It seems GitHub is
planning to
rename the
default brach for newly created repositories from "master" to "main". It's incredible how much positive PR you can get with a one line configuration change, while still working together with the ICE.
However, this post is not about bashing GitHub.
Changing the default branch for newly created repositories is good. And you also should do that for the ones
you create with git init locally. But what about all the repositories out there? GitHub surely won't force-rename those branches, but we can!
Ian will do this as he touches the individual repositories, but I tend to forget things unless I do them immediately
Oh, so this is another "automate everything with an API" post? Yes, yes it is!
And yes, I am going to use GitHub here, but something similar should be implementable on any git hosting platform that has an API.
Of course, if you have SSH access to the repositories, you can also just edit
HEAD in an
for loop in bash, but that would be boring ;-)
I'm going with
devel btw, as I'm already used to
develop in the Foreman project and
devel in Ansible.
acquire credentials
My GitHub account is 2FA enabled, so I can't just use my username and password in a basic HTTP API client. So the first step is to acquire a
personal access token, that can be used instead. Of course I could also have implemented OAuth2 in my lousy script, but ain't nobody have time for that.
The token will require the "repo" permission to be able to change repositories.
And we'll need some boilerplate code (I'm using Python3 and
requests, but anything else will work too):
#!/usr/bin/env python3
import requests
BASE='https://api.github.com'
USER='evgeni'
TOKEN='abcdef'
headers = 'User-Agent': '@ '.format(USER)
auth = (USER, TOKEN)
session = requests.Session()
session.auth = auth
session.headers.update(headers)
session.verify = True
This will store our username, token, and create a
requests.Session so that we don't have to pass the same data all the time.
get a list of repositories to change
I want to change all my own repos that are not archived, not forks, and actually have the default branch set to
master, YMMV.
As we're authenticated, we can just list the repositories of the
currently authenticated user, and limit them to "owner" only.
GitHub uses pagination for their API, so we'll have to loop until we get to the end of the repository list.
repos_to_change = []
url = ' /user/repos?type=owner'.format(BASE)
while url:
r = session.get(url)
if r.ok:
repos = r.json()
for repo in repos:
if not repo['archived'] and not repo['fork'] and repo['default_branch'] == 'master':
repos_to_change.append(repo['name'])
if 'next' in r.links:
url = r.links['next']['url']
else:
url = None
else:
url = None
create a new
devel branch and mark it as default
Now that we know which repos to change, we need to fetch the SHA of the current
master, create a new
devel branch pointing at the same commit and then set that new branch as the default branch.
for repo in repos_to_change:
master_data = session.get(' /repos/evgeni/ /git/ref/heads/master'.format(BASE, repo)).json()
data = 'ref': 'refs/heads/devel', 'sha': master_data['object']['sha']
session.post(' /repos/ / /git/refs'.format(BASE, USER, repo), json=data)
default_branch_data = 'default_branch': 'devel'
session.patch(' /repos/ / '.format(BASE, USER, repo), json=default_branch_data)
session.delete(' /repos/ / /git/refs/heads/ '.format(BASE, USER, repo, 'master'))
I've also opted in to actually delete the old
master, as I think that's the safest way to let the users know that it's gone. Letting it rot in the repository would mean people can still
pull and won't notice that there are no changes anymore as the default branch moved to
devel.
So
announcement
I've updated all my (those in the
evgeni namespace) non-archived repositories to have
devel instead of
master as the default branch.
Have fun updating!
code
#!/usr/bin/env python3
import requests
BASE='https://api.github.com'
USER='evgeni'
TOKEN='abcd'
headers = 'User-Agent': '@ '.format(USER)
auth = (USER, TOKEN)
session = requests.Session()
session.auth = auth
session.headers.update(headers)
session.verify = True
repos_to_change = []
url = ' /user/repos?type=owner'.format(BASE)
while url:
r = session.get(url)
if r.ok:
repos = r.json()
for repo in repos:
if not repo['archived'] and not repo['fork'] and repo['default_branch'] == 'master':
repos_to_change.append(repo['name'])
if 'next' in r.links:
url = r.links['next']['url']
else:
url = None
else:
url = None
for repo in repos_to_change:
master_data = session.get(' /repos/evgeni/ /git/ref/heads/master'.format(BASE, repo)).json()
data = 'ref': 'refs/heads/devel', 'sha': master_data['object']['sha']
session.post(' /repos/ / /git/refs'.format(BASE, USER, repo), json=data)
default_branch_data = 'default_branch': 'devel'
session.patch(' /repos/ / '.format(BASE, USER, repo), json=default_branch_data)
session.delete(' /repos/ / /git/refs/heads/ '.format(BASE, USER, repo, 'master'))
I was assigned 20 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative,
and worked all 20 hours this month.
I sent a final
request
for testing for the next update to Linux 3.16 in jessie. I also
prepared an update to Linux 4.9, included in both jessie and
stretch. I completed backporting of kernel changes related to
CVE-2020-0543,
which was still under embargo, to Linux 3.16.
Finally I uploaded the updates for Linux 3.16 and 4.9, and issued
DLA-2241
and
DLA-2242.
The end of June marked the end of long-term support for Debian 8
"jessie" and
for
Linux 3.16. I am no longer maintaining any stable kernel
branches, but will continue contributing to them as part of my
work on Debian 9 "stretch" LTS and other Debian releases.
In June 2020, I have worked on the Debian LTS project for 8 hours (of 8 hours planned).
LTS Work
Since this info was too well hidden on the internet, here is the information: 
I was wondering: What happens if I have a Haskell module with Template Haskell that embeds some information from the environment (time, environment variables). Will such a module be reliable recompiled? And what if it gets recompiled, but the source code produced by Template Haskell is actually unchanged (e.g., because the environment variable has not changed), will all depending modules be recompiled (which would be bad)?
Here is a quick experiment, using GHC-8.8:
Also this was the last month before shifting suites: goodbye to Jessie LTS and Wheezy ELTS, welcome Stretch LTS and Jessie ELTS.
ELTS - Wheezy
Last month, I got selected as a 
Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world during June 2020 (
More than a month has passed since the last update of TeX Live packages in Debian, so here is a new checkout!
All arch all packages have been updated to the tlnet state as of 2020-06-29, see the detailed update list below.
Enjoy.
New packages
developer-reference challenge: get the bug count down to 0
As of now, the 
And thank you, it's awesome to be in this together.
The twelveth release of 
I have been preparing this release for quite some time, but due to Qt 5.12 I could only test it in a virtual machine using Debian/experimental. But now, finally, a full upgrade to Plasma 5.19(.2) has arrived.
Unfortunately, it turned out that the OBS build servers are either overloaded, incapable, or broken, but they do not properly build the necessary packages. Thus, I make the Plasma 5.19.2 (and framework) packages available via my server, for amd64. Please use the following apt line: