My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donors (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me. Debian LTS This month I was allocated 12h but I only spent 10.5h. During this time, I continued my work on exiv2. I finished reproducing all the issues and then went on doing code reviews to confirm that vulnerabilities were not present when the issue was not reproducible. I found two CVE where the vulnerability was present in the wheezy version and I posted patches in the upstream bug tracker: #57 and #55. Then another batch of 10 CVE appeared and I started the process over I m currently trying to reproduce the issues. While doing all this work on exiv2, I also uncovered a failure to build on the package in experimental (reported here). Misc Debian/Kali work Debian Live. I merged 3 live-build patches prepared by Matthijs Kooijman and added an armel fix to cope with the the rename of the orion5x image into the marvell one. I also uploaded a new live-config to fix a bug with the keyboard configuration. Finally, I also released a new live-installer udeb to cope with a recent live-build change that broke the locale selection during the installation process. Debian Installer. I prepared a few patches on pkgsel to merge a few features that had been added to Ubuntu, most notably the possibility to enable unattended-upgrades by default. More bug reports. I investigated much further my problem with non-booting qemu images when they are built by vmdebootstrap in a chroot managed by schroot (cf #872999) and while we have much more data, it s not yet clear why it doesn t work. But we have a working work-around While investigating issues seen in Kali, I opened a bunch of reports on the Debian side:

• #874657: pcmanfm: should have explicit recommends on lxpolkit polkit-1-auth-agent
• #874626: bin-nmu request to complete two transitions and bring back some packages in testing
• #875423: openssl: Please re-enable TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 (at least in testing)

Packaging. I sponsored two uploads (dirb and python-elasticsearch). Debian Handbook. My work on updating the book mostly stalled. The only thing I did was to review the patch about wireless configuration in #863496. I must really get back to work on the book! Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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RProtoBuf provides R bindings for the Google Protocol Buffers ("ProtoBuf") data encoding and serialization library used and released by Google, and deployed fairly widely in numerous projects as a language and operating-system agnostic protocol. A new releases RProtoBuf 0.4.11 appeared on CRAN earlier today. Not unlike the other recent releases, it is mostly a maintenance release which switches two of the vignettes over to using the pinp package and its template for vignettes.

Changes in RProtoBuf version 0.4.11 (2017-10-03)

• The RProtoBuf-intro and RProtoBuf-quickref vignettes were converted to Rmarkdown using the templates and style file from the pinp package.
• A few minor internal upgrades

CRANberries also provides a diff to the previous release. The RProtoBuf page has copies of the (older) package vignette, the 'quick' overview vignette, a unit test summary vignette, and the pre-print for the JSS paper. Questions, comments etc should go to the GitHub issue tracker off the GitHub repo.

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

Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world in September 2017 (previous month):

• Submitted a pull request to Quadrapassel (the Gnome version of Tetris) to start a new game when the pause button is pressed outside of a game. This means you would no longer have to use the mouse to start a new game. [...]
• Made a large number of improvements to AptFS my FUSE-based filesystem that provides a view on unpacked Debian source packages as regular folders including moving away from manual parsing of package lists [...] and numerous code tidying/refactoring changes.
• Sent a small patch to django-sitetree, a Django library for menu and breadcrumb navigation elements to not mask test exit codes from the surrounding shell. [...]
• Updated travis.debian.net, my hosted service for projects that host their Debian packaging on GitHub to use the Travis CI continuous integration platform to test builds:
  • Add support for "sloppy" backports. Thanks to Bernd Zeimetz for the idea and ongoing testing. [...]
  • Merged a pull request from James McCoy to pass DEB_BUILD_PROFILES through to the build. [...]
  • Workaround Travis CI's HTTP proxy which does not appear to support SRV records. [...]
  • Run debc from devscripts if the build was successful [...] and output the .buildinfo file if it exists [...].
• Fixed a few issues in local-debian-mirror, my package to easily maintain and customise a local Debian mirror via the DebConf configuration tool:
  • Fix an issue where file permissions from the remote could result in a local archive that was impossible to access. [...]
  • Clear out empty directories on the local repository. [...]
• Updated django-staticfiles-dotd, my Django staticfiles adaptor to concatentate static media in .d-style directories to support Python 3.x by using bytes objects (commit) and move away from monkeypatch as it does not have a Python 3.x port yet (commit).
• I also posted a short essay to my blog entitled "Ask the Dumb Questions" as well as provided an update on the latest Lintian release.

---

The thirteenth release in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp landed on CRAN this morning, following a little delay because Uwe Ligges was traveling and whatnot. We had announced its availability to the mailing list late last week. As usual, a rather substantial amount of testing effort went into this release so you should not expect any surprise. This release follows the 0.12.0 release from July 2016, the 0.12.1 release in September 2016, the 0.12.2 release in November 2016, the 0.12.3 release in January 2017, the 0.12.4 release in March 2016, the 0.12.5 release in May 2016, the 0.12.6 release in July 2016, the 0.12.7 release in September 2016, the 0.12.8 release in November 2016, the 0.12.9 release in January 2017, the 0.12.10.release in March 2017, the 0.12.11.release in May 2017, and the 0.12.12 release in July 2017 making it the seventeeth release at the steady and predictable bi-montly release frequency. Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing GNU R with C or C++ code. As of today, 1069 packages (and hence 73 more since the last release) on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further, along with another 91 in BioConductor. This releases contains a large-ish update to the documentation as all vignettes (apart from the unit test one, which is a one-off) now use Markdown and the (still pretty new) pinp package by James and myself. There is also a new vignette corresponding to the PeerJ preprint James and I produced as an updated and current Introduction to Rcpp replacing the older JSS piece (which is still included as a vignette too). A few other things got fixed: Dan is working on const iterators you would expect with modern C++, Lei Yu spotted error in Modules, and more. See below for details.

Changes in Rcpp version 0.12.13 (2017-09-24)

• Changes in Rcpp API:
  • New const iterators functions cbegin() and cend() have been added to several vector and matrix classes (Dan Dillon and James Balamuta in #748) starting to address #741).
• Changes in Rcpp Modules:
  • Misplacement of one parenthesis in macro LOAD_RCPP_MODULE was corrected (Lei Yu in #737)
• Changes in Rcpp Documentation:
  • Rewrote the macOS sections to depend on official documentation due to large changes in the macOS toolchain. (James Balamuta in #742 addressing issue #682).
  • Added a new vignette Rcpp-introduction based on new PeerJ preprint, renamed existing introduction to Rcpp-jss-2011 .
  • Transitioned all vignettes to the 'pinp' RMarkdown template (James Balamuta and Dirk Eddelbuettel in #755 addressing issue #604).
  • Added an entry on running 'compileAttributes()' twice to the Rcpp-FAQ (##745).

Thanks to CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release. As always, even fuller details are on the Rcpp Changelog page and the Rcpp page which also leads to the downloads page, the browseable doxygen docs and zip files of doxygen output for the standard formats. A local directory has source and documentation too. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

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

A full month or more has past since the last upload of TeX Live, so it was high time to prepare a new package. Nothing spectacular here I have to say, two small bugs fixed and the usual long list of updates and new packages. From the new packages I found fontloader-luaotfload and interesting project. Loading fonts via lua code in luatex is by now standard, and this package allows for experiments with newer/alternative font loaders. Another very interesting new-comer is pdfreview which lets you set pages of another PDF on a lined background and add notes to it, good for reviewing. Enjoy. New packages abnt, algobox, beilstein, bib2gls, cheatsheet, coelacanth, dijkstra, dynkin-diagrams, endofproofwd, fetchcls, fixjfm, fontloader-luaotfload, forms16be, hithesis, ifxptex, komacv-rg, ku-template, latex-refsheet, limecv, mensa-tex, multilang, na-box, notes-tex, octave, pdfreview, pst-poker, theatre, upzhkinsoku, witharrows. Updated packages 2up, acmart, acro, amsmath, animate, babel, babel-french, babel-hungarian, bangorcsthesis, beamer, beebe, biblatex-gost, biblatex-philosophy, biblatex-source-division, bibletext, bidi, bpchem, bxjaprnind, bxjscls, bytefield, checkcites, chemmacros, chet, chickenize, complexity, curves, cweb, datetime2-german, e-french, epstopdf, eqparbox, esami, etoc, fbb, fithesis, fmtcount, fnspe, fontspec, genealogytree, glossaries, glossaries-extra, hvfloat, ifptex, invoice2, jfmutil, jlreq, jsclasses, koma-script, l3build, l3experimental, l3kernel, l3packages, latexindent, libertinust1math, luatexja, lwarp, markdown, mcf2graph, media9, nddiss, newpx, newtx, novel, numspell, ocgx2, philokalia, phfqit, placeat, platex, poemscol, powerdot, pst-barcode, pst-cie, pst-exa, pst-fit, pst-func, pst-geometrictools, pst-ode, pst-plot, pst-pulley, pst-solarsystem, pst-solides3d, pst-tools, pst-vehicle, pst2pdf, pstricks, pstricks-add, ptex-base, ptex-fonts, pxchfon, quran, randomlist, reledmac, robustindex, scratch, skrapport, spectralsequences, tcolorbox, tetex, tex4ht, texcount, texdef, texinfo, texlive-docindex, texlive-scripts, tikzducks, tikzsymbols, tocloft, translations, updmap-map, uplatex, widetable, xepersian, xetexref, xint, xsim, zhlipsum.

Lintian is a static analysis tool for Debian packages, reporting on various errors, omissions and general quality-assurance issues to maintainers. I've previously written about my exploits with Lintian as well as authoring a short tutorial on how to write your own Lintian check. Anyway, I recently uploaded version 2.5.53 about two months since previous release. The biggest changes you may notice are supporting the latest version of the Debian Policy as well the addition of checks to encourage the migration to Python 3. Thanks to all who contributed patches, code review and bug reports to this release. The full changelog is as follows:

lintian (2.5.53) unstable; urgency=medium
  The "we are all Perl developers now" release.
  * Summary of tag changes:
    + Added:
      - alternatively-build-depends-on-python-sphinx-and-python3-sphinx
      - build-depends-on-python-sphinx-only
      - dependency-on-python-version-marked-for-end-of-life
      - maintainer-script-interpreter
      - missing-call-to-dpkg-maintscript-helper
      - node-package-install-in-nodejs-rootdir
      - override-file-in-wrong-package
      - package-installs-java-bytecode
      - python-foo-but-no-python3-foo
      - script-needs-depends-on-sensible-utils
      - script-uses-deprecated-nodejs-location
      - transitional-package-should-be-oldlibs-optional
      - unnecessary-testsuite-autopkgtest-header
      - vcs-browser-links-to-empty-view
    + Removed:
      - debug-package-should-be-priority-extra
      - missing-classpath
      - transitional-package-should-be-oldlibs-extra
  * checks/apache2.pm:
    + [CL] Fix an apache2-unparsable-dependency false positive by allowing
      periods (".") in dependency names.  (Closes: #873701)
  * checks/binaries.pm:
    + [CL] Apply patches from Guillem Jover & Boud Roukema to improve the
      description of the binary-file-built-without-LFS-support tag.
      (Closes: #874078)
  * checks/changes. pm,desc :
    + [CL] Ignore DFSG-repacked packages when checking for upstream
      source tarball signatures as they will never match by definition.
      (Closes: #871957)
    + [CL] Downgrade severity of orig-tarball-missing-upstream-signature
      from "E:" to "W:" as many common tools do not make including the
      signatures easy enough right now.  (Closes: #870722, #870069)
    + [CL] Expand the explanation of the
      orig-tarball-missing-upstream-signature tag to include the location
      of where dpkg-source will look. Thanks to Theodore Ts'o for the
      suggestion.
  * checks/copyright-file.pm:
    + [CL] Address a number of issues in copyright-year-in-future:
      - Prevent false positives in port numbers, email addresses, ISO
        standard numbers and matching specific and general street
        addresses.  (Closes: #869788)
      - Match all violating years in a line, not just the first (eg.
        "2000-2107").
      - Ignore meta copyright statements such as "Original Author". Thanks
        to Thorsten Alteholz for the bug report.  (Closes: #873323)
      - Expand testsuite.
  * checks/cruft. pm,desc :
    + [CL] Downgrade severity of file-contains-fixme-placeholder
      tag from "important" (ie. "E:") to "wishlist" (ie. "I:").
      Thanks to Gregor Herrmann for the suggestion.
    + [CL] Apply patch from Alex Muntada (alexm) to use "substr" instead
      of "substring" in mentions-deprecated-usr-lib-perl5-directory's
      description.  (Closes: #871767)
    + [CL] Don't check copyright_hints file for FIXME placeholders.
      (Closes: #872843)
    + [CL] Don't match quoted "FIXME" variants as they are almost always
      deliberate. Thanks to Adrian Bunk for the report.  (Closes: #870199)
    + [CL] Avoid false positives in missing source checks for "CSS Browser
      Selector".  (Closes: #874381)
  * checks/debhelper.pm:
    + [CL] Prevent a false positive of
      missing-build-dependency-for-dh_-command that can be exposed by
      following the advice for the recently added
      useless-autoreconf-build-depends tag.  (Closes: #869541)
  * checks/debian-readme. pm,desc :
    + [CL] Ensure readme-debian-contains-debmake-template also checks
      for templates "Automatically generated by debmake".
  * checks/description. desc,pm :
    + [CL] Clarify explanation of description-starts-with-leading-spaces
      tag. Thanks to Taylor Kline  for the report
      and patch.  (Closes: #849622)
    + [NT] Skip capitalization-error-in-description-synopsis for
      auto-generated packages (such as dbgsym packages).
  * checks/fields. desc,pm :
    + [CL] Ensure that python3-foo packages have "Section: python", not
      just python2-foo.  (Closes: #870272)
    + [RG] Do no longer require debug packages to be priority extra.
    + [BR] Use Lintian::Data for name/section mapping
    + [CL] Check for packages including "?rev=0&sc=0" in Vcs-Browser.
      (Closes: #681713)
    + [NT] Transitional packages should now be "oldlibs/optional" rather
      than "oldlibs/extra".  The related tag has been renamed accordingly.
  * checks/filename-length.pm:
    + [NT] Skip the check on auto-generated binary packages (such as
      dbgsym packages).
  * checks/files. pm,desc :
    + [BR] Avoid privacy-breach-generic false positives for legal.xml.
    + [BR] Detect install of node package under /usr/lib/nodejs/[^/]*$
    + [CL] Check for packages shipping compiled Java class files. Thanks
      Carn  Draug .  (Closes: #873211)
    + [BR] Privacy breach is no longer experimental.
  * checks/init.d.desc:
    + [RG] Do not recommend a versioned dependency on lsb-base in
      init.d-script-needs-depends-on-lsb-base.  (Closes: #847144)
  * checks/java.pm:
    + [CL] Additionally consider .cljc files as code to avoid false-
      positive codeless-jar warnings.  (Closes: #870649)
    + [CL] Drop problematic missing-classpath check.  (Closes: #857123)
  * checks/menu-format.desc:
    + [CL] Prevent false positives in desktop-entry-lacks-keywords-entry
      for "Link" and "Directory" .desktop files.  (Closes: #873702)
  * checks/python. pm,desc :
    + [CL] Split out Python checks from "scripts" check to a new, source
      check of type "source".
    + [CL] Check for python-foo without corresponding python3-foo packages
      to assist in Python 2.x deprecation.  (Closes: #870681)
    + [CL] Check for packages that Build-Depend on python-sphinx only.
      (Closes: #870730)
    + [CL] Check for packages that alternatively Build-Depend on the
      Python 2 and Python 3 versions of Sphinx.  (Closes: #870758)
    + [CL] Check for binary packages that depend on Python 2.x.
      (Closes: #870822)
  * checks/scripts.pm:
    + [CL] Correct false positives in
      unconditional-use-of-dpkg-statoverride by detecting "if !" as a
      valid shell prefix.  (Closes: #869587)
    + [CL] Check for missing calls to dpkg-maintscript-helper(1) in
      maintainer scripts.  (Closes: #872042)
    + [CL] Check for packages using sensible-utils without declaring a
      dependency after its split from debianutils.  (Closes: #872611)
    + [CL] Warn about scripts using "nodejs" as an interpreter now that
      nodejs provides /usr/bin/node.  (Closes: #873096)
    + [BR] Add a statistic tag giving interpreter.
  * checks/testsuite. desc,pm :
    + [CL] Remove recommendations to add a "Testsuite: autopkgtest" field
      to debian/control as it is added when needed by dpkg-source(1)
      since dpkg 1.17.1.  (Closes: #865531)
    + [CL] Warn if we see an unnecessary "Testsuite: autopkgtest" header
      in debian/control.
    + [NT] Recognise "autopkgtest-pkg-go" as a valid test suite.
    + [CL] Recognise "autopkgtest-pkg-elpa" as a valid test suite.
      (Closes: #873458)
    + [CL] Recognise "autopkgtest-pkg-octave" as a valid test suite.
      (Closes: #875985)
    + [CL] Update the description of unknown-testsuite to reflect that
      "autopkgtest" is not the only valid value; the referenced URL
      is out-of-date (filed as #876008).  (Closes: #876003)
  * data/binaries/embedded-libs:
    + [RG] Detect embedded copies of heimdal, libgxps, libquicktime,
      libsass, libytnef, and taglib.
    + [RG] Use an additional string to detect embedded copies of
      openjpeg2.  (Closes: #762956)
  * data/fields/name_section_mappings:
    + [BR] node- package section is javascript.
    + [CL] Apply patch from Guillem Jover to add more section mappings.
      (Closes: #874121)
  * data/fields/obsolete-packages:
    + [MR] Add dh-systemd.  (Closes: #872076)
  * data/fields/perl-provides:
    + [CL] Refresh perl provides.
  * data/fields/virtual-packages:
    + [CL] Update data file from archive. This fixes a false positive for
      "bacula-director".  (Closes: #835120)
  * data/files/obsolete-paths:
    + [CL] Add note to /etc/bash_completion.d entry regarding stricter
      filename requirements.  (Closes: #814599)
  * data/files/privacy-breaker-websites:
    + [BR] Detect custom donation logos like apache.
    + [BR] Detect generic counter website.
  * data/standards-version/release-dates:
    + [CL] Add 4.0.1 and 4.1.0 as known standards versions.
      (Closes: #875509)
  * debian/control:
    + [CL] Mention Debian Policy v4.1.0 in the description.
    + [CL] Add myself to Uploaders.
    + [CL] Drop unnecessary "Testsuite: autopkgtest"; this is implied from
      debian/tests/control existing.
  * commands/info.pm:
    + [CL] Add a --list-tags option to print all tags Lintian knows about.
      Thanks to Rajendra Gokhale for the suggestion.  (Closes: #779675)
  * commands/lintian.pm:
    + [CL] Apply patch from Maia Everett to avoid British spelling when
      using en_US locale.  (Closes: #868897)
  * lib/Lintian/Check.pm:
    + [CL] Stop emitting  maintainer,uploader -address-causes-mail-loops
      for @packages.debian.org addresses.  (Closes: #871575)
  * lib/Lintian/Collect/Binary.pm:
    + [NT] Introduce an "auto-generated" argument for "is_pkg_class".
  * lib/Lintian/Data.pm:
    + [CL] Modify Lintian::Data's "all" to always return keys in insertion
      order, dropping dependency on libtie-ixhash-perl.
  * helpers/coll/objdump-info-helper:
    + [CL] Apply patch from Steve Langasek to accommodate binutils 2.29
      outputting symbols in a different format on ppc64el.
      (Closes: #869750)
  * t/tests/fields-perl-provides/tags:
    + [CL] Update expected output to match new Perl provides.
  * t/tests/files-privacybreach/*:
    + [CL] Add explicit test for packages including external fonts via
      the Google Font API. Thanks to Ian Jackson for the report.
      (Closes: #873434)
    + [CL] Add explicit test for packages including external fonts via
      the Typekit API via <script/> HTML tags.
  * t/tests/*/desc:
    + [CL] Add missing entries in "Test-For" fields to make
      development/testing workflow less error-prone.
  * private/generate-tag-summary:
    + [CL] git-describe(1) will usually emit 7 hexadecimal digits as the
      abbreviated object name,  However, as this can be user-dependent,
      pass --abbrev=0 to ensure it does not vary between systems.  This
      also means we do not need to strip it ourselves.
  * private/refresh-*:
    + [CL] Use deb.debian.org as the default mirror.
    + [CL] Update locations of Contents-<arch> files; they are now
      namespaced by distribution (eg. "main").
 -- Chris Lamb <lamby@debian.org>  Wed, 20 Sep 2017 09:25:06 +0100

A first update 0.0.2 of the pinp package arrived on CRAN just a few days after the initial release. We added a new vignette for the package (see below), extended a few nice features, and smoothed a few corners. The NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in tint version 0.0.2 (2017-09-20)

• The YAML segment can be used to select font size, one-or-two column mode, one-or-two side mode, linenumbering and watermarks (#21 and #26 addressing #25)
• If pinp.cls or jss.bst are not present, they are copied in ((#27 addressing #23)
• Output is now in shaded framed boxen too (#29 addressing #28)
• Endmatter material is placed in template.tex (#31 addressing #30)
• Expanded documentation of YAML options in skeleton.Rmd and clarified available one-column option (#32).
• Section numbering can now be turned on and off (#34)
• The default bibliography style was changed to jss.bst.
• A short explanatory vignette was added.

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a comparison to the previous release. More information is on the tint page. For questions or comments use the issue tracker off the GitHub repo.

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

Many voices arise now and then against risks linked to the Github use by Free Software projects. Yet the infatuation for the collaborative forge of the Octocat Californian start-ups doesn t seem to fade away.

These recent years, Github and its services take an important role in software engineering as they are seen as easy to use, efficient for a daily workload with interesting functions in enterprise collaborative workflow or amid a Free Software project. What are the arguments against using its services and are they valid? We will list them first, then we ll examine their validity.

1. Critical points

1.1 Centralization

The Github application belongs to a single entity, Github Inc, a US company which manage it alone. So, a unique company under US legislation manages the access to most of Free Software application code sources, which may be a problem with groups using it when a code source is no longer available, for political or technical reason.

The Octocat, the Github mascot

This centralization leads to another trouble: as it obtained critical mass, it becomes more and more difficult not having a Github account. People who don t use Github, by choice or not, are becoming a silent minority. It is now fashionable to use Github, and not doing so is seen as out of date . The same phenomenon is a classic, and even the norm, for proprietary social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram).

1.2 A Proprietary Software

When you interact with Github, you are using a proprietary software, with no access to its source code and which may not work the way you think it is. It is a problem at different levels. First, ideologically, but foremost in practice. In the Github case, we send them code we can control outside of their interface. We also send them personal information (profile, Github interactions). And mostly, Github forces any project which goes through the US platform to use a crucial proprietary tools: its bug tracking system.

Windows, the epitome of proprietary software, even if others took the same path

1.3 The Uniformization

Working with Github interface seems easy and intuitive to most. Lots of companies now use it as a source repository, and many developers leaving a company find the same Github working environment in the next one. This pervasive presence of Github in free software development environment is a part of the uniformization of said developers working space.

Uniforms always bring Army in my mind, here the Clone army

2 Critical points cross-examination

2.1 Regarding the centralization

2.1.1 Service availability rate

As said above, nowadays, Github is the main repository of Free Software source code. As such it is a favorite target for cyberattacks. DDOS hit it in March and August 2015. On December 15, 2015, an outage led to the inaccessibility of 5% of the repositories. The same occurred on November 15. And these are only the incident reported by Github itself. One can imagine that the mean outage rate of the platform is underestimated.

2.1.2 Chain reaction could block Free Software development

Today many dependency maintenance tools, as npm for javascript, Bundler for Ruby or even pip for Python can access an application source code directly from Github. Free Software projects getting more and more linked and codependents, if one component is down, all the developing process stop.

One of the best examples is the npmgate. Any company could legally demand that Github take down some source code from its repository, which could create a chain reaction and blocking the development of many Free Software projects, as suffered the Node.js community from the decisions of Npm, Inc, the company managing npm.

2.2 A historical precedent: SourceForge

Github didn t appear out of the blue. In his time, its predecessor, SourceForge, was also extremely popular.

Heavily centralized, based on strong interaction with the community, SourceForge is now seen as an aging SAAS (Software As A Service) and sees most of its customers fleeing to Github. Which creates lots of hurdles for those who stayed. The Gimp project suffered from spams and terrible advertising, which led to the departure of the VLC project, then from installers corrupted with adwares instead of the official Gimp installer for Windows. And finally, the Project Gimp s SourceForge account was hacked by SourceForge team itself!

These are very recent examples of what can do a commercial entity when it is under its stakeholders pressure. It is vital to really understand what it means to trust them with data and exchange centralization, where it could have tremendous repercussion on the day-to-day life and the habits of the Free Software and open source community.

2.3. Regarding proprietary software

2.3.1 One community, several opinions on proprietary software

Mostly based on ideology, this point deals with the definition every member of the community gives to Free Software and open source. Mostly about one thing: is it viral or not? Or GPL vs MIT/BSD.

Those on the side of the viral Free Software will have trouble to use a proprietary software as this last one shouldn t even exist. It must be assimilated, to quote Star Trek, as it is a connected black box, endangering privacy, corrupting for profit our uses and restrain our freedom to use as we re pleased what we own, etc.

Those on the side of complete freedom have no qualms using proprietary software as their very existence is a consequence of freedom without restriction. They even agree that code they developed may be a part of proprietary software, which is quite a common occurrence. This part of the Free Software community has no qualm using Github, which is well within their ideology parameters. Just take a look at the Janson amphitheater during Fosdem and check how many Apple laptops running on macOS are around.

FreeBSD, the main BSD project under the BSD license

2.3.2 Data loss and data restrictions linked to proprietary software use

Even without ideological consideration, and just focusing on Github infrastructure, the bug tracking system is a major problem by itself.

Bug report builds the memory of Free Software projects. It is the entrance point for new contributors, the place to find bug reporting, requests for new functions, etc. The project history can t be limited only to the code. It s very common to find bug reports when you copy and paste an error message in a search engine. Not their historical importance is precious for the project itself, but also for its present and future users.

Github gives the ability to extract bug reports through its API. What would happen if Github is down or if the platform doesn t support this feature anymore? In my opinion, not that many projects ever thought of this outcome. How could they move all the data generated by Github into a new bug tracking system? One old example now is Astrid, a TODO list bought by Yahoo a few years ago. Very popular, it grew fast until it was closed overnight, with only a few weeks for its users to extract their data. It was only a to-do list. The same situation with Github would be tremendously difficult to manage for several projects if they even have the ability to deal with it. Code would still be available and could still live somewhere else, but the project memory would be lost. A project like Debian has today more than 800,000 bug reports, which are a data treasure trove about problems solved, function requests and where the development stand on each. The developers of the Cpython project have anticipated the problem and decided not to use Github bug tracking systems.

Issues, the Github proprietary bug tracking system

Another thing we could lose if Github suddenly disappear: all the work currently done regarding the push requests (aka PRs). This Github function gives the ability to clone one project s Github repository, to modify it to fit your needs, then to offer your own modification to the original repository. The original repository s owner will then review said modification, and if he or she agrees with them will fuse them into the original repository. As such, it s one of the main advantages of Github, since it can be done easily through its graphic interface.

However reviewing all the PRs may be quite long, and most of the successful projects have several ongoing PRs. And this PRs and/or the proprietary bug tracking system are commonly used as a platform for comment and discussion between developers.

Code itself is not lost if Github is down (except one specific situation as seen below), but the peer review works materialized in the PRs and the bug tracking system is lost. Let s remember than the PR mechanism let you clone and modify projects and then generate PRs directly from its proprietary web interface without downloading a single code line on your computer. In this particular case, if Github is down, all the code and the work in progress is lost. Some also use Github as a bookmark place. They follow their favorite projects activity through the Watch function. This technological watch style of data collection would also be lost if Github is down.

Debian, one of the main Free Software projects with at least a thousand official contributors

2.4 Uniformization

The Free Software community is walking a thigh rope between normalization needed for an easier interoperability between its products and an attraction for novelty led by a strong need for differentiation from what is already there.

Github popularized the use of Git, a great tool now used through various sectors far away from its original programming field. Step by step, Git is now so prominent it s almost impossible to even think to another source control manager, even if awesome alternate solutions, unfortunately not as popular, exist as Mercurial.

A new Free Software project is now a Git repository on Github with README.md added as a quick description. All the other solutions are ostracized? How? None or very few potential contributors would notice said projects. It seems very difficult now to encourage potential contributors into learning a new source control manager AND a new forge for every project they want to contribute. Which was a basic requirement a few years ago. It s quite sad because Github, offering an original experience to its users, cut them out of a whole possibility realm. Maybe Github is one of the best web versioning control systems. But being the main one doesn t let room for a new competitor to grow. And it let Github initiate development newcomers into a narrow function set, totally unrelated to the strength of the Git tool itself.

3. Centralization, uniformization, proprietary software What s next? Laziness?

Fight against centralization is a main part of the Free Software ideology as centralization strengthens the power of those who manage it and who through it control those who are managed by it. Uniformization allergies born against main software companies and their wishes to impose a closed commercial software world was for a long time the main fuel for innovation thirst and intelligent alternative development. As we said above, part of the Free Software community was built as a reaction to proprietary software and their threat. The other part, without hoping for their disappearance, still chose a development model opposite to proprietary software, at least in the beginning, as now there s more and more bridges between the two.

The Github effect is a morbid one because of its consequences: at least centralization, uniformization, proprietary software usage as their bug tracking system. But some years ago the Dear Github buzz showed one more side effect, one I ve never thought about: laziness. For those who don t know what it is about, this letter is a complaint from several spokespersons from several Free Software projects which demand to Github team to finally implement, after years of polite asking, new functions. Since when Free Software project facing a roadblock request for clemency and don t build themselves the path they need? When Torvalds was involved in the Bitkeeper problem and the Linux kernel development team couldn t use anymore their revision control software, he developed Git. The mere fact of not being able to use one tool or functions lacking is the main motivation to seek alternative solutions and, as such, of the Free Software movement. Every Free Software community member able to code should have this reflex. You don t like what Github offers? Switch to Gitlab. You don t like it Gitlab? Improve it or make your own solution.

The Gitlab logo

Let s be crystal clear. I ve never said that every Free Software developers blocked should code his or her own alternative. We all have our own priorities, and some of us even like their beauty sleep, including me. But, to see that this open letter to Github has 1340 names attached to it, among them some spokespersons for major Free Software project showed me that need, willpower and strength to code a replacement are here. Maybe said replacement will be born from this letter, it would be the best outcome of this buzz.

In the end, Github usage is just another example of Internet usage massification. As Internet users are bound to go to massively centralized social network as Facebook or Twitter, developers are following the same path with Github. Even if a large fraction of developers realize the threat linked this centralized and proprietary organization, the whole community is following this centralization and uniformization trend. Github service is useful, free or with a reasonable price (depending on the functions you need) easy to use and up most of the time. Why would we try something else? Maybe because others are using us while we are savoring the convenience? The Free Software community seems to be quite sleepy to me.

The lion enjoying the hearth warm

About Me Carl Chenet, Free Software Indie Hacker, founder of the French-speaking Hacker News-like Journal du hacker. Follow me on social networks

• My Mastodon account : @carlchenet
• My Diaspora* account : @carlchenet
• My Twitter account : @carl_chenet

Translated from French by St phanie Chaptal. Original article written in 2015.

A new and much enhanced version of RcppMsgPack arrived on CRAN a couple of days ago. It came together following this email to the r-package-devel list which made it apparent that Travers Ching had been working on MessagePack converters for R which required the very headers I had for use from, inter alia, the RcppRedis package. So we joined our packages. I updated the headers in RcppMsgPack to the current upstream version 2.1.5 of MessagePack, and Travers added his helper functions allow direct packing / unpacking of MessagePack objects at the R level, as well as tests and a draft vignette. Very exciting, and great to have a coauthor! So now RcppMspPack provides R with both MessagePack header files for use via C++ (or C, if you must) packages such as RcppRedis --- and direct conversion routines at the R prompt. MessagePack itself is an efficient binary serialization format. It lets you exchange data among multiple languages like JSON. But it is faster and smaller. Small integers are encoded into a single byte, and typical short strings require only one extra byte in addition to the strings themselves.

Changes in version 0.2.0 (2017-09-07)

• Added support for building on Windows
• Upgraded to MsgPack 2.1.5 (#3)
• New R functions to manipulate MsgPack objects: msgpack_format, msgpack_map, msgpack_pack, msgpack_simplify, mgspack_unpack (#4)
• New R functions also available as msgpackFormat, msgpackMap, msgpackPack, msgpackSimplify, mgspackUnpack (#4)
• New vignette (#4)
• New tests (#4)

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. More information is on the RcppRedis page. More information may be on the RcppMsgPack page. Issues and bugreports should go to the GitHub issue tracker.

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

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday August 27 and Saturday September 2 2017: Talks and presentations Holger Levsen talked about our progress and our still-far goals at BornHack 2017 (Video). Toolchain development and fixes The Debian FTP archive will now reject changelogs where different entries have the same timestamps. UDD now uses reproducible-tracker.json (~25MB) which ignores our tests for Debian unstable, instead of our full set of results in reproducible.json. Our tests for Debian unstable uses a stricter definition of "reproducible" than what was recently added to Debian policy, and these stricter tests are currently more unreliable. Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed Patches sent upstream:

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • File ordering:
    • klee-uclibc: sort
    • libdnet: sort
    • libinvm-cim: sort
    • libinvm-cli: sort
  • Embedded build-date timestamps:
    • robinhood: SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH support
    • ceph/rocksdb: SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH support
    • hylafax: use changelog modtime
    • gnucash: use changelog modtime
  • Warzone2100, merged: omit timestamps, sort file lists
• Chris Lamb:
  • glib2.0: sort file lists
  • (old) xorg, merged: SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH support

Debian bugs filed:

• Adrian Bunk:
  • #873608 filed against uhd.
  • #874186 filed against svgpp.
• Chris Lamb:
  • #873625 filed against glib2.0, filed upstream.
  • #874102 filed against texlive-bin.

Debian packages NMU-uploaded:

• Chris Lamb:
  • bittornado/0.3.18-10.3 from #796212
  • cgilib/0.6-1.1 from #776935
  • dict-gazetteer2k/1.0.0-5.4 from #776376
  • dict-moby-thesaurus/1.0-6.4 from #776375
  • dtaus/0.9-1.1 from #777321
  • wily/0.13.41-7.3 from #777360

Reviews of unreproducible packages 25 package reviews have been added, 50 have been updated and 86 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by:

• Adrian Bunk (46)
• Mart n Ferrari (1)
• Steve Langasek (1)

diffoscope development Version 86 was uploaded to unstable by Mattia Rizzolo. It included previous weeks' contributions from:

• Mattia Rizzolo
  • tests/binary: skip a test if the 'distro' module is not available.
  • Some code quality and style improvements.
• Guangyuan Yang
  • tests/iso9660: support both cdrtools' genisoimage's versions of isoinfo.
• Chris Lamb
  • comparators/xml: Use name attribute over path to avoid leaking comparison full path in output.
  • Tidy diffoscope.progress a little.
• Ximin Luo
  • Add a --tool-prefix-binutils CLI flag. Closes: #869868
  • On non-GNU systems, prefer some tools that start with "g". Closes: #871029
  • presenters/html: Don't traverse children whose parents were already limited. Closes: #871413
• Santiago Torres-Arias
  • diffoscope.progress: Support the new fork of python-progressbar. Closes: #873157

reprotest development Development continued in git with contributions from:

• Ximin Luo:
  • Add -v/--verbose which is a bit more popular.
  • Make it possible to omit "auto" when building packages.
  • Refactor how the config file works, in preparation for new features.
  • chown -h for security.

Misc. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Chris Lamb, Bernhard M. Wiedemann and Holger Levsen & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

As I've blogged before, I've been on and off working on SReview, a video review system. Development over the past year has been mostly driven by the need to have something up and running for first FOSDEM 2017, and then DebConf17, and so I've cut corners left and right which made the system, while functional, not quite entirely perfect everywhere. For instance, the backend scripts were done in ad-hoc perl, each reinventing their own wheel. Doing so made it easier for me to experiment with things and figure out where I want them to go, without immediately creating a lot of baggage that is not necessarily something I want to be stuck to. This flexibility has already paid off, in that I've redone the state machine between FOSDEM and DebConf17 and all it needed was to update a few SQL statements here and there. Well, and add a few of them, too. It was always the intent to replace most of the ad-hoc perl with something better, however, once the time was ripe. One place where historical baggage is not so much of a problem, and where in fact abstracting away the complexity would now be an asset, is in the area of FFmpeg command lines. Currently, these are built by simple string expansion. For example, we do something like this (shortened for brevity):

system("ffmpeg -y -i $outputdir/$slug.ts -pass 1 -passlogfile ...");

inside an environment where the $outputdir and $slug variables are set in a perl environment. That works, but it has some downsides; e.g., adding or removing options based on which codecs we're using is not so easy. It would be much more flexible if the command lines were generated dynamically based on requested output bandwidth and codecs, rather than that they be hardcoded in the file. Case in point: currently there are multiple versions of some of the backend scripts, that only differ in details mostly the chosen codec on the ffmpeg command line. Obviously this is suboptimal. Instead, we want a way where video file formats can be autodetected, so that I can just say "create a file that uses encoder etc settings of this other file here". In addition, we also want a way where we can say "create a file that uses encoder etc settings of this other file here, except for these one or two options that I want to fine-tune manually". When I first thought about doing that about a year ago, that seemed complicated and not worth it or at least not to that extent. Enter Moose. The Moose OO system for Perl 5 is an interesting way to do object orientation in Perl. I knew Perl supports OO, and I had heard about Moose, but never had looked into it, mostly because the standard perl OO features were "good enough". Until now. Moose has a concept of adding 'attributes' to objects. Attributes can be set at object construction time, or can be accessed later on by way of getter/setter functions, or even simply functions named after the attribute itself (the default). For more complicated attributes, where the value may not be known until some time after the object has been created, Moose borrows the concept of "lazy" variables from Perl 6:

package Object;
use Moose;
has 'time' => (
    is => 'rw',
    builder => 'read_time',
    lazy => 1,
);
sub read_time  
    return localtime();
 

The above object has an attribute 'time', which will not have a value initially. However, upon first read, the 'localtime()' function will be called, the result is cached, and then (and on all further calls of the same function), the cached result will be returned. In addition, since the attribute is read/write, the time can also be written to. In that case, any cached value that may exist will be overwritten, and if no cached value exists yet, the read_time function will never be called. (it is also possible to clear values if needs be, so that the function would be called again). We use this with the following pattern:

package SReview::Video;
use Moose;
has 'url' => (
    is => 'rw',
)
has 'video_codec' => (
    is => 'rw',
    builder => '_probe_videocodec',
    lazy => 1,
);
has 'videodata' => (
    is => 'bare',
    reader => '_get_videodata',
    builder => '_probe_videodata',
    lazy => 1,
);
has 'probedata' => (
    is => 'bare',
    reader => '_get_probedata',
    builder => '_probe',
    lazy => 1,
);
sub _probe_videocodec  
    my $self = shift;
    return $self->_get_videodata-> codec_name ;
 
sub _probe_videodata  
    my $self = shift;
    if(!exists($self->_get_probedata-> streams ))  
        return  ;
     
    foreach my $stream(@ $self->_get_probedata-> streams )  
        if($stream-> codec_type  eq "video")  
            return $stream;
         
     
    return  ;
 
sub _probe  
    my $self = shift;
    open JSON, "ffprobe -print_format json -show_format -show_streams " . $self->url . " "
    my $json = "";
    while(<JSON>)  
        $json .= $_;
     
    close JSON;
    return decode_json($json);
 

The videodata and probedata attributes are internal-use only attributes, and are therefore of the 'bare' type that is, they cannot be read nor written to. However, we do add 'reader' functions that can be used from inside the object, so that the object itself can access them. These reader functions are generated, so they're not part of the object source. The probedata attribute's builder simply calls ffprobe with the right command-line arguments to retrieve data in JSON format, and then decodes that JSON file. Since the passed JSON file contains an array with (at least) two streams one for video and one for audio and since the ordering of those streams depends on the file and is therefore not guaranteed, we have to loop over them. Since doing so in each and every attribute of the file we might be interested in would be tedious, we add a videodata attribute that just returns the data for the first found video stream (the actual source also contains a similar one for audio streams). So, if you create an SReview::Video object and you pass it a filename in the url attribute, and then immediately run print $object->video_codec, then the object will

• call ffprobe, and cache the (decoded) output for further use
• from that, extract the video stream data, and cache that for further use
• from that, extract the name of the used codec, cache it, and then return that name to the caller.

However, if the caller first calls $object->video_codec('h264'), then the ffprobe and most of the caching will be skipped, and instead the h265 data will be returned as video codec name. Okay, so with a reasonably small amount of code, we now have a bunch of attributes that have defaults based on actual files but can be overwritten when necessary. Useful, right? Well, you might also want to care about the fact that sometimes you want to generate a video file that uses the same codec settings of this other file here. That's easy. First, we add another attribute:

has 'reference' => (
    is => 'ro',
    isa => 'SReview::Video',
    predicate => 'has_reference'
);

which we then use in the _probe method like so:

sub _probe  
    my $self = shift;
    if($self->has_reference)  
        return $self->reference->_get_probedata;
     
    # original code remains here
 

With that, we can create an object like so:

my $video = SReview::Video->new(url => 'file.ts');
my $generated = SReview::Video->new(url => 'file2.ts', reference => $video);

now if we ask the $generated object what the value of its video_codec setting is without telling it ourselves first, it will use the $video object for its probed data, and use that. That only misses generating the ffmpeg command line, but that's all fairly straightforward and therefore left as an exercise to the reader. Or you can cheat, and look it up.

Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world in August 2017 (previous month):

• Created ZeroCoolOS, a live operating system that plays the film Hackers (1995) on a continuous loop.
• Sent a patch for pristine-tar to allow storage of detached upstream signatures. (#871809)
• Worked more on Lintian, a static analysis tool for Debian packages, reporting on various errors, omissions and quality-assurance issues to the maintainer (previous changes):
  • Fix an apache2-unparsable-dependency false positive by allowing periods in dependency names. (#873701)
  • Ignore "repacked" packages when checking for upstream source tarball signatures as they will never match.
  • Downgrade the severity of orig-tarball-missing-upstream-signature. (#870722)
  • From a suggestion by Theodore Ts'o, expand the explanation of orig-tarball-missing-upstream-signature to include the location of where dpkg-source looks.
  • Address a number of issues in the copyright-year-in-future tag including preventing false positives in port numbers, email addresses, ISO standard numbers and street addresses (#869788), as well as "meta" or testing statements (#873323). In addition, report all violating years in a line and expand the testsuite.
  • Don't match quoted "FIXME" variants of file-contains-fixme-placeholder (#870199), avoid checking copyright_hints files (#872843) and downgrade the tag's severity.
  • Apply a patch from Alex Muntada to recommend "substr" over of "substring" in mentions-deprecated-usr-lib-perl5-directory. (#871767)
  • Prevent missing-build-dependency-for-dh_-command false positives exposed by following the advice in useless-autoreconf-build-depends. (#869541)
  • Ensure readme-debian-contains-debmake-template also checks for files containing "Automatically generated by debmake".
  • Check python3-foo packages have a Section: python, not just python2-foo. (#870272)
  • Check for packages shipping compiled Java class files. (#873211)
  • Additionally consider .cljc files to avoid codeless-jar warnings. (#870649)
  • Prevent desktop-entry-lacks-keywords-entry false positives for Link and Directory-style .desktop files. (#873702)
  • Split out Python checks from checks/scripts.pm check to a new, source check of type source.
  • Check for python-foo without a corresponding python3-foo package. (#870681)
  • Complain about packages that Build-Depend on python-sphinx only. (#870730)
  • Warn about packages that alternatively Build-Depend on the Python 2 and Python 3 versions of Sphinx. (#870758)
  • Check for packages that depend on Python 2.x. (#870822)
  • Correct false positives in unconditional-use-of-dpkg-statoverride by detecting "if !" as a shell prefix. (#869587)
  • Alert on for missing calls to dpkg-maintscript-helper(1) in maintainer scripts. (#872042)
  • Check for packages using sensible-utils without declaring a dependency after splitting from debianutils. (#872611)
  • Warn about scripts using nodejs as an interpreter now that the nodejs script provides /usr/bin/node. (#873096)
  • Remove recommendations to add a Testsuite: autopkgtest field to debian/control and emit a new tag the package if it does so. (#865531)
  • Recognise autopkgtest-pkg-elpa as a valid test suite. (#873458)
  • Add note to /etc/bash_completion.d's obsolete path warning output regarding stricter filename requirements. (#814599)
  • Add 4.0.1 and 4.1.0 as known Policy standards versions.
  • Apply a patch from Maia Everett to avoid British spellings under the en_US locale. (#868897)
  • Stop emitting maintainer,uploader -address-causes-mail-loops for @packages.debian.org addresses. (#871575)
  • Modify Lintian::Data's all subroutine to always return keys in insertion order.
  • Apply a patch from Steve Langasek to accomodate binutils outputting symbols in a different format on the ppc64el architecture. (#869750)
  • Add an explicit test for packages including external fonts via the Google Font and TypeKit APIs. (#873434)
  • Add missing entries in internal Test-For fields to make development/testing workflow less error-prone.
• Sent three pull requests to git-buildpackage, a tool to assist in Debian packaging from Git repositories:
  • Make pq --abbrev= configurable. (#872351)
  • Use build profiles to avoid installation of test dependencies. (#31)
  • Correct "allow to" grammar. (#30)
• Updated travis.debian.net (my hosted service for projects that host their Debian packaging on GitHub to use the Travis CI continuous integration platform for testing):
  • Move away from deb.debian.org; Travis appears to be using a HTTP proxy that strips SRV records. (commit)
  • Highlight double quotes are required for TRAVIS_DEBIAN_EXTRA_REPOSITORY. (commit)
  • Use force-unsafe-io. (commit)
  • Clarify docs when upstream already has a travis.yml file. (#46)
  • Make documentation easier to copy-paste. (commit)
• Merged a pull request in django-slack, my library to easily post messages to the Slack group-messaging utility, where instantiation of a SlackException was failing. (#71)
• Assigned two pull requests to the Redis key-value database store to correct "did not received" and "faield" typos. (#4216 & #4215).

---

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday August 20 and Saturday August 26 2017: Debian development

• "Packages should build reproducibly" was released in Debian Policy 4.1.0.0. For more background please see last week's post.
• A patch by Chris Lamb to make Dpkg::Substvars warnings output deterministic was merged by Guillem Jover. This helps the Reproducible Builds effort as it removes unnecessary differences in logs of two package builds. (#870221)

Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed Forwarded upstream:

• Debian bug #872728 filed against desktop-file-utils. Filed upstream. (lamby, via a reproducibility issue in Tails).
• Debian bug #872729 filed against gtk+2.0. Filed upstream. (lamby, via a reproducibility issue in Tails).
• sawfish:
  • SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH
  • .tar.gz (merged)
  • Sorting (merged)
• librep:
  • SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH (merged)
  • Sorting (merged)
• zstd (merged) sort
• lirc (solved)
• autogen (tar.gz)

Accepted repoducibility NMUs in Debian:

• Chris Lamb:
  • jsmath-fonts (for bug #792319).
  • xvier (for bug #777330).
• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • aewan (for bug #842864).

Other issues:

• Adrian Bunk:
  • #872675 filed against pdp.
  • #872678 filed against gem.
  • #872860 filed against csound.
  • #872918 filed against sketch.
• Dmitry Shachnev:
  • #872992 filed against pytest-qt.

Reviews of unreproducible packages 16 package reviews have been added, 38 have been updated and 48 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 2 issue types have been updated:

• Add new captures_build_dir_in_qmake_prl_files toolchain issue (Chris Lamb)
• Remove ftbfs_uninvestigated_big_packages (Mattia Rizzolo)

Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by:

• Adrian Bunk (37)
• Dmitry Shachnev (1)
• James Cowgill (1)

diffoscope development

• Chris Lamb:
  • Tidy diffoscope.progress a little.
• Santiago Torres-Arias:
  • diffoscope.progress: Support the new fork of python-progressbar. (#873157)

disorderfs development Version 0.5.2-1 was uploaded to unstable by Ximin Luo. It included contributions from:

• Ximin Luo:
  • Add -q,--quiet CLI option
  • Update to latest Standards-Version; no changes required
  • Update debian/changelog
  • Update NEWS
  • Adopt as team maintenance
  • Add my signing key only
  • Add instructions for Debian release
• Holger Levsen:
  • Add myself to uploaders
  • Move package to 'optional' section

reprotest development

• Ximin Luo:
  • Don't vary user_group in the tests - it's not usually possible in automated builders
  • Default verbosity to 0 and silence disorderfs if set
  • Add the ability to vary the user. (#872412)
  • Add TODO

Misc. This week's edition was written in alphabetical order by Bernhard M. Wiedemann, Chris Lamb, Mattia Rizzolo & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

A new version 0.2.0 of the RcppSMC package arrived on CRAN earlier today (as a very quick pretest-publish within minutes of submission). RcppSMC provides Rcpp-based bindings to R for the Sequential Monte Carlo Template Classes (SMCTC) by Adam Johansen described in his JSS article. This release 0.2.0 is chiefly the work of Leah South, a Ph.D. student at Queensland University of Technology, who was during the last few months a Google Summer of Code student mentored by Adam and myself. It was pleasure to work with Leah on this, and see her progress. Our congratulations to Leah for a job well done!

Changes in RcppSMC version 0.2.0 (2017-08-28)

• Also use .registration=TRUE in useDynLib in NAMESPACE
• Multiple Sequential Monte Carlo extensions (Leah South as part of Google Summer of Code 2017)
  • Switching to population level objects (#2 and #3).
  • Using Rcpp attributes (#2).
  • Using automatic RNGscope (#4 and #5).
  • Adding multiple normalising constant estimators (#7).
  • Static Bayesian model example: linear regression (#10 addressing #9).
  • Adding a PMMH example (#13 addressing #11).
  • Framework for additional algorithm parameters and adaptation (#19 addressing #16; also #24 addressing #23).
  • Common adaptation methods for static Bayesian models (#20 addressing #17).
  • Supporting MCMC repeated runs (#21).
  • Adding adaptation to linear regression example (#22 addressing #18).

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a diffstat report for this release. More information is on the RcppSMC page. Issues and bugreports should go to the GitHub issue tracker.

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

Lately I experienced some new kind of spam, at least new to myself. Seems that spammer abuse registration input fields that do not implement strong enough validation, and echo back several values from the registration process in some kind of welcome mail. Basically filling the spam message in name and surname fields. So far I found a bunch of those originating from the following AS: AS49453, AS50896, AS200557 and AS61440. The first three belong to something identifying itself as "QUALITYNETWORK". The last one, AS61440, seems to be involved only partially with some networks being delegated to "Atomohost". To block them it's helpful to query the public radb service whois.radb.net for all networks belonging to the specific AS like this:

whois -h whois.radb.net -- '-i origin AS50896'

Another bunch of batch capable whois services are provided by Team Cymru. They've some examples at the end of https://www.team-cymru.org/IP-ASN-mapping.html. In this specific case the spam was for "www.robotas.ru" which is currently terminated at CloudFlare and redirects via JS document.location to "http://link31.net/b494d/ooo/", which in turn redirects via JS window.location to "http://revizor-online.ga/" which is again hosted at CloudFlare. The page at the end plays some strange youtube video - currently at around 1900 plays, so not that widely spread. In the end an interesting indicator about spam campaign success.

TL;DR: With its implementation of IPv6 routing tables using radix trees, Linux offers subpar performance (450 ns for a full view 40,000 routes) compared to IPv4 (50 ns for a full view 500,000 routes) but fair memory usage (20 MiB for a full view).

---

In a previous article, we had a look at IPv4 route lookup on Linux. Let s see how different IPv6 is.

Lookup trie implementation Looking up a prefix in a routing table comes down to find the most specific entry matching the requested destination. A common structure for this task is the trie, a tree structure where each node has its parent as prefix. With IPv4, Linux uses a level-compressed trie (or LPC-trie), providing good performances with low memory usage. For IPv6, Linux uses a more classic radix tree (or Patricia trie). There are three reasons for not sharing:

• The IPv6 implementation (introduced in Linux 2.1.8, 1996) predates the IPv4 implementation based on LPC-tries (in Linux 2.6.13, commit 19baf839ff4a).
• The feature set is different. Notably, IPv6 supports source-specific routing¹ (since Linux 2.1.120, 1998).
• The IPv4 address space is denser than the IPv6 address space. Level-compression is therefore quite efficient with IPv4. This may not be the case with IPv6.

The trie in the below illustration encodes 6 prefixes: For more in-depth explanation on the different ways to encode a routing table into a trie and a better understanding of radix trees, see the explanations for IPv4. The following figure shows the in-memory representation of the previous radix tree. Each node corresponds to a struct fib6_node. When a node has the RTN_RTINFO flag set, it embeds a pointer to a struct rt6_info containing information about the next-hop. The fib6_lookup_1() function walks the radix tree in two steps:

1. walking down the tree to locate the potential candidate, and
2. checking the candidate and, if needed, backtracking until a match.

Here is a slightly simplified version without source-specific routing:

static struct fib6_node *fib6_lookup_1(struct fib6_node *root,
                                       struct in6_addr  *addr)
 
    struct fib6_node *fn;
    __be32 dir;
    /* Step 1: locate potential candidate */
    fn = root;
    for (;;)  
        struct fib6_node *next;
        dir = addr_bit_set(addr, fn->fn_bit);
        next = dir ? fn->right : fn->left;
        if (next)  
            fn = next;
            continue;
         
        break;
     
    /* Step 2: check prefix and backtrack if needed */
    while (fn)  
        if (fn->fn_flags & RTN_RTINFO)  
            struct rt6key *key;
            key = fn->leaf->rt6i_dst;
            if (ipv6_prefix_equal(&key->addr, addr, key->plen))  
                if (fn->fn_flags & RTN_RTINFO)
                    return fn;
             
         
        if (fn->fn_flags & RTN_ROOT)
            break;
        fn = fn->parent;
     
    return NULL;
 

Caching While IPv4 lost its route cache in Linux 3.6 (commit 5e9965c15ba8), IPv6 still has a caching mechanism. However cache entries are directly put in the radix tree instead of a distinct structure. Since Linux 2.1.30 (1997) and until Linux 4.2 (commit 45e4fd26683c), almost any successful route lookup inserts a cache entry in the radix tree. For example, a router forwarding a ping between 2001:db8:1::1 and 2001:db8:3::1 would get those two cache entries:

$ ip -6 route show cache
2001:db8:1::1 dev r2-r1  metric 0
    cache
2001:db8:3::1 via 2001:db8:2::2 dev r2-r3  metric 0
    cache

These entries are cleaned up by the ip6_dst_gc() function controlled by the following parameters:

$ sysctl -a   grep -F net.ipv6.route
net.ipv6.route.gc_elasticity = 9
net.ipv6.route.gc_interval = 30
net.ipv6.route.gc_min_interval = 0
net.ipv6.route.gc_min_interval_ms = 500
net.ipv6.route.gc_thresh = 1024
net.ipv6.route.gc_timeout = 60
net.ipv6.route.max_size = 4096
net.ipv6.route.mtu_expires = 600

The garbage collector is triggered at most every 500 ms when there are more than 1024 entries or at least every 30 seconds. The garbage collection won t run for more than 60 seconds, except if there are more than 4096 routes. When running, it will first delete entries older than 30 seconds. If the number of cache entries is still greater than 4096, it will continue to delete more recent entries (but no more recent than 512 jiffies, which is the value of gc_elasticity) after a 500 ms pause. Starting from Linux 4.2 (commit 45e4fd26683c), only a PMTU exception would create a cache entry. A router doesn t have to handle those exceptions, so only hosts would get cache entries. And they should be pretty rare. Martin KaFai Lau explains:

Out of all IPv6 RTF_CACHE routes that are created, the percentage that has a different MTU is very small. In one of our end-user facing proxy server, only 1k out of 80k RTF_CACHE routes have a smaller MTU. For our DC traffic, there is no MTU exception.

Here is how a cache entry with a PMTU exception looks like:

$ ip -6 route show cache
2001:db8:1::50 via 2001:db8:1::13 dev out6  metric 0
    cache  expires 573sec mtu 1400 pref medium

Performance We consider three distinct scenarios:

Excerpt of an Internet full view

In this scenario, Linux acts as an edge router attached to the default-free zone. Currently, the size of such a routing table is a little bit above 40,000 routes.

/48 prefixes spread linearly with different densities

Linux acts as a core router inside a datacenter. Each customer or rack gets one or several /48 networks, which need to be routed around. With a density of 1, /48 subnets are contiguous.

/128 prefixes spread randomly in a fixed /108 subnet

Linux acts as a leaf router for a /64 subnet with hosts getting their IP using autoconfiguration. It is assumed all hosts share the same OUI and therefore, the first 40 bits are fixed. In this scenario, neighbor reachability information for the /64 subnet are converted into routes by some external process and redistributed among other routers sharing the same subnet².

Route lookup performance With the help of a small kernel module, we can accurately benchmark³ the ip6_route_output_flags() function and correlate the results with the radix tree size: Getting meaningful results is challenging due to the size of the address space. None of the scenarios have a fallback route and we only measure time for successful hits⁴. For the full view scenario, only the range from 2400::/16 to 2a06::/16 is scanned (it contains more than half of the routes). For the /128 scenario, the whole /108 subnet is scanned. For the /48 scenario, the range from the first /48 to the last one is scanned. For each range, 5000 addresses are picked semi-randomly. This operation is repeated until we get 5000 hits or until 1 million tests have been executed. The relation between the maximum depth and the lookup time is incomplete and I can t explain the difference of performance between the different densities of the /48 scenario. We can extract two important performance points:

• With a full view, the lookup time is 450 ns. This is almost ten times the budget for forwarding at 10 Gbps which is about 50 ns.
• With an almost empty routing table, the lookup time is 150 ns. This is still over the time budget for forwarding at 10 Gbps.

With IPv4, the lookup time for an almost empty table was 20 ns while the lookup time for a full view (500,000 routes) was a bit above 50 ns. How to explain such a difference? First, the maximum depth of the IPv4 LPC-trie with 500,000 routes was 6, while the maximum depth of the IPv6 radix tree for 40,000 routes is 40. Second, while both IPv4 s fib_lookup() and IPv6 s ip6_route_output_flags() functions have a fixed cost implied by the evaluation of routing rules, IPv4 has several optimizations when the rules are left unmodified⁵. Those optimizations are removed on the first modification. If we cancel those optimizations, the lookup time for IPv4 is impacted by about 30 ns. This still leaves a 100 ns difference with IPv6 to be explained. Let s compare how time is spent in each lookup function. Here is a CPU flamegraph for IPv4 s fib_lookup(): Only 50% of the time is spent in the actual route lookup. The remaining time is spent evaluating the routing rules (about 30 ns). This ratio is dependent on the number of routes we inserted (only 1000 in this example). It should be noted the fib_table_lookup() function is executed twice: once with the local routing table and once with the main routing table. The equivalent flamegraph for IPv6 s ip6_route_output_flags() is depicted below: Here is an approximate breakdown on the time spent:

• 50% is spent in the route lookup in the main table,
• 15% is spent in handling locking (IPv4 is using the more efficient RCU mechanism),
• 5% is spent in the route lookup of the local table,
• most of the remaining is spent in routing rule evaluation (about 100 ns)⁶.

Why does the evaluation of routing rules is less efficient with IPv6? Again, I don t have a definitive answer.

History The following graph shows the performance progression of route lookups through Linux history: All kernels are compiled with GCC 4.9 (from Debian Jessie). This version is able to compile older kernels as well as current ones. The kernel configuration is the default one with CONFIG_SMP, CONFIG_IPV6, CONFIG_IPV6_MULTIPLE_TABLES and CONFIG_IPV6_SUBTREES options enabled. Some other unrelated options are enabled to be able to boot them in a virtual machine and run the benchmark. There are three notable performance changes:

• In Linux 3.1, Eric Dumazet delays a bit the copy of route metrics to fix the undesirable sharing of route-specific metrics by all cache entries (commit 21efcfa0ff27). Each cache entry now gets its own metrics, which explains the performance hit for the non-/128 scenarios.
• In Linux 3.9, Yoshifuji Hideaki removes the reference to the neighbor entry in struct rt6_info (commit 887c95cc1da5). This should have lead to a performance increase. The small regression may be due to cache-related issues.
• In Linux 4.2, Martin KaFai Lau prevents the creation of cache entries for most route lookups. The most sensible performance improvement comes with commit 4b32b5ad31a6. The second one is from commit 45e4fd26683c, which effectively removes creation of cache entries, except for PMTU exceptions.

Insertion performance Another interesting performance-related metric is the insertion time. Linux is able to insert a full view in less than two seconds. For some reason, the insertion time is not linear above 50,000 routes and climbs very fast to 60 seconds for 500,000 routes. Despite its more complex insertion logic, the IPv4 subsystem is able to insert 2 million routes in less than 10 seconds.

Memory usage Radix tree nodes (struct fib6_node) and routing information (struct rt6_info) are allocated with the slab allocator⁷. It is therefore possible to extract the information from /proc/slabinfo when the kernel is booted with the slab_nomerge flag:

# sed -ne 2p -e '/^ip6_dst/p' -e '/^fib6_nodes/p' /proc/slabinfo   cut -f1 -d:
   name            <active_objs> <num_objs> <objsize> <objperslab> <pagesperslab>
fib6_nodes         76101  76104     64   63    1
ip6_dst_cache      40090  40090    384   10    1

In the above example, the used memory is 76104 64+40090 384 bytes (about 20 MiB). The number of struct rt6_info matches the number of routes while the number of nodes is roughly twice the number of routes: The memory usage is therefore quite predictable and reasonable, as even a small single-board computer can support several full views (20 MiB for each): The LPC-trie used for IPv4 is more efficient: when 512 MiB of memory is needed for IPv6 to store 1 million routes, only 128 MiB are needed for IPv4. The difference is mainly due to the size of struct rt6_info (336 bytes) compared to the size of IPv4 s struct fib_alias (48 bytes): IPv4 puts most information about next-hops in struct fib_info structures that are shared with many entries.

Conclusion The takeaways from this article are:

• upgrade to Linux 4.2 or more recent to avoid excessive caching,
• route lookups are noticeably slower compared to IPv4 (by an order of magnitude),
• CONFIG_IPV6_MULTIPLE_TABLES option incurs a fixed penalty of 100 ns by lookup,
• memory usage is fair (20 MiB for 40,000 routes).

Compared to IPv4, IPv6 in Linux doesn t foster the same interest, notably in term of optimizations. Hopefully, things are changing as its adoption and use at scale are increasing.

---

1. For a given destination prefix, it s possible to attach source-specific prefixes:

   ip -6 route add 2001:db8:1::/64 \
     from 2001:db8:3::/64 \
     via fe80::1 \
     dev eth0
   

   Lookup is first done on the destination address, then on the source address.
2. This is quite different of the classic scenario where Linux acts as a gateway for a /64 subnet. In this case, the neighbor subsystem stores the reachability information for each host and the routing table only contains a single /64 prefix.
3. The measurements are done in a virtual machine with one vCPU and no neighbors. The host is an Intel Core i5-4670K running at 3.7 GHz during the experiment (CPU governor set to performance). The benchmark is single-threaded. Many lookups are performed and the result reported is the median value. Timings of individual runs are computed from the TSC.
4. Most of the packets in the network are expected to be routed to a destination. However, this also means the backtracking code path is not used in the /128 and /48 scenarios. Having a fallback route gives far different results and make it difficult to ensure we explore the address space correctly.
5. The exact same optimizations could be applied for IPv6. Nobody did it yet.
6. Compiling out table support effectively removes those last 100 ns.
7. There is also per-CPU pointers allocated directly (4 bytes per entry per CPU on a 64-bit architecture). We ignore this detail.

Welcome to the tenth post in the rarely ranting R recommendations series, or R⁴ for short. A few days ago we showed how to tell the linker to strip shared libraries. As discussed in the post, there are two options. One can either set up ~/.R/Makevars by passing the strip-debug option to the linker. Alternatively, one can adjust src/Makevars in the package itself with a bit a Makefile magic. Of course, there is a third way: just run strip --strip-debug over all the shared libraries after the build. As the path is standardized, and the shell does proper globbing, we can just do

$ strip --strip-debug /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/*/libs/*.so

using a double-wildcard to get all packages (in that R package directory) and all their shared libraries. Users on macOS probably want .dylib on the end, users on Windows want another computer as usual (just kidding: use .dll). Either may have to adjust the path which is left as an exercise to the reader. The impact can be Yuge as illustrated in the following dotplot: This illustration is in response to a mailing list post. Last week, someone claimed on r-help that tidyverse would not install on Ubuntu 17.04. And this is of course patently false as many of us build and test on Ubuntu and related Linux systems, Travis runs on it, CRAN tests them etc pp. That poor user had somehow messed up their default gcc version. Anyway: I fired up a Docker container, installed r-base-core plus three required -dev packages (for xml2, openssl, and curl) and ran a single install.packages("tidyverse"). In a nutshell, following the launch of Docker for an Ubuntu 17.04 container, it was just

$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install r-base libcurl4-openssl-dev libssl-dev libxml2-dev
$ apt-get install mg          # a tiny editor
$ mg /etc/R/Rprofile.site     # to add a default CRAN repo
$ R -e 'install.packages("tidyverse")'

which not only worked (as expected) but also installed a whopping fifty-one packages (!!) of which twenty-six contain a shared library. A useful little trick is to run du with proper options to total, summarize, and use human units which reveals that these libraries occupy seventy-eight megabytes:

root@de443801b3fc:/# du -csh /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/*/libs/*so
4.3M    /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/Rcpp/libs/Rcpp.so
2.3M    /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/bindrcpp/libs/bindrcpp.so
144K    /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/colorspace/libs/colorspace.so
204K    /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/curl/libs/curl.so
328K    /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/digest/libs/digest.so
33M     /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/dplyr/libs/dplyr.so
36K     /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/glue/libs/glue.so
3.2M    /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/haven/libs/haven.so
272K    /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/jsonlite/libs/jsonlite.so
52K     /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/lazyeval/libs/lazyeval.so
64K     /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/lubridate/libs/lubridate.so
16K     /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/mime/libs/mime.so
124K    /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/mnormt/libs/mnormt.so
372K    /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/openssl/libs/openssl.so
772K    /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/plyr/libs/plyr.so
92K     /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/purrr/libs/purrr.so
13M     /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/readr/libs/readr.so
4.7M    /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/readxl/libs/readxl.so
1.2M    /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/reshape2/libs/reshape2.so
160K    /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/rlang/libs/rlang.so
928K    /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/scales/libs/scales.so
4.9M    /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/stringi/libs/stringi.so
1.3M    /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/tibble/libs/tibble.so
2.0M    /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/tidyr/libs/tidyr.so
1.2M    /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/tidyselect/libs/tidyselect.so
4.7M    /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/xml2/libs/xml2.so
78M     total
root@de443801b3fc:/# 

Looks like dplyr wins this one at thirty-three megabytes just for its shared library. But with a single stroke of strip we can reduce all this down a lot:

root@de443801b3fc:/# strip --strip-debug /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/*/libs/*so
root@de443801b3fc:/# du -csh /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/*/libs/*so
440K    /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/Rcpp/libs/Rcpp.so
220K    /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/bindrcpp/libs/bindrcpp.so
52K     /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/colorspace/libs/colorspace.so
56K     /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/curl/libs/curl.so
120K    /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/digest/libs/digest.so
2.5M    /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/dplyr/libs/dplyr.so
16K     /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/glue/libs/glue.so
404K    /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/haven/libs/haven.so
76K     /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/jsonlite/libs/jsonlite.so
20K     /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/lazyeval/libs/lazyeval.so
24K     /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/lubridate/libs/lubridate.so
8.0K    /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/mime/libs/mime.so
52K     /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/mnormt/libs/mnormt.so
84K     /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/openssl/libs/openssl.so
76K     /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/plyr/libs/plyr.so
32K     /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/purrr/libs/purrr.so
648K    /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/readr/libs/readr.so
400K    /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/readxl/libs/readxl.so
128K    /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/reshape2/libs/reshape2.so
56K     /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/rlang/libs/rlang.so
100K    /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/scales/libs/scales.so
496K    /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/stringi/libs/stringi.so
124K    /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/tibble/libs/tibble.so
164K    /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/tidyr/libs/tidyr.so
104K    /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/tidyselect/libs/tidyselect.so
344K    /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/xml2/libs/xml2.so
6.6M    total
root@de443801b3fc:/#

Down to six point six megabytes. Not bad for one command. The chart visualizes the respective reductions. Clearly, C++ packages (and their template use) lead to more debugging symbols than plain old C code. But once stripped, the size differences are not that large. And just to be plain, what we showed previously in post #9 does the same, only already at installation stage. The effects are not cumulative.

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

Work on Debian for mobile devices, i.e. telephones, tablets, and handheld computers, continues. During the recent DebConf17 in Montr al, Canada, more than 50 people had a meeting to reconsider opportunities and challenges for Debian on mobile devices. A number of devices were shown at DebConf:

• PocketCHIP: A very small handheld computer with keyboard, Wi-Fi, USB, and Bluetooth, running Debian 8 (Jessie) or 9 (Stretch).
• Pyra: A modular handheld computer with a touchscreen, gaming controls, Wi-Fi, keyboard, multiple USB ports and SD card slots, and an optional modem for either Europe or the USA. It will come preinstalled with Debian.
• Samsung Galaxy S Relay 4G: An Android smartphone featuring a physical keyboard, which can already run portions of Debian userspace on the Android kernel. Kernel upstreaming is on the way.
• ZeroPhone: An open-source smartphone based on Raspberry Pi Zero, with a small screen, classic telephone keypad and hardware switches for telephony, Wi-Fi, and the microphone. It is running Debian-based Raspbian OS.

The photo (click to enlarge) shows all four devices, together with a Nokia N900, which was the first Linux-based smartphone by Nokia, running Debian-based Maemo and a completely unrelated Gnuk cryptographic token, which just sneaked into the setting. If you like to participate, please

• check the Debian Mobile wiki page,
• subscribe to the Debian mobile mailing list,
• or join the the #debian-mobile IRC chatroom at irc.oftc.net.

RProtoBuf provides R bindings for the Google Protocol Buffers ("ProtoBuf") data encoding and serialization library used and released by Google, and deployed fairly widely in numerous projects as a language and operating-system agnostic protocol. A new releases RProtoBuf 0.4.10 just appeared on CRAN. It is a maintenance releases replacing one leftover errorenous use of package= in .Call with the correct PACKAGE= (as requsted by CRAN). It also integrates a small robustification in the deserializer when encountering invalide objects; this was both reported and fixed by Jeffrey Shen.

Changes in RProtoBuf version 0.4.10 (2017-08-13)

• More careful operation in deserializer checking for a valid class attribute (Jeffrey Shen in #29 fixing #28)
• At the request of CRAN, correct one .Call() argument to PACKAGE=; update routine registration accordingly

CRANberries also provides a diff to the previous release. The RProtoBuf page has an older package vignette, a 'quick' overview vignette, a unit test summary vignette, and the pre-print for the JSS paper. Questions, comments etc should go to the GitHub issue tracker off the GitHub repo.

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