Search Results: "ag"

3 June 2020

Dirk Eddelbuettel: littler 0.3.10: Some more updates

max-heap image The eleventh release of littler as a CRAN package is now available, following in the fourteen-ish year history as a package started by Jeff in 2006, and joined by me a few weeks later. littler is the first command-line interface for R as it predates Rscript. It allows for piping as well for shebang scripting via #!, uses command-line arguments more consistently and still starts faster. It also always loaded the methods package which Rscript only started to do in recent years. littler lives on Linux and Unix, has its difficulties on macOS due to yet-another-braindeadedness there (who ever thought case-insensitive filesystems as a default where a good idea?) and simply does not exist on Windows (yet the build system could be extended see RInside for an existence proof, and volunteers are welcome!). See the FAQ vignette on how to add it to your PATH. A few examples are highlighted at the Github repo, as well as in the examples vignette. This release adds a new helper / example script installBioc.r for BioConductor package installation, generalizes the roxygenize() wrapper roxy.r a little, and polished a couple of other corners. The NEWS file entry is below.

Changes in littler version 0.3.10 (2020-06-02)
  • Changes in examples
    • The update.r script only considers writeable directories.
    • The rcc.r script tries to report full logs by setting _R_CHECK_TESTS_NLINES_=0.
    • The tt.r script has an improved ncpu fallback.
    • Several installation and updating scripts set _R_SHLIB_STRIP_ to TRUE.
    • A new script installBioc.r was added.
    • The --error option to install2.r was generalized (Sergio Oller in #78).
    • The roxy.r script was extended a little.
  • Changes in package
    • Travis CI now uses R 4.0.0 and the bionic distro

CRANberries provides a comparison to the previous release. Full details for the littler release are provided as usual at the ChangeLog page. The code is available via the GitHub repo, from tarballs and now of course also from its CRAN page and via install.packages("littler"). Binary packages are available directly in Debian as well as soon via Ubuntu binaries at CRAN thanks to the tireless Michael Rutter. Comments and suggestions are welcome at the GitHub repo. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

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

Olivier Berger: Automate the capture a full BigBlueButton conference replay, with bbb-downloader

BigBlueButton, aka BBB, is a webrtc conferencing solution, that among many features, allows to record a conference, for later replay. We have been working together with my colleague Fran ois Trahay, on a set of scripts (bbb-downloader) that will allow to easily (on Linux) download recordings of BBB conferences, for local backup, video editing, upload on video sharing platforms, etc. This is particularly useful in our distance learning contexts where students may have to catch up on a live session that was recorded. We have integrated a hackish solution to capture, as a single video, presentations that contained slide deck presentations. Let me explain why this was necessary. A nice feature of BBB is the fact that, to present a slides deck, you don t need to share your screen (as a video stream), but just have to upload your file, which is then auto-converted to images, that are sent to participants, in sync with your next/previous browsing of the slides. This is great for participants with low bandwidth, which can see the slides ( static images) instead of receiving a full screen video stream. But a side effect is that the recording of a class/conference that is done by BBB replays the slides just as it was done live : displaying images one after the other. While it is easy to retrieve the audio, webcams of participants, or screen sharings as video streams, directly available from the recordings replay app, it is thus not the same for the slides, which don t come as a video. Our script will perform a replay, using a Docker container which drives Selenium under the hood, to capture the full replay, as a single video, which then includes the slides and everything. You can see my demo of this process in the following video: bbb-downloader full capture demo. It takes long to replay, in real-time, the recordings, to perform this capture but it works. Kudos to elgalu/docker-selenium for the Docker env. Feel free to test it and profit, or to report issues in the Guthub issues of the repo: https://github.com/trahay/bbb-downloader/.

Keith Packard: picolibc-ryu

Float/String Conversion in Picolibc: Enter Ry I recently wrote about this topic having concluded that the best route for now was to use the malloc-free, but imprecise, conversion routines in the tinystdio alternative. A few days later, Sreepathi Pai pointed me at some very recent work in this area: This is amazing! Thirty years after the papers referenced in the previous post, Ulf Adams came up with some really cool ideas and managed to reduce the math required for 64-bit conversion to 128 bit integers. This is a huge leap forward; we were doing long multi-precision computations before, and now it's all short enough to fit in registers (ok, a lot of registers, but still). Getting the Ry Code The code is available on github: https://github.com/ulfjack/ryu. Reading through it, it's very clear that the author focuses on performance with lots of tuning for common cases. Still, it's quite readable, especially compared with the newlib multi-precision based code. Picolibc String/Float conversion interface Picolibc has some pretty basic needs for the float/string conversion code, it wants four functions:
  1. __dtoa_engine 
    int
__dtoa_engine(double x, struct dtoa *dtoa, uint8_t max_digits, uint8_t max_decimals);
    This converts the double x to a string of decimal digits and a decimal exponent stored inside the 'dtoa' struct. It limits the total number of digits to max_digits and, optionally (when max_decimals is non-zero), limits the number of fractional digits to max_decimals - 1. This latter supports 'f' formats. Returns the number of digits stored, which is <= max_digits. Less if the number can be accurately represented in fewer digits.
  2. __ftoa_engine 
    int
__ftoa_engine(float x, struct ftoa *ftoa, uint8_t max_digits, uint8_t max_decimals);
    The same as __dtoa_engine, except for floats.
  3. __atod_engine 
    double
__atod_engine(uint64_t m10, int e10);
    To avoid needing to handle stdio inside the conversion function, __atod_engine receives fully parsed values, the base-10 significand (m10) and exponent (e10). The value to convert is m10 * pow(10, e10).
  4. __atof_engine 
    float
__atof_engine(uint32_t m10, int e10);
    The same as __atod_engine, except for floats.
With these, it can do printf, scanf, ecvt, fcvt, gcvt, strtod, strtof and atof. Porting Ry to Picolibc The existing Ry float-to-string code always generates the number of digits necessary for accurate output. I had to hack it up to generate correctly rounded shorter output when max_digits or max_decimals were smaller. I'm not sure I managed to do that correctly, but at least it appears to be passing all of the test cases I have. In normal operation, Ry iteratively removes digits from the answer that aren't necessary to disambiguate with neighboring values. What I changed was to keep removing digits using that method until the answer had few enough digits to fit in the desired length. There's some tricky rounding code that adjusts the final result and I had to bypass that if I'd removed extra digits. That was about the only change necessary to the core algorithm. I also trimmed the code to only include the general case and not the performance improvements, then wrapped it with code to provide the _engine interface. On the string-to-float side, most of what I needed to do was remove the string parsing bits at the start of the function and switch from performance-optimized to space-optimized versions of a couple of internal routines. Correctness Results Because these new functions are now 'exact', I was able to adjust the picolibc tests to compare all of the bits for string/float conversion instead of having to permit a bit of slop in the answers. With those changes, the picolibc test suite passes, which offers some assurance that things aren't completely broken. Size Results Snek uses the 32-bit float versions of the conversion routines, and for that, the size difference is: 
   text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
  59068      44   37968   97080   17b38 snek-qemu-riscv-orig.elf
  59430      44   37968   97442   17ca2 snek-qemu-riscv-ryu.elf
    362
362 bytes added to gain accurate printf/strtof results seems like a good trade-off in this case. Performance I haven't measured performance at all, but I suspect that it won't be nearly as problematic on most platforms as the source code makes it appear. And that's because Ry is entirely integer arithmetic with no floating point at all. This avoids using the soft fp code for platforms without hardware float support. Pointers to the Code I haven't merged this to picolibc master yet, it's on the ryu branch: Review, especially of the hack above to return short results, would be greatly appreciated! Thanks again to Ulf Adams for creating this code and to Sreepathi Pai for sending me a note about it!

Dima Kogan: vnlog now functional on *BSD and OSX

So somebody finally bugged me about supporting vnlog tools on OSX. I was pretty sure that between all the redirection, process communication, and file descriptor management something was Linux-specific, but apparently not: everything just works. There were a few uninteresting issues with tool paths, core tool and linker flags and so on, but it was all really minor. I have a report that the test suite passes on OSX, and I verified it on FreeBSD. I made a new 1.28 release tag, but it exists mostly for the benefit of any OSX or *BSD people who'd want to make a package for their system. Progress!

2 June 2020

Olivier Berger: Mixing NRELab s Antidote and Eclipse Che on the same k8s cluster

You may have heard of my search for Cloud solutions to run labs in an academic context, with a focus on free an open source solutions . You may read previous installments of this blog, or for a shorter, check the presentation I ve recorded last week. I ve become quite interested, in the latest month, in 2 projects: NRELab s Antidote and Eclipse Che. Antidote is the software that powers NRELabs, a labs platform for learning network automation, which runs on top of Kubernetes (k8s). The interesting thing is that for each learner, there can be a dedicated k8s namespace with multiple virtual nodes running on a separate network. This can be used in the context of virtual classes/labs where our students will perform network labs in parallel on the same cluster. Eclipse Che powers Eclipse on the Cloud , making available software development environments, for developers, on a Kubernetes Cloud. Developers typically work from a Web page instead of installing local development tools. Both projects seem quite complementary. For one, we both teach networks and software developments. So that would naturally appeal for many professors. Furthermore, Eclipse Che provides a few features that Antidote is lacking : authenticating users (with keycloak), and persisting their work in workspaces, between work sessions. Typically what we need in our academic context where students will work on the same labs during scheduled classes, week after week, during or off-hours. Thus it would be great to have more integration between the 2 environments. I intend to work on that front, but that takes time, as running stuff on Kubernetes isn t exactly trivial, at least when you re like me and want to use a vanilla kubernetes. I ve mainly relied on running k8s inside VMs using Vagrant and/or minikube so far. A first milestone I ve achieved is making sure that Antidote and Eclipse Che aren t incompatible. Antidote s selfmedicate script was actually running inside a Vagrant VM, where I had difficulties installing Eclipse Che (probably because of old software, or particular networking setup details). I ve overcome this hurdle, as I m now able to install both environments on a single Kubernetes VM (using my own Vagrant setup). Running Eclipse Che (alongsite Antidote) on a k8s Vagrant VM. This proves only that there s no show stopper there, but a lot of work remains. Stay tuned. Update: I ve finally managed to get it to work on the antidote-selfmedicate base too. See my branch at: https://github.com/olberger/antidote-selfmedicate/tree/che

Sylvestre Ledru: Debian rebuild with clang 10 + some patches

Because of the lock-down in France and thanks to Lucas, I have been able to make some progress rebuilding Debian with clang instead of gcc.

TLDR Instead of patching clang itself, I used a different approach this time: patching Debian tools or implementing some workaround to mitigate an issue.
The percentage of packages failing drop from 4.5% to 3.6% (1400 packages to 1110 - on a total of 31014). I focused on two classes of issues:

Qmake As I have no intention to merge the patch upstream, I used a very dirty workaround. I overwrote the g++ qmake file by clang's:
https://salsa.debian.org/lucas/collab-qa-tools/-/blob/master/modes/clang10#L44-47 I dropped the number of this failure to 0, making some packages build flawlessly (example: qtcreator, chessx, fwbuilder, etc). However, some packages are still failing later and therefore increasing the number of failures in some other categories like link error. For example, qtads fails because of ordered comparison between pointer and zero or oscar fails on a -Werror,-Wdeprecated-copy error. Breaking the build later also highlighted some new classes of issues which didn't occur with clang < 10.
For example, warnings related to C++ range loop or implicit int float conversion (I fixed a bunch of them in Firefox) .

Symbol differences Historically, symbol management for C++ in Debian has been a pain. Russ Allbery wrote a blog post in 2012 explaining the situation. AFAIK, it hasn't changed much.
Once more, I took the dirty approach: if there new or missing symbols, don't fail the build.
The rational is the following: Packages in the Debian archive are supposed to build without any issue. If there is new or missing symbols, it is probably clang generating a different library but this library is very likely working as expected (and usable by a program compiled with g++ or clang). It is purely a different approach taken by the compiler developer. In order to mitigate this issue, before the build starts, I am modifying dpkg-gensymbols to transform the error into a warning.
So, the typical Debian error some new symbols appeared in the symbols file or some symbols or patterns disappeared in the symbols file will NOT fail the build. Unsurprisingly, all but one package (libktorrent) build. Even if I am pessimistic, I reported a bug on dpkg-dev to evaluate if we could improve dpkg-gensymbol not to fail on these cases.

Next steps The next offender is Imake.tmpl:2243:10: fatal error: ' X11 .rules' file not found with more than an hundred occurrences, reported upstream quite sometime ago. Then, the big issues are going to be much harder to fix as they are real issues/warnings (with -Werror) in the code of the packages. Example: -Wc++11-narrowing & Wreserved-user-defined-literal... The list is long.
I will probably work on that when llvm/clang 11 are in RC phase.

For maintainers & upstream Maintainer of Debian/Ubuntu packages? I am providing a list of failing packages per maintainer: https://clang.debian.net/maintainers.php
For upstream, it is also easy to test with clang. Usually, apt install clang && CC=clang CXX=clang++ <build step> is good enough.

Conclusion With these two changes, I have been able to fix about 290 packages. I think I will be able to get that down a bit more but we will soon reach a plateau as many warnings/issues will have to fix in the C/C++ code itself.

Lisandro Dami n Nicanor P rez Meyer: Simplified Monitoring of Patients in Situations of Mass Hospitalization (MoSimPa) - Fighting COVID-19

I have been quite absent from Debian stuff lately, but this increased since COVID-19 hits us. In this blog post I'll try to sketch what I have been doing to help fight COVID-19 this last few months.

In the beginningWhen the pandemic reached Argentina the government started a quarantine. We engineers (like engineers around the world) started to think on how to put our abilities in order to help with the situation. Some worked toward providing more protection elements to medical staff, some towards increasing the number of ventilation machines at disposal. Another group of people started thinking on another ways of helping. In Bah a Blanca arised the idea of monitoring some variables remotely and in masse.

Simplified Monitoring of Patients in Situations of Mass Hospitalization (MoSimPa)

This is where the idea of remotely monitored devices came in, and MoSimPa (from the spanish of "monitoreo simplificado de pacientes en situaci n de internaci n masiva") started to get form. The idea is simple: oximetry (SpO2), heart rate and body temperature will be recorded and, instead of being shown in a display in the device itself, they will be transmitted and monitored in one or more places. In this way medical staff doesn't has to reach a patient constantly and monitoring could be done by medical staff for more patients at the same time. In place monitoring can also happen using a cellphone or tablet.

The devices do not have a screen of their own and almost no buttons, making them more cheap to build and thus more in line with the current economic reality of Argentina.


This is where the project Para Ayudar was created. The project aims to produce the aforementioned non-invasive device to be used in health institutions, hospitals, intra hospital transports and homes.

It is worth to note that the system is designed as a complementary measure for continuous monitoring of a pacient. Care should be taken to check that symptomps and overall patient status don't mean an inmediate life threat. In other words, it is NOT designed for ICUs.

All the above done with Free/Libre/Open Source software and hardware designs. Any manufacturing company can then use them for mass production.

The importance of early pneumonia detection


We were already working in MoSimPa when an NYTimes article caught or attention: "The Infection That s Silently Killing Coronavirus Patients". From the article:

A vast majority of Covid pneumonia patients I met had remarkably low oxygen saturations at triage seemingly incompatible with life but they were using their cellphones as we put them on monitors. Although breathing fast, they had relatively minimal apparent distress, despite dangerously low oxygen levels and terrible pneumonia on chest X-rays.

This greatly reinforced the idea we were on the right track.

The project from a technical standpoint


As the project is primarily designed for and by Argentinians the current system design and software documentation is written in spanish, but the source code (or at least most of it) is written in english. Should anyone need it in english please do not hesitate in asking me.

General system description

System schema

The system is comprised of the devices, a main machine acting as a server (in our case for small setups a Raspberry Pi) and the possibility of accessing data trough cell phones, tablets or other PCs in the network.

The hardware


As of today this is the only part in which I still can't provide schematics, but I'll update this blog post and technical doc with them as soon as I get my hands into them.

Again the design is due to be built in Argentina where getting our hands on hardware is not easy. Moreover it needs to be as cheap as possible, specially now that the Argentinian currency, the peso, is every day more depreciated. So we decided on using an ESP32 as the main microprocessor and a set of Maxim sensors devices. Again, more info when I have them at hand.

The software


Here we have many more components to describe. Firstly the ESP32 code is done with the Arduino SDK. This part of the stack will receive many updates soon, as soon as the first hardware prototypes are out.

For the rest of the stack I decided to go ahead with whatever is available in Debian stable. Why? Well, Raspbian provides a Debian stable-based image and I'm a Debian Developer, so things should go just natural for me in that front. Of course each component has its own packaging. I'm one of Debian's Qt maintainers then using Qt will also be quite natural for me. Plots? Qwt, of course. And with that I have most of my necessities fulfilled. I choose PostgreSql as database server and Mosquitto as MQTT broker.

Between the database and MQTT is mosimpa-datakeeper. The piece of software from which medical staff monitor patients is unsurprisingly called mosimpa-monitor.

mosimpa-monitor
MoSimPa's monitor main screen

mosimpa-monitor plots
Plots of a patient's data


mosimpa-monitor-alarms-setup
Alarm thresholds setup


And for managing patients, devices, locations and internments (CRUD anyone?) there is currently a Qt-based application called mosimpa-abm.

mosimpa-abm
ABM main screen


mosimpa-abm-internments
ABM internments view

The idea is to replace it with a web service so it doesn't needs to be confined to the RPi or require installations in other machines. I considered using webassembly but I would have to also build PostgreSql in order to compile Qt's plugin.

Translations? Of course! As I have already mentioned the code is written in English. Qt allows to easily translate applications, so I keep a Spanish one as the code changes (and we are primarily targeting spanish-speaking people). But of course this also means it can be easily translated to whichever language is necessary.

Even if I am a packager I still have some stuff to fix from the packaging itself, like letting datakeeper run with its own user. I just haven't got to it yet.


A video showing the software in action

Certifications


We are working towards getting the system certified by ANMAT, which is the Argentinian equivalent for EEUU's FDA.

Funding


While all the people involved are working ad-honorem funding is still required in order to buy materials, create the prototypes, etc. The project created payments links with Mercado Pago (in spanish and argentinian pesos) and other bank methods (PDF, also in spanish).

I repeat the links here with an aproximation to US$.

- 500 AR$ (less than 8 US$)
- 1000 AR$ (less than 15 US$)
- 2000 AR$ (less than 30 US$)
- 3000 AR$ (less than 45 US$)
- 5000 AR$ (less than 75 US$)

You can check the actual convertion rate in https://www.google.com/search?q=argentine+peso+to+us+dollars

The project was also presented at a funding call of argentinian Agencia de Promoci n de la Investigaci n, el Desarrollo Tecnol gico y la Innovaci n (Agencia I+D+i). 900+ projects where presented and 64 funded, MoSimPa between them.

Sylvain Beucler: Debian LTS and ELTS - May 2020

Debian LTS Logo Here is my transparent report for my work on the Debian Long Term Support (LTS) and Debian Extended Long Term Support (ELTS), which extend the security support for past Debian releases, as a paid contributor. In May, the monthly sponsored hours were split evenly among contributors depending on their max availability - I was assigned 17.25h for LTS (out of 30 max; all done) and 9.25h for ELTS (out of 20 max; all done). A survey will be published very shortly to gather feedback from all parties involved in LTS (users, other Debian teams...) -- let us know what you think, so we start the forthcoming new (Stretch) LTS cycle in the best conditions :) Discussion is progressing on funding & governance of larger LTS-related projects. Who should decide: contributors, Freexian, sponsors? Do we fund with a percentage or by capping resources allocated on security updates? I voiced concerns over funding these at the expense of smaller, more organic, more recurrent tasks that are less easy to specify but greatly contribute to the overall quality nevertheless. ELTS - Wheezy LTS - Jessie Documentation/Scripts

1 June 2020

Jonathan Carter: Free Software Activities for 2020-05

I would say that this was a crazy month, but with everything ever escalating, does that even mean anything anymore? I lost track of tracking my activities in the second half of the month, and I m still not very good at logging the soft stuff , that is, things like non-technical work but that also takes up a lot of time, but will continue to work on it.
Towards the end of the month I spent a huge amount of time on MiniDebConf Online, I m glad it all worked out, and will write a seperate blog entry on that. Thank you again to everyone for making it a success! I m also moving DPL activities to the DPL blog, so even though it s been a busy month in the free software world my activity log here will look somewhat deceptively short this month MiniDebConf Online 2020-05-06: Help prepare initial CfP mail. 2020-05-06: Process some feedback regarding accessibility on Jitsi.

Debian Packaging 2020-05-02: Upload package gnome-shell-extension-workspaces-to-dock (53-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-05-02: Upload package tetzle (2.1.6-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-05-06: Upload package bundlewrap (3.9.0-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-05-06: Accept MR#1 for connectagram. 2020-05-06: Upload package connectagram (1.2.11-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-05-07: Upload package gnome-shell-extension-multi-monitors (20-1) to Debian unstable (Closes: #956169). 2020-05-07: Upload package tanglet (1.5.6-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-05-16: Upload package calamares (3.2.24-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-05-16: Accept MR#1 for tuxpaint-config. 2020-05-16: Accept MR#7 for debian-live. 2020-05-18: Upload package bundlewrap (3.10.0) to Debian unstable.

Debian Mentoring 2020-05-02: Sponsor package gamemode (1.5.1-3) (Games team request). 2020-05-16: Sponsor package gamemode (1.5.1-4) (Games team request).

Mike Gabriel: My Work on Debian LTS (May 2020)

In May 2020, I have worked on the Debian LTS project for 14.5 hours (of 14.5 hours planned). LTS Work Other security related work for Debian Credits References

Debian GSoC Kotlin project blog: Kotlin Update

A Quick Recap from last year: Kotlin is being packaged under the Google Summer of Code within the Debian organization itself. The major reason behind bringing Kotlin in Debian is to update all the Android packages which are now heavily dependent upon the Kotlin libraries. The major work to bring Kotlin into Debian is done for the version 1.3.30, by Saif Abdul Cassim (goes by m36 on IRC) as a part of his GSoC'2019. All his contributions to the team can be found in his blog posts. So, for now, we have a bootstrap package and a Kotlin package for the version with 1.3.30. There were still changes needed as we lacked some of the dependencies for Kotlin, and the source package lacked copyright information and didn t comply with Debian standards. What's the present year brought for Kotlin? To be specific the following were mainly left dependencies for Kotlin: And, we lack documentation for the newbies in order to get them started :( Most importantly the crucial part was and still is, to figure out how to upload the package? For GSoC'20, three students are selected as a part of project Android SDK tools in Debian. What's the work done/left? Work Done What's Blocking? What is the problem being faced? The Kotlin-Bootstrap package consists of JAR files for various dependencies of kotlin such as Gradle, kotlin compiler, and kotlinx. The package is added to the build-depends of the main package so that the JAR files can be provided. Since the kotlin-bootstrap consists of binaries (JAR files), it is not feasible to upload the package as free software. The other workaround was the Gradle 6.4 version, which consists of Kotlin files and generates a suitable JAR. But since the package needed Kotlin language itself, it was never updated, as it created a cyclic dependency. Final workaround came, which proposed Kotlin to build from itself, that was a pretty impressive suggestion. But, we still have to look if the solution is feasible? Because, as far as I last checked and conversed with ebourg on the mailing list here, Emmanuel Bbourg mentioned very clearly that the rebuilt package is our interest. So, this is under WIP. But, I fail to acknowledge the fact if we can drop the kotlin-bootstrap package totally, Kotlin will not be able to be built because each and every JAR file present in the bootstrap is needed. That pretty much is the ongoing work and the update on the kotlin package. We intend to bring Kotlin to the Debian Archive as soon as possible :) Have any queries or suggestions for Kotlin? Please feel to drop a message at #debian-mobile channel on OFTC.

Utkarsh Gupta: FOSS Activites in May 2020

Here s my (eighth) monthly update about the activities I ve done in the F/L/OSS world.

Debian
This month marks my 15 months of contributing to Debian. And 6th month as a DD! \o/ Whilst I love doing Debian stuff, I have started spending more time on the programming side now. And I hope to keep it this for some time now.
Of course, I ll keep doing the Debian stuff, but just lesser in amount. Anyway, the following are the things I did in May.

Uploads:

Other $things:
  • Hosted Ruby team meeting. Logs here.
  • Attended Debian Perl Sprints. Report here.
  • Sponsored git-repo-updater and mplcursors for Sudip.
  • Mentoring for newcomers.
  • FTP Trainee reviewing.
  • Moderation of -project mailing list.
  • Got selected for GSoC 20 for Debian!

Experimenting and improving Ruby libraries FTW!
I have been very heavily involved with the Debian Ruby team for over an year now.
Thanks to Antonio Terceiro (and GSoC), I ve started experimenting and taking more interest in upstream development and improvement of these libraries. This has the sole purpose of learning. It has gotten fun since I ve started doing Ruby.
And I hope it stays this way. This month, I opened some issues and proposed a few pull requests. They are:
  • Issue #802 against whenever for Ruby2.7 test failures.
  • Issue #8 against aggregate asking upstream for a release on rubygems.
  • Issue #104 against irb for asking more about Array.join("\n").
  • Issue #1391 against mail asking upstream to cut a new release.
  • Issue #1655 against rack reporting test failures in the CVE fix.
  • Issue #84 against ruby-dbus for help with Debian bug #836296.
  • Issue #85 against ruby-dbus asking if they still use rDoc for doc generation.
  • PR #9 against aggregate for dropping git from gemspec.
  • PR #804 against whenever for dropping git from gemspec.
  • Packaged ruby-cmath as it was split from Ruby2.7; cf: (#961213).

Debian LTS
Debian Long Term Support (LTS) is a project to extend the lifetime of all Debian stable releases to (at least) 5 years. Debian LTS is not handled by the Debian security team, but by a separate group of volunteers and companies interested in making it a success. This was my eighth month as a Debian LTS paid contributor. I was assigned 17.25 hours and worked on the following things:

CVE Fixes and Announcements:

Other LTS Work:
  • Triaged tika, freerdp, and apache2.
  • Mark CVE-2020-12105/openconnect as no-dsa not-affected for Jessie.
  • Mark CVE-2020-9489/tika as no-dsa ignored for Jessie.
  • Mark CVE-2020-11025/wordpres as not-affected for Jessie.
  • Add fix for Add fix for CVE-2019-18823/condor.
  • Requested CVE for bug#60251 against apache2.
  • Raised issue #947 against sympa reporting an incomplete patch for CVE-2020-10936.
  • Created the LTS Survey on the self-hosted LimeSurvey instance.
  • Attended the second LTS meeting. Logs here.
  • General discussion on LTS private and public mailing list.

Other(s)
Sometimes it gets hard to categorize work/things into a particular category.
That s why I am writing all of those things inside this category.
This includes two sub-categories and they are as follows.

Personal: This month I could get the following things done:
  • Wrote and published my first Ruby gem/library/tool on RubyGems!
    It s open-sourced and the repository is here.
    Bug reports and pull requests are welcomed!
  • Wrote a small Ruby script (available here) to install Ruby gems from Gemfile(.lock).
    Needed this when I hit a bug while using ruby-standalone, which Antonio fixed pretty quickly!
  • Had a coffee chat with John Coghlan!
    Tweet here.

Open Source: Again, this contains all the things that I couldn t categorize earlier.
Opened several issues and did a PR review:
  • Issue #15434 against phantomjs, asking to look into CVE-2019-17221. Still no action :/
  • Issue #947 against sympa, reporting an incomplete patch for CVE-2020-10936.
  • Issue #2102 against polybar, mentioning that the build is not reproducible.
  • Issue #5521 against libgit2, mentioning that the build is not reproducible.
  • Reviewed PR #5523 for polybar, which was a fix for the above issue.
Until next time.
:wq for today.

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities May 2020

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration
  • nsntrace: talk to upstream about collaborative maintenance
  • Debian: deploy changes, debug issue with GPS markers file generation, migrate bls/DUCK from alioth-archive to salsa
  • Debian website: ran map cron job, synced mirrors
  • Debian wiki: approve accounts, ping folks with bouncing email

Communication

Sponsors The apt-offline work and the libfile-libmagic-perl backports were sponsored. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

31 May 2020

Enrico Zini: Controversial inventors

Paul-F lix Armand-Delille - Wikipedia
history people archive.org
2020-06-01
Paul-F lix Armand-Delille (3 July 1874 in Fourchambault, Ni vre 4 September 1963) was a physician, bacteriologist, professor, and member of the French Academy of Medicine who accidentally brought about the collapse of rabbit populations throughout much of Europe and beyond in the 1950s by infecting them with myxomatosis.
Charles F. Kettering - Wikipedia
history people archive.org
2020-06-01
Charles Franklin Kettering (August 29, 1876 November 25, 1958) sometimes known as Charles "Boss" Kettering[1] was an American inventor, engineer, businessman, and the holder of 186 patents.[2] He was a founder of Delco, and was head of research at General Motors from 1920 to 1947. Among his most widely used automotive developments were the electrical starting motor[3] and leaded gasoline.[4][5] In association with the DuPont Chemical Company, he was also responsible for the invention of Freon refrigerant for refrigeration and air conditioning systems. At DuPont he also was responsible for the development of Duco lacquers and enamels, the first practical colored paints for mass-produced automobiles. While working with the Dayton-Wright Company he developed the "Bug" aerial torpedo, considered the world's first aerial missile.[6] He led the advancement of practical, lightweight two-stroke diesel engines, revolutionizing the locomotive and heavy equipment industries. In 1927, he founded the Kettering Foundation, a non-partisan research foundation. He was featured on the cover of Time magazine on January 9, 1933.
John Charles Cutler - Wikipedia
history people archive.org
2020-06-01
John Charles Cutler (June 29, 1915 February 8, 2003) was a senior surgeon, and the acting chief of the venereal disease program in the United States Public Health Service. After his death, his involvement in several controversial and unethical medical studies of syphilis was revealed, including the Guatemala and the Tuskegee syphilis experiments.
Ivy Lee - Wikipedia
history people archive.org
2020-06-01
Ivy Ledbetter Lee (July 16, 1877 November 9, 1934) was an American publicity expert and a founder of modern public relations. Lee is best known for his public relations work with the Rockefeller family. His first major client was the Pennsylvania Railroad, followed by numerous major railroads such as the New York Central, the Baltimore and Ohio, and the Harriman lines such as the Union Pacific. He established the Association of Railroad Executives, which included providing public relations services to the industry. Lee advised major industrial corporations, including steel, automobile, tobacco, meat packing, and rubber, as well as public utilities, banks, and even foreign governments. Lee pioneered the use of internal magazines to maintain employee morale, as well as management newsletters, stockholder reports, and news releases to the media. He did a great deal of pro bono work, which he knew was important to his own public image, and during World War I, he became the publicity director for the American Red Cross.[1]

Chris Lamb: Free software activities in May 2020

Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world during May 2020 (previous month): In Lintian, the static analysis tool for Debian packages:
Reproducible builds One of the original promises of open source software is that distributed peer review and transparency of process results in enhanced end-user security. However, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free and open source software for malicious flaws, almost all software today is distributed as pre-compiled binaries. This allows nefarious third-parties to compromise systems by injecting malicious code into ostensibly secure software during the various compilation and distribution processes. The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to ensure no flaws have been introduced during this compilation process by promising identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised. The initiative is proud to be a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy, a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) charity focused on ethical technology and user freedom. Conservancy acts as a corporate umbrella allowing projects to operate as non-profit initiatives without managing their own corporate structure. If you like the work of the Conservancy or the Reproducible Builds project, please consider becoming an official supporter.
Elsewhere in our tooling, I made the following changes to diffoscope, our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, including preparing and uploading versions 142, 143, 144, 145 and 146 to Debian: I also performed a huge overhaul of diffoscope's website:
Lastly, I made a large number of changes to the main Reproducible Builds website and documentation:
Debian LTS This month I contributed 17 hours to Debian Long Term Support (LTS) and 9 hours on its sister Extended LTS project. You can find out more about the two projects via the following video:
Debian I filed the following bug reports in Debian this month: I also filed a number of bugs against packages that are not compatible with Django 3.x, (organised around a single master bug) including django-taggit, sorl-thumbnail, django-simple-captcha, django-cas-server, django-cors-headers, python-django-csp, django-pipeline, python-django-jsonfield, python-django-contact-form, django-model-utils, django-fsm, django-modeltranslation, django-oauth-toolkit, libthumbor, python-django-extensions, python-django-imagekit, python-django-navtag, python-django-tagging, djangorestframework, django-haystack, django-taggit, django-simple-captcha, python-django-registration, python-django-pyscss, python-django-compressor, python-django-crispy-forms & python-django-mptt,
Lastly, I made the following uploads to Debian: I also sponsored an upload for adminer (4.7.7-1), also uploading it to buster-backports.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: T^4 #4: Introducing Byobu

The next video (following the announcement, and shells sessions one, two, and three) is up in the T^4 series of video lightning talks with tips, tricks, tools, and toys. This time we introduce the wonderful byobu tool which is called both a text-based window manager and a terminal multiplexer :

The slides are here. This repo at GitHub support the series: use it to open issues for comments, criticism, suggestions, or feedback. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

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

Jonathan Dowland: Golf Peaks

tricky tricky
This one was a bit of a surprise hit. Golf Peaks is a Golf-themed puzzle game. The objective is to get the golf ball into the hole, obviously, but how you do that is by choosing from a set of fixed moves (e.g., move one square; jump one square; etc.) and a direction. This works well with my eldest daughter. She takes one joy-con and I take the other. I typically am responsible for direction, and she hits 'A' to move the ball. We discuss which move to make, which has been a good test of her numeracy.

Jonathan McDowell: OpenOCD snapshot uploaded to Debian experimental

One of the things I maintain in Debian is OpenOCD. I say maintain, but it s so far required very little work, as it s been 3 years since a release (0.10.0). I ve talked about doing a git snapshot package for some time (I have an email from last DebConf in my inbox about it, and that wasn t the first time someone had asked), but never got around to it. Spurred on by some moves towards a 0.11.0 release I ve built a recent snapshot and uploaded it to the experimental suite in Debian. Of particular interest is the support for more recent architectures that this brings - ARMv8/aarch64 and RISC-V being the big ones, but also MIPS64 and various other ARM improvements. I no longer have access to Xilinx Zynq or Mellanox Bluefield platforms to test against so I ve just done some some basic tests with a Sheevaplug and BusPirate/STM32F103, but those worked just fine. Builds should hopefully happen shortly. Enjoy!

30 May 2020

Sean Whitton: GNU Emacs' Transient Mark mode

Something I ve found myself doing as the pandemic rolls on is picking out and (re-)reading through sections of the GNU Emacs manual and the GNU Emacs Lisp reference manual. This has got me (too) interested in some of the recent history of Emacs development, and I did some digging into archives of emacs-devel from 2008 (15M mbox) regarding the change to turn Transient Mark mode on by default and set mark-even-if-inactive to true by default in Emacs 23.1. It s not always clear which objections to turning on Transient Mark mode by default take into account the mark-even-if-inactive change. I think that turning on Transient Mark mode along with mark-even-if-inactive is a good default. The question that remains is whether the disadvantages of Transient Mark mode are significant enough that experienced Emacs users should consider altering Emacs default behaviour to mitigate them. Here s one popular blog arguing for some mitigations. How might Transient Mark mode be disadvantageous? The suggestion is that it makes using the mark for navigation rather than for acting on regions less convenient:
  1. setting a mark just so you can jump back to it (i) is a distinct operation you have to think of separately; and (ii) requires two keypresses, C-SPC C-SPC, rather than just one keypress
  2. using exchange-point-and-mark activates the region, so to use it for navigation you need to use either C-u C-x C-x or C-x C-x C-g, neither of which are convenient to type, or else it will be difficult to set regions at the place you ve just jumped to because you ll already have one active.
There are two other disadvantages that people bring up which I am disregarding. The first is that it makes it harder for new users to learn useful ways in which to use the mark when it s deactivated. This happened to me, but it can be mitigated without making any behavioural changes to Emacs. The second is that the visual highlighting of the region can be distracting. So far as I can tell, this is only a problem with exchange-point-and-mark, and it s subsumed by the problem of that command actually activating the region. The rest of the time Emacs automatic deactivation of the region seems sufficient. How might disabling Transient Mark mode be disadvantageous? When Transient Mark mode is on, many commands will do something usefully different when the mark is active. The number of commands in Emacs which work this way is only going to increase now that Transient Mark mode is the default. If you disable Transient Mark mode, then to use those features you need to temporarily activate Transient Mark mode. This can be fiddly and/or require a lot of keypresses, depending on exactly where you want to put the region. Without being able to see the region, it might be harder to know where it is. Indeed, this is one of the main reasons for wanting Transient Mark mode to be the default, to avoid confusing new users. I don t think this is likely to affect experienced Emacs users often, however, and on occasions when more precision is really needed, C-u C-x C-x will make the region visible. So I m not counting this as a disadvantage. How might we mitigate these two sets of disadvantages? Here are the two middle grounds I m considering. Mitigation #1: Transient Mark mode, but hack C-x C-x behaviour 
(defun spw/exchange-point-and-mark (arg)
  "Exchange point and mark, but reactivate mark a bit less often.

Specifically, invert the meaning of ARG in the case where
Transient Mark mode is on but the region is inactive."
  (interactive "P")
  (exchange-point-and-mark
   (if (and transient-mark-mode (not mark-active))
       (not arg)
     arg)))
(global-set-key [remap exchange-point-and-mark] &aposspw/exchange-point-and-mark)
We avoid turning Transient Mark mode off, but mitigate the second of the two disadvantages given above. I can t figure out why it was thought to be a good idea to make C-x C-x reactivate the mark and require C-u C-x C-x to use the action of exchanging point and mark as a means of navigation. There needs to a binding to reactivate the mark, but in roughly ten years of having Transient Mark mode turned on, I ve found that the need to reactivate the mark doesn t come up often, so the shorter and longer bindings seem the wrong way around. Not sure what I m missing here. Mitigation #2: disable Transient Mark mode, but enable it temporarily more often 
(setq transient-mark-mode nil)
(defun spw/remap-mark-command (command &optional map)
  "Remap a mark-* command to temporarily activate Transient Mark mode."
  (let* ((cmd (symbol-name command))
         (fun (intern (concat "spw/" cmd)))
         (doc (concat "Call  "
                      cmd
                      "&apos and temporarily activate Transient Mark mode.")))
    (fset fun  (lambda ()
                 ,doc
                 (interactive)
                 (call-interactively #&apos,command)
                 (activate-mark)))
    (if map
        (define-key map (vector &aposremap command) fun)
      (global-set-key (vector &aposremap command) fun))))
(dolist (command &apos(mark-word
                   mark-sexp
                   mark-paragraph
                   mark-defun
                   mark-page
                   mark-whole-buffer))
  (spw/remap-mark-command command))
(with-eval-after-load &aposorg
  (spw/remap-mark-command &aposorg-mark-element org-mode-map)
  (spw/remap-mark-command &aposorg-mark-subtree org-mode-map))
;; optional
(global-set-key "\M-=" (lambda () (interactive) (activate-mark)))
;; resettle the previous occupant
(global-set-key "\C-cw" &aposcount-words-region)
Here we remove both of the disadvantages of Transient Mark mode given above, and mitigate the main disadvantage of not activating Transient Mark mode by making it more convenient to activate it temporarily. For example, this enables using C-M-SPC C-M-SPC M-( to wrap the following two function arguments in parentheses. And you can hit M-h a few times to mark some blocks of text or code, then operate on them with commands like M-% and C-/ which behave differently when the region is active.1 Comparing these mitigations Both of these mitigations handle the second of the two disadvantages of Transient Mark mode given above. What remains, then, is
  1. under the effects of mitigation #1, how much of a barrier to using marks for navigational purposes is it to have to press C-SPC C-SPC instead of having a single binding, C-SPC, for all manual mark setting2
  2. under the effects of mitigation #2, how much of a barrier to taking advantage of commands which act differently when the region is active is it to have to temporarily enable Transient Mark mode with C-SPC C-SPC, M-= or one of the mark-* commands?
These are unknowns.3 So I m going to have to experiment, I think, to determine which mitigation to use, if either. In particular, I don t know whether it s really significant that setting a mark for navigational purposes and for region marking purposes are distinct operations under mitigation #1. My plan is to start with mitigation #2 because that has the additional advantage of allowing me to confirm or disconfirm my belief that not being able to see where the region is will only rarely get in my way.
  1. The idea of making the mark-* commands activate the mark comes from an emacs-devel post by Stefan Monnier in the archives linked above.
  2. One remaining possibility I m not considering is mitigation #1 plus binding something else to do the same as C-SPC C-SPC. I don t believe there are any easily rebindable keys which are easier to type than typing C-SPC twice. And this does not deal with the two distinct mark-setting operations problem.
  3. Another way to look at this is the question of which of setting a mark for navigational purposes and activating a mark should get C-SPC and which should get C-SPC C-SPC.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: drat 0.1.6: Rewritten macOS binary support

drat user A new version of drat arrived on CRAN overnight, once again taking advantage of the fully automated process available for such packages with few reverse depends and no open issues. As we remarked at the last release fourteen months ago when we scored the same nice outcome: Being a simple package can have its upsides This release is mostly the work of Felix Ernst who took on what became a rewrite of how binary macOS packages are handled. If you need to distribute binary packages for macOS users, this may help. Two more small updates were made, see below for full details. drat stands for drat R Archive Template, and helps with easy-to-create and easy-to-use repositories for R packages. Since its inception in early 2015 it has found reasonably widespread adoption among R users because repositories with marked releases is the better way to distribute code. As your mother told you: Friends don t let friends install random git commit snapshots. Rolled-up releases it is. drat is easy to use, documented by five vignettes and just works. The NEWS file summarises the release as follows:

Changes in drat version 0.1.6 (2020-05-29)
  • Changes in drat functionality
    • Support for the various (current) macOS binary formats was rewritten (Felix Ernst in #89 fixing #88).
    • Travis CI use was updated to R 4.0.0 and bionic (Dirk).
    • A drat repo was added to the README (Thomas Fuller in #86)

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a comparison to the previous release. More detailed information is on the drat page. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

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

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