Search Results: "tar"

28 August 2015

Ben Hutchings: Securing git imap-send in Debian

I usually send patches from git via git imap-send, which gives me a chance to edit and save them through my regular mail client. Obviously I want to make a secure connection to the IMAP server. The upstream code now supports doing this with OpenSSL, but git is under GPL and it seems that not all relevant contributors have given the extra permission to link with OpenSSL. So in Debian you still need to use an external program to provide a TLS tunnel. The commonly used TLS tunnelling programs, openssl s_client and stunnel, do not validate server certificates in a useful way - at least by default. Here's how I've configured git imap-send and stunnel to properly validate the server certificate. If you use the PLAIN or LOGIN authentication method with the server, you will still see the warning: 
*** IMAP Warning *** Password is being sent in the clear
The server does see the clear-text password, but it is encrypted on the wire and git imap-send just doesn't know that. ~/.gitconfig 
[imap]
	user = ben
	folder = "drafts"
	tunnel = "stunnel ~/.git-imap-send/stunnel.conf"
~/.git-imap-send/stunnel.conf 
debug = 3
foreground = yes
client = yes
connect = mail.decadent.org.uk:993
sslVersion = TLSv1.2
renegotiation = no
verify = 2
; Current CA for the IMAP server.
; If you don't want to pin to a specific CA certificate, use
; /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt instead.
CAfile = /etc/ssl/certs/StartCom_Certification_Authority.pem
checkHost = mail.decadent.org.uk
If stunnel chokes on the checkHost variable, it doesn't support certificate name validation. Unfortunately no Debian stable release has this feature - only testing/unstable. I'm wondering whether it would be worthwhile to backport it or even to make a stable update to add this important security feature.

Ben Hutchings: Securing git imap-send in Debian

I usually send patches from git via git imap-send, which gives me a chance to edit and save them through my regular mail client. Obviously I want to make a secure connection to the IMAP server. The upstream code now supports doing this with OpenSSL, but git is under GPL and it seems that not all relevant contributors have given the extra permission to link with OpenSSL. So in Debian you still need to use an external program to provide a TLS tunnel. The commonly used TLS tunnelling programs, openssl s_client and stunnel, do not validate server certificates in a useful way - at least by default. Here's how I've configured git imap-send and stunnel to properly validate the server certificate. If you use the PLAIN or LOGIN authentication method with the server, you will still see the warning: 
*** IMAP Warning *** Password is being sent in the clear
The server does see the clear-text password, but it is encrypted on the wire and git imap-send just doesn't know that. ~/.gitconfig 
[imap]
	user = ben
	folder = "drafts"
	tunnel = "stunnel ~/.git-imap-send/stunnel.conf"
~/.git-imap-send/stunnel.conf 
debug = 3
foreground = yes
client = yes
connect = mail.decadent.org.uk:993
sslVersion = TLSv1.2
renegotiation = no
verify = 2
; Current CA for the IMAP server.
; If you don't want to pin to a specific CA certificate, use
; /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt instead.
CAfile = /etc/ssl/certs/StartCom_Certification_Authority.pem
checkHost = mail.decadent.org.uk
If stunnel chokes on the checkHost variable, it doesn't support certificate name validation. Unfortunately no Debian stable release has this feature - only testing/unstable. I'm wondering whether it would be worthwhile to backport it or even to make a stable update to add this important security feature.

27 August 2015

Ritesh Raj Sarraf: Laptop Mode Tools - 1.68

I am please to announce the release of Laptop Mode Tools, version 1.68. This release is mainly focused on integration with the newer init system, systemd. Without the help from the awesome Debian systemd maintainers, this would not have been possible. Thank you folks. While the focus now is on systemd, LMT will still support the older SysV Init. With this new release, there are some new files: laptop-mode.service, laptop-mode.timer and lmt-poll.service. All the files should be documented well enough for users. lmt-poll.service is the equivalent of the module battery-level-polling, should you need it. Filtered git log: 
1.68 - Thu Aug 27 22:36:43 IST 2015
    * Fix all instances for BATTERY_LEVEL_POLLING
    * Group kill the polling daemon so that its child process get the same signal
    * Release the descriptor explicitly
    * Add identifier about who's our parent
    * Narrow down our power_supply subsystem event check condition
    * Fine tune the .service file
    * On my ultrabook, AC as reported as ACAD
    * Enhance lmt-udev to better work with systemd
    * Add a timer based polling for LMT. It is the equivalent of battery-polling-daemon,
      using systemd
    * Disable battery level polling by default, because most systems will have systemd running
    * Add documentation reference in systemd files
The md5 checksum for the tarball is 15edf643990e08deaebebf66b128b270

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Thorsten Glaser: Go enjoy shell

Dimitri, I personally enjoy shell 

tglase@tglase:~ $ x= 
tglase@tglase:~ $ echo $ x::12 
 
tglase@tglase:~ $ printf '%s\n' 'import sys' 'print(sys.argv[1][:12])' >x.py
tglase@tglase:~ $ python x.py $x

much more than Python, actually. (Python is the language in which you do not want to write code dealing with strings, due to UnicodeDecodeError and all; even py3k is not much better.) I would have commented on your post if it allowed doing so without getting a proprietary Google+ account.

26 August 2015

Carl Chenet: Retweet 0.2 : bump to Python 3

Follow me on Identi.ca or Twitter or Diaspora*diaspora-banner Don t know Retweet? My last post about it introduced this small Twitter bot whichs just retweets (for now) every tweets from a Twitter account to another one. Retweet Retweet was created in order to improve the Journal du hacker Twitter account. The Journal du hacker is a Hacker News-like French-speaking website. logo-journal-du-hacker Especially useful to broadcast news through a network of Twitter accounts, Retweet was improved to bump Python version to 3.4 and to improve pep8 compliance (work in progress). The project is also well documented and should be quite simple to install, configure and use. After my first blog post about Retweet, new users gave me feedback about it and I now have great ideas for future features for the next release. Twitter_logo_blue What about you? If you try it, please tell me what you think about it, opening a bug request or ask for new features. Or just write your comment here ;)

Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, July 2015

A Debian LTS logoLike each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In July, 79.50 work hours have been dispatched among 7 paid contributors. Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation August has seen a small decrease in terms of sponsored hours (71.50 hours per month) because two sponsors did not pay their renewal invoice on time. That said they reconfirmed their willingness to support us and things should be fixed after the summer. And we should be able to reach our first milestone of funding the equivalent of a half-time position, in particular since a new platinum sponsor might join the project. DebConf 15 happened this month and Debian LTS was featured in a talk and in a work session. Have a look at the video recordings: In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation is better than last month: the dla-needed.txt file lists 20 packages awaiting an update (4 less than last month), the list of open vulnerabilities in Squeeze shows about 22 affected packages in total (11 less than last month). The new LTS frontdesk ensures regular triage of CVE reports and the difference between both counts dropped significantly. That s good! Thanks to our sponsors Thanks to Sig-I/O, a new bronze sponsor, which joins our 35 other sponsors.

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25 August 2015

Richard Hartmann: Tor-enabled Debian mirror, part 2

Well, that was quite some feedback to my last post; via blog, email, irc, and in person. I actually think this may be the most feedback I ever got to any single blog post. If you are still waiting for a reply after this new post, I will get back to you. To handle common question/information at once: So this whole thing is a lot easier now: 
# apt-get install torsocks apt-transport-tor
# mv /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list--backup2
# > /etc/apt/sources.list << EOF
deb tor+http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free
deb tor+http://earthqfvaeuv5bla.onion/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free
EOF
# apt-get update
# apt-get install vcsh

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 17 in Stretch cycle

A good amount of the Debian reproducible builds team had the chance to enjoy face-to-face interactions during DebConf15.
Names in red and blue were all present at DebConf15
Picture of the reproducible builds talk during DebConf15
Hugging people with whom one has been working tirelessly for months gives a lot of warm-fuzzy feelings. Several recorded and hallway discussions paved the way to solve the remaining issues to get reproducible builds part of Debian proper. Both talks from the Debian Project Leader and the release team mentioned the effort as important for the future of Debian. A forty-five minutes talk presented the state of the reproducible builds effort. It was then followed by an hour long roundtable to discuss current blockers regarding dpkg, .buildinfo and their integration in the archive. Picture of the reproducible builds roundtable during DebConf15 Toolchain fixes Reiner Herrmann submitted a patch to make rdfind sort the processed files before doing any operation. Chris Lamb proposed a new patch for wheel implementing support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH instead of the custom WHEEL_FORCE_TIMESTAMP. akira sent one making man2html SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH aware. St phane Glondu reported that dpkg-source would not respect tarball permissions when unpacking under a umask of 002. After hours of iterative testing during the DebConf workshop, Sandro Knau created a test case showing how pdflatex output can be non-deterministic with some PNG files. Packages fixed The following 65 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: alacarte, arbtt, bullet, ccfits, commons-daemon, crack-attack, d-conf, ejabberd-contrib, erlang-bear, erlang-cherly, erlang-cowlib, erlang-folsom, erlang-goldrush, erlang-ibrowse, erlang-jiffy, erlang-lager, erlang-lhttpc, erlang-meck, erlang-p1-cache-tab, erlang-p1-iconv, erlang-p1-logger, erlang-p1-mysql, erlang-p1-pam, erlang-p1-pgsql, erlang-p1-sip, erlang-p1-stringprep, erlang-p1-stun, erlang-p1-tls, erlang-p1-utils, erlang-p1-xml, erlang-p1-yaml, erlang-p1-zlib, erlang-ranch, erlang-redis-client, erlang-uuid, freecontact, givaro, glade, gnome-shell, gupnp, gvfs, htseq, jags, jana, knot, libconfig, libkolab, libmatio, libvsqlitepp, mpmath, octave-zenity, openigtlink, paman, pisa, pynifti, qof, ruby-blankslate, ruby-xml-simple, timingframework, trace-cmd, tsung, wings3d, xdg-user-dirs, xz-utils, zpspell. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Uploads that might have fixed reproducibility issues: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: St phane Glondu reported two issues regarding embedded build date in omake and cduce. Aur lien Jarno submitted a fix for the breakage of make-dfsg test suite. As binutils now creates deterministic libraries by default, Aur lien's patch makes use of a wrapper to give the U flag to ar. Reiner Herrmann reported an issue with pound which embeds random dhparams in its code during the build. Better solutions are yet to be found. reproducible.debian.net Package pages on reproducible.debian.net now have a new layout improving readability designed by Mattia Rizzolo, h01ger, and Ulrike. The navigation is now on the left as vertical space is more valuable nowadays. armhf is now enabled on all pages except the dashboard. Actual tests on armhf are expected to start shortly. (Mattia Rizzolo, h01ger) The limit on how many packages people can schedule using the reschedule script on Alioth has been bumped to 200. (h01ger) mod_rewrite is now used instead of JavaScript for the form in the dashboard. (h01ger) Following the rename of the software, debbindiff has mostly been replaced by either diffoscope or differences in generated HTML and IRC notification output. Connections to UDD have been made more robust. (Mattia Rizzolo) diffoscope development diffoscope version 31 was released on August 21st. This version improves fuzzy-matching by using the tlsh algorithm instead of ssdeep. New command line options are available: --max-diff-input-lines and --max-diff-block-lines to override limits on diff input and output (Reiner Herrmann), --debugger to dump the user into pdb in case of crashes (Mattia Rizzolo). jar archives should now be detected properly (Reiner Herrman). Several general code cleanups were also done by Chris Lamb. strip-nondeterminism development Andrew Ayer released strip-nondeterminism version 0.010-1. Java properties file in jar should now be detected more accurately. A missing dependency spotted by St phane Glondu has been added. Testing directory ordering issues: disorderfs During the reproducible builds workshop at DebConf, participants identified that we were still short of a good way to test variations on filesystem behaviors (e.g. file ordering or disk usage). Andrew Ayer took a couple of hours to create disorderfs. Based on FUSE, disorderfs in an overlay filesystem that will mount the content of a directory at another location. For this first version, it will make the order in which files appear in a directory random. Documentation update Dhole documented how to implement support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in Python, bash, Makefiles, CMake, and C. Chris Lamb started to convert the wiki page describing SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH into a Freedesktop-like specification in the hope that it will convince more upstream to adopt it. Package reviews 44 reviews have been removed, 192 added and 77 updated this week. New issues identified this week: locale_dependent_order_in_devlibs_depends, randomness_in_ocaml_startup_files, randomness_in_ocaml_packed_libraries, randomness_in_ocaml_custom_executables, undeterministic_symlinking_by_rdfind, random_build_path_by_golang_compiler, and images_in_pdf_generated_by_latex. 117 new FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb, Chris West (Faux), and Niko Tyni. Misc. Some reproducibility issues might face us very late. Chris Lamb noticed that the test suite for python-pykmip was now failing because its test certificates have expired. Let's hope no packages are hiding a certificate valid for 10 years somewhere in their source! Pictures courtesy and copyright of Debian's own paparazzi: Aigars Mahinovs.

Richard Hartmann: Tor-enabled Debian mirror

During Jacob Applebaum's talk at DebConf15, he noted that Debian should TLS-enable all services, especially the mirrors. His reasoning was that when a high-value target downloads a security update for package foo, an adversary knows that they are still using a vulnerable version of foo and try to attack before the security update has been installed. In this specific case, TLS is not of much use though. If the target downloads 4.7 MiB right after a security update with 4.7 MiB has been released, or downloads from security.debian.org, it's still obvious what's happening. Even padding won't help much as the 5 MiB download will also be suspicious. The mere act of downloading anything from the mirrors after an update has been released is reason enough to try an attack. The solution, is, of course, Tor. weasel was nice enough to set up a hidden service on Debian's infrastructure; initally we agreed that he would just give me a VM and I would do the actual work, but he went the full way on his own. Thanks :) This service is not redundant, it uses a key which is stored on the local drive, the .onion will change, and things are expected to break. But at least this service exists now and can be used, tested, and put under some load: 
http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion/
I couldn't get apt-get to be content with a .onion in /etc/apt/sources.list and Acquire::socks::proxy "socks://127.0.0.1:9050"; in /etc/apt/apt.conf, but the torify wrapper worked like a charm. What follows is, to the best of my knowledge, the first ever download from Debian's "official" Tor-enabled mirror: 
~ # apt-get install torsocks
~ # mv /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.backup
~ # echo 'deb http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion/debian/ unstable main non-free contrib' > /etc/apt/sources.list
~ # torify apt-get update
Get:1 http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion unstable InRelease [215 kB]
Get:2 http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion unstable/main amd64 Packages [7548 kB]
Get:3 http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion unstable/non-free amd64 Packages [91.9 kB]
Get:4 http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion unstable/contrib amd64 Packages [58.5 kB]
Get:5 http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion unstable/main i386 Packages [7541 kB]
Get:6 http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion unstable/non-free i386 Packages [85.4 kB]
Get:7 http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion unstable/contrib i386 Packages [58.1 kB]
Get:8 http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion unstable/contrib Translation-en [45.7 kB]
Get:9 http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion unstable/main Translation-en [5060 kB]
Get:10 http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion unstable/non-free Translation-en [80.8 kB]
Fetched 20.8 MB in 2min 0s (172 kB/s)
Reading package lists... Done
~ # torify apt-get install vim
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  vim-common vim-nox vim-runtime vim-tiny
Suggested packages:
  ctags vim-doc vim-scripts cscope indent
The following packages will be upgraded:
  vim vim-common vim-nox vim-runtime vim-tiny
5 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 661 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B/7719 kB of archives.
After this operation, 2048 B disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] 
Retrieving bug reports... Done
Parsing Found/Fixed information... Done
Reading changelogs... Done
(Reading database ... 316427 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../vim-nox_2%3a7.4.826-1_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking vim-nox (2:7.4.826-1) over (2:7.4.712-3) ...
Preparing to unpack .../vim_2%3a7.4.826-1_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking vim (2:7.4.826-1) over (2:7.4.712-3) ...
Preparing to unpack .../vim-tiny_2%3a7.4.826-1_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking vim-tiny (2:7.4.826-1) over (2:7.4.712-3) ...
Preparing to unpack .../vim-runtime_2%3a7.4.826-1_all.deb ...
Unpacking vim-runtime (2:7.4.826-1) over (2:7.4.712-3) ...
Preparing to unpack .../vim-common_2%3a7.4.826-1_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking vim-common (2:7.4.826-1) over (2:7.4.712-3) ...
Processing triggers for man-db (2.7.0.2-5) ...
Processing triggers for mime-support (3.58) ...
Processing triggers for desktop-file-utils (0.22-1) ...
Processing triggers for hicolor-icon-theme (0.13-1) ...
Setting up vim-common (2:7.4.826-1) ...
Setting up vim-runtime (2:7.4.826-1) ...
Processing /usr/share/vim/addons/doc
Setting up vim-nox (2:7.4.826-1) ...
Setting up vim (2:7.4.826-1) ...
Setting up vim-tiny (2:7.4.826-1) ...
~ #
More services will follow. noodles, weasel, and me agreed that the project as a whole should aim to Tor-enable the complete package lifecycle, package information, and the website. Maybe a more secure install option on the official images which, amongst others, sets up apt, apt-listbugs, dput, reportbug, et al up to use Tor without further configuration could even be a realistic stretch goal.

24 August 2015

Richard Hartmann: DebConf15

Even though the week of DebCamp took its toll and the stress level will not go down any time soon... ...DebConf15 has finally started! :)

Iustin Pop: Finally, systemd!

Even though Debian has moved to systemd as default a long while ago now, I've stayed with sysv as I have somewhat custom setups (self-built trimmed down kernels, separate /usr not pre-mounted by initrd, etc.). After installing a new system with Jessie and playing a bit with systemd on it a couple of months ago, I said it's finally time to upgrade. Easier said than starting to actually do it . The first system I upgraded was a recent (~1 year old) install. It was a trimmed-down system with Debian's kernel, so everything went smoothly. So smoothly that I soon forgot I made the change, and didn't do any more switches for a while. Systemd was therefore out of my mind until this recent Friday when I got a bug report about mt's rcS init script and shipping a proper systemd unit. The first step should be to actually start using systemd, so I said - let's convert some more things! During the weekend I upgraded one system, still a reasonably small install, but older - probably 6-7 years. First reboot into systemd flagged the fact that I had some forced-load modules which no longer exist, fact that was too easy to ignore with sysv. Nice! The only downside was that there seems to be some race condition between and ntp, as it fails to start on boot (port listen conflict). I'll see if it repeats. Another small issue is that systemd doesn't like duplicate fstab entries (i.e. two devices which both refer to the same mount point), while this works fine for mount itself (when specifying the block device). I said that after that system, I'll wait a while until to upgrade the next. But so it happened that today another system had an issue and I had to reboot it (damn lost uptimes!). The kernel was old so I booted into a newer one (this time compiled with the required systemd options), so I had a though - what if I take the opportunity and also switch to systemd on this system? Caution said to wait, since this was the oldest system - installed sometime during or before 2004. Plus it doesn't use an initrd (long story), and it has a split /usr. Caution excitement caution lost and I proceeded. It turns out that systemd does warn about split /usr but itself has no problems. I learned that I also had very old sysfs entries that no longer exist, and which I didn't know about as sysv doesn't make it obvious. I also had a crypttab entry which was obsolete, and I forgot about it, until I met the nice red moving ASCII bar which fortunately had a timeout. To be honest, I believed I'll have to rescue boot and fix things on this "always-unstable" machine, on which I install and run random things, and which has a hackish /etc/fstab setup. I'm quite surprised it just worked. On unstable. So thanks a lot to the Debian systemd team. It was much simpler than I thought, and now, on to exploring systemd! P.S.: the sad part is that usually I'm a strong proponent of declarative configuration, but for some reason I was reluctant to migrate to systemd also on account on losing the "power" of shell scripts. Humans

Jonathan McDowell: Random post-DebConf 15 thoughts

There are a bunch of things I mean to blog about, but as I have just got fully home from Heidelberg and DebConf15 this afternoon that seems most appropriate to start with. It s a bit of a set of disjoint thoughts, but I figure I should write them down while they re in my head. DebConf is an interesting conference. It s the best opportunity the Debian project has every year to come together and actually spend a decent amount of time with each other. As a result it s a fairly full on experience, with lots of planned talks as a basis and a wide range of technical discussions and general social interaction filling in whatever gaps are available. I always find it a thoroughly enjoyable experience, but equally I m glad to be home and doing delightfully dull things like washing my clothes and buying fresh milk. I have always been of the opinion that the key aspect of DebConf is the face time. It was thus great to see so many people there - we were told several times that this was the largest DebConf so far (~ 570 people IIRC). That s good in the sense that it meant I got to speak to a lot of people (both old friends and new), but does mean that there are various people I know I didn t spend enough, or in some cases any, time with. My apologies, but I think many of us were in the same situation. I don t feel it made the conference any less productive for me - I managed to get a bunch of hacking done, discuss a number of open questions in person with various people and get pulled into various interesting discussions I hadn t expected. In short, a typical DebConf. Also I d like to say that the venue worked out really well. I ll admit I was dubious when I heard it was in a hostel, but it was well located (about a 30 minute walk into town, and a reasonable bus service available from just outside the door), self-contained with decent facilities (I m a big believer in having DebConf talks + accommodation be as close as possible to each other) and the room was much better than expected (well, aside from the snoring but I can t blame the DebConf organisers for that). One of the surprising and interesting things for me that was different from previous DebConfs was the opportunity to have more conversations with a legal leaning. I expect to go to DebConf and do OpenPGP/general crypto related bits. I wasn t expecting affirmation about the things I have learnt on my course over the past year, in terms of feeling that I could use that knowledge in the process of helping Debian. It provided me with some hope that I ll be able to tie my technology and law skills together in a way that I will find suitably entertaining (as did various conversations where people expressed significant interest in the crossover). Next year is in Cape Town, South Africa. It s a long way (though I suppose no worse than Portland and I get to stay in the same time zone), and a quick look at flights indicates they re quite expensive at the moment. The bid presentation did look pretty good though so as soon as the dates are confirmed (I believe this will happen as soon as there are signed contracts in place) I ll take another look at flights. In short, excellent DebConf, thanks to the organisers, lovely to see everyone I managed to speak to, apologies to those of you I didn t manage to speak to. Hopefully see you in Cape Town next year.

22 August 2015

Christian Perrier: [LIFE] Running activities - Echappee Belle next week

Hello dear readers, Next week, I'll be running the "Echappee Belle" race : 144km and 10.000 meters positive climb, in French Alps (Belledonne range, this time). That will be, by far, my longest race ever and indeed a great challenge for me with very difficult tracks (when there are tracks). I expect to run for about 48 hours, or even up to 55, two nights out.....or maybe less as I'm in very good shape. You can follow me on the live tracking site. The race starts on Friday August 28th, 06:00 CET DST.

21 August 2015

Norbert Preining: Work-Life Balance at Amazon

Having had personal contact with Amazon employees, and having read the NYT article Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace, I have only a few things to say: What remains I guess I would be a horrible performer at Amazon, and I am proud of it.

Rhonda D'Vine: DebConf15

I tried to start to write this blog entry like I usually do: Type along what goes through my mind and see where I'm heading. This won't work out right now for various reasons, mostly because there is so much going on that I don't have the time to finish that in a reasonable time and I want to publish this today still. So please excuse me for being way more brief than I usually am, and hopefully I'll find the time to expand some things when asked or come back to that later. Part of the reason of me being short on time is different stuff going on in my private life which requires additional attention. A small part of this is also something that I hinted in a former blog entry: I switched my job in June. I really was looking forward to this. I made them aware of what the name Rhonda means to me and it's definitely extremely nice to be addressed with female pronouns at work. And also I'm back in a system administration job which means there is an interest overlap with my work on Debian, so a win-win situation on sooo many levels! I'm at DebConf15 since almost two weeks now. On my way here I was complimented on my outfit by a security guard at the Vienna airport which surprised me but definitely made my day. I was wearing one of these baggy hippie pants (which was sent to me by a fine lady I met at MiniDebConf Bucharest) but pulled up the leg parts to the knees so it could be perceived as a skirt instead. Since I came here I was pretty busy with taking care of DCschedule bot adjustments (like, changing topic and twittering from @DebConf at the start of the talks), helping out with the video team when I noticed there was a lack of people (which is a hint for that you might want to help with the video team in the future too, it's important for remote people but also for yourself because you can't attend multiple sessions at the same time). And I have to repeat myself, this is the place I feel home amongst my extended family, even though I it still is sometimes for me to get to speak up in certain groups. I though believe it's more an issue of certain individuals taking up a lot of space in discussions without giving (more shy) people in the round the space to also join in. I guess it might be the time that we need a session on dominant talking patterns for next year and how to work against them. I absolutely enjoyed such a session during last year's FemCamp in Vienna which set the tone for the rest of the conference, and it was simply great. And then there was the DebConf Poetry Night. I'm kinda disappointed with the outcome this year. It wasn't able to attract as much people anticipated, which I to some degree account to me not making people aware of it well enough, overlapping with a really great band playing at the same time in competition, and even though the place where we did it sounded like a good idea at first, it didn't had enough light for someone to read something from a book (but that was solved through smartphone lights). I know that most people did enjoy it, so it was good to do it, but I'm still a fair bit disappointed with the outcome and will try to work on improving on that grounds for next year. :) With all this going on there unfortunately wasn't as much time as I would have liked to spend with people I haven't seen for a long time, or new people I haven't met yet. Given that this year's DebConf had an height in attendees (526 being here at certain times during the two weeks, and just today someone new arrived too, so that doesn't even have to be the final number) it makes it a bit painful to have picked up so many tasks and thus lost some chances to socialize as much as I would have liked to. So, if you are still here and have the feeling we should have talked more, please look for me. As Bdale pointed out correctly in the New to DebConf BoF (paraphrased): When you see us DebConf old timers speaking to someone else and you feel like you don't want to disturb, please do disturb and speak to us. I always enjoyed to get to know new people. This for me always is one of the important aspects of DebConf. Also, I am very very happy to have received feedback from different people about both my tweets and my blog, thank you a lot of that. It is really motivating to keep going. So, lets enjoy the last few hours of DebConf! Another last side notice: While my old name in the Debian LDAP did manage to find some wrongly displayed names in the DebConf website, like for speakers, or volunteers, it was clear to me that having it exposed through SSO.debian.org isn't really something I appreciate. So I took the chance and spoke to Luca from the DSA team right here today, and ... got it fixed. I love it! Next step is getting my gpg key exchanged, RT ticket is coming up. :)

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Simon Kainz: DUCK challenge: Final week

Well, here are the stats for the final week of the DUCK challenge as well as DebConf15: So we had 21 packages fixed and uploaded by 14 different uploaders. People were really working hard on this during DebConf. A big "Thank You" to you!! Since the start of this challenge, a total of 89 packages, were fixed. Here is a quick overview:
Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4 Week 5 Week 6 Week 7
# Packages 10 15 10 14 10 9 21
Total 10 25 35 49 59 68 89
Thank you all for participating - either on purpose or "accidentially": Some people were really surprised as i sneaked up on them at DebConf15, confronting them with a green lighter! I just tried to put even more fun into Debian, i hope this worked out Pevious articles are here: Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, Week 5,Week 6.

Norbert Preining: The sins of the past adding Cyrillic glyphs without renaming fonts

The URW Base35 fonts are a great set of fonts, available for free as in free software. They have been part of various distributions and systems since long time. Big thanks to URW for their work. But these fonts don t have Cyrillic or Greek glyphs. Be it as it is, world would be easy. People would need to use different fonts for these languages. Comes around someone who did the unthinkable namely adding the Cyrillic and Greek glyphs to the fonts (by now nothing bad), but then NOT renaming the fonts. Here we see one point of the stupidity of GPL and absolute freedom. Because what we now have is that documents produced several TeX engines (in particular XeTeX and LuaTeX) which use fontconfig to search the fonts, suddenly pick up these changed fonts that fake their identity, and what comes out is this, a complete rubbish: broken-fonts And now we are suffering huge pain from that. Look at the bug reports of that are coming in: Just to name a few. And there is a simple way to circumvent this: Don t install gsfonts which guarantees that fontconfig finds the real original URW fonts within the TeX Live tree first. I have now spent many hours to track down these problems, find the reason, and at the end of the day there is always gsfonts with its broken fonts with added Cyrillic glyphs. I honestly don t care about the history, there are now many fonts with Cyrillic and Greek glyphs, there is no need to fake fonts, and incorrectly take over font names. This should be a lesson to all the GPL zealots that require absolute freedom of each and everything. Unfortunately things don t work like that. Using AND RENAMING is ok, the Knuth license as I would say, but anything else is just a source of much pain. End for today, I have to go to work now. Real work instead of fighting sins of the past. Nothing to enjoy here. Additional information Just to let you know, before starting a flame war, I have already contacted the upstream developers, that is TeX Live, and explained them the situation. I don t see much chance for fixing, since the problem is with fonts without upstream and support, which are probably only used in Debian (I haven t seen them anywhere else but some mentioning in RH), and which are not officially supported or distributed. It really needs a nice developer to look into why this breakage appeared. Let us hope. And instead of flaming, anyone here is invited to dig into the code him/herself and search for changes. Additional information 2015-08-22 Just to back up my complaints and counteract several of the comments: I am quoting from an email of a colleague on the list where we are discussing the problem:
However, the fonts extended by Valek Filippov are quite problematic. The Type1 spec clearly requires that there may not exist two different fonts with the same /FontName. The modified fonts shipped with Ghostscript have the same /FontName as the original fonts donated by URW and not even the /UniqueID was changed. IMO they are broken because they don t comply with the Type1 specification.
I hope that convinced also the last in doubt.

20 August 2015

Axel Beckert: German-written Debian Package Management Book

Thursday was our big day: After more than 2.5 years of working in the hidden, ups and downs, Frank Hofmann and myself were able to announce the availability of our book project Debian Package Management under a free license (Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International License, short CC BY-SA 4.0 ) during a Lightning Talk at DebConf15 in Heidelberg. This became possible because we found Onyx Neon, a publishing company which is specialised on books with contents under free licenses. Its founder does not only have a faible for Perl but also for Debian. (Since the question already came up: We also thought about self-publishing, e.g. via Lulu or Epubli and it would have been our fallback solution , but we prefer the professionalism and services of a real publisher. I m though happy to share what I found out about self-publishing in the past few months.) The source code of the book is written in the AsciiDoc format and available on GitHub. The book is still work in progress. But if you want, you can already build an e-book out of the publically available source code: 
sudo apt-get install asciidoc dblatex git
git clone git://github.com/dpmb/dpmb.git
cd dpmb
make
(Works fine on Debian 7 Wheezy, Debian 8 Jessie and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty. Does not work on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise.) If you find an error in the book, please file an issue on GitHub. If you also know how to fix the error, please for the Git repository on GitHub, fix the error in your Git repository and file a pull request. (The first pull request already happenend and has been applied.) Initially there will be only a German written issue as e-book (at least in HTML, PDF and EPUB formats, maybe also KF8/MOBI and EPUB3) and at some point in the future also as printed book at Onyx Neon. But we re also planning a translation to English as well as a Debian package. If your want to get informed when we publish a printed book, a translation or an official e-book release, please subscribe to one of our mailing lists: There s one in German and one in English.

19 August 2015

Russell Coker: The Purpose of a Code of Conduct

On a private mailing list there have been some recent discussions about a Code of Conduct which demonstrate some great misunderstandings. The misunderstandings don t seem particular to that list so it s worthy of a blog post. Also people tend to think more about what they do when their actions will be exposed to a wider audience so hopefully people who read this post will think before they respond. Jokes The first discussion concerned the issue of making jokes . When dealing with the treatment of other people (particularly minority groups) the issue of jokes is a common one. It s fairly common for people in positions of power to make jokes about people with less power and then complain if someone disapproves. The more extreme examples of this concern hate words which are strongly associated with violence, one of the most common is a word used to describe gay men which has often been associated with significant violence and murder. Men who are straight and who conform to the stereotypes of straight men don t have much to fear from that word while men who aren t straight will associate it with a death threat and tend not to find any amusement in it. Most minority groups have words that are known to be associated with hate crimes. When such words are used they usually send a signal that the minority groups in question aren t welcome. The exception is when the words are used by other members of the group in question. For example if I was walking past a biker bar and heard someone call out geek or nerd I would be a little nervous (even though geeks/nerds have faced much less violence than most minority groups). But at a Linux conference my reaction would be very different. As a general rule you shouldn t use any word that has a history of being used to attack any minority group other than one that you are a member of, so black rappers get to use a word that was historically used by white slave-owners but because I m white I don t get to sing along to their music. As an aside we had a discussion about such rap lyrics on the Linux Users of Victoria mailing list some time ago, hopefully most people think I m stating the obvious here but some people need a clear explanation. One thing that people should consider jokes is the issue of punching-down vs punching-up [1] (there are many posts about this topic, I linked to the first Google hit which seems quite good). The basic concept is that making jokes about more powerful people or organisations is brave while making jokes about less powerful people is cowardly and serves to continue the exclusion of marginalised people. When I raised this issue in the mailing list discussion a group of men immediately complained that they might be bullied by lots of less powerful people making jokes about them. One problem here is that powerful people tend to be very thin skinned due to the fact that people are usually nice to them. While the imaginary scenario of less powerful people making jokes about rich white men might be unpleasant if it happened in person, it wouldn t compare to the experience of less powerful people who are the target of repeated jokes in addition to all manner of other bad treatment. Another problem is that the impact of a joke depends on the power of the person who makes it, EG if your boss makes a joke about you then you have to work on your CV, if a colleague or subordinate makes a joke then you can often ignore it. Who does a Code of Conduct Protect One member of the mailing list wrote a long and very earnest message about his belief that the CoC was designed to protect him from off-topic discussions. He analysed the results of a CoC on that basis and determined that it had failed due to the number of off-topic messages on the mailing lists he subscribes to. Being so self-centered is strongly correlated with being in a position of power, he seems to sincerely believe that everything should be about him, that he is entitled to all manner of protection and that any rule which doesn t protect him is worthless. I believe that the purpose of all laws and regulations should be to protect those who are less powerful, the more powerful people can usually protect themselves. The benefit that powerful people receive from being part of a system that is based on rules is that organisations (clubs, societies, companies, governments, etc) can become larger and achieve greater things if people can trust in the system. When minority groups are discouraged from contributing and when people need to be concerned about protecting themselves from attack the scope of an organisation is reduced. When there is a certain minimum standard of treatment that people can expect then they will be more willing to contribute and more able to concentrate on their contributions when they don t expect to be attacked. The Public Interest When an organisation declares itself to be acting in the public interest (EG by including Public Interest in the name of the organisation) I think that we should expect even better treatment of minority groups. One might argue that a corporation should protect members of minority groups for the sole purpose of making more money (it has been proven that more diverse groups produce better quality work). But an organisation that s in the Public Interest should be expected to go way beyond that and protect members of minority groups as a matter of principle. When an organisation is declared to be operating in the Public Interest I believe that anyone who s so unable to control their bigotry that they can t refrain from being bigoted on the mailing lists should not be a member.
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18 August 2015

Arturo Borrero Gonz lez: 2015 FLOSS summer report

debian logo
Good news. Many things happened since my last report (8 months ago), some of them very interesting :-)

debian maintainer

Back in April 2015 I applied to become Debian Maintainer (DM). I was supported by several Debian Developers (DD), including Ana Guerrero, Anibal Monsalve, Michael Prokop and Vicent Cheng. They are people I have been somehow involved with in the last times (developing, in-person meetings, other talks...).

After a month or two, my PGP key was added to the debian keyring.

And what means this? If a DD gives me the corresponding authorization, I can now upload packages directly to the archive without the need for a sponsor.

I have been maintaining packages as a standard contributor since early 2014. From 2014 to 2015 I've learned many many things about Debian. That knowledge was key to become DM.

Google Summer of Code 2015

This is my 3 year in GSoC. In 2013 and 2014 I was involved with the Netfilter Project, but this time I'm contributing to the Debian project.
In concrete, my project is "Improve the Debian port mipsel".

Most of the software is developed to run in common CPU architectures like amd64 and i386. However, Debian can run in a large variety of arches (not so many operating systems have this power). Developers tend to consider these arches 'exotic' and don't pay much attention to them.
The mips/mipsel architecture is somewhat similar to arm: its mainly intended for small devices.

My tasks consist mainly into fixing bugs and FTBFS errors in the mipsel architecture.

Roughly speaking, this can be done in two ways: emulating the mipsel arch using qemu, or using a physical mipsel machine. The qemu way is very very slow. Fortunately, as part of my GSoC involvement, I was given a ci20 mipsel board by Imagination Technologies. I have been using this board for all my GSoC work.

Detailing my work during this GSoC deserves his own blog post. However, the Debian workflow for GSoC'15 requires a weekly report, and here are mine:

  1. week 1
  2. week 2
  3. week 3
  4. week 4
  5. week 5
  6. week 6
  7. week 7
  8. week 8
  9. week 9
  10. week 10
  11. week 11
  12. week 12

no longer involved with the Netfilter Project

Such is life. Days only have 24 hours. I had to 'refactor' my priorities and my involvement with the Netfilter Project is now almost none. This happened back in May'15. I was in so many business that I had stress and even had anxiety. Among other things, this hard decision meant that I missed the Netfilter Workshop 2015 in Budapest :-(

My plan for 2016 is to focus in the University and pay bills with my full-time job as a system administrator.

other debian sutff

Regarding packaging, it worth mention my latest new package: liquidprompt. For people who get their hands dirty with the CLI, I recommend it :-)
I made lot of updates to the other packages as well.

The nftables package is now in jessie-backports. Debian includes now Linux v4 in jessie-backports as well, which mean you can start playing with a full-featured nftables right now :-)
I'm looking forward to package the following version of upstream nftables, which is to include new exciting changes.

best regards!

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