Manipur Lot of news from Manipur. Seems the killings haven t stopped. In fact, there was a huge public rally in support of the rapists and murderers as reported by Imphal Free Press. The Ruling Govt. both at the Center and the State being BJP continuing to remain mum. Both the Internet shutdowns have been criticized and seems no effect on the Government. Their own MLA was attacked but they have chosen to also be silent about that. The opposition demanded that the PM come in both the houses and speak but he has chosen to remain silent. In that quite a few bills were passed without any discussions. If it was not for the viral videos nobody would have come to know of anything . Internet shutdowns impact women disproportionately as more videos of assaults show Of course, as shared before that gentleman has been arrested under Section 66A as I shared in the earlier blog post. In any case, in the last few years, this Government has chosen to pass most of its bills without any discussions. Some of the bills I will share below. The attitude of this Govt. can be seen through this cartoon

The above picture shows the disqualified M.P. Rahul Gandhi because he had asked what is the relationship between Adani and Modi. The other is the Mr. Modi, the Prime Minister who refuses to enter and address the Parliament. Prem Panicker shares how we chillingly have come to this stage when even after rapes we are silent

Data Leakage According to most BJP followers this is not a bug but a feature of this Government. Sucheta Dalal of Moneylife shared how the data leakage has been happening at the highest levels in the Government. The leakage is happening at the ministerial level because unless the minister or his subordinate passes a certain startup others cannot come to know. As shared in the article, while the official approval may take 3-4 days, within hours other entities start congratulating. That means they know that the person/s have been approved.While reading this story, the first thought that immediately crossed my mind was data theft and how easily that would have been done. There was a time when people would be shocked by articles such as above and demand action but sadly even if people know and want to do something they feel powerless to do anything

PAN Linking and Aadhar Last month GOI made PAN Linking to Aadhar a thing. This goes against the judgement given by the honored Supreme Court in September 2018. Around the same time, Moneylife had reported on the issue on how the info. on Aadhar cards is available and that has its consequences. But to date nothing has happened except GOI shrugging. In the last month, 13 crore+ users of PAN including me affected by it I had tried to actually delink the two but none of the banks co-operated in the same Aadhar has actually number of downsides, most people know about the AEPS fraud that has been committed time and time again. I have shared in previous blog posts the issue with biometric data as well as master biometric data that can and is being used for fraud. GOI either ignorant or doesn t give a fig as to what happens to you, citizen of India. I could go on and on but it would result in nothing constructive so will stop now

IRCv3 I had been enthused when I heard about IRCV3. While it was founded in 2016, it sorta came on in its own in around 2020. I did try matrix or rather riot-web and went through number of names while finally setting on element. While I do have the latest build 1.11.36 element just hasn t been workable for me. It is too outsized, and occupies much more real estate than other IM s (Instant Messengers and I cannot correct size it like I do say for qbittorrent or any other app. I had filed couple of bugs on it but because it apparently only affects me, nothing happened afterwards But that is not the whole story at all. Because of Debconf happening in India, and that too Kochi, I decided to try out other tools to see how IRC is doing. While the Debian wiki page shares a lot about IRC clients and is also helpful in sharing stats by popcounter ( popularity-contest, thanks to whoever did that), it did help me in trying two of the most popular clients. Pidgin and Hexchat, both of which have shared higher numbers. This might be simply due to the fact that both get downloaded when you install the desktop version or they might be popular in themselves, have no idea one way or the other. But still I wanted to see what sort of experience I could expect from both of them in 2023. One of the other things I noticed is that Pidgin is not a participating organization in ircv3 while hexchat is. Before venturing in, I also decided to take a look at oftc.net. Came to know that for sometime now, oftc has started using web verify. I didn t see much of a difference between hcaptcha and gcaptcha other than that the fact that they looked more like oil paintings rather than anything else. While I could easily figure the odd man out or odd men out to be more accurate, I wonder how a person with low or no vision would pass that ??? Also much of our world is pretty much contextual based, figuring who the odd one is or are could be tricky. I do not have answers to the above other than to say more work needs to be done by oftc in that area. I did get a link that I verified. But am getting ahead of the story. Another thing I understood that for some reason oftc is also not particpating in ircv3, have no clue why not :(I

Account Registration in Pidgin and Hexchat This is the biggest pain point in both. I failed to register via either Pidgin or Hexchat. I couldn t find a way in either client to register my handle. I have had on/off relationships with IRC over the years, the biggest issue being IIRC is that if you stop using your handle for a month or two others can use it. IIRC, every couple of months or so, irc/oftc releases the dormant ones. Matrix/Vector has done quite a lot in that regard but that s a different thing altogether so for the moment will keep that aside. So, how to register for the network. This is where webchat.oftc.net comes in. You get a quaint 1970 s IRC window (probably emulated) where you call Nickserv to help you. As can be seen it one of the half a dozen bots that helps IRC. So the first thing you need to do is /msg nickserv help what you are doing is asking nickserv what services they have and Nickserv shares the numbers of services it offers. After looking into, you are looking for register /msg nickerv register Both the commands tell you what you need to do as can be seen by this

Let s say you are XYZ and your e-mail address is xyz@xyz.com This is just a throwaway id I am taking for the purpose of showing how the process is done. For this, also assume your passowrd is 1234xyz;0x something like this. I have shared about APG (Advanced Password Generator) before so you could use that to generate all sorts of passwords for yourself. So next would be /msg nickserv register 1234xyz;0x xyz@xyz.com Now the thing to remember is you need to be sure that the email is valid and in your control as it would generate a link with hcaptcha. Interestingly, their accessibility signup fails or errors out. I just entered my email and it errors out. Anyway back to it. Even after completing the puzzle, even with the valid username and password neither pidgin or hexchat would let me in. Neither of the clients were helpful in figuring out what was going wrong. At this stage, I decided to see the specs of ircv3 if they would help out in anyway and came across this. One would have thought that this is one of the more urgent things that need to be fixed, but for reasons unknown it s still in draft mode. Maybe they (the participants) are not in consensus, no idea. Unfortunately, it seems that the participants of IRCv3 have chosen a sort of closed working model as the channel is restricted. The only notes of any consequence are being shared by Ilmari Lauhakangas from Finland. Apparently, Mr/Ms/they Ilmari is also a libreoffice hacker. It is possible that their is or has been lot of drama before or something and that s why things are the way they are. In either way, doesn t tell me when this will be fixed, if ever. For people who are on mobiles and whatnot, without element, it would be 10x times harder. Update :- Saw this discussion on github. Don t see a way out It seems I would be unable to unable to be part of Debconf Kochi 2023. Best of luck to all the participants and please share as much as possible of what happens during the event.

Manipur Videos Warning: The text might be mature and will have references to violence so if there are kids or you are sensitive, please excuse. Few days back, saw the videos and I cannot share the rage, shame and many conflicting emotions that were going through me. I almost didn t want to share but couldn t stop myself. The woman in the video were being palmed, fingered, nude, later reportedly raped and murdered. And there have been more than a few cases. The next day saw another video that showed beheaded heads, and Kukis being killed just next to their houses. I couldn t imagine what those people must be feeling as the CM has been making partisan statements against them. One of the husbands of the Kuki women who had been paraded, fondled is an Army Officer in the Indian Army. The Meiteis even tried to burn his home but the Army intervened and didn t let it get burnt. The CM s own statement as shared before tells his inability to bring the situation out of crisis. In fact, his statement was dumb stating that the Internet shutdown was because there were more than 100 such cases. And it s spreading to the nearby Northeast regions. Now Mizoram, the nearest neighbor is going through similar things where the Meitis are not dominant. The Mizos have told the Meitis to get out. To date, the PM has chosen not to visit Manipur. He just made a small 1 minute statement about it saying how the women have shamed India, an approximation of what he said.While it s actually not the women but the men who have shamed India. The Wire has been talking to both the Meitis, the Kukis, the Nagas. A Kuki women sort of bared all. She is right on many counts. The GOI while wanting to paint the Kukis in a negative light have forgotten what has been happening in its own state, especially its own youth as well as in other states while also ignoring the larger geopolitics and business around it. Taliban has been cracking as even they couldn t see young boys, women becoming drug users. I had read somewhere that 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 young person in Afghanistan is now in its grip. So no wonder,the Taliban is trying to eradicate and shutdown drug use among it s own youth. Circling back to Manipur, I was under the wrong impression that the Internet shutdown is now over. After those videos became viral as well as the others I mentioned, again the orders have been given and there is shutdown. It is not fully shut but now only Govt. offices have it. so nobody can share a video that goes against any State or Central Govt. narrative A real sad state of affairs Update: There is conditional reopening whatever that means When I saw the videos, the first thing is I felt was being powerless, powerless to do anything about it. The second was if I do not write about it, amplify it and don t let others know about it then what s the use of being able to blog

Mental Health, Binging on various Webseries Both the videos shocked me and I couldn t sleep that night or the night after. it. Even after doing work and all, they would come in unobtrusively in my nightmares While I felt a bit foolish, I felt it would be nice to binge on some webseries. Little I was to know that both Northshore and Alaska Daily would have stories similar to what is happening here While the story in Alaska Daily is fictional it resembles very closely to a real newspaper called Anchorage Daily news. Even there the Intuit women , one of the marginalized communities in Alaska. The only difference I can see between GOI and the Alaskan Government is that the Alaskan Government was much subtle in doing the same things. There are some differences though. First, the State is and was responsive to the local press and apart from one close call to one of its reporters, most reporters do not have to think about their own life in peril. Here, the press cannot look after either their livelihood or their life. It was a juvenile kid who actually shot the video, uploaded and made it viral. One needs to just remember the case details of Siddique Kappan. Just for sharing the news and the video he was arrested. Bail was denied to him time and time again citing that the Police were investigating . Only after 2 years and 3 months he got bail and that too because none of the charges that the Police had they were able to show any prima facie evidence. One of the better interviews though was of Vrinda Grover. For those who don t know her, her Wikipedia page does tell a bit about her although it is woefully incomplete. For example, most recently she had relentlessly pursued the unconstitutional Internet Shutdown that happened in Kashmir for 5 months. Just like in Manipur, the shutdown was there to bury crimes either committed or being facilitated by the State. For the issues of livelihood, one can take the cases of Bipin Yadav and Rashid Hussain. Both were fired by their employer Dainik Bhaskar because they questioned the BJP MP Smriti Irani what she has done for the state. The problems for Dainik Bhaskar or for any other mainstream media is most of them rely on Government advertisements. Private investment in India has fallen to record lows mostly due to the policies made by the Centre. If any entity or sector grows a bit then either Adani or Ambani will one way or the other take it. So, for most first and second generation entrepreneurs it doesn t make sense to grow and then finally sell it to one of these corporates at a loss GOI on Adani, Ambani side of any deal. The MSME sector that is and used to be the second highest employer hasn t been able to recover from the shocks of demonetization, GST and then the pandemic. Each resulting in more and more closures and shutdowns. Most of the joblessness has gone up tremendously in North India which the Government tries to deny. The most interesting points in all those above examples is within a month or less, whatever the media reports gets scrubbed. Even the firing of the journos that was covered by some of the mainstream media isn t there anymore. I have to use secondary sources instead of primary sources. One can think of the chilling effects on reportage due to the above. The sad fact is even with all the money in the world the PM is unable to come to the Parliament to face questions.

The above poster/question is by Surya Pratap Singh, a retired IAS officer. He asks why the PM is unable to answer in either of the houses. As shared before, the Govt. wants very limited discussion. Even yesterday, the Lok Sabha TV just showed the BJP MP s making statements but silent or mic was off during whatever questions or statements made by the opposition. If this isn t mockery of Indian democracy then I don t know what is Even the media landscape has been altered substantially within the last few years. Both Adani and Ambani have distributed the media pie between themselves. One of the last bastions of the free press, NDTV was bought by Adani in a hostile takeover. Both Ambani and Adani are close to this Goverment. In fact, there is no sector in which one or the other is not present. Media houses like Newsclick, The Wire etc. that are a fraction of mainstream press are where most of the youth have been going to get their news as they are not partisan. Although even there, GOI has time and again interfered. The Wire has had too many 504 Gateway timeouts in the recent months and they had been forced to move most of their journalism from online to video, rather Youtube in order to escape both the censoring and the timeouts as shared above. In such a hostile environment, how both the organizations are somehow able to survive is a miracle. Most local reportage is also going to YouTube as that s the best way for them to not get into Govt. censors. Not an ideal situation, but that s the way it is. The difference between Indian and Israeli media can be seen through this

The above is a Screenshot shared by how the Israeli media has reacted to the Israeli Government s Knesset over the judicial overhaul . Here, the press itself erodes its own by giving into the Government day and night

Binging on Webseries Saw Northshore, Three Pines, Alaska Daily and Doogie Kamealoha M.D. which is based on Doogie Howser M.D. Of the four, enjoyed Doogie Kamealoha M.D. the most but then it might be because it s a copy of Doogie Howser, just updated to the new millenia and there are some good childhood memories associated with that series. The others are also good. I tried to not see European stuff as most of them are twisted and didn t want that space.

EU Digital Operational Resilience Act and impact on FOSS Few days ago, apparently the EU shared the above Act. One can read about it more here. This would have more impact on FOSS as most development of various FOSS distributions happens in EU. Fair bit of Debian s own development happens in Germany and France. While there have been calls to make things more clearer, especially for FOSS given that most developers do foss development either on side or as a hobby while their day job is and would be different. The part about consumer electronics and FOSS is a tricky one as updates can screw up your systems. Microsoft has had a huge history of devices not working after an update or upgrade. And this is not limited to Windows as they would like to believe. Even apple seems to be having its share of issues time and time again. One would have hoped that these companies that make billions of dollars from their hardware and software sales would be doing more testing and Q&A and be more aware about security issues. FOSS, on the other hand while being more responsive doesn t make as much money vis-a-vis the competitors. Let s take the most concrete example. The most successful mobile phone having FOSS is Purism. But it s phone, it has priced itself out of the market. A huge part of that is to do with both economies of scale and trying to get an infrastructure and skills in the States where none or minimally exists. Compared that to say Pinepro that is manufactured in Hong Kong and is priced 1/3rd of the same. For most people it is simply not affordable in these times. Add to that the complexity of these modern cellphones make it harder, not easier for most people to be vigilant and update the phone at all times. Maybe we need more dumphones such as Light and Punkt but then can those be remotely hacked or not, there doesn t seem to be any answers on that one. I haven t even seen anybody even ask those questions. They may have their own chicken and egg issues. For people like me who have lost hearing, while I can navigate smartphones for now but as I become old I don t see anything that would help me. For many an elderly population, both hearing and seeing are the first to fade. There doesn t seem to be any solutions targeted for them even though they are 5-10% of any population at the very least. Probably more so in Europe and the U.S. as well as Japan and China. All of them are clearly under-served markets but dunno a solution for them. At least to me that s an open question.

When I began to read about the generative AI revolution, I realized there was an opportunity to combine two aspects of my life I never thought I could merge. While I m not working on the cloud or security, I work as a sex and intimacy educator, helping people embrace love, vulnerability and connection. As I first began to interact with ChatGPT, I saw the potential for AI to help people explore parts of the world they had not experienced for themselves. I m blind. When I write fiction, physical descriptions are always challenging for me. I don t understand facial expressions very well, and figuring out what characters look like is difficult. Generative AI has opened up an entire new world for me. I can explore how people might express some emotion and how they might dress in a certain situation. I can even exploit the cultural biases that are sometimes the bane of AI to translate my ideas about personality and background into appearance. Immediately I realized the opportunities for sexual freedom:

• AI could help people practice talking about intimacy, for example helping people practice negotiating their limits and boundaries.
• AI could help explore feelings and find the words to share what is in our hearts.
• We are more willing to tell a computer our fantasies than another person. AI can reassure us that our desires are normal; we are not broken or disgusting because of what we desire.
• For the fantasies we want to stay in our head, AI can help us make them vivid in a way that respects our privacy.
• And for the fantasies we want to bring into the world, AI can help us understand how to turn the hot images in our head into something safe that respects our boundaries and those of our lovers.

People are already using Generative AI to help with intimacy. There are plenty of stories about how people use AI to tune their dating profiles. But all too often, the desire to make AI safe brings shame and rejection into the discussion of intimacy. Even something as simple as Help me come up with a sensual description of this character, is likely to run up against the all-too-familiar responses: I am a large language model and for safety reasons I cannot do that. That safety is important: one thing we have learned from sex positive culture is how important boundaries are. We need to respect those boundaries and not expose people to unwanted sexual content. But we also know how damaging shame is. When someone reaches out and tentatively asks to explore their sexuality, rejecting that exploration will come across as a rejection of that person they are dirty or disgusting for wanting to explore. Fortunately, we will see AI models that are open to exploring sexuality. Some of the uncensored models will already try, although calling some of the results sex positive would be stretching the truth. We re already seeing discussions of virtual AI girlfriends. And as AI meets sex, I m going to be there, helping try and turn it into something healthy both for business and for lovers. There are all sorts of interesting challenges: There are all the cultural and social challenges that sex-positive work faces. Then there are versions of the AI challenges of bias, hallucinations and the like, along with specific challenges of exploring emotionally-charged vulnerable topics. And yet there s so much potential to help people gain confidence and valuable skills. I am eagerly looking for opportunities to combine my work as a sex positive educator and as a software developer. I d love to hear about any ongoing work at the intersection of Sex and Generative AI. I ve done some research already, but there s so much going on in the AI world it is impossible to follow it all. Please reach out with anything you think I should track.

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We took a couple of days of for a family vacation / road trip through the hills of Central Mexico. The overall trip does not look like anything out of the ordinary Other than the fact that Google forecasted we d take approximately 15.5 hours driving for 852Km that is, an average of almost 55 Km/h. And yes, that s what we signed up for. And that s what we got. Of course, the exact routes are not exactly what Google suggested (I can say we optimized a bit the route, i.e., by avoiding the metropolitan area of Quer taro, at the extreme west, and going via San Juan del R o / Tequisquiapan / Bernal). The first stretch of the road is just a regular, huge highway, with no particular insights. The highways leaving and entering Mexico City on the North are not fun nor beautiful, only they are needed to get nice trips going Mexico City sits at a point of changing climates. Of course, it is a huge city And I cannot imagine how it would be without all of the urbanization it now sports. But anyway: On the West, South, and part of the East, it is surrounded by high mountains, with beautiful and dense forests. Mexico City is 2200m high, and most of the valley s surrounding peaks are ~3000m (and at the South Eastern tip, our two big volcanoes, Popocat petl and Iztacc huatl, get past the 5700m mark). Towards the North, the landscape is flatter and much more dry. Industrial compounds give way to dry grasslands. Of course, central Mexico does not understand the true meaning of flat, and the landscape is full with eh-not-very-big mountains. Then, as we entered Quer taro State, we started approaching Bernal. And we saw a huge rock that looks like it is not supposed to be there! It just does not fit the surroundings. Shortly after Bernal, we entered a beautiful, although most crumpled, mountain ridge: Sierra Gorda de Quer taro. Sierra Gorda encompasses most of the North of the (quite small 11500Km total) state of Quer taro, plus portions of the neighboring states; other than the very abrupt and sharp orography, what strikes me most is the habitat diversity it encompasses. We started going up an absolute desert, harsh and beautiful; we didn t take pictures along the way as the road is difficult enough that there are almost no points for stopping for refreshments or for photo opportunities. But it is quite majestic. And if you think deserts are barren, boring places well, please do spend some time enjoying them! Anyway At on point, the road passes by a ~3100m height, and suddenly Pines! More pines! A beautiful forest! We reached our first stop at the originally mining town of Pinal de Amoles. After spending the night there and getting a much needed rest, we started a quite steep descent towards Jalpan de Serra. While it is only ~20Km away on the map, we descended from 2300 to 760 meters of altitude (and the road was over 40Km long). Being much lower, the climate drastically changed from cool and humid to quite warm and the body attitude in the kids does not lie! In the mid-18th century, Fray Jun pero Serra established five missions to evangelize the population of this very harsh territory, and the frontispiece for the church and monastery in Jalpan is quite breathtaking. But we were just passing by Jalpan. A short visit to the church and to the ice-cream shop, and we were again on our way. We crossed the state border, entering San Luis Potos , and arrived to our main destination: Xilitla, the little town in the beautiful Huasteca where the jungle meets surrealism. Xilitla was chosen by the British poet and patron of various surrealist artists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_James. He was a British noble (an unofficial grandson of King Edward VII), and heir to a huge fortune. I m not going to repeat here his very well known biography suffice to say that he got in love with the Huasteca, and bought a >30ha piece of jungle and mountain close to the Xilitla town, and made it his house. With very ample economic resources, in the late 1940s he started his lifelong project of building a surrealist garden. And Well, that s enough blabbering for me. I m sharing some pictures I took there. The place is plainly magic and wonderful. Edward James died in 1984, and his will decrees that after his death, the jungle should be allowed to reclaim the constructions so many structures are somewhat crumbling, and it is expected they will break down in the following decades. But for whoever comes to Mexico This magic place is definitely worth the heavy ride to the middle of the mountains and to the middle of the jungle. Xilitla now also hosts a very good museum with sculptures by Leonora Carrington, James long-time friend, but I m not going to abuse this space with even more pictures. And of course, we did more, and enjoyed more, during our three days in Xilitla. And for our way back I wanted to try a different route. We decided to come back to Mexico City crossing Hidalgo state instead of Quer taro. I had feared the roads would be in a worse shape or would be more difficult to travel And I was happy to be proven wrong! This was the longest driving stretch approximately 6:30 for 250Km. The roads are in quite decent shape, and while there are some stretches where we were quite lonely (probably the loneliest one was the sharp ascent from Tamazunchale to the detour before Orizatl n), the road felt safe and well kept at all times. The sights all across Eastern Hidalgo are breathtaking, and all furiously green (be it with really huge fern leaves or with tall, strong pines), until Zacualtip n. And just as abruptly or more as when we entered Pinal de Amoles We crossed Orizatl n, and we were in a breathtaking arid, desert-like environment again. We crossed the Barranca de Metztitl n natural reserve, and arrived to spend the night at Huasca de Ocampo. There are many more things we could have done starting at Huasca, a region where old haciendas thrived, full of natural formations, and very very interesting. But we were tired and pining to be finally back home. So we rested until mid-morning and left straight back home in Mexico City. Three hours later, we were relaxing, preparing lunch, the kids watching whatever-TV-like-things are called nowadays. All in all, a very beautiful vacation!

Last month I blogged about how the mainstream media is focusing on the wrong parts of the Artificial Intelligence/ChatGPT story. One of the comments left on the post was:

I encourage you to dig a little deeper. If LLM s were just probability
machines, no one would be raising any flags.
Hinton, Bengio, Tegmark and many others are not simpletons. It is the fact that
the architecture and specific training (deep NN, back prop / gradient descend)
produces a system with emergent properties, beyond just a probability machine,
when the system size reaches some thresholds, that has them spooked.
They do understand mathematics and stats and probabilities, i assure you. It is
just that you may have only read the layman s articles and not the scientific
ones

I confess: I haven t made much progress in this regard. I gave Vicky Boykis' Embeddings a go, and started to get a handle on the math, but honestly had a hard time following it. I m open to suggestions from anyone with a few good recommendations for scientific papers accessible to non-math professionals, particularly ones that explain the emergent properties and what that means. Meanwhile, regardless of the scientific truths or falsehoods around chat GPT, the mainstream media continues to miserably fail in helping the rest of us understand the implications of this technology. Most recently, I listend to This American Life s First Contact (part of their Greetings People of Earth show). They interviewed several Microsft AI researchers who first experimented with ChatGPT 4 prior to it s big release. The focus of the researchers was: can we demonstrate chat GPT s general intelligence ability by presenting it with logic problems it could not possibly have encountered before? And the answer: YES! The two examples were:

1. Stacking: the researcher asked chat GPT how to stack a number of odd objects in a stable way (a book, a dozen eggs, a nail, etc) and chat GPT gave both the correct answer and a reasonable explanation of why.
2. Hidden state: the researcher described two people in a room with a cat. One person put the cat in a basket and left. The other moved the cat to a box ad left. And, remarkably, chat GPT could explain that when they returned, the first person would think the cat is in the basket and the second person would know it s in the box.

I thought this was pretty cool. So I fired up chat GPT (and even ponied up for chat GPT version 4). I asked it my own stacking question and, hm, chat GPT thought a plate should be placed on top of a can of soda instead of beneath it. So, well, mostly right but I m pretty sure any reasonable human would put the can of soda on the plate not the other way around (chat GPT 3.5 wanted the can of soda to be balanced on the tip of the nail). I then asked it my own simple version of the cat problem and it got it right. Very good. But when I asked it a much more complicated and weird version of the cat problem (involving beetles in a mansion with a movie theater and changing movies and a butler with a big mustache) it got the answer flat out wrong. Did anyone at This American Life try this? Really? It seems like a basic responsibility of journalism to fact check the experts. Maybe the scientists would have had a convincing response? Or maybe scientists are just like everyone else and can get caught up in the excitement and make mistakes? I am amazed and awed by what chat GPT can do - it truly is remarkable. And, I think that a lot of human intelligence is synthesizing what we ve seen and simply regurgitating it in a different context - a task that chat GPT is way better at doing than we are. But the overriding message of most mainstream media stories is that chat GPT is somehow going beyond word synthesis and probability and magically tapping into a form of logic. If the scientific papers are demonstrating this remarkable feat, I think the media needs to do a way better job reporting it.

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In June, 17 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:

• Abhijith PA did 12.0h (out of 6.0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.0h to the next month.
• Adrian Bunk did 28.0h (out of 0h assigned and 34.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 6.5h to the next month.
• Anton Gladky did 5.0h (out of 6.0h assigned and 9.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
• Bastien Roucari s did 17.0h (out of 17.0h assigned and 3.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 3.0h to the next month.
• Ben Hutchings did 24.0h (out of 16.5h assigned and 7.0h from previous period).
• Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 24.0h (out of 21.0h assigned and 2.5h from previous period).
• Guilhem Moulin did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
• Lee Garrett did 25.0h (out of 0h assigned and 40.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 15.5h to the next month.
• Markus Koschany did 23.5h (out of 23.5h assigned).
• Ola Lundqvist did 13.0h (out of 0h assigned and 24.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.0h to the next month.
• Roberto C. S nchez did 13.5h (out of 9.75h assigned and 13.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
• Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 8.25h (out of 23.5h assigned), thus carrying over 15.25h to the next month.
• Sylvain Beucler did 20.0h (out of 23.5h assigned), thus carrying over 3.5h to the next month.
• Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
• Tobias Frost did 16.0h (out of 16.0h assigned).
• Utkarsh Gupta did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 25.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 25.5h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In June, we have released 40 DLAs. Notable security updates in June included mariadb-10.3, openssl, and golang-go.crypto. The mariadb-10.3 package was synchronized with the latest upstream maintenance release, version 10.3.39. The openssl package was patched to correct several flaws with certificate validation and with object identifier parsing. Finally, the golang-go.crypto package was updated to address several vulnerabilities, and several associated Go packages were rebuilt in order to properly incorporate the update. LTS contributor Sylvain has been hard at work with some behind-the-scenes improvements to internal tooling and documentation. His efforts are helping to improve the efficiency of all LTS contributors and also helping to improve the quality of their work, making our LTS updates more timely and of higher quality. LTS contributor Lee Garrett began working on a testing framework specifically for Samba. Given the critical role which Samba plays in many deployments, the tremendous impact which regressions can have in those cases, and the unique testing requirements of Samba, this work will certainly result in increased confidence around our Samba updates for LTS. LTS contributor Emilio Pozuelo Monfort has begun preparatory work for the upcoming Firefox ESR version 115 release. Firefox ESR (and the related Thunderbird ESR) requires special work to maintain up to date in LTS. Mozilla do not release individual patches for CVEs, and our policy is to incorporate new ESR releases from Mozilla into LTS. Most updates are minor updates, but once a year Mozilla will release a major update as they move to a new major version for ESR. The update to a new major ESR version entails many related updates to toolchain and other packages. The preparations that Emilio has begun will ensure that once the 115 ESR release is made, updated packages will be available in LTS with minimal delay. Another highlight of behind-the-scenes work is our Front Desk personnel. While we often focus on the work which results in published package updates, much work is also involved in reviewing new vulnerabilities and triaging them (i.e., determining if they affect one or more packages in LTS and then determining the severity of those which are applicable). These intrepid contributors (Emilio Pozuelo Monfort, Markus Koschany, Ola Lundqvist, Sylvain Beucler, and Thorsten Alteholz for the month of June) reviewed dozens of vulnerabilities and made decisions about how those vulnerabilities should be dealt with.

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This is the fourth in a series about archiving to removable media (optical discs such as BD-Rs and DVD+Rs or portable hard drives). Here are the first three parts:

• In part 1, I laid out my goals for the project, and considered a number of tools before determining dar and git-annex were my leading options.
• In part 2, I took a deep dive into git-annex and simulated using it for this project.
• In part 3, I did the same with dar.
• And in this part, I want to put it together to come up with an initial direction to pursue.

I want to state at the outset that this is not a general review of dar or git-annex. This is an analysis of how those tools stack up to a particular use case. Neither tool focuses on this use case, and I note it is particularly far from the more common uses of git-annex. For instance, both tools offer support for cloud storage providers and special support for ssh targets, but neither of those are in-scope for this post. Comparison Matrix As part of this project, I made a comparison matrix which includes not just dar and git-annex, but also backuppc, bacula/bareos, and borg. This may give you some good context, and also some reference for other projects in this general space. Reviewing the Goals I identified some goals in part 1. They are all valid. As I have thought through the project more, I feel like I should condense them into a simpler ordered list, with the first being the most important. I omit some things here that both dar and git-annex can do (updates/incrementals, for instance; see the expanded goals list in part 1). Here they are:

1. The tool must not modify the source data in any way.
2. It must be simple to create or update an archive. Processes that require a lot of manual work, are flaky, or are difficult to do correctly, are unlikely to be done correctly and often. If it s easy to do right, I m more likely to do it. Put another way: an archive never created can never be restored.
3. The chances of a successful restore by someone that is not me, that doesn t know Linux, and is at least 10 years in the future, should be maximized. This implies a simple toolset, solid support for dealing with media errors or missing media, etc.
4. Both a partial point-in-time restore and a full restore should be possible. The full restore must, at minimum, provide a consistent directory tree; that is, deletions, additions, and moves over time must be accurately reflected. Preserving modification times is a near-requirement, and preserving hard links, symbolic links, and other POSIX metadata is a significant nice-to-have.
5. There must be a strategy to provide redundancy; for instance, a way for one set of archive discs to be offsite, another onsite, and the two to be periodically swapped.
6. Use storage space efficiently.

Let s take a look at how the two stack up against these goals. Goal 1: Not modifying source data With dar, this is accomplished. dar --create does not modify source data (and even has a mode to avoid updating atime) so that s done. git-annex normally does modify source data, in that it typically replaces files with symlinks into its hash-indexed storage directory. It can instead use hardlinks. In either case, you will wind up with files that have identical content (but may have originally been separate, non-linked files) linked together with git-annex. This would cause me trouble, as well as run the risk of modifying timestamps. So instead of just storing my data under a git-annex repo as is its most common case, I use the directory special remote with importtree=yes to sort of import the data in. This, plus my desire to have the repos sensible and usable on non-POSIX operating systems, accounts for a chunk of the git-annex complexity you see here. You wouldn t normally see as much complexity with git-annex (though, as you will see, even without the directory special remote, dar still has less complexity). Winner: dar, though I demonstrated a working approach with git-annex as well. Goal 2: Simplicity of creating or updating an archive Let us simply start by recognizing this:

• Number of commands to create a first dar archive, including all splits: 1
• Number of commands to create a first git-annex archive, with just the first two splits: 58
• Number of commands to create a dar incremental: 1
• Number of commands to update the last git-annex drive: 10
• Number of commands to do a full restore of all slices and both archives with dar: 2 (1 if dar_manager used)
• Number of commands to do a full restore of just the first two drive with git-annex: 9 (but my process may not be correct)

Both tools have a lot of power, but I must say, it is easier to wrap my head around what dar is doing than what git-annex is doing. Everything dar does is with files: here are the files to archive, here is an archive file, here is a detached (isolated) catalog. It is very straightforward. It took me far less time to develop my dar page than my git-annex page, despite having existing familiarity with both tools. As I pointed out in part 2, I still don t fully understand how git-annex syncs metadata. Unsolved mysteries from that post include why the two git-annex drives had no idea what was on the other drives, and why the export operation silenty did nothing. Additionally, for the optical disc case, I had to create a restricted-size filesystem/dataset for git-annex to write into in order to get the desired size limit. Looking at the optical disc case, dar has a lot of nice infrastructure built in. With pause and execute, it can very easily be combined with disc burning operations. slice will automatically limit the size of a given slice, regardless of how much disk space is free, meaning that the git-annex tricks of creating smaller filesystems/datasets are unnecessary with dar. To create an initial full backup with dar, you just give it the size of the device, and it will automatically split up the archive, with hooks to integrate for burning or changing drives. About as easy as you could get. With git-annex, you would run the commands to have it fill up the initial filesystem, then burn the disc (or remove the drive), then run the commands to create another repo on the second filesystem, and so forth. With hard drives, with git-annex you would do something similar; let it fill up a repo on a drive, and if it exits with a space error, swap in the next. With dar, you would slice as with an optical disk. Dar s slicing is less convenient in this case, though, as it assumes every drive is the same size and yours may not be. You could work around that by using a slice size no bigger than the smallest drive, and putting multiple slices on larger drives if need be. If a single drive is large enough to hold your entire data set, though, you need not worry about this with either tool. Here s a warning about git-annex: it won t store anything beneath directories named .git. My use case doesn t have many of those. If your use case does, you re going to have to figure out what to do about it. Maybe rename them to something else while the backup runs? In any case, it is simply a fact that git-annex cannot back up git repositories, and this cuts against being able to back up things correctly. Another point is that git-annex has scalability concerns. If your archive set gets into the hundreds of thousands of files, you may need to split it into multiple distinct git-annex repositories. If this occurs and it will in my case it may serve to dull the shine of some of git-annex s features such as location tracking. A detour down the update strategies path Update strategies get a little more complicated with both. First, let s consider: what exactly should our update strategy be? For optical discs, I might consider doing a monthly update. I could burn a disc (or more than one, if needed) regardless of how much data is going to go onto it, because I want no more than a month s data lost in any case. An alternative might be to spool up data until I have a disc s worth, and then write that, but that could possibly mean months between actually burning a disc. Probably not good. For removable drives, we re unlikely to use a new drive each month. So there it makes sense to continue writing to the drive until it s full. Now we have a choice: do we write and preserve each month s updates, or do we eliminate intermediate changes and just keep the most recent data? With both tools, the monthly burn of an optical disc turns out to be very similar to the initial full backup to optical disc. The considerations for spanning multiple discs are the same. With both tools, we would presumably want to keep some metadata on the host so that we don t have to refer to a previous disc to know what was burned. In the dar case, that would be an isolated catalog. For git-annex, it would be a metadata-only repo. I illustrated both of these in parts 2 and 3. Now, for hard drives. Assuming we want to continue preserving each month s updates, with dar, we could just write an incremental to the drive each month. Assuming that the size of the incremental is likely far smaller than the size of the drive, you could easily enough do this. More fancily, you could look at the free space on the drive and tell dar to use that as the size of the first slice. For git-annex, you simply avoid calling drop/dropunused. This will cause the old versions of files to accumulate in .git/annex. You can get at them with git annex commands. This may imply some degree of elevated risk, as you are modifying metadata in the repo each month, which with dar you could chmod a-w or even chattr +i the archive files once written. Hopefully this elevated risk is low. If you don t want to preserve each month s updates, with dar, you could just write an incremental each month that is based on the previous drive s last backup, overwriting the previous. That implies some risk of drive failure during the time the overwrite is happening. Alternatively, you could write an incremental and then use dar to merge it into the previous incremental, creating a new one. This implies some degree of extra space needed (maybe on a different filesystem) while doing this. With git-annex, you would use drop/dropunused as I demonstrated in part 2. The winner for goal 2 is dar. The gap is biggest with optical discs and more narrow with hard drives, thanks to git-annex s different options for updates. Still, I would be more confident I got it right with dar. Goal 3: Greatest chance of successful restore in the distant future If you use git-annex like I suggested in part 2, you will have a set of discs or drives that contain a folder structure with plain files in them. These files can be opened without any additional tools at all. For sheer ability to get at raw data, git-annex has the edge. When you talk about getting a consistent full restore without multiple copies of renamed files or deleted files coming back then you are going to need to use git-annex to do that. Both git-annex and dar provide binaries. Dar provides a win64 version on its Sourceforge page. On the author s releases site, you can find the win64 version in addition to a statically-linked x86_64 version for Linux. The git-annex install page mostly directs you to package managers for your distribution, but the downloads page also lists builds for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. The Linux version is dynamic, but ships most of its .so files alongside. The Windows version requires cygwin.dll, and all versions require you to also install git itself. Both tools are in package managers for Mac OS X, Debian, FreeBSD, and so forth. Let s just say that you are likely to be able to run either one on a future Windows or Linux system. There are also GUI frontends for dar, such as DARGUI and gdar. This can increase the chances of a future person being able to use the software easily. git-annex has the assistant, which is based on a different use case and probably not directly helpful here. When it comes to doing the actual restore process using software, dar provides the easier process here. For dealing with media errors and the like, dar can integrate with par2. While technically you could use par2 against the files git-annex writes, that s more cumbersome to manage to the point that it is likely not to be done. Both tools can deal reasonably with missing media entirely. I m going to give the edge on this one to git-annex; while dar does provide the easier restore and superior tools for recovering from media errors, the ability to access raw data as plain files without any tools at all is quite compelling. I believe it is the most critical advantage git-annex has, and it s a big one. Goal 4: Support high-fidelity partial and full restores Both tools make it possible to do a full restore reflecting deletions, additions, and so forth. Dar, as noted, is easier for this, but it is possible with git-annex. So, both can achieve a consistent restore. Part of this goal deals with fidelity of the restore: preserving timestamps, hard and symbolic links, ownership, permissions, etc. Of these, timestamps are the most important for me. git-annex can t do any of that. dar does all of it. Some of this can be worked around using mtree as I documented in part 2. However, that implies a need to also provide mtree on the discs for future users, and I m not sure mtree really exists for Windows. It also cuts against the argument that git-annex discs can be used without any tools. It is true, they can, but all you will get is filename and content; no accurate date. Timestamps are often highly relevant for everything from photos to finding an elusive document or record. Winner: dar. Goal 5: Supporting backup strategies with redundancy My main goal here is to have two separate backup sets: one that is offsite, and one that is onsite. Depending on the strategy and media, they might just always stay that way, or periodically rotate. For instance, with optical discs, you might just burn two copies of every disc and store one at each place. For hard drives, since you will be updating the content of them, you might swap them periodically. This is possible with both tools. With both tools, if using the optical disc scheme I laid out, you can just burn two identical copies of each disc. With the hard drive case, with dar, you can keep two directories of isolated catalogs, one for each drive set. A little identifier file on each drive will let you know which set to use. git-annex can track locations itself. As I demonstrated in part 2, you can make each drive its own repo, add all drives from a given drive set to a git-annex group. When initializing a drive, you tell git-annex what group it s a prt of. From then on, git-annex knows what content is in each group and will add whatever a given drive s group needs to that drive. It s possible to do this with both, but the winner here is git-annex. Goal 6: Efficient use of storage Here are situations in which one or the other will be more efficient:

• Lots of small files: dar, due to reduced filesystem overhead
• Compressible data: dar (git-annex doesn t support compression)
• Renamed files: git-annex (it will detect the sha256 match and avoid storing a duplicate copy)
• Identical files: git-annex, unless they are hardlinked already (again, detects the sha256 match)
• Small modifications to files (eg, ID3 tags on MP3s, EXIF data on photos, etc): dar (it supports rsync-style binary deltas)

The winner depends on your particular situation. Other notes While not part of the goals above, dar is capable of using tapes directly. While not as common, they are often used in communities of people that archive lots of data. Conclusions Overall, dar is the winner for me. It is simpler in most areas, easier to get correct, and scales very well. git-annex does, however, have some quite compelling points. Being able to access files as plain files is huge, and its location tracking is nicer than dar s, even when using dar_manager. Both tools are excellent and I recommend them both and for more than the particular scenario shown here. Both have fantastic and responsive authors.

A personal reflection on how I moved from my Debian home to find two new homes with Trisquel and Guix for my own ethical computing, and while doing so settled my dilemma about further Debian contributions. Debian s contributions to the free software community has been tremendous. Debian was one of the early distributions in the 1990 s that combined the GNU tools (compiler, linker, shell, editor, and a set of Unix tools) with the Linux kernel and published a free software operating system. Back then there were little guidance on how to publish free software binaries, let alone entire operating systems. There was a lack of established community processes and conflict resolution mechanisms, and lack of guiding principles to motivate the work. The community building efforts that came about in parallel with the technical work has resulted in a steady flow of releases over the years. From the work of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) during the 1980 s and early 1990 s, there was at the time already an established definition of free software. Inspired by free software definition, and a belief that a social contract helps to build a community and resolve conflicts, Debian s social contract (DSC) with the free software community was published in 1997. The DSC included the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG), which directly led to the Open Source Definition.

One of my earlier Slackware install disk sets, kept for nostalgic reasons.

I was introduced to GNU/Linux through Slackware in the early 1990 s (oh boy those nights calculating XFree86 modeline s and debugging sendmail.cf) and primarily used RedHat Linux during ca 1995-2003. I switched to Debian during the Woody release cycles, when the original RedHat Linux was abandoned and Fedora launched. It was Debian s explicit community processes and infrastructure that attracted me. The slow nature of community processes also kept me using RedHat for so long: centralized and dogmatic decision processes often produce quick and effective outcomes, and in my opinion RedHat Linux was technically better than Debian ca 1995-2003. However the RedHat model was not sustainable, and resulted in the RedHat vs Fedora split. Debian catched up, and reached technical stability once its community processes had been grounded. I started participating in the Debian community around late 2006. My interpretation of Debian s social contract is that Debian should be a distribution of works licensed 100% under a free license. The Debian community has always been inclusive towards non-free software, creating the contrib/non-free section and permitting use of the bug tracker to help resolve issues with non-free works. This is all explained in the social contract. There has always been a clear boundary between free and non-free work, and there has been a commitment that the Debian system itself would be 100% free. The concern that RedHat Linux was not 100% free software was not critical to me at the time: I primarily (and happily) ran GNU tools on Solaris, IRIX, AIX, OS/2, Windows etc. Running GNU tools on RedHat Linux was an improvement, and I hadn t realized it was possible to get rid of all non-free software on my own primary machine. Debian realized that goal for me. I ve been a believer in that model ever since. I can use Solaris, macOS, Android etc knowing that I have the option of using a 100% free Debian. While the inclusive approach towards non-free software invite and deserve criticism (some argue that being inclusive to non-inclusive behavior is a bad idea), I believe that Debian s approach was a successful survival technique: by being inclusive to and a compromise between free and non-free communities, Debian has been able to stay relevant and contribute to both environments. If Debian had not served and contributed to the free community, I believe free software people would have stopped contributing. If Debian had rejected non-free works completely, I don t think the successful Ubuntu distribution would have been based on Debian. I wrote the majority of the text above back in September 2022, intending to post it as a way to argue for my proposal to maintain the status quo within Debian. I didn t post it because I felt I was saying the obvious, and that the obvious do not need to be repeated, and the rest of the post was just me going down memory lane. The Debian project has been a sustainable producer of a 100% free OS up until Debian 11 bullseye. In the resolution on non-free firmware the community decided to leave the model that had resulted in a 100% free Debian for so long. The goal of Debian is no longer to publish a 100% free operating system, instead this was added: The Debian official media may include firmware . Indeed the Debian 12 bookworm release has confirmed that this would not only be an optional possibility. The Debian community could have published a 100% free Debian, in parallel with the non-free Debian, and still be consistent with their newly adopted policy, but chose not to. The result is that Debian s policies are not consistent with their actions. It doesn t make sense to claim that Debian is 100% free when the Debian installer contains non-free software. Actions speaks louder than words, so I m left reading the policies as well-intended prose that is no longer used for guidance, but for the peace of mind for people living in ivory towers. And to attract funding, I suppose. So how to deal with this, on a personal level? I did not have an answer to that back in October 2022 after the vote. It wasn t clear to me that I would ever want to contribute to Debian under the new social contract that promoted non-free software. I went on vacation from any Debian work. Meanwhile Debian 12 bookworm was released, confirming my fears. I kept coming back to this text, and my only take-away was that it would be unethical for me to use Debian on my machines. Letting actions speak for themselves, I switched to PureOS on my main laptop during October, barely noticing any difference since it is based on Debian 11 bullseye. Back in December, I bought a new laptop and tried Trisquel and Guix on it, as they promise a migration path towards ppc64el that PureOS do not. While I pondered how to approach my modest Debian contributions, I set out to learn Trisquel and gained trust in it. I migrated one Debian machine after another to Trisquel, and started to use Guix on others. Migration was easy because Trisquel is based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian. Using Guix has its challenges, but I enjoy its coherant documented environment. All of my essential self-hosted servers (VM hosts, DNS, e-mail, WWW, Nextcloud, CI/CD builders, backup etc) uses Trisquel or Guix now. I ve migrated many GitLab CI/CD rules to use Trisquel instead of Debian, to have a more ethical computing base for software development and deployment. I wish there were official Guix docker images around. Time has passed, and when I now think about any Debian contributions, I m a little less muddled by my disappointment of the exclusion of a 100% free Debian. I realize that today I can use Debian in the same way that I use macOS, Android, RHEL or Ubuntu. And what prevents me from contributing to free software on those platforms? So I will make the occasional Debian contribution again, knowing that it will also indirectly improve Trisquel. To avoid having to install Debian, I need a development environment in Trisquel that allows me to build Debian packages. I have found a recipe for doing this: # System commands:
sudo apt-get install debhelper git-buildpackage debian-archive-keyring
sudo wget -O /usr/share/debootstrap/scripts/debian-common https://sources.debian.org/data/main/d/debootstrap/1.0.128%2Bnmu2/scripts/debian-common
sudo wget -O /usr/share/debootstrap/scripts/sid https://sources.debian.org/data/main/d/debootstrap/1.0.128%2Bnmu2/scripts/sid
# Run once to create build image:
DIST=sid git-pbuilder create --mirror http://deb.debian.org/debian/ --debootstrapopts "--exclude=usr-is-merged" --basepath /var/cache/pbuilder/base-sid.cow
# Run in a directory with debian/ to build a package:
gbp buildpackage --git-pbuilder --git-dist=sid How to sustainably deliver a 100% free software binary distributions seems like an open question, and the challenges are not all that different compared to the 1990 s or early 2000 s. I m hoping Debian will come back to provide a 100% free platform, but my fear is that Debian will compromise even further on the free software ideals rather than the opposite. With similar arguments that were used to add the non-free firmware, Debian could compromise the free software spirit of the Linux boot process (e.g., non-free boot images signed by Debian) and media handling (e.g., web browsers and DRM), as Debian have already done with appstore-like functionality for non-free software (Python pip). To learn about other freedom issues in Debian packaging, browsing Trisquel s helper scripts may enlight you. Debian s setback and the recent setback for RHEL-derived distributions are sad, and it will be a challenge for these communities to find internally consistent coherency going forward. I wish them the best of luck, as Debian and RHEL are important for the wider free software eco-system. Let s see how the community around Trisquel, Guix and the other FSDG-distributions evolve in the future. The situation for free software today appears better than it was years ago regardless of Debian and RHEL s setbacks though, which is important to remember! I don t recall being able install a 100% free OS on a modern laptop and modern server as easily as I am able to do today. Happy Hacking! Addendum 22 July 2023: The original title of this post was Coping with non-free Debian, and there was a thread about it that included feedback on the title. I do agree that my initial title was confrontational, and I ve changed it to the more specific Coping with non-free software in Debian. I do appreciate all the fine free software that goes into Debian, and hope that this will continue and improve, although I have doubts given the opinions expressed by the majority of developers. For the philosophically inclined, it is interesting to think about what it means to say that a compilation of software is freely licensed. At what point does a compilation of software deserve the labels free vs non-free? Windows probably contains some software that is published as free software, let s say Windows is 1% free. Apple authors a lot of free software (as a tangent, Apple probably produce more free software than what Debian as an organization produces), and let s say macOS contains 20% free software. Solaris (or some still maintained derivative like OpenIndiana) is mostly freely licensed these days, isn t it? Let s say it is 80% free. Ubuntu and RHEL pushes that closer to let s say 95% free software. Debian used to be 100% but is now slightly less at maybe 99%. Trisquel and Guix are at 100%. At what point is it reasonable to call a compilation free? Does Debian deserve to be called freely licensed? Does macOS? Is it even possible to use these labels for compilations in any meaningful way? All numbers just taken from thin air. It isn t even clear how this can be measured (binary bytes? lines of code? CPU cycles? etc). The caveat about license review mistakes applies. I ignore Debian s own claims that Debian is 100% free software, which I believe is inconsistent and no longer true under any reasonable objective analysis. It was not true before the firmware vote since Debian ships with non-free blobs in the Linux kernel for example.

I use a LUKS-encrypted USB stick to store my GPG and SSH keys, which acts as a backup and portable key setup when working on different laptops. One inconvenience with LUKS-encrypted USB sticks is that you need to enter the password every time you want to mount the device, either through a Window Manager like KDE or using the cryptsetup luksOpen command. Fortunately, many laptops nowadays come equipped with TPM2 modules, which can be utilized to automatically decrypt the device and subsequently mount it. In this post, we'll explore the usage of systemd-cryptenroll for this purpose, along with udev rules and a set of scripts to automate the mounting of the encrypted USB. First, ensure that your device has a TPM2 module. You can run the following command to check: The output should resemble the following: You can also use the systemd-cryptenroll command to check for the availability of a TPM2 device on your laptop: The output will be something like following: Next, ensure that you have connected your encrypted USB device. Note that systemd-cryptenroll only works with LUKS2 and not LUKS1. If your device is LUKS1-encrypted, you may encounter an error while enrolling the device, complaining about the LUKS2 superblock not found. To determine if your device uses a LUKS1 header or LUKS2, use the cryptsetup luksDump <device> command. If it is LUKS1, the header will begin with: Converting from LUKS1 to LUKS2 is a simple process, but for safety, ensure that you backup the header using the cryptsetup luksHeaderBackup command. Once backed up, use the following command to convert the header to LUKS2: After conversion, the header will look like this: The next step is to enroll the new LUKS key for the encrypted device using systemd-cryptenroll. Run the following command: This command will prompt you to provide the existing key to unseal the device. It will then add a new random key to the volume, allowing it to be unlocked in addition to the existing keys. Additionally, it will bind this new key to PCRs 0 and 7, representing the system firmware and Secure Boot state. If there is only one TPM device on the system, you can use --tpm2-device=auto to automatically select the device. To confirm that the new key has been enrolled, you can dump the LUKS configuration and look for a systemd-tpm2 token entry, as well as an additional entry in the Keyslots section. To test the setup, you can use the /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-cryptsetup command. Additionally, you can check if the device is unsealed by using lsblk: The lsblk command should display the unsealed and mounted device, like this:

The Rcpp Core Team is delighted to announce that the newest release 1.0.11 of the Rcpp package arrived on CRAN and in Debian earlier today. Windows and macOS builds should appear at CRAN in the next few days, as will builds in different Linux distribution and of course at r2u. The release was finalized three days ago, but given the widespread use and extended reverse dependencies at CRAN it usually takes a few days to be processed. This release continues with the six-months January-July cycle started with release 1.0.5 in July 2020. As a reminder, we do of course make interim snapshot dev or rc releases available via the Rcpp drat repo and strongly encourage their use and testing I run my systems with these versions which tend to work just as well, and are also fully tested against all reverse-dependencies. Rcpp has long established itself as the most popular way of enhancing R with C or C++ code. Right now, 2720 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further, along with 251 in BioConductor. On CRAN, 13.7% of all packages depend (directly) on Rcpp, and 59.6% of all compiled packages do. From the cloud mirror of CRAN (which is but a subset of all CRAN downloads), Rcpp has been downloaded 72.5 million times. The two published papers (also included in the package as preprint vignettes) have, respectively, 1678 (JSS, 2011) and 259 (TAS, 2018) citations, while the the book (Springer useR!, 2013) has another 588. This release is incremental as usual, generally preserving existing capabilities faithfully while smoothing our corners and / or extending slightly, sometimes in response to changing and tightened demands from CRAN or R standards. The full list below details all changes, their respective PRs and, if applicable, issue tickets. Big thanks from all of us to all contributors!

Changes in Rcpp version 1.0.11 (2023-07-03)

• Changes in Rcpp API:
  • Rcpp:::CxxFlags() now quotes only non-standard include path on linux (Lukasz in #1243 closing #1242).
  • Two unit tests no longer accidentally bark on stdout (Dirk and I aki in #1245).
  • Compilation under C++20 using clang++ and its standard library is enabled (Dirk in #1248 closing #1244).
  • Use backticks in a generated .Call() statement in RcppExports.R (Dirk #1256 closing #1255).
  • Switch to system2() to capture standard error messages in error cases (I aki in #1259 and #1261 fixing #1257).
• Changes in Rcpp Documentation:
  • The CITATION file format has been updated (Dirk in #1250 fixing #1249).
• Changes in Rcpp Deployment:
  • A test for qnorm now uses the more accurate value from R 4.3.0 (Dirk in #1252 and #1260 fixing #1251).
  • Skip tests with path issues on Windows (I aki in #1258).
  • Container deployment in continuous integrations was improved. (I aki and Dirk in #1264, Dirk in #1269).
  • Several files receives minor edits to please R CMD check from r-devel (Dirk in #1267).

Thanks to my CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page. Bugs reports are welcome at the GitHub issue tracker as well (where one can also search among open or closed issues); questions are also welcome under rcpp tag at StackOverflow which also allows searching among the (currently) 2994 previous questions. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

From May 25th to 27th, Bras lia hosted the MiniDebConf 2023. This gathering, composed of various activities such as talks, workshops, sprints, BSP (Bug Squashing Party), key signing, social events, and hacking, aimed to bring the community together and celebrate the world's largest Free Software project: Debian. The MiniDebConf Bras lia 2023 was a success thanks to the participation of everyone, regardless of their level of knowledge about Debian. We valued the presence of both beginners who are getting familiar with the system and official project developers. The spirit of inclusion and collaboration was present throughout the event. MiniDebConfs are local meetings organized by members of the Debian Project, aiming to achieve similar goals as DebConf but on a regional scale. Throughout the year, events like this occur in different parts of the world, strengthening the Debian community. Activities The MiniDebConf program was intense and diverse. On May 25th and 26th (Thursday and Friday), we had talks, discussions, workshops, and many hands-on activities. On the 27th (Saturday), the Hacking Day took place, which was a special moment for Debian contributors to come together and work collaboratively on various aspects of the project. This was the Brazilian version of Debcamp, a tradition preceding DebConf. On this day, we prioritized practical activities such as software packaging, translations, key signing, install fest, and the Bug Squashing Party.

Edition numbers The event numbers are impressive and demonstrate the community's involvement with Debian. We had 236 registered participants, 20 submitted talks, 14 volunteers, and 125 check-ins. Furthermore, in the hands-on activities, we achieved significant results, including 7 new installations of Debian GNU/Linux, the update of 18 packages in the official Debian project repository by participants, and the inclusion of 7 new contributors to the translation team. We also highlight the remote participation of the community through live streams. The analytics data reveals that our website received a total of 7,058 views, with 2,079 views on the homepage (which featured our sponsors' logos), 3,042 views on the program page, and 104 views on the sponsors' page. We recorded 922 unique users during the event. On YouTube, the live stream reached 311 views, with 56 likes and a peak of 20 concurrent views. There were an incredible 85.1 hours of watch time, and our channel gained 30 new subscribers. All this engagement and interest from the community further strengthen MiniDebConf. Photos and videos To relive the best moments of the event, we have photos and recordings available. Photos can be accessed at: https://deb.li/pbsb2023. Video recordings of the talks are available at the following link: https://deb.li/vbsb2023. To stay updated and connect with the Debian Bras lia community, follow us on our social media channels:

• Telegram: https://t.me/debianbrasilia
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/debianbrasiliaoficial
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/DebianBrasilia

Thanks We would like to express our deep gratitude to all the participants, organizers, sponsors, and supporters who contributed to the success of MiniDebConf Bras lia 2023. In particular, we extend our thanks to our Gold sponsors: 2024. Pencillabs, Globo, Policorp, and Toradex Brasil, and our Silver sponsor, 4-Linux. We also thank Finatec and the Instituto para Conserva o de Tecnologias Livres (ICTL) for their support. MiniDebConf Bras lia 2023 was a milestone for the Debian community, demonstrating the power of collaboration and Free Software. We hope that everyone enjoyed this enriching gathering and will continue to actively participate in future Debian Project initiatives. Together, we can make a difference!

Review: Semiosis, by Sue Burke

Series:	Semiosis #1
Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	February 2018
ISBN:	0-7653-9137-6
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	333

Semiosis is a first-contact science fiction novel and the first half of a duology. It was Sue Burke's first novel. In the 2060s, with the Earth plagued by environmental issues, a group of utopians decided to found a colony on another planet. Their goal is to live in harmony with an unspoiled nature. They wrote a suitably high-minded founding document, the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pax, and set out in cold sleep on an interstellar voyage. 158 years later, they awoke in orbit around a planet with a highly-developed ecology, which they named Pax. Two pods and several colonists were lost on landing, but the rest remained determined to follow through with their plan. Not that they had many alternatives. Pax does not have cities or technological mammalian life, just as they hoped. It does, however, have intelligent life. This novel struggled to win me over for reasons that aren't the fault of Burke's writing. The first is that it is divided into seven parts, each telling the story of a different generation. Intellectually, I like this technique for telling an anthropological story that follows a human society over time. But emotionally, I am a character reader first and foremost, and I struggle with books where I can't follow the same character throughout. It makes the novel feel more like a fix-up of short stories, and I'm not much of a short story reader. Second, this is one of those stories where a human colony loses access to its technology and falls back to a primitive lifestyle. This is a concept I find viscerally unpleasant and very difficult to read about. I don't mind reading stories that start at the lower technological level and rediscover lost technology, but the process of going backwards, losing knowledge, surrounded by breaking technology that can never be repaired, is disturbing at a level that throws me out of the story. It doesn't help that the original colonists chose to embrace that reversion. Some of this wasn't intentional some vital equipment was destroyed when they landed but a lot of it was the plan from the start. They are the type of fanatics who embrace a one-way trip and cannibalizing the equipment used to make it in order to show their devotion to the cause. I spent the first part of the book thinking the founding colonists were unbelievably foolish, but then they started enforcing an even more restrictive way of life on their children and that tipped me over into considering them immoral. This was the sort of political movement that purged all religion and political philosophy other than their one true way so that they could raise "uncorrupted" children. Burke does recognize how deeply abusive this is. The second part of the book, which focuses on the children of the initial colonists, was both my favorite section and had my favorite protagonist, precisely because someone put words to the criticisms that I'd been thinking since the start of the book. The book started off on a bad foot with me, but if it had kept up the momentum of political revolution and rethinking provided by the second part, it might have won me over. That leads to the third problem, though, which is the first contact part of the story. (If you've heard anything about this series, you probably know what the alien intelligence is, and even if not you can probably guess, but I'll avoid spoilers anyway.) This is another case where the idea is great, but I often don't get along with it as a reader. I'm a starships and AIs and space habitats sort of SF reader by preference and tend to struggle with biological SF, even though I think it's great more of it is being written. In this case, mind-altering chemicals enter the picture early in the story, and while this makes perfect sense given the world-building, this is another one of my visceral dislikes. A closely related problem is that the primary alien character is, by human standards, a narcissistic asshole. This is for very good story and world-building reasons. I bought the explanation that Burke offers, I like the way this shows how there's no reason to believe humans have a superior form of intelligence, and I think Burke's speculations on the nature of that alien intelligence are fascinating. There are a lot of good reasons to think that alien morality would be wildly different from human morality. But, well, I'm still a human reading this book and I detested the alien, which is kind of a problem given how significant of a character it is. That's a lot baggage for a story to overcome. It says something about how well-thought-out the world-building is that it kept my attention anyway. Burke uses the generational structure very effectively. Events, preferences, or even whims early in the novel turn into rituals or traditions. Early characters take on outsized roles in history. The humans stick with the rather absurd constitution of Pax, but do so in a way that feels true to how humans reinterpret and stretch and layer meaning on top of wholly inadequate documents written in complete ignorance of the challenges that later generations will encounter. I would have been happier without the misery and sickness and messy physicality of this abusive colonization project, but watching generations of humans patch together a mostly functioning society was intellectually satisfying. The alien interactions were also solid, with the caveat that it's probably impossible to avoid a lot of anthropomorphizing. If I were going to sum up the theme of the novel in a sentence, it's that even humans who think they want to live in harmony with nature are carrying more arrogance about what that harmony would look like than they realize. In most respects the human colonists stumbled across the best-case scenario for them on this world, and it was still harder than anything they had imagined. Unfortunately, I thought the tail end of the book had the weakest plot. It fell back on a story that could have happened in a lot of first-contact novels, rather than the highly original negotiation over ecological niches that happened in the first half of the book. Out of eight viewpoint characters in this book, I only liked one of them (Sylvia). Tatiana and Lucille were okay, and I might have warmed to them if they'd had more time in the spotlight, but I felt like they kept making bad decisions. That's the main reason why I can't really recommend it; I read for characters, I didn't really like the characters, and it's hard for a book to recover from that. It made the story feel chilly and distant, more of an intellectual exercise than the sort of engrossing emotional experience I prefer. But, that said, this is solid SF speculation. If your preferred balance of ideas and characters is tilted more towards ideas than mine, and particularly if you like interesting aliens and don't mind the loss of technology setting, this may well be to your liking. Even with all of my complaints, I'm curious enough about the world that I am tempted to read the sequel, since its plot appears to involve more of the kind of SF elements I like. Followed by Interference. Content warning: Rape, and a whole lot of illness and death. Rating: 6 out of 10

We are happy to announce that Netplan 0.106.1 is available for download on Ubuntu Mantic Minotaur and Debian testing. This release includes some improvements in our documentation and CI infrastructure and a number of bug fixes.

What s new in Netplan 0.106.1?

Documentation

• New Netplan tutorial. A tutorial for beginners on how to get started with Netplan was included in our main documentation. It s intended to help newcomers to get familiar with Netplan and guide the reader through the basics to start using it. The new tutorial can be found in this link https://netplan.readthedocs.io/en/0.106.1/tutorial/
• Netplan How-tos. The how-tos section was restructured and expanded with more use cases. The how-tos can be found in this link https://netplan.readthedocs.io/en/0.106.1/howto/
• Manual pages. All Netplan subcommands now have their own man page. The online version of the man pages can be found in this link https://netplan.readthedocs.io/en/0.106.1/cli/
• Desktop integration how-to. In Ubuntu Mantic (23.10), Netplan and Network Manager work in tandem to generate network configuration. This integration is described in more details here https://netplan.readthedocs.io/en/0.106.1/netplan-everywhere/

Infrastructure

• canonical/setup-lxd GitHub action. The autopkgtest environment creation was standardized to use Canonical s setup-lxd action.
• Snapd integrations tests with spread. A new test set for the Snapd integration with Netplan was introduced using the spread tool.
• DBus. A number of DBus integration tests were added to the Debian package.

New features

• Keyfile parser improvements. Our Network Manager keyfile parser (the capability of loading Network Manager configuration to Netplan YAML) was expanded to support all the types of tunnels supported by Netplan.

Misc

• Ubuntu s Code of Conduct 2.0 was added to the code repository.
• We added a new bash autocompletion script with all the Netplan s subcommands.
• The new release package was synchronized with Debian.

Bug fixes

• Keyfile parser. This release contains a couple of important fixes for the NetworkManager integration stability: 1) adding WPA enterprise connections is now working fine and new test cases were added to the package; 2) a WireGuard peer with allowed IPs that don t include the network prefix are now accepted.
• Netplan parser. A number of memory leaks and stability issues were fixed.
• DBus. An issue related to how directory paths are built in the Netplan DBus service was causing issues in the Snapd integration and was fixed.

For the complete list of changes please consult the debian/changelog file in https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/netplan.io/+changelog

As some of you may know, the Debian project released v12, bookworm to stable on the 10th of this month. I haven t had a reason to try it yet, but I m downloading it now. My first thought is that it s much larger than I expected. The normal sized version used to fit on a CD-ROM disk, so around 650MB. The netinst has until now been even smaller, with the most recent versions being about 256MB if I recall correctly. The netinst, now with proprietary firmware, weighs in over 700MB:

2023-06-18 20:29:29 (6.85 MB/s) -  debian-12.0.0-amd64-netinst.iso  saved [773849088/773849088]

It looks like 738.0MB! The system I m installing is for a piece of software I m crafting for use by Remote Online Notaries. I m building a disk image for the notary s side of the connection. The notary will have a yubikey-style PGP card which they will use as a digital seal similar to the one required to perform notarial acts for the state of washington. I ll leave some ramblings on the blog as I go through the process of implementation. Here s a link to whet your appetite! https://app.leg.wa.gov/wac/default.aspx?cite=308-30-020

This is the third post in a series about data archiving to removable media (optical discs and hard drives). In the first, I explained the difference between backing up and archiving, established goals for the project, and said I d evaluate git-annex and dar. The second post evaluated git-annex, and now it s time to look at dar. The series will conclude with a post comparing git-annex with dar. What is dar? I could open with the same thing I did with git-annex, just changing the name of the program: [dar] is a fantastic and versatile program that does well, it s one of those things that can do so much that it s a bit hard to describe. It is, fundamentally, an archiver like tar or zip (makes one file representing a bunch of other files), but it goes far beyond that. dar s homepage lays out a comprehensive list of features, which I will try to summarize here.

• Dar itself is both a library (with C++ and Python bindings) for interacting with data, and a CLI tool (dar itself).
• Alongside this, there is an ecosystem of tools around dar, including GUIs for multiple platforms, backup scripts, and FUSE implementations.
• Dar is like tar in that it can read and write files sequentially if desired. Dar archives can be streamed, just like tar archives. But dar takes it further; if you have dar_slave on the remote end, random access is possible over ssh (dramatically speeding up certain operations).
• Dar is like zip in that a dar archive contains a central directory (called a catalog) which permits random access to the contents of an archive. In other words, you don t have to read an entire archive to extract just one file (assuming the archive is on disk or something that itself permits random access). Also, dar can compress each file individually, rather than the tar approach of compressing the archive as a whole. This increases archive performance (dar knows not to try to compress already-compressed data), boosts restore resilience (corruption of one part of an archive doesn t invalidate the entire rest of it), and boosts restore performance (permitting random access).
• Dar can split an archive into multiple pieces called slices, and it can even split member files among the slices. The catalog contains information allowing you to know which slice(s) a given file is saved in.
• The catalog can also be saved off in a file of its own (dar calls this an isolated catalog ). Isolated catalogs record just metadata about files archived.
• dar_manager can assemble a database by reading archives or isolated catalogs, letting you know where files are stored and facilitating restores using the minimal number of discs.
• Dar supports differential/incremental backups, which record changes since the last backup. These backups record not just additions, but also deletions. dar can optionally use rsync-style binary deltas to minimize the space needed to record changes. Dar does not suffer from GNU tar s data loss bug with incrementals.
• Dar can slice and dice archives like Perl does strings. The usage notes page shows how you can merge archives, create decremental archives (where the full backup always reflects the current state of the system, and incrementals go backwards in time instead of forwards), etc. You can change the compression algorithm on an existing archive, re-slice it, etc.
• Dar is extremely careful about preserving all metadata: hard links, sparse files, symlinks, timestamps (including subsecond resolution), EAs, POSIX ACLs, resource forks on Mac, detecting files being modified while being read, etc. It makes a nice way to copy directories, sort of similar to rsync -avxHAXS.

So to tie this together for this project, I will set up a 400MB slice size (to mimic what I did with git-annex), and see how dar saves the data and restores it. Isolated cataloges aren t strictly necessary for this, but by using them (and/or dar_manager), we can build up a database of files and locations and thus directly compare dar to git-annex location tracking. Walkthrough: Creating the first archive As with the git-annex walkthrough, I ll set some variables to make it easy to remember:

• $SOURCEDIR is the directory being backed up
• $DRIVE is the directory for backups to be stored in. Since dar can split by a specified size, I don t need to make separate filesystems to simulate the separate drive experience as I did with git-annex.
• $CATDIR will hold isolated catalogs
• $DARDB points to the dar_manager database

OK, we can run the backup immediately. No special setup is needed. dar supports both short-form (single-character) parameters and long-form ones. Since the parameters probably aren t familiar to everyone, I will use the long-form ones in these examples. Here s how we create our initial full backup. I ll explain the parameters below:
$ dar \
--verbose \
--create $DRIVE/bak1 \
--on-fly-isolate $CATDIR/bak1 \
--slice 400M \
--min-digits 2 \
--pause \
--fs-root $SOURCEDIR
Let s look at each of these parameters:

• verbose does what you expect
• create selects the operation mode (like tar -c) and gives the archive basename
• on-fly-isolate says to write an isolated catalog as well, right while making the archive. You can always create an isolated catalog later (which is fast, since it only needs to read the last bits of the last slice) but it s more convenient to do it now, so we do. We give the base name for the isolated catalog also.
• slice 400M says to split the archive, and create slices 400MB each.
• min-digits 2 pertains to naming files. Without it, dar would create files named bak1.dar.1, bak1.dar.2, bak1.dar.10, etc. dar works fine with this, but it can be annoying in ls. This is just convenience for humans.
• pause tells dar to pause after writing each slice. This would let us swap drives, burn discs, etc. I do this for demonstration purposes only; it isn t strictly necessary in this situation. For a more powerful option, dar also supports execute, which can run commands after each slice.
• fs-root gives the path to actually back up.

This same command could have been written with short options as:
$ dar -v -c $DRIVE/bak1 -@ $CATDIR/bak1 -s 400M -9 2 -p -R $SOURCEDIR
What does it look like while running? Here s an excerpt:
...
Adding file to archive: /acrypt/no-backup/jgoerzen/testdata/[redacted]
Finished writing to file 1, ready to continue ? [return = YES Esc = NO]
...
Writing down archive contents...
Closing the escape layer...
Writing down the first archive terminator...
Writing down archive trailer...
Writing down the second archive terminator...
Closing archive low layer...
Archive is closed. --------------------------------------------
581 inode(s) saved
including 0 hard link(s) treated
0 inode(s) changed at the moment of the backup and could not be saved properly
0 byte(s) have been wasted in the archive to resave changing files
0 inode(s) with only metadata changed
0 inode(s) not saved (no inode/file change)
0 inode(s) failed to be saved (filesystem error)
0 inode(s) ignored (excluded by filters)
0 inode(s) recorded as deleted from reference backup
--------------------------------------------
Total number of inode(s) considered: 581
--------------------------------------------
EA saved for 0 inode(s)
FSA saved for 581 inode(s)
--------------------------------------------
Making room in memory (releasing memory used by archive of reference)...
Now performing on-fly isolation...
...
That was easy! Let s look at the contents of the backup directory:
$ ls -lh $DRIVE
total 3.7G
-rw-r--r-- 1 jgoerzen jgoerzen 400M Jun 16 19:27 bak1.01.dar
-rw-r--r-- 1 jgoerzen jgoerzen 400M Jun 16 19:27 bak1.02.dar
-rw-r--r-- 1 jgoerzen jgoerzen 400M Jun 16 19:27 bak1.03.dar
-rw-r--r-- 1 jgoerzen jgoerzen 400M Jun 16 19:27 bak1.04.dar
-rw-r--r-- 1 jgoerzen jgoerzen 400M Jun 16 19:28 bak1.05.dar
-rw-r--r-- 1 jgoerzen jgoerzen 400M Jun 16 19:28 bak1.06.dar
-rw-r--r-- 1 jgoerzen jgoerzen 400M Jun 16 19:28 bak1.07.dar
-rw-r--r-- 1 jgoerzen jgoerzen 400M Jun 16 19:28 bak1.08.dar
-rw-r--r-- 1 jgoerzen jgoerzen 400M Jun 16 19:29 bak1.09.dar
-rw-r--r-- 1 jgoerzen jgoerzen 156M Jun 16 19:33 bak1.10.dar
And the isolated catalog:
$ ls -lh $CATDIR
total 37K
-rw-r--r-- 1 jgoerzen jgoerzen 35K Jun 16 19:33 bak1.1.dar
The isolated catalog is stored compressed automatically. Well this was easy. With one command, we archived the entire data set, split into 400MB chunks, and wrote out the catalog data. Walkthrough: Inspecting the saved archive Can dar tell us which slice contains a given file? Sure:
$ dar --list $DRIVE/bak1 --list-format=slicing less
Slice(s) [Data ][D][ EA ][FSA][Compr][S] Permission Filemane
--------+--------------------------------+----------+-----------------------------
...
1 [Saved][ ] [-L-][ 0%][X] -rwxr--r-- [redacted]
1-2 [Saved][ ] [-L-][ 0%][X] -rwxr--r-- [redacted]
2 [Saved][ ] [-L-][ 0%][X] -rwxr--r-- [redacted]
...
This illustrates the transition from slice 1 to slice 2. The first file was stored entirely in slice 1; the second stored partially in slice 1 and partially in slice 2, and third solely in slice 2. We can get other kinds of information as well.
$ dar --list $DRIVE/bak1 less
[Data ][D][ EA ][FSA][Compr][S] Permission User Group Size Date filename
--------------------------------+------------+-------+-------+---------+-------------------------------+------------
[Saved][ ] [-L-][ 0%][X] -rwxr--r-- jgoerzen jgoerzen 24 Mio Mon Mar 5 07:58:09 2018 [redacted]
[Saved][ ] [-L-][ 0%][X] -rwxr--r-- jgoerzen jgoerzen 16 Mio Mon Mar 5 07:58:09 2018 [redacted]
[Saved][ ] [-L-][ 0%][X] -rwxr--r-- jgoerzen jgoerzen 22 Mio Mon Mar 5 07:58:09 2018 [redacted]
These are the same files I was looking at before. Here we see they are 24MB, 16MB, and 22MB in size, and some additional metadata. Even more is available in the XML list format. Walkthrough: updates As with git-annex, I ve made some changes in the source directory: moved a file, added another, and deleted one. Let s create an incremental backup now:
$ dar \
--verbose \
--create $DRIVE/bak2 \
--on-fly-isolate $CATDIR/bak2 \
--ref $CATDIR/bak1 \
--slice 400M \
--min-digits 2 \
--pause \
--fs-root $SOURCEDIR
This command is very similar to the earlier one. Instead of writing an archive and catalog named bak1, we write one named bak2. What s new here is --ref $CATDIR/bak1. That says, make an incremental based on an archive of reference. All that is needed from that archive of reference is the detached catalog. --ref $DRIVE/bak1 would have worked equally well here. Here s what I did to the $SOURCEDIR:

• Renamed a file to file01-unchanged
• Deleted a file
• Copied /bin/cp to a file named cp

Let s see if dar s command output matches this:
...
Adding file to archive: /acrypt/no-backup/jgoerzen/testdata/file01-unchanged
Saving Filesystem Specific Attributes for /acrypt/no-backup/jgoerzen/testdata/file01-unchanged
Adding file to archive: /acrypt/no-backup/jgoerzen/testdata/cp
Saving Filesystem Specific Attributes for /acrypt/no-backup/jgoerzen/testdata/cp
Adding folder to archive: [redacted]
Saving Filesystem Specific Attributes for [redacted]
Adding reference to files that have been destroyed since reference backup...
...
--------------------------------------------
3 inode(s) saved
including 0 hard link(s) treated
0 inode(s) changed at the moment of the backup and could not be saved properly
0 byte(s) have been wasted in the archive to resave changing files
0 inode(s) with only metadata changed
578 inode(s) not saved (no inode/file change)
0 inode(s) failed to be saved (filesystem error)
0 inode(s) ignored (excluded by filters)
2 inode(s) recorded as deleted from reference backup
--------------------------------------------
Total number of inode(s) considered: 583
--------------------------------------------
EA saved for 0 inode(s)
FSA saved for 3 inode(s)
--------------------------------------------
...
Yes, it does. The rename is recorded as a deletion and an addition, since dar doesn t directly track renames. So the rename plus the deletion account for the two deletions. The rename plus the addition of cp count as 2 of the 3 inodes saved; the third is the modified directory from which files were deleted and moved out. Let s see the files that were created:
$ ls -lh $DRIVE/bak2*
-rw-r--r-- 1 jgoerzen jgoerzen 18M Jun 16 19:52 /acrypt/no-backup/jgoerzen/dar-testing/drive/bak2.01.dar
$ ls -lh $CATDIR/bak2*
-rw-r--r-- 1 jgoerzen jgoerzen 22K Jun 16 19:52 /acrypt/no-backup/jgoerzen/dar-testing/cat/bak2.1.dar
What does list look like now?
Slice(s) [Data ][D][ EA ][FSA][Compr][S] Permission Filemane
--------+--------------------------------+----------+-----------------------------
[ ][ ] [---][-----][X] -rwxr--r-- [redacted]
1 [Saved][ ] [-L-][ 0%][X] -rwxr--r-- file01-unchanged
...
[--- REMOVED ENTRY ----][redacted]
[--- REMOVED ENTRY ----][redacted]
Here I show an example of:

1. A file that was not changed from the initial backup. Its presence was simply noted, but because we re doing an incremental, the data wasn t saved.
2. A file that is saved in this incremental, on slice 1.
3. The two deleted files

Walkthrough: dar_manager As we ve seen above, the two archives (or their detached catalog) give us a complete picture of what files were present at the time of the creation of each archive, and what files were stored in a given archive. We can certainly continue working in that way. We can also use dar_manager to build a comprehensive database of these archives, to be able to find what media is necessary to restore each given file. Or, with dar_manager s when parameter, we can restore files as of a particular date. Let s try it out. First, we create our database:
$ dar_manager --create $DARDB
$ dar_manager --base $DARDB --add $DRIVE/bak1
Auto detecting min-digits to be 2
$ dar_manager --base $DARDB --add $DRIVE/bak2
Auto detecting min-digits to be 2
Here we created the database, and added our two catalogs to it. (Again, we could have as easily used $CATDIR/bak1; either the archive or its isolated catalog will work here.) It s important to add the catalogs in order. Let s do some quick experimentation with dar_manager:
$ dar_manager -v --base $DARDB --list
Decompressing and loading database to memory... dar path :
dar options :
database version : 6
compression used : gzip
compression level: 9 archive # path basename
------------+--------------+---------------
1 /acrypt/no-backup/jgoerzen/dar-testing/drive bak1
2 /acrypt/no-backup/jgoerzen/dar-testing/drive bak2 $ dar_manager --base $DARDB --stat
archive # most recent/total data most recent/total EA
--------------+-------------------------+-----------------------
1 580/581 0/0
2 3/3 0/0
The list option shows the correlation between dar_manager archive number (1, 2) with filenames (bak1, bak2). It is coincidence here that 1/bak1 and 2/bak2 correlate; that s not necessarily the case. Most dar_manager commands operate on archive number, while dar commands operate on archive path/basename. Now let s see just what files are saved in archive #2, the incremental:
$ dar_manager --base $DARDB --used 2
[ Saved ][ ] [redacted]
[ Saved ][ ] file01-unchanged
[ Saved ][ ] cp
Now we can also where a file is stored. Here s one that was saved in the full backup and unmodified in the incremental:
$ dar_manager --base $DARDB --file [redacted]
1 Fri Jun 16 19:15:12 2023 saved absent
2 Fri Jun 16 19:15:12 2023 present absent
(The absent at the end refers to extended attributes that the file didn t have) Similarly, for files that were added or removed, they ll be listed only at the appropriate place. Walkthrough: Restoration I m not going to repeat the author s full restoration with dar page, but here are some quick examples. A simple way of doing everything is using incrementals for the whole series. To do that, you d have bak1 be full, bak2 based on bak1, bak3 based on bak2, bak4 based on bak3, etc. To restore from such a series, you have two options:

• Use dar to simply extract each archive in order. It will handle deletions, renames, etc. along the way.
• Use dar_manager with the backup database to do manage the process. It may be somewhat more efficient, as it won t bother to restore files that will later be modified or deleted.

If you get fancy for instance, bak2 is based on bak1, bak3 on bak2, bak4 on bak1 then you would want to use dar_manager to ensure a consistent restore is completed. Either way, the process is nearly identical. Also, I figure, to make things easy, you can save a copy of the entire set of isolated catalogs before you finalize each disc/drive. They re so small, and this would let someone with just the most recent disc build a dar_manager database without having to go through all the other discs. Anyhow, let s do a restore using just dar. I ll make a $RESTOREDIR and do it that way.
$ dar \
--verbose \
--extract $DRIVE/bak1 \
--fs-root $RESTOREDIR \
--no-warn \
--execute "echo Ready for slice %n. Press Enter; read foo"
This execute lets us see how dar works; this is an illustration of the power it has (above pause); it s a snippet interpreted by /bin/sh with %n being one of the dar placeholders. If memory serves, it s not strictly necessary, as dar will prompt you for slices it needs if they re not mounted. Anyhow, you ll see it first reading the last slice, which contains the catalog, then reading from the beginning. Here we go:
Auto detecting min-digits to be 2
Opening archive bak1 ...
Opening the archive using the multi-slice abstraction layer...
Ready for slice 10. Press Enter
...
Loading catalogue into memory...
Locating archive contents...
Reading archive contents...
File ownership will not be restored du to the lack of privilege, you can disable this message by asking not to restore file ownership [return = YES Esc = NO]
Continuing...
Restoring file's data: [redacted]
Restoring file's FSA: [redacted]
Ready for slice 1. Press Enter
...
Ready for slice 2. Press Enter
...
--------------------------------------------
581 inode(s) restored
including 0 hard link(s)
0 inode(s) not restored (not saved in archive)
0 inode(s) not restored (overwriting policy decision)
0 inode(s) ignored (excluded by filters)
0 inode(s) failed to restore (filesystem error)
0 inode(s) deleted
--------------------------------------------
Total number of inode(s) considered: 581
--------------------------------------------
EA restored for 0 inode(s)
FSA restored for 0 inode(s)
--------------------------------------------
The warning is because I m not doing the extraction as root, which limits dar s ability to fully restore ownership data. OK, now the incremental:
$ dar \
--verbose \
--extract $DRIVE/bak2 \
--fs-root $RESTOREDIR \
--no-warn \
--execute "echo Ready for slice %n. Press Enter; read foo"
...
Ready for slice 1. Press Enter
...
Restoring file's data: /acrypt/no-backup/jgoerzen/dar-testing/restore/file01-unchanged
Restoring file's FSA: /acrypt/no-backup/jgoerzen/dar-testing/restore/file01-unchanged
Restoring file's data: /acrypt/no-backup/jgoerzen/dar-testing/restore/cp
Restoring file's FSA: /acrypt/no-backup/jgoerzen/dar-testing/restore/cp
Restoring file's data: /acrypt/no-backup/jgoerzen/dar-testing/restore/[redacted directory]
Removing file (reason is file recorded as removed in archive): [redacted file]
Removing file (reason is file recorded as removed in archive): [redacted file]
This all looks right! Now how about we compare the restore to the original source directory?
$ diff -durN $SOURCEDIR $RESTOREDIR
No changes perfect. We could instead do this restore via a single dar_manager command, though annoyingly, we d have to pass all top-level files/directories to dar_manager restore. But still, it s one command, and basically automates and optimizes the dar restores shown above. Conclusions Dar makes it extremely easy to just Do The Right Thing when making archives. One command makes a backup. It saves things in simple files. You can make an isolated catalog if you want, and it too is saved in a simple file. You can query what is in the files and where. You can restore from all or part of the files. You can simply play the backups forward, in order, to achieve a full and consistent restore. Or you can load data about them into dar_manager for an optimized restore. A bit of scripting will be necessary to make incrementals; finding the most recent backup or catalog. If backup files are named with care for instance, by date then this should be a pretty easy task. I haven t touched on resiliency yet. dar comes with tools for recovering archives that have had portions corrupted or lost. It can also rebuild the catalog if it is corrupted or lost. It adds tape marks (or escape sequences ) to the archive along with the data stream. So every entry in the catalog is actually stored in the archive twice: once alongside the file data, and once at the end in the collected catalog. This allows dar to scan a corrupted file for the tape marks and reconstruct whatever is still intact, even if the catalog is lost. dar also integrates with tools like sha256sum and par2 to simplify archive integrity testing and restoration. This balances against the need to use a tool (dar, optionally with a GUI frontend) to restore files. I ll discuss that more in the next post.

In my recent post about data archiving to removable media, I laid out the difference between backing up and archiving, and also said I d evaluate git-annex and dar. This post evaluates git-annex. The next will look at dar, and then I ll make a comparison post. What is git-annex? git-annex is a fantastic and versatile program that does well, it s one of those things that can do so much that it s a bit hard to describe. Its homepage says:

git-annex allows managing large files with git, without storing the file contents in git. It can sync, backup, and archive your data, offline and online. Checksums and encryption keep your data safe and secure. Bring the power and distributed nature of git to bear on your large files with git-annex.

I think the particularly interesting features of git-annex aren t actually included in that list. Among the features of git-annex that make it shine for this purpose, its location tracking is key. git-annex can know exactly which device has which file at which version at all times. Combined with its preferred content settings, this lets you very easily say things like:

• I want exactly 1 copy of every file to exist within the set #1 of backup drives. Here s a drive in that set; copy to it whatever needs to be copied to satisfy that requirement.
• Now I have another set of backup drives. Periodically I will swap sets offsite. Copy whatever is needed to this drive in the second set, making sure that there is 1 copy of every file within this set as well, regardless of what s in the first set.
• Here s a directory I want to use to track the status of everything else. I don t want any copies at all here.

git-annex can be set to allow a configurable amount of free space to remain on a device, and it will fill it up with whatever copies are necessary up until it hits that limit. Very convenient! git-annex will store files in a folder structure that mirrors the origin folder structure, in plain files just as they were. This maximizes the ability for a future person to access the content, since it is all viewable without any special tool at all. Of course, for things like optical media, git-annex will essentially be creating what amounts to incrementals. To obtain a consistent copy of the original tree, you would still need to use git-annex to process (export) the archives. git-annex challenges In my prior post, I related some challenges with git-annex. The biggest of them quite poor performance of the directory special remote when dealing with many files has been resolved by Joey, git-annex s author! That dramatically improves the git-annex use scenario here! The fixing commit is in the source tree but not yet in a release. git-annex no doubt may still have performance challenges with repositories in the 100,000+-range, but in that order of magnitude it now looks usable. I m not sure about 1,000,000-file repositories (I haven t tested); there is a page about scalability. A few other more minor challenges remain:

• git-annex doesn t really preserve POSIX attributes; for instance, permissions, symlink destinations, and timestamps are all not preserved. Of these, timestamps are the most important for my particular use case.
• If your data set to archive contains Git repositories itself, these will not be included.

I worked around the timestamp issue by using the mtree-netbsd package in Debian. mtree writes out a summary of files and metadata in a tree, and can restore them. To save: mtree -c -R nlink,uid,gid,mode -p /PATH/TO/REPO -X <(echo './.git') > /tmp/spec And, after restoration, the timestamps can be applied with: mtree -t -U -e < /tmp/spec Walkthrough: initial setup To use git-annex in this way, we have to do some setup. My general approach is this:

• There is a source of data that lives outside git-annex. I'll call this $SOURCEDIR.
• I'm going to name the directories holding my data $REPONAME.
• There will be a "coordination" git-annex repo. It will hold metadata only, and no data. This will let us track where things live. I'll call it $METAREPO.
• There will be drives. For this example, I'll call their mountpoints $DRIVE01 and $DRIVE02. For easy demonstration purposes, I used a ZFS dataset with a refquota set (to observe the size handling), but I could have as easily used a LVM volume, btrfs dataset, loopback filesystem, or USB drive. For optical discs, this would be a staging area or a UDF filesystem.

Let's get started! I've set all these shell variables appropriately for this example, and REPONAME to "testdata". We'll begin by setting up the metadata-only tracking repo.
$ REPONAME=testdata
$ mkdir "$METAREPO"
$ cd "$METAREPO"
$ git init
$ git config annex.thin true
There is a sort of complicated topic of how git-annex stores files in a repo, which varies depending on whether the data for the file is present in a given repo, and whether the file is locked or unlocked. Basically, the options I use here cause git-annex to mostly use hard links instead of symlinks or pointer files, for maximum compatibility with non-POSIX filesystems such as NTFS and UDF, which might be used on these devices. thin is part of that. Let's continue:
$ git annex init 'local hub'
init local hub ok
(recording state in git...)
$ git annex wanted . "include=* and exclude=$REPONAME/*"
wanted . ok
(recording state in git...)
In a bit, we are going to import the source data under the directory named $REPONAME (here, testdata). The wanted command says: in this repository (represented by the bare dot), the files we want are matched by the rule that says eveyrthing except what's under $REPONAME. In other words, we don't want to make an unnecessary copy here. Because I expect to use an mtree file as documented above, and it is not under $REPONAME/, it will be included. Let's just add it and tweak some things.
$ touch mtree
$ git annex add mtree
add mtree
ok
(recording state in git...)
$ git annex sync
git-annex sync will change default behavior to operate on --content in a future version of git-annex. Recommend you explicitly use --no-content (or -g) to prepare for that change. (Or you can configure annex.synccontent)
commit
[main (root-commit) 6044742] git-annex in local hub
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
create mode 120000 mtree
ok
$ ls -l
total 9
lrwxrwxrwx 1 jgoerzen jgoerzen 178 Jun 15 22:31 mtree -> .git/annex/objects/pX/ZJ/...
OK! We've added a file, and it got transformed into a symlink. That's the thing I said we were going to avoid, so:
git annex adjust --unlock-present
adjust
Switched to branch 'adjusted/main(unlockpresent)'
ok
$ ls -l
total 1
-rw-r--r-- 2 jgoerzen jgoerzen 0 Jun 15 22:31 mtree
You'll notice it transformed into a hard link (nlinks=2) file. Great! Now let's import the source data. For that, we'll use the directory special remote.
$ git annex initremote source type=directory directory=$SOURCEDIR importtree=yes \
encryption=none
initremote source ok
(recording state in git...)
$ git annex enableremote source directory=$SOURCEDIR
enableremote source ok
(recording state in git...)
$ git config remote.source.annex-readonly true
$ git config annex.securehashesonly true
$ git config annex.genmetadata true
$ git config annex.diskreserve 100M
$ git config remote.source.annex-tracking-branch main:$REPONAME
OK, so here we created a new remote named "source". We enabled it, and set some configuration. Most notably, that last line causes files from "source" to be imported under $REPONAME/ as we wanted earlier. Now we're ready to scan the source.
$ git annex sync
At this point, you'll see git-annex computing a hash for every file in the source directory. I can verify with du that my metadata-only repo only uses 14MB of disk space, while my source is around 4GB. Now we can see what git-annex thinks about file locations:
$ git-annex whereis less
whereis mtree (1 copy)
8aed01c5-da30-46c0-8357-1e8a94f67ed6 -- local hub [here]
ok
whereis testdata/[redacted] (0 copies)
The following untrusted locations may also have copies:
9e48387e-b096-400a-8555-a3caf5b70a64 -- [source]
failed
... many more lines ...
So remember we said we wanted mtree, but nothing under testdata, under this repo? That's exactly what we got. git-annex knows that the files under testdata can be found under the "source" special remote, but aren't in any git-annex repo -- yet. Now we'll start adding them. Walkthrough: removable drives I've set up two 500MB filesystems to represent removable drives. We'll see how git-annex works with them.
$ cd $DRIVE01
$ df -h .
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
acrypt/no-backup/annexdrive01 500M 1.0M 499M 1% /acrypt/no-backup/annexdrive01
$ git clone $METAREPO
Cloning into 'testdata'...
done.
$ cd $REPONAME
$ git config annex.thin true
$ git annex init "test drive #1"
$ git annex adjust --hide-missing --unlock
adjust
Switched to branch 'adjusted/main(hidemissing-unlocked)'
ok
$ git annex sync
OK, that's the initial setup. Now let's enable the source remote and configure it the same way we did before:
$ git annex enableremote source directory=$SOURCEDIR
enableremote source ok
(recording state in git...)
$ git config remote.source.annex-readonly true
$ git config remote.source.annex-tracking-branch main:$REPONAME
$ git config annex.securehashesonly true
$ git config annex.genmetadata true
$ git config annex.diskreserve 100M
Now, we'll add the drive to a group called "driveset01" and configure what we want on it:
$ git annex group . driveset01
$ git annex wanted . '(not copies=driveset01:1)'
What this does is say: first of all, this drive is in a group named driveset01. Then, this drive wants any files for which there isn't already at least one copy in driveset01. Now let's load up some files!
$ git annex sync --content
As the messages fly by from here, you'll see it mentioning that it got mtree, and then various files from "source" -- until, that is, the filesystem had less than 100MB free, at which point it complained of no space for the rest. Exactly like we wanted! Now, we need to teach $METAREPO about $DRIVE01.
$ cd $METAREPO
$ git remote add drive01 $DRIVE01/$REPONAME
$ git annex sync drive01
git-annex sync will change default behavior to operate on --content in a future version of git-annex. Recommend you explicitly use --no-content (or -g) to prepare for that change. (Or you can configure annex.synccontent)
commit
On branch adjusted/main(unlockpresent)
nothing to commit, working tree clean
ok
merge synced/main (Merging into main...)
Updating d1d9e53..817befc
Fast-forward
(Merging into adjusted branch...)
Updating 7ccc20b..861aa60
Fast-forward
ok
pull drive01
remote: Enumerating objects: 214, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (214/214), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (95/95), done.
remote: Total 110 (delta 6), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
Receiving objects: 100% (110/110), 13.01 KiB 1.44 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (6/6), completed with 6 local objects.
From /acrypt/no-backup/annexdrive01/testdata
* [new branch] adjusted/main(hidemissing-unlocked) -> drive01/adjusted/main(hidemissing-unlocked)
* [new branch] adjusted/main(unlockpresent) -> drive01/adjusted/main(unlockpresent)
* [new branch] git-annex -> drive01/git-annex
* [new branch] main -> drive01/main
* [new branch] synced/main -> drive01/synced/main
ok
OK! This step is important, because drive01 and drive02 (which we'll set up shortly) won't necessarily be able to reach each other directly, due to not being plugged in simultaneously. Our $METAREPO, however, will know all about where every file is, so that the "wanted" settings can be correctly resolved. Let's see what things look like now:
$ git annex whereis less
whereis mtree (2 copies)
8aed01c5-da30-46c0-8357-1e8a94f67ed6 -- local hub [here]
b46fc85c-c68e-4093-a66e-19dc99a7d5e7 -- test drive #1 [drive01]
ok
whereis testdata/[redacted] (1 copy)
b46fc85c-c68e-4093-a66e-19dc99a7d5e7 -- test drive #1 [drive01] The following untrusted locations may also have copies:
9e48387e-b096-400a-8555-a3caf5b70a64 -- [source]
ok
If I scroll down a bit, I'll see the files past the 400MB mark that didn't make it onto drive01. Let's add another example drive! Walkthrough: Adding a second drive The steps for $DRIVE02 are the same as we did before, just with drive02 instead of drive01, so I'll omit listing it all a second time. Now look at this excerpt from whereis:
whereis testdata/[redacted] (1 copy)
b46fc85c-c68e-4093-a66e-19dc99a7d5e7 -- test drive #1 [drive01] The following untrusted locations may also have copies:
9e48387e-b096-400a-8555-a3caf5b70a64 -- [source]
ok
whereis testdata/[redacted] (1 copy)
c4540343-e3b5-4148-af46-3f612adda506 -- test drive #2 [drive02] The following untrusted locations may also have copies:
9e48387e-b096-400a-8555-a3caf5b70a64 -- [source]
ok
Look at that! Some files on drive01, some on drive02, some neither place. Perfect! Walkthrough: Updates So I've made some changes in the source directory: moved a file, added another, and deleted one. All of these were copied to drive01 above. How do we handle this? First, we update the metadata repo:
$ cd $METAREPO
$ git annex sync
$ git annex dropunused all
OK, this has scanned $SOURCEDIR and noted changes. Let's see what whereis says:
$ git annex whereis less
...
whereis testdata/cp (0 copies)
The following untrusted locations may also have copies:
9e48387e-b096-400a-8555-a3caf5b70a64 -- [source]
failed
whereis testdata/file01-unchanged (1 copy)
b46fc85c-c68e-4093-a66e-19dc99a7d5e7 -- test drive #1 [drive01] The following untrusted locations may also have copies:
9e48387e-b096-400a-8555-a3caf5b70a64 -- [source]
ok
So this looks right. The file I added was a copy of /bin/cp. I moved another file to one named file01-unchanged. Notice that it realized this was a rename and that the data still exists on drive01. Well, let's update drive01.
$ cd $DRIVE01/$REPONAME
$ git annex sync --content
Looking at the testdata/ directory now, I see that file01-unchanged has been renamed, the deleted file is gone, but cp isn't yet here -- probably due to space issues; as it's new, it's undefined whether it or some other file would fill up free space. Let's work along a few more commands.
$ git annex get --auto
$ git annex drop --auto
$ git annex dropunused all
And now, let's make sure metarepo is updated with its state.
$ cd $METAREPO
$ git annex sync
We could do the same for drive02. This is how we would proceed with every update. Walkthrough: Restoration Now, we have bare files at reasonable locations in drive01 and drive02. But, to generate a consistent restore, we need to be able to actually do an export. Otherwise, we may have files with old names, duplicate files, etc. Let's assume that we lost our source and metadata repos and have to restore from scratch. We'll make a new $RESTOREDIR. We'll begin with drive01 since we used it most recently.
$ mv $METAREPO $METAREPO.disabled
$ mv $SOURCEDIR $SOURCEDIR.disabled
$ git clone $DRIVE01/$REPONAME $RESTOREDIR
$ cd $RESTOREDIR
$ git config annex.thin true
$ git annex init "restore"
$ git annex adjust --hide-missing --unlock
Now, we need to connect the drive01 and pull the files from it.
$ git remote add drive01 $DRIVE01/$REPONAME
$ git annex sync --content
Now, repeat with drive02:
$ git remote add drive02 $DRIVE02/$REPONAME
$ git annex sync --content
Now we've got all our content back! Here's what whereis looks like:
whereis testdata/file01-unchanged (3 copies)
3d663d0f-1a69-4943-8eb1-f4fe22dc4349 -- restore [here]
9e48387e-b096-400a-8555-a3caf5b70a64 -- source
b46fc85c-c68e-4093-a66e-19dc99a7d5e7 -- test drive #1 [origin]
ok
...
I was a little surprised that drive01 didn't seem to know what was on drive02. Perhaps that could have been remedied by adding more remotes there? I'm not entirely sure; I'd thought would have been able to do that automatically. Conclusions I think I have demonstrated two things: First, git-annex is indeed an extremely powerful tool. I have only scratched the surface here. The location tracking is a neat feature, and being able to just access the data as plain files if all else fails is nice for future users. Secondly, it is also a complex tool and difficult to get right for this purpose (I think much easier for some other purposes). For someone that doesn't live and breathe git-annex, it can be hard to get right. In fact, I'm not entirely sure I got it right here. Why didn't drive02 know what files were on drive01 and vice-versa? I don't know, and that reflects some kind of misunderstanding on my part about how metadata is synced; perhaps more care needs to be taken in restore, or done in a different order, than I proposed. I initially tried to do a restore by using git annex export to a directory special remote with exporttree=yes, but I couldn't ever get it to actually do anything, and I don't know why. These two cut against each other. On the one hand, the raw accessibility of the data to someone with no computer skills is unmatched. On the other hand, I'm not certain I have the skill to always prepare the discs properly, or to do a proper consistent restore.

Posted on June 16, 2023

Update 2023-06-17: I had missed an N in the formulas, they have been updated, and since I was editing this I ve added the haskell bit. I ve just realized that I m not anywhere close to finishing the shawl I m knitting, so I ve done the perfectly logical and rational thing and started a new one. This one is using some yarn from the stash, so its size is limited by the available yarn, and I wanted to estimate how long it may be, so I weighted the ball of yarn at the beginning and then again after knitting 10 and 20 rows. It s a top-down crescent, with 6 increases every two rows (but these calculations should work for any uniform top-down shawl with a regular number of increases), so each block of 10 rows should use an approximately fixed weight of yarn more than the previous block of 10 rows. So, let w₀ be the weight of the first block of rows, w_r the (average) difference between two consecutive blocks and w_T the total weight of the shawl. Then the weight used by block i should be w_i = w₀ + w_r i and the total weight of the shawl should be:
$$w_T = \sum_ i=0 ^ N w_i = N w_0 + w_r \frac N ( N + 1) 2 $$
where N is the number of blocks in the whole shawl. This gives:
N² + (1 + 2 w₀/w_r) N 2 * w_T/w_r = 0
and the only positive solution will be:
$$N = - 1/2 - w_0/w_r + \sqrt(1/4 + w_0^2/w_r^2 - w_0/w_r + 2 w_T/w_r)$$
or, in a few lines of python that can be easily copypasted (changing the values in ws and w_T, of course):

import math
import statistics
w_T = 200
ws = [2, 4, 6]
w_r = statistics.mean(map(lambda x: x[0] - x[1], zip(ws[1:], ws)))
-1/2 - ws[0] / w_r + math.sqrt(1/4 + ws[0]**2 / w_r**2 - ws[0]/w_r + 2 * w_T / w_r)

Or, in Haskell:

let ws = [2, 4, 6]
let w_T = 200
let w_0 = head ws
let w_r = ( sum (map (\(x,y) -> y-x) (zip ws (drop 1 ws))) ) / (fromIntegral (length ws - 1))
-1/2 - w_0 / w_r + sqrt (1/4 + (w_0/w_r)**2 - w_0/w_r + 2 * w_T / w_r)

Which right now (using the actual measured values) tells me I will have about 135 rows in my shawl, but I d really want to do a few more blocks of 10 rows and have more datapoints before I trust the numbers I ve put in. Which means that this shawl will also take forever.

Posted on June 16, 2023

I ve just realized that I m not anywhere close to finishing the shawl I m knitting, so I ve done the perfectly logical and rational thing and started a new one. This one is using some yarn from the stash, so its size is limited by the available yarn, and I wanted to estimate how long it may be, so I weighted the ball of yarn at the beginning and then again after knitting 10 and 20 rows. It s a top-down crescent, with 6 increases every two rows (but these calculations should work for any uniform top-down shawl with a regular number of increases), so each block of 10 rows should use an aproximately fixed weight of yarn more than the previous block of 10 rows. So, let w₀ be the weight of the first block of rows, w_r the (average) difference between two consecutive blocks and w_T the total weight of the shawl. Then the weight used by block i should be w_i = w₀ + w_r i and the total weight of the shawl should be:
$$w_T = \sum_ i=0 ^ N w_i = w_0 + w_r \frac N ( N + 1) 2 $$
where N is the number of blocks in the whole shawl. This gives:
N² + N + 2/W_r (w₀ w_T)
and the only positive solution will be:
$$N = \frac -1 - \sqrt(1 - \frac 8 w_r (w_0 - w_T)) 2 $$
or, in a few lines of python that can be easily copypasted (changing the values in ws and w_T, of course):

import math
import statistics
w_T = 200
ws = [2, 4, 6]
w_r = statistics.mean(map(lambda x: x[0] - x[1], zip(ws[1:], ws)))
(-1 + math.sqrt(1 - 8 / w_r * (ws[0] - w_T))) / 2

Which right now (using the actual measured values) tells me I will have about 140 rows in my shawl, but I d really want to do a few more blocks of 10 rows and have more datapoints before I trust the numbers I ve put in. Which means that this shawl will also take forever.

Ayisha After a long time I saw a movie that I enjoyed wholeheartedly. And it unexpectedly touched my heart. The name of the movie is Ayisha. The first frame of the movie itself sets the pace where we see Ayisha (Manju Warrier) who decides to help out a gang as lot of women were being hassled. So she agrees to hoodwink cops and help launder some money. Then she is shown to work as a maid for an elite Arab family. To portray a Muslim character in these polarized times really shows guts especially when the othering of the Muslim has been happening 24 7. In fact, just few days back I was shocked to learn that Muslim homes were being marked as Jews homes had been marked in the 1930 s. Not just homes but also businesses too. And after few days in a total hypocritical fashion one of the judges says that you cannot push people to buy or not buy from a shop. This is after systemically doing the whole hate campaign for almost 2 weeks. What value the judge s statements are after 2 weeks ??? The poison has already seeped in But I m drifting from the topic/movie.

The real fun of the movie is the beautiful relationship that happens between Ayisha and Mama, she is the biggest maternal figure in the house and in fact, her command is what goes in the house. The house or palace which is the perfect description is shown as being opulent but not as rich as both Mama and Ayisha are, spiritually and emotionally both giving and sharing of each other. Almost a mother daughter relationship, although with others she is shown as having a bit of an iron hand. Halfway through the movie we come to know that Ayisha was also a dramatist and an actress having worked in early Malayalam movies. I do not want to go through all the ups and downs as that is the beauty of the movie and it needs to be seen for that aspect. I am always sort of in two worlds where should I promote a book or series or movie or not because most of the time it is the unexpected that works. When we have expectation it doesn t. Avatar, the Way of the Water is an exception, not many movies I can recall like that where I had expectations and still the movie surpassed it. So maybe go with no expectations at all

Manju Warrier Manju Warrier should actually be called Manju Warrior as she chose to be with the survivor rather than the sexism that is prevalent in the Malayalam film industry which actually is more or less a mirror of Bollywood and society as whole. These three links should give enough background knowledge as to what has been happening although I m sure my Malayalam friends would more than add to that knowledge whatever may be missing. In quite a few movies, the women are making inroads without significant male strength. Especially Manju s movies have no male lead for the last few movies. Whether that is deliberate part on Manju or an obstacle being put in front of her. Anyone knows that having a male lead and a female lead enriches the value of a movie quite a bit. This doesn t mean one is better than the other but having both enriches the end product, as simple as that. This is sadly not happening. Having POSH training and having an ICC is something that each organization should look forward for. It s kind of mandatory need of hour, especially when we have young people all around us. I am hopeful that people who are from Kerala would shed some more background light on what has been happening.

Books I haven t yet submitted an application for Debconf. But my idea is irrespective of whether or not I m there, I do hope we can have a library where people can donate books and people can take away books as well. A kind of circular marketplace/library where just somebody notes what books are available. Even if 100 odd people are coming to Debconf that easily means 100 books of various languages. That in itself would be interesting and to see what people are reading, wanting to discuss etc. We could even have readings. IIRC, in 2016 we had a children s area, maybe we could do some readings from some books to children which fuels their imagination. Even people like me who are deaf would be willing to look at excerpts and be charmed by them. For instance, in all my forays of fantasy literature except for Babylon Steel I haven t read one book that has a female lead character and I have read probably around 100 odd fantasy books till date. Not a lot but still to my mind, is a big gap as far as literature is concerned. How would more women write fantasy if they don t have heroes to look forward to :(. Or maybe I may be missing some authors and characters that others know and I do not. Do others feel the same or this question hasn t even been asked ??? Dunno. Please let me know.

Debutsav So apparently Debutsav is happening 2 days from now. While I did come to know about it few days back I had to think whether I want to apply for this or apply for Debconf as I physically, emotionally can t do justice to both even though they are a few months apart. I wish all the best for the attendees as well as presenters sharing all the projects and hopefully somebody shares at least some of the projects that are presented there so we may know what new projects or softwares to follow or whatever. Till later.

The counter of the FAI.me build service has reached 20.000. This counter was added shortly after the service was started in November 2017. Since then, this service has built more than 21.000 installation images and more than 1300 cloud disk images. In the last few month we had averaged 100 requests per week. Some statistics which settings are popular:

• Language/keyboard layout selected

  12000	us
  4000	de
  2500	fr
  800	gb
  500	es
  300	ru
  300	cn
  200	pt

• Desktop environments selected

  12000	NONE (without any desktop)
  5000	GNOME
  1800	XFCE
  800	KDE
  700	CINNAMON
  700	MATE
  500	LXDE

• In April 2023, support for building your own Ubuntu installation ISO was added. Since then, 200 Ubuntu ISOs has been created.
• Packages that are often added: tmux screen apt-transport-https build-essential sudo net-tools mc git wget htop vim curl
• A postinst script was provided more that 1500 times even though it was not added until 2021.
• Packages from backports were used 4000 times.

I still have some more ideas for the future: Build your own custom Live ISO Thanks for all your feedback I got to improve this service. The build service is available on the FAI project website at https://fai-project.org/FAIme