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.

Debconf14 was the first Debconf I attended. It was an awesome experience. Debconf14 started with a Meet and Greet before the Welcome Talk. I got to meet people and find out what they do for Debian. I also got to meet other GSoC students that I had only previously interacted with online. During the Meet and Greet I also met one of my mentors for GSoC, Zack. Later in the conference I met another of my mentors, Piotr. Previously I only interacted with Zack and Piotr online. On Monday we had the OpenPGP Keysigning. I got to meet people and exchange information so that we could later sign keys. Then on Tuesday I gave my talk about debmetrics as part of the larger GSoC talks. During the conference I mostly attended talks. Then on Wednesday we had the daytrip. I went hiking at Multnomah Falls, had lunch at Rooster Rock State Park, and then went to Vista House. Later in the conference, Zack and I did some work on debmetrics. We looked at the tests, which had some issues. I was able to fix most of the issues with the tests while I was there at Debconf. We also moved the debmetrics repository under the qa category of repositories. Previously it was a private repository.

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,

I was staring at qemu source for a while last month. There's a lot of things that I don't understand about the codebase. There's a race but it's hard to tell why a SIGSEGV was received.

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.

Modern web applications are much more complicated than the simple Perl CGI scripts or PHP pages of the past. They usually start with a framework and include lots of external components both on the front-end and on the back-end. Here's an example from the Node.js back-end of a real application:

$ npm list   wc -l
256

What if one of these 256 external components has a security vulnerability? How would you know and what would you do if of your direct dependencies had a hard-coded dependency on the vulnerable version? It's a real problem and of course one way to avoid this is to write everything yourself. But that's neither realistic nor desirable. However, it's not a new problem. It was solved years ago by Linux distributions for C and C++ applications. For some reason though, this learning has not propagated to the web where the standard approach seems to be to "statically link everything". What if we could build on the work done by Debian maintainers and the security team?

Case study - the Libravatar project As a way of discussing a different approach to the problem of dependency management in web applications, let me describe the decisions made by the Libravatar project.

Description Libravatar is a federated and free software alternative to the Gravatar profile photo hosting site. From a developer point of view, it's a fairly simple stack:

• Apache
• Postgres
• Django
• Python
• Gearman

The service is split between the master node, where you create an account and upload your avatar, and a few mirrors, which serve the photos to third-party sites. Like with Gravatar, sites wanting to display images don't have to worry about a complicated protocol. In a nutshell, all that a site needs to do is hash the user's email and add that hash to a base URL. Where the federation kicks in is that every email domain is able to specify a different base URL via an SRV record in DNS. For example, francois@debian.org hashes to 7cc352a2907216992f0f16d2af50b070 and so the full URL is:

http://cdn.libravatar.org/avatar/7cc352a2907216992f0f16d2af50b070

whereas francois@fmarier.org hashes to 0110e86fdb31486c22dd381326d99de9 and the full URL is:

http://fmarier.org/avatar/0110e86fdb31486c22dd381326d99de9

due to the presence of an SRV record on fmarier.org.

Ground rules The main rules that the project follows is to:

1. only use Python libraries that are in Debian
2. use the versions present in the latest stable release (including backports)

Deployment using packages In addition to these rules around dependencies, we decided to treat the application as if it were going to be uploaded to Debian:

• It includes an "upstream" Makefile which minifies CSS and JavaScript, gzips them, and compiles PO files (i.e. a "build" step).
• The Makefile includes a test target which runs the unit tests and some lint checks (pylint, pyflakes and pep8).
• Debian packages are produced to encode the dependencies in the standard way as well as to run various setup commands in maintainer scripts and install cron jobs.
• The project runs its own package repository using reprepro to easily distribute these custom packages.
• In order to update the repository and the packages installed on servers that we control, we use fabric, which is basically a fancy way to run commands over ssh.
• Mirrors can simply add our repository to their apt sources.list and upgrade Libravatar packages at the same time as their system packages.

Results Overall, this approach has been quite successful and Libravatar has been a very low-maintenance service to run. The ground rules have however limited our choice of libraries. For example, to talk to our queuing system, we had to use the raw Python bindings to the C Gearman library instead of being able to use a nice pythonic library which wasn't in Debian squeeze at the time. There is of course always the possibility of packaging a missing library for Debian and maintaining a backport of it until the next Debian release. This wouldn't be a lot of work considering the fact that responsible bundling of a library would normally force you to follow its releases closely and keep any dependencies up to date, so you may as well share the result of that effort. But in the end, it turns out that there is a lot of Python stuff already in Debian and we haven't had to package anything new yet. Another thing that was somewhat scary, due to the number of packages that were going to get bumped to a new major version, was the upgrade from squeeze to wheezy. It turned out however that it was surprisingly easy to upgrade to wheezy's version of Django, Apache and Postgres. It may be a problem next time, but all that means is that you have to set a day aside every 2 years to bring everything up to date.

Problems The main problem we ran into is that we optimized for sysadmins and unfortunately made it harder for new developers to setup their environment. That's not very good from the point of view of welcoming new contributors as there is quite a bit of friction in preparing and testing your first patch. That's why we're looking at encoding our setup instructions into a Vagrant script so that new contributors can get started quickly. Another problem we faced is that because we use the Debian version of jQuery and minify our own JavaScript files in the build step of the Makefile, we were affected by the removal from that package of the minified version of jQuery. In our setup, there is no way to minify JavaScript files that are provided by other packages and so the only way to fix this would be to fork the package in our repository or (preferably) to work with the Debian maintainer and get it fixed globally in Debian. One thing worth noting is that while the Django project is very good at issuing backwards-compatible fixes for security issues, sometimes there is no way around disabling broken features. In practice, this means that we cannot run unattended-upgrades on our main server in case something breaks. Instead, we make use of apticron to automatically receive email reminders for any outstanding package updates. On that topic, it can occasionally take a while for security updates to be released in Debian, but this usually falls into one of two cases:

1. You either notice because you're already tracking releases pretty well and therefore could help Debian with backporting of fixes and/or testing;
2. or you don't notice because it has slipped through the cracks or there simply are too many potential things to keep track of, in which case the fact that it eventually gets fixed without your intervention is a huge improvement.

Finally, relying too much on Debian packaging does prevent Fedora users (a project that also makes use of Libravatar) from easily contributing mirrors. Though if we had a concrete offer, we would certainly look into creating the appropriate RPMs.

Is it realistic? It turns out that I'm not the only one who thought about this approach, which has been named "debops". The same day that my talk was announced on the DebConf website, someone emailed me saying that he had instituted the exact same rules at his company, which operates a large Django-based web application in the US and Russia. It was pretty impressive to read about a real business coming to the same conclusions and using the same approach (i.e. system libraries, deployment packages) as Libravatar. Regardless of this though, I think there is a class of applications that are particularly well-suited for the approach we've just described. If a web application is not your full-time job and you want to minimize the amount of work required to keep it running, then it's a good investment to restrict your options and leverage the work of the Debian community to simplify your maintenance burden. The second criterion I would look at is framework maturity. Given the 2-3 year release cycle of stable distributions, this approach is more likely to work with a mature framework like Django. After all, you probably wouldn't compile Apache from source, but until recently building Node.js from source was the preferred option as it was changing so quickly. While it goes against conventional wisdom, relying on system libraries is a sustainable approach you should at least consider in your next project. After all, there is a real cost in bundling and keeping up with external dependencies. This blog post is based on a talk I gave at DebConf 14: slides, video.

Monday morning, 1:45AM. Laura and I walk into the boys room. We turn on the light. Nothing happens. (They re sound sleepers.) Boys, it s time to get up to go get on the train! Four eyes pop open. Yay! Oh I m so excited! And then, Meow! (They enjoy playing with their stuffed cats that Laura got them for Christmas.) Before long, it was out the door to the train station. We even had time to stop at a donut shop along the way. We climbed into our family bedroom (a sleeping car room on Amtrak specifically designed for families of four), and as the train started to move, the excitement of what was going on crept in. Yes, it s 2:42AM, but these are two happy boys: Jacob and Oliver love trains, and this was the beginning of a 3-day train trip from Newton to Seattle that would take us through Kansas, Colorado, the Rocky Mountains of New Mexico, Arizona, Los Angeles, up the California coast, through the Cascades, and on to Seattle. Whew! Here we are later that morning before breakfast: Here s our train at a station stop in La Junta, CO: And at the beautiful small mountain town of Raton, NM: Some of the passing scenery in New Mexico: Through it all, we found many things to pass the time. I don t think anybody was bored. I took the boys exploring the train several times we d walk from one end to the other and see what all was there. There was always the dining car for our meals, the lounge car for watching the passing scenery, and on the Coast Starlight, the Pacific Parlor Car. Here we are getting ready for breakfast one morning. Getting to select meals and order in the train restaurant was a big deal for the boys. Laura brought one of her origami books, which even managed to pull the boys away from the passing scenery in the lounge car for quite some time. Origami is serious business: They had some fun wrapping themselves around my feet and challenging me to move. And were delighted when I could move even though they were trying to weight me down! Several games of Uno were played, but even those sometimes couldn t compete with the passing scenery: The Coast Starlight features the Pacific Parlor Car, which was built over 50 years ago for the Santa Fe Hi-Level trains. They ve been updated; the upper level is a lounge and small restaurant, and the lower level has been turned into a small theater. They show movies in there twice a day, but most of the time, the place is empty. A great place to go with little boys to run around and play games. The boys and I sort of invented a new game: roadrunner and coyote, loosely based on the old Looney Tunes cartoons. Jacob and Oliver would be roadrunners, running around and yelling MEEP MEEP! Meanwhile, I was the coyote, who would try to catch them even briefly succeeding sometimes but ultimately fail in some hilarious way. It burned a lot of energy. And, of course, the parlor car was good for scenery-watching too: We were right along the Pacific Ocean for several hours sometimes there would be a highway or a town between us and the beach, but usually there was nothing at all between us and the coast. It was beautiful to watch the jagged coastline go by, to gaze out onto the ocean, watching the birds apparently so beautiful that I didn t even think to take some photos. Laura s parents live in California, and took a connecting train. I had arranged for them to have a sleeping car room near ours, so for the last day of the trip, we had a group of 6. Here are the boys with their grandparents at lunch Wednesday: We stepped off the train in Seattle into beautiful King Street Station. Our first day in Seattle was a quiet day of not too much. Laura s relatives live near Lake Washington, so we went out there to play. The boys enjoyed gathering black rocks along the shore. We went blackberry picking after that filled up buckets for a cobbler. The next day, we rode the Seattle Monorail. The boys have been talking about this for months a kind of train they ve never been on. That was the biggest thing in their minds that they were waiting for. They got to ride in the very front, by the operator. Nice view from up there. We walked through the Pike Market I hadn t been in such a large and crowded place like that since I was in Guadalajara: At the Seattle Aquarium, we all had a great time checking out all the exhibits. The please touch one was a particular hit. Walking underneath the salmon tank was fun too. We spent a couple of days doing things closer to downtown. Laura s cousin works at MOHAI, the Museum of History and Industry, so we spent a morning there. The boys particularly enjoyed the old periscope mounted to the top of the building, and the exhibit on chocolate (of course!) They love any kind of transportation, so of course we had to get a ride on the Seattle Streetcar that comes by MOHAI. All weekend long, we had been noticing the seaplanes taking off from Lake Washington and Lake Union (near MOHAI). So finally I decided to investigate, and one morning while Laura was doing things with her cousin, the boys and I took a short seaplane ride from one lake to another, and then rode every method of transportation we could except for ferries (we did that the next day). Here is our Kenmore Air plane: The view of Lake Washington from 1000 feet was beautiful: I think we got a better view than the Space Needle, and it probably cost about the same anyhow. After splashdown, we took the streetcar to a place where we could eat lunch right by the monorail tracks. Then we rode the monorail again. Then we caught a train (it went underground a bit so it was a subway to them!) and rode it a few blocks. There is even scenery underground, it seems. We rode a bus back, and saved one last adventure for the next day: a ferry to Bainbridge Island. Laura and I even got some time to ourselves to go have lunch at an amazing Greek restaurant to celebrate a year since we got engaged. It s amazing to think that, by now, it s only a few months until our wedding anniversary too! There are many special memories of the weekend I could mention visiting with Laura s family, watching the boys play with her uncle s pipe organ (it s in his house!), watching the boys play with their grandparents, having all six of us on the train for a day, flying paper airplanes off the balcony, enjoying the cool breeze on the ferry and the beautiful mountains behind the lake. One of my favorites is waking up to high-pitched Meow? Meow meow meow! Wake up, brother! sorts of sounds. There was so much cat-play on the trip, and it was cute to hear. I have the feeling we won t hear things like that much more. So many times on the trip I heard, Oh dad, I am so excited! I never get tired of hearing that. And, of course, I was excited, too.

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.

For the past decade or so, I wasn't exactly happy. I struggled with low self esteem, likely bordered on depression at times. I disappointed friends, family and most of all, myself. There were times I not only disliked the person I was, but hated it. This wasn't healthy, nor forward-looking, I knew that all along, and that made the situation even worse. I tried to maintain a more enthusiastic mask, pretended that nothing's wrong. Being fully aware that there actually is nothing terribly wrong, while still feeling worthless, just added insult to injury.In the past few years, things started to improve. I had a job, things to care about, things to feel passionate about, people around me who knew nothing about the shadows on my heart, yet still smiled, still supported me. But years of self loathing does not disappear overnight.Then one day, some six months ago, my world turned upside down. Years of disappointment, hate and loathing - poof, gone. Today, I'm happy. This is something I have not been able to tell myself in all honesty in this century yet (except maybe for very brief periods of time, when I was happy for someone else).A little over six months ago, I met someone, someone I could open up to. I still remember the first hour, where we talked about our own shortcomings and bad habits. At the end of the day, when She ordered me a crazy-pancake (a pancake with half a dozen random fillings), I felt happy. She is everything I could ever wish for, and more. She isn't just the woman I love, with whom I'll say the words in a couple of months. She's much more than a partner, a friend a soul-mate combined in one person. She is my inspiration, my role model and my Guardian Angel too.I no longer feel worthless, nor inadequate. I am disappointed with myself no more. I do not hate, I do not loathe, and past mistakes, past feelings seem so far away! I can share everything with Her, She does not judge, nor condemn: she supports and helps. With Her, I am happy. With Her, I am who I wanted myself to be. With Her, I am complete.Thank You.

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

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!)

Many package maintainers need to decide when to upload a new version to Debian. Should the upload be done only after the official release, or is there a place for uploads during the development process. In the latter case there s a need to balance between the benefit of early testing and feedback with the stability and not completely breaking user s environment (and package relationships) too often. With the coming PHP 5.6.0 release, Debian kept being on the cutting edge. Thanks to Ond ej, the new version was available in experimental since alpha1 and in unstable/testing since beta3. Considering the timing of the PHP release related to the Debian freeze, I m happy we started early, and did the transition to PHP 5.6 a few months ago. But just following the development releases (betas ,RCs) isn t enough. Both Ond ej and myself are part of the PHP community, and know the planned timelines, current status and what are the critical points. Such knowledge was very useful this week, when we new 5.6.0 was pending finale tagging before release (after RC4). This made take the report of Debian bug #759381: php5: TLS connections broken in 5.6.0 RC4 seriously and contact the release managers. First it was a heads up and then a real problem. After a quick discussion (both private mails by me and on github by Ond ej), the relevant commit was reverted by the release managers (Julien Pauli & Ferenc Kovacs), and 5.6.0 was retagged. The issue will get more checks towards 5.6.1 without any time pressure. Although 5.6.0 isn t in production for anyone (yet), and like any major release can have issues, the close connectivity between everyone saved complaints from the PHP users and ecosystem. I don t imagine the issue been sorted so quickly 16 hours later. This is also due to the bug been reported on difference between two close release (regression in RC4 comparing to RC3). To close the loop, if we ve uploaded 5.6.0 only after the release, the report would be regression between 5.5.x and 5.6.0, which is obviously much harder to pinpoint. So, I m not sure I have a good answer for the question in the beginning of the post, but for this case our policy proved itself.
Filed under: Debian GNU/Linux, PHP

After I moved to a new OpenPGP key (see key transition statement) I have received comments about the short life length of my new key. When I created the key (see my GnuPG setup) I set it to expire after 100 days. Some people assumed that I would have to create a new key then, and therefore wondered what value there is to sign a key that will expire in two months. It doesn t work like that, and below I will explain how OpenPGP key expiration works; how to extend the expiration time of your key; and argue why having a relatively short validity period can be a good thing.
The OpenPGP message format has a sub-packet called the Key Expiration Time, quoting the RFC:

5.2.3.6. Key Expiration Time
   (4-octet time field)
   The validity period of the key.  This is the number of seconds after
   the key creation time that the key expires.  If this is not present
   or has a value of zero, the key never expires.  This is found only on
   a self-signature.

You can print the sub-packets in your OpenPGP key with gpg --list-packets. See below an output for my key, and notice the created 1403464490 (which is Unix time for 2014-06-22 21:14:50) and the subpkt 9 len 4 (key expires after 100d0h0m) which adds up to an expiration on 2014-09-26. Don t confuse the creation time of the key ( created 1403464321 ) with when the signature was created ( created 1403464490 ).

jas@latte:~$ gpg --export 54265e8c   gpg --list-packets  head -20
:public key packet:
	version 4, algo 1, created 1403464321, expires 0
	pkey[0]: [3744 bits]
	pkey[1]: [17 bits]
:user ID packet: "Simon Josefsson "
:signature packet: algo 1, keyid 0664A76954265E8C
	version 4, created 1403464490, md5len 0, sigclass 0x13
	digest algo 10, begin of digest be 8e
	hashed subpkt 27 len 1 (key flags: 03)
	hashed subpkt 9 len 4 (key expires after 100d0h0m)
	hashed subpkt 11 len 7 (pref-sym-algos: 9 8 7 13 12 11 10)
	hashed subpkt 21 len 4 (pref-hash-algos: 10 9 8 11)
	hashed subpkt 30 len 1 (features: 01)
	hashed subpkt 23 len 1 (key server preferences: 80)
	hashed subpkt 2 len 4 (sig created 2014-06-22)
	hashed subpkt 25 len 1 (primary user ID)
	subpkt 16 len 8 (issuer key ID 0664A76954265E8C)
	data: [3743 bits]
:signature packet: algo 1, keyid EDA21E94B565716F
	version 4, created 1403466403, md5len 0, sigclass 0x10
jas@latte:~$ 

So the key will simply stop being valid after that time? No. It is possible to update the key expiration time value, re-sign the key, and distribute the key to people you communicate with directly or indirectly to OpenPGP keyservers. Since that date is a couple of weeks away, now felt like the perfect opportunity to go through the exercise of taking out my offline master key and boot from a Debian LiveCD and extend its expiry time. See my earlier writeup for LiveCD and USB stick conventions.

user@debian:~$ export GNUPGHOME=/media/FA21-AE97/gnupghome
user@debian:~$ gpg --edit-key 54265e8c
gpg (GnuPG) 1.4.12; Copyright (C) 2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
Secret key is available.
pub  3744R/54265E8C  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2014-09-30  usage: SC  
                     trust: ultimate      validity: ultimate
sub  2048R/32F8119D  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2014-09-30  usage: S   
sub  2048R/78ECD86B  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2014-09-30  usage: E   
sub  2048R/36BA8F9B  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2014-09-30  usage: A   
[ultimate] (1). Simon Josefsson 
[ultimate] (2)  Simon Josefsson 
gpg> expire
Changing expiration time for the primary key.
Please specify how long the key should be valid.
         0 = key does not expire
        = key expires in n days
      w = key expires in n weeks
      m = key expires in n months
      y = key expires in n years
Key is valid for? (0) 150
Key expires at Fri 23 Jan 2015 02:47:48 PM UTC
Is this correct? (y/N) y
You need a passphrase to unlock the secret key for
user: "Simon Josefsson "
3744-bit RSA key, ID 54265E8C, created 2014-06-22
pub  3744R/54265E8C  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2015-01-23  usage: SC  
                     trust: ultimate      validity: ultimate
sub  2048R/32F8119D  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2014-09-30  usage: S   
sub  2048R/78ECD86B  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2014-09-30  usage: E   
sub  2048R/36BA8F9B  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2014-09-30  usage: A   
[ultimate] (1). Simon Josefsson 
[ultimate] (2)  Simon Josefsson 
gpg> key 1
pub  3744R/54265E8C  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2015-01-23  usage: SC  
                     trust: ultimate      validity: ultimate
sub* 2048R/32F8119D  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2014-09-30  usage: S   
sub  2048R/78ECD86B  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2014-09-30  usage: E   
sub  2048R/36BA8F9B  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2014-09-30  usage: A   
[ultimate] (1). Simon Josefsson 
[ultimate] (2)  Simon Josefsson 
gpg> expire
Changing expiration time for a subkey.
Please specify how long the key should be valid.
         0 = key does not expire
        = key expires in n days
      w = key expires in n weeks
      m = key expires in n months
      y = key expires in n years
Key is valid for? (0) 150
Key expires at Fri 23 Jan 2015 02:48:05 PM UTC
Is this correct? (y/N) y
You need a passphrase to unlock the secret key for
user: "Simon Josefsson "
3744-bit RSA key, ID 54265E8C, created 2014-06-22
pub  3744R/54265E8C  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2015-01-23  usage: SC  
                     trust: ultimate      validity: ultimate
sub* 2048R/32F8119D  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2015-01-23  usage: S   
sub  2048R/78ECD86B  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2014-09-30  usage: E   
sub  2048R/36BA8F9B  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2014-09-30  usage: A   
[ultimate] (1). Simon Josefsson 
[ultimate] (2)  Simon Josefsson 
gpg> key 2
pub  3744R/54265E8C  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2015-01-23  usage: SC  
                     trust: ultimate      validity: ultimate
sub* 2048R/32F8119D  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2015-01-23  usage: S   
sub* 2048R/78ECD86B  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2014-09-30  usage: E   
sub  2048R/36BA8F9B  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2014-09-30  usage: A   
[ultimate] (1). Simon Josefsson 
[ultimate] (2)  Simon Josefsson 
gpg> key 1
pub  3744R/54265E8C  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2015-01-23  usage: SC  
                     trust: ultimate      validity: ultimate
sub  2048R/32F8119D  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2015-01-23  usage: S   
sub* 2048R/78ECD86B  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2014-09-30  usage: E   
sub  2048R/36BA8F9B  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2014-09-30  usage: A   
[ultimate] (1). Simon Josefsson 
[ultimate] (2)  Simon Josefsson 
gpg> expire
Changing expiration time for a subkey.
Please specify how long the key should be valid.
         0 = key does not expire
        = key expires in n days
      w = key expires in n weeks
      m = key expires in n months
      y = key expires in n years
Key is valid for? (0) 150
Key expires at Fri 23 Jan 2015 02:48:14 PM UTC
Is this correct? (y/N) y
You need a passphrase to unlock the secret key for
user: "Simon Josefsson "
3744-bit RSA key, ID 54265E8C, created 2014-06-22
pub  3744R/54265E8C  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2015-01-23  usage: SC  
                     trust: ultimate      validity: ultimate
sub  2048R/32F8119D  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2015-01-23  usage: S   
sub* 2048R/78ECD86B  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2015-01-23  usage: E   
sub  2048R/36BA8F9B  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2014-09-30  usage: A   
[ultimate] (1). Simon Josefsson 
[ultimate] (2)  Simon Josefsson 
gpg> key 3
pub  3744R/54265E8C  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2015-01-23  usage: SC  
                     trust: ultimate      validity: ultimate
sub  2048R/32F8119D  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2015-01-23  usage: S   
sub* 2048R/78ECD86B  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2015-01-23  usage: E   
sub* 2048R/36BA8F9B  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2014-09-30  usage: A   
[ultimate] (1). Simon Josefsson 
[ultimate] (2)  Simon Josefsson 
gpg> key 2
pub  3744R/54265E8C  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2015-01-23  usage: SC  
                     trust: ultimate      validity: ultimate
sub  2048R/32F8119D  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2015-01-23  usage: S   
sub  2048R/78ECD86B  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2015-01-23  usage: E   
sub* 2048R/36BA8F9B  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2014-09-30  usage: A   
[ultimate] (1). Simon Josefsson 
[ultimate] (2)  Simon Josefsson 
gpg> expire
Changing expiration time for a subkey.
Please specify how long the key should be valid.
         0 = key does not expire
        = key expires in n days
      w = key expires in n weeks
      m = key expires in n months
      y = key expires in n years
Key is valid for? (0) 150
Key expires at Fri 23 Jan 2015 02:48:23 PM UTC
Is this correct? (y/N) y
You need a passphrase to unlock the secret key for
user: "Simon Josefsson "
3744-bit RSA key, ID 54265E8C, created 2014-06-22
pub  3744R/54265E8C  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2015-01-23  usage: SC  
                     trust: ultimate      validity: ultimate
sub  2048R/32F8119D  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2015-01-23  usage: S   
sub  2048R/78ECD86B  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2015-01-23  usage: E   
sub* 2048R/36BA8F9B  created: 2014-06-22  expires: 2015-01-23  usage: A   
[ultimate] (1). Simon Josefsson 
[ultimate] (2)  Simon Josefsson 
gpg> save
user@debian:~$ gpg -a --export 54265e8c > /media/KINGSTON/updated-key.txt
user@debian:~$ 

I remove the transport USB stick from the offline computer, and back on my laptop I can inspect the new updated key. Let s use the same command as before. The key creation time is the same ( created 1403464321 ), of course, but the signature packet has a new time ( created 1409064478 ) since it was signed now. Notice created 1409064478 and subpkt 9 len 4 (key expires after 214d19h35m) . The expiration time is computed based on when the key was generated, not when the signature packet was generated. You may want to double-check the pref-sym-algos, pref-hash-algos and other sub-packets so that you don t accidentally change anything else. (Btw, re-signing your key is also how you would modify those preferences over time.)

jas@latte:~$ cat /media/KINGSTON/updated-key.txt  gpg --list-packets   head -20
:public key packet:
	version 4, algo 1, created 1403464321, expires 0
	pkey[0]: [3744 bits]
	pkey[1]: [17 bits]
:user ID packet: "Simon Josefsson "
:signature packet: algo 1, keyid 0664A76954265E8C
	version 4, created 1409064478, md5len 0, sigclass 0x13
	digest algo 10, begin of digest 5c b2
	hashed subpkt 27 len 1 (key flags: 03)
	hashed subpkt 11 len 7 (pref-sym-algos: 9 8 7 13 12 11 10)
	hashed subpkt 21 len 4 (pref-hash-algos: 10 9 8 11)
	hashed subpkt 30 len 1 (features: 01)
	hashed subpkt 23 len 1 (key server preferences: 80)
	hashed subpkt 25 len 1 (primary user ID)
	hashed subpkt 2 len 4 (sig created 2014-08-26)
	hashed subpkt 9 len 4 (key expires after 214d19h35m)
	subpkt 16 len 8 (issuer key ID 0664A76954265E8C)
	data: [3744 bits]
:user ID packet: "Simon Josefsson "
:signature packet: algo 1, keyid 0664A76954265E8C
jas@latte:~$ 

Being happy with the new key, I import it and send it to key servers out there.

jas@latte:~$ gpg --import /media/KINGSTON/updated-key.txt 
gpg: key 54265E8C: "Simon Josefsson " 5 new signatures
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg:         new signatures: 5
jas@latte:~$ gpg --send-keys 54265e8c
gpg: sending key 54265E8C to hkp server keys.gnupg.net
jas@latte:~$ gpg --keyserver keyring.debian.org  --send-keys 54265e8c
gpg: sending key 54265E8C to hkp server keyring.debian.org
jas@latte:~$ 

Finally: why go through this hassle, rather than set the key to expire in 50 years? Some reasons for this are:

1. I don t trust myselt to keep track of a private key (or revocation cert) for 50 years.
2. I want people to notice my revocation certificate as quickly as possible.
3. I want people to notice other changes to my key (e.g., cipher preferences) as quickly as possible.

Let s look into the first reason a bit more. What would happen if I lose both the master key and the revocation cert, for a key that s valid 50 years? I would start from scratch and create a new key that I upload to keyservers. Then there would be two keys out there that are valid and identify me, and both will have a set of signatures on it. None of them will be revoked. If I happen to lose the new key again, there will be three valid keys out there with signatures on it. You may argue that this shouldn t be a problem, and that nobody should use any other key than the latest one I want to be used, but that s a technical argument and at this point we have moved into usability, and that s a trickier area. Having users select which out of a couple of apparently all valid keys that exist for me is simply not going to work well. The second is more subtle, but considerably more important. If people retrieve my key from keyservers today, and it expires in 50 years, there will be no need to refresh it from key servers. If for some reason I have to publish my revocation certificate, there will be people that won t see it. If instead I set a short validity period, people will have to refresh my key once in a while, and will then either get an updated expiration time, or will get the revocation certificate. This amounts to a CRL/OCSP-like model. The third is similar to the second, but deserves to be mentioned on its own. Because the cipher preferences are expressed (and signed) in my key, and that ciphers come and go, I would expect that I will modify those during the life-time of my long-term key. If I have a long validity period of my key, people would not refresh it from key servers, and would encrypt messages to me with ciphers I may no longer want to be used. The downside of having a short validity period is that I have to do slightly more work to get out the offline master key once in a while (which I have to once in a while anyway because I m signing other peoples keys) and that others need to refresh my key from the key servers. Can anyone identify other disadvantages? Also, having to explain why I m using a short validity period used to be a downside, but with this writeup posted that won t be the case any more.