Search Results: "cas"

5 March 2025

Otto Kek l inen: Will decentralized social media soon go mainstream?

Featured image of post Will decentralized social media soon go mainstream?In today s digital landscape, social media is more than just a communication tool it is the primary medium for global discourse. Heads of state, corporate leaders and cultural influencers now broadcast their statements directly to the world, shaping public opinion in real time. However, the dominance of a few centralized platforms X/Twitter, Facebook and YouTube raises critical concerns about control, censorship and the monopolization of information. Those who control these networks effectively wield significant power over public discourse. In response, a new wave of distributed social media platforms has emerged, each built on different decentralized protocols designed to provide greater autonomy, censorship resistance and user control. While Wikipedia maintains a comprehensive list of distributed social networking software and protocols, it does not cover recent blockchain-based systems, nor does it highlight which have the most potential for mainstream adoption. This post explores the leading decentralized social media platforms and the protocols they are based on: Mastodon (ActivityPub), Bluesky (AT Protocol), Warpcast (Farcaster), Hey (Lens) and Primal (Nostr).

Comparison of architecture and mainstream adoption potential
Protocol Identity System Example Storage model Cost for end users Potential
Mastodon Tied to server domain @ottok@mastodon.social Federated instances Free (some instances charge) High
Bluesky Portable (DID) ottoke.bsky.social Federated instances Free Moderate
Farcaster ENS (Ethereum) @ottok Blockchain + off-chain Small gas fees Moderate
Lens NFT-based (Polygon) @ottok Blockchain + off-chain Small gas fees Niche
Nostr Cryptographic Keys npub16lc6uhqpg6dnqajylkhwuh3j7ynhcnje508tt4v6703w9kjlv9vqzz4z7f Federated instances Free (some instances charge) Niche

1. Mastodon (ActivityPub) Screenshot of Mastodon Mastodon was created in 2016 by Eugen Rochko, a German software developer who sought to provide a decentralized and user-controlled alternative to Twitter. It was built on the ActivityPub protocol, now standardized by W3C Social Web Working Group, to allow users to join independent servers while still communicating across the broader Mastodon network. Mastodon operates on a federated model, where multiple independently run servers communicate via ActivityPub. Each server sets its own moderation policies, leading to a decentralized but fragmented experience. The servers can alternatively be called instances, relays or nodes, depending on what vocabulary a protocol has standardized on.
  • Identity: User identity is tied to the instance where they registered, represented as @username@instance.tld.
  • Storage: Data is stored on individual instances, which federate messages to other instances based on their configurations.
  • Cost: Free to use, but relies on instance operators willing to run the servers.
The protocol defines multiple activities such as:
  • Creating a post
  • Liking
  • Sharing
  • Following
  • Commenting

Example Message in ActivityPub (JSON-LD Format)
json 
 
 "@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
 "type": "Create",
 "actor": "https://mastodon.social/users/ottok",
 "object":  
 "type": "Note",
 "content": "Hello from #Mastodon!",
 "published": "2025-03-03T12:00:00Z",
 "to": ["https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"]
Servers communicate across different platforms by publishing activities to their followers or forwarding activities between servers. Standard HTTPS is used between servers for communication, and the messages use JSON-LD for data representation. The WebFinger protocol is used for user discovery. There is however no neat way for home server discovery yet. This means that if you are browsing e.g. Fosstodon and want to follow a user and press Follow, a dialog will pop up asking you to enter your own home server (e.g. mastodon.social) to redirect you there for actually executing the Follow action on with your account. Mastodon is open source under the AGPL at github.com/mastodon/mastodon. Anyone can operate their own instance. It just requires to run your own server and some skills to maintain a Ruby on Rails app with a PostgreSQL database backend, and basic understanding of the protocol to configure federation with other ActivityPub instances.

Popularity: Already established, but will it grow more? Mastodon has seen steady growth, especially after Twitter s acquisition in 2022, with some estimates stating it peaked at 10 million users across thousands of instances. However, its fragmented user experience and the complexity of choosing instances have hindered mainstream adoption. Still, it remains the most established decentralized alternative to Twitter. Note that Donald Trump s Truth Social is based on the Mastodon software but does not federate with the ActivityPub network. The ActivityPub protocol is the most widely used of its kind. One of the other most popular services is the Lemmy link sharing service, similar to Reddit. The larger ecosystem of ActivityPub is called Fediverse, and estimates put the total active user count around 6 million.

2. Bluesky (AT Protocol) Screenshot of Bluesky Interestingly, Bluesky was conceived within Twitter in 2019 by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. After being incubated as a Twitter-funded project, it spun off as an independent Public Benefit LLC in February 2022 and launched its public beta in February 2023. Bluesky runs on top of the Authenticated Transfer (AT) Protocol published at https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto. The protocol enables portable identities and data ownership, meaning users can migrate between platforms while keeping their identity and content intact. In practice, however, there is only one popular server at the moment, which is Bluesky itself.
  • Identity: Usernames are domain-based (e.g., @user.bsky.social).
  • Storage: Content is theoretically federated among various servers.
  • Cost: Free to use, but relies on instance operators willing to run the servers.

Example Message in AT Protocol (JSON Format)
json 
 
 "repo": "did:plc:ottoke.bsky.social",
 "collection": "app.bsky.feed.post",
 "record":  
 "$type": "app.bsky.feed.post",
 "text": "Hello from Bluesky!",
 "createdAt": "2025-03-03T12:00:00Z",
 "langs": ["en"]

Popularity: Hybrid approach may have business benefits? Bluesky reported over 3 million users by 2024, probably getting traction due to its Twitter-like interface and Jack Dorsey s involvement. Its hybrid approach decentralized identity with centralized components could make it a strong candidate for mainstream adoption, assuming it can scale effectively.

3. Warpcast (Farcaster Network) Farcaster was launched in 2021 by Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan, both former crypto exchange Coinbase executives, to create a decentralized but user-friendly social network. Built on the Ethereum blockchain, it could potentially offer a very attack-resistant communication medium. However, in my own testing, Farcaster does not seem to fully leverage what Ethereum could offer. First of all, there is no diversity in programs implementing the protocol as at the moment there is only Warpcast. In Warpcast the signup requires an initial 5 USD fee that is not payable in ETH, and users need to create a new wallet address on the Ethereum layer 2 network Base instead of simply reusing their existing Ethereum wallet address or ENS name. Despite this, I can understand why Farcaster may have decided to start out like this. Having a single client program may be the best strategy initially. One of the decentralized chat protocol Matrix founders, Matthew Hodgson, shared in his FOSDEM 2025 talk that he slightly regrets focusing too much on developing the protocol instead of making sure the app to use it is attractive to end users. So it may be sensible to ensure Warpcast gets popular first, before attempting to make the Farcaster protocol widely used. As a protocol Farcaster s hybrid approach makes it more scalable than fully on-chain networks, giving it a higher chance of mainstream adoption if it integrates seamlessly with broader Web3 ecosystems.
  • Identity: ENS (Ethereum Name Service) domains are used as usernames.
  • Storage: Messages are stored in off-chain hubs, while identity is on-chain.
  • Cost: Users must pay gas fees for some operations but reading and posting messages is mostly free.

Example Message in Farcaster (JSON Format)
json 
 
 "fid": 766579,
 "username": "ottok",
 "custodyAddress": "0x127853e48be3870172baa4215d63b6d815d18f21",
 "connectedWallet": "0x3ebe43aa3ae5b891ca1577d9c49563c0cee8da88",
 "text": "Hello from Farcaster!",
 "publishedAt": 1709424000,
 "replyTo": null,
 "embeds": []

Popularity: Decentralized social media + decentralized payments a winning combo? Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin (warpcast.com/vbuterin) and many core developers are active on the platform. Warpcast, the main client for Farcaster, has seen increasing adoption, especially among Ethereum developers and Web3 enthusiasts. I too have an profile at warpcast.com/ottok. However, the numbers are still very low and far from reaching network effects to really take off. Blockchain-based social media networks, particularly those built on Ethereum, are compelling because they leverage existing user wallets and persistent identities while enabling native payment functionality. When combined with decentralized content funding through micropayments, these blockchain-backed social networks could offer unique advantages that centralized platforms may find difficult to replicate, being decentralized both as a technical network and in a funding mechanism.

4. Hey.xyz (Lens Network) The Lens Protocol was developed by decentralized finance (DeFi) team Aave and launched in May 2022 to provide a user-owned social media network. While initially built on Polygon, it has since launched its own Layer 2 network called the Lens Network in February 2024. Lens is currently the main competitor to Farcaster. Lens stores profile ownership and references on-chain, while content is stored on IPFS/Arweave, enabling composability with DeFi and NFTs.
  • Identity: Profile ownership is tied to NFTs on the Polygon blockchain.
  • Storage: Content is on-chain and integrates with IPFS/Arweave (like NFTs).
  • Cost: Users must pay gas fees for some operations but reading and posting messages is mostly free.

Example Message in Lens (JSON Format)
json 
 
 "profileId": "@ottok",
 "contentURI": "ar://QmExampleHash",
 "collectModule": "0x23b9467334bEb345aAa6fd1545538F3d54436e96",
 "referenceModule": "0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000",
 "timestamp": 1709558400

Popularity: Probably not as social media site, but maybe as protocol? The social media side of Lens is mainly the Hey.xyz website, which seems to have fewer users than Warpcast, and is even further away from reaching critical mass for network effects. The Lens protocol however has a lot of advanced features and it may gain adoption as the building block for many Web3 apps.

5. Primal.net (Nostr Network) Nostr (Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays) was conceptualized in 2020 by an anonymous developer known as fiatjaf. One of the primary design tenets was to be a censorship-resistant protocol and it is popular among Bitcoin enthusiasts, with Jack Dorsey being one of the public supporters. Unlike the Farcaster and Lens protocols, Nostr is not blockchain-based but just a network of relay servers for message distribution. If does however use public key cryptography for identities, similar to how wallets work in crypto.
  • Identity: Public-private key pairs define identity (with prefix npub...).
  • Storage: Content is federated among multiple servers, which in Nostr vocabulary are called relays.
  • Cost: No gas fees, but relies on relay operators willing to run the servers.

Example Message in Nostr (JSON Format)
json 
 
 "id": "note1xyz...",
 "pubkey": "npub1...",
 "kind": 1,
 "content": "Hello from Nostr!",
 "created_at": 1709558400,
 "tags": [],
 "sig": "sig1..."

Popularity: If Jack Dorsey and Bitcoiners promote it enough? Primal.net as a web app is pretty solid, but it does not stand out much. While Jack Dorsey has shown support by donating $1.5 million to the protocol development in December 2021, its success likely depends on broader adoption by the Bitcoin community.

Will any of these replace X/Twitter? As usage patterns vary, the statistics are not fully comparable, but this overview of the situation in March 2025 gives a decent overview.
Platform Total Accounts Active Users Growth Trend
Mastodon ~10 million ~1 million Steady
Bluesky ~33 million ~1 million Steady
Nostr ~41 million ~20 thousand Steady
Farcaster ~850 thousand ~50 thousand Flat
Lens ~140 thousand ~20 thousand Flat
Mastodon and Bluesky have already reached millions of users, while Lens and Farcaster are growing within crypto communities. It is however clear that none of these are anywhere close to how popular X/Twitter is. In particular, Mastodon had a huge influx of users in the fall of 2022 when Twitter was acquired, but to challenge the incumbents the growth would need to significantly accelerate. We can all accelerate this development by embracing decentralized social media now alongside existing dominant platforms. Who knows, given the right circumstances maybe X.com leadership decides to change the operating model and start federating contents to break out from a walled garden model. The likelyhood of such development would increase if decentralized networks get popular, and the encumbents feel they need to participate to not lose out.

Past and future The idea of decentralized social media is not new. One early pioneer identi.ca launched in 2008, only two years after Twitter, using the OStatus protocol to promote decentralization. A few years later it evolved into pump.io with the ActivityPump protocol, and also forked into GNU Social that continued with OStatus. I remember when these happened, and that in 2010 also Diaspora launched with fairly large publicity. Surprisingly both of these still operate (I can still post both on identi.ca and diasp.org), but the activity fizzled out years ago. The protocol however survived partially and evolved into ActivityPub, which is now the backbone of the Fediverse. The evolution of decentralized social media over the next decade will likely parallel developments in democracy, freedom of speech and public discourse. While the early 2010s emphasized maximum independence and freedom, the late 2010s saw growing support for content moderation to combat misinformation. The AI era introduces new challenges, potentially requiring proof-of-humanity verification for content authenticity. Key factors that will determine success:
  • User experience and ease of onboarding
  • Network effects and critical mass of users
  • Integration with existing web3 infrastructure
  • Balance between decentralization and usability
  • Sustainable economic models for infrastructure
This is clearly an area of development worth monitoring closely, as the next few years may determine which protocol becomes the de facto standard for decentralized social communication.

4 March 2025

Paul Tagliamonte: Reverse Engineering (another) Restaurant Pager system

Some of you may remember that I recently felt a bit underwhelmed by the last pager I reverse engineered the Retekess TD-158, mostly due to how intuitive their design decions were. It was pretty easy to jump to conclusions because they had made some pretty good decisions on how to do things. I figured I d spin the wheel again and try a new pager system this time I went for a SU-68G-10 pager, since I recognized the form factor as another fairly common unit I ve seen around town. Off to Amazon I went, bought a set, and got to work trying to track down the FCC filings on this model. I eventually found what seemed to be the right make/model, and it, once again, indicated that this system should be operating in the 433 MHz ISM band likely using OOK modulation. So, figured I d start with the center of the band (again) at 433.92 MHz, take a capture, test my luck, and was greeted with a now very familiar sight. Same as the last goarounds, except the premable here is a 0 symbol followed by 6-ish symbol durations of no data, followed by 25 bits of a packet. Careful readers will observe 26 symbols above after the preamble I did too! The last 0 in the screenshot above is not actually a part of the packet rather, it s part of the next packet s preamble. Each packet is packed in pretty tight.

By Hand Demodulation Going off the same premise as last time, I figured i d give it a manual demod and see what shakes out (again). This is now the third time i ve run this play, so check out either of my prior two posts for a better written description of what s going on here I ll skip all the details since i d just be copy-pasting from those posts into here. Long story short, I demodulated a call for pager 1, call for pager 10, and a power off command.
What Bits
Call 1 1101111111100100100000000
Call 101101111111100100010100000
Off 1101111111100111101101110
A few things jump out at me here the first 14 bits are fixed (in my case, 11011111111001), which means some mix of preamble, system id, or other system-wide constant. Additionally, The last 9 bits also look like they are our pager the 1 and 10 pager numbers (LSB bit order) jump right out (100000000 and 010100000, respectively). That just leaves the two remaining bits which look to be the action 00 for a Call , and 11 for a Power off . I don t super love this since command has two bits rather than one, the base station ID seems really long, and a 9-bit Pager ID is just weird. Also, what is up with that power-off pager id? Weird. So, let s go and see what we can do to narrow down and confirm things by hand.

Testing bit flips Rather than call it a day at that, I figure it s worth a bit of diligence to make sure it s all correct so I figured we should try sending packets to my pagers and see how they react to different messages after flipping bits in parts of the packet. I implemented a simple base station for the pagers using my Ettus B210mini, and threw together a simple OOK modulator and transmitter program which allows me to send specifically crafted test packets on frequency. Implementing the base station is pretty straightforward, because of the modulation of the signal (OOK), it s mostly a matter of setting a buffer to 1 and 0 for where the carrier signal is on or off timed to the sample rate, and sending that off to the radio. If you re interested in a more detailed writeup on the steps involved, there s a bit more in my christmas tree post. First off, I d like to check the base id. I want to know if all the bits in what I m calling the base id are truly part of the base station ID, or perhaps they have some other purpose (version, preamble?). I wound up following a three-step process for every base station id:
  • Starting with an unmodified call packet for the pager under test:
    • Flip the Nth bit, and transmit the call. See if the pager reacts.
    • Hold SET , and pair the pager with the new packet.
    • Transmit the call. See if the pager reacts.
    • After re-setting the ID, transmit the call with the physical base station, see if the pager reacts.
  • Starting with an unmodified off packet for the pager system
  • Flip the Nth bit, transmit the off, see if the pager reacts.
What wound up happening is that changing any bit in the first 14 bits meant that the packet no longer worked with any pager until it was re-paired, at which point it begun to work again. This likely means the first 14 bits are part of the base station ID and not static between base stations, or some constant like a version or something. All bits appear to be used. I repeated the same process with the command bits, and found that only 11 and 00 caused the pagers to react for the pager ids i ve tried. I repeated this process one last time with the pager id bits this time, and found the last bit in the packet isn t part of the pager ID, and can be either a 1 or a 0 and still cause the pager to react as if it were a 0. This means that the last bit is unknown but it has no impact on either a power off or call, and all messages sent by my base station always have a 0 set. It s not clear if this is used by anything likely not since setting a bit there doesn t result in any change of behavior I can see yet.

Final Packet Structure After playing around with flipping bits and testing, the final structure I was able to come up with based on behavior I was able to observe from transmitting hand-crafted packets and watching pagers buzz:
base id
command
pager id
???

Commands The command section bit comes in two flavors either a call or an off command.
Type Id (2 bits) Description
Call00Call the pager identified by the id in pager id
Off11Request pagers power off, pager id is always 10110111
As for the actual RF PHY characteristics, here s my best guesses at what s going on with them:
What Description
Center Frequency 433.92 MHz
Modulation OOK
Symbol Duration 1300us
Bits 25
Preamble 325us of carrier, followed by 8800us of no carrier
I m not 100% on the timings, but they appear to be close enough to work reliabily. Same with the center frequency, it s roughly right but there may be a slight difference i m missing.

Lingering Questions This was all generally pretty understandable another system that had some good decisions, and wasn t too bad to reverse engineer. This was a bit more fun to do, since there was a bit more ambiguity here, but still not crazy. At least this one was a bit more ambiguous that needed a bit of followup to confirm things, which made it a bit more fun. I am left with a few questions, though which I m kinda interested in understanding, but I ll likely need a lot more data and/or original source: Why is the command two bits here? This was a bit tough to understand because of the number of bits they have at their disposal given the one last bit at the end of the packet that doesn t seem to do anything, there s no reason this couldn t have been a 16 bit base station id, and an 8 bit pager id along with a single bit command (call or off). When sending an off why is power off that bit pattern? Other pager IDs don t seem to work with off , so it has some meaning, but I m not sure what that is. You press and hold 9 on the physical base station, but the code winds up coming out to 0xED, 237 or maybe -19 if it s signed. I can t quite figure out why it s this value. Are there other codes? Finally what s up with the last bit? Why is it 25 bits and not 24? It must take more work to process something that isn t 8 bit aligned and all for something that s not being used!

3 March 2025

Bits from Debian: Bits from the DPL

Dear Debian community, this is bits from DPL for February. Ftpmaster team is seeking for new team members In December, Scott Kitterman announced his retirement from the project. I personally regret this, as I vividly remember his invaluable support during the Debian Med sprint at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. He even took time off to ensure new packages cleared the queue in under 24 hours. I want to take this opportunity to personally thank Scott for his contributions during that sprint and for all his work in Debian. With one fewer FTP assistant, I am concerned about the increased workload on the remaining team. I encourage anyone in the Debian community who is interested to consider reaching out to the FTP masters about joining their team. If you're wondering about the role of the FTP masters, I'd like to share a fellow developer's perspective:
"My read on the FTP masters is:
  • In truth, they are the heart of the project.
  • They know it.
  • They do a fantastic job."
I fully agree and see it as part of my role as DPL to ensure this remains true for Debian's future. If you're looking for a way to support Debian in a critical role where many developers will deeply appreciate your work, consider reaching out to the team. It's a great opportunity for any Debian Developer to contribute to a key part of the project. Project Status: Six Months of Bug of the Day In my Bits from the DPL talk at DebConf24, I announced the Tiny Tasks effort, which I intended to start with a Bug of the Day project. Another idea was an Autopkgtest of the Day, but this has been postponed due to limited time resources-I cannot run both projects in parallel. The original goal was to provide small, time-bound examples for newcomers. To put it bluntly: in terms of attracting new contributors, it has been a failure so far. My offer to explain individual bug-fixing commits in detail, if needed, received no response, and despite my efforts to encourage questions, none were asked. However, the project has several positive aspects: experienced developers actively exchange ideas, collaborate on fixing bugs, assess whether packages are worth fixing or should be removed, and work together to find technical solutions for non-trivial problems. So far, the project has been engaging and rewarding every day, bringing new discoveries and challenges-not just technical, but also social. Fortunately, in the vast majority of cases, I receive positive responses and appreciation from maintainers. Even in the few instances where help was declined, it was encouraging to see that in two cases, maintainers used the ping as motivation to work on their packages themselves. This reflects the dedication and high standards of maintainers, whose work is essential to the project's success. I once used the metaphor that this project is like wandering through a dark basement with a lone flashlight-exploring aimlessly and discovering a wide variety of things that have accumulated over the years. Among them are true marvels with popcon >10,000, ingenious tools, and delightful games that I only recently learned about. There are also some packages whose time may have come to an end-but each of them reflects the dedication and effort of those who maintained them, and that deserves the utmost respect. Leaving aside the challenge of attracting newcomers, what have we achieved since August 1st last year? With some goodwill, you can see a slight impact on the trends.debian.net graphs (thank you Lucas for the graphs), but I would never claim that this project alone is responsible for the progress. What I have also observed is the steady stream of daily uploads to the delayed queue, demonstrating the continuous efforts of many contributors. This ongoing work often remains unseen by most-including myself, if not for my regular check-ins on this list. I would like to extend my sincere thanks to everyone pushing fixes there, contributing to the overall quality and progress of Debian's QA efforts. If you examine the graphs for "Version Control System" and "VCS Hosting" with the goodwill mentioned above, you might notice a positive trend since mid-last year. The "Package Smells" category has also seen reductions in several areas: "no git", "no DEP5 copyright", "compat <9", and "not salsa". I'd also like to acknowledge the NMUers who have been working hard to address the "format != 3.0" issue. Thanks to all their efforts, this specific issue never surfaced in the Bug of the Day effort, but their contributions deserve recognition here. The experience I gathered in this project taught me a lot and inspired me to some followup we should discuss at a Sprint at DebCamp this year. Finally, if any newcomer finds this information interesting, I'd be happy to slow down and patiently explain individual steps as needed. All it takes is asking questions on the Matrix channel to turn this into a "teaching by example" session. By the way, for newcomers who are interested, I used quite a few abbreviations-all of which are explained in the Debian Glossary. Sneak Peek at Upcoming Conferences I will join two conferences in March-feel free to talk to me if you spot me there.
  1. FOSSASIA Summit 2025 (March 13-15, Bangkok, Thailand) Schedule: https://eventyay.com/e/4c0e0c27/schedule
  2. Chemnitzer Linux-Tage (March 22-23, Chemnitz, Germany) Schedule: https://chemnitzer.linux-tage.de/2025/de/programm/vortraege
Both events will have a Debian booth-come say hi! Kind regards Andreas.

2 March 2025

Jonathan McDowell: RIP: Steve Langasek

[I d like to stop writing posts like this. I ve been trying to work out what to say now for nearly 2 months (writing the mail to -private to tell the Debian project about his death is one of the hardest things I ve had to write, and I bottled out and wrote something that was mostly just factual, because it wasn t the place), and I ve decided I just have to accept this won t be the post I want it to be, but posted is better than languishing in drafts.] Last weekend I was in Portland, for the Celebration of Life of my friend Steve, who sadly passed away at the start of the year. It wasn t entirely unexpected, but that doesn t make it any easier. I ve struggled to work out what to say about Steve. I ve seen many touching comments from others in Debian about their work with him, but what that s mostly brought home to me is that while I met Steve through Debian, he was first and foremost my friend rather than someone I worked with in Debian. And so everything I have to say is more about that friendship (and thus feels a bit self-centred). My first memory of Steve is getting lost with him in Porto Alegre, Brazil, during DebConf4. We d decided to walk to a local mall to meet up with some other folk (I can t recall how they were getting there, but it wasn t walking), ended up deep in conversation (ISTR it was about shared library transititions), and then it took a bit longer than we expected. I don t know how that managed to cement a friendship (neither of us saw it as the near death experience others feared we d had), but it did. Unlike others I never texted Steve much; we d occasionally chat on IRC, but nothing major. That didn t seem to matter when we actually saw each other in person though, we just picked up like we d seen each other the previous week. DebConf became a recurring theme of when we d see each other. Even outside DebConf we went places together. The first time I went somewhere in the US that wasn t the Bay Area, it was to Portland to see Steve. He, and his family, came to visit me in Belfast a couple of times, and I did road trip from Dublin to Cork with him. He took me to a volcano. Steve saw injustice in the world and actually tried to do something about it. I still have a copy of the US constitution sitting on my desk that he gave me. He made me want to be a better person. The world is a worse place without him in it, and while I am better for having known him, I am sadder for the fact he s gone.

1 March 2025

Debian Brasil: Debian Day 30 years online in Brazil

title: Debian Day 30 years online in Brazil description: by Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana (phls) published: true date: 2025-03-01T17:39:03.284Z tags: blog, english editor: markdown dateCreated: 2023-08-25T16:00:00.000Z In 2023 the traditional Debian Day is being celebrated in a special way, after all on August 16th Debian turned 30 years old! To celebrate this special milestone in the Debian's life, the Debian Brasil community organized a week with talks online from August 14th to 18th. The event was named Debian 30 years. Two talks were held per night, from 7:00 pm to 10:00 pm, streamed on the Debian Brasil channel on YouTube totaling 10 talks. The recordings are also available on the Debian Brazil channel on Peertube. We had the participation of 9 DDs, 1 DM, 3 contributors in 10 activities. The live audience varied a lot, and the peak was on the preseed talk with Eriberto Mota when we had 47 people watching. Thank you to all participants for the contribution you made to the success of our event. Veja abaixo as fotos de cada atividade: Nova gera o: uma entrevista com iniciantes no projeto Debian Nova gera o: uma entrevista com iniciantes no projeto Debian Instala o personalizada e automatizada do Debian com preseed Instala o personalizada e automatizada do Debian com preseed Manipulando patches com git-buildpackage Manipulando patches com git-buildpackage debian.social: Socializando Debian do jeito Debian debian.social: Socializando Debian do jeito Debian Proxy reverso com WireGuard Proxy reverso com WireGuard Celebra o dos 30 anos do Debian! Celebra o dos 30 anos do Debian! Instalando o Debian em disco criptografado com LUKS Instalando o Debian em disco criptografado com LUKS O que a equipe de localiza o j conquistou nesses 30 anos O que a equipe de localiza o j conquistou nesses 30 anos Debian - Projeto e Comunidade! Debian - Projeto e Comunidade! Design Gr fico e Software livre, o que fazer e por onde come ar Design Gr fico e Software livre, o que fazer e por onde come ar

Guido G nther: Free Software Activities February 2025

Another short status update of what happened on my side last month. One larger blocks are the Phosh 0.45 release, also reviews took a considerable amount of time. From the fun side debugging bananui and coming up with a fix in phoc as well as setting up a small GSM network using osmocom to test more Cell Broadcast thingies were likely the most fun parts. phosh phoc phosh-osk-stub phosh-tour phosh-mobile-settings pfs libphosh-rs meta-phosh libcmatrix Debian gmobile feedbackd grim Wayland protocols g4music wlroots qbootctl bananui-shell libssc ModemManager Waycheck Bug reports Reviews This is not code by me but reviews on other peoples code. The list is a slightly incomplete. Thanks for the contributions! Help Development If you want to support my work see donations. Comments? Join the Fediverse thread

28 February 2025

Petter Reinholdtsen: Brushing up on old packages in Xiph and Debian

Since my motivation boost in the beginning of the month caused me to wrap up a new release of liboggz, I have used the same boost to wrap up new editions of libfishsound, liboggplay and libkate too. These have been tagged in upstream git, but not yet published on the Xiph download location. I am waiting for someone with access to have time to move the tarballs there, I hope it will happen in a few days. The same is the case for a minor update of liboggz too. As I was looking at Xiph packages lacking updates, it occurred to me that there are packages in Debian that have not received a new upload in a long time. Looking for a way to identify them, I came across the ltnu script from the devscripts package. It can sort by last update, packages maintained by a single user/group, and is useful to figure out which packages a single maintainer should have a look at. But I wanted a archive wide summary. Based on the UDD SQL query used by ltnu, I ended up with the following command: 
#!/bin/sh
env PGPASSWORD=udd-mirror psql --host=udd-mirror.debian.net --user=udd-mirror udd --command="
select source,
       max(version) as ver,
       max(date) as uploaded
from upload_history
where distribution='unstable' and
      source in (select source
                 from sources
                 where release='sid')
group by source
order by max(date) asc
limit 50;"
This will sort all source packages in Debian by upload date, and list the 50 oldest ones. The end result is a list of packages I suspect could use some attention: 
           source                        ver                    uploaded        
-----------------------------+-------------------------+------------------------
 xserver-xorg-video-ivtvdev    1.1.2-1                   2011-02-09 22:26:27+00
 dynamite                      0.1.1-2                   2011-04-30 16:47:20+00
 xkbind                        2010.05.20-1              2011-05-02 22:48:05+00
 libspctag                     0.2-1                     2011-09-22 18:47:07+00
 gromit                        20041213-9                2011-11-13 21:02:56+00
 s3switch                      0.1-1                     2011-11-22 15:47:40+00
 cd5                           0.1-3                     2011-12-07 21:19:05+00
 xserver-xorg-video-glide      1.2.0-1                   2011-12-30 16:50:48+00
 blahtexml                     0.9-1.1                   2012-04-25 11:32:11+00
 aggregate                     1.6-7                     2012-05-01 00:47:11+00
 rtfilter                      1.1-4                     2012-05-11 12:50:00+00
 sic                           1.1-5                     2012-05-11 19:10:31+00
 kbdd                          0.6-4                     2012-05-12 07:33:32+00
 logtop                        0.4.3-1                   2012-06-05 23:04:20+00
 gbemol                        0.3.2-2                   2012-06-26 17:03:11+00
 pidgin-mra                    20100304-1                2012-06-29 23:07:41+00
 mumudvb                       1.7.1-1                   2012-06-30 09:12:14+00
 libdr-sundown-perl            0.02-1                    2012-08-18 10:00:07+00
 ztex-bmp                      20120314-2                2012-08-18 19:47:55+00
 display-dhammapada            1.0-0.1                   2012-12-19 12:02:32+00
 eot-utils                     1.1-1                     2013-02-19 17:02:28+00
 multiwatch                    1.0.0-rc1+really1.0.0-1   2013-02-19 17:02:35+00
 pidgin-latex                  1.5.0-1                   2013-04-04 15:03:43+00
 libkeepalive                  0.2-1                     2013-04-08 22:00:07+00
 dfu-programmer                0.6.1-1                   2013-04-23 13:32:32+00
 libb64                        1.2-3                     2013-05-05 21:04:51+00
 i810switch                    0.6.5-7.1                 2013-05-10 13:03:18+00
 premake4                      4.3+repack1-2             2013-05-31 12:48:51+00
 unagi                         0.3.4-1                   2013-06-05 11:19:32+00
 mod-vhost-ldap                2.4.0-1                   2013-07-12 07:19:00+00
 libapache2-mod-ldap-userdir   1.1.19-2.1                2013-07-12 21:22:48+00
 w9wm                          0.4.2-8                   2013-07-18 11:49:10+00
 vish                          0.0.20130812-1            2013-08-12 21:10:37+00
 xfishtank                     2.5-1                     2013-08-20 17:34:06+00
 wap-wml-tools                 0.0.4-7                   2013-08-21 16:19:10+00
 ttysnoop                      0.12d-6                   2013-08-24 17:33:09+00
 libkaz                        1.21-2                    2013-09-02 16:00:10+00
 rarpd                         0.981107-9                2013-09-02 19:48:24+00
 libimager-qrcode-perl         0.033-1.2                 2013-09-04 21:06:31+00
 dov4l                         0.9+repack-1              2013-09-22 19:33:25+00
 textdraw                      0.2+ds-0+nmu1             2013-10-07 21:25:03+00
 gzrt                          0.8-1                     2013-10-08 06:33:13+00
 away                          0.9.5+ds-0+nmu2           2013-10-25 01:18:18+00
 jshon                         20131010-1                2013-11-30 00:00:11+00
 libstar-parser-perl           0.59-4                    2013-12-23 21:50:43+00
 gcal                          3.6.3-3                   2013-12-29 18:33:29+00
 fonts-larabie                 1:20011216-5              2014-01-02 21:20:49+00
 ccd2iso                       0.3-4                     2014-01-28 06:33:35+00
 kerneltop                     0.91-1                    2014-02-04 12:03:30+00
 vera++                        1.2.1-2                   2014-02-04 21:21:37+00
(50 rows)
So there are 8 packages last uploaded to unstable in 2011, 12 packages in 2012 and 26 packages in 2013. I suspect their maintainers need help and we should all offer our assistance. I already contacted two of them and hope the rest of the Debian community will chip in to help too. We should ensure any Debian specific patches are passed upstream if they still exist, that the package is brought up to speed with the latest Debian policy, as well as ensure the source can built with the current compiler set in Debian. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Joey Hess: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

So there are only 2 web browser engines, and it seems likely there will soon only be 1, and making a whole new web browser from the ground up is effectively impossible because the browsers vendors have weaponized web standards complexity against any newcomers. Maybe eventually someone will succeed and there will be 2 again. Best case. What a situation. So throw out all the web standards. Make a browser that just runs WASM blobs, and gives them a surface to use, sorta like Wayland does. It has tabs, and a throbber, and urls, but no HTML, no javascript, no CSS. Just HTTP of WASM blobs. This is where the web browser is going eventually anyway, except in the current line of evolution it will be WASM with all the web standards complexity baked in and reinforcing the current situation. Would this be a mass of proprietary software? Have you looked at any corporate website's "source" lately? But what's important is that this would make it easy enough to build new browsers that they would stop being a point of control. Want a browser that natively supports RSS? Poll the feeds, make a UI, download the WASM enclosures to view the posts. Want a browser that supports IPFS or gopher? Fork any browser and add it, the mantenance load will be minimal. Want to provide access to GPIO pins or something? Add an extension that can be accessed via the WASI component model. This would allow for so many things like that which won't and can't happen with the current market duopoly browser situation. And as for your WASM web pages, well you can still use HTML if you like. Use the WASI component model to pull in a HTML engine. It doesn't need to support everything, just the parts of web standards that you want to use. Or you can do something entitely different in your WASM that is not HTML based at all but a better paradigm (oh hi Spritely or display postscript or gemini capsules or whatever). Dual innovation sources or duopoly? I know which I'd prefer. This is not my project to build though.

Antoine Beaupr : testing the fish shell

I have been testing fish for a couple months now (this file started on 2025-01-03T23:52:15-0500 according to stat(1)), and those are my notes. I suspect people will have Opinions about my comments here. Do not comment unless you have some Constructive feedback to provide: I don't want to know if you think I am holding it Wrong. Consider that I might have used UNIX shells for longer that you have lived. I'm not sure I'll keep using fish, but so far it's the first shell that survived heavy use outside of zsh(1) (unless you count tcsh(1), but that was in another millenia). My normal shell is bash(1), and it's still the shell I used everywhere else than my laptop, as I haven't switched on all the servers I managed, although it is available since August 2022 on torproject.org servers. I first got interested in fish because they ported to Rust, making it one of the rare shells out there written in a "safe" and modern programming language, released after an impressive ~2 year of work with Fish 4.0.

Cool things Current directory gets shortened, ~/wikis/anarc.at/software/desktop/wayland shows up as ~/w/a/s/d/wayland Autocompletion rocks. Default prompt rocks. Doesn't seem vulnerable to command injection assaults, at least it doesn't trip on the git-landmine. It even includes pipe status output, which was a huge pain to implement in bash. Made me realized that if the last command succeeds, we don't see other failures, which is the case of my current prompt anyways! Signal reporting is better than my bash implementation too. So far the only modification I have made to the prompt is to add a printf '\a' to output a bell. By default, fish keeps a directory history (but separate from the pushd stack), that can be navigated with cdh, prevd, and nextd, dirh shows the history.

Less cool I feel there's visible latency in the prompt creation. POSIX-style functions (foo() true ) are unsupported. Instead, fish uses whitespace-sensitive definitions like this: 
function foo
    true
end
This means my (modest) collection of POSIX functions need to be ported to fish. Workaround: simple functions can be turned into aliases, which fish supports (but implements using functions). EOF heredocs are considered to be "minor syntactic sugar". I find them frigging useful. Process substitution is split on newlines, not whitespace. you need to pipe through string split -n " " to get the equivalent. <(cmd) doesn't exist: they claim you can use cmd foo - as a replacement, but that's not correct: I used <(cmd) mostly where foo does not support - as a magic character to say 'read from stdin'. Documentation is... limited. It seems mostly geared the web docs which are... okay (but I couldn't find out about ~/.config/fish/conf.d there!), but this is really inconvenient when you're trying to browse the manual pages. For example, fish thinks there's a fish_prompt manual page, according to its own completion mechanism, but man(1) cannot find that manual page. I can't find the manual for the time command (which is actually a keyword!) Fish renders multi-line commands with newlines. So if your terminal looks like this, say: 
anarcat@angela:~> sq keyring merge torproject-keyring/lavamind-
95F341D746CF1FC8B05A0ED5D3F900749268E55E.gpg torproject-keyrin
g/weasel-E3ED482E44A53F5BBE585032D50F9EBC09E69937.gpg   wl-copy
... but it's actually one line, when you copy-paste the above, in foot(1), it will show up exactly like this, newlines and all: 
sq keyring merge torproject-keyring/lavamind-
95F341D746CF1FC8B05A0ED5D3F900749268E55E.gpg torproject-keyrin
g/weasel-E3ED482E44A53F5BBE585032D50F9EBC09E69937.gpg   wl-copy
Whereas it should show up like this: 
sq keyring merge torproject-keyring/lavamind-95F341D746CF1FC8B05A0ED5D3F900749268E55E.gpg torproject-keyring/weasel-E3ED482E44A53F5BBE585032D50F9EBC09E69937.gpg   wl-copy
Note that this is an issue specific to foot(1), alacritty(1) and gnome-terminal(1) don't suffer from that issue. I have already filed it upstream in foot and it is apparently fixed already. Globbing is driving me nuts. You can't pass a * to a command unless fish agrees it's going to match something. You need to escape it if it doesn't immediately match, and then you need the called command to actually support globbing. 202[345] doesn't match folders named 2023, 2024, 2025, it will send the string 202[345] to the command.

Blockers () is like $(): it's process substitution, and not a subshell. This is really impractical: I use ( cd foo ; do_something) all the time to avoid losing the current directory... I guess I'm supposed to use pushd for this, but ouch. This wouldn't be so bad if it was just for cd though. Clean constructs like this: 
( git grep -l '^#!/.*bin/python' ; fdfind .py )   sort -u
Turn into what i find rather horrible: 
begin; git grep -l '^#!/.*bin/python' ; fdfind .py ; end   sort -ub
It... works, but it goes back to "oh dear, now there's a new langage again". I only found out about this construct while trying: 
  git grep -l '^#!/.*bin/python' ; fdfind .py     sort -u
... which fails and suggests using begin/end, at which point: why not just support the curly braces? FOO=bar is not allowed. It's actually recognized syntax, but creates a warning. We're supposed to use set foo bar instead. This really feels like a needless divergence from standard. Aliases are... peculiar. Typical constructs like alias mv="\mv -i" don't work because fish treats aliases as a function definition, and \ is not magical there. This can be worked around by specifying the full path to the command, with e.g. alias mv="/bin/mv -i". Another problem is trying to override a built-in, which seems completely impossible. In my case, I like the time(1) command the way it is, thank you very much, and fish provides no way to bypass that builtin. It is possible to call time(1) with command time, but it's not possible to replace the command keyword so that means a lot of typing. Again: you can't use \ to bypass aliases. This is a huge annoyance for me. I would need to learn to type command in long form, and I use that stuff pretty regularly. I guess I could alias command to c or something, but this is one of those huge muscle memory challenges. alt . doesn't always work the way i expect.

25 February 2025

Michael Ablassmeier: proxmox backup nbdkit plugin

nbdkit is a really powerful NBD toolkit. Lately, i wanted to access VM backups from a Proxmox Backup Server via network (not by using the proxmox-backup-client map function..) For example, to test-boot a virtual machine snapshot directly from a backup. NBD suits that usecase quite well, so i quickly put a nbdkit plugin together that can be used for this. The available golang bindings for the proxmox backup client API, made that quite easy. As nbdkit already comes with a neat COW plugin, its only been a few lines of go code resulting in: pbsnbd

24 February 2025

Russ Allbery: Review: A Little Vice

Review: A Little Vice, by Erin E. Elkin
Publisher: Erin Elkin
Copyright: June 2024
ASIN: B0CTHRK61X
Format: Kindle
Pages: 398
A Little Vice is a stand-alone self-published magical girl novel. It is the author's first novel. C is a high school student and frequent near-victim of monster attacks. Due to the nefarious work of Avaritia Wolf and her allies, his high school is constantly attacked by Beasts, who are magical corruptions of some internal desire taken to absurd extremes. Standing in their way are the Angelic Saints: magical girls who transform into Saint Castitas, Saint Diligentia, and Saint Temperantia and fight the monsters. The monsters for some reason seem disposed to pick C as their victim for hostage-taking, mind control, use as a human shield, and other rather traumatic activities. He's always rescued by the Saints before any great harm is done, but in some ways this makes the situation worse. It is obvious to C that the Saints are his three friends Inessa, Ida, and Temperance, even though no one else seems able to figure this out despite the blatant clues. Inessa has been his best friend since childhood when she was awkward and needed his support. Now, she and his other friends have become literal heroes, beautiful and powerful and capable, constantly protecting the school and innocent people, and C is little more than a helpless burden to be rescued. More than anything else, he wishes he could be an Angelic Saint like them, but of course the whole idea is impossible. Boys don't get to be magical girls. (I'm using he/him pronouns for C in this review because C uses them for himself for most of the book.) This is a difficult book to review because it is deeply focused on portraying a specific internal emotional battle in all of its sometimes-ugly complexity, and to some extent it prioritizes that portrayal over conventional story-telling. You have probably already guessed that this is a transgender coming-out story Elkin's choice of the magical girl genre was done with deep understanding of its role in transgender narratives but more than that, it is a transgender coming-out story of a very specific and closely-observed type. C knows who he wishes he was, but he is certain that this transformation is absolutely impossible. He is very deep in a cycle of self-loathing for wanting something so manifestly absurd and insulting to people who have the virtues that C does not. A Little Vice is told in the first person from C's perspective, and most of this book is a relentless observation of C's anxiety and shame spiral and reflexive deflection of any possibility of a way out. This is very well-written: Elkin knows the reader is going to disagree with C's internalized disgust and hopelessness, knows the reader desperately wants C to break out of that mindset, and clearly signals in a myriad of adroit ways that Elkin is on the reader's side and does not agree with C's analysis. C's friends are sympathetic, good-hearted people, and while sometimes oblivious, it is obvious to the reader that they're also on the reader's side and would help C in a heartbeat if they saw an opening. But much of the point of the book is that it's not that easy, that breaking out of the internal anxiety spiral is nearly impossible, and that C is very good at rejecting help, both because he cannot imagine what form it could take but also because he is certain that he does not deserve it. In other words, much of the reading experience of this book involves watching C torture and insult himself. It's all the more effective because it isn't gratuitous. C's internal monologue sounds exactly like how an anxiety spiral feels, complete with the sort of half-effective coping mechanisms, deflections, and emotional suppression one develops to blunt that type of emotional turmoil. I normally hate this kind of book. I am a happy ending and competence porn reader by default. The world is full of enough pain that I don't turn to fiction to read about more pain. It says a lot about how well-constructed this book is that I stuck with it. Elkin is going somewhere with the story, C gets moments of joy and delight along the way to keep the reader from bogging down completely, and the best parts of the book feel like a prolonged musical crescendo with suspended chords. There is a climax coming, but Elkin is going to make you wait for it for far longer than you want to. The main element that protects A Little Vice from being too grim is that it is a genre novel that is very playful about both magical girls and superhero tropes in general. I've already alluded to one of those elements: Elkin plays with the Mask Principle (the inability of people to see through entirely obvious secret identities) in knowing and entertaining ways. But there are also villains, and that leads me to the absolutely delightful Avaritia Wolf, who for me was the best character in this book. The Angelic Saints are not the only possible approach to magical girl powers in this universe. There are villains who can perform a similar transformation, except they embrace a vice rather than a virtue. Avaritia Wolf embraces the vice of greed. They (Avaritia's pronouns change over the course of the book) also have a secret identity, which I suspect will be blindingly obvious to most readers but which I'll avoid mentioning since it's still arguably a spoiler. The primary plot arc of this book is an attempt to recruit C to the side of the villains. The Beasts are drawn to him because he has magical potential, and the villains are less picky about gender. This initially involves some creepy and disturbing mind control, but it also brings C into contact with Avaritia and Avaritia's very specific understanding of greed. As far as Avaritia is concerned, greed means wanting whatever they want, for whatever reason they feel like wanting it, and there is absolutely no reason why that shouldn't include being greedy for their friends to be happy. Or doing whatever they can to make their friends happy, whether or not that looks like villainy. Elkin does two things with this plot that I thought were remarkably skillful. The first is that she directly examines and then undermines the "easy" transgender magical girl ending. In a world of transformation magic, someone who wants to be a girl could simply turn into a girl and thus apparently resolve the conflict in a way that makes everyone happy. I think there is an important place for that story (I am a vigorous defender of escapist fantasy and happy endings), but that is not the story that Elkin is telling. I won't go into the details of why and how the story complicates and undermines this easy ending, but it's a lot of why this book feels both painful and honest to a specific, and very not easy, transgender experience, even though it takes place in an utterly unrealistic world. But the second, which is more happy and joyful, is that Avaritia gleefully uses a wholehearted embrace of every implication of the vice of greed to bulldoze the binary morality of the story and question the classification of human emotions into virtues and vices. They are not a hero, or even all that good; they have some serious flaws and a very anarchic attitude towards society. But Avaritia provides the compelling, infectious thrill of the character who looks at the social construction of morality that is constraining the story and decides that it's all bullshit and refuses to comply. This is almost the exact opposite of C's default emotional position at the start of the book, and watching the two characters play off of each other in a complex friendship is an absolute delight. The ending of this book is complicated, messy, and incomplete. It is the sort of ending that I think could be incredibly powerful if it hits precisely the right chords with the reader, but if you're not that reader, it can also be a little heartbreaking because Elkin refuses to provide an easy resolution. The ending also drops some threads that I wish Elkin hadn't dropped; there are some characters who I thought deserved a resolution that they don't get. But this is one of those books where the author knows exactly what story they're trying to tell and tells it whether or not that fits what the reader wants. Those books are often not easy reading, but I think there's something special about them. This is not the novel for people who want detailed world-building that puts a solid explanation under events. I thought Elkin did a great job playing with the conventions of an episodic anime, including starting the book on Episode 12 to imply C's backstory with monster attacks and hinting at a parallel light anime story by providing TV-trailer-style plot summaries and teasers at the start and end of each chapter. There is a fascinating interplay between the story in which the Angelic Saints are the protagonists, which the reader can partly extrapolate, and the novel about C that one is actually reading. But the details of the world-building are kept at the anime plot level: There's an arch-villain, a World Tree, and a bit of backstory, but none of it makes that much sense or turns into a coherent set of rules. This is a psychological novel; the background and rules exist to support C's story. If you do want that psychological novel... well, I'm not sure whether to recommend this book or not. I admire the construction of this book a great deal, but I don't think appealing to the broadest possible audience was the goal. C's anxiety spiral is very repetitive, because anxiety spirals are very repetitive, and you have to be willing to read for the grace notes on the doom loop if you're going to enjoy this book. The sentence-by-sentence writing quality is fine but nothing remarkable, and is a bit shy of the average traditionally-published novel. The main appeal of A Little Vice is in the deep and unflinching portrayal of a specific emotional journey. I think this book is going to work if you're sufficiently invested in that journey that you are willing to read the brutal and repetitive parts. If you're not, there's a chance you will bounce off this hard. I was invested, and I'm glad I read this, but caveat emptor. You may want to try a sample first. One final note: If you're deep in the book world, you may wonder, like I did, if the title is a reference to Hanya Yanagihara's (in)famous A Little Life. I do not know for certain I have not read that book because I am not interested in being emotionally brutalized but if it is, I don't think there is much similarity. Both books are to some extent about four friends, but I couldn't find any other obvious connections from some Wikipedia reading, and A Little Vice, despite C's emotional turmoil, seems to be considerably more upbeat. Content notes: Emotionally abusive parent, some thoughts of self-harm, mind control, body dysmorphia, and a lot (a lot) of shame and self-loathing. Rating: 7 out of 10

23 February 2025

Kentaro Hayashi: Short journey to Mozc 2.29.5160.102+dfsg-1

Introduction This is just a note-taking about how to upgrading Mozc package for up-coming trixie ready (with many restrictions) last year. Maybe Mozc 2.29.5160.102+dfsg-1.3 will be shipped for Debian 13 (trixie).

FTBFS with Mozc 2.28.4715.102+dfsg-2.2 In May 2024, I've found that Mozc was removed from testing, and still in FTBFS. #1068186 - mozc: FTBFS with abseil 20230802: ../../base/init_mozc.cc:90:29: error: absl::debian5::flags_internal::ArgvListAction has not been declared - Debian Bug report logs That FTBFS was fixed in the Mozc upstream, but not applied for a while. Not only upstream patch, but also additional linkage patch was required to fix it. Mozc is the de-fact standard input method editor for Japanese. Most of Japanese uses it by default on linux desktop. (Even though frontend input method framework is different, the background engine is Mozc in most cases - uim-mozc for task-japanese-desktop, ibus-mozc for task-japanese-gnome-desktop in Debian) There is a case that Mozc was re-built locally with integrated external dictionary to improve quantity of vocabulary. If FTBFS keep ongoing, it means that it blocks such a usage. So I've sent patches to fix it and they were merged.

Motivation to update Mozc With fixing #1068186, I've also found Mozc version is not synced to upstream for a long time. At that time, Mozc in unstable was version 2.28.4715.102+dfsg, but upstream already released 2.30.5544.102. It seems that Mozc's maintainer was too busy and can't afford to update it, so I've tried to do it.

The blockers for updating Mozc But, it was not so easy task to do so. If you want to package latest Mozc, there were many blockers.
  • Newer Mozc requires Bazel to build, but there is no Bazel package to fit it (There is bazel-bootstrap 4.x, but it's old. v6.x or newer one is required.)
  • Newer abseil and protobuf were required
  • Renderer was changed to Qt. GTK renderer was removed
  • Revise existing patchsets (e.g. for UIM, for Fcitx)
It was not all.

Road to latest Mozc First, I knew the existence of debian-bazel, so I've posted about bazel-packaging progress. Any updates about bazel packaging effort? Sadly there was no response from it. Thus, it was not realistic to adopt Bazel as build tool chain. In other words, we need to keep GYP patch and maintain it. And as another topic, upstream changed renderer from GTK+ to Qt. Here are the major topics about each release of Mozc.
  • 2.30.5544.102 Require abseil 20240116.1 or later
  • 2.29.5544.102 GYP was deprecated
  • 2.29.5374.102
  • 2.29.5268.102 No gtk renderer anymore, need Qt.
  • 2.29.5160.102
    • The last version that gtk renderer is available.
    • --use_gyp_for_ibus_build option was removed.
  • 2.28.5029.102
  • 2.28.4880.102
  • 2.28.4715.102+dfsg Debian sid
The internal renderer change are too big, and before GYP deprecation in 2.29.5544.102, GYP support was already removed gradually. As a result, target to 2.29.5160.102 was the practical approach to make it forward.

Revisit existing patchsets for 2.28.4715.102+dfsg Second, need to revisit existing patchset to triage them.
  • 0001-Update-uim-mozc-to-c979f127acaeb7b35d3344e8b1e40848e.patch
    • Required
  • 0002-Support-fcitx.patch
    • Required
  • 0003-Change-compiler-from-clang-to-gcc.patch
  • 0004-Add-usage_dict.txt.patch
    • Required. (maybe)
  • 0005-Enable-verbose-build.patch
    • Required.
  • 0006-Update-gyp-using-absl.patch
    • Required and need massive refactoring.
  • 0007-common.gypi-Use-command-v-instead-of-which.patch
    • (maybe) Not needed anymore
  • 0009-protobuf.gyp-Add-latomic-to-link_settings.patch
    • Required.
  • 0010-Fix-the-compile-error-of-ParseCommandLineFlags-with.patch
    • Required. Should be merged into 0006 patch.
  • 0011-Fix-missing-abseil-gyp-link-settings.patch
    • Required. Should be merged into 0006 patch.
UIM patch was maintained in third-party repository, and directory structure was quite different from Mozc. It seems that maintenance activity was too low, so it was not enough that picking changes from macuim. It was required to fix FTBFS additionally. Fcitx patch was also maintained in fcitx/mozc. But it tracks only master branch, so it was hard to pick patchset for specific version of Mozc. Finally, I could manage to refresh patchset for 2.29.5160.102.
  • support-uim.patch
  • support-fcitx.patch
  • change-compiler-from-clang-to-gcc.patch
  • add-japanese-usage-dictionary.patch
  • enable-verbose-build.patch
  • update-gyp-using-system-abseil.patch
  • gyp-using-command-instead-of-which.patch
  • gyp-protobuf-link-with-atomic.patch
  • enable-deprecated-gtk-renderer.patch
  • fix-compile-error-of-ParseCommandLineFlags.patch
  • enable-use_gyp_for_ibus_build-again.patch
  • ibus-drop-needless-client_mock.patch
  • protobuf-revert-internal-cleanup.patch
  • uim-mozc-fix-ftbfs.patch

Improve packaging task Mozc need to be repacked, but it didn't use Files-Excluded yet. So I've introduced d/watch to repack upstream source. It makes source package more reproducible.

OT: Hardware breakage There was another blocker to do this task. I've hit the situation that g++ cause SEGV during building Mozc randomly. First, I wonder why it fails, but digging further more, finally I've found that memory module was corrupted. Thus I've lost 32GB memory modules. :-<

Unexpected behaviour in uim-mozc When uploaded Mozc 2.29.5160.102+dfsg-1 to experimental, I've found that there is a case that uim-mozc behaves weird. The candidate words were shown with flickering. But it was not regression in this upload. uim-mozc with Wayland cause that problem. Thus GNOME and derivatives might not be affected because ibus-mozc will be used.

Mozc 2.29.5160.102+dfsg-1 As the patchset was matured, then uploaded 2.29.5160.102+dfsg-1 with --delayed 15 option. 
$ dput --delayed 15 mozc_2.29.5160.102+dfsg-1_source.changes
Uploading mozc using ftp to ftp-master (host: ftp.upload.debian.org; directory: /pub/UploadQueue/DELAYED/15-day)
running allowed-distribution: check whether a local profile permits uploads to the target distribution
running protected-distribution: warn before uploading to distributions where a special policy applies
running checksum: verify checksums before uploading
running suite-mismatch: check the target distribution for common errors
running gpg: check GnuPG signatures before the upload
 signfile dsc mozc_2.29.5160.102+dfsg-1.dsc 719EB2D93DBE9C4D21FBA064F7FB75C566ED20E3
 fixup_buildinfo mozc_2.29.5160.102+dfsg-1.dsc mozc_2.29.5160.102+dfsg-1_amd64.buildinfo
 signfile buildinfo mozc_2.29.5160.102+dfsg-1_amd64.buildinfo 719EB2D93DBE9C4D21FBA064F7FB75C566ED20E3
 fixup_changes dsc mozc_2.29.5160.102+dfsg-1.dsc mozc_2.29.5160.102+dfsg-1_source.changes
 fixup_changes buildinfo mozc_2.29.5160.102+dfsg-1_amd64.buildinfo mozc_2.29.5160.102+dfsg-1_source.changes
 signfile changes mozc_2.29.5160.102+dfsg-1_source.changes 719EB2D93DBE9C4D21FBA064F7FB75C566ED20E3
Successfully signed dsc, buildinfo, changes files
Uploading mozc_2.29.5160.102+dfsg-1.dsc
Uploading mozc_2.29.5160.102+dfsg-1.debian.tar.xz
Uploading mozc_2.29.5160.102+dfsg-1_amd64.buildinfo
Uploading mozc_2.29.5160.102+dfsg-1_source.changes
Mozc 2.29.5160.102+dfsg-1 was landed to unstable at 2024-12-20.

Additional bug fixes Additionally, the following bugs were also fixed. These bugs were fixed in 2.29.5160.102+dfsg-1.1 And more, I've found that even though missing pristine-tar branch commit, salsa CI succeeds. I've sent MR for this issue and already merged into.

Mozc and future in Debian In this short journey, I gave up to updating more newer Mozc because the version of dependency libraries were not updated. Note that protobuf 3.25.4 on experimental depends on older absl 20230802, so it must be rebuilt against absl 20240722.0. And more, we need to consider how to migrate from GTK renderer to Qt renderer in the future.

Valhalla's Things: Water Resistant Hood

Posted on February 23, 2025
Tags: madeof:atoms, craft:sewing, FreeSoftWear
a person wearing a relatively boxy water resistant jacket with pockets and a zipper, and a detached hood with a big square cowl that reaches mid-torso. Many years ago I made myself a vest with lots of pockets 1 in a few layers of cheap cotton, and wore the hell out of it, for the added warmth, but most importantly for the convenience provided by the pockets. the same person showing just the vest, with two applied pockets on the bust, closed with buttons, and two big flaps covering two welted pockets at waist level, plus a strip of fabric with loops where things may be attached. Then a few years ago the cheap cotton had started to get worn, and I decided I needed to replace it. I found a second choice (and thus cheaper :) ) version of a water-repellent cotton and made another vest, lined with regular cotton, for a total of just two layers. the same person, this time there are also two sleeves, attached to the vest with big snaps, the outline of which can be seen on the vest. they are significantly less faded than the vest. This time I skipped a few pockets that I had found I didn t use that much, and I didn t add a hood, which didn t play that well when worn over a hoodie, but I added some detached sleeves, for additional wind protection. This left about 60 cm and some odd pieces of leftover fabric in my stash, for which I had no plan. the hood pulled down on the back, showing the big square cowl. And then February2 came, and I needed a quick simple mindless handsewing projects for the first weekend, I saw the vest (which I m wearing as much as the old one), the sleeves (which have been used much less, but I d like to change this) and thought about making a matching hood for it, using my square hood pattern. Since the etaproof is a bit stiff and not that nice to the touch I decide to line3 it with the same cotton as the vest and sleeves, and in the style of the pattern I did so by finishing each panel with its own lining (with regular cotton thread) and then whipstitching the panels together with the corespun cotton/poly thread recommended by the seller of the fabric. I m not sure this is the best way to construct something that is supposed to resist the rain, but if I notice issues I can always add some sealing tape afterwards. I do have a waterproof cape to wear in case of real rain, so this is only supposed to work for light rain anyway, and it may prove not to be an issue. As something designed to be worn in light rain, this is also something likely to be worn in low light conditions, where 100% black may not be the wisest look. On the vest I had added reflective piping to the armscyes, but I was out of the same piping. from the front; a flash was used to take the picture, making the border of the cowl very visible. I did however have a spool of reflector thread made of glass fibre by Rico Design, which I think was originally sold to be worked into knitting or crochet projects (it is now discontinued) and I had never used. I decided to try and sew a decorative blanket stitch border, a decision I had reasons to regret, since the thread broke and tangled like crazy, but in the end it was done, I like how it looks, and it seems pretty functional. I hope it won t break with time and use, and if it does I ll either fix it or try to redo with something else. Of course, the day I finished sewing the reflective border it stopped raining, so I haven t worn it yet, but I hope I ll be able to, and if it is an horrible failure I ll make sure to update this post.
  1. and I ve just realized that I haven t migrated that pattern to my pattern website, and I should do that. just don t hold your breath for it to happen O:-). And for the time being it will not have step-by-step pictures, as I currently don t need another vest.
  2. and February of course means a weekend in front of a screen that is showing a live-streamed conference.
  3. and of course I updated the pattern with instructions on how to add a lining.

21 February 2025

Jonathan Dowland: haskell streaming libraries

For my PhD, my colleagues/collaborators and I built a distributed stream-processing system using Haskell. There are several other Haskell stream-processing systems. How do they compare? First, let's briefly discuss and define streaming in this context. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs introduces Streams as an analogue of lists, to support delayed evaluation. In brief, the inductive list type (a list is either an empty list or a head element pre-pended to another list) is replaced with a structure with a head element and a promise which, when evaluated, will generate the tail (which in turn may have a head element and a promise to generate another tail, culminating in the equivalent of an empty list.) Later on SICP also covers lazy evaluation. However, the streaming we're talking about originates in the relational community, rather than the functional one, and is subtly different. It's about building a pipeline of processing that receives and emits data but doesn't need to (indeed, cannot) reference the whole stream (which may be infinite) at once. Haskell streaming systems Now let's go over some Haskell streaming systems. conduit (2011-) Conduit is the oldest of the ones I am reviewing here, but I doubt it's the first in the Haskell ecosystem. If I've made any obvious omissions, please let me know! Conduit provides a new set of types to model streaming data, and a completely new set of functions which are analogues of standard Prelude functions, e.g. sumC in place of sum. It provides its own combinator(s) such as . ( aka fuse) which is like composition but reads left-to-right. The motivation for this is to enable (near?) constant memory usage for processing large streams of data -- presumably versus using a list-based approach and to provide some determinism: the README gives the example of "promptly closing file handles". I think this is another way of saying that it uses strict evaluation, or at least avoids lazy evaluation for some things. Conduit offers interleaved effects: which is to say, IO can be performed mid-stream. Conduit supports distributed operation via Data.Conduit.Network in the conduit-extra package. Michael Snoyman, principal Conduit author, wrote up how to use it here: https://www.yesodweb.com/blog/2014/03/network-conduit-async To write a distributed Conduit application, the application programmer must manually determine the boundaries between the clients/servers and write specific code to connect them. pipes (2012-) The Pipes Tutorial contrasts itself with "Conventional Haskell stream programming": whether that means Conduit or something else, I don't know. Paraphrasing their pitch: Effects, Streaming Composability: pick two. That's the situation they describe for stream programming prior to Pipes. They argue Pipes offers all three. Pipes offers it's own combinators (which read left-to-right) and offers interleaved effects. At this point I can't really see what fundamentally distinguishes Pipes from Conduit. Pipes has some support for distributed operation via the sister library pipes-network. It looks like you must send and receive ByteStrings, which means rolling your own serialisation for other types. As with Conduit, to send or receive over a network, the application programmer must divide their program up into the sub-programs for each node, and add the necessary ingress/egress code. io-streams (2013-) io-streams emphasises simple primitives. Reading and writing is done under the IO Monad, thus, in an effectful (but non-pure) context. The presence or absence of further stream data are signalled by using the Maybe type (Just more data or Nothing: the producer has finished.) It provides a library of functions that shadow the standard Prelude, such as S.fromList, S.mapM, etc. It's not clear to me what the motivation for io-streams is, beyond providing a simple interface. There's no declaration of intent that I can find about (e.g.) constant-memory operation. There's no mention of or support (that I can find) for distributed operation. streaming (2015-) Similar to io-streams, Streaming emphasises providing a simple interface that gels well with traditional Haskell methods. Streaming provides effectful streams (via a Monad -- any Monad?) and a collection of functions for manipulating streams which are designed to closely mimic standard Prelude (and Data.List) functions. Streaming doesn't push its own combinators: the examples provided use $ and read right-to-left. The motivation for Streaming seems to be to avoid memory leaks caused by extracting pure lists from IO with traditional functions like mapM, which require all the list constructors to be evaluated, the list to be completely deconstructed, and then a new list constructed. Like io-streams, the focus of the library is providing a low-level streaming abstraction, and there is no support for distributed operation. streamly (2017-) Streamly appears to have the grand goal of providing a unified programming tool as suited for quick-and-dirty programming tasks (normally the domain of scripting languages) and high-performance work (C, Java, Rust, etc.). Their intended audience appears to be everyone, or at least, not just existing Haskell programmers. See their rationale Streamly offers an interface to permit composing concurrent (note: not distributed) programs via combinators. It relies upon fusing a streaming pipeline to remove intermediate list structure allocations and de-allocations (i.e. de-forestation, similar to GHC rewrite rules) The examples I've seen use standard combinators (e.g. Control.Function.&, which reads left-to-right, and Applicative). Streamly provide benchmarks versus Haskell pure lists, Streaming, Pipes and Conduit: these generally show Streamly several orders of magnitude faster. I'm finding it hard to evaluate Streamly. It's big, and it's focus is wide. It provides shadows of Prelude functions, as many of these libraries do. wrap-up It seems almost like it must be a rite-of-passage to write a streaming system in Haskell. Stones and glass houses, I'm guilty of that too. The focus of the surveyed libraries is mostly on providing a streaming abstraction, normally with an analogous interface to standard Haskell lists. They differ on various philosophical points (whether to abstract away the mechanics behind type synonyms, how much to leverage existing Haskell idioms, etc). A few of the libraries have some rudimentary support for distributed operation, but this is limited to connecting separate nodes together: in some cases serialising data remains the application programmer's job, and in all cases the application programmer must manually carve up their processing according to a fixed idea of what nodes they are deploying to. They all define a fixed-function pipeline.

14 February 2025

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, January 2025 (by Roberto C. S nchez)

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In January, 20 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 8.0h (out of 14.0h assigned), thus carrying over 6.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 36.5h (out of 47.75h assigned and 52.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 63.5h to the next month.
  • Andrej Shadura did 11.0h (out of 11.0h assigned and 4.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 4.0h to the next month.
  • Arturo Borrero Gonzalez did 9.0h (out of 10.0h assigned), thus carrying over 1.0h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 22.0h (out of 22.0h assigned).
  • Ben Hutchings did 8.0h (out of 21.0h assigned and 3.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 16.0h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Daniel Leidert did 20.0h (out of 23.0h assigned and 3.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 6.0h to the next month.
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 34.0h (out of 7.0h assigned and 27.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 0.75h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 3.25h (out of 20.0h assigned), thus carrying over 16.75h to the next month.
  • Jochen Sprickerhof did 23.0h (out of 15.0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period).
  • Lee Garrett did 15.75h (out of 8.5h assigned and 51.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 44.25h to the next month.
  • Lucas Kanashiro did 8.0h (out of 32.0h assigned and 32.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 56.0h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 14.75h (out of 13.5h assigned and 10.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.25h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 21.75h (out of 18.75h assigned and 6.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 3.25h to the next month.
  • Sean Whitton did 8.5h (out of 8.5h assigned).
  • Sylvain Beucler did 10.5h (out of 0.0h assigned and 49.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 39.0h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 11.0h (out of 11.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 12.0h (out of 12.0h assigned).

Evolution of the situation In January, we have released 33 DLAs. There were numerous security and non-security updates to Debian 11 (codename bullseye ) during January.
  • Notable security updates:
    • rsync, prepared by Thorsten Alteholz, fixed several CVEs (including information leak and path traversal vulnerabilities)
    • tomcat9, prepared by Markus Koschany, fixed several CVEs (including denial of service and information disclosure vulnerabilities)
    • ruby2.7, prepared by Bastien Roucari s, fixed several CVEs (including denial of service vulnerabilities)
    • tiff, prepared by Adrian Bunk, fixed several CVEs (including NULL ptr, buffer overflow, use-after-free, and segfault vulnerabilities)
  • Notable non-security updates:
    • linux-6.1, prepared by Ben Hutchings, has been packaged for bullseye (this was done specifically to provide a supported upgrade path for systems that currently use kernel packages from the bullseye-backports suite)
    • debian-security-support, prepared by Santiago Ruano Rinc n, which formalized the EOL of intel-mediasdk and node-matrix-js-sdk
In addition to the security and non-security updates targeting bullseye , various LTS contributors have prepared uploads targeting Debian 12 (codename bookworm ) with fixes for a variety of vulnerabilities. Abhijith PA prepared an upload of puma; Bastien Roucari s prepared an upload of node-postcss with fixes for data processing and denial of service vulnerabilities; Daniel Leidert prepared updates for setuptools, python-asyncssh, and python-tornado; Lee Garrett prepared an upload of ansible-core; and Guilhem Moulin prepared updates for python-urllib3, sqlparse, and opensc. Santiago Ruano Rinc n also worked on tracking and filing some issues about packages that need an update in recent releases to avoid regressions on upgrade. This relates to CVEs that were fixed in buster or bullseye, but remain open in bookworm. These updates, along with Santiago s work on identifying and tracking similar issues, underscore the LTS Team s commitment to ensuring that the work we do as part of LTS also benefits the current Debian stable release. LTS contributor Sean Whitton also prepared an upload of jinja2 and Santiago Ruano Rinc n prepared an upload of openjpeg2 for Debian unstable (codename sid ), as part of the LTS Team effort to assist with package uploads to unstable.

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13 February 2025

Jonathan Dowland: 10 years at Red Hat

Red Hat Fedora company logo
I've just passed my 10th anniversary of starting at Red Hat! As a personal milestone, this is the longest I've stayed in a job: I managed 10 years at Newcastle University, although not in one continuous role. I haven't exactly worked in one continuous role at Red Hat either, but it feels like what I do Today is a logical evolution from what I started doing, whereas in Newcastle I jumped around a bit. I've seen some changes: in my time here, we changed the logo from Shadow Man; we transitioned to using Google Workspace for lots of stuff, instead of in-house IT; we got bought by IBM; we changed President and CEO, twice. And millions of smaller things. I won't reach an 11th: my Organisation in Red Hat is moving to IBM. I think this is sad news for Red Hat: they're losing some great people. But I'm optimistic for the future of my Organisation.

11 February 2025

Ian Jackson: derive-deftly 1.0.0 - Rust derive macros, the easy way

derive-deftly 1.0 is released. derive-deftly is a template-based derive-macro facility for Rust. It has been a great success. Your codebase may benefit from it too! Rust programmers will appreciate its power, flexibility, and consistency, compared to macro_rules; and its convenience and simplicity, compared to proc macros. Programmers coming to Rust from scripting languages will appreciate derive-deftly s convenient automatic code generation, which works as a kind of compile-time introspection. Rust s two main macro systems I m often a fan of metaprogramming, including macros. They can help remove duplication and flab, which are often the enemy of correctness. Rust has two macro systems. derive-deftly offers much of the power of the more advanced (proc_macros), while beating the simpler one (macro_rules) at its own game for ease of use. (Side note: Rust has at least three other ways to do metaprogramming: generics; build.rs; and, multiple module inclusion via #[path=]. These are beyond the scope of this blog post.) macro_rules! macro_rules! aka pattern macros , declarative macros , or sometimes macros by example are the simpler kind of Rust macro. They involve writing a sort-of-BNF pattern-matcher, and a template which is then expanded with substitutions from the actual input. If your macro wants to accept comma-separated lists, or other simple kinds of input, this is OK. But often we want to emulate a #[derive(...)] macro: e.g., to define code based on a struct, handling each field. Doing that with macro_rules is very awkward: macro_rules! s pattern language doesn t have a cooked way to match a data structure, so you have to hand-write a matcher for Rust syntax, in each macro. Writing such a matcher is very hard in the general case, because macro_rules lacks features for matching important parts of Rust syntax (notably, generics). (If you really need to, there s a horrible technique as a workaround.) And, the invocation syntax for the macro is awkward: you must enclose the whole of the struct in my_macro! . This makes it hard to apply more than one macro to the same struct, and produces rightward drift. Enclosing the struct this way means the macro must reproduce its input - so it can have bugs where it mangles the input, perhaps subtly. This also means the reader cannot be sure precisely whether the macro modifies the struct itself. In Rust, the types and data structures are often the key places to go to understand a program, so this is a significant downside. macro_rules also has various other weird deficiencies too specific to list here. Overall, compared to (say) the C preprocessor, it s great, but programmers used to the power of Lisp macros, or (say) metaprogramming in Tcl, will quickly become frustrated. proc macros Rust s second macro system is much more advanced. It is a fully general system for processing and rewriting code. The macro s implementation is Rust code, which takes the macro s input as arguments, in the form of Rust tokens, and returns Rust tokens to be inserted into the actual program. This approach is more similar to Common Lisp s macros than to most other programming languages macros systems. It is extremely powerful, and is used to implement many very widely used and powerful facilities. In particular, proc macros can be applied to data structures with #[derive(...)]. The macro receives the data structure, in the form of Rust tokens, and returns the code for the new implementations, functions etc. This is used very heavily in the standard library for basic features like #[derive(Debug)] and Clone, and for important libraries like serde and strum. But, it is a complete pain in the backside to write and maintain a proc_macro. The Rust types and functions you deal with in your macro are very low level. You must manually handle every possible case, with runtime conditions and pattern-matching. Error handling and recovery is so nontrivial there are macro-writing libraries and even more macros to help. Unlike a Lisp codewalker, a Rust proc macro must deal with Rust s highly complex syntax. You will probably end up dealing with syn, which is a complete Rust parsing library, separate from the compiler; syn is capable and comprehensive, but a proc macro must still contain a lot of often-intricate code. There are build/execution environment problems. The proc_macro code can t live with your application; you have to put the proc macros in a separate cargo package, complicating your build arrangements. The proc macro package environment is weird: you can t test it separately, without jumping through hoops. Debugging can be awkward. Proper tests can only realistically be done with the help of complex additional tools, and will involve a pinned version of Nightly Rust. derive-deftly to the rescue derive-deftly lets you use a write a #[derive(...)] macro, driven by a data structure, without wading into any of that stuff. Your macro definition is a template in a simple syntax, with predefined $-substitutions for the various parts of the input data structure. Example Here s a real-world example from a personal project: 
define_derive_deftly!  
    export UpdateWorkerReport:
    impl $ttype  
        pub fn update_worker_report(&self, wr: &mut WorkerReport)  
            $(
                $ when fmeta(worker_report) 
                wr.$fname = Some(self.$fname.clone()).into();
            )
         
     
 
#[derive(Debug, Deftly, Clone)]
...
#[derive_deftly(UiMap, UpdateWorkerReport)]
pub struct JobRow  
    ...
    #[deftly(worker_report)]
    pub status: JobStatus,
    pub processing: NoneIsEmpty<ProcessingInfo>,
    #[deftly(worker_report)]
    pub info: String,
    pub duplicate_of: Option<JobId>,
This is a nice example, also, of how using a macro can avoid bugs. Implementing this update by hand without a macro would involve a lot of cut-and-paste. When doing that cut-and-paste it can be very easy to accidentally write bugs where you forget to update some parts of each of the copies: 
    pub fn update_worker_report(&self, wr: &mut WorkerReport)  
        wr.status = Some(self.status.clone()).into();
        wr.info = Some(self.status.clone()).into();
Spot the mistake? We copy status to info. Bugs like this are extremely common, and not always found by the type system. derive-deftly can make it much easier to make them impossible. Special-purpose derive macros are now worthwhile! Because of the difficult and cumbersome nature of proc macros, very few projects have site-specific, special-purpose #[derive(...)] macros. The Arti codebase has no bespoke proc macros, across its 240kloc and 86 crates. (We did fork one upstream proc macro package to add a feature we needed.) I have only one bespoke, case-specific, proc macro amongst all of my personal Rust projects; it predates derive-deftly. Since we have started using derive-deftly in Arti, it has become an important tool in our toolbox. We have 37 bespoke derive macros, done with derive-deftly. Of these, 9 are exported for use by downstream crates. (For comparison there are 176 macro_rules macros.) In my most recent personal Rust project, I have 22 bespoke derive macros, done with with derive-deftly, and 19 macro_rules macros. derive-deftly macros are easy and straightforward enough that they can be used as readily as macro_rules macros. Indeed, they are often clearer than a macro_rules macro. Stability without stagnation derive-deftly is already highly capable, and can solve many advanced problems. It is mature software, well tested, with excellent documentation, comprising both comprehensive reference material and the walkthrough-structured user guide. But declaring it 1.0 doesn t mean that it won t improve further. Our ticket tracker has a laundry list of possible features. We ll sometimes be cautious about committing to these, so we ve added a beta feature flag, for opting in to less-stable features, so that we can prototype things without painting ourselves into a corner. And, we intend to further develop the Guide.

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Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Python 3.13 as the default Python 3 version, Fixing qtpaths6 for cross compilation, sbuild support for Salsa CI, Rails 7 transition, DebConf preparations and more! (by Anupa Ann Joseph)

Debian Contributions: 2025-01 Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

Python 3.13 is now the default Python 3 version in Debian, by Stefano Rivera and Colin Watson The Python 3.13 as default transition has now completed. The next step is to remove Python 3.12 from the archive, which should be very straightforward, it just requires rebuilding C extension packages in no particular order. Stefano fixed some miscellaneous bugs blocking the completion of the 3.13 as default transition.

Fixing qtpaths6 for cross compilation, by Helmut Grohne While Qt5 used to use qmake to query installation properties, Qt6 is moving more and more to CMake and to ease that transition it relies on more qtpaths. Since this tool is not naturally aware of the architecture it is called for, it tends to produce results for the build architecture. Therefore, more than 100 packages were picking up a multiarch directory for the build architecture during cross builds. In collaboration with the Qt/KDE team and Sandro Knau in particular (none affiliated with Freexian), we added an architecture-specific wrapper script in the same way qmake has one for Qt5 and Qt6 already. The relevant CMake module has been updated to prefer the triplet-prefixed wrapper. As a result, most of the KDE packages now cross build on unstable ready in time for the trixie release.

/usr-move, by Helmut Grohne In December, Emil S dergren reported that a live-build was not working for him and in January, Colin Watson reported that the proposed mitigation for debian-installer-utils would practically fail. Both failures were to be attributed to a wrong understanding of implementation-defined behavior in dpkg-divert. As a result, all M18 mitigations had to be reviewed and many of them replaced. Many have been uploaded already and all instances have received updated patches. Even though dumat has been in operation for more than a year, it gained recent changes. For one thing, analysis of architectures other than amd64 was requested. Chris Hofstaedler (not affiliated with Freexian) kindly provided computing resources for repeatedly running it on the larger set. Doing so revealed various cross-architecture undeclared file conflicts in gcc, glibc, and binutils-z80, but it also revealed a previously unknown /usr-move issue in rpi.rpi-common. On top of that, dumat produced false positive diagnostics and wrongly associated Debian bugs in some cases, both of which have now been fixed. As a result, a supposedly fixed python3-sepolicy issue had to be reopened.

rebootstrap, by Helmut Grohne As much as we think of our base system as stable, it is changing a lot and the architecture cross bootstrap tooling is very sensitive to such changes requiring permanent maintenance. A problem that recently surfaced was that building a binutils cross toolchain would result in a binutils-for-host package that would not be practically installable as it would depend on a binutils-common package that was not built. This turned into an examination of binutils-common and noticing that it actually differed across architectures even though it should not. Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues (not affiliated with Freexian) and Colin Watson kindly helped brainstorm possible solutions. Eventually, Helmut provided a patch to move gprofng bits out of binutils-common. Independently, Matthias Klose (not affiliated with Freexian) split out binutils-gold into a separate source package. As a result, binutils-common is now equal across architectures and can be marked Multi-Arch: foreign resolving the initial problem.

Salsa CI, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n Santiago continued the work about the sbuild support for Salsa CI, that was mentioned in the previous month report. The !568 merge request that created the new build image was merged, making it easier to test !569 with external projects. Santiago used a fork of the debusine repo to try the draft !569, and some issues were spotted, and part of them fixed. This is the last debusine pipeline run with the current !569: https://salsa.debian.org/santiago/debusine/-/pipelines/794233. One of the last improvements relates to how to enable projects to customize the pipeline, in an equivalent way than they currently do in the extract-source and build jobs. While this is work-in-progress, the results are rather promising. Next steps include deciding on introducing schroot support for bookworm, bookworm-security, and older releases, as they are done in the official debian buildd.

DebConf preparations, by Stefano Rivera and Santiago Ruano Rinc n DebConf will be happening in Brest, France, in July. Santiago continued the DebConf 25 organization work, looking for catering providers. Both Stefano and Santiago have been reaching out to some potential sponsors. DebConf depends on sponsors to cover the organization cost, if your company depends on Debian, please consider sponsoring DebConf. Stefano has been winding up some of the finances from previous DebConfs. Finalizing reimbursements to team members from DebConf 23, and handling some outstanding issues from DebConf 24. Stefano and the rest of the DebConf committee have been reviewing bids for DebConf 26, to select the next venue.

Ruby 3.3 is now the default Ruby interpreter, by Lucas Kanashiro Ruby 3.3 is about to become the default Ruby interpreter for Trixie. Many bugs were fixed by Lucas and the Debian Ruby team during the sprint hold in Paris during Jan 27-31. The next step is to remove support of Ruby 3.1, which is the alternative Ruby interpreter for now. Thanks to the Debian Release team for all the support, especially Emilio Pozuelo Monfort.

Rails 7 transition, by Lucas Kanashiro Rails 6 has been shipped by Debian since Bullseye, and as a WEB framework, many issues (especially security related issues) have been encountered and the maintainability of it becomes harder and harder. With that in mind, during the Debian Ruby team sprint last month, the transition to Rack 3 (an important dependency of rails containing many breaking changes) was started in Debian unstable, it is ongoing. Once it is done, the Rails 7 transition will take place, and Rails 7 should be shipped in Debian Trixie.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Stefano improved a poor ImportError for users of the turtle module on Python 3, who haven t installed the python3-tk package.
  • Stefano updated several packages to new upstream releases.
  • Stefano added the Python extension to the re2 package, allowing for the use of the Google RE2 regular expression library as a direct replacement for the standard library re module.
  • Stefano started provisioning a new physical server for the debian.social infrastructure.
  • Carles improved simplemonitor (documentation on systemd integration, worked with upstream for fixing a bug).
  • Carles upgraded packages to new upstream versions: python-ring-doorbell and python-asyncclick.
  • Carles did po-debconf translations to Catalan: reviewed 44 packages and submitted translations to 90 packages (via salsa merge requests or bugtracker bugs).
  • Carles maintained po-debconf-manager with small fixes.
  • Rapha l worked on some outstanding DEP-14 merge request and participated in the associated discussion. The discussions have been more contentious than anticipated, somewhat exacerbated by Otto s desire to conclude fast while the required tool support is not yet there.
  • Rapha l, with the help of Philipp Kern from the DSA team, upgraded tracker.debian.org to use Django 4.2 (from bookworm-backports) which in turn enabled him to configure authentication via salsa.debian.org. It s now possible to login to tracker.debian.org with your salsa credentials!
  • Rapha l updated zim a nice desktop wiki that is very handy to organize your day-to-day digital life to the latest upstream version (0.76).
  • Helmut sent patches for 10 cross build failures.
  • Helmut continued working on a tool for memory-based concurrency limit of builds.
  • Helmut NMUed libtool, opensysusers and virtualbox.
  • Enrico tried to support Helmut in working out tricky usrmerge situations
  • Thorsten Alteholz uploaded a new upstream version of brlaser.
  • Colin Watson upgraded 33 Python packages to new upstream versions, including fixes for CVE-2024-42353, CVE-2024-47532, and CVE-2025-22153.
  • Emilio Pozuelo managed various transitions, and fixed various RC bugs (telepathy-glib, xorg, xserver-xorg-video-vesa, apitrace, mesa).
  • Anupa attended the monthly team meeting for Debian publicity team and shared the social media stats.
  • Anupa assisted Jean-Pierre Giraud in the point release announcement for Debian 12.9 and published the Micronews.
  • Anupa took part in multiple Debian publicity team discussions regarding our presence in social media platforms.

9 February 2025

Dave Hibberd: Radio Activity 10-16 Feb 2025

It s been quite the week of radio related nonsense for me, where I ve been channelling my time and brainspace for radio into activity on air and system refinements, not working on Debian.

POTA, Antennas and why do my toys not work? Having had my interest piqued by Ian at mastodon.radio, I looked online and spotted a couple of parks within stumbling distance of my house, that s good news! It looks like the list has been refactored and expanded since I last looked at it, so there are now more entities to activate and explore. My concerns about antennas noted last week rumbled on. There was a second strand to this concern too, my end fed 64:1 (or 49:1?!) transformer from MM0OPX sits in my mind as not having worked very well in Spain last year, and I want to get to the bottom of why. As with most things in my life, it s probably a me problem. I came up with a cunning plan - firstly, buy a new mast to replace the one I broke a few weeks back on Cat Law. Secondly, buy a couple of new connectors and some heatshrink to reterminate my cable that I m sure is broken. Spending more money on a problem never hurt anyone, right? Come Wednesday, the new toys arrived and I figured combining everything into one convenient night time walk and radio was a good plan. So I walk out to the nearest park with my LoRa APRS doofer going and see what happens: APRS-Map After circling a bit to find somewhere suitable (there appear to be construction works in the park!) I set up my gear in 2C with frost on the ground, called CQ, spotted and got nothing on either the end fed half wave or the cheap vertical. As it was too late for 20m, I tried 40 and a bit of 80 using the inbuilt tuner, but wasn t heard by stations I called or when calling independently. I packed everything up and lora-doofered my way home, mildly deflated.

Try it at home It still didn t sit with me that the end fed wasn t working, so come Friday night I set it up in the back garden/woods behind the house to try and diagnose why it wasn t working. Up it went, I worked some Irish stations pretty effortlessly, and down everything came. No complaints - the only things I did differently was have the feedpoint a little higher and check my power, limiting it to 10W. The G90 can do 20W, I wonder if running at that was saturating the core in the 64:1. At some point in the evening I stepped in some dog s shit too, and spent some time cleaning my boots outside to avoid further tramping the smell through the house. Win some, lose some.

Take it to the Hills On Friday, some of the other GM-ES Sota-ists had been out for an activity day. On account of me being busy in work, I couldn t go outside to play, but I figured a weekend of activity was on the books.

Saturday - A day above the clouds On Saturday I took myself up Tap O Noth, a favourite of mine for some reason, and Lord Arthur s Hill. Before I hit the hills, I took myself to the hackerspace and printed myself a K6ARK Winder and a guy ring for the mast, cut string, tied it together and wound the string on to the winder. I also took time to buzz out my wonky coax and it showed great continuity. Hmm, that can be continued later. I didn t quite get to crimping the radial network of the Aliexpress whip with a 12mm stud crimp, that can also be put on the TODO list.

Tap O Noth Once finally out, the weather was a bit cloudy with passing snow showers, but in between the showers I was above the clouds and the air was clear: After a mild struggle on 2m, I set up the end fed the first hill and got to work from the old hill fort: The end fed worked flawlessly. Exactly as promised, switching between 7MHz, 14MHz, 21MHz and 28MHz without a tuner was perfect, I chased hills on all the bands, and had a great time. Apart from 40m, where there was absolutely no space due to a contest. That wasn t such a fun time! My fingers were bitterly cold, so on went the big gloves for the descent and I felt like I was warm by the time I made it back to the car. It worked so well, in fact, I took the 1/4 wave cheap vertical out my bag and decided to brave it on the next activation.

Lord Arthur s Hill GM5ALX has posted a .gpx to sotlas which is shorter than the other ascent, but much sharper - I figured this would be a fun new way to try up the hill! It takes you right through the heart of the Littlewood Park estate, and I felt a bit uncomfortable walking straight past the estate cottages, especially when there were vehicles moving and active work happening. Presumably this is where Lord Arthur lived, at the foot of his hill. I cut through the woods to the west of the cottages, disturbing some deer and many, many pheasants, but I met the path fairly quickly. From there it was a 2km walk, 300m vertical ascent. Short and sharp! At the top, I was treated to a view of the hill I had activated only an hour or so before, which is a view that always makes me smile: To get some height for the feedpoint, I wrapped the coax around my winder a couple of turns and trapped it with the elastic while draping the coax over the trig. This bought me some more height and I felt clever because of it. Maybe a pole would be easier? From here, I worked inter-G on 40m and had a wee pile up, eventually working 15 or so European stations on 20m. Pleased with that! I had been considering a third hill, but home was the call in the failing light. Back to the car I walked to find my key didn t have any battery, so out came the Audi App and I used the Internet of Things to unlock my car. The modern world is bizarre.

Sunday - Cloudy Head // Head in the Clouds Sunday started off migraney, so I stayed within the confines of my house until I felt safe driving! After some back and forth in my cloudy head, I opted for the easier option of Ladylea Hill as I wasn t feeling up for major physical exertion. It was a long drive, after which I felt more wonky, but I hit the path eventually - I run to Hibby Standard Time, a few hours to a few days behind the rest of GM/ES. I was ready to bail if my head didn t improve, but it turns out, fresh cold air, silence and bloodflow helped. Ladylea Hill was incredibly quiet, a feature I really appreciated. It feels incredibly remote, with a long winding drive down Glenbuchat, which still has ice on the surface of the lochs and standing water. A brooding summit crowned with grey cloud in fantastic scenery that only revealed itself upon the clouds blowing through: I set up at the cairn and picked up 30 contacts overall, split between 40m and 20m, with some inter-g on 40 and a couple of continental surprises. 20 had longer skip today, so I saw Spain, Finland, Slovenia, Poland. On teardown, I managed to snap the top segment of my brand new mast with my cold, clumsy fingers, but thankfully sotabeams stock replacements. More money at the problem, again. Back to the car, no app needed, and homeward bound as the light faded. At the end of the weekend, I find myself finally over 100 activator points and over 400 chaser points. Somehow I ve collected more points this year already than last year, the winter bonuses really do stack up!

Addendum - OSMAnd & Open Street Map I ve been using OSMAnd on my iPhone quite extensively recently, I think offline mapping is super important if you re going out to get mildly lost in the hills. On more than one occasion, I have confidently set off in the wrong direction in the mist, and maps have saved my bacon! As you can download .gpx files, it s great to have them on the device and available for guidance in case you get lost, coupled with an offline map. Plus, as I drive around I love to have the dark red of a hill I ve walked appear on the map in my car dash or in my hand: This weekend I discovered it s possible to have height maps for nice 3d maps and contours marked on the map - you just need to download some additions for the maps. This is a really nice feature, it makes maps more pretty and more useful when you re in the middle of nowhere. Open Street Map also has designators for SOTA summits here and similar for POTA here GM5ALX has set to adding the summits around Scotland here. While the benefits aren t immediately obvious, it allows developers of mapping applications access to more data at no extra cost, really. It helps add depth to an already rich set of information, and allows us as radio amateurs to do more interesting things with maps and not be shackled to Apple/Google. Because it s open data, we can also fix things we find wrong as users. I like to fix road surfaces after I ve been cycling as that will feed forward to route planning through Komoot and data on my wahoo too, which can be modified with osm maps. In the future, it s possible to have an OSMAnd plugin highlighting local SOTA summits or mimicking features of sotl.as but offline. It s cool to be able to put open technologies to use like this in the field and really is the convergence point of all my favourite things!

Antoine Beaupr : Qalculate hacks

This is going to be a controversial statement because some people are absolute nerds about this, but, I need to say it. Qalculate is the best calculator that has ever been made. I am not going to try to convince you of this, I just wanted to put out my bias out there before writing down those notes. I am a total fan. This page will collect my notes of cool hacks I do with Qalculate. Most examples are copy-pasted from the command-line interface (qalc(1)), but I typically use the graphical interface as it's slightly better at displaying complex formulas. Discoverability is obviously also better for the cornucopia of features this fantastic application ships.

Qalc commandline primer On Debian, Qalculate's CLI interface can be installed with: 
apt install qalc
Then you start it with the qalc command, and end up on a prompt: 
anarcat@angela:~$ qalc
>
Then it's a normal calculator: 
anarcat@angela:~$ qalc
> 1+1
  1 + 1 = 2
> 1/7
  1 / 7   0.1429
> pi
  pi   3.142
>
There's a bunch of variables to control display, approximation, and so on: 
> set precision 6
> 1/7
  1 / 7   0.142857
> set precision 20
> pi
  pi   3.1415926535897932385
When I need more, I typically browse around the menus. One big issue I have with Qalculate is there are a lot of menus and features. I had to fiddle quite a bit to figure out that set precision command above. I might add more examples here as I find them.

Bandwidth estimates I often use the data units to estimate bandwidths. For example, here's what 1 megabit per second is over a month ("about 300 GiB"): 
> 1 megabit/s * 30 day to gibibyte 
  (1 megabit/second)   (30 days)   301.7 GiB
Or, "how long will it take to download X", in this case, 1GiB over a 100 mbps link: 
> 1GiB/(100 megabit/s)
  (1 gibibyte) / (100 megabits/second)   1 min + 25.90 s

Password entropy To calculate how much entropy (in bits) a given password structure, you count the number of possibilities in each entry (say, [a-z] is 26 possibilities, "one word in a 8k dictionary" is 8000), extract the base-2 logarithm, multiplied by the number of entries. For example, an alphabetic 14-character password is: 
> log2(26*2)*14
  log (26   2)   14   79.81
... 80 bits of entropy. To get the equivalent in a Diceware password with a 8000 word dictionary, you would need: 
> log2(8k)*x = 80
  (log (8   000)   x) = 80  
  x   6.170
... about 6 words, which gives you: 
> log2(8k)*6
  log (8   1000)   6   77.79
78 bits of entropy.

Exchange rates You can convert between currencies! 
> 1 EUR to USD
  1 EUR   1.038 USD
Even fake ones! 
> 1 BTC to USD
  1 BTC   96712 USD
This relies on a database pulled form the internet (typically the central european bank rates, see the source). It will prompt you if it's too old: 
It has been 256 days since the exchange rates last were updated.
Do you wish to update the exchange rates now? y
As a reader pointed out, you can set the refresh rate for currencies, as some countries will require way more frequent exchange rates. The graphical version has a little graphical indicator that, when you mouse over, tells you where the rate comes from.

Other conversions Here are other neat conversions extracted from my history 
> teaspoon to ml
  teaspoon = 5 mL
> tablespoon to ml
  tablespoon = 15 mL
> 1 cup to ml 
  1 cup   236.6 mL
> 6 L/100km to mpg
  (6 liters) / (100 kilometers)   39.20 mpg
> 100 kph to mph
  100 kph   62.14 mph
> (108km - 72km) / 110km/h
  ((108 kilometers)   (72 kilometers)) / (110 kilometers/hour)  
  19 min + 38.18 s

Completion time estimates This is a more involved example I often do.

Background Say you have started a long running copy job and you don't have the luxury of having a pipe you can insert pv(1) into to get a nice progress bar. For example, rsync or cp -R can have that problem (but not tar!). (Yes, you can use --info=progress2 in rsync, but that estimate is incremental and therefore inaccurate unless you disable the incremental mode with --no-inc-recursive, but then you pay a huge up-front wait cost while the entire directory gets crawled.)

Extracting a process start time First step is to gather data. Find the process start time. If you were unfortunate enough to forget to run date --iso-8601=seconds before starting, you can get a similar timestamp with stat(1) on the process tree in /proc with: 
$ stat /proc/11232
  File: /proc/11232
  Size: 0               Blocks: 0          IO Block: 1024   directory
Device: 0,21    Inode: 57021       Links: 9
Access: (0555/dr-xr-xr-x)  Uid: (    0/    root)   Gid: (    0/    root)
Access: 2025-02-07 15:50:25.287220819 -0500
Modify: 2025-02-07 15:50:25.287220819 -0500
Change: 2025-02-07 15:50:25.287220819 -0500
 Birth: -
So our start time is 2025-02-07 15:50:25, we shave off the nanoseconds there, they're below our precision noise floor. If you're not dealing with an actual UNIX process, you need to figure out a start time: this can be a SQL query, a network request, whatever, exercise for the reader.

Saving a variable This is optional, but for the sake of demonstration, let's save this as a variable: 
> start="2025-02-07 15:50:25"
  save("2025-02-07T15:50:25"; start; Temporary; ; 1) =
  "2025-02-07T15:50:25"

Estimating data size Next, estimate your data size. That will vary wildly with the job you're running: this can be anything: number of files, documents being processed, rows to be destroyed in a database, whatever. In this case, rsync tells me how many bytes it has transferred so far: 
# rsync -ASHaXx --info=progress2 /srv/ /srv-zfs/
2.968.252.503.968  94%    7,63MB/s    6:04:58  xfr#464440, ir-chk=1000/982266)
Strip off the weird dots in there, because that will confuse qalculate, which will count this as: 
  2.968252503968 bytes   2.968 B
Or, essentially, three bytes. We actually transferred almost 3TB here: 
  2968252503968 bytes   2.968 TB
So let's use that. If you had the misfortune of making rsync silent, but were lucky enough to transfer entire partitions, you can use df (without -h! we want to be more precise here), in my case: 
Filesystem              1K-blocks       Used  Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vg_hdd-srv 7512681384 7258298036  179205040  98% /srv
tank/srv               7667173248 2870444032 4796729216  38% /srv-zfs
(Otherwise, of course, you use du -sh $DIRECTORY.)

Digression over bytes Those are 1 K bytes which is actually (and rather unfortunately) Ki, or "kibibytes" (1024 bytes), not "kilobytes" (1000 bytes). Ugh. 
> 2870444032 KiB
  2870444032 kibibytes   2.939 TB

> 2870444032 kB
  2870444032 kilobytes   2.870 TB
At this scale, those details matter quite a bit, we're talking about a 69GB (64GiB) difference here: 
> 2870444032 KiB - 2870444032 kB
  (2870444032 kibibytes)   (2870444032 kilobytes)   68.89 GB
Anyways. Let's take 2968252503968 bytes as our current progress. Our entire dataset is 7258298064 KiB, as seen above.

Solving a cross-multiplication We have 3 out of four variables for our equation here, so we can already solve: 
> (now-start)/x = (2996538438607 bytes)/(7258298064 KiB) to h
  ((actual   start) / x) = ((2996538438607 bytes) / (7258298064
  kibibytes))
  x   59.24 h
The entire transfer will take about 60 hours to complete! Note that's not the time left, that is the total time. To break this down step by step, we could calculate how long it has taken so far: 
> now-start
  now   start   23 h + 53 min + 6.762 s
> now-start to s
  now   start   85987 s
... and do the cross-multiplication manually, it's basically: 
x/(now-start) = (total/current)
so: 
x = (total/current) * (now-start)
or, in Qalc: 
> ((7258298064  kibibytes) / ( 2996538438607 bytes) ) *  85987 s
  ((7258298064 kibibytes) / (2996538438607 bytes))   (85987 secondes)  
  2 d + 11 h + 14 min + 38.81 s
It's interesting it gives us different units here! Not sure why.

Now and built-in variables The now here is actually a built-in variable: 
> now
  now   "2025-02-08T22:25:25"
There is a bewildering list of such variables, for example: 
> uptime
  uptime = 5 d + 6 h + 34 min + 12.11 s
> golden
  golden   1.618
> exact
  golden = ( (5) + 1) / 2

Computing dates In any case, yay! We know the transfer is going to take roughly 60 hours total, and we've already spent around 24h of that, so, we have 36h left. But I did that all in my head, we can ask more of Qalc yet! Let's make another variable, for that total estimated time: 
> total=(now-start)/x = (2996538438607 bytes)/(7258298064 KiB)
  save(((now   start) / x) = ((2996538438607 bytes) / (7258298064
  kibibytes)); total; Temporary; ; 1)  
  2 d + 11 h + 14 min + 38.22 s
And we can plug that into another formula with our start time to figure out when we'll be done! 
> start+total
  start + total   "2025-02-10T03:28:52"
> start+total-now
  start + total   now   1 d + 11 h + 34 min + 48.52 s
> start+total-now to h
  start + total   now   35 h + 34 min + 32.01 s
That transfer has ~1d left, or 35h24m32s, and should complete around 4 in the morning on February 10th. But that's icing on top. I typically only do the cross-multiplication and calculate the remaining time in my head. I mostly did the last bit to show Qalculate could compute dates and time differences, as long as you use ISO timestamps. Although it can also convert to and from UNIX timestamps, it cannot parse arbitrary date strings (yet?).

Other functionality Qalculate can:
  • Plot graphs;
  • Use RPN input;
  • Do all sorts of algebraic, calculus, matrix, statistics, trigonometry functions (and more!);
  • ... and so much more!
I have a hard time finding things it cannot do. When I get there, I typically need to resort to programming code in Python, use a spreadsheet, and others will turn to more complete engines like Maple, Mathematica or R. But for daily use, Qalculate is just fantastic. And it's pink! Use it!

Further reading and installation This is just scratching the surface, the fine manual has more information, including more examples. There is also of course a qalc(1) manual page which also ships an excellent EXAMPLES section. Qalculate is packaged for over 30 Linux distributions, but also ships packages for Windows and MacOS. There are third-party derivatives as well including a web version and an Android app.

Updates Colin Watson liked this blog post and was inspired to write his own hacks, similar to what's here, but with extras, check it out!

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