016

Paul Wise: DebCamp16 day 2

Review wiki RecentChanges since my bookmark. Usual spam reporting. Mention microG on #debian-mobile. Answer pkg-config question on #debian-mentors. Suggest using UUIDs in response to a debian-arm query. Reported Debian bug #828103 against needrestart. A giant yellow SOS crane between the balcony hacklab and a truly misty city. Locate the 2014 Debian & stuff podcast on archive.org. Poke the SPARC porters in response to a suggestion on debian-www. Mention systemctl daemon-reload wrt buildd service changes. Automate updating some extension lists from check-all-the-things. Reported wishlist Debian bug #828128 against debsources. Engage lizard mode! Wish for better display technology. Nice vegetarian food with nice folks and interesting discussions with interesting locals. Polish and release check-all-the-things. Close bugs I forgot to close in the changelog. Add link to debian-boot on Debootstrap wiki page. Notice first mockup of a theme for Debian stretch. Answer a question about package naming on #debian-mentors. Discuss the future of cross compilation on Debian. Notice a talk about FOSSology & update a wiki page. Mention AsteroidOS and MaruOS on the mobile wiki page. Contemplate how close to the FSDG Debian might be and approaches to improving that.

Dimitri John Ledkov: Post-Brexit - The What Now?

Out of 46,500,001 electorate 17,410,742 voted to leave, which is a mere 37.4% or just over a third. [source]. On my books this is not a clear expression of the UK wishes.

The reaction that the results have caused are devastating. The Scottish First Minister has announced plans for 2nd Scottish Independence referendum [source]. Londoners are filing petitions calling for Independent London [source, source]. The Prime Minister announced his resignation [source]. Things are not stable.

I do not believe that super majority of the electorate are in favor of leaving the EU. I don't even believe that those who voted to leave have considered the break up of the UK as the inevitable outcome of the leave vote. There are numerous videos on the internet about that, impossible to quantify or reliably cite, but for example this [source]

So What Now?

P R O T E S T

I urge everyone to start protesting the outcome of the mistake that happened last Thursday. 4th of July is a good symbolic date to show your discontent with the UK governemnt and a tiny minority who are about to cause the country to fall apart with no other benefits. Please stand up and make yourself heard.
  • General Strikes 4th & 5th of July
There are 64,100,000 people living in the UK according to the World Bank, maybe the government should fear and listen to the unheard third. The current "majority" parliament was only elected by 24% of electorate.

It is time for people to actually take control, we can fix our parliament, we can stop austerity, we can prevent the break up of the UK, and we can stay in the EU. Over to you.

ps. How to elect next PM?

Electing next PM will be done within the Conservative Party, and that's kind of a bummer, given that the desperate state the country currently is in. It is not that hard to predict that Boris Johnson is a front-runner. If you wish to elect a different PM, I urge you to splash out 25 quid and register to be a member of the Conservative Party just for one year =) this way you will get a chance to directly elect the new Leader of the Conservative Party and thus the new Prime Minister. You can backdoor the Conservative election here.

24 June 2016

Joey Hess: twenty years of free software -- part 5 pristine-tar

I've written retrospectively about pristine-tar before, when I stopped maintaining it. So, I'll quote part of that here: 
[...] a little bit about the reason I wrote pristine-tar in the
first place. There were two reasons:
1. I was once in a talk where someone mentioned that Ubuntu had/was
   developing something that involved regenerating orig tarballs
   from version control.
   I asked the obvious question: How could that possibly be done
   technically? 
   The (slightly hung over) presenter did not have a satesfactory
   response, so my curiosity was piqued to find a way to do it.
   (I later heard that Ubuntu has been using pristine-tar..)
2. Sometimes code can be subversive. It can change people's perspective
   on a topic, nudging discourse in a different direction. It can even
   point out absurdities in the way things are done. I may or may not
   have accomplished the subversive part of my goals with pristine-tar.
Code can also escape its original intention. Many current uses of
pristine-tar fall into that category. So it seems likely that some
people will want it to continue to work even if it's met the two goals
above already.
For me, the best part of building pristine-tar was finding an answer to the question "How could that possibly be done technically?" It was also pretty cool to be able to use every tarball in Debian as the test suite for pristine-tar. I'm afraid I kind of left Debian in the lurch when I stopped maintaining pristine-tar. "Debian has probably hundreds, if not thousands of git repositories using pristine-tar. We all rely now on an unmaintained, orphaned, and buggy piece of software." -- Norbert Preining So I was relieved when it finally got a new maintainer just recently. Still, I don't expect I'll ever use pristine-tar again. It's the only software I've built in the past ten years that I can say that about. Next: twenty years of free software -- part 6 moreutils

Norbert Preining: Debian/TeX Live 2016.20160623-1

About one month has passed since we did release TeX Live 2016, and more than a month since the last Debian packages, so it is high time to ship out a new checkout of upstream. Nothing spectacular new here, just lots and lots of updates since the freeze. texlive2016-debian I am dedicating this release to those intelligent beings who voted against the stupid Brexit and for remaining in the EC! I am still optimist! New packages aucklandthesis, autobreak, cquthesis, getargs, hustthesis, ietfbibs, linop, markdown, olsak-misc, optidef, sanitize-umlaut, umbclegislation, wordcount, xcntperchap. Updated packages academicons, achemso, acmart, acro, animate, apa6, arabluatex, archaeologie, babel-hungarian, beamertheme-epyt, beebe, biblatex-abnt, biblatex-anonymous, biblatex-bookinother, biblatex-caspervector, biblatex-chicago, biblatex-manuscripts-philology, biblatex-morenames, biblatex-opcit-booktitle, biblatex-philosophy, biblatex-realauthor, biblatex-source-division, biblatex-subseries, bidi, bookcover, bxjscls, caption, chemformula, chemmacros, circuitikz, cloze, cochineal, context, csplain, cstex, datetime2, denisbdoc, dvipdfmx-def, epstopdf, erewhon, exsol, fbb, fibeamer, fithesis, fontawesome, fontspec, fonts-tlwg, geschichtsfrkl, getmap, glossaries, glossaries-extra, graphics, graphics-cfg, gregoriotex, gzt, he-she, hook-pre-commit-pkg, hyperref, ifluatex, keyvaltable, koma-script, l3build, latex, latex-bin, limap, lollipop, lshort-chinese, luaotfload, luatex85, luatex-def, luatexja, lua-visual-debug, marginnote, mcf2graph, media9, minted, mptopdf, msu-thesis, musixtex, navigator, nwejm, oberdiek, patchcmd, pdfcomment, pdftex-def, pdfx, pkuthss, platex, pstricks, ptex, ptex2pdf, ptex-base, ptex-ng, reledmac, repere, scheme-xml, sduthesis, showlabels, tableaux, tcolorbox, tex4ht, texinfo, texlive-scripts, tex-overview, textpos, tools, translations, tudscr, unicode-data, uplatex, uptex, xassoccnt, xcharter, xetex, xindy, yathesis, ycbook. Enjoy.

23 June 2016

Jaminy Prabaharan: GSoC-Journey till Mid term

Hi readers,

Here comes my journey till the mid-term (June 21st) as a blog to share my experience.

I have previously worked on some social related projects such as smart guidance for blind and sensor based wireless controller . I have been selected as a speaker for FOSSASIA-16 (Asia s premier technological event)to talk on the project smart guidance for blind .FOSSASIA speakers. It was a great experience participating in the technological event in Singapore science centre.Got an opportunity to meet open source contributors from all over the world(even though it is an Asian event, participation was all over from the world). There were pre-meetups for FOSSASIA on the day before three-day event.I have attended the one organised by RedHat, Singapore.Discussed on many topics related to open source.

Three days of FOSSASIA event was a great experience.It was the second time as a speaker in an international conference.My talk was on the second day.Sharing is the best way to increase your knowledge. Talks and workshops were brainstorming.Learnt many new things and got the courage to contribute to the open source.Met Daniel Pocock in Debian exhibition table.Meeting awesome people can be the turning point of life.Had a discussion about the Debian projects and it motivated me for open source software.We have discussed about the Real Time Communication and was encouraged to apply for GSoC (Google Summer of Code). As per our discussion, prepared the project proposal on improving voice,video and chat communication with free software and submitted it for GSoC. I have been selected to contribute for Debian with stipend from Google.

This was my first application for GSoC and I have been selected to contribute for open source and free software. I would like to thank Google and Debian for giving this amazing experience.

Learning and coding have begun.Updated my laptop with Jessie, latest version of Debian.Get acquainted with the new platform.Got to learn many things about Real Time Communication.Learnt more about SIP, XMPP, peer-to-peer technology to work on my project.It s always better to be clear with theory before coding.When it comes to voice and video over IP, most people nowadays are quick to use Skype, Whatsapp, or Viber. My main goals of the project are helping people to avoid using proprietary communications tools like Skype, Viber and WhatsApp and simplifying the setup of free alternatives like Jitsi, Linphone, Ekiga, Tox (qtox), Mumble.Downloaded some of the already available open source VoIP to find the problems behind it and improve it further.Bootstrapping any business relevant network based on these free alternatives is still hard.

Would you like to list the senders, receivers and date of the messages in the inbox of your mail.Python has a library file IMAP which can be used to connect to an email account, examine every message in every folder and look at the To , From and CC headers of every email message in the folder.

Do you have phone numbers and other contact details in old emails? Would you like a quick way to data-mine your inbox to find them and help migrate them to your address book? Got the help from phonenumbers library for parsing, formatting, and validating international phone numbers.I would like to share how I imported this library file into my coding.Download the given library file and open the file in the terminal.Type

$ python setup.py install

to install the library file.Now you can call the functions by importing phonenumbers.

You can go through the code in my GitHub profile here.(Recently started committing my projects in GitHub)

Iain R. Learmonth joined my journey as a mentor.Helped in solving some issues in my coding through GitHub.

It was a wonderful journey till now.Will be working further to improve voice, video and chat communication with free software.Stay connected to know more about my further journey through GSoC.

download

Jonathan McDowell: Fixing missing text in Firefox

Every now and again I get this problem where Firefox won t render text correctly (on a Debian/stretch system). Most websites are fine, but the odd site just shows up with blanks where the text should be. Initially I thought it was NoScript, but turning that off didn t help. Daniel Silverstone gave me a pointer today that the pages in question were using webfonts, and that provided enough information to dig deeper. The sites in question were using Cantarell, via: 
src: local('Cantarell Regular'), local('Cantarell-Regular'), url(cantarell.woff2) format('woff2'), url(cantarell.woff) format('woff');
The Firefox web dev inspector didn t show it trying to fetch the font remotely, so I removed the local() elements from the CSS. That fixed the page, letting me pinpoint the problem as a local font issue. I have fonts-cantarell installed so at first I tried to remove it, but that breaks gnome-core. So instead I did an fc-list grep -i cant to ask fontconfig what it thought was happening. That gave: 
/usr/share/fonts/opentype/cantarell/Cantarell-Regular.otf.dpkg-tmp: Cantarell:style=Regular
/usr/share/fonts/opentype/cantarell/Cantarell-Bold.otf.dpkg-tmp: Cantarell:style=Bold
/usr/share/fonts/opentype/cantarell/Cantarell-Bold.otf: Cantarell:style=Bold
/usr/share/fonts/opentype/cantarell/Cantarell-Oblique.otf: Cantarell:style=Oblique
/usr/share/fonts/opentype/cantarell/Cantarell-Regular.otf: Cantarell:style=Regular
/usr/share/fonts/opentype/cantarell/Cantarell-Bold-Oblique.otf: Cantarell:style=Bold-Oblique
/usr/share/fonts/opentype/cantarell/Cantarell-Oblique.otf.dpkg-tmp: Cantarell:style=Oblique
/usr/share/fonts/opentype/cantarell/Cantarell-BoldOblique.otf: Cantarell:style=BoldOblique
Hmmm. Those .dpkg-tmp files looked odd, and sure enough they didn t actually exist. So I did a sudo fc-cache -f -v to force a rebuild of the font cache and restarted Firefox (it didn t seem to work before doing so) and everything works fine now. It seems that fc-cache must have been run at some point when dpkg had not yet completed installing an update to the fonts-cantarell package. That seems like a bug - fontconfig should probably ignore .dpkg* files, but equally I wouldn t expect it to be run before dpkg had finished its unpacking stage fully.

Joey Hess: twenty years of free software -- part 4 ikiwiki-hosting

ikiwiki-hosting is a spin-off from ikiwiki. I wrote it to manage many ikiwiki instances for Branchable, and made it free software out of principle. While Branchable has not reached the point of providing much income, it's still running after 6 years. Ikiwiki-hosting makes it pretty easy to maintain it, and I host all of my websites there. A couple of other people have also found ikiwiki-hosting useful, which is not only nice, but led to some big improvements to it. Mostly though, releasing the software behind the business as free software caused us to avoid shortcuts and build things well. Next: twenty years of free software -- part 5 pristine-tar

22 June 2016

Scarlett Clark: KDE: Debian: *ubuntu snappy: Reproducible builds, Randa! and much more

#Randa2016 KDE Sprint

#Randa2016 KDE Sprint

Debian: I am very late on post due to travel, Flu, jetlag sorry! choqok:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=825322
For this I was able to come up with a patch for kconfig_compiler to encode generated files to utf-8.
Review request is here:
https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/128102/
This has been approved and I will be pushing it as soon as I patch the qt5 frameworks version.
Both kde4libs and kf5 kconfig has been pushed upstream kde. kxmlgui:
WIP this has been a steep learning curve, according to the notes it was an easy embedded kernel version, that was not the case! After grueling hours of
trying to sort out randomness in debug output I finally narrowed it down to cases where QStringLiteral was used and there were non letter characters eg. ( <") These were causing debug symbols to generate with ( lambda() ) which caused unreproducible symbol/debug files. It is now a case of fixing all of these in the code to use QString::fromUtf8 seems to fix this. I am working on a mega patch for upstream and it should be ready early in the week. This last week I spent a large portion making my through a mega patch for kxmlgui, when it was suggested to me to write a small qt app to test QStringLiteral isolated and sure enough two build were byte for byte identical. So this means that QStringLiteral may not be the issue at all. With some more assistance I am to expand my test app with several QStringLiterals of varying lengths, we have suspicion it is a padding issue, which complicates things.
I am still fighting with this one, will set aside to simmer for now, as I have no idea how to fix padding issues. extra-cmake-modules:
I am testing a patch to fix umask issues for anyone that uses the kapptemplate generation macro. Thank you Simon for pointing me to this.
known affected:
plasma-framework kdevplatform:
The kapptemplate generation users/groups and umask patch has been pushed upstream.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=363615 KDE Randa!:
Despite managing to get a terrible Flu I accomplished more than I would have at home without awesome devs to help me out! CI TODO: Randa as usual was an amazing experience. Yes it is very hard work, but you have the beauty of the Swiss Alps at your fingertips! Not to mention all the
friendly faces and collaboration. A big thank you to all supporters and the Randa team! Please help make KDE better by supporting the very important Randa Sprint:
https://www.kde.org/fundraisers/randameetings2016/ Have a great day.

Satyam Zode: GSoC 2016 Week 4 and 5: Reproducible Builds in Debian

This is a brief report on my last week work with Debian Reproducible Builds. In week 4, I mostly worked on designing an interfaces and tackling different issues related to argument completion feature of diffoscope and in week 5 I worked on adding hiding .buildinfo from .changes files. Update for last week s activities Goal for upcoming week: I am thankful to Shirish Agarwal for helping me through visa process. But, unfortunately I won t get visa till 5th July. So I don t think, I would make it to debconf this year. I will certainly attend Debconf 2017. Good news for me is I have passed mid-term evaluations of Google Summer of Code 2016. I will continue my work to improve Debian. Even, I have post GSoC plans ready for Debian project ;) Have a nice day :)

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