It s Seafair weekend in Seattle. As always, the centerpiece is the H1 Unlimited hydroplane races on Lake Washington. In my social circle, I m nearly the only person I know who grew up in area. None of the newcomers I know had heard of hydroplane racing before moving to Seattle. Even after I explain it to them i.e., boats with 3,000+ horse power airplane engines that fly just above the water at more than 320kph (200mph) leaving 10m+ (30ft) wakes behind them! most people seem more puzzled than interested. I grew up near the shore of Lake Washington and could see (and hear!) the races from my house. I don t follow hydroplane racing throughout the year but I do enjoy watching the races at Seafair. Here s my attempt to explain and make the case for the races to new Seattleites. Before Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, etc., there were basically three major Seattle industries: (1) logging and lumber based industries like paper manufacturing; (2) maritime industries like fishing, shipbuilding, shipping, and the navy; (3) aerospace (i.e., Boeing). Vintage hydroplane racing represented the Seattle trifecta: Wooden boats with airplane engines! The wooden U-60 Miss Thriftway circa 1955 (Thriftway is a Washinton-based supermarket that nobody outside has heard of) below is a picture of old-Seattle awesomeness. Modern hydroplanes are now made of fiberglass but two out of three isn t bad. Although the boats are racing this year in events in Indiana, San Diego, and Detroit in addition to the two races in Washington, hydroplane racing retains deep ties to the region. Most of the drivers are from the Seattle area. Many or most of the teams and boats are based in Washington throughout the year. Many of the sponsors are unknown outside of the state. This parochialness itself cultivates a certain kind of appeal among locals. In addition to old-Seattle/new-Seattle cultural divide, there s a class divide that I think is also worth challenging. Although the demographics of hydro-racing fans is surprisingly broad, it can seem like Formula One or NASCAR on the water. It seems safe to suggest that many of the demographic groups moving to Seattle for jobs in the tech industry are not big into motorsports. Although I m no follower of motorsports in general, I ve written before cultivated disinterest in professional sports, and it remains something that I believe is worth taking on. It s not all great. In particular, the close relationship between Seafair and the military makes me very uneasy. That said, even with the military-heavy airshow, I enjoy the way that Seafair weekend provides a little pocket of old-Seattle that remains effectively unchanged from when I was a kid. I d encourage others to enjoy it as well!

It s Seafair weekend in Seattle. As always, the centerpiece is the H1 Unlimited hydroplane races on Lake Washington. In my social circle, I m nearly the only person I know who grew up in area. None of the newcomers I know had heard of hydroplane racing before moving to Seattle. Even after I explain it to them i.e., boats with 3,000+ horse power airplane engines that fly just above the water at more than 320kph (200mph) leaving 10m+ (30ft) wakes behind them! most people seem more puzzled than interested. I grew up near the shore of Lake Washington and could see (and hear!) the races from my house. I don t follow hydroplane racing throughout the year but I do enjoy watching the races at Seafair. Here s my attempt to explain and make the case for the races to new Seattleites. Before Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, etc., there were basically three major Seattle industries: (1) logging and lumber based industries like paper manufacturing; (2) maritime industries like fishing, shipbuilding, shipping, and the navy; (3) aerospace (i.e., Boeing). Vintage hydroplane racing represented the Seattle trifecta: Wooden boats with airplane engines! The wooden U-60 Miss Thriftway circa 1955 (Thriftway is a Washinton-based supermarket that nobody outside has heard of) below is a picture of old-Seattle awesomeness. Modern hydroplanes are now made of fiberglass but two out of three isn t bad. Although the boats are racing this year in events in Indiana, San Diego, and Detroit in addition to the two races in Washington, hydroplane racing retains deep ties to the region. Most of the drivers are from the Seattle area. Many or most of the teams and boats are based in Washington throughout the year. Many of the sponsors are unknown outside of the state. This parochialness itself cultivates a certain kind of appeal among locals. In addition to old-Seattle/new-Seattle cultural divide, there s a class divide that I think is also worth challenging. Although the demographics of hydro-racing fans is surprisingly broad, it can seem like Formula One or NASCAR on the water. It seems safe to suggest that many of the demographic groups moving to Seattle for jobs in the tech industry are not big into motorsports. Although I m no follower of motorsports in general, I ve written before cultivated disinterest in professional sports, and it remains something that I believe is worth taking on. It s not all great. In particular, the close relationship between Seafair and the military makes me very uneasy. That said, even with the military-heavy airshow, I enjoy the way that Seafair weekend provides a little pocket of old-Seattle that remains effectively unchanged from when I was a kid. I d encourage others to enjoy it as well!

There can be issues with shipping installer images including UEFI. But they're mainly due to crappy UEFI implementations that vendors have shipped. It's fairly well-known that Apple have shipped some really shoddy firmware over the years, and to allow people to install Debian on older Apple x86 machines we've now added the workaround of a non-UEFI 32-bit installer image too. But Apple aren't the only folks shipping systems with horrendously buggy UEFI, and a lot of Linux folks have had to deal with this over the last few years. I've been talking to a number of other UEFI developers lately, and we've agreed to start a cross-distro resource to help here - a list of known-broken UEFI implementations so that we can share our experiences. The place for this in in the OSDev wiki at http://wiki.osdev.org/Broken_UEFI_implementations. We're going to be adding new information here as we find it. If you've got a particular UEFI horror story on your own broken system, then please either add details there or let me know and I'll try to do it for you.

We've just started a new team in Debian for maintaining our UEFI packages together, with git repositories in a shared project on alioth etc. We're just working out the exact details of how we're going to manage things, but for now we've moved the following packages under the team's umbrella:

• efibootmgr
• efivar
• fwupd
• fwupdate
• pesign

and in the future we'll clearly end up adding more. We've also started a new IRC channel (#debian-efi) on irc.debian.org aka irc.oftc.net. New members always welcome to help with the work here!

The list of available wifi channels is slightly different from country to country. To ensure access to the right channels and transmit power settings, one needs to set the right regulatory domain in the wifi stack.

Linux For most Linux-based computers, you can look and change the current regulatory domain using these commands:

iw reg get
iw reg set CA

where CA is the two-letter country code when the device is located. On Debian and Ubuntu, you can make this setting permanent by putting the country code in /etc/default/crda. Finally, to see the list of channels that are available in the current config, use:

iwlist wlan0 frequency

OpenWRT On OpenWRT-based routers (including derivatives like Gargoyle), looking and setting the regulatory domain temporarily works the same way (i.e. the iw commands above). In order to persist your changes though, you need to use the uci command:

uci set wireless.radio0.country=CA
uci set wireless.radio1.country=CA
uci commit wireless

where wireless.radio0 and wireless.radio1 are the wireless devices specific to your router. You can look them up using:

uci show wireless

To test that it worked, simply reboot the router and then look at the selected regulatory domain:

iw reg get

Scanning the local wifi environment Once your devices are set to the right country, you should scan the local environment to pick the least congested wifi channel. You can use the Kismet spectools (free software) if you have the hardware, otherwise WifiAnalyzer (proprietary) is a good choice on Android (remember to manually set the available channels in the settings).

Review: The Pyramid Waltz, by Barbara Ann Wright

Series:	Katya and Starbride #1
Publisher:	Bold Strokes
Copyright:	September 2012
ISBN:	1-60282-792-3
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	264

Princess Katya Nar Umbriel is publicly a bored, womanizing, and difficult daughter to the rulers of Farraday. It's all an act, though, with the full knowledge of her parents. As the second child, she's the leader of the Order of Vestra: the equivalent of the Secret Service, devoted to protecting the royal family and, by extension, the kingdom, particularly against magical attacks. Starbride is new to court and entirely out of place. From a northern neighboring country, and far more comfortable in practical clothing than the frilled court dresses that her mother wants her to wear, she has been sent to court to make contacts. Her people are getting the bad side of various trade contracts and desperately need some political maneuvering space of their own. Starbride's best hope for this is to study law in the palace library when she can manage to avoid the other courtiers. But then she and Katya stumble across each other, outside of the roles they're playing, and might have an opportunity for a deeper connection. One that neither of them want to entangle in their personal worries. This is the last of a set of books I picked up while looking for lesbian romance with fantasy or science fiction elements. On the romance front, it's one of the better entries in that set. Both Katya and Starbride are likeable, in large part due to their mutual exasperation with the trappings of the court. (Making the protagonists more serious, thoughtful, and intelligent than the surrounding characters is an old trick, but it works.) Wright has a good ear for banter, particularly the kind when two people of good will are carefully feeling each other out. And despite Katya's need to keep a deep secret from Starbride for some of the book, The Pyramid Waltz mostly avoids irritating communication failures as a plot driver. The fantasy portion and the plot drivers, alas, are weaker. The world building is not exactly bad, but it's just not that interesting. There are a couple of moderately good ideas, in the form of pyramid magic and secret (and dangerous) magical powers that run in the royal family, but they're not well-developed. Pyramid magic turns out to look much like any other generic fantasy magic system, with training scenes that could have come from a Valdemar or Wheel of Time novel (and without as much dramatic tension). And the royal family's secret, while better-developed and integral to the plot, still felt rather generic and one-sided. Maybe that's something Wright develops better in future novels in this series, but that was another problem: the ending of The Pyramid Waltz was rather weak. Partly, I think, this is because the cast is too large and not well-developed. I cared about Katya and Starbird, and to a lesser extent their servants and one of the Order members. (Wright has a moderately interesting bit of worldbuilding about how servants work in Starbride's culture, which I wish we'd seen more of.) But there are a bunch of other Order of Vesta members, Katya's family, and various other bits of history and hinted world views, none of which seemed to get much depth. The ending climax involved a lot of revelations and twists that primarily concerned characters I didn't care about. It lost something in the process. This book is clearly set up for a sequel. There is an ending, but it's not entirely satisfying. Unfortunately, despite liking Katya and Starbird a lot, the rest of the story wasn't compelling enough to make me want to buy it, particularly since the series apparently goes through another three books before reaching a real ending. I enjoyed parts of this book, particularly Katya and Starbird feeling each other out and discovering similarities in their outlook. Katya teasing Starbird, and Starbird teasing herself, over her mother's choice of her clothing was probably the best part. It's not bad for what it's trying to do, but I think it's a bit too generic and not satisfying enough to really recommend. Followed by For Want of a Fiend. Rating: 6 out of 10

A few days ago, fellow Qt/KDE team member Lisandro gave an update on the situation with migration to Plasma 5 in Debian Testing (AKA Stretch). It s changed again. All of Plasma 5 is now in Testing. The upgrade probably won t be entirely smooth, which we ll work on that after the gcc5 transition is done, but it will be much better than the half KDE4 SC half Kf5/Plasma 5 situation we ve had for the last several days. The issues with starting kwin should be resolved once users upgrade to Plasma 5. To use the current kwin with KDE SC 4, you will need to add a symlink from /usr/bin/kwin to /usr/bin/kwin_x11. That will be included in the next upload after gcc5. Systemsettings and plasma-nm now work. In my initial testing, I didn t see anything major that was broken. One user reported an issue with sddm starting automatically, but it worked fine for me. During the upgrade you should get a debconf prompt asking if you want to use kdm or sddm. Pick sddm. When I tried to dist-upgrade, apt wanted to remove task-kde-desktop. I let it remove it and some other packages and then in a second step did apt-get install task-kde-desktop. That pulled it back in successfully along with adding and removing a reasonably large stack of packages. Obviously we need to make that work better before Stretch is released, but as long as you don t restart KDE in between those two steps it should be fine. Lastely, I used apt-get autoremove to clear out a lot of no longer needed KDE4 things (when it asks if you want to stop the running kdm, say no). Here are a few notes on terminology and what I understand of the future plans: What used to be called KDE is now three different things (in part because KDE is now the community of people, not the software): KDE Frameworks 5 (Kf5): This is a group of several dozen small libraries that as a group, roughly equate to what used to be kdelibs. Plasma (Workspaces) 5: This is the desktop that we ve just transitioned to. Applications: These are a mix of kdelibs and Kf5 based applications. Currently in Testing there are some of both and this will evolve over time based on upstream development. As an example, the Kf5 based version of konsole is in Unstable and should transition to Testing shortly. Finally, thanks to Maximiliano Curia (maxy on IRC) for doing virtually all of the packaging of Kf5, Plasma 5, and applications. He did the heavy lifting, the rest of us just nibbled around the edges to keep it moving towards testing.

VLANd is a python program intended to make it easy to manage port-based VLAN setups across multiple switches in a network. It is designed to be vendor-agnostic, with a clean pluggable driver API to allow for a wide range of different switches to be controlled together. There's more information in the README file. I've just released v0.3, with a lot of changes included since the last release:

• Massive numbers of bugfixes and code cleanups
• Added two new switch drivers:
  • TP-Link TL-SG2XXX family (TPLinkTLSG2XXX)
  • Netgear XSM family (NetgearXSM)
• Added "debug" option to all the switch drivers to log all interactions
• Added internal caching of port modes within the driver core for a large speed-up in normal use
• Bug fix to handling of trunk ports in the CiscoCatalyst driver, improving VLAN interop with other switches
• Huge changes to the test lab, now using 5 switches and 10 hosts
• Big improvements to the test suite:
  • Match the new test lab layout
  • Move more of the core test code into the test-common utility library
  • Massively improved the check-networks test runner for the test hosts
  • Added parsing of the UP/DOWN results in test-common to give a simple PASS/FAIL result for each test
  • Added more tests
• All logging now in UTC

VLANd is Free Software, released under the GPL version 2 (or any later version). For now, grab it from git; tarballs will be coming shortly.

The DUCK challenge is making a quite stable progress: in the last 4 weeks there were approximately 12.25 packages fixed and uploaded per week. In the current week the following packages were fixed and uploaded into unstable:

• Fran ois-Ren Ridea uploaded cl-adsl
• gregor herrmann uploaded libdevel-profile-perl and libmail-verp-perl
• Lucas Kanashiro uploaded libclass-singleton-perl, libpod-readme-perl and libconfig-json-perl
• Jordi Mallach uploaded fcgiwrap
• Joao Eriberto Mota Filho uploaded rifiuti and rifiuti2
• Gergely Nagy uploaded dh-exec
• Ian Jackson uploaded dgit
• Rapha l Hertzog uploaded memdump
• Joao Eriberto Mota Filho uploaded recoverdm
• Picca Fr d ric-Emmanu uploaded sardana

So we had 14 packages fixed and uploaded by 10 different uploaders. A big "Thank You" to you!! Since the start of this challenge, a total of 49 packages, uploaded by 31 different persons 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	-	-	-
Total	10	25	35	49	-	-	-

The list of the fixed and updated packages is availabe here. I will try to update this ~daily. If I missed one of your uploads, please drop me a line. DebConf15 is approaching quite fast, so please get involved: The DUCK Challenge is running until end of DebConf15! Pevious articles are here: Week 1, Week 2, Week 3.

So we're in Finland, and the differences start out immediately. We're renting a flat, in building ten, on a street. You'd think "10 Streetname" was a single building, but no. It is a pair of buildings: 10A, and 10B. Both of the buildings have 12 flats in them, with 10A having 1-12, and 10B having 13-24. There's a keypad at the main entrance, which I assumed was to let you press a button and talk to the people inside "Hello I'm the postmaster", but no. There is no intercom system, instead you type in a magic number and the door opens. The magic number? Sounds like you want to keep that secret, since it lets people into the common-area? No. Everybody has it. The postman, the cleaners, the DHL delivery man, and all the ex-tenants. We invited somebody over recently and gave it out in advance so that they could knock on our flat-door. Talking of cleaners: In the UK I lived in a flat and once a fortnight somebody would come and sweep the stair-well, since we didn't ever agree to do it ourselves. Here somebody turns up every day, be it to cut the grass, polish the hand-rail, clean the glass on the front-door, or mop the floors of the common area. Sounds awesome. But they cut the grass, right outside our window, at 7:30AM. On the dot. (Or use a leaf-blower, or something equally noisy.) All this communal-care is paid for by the building-association, of which all flat-owners own shares. Sounds like something we see in England, or even like Americas idea of a Home-Owners-Association. (In Scotland you own your own flat, you don't own shares of an entity which owns the complete building. I guess there are pros and cons to both approaches.) Moving onwards other things are often the same, but the differences when you spot them are odd. I'm struggling to think of them right now, somebody woke me up by cutting our grass for the second time this week (!) Anyway I'm registered now with the Finnish government, and have a citizen-number, which will be useful, I've got an appointment booked to register with the police - which is something I had to do as a foreigner within the first three months - and today I've got an appointment with a local bank so that I can have a euro-bank-account. Happily I did find a gym to join, the owner came over one Sunday to give me a tiny-tour, and then gave me a list of other gyms to try if his wasn't good enough - which was a nice touch - I joined a couple of days later, his gym is awesome. (I'm getting paid in UK-pounds, to a UK-bank, so right now I'm getting local money by transferring to my wifes account here, but I want to do that to my own, and open a shared account for paying for rent, electricity, internet, water, & etc). My flat back home is still not rented, because the nice property management company lost my keys. Yeah you can't make that up can you? With a bit of luck the second set of keys I mailed them will arrive soon and the damn thing can be occupied, while I'm not relying on that income I do wish to have it.

Long long time ago I wanted to have Sigil, an epub editor, to appear in Debian. There was a packaging wishlist bug from back in 2010 with intermittent activities. But thanks to concerted effort, especially by Mattia Rizzolo and Don Armstrong, packaging progressed to a state that I could sponsor the upload to experimental about 4 months ago. And yesterday, after long waiting, finally Sigil passed the watchful eyes of the Debian ftp-masters and has entered Debian/experimental. I have already updated the packaging for the latest version 0.8.7, which will be included in Debian/sid rather soon. Thanks again especially Mattia for his great work.

Recently, the pkg-go team has been quite busy, uploading dozens of Go library packages in order to be able to package gcsfuse (a user-space file system for interacting with Google Cloud Storage) and InfluxDB (an open-source distributed time series database). Packaging Go library packages (!) is a fairly repetitive process, so before starting my work on the dependencies for gcsfuse, I started writing a tool called dh-make-golang. Just like dh-make itself, the goal is to automatically create (almost) an entire Debian package. As I worked my way through the dependencies of gcsfuse, I refined how the tool works, and now I believe it s good enough for a first release. To demonstrate how the tool works, let s assume we want to package the Go library github.com/jacobsa/ratelimit:

midna /tmp $ dh-make-golang github.com/jacobsa/ratelimit
2015/07/25 18:25:39 Downloading "github.com/jacobsa/ratelimit/..."
2015/07/25 18:25:53 Determining upstream version number
2015/07/25 18:25:53 Package version is "0.0~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c"
2015/07/25 18:25:53 Determining dependencies
2015/07/25 18:25:55 
2015/07/25 18:25:55 Packaging successfully created in /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit
2015/07/25 18:25:55 
2015/07/25 18:25:55 Resolve all TODOs in itp-golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit.txt, then email it out:
2015/07/25 18:25:55     sendmail -t -f < itp-golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit.txt
2015/07/25 18:25:55 
2015/07/25 18:25:55 Resolve all the TODOs in debian/, find them using:
2015/07/25 18:25:55     grep -r TODO debian
2015/07/25 18:25:55 
2015/07/25 18:25:55 To build the package, commit the packaging and use gbp buildpackage:
2015/07/25 18:25:55     git add debian && git commit -a -m 'Initial packaging'
2015/07/25 18:25:55     gbp buildpackage --git-pbuilder
2015/07/25 18:25:55 
2015/07/25 18:25:55 To create the packaging git repository on alioth, use:
2015/07/25 18:25:55     ssh git.debian.org "/git/pkg-go/setup-repository golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit 'Packaging for golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit'"
2015/07/25 18:25:55 
2015/07/25 18:25:55 Once you are happy with your packaging, push it to alioth using:
2015/07/25 18:25:55     git push git+ssh://git.debian.org/git/pkg-go/packages/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit.git --tags master pristine-tar upstream

The ITP is often the most labor-intensive part of the packaging process, because any number of auto-detected values might be wrong: the repository owner might not be the Upstream Author , the repository might not have a short description, the long description might need some adjustments or the license might not be auto-detected.

midna /tmp $ cat itp-golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit.txt
From: "Michael Stapelberg" <stapelberg AT debian.org>
To: submit@bugs.debian.org
Subject: ITP: golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit -- Go package for rate limiting
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: Michael Stapelberg <stapelberg AT debian.org>
* Package name    : golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit
  Version         : 0.0~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1
  Upstream Author : Aaron Jacobs
* URL             : https://github.com/jacobsa/ratelimit
* License         : Apache-2.0
  Programming Lang: Go
  Description     : Go package for rate limiting
 GoDoc (https://godoc.org/github.com/jacobsa/ratelimit)
 .
 This package contains code for dealing with rate limiting. See the
 reference (http://godoc.org/github.com/jacobsa/ratelimit) for more info.
TODO: perhaps reasoning
midna /tmp $

After filling in all the TODOs in the file, let s mail it out and get a sense of what else still needs to be done:

midna /tmp $ sendmail -t -f < itp-golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit.txt
midna /tmp $ cd golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $ grep -r TODO debian
debian/changelog:  * Initial release (Closes: TODO) 
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $

After filling in these TODOs as well, let s have a final look at what we re about to build:

midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $ head -100 debian/**/*
==> debian/changelog <==                            
golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit (0.0~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1) unstable; urgency=medium
  * Initial release (Closes: #793646)
 -- Michael Stapelberg <stapelberg@debian.org>  Sat, 25 Jul 2015 23:26:34 +0200
==> debian/compat <==
9
==> debian/control <==
Source: golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit
Section: devel
Priority: extra
Maintainer: pkg-go <pkg-go-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org>
Uploaders: Michael Stapelberg <stapelberg@debian.org>
Build-Depends: debhelper (>= 9),
               dh-golang,
               golang-go,
               golang-github-jacobsa-gcloud-dev,
               golang-github-jacobsa-oglematchers-dev,
               golang-github-jacobsa-ogletest-dev,
               golang-github-jacobsa-syncutil-dev,
               golang-golang-x-net-dev
Standards-Version: 3.9.6
Homepage: https://github.com/jacobsa/ratelimit
Vcs-Browser: http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-go/packages/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit.git;a=summary
Vcs-Git: git://anonscm.debian.org/pkg-go/packages/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit.git
Package: golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit-dev
Architecture: all
Depends: $ shlibs:Depends ,
         $ misc:Depends ,
         golang-go,
         golang-github-jacobsa-gcloud-dev,
         golang-github-jacobsa-oglematchers-dev,
         golang-github-jacobsa-ogletest-dev,
         golang-github-jacobsa-syncutil-dev,
         golang-golang-x-net-dev
Built-Using: $ misc:Built-Using 
Description: Go package for rate limiting
 This package contains code for dealing with rate limiting. See the
 reference (http://godoc.org/github.com/jacobsa/ratelimit) for more info.
==> debian/copyright <==
Format: http://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/
Upstream-Name: ratelimit
Source: https://github.com/jacobsa/ratelimit
Files: *
Copyright: 2015 Aaron Jacobs
License: Apache-2.0
Files: debian/*
Copyright: 2015 Michael Stapelberg <stapelberg@debian.org>
License: Apache-2.0
Comment: Debian packaging is licensed under the same terms as upstream
License: Apache-2.0
 Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
 you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
 You may obtain a copy of the License at
 .
 http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
 .
 Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
 distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
 WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
 See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
 limitations under the License.
 .
 On Debian systems, the complete text of the Apache version 2.0 license
 can be found in "/usr/share/common-licenses/Apache-2.0".
==> debian/gbp.conf <==
[DEFAULT]
pristine-tar = True
==> debian/rules <==
#!/usr/bin/make -f
export DH_GOPKG := github.com/jacobsa/ratelimit
%:
	dh $@ --buildsystem=golang --with=golang
==> debian/source <==
head: error reading  debian/source : Is a directory
==> debian/source/format <==
3.0 (quilt)
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $

Okay, then. Let s give it a shot and see if it builds:

midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $ git add debian && git commit -a -m 'Initial packaging'
[master 48f4c25] Initial packaging                                                      
 7 files changed, 75 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 debian/changelog
 create mode 100644 debian/compat
 create mode 100644 debian/control
 create mode 100644 debian/copyright
 create mode 100644 debian/gbp.conf
 create mode 100755 debian/rules
 create mode 100644 debian/source/format
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $ gbp buildpackage --git-pbuilder
[ ]
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $ lintian ../golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit_0.0\~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1_amd64.changes
I: golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit source: debian-watch-file-is-missing
P: golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit-dev: no-upstream-changelog
I: golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit-dev: extended-description-is-probably-too-short
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $

This package just built (as it should!), but occasionally one might need to disable a test and file an upstream bug about it. So, let s push this package to pkg-go and upload it:

midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $ ssh git.debian.org "/git/pkg-go/setup-repository golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit 'Packaging for golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit'"
Initialized empty shared Git repository in /srv/git.debian.org/git/pkg-go/packages/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit.git/
HEAD is now at ea6b1c5 add mrconfig for dh-make-golang
[master c5be5a1] add mrconfig for golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit
 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+)
To /git/pkg-go/meta.git
   ea6b1c5..c5be5a1  master -> master
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $ git push git+ssh://git.debian.org/git/pkg-go/packages/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit.git --tags master pristine-tar upstream
Counting objects: 31, done.
Delta compression using up to 8 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (25/25), done.
Writing objects: 100% (31/31), 18.38 KiB   0 bytes/s, done.
Total 31 (delta 2), reused 0 (delta 0)
To git+ssh://git.debian.org/git/pkg-go/packages/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit.git
 * [new branch]      master -> master
 * [new branch]      pristine-tar -> pristine-tar
 * [new branch]      upstream -> upstream
 * [new tag]         upstream/0.0_git20150723.0.2ca5e0c -> upstream/0.0_git20150723.0.2ca5e0c
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $ cd ..
midna /tmp $ debsign golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit_0.0\~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1_amd64.changes
[ ]
midna /tmp $ dput golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit_0.0\~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1_amd64.changes   
Uploading golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit using ftp to ftp-master (host: ftp.upload.debian.org; directory: /pub/UploadQueue/)
[ ]
Uploading golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit_0.0~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1.dsc
Uploading golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit_0.0~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c.orig.tar.bz2
Uploading golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit_0.0~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1.debian.tar.xz
Uploading golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit-dev_0.0~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1_all.deb
Uploading golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit_0.0~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1_amd64.changes
midna /tmp $ cd golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit 
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $ git tag debian/0.0_git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $ git push git+ssh://git.debian.org/git/pkg-go/packages/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit.git --tags master pristine-tar upstream
Total 0 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
To git+ssh://git.debian.org/git/pkg-go/packages/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit.git
 * [new tag]         debian/0.0_git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1 -> debian/0.0_git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit master $

Thanks for reading this far, and I hope dh-make-golang makes your life a tiny bit easier. As dh-make-golang just entered Debian unstable, you can install it using apt-get install dh-make-golang. If you have any feedback, I m eager to hear it.

Hadley is a popular figure, and rightly so as he successfully introduced many newcomers to the wonders offered by R. His approach strikes some of us old greybeards as wrong---I particularly take exception with some of his writing which frequently portrays a particular approach as both the best and only one. Real programming, I think, is often a little more nuanced and aware of tradeoffs which need to be balanced. As a book on another language once popularized: "There is more than one way to do things." But let us leave this discussion for another time. As the reach of the Hadleyverse keeps spreading, we sometimes find ourselves at the receiving end of a cost/benefit tradeoff. That is what this post is about, and it uses a very concrete case I encountered yesterday. As blogged earlier, the RcppZiggurat package was updated. I had not touched it in a year, but Brian Ripley had sent a brief and detailed note concerning something flagged by the Solaris compiler (correctly suggesting I replace fabs() with abs() on integer types). (Allow me to stray from the main story line here for a second to stress just how insane a work load he is carrying, essentially for all of us. R and the R community are so just so indebted to him for all his work---which makes the usual social media banter about him so unfortunate. But that too shall be left for another time.) Upon making the simple fix, and submitting to GitHub the usual Travis CI was triggered. And here is what I saw:
All happy, all green. Previous build a year ago, most recent build yesterday, both passed. But hold on: test time went from 2:54 minutes to 7:47 minutes for an increase of almost five minutes! And I knew that I had not added any new dependencies, or altered any build options. What did happen was that among the dependencies of my package, one had decided to now also depend on ggplot2. Which leads to a chain of sixteen additional packages being loaded besides the four I depend upon---when it used to be just one. And that took five minutes as all those packages are installed from source, and some are big and take a long time to compile. There is however and easy alternative, and for that we have to praise Michael Rutter who looks after a number of things for R on Ubuntu. Among these are the R builds for Ubuntu but also the rrutter PPA as well as the c2d4u PPA. If you have not heard this alphabet soup before, a PPA is a package repository for Ubuntu where anyone (who wants to sign up) can upload (properly setup) source files which are then turned into Ubuntu binaries. With full dependency resolution and all other goodies we have come to expect from the Debian / Ubuntu universe. And Michael uses this facility with great skill and calm to provide us all with Ubuntu binaries for R itself (rebuilding what yours truly uploads into Debian), as well as a number of key packages available via the CRAN mirrors. Less know however is this "c2d4u" which stands for CRAN to Debian for Ubuntu. And this builds on something Charles Blundell once built under my mentorship in a Google Summer of Code. And Michael does a tremdous job covering well over a thousand CRAN source packages---and providing binaries for all. Which we can use for Travis! What all that means is that I could now replace the line

 - ./travis-tool.sh install_r RcppGSL rbenchmark microbenchmark highlight

which implies source builds of the four listed packages and all their dependencies with the following line implying binary installations of already built packages:

 - ./travis-tool.sh install_aptget libgsl0-dev r-cran-rcppgsl r-cran-rbenchmark r-cran-microbenchmark r-cran-highlight

In this particular case I also needed to build a binary package of my RcppGSL package as this one is not (yet) handled by Michael. I happen to have (re-)discovered the beauty of PPAs for Travis earlier this year and revitalized an older and largely dormant launchpad account I had for this PPA of mine. How to build a simple .deb package will also have to left for a future post to keep this more concise. This can be used with the existing r-travis setup---but one needs to use the older, initial variant in order to have the ability to install .deb packages. So in the .travis.yml of RcppZiggurat I just use

before_install:
## PPA for Rcpp and some other packages
- sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:edd/misc
## r-travis by Craig Citro et al
- curl -OL http://raw.github.com/craigcitro/r-travis/master/scripts/travis-tool.sh
- chmod 755 ./travis-tool.sh
- ./travis-tool.sh bootstrap

to add my own PPA and all is good. If you do not have a PPA, or do not want to create your own packages you can still benefit from the PPAs by Michael and "mix and match" by installing from binary what is available, and from source what is not. Here we were able to use an all-binary approach, so let's see the resulting performance:
Now we are at 1:03 to 1:15 minutes---much better. So to conclude, while the every expanding universe of R packages is fantastic for us as users, it can be seen to be placing a burden on us as developers when installing and testing. Fortunately, the packaging infrastructure built on top of Debian / Ubuntu packages can help and dramatically reduce build (and hence test) times. Learning about PPAs can be a helpful complement to learning about Travis and continued integration. So maybe now I need a new reason to blame Hadley? Well, there is always snake case ...

Follow-up: The post got some pretty immediate feedback shortly after I posted it. Craig Citro pointed out (quite correctly) that I could use r_binary_install which would also install the Ubuntu binaries based on their R packages names. Having built R/CRAN packages for Debian for so long, I am simply more used to the r-cran-* notations, and I think I was also the one contributing install_aptget to r-travis ... Yihui Xie spoke up for the "new" Travis approach deploying containers, caching of packages and explicit whitelists. It was in that very (GH-based) discussion that I started to really lose faith in the new Travis approach as they want use to whitelist each and every package. With 6900 and counting at CRAN I fear this simply does not scale. But different approaches are certainly welcome. I posted my 1:03 to 1:15 minutes result. If the "New School" can do it faster, I'd be all ears.

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

this week, besides other activities, I again managed to NMU a few packages as part of the GCC 5 transition. & again I could build on patches submitted by various HP engineers & other helpful souls.

• #757525 hardinfo: "hardinfo: FTBFS with clang instead of gcc"
  patch to build with -std=gnu89, upload to DELAYED/5
• #758723 nagios-plugins-rabbitmq: "should depend on libjson-perl"
  add missing dependency, upload to DELAYED/5
• #777766 src:adun.app: "adun.app: ftbfs with GCC-5"
  send updated patch to BTS
• #777837 src:ebview: "ebview: ftbfs with GCC-5"
  add patch from paulownia@Safe-mail.net, upload to DELAYED/5
• #777882 src:gnokii: "gnokii: ftbfs with GCC-5"
  build with -fgnu89-inline, upload to DELAYED/5
• #777907 src:hunt: "hunt: ftbfs with GCC-5"
  apply patch from Nicholas Luedtke, upload to DELAYED/5
• #777920 src:isdnutils: "isdnutils: ftbfs with GCC-5"
  add patch to build with -fgnu89-inline; upload to DELAYED/5
• #778019 src:multimon: "multimon: ftbfs with GCC-5"
  build with -fgnu89-inline; upload to DELAYED/5
• #778068 src:pork: "pork: ftbfs with GCC-5"
  build with -fgnu89-inline, QA upload
• #778098 src:quarry: "quarry: ftbfs with GCC-5"
  build with -std=gnu89, upload to DELAYED/5, then rescheduled to 0-day with maintainer's permission
• #778099 src:ratbox-services: "ratbox-services: ftbfs with GCC-5"
  build with -fgnu89-inline, upload to DELAYED/5, later cancelled because package is about to be removed (#793408)
• #778109 src:s51dude: "s51dude: ftbfs with GCC-5"
  build with -fgnu89-inline, upload to DELAYED/5
• #778116 src:shell-fm: "shell-fm: ftbfs with GCC-5"
  apply patch from Brett Johnson, upload to DELAYED/5
• #778119 src:simulavr: "simulavr: ftbfs with GCC-5"
  apply patch from Brett Johnson, QA upload
• #778120 src:sipsak: "sipsak: ftbfs with GCC-5"
  apply patch from Brett Johnson, upload to DELAYED/5
• #778122 src:skyeye: "skyeye: ftbfs with GCC-5"
  build with -fgnu89-inline, QA upload
• #778140 src:tcpcopy: "tcpcopy: ftbfs with GCC-5"
  add patch backported from upstream git, upload to DELAYED/5
• #778145 src:thewidgetfactory: "thewidgetfactory: ftbfs with GCC-5"
  add missing #include, upload to DELAYED/5
• #778164 src:vtun: "vtun: ftbfs with GCC-5"
  add patch from Tim Potter, upload to DELAYED/5
• #790464 flow-tools: "Please drop conditional build-depend on libmysqlclient15-dev"
  drop obsolete dependency, NMU
• #793336 src:libdevel-profile-perl: "libdevel-profile-perl: FTBFS with perl 5.22 in experimental (MakeMaker changes)"
  finish and upload package modernized by XTaran (pkg-perl)
• #793580 libb-hooks-parser-perl: "libb-hooks-parser-perl: B::Hooks::Parser::Install::Files missing"
  investigate and forward upstream, upload new upstream release later (pkg-perl)

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Eric Dorlan uploaded automake-1.15/1:1.15-2 which makes the output of mdate-sh deterministic. Original patch by Reiner Herrmann. Kenneth J. Pronovici uploaded epydoc/3.0.1+dfsg-8 which now honors SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. Original patch by Reiner Herrmann. Chris Lamb submitted a patch to dh-python to make the order of the generated maintainer scripts deterministic. Chris also offered a fix for a source of non-determinism in dpkg-shlibdeps when packages have alternative dependencies. Dhole provided a patch to add support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to gettext. Packages fixed The following 78 packages became reproducible in our setup due to changes in their build dependencies: chemical-mime-data, clojure-contrib, cobertura-maven-plugin, cpm, davical, debian-security-support, dfc, diction, dvdwizard, galternatives, gentlyweb-utils, gifticlib, gmtkbabel, gnuplot-mode, gplanarity, gpodder, gtg-trace, gyoto, highlight.js, htp, ibus-table, impressive, jags, jansi-native, jnr-constants, jthread, jwm, khronos-api, latex-coffee-stains, latex-make, latex2rtf, latexdiff, libcrcutil, libdc0, libdc1394-22, libidn2-0, libint, libjava-jdbc-clojure, libkryo-java, libphone-ui-shr, libpicocontainer-java, libraw1394, librostlab-blast, librostlab, libshevek, libstxxl, libtools-logging-clojure, libtools-macro-clojure, litl, londonlaw, ltsp, macsyfinder, mapnik, maven-compiler-plugin, mc, microdc2, miniupnpd, monajat, navit, pdmenu, pirl, plm, scikit-learn, snp-sites, sra-sdk, sunpinyin, tilda, vdr-plugin-dvd, vdr-plugin-epgsearch, vdr-plugin-remote, vdr-plugin-spider, vdr-plugin-streamdev, vdr-plugin-sudoku, vdr-plugin-xineliboutput, veromix, voxbo, xaos, xbae. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• analog/2:6.0-21 uploaded by Andreas Beckmann, original patch by Dhole.
• base-passwd/3.5.38 uploaded by Colin Watson, original patch by Juan Picca.
• debconf/1.5.57 uploaded by Colin Watson, original patch by Lunar.
• ipband/0.8.1-4 by Mats Erik Andersson.
• kfreebsd-10/10.1~svn274115-7 by Steven Chamberlain.
• libcommons-cli-java/1.3.1-1 by tony mancill.
• libpsl/0.7.1-1 by Daniel Kahn Gillmor.
• maven-archiver/2.6-3 by Emmanuel Bourg.
• mtink/1.0.16-9 by Graham Inggs.
• ocamlweb/1.39-2 uploaded by Mehdi Dogguy, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• rbdoom3bfg/1.0.3+repack1+git20150625-1 by Tobias Frost.
• spatialite-tools/4.2.1~rc1-2 by Bas Couwenberg.
• task/2.4.4+dfsg-1 by Sebastien Badia.

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

• bullet/2.83.4+dfsg-1 by Markus Koschany.
• cdo/1.6.6+dfsg.1-2 by Alastair McKinstry.
• fish/2.2.0-1 uploaded by Tristan Seligmann, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• sympy/0.7.6-3 by Sergey B Kirpichev.
• xtables-addons/2.7-1 uploaded by Dmitry Smirnov, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.

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

• #792178 on gunroar by Reiner Herrmann: use C locale when sorting source files.
• #792181 on tth by Reiner Herrmann: remove timestamps from generated HTML files.
• #792285 on pkgconf by Juan Picca: set LC_ALL=C when running sort.
• #792319 on jsmath-fonts by Chris Lamb: set TZ=UTC when calling unzip.
• #792424 on swh-plugins by Chris Lamb: sort inputs in Makefile.
• #792525 on ruby-standalone by Reiner Herrmann: use UTC and C locale when formatting the manpage date for the documentation.
• #792528 on dict-foldoc by Reiner Herrmann: use C locale when formatting the date for the documentation.
• #792529 on tomatoes by Reiner Herrmann: use date from debian/changelog in version string.
• #792593 on lives by Dhole: process a Perl hash in stable order.
• #792596 on jsmath by Dhole: set TZ=UTC when calling unzip.
• #792597 on jsmath-fonts-sprite by Dhole: set TZ=UTC when calling unzip.
• #792598 on libreoffice-canzeley-client by Dhole: set TZ=UTC when calling unzip.
• #792599 on openthesaurus by Dhole: set TZ=UTC when calling unzip.
• #792602 on fonts-stix by Dhole: set TZ=UTC when calling unzip.
• #792667 on jack-audio-connection-kit by use date from debian/changelog in manpages.
• #792668 on pyhoca-gui by remove date from package version number.
• #792671 on apertium-dbus by remove *.pyo and *.pyc from binary package.
• #792673 on bup by use date from debian/changelog when generating version strings.
• #792684 on cain by Chris Lamb: ensure stable permissions when creating source tarball.
• #792709 on dict-jargon by Dhole: set timestamp in archive using the latest entry of debian/changelog.
• #792727 on libaqbanking by Micha Lenk (upstream): sort source files in documentation.
• #792763 on docbook-dsssl by Chris Lamb: sort input files when creating changelog.
• #792770 on lynx-cur by Reiner Herrmann: use C locale when sorting configuration files.
• #792771 on mu-cade by Reiner Herrmann: use C locale when sorting source files.
• #792772 on titanion by Reiner Herrmann: use C locale when sorting source files.
• #792783 on linuxlogo by Reiner Herrmann: use C locale when sorting source files.
• #792821 on pkg-config by Juan Picca: use C locale when sorting source files.
• #792828 on tiger by Daniel Kahn Gillmor: use C locale when listing soure files.

reproducible.debian.net The statistics on the main page of reproducible.debian.net are now updated every five minutes. A random unreviewed package is suggested in the look at a package form on every build. (h01ger) A new package set based new on the Core Internet Infrastructure census has been added. (h01ger) Testing of FreeBSD has started, though no results yet. More details have been posted to the freebsd-hackers mailing list. The build is run on a new virtual machine running FreeBSD 10.1 with 3 cores and 6 GB of RAM, also sponsored by Profitbricks. strip-nondeterminism development Andrew Ayer released version 0.009 of strip-nondeterminism. The new version will strip locales from Javadoc, include the name of files causing errors, and ignore unhandled (but rare) zip64 archives. debbindiff development Lunar continued its major refactoring to enhance code reuse and pave the way to fuzzy-matching and parallel processing. Most file comparators have now been converted to the new class hierarchy. In order to support for archive formats, work has started on packaging Python bindings for libarchive. While getting support for more archive formats with a common interface is very nice, libarchive is a stream oriented library and might have bad performance with how debbindiff currently works. Time will tell if better solutions need to be found. Documentation update Lunar started a Reproducible builds HOWTO intended to explain the different aspects of making software build reproducibly to the different audiences that might have to get involved like software authors, producers of binary packages, and distributors. Package reviews 17 obsolete reviews have been removed, 212 added and 46 updated this week. 15 new bugs for packages failing to build from sources have been reported by Chris West (Faux), and Mattia Rizzolo. Presentations Lunar presented Debian efforts and some recipes on making software build reproducibly at Libre Software Meeting 2015. Slides and a video recording are available. Misc. h01ger, dkg, and Lunar attended a Core Infrastructure Initiative meeting. The progress and tools mode for the Debian efforts were shown. Several discussions also helped getting a better understanding of the needs of other free software projects regarding reproducible builds. The idea of a global append only log, similar to the logs used for Certificate Transparency, came up on multiple occasions. Using such append only logs for keeping records of sources and build results has gotten the name Binary Transparency Logs . They would at least help identifying a compromised software signing key. Whether the benefits in using such logs justify the costs need more research.

When I recently complained that Portal 2 was too easy, I have to say, The Talos Principle is challenging. For a solution that, if known, takes only a few seconds, I often have to wring my brain about the logistics for long long time. Here a nice screenshot from one of the easier riddles, but with great effect. A great game, very challenging. A more length review will come when I have finished the game.

Several services in Google depends on your location, in particular on Google Play (things like apps, devices, contents can be restricted to some countries), but what to do if you relocate and want to update your information to access those exclusive services? Lots of stories out there to make a payment on the playstore with updated credit card info etc etc, it's actually a bit different, but not that much.

There are 3 places where you need to update your location information, all of them on Google Payments:

1. in Payment Methods, change the billing address of all your payment methods;
2. in Address Book, change the default shipping address;
3. in Settings, change your home address.

DICOM is a standard for your RX/CT/MRI scans and the format most of the times your result will be given to you, along with Win/MacOS viewers, but what about Debian? the best I could find is Ginkgo CADx (package ginkgocadx).

If you want to convert those DICOM files into images you can use convert (I dont know why I was surprised to find out imagemagik can handle it).

PS: here a description of the format.

I just pushed a new release of PiwigoPress (main page, WordPress plugin dir) to the WordPress servers. This release incorporates some new features, mostly contributed by Anton Lavrov (big thanks!) The new features are:

• Shortcode: multiple ids can be specified, including ranges (not supported in the shortcode generator)
• Display of image name/title: in addition to the description, also the name/title can be displayed. Here three possible settings can be choosen: 0 never show titles (default as before), 1 always show titles, and auto show only titles that do not look like auto-generated titles. (supported in the shortcode generator)

I also checked that the plugin runs with the soon to be released WordPress 4.3, and fixed a small problem with the setting of albumpicture not being saved. That s all, enjoy, and leave your wishlist items and complains at the issue tracker on the github project piwigopress.