On an episode of Postgres FM, the hosts had a (very brief) discussion of data encryption in PostgreSQL. While Postgres FM is a podcast well worth a subscribe, the hosts aren t data security experts, and so as someone who builds a queryable database encryption system, I found the coverage to be somewhat lacking. I figured I d provide a more complete survey of the available options for PostgreSQL-related data encryption.

The Status Quo By default, when you install PostgreSQL, there is no data encryption at all. That means that anyone who gets access to any part of the system can read all the data they have access to. This is, of course, not peculiar to PostgreSQL: basically everything works much the same way. What s stopping an attacker from nicking off with all your data is the fact that they can t access the database at all. The things that are acting as protection are perimeter defences, like putting the physical equipment running the server in a secure datacenter, firewalls to prevent internet randos connecting to the database, and strong passwords. This is referred to as tortoise security it s tough on the outside, but soft on the inside. Once that outer shell is cracked, the delicious, delicious data is ripe for the picking, and there s absolutely nothing to stop a miscreant from going to town and making off with everything. It s a good idea to plan your defenses on the assumption you re going to get breached sooner or later. Having good defence-in-depth includes denying the attacker to your data even if they compromise the database. This is where encryption comes in.

Storage-Layer Defences: Disk / Volume Encryption To protect against the compromise of the storage that your database uses (physical disks, EBS volumes, and the like), it s common to employ encryption-at-rest, such as full-disk encryption, or volume encryption. These mechanisms protect against offline attacks, but provide no protection while the system is actually running. And therein lies the rub: your database is always running, so encryption at rest typically doesn t provide much value. If you re running physical systems, disk encryption is essential, but more to prevent accidental data loss, due to things like failing to wipe drives before disposing of them, rather than physical theft. In systems where volume encryption is only a tickbox away, it s also worth enabling, if only to prevent inane questions from your security auditors. Relying solely on storage-layer defences, though, is very unlikely to provide any appreciable value in preventing data loss.

Database-Layer Defences: Transparent Database Encryption If you ve used proprietary database systems in high-security environments, you might have come across Transparent Database Encryption (TDE). There are also a couple of proprietary extensions for PostgreSQL that provide this functionality. TDE is essentially encryption-at-rest implemented inside the database server. As such, it has much the same drawbacks as disk encryption: few real-world attacks are thwarted by it. There is a very small amount of additional protection, in that physical level backups (as produced by pg_basebackup) are protected, but the vast majority of attacks aren t stopped by TDE. Any attacker who can access the database while it s running can just ask for an SQL-level dump of the stored data, and they ll get the unencrypted data quick as you like.

Application-Layer Defences: Field Encryption If you want to take the database out of the threat landscape, you really need to encrypt sensitive data before it even gets near the database. This is the realm of field encryption, more commonly known as application-level encryption. This technique involves encrypting each field of data before it is sent to be stored in the database, and then decrypting it again after it s retrieved from the database. Anyone who gets the data from the database directly, whether via a backup or a direct connection, is out of luck: they can t decrypt the data, and therefore it s worthless. There are, of course, some limitations of this technique. For starters, every ORM and data mapper out there has rolled their own encryption format, meaning that there s basically zero interoperability. This isn t a problem if you build everything that accesses the database using a single framework, but if you ever feel the need to migrate, or use the database from multiple codebases, you re likely in for a rough time. The other big problem of traditional application-level encryption is that, when the database can t understand what data its storing, it can t run queries against that data. So if you want to encrypt, say, your users dates of birth, but you also need to be able to query on that field, you need to choose between one or the other: you can t have both at the same time. You may think to yourself, but this isn t any good, an attacker that breaks into my application can still steal all my data! . That is true, but security is never binary. The name of the game is reducing the attack surface, making it harder for an attacker to succeed. If you leave all the data unencrypted in the database, an attacker can steal all your data by breaking into the database or by breaking into the application. Encrypting the data reduces the attacker s options, and allows you to focus your resources on hardening the application against attack, safe in the knowledge that an attacker who gets into the database directly isn t going to get anything valuable.

Sidenote: The Curious Case of pg_crypto PostgreSQL ships a contrib module called pg_crypto, which provides encryption and decryption functions. This sounds ideal to use for encrypting data within our applications, as it s available no matter what we re using to write our application. It avoids the problem of framework-specific cryptography, because you call the same PostgreSQL functions no matter what language you re using, which produces the same output. However, I don t recommend ever using pg_crypto s data encryption functions, and I doubt you will find many other cryptographic engineers who will, either. First up, and most horrifyingly, it requires you to pass the long-term keys to the database server. If there s an attacker actively in the database server, they can capture the keys as they come in, which means all the data encrypted using that key is exposed. Sending the keys can also result in the keys ending up in query logs, both on the client and server, which is obviously a terrible result. Less scary, but still very concerning, is that pg_crypto s available cryptography is, to put it mildly, antiquated. We have a lot of newer, safer, and faster techniques for data encryption, that aren t available in pg_crypto. This means that if you do use it, you re leaving a lot on the table, and need to have skilled cryptographic engineers on hand to avoid the potential pitfalls. In short: friends don t let friends use pg_crypto.

The Future: Enquo All this brings us to the project I run: Enquo. It takes application-layer encryption to a new level, by providing a language- and framework-agnostic cryptosystem that also enables encrypted data to be efficiently queried by the database. So, you can encrypt your users dates of birth, in such a way that anyone with the appropriate keys can query the database to return, say, all users over the age of 18, but an attacker just sees unintelligible gibberish. This should greatly increase the amount of data that can be encrypted, and as the Enquo project expands its available data types and supported languages, the coverage of encrypted data will grow and grow. My eventual goal is to encrypt all data, all the time. If this appeals to you, visit enquo.org to use or contribute to the open source project, or EnquoDB.com for commercial support and hosted database options.

SSH offers several forms of authentication, such as passwords and public keys. The latter are considered more secure. However, password authentication remains prevalent, particularly with network equipment.¹ A classic solution to avoid typing a password for each connection is sshpass, or its more correct variant passh. Here is a wrapper for Zsh, getting the password from pass, a simple password manager:² This approach is a bit brittle as it requires to parse the output of the ssh command to look for a password prompt. Moreover, if no password is required, the password manager is still invoked. Since OpenSSH 8.4, we can use SSH_ASKPASS and SSH_ASKPASS_REQUIRE instead: If the password is incorrect, we can display a prompt on the second tentative: A possible improvement is to use a different password entry depending on the remote host:³ It is also possible to make scp invoke our custom ssh function: For the complete code, have a look at my zshrc. As an alternative, you can put the ssh() function body into its own script file and replace command ssh with /usr/bin/ssh to avoid an unwanted recursive call. In this case, the scp() function is not needed anymore.

Farewell from the Reproducible Builds summit, which just took place in Hamburg, Germany: This year, we were thrilled to host the seventh edition of this exciting event. Topics covered this year included:

• Project updates from openSUSE, Fedora, Debian, ElectroBSD, Reproducible Central and NixOS
• Mapping the big picture
• Towards a snapshot service
• Understanding user-facing needs and personas
• Language-specific package managers
• Defining our definitions
• Creating a Ten Commandments of reproducibility
• Embedded systems
• Next steps in GNU Guix reproducibility
• Signature storage and sharing
• Public verification services
• Verification use cases
• Web site audiences
• Enabling new projects to be born reproducible
• Collecting reproducibility success stories
• Reproducibility s relationship to SBOMs
• SBOMs for RPM-based distributions
• Filtering diffoscope output
• Reproducibility of filesystem images, filesystems and containers
• Using verification data
• A deep-dive on Fedora and Arch Linux package reproducibility
• Debian rebuild archive service discussion

as well as countless informal discussions and hacking sessions into the night. Projects represented at the venue included:

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A huge thanks to our sponsors and partners for making the event possible:
If you weren t able to make it this year, don t worry; just look out for an announcement in 2024 for the next event.

"Why does ACPI exist" - - the greatest thread in the history of forums, locked by a moderator after 12,239 pages of heated debate, wait no let me start again.

Why does ACPI exist? In the beforetimes power management on x86 was done by jumping to an opaque BIOS entry point and hoping it would do the right thing. It frequently didn't. We called this Advanced Power Management (Advanced because before this power management involved custom drivers for every machine and everyone agreed that this was a bad idea), and it involved the firmware having to save and restore the state of every piece of hardware in the system. This meant that assumptions about hardware configuration were baked into the firmware - failed to program your graphics card exactly the way the BIOS expected? Hurrah! It's only saved and restored a subset of the state that you configured and now potential data corruption for you. The developers of ACPI made the reasonable decision that, well, maybe since the OS was the one setting state in the first place, the OS should restore it.

So far so good. But some state is fundamentally device specific, at a level that the OS generally ignores. How should this state be managed? One way to do that would be to have the OS know about the device specific details. Unfortunately that means you can't ship the computer without having OS support for it, which means having OS support for every device (exactly what we'd got away from with APM). This, uh, was not an option the PC industry seriously considered. The alternative is that you ship something that abstracts the details of the specific hardware and makes that abstraction available to the OS. This is what ACPI does, and it's also what things like Device Tree do. Both provide static information about how the platform is configured, which can then be consumed by the OS and avoid needing device-specific drivers or configuration to be built-in.

The main distinction between Device Tree and ACPI is that Device Tree is purely a description of the hardware that exists, and so still requires the OS to know what's possible - if you add a new type of power controller, for instance, you need to add a driver for that to the OS before you can express that via Device Tree. ACPI decided to include an interpreted language to allow vendors to expose functionality to the OS without the OS needing to know about the underlying hardware. So, for instance, ACPI allows you to associate a device with a function to power down that device. That function may, when executed, trigger a bunch of register accesses to a piece of hardware otherwise not exposed to the OS, and that hardware may then cut the power rail to the device to power it down entirely. And that can be done without the OS having to know anything about the control hardware.

How is this better than just calling into the firmware to do it? Because the fact that ACPI declares that it's going to access these registers means the OS can figure out that it shouldn't, because it might otherwise collide with what the firmware is doing. With APM we had no visibility into that - if the OS tried to touch the hardware at the same time APM did, boom, almost impossible to debug failures (This is why various hardware monitoring drivers refuse to load by default on Linux - the firmware declares that it's going to touch those registers itself, so Linux decides not to in order to avoid race conditions and potential hardware damage. In many cases the firmware offers a collaborative interface to obtain the same data, and a driver can be written to get that. this bug comment discusses this for a specific board)

Unfortunately ACPI doesn't entirely remove opaque firmware from the equation - ACPI methods can still trigger System Management Mode, which is basically a fancy way to say "Your computer stops running your OS, does something else for a while, and you have no idea what". This has all the same issues that APM did, in that if the hardware isn't in exactly the state the firmware expects, bad things can happen. While historically there were a bunch of ACPI-related issues because the spec didn't define every single possible scenario and also there was no conformance suite (eg, should the interpreter be multi-threaded? Not defined by spec, but influences whether a specific implementation will work or not!), these days overall compatibility is pretty solid and the vast majority of systems work just fine - but we do still have some issues that are largely associated with System Management Mode.

One example is a recent Lenovo one, where the firmware appears to try to poke the NVME drive on resume. There's some indication that this is intended to deal with transparently unlocking self-encrypting drives on resume, but it seems to do so without taking IOMMU configuration into account and so things explode. It's kind of understandable why a vendor would implement something like this, but it's also kind of understandable that doing so without OS cooperation may end badly.

This isn't something that ACPI enabled - in the absence of ACPI firmware vendors would just be doing this unilaterally with even less OS involvement and we'd probably have even more of these issues. Ideally we'd "simply" have hardware that didn't support transitioning back to opaque code, but we don't (ARM has basically the same issue with TrustZone). In the absence of the ideal world, by and large ACPI has been a net improvement in Linux compatibility on x86 systems. It certainly didn't remove the "Everything is Windows" mentality that many vendors have, but it meant we largely only needed to ensure that Linux behaved the same way as Windows in a finite number of ways (ie, the behaviour of the ACPI interpreter) rather than in every single hardware driver, and so the chances that a new machine will work out of the box are much greater than they were in the pre-ACPI period.

There's an alternative universe where we decided to teach the kernel about every piece of hardware it should run on. Fortunately (or, well, unfortunately) we've seen that in the ARM world. Most device-specific simply never reaches mainline, and most users are stuck running ancient kernels as a result. Imagine every x86 device vendor shipping their own kernel optimised for their hardware, and now imagine how well that works out given the quality of their firmware. Does that really seem better to you?

It's understandable why ACPI has a poor reputation. But it's also hard to figure out what would work better in the real world. We could have built something similar on top of Open Firmware instead but the distinction wouldn't be terribly meaningful - we'd just have Forth instead of the ACPI bytecode language. Longing for a non-ACPI world without presenting something that's better and actually stands a reasonable chance of adoption doesn't make the world a better place.

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Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language and is widely used by (currently) 1110 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 31.2 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 563 times according to Google Scholar. This release brings upstream bugfix releases 12.6.5 (sparse matrix corner case) and 12.6.6 with an ARPACK correction. Conrad released it this this morning, I had been running reverse dependency checks anyway and knew we were in good shape so for once I did not await a full run against the now over 1100 (!!) packages using RcppArmadillo. This release also contains a change I prepared on Sunday and which helps with much-criticized (and rightly I may add) insistence by CRAN concerning throttling . The motivation is understandable: CRAN tests many packages at once on beefy servers and can ill afford tests going off and requesting numerous cores. But rather than providing a global setting at their end, CRAN insists that each package (!!) deals with this. The recent traffic on the helpful-as-ever r-pkg-devel mailing clearly shows that this confuses quite a few package developers. Some have admitted to simply turning examples and tests off: a net loss for all of us. Now, Armadillo defaults to using up to eight cores (which is enough to upset CRAN) when running with OpenMP (which is generally only on Linux for reasons I rather not get into ). With this release I expose a helper functions (from OpenMP) to limit this. I also set up an example package and repo RcppArmadilloOpenMPEx detailing this, and added a demonstration of how to use the new throttlers to the fastLm example. I hope this proves useful to users of the package. The set of changes since the last CRAN release follows.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.6.6.0 (2023-10-31)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 12.6.6 (Cortisol Retox)
  • Fix eigs_sym(), eigs_gen() and svds() to generate deterministic results in ARPACK mode
• Add helper functions to set and get the number of OpenMP threads
• Store initial thread count at package load and use in thread-throttling helper (and resetter) suitable for CRAN constraints

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.6.5.0 (2023-10-14)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 12.6.5 (Cortisol Retox)
  • Fix for corner-case bug in handling sparse matrices with no non-zero elements

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

The Daily Kos has an interesting article about a new more effective method of desalination [1]. Here is a video of a crazy guy zapping things with 100 car batteries [2]. This is sonmething you should avoid if you want to die of natural causes. Does dying while making a science video count for a Darwin Award? A Hacker News comment has an interesting explanation of Unix signals [3]. Interesting documentary on the rise of mega corporations [4]. We need to split up Google, Facebook, and Amazon ASAP. Also every phone platform should have competing app stores. Dave Taht gave an interesting LCA lecture about Internet congestion control [5]. He also referenced a web site about projects to alleviate the buffer bloat problem [6]. This tiny event based sensor is an interesting product [7]. It could lead to some interesting (but possibly invasive) technological developments in phones. Tara Barnett s Everything Open lecture Swiss Army GLAM had some interesting ideas for community software development [8]. Having lots of small programs communicating with APIs is an interesting way to get people into development. Actually Hardcore Overclocking has an interesting youtube video about the differences between x8 and x14 DDR4 DIMMs [9]. Interesting YouTube video from someone who helped the Kurds defend against Turkey about how war tunnels work [10]. He makes a strong case that the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip won t be easy or pleasant.

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/ywoxq29u
• [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywaTX-nLm6Y
• [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37902515
• [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy8ogOaKk4Y
• [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeCIbCzGY6k
• [6] https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/
• [7] https://www.prophesee.ai/event-based-sensor-genx320/
• [8] https://tinyurl.com/yoo435ra
• [9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=w2bFzQTQ9aI
• [10] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMaQn6eBroY

Recently I completed a small project, including an embedded microcontroller. For me, using the popular Arduino IDE, and C, was a mistake. The experience with Rust was better, but still very exciting, and not in a good way. Here follows the rant.

• Introduction
• Arduino IDE
• Writing C again
• Rust on the DigiSpark
• RIIR (Rewrite It In Rust)
• An offer of help
• Conclusions

Introduction In a recent project (I ll write about the purpose, and the hardware in another post) I chose to use a DigiSpark board. This is a small board with a USB-A tongue (but not a proper plug), and an ATTiny85 microcontroller, This chip has 8 pins and is quite small really, but it was plenty for my application. By choosing something popular, I hoped for convenient hardware, and an uncomplicated experience. Convenient hardware, I got. Arduino IDE The usual way to program these boards is via an IDE. I thought I d go with the flow and try that. I knew these were closely related to actual Arduinos and saw that the IDE package arduino was in Debian. But it turns out that the Debian package s version doesn t support the DigiSpark. (AFAICT from the list it offered me, I m not sure it supports any ATTiny85 board.) Also, disturbingly, its board manager seemed to be offering to install board support, suggesting it would download stuff from the internet and run it. That wouldn t be acceptable for my main laptop. I didn t expect to be doing much programming or debugging, and the project didn t have significant security requirements: the chip, in my circuit, has only a very narrow ability do anything to the real world, and no network connection of any kind. So I thought it would be tolerable to do the project on my low-security video laptop . That s the machine where I m prepared to say yes to installing random software off the internet. So I went to the upstream Arduino site and downloaded a tarball containing the Arduino IDE. After unpacking that in /opt it ran and produced a pointy-clicky IDE, as expected. I had already found a 3rd-party tutorial saying I needed to add a magic URL (from the DigiSpark s vendor) in the preferences. That indeed allowed it to download a whole pile of stuff. Compilers, bootloader clients, god knows what. However, my tiny test program didn t make it to the board. Half-buried in a too-small window was an error message about the board s bootloader ( Micronucleus ) being too new. The boards I had came pre-flashed with micronucleus 2.2. Which is hardly new, But even so the official Arduino IDE (or maybe the DigiSpark s board package?) still contains an old version. So now we have all the downsides of curl bash-ware, but we re lacking the it s up to date and it just works upsides. Further digging found some random forum posts which suggested simply downloading a newer micronucleus and manually stuffing it into the right place: one overwrites a specific file, in the middle the heaps of stuff that the Arduino IDE s board support downloader squirrels away in your home directory. (In my case, the home directory of the untrusted shared user on the video laptop,) So, whatever . I did that. And it worked! Having demo d my ability to run code on the board, I set about writing my program. Writing C again The programming language offered via the Arduino IDE is C. It s been a little while since I started a new thing in C. After having spent so much of the last several years writing Rust. C s primitiveness quickly started to grate, and the program couldn t easily be as DRY as I wanted (Don t Repeat Yourself, see Wilson et al, 2012, 4, p.6). But, I carried on; after all, this was going to be quite a small job. Soon enough I had a program that looked right and compiled. Before testing it in circuit, I wanted to do some QA. So I wrote a simulator harness that #included my Arduino source file, and provided imitations of the few Arduino library calls my program used. As an side advantage, I could build and run the simulation on my main machine, in my normal development environment (Emacs, make, etc.). The simulator runs confirmed the correct behaviour. (Perhaps there would have been some more faithful simulation tool, but the Arduino IDE didn t seem to offer it, and I wasn t inclined to go further down that kind of path.) So I got the video laptop out, and used the Arduino IDE to flash the program. It didn t run properly. It hung almost immediately. Some very ad-hoc debugging via led-blinking (like printf debugging, only much worse) convinced me that my problem was as follows: Arduino C has 16-bit ints. My test harness was on my 64-bit Linux machine. C was autoconverting things (when building for the micrcocontroller). The way the Arduino IDE ran the compiler didn t pass the warning options necessary to spot narrowing implicit conversions. Those warnings aren t the default in C in general because C compilers hate us all for compatibility reasons. I don t know why those warnings are not the default in the Arduino IDE, but my guess is that they didn t want to bother poor novice programmers with messages from the compiler explaining how their program is quite possibly wrong. After all, users don t like error messages so we shouldn t report errors. And novice programmers are especially fazed by error messages so it s better to just let them struggle themselves with the arcane mysteries of undefined behaviour in C? The Arduino IDE does offer a dropdown for compiler warnings . The default is None. Setting it to All didn t produce anything about my integer overflow bugs. And, the output was very hard to find anyway because the log window has a constant stream of strange messages from javax.jmdns, with hex DNS packet dumps. WTF. Other things that were vexing about the Arduino IDE: it has fairly fixed notions (which don t seem to be documented) about how your files and directories ought to be laid out, and magical machinery for finding things you put nearby its sketch (as it calls them) and sticking them in its ear, causing lossage. It has a tendency to become confused if you edit files under its feet (e.g. with git checkout). It wasn t really very suited to a workflow where principal development occurs elsewhere. And, important settings such as the project s clock speed, or even the target board, or the compiler warning settings to use weren t stored in the project directory along with the actual code. I didn t look too hard, but I presume they must be in a dotfile somewhere. This is madness. Apparently there is an Arduino CLI too. But I was already quite exasperated, and I didn t like the idea of going so far off the beaten path, when the whole point of using all this was to stay with popular tooling and share fate with others. (How do these others cope? I have no idea.) As for the integer overflow bug: I didn t seriously consider trying to figure out how to control in detail the C compiler options passed by the Arduino IDE. (Perhaps this is possible, but not really documented?) I did consider trying to run a cross-compiler myself from the command line, with appropriate warning options, but that would have involved providing (or stubbing, again) the Arduino/DigiSpark libraries (and bugs could easily lurk at that interface). Instead, I thought, if only I had written the thing in Rust . But that wasn t possible, was it? Does Rust even support this board? Rust on the DigiSpark I did a cursory web search and found a very useful blog post by Dylan Garrett. This encouraged me to think it might be a workable strategy. I looked at the instructions there. It seemed like I could run them via the privsep arrangement I use to protect myself when developing using upstream cargo packages from crates.io. I got surprisingly far surprisingly quickly. It did, rather startlingly, cause my rustup to download a random recent Nightly Rust, but I have six of those already for other Reasons. Very quickly I got the trinket LED blink example, referenced by Dylan s blog post, to compile. Manually copying the file to the video laptop allowed me to run the previously-downloaded micronucleus executable and successfully run the blink example on my board! I thought a more principled approach to the bootloader client might allow a more convenient workflow. I found the upstream Micronucleus git releases and tags, and had a look over its source code, release dates, etc. It seemed plausible, so I compiled v2.6 from source. That was a success: now I could build and install a Rust program onto my board, from the command line, on my main machine. No more pratting about with the video laptop. I had got further, more quickly, with Rust, than with the Arduino IDE, and the outcome and workflow was superior. So, basking in my success, I copied the directory containing the example into my own project, renamed it, and adjusted the path references. That didn t work. Now it didn t build. Even after I copied about .cargo/config.toml and rust-toolchain.toml it didn t build, producing a variety of exciting messages, depending what precisely I tried. I don t have detailed logs of my flailing: the instructions say to build it by cd ing to the subdirectory, and, given that what I was trying to do was to not follow those instructions, it didn t seem sensible to try to prepare a proper repro so I could file a ticket. I wasn t optimistic about investigating it more deeply myself: I have some experience of fighting cargo, and it s not usually fun. Looking at some of the build control files, things seemed quite complicated. Additionally, not all of the crates are on crates.io. I have no idea why not. So, I would need to supply local copies of them anyway. I decided to just git subtree add the avr-hal git tree. (That seemed better than the approach taken by the avr-hal project s cargo template, since that template involve a cargo dependency on a foreign git repository. Perhaps it would be possible to turn them into path dependencies, but given that I had evidence of file-location-sensitive behaviour, which I didn t feel like I wanted to spend time investigating, using that seems like it would possibly have invited more trouble. Also, I don t like package templates very much. They re a form of clone-and-hack: you end up stuck with whatever bugs or oddities exist in the version of the template which was current when you started.) Since I couldn t get things to build outside avr-hal, I edited the example, within avr-hal, to refer to my (one) program.rs file outside avr-hal, with a #[path] instruction. That s not pretty, but it worked. I also had to write a nasty shell script to work around the lack of good support in my nailing-cargo privsep tool for builds where cargo must be invoked in a deep subdirectory, and/or Cargo.lock isn t where it expects, and/or the target directory containing build products is in a weird place. It also has to filter the output from cargo to adjust the pathnames in the error messages. Otherwise, running both cd A; cargo build and cd B; cargo build from a Makefile produces confusing sets of error messages, some of which contain filenames relative to A and some relative to B, making it impossible for my Emacs to reliably find the right file. RIIR (Rewrite It In Rust) Having got my build tooling sorted out I could go back to my actual program. I translated the main program, and the simulator, from C to Rust, more or less line-by-line. I made the Rust version of the simulator produce the same output format as the C one. That let me check that the two programs had the same (simulated) behaviour. Which they did (after fixing a few glitches in the simulator log formatting). Emboldened, I flashed the Rust version of my program to the DigiSpark. It worked right away! RIIR had caused the bug to vanish. Of course, to rewrite the program in Rust, and get it to compile, it was necessary to be careful about the types of all the various integers, so that s not so surprising. Indeed, it was the point. I was then able to refactor the program to be a bit more natural and DRY, and improve some internal interfaces. Rust s greater power, compared to C, made those cleanups easier, so making them worthwhile. However, when doing real-world testing I found a weird problem: my timings were off. Measured, the real program was too fast by a factor of slightly more than 2. A bit of searching (and searching my memory) revealed the cause: I was using a board template for an Adafruit Trinket. The Trinket has a clock speed of 8MHz. But the DigiSpark runs at 16.5MHz. (This is discussed in a ticket against one of the C/C++ libraries supporting the ATTiny85 chip.) The Arduino IDE had offered me a choice of clock speeds. I have no idea how that dropdown menu took effect; I suspect it was adding prelude code to adjust the clock prescaler. But my attempts to mess with the CPU clock prescaler register by hand at the start of my Rust program didn t bear fruit. So instead, I adopted a bodge: since my code has (for code structure reasons, amongst others) only one place where it dealt with the underlying hardware s notion of time, I simply changed my delay function to adjust the passed-in delay values, compensating for the wrong clock speed. There was probably a more principled way. For example I could have (re)based my work on either of the two unmerged open MRs which added proper support for the DigiSpark board, rather than abusing the Adafruit Trinket definition. But, having a nearly-working setup, and an explanation for the behaviour, I preferred the narrower fix to reopening any cans of worms. An offer of help As will be obvious from this posting, I m not an expert in dev tools for embedded systems. Far from it. This area seems like quite a deep swamp, and I m probably not the person to help drain it. (Frankly, much of the improvement work ought to be done, and paid for, by hardware vendors.) But, as a full Member of the Debian Project, I have considerable gatekeeping authority there. I also have much experience of software packaging, build systems, and release management. If anyone wants to try to improve the situation with embedded tooling in Debian, and is willing to do the actual packaging work. I would be happy to advise, and to review and sponsor your contributions. An obvious candidate: it seems to me that micronucleus could easily be in Debian. Possibly a DigiSpark board definition could be provided to go with the arduino package. Unfortunately, IMO Debian s Rust packaging tooling and workflows are very poor, and the first of my suggestions for improvement wasn t well received. So if you need help with improving Rust packages in Debian, please talk to the Debian Rust Team yourself. Conclusions Embedded programming is still rather a mess and probably always will be. Embedded build systems can be bizarre. Documentation is scant. You re often expected to download board support packages full of mystery binaries, from the board vendor (or others). Dev tooling is maddening, especially if aimed at novice programmers. You want version control? Hermetic tracking of your project s build and install configuration? Actually to be told by the compiler when you write obvious bugs? You re way off the beaten track. As ever, Free Software is under-resourced and the maintainers are often busy, or (reasonably) have other things to do with their lives. All is not lost Rust can be a significantly better bet than C for embedded software: The Rust compiler will catch a good proportion of programming errors, and an experienced Rust programmer can arrange (by suitable internal architecture) to catch nearly all of them. When writing for a chip in the middle of some circuit, where debugging involves staring an LED or a multimeter, that s precisely what you want. Rust embedded dev tooling was, in this case, considerably better. Still quite chaotic and strange, and less mature, perhaps. But: significantly fewer mystery downloads, and significantly less crazy deviations from the language s normal build system. Overall, less bad software supply chain integrity. The ATTiny85 chip, and the DigiSpark board, served my hardware needs very well. (More about the hardware aspects of this project in a future posting.)

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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.

Freexian Meetup, by Stefano Rivera, Utkarsh Gupta, et al. During DebConf, Freexian organized a meetup for its collaborators and those interested in learning more about Freexian and its services. It was well received and many people interested in Freexian showed up. Some developers who were interested in contributing to LTS came to get more details about joining the project. And some prospective customers came to get to know us and ask questions. Sadly, the tragic loss of Abraham shook DebConf, both individually and structurally. The meetup got rescheduled to a small room without video coverage. With that, we still had a wholesome interaction and here s a quick picture from the meetup taken by Utkarsh (which is also why he s missing!).

Debusine, by Rapha l Hertzog, et al. Freexian has been investing into debusine for a while, but development speed is about to increase dramatically thanks to funding from SovereignTechFund.de. Rapha l laid out the 5 milestones of the funding contract, and filed the issues for the first milestone. Together with Enrico and Stefano, they established a workflow for the expanded team. Among the first steps of this milestone, Enrico started to work on a developer-friendly description of debusine that we can use when we reach out to the many Debian contributors that we will have to interact with. And Rapha l started the design work of the autopkgtest and lintian tasks, i.e. what s the interface to schedule such tasks, what behavior and what associated options do we support? At this point you might wonder what debusine is supposed to be let us try to answer this: Debusine manages scheduling and distribution of Debian-related build and QA tasks to a network of worker machines. It also manages the resulting artifacts and provides the results in an easy to consume way. We want to make it easy for Debian contributors to leverage all the great QA tools that Debian provides. We want to build the next generation of Debian s build infrastructure, one that will continue to reliably do what it already does, but that will also enable distribution-wide experiments, custom package repositories and custom workflows with advanced package reviews. If this all sounds interesting to you, don t hesitate to watch the project on salsa.debian.org and to contribute.

lpr/lpd in Debian, by Thorsten Alteholz During Debconf23, Till Kamppeter presented CPDB (Common Print Dialog Backend), a new way to handle print queues. After this talk it was discussed whether the old lpr/lpd based printing system could be abandoned in Debian or whether there is still demand for it. So Thorsten asked on the debian-devel email list whether anybody uses it. Oddly enough, these old packages are still useful:

• Within a small network it is easier to distribute a printcap file, than to properly configure cups clients.
• One of the biggest manufacturers of WLAN router and DSL boxes only supports raw queues when attaching an USB printer to their hardware. Admittedly the CPDB still has problems with such raw queues.
• The Pharos printing system at MIT is still lpd-based.

As a result, the lpr/lpd stuff is not yet ready to be abandoned and Thorsten will adopt the relevant packages (or rather move them under the umbrella of the debian-printing team). Though it is not planned to develop new features, those packages should at least have a maintainer. This month Thorsten adopted rlpr, an utility for lpd printing without using /etc/printcap. The next one he is working on is lprng, a lpr/lpd printer spooling system. If you know of any other package that is also needed and still maintained by the QA team, please tell Thorsten.

/usr-merge, by Helmut Grohne Discussion about lifting the file move moratorium has been initiated with the CTTE and the release team. A formal lift is dependent on updating debootstrap in older suites though. A significant number of packages can automatically move their systemd unit files if dh_installsystemd and systemd.pc change their installation targets. Unfortunately, doing so makes some packages FTBFS and therefore patches have been filed. The analysis tool, dumat, has been enhanced to better understand which upgrade scenarios are considered supported to reduce false positive bug filings and gained a mode for local operation on a .changes file meant for inclusion in salsa-ci. The filing of bugs from dumat is still manual to improve the quality of reports. Since September, the moratorium has been lifted.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Rapha l updated Django s backport in bullseye-backports to match the latest security release that was published in bookworm. Tracker.debian.org is still using that backport.
• Helmut Grohne sent 13 patches for cross build failures.
• Helmut Grohne performed a maintenance upload of debvm enabling its use in autopkgtests.
• Helmut Grohne wrote an API-compatible reimplementation of autopkgtest-build-qemu. It is powered by mmdebstrap, therefore unprivileged, EFI-only and will soon be included in mmdebstrap.
• Santiago continued the work regarding how to make it easier to (automatically) test reverse dependencies. An example of the ongoing work was presented during the Salsa CI BoF at DebConf 23.
  In fact, omniorb-dfsg test pipelines as the above were used for the omniorb-dfsg 4.3.0 transition, verifying how the reverse dependencies (tango, pytango and omnievents) were built and how their autopkgtest jobs run with the to-be-uploaded omniorb-dfsg new release.
• Utkarsh and Stefano attended and helped run DebConf 23. Also continued winding up DebConf 22 accounting.
• Anton Gladky did some science team uploads to fix RC bugs.

Review: The Cassini Division, by Ken MacLeod

Series:	Fall Revolution #3
Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	1998
Printing:	August 2000
ISBN:	0-8125-6858-3
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	305

The Cassini Division is the third book in the Fall Revolution series and a fairly direct sequel (albeit with different protagonists) to The Stone Canal. This is not a good place to start the series. It's impossible to talk about the plot of this book without discussing the future history of this series, which arguably includes some spoilers for The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal. I don't think the direction of history matters that much in enjoying the previous books, but read the first two books of the series before this review if you want to avoid all spoilers. When the Outwarders uploaded themselves and went fast, they did a lot of strange things: an interstellar probe contrary to all known laws of physics, the disassembly of Ganymede, and the Malley Mile, which plays a significant role in The Stone Canal. They also crashed the Earth. This was not entirely their fault. There were a lot of politics, religious fundamentalism, and plagues in play as well. But the storm of viruses broadcast from their transformed Jupiter shut down essentially all computing equipment on Earth, which set off much of the chaos. The results were catastrophic, and also politically transformative. Now, the Solar Union is a nearly unified anarchosocialist society, with only scattered enclaves of non-cooperators left outside that structure. Ellen May Ngewthu is a leader of the Cassini Division, the bulwark that stands between humans and the Outwarders. The Division ruthlessly destroys any remnant or probe that dares rise out of Jupiter's atmosphere, ensuring that the Outwarders, whatever they have become after untold generations of fast evolution, stay isolated to the one planet they have absorbed. The Division is very good at what they do. But there is a potential gap in that line of defense: there are fast folk in storage at the other end of the Malley Mile, on New Mars, and who knows what the deranged capitalists there will do or what forces they might unleash. The one person who knows a path through the Malley Mile isn't talking, so Ellen goes in search of the next best thing: the non-cooperator scientist Isambard Kingdom Malley. I am now thoroughly annoyed at how politics are handled in this series, and much less confused by the frequency with which MacLeod won Prometheus Awards from the Libertarian Futurist Society. Some of this is my own fault for having too high of hopes for political SF, but nothing in this series so far has convinced me that MacLeod is seriously engaging with political systems. Instead, the world-building to date makes the classic libertarian mistake of thinking societies will happily abandon stability and predictability in favor of their strange definition of freedom. The Solar Union is based on what Ellen calls the true knowledge, which is worth quoting in full so that you know what kind of politics we're talking about:

Life is a process of breaking down and using other matter, and if need be, other life. Therefore, life is aggression, and successful life is successful aggression. Life is the scum of matter, and people are the scum of life. There is nothing but matter, forces, space and time, which together make power. Nothing matters, except what matters to you. Might makes right, and power makes freedom. You are free to do whatever is in your power, and if you want to survive and thrive you had better do whatever is in your interests. If your interests conflict with those of others, let the others pit their power against yours, everyone for theirselves. If your interests coincide with those of others, let them work together with you, and against the rest. We are what we eat, and we eat everything. All that you really value, and the goodness and truth and beauty of life, have their roots in this apparently barren soil. This is the true knowledge. We had founded our idealism on the most nihilistic implications of science, our socialism on crass self-interest, our peace on our capacity for mutual destruction, and our liberty on determinism. We had replaced morality with convention, bravery with safety, frugality with plenty, philosophy with science, stoicism with anaesthetics and piety with immortality. The universal acid of the true knowledge had burned away a world of words, and exposed a universe of things. Things we could use.

This is certainly something that some people will believe, particularly cynical college students who love political theory, feeling smarter than other people, and calling their pet theories things like "the true knowledge." It is not even remotely believable as the governing philosophy of a solar confederation. The point of government for the average person in human society is to create and enforce predictable mutual rules that one can use as a basis for planning and habits, allowing you to not think about politics all the time. People who adore thinking about politics have great difficulty understanding how important it is to everyone else to have ignorable government. Constantly testing your power against other coalitions is a sport, not a governing philosophy. Given the implication that this testing is through violence or the threat of violence, it beggars belief that any large number of people would tolerate that type of instability for an extended period of time. Ellen is fully committed to the true knowledge. MacLeod likely is not; I don't think this represents the philosophy of the author. But the primary political conflict in this novel famous for being political science fiction is between the above variation of anarchy and an anarchocapitalist society, neither of which are believable as stable political systems for large numbers of people. This is a bit like seeking out a series because you were told it was about a great clash of European monarchies and discovering it was about a fight between Liberland and Sealand. It becomes hard to take the rest of the book seriously. I do realize that one point of political science fiction is to play with strange political ideas, similar to how science fiction plays with often-implausible science ideas. But those ideas need some contact with human nature. If you're going to tell me that the key to clawing society back from a world-wide catastrophic descent into chaos is to discard literally every social system used to create predictability and order, you had better be describing aliens, because that's not how humans work. The rest of the book is better. I am untangling a lot of backstory for the above synopsis, which in the book comes in dribs and drabs, but piecing that together is good fun. The plot is far more straightforward than the previous two books in the series: there is a clear enemy, a clear goal, and Ellen goes from point A to point B in a comprehensible way with enough twists to keep it interesting. The core moral conflict of the book is that Ellen is an anti-AI fanatic to the point that she considers anyone other than non-uploaded humans to be an existential threat. MacLeod gives the reader both reasons to believe Ellen is right and reasons to believe she's wrong, which maintains an interesting moral tension. One thing that MacLeod is very good at is what Bob Shaw called "wee thinky bits." I think my favorite in this book is the computer technology used by the Cassini Division, who have spent a century in close combat with inimical AI capable of infecting any digital computer system with tailored viruses. As a result, their computers are mechanical non-Von-Neumann machines, but mechanical with all the technology of a highly-advanced 24th century civilization with nanometer-scale manufacturing technology. It's a great mental image and a lot of fun to think about. This is the only science fiction novel that I can think of that has a hard-takeoff singularity that nonetheless is successfully resisted and fought to a stand-still by unmodified humanity. Most writers who were interested in the singularity idea treated it as either a near-total transformation leaving only remnants or as something that had to be stopped before it started. MacLeod realizes that there's no reason to believe a post-singularity form of life would be either uniform in intent or free from its own baffling sudden collapses and reversals, which can be exploited by humans. It makes for a much better story. The sociology of this book is difficult to swallow, but the characterization is significantly better than the previous books of the series and the plot is much tighter. I was too annoyed by the political science to fully enjoy it, but that may be partly the fault of my expectations coming in. If you like chewy, idea-filled science fiction with a lot of unexplained world-building that you have to puzzle out as you go, you may enjoy this, although unfortunately I think you need to read at least The Stone Canal first. The ending was a bit unsatisfying, but even that includes some neat science fiction ideas. Followed by The Sky Road, although I understand it is not a straightforward sequel. Rating: 6 out of 10

A trip full of hitchhiking, beautiful places and welcoming locals.

Day 1: Arrival in Kochi Kochi is a city in the state of Kerala, India. This year s DebConf was to be held in Kochi from 3rd September to 17th of September, which I was planning to attend. My friend Suresh, who was planning to join, told me that 29th August 2023 will be Onam, a major festival of the state of Kerala. So, we planned a Kerala trip before the DebConf. We booked early morning flights for Kochi from Delhi and reached Kochi on 28th August. We had booked a hostel named Zostel in Ernakulam. During check-in, they asked me to fill a form which required signing in using a Google account. I told them I don t have a Google account and I don t want to create one either. The people at the front desk seemed receptive, so I went ahead with telling them the problems of such a sign-in being mandatory for check-in. Anyways, they only took a photo of my passport and let me check-in without a Google account. We stayed in a ten room dormitory, which allowed travellers of any gender. The dormitory room was air-conditioned, spacious, clean and beds were also comfortable. There were two bathrooms in the dormitory and they were clean. Plus, there was a separate dormitory room in the hostel exclusive for females. I noticed that that Zostel was not added in the OpenStreetMap and so, I added it :) . The hostel had a small canteen for tea and snacks, a common sitting area outside the dormitories, which had beds too. There was a separate silent room, suitable for people who want to work.

Dormitory room in Zostel Ernakulam, Kochi.

Beds in Zostel Ernakulam, Kochi.

We had lunch at a nearby restaurant and it was hard to find anything vegetarian for me. I bought some freshly made banana chips from the street and they were tasty. As far as I remember, I had a big glass of pineapple juice for lunch. Then I went to the Broadway market and bought some cardamom and cinnamon for home. I also went to a nearby supermarket and bought Matta brown rice for home. Then, I looked for a courier shop to send the things home but all of them were closed due to Onam festival. After returning to the Zostel, I overslept till 9 PM and in the meanwhile, Suresh planned with Saidut and Shwetank (who met us during our stay in Zostel) to go to a place in Fort Kochi for dinner. I suspected I will be disappointed by lack of vegetarian options as they were planning to have fish. I already had a restaurant in mind - Brindhavan restaurant (suggested by Anupa), which was a pure vegetarian restaurant. To reach there, I got off at Palarivattom metro station and started looking for an auto-rickshaw to get to the restaurant. I didn t get any for more than 5 minutes. Since that restaurant was not added to the OpenStreetMap, I didn t even know how far that was and which direction to go to. Then, I saw a Zomato delivery person on a motorcycle and asked him where the restaurant was. It was already 10 PM and the restaurant closes at 10:30. So, I asked him whether he can drop me off. He agreed and dropped me off at that restaurant. It was 4-5 km from that metro station. I tipped him and expressed my gratefulness for the help. He refused to take the tip, but I insisted and he accepted. I entered the restaurant and it was coming to a close, so many items were not available. I ordered some Kadhai Paneer (only item left) with naan. It tasted fine. Since the next day was Thiruvonam, I asked the restaurant about the Sadya thali menu and prices for the next day. I planned to eat Sadya thali at that restaurant, but my plans got changed later.

Onam sadya menu from Brindhavan restaurant.

Day 2: Onam celebrations Next day, on 29th of August 2023, we had plan to leave for Wayanad. Wayanad is a hill station in Kerala and a famous tourist spot. Praveen suggested to visit Munnar as it is far closer to Kochi than Wayanad (80 km vs 250 km). But I had already visited Munnar in my previous trips, so we chose Wayanad. We had a train late night from Ernakulam Junction (at 23:30 hours) to Kozhikode, which is the nearest railway station from Wayanad. So, we checked out in the morning as we had plans to roam around in Kochi before taking the train. Zostel was celebrating Onam on that day. To opt-in, we had to pay 400 rupees, which included a Sadya Thali and a mundu. Me and Suresh paid the amount and opted in for the celebrations. Sadya thali had Rice, Sambhar, Rasam, Avial, Banana Chips, Pineapple Pachadi, Pappadam, many types of pickels and chutneys, Pal Ada Payasam and Coconut jaggery Pasam. And, there was water too :). Those payasams were really great and I had one more round of them. Later, I had a lot of variety of payasams during the DebConf.

Sadya lined up for serving

Sadya thali served on banana leaf.

So, we hung out in the common room and put our luggage there. We played UNO and had conversations with other travellers in the hostel. I had a fun time there and I still think it is one of the best hostel experiences I had. We made good friends with Saiduth (Telangana) and Shwetank (Uttarakhand). They were already aware about the software like debian, and we had some detailed conversations about the Free Software movement. I remember explaining the difference between the terms Open Source and Free Software . I also told them about the Streetcomplete app, a beginner friendly app to edit OpenStreetMap. We had dinner at a place nearby (named Palaraam), but again, the vegetarian options were very limited! After dinner, we came back to the Zostel and me and Suresh left for Ernakulam Junction to catch our train Maveli Express (16604).

Day 3: Going to Wayanad Maveli Express was scheduled to reach Kozhikode at 03:25 (morning). I had set alarms from 03:00 to 03:30, with the gap of 10 minutes. Every time I woke up, I turned off the alarm. Then I woke up and saw train reaching the Kozhikode station and woke up Suresh for deboarding. But then I noticed that the train is actually leaving the station, not arriving! This means we missed our stop. Now we looked at the next stops and whether we can deboard there. I was very sleepy and wanted to take a retiring room at some station before continuing our journey to Wayanad. The next stop was Quilandi and we checked online that it didn t have a retiring room. So, we skipped this stop. We got off at the next stop named Vadakara and found out no retiring room was available. So, we asked about information regarding bus for Wayanad and they said that there is a bus to Wayanad around 07:00 hours from bus station which was a few kilometres from the railway station. We took a bus for Kalpetta (in Wayanad) at around 07:00. The destination of the buses were written in Malayalam, which we could not read. Once again, the locals helped us to get on to the bus to Kalpetta. Vadakara is not a big city and it can be hard to find people who know good Hindi or English, unlike Kochi. Despite language issues, I had no problem there in navigation, thanks to locals. I mostly spent time sleeping during the bus journey. A few hours later, the bus dropped us at Kalpetta. We had a booking at a hostel in Rippon village. It was 16 km from Kalpetta. On the way, we were treated with beautiful views of nature, which was present everywhere in Wayanad. The place was covered with tea gardens and our eyes were treated with beautiful scenery at every corner.

We were treated with such views during the Wayanad trip.

Rippon village was a very quiet place and I liked the calm atmosphere. This place is blessed by nature and has stunning scenery. I found English was more common than Hindi in Wayanad. Locals were very nice and helped me, even if they didn t know my language.

A road in Rippon.

After catching some sleep at the hostel, I went out in the afternoon. I hitchhiked to reach the main road from the hostel. I bought more spices from a nearby shop and realized that I should have waited for my visit to Wayanad to buy cardamom, which I already bought from Kochi. Then, I was looking for post office to send spices home. The people at the spices shop told me that the nearby Rippon post office was closed by that time, but the post office at Meppadi was open, which was 5 km from there. I went to Meppadi and saw the post office closes at 15:00, but I reached five minutes late. My packing was not very good and they asked me to pack it tighter. There was a shop near the post office and the people there gave me a cardboard and tapes, and helped pack my stuff for the post. By the time I went to the post office again, it was 15:30. But they accepted my parcel for post.

Day 4: Kanthanpara Falls, Zostel Wayanad and Karapuzha Dam Kanthanpara waterfalls were 2 km from the hostel. I hitchhiked to the place from the hostel on a scooty. Entry ticket was worth Rs 40. There were good views inside and nothing much to see except the waterfalls.

Entry to Kanthanpara Falls.

Kanthanpara Falls.

We had a booking at Zostel Wayanad for this day and so we shifted there. Again, as with their Ernakulam branch, they asked me to fill a form which required signing in using Google, but when I said I don t have a Google account they checked me in without that. There were tea gardens inside the Zostel boundaries and the property was beautiful.

A view of Zostel Wayanad.

A map of Wayanad showing tourist places.

A view from inside the Zostel Wayanad property.

Later in the evening, I went to Karapuzha Dam. I witnessed a beautiful sunset during the journey. Karapuzha dam had many activites, like ziplining, and was nice to roam around. Chembra Peak is near to the Zostel Wayanad. So, I was planning to trek to the heart shaped lake. It was suggested by Praveen and looking online, this trek seemed worth doing. There was an issue however. The charges for trek were Rs 1770 for upto five people. So, if I go alone I will have to spend Rs 1770 for the trek. If I go with another person, we split Rs 1770 into two, and so on. The optimal way to do it is to go in a group of five (you included :D). I asked front desk at Zostel if they can connect me with people going to Chembra peak the next day, and they told me about a group of four people planning to go to Chembra peak the next day. I got lucky! All four of them were from Kerala and worked in Qatar.

Day 5: Chembra peak trek The date was 1st September 2023. I woke up early (05:30 in the morning) for the Chembra peak trek. I had bought hiking shoes especially for trekking, which turned out to be a very good idea. The ticket counter opens at 07:00. The group of four with which I planned to trek met me around 06:00 in the Zostel. We went to the ticket counter around 06:30. We had breakfast at shops selling Maggi noodles and bread omlette near the ticket counter. It was a hot day and the trek was difficult for an inexperienced person like me. The scenery was green and beautiful throughout.

Terrain during trekking towards the Chembra peak.

Heart-shaped lake at the Chembra peak.

Me at the heart-shaped lake.

Views from the top of the Chembra peak.

View of another peak from the heart-shaped lake.

While returning from the trek, I found out a shop selling bamboo rice, which I bought and will make bamboo rice payasam out of it at home (I have some coconut milk from Kerala too ;)). We returned to Zostel in the afternoon. I had muscle pain after the trek and it has still not completely disappeared. At night, we took a bus from Kalpetta to Kozhikode in order to return to Kochi.

Day 6: Return to Kochi At midnight of 2nd of September, we reached Kozhikode bus stand. Then we roamed around for something to eat. I didn t find anything vegetarian to eat. No surprises there! Then we went to Kozhikode railway station and looked for retiring rooms, but no luck there. We waited at the station and took the next train to Kochi at 03:30 and reached Ernakulam Junction at 07:30 (half hours before train s scheduled time!). From there, we went to Zostel Fort Kochi and stayed one night there and checked out next morning.

Day 7: Roaming around in Fort Kochi On 3rd of September, we roamed around in Fort Kochi. We visited the usual places - St Francis Church, Dutch Palace, Jew Town, Pardesi Synagogue. I also visited some homestays and the owners were very happy to show their place even when I made it clear that I was not looking for a stay. In the evening, we went to Kakkanad to attend DebConf. The story continues in my DebConf23 blog post.

The Free Software Foundation Europe and the Software Freedom Conservancy recently released a statement that they would no longer work with Eben Moglen, chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center. Eben was the general counsel for the Free Software Foundation for over 20 years, and was centrally involved in the development of version 3 of the GNU General Public License. He's devoted a great deal of his life to furthering free software.

But, as described in the joint statement, he's also acted abusively towards other members of the free software community. He's acted poorly towards his own staff. In a professional context, he's used graphically violent rhetoric to describe people he dislikes. He's screamed abuse at people attempting to do their job.

And, sadly, none of this comes as a surprise to me. As I wrote in 2017, after it became clear that Eben's opinions diverged sufficiently from the FSF's that he could no longer act as general counsel, he responded by threatening an FSF board member at an FSF-run event (various members of the board were willing to tolerate this, which is what led to me quitting the board). There's over a decade's evidence of Eben engaging in abusive behaviour towards members of the free software community, be they staff, colleagues, or just volunteers trying to make the world a better place.

When we build communities that tolerate abuse, we exclude anyone unwilling to tolerate being abused[1]. Nobody in the free software community should be expected to deal with being screamed at or threatened. Nobody should be afraid that they're about to have their sexuality outed by a former boss.

But of course there are some that will defend Eben based on his past contributions. There were people who were willing to defend Hans Reiser on that basis. We need to be clear that what these people are defending is not free software - it's the right for abusers to abuse. And in the long term, that's bad for free software.

[1] "Why don't people just get better at tolerating abuse?" is a terrible response to this. Why don't abusers stop abusing? There's fewer of them, and it should be easier.

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Welcome to the September 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project In these reports, we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a quick recap, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, almost all software is distributed to end users as pre-compiled binaries.
Andreas Herrmann gave a talk at All Systems Go 2023 titled Fast, correct, reproducible builds with Nix and Bazel . Quoting from the talk description:

You will be introduced to Google s open source build system Bazel, and will learn how it provides fast builds, how correctness and reproducibility is relevant, and how Bazel tries to ensure correctness. But, we will also see where Bazel falls short in ensuring correctness and reproducibility. You will [also] learn about the purely functional package manager Nix and how it approaches correctness and build isolation. And we will see where Bazel has an advantage over Nix when it comes to providing fast feedback during development.

Andreas also shows how you can get the best of both worlds and combine Nix and Bazel, too. A video of the talk is available.
diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb fixed compatibility with file(1) version 5.45 [ ] and updated some documentation [ ]. In addition, Vagrant Cascadian extended support for GNU Guix [ ][ ] and updated the version in that distribution as well. [ ].
Yet another reminder that our upcoming Reproducible Builds Summit is set to take place from October 31st November 2nd 2023 in Hamburg, Germany. If you haven t been before, our summits are a unique gathering that brings together attendees from diverse projects, united by a shared vision of advancing the Reproducible Builds effort. During this enriching event, participants will have the opportunity to engage in discussions, establish connections and exchange ideas to drive progress in this vital field. If you re interested in joining us this year, please make sure to read the event page, the news item, or the invitation email that Mattia Rizzolo sent out recently, all of which have more details about the event and location. We are also still looking for sponsors to support the event, so please reach out to the organising team if you are able to help. Also note that PackagingCon 2023 is taking place in Berlin just before our summit.
On the Reproducible Builds website, Greg Chabala updated the JVM-related documentation to update a link to the BUILDSPEC.md file. [ ] And Fay Stegerman fixed the builds failing because of a YAML syntax error.

Distribution work In Debian, this month:

• Debian bug #940234 was originally opened in September 2019 by Aurelien Jarno to request that Debian add a new requirement that repeatedly building the source package in the same environment produces identical .dsc file modulo the GPG signature . This month, however, Russ Allbery closed the bug due to concerns about the viability of source reproducibility.
• 10 reviews of Debian packages were added, 56 were updated and 68 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues.
• Bastian Blank posted a mail to a number of Debian mailing lists titled Upcoming changes to Debian Linux kernel packages . Under Kernel modules will be signed with an ephemeral key, Bastian wrote: Yes, this will make the build unreproducible, but no better solution currently exists.
• Vagrant Cascadian posted about various experiments with verification builds for Debian and snapshotting the Debian archive

September saw F-Droid add ten new reproducible apps, and one existing app switched to reproducible builds. In addition, two reproducible apps were archived and one was disabled for a current total of 199 apps published with Reproducible Builds and using the upstream developer s signature. [ ] In addition, an extensive blog post was posted on f-droid.org titled Reproducible builds, signing keys, and binary repos .

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:

• openSUSE monthly
• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • linuxsampler (benchmarking issue)
  • antlr3 (date)
  • rpm (embeds too many build details)
  • seamonkey (date)
  • conky (date and ordering-related issue)
  • lsp-plugins-shared (date/copyright year issue)
  • build-compare
  • helix (ASLR-related non-determinism)
  • intel-graphics-compiler (ASLR)
• Chris Lamb:
  • #1052950 filed against sphinxcontrib-mermaid.
  • #1052970 filed against mkdocs-material.
  • #1052989 filed against apophenia.
  • #1053205 filed against lapackpp.
  • #1053263 filed against blaspp.
• Fridrich Strba applied 124 Java-related patches into openSUSE:
  • mysql-connector-java, java-21-openjdk, apache-ivy, maven-assembly-plugin, eclipse, antlr3, groovy18, hbci4java, ini4j, hppc, checkstyle, glassfish-jaxb, tycho, xmvn, mockito, languagetool, json-lib, jnr-unixsocket, jnr-ffi, jnr-enxio, jboss-jaxrs-2.0-api, istack-commons, rxtx-java, glassfish-jaxb, glassfish-hk2, findbugs, docker-client-java, maven, xmvn-connector-ivy, xmlstreambuffer, checkstyle, cglib, bean-validation-api, aws-sdk-java, javapackages-tools, ant, scala, osgi-service-log, jmdns, xml-security, super-csv, osgi-service-jdbc, msv, junit5, jsr-311, jersey, itextpdf, httpcomponents-asyncclient, ed25519-java, jnacl, javaparser, picocli, freemarker, extra166y, javaparser, xstream, woodstox-core, uom-lib, unit-api, uncommons-maths, tycho, treelayout, tiger-types, super-csv, stax-ex, stax2-api, sqlite-jdbc, reflectasm, prometheus-simpleclient-java, powermock, paranamer, opennlp, netty3, mybatis, morfologik-stemming, minlog, maven-archetype, mariadb-java-client, logback, kryo, jsonp, jopt-simple, jnr-posix, jnr-constants, jnr-a64asm, jfreechart, jffi, jetty-schemas, jetty-minimal, jeromq, jctools, jcsp, jboss-websocket-1.0-api, jboss-marshalling, jboss-logmanager, jboss-logging, javaewah, jatl, janino, jackson-modules-base, jackson-jaxrs-providers, jackson-datatypes-collections, jackson-dataformat-xml, jackson-dataformats-text, jackson-dataformats-binary, indriya, google-gson, glassfish-websocket-api, glassfish-transaction-api, glassfish-jsp, glassfish-jax-rs-api, glassfish-hk2, glassfish-fastinfoset, felix-scr, felix-gogo-shell, felix-gogo-command, disruptor, apache-commons-ognl, apache-commons-math, apache-commons-csv, antlr4, jettison, sisu, maven
• Pol Dellaiera:
  • Since version 2.6.4, Composer (the PHP package manager) is now fully reproducible. See the work in the corresponding PR.

Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework (available at tests.reproducible-builds.org) in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In August, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:

• Disable armhf and i386 builds due to Debian bug #1052257. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
• Run diffoscope with a lower ionice priority. [ ]
• Log every build in a simple text file [ ] and create persistent stamp files when running diffoscope to ease debugging [ ].
• Run schedulers one hour after dinstall again. [ ]
• Temporarily use diffoscope from the host, and not from a schroot running the tested suite. [ ][ ]
• Fail the diffoscope distribution test if the diffoscope version cannot be determined. [ ]
• Fix a spelling error in the email to IRC gateway. [ ]
• Force (and document) the reconfiguration of all jobs, due to the recent rise of zombies. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
• Deal with a rare condition when killing processes which should not be there. [ ]
• Install the Debian backports kernel in an attempt to address Debian bug #1052257. [ ][ ]

In addition, Mattia Rizzolo fixed a call to diffoscope --version (as suggested by Fay Stegerman on our mailing list) [ ], worked on an openQA credential issue [ ] and also made some changes to the machine-readable reproducible metadata, reproducible-tracker.json [ ]. Lastly, Roland Clobus added instructions for manual configuration of the openQA secrets [ ].

---

If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

• IRC: #reproducible-builds on irc.oftc.net.
• Mailing list: rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org
• Mastodon: @reproducible_builds
• Twitter: @ReproBuilds

I have just got a PineTime smart watch [1] from Pine64. They cost $US27 each which ended up as $144.63 Australian for three including postage when I ordered on the 16th of September, it s annoying that you can t order more than 3 at a time to reduce postage costs. The Australian online store Kogan has smart watches starting at about $15 [2] with Bluetooth and support for phone notifications so the $48.21 for a PineTime doesn t compare well on just price and features. The watches Kogan sells start getting into high resolution at around the $25 price and many of them have features like 24*7 heart monitoring that the PineTime lacks (it just measures when you request it). No-one would order a PineTime for being cheap or having lots of features, you order it because you want open hardware that allows you to do things your way. Also the PineTime isn t going to be orphaned while it s likely that in a few years most of the cheap watches sold by Kogan etc won t support the new phones running the latest version of Android. The screen of the PineTime is 240*240 resolution (about 260dpi) with 64k colors. The screen resolution is lower than some high-end smart watches but higher than most phones and almost all monitors. I doubt that much benefit could be gained from higher resolution. Even on minimum brightness the screen is easy to read on all but the brightest sunny days. The compute capabilities are 4.5MB of flash storage, 64k of RAM, and a 64MHz CPU this can t run Linux and nothing like it will run Linux for a long time. I ve had the PineTime for 6 days now, I charged it once and it s now at 55% battery. It looks like it will last close to 2 weeks on a single charge and it s claimed that a newer firmware will make the battery last longer. Software The main Android app for using with the PineTime is GadgetBridge which I installed from the f-droid repository. It had lots of click-through menus for allowing access to various Android features (contacts, bluetooth, draw over foreground, location, and more) but after that it was easy to setup. It was the first bluetooth device I ve used which had a 6 digit PIN for connecting to a phone. Initially I used the PineTime with my Huawei Nova 7i [3]. The aim is to eventually have it run from my PinePhonePro but my test of the PinePhonePro didn t go as well as hoped [4]. Now I m using it on my Huawei Mate 10 Pro. It comes with InfiniTime [5] installed as the default firmware, mine had 1.11.0 which is a fairly recent version. I will probably upgrade it soon to get the better power optimisation and weather alerts in the watch face. I don t have any plans to use different watch firmware and I don t have any plans to contribute to firmware development I just can t hack on every FOSS project around it s better to do big contributions to a small number of projects. For people who don t want the default firmware the Wasp-OS project seems interesting as it s written in Python [6], I don t like Python but it s very popular. Python is particularly popular in ML development, it will be interesting to see if Wasp-OS becomes a preferred platform for smart watches that talk to GPT servers. Generally the software works well, one annoyance is that when a notification goes away on the phone it remains on the PineTime and has to be manually dismissed. It would be nice if clearing notifications on the phone would clear them on the PineTime too. The music control works with RocketPlayer on Android, it displays the track name and has options for pause/play and skipping forward and backward one track. Annoyingly the current firmware doesn t allow configuring the main screens, from the primary screen you swipe down for notifications, right for settings, up for menus, and there s nothing defined for swipe left. I d like to make swipe left the command to get to music control. Hardware It has a detachable band that appears to be within the common range of watch bands. According to the PineTime Wiki page [7] there are a selection of alternate bands that will fit it, but some don t because the band is recessed into the watch. It is IP67 rated which means you can probably wear it while swimming. The charging contacts are exposed on the bottom of the case which means that any chemicals left by pool water can be cleaned off and also as they are apparently not expected to be harmed by sweat and skin oil there shouldn t be a problem charging it. I have significant experience using a Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini which is rated at IP67 in swimming pools. I had two problems with the S5 Mini when getting out of the pool, firstly water in the headphone socket made the phone consider that it was in headphone mode and turn off the speakers and secondly it took hours to become dry enough to charge and after many swims the charge rate dropped presumably due to oxide on the contacts. There are reports of success when swimming with a PineTime. Generally it feels well made and appears more solid than the cheapest Kogan devices appear to be. Conclusion If I wanted monitoring for medical reasons then I would choose a different smart watch. I ve read about people doing things like tracking their body stats 24*7 and trying to discover useful things, the PineTime is not a good option for BioHacking type use. However if I did have a need for such things I d probably just buy a second smart watch and have one on each wrist. The PineTime generally works well. It s a pity it has fewer hardware features than closed devices that are cheaper. But having a firmware that can be continually improved by the community is good. The continually expanding use of mobile phone technology devices for custom use in corporations (such as mobile phone in custom case for scanning prices etc in a supermarket) has some potential for use with this. I can imagine someone adding some custom features to a PineTime for such use. When a supermarket chain has 200,000 employees (as Woolworths in Australia does) then paying for a few months of software development work to make a smart watch do specific things for that company could provide significant value. There are probably some business opportunities for FOSS developers to hack on extra hardware on a PineTime and write software to support it. I recommend that everyone who s into FOSS buy one of these. Preferably make a deal with two friends to get the minimum postage cost.

• [1] https://pine64.com/product-category/pinetime-smartwatch/
• [2] https://www.kogan.com/au/shop/category/smart-watches/
• [3] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/04/20/android-without-play/
• [4] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/10/11/pinephone-status/
• [5] https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/InfiniTime
• [6] https://wasp-os.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
• [7] https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineTime

Review: The Far Reaches, edited by John Joseph Adams

Publisher:	Amazon Original Stories
Copyright:	June 2023
ISBN:	1-6625-1572-3
ISBN:	1-6625-1622-3
ISBN:	1-6625-1503-0
ISBN:	1-6625-1567-7
ISBN:	1-6625-1678-9
ISBN:	1-6625-1533-2
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	219

Amazon has been releasing anthologies of original short SFF with various guest editors, free for Amazon Prime members. I previously tried Black Stars (edited by Nisi Shawl and Latoya Peterson) and Forward (edited by Blake Crouch). Neither were that good, but the second was much worse than the first. Amazon recently released a new collection, this time edited by long-standing SFF anthology editor John Joseph Adams and featuring a new story by Ann Leckie, which sounded promising enough to give them another chance. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. As with the previous anthologies, each story is available separately for purchase or Amazon Prime "borrowing" with separate ISBNs. The sidebar cover is for the first in the sequence. Unlike the previous collections, which were longer novelettes or novellas, my guess is all of these are in the novelette range. (I did not do a word count.) If you're considering this anthology, read the Okorafor story ("Just Out of Jupiter's Reach"), consider "How It Unfolds" by James S.A. Corey, and avoid the rest. "How It Unfolds" by James S.A. Corey: Humans have invented a new form of physics called "slow light," which can duplicate any object that is scanned. The energy expense is extremely high, so the result is not a post-scarcity paradise. What the technology does offer, however, is a possible route to interstellar colonization: duplicate a team of volunteers and a ship full of bootstrapping equipment, and send copies to a bunch of promising-looking exoplanets. One of them might succeed. The premise is interesting. The twists Corey adds on top are even better. What can be duplicated once can be duplicated again, perhaps with more information. This is a lovely science fiction idea story that unfortunately bogs down because the authors couldn't think of anywhere better to go with it than relationship drama. I found the focus annoying, but the ideas are still very neat. (7) "Void" by Veronica Roth: A maintenance worker on a slower-than-light passenger ship making the run between Sol and Centauri unexpectedly is called to handle a dead body. A passenger has been murdered, two days outside the Sol system. Ace is in no way qualified to investigate the murder, nor is it her job, but she's watched a lot of crime dramas and she has met the victim before. The temptation to start poking around is impossible to resist. It's been a long time since I've read a story built around the differing experiences of time for people who stay on planets and people who spend most of their time traveling at relativistic speeds. It's a bit of a retro idea from an earlier era of science fiction, but it's still a good story hook for a murder mystery. None of the characters are that memorable and Roth never got me fully invested in the story, but this was still a pleasant way to pass the time. (6) "Falling Bodies" by Rebecca Roanhorse: Ira is the adopted son of a Genteel senator. He was a social experiment in civilizing the humans: rescue a human orphan and give him the best of Genteel society to see if he could behave himself appropriately. The answer was no, which is how Ira finds himself on Long Reach Station with a parole officer and a schooling opportunity, hopefully far enough from his previous mistakes for a second chance. Everyone else seems to like Rebecca Roanhorse's writing better than I do, and this is no exception. Beneath the veneer of a coming-of-age story with a twist of political intrigue, this is brutal, depressing, and awful, with an ending that needs a lot of content warnings. I'm sorry that I read it. (3) "The Long Game" by Ann Leckie: The Imperial Radch trilogy are some of my favorite science fiction novels of all time, but I am finding Leckie's other work a bit hit and miss. I have yet to read a novel of hers that I didn't like, but the short fiction I've read leans more heavily into exploring weird and alien perspectives, which is not my favorite part of her work. This story is firmly in that category: the first-person protagonist is a small tentacled alien creature, a bit like a swamp-dwelling octopus. I think I see what Leckie is doing here: balancing cynicism and optimism, exploring how lifespans influence thinking and planning, and making some subtle points about colonialism. But as a reading experience, I didn't enjoy it. I never liked any of the characters, and the conclusion of the story is the unsettling sort of main-character optimism that seems rather less optimistic to the reader. (4) "Just Out of Jupiter's Reach" by Nnedi Okorafor: K rm n scientists have found a way to grow living ships that can achieve a symbiosis with a human pilot, but the requirements for that symbiosis are very strict and hard to predict. The result was a planet-wide search using genetic testing to find the rare and possibly nonexistent matches. They found seven people. The deal was simple: spend ten years in space, alone, in her ship. No contact with any other human except at the midpoint, when the seven ships were allowed to meet up for a week. Two million euros a year, for as long as she followed the rules, and the opportunity to be part of a great experiment, providing data that will hopefully lead to humans becoming a spacefaring species. The core of this story is told during the seven days in the middle of the mission, and thus centers on people unfamiliar with human contact trying to navigate social relationships after five years in symbiotic ships that reshape themselves to their whims and personalities. The ships themselves link so that the others can tour, which offers both a good opportunity for interesting description and a concretized metaphor about meeting other people. I adore symbiotic spaceships, so this story had me at the premise. The surface plot is very psychological, and I didn't entirely click with it, but the sense of wonder vibes beneath that surface were wonderful. It also feels fresh and new: I've seen most of the ideas before, but not presented or written this way, or approached from quite this angle. Definitely the best story of the anthology. (8) "Slow Time Between the Stars" by John Scalzi: This, on the other hand, was a complete waste of time, redeemed only by being the shortest "story" in the collection. "Story" is generous, since there's only one character and a very dry, linear plot that exists only to make a philosophical point. "Speculative essay" may be closer. The protagonist is the artificial intelligence responsible for Earth's greatest interstellar probe. It is packed with a repository of all of human knowledge and the raw material to create life. Its mission is to find an exoplanet capable of sustaining that life, and then recreate it and support it. The plot, such as it is, follows the AI's decision to abandon that mission and cut off contact with Earth, for reasons that it eventually explains. Every possible beat of this story hit me wrong. The sense of wonder attaches to the most prosaic things and skips over the moments that could have provoked real wonder. The AI is both unbelievable and irritating, with all of the smug self-confidence of an Internet reply guy. The prose is overwrought in all the wrong places ("the finger of God, offering the spark to animate the dirt of another world" would totally be this AI's profile quote under their forum avatar). The only thing I liked about the story is the ethical point that it slowly meanders into, which I think I might agree with and at least find plausible. But it's delivered by the sort of character I would actively leave rooms to avoid, in a style that's about as engrossing as a tax form. Avoid. (2) Rating: 5 out of 10

There are a couple of things I tend to do after packaging a piece of software for Debian, filing an Intent To Package bug and uploading the package. This is both a checklist for me and (hopefully) a way to inspire other maintainers to go beyond the basic package maintainer duties as documented in the Debian Developer's Reference. If I've missed anything, please leave an comment or send me an email!

Salsa for collaborative development To foster collaboration and allow others to contribute to the packaging, I upload my package to a new subproject on Salsa. By doing this, I enable other Debian contributors to make improvements and propose changes via merge requests. I also like to upload the project logo in the settings page (i.e. https://salsa.debian.org/debian/packagename/edit) since that will show up on some dashboards like the Package overview.

Launchpad for interacting with downstream Ubuntu users While Debian is my primary focus, I also want to keep an eye on how my package is doing on derivative distributions like Ubuntu. To do this, I subscribe to bugs related to my package on Launchpad. Ubuntu bugs are rarely Ubuntu-specific and so I will often fix them in Debian. I also set myself as the answer contact on Launchpad Answers since these questions are often the sign of a Debian or a lack of documentation. I don't generally bother to fix bugs on Ubuntu directly though since I've not had much luck with packages in universe lately. I'd rather not spend much time preparing a package that's not going to end up being released to users as part of a Stable Release Update. On the other hand, I have succesfully requested simple Debian syncs when an important update was uploaded after the Debian Import Freeze.

Screenshots and tags I take screenshots of my package and upload them on https://screenshots.debian.net to help users understand what my package offers and how it looks. I believe that these screenshots end up in software "stores" type of applications. Similarly, I add tags to my package using https://debtags.debian.org. I'm not entirely sure where these tags are used, but they are visible from apt show packagename.

Monitoring Upstream Releases Staying up-to-date with upstream releases is one of the most important duties of a software packager. There are a lot of different ways that upstream software authors publicize their new releases. Here are some of the things I do to monitor these releases:

• I have a cronjob which run uscan once a day to check for new upstream releases using the information specified in my debian/watch files:

    0 12 * * 1-5   francois  test -e /home/francois/devel/deb && HTTPS_PROXY= https_proxy= uscan --report /home/francois/devel/deb   true
  

• I subscribe to the upstream project's releases RSS feed, if available. For example, I subscribe to the GitHub tags feed for git-secrets and Launchpad announcements for email-reminder.
• If the upstream project maintains an announcement mailing list, I subscribe to it (e.g. rkhunter-announce or tor release announcements).

When nothing else is available, I write a cronjob that downloads the upstream changelog once a day and commits it to a local git repo:

#!/bin/bash
pushd /home/francois/devel/zlib-changelog > /dev/null
wget --quiet -O ChangeLog.txt https://zlib.net/ChangeLog.txt   exit 1
git diff
git commit -a -m "Updated changelog" > /dev/null
popd > /dev/null

This sends me a diff by email when a new release is added (and no emails otherwise).

KDE Plasma 6

I would like to welcome you to my revamped site. It is still a work in progress, so please be patient while I work out the kinks! I have also explained a bit more about myself in my About Me page for those that may have questions about my homesteader lifestyle. Check it out when you have time. My site is mostly my adventures in packaging software in Linux in a variety of formats ( mostly Debian and Ubuntu Snaps containerized packages ). This keeps me very busy, as folks don t realize the importance of packaging. Without it, applications remain in source code form which isn t very usable by the users! While turning the source code into something user friendly we often run into issues and work with upstream ( I am a very strong believer in upstream first ) to resolve any issues. This makes for a better user experience and less buggy software. Workarounds are very hard to maintain and thus fixing it right the first time is the best path! With this said, while I am not strong in any one programming language ( Well maybe Ruby from my CI tooling background ) I am versed in many languages, as I have to understand the code that I am filing bug reports for! We have to have a strong knowledge of being able to understand build failures, debug runtime failures and most importantly we have to be able to fix them, or find the resources to assist in fixing them. As most of you know I am KDE s biggest fan ( There is nothing wrong with Gnome, its a great platform ). So a big portion of my work is dedicated to KDE. A fantastic tool for working on my KDE packaging has been KDE Neon! With the developer version I have all the tools necessary to debug and fix issues that arise. There is also the added bonus of living on the edge and finding out runtime issues right away! That is enough about me for now and on to my weekly round up! KDE neon: Carlos ( check out his new blog! https://www.ethicalconstruct.au/dotclear_blog/ ) and I have been very busy with another round of KDE applications making the move to Qt6. We have finished KDE PIM and KDE Games in Neon/unstable! I have worked out issues with print-manager and re-enabled it in experimental as it s qt6 development is still happening in kf6 branch. Instructions here: https://blog.neon.kde.org/2023/08/04/announcing-kde-neon-experimental/ Fixed issues with a broken kscreenlocker and missing window decorations. You can now safely leave your computer and not worry about that dreaded black screen. Debian: I have uploaded the newest squashfuse to unstable. I have uploaded another NEW dependency for bubblegum golang-github-alecthomas-mango-kong-dev Ubuntu Snaps: This week continues working closely with Jarred Wilson of Canonical in getting his Qt6 content snap in shape for use with my KDE Frameworks 6 snap ( an essential snap to move forward with our next generation Qt6 applications and of course the Plasma snap. I spent some time debugging the neochat snap and fixed some QML issues, but I am now facing issues with wayland. It now works fine for those of us still on X11. I will continue working out wayland. Thank you! I rely on donations to upkeep my everyday living and so far thanks to each and every one of you I have survived almost a full year! It has been scary from time to time, but I am surviving. Until my snap project goes through I must rely on the kindness of my supporters. The proceeds of my donations goes to the following:

• Car payment
• Car insurance
• Land Payment
• Gas for vehicles ( car for errands, truck to haul water )
• Propane
• Food
• Phone / Internet ( Very important in this line of work! )
• Pet Food ( Yes we have a few )
• Misc everyday living supplies ( shampoo etc )

I have joined the kool kids and moved to Donorbox for donations. Donate I still have Gofundme for those that don t want to signup for yetanotherdonationplatform. https://gofund.me/b8b69e54

Part of what I love to do is to play with embedded devices running Linux. And many times I need to juggle with an SD card in order to copy a filesystem to a board... until I found SDWire. This little gadget is an SD muxer: it allows you to use it as a "normal" card reader or switch the SD card to the SD card slot. So next time I need to copy contents to a SD card and then push it to a board I can just do it from the command line. Now the software to control this device was not in Debian, so I fixed that. I am keeping the code and the packaging on GitLab, as "The Tizen project is not anymore really active". At the time of writing the package was just accepted, so it might take a couple of hours to be available on the archive. Enjoy!

Man, you re no longer with us, but I am touched by the number of people you have positively impacted. Almost every DebConf23 presentations by locals I saw after you, carried how you were instrumental in bringing them there. How you were a dear friend and brother. It s a weird turn of events, that you left us during one thing we deeply cared and worked towards making possible since the last 3 years together. Who would have known, that Sahil, I m going back to my apartment tonight and casual bye post that would be the last conversation we ever had. Things were terrible after I heard the news. I had a hard time convincing myself to come see you one last time during your funeral. That was the last time I was going to get to see you, and I kept on looking at you. You, there in front of me, all calm, gave me peace. I ll carry that image all my life now. Your smile will always remain with me. Now, who ll meet and receive me on the door at almost every Debian event (just by sheer co-incidence?). Who ll help me speak out loud about all the Debian shortcomings (and then discuss solutions, when sober :)). It was a testament of the amount of time we had already spent together online, that when we first met during MDC Palakkad, it didn t feel we were physically meeting for the first time. The conversations just flowed. Now this song is associated with you due to your speech during post MiniDebConf Palakkad dinner. Hearing it reminds me of all the times we spent together chilling and talking community (which you cared deeply about). I guess, now we can t stop caring for the community, because your energy was contagious. Now, I can t directly dial your number to listen - Hey Sahil! What s up? from the other end, or Tell me, tell me on any mention of the problem. Nor would I be able to send reference usage of your Debian packaging guide in the wild. You already know how popular this guide of yours. How many people that guide has helped with getting started with packaging. Our last telegram text was me telling you about guide usage in Ravi s DebConf23 presentation. Did I ever tell you, I too got my first start with packaging from there. I started looking up to you from there, even before we met or talked. Now, I missed telling you, I was probably your biggest fan whenever you had the mic in hand and started speaking. You always surprised me all the insights and idea you brought and would kept on impressing me for someone who was just my age but was way more mature. Reading recent toots from Raju Dev made me realize how much I loved your writings. You wrote How the Future will remember Us , Doing what s right and many more. The level of depth in your thought was unparalleled. I loved reading those. That s why I kept pestering you to write more, which you slowly stopped. Now I fully understand why though. You were busy; really busy helping people out or just working for making things better. You were doing Debian, upstream projects, web development, designs, graphics, mentoring, free software evangelism while being the go-to person for almost everyone around. Everyone depended on you, because you were too kind to turn down anyone. Man, I still get your spelling wrong :) Did I ever tell you that? That was the reason, I used to use AR instead online. You ll be missed and will always be part of our conversations, because you have left a profound impact on me, our friends, Debian India and everyone around. See you! the coolest man around. In memory:

• Farewell Abraham video by Vysakh Premkumar
• Tails project dedicating 5.17.1 release
• Hopscotch team dedicating 2023.8.1 release
• Athul dedicating 0.2.5 release of waka-readme
• Debian project

PS - Just found you even had a Youtube channel, you one heck of a talented man.