This doesn t appear to cover the other kind of comment-moderation problem: that where overmoderation and attachment to poster identity leads to an environment of stifling conventionalism. Photography communities in particular (e.g. flickr, instagram, 500px) are vulnerable to turning into circlejerks where no-one is willing to say what they mean for fear of appearing the negative nancy (no pun intended) and where high post-count contributors poorly-supported opinions become elevated above said views merits. In such communities the typical discussion is at the level of tepid platitude: good exposure! , nice depth of field! , or cool HDR! . On the other end of the scale there s the imageboard style of community where anonymity is the norm, feedback is uncompromisingly harsh, and uselessly opaque criticism appears such on its face; unsuited to the overly sensitive but hideously valuable to the advancing novice. Ordinary web forums, with tools oriented towards a punitive he said the n-word! delete his account and everything he s posted! persona non grata, in damnatio memoriae! school of moderation, strongly tend to the former.

ksandstr on LWN

Some weeks ago I ve implemented the option to send a text message from telepathy-resiprocate Empathy. At that time I just implemented it at apps/telepathy/TextChannel class which wasn t the ideal. Now, with a better understand of the resip/recon and resip/dum APIs, I was able to move this implementation there. Besides that I also have implemented the option to receive a text message. For that I have done some changes at resip/recon/ConversationManager and resip/recon/UserAgent classes, along some other. The complete changes could be seen at [1]. This branch also holds modifications related to send/receive presence. This is necessary since to send a message to a contact he/she should be online. There is still work to be done specially checking the possible error cases but at least we could see a first prototype working. Follow some images:

Account logged in with Jitsi

Account logged in with Empathy using telepathy-resiprocate

[1] https://github.com/resiprocate/resiprocate/compare/master MateusBellomo:mateus-presence-text

First week after DebCamp and DebConf! Both were incredible the debian project and it s contributors never fail to impress and delight me. None the less it felt great to have a few quiet, peaceful days of uninterrupted programming. Notes about last week: 1. Finished Mattia s final suggestions for the conversion of the package set pages script to python. Hopefully it will be deployed soon, awaiting final approval 2. Replace the bash code that produced the left navigation on the home page (and most other pages) with the mustache template the python scripts use. Previously, html was constructed and spat out from both a python and shell script now we have a single, DRY mustache template. (At the top of the bash function that produced the navigation html, you will find the comment: this is really quite incomprehensible and should be killed, the solution is to write all html pages with python . Turns out the intermediate solution is to use templates ) 3. Thought hard about navigation of the test website, and redesigned (by rearranging) links in the left hand navigation. After code review, you will see these changes as well! Things to look forward to include:
A link to the Debian dashboard on the top left of every page (except the package specific pages).
The title of each page (except the package pages) stretches across the whole page (instead of being squashed into the top left).
Hover text has been added to most links in the left navigation.
Links in left navigation have been reordered, and headers added. Once you see the changes, please let me know if you think anything is unintuitive or confusion, everything can be easily changed! 4. Cross suite and architecture navigation enabled for most pages. For most pages, you will be one click away from seeing the same statistics for a different suite or architecture! Whoo! Notes about next week: Last week I got carried away imagining minor improvements that can be made to the test websites UI, and I now have a backlog of ideas I d like to implement. I ve begun editing the script that makes most of the pages with statistics or package list (for example, all packages with notes, or all recently tested packages) to use templates and contain a bit more descriptive text. I d also like to do a some revamping of the package set pages I converted. These addition UI changes will be my first tasks for the coming week since they are fresh on my mind and I m quite excited about them. The following week I d like to get back to extensibility and database issues mentioned previously!

Japanese authors have a tendency to commit suicide, it seems. I have read Ryunosuke Akutagawa ( , at 35), Yukio Mishima ( , at 45), and also Osamu Dazai ( , at 39). Their end often reflects in their writings, and one of these examples is the book I just finished, No Longer Human. Considered as Dazai s master piece, and with Soseki s Kokoro the best selling novels in Japan. The book recounts the life of Oba Yozo, from childhood to the end in a mental hospital. The early years, described in the first chapter ( Memorandum ), are filled with the feeling of differentness, alienation from the rest, and Oba starts his way of living by playing the clown, permanently making jokes. The Second Memorandom spans the time to university, where he drops out, tries to become a painter, indulges in alcohol, smoking and prostitutes, leading to a suicide attempt together with a married woman, but he survived. The first part of the Third Memorandom sees a short recovering due to his relationship with a woman. He stops drinking and works as cartoonist, but in the last part his drinking pal from university times shows up again and they return into an ever increasing vicious drinking. Eventually he is separated from his wife, and confined to a mental hospital. Very depressing to read, but written in a way that one cannot stop reading. The disturbing thing about this book is that, although the main actor conceives many bad actions, we feel somehow attached to him and feel pity for him. It is somehow a exercise how circumstances and small predispositions can make a huge change in our lives. And it warns us that each one of us can easily come to this brink.

Now it s also implemented the functionality that allows a user to see his contacts presence. At first week I ve implemented only the Telepathy part of this methods and back then I didn t comprehend that this information would come in the form of a NOTIFY SIP message. I also needed to use the SUBSCRIPTION mechanism properly so the presence server could send me the NOTIFY message. To be able to create those messages was necessary a better understanding of resip/stack, resip/recon and resip/dum API s. Not that I master this libraries now, but at least I m not totally lost anymore =) Looking into this libraries I could see how much work was done by all of resiprocate contributors (and I imagine I don t even saw the tip of the iceberg). There is so many features ready for use that now I think twice before start implementing something. Since I didn t find any reference explicitly showing the contact s status in RFC3863 [1], I got this information by changing a contact presence (in a different machine logged in Jitsi [2]) and looking into the NOTIFY message received at resiprocate. Follow some images about contact s presence at Empathy:

Online status

Offline status

Busy DND status

Away status

In a meeting status

Unknow status

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3863 [2] https://jitsi.org/

With more than 10 million users, the Scratch online community is the largest online community where kids learn to program. Since it was created, a central goal of the community has been to promote remixing the reworking and recombination of existing creative artifacts. As the video above shows, remixing programming projects in the current web-based version of Scratch is as easy is as clicking on the see inside button in a project web-page, and then clicking on the remix button in the web-based code editor. Today, close to 30% of projects on Scratch are remixes. Remixing plays such a central role in Scratch because its designers believed that remixing can play an important role in learning. After all, Scratch was designed first and foremost as a learning community with its roots in the Constructionist framework developed at MIT by Seymour Papert and his colleagues. The design of the Scratch online community was inspired by Papert s vision of a learning community similar to Brazilian Samba schools (Henry Jenkins writes about his experience of Samba schools in the context of Papert s vision here), and a comment Marvin Minsky made in 1984:

Adults worry a lot these days. Especially, they worry about how to make other people learn more about computers. They want to make us all computer-literate. Literacy means both reading and writing, but most books and courses about computers only tell you about writing programs. Worse, they only tell about commands and instructions and programming-language grammar rules. They hardly ever give examples. But real languages are more than words and grammar rules. There s also literature what people use the language for. No one ever learns a language from being told its grammar rules. We always start with stories about things that interest us.

In a new paper titled Remixing as a pathway to Computational Thinking that was recently published at the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) conference, we used a series of quantitative measures of online behavior to try to uncover evidence that might support the theory that remixing in Scratch is positively associated with learning. Of course, because Scratch is an informal environment with no set path for users, no lesson plan, and no quizzes, measuring learning is an open problem. In our study, we built on two different approaches to measure learning in Scratch. The first approach considers the number of distinct types of programming blocks available in Scratch that a user has used over her lifetime in Scratch (there are 120 in total) something that can be thought of as a block repertoire or vocabulary. This measure has been used to model informal learning in Scratch in an earlier study. Using this approach, we hypothesized that users who remix more will have a faster rate of growth for their code vocabulary. Controlling for a number of factors (e.g. age of user, the general level of activity) we found evidence of a small, but positive relationship between the number of remixes a user has shared and her block vocabulary as measured by the unique blocks she used in her non-remix projects. Intriguingly, we also found a strong association between the number of downloads by a user and her vocabulary growth. One interpretation is that this learning might also be associated with less active forms of appropriation, like the process of reading source code described by Minksy. The second approach we used considered specific concepts in programming, such as loops, or event-handling. To measure this, we utilized a mapping of Scratch blocks to key programming concepts found in this paper by Karen Brennan and Mitchel Resnick. For example, in the image below are all the Scratch blocks mapped to the concept of loop . We looked at six concepts in total (conditionals, data, events, loops, operators, and parallelism). In each case, we hypothesized that if someone has had never used a given concept before, they would be more likely to use that concept after encountering it while remixing an existing project. Using this second approach, we found that users who had never used a concept were more likely to do so if they had been exposed to the concept through remixing. Although some concepts were more widely used than others, we found a positive relationship between concept use and exposure through remixing for each of the six concepts. We found that this relationship was true even if we ignored obvious examples of cutting and pasting of blocks of code. In all of these models, we found what we believe is evidence of learning through remixing. Of course, there are many limitations in this work. What we found are all positive correlations we do not know if these relationships are causal. Moreover, our measures do not really tell us whether someone has understood the usage of a given block or programming concept.However, even with these limitations, we are excited by the results of our work, and we plan to build on what we have. Our next steps include developing and utilizing better measures of learning, as well as looking at other methods of appropriation like viewing the source code of a project.

This blog post and the paper it describes are collaborative work with Sayamindu Dasgupta, Andr s Monroy-Hern ndez, and William Hale. The paper is released as open access so anyone can read the entire paper here. This blog post was also posted on Sayamindu Dasgupta s blog and on Medium by the MIT Media Lab.

For a while now, I have wanted to test the Signal app, as it is said to provide end to end encrypted communication and several of my friends and family are already using it. As I by choice do not own a mobile phone, this proved to be harder than expected. And I wanted to have the source of the client and know that it was the code used on my machine. But yesterday I managed to get it working. I used the Github source, compared it to the source in the Signal Chrome app available from the Chrome web store, applied patches to use the production Signal servers, started the app and asked for the hidden "register without a smart phone" form. Here is the recipe how I did it. First, I fetched the Signal desktop source from Github, using

git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git

Next, I patched the source to use the production servers, to be able to talk to other Signal users:

cat <<EOF   patch -p0
diff -ur ./js/background.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js
--- ./js/background.js  2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
+++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js    2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
@@ -47,8 +47,8 @@
          );
      );
 
-    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org';
-    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com';
+    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org:4433';
+    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com';
     var messageReceiver;
     window.getSocketStatus = function()  
         if (messageReceiver)  
diff -ur ./js/expire.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js
--- ./js/expire.js      2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
+++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 ;(function()  
     'use strict';
-    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 0;
+    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 1474492690000;
 
     window.extension = window.extension    ;
 
EOF

The first part is changing the servers, and the second is updating an expiration timestamp. This timestamp need to be updated regularly. It is set 90 days in the future by the build process (Gruntfile.js). The value is seconds since 1970 times 1000, as far as I can tell. Based on a tip and good help from the #nuug IRC channel, I wrote a script to launch Signal in Chromium.

#!/bin/sh
cd $(dirname $0)
mkdir -p userdata
exec chromium \
  --proxy-server="socks://localhost:9050" \
  --user-data-dir= pwd /userdata --load-and-launch-app= pwd 

The script start the app and configure Chromium to use the Tor SOCKS5 proxy to make sure those controlling the Signal servers (today Amazon and Whisper Systems) as well as those listening on the lines will have a harder time location my laptop based on the Signal connections if they use source IP address. When the script starts, one need to follow the instructions under "Standalone Registration" in the CONTRIBUTING.md file in the git repository. I right clicked on the Signal window to get up the Chromium debugging tool, visited the 'Console' tab and wrote 'extension.install("standalone")' on the console prompt to get the registration form. Then I entered by land line phone number and pressed 'Call'. 5 seconds later the phone rang and a robot voice repeated the verification code three times. After entering the number into the verification code field in the form, I could start using Signal from my laptop. As far as I can tell, The Signal app will leak who is talking to whom and thus who know who to those controlling the central server, but such leakage is hard to avoid with a centrally controlled server setup. It is something to keep in mind when using Signal - the content of your chats are harder to intercept, but the meta data exposing your contact network is available to people you do not know. So better than many options, but not great. And sadly the usage is connected to my land line, thus allowing those controlling the server to associate it to my home and person. I would prefer it if only those I knew could tell who I was on Signal. There are options avoiding such information leakage, but most of my friends are not using them, so I am stuck with Signal for now.

What an amazingly quick week that was Our bid to host DebConf in Cape Town was accepted nearly 15 months ago. And before that, the bid itself was a big collective effort from our team. So it s almost surreal that the first half of the two weeks of DebCamp/DebConf is now over. Things have been going really well. The few problems we ve had so far were too small to even mention. It s a few degrees colder than it usually is this time of the year and there s already snow on the mountains, so Cape Town is currently quite chilly. All Kinds of Quality Time I really enjoyed working with the video team last year, but this year there was just 0 time for that. Working on the orga team means dealing with a constant torrent of small tasks, which is good in its own way because you get to deal with a wide variety of Debian people you might not usually get to interact with, but video team problems are more fun and interesting. Next year I hope to do a lot more video work again. If you re at DebConf over the next week, I can highly recommend that you get involved! The first time I met Debian folk was early in 2004. I worked at the Shuttleworth Foundation as Open Source Technical Co-ordinator at the time, and Mark Shuttleworth had them over for one of the early Ubuntu sprints in Canonical s early days. I was so intimidated by them back then that I could hardly even manage to speak to them. I was already a big free software fan before working there, but little did I even dream to think that I would one day be involved in a project like Ubuntu or Debian. My manager back then encouraged me to go talk to them and get involved and become a Debian Developer and joked that I should become highvoltage@debian.org. I guess that was when the initial seeds got planted and since then I ve met many great people all over the world who have even became friends during UDS, DebConf, BTS and other hackfests where Debianites hang out. It gave me a really nice warm feeling to have all these amazing, talented and really friendly people from all over coming together in this little corner of the world to work together on projects that I think are really important. Oh the Chicken Back at DebConf12, someone (I don t remember the exact history) brought a rubber chicken to DebConf who was simply called Pollito ( chicken in Spanish). Since then the chicken has grown into somewhat of a mascot for DebConf. Back in 2012 I already imagined that if we would ever host a DebConf, I d make a little of picture book story about Pollito. Last year after DC15, when bringing Pollito over, I created a little story called Pollito s first trip to Africa . I was recovering from flu while putting that together and didn t spend much time on it, but it turned out to be somewhat of a hit. I was surprised to see it in the #debconf topic ever since I posted it :) We gave a tour of the campus on the first and second days and it was quite time consuming and there was no way we could do it every day for the rest of DebCamp, so on the 2nd day I smacked together a new rush job called Pollito s Guide to DC16 . The idea was that newcommers could use it as a visual guide and rely on others who have been there for a while if they get stuck. I wish I had the time to make it a lot nicer, but I think the general idea is good and next year we can have a much nicer one that might not be quite as Pollito focused. Debian Maintainer After all these years, I finally sat down and applied to become a Debian Maintainer, and the application was successful (approved yesterday \o/). Now just for the wait until my key is uploaded to the keyring. I haven t yet had time to properly process this but I think once the DebConf dust settles and I had some time to recover, I will be ecstatic. Some actual DebCampy work Everywhere I go, I see people installing a bunch of GNOME extensions on their Debian GNOME desktops shortly after installation using http://extensions.gnome.org/ (I noticed this even at DebCamp!). A few months ago I thought that it s really about time someone package up some of the really popular ones. So I started to put together some basic packaging for AIMS Desktop around a month ago. During the last few days of DebCamp, things were going well enough with the organisational tasks that I had some time to do some actual packaging work and improve these so that they re ready for upload to the Debian archives. The little DebCamp time I had ended up being my very own little extension fest :) I worked on the following packages which are ready for upload:

• gnome-shell-extension-pixelsaver
• gnome-shell-extension-move-clock
• gnome-shell-extension-dashtodock
• gnome-shell-extension-remove-dropdown-arrows

I worked on the following packages which still need minor work, might be able to get them in uploadable state by the end of DebConf:

• gnome-shell-extension-trash-applet
• gnome-shell-extension-topicons
• gnome-shell-extension-taskbar
• gnome-shell-extension-refresh-wifi
• gnome-shell-extension-disconnect-wifi
• gnome-shell-extension-hide-activities
• gnome-shell-extension-impatience

The actual packaging of GNOME extensions is actually pretty trivial. It s mostly source-only JavaScript with some CSS and translations and maybe some gsettings schemas and dialogs. Or at least, it would be pretty trivial, but many extensions are without licenses, contain embedded code (often JavaScript) from other projects, or have no usable form of upstream tarball, to name a few of the problems. So I ve been contacting the upstream authors of these packages where there have been problems, and for the most part they ve been friendly and pretty quick to address the problems. So that s it, for now. I couldn t possibly sum up the last week and everything that lead up to it in a single blog post. All I can really say is thank you for letting me be a part of this very special project!

Busy/idle status indicator




About one year ago, during my first http://debconf15.debconf.org/, I've felt the need for some way to tell people whether I was busy on my laptop doing stuff that required concentration or just passing some time between talks etc. and available for interruptions, socialization or context switches.

One easily available method of course would have been to ping me on IRC (and then probably go on chatting on it while being in the same room, of course :) ), but I wanted to try something that allowed for less planning and worked even in places with less connectivity.

My first idea was a base laptop sticker with two statuses and then a removable one used to cover the wrong status and point to the correct one, and I still think it would be nice, but having it printed is probably going to be somewhat expensive, so I shelved the project for the time being.



Lately, however, I've been playing with hexagonal stickers https://terinjokes.github.io/StickerConstructorSpec/ and decided to design something on this topic, whith the result in the figure above, with the hacking sticker being my first choice, and the concentrating alternative probably useful while surrounded by people who may misunderstand the term hacking .

While idly looking around for sticker printing prices I realized that it didn't necessarly have to be a sticker and started to consider alternatives.

One format I'm trying is inspired by "do not disturb" door signs: I've used some laminating pouches I already had around which are slightly bigger than credit-card format (but credit-card size would also work of course ) and cut a notch so that they can be attached to the open lid of a laptop.



They seem to fit well on my laptop lid, and apart from a bad tendency to attract every bit of lint in a radius of a few meters the form factor looks good. I'll try to use them at the next conference to see if they actually work for their intended purpose.

SVG sources (and a PDF) are available on my website http://www.trueelena.org/computers/projects/busy_idle_indicator.html under the CC-BY-SA license.

The past few days I've been working on my mail client which has resulted in a lot of improvements to drawing, display and correctness. Since then I've been working on adding GPG-support. My naive attempt was to extract the signature, and the appropriate body-part from the message. Write them both to disk then I could validate via:

gpg --verify msg.sig msg

However that failed, and it took me a long to work out why. I downloaded the source to mutt, which can correctly verify an attached-signature, then hacked lib.c to neuter the mutt_unlink function. That left me with a bunch of files inside $TEMPFILE one of which provided the epiphany. A message which is to be validated is indeed written out to disk, just as I would have done, as is the signature. Ignoring the signature the message is interesting:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
On Mon, 27 Jun 2016 08:08:14 +0200
...
--=20
Bob Smith

The reason I'd failed to validate my message-body was because I'd already decoded the text of the MIME-part, and I'd also lost the prefixed two lines "Content-type:.." and Content-Transfer:.... I'm currently trying to work out if it is possible to get access to the RAW MIME-part-text in GMIME. Anyway that learning aside I've made a sleazy hack which just shells out to mimegpg, and this allows me to validate GPG signatures! That's not the solution I'd prefer, but that said it does work, and it works with inline-signed messages as well as messages with application/pgp-signature MIME-parts. Changing the subject now. I wonder how many people read to the end anyway? I've been in Finland for almost a year now. Recently I was looking over websites and I saw that the domain steve.fi was going to expire in a few weeks. So I started obsessively watching it. Today I claimed it. So I'll be slowly moving things from beneath steve.org.uk to use the new home steve.fi. I also setup a mini-portfolio/reference site at http://steve.kemp.fi/ - which was a domain I registered while I was unsure if I could get steve.fi. Finally now is a good time to share more interesting news:

• I've been reinstated as a Debian developer.
• We're having a baby.
  • Interesting times.

The past few days I've been working on my mail client which has resulted in a lot of improvements to drawing, display and correctness. Since then I've been working on adding GPG-support. My naive attempt was to extract the signature, and the appropriate body-part from the message. Write them both to disk then I could validate via:

gpg --verify msg.sig msg

However that failed, and it took me a long to work out why. I downloaded the source to mutt, which can correctly verify an attached-signature, then hacked lib.c to neuter the mutt_unlink function. That left me with a bunch of files inside $TEMPFILE one of which provided the epiphany. A message which is to be validated is indeed written out to disk, just as I would have done, as is the signature. Ignoring the signature the message is interesting:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
On Mon, 27 Jun 2016 08:08:14 +0200
...
--=20
Bob Smith

The reason I'd failed to validate my message-body was because I'd already decoded the text of the MIME-part, and I'd also lost the prefixed two lines "Content-type:.." and Content-Transfer:.... I'm currently trying to work out if it is possible to get access to the RAW MIME-part-text in GMIME. Anyway that learning aside I've made a sleazy hack which just shells out to mimegpg, and this allows me to validate GPG signatures! That's not the solution I'd prefer, but that said it does work, and it works with inline-signed messages as well as messages with application/pgp-signature MIME-parts. Changing the subject now. I wonder how many people read to the end anyway? I've been in Finland for almost a year now. Recently I was looking over websites and I saw that the domain steve.fi was going to expire in a few weeks. So I started obsessively watching it. Today I claimed it. So I'll be slowly moving things from beneath steve.org.uk to use the new home steve.fi. I also setup a mini-portfolio/reference site at http://steve.kemp.fi/ - which was a domain I registered while I was unsure if I could get steve.fi. Finally now is a good time to share more interesting news:

• I've been reinstated as a Debian developer.
• We're having a baby.
  • Interesting times.

The past few days I've been working on my mail client which has resulted in a lot of improvements to drawing, display and correctness. Since then I've been working on adding GPG-support. My naive attempt was to extract the signature, and the appropriate body-part from the message. Write them both to disk then I could validate via:

gpg --verify msg.sig msg

However that failed, and it took me a long to work out why. I downloaded the source to mutt, which can correctly verify an attached-signature, then hacked lib.c to neuter the mutt_unlink function. That left me with a bunch of files inside $TEMPFILE one of which provided the epiphany. A message which is to be validated is indeed written out to disk, just as I would have done, as is the signature. Ignoring the signature the message is interesting:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
On Mon, 27 Jun 2016 08:08:14 +0200
...
--=20
Bob Smith

The reason I'd failed to validate my message-body was because I'd already decoded the text of the MIME-part, and I'd also lost the prefixed two lines "Content-type:.." and Content-Transfer:.... I'm currently trying to work out if it is possible to get access to the RAW MIME-part-text in GMIME. Anyway that learning aside I've made a sleazy hack which just shells out to mimegpg, and this allows me to validate GPG signatures! That's not the solution I'd prefer, but that said it does work, and it works with inline-signed messages as well as messages with application/pgp-signature MIME-parts. Changing the subject now. I wonder how many people read to the end anyway? I've been in Finland for almost a year now. Recently I was looking over websites and I saw that the domain steve.fi was going to expire in a few weeks. So I started obsessively watching it. Today I claimed it. So I'll be slowly moving things from beneath steve.org.uk to use the new home steve.fi. I also setup a mini-portfolio/reference site at http://steve.kemp.fi/ - which was a domain I registered while I was unsure if I could get steve.fi. Finally now is a good time to share more interesting news:

• I've been reinstated as a Debian developer.
• We're having a baby.
  • Interesting times.

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:

• Bugs in/Updates to auto-generated snippets require a rebuild of all packages (not to mention the obvious code-duplication in all packages).
• In case of circular dependencies[1] all having postinst scripts, dpkg will have to guess which package to configure first.
• They require forking a shell at least once for each maintscript.
• They complicate the implementations of e.g. detached chroot creation.

Accordingly, I think we should aim for a more declarative packaging style. To help facilitate this, I have implemented 3 tracking tags in Lintian.

• no-ctrl-scripts in 2.5.44
• ctrl-script in 2.5.44
• debhelper-autoscript-in-maintainer-scripts in 2.5.45

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
   • This will presumably drop as menu files should be replaced with desktop files.
3. dh_makeshlibs with 1396 remaining instances
   • This should be in rapid decline since we decided to replace its scripts with a dpkg trigger. Unfortunately, it can take quite a while until all of them have been rebuilt with a new version of debhelper
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:

• Replacing the python scripts (I presume it is the byte-code handling, but I have not looked at this at all)
• Migrating away from menu files
• Support enabling + starting/stopping/restarting a service declaratively.
  • This might have a hidden requirement on declaratively creating service users if we want these packages to become truly maintscript-less .

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

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between June 12th and June 18th 2016: Media coverage

• Sune Vuorela blogged about making Qt documentation reproducible while spending good times in the Alps.

GSoC and Outreachy updates Weekly reports by our participants:

• Scarlett Clark
• Satyam Zode

Toolchain fixes

• texlive-bin/2016.20160513.41080-3 has been uploaded to unstable, featuring support for FORCE_SOURCE_DATE. See the last post for details on it.
• doxygen/1.4.4-1 has been uploaded to unstable, fixing #822197 (upstream bug), which caused some generated html file to contain unreproducible memory addresses of Python objects used at build time.
• debhelper/9.20160618 has been uploaded to unstable, fixing #824490, which instructs ant to not save the username of the build user in the generated files. Original patch by Emmanuel Bourg.
• HW42 reported a long-known (although only internally) bug in our dpkg-buildinfo. this particular bug doesn't affect our current infrastructure, but it's a blocker for having .buildinfo support merged upstream.
• epydoc/3.0.1+dfsg-13 and 3.0.1+dfsg-14 have been uploaded by Kenneth J. Pronovici which fixes nondeterministic ordering issues in generated documentation and removes memory addresses. Original patches (#825968 and #827416) by Sascha Steinbiss.

With this upload of texlive-bin we decided to stop keeping our patched fork of as most of the patches for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH support had been integrated upstream already, and the last one (making FORCE_SOURCE_DATE default to 1) had been refused. So, we are now going to let the archive be rebuilt against unstable's texlive-bin and see how many packages will become unreproducible with this change; once enough data will be collected we will ponder whether FORCE_SOURCE_DATE should be exported by helper tools (such as debhelper) or manually exported by every package that needs it. (For those wondering: we still recommend to follow SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH always and don't recommend other projects to implement FORCE_SOURCE_DATE ) With the drop of texlive-bin we now have only three modified packages in our experimental repository. Reproducible work in other projects

• Ed Maste sent a patch to have ELF Tool Chain's elfcopy support SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH.
• Ed Maste changed FreeBSD's ar(1) to have a reproducible output by default when invoked with -s.
• Ed Maste merged changes from NetBSD's makefs to FreeBSD's to add a command line option for setting the timestamp.
• Ed Maste reported on FreeBSD package reproducibility details from the investigation for his BSDCan talk, including diffoscope results for the non-reproducible packages.
• Holger Levsen spent some time thinking and documenting how to store package notes and issues in a multi-distribution friendly manner, so that we can share these issues and notes between reproducible efforts across different projects. Thoughts we had about this topic during the Athens meeting last December are included in the updated README.

Packages fixed The following 12 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: django-floppyforms flask-restful hy jets3t kombu llvm-toolchain-3.8 moap python-bottle python-debtcollector python-django-debug-toolbar python-osprofiler stevedore The following packages have become reproducible after being fixed:

• adios/1.9.0-10 by Alastair McKinstry.
• airstrike/0.99+1.0pre6a-8 by Markus Koschany, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• apt-dater/1.0.3-1 by Patrick Matth i, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• bitlbee/3.4.2-1 by Jelmer Vernoo .
• dar/2.5.5-1 by Laszlo Boszormenyi.
• fastjet/3.0.6+dfsg-2 by Mattia Rizzolo, original patch by Maria Valentina Marin.
• libretro-beetle-pce-fast/0.9.38.7+git20160609-1 by S rgio Benjamim, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• libretro-beetle-psx/0.9.38.6+git20151019-2 by S rgio Benjamim, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• mx/1.99.4-1 by Ying-Chun Liu.
• python-coverage/4.1+dfsg.1-1 by Ben Finney.
• shiro/1.2.5-1 by Tony Mancill, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• splix/2.0.0+svn315-5 by Didier Raboud.
• u-boot/2016.07~rc1+dfsg1-3 by Vagrant Cascadian, debugging and patch by HW42, patches submitted upstream.

Some uploads have fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them:

• gcc-mingw-w64/18 by Stephen Kitt.
• gnuplot/5.0.3+dfsg3-6 by Anton Gladky, original patch by Alexis Bienven e.

Uploads with reproducibility fixes that currently fail to build:

• ruby2.3/2.3.1-3 by Christian Hofstaedtler, avoids unreproducible rbconfig.rb files by always using bash for building.

Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #827109 against asciijump by Reiner Herrmann: sort source files for deterministic linking order.
• #827112 against boswars by Reiner Herrmann: sort source files for deterministic linking order.
• #827114 against overgod by Reiner Herrmann: use C locale for sorting source files.
• #827115 against netpbm by Alexis Bienven e: honour SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH while generating output.
• #827124 against funguloids by Reiner Herrmann: use C locale for sorting files.
• #827145 against scummvm by Reiner Herrmann: don't embed extra fields in zip archive and build with proper host architecture.
• #827150 against netpanzer by Reiner Herrmann: sort source files for deterministic linking order.
• #827172 against reaver by Alexis Bienven e: sort object files for deterministic linking order.
• #827187 against latex2html by Alexis Bienven e: iterate deterministic over Perl hashes; honour SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH for output; strip username from output; sort index keys.
• #827313 against cherrypy3 by Sascha Steinbiss: prevent memory addresses in output.
• #827361 against matplotlib by Alexis Bienven e: honour SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in output and sort keys while iterating over dict.
• #827382 against dwarfutils by Reiner Herrmann: fix array size, which caused memory from outside a table to be embedded into output.
• #827384 against skytools3 by Sascha Steinbiss: use stable sorting order and remove timestamps from documentation.
• #827419 against ldaptor by Sascha Steinbiss: sort list of input files and prevent home directory from leaking into documentation.
• #827546 against git-buildpackage by Sascha Steinbiss: replace timestamps in documentation with changelog date; prevent temporary paths in documentation.
• #827572 against xprobe by Reiner Herrmann: sort list of object files in static library archives.

Package reviews 36 reviews have been added, 12 have been updated and 31 have been removed in this week. 17 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb, Santiago Vila and Dominic Hargreaves. diffoscope development Satyam worked on argument completion (#826711) for diffoscope. strip-nondeterminism development Mattia Rizzolo uploaded strip-nondeterminism 0.019-1~bpo8+1 to jessie-backports. reprotest development Ceridwen filed an Intent To Package (ITP) bug for reprotest as #827293. tests.reproducible-builds.org

• Mattia Rizzolo uploaded pbuilder 0.225 to unstable, providing built-in support for eatmydata. We're planning to use it in armhf and i386 builders where we don't build in tmpfs, to increase the build speed some more.
• Valery Young reworked the appearance of the package page, hopefully making them more intuitive and usable. In the process she changed the script generating them to use a real templating system, thus improving maintenance for the future.
• Holger adjusted the scheduler to reschedule packages in state 'depwait' after two days instead of three.
• Mattia added the bug title next to the bug numbers in the notes.

Misc. This week's edition was written by Mattia Rizzolo, Reiner Herrmann, Ed Maste and Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible builds folks on IRC.

Here is a small update for last week s work: 1. Templates tests.reproducible-builds.org now has a templating system, instead of writing HTML in python files We are using mustache with pystache. So far, only the html for the package pages have been converted. 2. Navigation improvements on package pages While converting the package pages to using mustache I also rearranged the navigation bar, adding sections and hover text. Navigation improvements inspired by Gerts Wollney s email requests. Please check out the changes and provide feedback: tests.reproducible-builds.org/<your-favorite-package> 3. Began converting script from bash to python Before converting the rest of the site to mustache, I spent a day digging into the last unconverted bash script (all other html producing scripts are python). I ve never written or read that much bash, yet another learning opportunity I have to admit it s a bit less intuitive than python Up next: Finish converting package set script, create more mustache templates, more site improvements! Then fly to South Africa.

StickerConstructorSpec compliant swirl

This evening I've played around a bit with the Sticker Constructor Specification https://github.com/terinjokes/StickerConstructorSpec and its https://github.com/terinjokes/StickerConstructorSpec/blob/master/assets/hexagonal-sticker_template.svg, and this is the result:

http://social.gl-como.it/photos/valhalla/image/e8ee069635b2823e168c358d2a753f14


Now I just have to:

* find somebody in Europe who prints good stickers and doesn't require illustrator (or other proprietary software) to submit files for non-rectangular shapes
* find out which Debian team I should contact to submit the files so that they can be used by everybody interested.

But neither will happen today, nor probably tomorrow, because lazy O:-)

Edit: now that I'm awake I realized I forgot to thank @Enrico Zini Zini and MadameZou for their help in combining my two proposals in a better design.

Source svg http://social.gl-como.it/attach/3

Everybody is talking about the Internet of Things. Unfortunately there is no sign of it in Debian yet. Besides some smaller packages like sispmctl, usbrelay or the 1-wire support in digitemp and owfs, there is not much software to control devices over a network. With the recent upload of alljoyn-core-1504 this might change. The Alljoyn Framework, where the Alljoyn Core is just one of several modules, lets devices and applications detect each other and communicate with one another over a D-Bus like message bus. The development of the framework has been started by Qualcomm some years ago and is meanwhile managed by the AllSeen Alliance, a nonprofit consortium. The software is licensed under the ISC license. This first upload is just the first step of a long journey. Other modules that compose the framework and already have a released tarball are related to lightning products, gateways to overcome the boundaries of the local network and much more. In the near future it is also planned to have modules that attach Z-Wave-, ZigBee- or Bluetooth-devices to the Alljoyn bus. So all in all, this looks like an exciting task and everybody is invited to help maintaining the software in Debian.

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between May 1st and May 7th 2016: Media coverage There has been a surprising tweet last week: "Props to @FiloSottile for his nifty gvt golang tool. We're using it to get reproducible builds for a Zika & West Nile monitoring project." and to our surprise Kenn confirmed privately that he indeed meant "reproducible builds" as in "bit by bit identical builds". Wow. We're looking forward to learn more details about this; for now we just know that they are doing this for software quality reasons basically. Two of the four GSoC and Outreachy participants for Reproducible builds posted their introductions to Planet Debian:

• Scarlett Clark: Kubuntu: Debian: KDE: Outreachy! Yay! Upcoming changes
• Satyam Zode: Google Summer of Code 2016 With Debian Reproducible Builds : Introduction

Toolchain fixes and other upstream developments dpkg 1.18.5 was uploaded fixing two bugs relevant to us:

• #719845 (make the file order within the data,control .tar.gz .deb members deterministic)
• #819194 (add -fdebug-prefix-map to the compilers options)

This upload made it necessary to rebase our dpkg on the version on sid again, which Niko Tyni and Lunar promptly did. Then a few days later 1.18.6 was released to fix a regression in the previous upload, and Niko promptly updated our patched version again. Following this Niko Tyni found #823428: "dpkg: many packages affected by dpkg-source: error: source package uses only weak checksums". Alexis Bienven e worked on tex related packages and SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH:

• Alexis uploaded texlive-bin to our repo improving the existing patches.
• pdftex upstream discussion by Alexis Bienven e began at tex-k mailing list to make \today honour SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. Upstream already commited enhanced versions of the proposed patches.
• Similar discussion on the luatex side at luatex mailing list. Upstream is working on it, and already committed some changes.

Emmanuel Bourg uploaded jflex/1.4.3+dfsg-2, which removes timestamps from generated files. Packages fixed The following 285 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies (mostly from GCC honouring SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH, see the previous week report): 0ad abiword abcm2ps acedb acpica-unix actiona alliance amarok amideco amsynth anjuta aolserver4-nsmysql aolserver4-nsopenssl aolserver4-nssqlite3 apbs aqsis aria2 ascd ascii2binary atheme-services audacity autodocksuite avis awardeco bacula ballerburg bb berusky berusky2 bindechexascii binkd boinc boost1.58 boost1.60 bwctl cairo-dock cd-hit cenon.app chipw ckermit clp clustalo cmatrix coinor-cbc commons-pool cppformat crashmail crrcsim csvimp cyphesis-cpp dact dar darcs darkradiant dcap dia distcc dolphin-emu drumkv1 dtach dune-localfunctions dvbsnoop dvbstreamer eclib ed2k-hash edfbrowser efax-gtk efax exonerate f-irc fakepop fbb filezilla fityk flasm flightgear fluxbox fmit fossil freedink-dfarc freehdl freemedforms-project freeplayer freeradius fxload gdb-arm-none-eabi geany-plugins geany geda-gaf gfm gif2png giflib gifticlib glaurung glusterfs gnokii gnubiff gnugk goaccess gocr goldencheetah gom gopchop gosmore gpsim gputils grcompiler grisbi gtkpod gvpe hardlink haskell-github hashrat hatari herculesstudio hpcc hypre i2util incron infiniband-diags infon ips iptotal ipv6calc iqtree jabber-muc jama jamnntpd janino jcharts joy2key jpilot jumpnbump jvim kanatest kbuild kchmviewer konclude krename kscope kvpnc latexdiff lcrack leocad libace-perl libcaca libcgicc libdap libdbi-drivers libewf libjlayer-java libkcompactdisc liblscp libmp3spi-java libpwiz librecad libspin-java libuninum libzypp lightdm-gtk-greeter lighttpd linpac lookup lz4 lzop maitreya meshlab mgetty mhwaveedit minbif minc-tools moc mrtrix mscompress msort mudlet multiwatch mysecureshell nifticlib nkf noblenote nqc numactl numad octave-optim omega-rpg open-cobol openmama openmprtl openrpt opensm openvpn openvswitch owx pads parsinsert pcb pd-hcs pd-hexloader pd-hid pd-libdir pear-channels pgn-extract phnxdeco php-amqp php-apcu-bc php-apcu php-solr pidgin-librvp plan plymouth pnscan pocketsphinx polygraph portaudio19 postbooks-updater postbooks powertop previsat progressivemauve puredata-import pycurl qjackctl qmidinet qsampler qsopt-ex qsynth qtractor quassel quelcom quickplot qxgedit ratpoison rlpr robojournal samplv1 sanlock saods9 schism scorched3d scummvm-tools sdlbasic sgrep simh sinfo sip-tester sludge sniffit sox spd speex stimfit swarm-cluster synfig synthv1 syslog-ng tart tessa theseus thunar-vcs-plugin ticcutils tickr tilp2 timbl timblserver tkgate transtermhp tstools tvoe ucarp ultracopier undbx uni2ascii uniutils universalindentgui util-vserver uudeview vfu virtualjaguar vmpk voms voxbo vpcs wipe x264 xcfa xfrisk xmorph xmount xyscan yacas yasm z88dk zeal zsync zynaddsubfx Last week the 1000th bug usertagged "reproducible" was fixed! This means roughly 2 bugs per day since 2015-01-01. Kudos and huge thanks to everyone involved! Please also note: FTBFS packages have not been counted here and there are still 600 open bugs with reproducible patches provided. Please help bringing that number down to 0! The following packages have become reproducible after being fixed:

• crawl/2:0.18.0-1 by Adam Borowski, original patch by Alexis Bienven e.
• eigenbase-resgen/1.3.0.13768-3 by Emmanuel Bourg.
• fpga-icestorm/0~20160218gitf2b2549-2 by Ruben Undheim, original patch by Daniel Shahaf.
• gap/4r8p3-3 by Bill Allombert, original patch by Jerome Benoit.
• libksba/1.3.4-1 by Andreas Metzler.
• libusb/2:0.1.12-29 by Aurelien Jarno, original patch by Daniel Shahaf.
• milkytracker/0.90.86+dfsg-1 by James Cowgill.
• mp4h/1.3.1-15 by Axel Beckert.
• rdtool/0.6.38-4 by Christian Hofstaedtler, original patch by Alexis Bienven e.
• sympow/1.023-7 by Jerome Benoit.

Some uploads have fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them:

• freefem++/3.46+dfsg1-2 by Dimitrios Eftaxiopoulosis, original patch by Alexis Bienven e.
• jaligner/1.0+dfsg-2 by Michael R. Crusoe.
• keyutils/1.5.9-9 by Christian Kastner.
• shotwell/0.22.1-1 by J rg Frings-F rst.

Uploads which fix reproducibility issues, but currently FTBFS:

• emoslib/2:4.4.1-1 by Alastair McKinstry, original patch by boyska.

Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #823174 against ros-pluginlib by Daniel Shahaf: use printf instead of echo to fix implementation-specific behavior.
• #823239 against gspiceui by Alexis Bienven e: sort list of object files for linking binary.
• #823241 against unhide by Alexis Bienven e: sort list of source files passed to compiler.
• #823393 against kdbg by Alexis Bienven e: fix changelog encoding and call grep in text mode.
• #823452 against khronos-opengl-man4 by Daniel Shahaf: sort file lists deterministically.

Package reviews 54 reviews have been added, 6 have been updated and 44 have been removed in this week. 18 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb, James Cowgill and Niko Tyni. diffoscope development Thanks to Mattia, diffoscope 52~bpo8+1 is available in jessie-backports now. tests.reproducible-builds.org

• All packages from all tested suites have finally been built on i386.
• Due to GCC supporting SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH sid/armhf has finally reached 20k reproducible packages and sid/amd64 has even reached 21k reproducible packages. (These numbers are about our test setup. The numbers for the Debian archive are still all 0. dpkg and dak need to be fixed to get the numbers above 0.)
• IRC notifications for non-Debian related jenkins job results go to #reproducible-builds now, while Debian related notifications stay on #debian-reproducible. (h01ger)
• profitbricks-build4-amd64 has been fully set up now and is running 398 days in the future. Next: update coreboot/OpenWrt/Fedora/Archlinux/FreeBSD/NetBSD scripts to use it. Help (in form of patches to existing shell scripts) very much welcome! (Other help is much welcome (and needed) too, but some things might take longer to merge or explain )

Misc. This week's edition was written by Reiner Herrmann, Holger Levsen and Mattia Rizzolo and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible builds folks on IRC. Mattia also wrote a small ikiwiki macro for this blog to ease linking reproducible issues, packages in the package tracker and bugs in the Debian BTS.

Six months ago I received a small grant from the Shuttleworth Foundation with no strings attached other than I should write this blog post about it. That was a nice surprise. The main thing that ended up being supported by the grant was work on Propellor, my configuration management system that is configured by writing Haskell code. I made 11 releases of Propellor in the grant period, with some improvements from me, and lots more from other contributors. The biggest feature that I added to Propellor was LetsEncrypt support. More important than features is making Propellor prevent more classes of mistakes, by creative use of the type system. The biggest improvement in this area was type checking the OSes of Propellor properties, so Propellor can reject host configurations that combine eg, Linux-only and FreeBSD-only properties. Turns out that the same groundwork needed for that is also what's needed to get Propellor to do type-level port conflict detection. I have a branch underway that does that, although it's not quite done yet. The grant also funded some of my work on git-annex. My main funding for git-annex doesn't cover development of the git-annex assistant, so the grant filled in that gap, particularly in updating the assistant to support the git-annex v6 repo format. I've very happy to have received this grant, and with the things it enabled me to work on.