Search Results: "reg"

12 November 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, October 2024 (by Roberto C. S nchez)

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

Debian LTS contributors In October, 20 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 6.0h (out of 7.0h assigned and 7.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 15.0h (out of 87.0h assigned and 13.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 85.0h to the next month.
  • Arturo Borrero Gonzalez did 10.0h (out of 10.0h assigned).
  • Bastien Roucari s did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
  • Ben Hutchings did 4.0h (out of 0.0h assigned and 4.0h from previous period).
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Daniel Leidert did 29.0h (out of 26.0h assigned and 3.0h from previous period).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 60.0h (out of 23.5h assigned and 36.5h from previous period).
  • Guilhem Moulin did 7.5h (out of 19.75h assigned and 0.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 12.5h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 15.25h (out of 0.0h assigned and 60.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 44.75h to the next month.
  • Lucas Kanashiro did 10.0h (out of 10.0h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 14.5h (out of 6.5h assigned and 17.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.5h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 9.75h (out of 24.0h assigned), thus carrying over 14.25h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 23.5h (out of 25.0h assigned), thus carrying over 1.5h to the next month.
  • Sean Whitton did 6.25h (out of 1.0h assigned and 5.25h from previous period).
  • Stefano Rivera did 1.0h (out of 0.0h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.0h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 9.5h (out of 16.0h assigned and 44.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 50.5h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 11.0h (out of 11.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 10.5h (out of 12.0h assigned), thus carrying over 1.5h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In October, we have released 35 DLAs. Some notable updates prepared in October include denial of service vulnerability fixes in nss, regression fixes in apache2, multiple fixes in php7.4, and new upstream releases of firefox-esr, openjdk-17, and opendk-11. Additional contributions were made for the stable Debian 12 bookworm release by several LTS contributors. Arturo Borrero Gonzalez prepared a parallel update of nss, Bastien Roucari s prepared a parallel update of apache2, and Santiago Ruano Rinc n prepared updates of activemq for both LTS and Debian stable. LTS contributor Bastien Roucari s undertook a code audit of the cacti package and in the process discovered three new issues in node-dompurity, which were reported upstream and resulted in the assignment of three new CVEs. As always, the LTS team continues to work towards improving the overall sustainability of the free software base upon which Debian LTS is built. We thank our many committed sponsors for their ongoing support.

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

11 November 2024

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppSpdlog 0.0.19 on CRAN: New Upstream, New Features

Version 0.0.19 of RcppSpdlog arrived on CRAN early this morning and has been uploaded to Debian. RcppSpdlog bundles spdlog, a wonderful header-only C++ logging library with all the bells and whistles you would want that was written by Gabi Melman, and also includes fmt by Victor Zverovich. You can learn more at the nice package documention site. This releases updates the code to the version 1.15.0 of spdlog which was released on Saturday, and contains fmt 11.0.2. It also contains a contributed PR which allows use std::format under C++20, bypassing fmt (with some post-merge polish too), and another PR correcting a documentation double-entry. The NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in RcppSpdlog version 0.0.19 (2024-11-10)
  • Support use of std::format under C++20 via opt-in define instead of fmt (Xanthos Xanthopoulos in #19)
  • An erroneous duplicate log=level documentation level was removed (Contantinos Giachalis in #20)
  • Upgraded to upstream release spdlog 1.15.0 (Dirk in #21)
  • Partially revert / simplify src/formatter.cpp accomodating both #19 and previous state (Dirk in #21)

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report. More detailed information is on the RcppSpdlog page, or the package documention site. 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.

Vincent Bernat: Customize Caddy's plugins with Nix

Caddy is an open-source web server written in Go. It handles TLS certificates automatically and comes with a simple configuration syntax. Users can extend its functionality through plugins1 to add features like rate limiting, caching, and Docker integration. While Caddy is available in Nixpkgs, adding extra plugins is not simple.2 The compilation process needs Internet access, which Nix denies during build to ensure reproducibility. When trying to build the following derivation using xcaddy, a tool for building Caddy with plugins, it fails with this error: dial tcp: lookup proxy.golang.org on [::1]:53: connection refused. 
  pkgs  :
pkgs.stdenv.mkDerivation  
  name = "caddy-with-xcaddy";
  nativeBuildInputs = with pkgs; [ go xcaddy cacert ];
  unpackPhase = "true";
  buildPhase =
    ''
      xcaddy build --with github.com/caddy-dns/powerdns@v1.0.1
    '';
  installPhase = ''
    mkdir -p $out/bin
    cp caddy $out/bin
  '';
Fixed-output derivations are an exception to this rule and get network access during build. They need to specify their output hash. For example, the fetchurl function produces a fixed-output derivation: 
  stdenv, fetchurl  :
stdenv.mkDerivation rec  
  pname = "hello";
  version = "2.12.1";
  src = fetchurl  
    url = "mirror://gnu/hello/hello-$ version .tar.gz";
    hash = "sha256-jZkUKv2SV28wsM18tCqNxoCZmLxdYH2Idh9RLibH2yA=";
   ;
To create a fixed-output derivation, you need to set the outputHash attribute. The example below shows how to output Caddy s source code, with some plugin enabled, as a fixed-output derivation using xcaddy and go mod vendor. 
pkgs.stdenvNoCC.mkDerivation rec  
  pname = "caddy-src-with-xcaddy";
  version = "2.8.4";
  nativeBuildInputs = with pkgs; [ go xcaddy cacert ];
  unpackPhase = "true";
  buildPhase =
    ''
      export GOCACHE=$TMPDIR/go-cache
      export GOPATH="$TMPDIR/go"
      XCADDY_SKIP_BUILD=1 TMPDIR="$PWD" \
        xcaddy build v$ version  --with github.com/caddy-dns/powerdns@v1.0.1
      (cd buildenv* && go mod vendor)
    '';
  installPhase = ''
    mv buildenv* $out
  '';
  outputHash = "sha256-F/jqR4iEsklJFycTjSaW8B/V3iTGqqGOzwYBUXxRKrc=";
  outputHashAlgo = "sha256";
  outputHashMode = "recursive";
With a fixed-output derivation, it is up to us to ensure the output is always the same: You can use this derivation to override the src attribute in pkgs.caddy: 
pkgs.caddy.overrideAttrs (prev:  
  src = pkgs.stdenvNoCC.mkDerivation   /* ... */  ;
  vendorHash = null;
  subPackages = [ "." ];
 );
Check out the complete example in the GitHub repository. To integrate into a Flake, add github:vincentbernat/caddy-nix as an overlay: 
 
  inputs =  
    nixpkgs.url = "nixpkgs";
    flake-utils.url = "github:numtide/flake-utils";
    caddy.url = "github:vincentbernat/caddy-nix";
   ;
  outputs =   self, nixpkgs, flake-utils, caddy  :
    flake-utils.lib.eachDefaultSystem (system:
      let
        pkgs = import nixpkgs  
          inherit system;
          overlays = [ caddy.overlays.default ];
         ;
      in
       
        packages =  
          default = pkgs.caddy.withPlugins  
            plugins = [ "github.com/caddy-dns/powerdns@v1.0.1" ];
            hash = "sha256-F/jqR4iEsklJFycTjSaW8B/V3iTGqqGOzwYBUXxRKrc=";
           ;
         ;
       );

Update (2024-11) This flake won t work with Nixpkgs 24.05 or older because it relies on this commit to properly override the vendorHash attribute.

  1. This article uses the term plugins, though Caddy documentation also refers to them as modules since they are implemented as Go modules.
  2. This is a feature request since quite some time. A proposed solution has been rejected. The one described in this article is a bit different and I have proposed it in another pull request.
  3. This is not perfect: if the source code produced by xcaddy changes, the hash would change and the build would fail.

10 November 2024

Dirk Eddelbuettel: inline 0.3.20: Mostly Maintenance

A new release of the inline package got to CRAN today marking the first release in three and half years. inline facilitates writing code in-line in simple string expressions or short files. The package was used quite extensively by Rcpp in the very early days before Rcpp Attributes arrived on the scene providing an even better alternative for its use cases. inline is still used by rstan and a number of other packages. This release was tickled by changing in r-devel just this week, and the corresponding please fix or else email I received this morning. R_NO_REMAP is now the default in r-devel, and while we had already converted most (old-style) calls into the API to using the now mandatory Rf_ prefix, the package contained few remaining cases in examples as well as one in code generation. The release also contains a helpful contributed PR making an error message a little clearer, plus several small and common maintenance changed around continuous integration, package layout and the repository. The NEWS extract follows and details the changes some more.

Changes in inline version 0.3.20 (2024-11-10)
  • Error message formatting is improved for compileCode (Alexis Derumigny in #25)
  • Switch to using Authors@R, other general packaging maintenance for continuous integration and repository
  • Use Rf_ in a handful of cases as R-devel now mandates it

Thanks to my CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page. Bugs reports are welcome at the GitHub issue tracker as well (where one can also search among open or closed issues). 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.

9 November 2024

Jonathan Dowland: Progressively enhancing CGI apps with htmx

I was interested in learning about htmx, so I used it to improve the experience of posting comments on my blog. It seems much of modern web development is structured around having a JavaScript program on the front-end (browser) which exchanges data encoded in JSON asynchronously with the back-end servers. htmx uses a novel (or throwback) approach: it asynchronously fetches snippets of HTML from the back-end, and splices the results into the live page. For example, a htmx-powered button may request a URI on the server, receive HTML in response, and then the button itself would be replaced by the resulting HTML, within the page. I experimented with incorporating it into an existing, old-school CGI web app: IkiWiki, which I became a co-maintainer of this year, and powers my blog. Throughout this project I referred to the excellent book Server-Driven Web Apps with htmx. Comment posting workflow I really value blog comments, but the UX for posting them on my blog was a bit clunky. It went like this:
  1. you load a given page (such as this blog post), which is a static HTML document. There's a link to add a comment to the page.
  2. The link loads a new page which is generated dynamically and served back to you via CGI. This contains a HTML form for you to write your comment.
  3. The form submits to the server via HTTP POST. IkiWiki validates the form content. Various static pages (in particular the one you started on, in Step 1) are regenerated.
  4. the server response to the request in (3) is a HTTP 302 redirect, instructing the browser to go back to the page in Step 1.
First step: fetching a comment form First, I wanted the "add a comment" link to present the edit box in the current page. This step was easiest: add four attributes to the "comment on this page" anchor tag:
hx-get="<CGI ENDPOINT GOES HERE>"
suppresses the normal behaviour of the tag, so clicking on it doesn't load a new page.
issues an asynchronous HTTP GET to the CGI end-point, which returns the full HTML document for the comment edit form
hx-select=".editcomment form"
extract the edit-comment form from within that document
hx-swap=beforeend and hx-target=".addcomment"
append (courtesy of beforeend) the form into the source page after the "add comment" anchor tag (.addcomment)
Now, clicking "comment on this page" loads in the edit-comment box below it without moving you away from the source page. All that without writing any new code! Second step: handling previews
The old Preview Comment page The old Preview Comment page
In the traditional workflow, clicking on "Preview" loaded a new page containing the edit form (but not the original page or any existing comments) with a rendering of the comment-in-progress below it. I wasn't originally interested in supporting the "Preview" feature, but I needed to for reasons I'll explain later. Rather than load new pages, I wanted "Preview" to insert a rendering of the comment-in-progress being inserted into the current page's list of comments, marked up to indicate that it's a preview. IkiWiki provides some templates which you can override to customise your site. I've long overridden page.tmpl, the template used for all pages. I needed to add a new empty div tag in order to have a "hook" to target with the previewed comment. The rest of this was achieved with htmx attributes on the "Preview" button, similar to in the last step: hx-post to define a target URI when you click the button (and specify HTTP POST); hx-select to filter the resulting HTML and extract the comment; hx-target to specify where to insert it. Now, clicking "Preview" does not leave the current page, but fetches a rendering of your comment-in-progress, and splices it into the comment list, appropriately marked up to be clear it's a preview. Third step: handling submitted comments IkiWiki is highly configurable, and many different things could happen once you post a comment. On my personal blog, all comments are held for moderation before they are published. The page you were served after submitting a comment was rather bare-bones, a status message "Your comment will be posted after moderator review", without the original page content or comments. I wanted your comment to appear in the page immediately, albeit marked up to indicate it was awaiting review. Since the traditional workflow didn't render or present your comment to you, I had to cheat. handling moderated comments
Moderation message upon submitting a comment Moderation message upon submitting a comment
One of my goals with this project was not to modify IkiWiki itself. I had to break this rule for moderated comments. When returning the "comment is moderated" page, IkiWiki uses HTTP status code 200, the same as for other scenarios. I wrote a tiny patch to return HTTP 202 (Accepted, but not processed) instead. I now have to write some actual JavaScript. htmx emits the htmx:beforeSwap event after an AJAX call returns, but before the corresponding swap is performed. I wrote a function that is triggered on this event, filters for HTTP 202 responses, triggers the "Preview" button, and then alters the result to indicate a moderated, rather than previewed, comment. (That's why I bothered to implement previews). You can read the full function here: jon.js. Summary I've done barely any front-end web development for years and I found working with htmx to be an enjoyable experience. You can leave a comment on this very blog post if you want to see it in action. I couldn't resist adding an easter egg: Brownie points if you can figure out what it is. Adding htmx to an existing CGI-based website let me improve one of the workflows in a gracefully-degrading way (without JavaScript, the old method will continue to work fine) without modifying the existing application itself (well, almost) and without having to write very much code of my own at all: nearly all of the configuration was declarative.

8 November 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: October s report (by Anupa Ann Joseph)

Debian Contributions: 2024-10 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.

rebootstrap, by Helmut Grohne After significant changes earlier this year, the state of architecture cross bootstrap is normalizing again. More and more architectures manage to complete rebootstrap testing successfully again. Here are two examples of what kind of issues the bootstrap testing identifies. At some point, libpng1.6 would fail to cross build on musl architectures whereas it would succeed on other ones failing to locate zlib. Adding --debug-find to the cmake invocation eventually revealed that it would fail to search in /usr/lib/<triplet>, which is the default library path. This turned out to be a bug in cmake assuming that all linux systems use glibc. libpng1.6 also gained a baseline violation for powerpc and ppc64 by enabling the use of AltiVec there. The newt package would fail to cross build for many 32-bit architectures whereas it would succeed for armel and armhf due to -Wincompatible-pointer-types. It turns out that this flag was turned into -Werror and it was compiling with a warning earlier. The actual problem is a difference in signedness between wchar_t and FriBidChar (aka uint32_t) and actually affects native building on i386.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Helmut sent 35 patches for cross build failures.
  • Stefano Rivera uploaded the Python 3.13.0 final release.
  • Stefano continued to rebuild Python packages with C extensions using Python 3.13, to catch compatibility issues before the 3.13-add transition starts.
  • Stefano uploaded new versions of a handful of Python packages, including: dh-python, objgraph, python-mitogen, python-truststore, and python-virtualenv.
  • Stefano packaged a new release of mkdocs-macros-plugin, which required packaging a new Python package for Debian, python-super-collections (now in NEW review).
  • Stefano helped the mini-DebConf Online Brazil get video infrastructure up and running for the event. Unfortunately, Debian s online-DebConf setup has bitrotted over the last couple of years, and it eventually required new temporary Jitsi and Jibri instances.
  • Colin Watson fixed a number of autopkgtest failures to get ansible back into testing.
  • Colin fixed an ssh client failure in certain cases when using GSS-API key exchange, and added an integration test to ensure this doesn t regress in future.
  • Colin worked on the Python 3.13 transition, fixing problems related to it in 15 packages. This included upstream work in a number of packages (postgresfixture, python-asyncssh, python-wadllib).
  • Colin upgraded 41 Python packages to new upstream versions.
  • Carles improved po-debconf-manager: now it can create merge requests to Salsa automatically (created 17, new batch coming this month), imported almost all the packages with debconf translation templates whose VCS is Salsa (currently 449 imported), added statistics per package and language, improved command line interface options. Performed user support fixing different issues. Also prepared an abstract for the talk at MiniDebConf Toulouse.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n continued the organization work for the DebConf 25 conference, to be held in Brest, France. Part of the work relates to the initial edits of the sponsoring brochure. Thanks to Benjamin Somers who finalized the French and English versions.
  • Rapha l forwarded a couple of zim and hamster bugs to the upstream developers, and tried to diagnose a delayed startup of gdm on his laptop (cf #1085633).
  • On behalf of the Debian Publicity Team, Anupa interviewed 7 women from the Debian community, old and new contributors. The interview was published in Bits from Debian.

6 November 2024

Bits from Debian: Bits from the DPL

Dear Debian community, this is Bits from DPL for October. In addition to a summary of my recent activities, I aim to include newsworthy developments within Debian that might be of interest to the broader community. I believe this provides valuable insights and foster a sense of connection across our diverse projects. Also, I welcome your feedback on the format and focus of these Bits, as community input helps shape their value. Ada Lovelace Day 2024 As outlined in my platform, I'm committed to increasing the diversity of Debian developers. I hope the recent article celebrating Ada Lovelace Day 2024 featuring interviews with women in Debian will serve as an inspiring motivation for more women to join our community. MiniDebConf Cambridge This was my first time attending the MiniDebConf in Cambridge, hosted at the ARM building. I thoroughly enjoyed the welcoming atmosphere of both MiniDebCamp and MiniDebConf. It was wonderful to reconnect with people who hadn't made it to the last two DebConfs, and, as always, there was plenty of hacking, insightful discussions, and valuable learning. If you missed the recent MiniDebConf, there's a great opportunity to attend the next one in Toulouse. It was recently decided to include a MiniDebCamp beforehand as well. FTPmaster accepts MRs for DAK At the recent MiniDebConf in Cambridge, I discussed potential enhancements for DAK to make life easier for both FTP Team members and developers. For those interested, the document "Hacking on DAK" provides guidance on setting up a local DAK instance and developing patches, which can be submitted as MRs. As a perfectly random example of such improvements some older MR, "Add commands to accept/reject updates from a policy queue" might give you some inspiration. At MiniDebConf, we compiled an initial list of features that could benefit both the FTP Team and the developer community. While I had preliminary discussions with the FTP Team about these items, not all ideas had consensus. I aim to open a detailed, public discussion to gather broader feedback and reach a consensus on which features to prioritize. Sometimes, packages are rejected not because of DFSG-incompatible licenses but due to other issues that could be resolved within an existing package (as discussed in my DebConf23 BoF, "Chatting with ftpmasters"[1]). During the "Meet the ftpteam" BoF (Log/transcription of the BoF can be found here), for the moment until the MR gets accepted, a new option was proposed for FTP Team members reviewing packages in NEW:

Accept + Bug Report This option would allow a package to enter Debian (in unstable or experimental) with an automatically filed RC bug report. The RC bug would prevent the package from migrating to testing until the issues are addressed. To ensure compatibility with the BTS, which only accepts bug reports for existing packages, a delayed job (24 hours post-acceptance) would file the bug.

When binary package names change, currently the package must go through the NEW queue, which can delay the availability of updated libraries. Allowing such packages to bypass the queue could expedite this process. A configuration option to enable this bypass specifically for uploads to experimental may be useful, as it avoids requiring additional technical review for experimental uploads. Previously, I believed the requirement for binary name changes to pass through NEW was due to a missing feature in DAK, possibly addressable via an MR. However, in discussions with the FTP Team, I learned this is a matter of team policy rather than technical limitation. I haven't found this policy documented, so it may be worth having a community discussion to clarify and reach consensus on how we want to handle binary name changes to get the MR sensibly designed. When a developer requests the removal of a package whether entirely or for specific architectures RM bugs must be filed for the package itself as well as for each package depending on it. It would be beneficial if the dependency tree could be automatically resolved, allowing either: 
a) the DAK removal tooling to remove the entire dependency tree
   after prompting the bug report author for confirmation, or
b) the system to auto-generate corresponding bug reports for all
   packages in the dependency tree.
The latter option might be better suited for implementation in an MR for reportbug. However, given the possibility of large-scale removals (for example, targeting specific architectures), having appropriate tooling for this would be very beneficial. In my opinion the proposed DAK enhancements aim to support both FTP Team members and uploading developers. I'd be very pleased if these ideas spark constructive discussion and inspire volunteers to start working on them--possibly even preparing to join the FTP Team. On the topic of ftpmasters: an ongoing discussion with SPI lawyers is currently reviewing the non-US agreement established 22 years ago. Ideally, this review will lead to a streamlined workflow for ftpmasters, removing certain hurdles that were originally put in place due to legal requirements, which were updated in 2021. Contacting teams My outreach efforts to Debian teams have slowed somewhat recently. However, I want to emphasize that anyone from a packaging team is more than welcome to reach out to me directly. My outreach emails aren't following any specific orders--just my own somewhat na ve view of Debian, which I'm eager to make more informed. Recently, I received two very informative responses: one from the Qt/KDE Team, which thoughtfully compiled input from several team members into a shared document. The other was from the Rust Team, where I received three quick, helpful replies one of which included an invitation to their upcoming team meeting. Interesting readings on our mailing lists I consider the following threads on our mailing list some interesting reading and would like to add some comments. Sensible languages for younger contributors Though the discussion on debian-devel about programming languages took place in September, I recently caught up with it. I strongly believe Debian must continue evolving to stay relevant for the future. "Everything must change, so that everything can stay the same." -- Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard I encourage constructive discussions on integrating programming languages in our toolchain that support this evolution. Concerns regarding the "Open Source AI Definition" A recent thread on the debian-project list discussed the "Open Source AI Definition". This topic will impact Debian in the future, and we need to reach an informed decision. I'd be glad to see more perspectives in the discussions particularly on finding a sensible consensus, understanding how FTP Team members view their delegated role, and considering whether their delegation might need adjustments for clarity on this issue. Kind regards Andreas.

4 November 2024

Ravi Dwivedi: Asante Kenya for a Good Time

In September of this year, I visited Kenya to attend the State of the Map conference. I spent six nights in the capital Nairobi, two nights in Mombasa, and one night on a train. I was very happy with the visa process being smooth and quick. Furthermore, I stayed at the Nairobi Transit Hotel with other attendees, with Ibtehal from Bangladesh as my roommate. One of the memorable moments was the time I spent at a local coffee shop nearby. We used to go there at midnight, despite the grating in the shops suggesting such adventures were unsafe. Fortunately, nothing bad happened, and we were rewarded with a fun time with the locals.
The coffee shop Ibtehal and me used to visit during the midnight
Grating at a chemist shop in Mombasa, Kenya
The country lies on the equator, which might give the impression of extremely hot temperatures. However, Nairobi was on the cooler side (10 25 degrees Celsius), and I found myself needing a hoodie, which I bought the next day. It also served as a nice souvenir, as it had an outline of the African map printed on it. I also bought a Safaricom SIM card for 100 shillings and recharged it with 1000 shillings for 8 GB internet with 5G speeds and 400 minutes talk time.

A visit to Nairobi s Historic Cricket Ground On this trip, I got a unique souvenir that can t be purchased from the market a cricket jersey worn in an ODI match by a player. The story goes as follows: I was roaming around the market with my friend Benson from Nairobi to buy a Kenyan cricket jersey for myself, but we couldn t find any. So, Benson had the idea of visiting the Nairobi Gymkhana Club, which used to be Kenya s main cricket ground. It has hosted some historic matches, including the 2003 World Cup match in which Kenya beat the mighty Sri Lankans and the record for the fastest ODI century by Shahid Afridi in just 37 balls in 1996. Although entry to the club was exclusively for members, I was warmly welcomed by the staff. Upon reaching the cricket ground, I met some Indian players who played in Kenyan leagues, as well as Lucas Oluoch and Dominic Wesonga, who have represented Kenya in ODIs. When I expressed interest in getting a jersey, Dominic agreed to send me pictures of his jersey. I liked his jersey and collected it from him. I gave him 2000 shillings, an amount suggested by those Indian players.
Me with players at the Nairobi Gymkhana Club
Cricket pitch at the Nairobi Gymkhana Club
A view of the cricket ground inside the Nairobi Gymkhana Club
Scoreboard at the Nairobi Gymkhana cricket ground

Giraffe Center in Nairobi Kenya is known for its safaris and has no shortage of national parks. In fact, Nairobi is the only capital in the world with a national park. I decided not to visit one, as most of them were expensive and offered multi-day tours, and I didn t want to spend that much time in the wildlife. Instead, I went to the Giraffe Center in Nairobi with Pragya and Rabina. The ticket cost 1500 Kenyan shillings (1000 Indian rupees). In Kenya, matatus - shared vans, usually decorated with portraits of famous people and play rap songs - are the most popular means of public transport. Reaching the Giraffe Center from our hotel required taking five matatus, which cost a total of 150 shillings, and a 2 km walk. The journey back was 90 shillings, suggesting that we didn t find the most efficient route to get there. At the Giraffe Center, we fed giraffes and took photos.
A matatu with a Notorious BIG portrait.
Inside the Giraffe Center

Train ride from Nairobi to Mombasa I took a train from Nairobi to Mombasa. The train is known as the SGR Train, where SGR refers to Standard Gauge Railway. The journey was around 500 km. M-Pesa was the only way to make payment for pre-booking the train ticket, and I didn t have an M-Pesa account. Pragya s friend Mary helped facilitate the payment. I booked a second-class ticket, which cost 1500 shillings (1000 Indian rupees). The train was scheduled to depart from Nairobi at 08:00 hours in the morning and arrive in Mombasa at 14:00 hours. The security check at the station required scanning our bags and having them sniffed by sniffer dogs. I also fell victim to a scam by a security official who offered to help me get my ticket printed, only to later ask me to get him some coffee, which I politely declined. Before boarding the train, I was treated to some stunning views at the Nairobi Terminus station. It was a seating train, but I wished it were a sleeper train, as I was sleep-deprived. The train was neat and clean, with good toilets. The train reached Mombasa on time at around 14:00 hours.
SGR train at Nairobi Terminus.
Interior of the SGR train

Arrival in Mombasa
Mombasa Terminus station.
Mombasa was a bit hotter than Nairobi, with temperatures reaching around 30 degrees Celsius. However, that s not too hot for me, as I am used to higher temperatures in India. I had booked a hostel in the Old Town and was searching for a hitchhike from the Mombasa Terminus station. After trying for more than half an hour, I took a matatu that dropped me 3 km from my hostel for 200 shillings (140 Indian rupees). I tried to hitchhike again but couldn t find a ride. I think I know why I couldn t get a ride in both the cases. In the first case, the Mombasa Terminus was in an isolated place, so most of the vehicles were taxis or matatus while any noncommercial cars were there to pick up friends and family. If the station were in the middle of the city, there would be many more car/truck drivers passing by, thus increasing my possibilities of getting a ride. In the second case, my hostel was at the end of the city, and nobody was going towards that side. In fact, many drivers told me they would love to give me a ride, but they were going in some other direction. Finally, I took a tuktuk for 70 shillings to reach my hostel, Tulia Backpackers. It was 11 USD (1400 shillings) for one night. The balcony gave a nice view of the Indian Ocean. The rooms had fans, but there was no air conditioning. Each bed also had mosquito nets. The place was walking distance of the famous Fort Jesus. Mombasa has had more Islamic influence compared to Nairobi and also has many Hindu temples.
The balcony at Tulia Backpackers Hostel had a nice view of the ocean.
A room inside the hostel with fans and mosquito nets on the beds

Visiting White Sandy Beaches and Getting a Hitchhike Visiting Nyali beach marked my first time ever at a white sand beach. It was like 10 km from the hostel. The next day, I visited Diani Beach, which was 30 km from the hostel. Going to Diani Beach required crossing a river, for which there s a free ferry service every few minutes, followed by taking a matatu to Ukunda and then a tuk-tuk. The journey gave me a glimpse of the beautiful countryside of Kenya.
Nyali beach is a white sand beach
This is the ferry service for crossing the river.
During my return from Diani Beach to the hostel, I was successful in hitchhiking. However, it was only a 4 km ride and not sufficient to reach Ukunda, so I tried to get another ride. When a truck stopped for me, I asked for a ride to Ukunda. Later, I learned that they were going in the same direction as me, so I got off within walking distance from my hostel. The ride was around 30 km. I also learned the difference between a truck ride and a matatu or car ride. For instance, matatus and cars are much faster and cooler due to air conditioning, while trucks tend to be warmer because they lack it. Further, the truck was stopped at many checkpoints by the police for inspections as it carried goods, which is not the case with matatus. Anyways, it was a nice experience, and I am grateful for the ride. I had a nice conversation with the truck drivers about Indian movies and my experiences in Kenya.
Diani beach is a popular beach in Kenya. It is a white sand beach.
Selfie with truck drivers who gave me the free ride

Back to Nairobi I took the SGR train from Mombasa back to Nairobi. This time I took the night train, which departs at 22:00 hours, reaching Nairobi at around 04:00 in the morning. I could not sleep comfortably since the train only had seater seats. I had booked the Zarita Hotel in Nairobi and had already confirmed if they allowed early morning check-in. Usually, hotels have a fixed checkout time, say 11:00 in the morning, and you are not allowed to stay beyond that regardless of the time you checked in. But this hotel checked me in for 24 hours. Here, I paid in US dollars, and the cost was 12 USD.

Almost Got Stuck in Kenya Two days before my scheduled flight from Nairobi back to India, I heard the news that the airports in Kenya were closed due to the strikes. Rabina and Pragya had their flight back to Nepal canceled that day, which left them stuck in Nairobi for two additional days. I called Sahil in India and found out during the conversation that the strike was called off in the evening. It was a big relief for me, and I was fortunate to be able to fly back to India without any changes to my plans.
Newspapers at a stand in Kenya covering news on the airport closure

Experience with locals I had no problems communicating with Kenyans, as everyone I met knew English to an extent that could easily surpass that of big cities in India. Additionally, I learned a few words from Kenya s most popular local language, Swahili, such as Asante, meaning thank you, Jambo for hello, and Karibu for welcome. Knowing a few words in the local language went a long way. I am not sure what s up with haggling in Kenya. It wasn t easy to bring the price of souvenirs down. I bought a fridge magnet for 200 shillings, which was the quoted price. On the other hand, it was much easier to bargain with taxis/tuktuks/motorbikes. I stayed at three hotels/hostels in Kenya. None of them had air conditioners. Two of the places were in Nairobi, and they didn t even have fans in the rooms, while the one in Mombasa had only fans. All of them had good Wi-Fi, except Tulia where the internet overall was a bit shaky. My experience with the hotel staff was great. For instance, we requested that the Nairobi Transit Hotel cancel the included breakfast in order to reduce the room costs, but later realized that it was not a good idea. The hotel allowed us to revert and even offered one of our missing breakfasts during dinner. The staff at Tulia Backpackers in Mombasa facilitated the ticket payment for my train from Mombasa to Nairobi. One of the staff members also gave me a lift to the place where I could catch a matatu to Nyali Beach. They even added an extra tea bag to my tea when I requested it to be stronger.

Food At the Nairobi Transit Hotel, a Spanish omelet with tea was served for breakfast. I noticed that Spanish omelette appeared on the menus of many restaurants, suggesting that it is popular in Kenya. This was my first time having this dish. The milk tea in Kenya, referred to by locals as white tea, is lighter than Indian tea (they don t put a lot of tea leaves).
Spanish Omelette served in breakfast at Nairobi Transit Hotel
I also sampled ugali with eggs. In Mombasa, I visited an Indian restaurant called New Chetna and had a buffet thali there twice.
Ugali with eggs.

Tips for Exchanging Money In Kenya, I exchanged my money at forex shops a couple of times. I received good exchange rates for bills larger than 50 USD. For instance, 1 USD on xe.com was 129 shillings, and I got 128.3 shillings per USD (a total of 12,830 shillings) for two 50 USD notes at an exchange in Nairobi, while 127 shillings, which was the highest rate at the banks. On the other hand, for smaller bills such as a one US dollar note, I would have got 125 shillings. A passport was the only document required for the exchange, and they also provided a receipt. A good piece of advice for travelers is to keep 50 USD or larger bills for exchanging into the local currency while saving the smaller US dollar bills for accommodation, as many hotels and hostels accept payment in US dollars (in addition to Kenyan shillings).

Missed Malindi and Lamu There were more places on my to-visit list in Kenya. But I simply didn t have time to cover them, as I don t like rushing through places, especially in a foreign country where there is a chance of me underestimating the amount of time it takes during transit. I would have liked to visit at least one of Kilifi, Watamu or Malindi beaches. Further, Lamu seemed like a unique place to visit as it has no cars or motorized transport; the only options for transport are boats and donkeys. That s it for now. Meet you in the next one :)

2 November 2024

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp 1.0.13-1 on CRAN: Hot Fix

rcpp logo A hot-fix release 1.0.13-1, consisting of two small PRs relative to the last regular CRAN release 1.0.13, just arrived on CRAN. When we prepared 1.0.13, we included a change related to the tightening of the C API of R itself. Sadly, we pinned an expected change to comes with next (minor) release 4.4.2 rather than now next (normal aka major) release 4.5.0 . And now that R 4.4.2 is out (as of two days ago) we accidentally broke building against the header file with that check. Whoops. Bugs happen, and we are truly sorry but this is now addressed in 1.0.13-1. The normal (bi-annual) release cycle will resume with 1.0.14 slated for January. As you can see from the NEWS file of the development branch, we have a number of changes coming. You can safely access that release candidate version, either off the default branch at github or via r-universe artifacts. The list below details all changes, as usual. The only other change concerns the now-mandatory use of Authors@R.

Changes in Rcpp release version 1.0.13-1 (2024-11-01)
  • Changes in Rcpp API:
    • Use read-only VECTOR_PTR and STRING_PTR only with with R 4.5.0 or later (Kevin in #1342 fixing #1341)
  • Changes in Rcpp Deployment:
    • Authors@R is now used in DESCRIPTION as mandated by CRAN

Thanks to my CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page. Bugs reports are welcome at the GitHub issue tracker as well (where one can also search among open or closed issues). 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.

1 November 2024

Colin Watson: Free software activity in October 2024

Almost all of my Debian contributions this month were sponsored by Freexian. You can also support my work directly via Liberapay. Ansible I noticed that Ansible had fallen out of Debian testing due to autopkgtest failures. This seemed like a problem worth fixing: in common with many other people, we use Ansible for configuration management at Freexian, and it probably wouldn t make our sysadmins too happy if they upgraded to trixie after its release and found that Ansible was gone. The problems here were really just slogging through test failures in both the ansible-core and ansible packages, but their test suites are large and take a while to run so this took some time. I was able to contribute a few small fixes to various upstreams in the process: This should now get back into testing tomorrow. OpenSSH Martin- ric Racine reported that ssh-audit didn t list the ext-info-s feature as being available in Debian s OpenSSH 9.2 packaging in bookworm, contrary to what OpenSSH upstream said on their specifications page at the time. I spent some time looking into this and realized that upstream was mistakenly saying that implementations of ext-info-c and ext-info-s were added at the same time, while in fact ext-info-s was added rather later. ssh-audit now has clearer output, and the OpenSSH maintainers have corrected their specifications page. I looked into a report of an ssh failure in certain cases when using GSS-API key exchange (which is a Debian patch). Once again, having integration tests was a huge win here: the affected scenario is quite a fiddly one, but I was able to set it up in the test, and thereby make sure it doesn t regress in future. It still took me a couple of hours to get all the details right, but in the past this sort of thing took me much longer with a much lower degree of confidence that the fix was correct. On upstream s advice, I cherry-picked some key exchange fixes needed for big-endian architectures. Python team I packaged python-evalidate, needed for a new upstream version of buildbot. The Python 3.13 transition rolls on. I fixed problems related to it in htmlmin, humanfriendly, postgresfixture (contributed upstream), pylint, python-asyncssh (contributed upstream), python-oauthlib, python3-simpletal, quodlibet, zope.exceptions, and zope.interface. A trickier Python 3.13 issue involved the cgi module. Years ago I ported zope.publisher to the multipart module because cgi.FieldStorage was broken in some situations, and as a result I got a recommendation into Python s dead batteries PEP 594. Unfortunately there turns out to be a name conflict between multipart and python-multipart on PyPI; python-multipart upstream has been working to disentangle this, though we still need to work out what to do in Debian. All the same, I needed to fix python-wadllib and multipart seemed like the best fit; I contributed a port upstream and temporarily copied multipart into Debian s python-wadllib source package to allow its tests to pass. I ll come back and fix this properly once we sort out the multipart vs. python-multipart packaging. tzdata moved some timezone definitions to tzdata-legacy, which has broken a number of packages. I added tzdata-legacy build-dependencies to alembic and python-icalendar to deal with this in those packages, though there are still some other instances of this left. I tracked down an nltk regression that caused build failures in many other packages. I fixed Rust crate versioning issues in pydantic-core, python-bcrypt, and python-maturin (mostly fixed by Peter Michael Green and Jelmer Vernoo , but it needed a little extra work). I fixed other build failures in entrypoints, mayavi2, python-pyvmomi (mostly fixed by Alexandre Detiste, but it needed a little extra work), and python-testing.postgresql (ditto). I fixed python3-simpletal to tolerate future versions of dh-python that will drop their dependency on python3-setuptools. I fixed broken symlinks in python-treq. I removed (build-)depends on python3-pkg-resources from alembic, autopep8, buildbot, celery, flufl.enum, flufl.lock, python-public, python-wadllib (contributed upstream), pyvisa, routes, vulture, and zodbpickle (contributed upstream). I upgraded astroid, asyncpg (fixing a Python 3.13 failure and a build failure), buildbot (noticing an upstream test bug in the process), dnsdiag, frozenlist, netmiko (fixing a Python 3.13 failure), psycopg3, pydantic-settings, pylint, python-asyncssh, python-bleach, python-btrees, python-cytoolz, python-django-pgtrigger, python-django-test-migrations, python-gssapi, python-icalendar, python-json-log-formatter, python-pgbouncer, python-pkginfo, python-plumbum, python-stdlib-list, python-tokenize-rt, python-treq (fixing a Python 3.13 failure), python-typeguard, python-webargs (fixing a build failure), pyupgrade, pyvisa, pyvisa-py (fixing a Python 3.13 failure), toolz, twisted, vulture, waitress (fixing CVE-2024-49768 and CVE-2024-49769), wtf-peewee, wtforms, zodbpickle, zope.exceptions, zope.interface, zope.proxy, zope.security, and zope.testrunner to new upstream versions. I tried to fix a regression in python-scruffy, but I need testing feedback. I requested removal of python-testing.mysqld.

Russ Allbery: Review: Overdue and Returns

Review: Overdue and Returns, by Mark Lawrence
Publisher: Mark Lawrence
Copyright: June 2023
Copyright: February 2024
ASIN: B0C9N51M6Y
ASIN: B0CTYNQGBX
Format: Kindle
Pages: 99
Overdue is a stand-alone novelette in the Library Trilogy universe. Returns is a collection of two stories, the novelette "Returns" and the short story "About Pain." All of them together are about the length of a novella, so I'm combining them into a single review. These are ancillary stories in the same universe as the novels, but not necessarily in the same timeline. (Trying to fit "About Pain" into the novel timeline will give you a headache and I am choosing to read it as author's fan fiction.) I'm guessing they're part of the new fad for releasing short fiction on Amazon to tide readers over and maintain interest between books in a series, a fad about which I have mixed feelings. Given the total lack of publisher metadata in either the stories or on Amazon, I'm assuming they were self-published even though the novels are published by Ace, but I don't know that for certain. There are spoilers for The Book That Wouldn't Burn, so don't read these before that novel. There are no spoilers for The Book That Broke the World, and I don't think the reading order would matter. I found all three of these stories irritating and thuddingly trite. "Returns" is probably the best of the lot in terms of quality of storytelling, but I intensely dislike the structural implications of the nature of the book at its center and am therefore hoping that it's non-canonical. I would not waste your time with these even if you are enjoying the novels. "Overdue": Three owners of the same bookstore at different points in time have encounters with an albino man named Yute who is on a quest. One of the owners is trying to write a book, one of them is older, depressed, and closed off, and one of them has regular conversations with her sister's ghost. The nature of the relationship between the three is too much of a spoiler, but it involves similar shenanigans as The Book That Wouldn't Burn. Lawrence uses my least favorite resolution of benign ghost stories. The story tries very hard to sell it as a good thing, but I thought it was cruel and prefer fantasy that rejects both branches of that dilemma. Other than that, it was fine, I guess, although the moral was delivered with all of the subtlety of the last two minutes of a Saturday morning cartoon. (5) "Returns": Livira returns a book deep inside the library and finds that she can decipher it, which leads her to a story about Yute going on a trip to recover another library book. This had a lot of great Yute lines, plus I always like seeing Livira in exploration mode. The book itself is paradoxical in a causality-destroying way, which is handwaved away as literal magic. I liked this one the best of the three stories, but I hope the world-building of the main series does not go in this direction and I'm a little afraid it might. (6) "About Pain": A man named Holden runs into a woman named Clovis at the gym while carrying a book titled Catcher that his dog found and that he's returning to the library. I thoroughly enjoy Clovis and was happy to read a few more scenes about her. Other than that, this was fine, I guess, although it is a story designed to deliver a point and that point is one that appears in every discussion of classics and re-reading that has ever happened on the Internet. Also, I know I'm being grumpy, but Lawrence's puns with authors and character names are chapter-epigraph amusing but not short-story-length funny. Yes, yes, his name is Holden, we get it. (5) Rating: 5 out of 10

30 October 2024

Dirk Eddelbuettel: gcbd 0.2.7 on CRAN: More Mere Maintenance

Another pure maintenance release 0.2.7 of the gcbd package is now on CRAN. The gcbd proposes a benchmarking framework for LAPACK and BLAS operations (as the library can exchanged in a plug-and-play sense on suitable OSs) and records result in local database. Its original motivation was to also compare to GPU-based operations. However, as it is both challenging to keep CUDA working packages on CRAN providing the basic functionality appear to come and go so testing the GPU feature can be challenging. The main point of gcbd is now to actually demonstrate that yes indeed we can just swap BLAS/LAPACK libraries without any change to R, or R packages. The configure / rebuild R for xyz often seen with xyz being Goto or MKL is simply plain wrong: you really can just swap them (on proper operating systems, and R configs see the package vignette for more). But nomatter how often we aim to correct this record, it invariably raises its head another time. This release accommodates a CRAN change request as we were referencing the (now only suggested) package gputools. As hinted in the previous paragraph, it was once on CRAN but is not right now so we adjusted our reference. CRANberries also provides a diffstat report for the latest release. 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.

28 October 2024

Sven Hoexter: GKE version 1.31.1-gke.1678000+ is a baddy

Just a "warn your brothers" for people foolish enough to use GKE and run on the Rapid release channel. Update from version 1.31.1-gke.1146000 to 1.31.1-gke.1678000 is causing trouble whenever NetworkPolicy resources and a readinessProbe (or health check) are configured. As a workaround we started to remove the NetworkPolicy resources. E.g. when kustomize is involved with a patch like this: 
- patch:  -
    $patch: delete
    apiVersion: "networking.k8s.io/v1"
    kind: NetworkPolicy
    metadata:
        name: dummy
  target:
    kind: NetworkPolicy
We tried to update to the latest version - right now 1.31.1-gke.2008000 - which did not change anything. Behaviour is pretty much erratic, sometimes it still works and sometimes the traffic is denied. It also seems that there is some relevant fix in 1.31.1-gke.1678000 because that is now the oldest release of 1.31.1 which I can find in the regular and rapid release channels. The last known good version 1.31.1-gke.1146000 is not available to try a downgrade.

26 October 2024

Russell Coker: The CUPS Vulnerability

The Announcement Late last month there was an announcement of a severity 9.9 vulnerability allowing remote code execution that affects all GNU/Linux systems (plus others) [1]. For something to affect all Linux systems that would have to be either a kernel issue or a sshd issue. The announcement included complaints about the lack of response of vendors and And YES: I LOVE hyping the sh1t out of this stuff because apparently sensationalism is the only language that forces these people to fix . He seems to have a different experience to me of reporting bugs, I have had plenty of success getting bugs fixed without hyping them. I just report the bug, wait a while, and it gets fixed. I have reported potential security bugs without even bothering to try and prove that they were exploitable (any situation where you can make a program crash is potentially exploitable), I just report it and it gets fixed. I was very dubious about his ability to determine how serious a bug is and to accurately report it so this wasn t a situation where I was waiting for it to be disclosed to discover if it affected me. I was quite confident that my systems wouldn t be at any risk. Analysis Not All Linux Systems Run CUPS When it was published my opinion was proven to be correct, it turned out to be a series of CUPS bugs [2]. To describe that as all GNU/Linux systems (plus others) seems like a vast overstatement, maybe a good thing to say if you want to be a TikTok influencer but not if you want to be known for computer security work. For the Debian distribution the cups-browsed package (which seems to be the main exploitable one) is recommended by cups-daemon, as I have my Debian systems configured to not install recommended packages by default that means that it wasn t installed on any of my systems. Also the vast majority of my systems don t do printing and therefore don t have any part of CUPS installed. CUPS vs NAT The next issue is that in Australia most home ISPs don t have IPv6 enabled and CUPS doesn t do the things needed to allow receiving connections from the outside world via NAT with IPv4. If inbound port 631 is blocked on both TCP and USP as is the default on Australian home Internet or if there is a correctly configured firewall in place then the network is safe from attack. There is a feature called uPnP port forwarding [3] to allow server programs to ask a router to send inbound connections to them, this is apparently usually turned off by default in router configuration. If it is enabled then there are Debian packages of software to manage this, the miniupnpc package has the client (which can request NAT changes on the router) [4]. That package is not installed on any of my systems and for my home network I don t use a router that runs uPnP. The only program I knowingly run that uses uPnP is Warzone2100 and as I don t play network games that doesn t happen. Also as an aside in version 4.4.2-1 of warzone2100 in Debian and Ubuntu I made it use Bubblewrap to run the game in a container. So a Remote Code Execution bug in Warzone 2100 won t be an immediate win for an attacker (exploits via X11 or Wayland are another issue). MAC Systems Debian has had AppArmor enabled by default since Buster was released in 2019 [5]. There are claims that AppArmor will stop this exploit from doing anything bad. To check SE Linux access I first use the semanage fcontext command to check the context of the binary, cupsd_exec_t means that the daemon runs as cupsd_t. Then I checked what file access is granted with the sesearch program, mostly just access to temporary files, cupsd config files, the faillog, the Kerberos cache files (not used on the Kerberos client systems I run), Samba run files (might be a possibility of exploiting something there), and the security_t used for interfacing with kernel security infrastructure. I then checked the access to the security class and found that it is permitted to check contexts and access-vectors not access that can be harmful. The next test was to use sesearch to discover what capabilities are granted, which unfortunately includes the sys_admin capability, that is a capability that allows many sysadmin tasks that could be harmful (I just checked the Fedora source and Fedora 42 has the same access). Whether the sys_admin capability can be used to do bad things with the limited access cupsd_t has to device nodes etc is not clear. But this access is undesirable. So the SE Linux policy in Debian and Fedora will stop cupsd_t from writing SETUID programs that can be used by random users for root access and stop it from writing to /etc/shadow etc. But the sys_admin capability might allow it to do hostile things and I have already uploaded a changed policy to Debian/Unstable to remove that. The sys_rawio capability also looked concerning but it s apparently needed to probe for USB printers and as the domain has no access to block devices it is otherwise harmless. Below are the commands I used to discover what the policy allows and the output from them. 
# semanage fcontext -l grep bin/cups-browsed
/usr/bin/cups-browsed                              regular file       system_u:object_r:cupsd_exec_t:s0 
# sesearch -A -s cupsd_t -c file -p write
allow cupsd_t cupsd_interface_t:file   append create execute execute_no_trans getattr ioctl link lock map open read rename setattr unlink write  ;
allow cupsd_t cupsd_lock_t:file   append create getattr ioctl link lock open read rename setattr unlink write  ;
allow cupsd_t cupsd_log_t:file   append create getattr ioctl link lock open read rename setattr unlink write  ;
allow cupsd_t cupsd_runtime_t:file   append create getattr ioctl link lock open read rename setattr unlink write  ;
allow cupsd_t cupsd_rw_etc_t:file   append create getattr ioctl link lock open read rename setattr unlink write  ;
allow cupsd_t cupsd_t:file   append create getattr ioctl link lock open read rename setattr unlink write  ;
allow cupsd_t cupsd_tmp_t:file   append create getattr ioctl link lock open read rename setattr unlink write  ;
allow cupsd_t faillog_t:file   append getattr ioctl lock open read write  ;
allow cupsd_t init_tmpfs_t:file   append getattr ioctl lock read write  ;
allow cupsd_t krb5_host_rcache_t:file   append create getattr ioctl link lock open read rename setattr unlink write  ; [ allow_kerberos ]:True
allow cupsd_t print_spool_t:file   append create getattr ioctl link lock open read relabelfrom relabelto rename setattr unlink write  ;
allow cupsd_t samba_var_t:file   append getattr ioctl lock open read write  ;
allow cupsd_t security_t:file   append getattr ioctl lock open read write  ;
allow cupsd_t security_t:file   append getattr ioctl lock open read write  ; [ allow_kerberos ]:True
allow cupsd_t usbfs_t:file   append getattr ioctl lock open read write  ;
# sesearch -A -s cupsd_t -c security
allow cupsd_t security_t:security check_context; [ allow_kerberos ]:True
allow cupsd_t security_t:security   check_context compute_av  ;
# sesearch -A -s cupsd_t -c capability
allow cupsd_t cupsd_t:capability net_bind_service; [ allow_ypbind ]:True
allow cupsd_t cupsd_t:capability   audit_write chown dac_override dac_read_search fowner fsetid ipc_lock kill net_bind_service setgid setuid sys_admin sys_rawio sys_resource sys_tty_config  ;
# sesearch -A -s cupsd_t -c capability2
allow cupsd_t cupsd_t:capability2   block_suspend wake_alarm  ;
# sesearch -A -s cupsd_t -c blk_file
Conclusion This is an example of how not to handle security issues. Some degree of promotion is acceptable but this is very excessive and will result in people not taking security announcements seriously in future. I wonder if this is even a good career move by the researcher in question, will enough people believe that they actually did something good in this that it outweighs the number of people who think it s misleading at best?
Related posts:
  1. SE Linux audit2allow -R and Milter policy Since the earliest days there has been a command named...
  2. SE Linux File Context Precedence In my previous post I expressed a desire to use...
  3. SE Linux Things To Do At the end of my talk on Monday about the...

22 October 2024

Dirk Eddelbuettel: drat 0.2.5 on CRAN: Small Updates

drat user A new minor release of the drat package arrived on CRAN today, which is just over a year since the previous release. drat stands for drat R Archive Template, and helps with easy-to-create and easy-to-use repositories for R packages. Since its inception in early 2015 it has found reasonably widespread adoption among R users because repositories with marked releases is the better way to distribute code. Because for once it really is as your mother told you: Friends don t let friends install random git commit snapshots. Properly rolled-up releases it is. Just how CRAN shows us: a model that has demonstrated for over two-and-a-half decades how to do this. And you can too: drat is easy to use, documented by six vignettes and just works. Detailed information about drat is at its documentation site. That said, and these days , if you mainly care about github code then r-universe is there too, also offering binaries its makes and all that jazz. But sometimes you just want to, or need to, roll a local repository and drat can help you there. This release contains a small PR (made by Arne Holmin just after the previous release) adding support for an OSflacour variable (helpful for macOS). We also corrected an issue with one test file being insufficiently careful of using git2r only when installed, and as usual did a round of maintenance for the package concerning both continuous integration and documentation. The NEWS file summarises the release as follows:

Changes in drat version 0.2.5 (2024-10-21)
  • Function insertPackage has a new optional argument OSflavour (Arne Holmin in #142)
  • A test file conditions correctly about git2r being present (Dirk)
  • Several smaller packaging updates and enhancements to continuous integration and documentation have been added (Dirk)

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a comparison to the previous release. More detailed information is on the drat page as well as at the documentation site. 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.

21 October 2024

Russ Allbery: California general election

As usual with these every-two-year posts, probably of direct interest only to California residents. Maybe the more obscure things we're voting on will be a minor curiosity to people elsewhere. I'm a bit late this year, although not as late as last year, so a lot of people may have already voted, but I've been doing this for a while and wanted to keep it up. This post will only be about the ballot propositions. I don't have anything useful to say about the candidates that isn't hyper-local. I doubt anyone who has read my posts will be surprised by which candidates I'm voting for. As always with Calfornia ballot propositions, it's worth paying close attention to which propositions were put on the ballot by the legislature, usually because there's some state law requirement (often that I disagree with) that they be voted on by the public, and propositions that were put on the ballot by voter petition. The latter are often poorly written and have hidden problems. As a general rule of thumb, I tend to default to voting against propositions added by petition. This year, one can conveniently distinguish by number: the single-digit propositions were added by the legislature, and the two-digit ones were added by petition. Proposition 2: YES. Issue $10 billion in bonds for public school infrastructure improvements. I generally vote in favor of spending measures like this unless they have some obvious problem. The opposition argument is a deranged rant against immigrants and government debt and fails to point out actual problems. The opposition argument also claims this will result in higher property taxes and, seriously, if only that were true. That would make me even more strongly in favor of it. Proposition 3: YES. Enshrines the right to marriage without regard to sex or race into the California state constitution. This is already the law given US Supreme Court decisions, but fixing California state law is a long-overdue and obvious cleanup step. One of the quixotic things I would do if I were ever in government, which I will never be, would be to try to clean up the laws to make them match reality, repealing all of the dead clauses that were overturned by court decisions or are never enforced. I am in favor of all measures in this direction even when I don't agree with the direction of the change; here, as a bonus, I also strongly agree with the change. Proposition 4: YES. Issue $10 billion in bonds for infrastructure improvements to mitigate climate risk. This is basically the same argument as Proposition 2. The one drawback of this measure is that it's kind of a mixed grab bag of stuff and probably some of it should be supported out of the general budget rather than bonds, but I consider this a minor problem. We definitely need to ramp up climate risk mitigation efforts. Proposition 5: YES. Reduces the required super-majority to pass local bond measures for affordable housing from 67% to 55%. The fact that this requires a supermajority at all is absurd, California desperately needs to build more housing of any kind however we can, and publicly funded housing is an excellent idea. Proposition 6: YES. Eliminates "involuntary servitude" (in other words, "temporary" slavery) as a legally permissible punishment for crimes in the state of California. I'm one of the people who think the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution shouldn't have an exception for punishment for crimes, so obviously I'm in favor of this. This is one very, very tiny step towards improving the absolutely atrocious prison conditions in the state. Proposition 32: YES. Raises the minimum wage to $18 per hour from the current $16 per hour, over two years, and ties it to inflation. This is one of the rare petition-based propositions that I will vote in favor of because it's very straightforward, we clearly should be raising the minimum wage, and living in California is absurdly expensive because we refuse to build more housing (see Propositions 5 and 33). The opposition argument is the standard lie that a higher minimum wage will increase unemployment, which we know from numerous other natural experiments is simply not true. Proposition 33: NO. Repeals Costa-Hawkins, which prohibits local municipalities from enacting rent control on properties built after 1995. This one is going to split the progressive vote rather badly, I suspect. California has a housing crisis caused by not enough housing supply. It is not due to vacant housing, as much as some people would like you to believe that; the numbers just don't add up. There are way more people living here and wanting to live here than there is housing, so we need to build more housing. Rent control serves a valuable social function of providing stability to people who already have housing, but it doesn't help, and can hurt, the project of meeting actual housing demand. Rent control alone creates a two-tier system where people who have housing are protected but people who don't have housing have an even harder time getting housing than they do today. It's therefore quite consistent with the general NIMBY playbook of trying to protect the people who already have housing by making life harder for the people who do not, while keeping the housing supply essentially static. I am in favor of rent control in conjunction with real measures to increase the housing supply. I am therefore opposed to this proposition, which allows rent control without any effort to increase housing supply. I am quite certain that, if this passes, some municipalities will use it to make constructing new high-density housing incredibly difficult by requiring it all be rent-controlled low-income housing, thus cutting off the supply of multi-tenant market-rate housing entirely. This is already a common political goal in the part of California where I live. Local neighborhood groups advocate for exactly this routinely in local political fights. Give me a mandate for new construction that breaks local zoning obstructionism, including new market-rate housing to maintain a healthy lifecycle of housing aging into affordable housing as wealthy people move into new market-rate housing, and I will gladly support rent control measures as part of that package. But rent control on its own just allocates winners and losers without addressing the underlying problem. Proposition 34: NO. This is an excellent example of why I vote against petition propositions by default. This is a law designed to affect exactly one organization in the state of California: the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. The reason for this targeting is disputed; one side claims it's because of the AHF support for Proposition 33, and another side claims it's because AHF is a slumlord abusing California state funding. I have no idea which side of this is true. I also don't care, because I am fundamentally opposed to writing laws this way. Laws should establish general, fair principles that are broadly applicable, not be written with bizarrely specific conditions (health care providers that operate multifamily housing) that will only be met by a single organization. This kind of nonsense creates bad legal codes and the legal equivalent of technical debt. Just don't do this. Proposition 35: YES. I am, reluctantly, voting in favor of this even though it is a petition proposition because it looks like a useful simplification and cleanup of state health care funding, makes an expiring tax permanent, and is supported by a very wide range of organizations that I generally trust to know what they're talking about. No opposition argument was filed, which I think is telling. Proposition 36: NO. I am resigned to voting down attempts to start new "war on drugs" nonsense for the rest of my life because the people who believe in this crap will never, ever, ever stop. This one has bonus shoplifting fear-mongering attached, something that touches on nasty local politics that have included large retail chains manipulating crime report statistics to give the impression that shoplifting is up dramatically. It's yet another round of the truly horrific California "three strikes" criminal penalty obsession, which completely misunderstands both the causes of crime and the (almost nonexistent) effectiveness of harsh punishment as deterrence.

20 October 2024

Bits from Debian: Ada Lovelace Day 2024 - Interview with some Women in Debian

Alt Ada Lovelace portrait Ada Lovelace Day was celebrated on October 8 in 2024, and on this occasion, to celebrate and raise awareness of the contributions of women to the STEM fields we interviewed some of the women in Debian. Here we share their thoughts, comments, and concerns with the hope of inspiring more women to become part of the Sciences, and of course, to work inside of Debian. This article was simulcasted to the debian-women mail list. Beatrice Torracca 1. Who are you? I am Beatrice, I am Italian. Internet technology and everything computer-related is just a hobby for me, not my line of work or the subject of my academic studies. I have too many interests and too little time. I would like to do lots of things and at the same time I am too Oblomovian to do any. 2. How did you get introduced to Debian? As a user I started using newsgroups when I had my first dialup connection and there was always talk about this strange thing called Linux. Since moving from DR DOS to Windows was a shock for me, feeling like I lost the control of my machine, I tried Linux with Debian Potato and I never strayed away from Debian since then for my personal equipment. 3. How long have you been into Debian? Define "into". As a user... since Potato, too many years to count. As a contributor, a similar amount of time, since early 2000 I think. My first archived email about contributing to the translation of the description of Debian packages dates 2001. 4. Are you using Debian in your daily life? If yes, how? Yes!! I use testing. I have it on my desktop PC at home and I have it on my laptop. The desktop is where I have a local IMAP server that fetches all the mails of my email accounts, and where I sync and back up all my data. On both I do day-to-day stuff (from email to online banking, from shopping to taxes), all forms of entertainment, a bit of work if I have to work from home (GNU R for statistics, LibreOffice... the usual suspects). At work I am required to have another OS, sadly, but I am working on setting up a Debian Live system to use there too. Plus if at work we start doing bioinformatics there might be a Linux machine in our future... I will of course suggest and hope for a Debian system. 5. Do you have any suggestions to improve women's participation in Debian? This is a tough one. I am not sure. Maybe, more visibility for the women already in the Debian Project, and make the newcomers feel seen, valued and welcomed. A respectful and safe environment is key too, of course, but I think Debian made huge progress in that aspect with the Code of Conduct. I am a big fan of promoting diversity and inclusion; there is always room for improvement. Ileana Dumitrescu (ildumi) 1. Who are you? I am just a girl in the world who likes cats and packaging Free Software. 2. How did you get introduced to Debian? I was tinkering with a computer running Debian a few years ago, and I decided to learn more about Free Software. After a search or two, I found Debian Women. 3. How long have you been into Debian? I started looking into contributing to Debian in 2021. After contacting Debian Women, I received a lot of information and helpful advice on different ways I could contribute, and I decided package maintenance was the best fit for me. I eventually became a Debian Maintainer in 2023, and I continue to maintain a few packages in my spare time. 4. Are you using Debian in your daily life? If yes, how? Yes, it is my favourite GNU/Linux operating system! I use it for email, chatting, browsing, packaging, etc. 5. Do you have any suggestions to improve women's participation in Debian? The mailing list for Debian Women may attract more participation if it is utilized more. It is where I started, and I imagine participation would increase if it is more engaging. Kathara Sasikumar (kathara) 1. Who are you? I'm Kathara Sasikumar, 22 years old and a recent Debian user turned Maintainer from India. I try to become a creative person through sketching or playing guitar chords, but it doesn't work! xD 2. How did you get introduced to Debian? When I first started college, I was that overly enthusiastic student who signed up for every club and volunteered for anything that crossed my path just like every other fresher. But then, the pandemic hit, and like many, I hit a low point. COVID depression was real, and I was feeling pretty down. Around this time, the FOSS Club at my college suddenly became more active. My friends, knowing I had a love for free software, pushed me to join the club. They thought it might help me lift my spirits and get out of the slump I was in. At first, I joined only out of peer pressure, but once I got involved, the club really took off. FOSS Club became more and more active during the pandemic, and I found myself spending more and more time with it. A year later, we had the opportunity to host a MiniDebConf at our college. Where I got to meet a lot of Debian developers and maintainers, attending their talks and talking with them gave me a wider perspective on Debian, and I loved the Debian philosophy. At that time, I had been distro hopping but never quite settled down. I occasionally used Debian but never stuck around. However, after the MiniDebConf, I found myself using Debian more consistently, and it truly connected with me. The community was incredibly warm and welcoming, which made all the difference. 3. How long have you been into Debian? Now, I've been using Debian as my daily driver for about a year. 4. Are you using Debian in your daily life? If yes, how? It has become my primary distro, and I use it every day for continuous learning and working on various software projects with free and open-source tools. Plus, I've recently become a Debian Maintainer (DM) and have taken on the responsibility of maintaining a few packages. I'm looking forward to contributing more to the Debian community Rhonda D'Vine (rhonda) 1. Who are you? My name is Rhonda, my pronouns are she/her, or per/pers. I'm 51 years old, working in IT. 2. How did you get introduced to Debian? I was already looking into Linux because of university, first it was SuSE. And people played around with gtk. But when they packaged GNOME and it just didn't even install I looked for alternatives. A working colleague from back then gave me a CD of Debian. Though I couldn't install from it because Slink didn't recognize the pcmcia drive. I had to install it via floppy disks, but apart from that it was quite well done. And the early GNOME was working, so I never looked back. 3. How long have you been into Debian? Even before I was more involved, a colleague asked me whether I could help with translating the release documentation. That was my first contribution to Debian, for the slink release in early 1999. And I was using some other software before on my SuSE systems, and I wanted to continue to use them on Debian obviously. So that's how I got involved with packaging in Debian. But I continued to help with translation work, for a long period of time I was almost the only person active for the German part of the website. 4. Are you using Debian in your daily life? If yes, how? Being involved with Debian was a big part of the reason I got into my jobs since a long time now. I always worked with maintaining Debian (or Ubuntu) systems. Privately I run Debian on my laptop, with occasionally switching to Windows in dual boot when (rarely) needed. 5. Do you have any suggestions to improve women's participation in Debian? There are factors that we can't influence, like that a lot of women are pushed into care work because patriarchal structures work that way, and don't have the time nor energy to invest a lot into other things. But we could learn to appreciate smaller contributions better, and not focus so much on the quantity of contributions. When we look at longer discussions on mailing lists, those that write more mails actually don't contribute more to the discussion, they often repeat themselves without adding more substance. Through working on our own discussion patterns this could create a more welcoming environment for a lot of people. Sophie Brun (sophieb) 1. Who are you? I'm a 44 years old French woman. I'm married and I have 2 sons. 2. How did you get introduced to Debian? In 2004 my boyfriend (now my husband) installed Debian on my personal computer to introduce me to Debian. I knew almost nothing about Open Source. During my engineering studies, a professor mentioned the existence of Linux, Red Hat in particular, but without giving any details. I learnt Debian by using and reading (in advance) The Debian Administrator's Handbook. 3. How long have you been into Debian? I've been a user since 2004. But I only started contributing to Debian in 2015: I had quit my job and I wanted to work on something more meaningful. That's why I joined my husband in Freexian, his company. Unlike most people I think, I started contributing to Debian for my work. I only became a DD in 2021 under gentle social pressure and when I felt confident enough. 4. Are you using Debian in your daily life? If yes, how? Of course I use Debian in my professional life for almost all the tasks: from administrative tasks to Debian packaging. I also use Debian in my personal life. I have very basic needs: Firefox, LibreOffice, GnuCash and Rhythmbox are the main applications I need. Sruthi Chandran (srud) 1. Who are you? A feminist, a librarian turned Free Software advocate and a Debian Developer. Part of Debian Outreach team and DebConf Committee. 2. How did you get introduced to Debian? I got introduced to the free software world and Debian through my husband. I attended many Debian events with him. During one such event, out of curiosity, I participated in a Debian packaging workshop. Just after that I visited a Tibetan community in India and they mentioned that there was no proper Tibetan font in GNU/Linux. Tibetan font was my first package in Debian. 3. How long have you been into Debian? I have been contributing to Debian since 2016 and Debian Developer since 2019. 4. Are you using Debian in your daily life? If yes, how? I haven't used any other distro on my laptop since I got introduced to Debian. 5. Do you have any suggestions to improve women's participation in Debian? I was involved with actively mentoring newcomers to Debian since I started contributing myself. I specially work towards reducing the gender gap inside the Debian and Free Software community in general. In my experience, I believe that visibility of already existing women in the community will encourage more women to participate. Also I think we should reintroduce mentoring through debian-women. T ssia Cam es Ara jo (tassia) 1. Who are you? T ssia Cam es Ara jo, a Brazilian living in Canada. I'm a passionate learner who tries to push myself out of my comfort zone and always find something new to learn. I also love to mentor people on their learning journey. But I don't consider myself a typical geek. My challenge has always been to not get distracted by the next project before I finish the one I have in my hands. That said, I love being part of a community of geeks and feel empowered by it. I love Debian for its technical excellence, and it's always reassuring to know that someone is taking care of the things I don't like or can't do. When I'm not around computers, one of my favorite things is to feel the wind on my cheeks, usually while skating or riding a bike; I also love music, and I'm always singing a melody in my head. 2. How did you get introduced to Debian? As a student, I was privileged to be introduced to FLOSS at the same time I was introduced to computer programming. My university could not afford to have labs in the usual proprietary software model, and what seemed like a limitation at the time turned out to be a great learning opportunity for me and my colleagues. I joined this student-led initiative to "liberate" our servers and build LTSP-based labs - where a single powerful computer could power a few dozen diskless thin clients. How revolutionary it was at the time! And what an achievement! From students to students, all using Debian. Most of that group became close friends; I've married one of them, and a few of them also found their way to Debian. 3. How long have you been into Debian? I first used Debian in 2001, but my first real connection with the community was attending DebConf 2004. Since then, going to DebConfs has become a habit. It is that moment in the year when I reconnect with the global community and my motivation to contribute is boosted. And you know, in 20 years I've seen people become parents, grandparents, children grow up; we've had our own child and had the pleasure of introducing him to the community; we've mourned the loss of friends and healed together. I'd say Debian is like family, but not the kind you get at random once you're born, Debian is my family by choice. 4. Are you using Debian in your daily life? If yes, how? These days I teach at Vanier College in Montr al. My favorite course to teach is UNIX, which I have the pleasure of teaching mostly using Debian. I try to inspire my students to discover Debian and other FLOSS projects, and we are happy to run a FLOSS club with participation from students, staff and alumni. I love to see these curious young minds put to the service of FLOSS. It is like recruiting soldiers for a good battle, and one that can change their lives, as it certainly did mine. 5. Do you have any suggestions to improve women's participation in Debian? I think the most effective way to inspire other women is to give visibility to active women in our community. Speaking at conferences, publishing content, being vocal about what we do so that other women can see us and see themselves in those positions in the future. It's not easy, and I don't like being in the spotlight. It took me a long time to get comfortable with public speaking, so I can understand the struggle of those who don't want to expose themselves. But I believe that this space of vulnerability can open the way to new connections. It can inspire trust and ultimately motivate our next generation. It's with this in mind that I publish these lines. Another point we can't neglect is that in Debian we work on a volunteer basis, and this in itself puts us at a great disadvantage. In our societies, women usually take a heavier load than their partners in terms of caretaking and other invisible tasks, so it is hard to afford the free time needed to volunteer. This is one of the reasons why I bring my son to the conferences I attend, and so far I have received all the support I need to attend DebConfs with him. It is a way to share the caregiving burden with our community - it takes a village to raise a child. Besides allowing us to participate, it also serves to show other women (and men) that you can have a family life and still contribute to Debian. My feeling is that we are not doing super well in terms of diversity in Debian at the moment, but that should not discourage us at all. That's the way it is now, but that doesn't mean it will always be that way. I feel like we go through cycles. I remember times when we had many more active female contributors, and I'm confident that we can improve our ratio again in the future. In the meantime, I just try to keep going, do my part, attract those I can, reassure those who are too scared to come closer. Debian is a wonderful community, it is a family, and of course a family cannot do without us, the women. These interviews were conducted via email exchanges in October, 2024. Thanks to all the wonderful women who participated in this interview. We really appreciate your contributions in Debian and to Free/Libre software.

15 October 2024

Dirk Eddelbuettel: qlcal 0.0.13 on CRAN: Small Calendar Update

The thirteenth release of the qlcal package arrivied at CRAN today. qlcal delivers the calendaring parts of QuantLib. It is provided (for the R package) as a set of included files, so the package is self-contained and does not depend on an external QuantLib library (which can be demanding to build). qlcal covers over sixty country / market calendars and can compute holiday lists, its complement (i.e. business day lists) and much more. Examples are in the README at the repository, the package page, and course at the CRAN package page. This releases synchronizes qlcal with the QuantLib release 1.36 (made this week) and contains some minor updates to two calendars.

Changes in version 0.0.13 (2024-10-15)
  • Synchronized with QuantLib 1.36 released yesterday
  • Calendar updates for South Korea and Poland

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report for this release. See the project page and package documentation for more details, and more examples. 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.

14 October 2024

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppDate 0.0.4: New Upstream Minor

RcppDate wraps the featureful date library written by Howard Hinnant for use with R. This header-only modern C++ library has been in pretty wide-spread use for a while now, and adds to C++11/C++14/C++17 what will be (with minor modifications) the date library in C++20. This release, the first in 3 1/2 years, syncs the code with the recent date 3.0.2 release from a few days ago. It also updates a few packaging details such as URLs, badges or continuous integration.

Changes in version 0.0.4 (2024-10-14)
  • Updated to upstream version 3.0.2 (and adjusting one pragma)
  • Several small updates to overall packaging and testing

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release. More information is available at the repository or the package 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.

12 October 2024

Jonathan Dowland: Code formatting in documents

I've been exploring typesetting and formatting code within text documents such as papers, or my thesis. Up until now, I've been using the listings package without thinking much about it. By default, some sample Haskell code processed by listings looks like this (click any of the images to see larger, non-blurry versions):
default output of listings on a Haskell code sample
It's formatted with a monospaced font, with some keywords highlighted, but not syntactic symbols. There are several other options for typesetting and formatting code in LaTeX documents. For Haskell in particular, there is the preprocessor lhs2tex, The default output of which looks like this:
default output of lhs2tex on a Haskell code sample
A proportional font, but it's taken pains to preserve vertical alignment, which is syntactically significant for Haskell. It looks a little cluttered to me, and I'm not a fan of nearly everything being italic. Again, symbols aren't differentiated, but it has substituted them for more typographically pleasing alternatives: -> has become , and \ is now . Another option is perhaps the newest, the LaTeX package minted, which leverages the Python Pygments program. Here's the same code again. It defaults to monospace (the choice of font seems a lot clearer to me than the default for listings), no symbolic substitution, and liberal use of colour:
default output of minted on a Haskell code sample
An informal survey of the samples so far showed that the minted output was the most popular. All of these packages can be configured to varying degrees. Here are some examples of what I've achieved with a bit of tweaking
_listings_ adjusted with colour and some symbols substituted (but sadly not the two together) listings adjusted with colour and some symbols substituted (but sadly not the two together)
_lhs2tex_ adjusted to be less italic, sans-serif and use some colour lhs2tex adjusted to be less italic, sans-serif and use some colour
All of this has got me wondering whether there are straightforward empirical answers to some of these questions of style. Firstly, I'm pretty convinced that symbolic substitution is valuable. When writing Haskell, we write ->, \, /= etc. not because it's most legible, but because it's most practical to type those symbols on the most widely available keyboards and popular keyboard layouts.1 Of the three options listed here, symbolic substitution is possible with listings and lhs2tex, but I haven't figured out if minted can do it (which is really the question: can pygments do it?) I'm unsure about proportional versus monospaced fonts. We typically use monospaced fonts for editing computer code, but that's at least partly for historical reasons. Vertical alignment is often very important in source code, and it can be easily achieved with monospaced text; it's also sometimes important to have individual characters (., etc.) not be de-emphasised by being smaller than any other character. lhs2tex, at least, addresses vertical alignment whilst using proportional fonts. I guess the importance of identifying individual significant characters is just as true in a code sample within a larger document as it is within plain source code. From a (brief) scan of research on this topic, it seems that proportional fonts result in marginally quicker reading times for regular prose. It's not clear whether those results carry over into reading computer code in particular, and the margin is slim in any case. The drawbacks of monospaced text mostly apply when the volume of text is large, which is not the case for the short code snippets I am working with. I still have a few open questions:
  1. The Haskell package Data.List.Unicode lets the programmer use a range of unicode symbols in place of ASCII approximations, such as instead of elem, instead of /=. Sadly, it's not possible to replace the denotation for an anonymous function, \, with this way.

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