I also posted this to debian-devel, which is where the discussion will be, but I wanted to post it on my journal as well so that others who may be interested will see it on Planet Debian. For those not familiar with Debian, this concerns the implications of a new feature for how Debian tracks shared library dependencies. I'm currently working on the Policy modification to document (and recommend) use of symbols instead of shlibs, but I'd only personally used symbols with C libraries. Today I decided that I should try adding a symbols file to a C++ library, particularly if I'm going to recommend everyone do it. I tried this exercise with xml-security-c, which is, I think, a reasonably typical C++ library. Not the sort of core C++ library that would sit at the center of the distribution, but a random software package that's in Debian because other things use it. The experience was rather interesting, and I ended up uploading the new version without a symbols file and continuing to just use shlibs. That's for the following reasons:

1. The generated symbols file was HUGE. Hundreds of lines. This is a marked difference from the typical C symbols file, which is of quite manageable size. Some of that is that the library provides a lot of different classes, but some of it is that C++ just generates a lot of exported symbols. There's no way that I could do what I would do with a C library and understand those symbols, why they're there, and whether they are likely to have changed between revisions.
2. Generating a reasonable symbols file was a pain. Generating an unreasonable symbols file that just contains all of the mangled symbols is largely mechanical and uninteresting, but that symbols file doesn't seem to me to convey useful information. So I did some scripting to translate the symbols back with c++filt, and add (c++) tags, and then try to understand what I was looking at and figure out whether I should sort the symbols list because the default sort is by mangled name, which is meaningless. This is a rather unappealing process. It's not particularly difficult, but it's very awkward and feels like it's missing vital tools.
3. The resulting symbols file is incomprehensible to someone without strong knowledge of C++. It's full of opaque entries that don't make sense to the non-C++ programmer, which I suspect is a substantial number of people who package C++ libraries for Debian. I know enough C++ from school that I can evaluate security fixes, make simple patches, and review upstream changes, and I think that's all that should be needed to package things for Debian. But I'm deeply uncomfortable producing a symbols file on my own that contains entries for things that I know nothing about and cannot evaluate when they've last changed, like "non-virtual thunk to FooClass::~FooClass@Base".
4. Once I had a symbols file that resulted in a successful build and that I could have uploaded, I started thinking about how I was going to maintain it. With a C program, I would change the symbols file versions when the underlying function implementation changes in a way that may not offer eqiuvalence, similar to bumping shlibs. I realized that I was going to have no idea when that happened, and the only way that I would maintain the symbols file would be to either trust upstream to maintain ABI equivalence and therefore only change the symbols file when upstream changes the SONAME, or not trust upstream to maintain ABI equivalence and therefore change all the versions with each new upstream release. That gives me exactly the same semantics as a shlibs file, so what's the point in having a symbols file?
5. The exported symbols of the library contained many symbols that obviously weren't really from that library, but instead were artifacts of the C++ compilation process, things like instantiations of std::vector. Do those go into the symbols file? Do they change from architecture to architecture? If they disappear again, is that actually an ABI break? How do I know? It's all very mysterious, and while shlibs provides the same semantics as just ignoring this, at least I'm not then including in the package data, generated by me, things that I'm just blindly ignoring.

I came away from this experience thinking that I should revise the Policy amendment to say that symbols files are really for C libraries and for C++ libraries with either a tightly maintained symbol export list or maintained by a C++ expert, and that most C++ library maintainers should just not bother with this and use shlibs, bumping the shlibs version or not based on their impression of how good upstream is at maintaining ABI equivalence. But that feels like a result contrary to what I had previously thought was the intended direction, so I wanted to ask the Debian development community as a whole: am I missing something? Are these symbols files actually useful? Am I missing some trick to make them useful?

... a week ago, in the shape of Alexandra Daphne Scholz, my enchanting daughter. She seems to have inherited my hairstyle. Gundemarie Scholz (my wife) and she are both doing remarkably well, to the extent that they both keep surprising medical staff with their rapid progress. For those of you that care about such things: She was 2.9kg (6lb 6oz) at birth, and 49cm (1'7") tall ... or should that be "long", given that she's not doing so much standing up as yet? What she is doing is sleeping, breast feeding, and excreting ... rather a lot. Between times, it's mostly gurgling cheerfully, looking around at the world, and attempting to study her own hands -- I find her completely fascinating. That being the case, don't expect anything very sensible out of me for the foreseeable future (so no change there, eh? ) and because I cannot resist the urge, here are a few more snaps of her: As you can see, at only one day old, it seems that she'd already managed to get hold of the Amulet of Yendor, and was having a well earned nap

This summer my beloved thinkpad x301 died in a cloud of smoke. It was exactly 3 years and 20 days old while my warranty was valid only for 3 years. Now, don't tell me this is a coincidence. Anyway. After about 5 months, I finally managed to convince my employer to get me a new thinkpad, the x220. My specs includes a 128G SSD , 4G of RAM, 2.4Gz processor, camera and fingerprint reader. It's a pity that the x300 series is not in production anymore. They were light, with a solid battery and a large screen. The X1 just don't cut it. Even though it can be consider the successor of the x300, its battery life is just not enough for my needs. On the other hand, the x220 is a very nice machine : the screen is a bit smaller then the X300, but it is light, with a very powerful processor, good battery and it feels very solid. In my opinion lenovo should have packed the new hw of the x220 in the chassis of the x300, maybe with small compromise on the battery life (I got the big battery and I can squeeze almost 7 hs with a single charge) but clearly this was not a good business choice... Installing debian on this laptop is not immediate because none of the official debian installers are shipped with a recent kernel (as in 3.x series). Since with the official debian installer I cannot have neither the driver for the Ethernet card or the driver for the wirelles card, I opted to use a custom installer built by kmuto (http://kmuto.jp/debian/d-i/ ) . Using this installer the ethernet card is recognized immediately and it's easy to proceed with the installation as usual. Another option would have been to add the binary blog for the wireless chip, but apparently the deb installer supports only WEP auth, while all my access point are WPA. I didn't spend too much time on the wireless setup, so it might well be that is indeed possible to install using a WPA access point. Last time I installed a laptop, I used the automatic partition option to have lvm on top of a lucks encrypted partition, only to discover later that the default dimensions of the partitions were a bit too small for me. For example, by default the boot partition is only 256Mb. This is plenty if you want to have only one kernel image installed at each given time, but if you want more then one kernel, memtest and for example a grml rescue iso, it's easy to run out of space. So I proceed to manually partition the disc creating a boot partition of 512M, and using the rest as a luks encrypted device with lvm on top and 3 logical volumes : sys (15G), swap (4G) and home (the rest). For my daily use having 15G on my laptop for /usr, /var, etc should more the enough... Next step was to install the system. Since in recent times I got extremely pissed off with gnome 3, I've decided to dump it completely and go back to awesome. But since awesome all by itself is a bit sad, I paired it up with xfce. Everything works, except the automount, and I'm still trying to figure out how to make it work. Apparently is a consolkit problem... I'll write another post about the xfce4 + awsome setup soon... Today I've also started playing with the finger print reader. It seems working, but I haven't managed yet to use it in conjunction with pam for authentication ... more to come. And... On last closing remark : during the last 5 months I've used a dell latitude e6410 ... Gosh. I feel I'm on anther planet. The keyboard of a thinkpad give you pleasure, not pain, from 2 to 4G of RAM is a big jump and from a conventional HD to a SSD ... well... it seems I'm flyinggggg :) I've the impression my productivity just went up 50% !!! If you work with your laptop everyday get a good laptop. It is well worth the investment ...

I've been working with appengine for a few months now. I've managed to find out the hard way that appcfg.py rollback is useless. I've learned to create a git branch for each refactoring I start on. The git branch also includes a new app version for the branch. When push all my changes to my live site, I upload one last time to the new app. Merge my branch into the master then change the live version from the old one to the new one.

I haven't learned how this work flow translates to having multiple developers. Hopefully, it is simple enough that other people can follow.

I also use make since it's an easy way to automate tasks. I hear redo is good, but for python, I'm not really compiling anything, I'm simply writing shell scripts and make is a great shell script dispatcher.

Recently, I tried to get 3G working on my Lenovo ThinkPad X121e - it has an Ericsson F5521gw mobile broadband card. This is supported by ModemManager, but all I got were unknown errors (276 and 272). Searching online, there were very few results (hence this short note) - just previous unrelated Linux kernel issues. I found someone with the same problem on Fedora, but no solution, so I started off by filing a bug report with Debian. Of course, then I found the Arch user who had filed the same bug on Launchpad, and had discovered that resetting the BIOS to its default settings fixes the issue. If only that page mentioned the keywords "Ericsson", or "Lenovo"... So after all that, it was just some weird BIOS issue. I hate hardware.

It is since two days that all my emails, @debian.org included, are in parked somewhere between the sender and my MX, as my server broke at a moment where I strictly had no time (dealine for a grant application). It is an OpenRD Ultimate with a second hand SSD. I was quite happy to have an ARM system available to test some packages like T-COFFEE, but it looks like I will have to do without. Apparently, the machine permanently reboots. I did not manage to access to the USB serial port; there are no 10 seconds where the USB port is not disconnected / reconnected. Both ethernet port LEDs blink together synchronously with the disconnections. Removing the drive did not solve the problem. The SSD itself is fine, and I did not find in the logs hints for software problems. Strange coincidence, the last log file that was modified is daemon.log, which indicates the connection of so-called megumi-PC to our unprotected, but to my knowledge never visited, wireless network. After this, nothing.

You are scaring away much more than that. I just came across an invitation for BugCon 2012. BugCon is a Mexican conference devoted to computer security I cannot comment on its level or value because, although it's a topic that has long interested me, I must recognize each day I feel less of an expert, nowadays finding myself at the level of a "sysadmin who tries not to be too dumb for his own job security". Oh, and also because it would be completely off-topic for this post. If you look at Vendetta's (the main organizer) blog post, it will probably give you the impression that the conference is just an excuse for the afterparty: Lets go see some b00bs! Do you think your fellow female hackers will have any interest in joining a bunch of sex-starved, hormone-infested teenagers who only want to pwn a website and grab more pr0n? Do you think females will feel welcome (or even mildly safe) between you? I would not think so. And I also think you are alienating any professional who might have any interest in joining your community, be it as a member, as a mentor, or whatnot. I cannot right now do a coherent post on this topic, but I can reference you to what I have seen (and read) over the last almost 10 years, when the issue was first brought up to our attention. I am very glad to see that, at least in the Free Software area, there has been a real change of mindset. I hope you are in time to think about it and rectify.

• Timeline of incidents in Geekfeminism. Note that while it seems we see more as time passes, I am almost sure it's because we are more aware of the problem, not because it occurs more often. I hope I'm not mistaken.
• Debconf ftp-masters talk. Myself a Debian person, my first contact with this problematic was being at the DebConf3 ftp-masters talk And the discussion and action that followed. This led to the creation of the Debian Women group, one of the most (socially, not technically) influent parts of Debian. Great thanks and admiration to their members, as well as to the (male and female alike) people who have worked to form it and make it heard.
  I think Debian Women sparked other similar projects such as GnomeWomen (and there is a list with further projects in there), but I cannot authoritatively say who was there first.
• Planet Fedora up-skirting photo (the original post is still available) showed the communit does no longer tolerate this behaviour. Good!
• The Open Source Boob Project. One of the most childlike attempts at humor that surely alienated many would-be female geeks.
• Another conference season, another dumb sexist, a post by Piers Cawley addressing this issue after attending the CouchDB + Ruby: Perform like a Pr0n star talk. Quoting him, Apparently, the difference between 80s truck salesmen and Matt s audience is that at least 80s salesmen had the grace to look embarrassed.
• Liz Keogh: "I am not a pr0n star: Avoiding unavoidable associations", a hacker woman that clearly felt offense by the CouchDB Pr0n Star joke, and did a thorough and interesting analysis, extending the effects to your work environment.
• Just Say You're Sorry Already (regarding the same incident on CouchDB+Ruby)
• Richard Stallman's EMACS virgins joke incident. It's sad how it's impossible to get Stallman to acknowledge he can also make mistakes and make feel people insulted.
• [update] And of course, MadameZou mentions the very important 2002 HOWTO: HOWTO encourage women in Linux?

Oh, and not the description of an incident, but a very interesting and thoughtful take on this: [pdf] Interesting analysis by Hannah Wallach on the numbers and motivations of women in Free Software groups. I don't know if Hannah has published this in article form, but many interesting points can be understood by looking at the presentation. My good friend Vendetta: I don't mean this post (longer than what I originally intended) as a way to say you and the conference you are organizing for the third year (IIRC) already is unprofessional or targetted to pimply teenagers. I know the work you have put in it. I hope you see the points I'm trying to drive You are of course free to have whatever afterparty you have. But, if as the main organizer, you are giving the images of nice chicks at Hooters more weight and relevance than to the conference itself... you are doing yourself a disservice. I hope you can rectify it, and make BugCon attractive to hacker women as well.

Over the last years, I have developed a variety of metapackages for managing the package selections of the systems I administrate. The meta packages are organized like this:

jak-standard

Standard packages for all systems

jak-desktop

Standard packages for all desktop systems (GNOME 3 if possible, otherwise GNOME 2)

jak-printing

Print support

jak-devel

Development packages

jak-machine-<X>

The meta package defining the computer X

Each computer has a jak-machine-X package installed. This package is marked as manually installed, all other packages are marked as automatically installed. The machine packages have the attribute XB-Important: yes set in debian/control. This creates an Important: yes field. This field is not official, but APT recognizes it and does not remove those packages (the same field is set for the APT package by APT when building the cache, as APT should not be removed either by APT). It seems to work a bit like Essential, with the exception that non-installed packages are not installed automatically on dist-upgrade. The meta packages are created using seed files similar to Ubuntu. In contrast to Ubuntu, I m not using germinate to create the packages from the seeds, but a custom dh_germinate_lite that simply takes a seed file and creates the correct substvars. It s faster than germinate and really simplistic. It also does not handle Recommends currently. The whole result can be seen on http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=users/jak/jak-meta.git. Maybe that s useful for some people. And if you happen to find some packages in the seeds that are deprecated, please let me know. Oh, and yes, some packages (such as the letterman one) are internal software not publically available yet [letterman is a simple GUI for creating letters using LaTeX]. While I m at it, I also built Ubuntu s version of wine1.2 for i386 squeeze. It can be found in
deb http://people.debian.org/~jak/debian/ squeeze main (it still needs a few changes to be correct though, I ll upload a jak2 build soon). I also built updated sun-java6 packages for my parents (mostly needed due to the plugin, some websites do not work with the IcedTea one), but can t share the binaries due to licensing requirements. I may push out a source repository, though, so others can build those packages themselves. I ll let you know once that s done.
Filed under: Debian, General

I really should write these a bit more often. Wow, I can't believe it was over 4 years ago that I started having occasional face to face meetings with the ISC DHCP folks. The entire ISC DHCP team (of 5) was in town for an all-hands meeting, and Larissa Shapiro, the Product Manager for DHCP (and BIND) suggested it would be a good opportunity for another catch up. Given the current (bad) state of DHCP 4.2 in unstable, I thought this was an excellent idea, and so we all had lunch on Tuesday. I pretty much set the agenda, and it was

• general state of 4.2.2 in Debian
• situation with GNU/Hurd and their patch to fix an FTBFS (#616290)
• the current FTBFS issues with kFreeBSD (#643569)
• the embedded BIND sources in the DHCP source
• removal of the RFCs from the embedded BIND source (#645760)

The general state of 4.2.2 in Debian In a nutshell, it's a bit of a mess. We've got release critical bugs, build failures, the whole cat and kaboodle. It makes me very sad, because 4.2.2 was the first 4.2 series that I had a chance to upload, and I was very excited to do so, because it contains the hotly desired LDAP patches merged upstream. Unfortunately, it's also got the beginnings of the BIND/DHCP merger that's going to be BIND 10, and that is all a bit of a mess. It's directly responsible for the kFreeBSD FTBFS and the introduction of the RFCs, which are both keeping 4.2.2 out of testing. I gave the ISC folks a high-level overview of how Debian development works, and the normal progression of packages from unstable to testing to stable, and the release process and whatnot, and impressed upon them the implications of the current release critical bugs. I also showed them how Ubuntu development fitted into the picture. Finally, I showed them the popcon statistics for DHCP. I think they found it useful. FTBFS issues on kFreeBSD This was a good segue to #643569. The issue is actually with the embedded BIND sources. I'd already forwarded this bug upstream when it first happened, but I don't know what had happened to it. They seemed to act as if this was the first they'd heard of it. I'm hoping that they can get this fixed in 4.2.3, which is due around the end of the quarter. Embedded BIND sources Since we were already talking about an issue caused by the embedded BIND sources, we moved on to talking about #645760 and the existence of the embedded BIND sources in general. It should be pretty straightforward for them to strip the RFCs out of the source. They've already done it in the past for the DHCP sources, so I'm also hopeful that this will get resolved in 4.2.3. The issue of the embedded BIND sources is apparently a bit more complicated, although the day before our meeting, Michael Gilbert filed #643569 and #645760, so I hope that the ISC folks can take a look at these patches and see if it's feasible to adopt them. Patches for GNU/Hurd Finally we talked about #616290, which I know is near and dear to the GNU/Hurd porters' hearts. We probably spent the most time talking about this. The DHCP developers have concerns about accepting a patch for an OS that they do absolutely no testing on, and also questioned the viability of the OS in general. They stressed that they're fairly thin in numbers relative to what they have on their plate to achieve this year, and so pushed back pretty firmly on accepting the current patch. I relayed the frustration that the Hurd folks were having about a lack of dialogue around the patch (most of the interaction has been via an ISC support person). There was actually a bit of a split between the developers, with one of them appreciating that the Hurd was unlikely to go anywhere as a platform without a working DHCP client, so in some regards, they were condemning the platform by taking the position they were taking. They're going to go away and take another look at the patch and try to come back with some actionable feedback on what needs to change to make it more acceptable to them, so we'll see what comes of this. I'm not particularly optimistic that anything acceptable to the GNU/Hurd folks is likely to happen any time soon, but maybe if the patch gets cleaned up a bit more, I'll just bite the bullet and start applying it to the Debian package. BIND 10 One of the guys is more involved in BIND 10 than DHCP, and asked if I could help out with the packaging of a build dependency for BIND 10. It seemed like #578387 was languishing so I offered to pick it up. I've not packaged a library before, mainly because the library packaging guide has scared me off it (I feel I lack the deep C fu that seems necessary), but I figured that this would be a good learning opportunity, so I'm going to dive in.

The bug webinterface of the Ultimate Debian Database currently knows about the following release critical bugs:

In Total:	1563
Affecting Wheezy:	928
Wheezy only:	192
Remaining to be fixed in Wheezy:	736

Of these 736 bugs, the following tags are set:

Pending in Wheezy:	51
Patched in Wheezy:	116
Duplicates in Wheezy:	46
Can be fixed in a security Update:	22
Contrib or non-free in Wheezy:	12
Claimed in Wheezy:	0
Delayed in Wheezy:	3
Otherwise fixed in Wheezy:	41

Ignoring all the above (multiple tags possible) 495 bugs need to be fixed by Debian Contributors to get Debian 7.0 Wheezy released. However, with the view of the Release Managers, 827 need to be dealt with for the release to happen. Please see Interpreting the release critical bug statistics for an explanation of the different numbers.

Hi folks!

We're almost done for the official Summer of Code program and I thought that I couldn't let it end without another update, so here we are (you may thank Daniel Burrows for additional poking).

The Gtk+ interface for Aptitude is making great progress. The product is not final yet but already implements many of the planned ideas, with others to come.




So, let's see the tasks presented in my previous update:

• A real user interface <- much progress here


• Being reliable <- check! we don't crash all the time anymore


• Packages dependencies, pre-dependencies, etc. <- check!


• Hyperlinks between packages <- check!


• Advanced package search <- check!


• Tags support (tag clouds ?) <- well, no clouds yet, but we have tags


• Linking with interesting data sources like popcon <- not done yet


• A lot of interesting things <- well..

In some more details: we are now much closer to the final interface. Some things are not done yet, for example, notification bars la Iceweasel (or is it Firefox ?) are in the works for unobtrusive notifications about important things and a little guidance.

We are much more reliable now. We eliminated lots of memory management problems that resulted from, mmh, imperfect coding discipline. We also lock the interface when important backend stuff reload to prevent the user from shooting himself in the foot when triggering an install when the APT cache is reloading for example.. The backend refactoring took a sizable part of this second term but it was worth it. The code is now much cleaner and uses no more (at least much fewer) ugly unscalable hacks.

One very important feature of Aptitude is the ability to easily display all kinds of dependencies and navigate through them by hyperlinking. It's now working in the Gtk+ interface as well. Feel free to click on whatever looks like a package or a package version.

We now support the powerful Aptitude package searching syntax. Daniel Burrows is talking with Enrico Zini to bring the power of apt-xapian-index to Aptitude: autocompletion! lightning fast full-text searches! tag clouds! ponies!

There is still a lot to be done. I'm not going away after the GSoC program. I'm here to stay, for Aptitude and Debian. Daniel Burrows has been very helpful and supportive. The Debian community is as awesome as I knew it before participating in the program.

Daniel Burrows is planning to merge the Gtk+ interface into the main branch in September and packages may appear into Experimental. With the very interesting evolutions of the upcoming Adept-3, Lenny+1 will show very interesting changes in the area of packages managers.

Now for you. I need you to test my interface. All necessary instructions are on the development trac : http://dev.graffit.net/aptitude/trac.

In case you've been living under a rock these past years, I shouldn't have to tell you what this is about :). Well, just in case.
The Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is an international program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. Debian has participated since 2006, mentoring dozens of students on Debian projects.

The important part of the 2009 edition of the Google Summer of Code is going to start next week with the Organizations application period (March 9th). By that time, we should have listed a reasonable number of ideas on the dedicated wiki page.

We will try this year to improve on the performance of the previous years, starting first with more and more dedicated manpower. If you have some time to spare to help manage our Summer of Code bid this year, we can make it a much better experience for the students and for Debian.

Help is immediately needed in many areas. Some examples:

• Map out which areas in Debian could benefit from a Summer of Code project and connect the right people with the right projects ideas


• Ideas, Ideas, Ideas for Summer of Code projects

By mid-March, we will need:

• Dedicated documentation to present Debian to the prospective student


• Publicity material to promote the Summer of Code at Debian


• Ideas, Ideas, Ideas for Summer of Code projects

Further in the spring:

• Mentors, people to review proposals, do interviews


• Ideas, Ideas, Ideas for Summer of Code projects

In the summer:

• Mentoring students


• Testing and feedback for projects


• Internal communication with the community

As you can see, there is much work ahead. It's time to pitch out your favorite pet project :)
Remember! The Summer of Code has become a prominent outreach forum for open source organizations. It puts a spotlight on each of them to provide a well-rounded and deep experience of open source development.

Right now, you can help with the Wiki, join us on IRC on #debian-soc on OFTC or join the mailing-list at soc-coordination on alioth.

The short "flyers-friendly" URL for the Summer of Code at Debian is : <http://wiki.debian.org/gsoc>. Publicize it!

See you this summer!

As sort of new year's resolution I started picking up the habit to work on release critical bugreports for squeeze again. The number is way to high to be healthy, but at least it is (still) below the amount of release critical bugreports for unstable. It will be an uneven fight because it seems that there are quite some people working on weeding out release critical bugreports in unstable, but those who are interested in weeding out releasing critical bugreports in stable seems to be limited, even though it is one of our supported releases and thus should receive quite some attention, at least by the corresponding package maintainers themself. So here is the list that I managed so far:

• 651792: not relevant for squeeze
• 653520: builds on squeeze
• 654568: re-add version information lost in reassign
• 654276: not relevant for squeeze
• 654257: not failing on squeeze
• 654810: not happening on squeeze
• 654459: not relevant for squeeze
• 654406: not release critical at all, shipped as upstream
• 655007: python2.7 isn't default in squeeze
• 655372: doesn't fail in squeeze
• 527403: libjack-dev in squeeze provides libjack0.100.0-dev
• 622903: not relevant for squeeze
• 625764: squeeze has older version of libvelocity-tools-java, not affected
• 654818: does work in squeeze
• 647795: squeeze still has libahven1-dev
• 647796: squeeze still has libahven1-dev
• 636823: not obsolete in squeeze
• 628500: no perl 5.14 in squeeze
• 629255: no perl 5.14 in squeeze
• 629284: no perl 5.14 in squeeze
• 629293: no perl 5.14 in squeeze
• 636132: no perl 5.14 in squeeze
• 636268: no perl 5.14 in squeeze
• 636271: no perl 5.14 in squeeze
• 636517: no perl 5.14 in squeeze
• 636520: no perl 5.14 in squeeze
• 636521: no perl 5.14 in squeeze
• 636522: no perl 5.14 in squeeze
• 636823: not obsolete dependencies in squeeze

That makes 29 squeeze RCs squashed so far, I hope I can keep up with it. Enjoy!

/debian permanent link Comments: 2 Flattr this

Those lovely people over at Flickr have finally bitten the bullet and are turning off FlickrAuth in the summer, meaning that all applications that use the Flickr API need to use OAuth. This is something I totally agree with, whilst FlickrAuth works and was clearly an important influence on OAuth, it's a single-service protocol when OAuth has managed to get massive adoption and a huge developer base. The problem I've got is libsocialweb, which has a Flickr module that allows both fetching of your contact's recent photos and uploading images. This uses FlickrAuth so at the end of July will suddenly stop working. I've got enough on my plate at the moment and would love for more people to understand how the entire social spagetti works, so this is a call for a volunteer to work on this, for which I'll obviously be available to offer any guidance and mentoring required. There are two ways of approaching this, the easy way and the slightly harder way. The easy way is to update libsocialweb to use an OAuthProxy instead of a FlickrProxy, and update the module metadata so that Bisho uses the generic OAuth flow instead of a Flickr-specific flow. This should be fairly simple and needs to happen soon so that any distributions that are using libsocialweb don't break in the summer. The harder way is to add Flickr support to gnome-online-accounts, using the Twitter service as an example, and then port the Flickr service in libsocialweb to use gnome-online-accounts to authenticate. I've a proof of concept for the librest-goa integration which will be a useful starting point. This is more of a proof of concept for libsocialweb, we've been looking at moving away from Bisho but haven't done anything substantial yet. Ideally both of these happen, so the current code will continue to work in the future and the GOA work demonstrates how GOA and libsocialweb would work together. So, anyone interested?

Finally I've also find time to test ColorHug on openSUSE 12.1. For my experiences on Debian check previous blog post. Unfortunately on openSUSE calibration is also not that easy. First of all, you have to install patched argyll CMS from multimedia:color_management repository. You can also install gnome-color-management (and colord), but for some reasons they did not offer me any screen for calibration, so I gave up on this and tried manual calibration using Argyll. After looking into documentation, it seems to be pretty straightforward:

$ dispcal -y l -o /tmp/L220x
Place instrument on test window.
Hit Esc or Q to give up, any other key to continue:
Display adjustment menu:
Press 1 .. 7
1) Black level (CRT: Offset/Brightness)
2) White point (Color temperature, R,G,B, Gain/Contrast)
3) White level (CRT: Gain/Contrast, LCD: Brightness/Backlight)
4) Black point (R,G,B, Offset/Brightness)
5) Check all
6) Measure and set ambient for viewing condition adjustment
7) Continue on to calibration
8) Exit
Doing check measurements
  Current Brightness = 190.74
  Target 50% Level  = 36.14, Current = 47.98, error =  6.2%
  Target Near Black =  1.91, Current =  4.11, error =  1.2%
  Current white = x 0.3424, y 0.3179, VDT 5910K DE 2K 18.3
  Target black = x 0.3424, y 0.3179, Current = x 0.3123, y 0.2711, error = 18.06 DE
Press 1 .. 7
1) Black level (CRT: Offset/Brightness)
2) White point (Color temperature, R,G,B, Gain/Contrast)
3) White level (CRT: Gain/Contrast, LCD: Brightness/Backlight)
4) Black point (R,G,B, Offset/Brightness)
5) Check all
6) Measure and set ambient for viewing condition adjustment
7) Continue on to calibration
8) Exit
Commencing device calibration
The instrument can be removed from the screen.
$ dispwin -I /tmp/L220x.icc 
$ dispwin -L

It turned out, that the change after calibration are quite minor here. This is sort of thing I've expected from past experiences with editing photos here, but anyway, now I trust results here even more :-).

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Yesterday, I've unpacked new toy - ColorHug. It came in small packet with CD (which is unfortunately not that useful as it should be), mini USB cable and a letter from Richard Hughes. First attempt to use was of course just connect and make it work :-). The basic access works out of the box:

$ /usr/lib/colorhug-client/colorhug get-firmware-version
1.0.3
$ /usr/lib/colorhug-client/colorhug get-hardware-version
Hardware Version 1
$ /usr/lib/colorhug-client/colorhug get-serial-number
000019

Unfortunately calibration with colord does not yet work out of the box on Debian due to bug 655888. Hopefully it will be fixed soon and it will work nicer. For now you have to rebuild Argyll with Colorhug support (with extra pain caused by Debian package using different build system than upstream). I won't provided binary packages as I pretty much gave up after effort to build clean packages from same sources on i386 and amd64, which always failed on patched autoconf based build system. Side note: I somehow hoped that I won't hit new (in meaning that I don't know them) open source projects which do not use some version control. Unfortunately Argyll CMS is one of such projects... After this update (and restarting GNOME), when connecting ColorHug, the Gnome Color Manager pops up and man can calibrate the screen. The biggest problem is to make ColorHug hold on desired place on screen, if it is not close enough to screen, you will get really bad results. The first result is of course far from being perfect, but colors are definitely better than without calibration or with ICC profile shipped with notebook.

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Yesterday, I've unpacked new toy - ColorHug. It came in small packet with CD (which is unfortunately not that useful as it should be), mini USB cable and a letter from Richard Hughes. First attempt to use was of course just connect and make it work :-). The basic access works out of the box:

$ /usr/lib/colorhug-client/colorhug get-firmware-version
1.0.3
$ /usr/lib/colorhug-client/colorhug get-hardware-version
Hardware Version 1
$ /usr/lib/colorhug-client/colorhug get-serial-number
000019

Unfortunately calibration with colord does not yet work out of the box on Debian due to bug 655888. Hopefully it will be fixed soon and it will work nicer. For now you have to rebuild Argyll with Colorhug support (with extra pain caused by Debian package using different build system than upstream). I won't provided binary packages as I pretty much gave up after effort to build clean packages from same sources on i386 and amd64, which always failed on patched autoconf based build system. Side note: I somehow hoped that I won't hit new (in meaning that I don't know them) open source projects which do not use some version control. Unfortunately Argyll CMS is one of such projects... After this update (and restarting GNOME), when connecting ColorHug, the Gnome Color Manager pops up and man can calibrate the screen. The biggest problem is to make ColorHug hold on desired place on screen, if it is not close enough to screen, you will get really bad results. The first result is of course far from being perfect, but colors are definitely better than without calibration or with ICC profile shipped with notebook.

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Update: I managed to make sound work. For some weird reason, a mute switch option of some the many (and who knows how useful) switches of my sound card was enabled. Now the damn thing works. Did I mention that since I did the upgrade all my sound cards (I have a USB sound card, too) have listed as available inputs all the inputs of my internal sound card (mic, front mic, line in, CD, etc.) in Audacity? That makes for a very confusing and loooong sound input sources list! The upside is that I can finally record clips from televisions that do not provide such a feature and FastVideoDownload doesn't handle.

I also seem to have found a possible fix for the caps-ctrl issue in Xfce4 (obviously, setting "-option ctrl:swapcap" in ~/.Xkbmap, instead of that Alt modifier).

---

As I said in my previous post, I will tell you what do GNOME 3 and Windows 7 have in common.

Before everything else, I want to make it clear that when I am saying GNOME 3, I am referring to Debian Wheezy's GNOME 3, since I recently upgraded from Squeeze on my laptop. I'll probably drop a line or two about that, too.

First, I'll tell you about the (boring, probably for many) experience with Windows 7. As I said before, my new job requires me to use a Windows machine, so up until a few months ago I was using Windows XP with some additional software and tweaks to make it usable. Then came the Windows 7 upgrade . I am using quotes since the more appropriate term would be fresh installation on a new partition , not even close to what Debian users are used to call an upgrade.

So after a fresh Windows 7 installation, my first shock was the fact there was NO Quick Launch*. Some of you might be laughing, but I had never used Windows 7 up until then, just saw it on a laptop of a friend of mine (Ovidiu, one of the guys with whom I am doing this podcast, went to Denkfest with, and made these interviews). That was the first shock. Initial discussions about this with Windows users lead me to believe Quick Launch was dead and for some unexplained reason, I believed them. Later, much later, a week ago, to be precise, I found out that you can bring back the Quick Launch through some convoluted way**. Up until that point I had to have some icons pinned to the task bar, but some others on the desktop (and I hate that) because some of them, like Cygwin, if pinned, would start a cmd console, since Win 7 pins the process, not the starting script.

Among other things which broke in Win 7 and used to work fine in XP, the Virtual Dimension application which provides me with a virtual desktop, was the first one which was broken. I have been using a liniar 4 desktops-wide virtual desktop for over 5 years and I am worthless and inefficient if all my apps are on the same desktop. Mail application is always on the first desktop, work and file managers are on the second, the third is for extras and multimedia editing while the fourth is my gateway to the internet, containing the browser, instant messenger, or whatever.

The shortcuts I use to get to the various desktops are Win+1 ... Win+4 keyboard shortcuts, but the M$ Evil Empire decided that those shortcuts are going to start or bring foreward the first, second and so on applications pinned on the task bar. And you can't change those shortcuts***. Nor is disabling just those possible since they are all disabled through a huge switch which disables ALL Win+x keyboard shortcuts, among which Win+E (file expolrer) and Win+D (Show Desktop) were also. Luckly, Win+L (lock screen) was not disabled. So I disabled al those Win+ shortcuts, since I need virtual desktops.

Now, imagine if I had to start a Cygwin console and I had all sorts of apps open! Win+D was disabled, so I had to minimize the apps covering the desktop shortcut for Cygwin, click on the icon to start it, bring back the minimized windows and go on with my work. What a waste of clicks, mouse movement, energy and time, just because some dudes thought a Quick Launch-like feature was useless****.


You might wonder already what do those '*' sings mean. Well, sadly, that's what GNOME 3 / gnome-shell and Windows 7 have in common.

Gnome 3 was a shock for me. An empty desktop right after upgrade. No panels, no shortcuts*, no power indicators, no wicd indicator, no virtual desktops, no desktop icons, (I have a few dirs and docs there). Sounds like an Evil Empire decision, doesn't it?

Luckly I have been using Tilda as my always-ready console and I could fire up iceweasel from the console in order to understand where my panel disappeared.

I then realised that the upgrade brought me Network Manager, that app which wicd replaced. As a consequence, I had no working wlan since Network Manager made sure to mess up with the network manager I chose.

After looking through the documentation of Network Manager and realising I either had it set up to leave wlan0 alone or I didn't understood NM's documentation, I simply stopped the service, which let Wicd its job flawlessly.

The first thing I searched was Gnome 3 panel or something of that sort and I was confronted with the obvious option to appeal to the Forced Fallback Mode which was disabled. I figured I either had an old version, or Debian disabled this feature (hoping they provided an alternative). There was also the option to conform to this convoluted way of working** with Actions and such uselessness like that. I still wonder, what is the purpose of the Favourites bar on the left side, since it's accessible only after wasting a lot of mouse movement and time? For Joe's Pesci sake, I use focus under mouse just to avoid needless mouse and keyboard manipulation. Why? Why? WHY would I want every time I need to start or SWITCH to another application to move the mouse to the upper-left corner then take my hands off the mouse to type, move the mouse downwards or move across the whole width of the screen to get to my beloved virtual desktops and pick the app I want?

Making a long story short, after even trying XFCE4 (which for some unknown reason resets almost immediately my keyboard layout to the default layout with the Caps on Caps, instead of my preferred and set Ctrl on Caps - yes, it's global), I managed to find GNOME Shell Frippery** which made the experience better.

Later I found out that GNOME 3's file manager, Nautilus, has decided that an up on level button is useless, since the default is to use that uncopy-pastable button location bar instead of a sane text location bar. And it seems the GNOME developers decided this*** and I should conform to it.

To add insult to injury, those icons on my old panel are apparently useless**** and even in the fallback version I can't get them back. Or so the GNOME developers decided.

At some point this sunday, don't know how or why this change happened, producing sound was impossible. I know the problem is pulseaudio since when I kill the pulseaudio daemon from the console I can play audio. BTW, great timing, just when I needed sound the most, before releasing episode 32 of our podcast (yay, I reaslised that xfce just decided to reset my caps to be caps, after setting to ctrl a few minutes ago).

I know I praised pulseaudio when I first tried it, but failing to make it work out of the box or after some tinkering is a deal breaker for me, so I removed it. Now I find it that is a default in GNOME, yet all it manages to do is prevent audio from working. At least on my machine.

Other problems? Gnome Power Manager manages to hang and block my session, GNOME managed somehow to fail to start at some point. Yeah, and that sound problem which I didn't fix yet, didn't went away after removing all the pulseaudio packages which could be removed (e.g.: ryhtmbox depends on libpulse0, same do some other apps like audacity, so I couldn't remove all pulse related packages).

I got involved with Debian and GNU/Linux because it was tweakable and customisable, didn't use to force all sorts of option on me and now I find with its increasing popularity it becomes more and more like a product of a corporation which decides to change some things just to change and totally disregadring user experience and uses.

So, in the light of all of these problems I think it's time to probably consider trying KDE. Is it any good lately?

Last year I shared my Debian related goals for 2011 . I tend to put more goals than what I can reasonably complete alone and this year was no exception. Let s have a look.

1. Translate my Debian book into English: PARTLY DONE
   It took more time than expected to prepare and to run the fundraising campaign but it has been successful and the translation is happening right now.
2. Finish multiarch support in dpkg: DONE BUT NOT ENTIRELY MERGED YET
   Yes, multiarch support was already in the pipe last year in January. I completed the development between January and April (it was sponsored by Linaro) and since then it has mostly been waiting on Guillem to review it, tweak it, and integrate it.
3. Make deb files use XZ compression by default: TRIED BUT ABANDONED
   After discussing the issue with Colin Watson and Joey Hess during debconf, I came to the conclusion that it was not really desirable at this point. The objections were that debian-installer was not ready for it and that it adds a new dependency on xz for debootstrap to work on non-Debian systems. I believe that the debian-installer side is no longer a problem since unxz is built in busybox-udeb (since version 1:1.19.3-2). For the other side, there s not much to do except ensuring that xz is portable to all the other OS we care about. DAK has been updated too (see #556407).
4. Be more reactive to review/merge dpkg patches: PARTLY DONE
   I don t think we had any patch that received zero input. We still have a backlog of patches, and the situation is far from ideal but the situation improved.
5. Implement the rolling distribution proposed as part of the CUT project and try to improve the release process: NOT DONE
   We had a BoF during debconf, we discussed it at length on debian-devel, but in the end we did nothing out of it. Except Josselin Mouette who wrote a proof of concept for his idea. For me testing is already what people are expecting from a rolling distribution. It s just a matter of documenting how to effectively use testing, and of some marketing by defining rolling as alias to testing.
6. Work more regularly on the developers-reference: PARTLY DONE
   I did contribute some new material to the document but not as much as I could have hoped. On the other hand, I have been rather reactive to ensure that sane patches got merged. We need more people writing new parts and updating the existing content.
7. Write a 10-lesson course called Smart Package Management : NOT DONE
8. Create an information product (most likely an ebook or an online training) and sell it on my blog: NOT DONE
   This was supposed to happen after the translation of the Debian Administrator s Handbook. Since the translation is not yet over, I did not start to work on this yet.
9. By the end of the year, have at least 1/3 of my time funded by donations and/or earnings of my information products: NOT REACHED
   My target was rather aggressive with 700 each month, and given that I did not manage to complete any information product, I m already very pleased to have achieved a mean amount of 204 of donations each month (min: 91 , max: 364 ). It s more than two times better than in 2010. Thank you! Note that those figures do not take into account the revenues of the fundraising of the Debian Administrator s Handbook since they will be used for its translation.

That makes quite a lot of red (for things that I did not achieve) on the other hand I completed projects that I did not foresee and did not plan. For instance improving dpkg-buildflags and then merging Kees Cook work on hardened build flags was an important step for Debian. This was waiting for so long already

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(This is not quite a Dear lazyweb post. If anything, it's Dear lazyweb, I've done my homework, now what? ) I'm looking for the ultimate distributed filesystem. Something that's simple to use, redundant, fault-tolerant, and still smart enough to avoid the more obvious performance chokepoints. Ideally, it should work for all of the following sets of files:

• Music files. They're currently stored on a plug computer at home and served over DAAP, but DAAP seems to become less and less of a priority for music players (I'll keep the music players suck rant for another post), and it has its inconveniences too. Ideally, the files should be integrated in the filesystem of my work computer, the one that serves as a media player in the living-room, the one I use for playing the backing tracks when I'm practising the drums, and the laptop I use when on the road too.
• Backups. My BackupPC currently runs on the plug computer at home, so backups of my remote servers are in a geographically distinct location; but backups of my home computers are not, and I'd like to change that without having to copy files around by hand. Backups do contain confidential data, so this adds a constraint on the filesystem.
• Bazaar repositories. I do have a script that pushes and pulls stuff across computers for the many repositories I use, but it's still awkward that I need to do that.
• Parts of my home directory, such as my browser preferences and bookmarks, or the database of the Hamster time tracking tool, or the working directories of stuff I do for clients, and so on. Again, each of those can be done with specific means (bookmarks synced to a server, CouchDB-like database, DVCS and regular commits, etc.), but wouldn't it be much simpler if there only was one file to begin with?

The requirements on the ultimate distributed filesystem (which I'll call UDFS for short, otherwise you'll get bored and go look at pictures of kittens) are as follows:

• Availability means redundancy: some of the storage nodes will be on dedicated servers in datacenters, others at home; I can imagine setting up the firewall so that the home computers are reachable from outside, but sometimes network links go down, and the home computers are far from being on 100% of the time.
• Availability/redundancy also means automated replication and rebalancing: if a node is added to the grid (or switched on), it should automatically get its share of the files so as to contribute to availability if another node goes down at a later time.
• Confidentiality: at the very least, network communications must be encrypted and authenticated; ideally, individual storage nodes wouldn't need to be able to access the stored data. If I store bits of my backups on a friend's server, I don't want to have to trust them not to look at the data; also, my friend may actually want to be unable to look at my data (to provide for deniability in case someone else wants to look at it).
• Performance: native disk performance may not be realistically reachable, but the system must be smart enough (or configurable enough) to store files on both sides of the ADSL link, for instance, so not all accesses need to go through the bottleneck.
• Integration with the system: I want a filesystem, not a storage system. All applications know how to navigate a mounted filesystem; very few will interface with an specific application designed to store and fetch chunks of data.
• Scalability would be nice, although my personal needs are still well below the terabyte range and I can't see myself using more than a dozen nodes or so.

Quite a few constraints, eh? I have a feeling they are not mutually incompatible though, so I had a look at several candidates. I started with Wikipedia, and I followed the links to Tahoe-LAFS, XtreemFS and Ceph. The following is my evaluation of these candidates based on much reading of docs and websites and wikis, some questioning on IRC, and very little testing.

• Availability/redundancy 1: all three candidates work on the net, and they all provide for data replication. XtreemFS seems to operate on a fall-back mode while the other two are more distributed (meaning there's no canonical node hosting any particular file). Tahoe uses erasure codes (files can be split across N shares, k of which are enough to reconstruct the whole file; the N/k ratio controls the amount of redundancy); it seems to require the introducer node to be always up, which introduces a single point of failure, but this node can be replaced with no loss of data if it fails (this just requires reconfiguring the storage nodes, which can probably be automated). Ceph can work with any number of meta-data servers, so redundancy is assured there (data itself can be replicated in a configurable way too).
• Availability/redundancy 2: either I'm a fool and I didn't find out about that, or none of the three candidates provides for automated rebalancing. Apparently Tahoe provides a way to repair files without enough redundancy, but that needs to be run manually on each file, rather than being systematic, and it's a kind of add-on to the system rather than being properly integrated. Ceph only does rebalancing of meta-data. XtreemFS seems to work a bit like RAID1 with spare disks, but details are scarce.
• Confidentiality: Tahoe wins, hands down. Neither network sniffers nor storage nodes can see the contents of the stored files. They can't even find out about their name or the directory structure. XtreemFS encrypts the data on the network (but it is still stored in cleartext on the nodes). Ceph doesn't even try.
• Performance: Ceph wins (or loses less, at any rate): it seems possible to configure a topology for the storage nodes, and to drive the storage location policy according to this topology; so I could define sets of nodes ( my servers in datacenters , my plug computer at home , my desktop and laptop computers , my friends' computers ) and decide that each file should be stored at least once on each set of nodes. Tahoe stores shares of files on a number of storage nodes chosed in kind of a round-robin way; read access uses the same round-robin system, which means that you will probably end up fetching a file at least partially over your slow link even when you could fetch it entirely from the local network. The XtreemFS website doesn't seem to acknowledge the possibility of the network being slow.
• Integration: Ceph and XtreemFS win: they're native filesystems. Tahoe is in the storage and retrieval system category; the FUSE layer is marked as experimental and not recommended, and the SFTP layer (which can be mounted as a filesystem with sshfs) has many documented drawbacks. Maybe a WebDAV frontend, combined with fusedav, would provide a working alternative, but it's not implemented yet.
• Scalability: all three candidates boast about scalability (in data size and in number of nodes). Ceph seems to require some configuration every time a new storage node is added. Tahoe seems much more dynamic: new nodes (storage or clients) just need to be told where the introducer node is, and then they merge into the grid seamlessly by being told about other nodes (a bit like Bittorrent, where clients learn about each other by asking the tracker).

The overall picture seems full of good things scattered across different solutions, but unfortunately none of the existing ones seems to address the whole problem; at least, not my whole problem. It would be good if each focused on one layer and did that layer well, but that seems not to be the case either, so they can't be combined to get the best of all worlds. It may be that I'm missing something, or that I failed to read some docs properly, or that I misunderstood the docs, or that the docs themselves are simply lacking; but my ideal UDFS currently doesn't seem to exist as a turn-key solution. However, the main pieces are available, and implementing the remaining parts may be doable. My humble idea of a way forward would be based on Tahoe-LAFS, with the following three changes:

• A configurable dispatch policy, so that administrators could define their own behaviour. The current Tahoe parts already turn files into a number of blobs that only need to be stored on various nodes, and the function that chooses which nodes seems to be reasonably self-contained, so it could maybe even be made pluggable, and an administrator could implement a storage policy that matches the constraints and the network topology. Ditto for the function that picks which nodes the data is read from (which, as far as I can tell, is the same; splitting could bring some benefits here).
• A working FUSE implementation, either on top of SFTP if the drawbacks can be fixed, on top of WebDAV if that gets implemented, or native to Tahoe if that can be done.
• Automatic rebalancing of data when new nodes are added or turned on, or when an intermittent network link comes up. The current script seems to be an afterthought; if it can be made more automated and more reliable, I'll be happy with that.

Also nice to have would be a way to work with multiple introducer nodes, but that seems to be in the works already. This would be pretty damn close to my UDFS; read/write performance would certainly be far from what can be obtained on native filesystems stored on local disks, but my use cases involve reasonably small files for which instant access is not compulsory, and the filesystem cache would probably absorb most of the access times. In case anyone is looking for ideas of things to do in their spare time, here are rough sketches of other possible UDFS implementations I thought of. These are wild ideas, and I'm not even sure they could be doable in practice:

• eCryptfs on top of Ceph. The file contents are still only accessible to those in possession of the adequate key, and replication/distribution is handled by Ceph. That could probably work; the main drawbacks I can see come from Ceph's administrative overhead and manual configuration.
• LUKS and a standard filesystem, on top of the part of Ceph that manages block devices (RADOS). I'm not sure this could be mounted simultaneously by several nodes, though.
• LUKS on top of Ceph's RADOS, and Lustre or GlusterFS on top of that? Am I even making sense?
• A kind of union filesystem with local caching, on top of Tahoe-LAFS. Say we take unionfs-fuse, and add local caching: if the requested file is already in cache, performance is near native; if not, we still get the advantages of Tahoe. I'm not sure how caching works with WebDAV, but once Tahoe gets a WebDAV frontend it might be a simple matter of adding a Squid cache between that and davfs.
• I even thought of building a filesystem on top of the Bittorrent protocol; redundancy would be obtained by ensuring that there are at least N distributed copies of a file among the peers. I gave up even before reaching the details phase, though, but maybe a variant of the idea could be workable.

Such is the state of my research so far. I would welcome feedback, pointers to things I neglected to read, corrections for things I misread or misunderstood, comments on the ideas and so on. I'll probably post an update if my search goes significantly forward. Update: I've already received two pieces of feedback, including a lengthy one with corrections about Tahoe-LAFS. For the sake of fairness, I'll solicit (and wait for) the same from the other candidates I looked at. I was also pointed at HekaFS, GlusterFS and git-annex, which I'll have to look at in more details. Other suggestions are still welcome, but the more I get, the more the full update will be delayed. Thanks already!