A few days ago I watched a Q/A session with Linus Torvalds at Debconf 14. One of the main complaint of Linus towards Linux distribution was the way that distribution ends up using different versions of libraries than what has been used during application development. And the fact that it s next to impossible to support properly all Linux distributions at the same time due to this kind of differences.
And now I just discovered a new proposal of the systemd team that basically tries to address this: Revisiting how we put together Linux Systems. They suggest to make extensive use of btrfs subvolumes to host multiple variants of the /usr tree (that is supposed to contain all the invariant system code/data) that you could combine with multiple runtime/framework subvolumes thanks to filesytem namespaces and make available to individual applications. This way of grouping libraries in runtime subvolumes reminds me a bit of the concepts of baserock (they are using git instead of btrfs) and while I was a bit dubious of all this (because it goes against quite a few of the principles of distribution integration) I m beginning to believe that there s room for both models to work together. It would be nice if Debian could become the reference distribution that upstream developers are using to develop against Linux. This would in turn mean that when upstream distribution their application under this new form, they will provide (or reference) Debian-based subvolumes ready for use by users (even those who are not using Debian as their main OS). And those subvolumes would be managed by the Debian project (probably automatically built from our collection of .deb). We re still quite far from this goal but it will interesting to see this idea mature and become reality. There are plenty of challenges facing us.

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After becoming a DM at Debconf12 in Managua, Nicaragua and entering the NM queue during Debconf13 in Vaumarcus, Switzerland I received the mail about 24 hours too late to officially become a DD during Debconf14 in Portland, USA. Nevertheless it was a very pleasant surprise to find the mail in my INBOX this morning confirming that my account had been created and that I was officially ijc@debian.org. Thanks to everyone who helped/encouraged me along the way! I don't imagine much will change in practice, I intend to remain involved in the kernel and Debian Installer efforts as well as continuing to contribute to the Xen packaging and to maintain qcontrol (both in Debian and upstream) and sunxi-tools. I suppose I also still maintain ivtv-utils and xserver-xorg-video-ivtv but they require so little in the way of updates that I'm not sure they count.

This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you re among the people who made a donation to support my work (65.55 , thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects. Distro Tracker Even though I was officially in vacation during 3 of the 4 weeks of August, I spent many nights working on Distro Tracker. I m pleased to have managed to bring back Python 3 compatibility over all the (tested) code base. The full test suite now passes with Python 3.4 and Django 1.6 (or 1.7). From now on, I ll run tox on all code submitted to make sure that we won t regress on this point. tox also runs flake8 for me so that I can easily detect when the submitted code doesn t respect the PEP8 coding style. It also catches other interesting mistakes (like unused variable or too complex functions). Getting the code to pass flake8 was also a major effort, it resulted in a huge commit (89 files changed, 1763 insertions, 1176 deletions). Thanks to the extensive test suite, all those refactoring only resulted in two regressions that I fixed rather quickly. Some statistics: 51 commits over the last month, 41 by me, 3 by Andrew Starr-Bochicchio, 3 by Christophe Siraut, 3 by Joseph Herlant and 1 by Simon Kainz. Thanks to all of them! Their contributions ported some features that were already available on the old PTS. The new PTS is now warning of upcoming auto-removals, is displaying problems with uptream URLs, includes a short package description in the page title, and provides a link to screenshots (if they exist on screenshots.debian.net). We still have plenty of bugs to handle, so you can help too: check out https://tracker.debian.org/docs/contributing.html. I always leave easy bugs for others to handle, so grab one and get started! I ll review your patch with pleasure. Tryton After my last batch of contributions to Tryton s French Chart of Accounts (#4108, #4109, #4110, #4111) C dric Krier granted me commit rights to the account_fr mercurial module. Debconf 14 I wasn t able to attend this year but thanks to awesome work of the video team, I watched some videos (and I still have a bunch that I want to see). Some of them were put online the day after they had been recorded. Really amazing work! Django 1.7 After the initial bug reports, I got some feedback of maintainers who feared that it would be difficult to get their packages working with Django 1.7. I helped them as best as I can by providing some patches (for horizon, for django-restricted-resource, for django-testscenarios). Since I expected many maintainers to be not very pro-active, I rebuilt all packages with Django 1.7 to detect at least those that would fail to build. I tagged as confirmed all the corresponding bug reports. Looking at https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=python-django@packages.debian.org;tag=django17, one can see that some progress has been made with 25 packages fixed. Still there are at least 25 others that are still problematic in sid and 35 that have not been investigated at all (except for the automatic rebuild that passed). Again your help is more than welcome! It s easy to install python-django 1.7 from experimental and they try to use/rebuild the packages from the above list. Dpkg translation With the freeze approaching, I wanted to ensure that dpkg was fully translated in French. I thus pinged debian-l10n-french@lists.debian.org and merged some translations that were done by volunteers. Unfortunately it looks like nobody really stepped up to maintain it in the long run so I did myself the required update when dpkg 1.17.12 got uploaded. Is there anyone willing to manage dpkg s French translation? With the latest changes in 1.17.13, we have again a few untranslated strings:
$ for i in $(find . -name fr.po); do echo $i; msgfmt -c -o /dev/null --statistics $i; done
./po/fr.po
1083 translated messages, 4 fuzzy translations, 1 untranslated message.
./dselect/po/fr.po
268 translated messages, 3 fuzzy translations.
./scripts/po/fr.po
545 translated messages.
./man/po/fr.po
2277 translated messages, 8 fuzzy translations, 3 untranslated messages.
Misc stuff I made an xsane QA upload (it s currently orphaned) to drop the (build-)dependency on liblcms1 and avoid getting it removed from Debian testing (see #745524). For the record, how-can-i-help warned me of this after one dist-upgrade. With the Django 1.7 work and the need to open up an experimental branch, I decided to switch python-django s packaging to git even though the current team policy is to use subversion. This triggered (once more) the discussion about a possible switch to git and I was pleased to see more enthusiasm this time around. Barry Warsaw tested a few workflows, shared his feeling and pushed toward a live discussion of the switch during Debconf. It looks like it might happen for good this time. I contributed my share in the discussions on the mailing list. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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This time, for personal reasons I wasn t able to attend the full DebConf, which started on the Saturday August 22nd. I arrived at Portland on the Tuesday the 26th by noon, at the 4th of the conference. Even though I would like to arrive earlier, the loss was alleviated by the work of the amazing DebConf video team. I was able to follow remotely most of the sessions I would like to attend if I were there already. As I will say to everyone, DebConf is for sure the best conference I have ever attended. The technical and philosophical discussions that take place in talks, BoF sessions or even unplanned ad-hoc gathering are deep. The hacking moments where you have a chance to pair with fellow developers, with whom you usually only have contact remotely via IRC or email, are precious. That is all great. But definitively, catching up with old friends, and making new ones, is what makes DebConf so special. Your old friends are your old friends, and meeting them again after so much time is always a pleasure. New friendships will already start with a powerful bond, which is being part of the Debian community. Being only 4 hours behind my home time zone, jetlag wasn t a big problem during the day. However, I was waking up too early in the morning and consequently getting tired very early at night, so I mostly didn t go out after hacklabs were closed at 10PM. Despite all of the discussion, being in the audience for several talks, other social interactions and whatnot, during this DebConf I have managed to do quite some useful work. debci and the Debian Continuous Integration project I gave a talk where I discussed past, present, and future of debci and the Debian Continuous Integration project. The slides are available, as well as the video recording. One thing I want you to take away is that there is a difference between debci and the Debian Continuous Integration project:

• debci is a platform for Continuous Integration specifically tailored for the Debian repository and similar ones. If you work on a Debian derivative, or otherwise provides Debian packages in a repository, you can use debci to run tests for your stuff.
  • a (very) few thinks in debci, though, are currently hardcoded for Debian. Other projects using it would be a nice and needed peer pressure to get rid of those.
• Debian Continuous Integration is Debian s instance of debci, which currently runs tests for all packages in the unstable distribution that provide autopkgtest support. It will be expanded in the future to run tests on other suites and architectures.

A few days before DebConf, C dric Boutillier managed to extract gem2deb-test-runner from gem2deb, so that autopkgtest tests can be run against any Ruby package that has tests by running gem2deb-test-runner --autopkgtest. gem2deb-test-runner will do the right thing, make sure that the tests don t use code from the source package, but instead run them against the installed package. Then, right after my talk I was glad to discover that the Perl team is also working on a similar tool that will automate running tests for their packages against the installed package. We agreed that they will send me a whitelist of packages in which we could just call that tool and have it do The Right Thing. We might be talking here about getting autopkgtest support (and consequentially continuous integration) for free for almost 2000 4000 packages. The missing bits for this to happen are:

• making debci use a whitelist of packages that, while not having the appropriate Testsuite: autopkgtest field in the Sources file, could be assumed to have autopkgtest support by calling the right tool (gem2deb-test-runner for Ruby, or the Perl team s new tool for Perl packages).
• make the autopkgtest test runner assume a corresponding, implicit, debian/tests/control when it not exists in those packages

During a few days I have mentored Lucas Kanashiro, who also attended DebConf, on writing a patch to add support for email notifications in debci so maintainers can be pro-actively notified of status changes (pass/fail, fail/pass) in their packages. I have also started hacking on the support for distributed workers, based on the initial work by Martin Pitt:

• updated the amqp branch against the code in the master branch.
• added a debci enqueue command that can be used to force test runs for packages given on the command line.
• I sent a patch for librabbitmq that adds support for limiting the number of messages the server will send to a connected client. With this patch applied, the debci workers were modified to request being sent only 1 message at a time, so late workers will start to receive packages to process as soon as they are up. Without this, a single connected worker would receive all messages right away, while a second worker that comes up 1 second later would sit idle until new packages are queued for testing.

Ruby I had some discusion with Christian about making Rubygems install to $HOME by default when the user is not root. We discussed a few implementation options, and while I don t have a solution yet, we have a better understanding of the potential pitfalls. The Ruby BoF session on Friday produced a few interesting discussions. Some take away point include, but are not limited to:

• Since the last DebConf, we were able to remove all obsolete Ruby interpreters, and now only have Ruby 2.1 in unstable. Ruby 2.1 will be the default version in Debian 8 (jessie).
• There is user interest is being able to run the interpreter from Debian, but install everything else from Rubygems.
• We are lacking in all the documentation-related goals for jessie that were proposed at the previous DebConf.

Redmine I was able to make Redmine work with the Rails 4 stack we currently have in unstable/testing. This required using a snapshot of the still unreleased version 3.0 based on the rails-4.1 branch in the upstream Subversion repository as source. I am a little nervous about using a upstream snapshot, though. According to the "roadmap of the project ":http://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/roadmap the only purpose of the 3.0 release will be to upgrade to Rails 4, but before that happens there should be a 2.6.0 release that is also not released yet. 3.0 should be equivalent to that 2.6.0 version both feature-wise and, specially, bug-wise. The only problem is that we don t know what that 2.6.0 looks like yet. According to the roadmap it seems there is not much left in term of features for 2.6.0, though. The updated package is not in unstable yet, but will be soon. It needs more testing, and a good update to the documentation. Those interested in helping to test Redmine on jessie before the freeze please get in touch with me. Noosfero I gave a lighting talk on Noosfero, a platform for social networking websites I am upstream for. It is a Rails appplication licensed under the AGPLv3, and there are packages for wheezy. You can checkout the slides I used. Video recording is not available yet, but should be soon. That s it. I am looking forward to DebConf 15 at Heidelberg. :-)

We are happy to announce a new release of littler. A few minor things have changes since the last release:

• A few new examples were added or updated, including use of the fabulous new docopt package by Edwin de Jonge which makes command-line parsing a breeze.
• Other new examples show simple calls to help with sweave, knitr, roxygen2, Rcpp's attribute compilation, and more.
• We also wrote an entirely new webpage with usage example.
• A new option -d --datastdin was added which will read stdin into a data.frame variable X.
• The repository has been move to this GitHub repo.
• With that, the build process was updated both throughout but also to reflect the current git commit at time of build.

Full details are provided at the ChangeLog The code is available via the GitHub repo, from tarballs off my littler page and the local directory here. A fresh package will got to Debian's incoming queue shortly as well. Comments and suggestions are welcome via the mailing list or issue tracker at the GitHub repo.

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

Howdy y all Two of the main things I ve been working on since I started at Xamarin are making it easier for people to try out the latest bleeding-edge Mono, and making it easier for people on older distributions to upgrade Mono without upgrading their entire OS. Public Jenkins packages Every time anyone commits to Mono git master or MonoDevelop git master, our public Jenkins will try and turn those into packages, and add them to repositories. There s a garbage collection policy currently the 20 most recent builds are always kept, then the first build of the month for everything older than 20 builds. Because we re talking potentially broken packages here, I wrote a simple environment mangling script called mono-snapshot. When you install a Jenkins package, mono-snapshot will also be installed and configured. This allows you to have multiple Mono versions installed at once, for easy bug bisecting.

directhex@marceline:~$ mono --version
Mono JIT compiler version 3.6.0 (tarball Wed Aug 20 13:05:36 UTC 2014)
directhex@marceline:~$ . mono-snapshot mono
[mono-20140828234844]directhex@marceline:~$ mono --version
Mono JIT compiler version 3.8.1 (tarball Fri Aug 29 07:11:20 UTC 2014)

The instructions for setting up the Jenkins packages are on the new Mono web site, specifically here. The packages are built on CentOS 7 x64, Debian 7 x64, and Debian 7 i386 they should work on most newer distributions or derivatives. Stable release packages This has taken a bit longer to get working. The aim is to offer packages in our Apt/Yum repositories for every Mono release, in a timely fashion, more or less around the same time as the Mac installers are released. Info for setting this up is, again, on the new website. Like the Jenkins packages, they are designed as far as I am able to cleanly integrate with different versions of major popular distributions though there are a few instances of ABI breakage in there which I have opted to fix using one evil method rather than another evil method. Please note that these are still at preview or beta quality, and shouldn t be considered usable in major production environments until I get a bit more user feedback. The RPM packages especially are super new, and I haven t tested them exhaustively at this point I d welcome feedback. I hope to remove the testing!!! warning labels from these packages soon, but that relies on user feedback to my xamarin.com account preferably (jo.shields@)

Part 1 - Debconf 2014 This year I went to my first Debconf, which took place in Portland, OR during the last week of August 2014. All in all I have to rate my experience as very enlightening and in the end quite fun. First of all, it was a little daunting to go to a conference in 1 - A city I d never been to before; 2 - A conference with 300+ people, only 3 of which I knew and even then I only knew them virtually. Not to mention I was in the presence of some extremely brilliant and known contirbutors in the Debian community which was somewhat intimidating. Just to give you an idea, Linus Torvalds showed up for a Q&A session last Friday morning! Jealous? Actually I missed that too. It was kind of a last minute thing, booked for coincidentally the exact time I d be flying out of Portland. I found out about it much too late. But luckily for me and maybe you, the session was filmed and can be seen here. Isn t that a treat? Point made, there are lots of really talented people there, both techies and non-techies. It s easy to feel you re out of league, at least I did. But I d highly encourage you to ignore such feelings if you re ever in the same situation. Debian has been built on for a long time now, but although a lot has been done, a lot still needs to be done. The Debian community is very welcoming of new contributors and users, regardless of the level of expertise. So far I haven t been snubbed by anyone. To the contrary, all my interactions with the Debian community members has been extremely positive. So go ahead and attend the meetings and presentations, even if you think it s not your area of expertise. Debconf was organized (or at least this one was) as a series of talks, meet ups and ad hoc sessions, some of which occured simultaneously. The sessions were all about different components of the Debian universe, from presenting new features to overviews of accomplishments to discussing issues and how to fix them. A schedule with the location and description of each session was posted on the Debconf wiki. Sometimes none of the sessions at a certain time was on a topic I knew very much about. But I d sit in anyways. There s no rule to attending the sessions, no minimum qualifications required. You ll likely learn something new and you just might find out there is something you can do to contribute. There are also hackathons that are quite the thing or so I heard. Or you could walk about and meet new people, do some networking. I have to say networking was the highlight of the Debconf for me. Remember I said I knew about 3 people who were at the conference? Well, I had actually just corresponded with those people. I didn t really know them. So on my first day I spent quite some time shyly peeking at people s name tags, trying to recognize someone I had met over email or IRC. But with 300 or so people at the conference, I was unsuccessful. So I finally gave up on that strategy and walked up to a random person, stuck out my hand and said, Hi. My name is Juliana. This is my first Debconf. What s your name and what do you do for Debian? This may not be according to protocol, but it worked for me. I got to meet lots of people that way, met some Debian contributos from my home country (Brazil), some from my current city (NYC), and yet others that had similar interests as I do who I might work with in the near future. For example, I love Machine Learning, I m currently beginning my graduate studies on that track. Several Debian contributors offered to introduce me to a well known Machine Learning researcher and Debian contributor who is in NYC. Others had tried out JSCommunicator and had lots of suggestions for new features and fixes, or wanted to know more about the project and WebRTC in general. Also, not everyone there is a super experienced Debian contributor or user. There are a lot of newbies like me. I got to do a quick 20-min presentation and demo of the work I had done on JSCommunicator during GSoC 2014. Oh my goodness that was nerve-wracking, but not half as painful as I expected. My mentor (Daniel Pocock) wisely suggested that when confronted with a question I didn t know how to answer, to redirect the question to to the audience. Chances are, there is someone there that knows the answer. If not, it will at least spark a good discussion. When meeting new people at Debian, a question almost everyone asked is How did you start working with/for Debian? . So I thought it would be a good topic to post about. Part 2 - How I Became a Debian Contributor Sometime in late October of 2013 (I think) I received an email from one of my professors at UNIRIO forwarding a description of the Outreach Program for Women. OPW is a program organized by the GNOME which endeavors to get more women involved in FOSS. OPW is similar to Google Summer of Code; you work remotely from home, guided by an assigned mentor. Debian was one of the 8 participating organizations that year. There was a list of project proposals which I perused, a few of them caught my eye and these projects were all Debian. I d already been a fan of FOSS before. I had used the Ubuntu and Debian OS, I d migrated to GIMP from Photoshop and to Open Office from Microsoft Office, for example. I d strongly advocated the use of some of my prefered open source apps and programs to my friends and family. But I hadn t ever contributed to a FOSS project. There s no time like the present, so I reached out the the mentor responsible for one of the projects I was interested in, Daniel Pocock. Daniel guided me through making a small contribution to a FOSS project, which serves as a token demonstration of my abilities and is part of the application process. I added a small feature to JMXetric and suggested a fix for an issue in the xTuple project. Actually, I had forgotten about this. Recently I made another contribution to xTuple, it s funny to see things come full circle. I also had to write a profile-ish description of my experience and how I intended on contributing during OPW on the Debian wiki, if you d like you can check it out here. I wouldn t follow my example to a T, because in the end I didn t make the OPW selection. Actually, I take that back. The fact I wasn t chosen for OPW that year doesn t mean I was incompetent or incapable of making a valuable contribution. OPW and GSoC do not have unlimited resources; they can t include everyone they d like to. They receive thousands of proposals from very talented engineers and not everyone can participate at a given moment. But even though I wasn t selected, like I said, I could still pitch in. It s good to keep in mind that people usually aren t paid to contribute to FOSS. It s usually volunteer based, which I think is one of the beauties of the FOSS community and in my opinion one of the causes of it s success and great quality. People contribute because they want to, not because they have to. I will say I was a little disappointed at not being chosen. But after being reassured that this rejection wasn t due to any lack on my part, I decided to continue contributing to the Debian project I d applied to. I was begining the final semester of my undergraduate studies which included writing a thesis. To be able to focus on my thesis and graduate on time, I d stopped working temporarily and was studying full time. But I didn t want to lose practice and contributing to a FOSS project is a great way to stay in coding shape while doing something useful. So continue contributing I did. It paid off. I gained experience, added value to a FOSS project and I think my previous contributions added weight to the application I later made for GSoC 2014. I passed this time. To be honest, I really wasn t counting on it. Actually, I was certain I wouldn t pass for some reason - insecure much? But with GSoC I wasn t too anxious about it as I was with the OPW application because by then, I was already hooked . I d learned about all the benefits of becoming a FOSS contributor and I wasn t stopping anytime soon. I had every intention of still working on my FOSS project with or without GSoC. GSoC 2014 ended a week ago (August 18th 2014). There s a list of things I still want to do with JSCommunicator and you can be sure I ll keep working on them. P.S. This is not to say that programs like OPW and GSoC aren t amazing programs. Try it out if you can, it s really a great experience.

= Fun and Profit with lirc == Getting the basics A couple weeks ago I got myself a small USB Infrared Transceiver from the people at iguanaworks. It comes in different models and I got the dual socket one that allows me to hook up external IR emitters. The goal was to remote control my stereo from my desktop machine, so using wired IR blasters gives me the flexibility I need with the wiring. They provide Debian packages built for some version of Ubunutu from their website. I wanted to build them from source, so apt-get source from their repository it is. The build process of the package is pretty broken -- it assumes there already is an iguanair user for instance. If somebody could package this up properly for Debian that'd be real nice. And who knows, maybe upstream would appreciate that as well. At first glance the software looks free enough. Once iguanair has been built and installed, lirc needs a recompile -- it will pick up the iguanair library automatically. Their Getting Started docs are actually pretty good. == Learning the IR codes Anyway, once the software was set up, I needed the IR-codes to send to my Denon. There are a couple of databases for varios remote controls and receivers on the internet, but I didn't find a single entry for my old Denon AVR-1600RD. Fortunately lirc alls you to learn codes off a remote control you already have, and since the iguana device also comes with a receiver, I could use irrecord to get the needed magic bytes for commands like power on/off, mute, volume up/down. This actually worked quite well, the only problem was realizing that the IR blasters are really picky about being properly aligned and close to the receiver (my Denon). Once I got that right, all the recorded codes worked. lircd.conf for Denon AVR-1600RD == Putting it all together I can now use this to mute my stereo using irsend send_once denon KEY_MUTE for instance. What I also wanted to get out of this was that the stereo should be shut off automatically when my machine goes to sleep, or when I haven't used it in a while. Since my Denon only has a power toggle command and does not appear to have a discrete power-off command -- at least I don't know it -- I needed something on my system to keep state, and it means I no longer should use my real remote control or else things will get out of sync. I have written a small wrapper script that does this for me -- stereo. It's in /usr/local/bin . === Initialisation On boot, the script creates its state file when called with the init command. There is a small init script that takes care of this, as well as turning off the stereo when the machine reboots or powers off. === Power off on suspend In addition to powering off the stereo when the machine goes down, I also want it to do that when it goes to sleep. Enter /etc/pm/sleep.d/20 stereo . === Power off on idle Furthermore, I run the script out of cron every 5 minutes - to see if anything is using the alsa device. If there isn't for half an hour the stereo gets turned off. Crontab entry: */5 * * * * /usr/local/bin/stereo off-if-idle === Manually controlling it And last not least I have integrated it into my xbindkeys config. I am abusing a couple special keys that I never ever use. Here's the snippet from my ~/.xbindkeysrc : "stereo mute" XF86HomePage "stereo vol-" XF86Search "stereo vol+" XF86Mail "stereo toggle" c:193 "stereo touch" c:192 Cheers,

Ren Mayorga reported Debian bug #760000 on Saturday August 30th, against the pyfribidi package. Bug #750000 was reported as of May 31th: nearly exactly 3 months for 10,000 bugs. The bug rate increased a little bit during the last weeks, probably because of the freeze approaching. We're therefore getting more clues about the time when bug #800000 for which we have bets. will be reported. At current rate, this should happen in one year. So, the current favorites are Knuth Posern or Kartik Mistry. Still, David Pr vot, Andreas Tille, Elmar Heeb and Rafael Laboissiere have their chances, too, if the bug rate increases (I'll watch you guys: any MBF by one of you will be suspect...:-)).

Debsources now has a HACKING file Here at DebConf14 I have given a few talks. The second one has been a technical talk about recent and future developments on Debsources. Both the talk slides and video are available. After the talk, various DebConf participants have approached me and started hacking on Debsources, which is awesome! As a result of their work, new shiny features will probably be announced shortly. Stay tuned. When discussing with new contributors (hi Luciano, Raphael!), though, it quickly became clear that getting started with Debsources hacking wasn't particularly easy. In particular, doing a local deployment for testing purposes might be intimidating, due to the need of having a (partial) source mirror and whatnot. To fix that, I have now written a HACKING file for Debsources, which you can find at top-level in the Git repo. Happy Debsources hacking!

FTP assistant By pure chance I was able to accept 237 packages, the same number as last month. 33 times I contacted the maintainer to ask a question about a package and 55 times I had to reject a package. The reject number increased a bit as I also worked on packages that already got a note but had not been fully processed. In contrast I only filed three serious bugs this month. Currently there are about 200 packages still waiting in the NEW queue As the freeze for Jessie comes closer every day, I wonder whether all of them can be processed in time. So I don t mind if every maintainer checks the package again and maybe uploads an improved version that can be processed faster. Squeeze LTS This was my second month that I did some work for the Squeeze LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian All in all I got assigned a workload of 16.5h for August. I spent these hours to upload new versions of

• [DLA 32-1] nspr security update
• [DLA 34-1] libapache-mod-security security update
• [DLA 36-1] polarssl security update
• [DLA 37-1] krb5 security update
• [DLA 39-1] gpgme1.0 security update
• [DLA 41-1] python-imaging security update

As last month I prepared these uploads on the basis of the corresponding DSAs for Wheezy. For these packages backporting the Wheezy patches to Squeeze was rather easy. I also had a look at python-django and eglibc. Although the python-django patches apply now, the package fails some tests and these issues need some further investigation. In case of eglibc, my small pbuilder didn t have enough resources and trying to build the package resulted in a full disk after more than three hours of work. For PHP5 Ond ej Sur (the real maintainer) suggested to use point releases of upstream instead of applying only patches. I am curious about how much effort is needed for this approach. Stay tuned, next month you will be told more details! Anyway, this is still a lot of fun and I hope I can finish python-django, eglibc and php5 in September. Other packages This month my meep packages plus mpb have been part of a small hdf5 transition. All five packages needed a small patch and a new upload. As the patch was already provided by Gilles Filippini, this was done rather quickly. Support If you would like to support my Debian work you could either be part of the Freexian initiative (see above) or consider to send some bitcoins to 1JHnNpbgzxkoNexeXsTUGS6qUp5P88vHej. Contact me at donation@alteholz.eu if you prefer another way to donate. Every kind of support is most appreciated.

Today we have a little diversion to talk about the National Health Service. The NHS is the publicly funded healthcare system in the UK.

Actually there are four such services in the UK, only one of which has this name:

• The national health service (England)
• Health and Social Care in Northern Ireland.
• NHS Scotland.
• NHS Wales.

In theory this doesn't matter, if you're in the UK and you break your leg you get carried to a hospital and you get treated. There are differences in policies because different rules apply, but the basic stuff "free health care" applies to all locations. (Differences? In Scotland you get eye-tests for free, in England you pay.)

My wife works as an accident & emergency doctor, and has recently changed jobs. Hearing her talk about her work is fascinating. The hospitals she's worked in (Dundee, Perth, Kirkcaldy, Edinburgh, Livingstone) are interesting places. During the week things are usually reasonably quiet, and during the weekend things get significantly more busy. (This might mean there are 20 doctors to hand, versus three at quieter times.) Weekends are busy largely because people fall down hills, get drunk and fight, and are at home rather than at work - where 90% of accidents occur. Of course even a "quiet" week can be busy, because folk will have heart-attacks round the clock, and somebody somewhere will always be playing with a power tool, a ladder, or both! So what was the point of this post? Well she's recently transferred to working for a childrens hospital (still in A&E) and the patiences are so very different. I expected the injuries/patients she'd see to differ. Few 10 year olds will arrive drunk (though it does happen), and few adults fall out of trees, or eat washing machine detergent, but talking to her about her day when she returns home is fascinating how many things are completely different from how I expected. Adults come to hospital mostly because they're sick, injured, or drunk. Children come to hospital mostly because their parents are paranoid. A child has a rash? Doctors are closed? Lets go to the emergency ward! A child has fallen out of a tree and has a bruise, a lump, or complains of pain? Doctors are closed? Lets go to the emergency ward! I've not kept statistics, though I wish I could, but it seems that she can go 3-5 days between seeing an actually injured or chronicly-sick child. It's the first-time-parents who bring kids in when they don't need to. Understandable, completely understandable, but at the same time I'm sure it is more than a little frustrating for all involved. Finally one thing I've learned, which seems completely stupid, is the NHS-Scotland approach to recruitment. You apply for a role, such as "A&E doctor" and after an interview, etc, you get told "You've been accepted - you will now work in Glasgow". In short you apply for a post, and then get told where it will be based afterward. There's no ability to say "I'd like to be a Doctor in city X - where I live", you apply, and get told where it is post-acceptance. If it is 100+ miles away you either choose to commute, or decline and go through the process again. This has lead to Kirsi working in hospitals with a radius of about 100km from the city we live in, and has meant she's had to turn down several posts. And that is all I have to say about the NHS for the moment, except for the implicit pity for people who have to pay (inflated and life-changing) prices for things in other countries.

After an intensive evening of brainstorming by the 5th floor cabal, I am happy to release the very first version of the Debian Trivia, modeled after the famous TCP/IP Drinking Game. Only the questions are listed here maybe they should go (with the answers) into a package? Anyone willing to co-maintain? Any suggestions for additional questions?

• what was the first release with an and-a-half release?
• Where were the first two DebConf held?
• what are Debian releases named after? Why?
• Give two names of girls that were originally part of the Debian Archive Kit (dak), that are still actively used today.
• Swirl on chin. Does it ring a bell?
• What was Dunc Tank about? Who was the DPL at the time? Who were the release managers during Dunc Tank?
• Cite 5 different valid values for a package s urgency field. Are all of them different?
• When was the Debian Maintainers status created?
• What is the codename for experimental?
• Order correctly lenny, woody, etch, sarge
• Which one was the Dunc Tank release?
• Name three locations where Debian machines are hosted.
• What does the B in projectb stand for?
• What is the official card game at DebConf?
• Describe the Debian restricted use logo.
• One Debian release was frozen for more than a year. Which one?
• name the kernel version for sarge, etch, lenny, squeeze, wheezy. bonus for etch-n-half!
• What happened to Debian 1.0?
• Which DebConfs were held in a Nordic country?
• What does piuparts stand for?
• Name the first Debian release.
• Order correctly hamm, bo, potato, slink
• What are most Debian project machines named after?

I m writing this blog post on the plane from Portland towards Europe (which I now can!), using the remaining battery live after having watched one of the DebConf talks that I missed. (It was the systemd talk, which was good and interesting, but maybe I should have watched one of the power management talks, as my battery is running down faster than it should be, I believe.) I mostly enjoyed this year s DebConf. I must admit that I did not come very prepared: I had neither something urgent to hack on, nor important things to discuss with the other attendees, so in a way I had a slow start. I also felt a bit out of touch with the project, both personally and technically: In previous DebConfs, I had more interest in many different corners of the project, and also came with more naive enthusiasm. After more than 10 years in the project, I see a few things more realistic and also more relaxed, and don t react on Wouldn t it be cool to have crazy idea very easily any more. And then I mostly focus on Haskell packaging (and related tooling, which sometimes is also relevant and useful to others) these days, which is not very interesting to most others. But in the end I did get to do some useful hacking, heard a few interesting talks and even got a bit excited: I created a new tool to schedule binNMUs for Haskell packages which is quite generic (configured by just a regular expression), so that it can and will be used by the OCaml team as well, and who knows who else will start using hash-based virtual ABI packages in the future... It runs via a cron job on people.debian.org to produce output for Haskell and for OCaml, based on data pulled via HTTP. If you are a Debian developer and want up-to-date results, log into wuiet.debian.org and run ~nomeata/binNMUs --sql; it then uses the projectb and wanna-build databases directly. Thanks to the ftp team for opening up incoming.debian.org, by the way! Unsurprisingly, I also held a talk on Haskell and Debian (slides available). I talked a bit too long and we had too little time for discussion, but in any case not all discussion would have fitted in 45 minutes. The question of which packages from Hackage should be added to Debian and which not is still undecided (which means we carry on packaging what we happen to want in Debian for whatever reason). I guess the better our tooling gets (see the next section), the more easily we can support more and more packages. I am quite excited by and supportive of Enrico s agenda to remove boilerplate data from the debian/ directories and relying on autodebianization tools. We have such a tool for Haskell package, cabal-debian, but it is unofficial, i.e. neither created by us nor fully endorsed. I want to change that, so I got in touch with the upstream maintainer and we want to get it into shape for producing perfect Debian packages, if the upstream provided meta data is perfect. I d like to see the Debian Haskell Group to follows Enrico s plan to its extreme conclusion, and this way drive innovation in Debian in general. We ll see how that goes. Besides all the technical program I enjoyed the obligatory games of Mao and Werewolves. I also got to dance! On Saturday night, I found a small but welcoming Swing-In-The-Park event where I could dance a few steps of Lindy Hop. And on Tuesday night, Vagrant Cascadian took us (well, three of us) to a blues dancing night, which I greatly enjoyed: The style was so improvisation-friendly that despite having missed the introduction and never having danced Blues before I could jump right in. And in contrast to social dances in Germany, where it is often announced that the girls are also invited to ask the boys, but then it is still mostly the boys who have to ask, here I took only half a minute of standing at the side until I got asked to dance. In retrospect I should have skipped the HP reception and went there directly... I m not heading home at the moment, but will travel directly to G teborg to attend ICFP 2014. I hope the (usually worse) west-to-east jet lag will not prevent me from enjoying that as much as I could.

If you ve noticed your chrome/chromium on Linux having problems since you upgraded to somewhere around version 35/36, you re not alone. Thankfully, it s relatively easy to workaround. It will hit people who keep their browser open for a long time, or who have lots of tabs (or if you re like me, and do both). To tell if you re suffering from this particular problem, crack open your ~/.xsession-errors file (or wherever your system logs stdout/stderr from programs running under X), and look for lines that look like this:

[22161:22185:0830/124533:ERROR:shared_memory_posix.cc(231)]
Creating shared memory in /dev/shm/.org.chromium.Chromium.gFTQSy
failed: Too many open files

And

[22161:22185:0830/124601:ERROR:host_shared_bitmap_manager.cc(122)]
Cannot create shared memory buffer

If you see those errors, congratulations! The rest of this blog post will be of use to you. There s probably a myriad of bugs open about this problem, but the one I found was #367037: Shared memory-related tab crash. It turns out there s a file handle leak in the chromium codebase somewhere, relating to shared memory handling. There s no fix available, but the workaround is quite simple: increase the number of files that processes are allowed to have open. System-wide, you can do this by creating a file /etc/security/limits.d/local-nofile.conf, containing this line:

* - nofile 65535

You could also edit /etc/security/limits.conf to contain the same line, if you were so inclined. Note that this will only take effect next time you login, or perhaps even only when you restart X (or, at worst, your entire machine). This doesn t help you if you ve got Chromium already open and you d like to stop it from crashing Right Now (perhaps restarting your machine would be a terrible hardship, causing you to lose your hard-won uptime record), then you can use a magical tool called prlimit. The prlimit syscall is available if you re running a Linux 2.6.36 or later kernel, and running at least glibc 2.13. You ll have a prlimit command line program if you ve got util-linux 2.21 or later. If not, you can use the example source code in the prlimit(2) manpage, changing RLIMIT_CPU to RLIMIT_NOFILE, and then running it like this:

prlimit <PID> 65535 65535

The <PID> argument is taken from the first number in the log messages from .xsession-errors in the example above, it s 22161. And now, you can go back to using your tabs as ersatz bookmarks, like I do.

Yesterday I carried out the upgrade of a Debian host from Squeeze to Wheezy for a friend. I like doing odd-jobs like this as they're generally painless, and when there are problems it is a fun learning experience. I accidentally forgot to check on the status of the MySQL server on that particular host, which was a little embarassing, but later put together a reasonably thorough serverspec recipe to describe how the machine should be setup, which will avoid that problem in the future - Introduction/tutorial here. The more I use serverspec the more I like it. My own personal servers have good rules now:

shelob ~/Repos/git.steve.org.uk/server/testing $ make
..
Finished in 1 minute 6.53 seconds
362 examples, 0 failures

Slow, but comprehensive. In other news I've now migrated every single one of my personal mercurial repositories over to git. I didn't have a particular reason for doing that, but I've started using git more and more for collaboration with others and using two systems felt like an annoyance. That means I no longer have to host two different kinds of repositories, and I can use the excellent gitbucket software on my git repository host. Needless to say I wrote a policy for this host too:

#
#  The host should be wheezy.
#
describe command("lsb_release -d") do
  its(:stdout)   should match /wheezy/  
end
#
# Our gitbucket instance should be running, under runit.
#
describe supervise('gitbucket') do
  its(:status)   should eq 'run'  
end
#
# nginx will proxy to our back-end
#
describe service('nginx') do
  it   should be_enabled    
  it   should be_running    
end
describe port(80) do
  it   should be_listening  
end
#
#  Host should resolve
#
describe host("git.steve.org.uk" ) do
  it   should be_resolvable.by('dns')  
end

Simple stuff, but being able to trigger all these kind of tests, on all my hosts, with one command, is very reassuring.

Since its very early days subunit has had a single model you run a process, it outputs test results. This works great, except when it doesn t. On the up side, you have a one way pipeline there s no interactivity needed, which makes it very very easy to write a subunit backend that e.g. testr can use. On the downside, there s no interactivity, which means that anytime you want to do something with those tests, a new process is needed and thats sometimes quite expensive particularly in test suites with 10 s of thousands of tests.Now, for use in the development edit-execute loop, this is arguably ok, because one needs to load the new tests into memory anyway; but wouldn t it be nice if tools like testr that run tests for you didn t have to decide upfront exactly how they were going to run. If instead they could get things running straight away and then give progressively larger and larger units of work to be run, without forcing a new process (and thus new discovery directory walking and importing) ? Secondly, testr has an inconsistent interface if testr is letting a user debug things to testr through to child workers in a chain, it needs to use something structured (e.g. subunit) and route stdin to the actual worker, but the final testr needs to unwrap everything this is needlessly complex. Lastly, for some languages at least, its possibly to dynamically pick up new code at runtime so a simple inotify loop and we could avoid new-process (and more importantly complete-enumeration) *entirely*, leading to very fast edit-test cycles. So, in this blog post I m really running this idea up the flagpole, and trying to sketch out the interface and hopefully get feedback on it. Taking subunit.run as an example process to do this to:

1. There should be an option to change from one-shot to server mode
2. In server mode, it will listen for commands somewhere (lets say stdin)
3. On startup it might eager load the available tests
4. One command would be list-tests which would enumerate all the tests to its output channel (which is stdout today so lets stay with that for now)
5. Another would be run-tests, which would take a set of test ids, and then filter-and-run just those ids from the available tests, output, as it does today, going to stdout. Passing somewhat large sets of test ids in may be desirable, because some test runners perform fixture optimisations (e.g. bringing up DB servers or web servers) and test-at-a-time is pretty much worst case for that sort of environment.
6. Another would be be std-in a command providing a packet of stdin used for interacting with debuggers

So that seems pretty approachable to me we don t even need an async loop in there, as long as we re willing to patch select etc (for the stdin handling in some environments like Twisted). If we don t want to monkey patch like that, we ll need to make stdin a socketpair, and have an event loop running to shepard bytes from the real stdin to the one we let the rest of Python have. What about that nirvana above? If we assume inotify support, then list_tests (and run_tests) can just consult a changed-file list and reload those modules before continuing. Reloading them just-in-time would be likely to create havoc I think reloading only when synchronised with test completion makes a great deal of sense. Would such a test server make sense in other languages? What about e.g. testtools.run vs subunit.run such a server wouldn t want to use subunit, but perhaps a regular CLI UI would be nice

Some recent blog (here and here) suggest short key expiry times. Then also highlight some thing many people forget: The expiry time of a key can be changed every time with just a new self-signature. Especially that can be made retroactively (you cannot avoid that, if you allow changing it: Nothing would stop an attacker from just changing the clock of one of his computers). (By the way: did you know you can also reduce the validity time of a key? If you look at the resulting packets in your key, this is simply a revocation packet of the previous self-signature followed by a new self-signature with a shorter expiration date.) In my eyes that fact has a very simple consequence: An expiry date on your gpg main key is almost totally worthless. If you for example lose your private key and have no revocation certificate for it, then a expiry time will not help at all: Once someone else got the private key (for example by brute forcing it, as computers got faster over the years or because they could brute-force the pass-phrase for your backup they got somehow), they can just extend the expiry date and make it look like it is still valid. (And if they do not have the private key, there is nothing they can do anyway). There is one place where expiration dates make much more sense, though: subkeys. As the expiration date of a subkey is part of the signature of that subkey with the main key, someone having access to only the subkey cannot change the date. This also makes it feasible to use new subkeys over the time, as you can let the previous subkey expire and use a new one. And only someone having the private main key (hopefully you), can extend its validity (or sign a new one). (I generally suggest to always have a signing subkey and never ever use the main key except off-line to sign subkeys or other keys. The fact that it can sign other keys just makes the main key just too precious to operate it on-line (even if it is on some smartcard the reader cannot show you what you just sign)).

I love to see there is a lot of crypto discussions going on at DebConf. Maybe I'm skewed by my role as keyring-maint, but I have been involved in more than one discussion every day on what do/should signatures mean, on best key handling practices, on some ideas to make key maintenance better, on how the OpenPGPv4 format lays out a key and its components on disk, all that. I enjoy some of those discussions pose questions that leave me thinking, as I am quite far from having all answers. Discussions should be had face to face, but some start online and deserve to be answered online (and also pose opportunity to become documentation). Simon Josefsson blogs about The case for short OpenPGP key validity periods. This will be an important issue to tackle, as we will soon require keys in the Debian keyring to have a set expiration date (surprise surprise!) and I agree with Simon, setting an expiration date far in the future means very little. There is a caveat with using, as he suggests, very short expiry periods: We have a human factor sitting in the middle. Keyring updates in Debian are done approximately once a month, and I do not see the period shortening. That means, only once a month we (currently Jonathan McDowell and myself, and we expect to add Daniel Kahn Gillmor soon) take the full changeset and compile a new keyring that replaces the active one in Debian. This means that if you have, as Simon suggests, a 100-day validity key, you have to remember to update it at least every 70 days, or you might be locked out during the days it takes us to process it. I set my expiration period to two years, although I might shorten it to only one. I expect to add checks+notifications before we enable this requirement project-wide (so that Debian servers will mail you when your key is close to expiry); I think that mail can be sent at approximately [expiry date - 90 days] to give you time both to you and to us to act. Probably the optimal expiration periods under such conditions would be between 180 and 365 days. But, yes, this is by far not yet a ruling, but a point in the discussion. We still have some days of DebConf, and I'll enjoy revising this point. And Simon, even if we correct some bits for these details, I'd like to have your permission to use this fine blog post as part of our documentation! (And on completely unrelated news: Congratulations to our dear and very much missed friend Bubulle for completely losing his sanity and running for 28 hours and a half straight! He briefly describes this adventure when it was about to start, and we all want him to tell us how it was. Mr. Running French Guy, you are amazing!)