Since gitorious' shutdown I decided it was time to start hosting my
own git repositories for my own little projects (although the company
which took over gitorious has a Free software offering it seems that
their hosted offering is based on the proprietary version, and in any
case
once bitten, twice shy and all that).
After a bit of investigation I settled on using
gitolite and
gitweb. I did consider
(and even had a vague preference for)
cgit but it wasn't available in Wheezy
(even backports, and the backport looked tricky) and I haven't
upgraded my VPS yet. I may reconsider cgit this once I switch to
Jessie.
The only wrinkle was that my VPS is shared with a friend and I didn't
want to completely take over the
gitolite and
gitweb namespaces in
case he ever wanted to setup
git.hisdomain.com, so I needed
something which was at least somewhat compatible with
vhosting.
gitolite doesn't appear to support such things out of the
box but I found an
interesting/useful
post
from Julius Plenz which included sufficient inspiration that I thought
I knew what to do.
After a bit of trial and error here is what I ended up with:
Install gitolite
The
gitolite website has
plenty of documentation on configuring gitolite. But since
gitolite is
in Debian its even more trivial than even the quick install makes out.
I decided to use the newer
gitolite3 package from
wheezy-backports instead of the
gitolite (v2) package
from Wheezy. I already had backports enabled so this was just:
# apt-get install gitolite3/wheezy-backports
I accepted the defaults and gave it the public half of the ssh key
which I had created to be used as the
gitolite admin key.
By default this added a user
gitolite3 with a home directory of
/var/lib/gitolite3. Since they username forms part of the URL used
to access the repositories I want it to include the 3, so I edited
/etc/passwd,
/etc/groups,
/etc/shadow and
/etc/gshadow to say
just
gitolite but leaving the home directory as
gitolite3.
Now I could clone the
gitolite-admin repo and begin to configure
things.
Add my user
This was simple as dropping the public half into the
gitolite-admin
repo as
keydir/ijc.pub, then
git add,
commit and
push.
Setup vhosting
Between
the gitolite
docs and
Julius'
blog
post
I had a pretty good idea what I wanted to do here.
I wasn't too worried about making the vhost transparent from the
developer's (ssh:// URL) point of view, just from the
gitweb and
git clone side. So I decided to adapt things to use a simple
$VHOST/$REPO.git schema.
I created
/var/lib/gitolite3/local/lib/Gitolite/Triggers/VHost.pm
containing:
package Gitolite::Triggers::VHost;
use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Slurp qw(read_file write_file);
sub post_compile
my %vhost = ();
my @projlist = read_file("$ENV HOME /projects.list");
for my $proj (sort @projlist)
$proj =~ m,^([^/\.]*\.[^/]*)/(.*)$, or next;
my ($host, $repo) = ($1,$2);
$vhost $host //= [];
push @ $vhost $host => $repo;
for my $v (keys %vhost)
write_file("$ENV HOME /projects.$v.list",
atomic => 1 , join("\n",@ $vhost $v ));
1;
I then edited
/var/lib/gitolite3/.gitolite.rc and ensured it
contained:
LOCAL_CODE => "$ENV HOME /local",
POST_COMPILE => [ 'VHost::post_compile', ],
(The first I had to uncomment, the second to add).
All this trigger does is take the global
projects.list, in which
gitolite will list any repo which is configured to be accessible via
gitweb, and split it into several vhost specific lists.
Create first repository
Now that the basics were in place I could create my first repository
(for hosting
qcontrol).
In the
gitolite-admin repository I edited
conf/gitolite.conf and added:
repo hellion.org.uk/qcontrol
RW+ = ijc
After adding, committing and pushing I now have
"/var/lib/gitolite3/projects.list" containing:
hellion.org.uk/qcontrol.git
testing.git
(the
testing.git repository is configured by default) and
/var/lib/gitolite3/projects.hellion.org.uk.list containing just:
qcontrol.git
For cloning the URL is:
gitolite@$ VPSNAME :hellion.org.uk/qcontrol.git
which is rather verbose (
$ VPSNAME is quote long in my case too),
so to simplify things I added to my
.ssh/config:
Host gitolite
Hostname $ VPSNAME
User gitolite
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa_gitolite
so I can instead use:
gitolite:hellion.org.uk/qcontrol.git
which is a bit less of a mouthful and almost readable.
Configure gitweb (http:// URL browsing)
Following the
documentation's
advice I edited
/var/lib/gitolite3/.gitolite.rc to set:
UMASK => 0027,
and then:
$ chmod -R g+rX /var/lib/gitolite3/repositories/*
Which arranges that members of the
gitolite group can read anything
under
/var/lib/gitolite3/repositories/*.
Then:
# adduser www-data gitolite
This adds the user
www-data to the
gitolite group so it can take
advantage of those relaxed permissions. I'm not super happy about this
but since gitweb runs as
www-data:www-data this seems to be the
recommended way of doing things. I'm consoling myself with the fact
that I don't plan on hosting anything sensitive... I also arranged
things such that members of the groups can only list the contents of
directories from the vhost directory down by setting
g=x not
g=rx
on higher level directories. Potentially sensitive files do not have group
permissions at all either.
Next I created
/etc/apache2/gitolite-gitweb.conf:
die unless $ENV GIT_PROJECT_ROOT ;
$ENV GIT_PROJECT_ROOT =~ m,^.*/([^/]+)$,;
our $gitolite_vhost = $1;
our $projectroot = $ENV GIT_PROJECT_ROOT ;
our $projects_list = "/var/lib/gitolite3/projects.$ gitolite_vhost .list";
our @git_base_url_list = ("http://git.$ gitolite_vhost ");
This extracts the vhost name from
$ GIT_PROJECT_ROOT (it must be
the last element) and uses it to select the appropriate vhost specific
projects.list.
Then I added a new vhost to my apache2 configuration:
<VirtualHost 212.110.190.137:80 [2001:41c8:1:628a::89]:80>
ServerName git.hellion.org.uk
SetEnv GIT_PROJECT_ROOT /var/lib/gitolite3/repositories/hellion.org.uk
SetEnv GITWEB_CONFIG /etc/apache2/gitolite-gitweb.conf
Alias /static /usr/share/gitweb/static
ScriptAlias / /usr/share/gitweb/gitweb.cgi/
</VirtualHost>
This configures
git.hellion.org.uk (don't forget to update DNS too)
and sets the appropriate environment variables to find the custom
gitolite-gitweb.conf and the project root.
Next I edited
/var/lib/gitolite3/.gitolite.rc again to set:
GIT_CONFIG_KEYS => 'gitweb\.(owner description category)',
Now I can edit the repo configuration to be:
repo hellion.org.uk/qcontrol
owner = Ian Campbell
desc = qcontrol
RW+ = ijc
R = gitweb
That
R permission for the
gitweb pseudo-user causes the repo to be
listed in the global
projects.list and the trigger which we've added
causes it to be listed in
projects.hellion.org.uk.list, which is
where our custom
gitolite-gitweb.conf will look.
Setting
GIT_CONFIG_KEYS allows those options (
owner and
desc are
syntactic sugar for two of them) to be set here and propagated to the
actual repo.
Configure git-http-backend (http:// URL cloning)
After all that this was pretty simple. I just added this to my vhost
before the
ScriptAlias / /usr/share/gitweb/gitweb.cgi/ line:
ScriptAliasMatch \
"(?x)^/(.*/(HEAD \
info/refs \
objects/(info/[^/]+ \
[0-9a-f] 2 /[0-9a-f] 38 \
pack/pack-[0-9a-f] 40 \.(pack idx)) \
git-(upload receive)-pack))$" \
/usr/lib/git-core/git-http-backend/$1
This (which I stole straight from the
git-http-backend(1) manpage
causes anything which
git-http-backend should deal with to be sent
there and everything else to be sent to
gitweb.
Having done that access is enabled by editing the repo configuration
one last time to be:
repo hellion.org.uk/qcontrol
owner = Ian Campbell
desc = qcontrol
RW+ = ijc
R = gitweb daemon
Adding
R permissions for
daemon causes
gitolite to drop a stamp
file in the repository which tells
git-http-backend that it should
export it.
Configure git daemon (git:// URL cloning)
I actually didn't bother with this,
git http-backend supports the
smart HTTP mode which
should be as efficient as the git
protocol. Given
that I couldn't see any reason to run another network facing daemon on
my VPS.
FWIW it looks like vhosting could have been achieved by using the
--interpolated-path option.
Conclusion
There's quite a few moving parts, but they all seems to fit together
quite nicely. In the end apart from adding
www-data to the
gitolite group I'm pretty happy with how things ended up.
So, following the previous post, I've indeed updated the way I'm making my grsec kernels.
I wanted to upgrade my server to Jessie, and didn't want to keep the 3.2 kernel indefinitely, so I had to update to at least 3.14, and find something to make my life (and maybe some others) easier.
In the end, like planned, I've switched to the make deb-pkg way, using some scripts here and there to simplify stuff.
The scripts and configs can be found in my debian-grsec-config repository. The repository layout is pretty much self-explaining:
The bin/ folder contains two scripts:
The other day I received from my Japanese teacher an interesting article by Yamazaki Masakazu 
The author describes his feelings and thoughts about the shishiodoshi, in particular connects human life (stress and relieve, cycles), the flow of time, and some other concepts with the shishiodoshi. Up to here it is a wonderful article providing interesting insights into the way the author thinks. Unfortunately, then the author tries to underline his ideas by comparing the Japanese shishiodoshi with European style water fountains, describing the former with all favorable properties and full of deep meaning, while the latter is qualified as beautiful and nice, but bare of any deeper meaning.
I don t go into details that the whole comparison is anyway a bad one, as he is comparing Baroque style fountains, a very limited period, and furthermore ignores the fact that water fountains are not genuinely European (isn t there one in the Kenrokuen, one of the three most famous gardens in Japan!?), nor does he consider any other water-installation that might be available. What really destroys the in principle very nice article is the tone:
The general tone of the article then can be summarized into: The shishiodoshi is rich on meaning, connects to the life of humans, instigates philosophical reflections, represents nature, the flow of time etc. The water fountain is beautiful and gorgeous, but that is all.
I don t think that this separation, or this negative undertone, was created on purpose by the author. A person of his stature is supposedly above this level of primitive comparison. I believe that it is nothing else but a consequence of upbringing and the general attitude that permeates the whole society with this feeling of separateness.
Us and They
Repeatedly providing sentences like Japanese people and Western people have different tastes.. ( ). About 10 times in this short article expressions like Japanese and Westerner appear, leaving the reader with a bitter taste of an author that considers first the Japanese a people (what about Ainu, Ryukyu, etc?), and second that the Japanese are exclusive in the sense that they are set apart from the rest of the world in their way of thinking, living, being.
What puzzles me is that this is not only a singular opinion, but a very general straight in the Japanese media, TV, radio, newspaper, books. Everyone considers Japan and Japanese as something that is fundamentally and profoundly different from everyone else in the world.
There is We the Japanese (and that doesn t mean nationality of passport, but blood line!), and there are They the Rest or, as the way of writing and and description on many occasion suggestions, They the Barbarians .
A short anecdote will underly this: One of the favorite TV talk show / pseudo-documentary style is about Japanese living abroad. That day a lady married in Paris was interviewed. What followed was a guided tour through Paris showing: Dirt in the gutter, street cleaning cars, waste disposal places. Yes, that was all. Just about the dirt . Of course, at length the (unfortunately only apparent) cleanliness of Japanese cities and neighborhoods are mentioned and shown to remind everyone how wonderful Japan is and how dirty the Barbarians. I don t want to say that I consider Japan more dirty than most other countries just the visible part is clean, the moment you step a bit aside and around the corner, there are the worst trash just thrown away without consideration. Anyway.
To return to the topic of Us and They I consider us all humans, first and foremost, and nationality, birthplace, and all that are just by chance. I do NOT reject cultural differences, they are here, of course. But cultural differences are one thing, separating one self and one s perceived people from the rest of the world is another.
Conclusion
I repeat, I don t think that the author had any ill intentions, but it would have been nicer if the article wouldn t make such a stark distinction. He could have written about Shishiodoshi and water fountains without using the Us They categorization. He could have compared other water installations, could have discussed the long tradition of small ponds in European gardens, just to name a few things. But the author choose to highlight differences instead of commonalities.
It is the Us against Them feeling that often makes life in Japan for a foreigner difficult. Japanese are not special, Austrians, too, are not special, nor are Americans, Russians, Tibetans, or any other nationality. No nationality is special, we are all humans. Maybe at some point this will arrive also in the Japanese society and thinking.
As shipped, Debian Jessie (8.0) did not include kernel support for
the USB controller on APM X-Gene based machines like the Mustang. In
fact, at the time of writing this that support has not yet gone
upstream into the mainline Linux kernel either but patches have been
posted by Mark Langsdorf from Red Hat.
This means that installing Debian is more awkward than it could be
on these machines. They don't have optical drives fitted normally, so
the neat isohybrid CD images that we have made in Debian so far won't
work very well at all. Booting via UEFI from a USB stick will work,
but then the installer won't be able to read from the USB stick at all
and you're stuck. :-( The best way so far for installing Debian is to
do a network installation using tftp etc.
Well, until now... :-)
I've patched the Debian Jessie kernel, then re-built the installer
and a netinst image to use them. I've put a copy of that image up at
Like 
Like 
What happened about the 
Lately, I have been dedicating a lot of my time (well, at least compared to
what I used to) to Free Software projects. In particular, I have spent a
moderate amount of time with two projects written in Python.
In this post, I want to talk about the first, more popular project is called
If you like the project, 
Unfortunately, with all the normal magic of QML property bindings, getting a property updated in a setup that involves return values from functions isn t really doable, like this:
The first two days of this year s DebConf (August 15th and 16th) will
constitute the Open Weekend. On these days, we are planning to have the
Debian 22nd Birthday party, a Job Fair, and more than 20 hours of events
and presentations, including some special invited speakers.
Given that we expect to have a broader and larger audience during the
weekend, our goal is to have talks that are equally interesting for both
Debian contributors and users.
If you want to present something that might be interesting to the larger
Debian community, please go ahead and submit it. It can be for a talk of
either 45 or 20 minutes; if you don t have content for a full length talk,
we encourage you to go for the half length one. If you consider that the
event is better suited for either the OpenWeekend or the regular DebConf
days, you may say so in the comment field. But keep in mind that all
events might be rearranged by the content team to make sure they fit
together nicely.
Call for proposals
The deadline to submit proposals is June 15th. Please submit your talk
early with a good description and a catchy title. We look forward to
seeing your proposals!
If you want to submit an event please go ahead and read the original CfP on
DebConf15 
The discussion regarding the legality and convenience of Uber, Cabify and similar taxi-by-app services has come to Mexico City Over the last few days, I've seen newspapers talk about 
I finally got around to finishing off and 
(This came up in a 
