Today I released man-db 2.7.6 (announcement, NEWS, git log), and uploaded it to Debian unstable. The major change in this release was a set of fixes for two security vulnerabilities, one of which affected all man-db installations since 2.3.12 (or 2.3.10-66 in Debian), and the other of which was specific to Debian and its derivatives. It s probably obvious from the dates here that this has not been my finest hour in terms of responding to security issues in a timely fashion, and I apologise for that. Some of this is just the usual life reasons, which I shan t bore you by reciting, but some of it has been that fixing this properly in man-db was genuinely rather complicated and delicate. Since I ve previously advocated man-db over some of its competitors on the basis of a better security posture, I think it behooves me to write up a longer description. I took over maintaining man-db over fifteen years ago in slightly unexpected circumstances (I got annoyed with its bug list and made a couple of non-maintainer uploads, and then the previous maintainer died, so I ended up taking over both in Debian and upstream). I was a fairly new developer at the time, and there weren t a lot of people I could ask questions of, but I did my best to recover as much of the history as I could and learn from it. One thing that became clear very quickly, both from my own inspection and from the bug list, was that most of the code had been written in a rather more innocent time. It was absolutely riddled with dangerous uses of the shell, poor temporary file handling, buffer overruns, and various common-or-garden deficiencies of that kind. I spent several years reworking large swathes of the codebase to be more robust against those kinds of bugs by design, and for example libpipeline came out of that effort. The most subtle and risky set of problems came from the fact that the man and mandb programs were installed set-user-id to the man user. Part of this was so that man could maintain preformatted cat pages , and part of it was so that users could run mandb if the system databases were out of date (this is now much less useful since most package managers, including dpkg, support some kind of trigger mechanism that can run mandb whenever new system-level manual pages are installed). One of the first things I did was to make this optional, and this has been a disabled-by-default debconf option in Debian for a long time now. But it s still a supported option and is enabled by default upstream, and when running setuid man and mandb need to take care to drop privileges when dealing with user-controlled data and to write files with the appropriate ownership and permissions. My predecessor had problems related to this such as Debian #26002, and one of the ways they dealt with them was to make /var/cache/man/ set-group-id root, in order that files written to that directory would have consistent group ownership. This always struck me as rather strange and I meant to do something about it at some point, but until the first vulnerability report above I regarded it as mainly a curiosity, since nothing in there was group-writeable anyway. As a result, with the more immediate aim of making the system behave consistently and dealing with bug reports, various bits of code had accreted that assumed that /var/cache/man/ would be man:root 2755, and not all of it was immediately obvious. This interacted with the second vulnerability report in two ways. Firstly, at some level it caused it because I was dealing with the day-to-day problems rather than thinking at a higher level: a series of bugs led me down the path of whacking problems over the head with a recursive chown of /var/cache/man/ from cron, rather than working out why things got that way in the first place. Secondly, once I d done that, I couldn t remove the chown without a much more extensive excursion into all the code that dealt with cache files, for fear of reintroducing those bugs. So although the fix for the second vulnerability is very simple in itself, I couldn t get there without dealing with the first vulnerability. In some ways, of course, cat pages are a bit of an anachronism. Most modern systems can format pages quickly enough that it s not much of an issue. However, I m loath to drop the feature entirely: I m generally wary of assuming that just because I have a fast system that everyone does. So, instead, I did what I should have done years ago: make man and mandb set-group-id man as well as set-user-id man, at which point we can simply make all the cache files and directories be owned by man:man and drop the setgid bit on cache directories. This should be simpler and less prone to difficult-to-understand problems. I expect that my next substantial upstream release will switch to --disable-setuid by default to reduce exposure, though, and distributions can start thinking about whether they want to follow that (Fedora already does, for example). If this becomes widely disabled without complaints then that would be good evidence that it s reasonable to drop the feature entirely. I m not in a rush, but if you do need cat pages then now is a good time to write to me and tell me why. This is the fiddliest set of vulnerabilities I ve dealt with in man-db for quite some time, so I hope that if there are more then I can get back to my previous quick response time.

DebConf16 Firstly, thanks to everyone who came out and added their own uniqueness and expertise to the pool. The feedback received so far has been very positive and I feel that the few problems we did experience was dealt with very efficiently. Having a DebConf in your hometown is a great experience, consider a bid for hosting a DebConf in your city! DebConf16 Open Festival (5 August) The Open Festival (usually Debian Open Day) turned out pretty good. It was a collection of talks, a job fair, and some demos of what can be done with Debian. I particularly liked Hetzner s stand. I got to show off some 20 year old+ Super Mario skills and they had some fun brain teasers as well. It s really great to see a job stand that s so interactive and I think many companies can learn from them.

At #Debconf? Join the #HetznerSA #Supermariobros challenge and stand a chance to win a case of #Leagueofbeers pic.twitter.com/DpkOj6wmZb HetznerSA Careers (@HetznerCareers) July 2, 2016

The demo that probably drew the most attention was from my friend Georg who demoed some LulzBot Mini 3D Printers. They really seem to love Debian which is great!

LulzBot Mini #3Dprinters were on the scene at @DebConf Open Festival in South Africa. We re powered by @debian! pic.twitter.com/AOBS64ZtiJ LulzBot (@lulzbot3D) July 13, 2016

DebConf (6 August to 12 August) If I try to write up all my thoughts and feeling about DC16, I ll never get this post finished. Instead, here as some tweets from DebConf that other have written:

@o0karen0o delivering today s #DebConf16 keynote pic.twitter.com/hG1wD5MBhH Michael Banck (@mbanck) July 3, 2016

Great to see Sicelo Mhlongo speaking about issues using @debian in Swaziland #debconf16 pic.twitter.com/U6z7HA8zd5 Neil McGovern (@nmcgovern) July 7, 2016

What happened at #DebConf16 yesterday? Sandstorm Principles talking about the freedom to choose #software #sandbox pic.twitter.com/ltYaw3dAmP Obsidian Systems (@obsidianza) July 5, 2016

All @DebConf end with similar feelings: we re an incredible crowd working together for a incredibly important cause. https://t.co/DYuUWT5eKt Didier Raboud (@OdyX_) July 9, 2016

My congratulations to the #DebConf video team. As usual, they are doing an amazing work at #DebConf16
Marcelo Santana (@mgsantana) July 8, 2016

Day Trip We had 3 day trips:

• Trip out to sea point and penguin spotting (Dominic Hargreaves has some beautiful photos up on Flickr)
• Hike up Table Mountaing to Kirstenbosch gardens
• Safari tour (I went on this one and you can see some of my photos on Gallery)

Brought to you by See you in Montr al! DebConf17 dates:

• DebCamp: 31 July to 4 August 2017
• DebConf: 6 August to 12 August 2017
• More details on the DebConf Wiki.

The DC17 sponsorship brochure contains a good deal of information, please share it with anyone who might be interested in sponsoring DebConf! Media

• Official (and some unofficial) photos are on the DebConf gallery site (you can add yours, too)
• All official DebConf videos can be found on the video meeting archives

Slightly belated... Another year, another OMGWTFBBQ. By my count, we had 49 people (and a dog) in my house and garden at the peak on Saturday evening. It was excellent to see people from all over coming together again, old friends and new. This year we had some weather issues, but due to the delights of gazebo technology most people stayed mostly dry. :-) Also: thanks to a number of companies near and far who sponsored the important refreshments for the weekend:

• Mythic Beasts
• Metail
• Collabora
• Codethink
• QvarnLabs

As far as I could tell, everybody enjoyed themselves; I know I definitely did!

A masterpiece by Yukio Mishima Patriotism the story of love and dead. A short story about the double suicide of a Lieutenant and his wife following the Ni Ni Roku Incident where some parts of the military tried to overthrow government and military leaders. Although Lieutenant Takeyama wasn t involved into the coup, because his friends wanted to safeguard him and his new wife, he found himself facing a fight and execution of his friends. Not being able to cope with this situation he commits suicide, followed by his wife.
Written in 1960 by one of the most interesting writers of Japanese modern history, Yukio Mishima, this book and the movie made by Mishima himself, are very disturbing images of the relation between human and state. Although the English title says Patriotism, the Japanese one is (Yukoku) which is closer to Concern for one s own country. This concern, and the feeling of devotion to the Imperial system and the country that leads the two into their deed. We are guided through the whole book and movie by a large scroll with (shisei, devotion) written on it. But indeed, Patriotism is a good title I think one of the most dangerous concepts mankind has brought forth. If Patriotism would be only the love for one s own country, all would be fine. But reality shows that patriotism unfailingly brings along xenophobia and the feeling of superiority. For someone coming from a small and unimportant country, I never had even the slightest allure to be patriotic in the bad sense. And looking at the world and people around me, I often have the feeling that mainly big countries produce the biggest and worst style of patriotism. This is obvious in countries like China, but having recently learned that all US pupils have to recite (obviously without understanding) the Pledge of Allegiance, the shock of how bad patriotism can start washing the brains of even the smallest kids in a seemingly free country is still present. But back to the book: Here the patriotism is exhibited by the presence of the Imperial images and shrine in the entrance, in front of which the two pray the last time before executing themselves. Not only the book is a masterpiece by itself, also the movie is a special piece of art: Filmed in silent movie style with text inserts, the whole story takes place on a Noh stage. This is in particular interesting as Mishima was one of the few, if not the only, modern Noh play writer. He has written several Noh plays. Another very impressive scene for me was when, after her husbands suicide, Reiko returns from putting up her final make-up into the central room. Her kimono is already blood soaked and the trailing kimono leaves traces on the Noh stage resembling the strokes of a calligraphy, as if her movement is guided, too, by . The final scene of the movie shows the two of them in a Zen stone garden, forming the stone, the unreachable island of happiness. Very impressive, both the book as well as the movie.

Talks have been finished, and as a special present to the participants, Pavneet has organized an excursion that probably was one of the best I ever had. First we visited the Toronto Reference Library where we were treated to a delicious collection of rare books (not to mention all the other books and architecture), and then a trip through the Ismaili Centre Toronto and the Aga Khan Museum.
(Kelmscott press edition from 1892 of William Morris A Dream of John Ball.) All these places were great pieces of architecture with excellent samples of the writing and printing art. And after all that and not to be mentioned, the conference dinner evening cruise! Our first stop was the Toronto Reference Library. Designed by Raymond Moriyama, it features a large open atrium with skylights, and it gives the library an open and welcoming feeling. We were told that it resembles a tea cup that needs to be filled with knowledge.
The library also features running water at several places the architect had the idea that natural ambient noise is more natural for a library than the eclectic silence that anyway never happens. Originally there were lots of greens hanging down into the Atrium, resembling the Hanging Gardens, but they have been scrapped due to financial reasons. But there are still green oasis like this beautiful green wall in a corner of the library.
We were guided first to the fifth floor where the special collection is housed. And what a special collection. The librarian in charge has laid out about 20 exquisite books starting from early illuminated manuscripts over incunabula to high pieces of printing art from the 18th and 19th century. Here we have a illuminated script in Carolingian minuscule.
What was really surprising for all of us in this special collection that all these books were simply laid out in front of us, that the librarian touched and used it without gloves, and above all, that he told us that if one wants it is common practice to check out these books for study sessions and enjoy them on the spot in the reading room. I don t know any other library that allows you to actually handle these rare and beauty specimens! The library not only featured lots of great books, it also had some art installation like these light rods.
In one of the books I found by chance a map of my hometown of Vienna. Looking at this map from very old times, the place where I grew up is still uninhabited somewhere in the far upper right corner of the map. Times have changed.
After we left this open and welcoming treasure house of beautiful books, we moved to the Aga Khan Museum and Ismaili Centre Toronto, which are standing face-to-face separated by some water ponds in the Aga Khan park a bit outside of central Toronto. Here we see the Ismaili Centre from the Aga Khan Museum entrance. The big glass dome is the central prayer room, and is illuminated at night. Just one detail one can see in the outer wall one part that looks like glass, too. This is the prayer alcove in the back of the prayer hall, and is made from huge slabs of Onyx that are also lit up in the night.
The Ismaili Centre, designed by Charles Correa combines modern functional and simple style with the wonderful ornamental art of the Islam heritage. The inside of the Ismaili Centre features many pieces of exquisite art calligraphy, murals, stone work, etc here is a medallion made from precious stone and set onto a hand-carved wall.
A calligraphy on the wall in the Ismaili Centre
Following the Ismaili Centre we turned to the Aga Khan museum which documents Islamic art, science, and history with an extensive collection. We didn t have much time, and in addition I had to do some fire-fighting over the phone, but the short trip through the permanent collection with samples of excellent calligraphy was amazing.
After returning from this lovely excursion and a short break, we set off for the last stop for tonight, the dinner cruise. After a short bus ride we could board our ship and off we go. Although the beer selection was not on par with what we are used from carft breweries, the perfectly sized boat with two decks and lots of places to hang around invited us to many discussions and chitchats. And finally I could enjoy also the skyline of Toronto.
After the dinner we had some sweets, one of which was a specially made cake with the TUG 2016 logo on it. I have to say, it was not only this cake but the whole excellent and overboarding food we had during all these days, that will make me go on diet when I am back in Japan. Pavneet organized for the lunch breaks three different style of kitchens (Thai, Indian, Italian), then the excursions to local brewers and and and If it wouldn t be for TeX, I would call it a Mastkur .
During the cruise we also had a little ceremony thanking Jim for his work as president of the TUG, but above all Pavneet for this incredible well organized conference. I think everyone agreed that this was the best TUG conference since long.
During the ceremony, Pavneet also announced the winners of the TUG 2016 fountain pen auction. These pens have a long history/travel behind them, see details on the linked page, and were presented to the special guests of the conference. Two remaining pens were auctioned with funds going to the TUG. The first one was handed over to Steve Grathwohl, and to my utter surprise the second one to myself. So now I am a happy owner of a TUG 2016 fountain pen. What a special feature! Just one more detail about these pens: They are traditional style, so without ink capsules, but one needs to insert the ink with a syringe. I guess I need to stack up a bit at home, and more importantly, train my really ugly hand-writing, otherwise it would be a shame to use this exquisite tool. We returned to the harbor around 10pm, and back to the hotel, where there was much greeting and thanking, as many people will return the following day.
I will also leave on Friday morning to meet with friends, thus I will not be participating in (and not reporting on) the last excursion of the TUG 2016. I will leave Toronto and the TUG 2016 with (nearly) exclusively good memories of excellent talks, great presentations, wonderful excursions, and lots of things I have learned. I hope to see all of the participants on next year s TUG meeting and I hope I will be able to attend it. Thanks a lot to Pavneet, you have done an incredible job. And last but not least, thanks to your lovely wife for letting you do all this, I know how much time we did steal from her. A few more photos can be found at the album Day 4 Books, ooh books.

Short trip to Opio en Provence I had a short work-related trip this week to Opio en Provence. It was not a working trip, but rather a team event, which means almost a vacation! Getting there and back I dislike taking the plane for very short flights (and Z rich-Nice is indeed only around one hour), as that means you're spending 3 as much going to the airport, at the airport, waiting to take off, waiting to get off the plane, and then going from the airport to the actual destination. So I took the opportunity to drive there, since I've never driven that way, and on the map the route seemed reasonably interesting. Not that it's a shorter trip by any measure, but seemed more interesting. Leaving Z rich I went over San Bernardino pass, as I never did that before. On the north side, the pass is actually much less suited to traffic than the Gotthard pass (also on the north side), as you basically climb around 300m in a very short distance, with very sharp hairpins. There was still snow on the top, and the small lake had lots of slush/ice floating on it. As to the south side, it looked much more driveable, but I'm not sure as I made the mistake of re-joining the highway, so instead of driving reasonably nice on the empty pass road, I spent half an hour in a slow moving line. Lesson learned Entering Italy was the usual Como-Milan route, but as opposed to my other trips, this time it was around Milan on the west (A50) and then south on the A7 until it meets the A26 and then down to the coast. From here, along the E80 (Italian A10, French A8) until somewhere near Nice, and then exiting the highway system to get on the small local roads towards Opio. What I read in advance on the internet was that the coastal highway is very nice, and has better views of the sea than the actual seaside drive (which goes through towns and is much slower). I should know better than trust the internet , and I should read maps instead, which would have shown me the fact that the Alps are reaching to the sea in this region, so The road was OK, but it definitely didn't feel like a highway: maximum allowed speed was usually either 90km/h or 110km/h, and half the time you're in a short tunnel, so it's sun, tunnel/dark, sun, dark, and you're eyes get quite tired from this continuous switching. The few glimpses of the sea were nice, but the road required enough concentration (both due to traffic and the amount of curves) that one couldn't look left or right. So that was that a semi-failure; I expected a nice drive, but instead it was a challenge drive If I had even more time to spend, going back via the Rhone valley (Grenoble, Geneva, Z rich) would have been a more interesting alternative. France Going to France always feels strange for me. I learned (some) French way before German, so the French language feels much more familiar to me, even without never actually having used it on a day-to-day basis; so going to France feels like getting back to somewhere where I never lived. Somewhat similar with Italian due to the language closeness between Romanian and Italian, but not the same feeling as I didn't actually hear or learn Italian in the childhood. So I go to France, and I start partially understand what I hear, and I can somewhat talk/communicate. Very weird, while I still struggle with German in my daily life in Z rich. For example, I would hesitate before asking for directions in German, but not so in French, unrelated to my actual understanding of either language. The brain is funny The hotel We stayed at Club Med Opio-en-Provence, which was interesting. Much bigger than I thought from quick looks on the internet (this internet seems quite unreliable), but also better than I expected from a family-oriented, all-inclusive hotel. The biggest problem was the food - French P tisserie is one of my weaknesses, and I failed to resist. I mean, it was much better than I expected, and I indulged a bit too much. I'll have to pay that back on the bike or running The other interesting part of the hotel was the wide range of activities. Again, this being a family hotel, I thought the organised activities would be pretty mild; but at least for our group, they weren't. The mountain bike ride included an easy single-trail section, but while easy it was single-trail and rocky, so complete beginners might have had a small surprise. Overall it was about 50 minutes, 13.5km, with 230m altitude gain, which again for sedentary people might be unusual. I probably spent during the ride one of the deserts I ate later that day The "hike" they organised for another sub-group was also interesting, involving going through old tunnels and something with broken water pipes that caused people to either get their feet wet or monkey-spidering along the walls. Fun! After the bike ride, on the same afternoon, while walking around the hotel, we found the Ecole de Trap ze volant open, which looked way to exciting not to try it. Try and fail to do things right, but nevertheless it was excellent and unexpected fun. I'll have to do that again some day when I'll be more fit! Plus that the hotel itself had a very nice location and olive garden, so short runs in the morning were very pleasant. Only one cookie though each Back home and then it was over; short, but quite good. The Provence area is nice, and I'd like to be back again someday, for a proper vacation longer and more relaxed. And do the trap ze thing again, properly this time.

Many years ago, when koffice was fresh and with few users, I decided to test its presentation tool when making the slides for a talk I was giving for NUUG on Japhar, a free Java virtual machine. I wrote the first draft of the slides, saved the result and went to bed the day before I would give the talk. The next day I took a plane to the location where the meeting should take place, and on the plane I started up koffice again to polish the talk a bit, only to discover that kpresenter refused to load its own data file. I cursed a bit and started making the slides again from memory, to have something to present when I arrived. I tested that the saved files could be loaded, and the day seemed to be rescued. I continued to polish the slides until I suddenly discovered that the saved file could no longer be loaded into kpresenter. In the end I had to rewrite the slides three times, condensing the content until the talk became shorter and shorter. After the talk I was able to pinpoint the problem kpresenter wrote inline images in a way itself could not understand. Eventually that bug was fixed and kpresenter ended up being a great program to make slides. The point I'm trying to make is that we expect a program to be able to load its own data files, and it is embarrassing to its developers if it can't. Did you ever experience a program failing to load its own data files from the desktop file browser? It is not a uncommon problem. A while back I discovered that the screencast recorder gtk-recordmydesktop would save an Ogg Theora video file the KDE file browser would refuse to open. No video player claimed to understand such file. I tracked down the cause being file --mime-type returning the application/ogg MIME type, which no video player I had installed listed as a MIME type they would understand. I asked for file to change its behavour and use the MIME type video/ogg instead. I also asked several video players to add video/ogg to their desktop files, to give the file browser an idea what to do about Ogg Theora files. After a while, the desktop file browsers in Debian started to handle the output from gtk-recordmydesktop properly. But history repeats itself. A few days ago I tested the music system Rosegarden again, and I discovered that the KDE and xfce file browsers did not know what to do with the Rosegarden project files (*.rg). I've reported the rosegarden problem to BTS and a fix is commited to git and will be included in the next upload. To increase the chance of me remembering how to fix the problem next time some program fail to load its files from the file browser, here are some notes on how to fix it. The file browsers in Debian in general operates on MIME types. There are two sources for the MIME type of a given file. The output from file --mime-type mentioned above, and the content of the shared MIME type registry (under /usr/share/mime/). The file MIME type is mapped to programs supporting the MIME type, and this information is collected from the desktop files available in /usr/share/applications/. If there is one desktop file claiming support for the MIME type of the file, it is activated when asking to open a given file. If there are more, one can normally select which one to use by right-clicking on the file and selecting the wanted one using 'Open with' or similar. In general this work well. But it depend on each program picking a good MIME type (preferably a MIME type registered with IANA), file and/or the shared MIME registry recognizing the file and the desktop file to list the MIME type in its list of supported MIME types. The /usr/share/mime/packages/rosegarden.xml entry for the Shared MIME database look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<mime-info xmlns="http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info">
  <mime-type type="audio/x-rosegarden">
    <sub-class-of type="application/x-gzip"/>
    <comment>Rosegarden project file</comment>
    <glob pattern="*.rg"/>
  </mime-type>
</mime-info>

This states that audio/x-rosegarden is a kind of application/x-gzip (it is a gzipped XML file). Note, it is much better to use an official MIME type registered with IANA than it is to make up ones own unofficial ones like the x-rosegarden type used by rosegarden. The desktop file of the rosegarden program failed to list audio/x-rosegarden in its list of supported MIME types, causing the file browsers to have no idea what to do with *.rg files:

% grep Mime /usr/share/applications/rosegarden.desktop
MimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition;audio/x-rosegarden-device;audio/x-rosegarden-project;audio/x-rosegarden-template;audio/midi;
X-KDE-NativeMimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition
%

The fix was to add "audio/x-rosegarden;" at the end of the MimeType= line. If you run into a file which fail to open the correct program when selected from the file browser, please check out the output from file --mime-type for the file, ensure the file ending and MIME type is registered somewhere under /usr/share/mime/ and check that some desktop file under /usr/share/applications/ is claiming support for this MIME type. If not, please report a bug to have it fixed. :)

Debian Long Term Support (LTS) This is my 4th month working on Debian LTS, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. I spent half of the month away on a vacation so little work was done, especially since I tried to tackle rather large uploads like NSS and Xen. I also worked on the frontdesk shift last week.

Frontdesk That work mainly consisted of figuring out how to best help the security team with the last uploads to the Wheezy release. For those who don't know, Debian 7 Wheezy, or "oldstable", is going to be unsupported by the security team starting end of april, and the Debian 6 Squeeze (the previous LTS) is now unsupported. The PGP signatures on the archived release have started yielding expiration errors which can be ignored but that are really a strong reminder that it is really time to upgrade. So the LTS team is now working towards backporting a few security issues from squeeze to wheezy, and this is what I focused on during triage work. I have identified the following high priority packages I will work on after I complete my work on the Xen and NSS packages (detailed below):

• libidn
• icu
• phpmyadmin
• tomcat6
• optipng
• srtp
• dhcpcd
• python-tornado

Updates to NSS and Xen I have spent a lot of time testing and building packages for NSS and Xen. To be fair, Brian May did most of the work on the Xen packages, and I merely did some work to test the packages on Koumbit's infrastructure, something which I will continue doing in the next month. For NSS, wheezy and jessie are in this weird state where patches were provided to the security team all the way back in November yet were never tested. Since then, yet more issues came up and I worked hard to review and port patches for those new security issues to wheezy. I'll followup on both packages in the following month.

Other free software work

Android TL;DR: there's an even longer version of this with the step-by-step procedures and that I will update as time goes on in my wiki. I somehow inherited an Android phone recently, on a loan from a friend because the phone broke one too many times and she got a new one from her provider. This phone is a HTC One S "Ville", which is fairly old, but good enough to play with and give me a mobile computing platform to listen to podcasts, play music, access maps and create GPS traces. I was previously doing this with my N900, but that device is really showing its age: very little development is happening on it, the SDK is closed source and the device itself is fairly big, compared to the "Ville". Plus, the SIM card actually works on the Ville so, even though I do not have an actual contract with a cell phone provider (too expensive, too invasive on my privacy), I can still make emergency phone calls (911)! Plus, since there is good wifi on the machine, I can use it to connect to the phone system with the built-in SIP client, send text messages through SMS (thanks to VoIP.ms SMS support) or Jabber. I have also played around with LibreSignal, the free software replacement for Signal, which uses proprietary google services. Yes, the VoIP.ms SMS app also uses GCM, but hopefully that can be fixed. (While I was writing this, another Debian Developer wrote a good review of Signal so I am happy to skip that step. Go read that.)

See also my apps list for a more complete list of the apps I have installed on the phone. I welcome recommendations on cool free software apps I should use!

I have replaced the stock firmware on the phone with Cyanogenmod 12.1, which was a fairly painful experience, partly because of the difficult ambiance on the #cyanogenmod channel on Freenode, where I had extreme experiences: a brave soul helped me through the first flashing process for around 2 hours, nicely holding my hand at every step. Other times, I have seen flames and obtuse comments from people being vulgar, brutal, obnoxious, if not sometimes downright homophobic and sexist from other users. It is clearly a community that needs to fix their attitude. I have documented everything I could in details in this wiki page, in case others want to resuscitate their old phones, but also because I ended up reinstalling the freaking phone about 4 times, and was getting tired of forgetting how to do it every time. I am somewhat fascinated by Android: here is the Linux-based device that should save us all from the proprietary Apple nightmares of fenced in gardens and censorship. Yet, public Android downloads are hidden behind license agreements, even though the code itself is free, which has led fellow Debian developers to work on making libre rebuilds of Androids to workaround this insanity. But worse: all phones are basically proprietary devices down to the core. You need custom firmware to be loaded on the machine for it to boot at all, from the bootloader all the way down to the GSM baseband and Wifi drivers. It is a minefield of closed source software, and trying to run free software on there is a bit of a delusion, especially since the baseband has so much power over the phone. Still, I think it is really interesting to run free software on those machines, and help people that are stuck with cell phones get familiar with software freedom. It seems especially important to me to make Android developers aware of software freedom considering how many apps are available for free yet on which it is not possible to contribute significantly because the source code is not published at all, or published only on the Google Store, instead of the more open and public F-Droid repository which publishes only free software. So I did contribute. This month, I am happy to announce that I contributed to the following free software projects on Android:

• listmyapps: feature request, patch
• Locker: bug report, added to f-droid
• Sensorium: bug report
• LibreSignal: feature request and testing

I have also reviewed the literature surrounding Telegram, a popular messaging app rival to Signal and Whatsapp. Oddly enough, my contributions to Wikipedia on that subject were promptly reverted which made me bring up the subject on the page's Talk page. This lead to an interesting response from the article's main editors which at least added that the "its security features have been contested by security researchers and cryptography experts". Considering the history of Telegram, I would keep people away from it and direct people to use Signal instead, even though Signal has similar metadata issues, mostly because Telegram's lack of response to the security issues that were outlined by fellow security researchers. Both systems suffer from a lack of federation as well, which is a shame in this era of increasing centralization. I am not sure I will put much more work in developing for Android for now. It seems like a fairly hostile platform to work on, and unless I have specific pain points I want to fix, it feels so much better to work on my own stuff in Debian. Which brings me to my usual plethora of free software projects I got stuck in this month.

IRC projects irssi-plugin-otr had a bunch of idiotic bugs lying around, and I had a patch that I hadn't submitted upstream from the Debian package, which needed a rebuild because the irssi version changed, which is a major annoyance. The version in sid is now a snapshot because upstream needs to make a new release but at least it should fix things for my friends running unstable and testing. Hopefully those silly uploads won't be necessary in the future. That's for the client side. On the server side, I have worked on updating the Atheme-services package to the latest version, which actually failed because the upstream libmowgli is missing release tags, which means the Debian package for it is not up-to-date either. Still, it is nice to have a somewhat newer version, even though it is not the latest and some bugs were fixed. I have also looked at making atheme reproducible but was surprised at the hostility of the upstream. In the end, it looks like they are still interested in patches, but they will be a little harder to deploy than for Charybdis, so this could take some time. Hopefully I will find time in the coming weeks to test the new atheme services daemon on the IRC network I operate.

Syncthing I have also re-discovered Syncthing, a file synchronization software. Amazingly, I was having trouble transferring a single file between two phones. I couldn't use Bluetooth (not sure why), the "Wifi sharing" app was available only on one phone (and is proprietary, and has a limit of 4MB files), and everything else requires an account, the cloud, or cabling. So. Just heading to f-droid, install syncthing, flash a few qr-codes around and voil : files are copied over! Pretty amazing: the files were actually copied over the local network, using IPv6 link-local addresses, encryption and the DHT. Which is a real geeky way of saying it's completely fast, secure and fast. Now, I found a few usability issues, so much that I wrote a whole usability story for the developers, which were really appreciative of my review. Some of the issues were already fixed, others were pretty minor. Syncthing has a great community, and it seems like a great project I encourage everyone to get familiar with.

Battery stats The battery-status project I mentionned previously has been merged with the battery-stats project (yes, the names are almost the same, which is confusing) and so I had to do some work to fix my Python graph script, which was accepted upstream and will be part of Debian officially from now on, which is cool. The previous package was unofficial. I have also noticed that my battery has a significantly than when I wrote the script. Whereas it was basically full back then, it seems now it has lost almost 15% of its capacity in about 6 months. According to the calculations of the script:

this battery will reach end of life (5%) in 935 days, 19:07:58.336480, on 2018-10-23 12:06:07.270290

Which is, to be fair, a good life: it will somewhat work for about three more years.

Playlist, git-annex and MPD in Python On top of my previously mentioned photos-import script, I have worked on two more small programs. One is called get-playlist and is an extension to git-annex to easily copy to the local git-annex repository all files present in a given M3U playlist. This is useful for me because my phone cannot possibly fit my whole MP3 collection, and I use playlists in GMPC to tag certain files, particularly the Favorites list which is populated by the "star" button in the UI. I had a lot of fun writing this script. I started using elpy as an IDE in Emacs. (Notice how Emacs got a new webpage, which is a huge improvement was had been basically unchanged since the original version, now almost 20 years old, and probably written by RMS himself.) I wonder how I managed to stay away from Elpy for so long, as it glues together key components of Emacs in an elegant and functional bundle:

• Company: the "vim-like" completion mode i had been waiting for forever
• Jedi: context-sensitive autocompletion for Python
• Flymake: to outline style and syntax errors (unfortunately not the more modern Flycheck)
• inline documentation...

In short, it's amazing and makes everything so much easier to work with that I wrote another script. The first program wouldn't work very well because some songs in the playlists had been moved, so I made another program, this time to repair playlists which refer to missing files. The script is simply called fix-playlists, and can operate transparently on multiple playlists. It has a bunch of heuristics to find files and uses a MPD server as a directory to search into. It can edit files in place or just act as a filter.

Useful snippets Writing so many scripts, so often, I figured I needed to stop wasting time always writing the same boilerplate stuff on top of every file, so I started publishing Yasnippet-compatible file snippets, in my snippets repository. For example, this report is based on the humble lts snippet. I also have a base license snippet which slaps the AGPLv3 license on top of a Python file. But the most interesting snippet, for me, is this simple script snippet which is a basic scaffolding for a commandline script that includes argument processing, logging and filtering of files, something which I was always copy-pasting around.

Other projects And finally, a list of interesting issues en vrac:

• there's a new Bootstrap 4 theme for Ikiwiki. It was delivering content over CDNs, which is bad for privacy issues, so I filed an issue which was almost immediately fixed by the author!
• I found out about BitHub, a tool to make payments with Bitcoins for patches submitted on OWS projects. It wasn't clear to me where to find the demo, but when I did, I quickly filed a PR to fix the documentation. Given the number of open PRs there and the lack of activity, I wonder if the model is working at all...
• a fellow Debian Developer shared his photos workflow, which was interesting to me because I have my own peculiar script, which I never mentionned here, but which I ended up sharing with the author

Earlier today I was made aware by Holger of the results of our reproducibility efforts during the sprint. I would like to thank Lunar for pinging us about the issue, and Holger for pointing me to updated results. The figure below depicts a stacked area chart where the X axis is time and the green area is reproducible packages. Red is packages that fail to build, and Orange are unreproducible packages I was able to book accommodation for the sprint attendees very close to both my place and the sprint venue, what was very useful but also had this downside of them not being able to see much of city. As the final day of the sprint was getting closer, we decided to have a different lunch to allow them to see one of the most famous local landmarks, the botanical gardens. So we headed down to the botanical gardens, grabbed a few items for lunch at the park coffee shop, and set out to visit this very beautiful place. I have to say that there is the place were I usually take every visitor I have. We were joined by Gioavani who had just arrived for the the MiniDebconf on the following weekend. The final lists of accomplishments of the day was again very impressive

• r10k 2.1.1-2
• run massive update on team repositories
  • bump Standards-Version
  • fix Vcs-* fields
  • drop version in gem2deb build-dependency
  • set debhelper compatibility level to 9
  • update the default ruby-tests.rake
• day 4 report
• uploaded ruby-faraday-middleware-multi-json 0.0.6-2
• uploaded ruby-powerpack 0.1.1-2
• uploaded ruby-contracts 0.13.0-1
• uploaded ruby-chef-config 12.7.2-1 (NEW)
• uploaded ruby-foreigner #808530 and asked it removal from the NEW queue (was already ROMed)
• filled for RM ruby-opengraph-parser (#816752)
• new how-can-i-help version developed and uploaded
• uploaded ruby-romkan to unstable (from exp)
• uploaded ruby-rinku to unstable (from exp)
• uploaded ruby-ole to unstable (from exp)
• uploaded ruby-net-ldap to unstable (from exp)
• uploaded ruby-rack-mobile-detect to unstable (from exp)
• uploaded gem2deb 0.28 to help with reproducible builds: filenames are now sorted
• uploaded rails 2:4.2.5.2-2 with packaging improvements
  • run unit tests during the build and on CI
  • apply upstream patch to fix ActiveRecord breakage under Ruby 2.3
• pushed a ton of tags for existing uploads
• merged improvements to the team master repository
  • review/cleanup the contents of the repository
  • improved helper scripts to automate the workflow (upload, build, new-upstream, etc)
• followed up on ruby2.3 transition, filed #816698 against subversion because of ftbfs on mips, mipsel
• put ruby-cocoon into a better state
• uploaded ruby-plist
• gem2deb: gem2tgz will now create foo.gemspec (easier to patch) instead of metadata.yml
• gemwatch: ditto
• close #794139 jekyll bug (unreproducible)
• close #798934 ruby-ffi-rzmq bug (unreproducible)
• closed ftbfs #816586 #800057 #784699 as unreproducible
• reassigned #760952 #680297 to ruby2.3 (from ruby2.2)
• investigated how to list packages with non-buildd-binary uploads
• ScottK has removed ruby2.1 from unstable!

By the end of the afternoon I asked everyone to fill out a simple retrospective list, what we can use later to make future sprints better and better. Below are the results we got. What was good:

• restricted room hours actually made for a nice rhythm (did not apply for a long time )
• very good food
• very cheap food!
• longer period makes the effort of travel more worthwhile
• many participants and longer sprint than usual allowing more work to be done
• good preparation with clear goals, make the sprint usefull
• patience with the less experienced participants
• RFS very fast
• Ant nio is an excellent host
• You all are so helpful
• great dinners

What could be better:

• room too close to the street, too much vehicle noise, but sometimes nice music
• more coffee ^W meat
• could know more portugues so ordering food would have been easier
• debian infra could have not been down during the sprint

The night ended at Bar do Alem o ( The German s Bar ). Both their beer and their food are very good, but I don t have enough elements to vouch for their authenticity. :) We were joined by Giovani (who we also met earlier in the botanic gardens), and by Paulo and Daniel who are organizing the MiniDebconf. And that is the end of this year s Debian Ruby team sprint. I hope we do it all over again next year.

How corporations killed the web I have read with fascination what we would have called before a blog post, except it was featured on The Guardian: Iran's blogfather: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are killing the web The "blogfather" is Hossein Derakshan or h0d3r, an author from Teheran that was jailed for almost a decade for his blogging. The article is very interesting both because it shows how fast things changed in the last few years, technology-wise, but more importantly, how content-free the web have become, where Facebook's last acquisition, Instagram, is not even censored by Iran. Those platforms have stopped being censored, not because of democratic progress but because they have become totally inoffensive (in the case of Iran) or become a tool of surveillance for the government and targeted advertisement for companies (in the case of, well, most of the world). This struck a chord, personally, at the political level: we are losing control of the internet (if we ever had it). The defeat isn't directly political: we have some institutions like ICANN and the IETF that we can still have an effect on, even if only at the technological level. The defeat is economic, and, of course, through economy comes enormous power. That defeat meant that we have first lost free and open access to the internet (yes, dialup used to be free) and then free hosting of our content (no, Google and Facebook are not free, you are the product). This marked a major change in the way content is treated online. H0d3r explains this as the shift from a link-based internet to a stream-based internet, a "deparure from a books-internet towards a television-internet". I have been warning about this "television-internet" in my talks and conversation for a while and with Netflix taking the crown off Youtube (and making you pay for it, of course), we can assuredly say that H0d3r is right and the television, far from disappearing, is finally being resurrected and taking over the internet.

The Downloadable internet and open standards But I would like to add to that: it is not merely that we had "links" before. We had, and still have, open standards. This made the internet "downloadable" (and by extension, uploadable) and decentralized. (In fact, I still remember my earlier days on the web when I would actually download images (as in "right-click" and "Save as..." images, not just have the browser download and display it on the fly). I would download images because they were big! It could take a minute or sometimes more to download images on older modems. Later, I would do the same with music: I would download WAV files before the rise of the MP3 format, of which I ended up building a significant collection (just fair use copies from friends and owned CDs, of course) and eventually video files.) The downloadable internet is what still allows me to type this article in a text editor, without internet access, while reading H0d3r's blog post on my e-reader, because I downloaded his article off an RSS feed. It is what makes it possible for anyone to download a full copy of this blog post and connected web pages as a git repository and this way get the full history of modifications on all the pages, but also be able to edit it offline and push modifications back in. Wikipedia is downloadable (there are even offline apps for your phone). Open standards like RSS feeds and HTML are downloadable. Heck, even the Internet Archive is downloadable (and I mean, all of it, not just the parts you want), surprisingly enough.

The app-based internet and proprietary software App-based websites like Google Plus and Facebook are not really downloadable. They are meant to be browsed through an app, so what you actually see through your web browser is really more an application, downloaded software than a downloaded piece of content. If you turn off Javascript, you will see that visiting Facebook actually shows no content: everything is downloaded on the fly by an application itself downloaded, on the fly, by your browser. In a way, your browser has become an operating system that runs proprietary, untrusted and unverified applications from the web. (The software is generally completely proprietary, except some frameworks that are published as free software in what looks like the lenient act of a godly king, but is actually more an economic decision of a clever corporation which outsources, for free, R&D and testing to the larger free software community. The real "secret sauce" is basically always proprietary, if only so that we don't freak out on stuff like PRISM that reports everything we do to the government.) Technology is political. This new "app design" is not a simple optimization or an cosmetic accident of a fancy engineer: by moving content through an application, Facebook, Twitter and the like can see exactly what you do on a web page, what you actually read (as opposed to what you click on) and how long. By adding a proprietary interface between you and the content online, the advertisement-surveillance complex can track every move you make online. This is a very fine-tuned surveillance system, and because of the App, you cannot escape it. You cannot share the content outside of Facebook, as you can't download it. Or at least, it's not obvious how you can. Projects like youtube-dl are doing an amazing job reverse-engineering what is becoming the proprietary Youtube streaming protocol, which is constantly changing and is not really documented. But it's a hack: it's a Sisyphus struggle which is bound to fail, and it does, all the time, until we figure out how to either turn those corporations into good netizens respecting and contributing to open standards (unlikely) or destroy those corporations (most likely). You are trapped in their walled garden. No wonder internet.org is Facebook only: for most people nowadays, the internet is the web, and the web is Facebook, Twitter and Google, or an iPad with a bunch of apps, each their own cute little walled garden, crafted just for you. If you think you like the Internet, you should really reconsider what you are watching, what you are consuming, or rather, how it is consuming you. There are alternatives. Facebook is a though nut to crack for free software activists because we lack the critical mass. But Facebook it is also an addiction for a lot of people, and spending less time on that spying machine could be a great improvement for you I am sure. For everything else, we have good free software alternatives and open standards, use them. "Big brother ain't watching you, you're watching him." - CRASS, Nineteen Eighty Bore (audio)

This post is intended to document some elements of workflow that I ve setup to manage videos produced for a MOOC, where different colleagues work collaboratively on a set of video sequences, in a remote way. We are a team of several schools working on the same course, and we have an incremental process, so we need some collaboration over a quite long period of many remote authors, over a set of video sequences. We re probably going to review some of the videos and make changes, so we need to monitor changes, and submit versions to colleagues on remote sites so they can criticize and get later edits. We may have more that one site doing video production. Thus we need to share videos along the flow of production, editing and revision of the course contents, in a way that is manageable by power users (we re all computer scientists, used to SVN or Git). I ve decided to start an experiment with Git and Git-Annex to try and manage the videos like we use to do for slides sources in LaTeX. Obviously the main issue is that videos are big files, demanding in storage space and bandwidth for transfers. We want to keep a track of everything which is done during the production of the videos, so that we can later re-do some of the video editing, for instance if we change the graphic design elements (logos, subtitles, frame dimensions, additional effects, etc.), for instance in the case where we would improve the classes over the seasons. On the other hand, not all colleagues want to have to download a full copy of all rushes on their laptop if they just want to review on particular sequence of the course. They will only need to download the final edit MP4. Even if they re interested in being able to fetch all the rushes, should they want to try and improve the videos. Git-Annex brings us the ability to decouple the presence of files in directories, managed by regular Git commands, from the presence of the file contents (the big stuff), which is managed by Git-Annex. Here s a quick description of our setup :

• we do screen capture and video editing with Camtasia on a Windows 7 system. Camtasia (although proprietary) is quite manageable without being a video editing expert, and suits quite well our needs in terms of screen capture, green background shooting and later face insertion over slides capture, additional motion design -like enhancement, etc.
• the rushes captured (audio, video) are kept on that machine
• the MP4 rendering of the edits are performed on that same machine
• all these files are stored locally on that computer, but we perform regular backups, on demand, on a remote system, with rsync+SSH. We have installed git for Windows so we use bash and rsync and ssh from git s install. SSH happens using a public key without a passphrase, to connect easily to the Linux remote, but that isn t mandatory.
• the mirrored files appear on a Linux filesystem on another host (running Debian), where the target is actually managed with git and git-annex.
• there we handle all the files added, removed or modified with git-annex.
• we have 2 more git-annex remote repos, accessed through SSH (again using a passphrase-less public key), run by GitoLite, to which git-annex rsyncs copies of all the file contents. These repos are on different machines keeping backups in case of crashes. git-annex is setup to mandate keeping at least 2 copies of files (numcopies).
• colleagues in turn clone from either of these repos and git-annex get to download the video contents, only for files which they are interested in (for instance final edits, but not rushes), which they can then play locally on their preferred OS and video player.

Why didn t we use git-annex on windows directly, on the Windows host which is the source of the files ? We tried, but that didn t make it. Git-Annex assistant somehow crashed on us, thus causing the Git history to be strange, so that became unmanageable, and more important, we need robust backups, so we can t allow to handle something we don t fully trust: shooting again a video is really costly (setting up again a shooting set, with lighting, cameras, and a professor who has to repeat again the speech!). The rsync (with delete on destination) from windows to Linux is robust. Git-Annex on Linux seems robust so far. That s enough for now The drawback is that we need manual intervention for starting the rsync, and also that we must make sure that the rsync target is ready to get a backup. The target of the rsync on Linux is a git-annex clone using the default indirect mode, which handles the files as symlinks to the actual copies managed by git-annex inside the .git/ directory. But that ain t suitable to be compared to the origin of the rsync mirror which are plain files on the Windows computer. We must then do a git-annex edit on the whole target of the rsync mirror before the rsync, so that the files are there as regular video files. This is costly, in terms of storage, and also copying time (our repo contains around 50 Gb, and the Linux host is a rather tiny laptop). After the rsync, all the files need to be compared to the SHA256 known to git-annex so that only modified files are taken into account in the commit. We perform a git-annex add on the whole files (for new files having appeared at rsync time), and then a git-annex sync . That takes a lot of time, since all SHA256 computations are quite long for such a set of big files (the video rushes and edited videos are in HD). So the process needs to be the following, on the target Linux host:

1. git annex add .
2. git annex sync
3. git annex copy . to server1
4. git annex copy . to server2
5. git annex edit .
6. only then : rsync

Iterate ad lib I would have preferred to have a working git-annex on windows, but that is a much more manageable process for me for now, and until we have more videos to handle in our repo that our Linux laptop can hold, we re quite safe. Next steps will probably involve gardening the contents of the repo on the Linux host so we re only keeping copies of current files, and older copies are only kept on the 2 servers, in case of later need. I hope this can be useful to others, and I d welcome suggestions on how to improve our process.

Last weekend the yearly Craft Beer Kanazawa Festival took place in central Kanazawa. This year 14 different producers brought about 80 different kind of beers for us to taste. Compared with 6 years ago when I came to Japan and Japan was still more or less Kirin-Asahi-Sapporo country without any distinguishable taste, the situation as improved vastly, and we can now enjoy lots of excellent local beers!
Returning from a trip to Swansea and a conference in Fukuoka, I arrived at Kanazawa train station and went directly to the beer festival. A great welcome back in Kanazawa, but due to excessive sleep deprivation and the feeling of finally I want to come home , I only enjoyed 6 beers from 6 different producers. In the gardens behind the Shinoki Cultural Center lots of small tents with beer and food were set up. Lots of tables and chairs were also available, but most people enjoyed flocking around in the grass around the tents. What a difference to last year s rainy and cold beer festival!
This year s producers were (in order from left to right, page links according to language):

• Swanlake Beer ( )
• Ise Kadoya Brewery ( )
• Yoho Brewing ( )
• Wakuwaku Farm Kawakita ( )
• Minoh Brewery ( )
• Ohya Brasserie ( )
• Shiga Kogen Beer ( )
• Harvest Moon ( )
• Ushitora Brewery ( )
• Johana Brewery ( )
• Fujizakura Brewery ( )
• North Island Brewery ( )
• Minami Shinshu Brewery ( )
• Heart&Beer Nihonkai Club ( )

With only 6 beers to my avail (due to ticket system), I choose the ones I don t have nearby. Mind that the following comments are purely personal and do not define a quality standards I just say what I like from worst to best:

• Ohya Brasserie, Kitokito Hop : A desaster, I was close to throw this beer away, but then thought (what a waste!). Strange and disturbing taste.
• Ushitora Brewery, Pure Street Session IPA: Ok, but nothing special. Too light and not taste a bit unclear to me.
• Minoh Brewery, Momo Weizen: Typical Weizen Beer, light and refreshing taste. Good.
• Swanlake Brewery, some seasonal IPA: good, not so extremely bitter, nice taste.
• Ise Kadoya Brewery, Pale Ale: very good, full taste
• Yoho Brewery, Red Ale: my absolute favorite I don t know why, but this brewery simply produces absolutely stunning ales. Their Aooni IPA is my day-in-day-out beer, world class. Their Yona Yona Ale, less bitter than the Aooni, is already famous, and this Red Ale was a perfect addition.

A great beer festival and I am looking for next years festival to try a few more. In the mean time I will stock up beers at home, so that I have always a good Yoho Brewery beer at hand! Enjoy

This year, Sarah and I spent two weeks off the coast of Dubrovnik, on Kolo ep island. We'd never been to Croatia before, and I was a little nervous that if there wasn't much to do on the island, we wouldn't be able to get elsewhere particularly easily. I needn't have worried: We thoroughly enjoyed our stay. It might even be my favourite holiday so far. We did travel around a bit: twice to Dubrovnik's old town and once to a botanical gardens in Trsteno but there was also loads to see on the island itself. One of our favourite trips was simply to a cave on the opposite side of the island known as a "blue cave" because you looked like a Smurf on the inside. We had to jump into the sea from the boat and swim into and out of the cave before continuing on our trip. Simply puttering about on the boat, either around the island or to Trsteno was a great experience in itself. Our guide Sammi was very friendly, the weather was great and swimming around or just enjoying the sun on the back of the boat was enough for me to want to check property prices out there. On Kolo ep island is a little restaurant called Villa Ruza. We managed to eat there twice during our stay. I think it is considered to be one of the top ten restaurants in Croatia. It's one of the best places I've ever eaten in my life. In terms of price, it was about half that of restaurants in Dubrovnik itself. Dubrovnik itself was, quite predictably, much busier than Kolo ep. It is a stunningly attractive old town. On our second visit we took a tour. There are a variety of different themed tours that you can take, including Game Of Thrones sight-seeing tours, and there were Game Of Thrones tat shops all over the place. We opted for A Story About The War. One thing we love to do when visiting foreign places is to get an idea of what life is like for people there, and this war was not all that long ago - I can remember the news coverage from the time. We were the only two people on that particular tour, so we had a fairly tailored experience. I wish I could remember our guide's name. She was the same age as us and grew up as a child in the city when it was under siege. Her personal story included details about where her family stayed; what life was like for kids growing up at the time; how people got supplies; which areas were badly affected and much more. It was a very heartfelt tour and gave us an intimate and personal portrait of what life was like for people there at a time that most tour operators tend to prefer to ignore. This was exactly what we were looking for. Sarah and I were both a little teary at the end! We tried to do things a little different on this holiday. Normally we keep ourselves to ourselves and don't socialise much with other guests. We also rarely do trips and excursions, preferring to sort things out for ourselves. This time we made an effort to be more sociable and I'm glad we did because we met some really nice people. The trips we did were great fun and on the last day I blew through most of the rest of our currency by hiring a jet ski for half an hour. Those things are FUN. Top speed on the one I was using was 57 land mph. Every muscle in my body was screaming for a few days afterwards! Often on a two-week holiday we reach a point around 10 days where we've pretty much had enough. This time around I could have stayed for twice as long. This was the first proper test of my new camera and I've uploaded a set of photographs from our holiday to a Flickr gallery.

A week ago, we concluded our biggest DebConf ever! It was a huge success. We are overwhelmed by the positive feedback, for which we re very grateful. We want to thank you all for participating in the talks; speakers and audience alike, in person or live over the global Internet it wouldn t be the fantastic DebConf experience without you! Many of our events were recorded and streamed live, and are now available for viewing, as are the slides and photos. To share a sense of the scale of what all of us accomplished together, we ve compiled a few statistics:

• 555 attendees from 52 countries (including 28 kids)
• 216 scheduled events (183 talks and workshops), of which 119 were streamed and recorded
• 62 sponsors and partners
• 169 people sponsored for food & accommodation
• 79 professional and 35 corporate registrations

Our very own designer Valessio Brito made a lovely video of impressions and images of the conference. We re collecting impressions from attendees as well as links to press articles, including Linux Weekly News coverage of specific sessions of DebConf. If you find something not yet included, please help us by adding links to the wiki. We tried a few new ideas this year, including a larger number of invited and featured speakers than ever before. On the Open Weekend, some of our sponsors presented their career opportunities at our job fair, which was very well attended. And a diverse selection of entertainment options provided the necessary breaks and ample opportunity for socialising. On the last Friday, the Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour was screened, with some introductory remarks by Jacob Appelbaum and a remote address by its director, Laura Poitras, and followed by a long Q&A session by Jacob. DebConf15 was also the first DebConf with organised childcare (including a Teckids workshop for kids of age 8-16), which our DPL Neil McGovern standardised for the future: it s a thing now, he said. The participants used the week before the conference for intensive work, sprints and workshops, and throughout the main conference, significant progress was made on Debian and Free Software. Possibly the most visible was the endeavour to provide reproducible builds, but the planning of the next stable release stretch received no less attention. Groups like the Perl team, the diversity outreach programme and even DebConf organisation spent much time together discussing next steps and goals, and hundreds of commits were made to the archive, as well as bugs closed. DebConf15 was an amazing conference, it brought together hundreds of people, some oldtimers as well as plenty of new contributors, and we all had a great time, learning and collaborating with each other, says Margarita Manterola of the organiser team, and continues: The whole team worked really hard, and we are all very satisfied with the outcome. Another organiser, Martin Krafft adds: We mainly provided the infrastructure and space. A lot of what happened during the two weeks was thanks to our attendees. And that s what makes DebConf be DebConf. Our organisation was greatly supported by the staff of the conference venue, the Jugendherberge Heidelberg International, who didn t take very long to identify with our diverse group, and who left no wishes untried. The venue itself was wonderfully spacious and never seemed too full as people spread naturally across the various conference rooms, the many open areas, the beergarden, the outside hacklabs and the lawn. The network installed specifically for our conference in collaboration with the nearby university, the neighbouring zoo, and the youth hostel provided us with a 1 Gbps upstream link, which we managed to almost saturate. The connection will stay in place, leaving the youth hostel as one with possibly the fastest Internet connection in the state. And the kitchen catered high-quality food to all attendees and their special requirements. Regional beer and wine, as well as local specialities, were provided at the bistro. DebConf exists to bring people together, which includes paying for travel, food and accomodation for people who could not otherwise attend. We would never have been able to achieve what we did without the support of our generous sponsors, especially our Platinum Sponsor Hewlett-Packard. Thank you very much. See you next year in Cape Town, South Africa!

Here's an odd thing about the git bisect command: It has only 1 option (--no-checkout). Compare with eg git commit, which has 36 options by my count. The difference is largely down to git having a pervasive culture of carefully edited history. We need lots of git commit options to carefully produce commits that look Just Right. Staging only some of the files we've edited, perhaps even staging only some of the changes within a file. Amend that commit if we notice we made a mistake. Create a whole series of beautiful commits, and use rebase later to remix them into a more beautiful whole. Beautiful fake histories. Because coding is actually messy; our actual edit history contains blind alleys and doublings back on itself; contains periods of many days the code isn't building properly. We want to sweep that complexity away, hide it under the rug. This works well except when it doesn't, when some detail airbrushed out of the only remaining history turns out to be important. Once we have these beautiful fake histories of changes, we can easily bisect them and find the commit that introduced a bug. So bisect doesn't need a lot of options to control how it works. I'd like to suggest a new option though. At least as a thought experiment. --merges-only would make bisect only check the merge commits in the range of commits being bisected. The bisection would result in not a single commit, but in the set of commits between two merges. I suspect this would be useful for faster bisecting some histories of the beautiful fake kind. But I know it would be useful when the history is messy and organic and full of false starts and points where the code doesn't build. Merges, in such histories, are often the points where things reach a certian level of beauty, where that messy feature branch got to the point it all built again (please let this happen today) and was merged into master. Bisecting such points in a messy organic history should work about as well as bisecting carefully gardened histories. I think I'll save the full rant about beautiful fake history vs messy real history for some other day. Or maybe I've already ranted that rant here before, I can't remember. Let's just say that I personally come down on the side of liking my git history to reflect the actual code I was working on, even if it was broken and even if I threw it away later. I've indeed taken this to extreme lengths with propellor; in its git history you can see every time I've ever run it, and the version of my config file and code at that point. Apologies to anyone who's been put off by that... But oddly, propellor gets by far more contributions from others than any of my other haskell programs. All in the form of beaufiully constructed commits, naturally.

The other day I received from my Japanese teacher an interesting article by Yamazaki Masakazu comparing garden styles, and in particular the attitude towards and presentation of water in Japanese and European gardens (page 1, page 2). The author s list of achievements is long, various professorships, dramatist, literature critique, recognized as Person of Cultural Merit, just to name a view. I was looking forward to an interesting and high quality article! The article itself introduces the reader to Shishiodoshi, one of the standard ingredients of a Japanese garden: It is a device where water drips into a bamboo tube that is also a seesaw. At some point the water in the bamboo tube makes the seesaw switch over and the water pours out, after which the seesaw returns to the original position and a new cycle begins. The author describes his feelings and thoughts about the shishiodoshi, in particular connects human life (stress and relieve, cycles), the flow of time, and some other concepts with the shishiodoshi. Up to here it is a wonderful article providing interesting insights into the way the author thinks. Unfortunately, then the author tries to underline his ideas by comparing the Japanese shishiodoshi with European style water fountains, describing the former with all favorable properties and full of deep meaning, while the latter is qualified as beautiful and nice, but bare of any deeper meaning. I don t go into details that the whole comparison is anyway a bad one, as he is comparing Baroque style fountains, a very limited period, and furthermore ignores the fact that water fountains are not genuinely European (isn t there one in the Kenrokuen, one of the three most famous gardens in Japan!?), nor does he consider any other water-installation that might be available. What really destroys the in principle very nice article is the tone: The general tone of the article then can be summarized into: The shishiodoshi is rich on meaning, connects to the life of humans, instigates philosophical reflections, represents nature, the flow of time etc. The water fountain is beautiful and gorgeous, but that is all. I don t think that this separation, or this negative undertone, was created on purpose by the author. A person of his stature is supposedly above this level of primitive comparison. I believe that it is nothing else but a consequence of upbringing and the general attitude that permeates the whole society with this feeling of separateness. Us and They Repeatedly providing sentences like Japanese people and Western people have different tastes.. ( ). About 10 times in this short article expressions like Japanese and Westerner appear, leaving the reader with a bitter taste of an author that considers first the Japanese a people (what about Ainu, Ryukyu, etc?), and second that the Japanese are exclusive in the sense that they are set apart from the rest of the world in their way of thinking, living, being. What puzzles me is that this is not only a singular opinion, but a very general straight in the Japanese media, TV, radio, newspaper, books. Everyone considers Japan and Japanese as something that is fundamentally and profoundly different from everyone else in the world. There is We the Japanese (and that doesn t mean nationality of passport, but blood line!), and there are They the Rest or, as the way of writing and and description on many occasion suggestions, They the Barbarians . A short anecdote will underly this: One of the favorite TV talk show / pseudo-documentary style is about Japanese living abroad. That day a lady married in Paris was interviewed. What followed was a guided tour through Paris showing: Dirt in the gutter, street cleaning cars, waste disposal places. Yes, that was all. Just about the dirt . Of course, at length the (unfortunately only apparent) cleanliness of Japanese cities and neighborhoods are mentioned and shown to remind everyone how wonderful Japan is and how dirty the Barbarians. I don t want to say that I consider Japan more dirty than most other countries just the visible part is clean, the moment you step a bit aside and around the corner, there are the worst trash just thrown away without consideration. Anyway. To return to the topic of Us and They I consider us all humans, first and foremost, and nationality, birthplace, and all that are just by chance. I do NOT reject cultural differences, they are here, of course. But cultural differences are one thing, separating one self and one s perceived people from the rest of the world is another. Conclusion I repeat, I don t think that the author had any ill intentions, but it would have been nicer if the article wouldn t make such a stark distinction. He could have written about Shishiodoshi and water fountains without using the Us They categorization. He could have compared other water installations, could have discussed the long tradition of small ponds in European gardens, just to name a few things. But the author choose to highlight differences instead of commonalities. It is the Us against Them feeling that often makes life in Japan for a foreigner difficult. Japanese are not special, Austrians, too, are not special, nor are Americans, Russians, Tibetans, or any other nationality. No nationality is special, we are all humans. Maybe at some point this will arrive also in the Japanese society and thinking.

I am happy to report that the Debian Edu team sent out this announcement today:

the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is pleased to announce the first
*beta* release of Debian Edu "Jessie" 8.0+edu0~b1, which for the first
time is composed entirely of packages from the current Debian stable
release, Debian 8 "Jessie".
(As most reading this will know, Debian "Jessie" hasn't actually been
released by now. The release is still in progress but should finish
later today ;)
We expect to make a final release of Debian Edu "Jessie" in the coming
weeks, timed with the first point release of Debian Jessie. Upgrades
from this beta release of Debian Edu Jessie to the final release will
be possible and encouraged!
Please report feedback to debian-edu@lists.debian.org and/or submit
bugs: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
Debian Edu - sometimes also known as "Skolelinux" - is a complete
operating system for schools, universities and other
organisations. Through its pre- prepared installation profiles
administrators can install servers, workstations and laptops which
will work in harmony on the school network.  With Debian Edu, the
teachers themselves or their technical support staff can roll out a
complete multi-user, multi-machine study environment within hours or
days.
Debian Edu is already in use at several hundred schools all over the
world, particularly in Germany, Spain and Norway. Installations come
with hundreds of applications pre-installed, plus the whole Debian
archive of thousands of compatible packages within easy reach.
For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
installation instructions are available, including detailed
instructions in the manual explaining the first steps, such as setting
up a network or adding users.  Please note that the password for the
user your prompted for during installation must have a length of at
least 5 characters!
== Where to download ==
A multi-architecture CD / usbstick image (649 MiB) for network booting
can be downloaded at the following locations:
    http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-CD.iso
    rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-CD.iso . 
The SHA1SUM of this image is: 54a524d16246cddd8d2cfd6ea52f2dd78c47ee0a
Alternatively an extended DVD / usbstick image (4.9 GiB) is also
available, with more software included (saving additional download
time):
    http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-USB.iso
    rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-USB.iso 
The SHA1SUM of this image is: fb1f1504a490c077a48653898f9d6a461cb3c636
Sources are available from the Debian archive, see
http://ftp.debian.org/debian-cd/8.0.0/source/ for some download
options.
== Debian Edu Jessie manual in seven languages ==
Please see https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/ for
the English version of the Debian Edu jessie manual.
This manual has been fully translated to German, French, Italian,
Danish, Dutch and Norwegian Bokm l. A partly translated version exists
for Spanish.  See http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/ for
online version of the translated manual.
More information about Debian 8 "Jessie" itself is provided in the
release notes and the installation manual:
- http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes
- http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual
== Errata / known problems ==
    It takes up to 15 minutes for a changed hostname to be updated via
    DHCP (#780461).
    The hostname script fails to update LTSP server hostname (#783087). 
Workaround: run update-hostname-from-ip on the client to update the
hostname immediately.
Check https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie for a possibly
more current and complete list.
== Some more details about Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~b1 Codename Jessie released 2015-04-25 ==
=== Software updates ===
Everything which is new in Debian 8 Jessie, e.g.:
 * Linux kernel 3.16.7-ctk9; for the i386 architecture, support for
   i486 processors has been dropped; oldest supported ones: i586 (like
   Intel Pentium and AMD K5).
 * Desktop environments KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.11.13, GNOME 3.14,
   Xfce 4.12, LXDE 0.5.6
   * new optional desktop environment: MATE 1.8
   * KDE Plasma Workspaces is installed by default; to choose one of
     the others see the manual.
 * the browsers Iceweasel 31 ESR and Chromium 41
 * LibreOffice 4.3.3
 * GOsa 2.7.4
 * LTSP 5.5.4
 * CUPS print system 1.7.5
 * new boot framework: systemd
 * Educational toolbox GCompris 14.12
 * Music creator Rosegarden 14.02
 * Image editor Gimp 2.8.14
 * Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.13.1
 * golearn 0.9
 * tuxpaint 0.9.22
 * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
 * Debian Jessie includes about 43000 packages available for installation.
 * More information about Debian 8 Jessie is provided in its release
   notes and the installation manual, see the link above.
=== Installation changes ===
    Installations done via PXE now also install firmware automatically
    for the hardware present.
=== Fixed bugs ===
A number of bugs have been fixed in this release; the most noticeable
from a user perspective:
 * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
   DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
   information is corrected (710362)
 * shutdown-at-night now shuts the system down if gdm3 is used (775608). 
=== Sugar desktop removed ===
As the Sugar desktop was removed from Debian Jessie, it is also not
available in Debian Edu jessie.
== About Debian Edu / Skolelinux ==
Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based on
Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
configured school network. Directly after installation a school server
running all services needed for a school network is set up just
waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa , a comfortable
Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
can choose between KDE, GNOME, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
environment.
== About Debian ==
The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a
huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
operating system.
== Thanks ==
Thanks to everyone making Debian and Debian Edu / Skolelinux happen!
You rock.

ApologyAs a twisted turn of fate, I need to start my platform with an apology. Last year, I withdrew my nomination, because my life turned upside down, and the effects of that are still felt today, and will continue to have a considerable footprint for the rest of my life. But this is not what I want to apologise for! I want to apologise because my nomination, my platform, and my plans are rather uncommon - or so I believe. Unlike past Project Leaders, if elected, I will not have as much time to travel, as some of them. Nor will I have the resources to do all the things one may expect from a Project Leader. But - as you'll read later - I consider this both the biggest weakness and the greatest strength of my platform.Furthermore, I will not be available from the second half of the voting period until after the new Project Leader's term starts: I'll be getting married, and will enjoy a nice honeymoon, and as such, my email will remain unread from the 9th of April until we're back on the 21st of April.On the mouse behind the keyboardMy name is Gergely Nagy, or algernon, for those of you who may know me by my online presence. I used to be a lot of things: a flaming youth, an application manager, package maintainer, upstream, ftp-assistant, a student, a mentor, a hacker. In the end, however, I am but a simple, albeit sometimes crazy person. I imagine, a lot of people reading this will not know me, and that is actually not only fine, but in my case, desirable.The Role of the Project LeaderThe role of the Project Leader, what people perceive about the role, and what is actually done by one single person changed dramatically over time. In some ways for the better, some ways for the worse. It should be sufficiently clear by now that if we combine all the things past Project Leaders have done, and what people expect the Project Leader to do, then not even all the time in the world would be enough to accomplish everything. On the other hand, we should not cut the responsibilities back to constitution-granted ones only.There has been some discussion about this very topic on debian-project@, back in February, with excellent observations by both past Project Leaders and the current one. I encourage my dear readers to stop reading this platform now, and read at least Lucas's mail. I'll be right here when you get back.Back? Good.You may notice that unlike in previous years, I do not have a Grand Vision, not in the same sense at least. No matter what I envision, however noble that vision may be, it is not the Project Leader's job to save the world, so to say. While I still believe that we have serious problems with motivation, inspiration and innovation within the project, the Project Leader is the wrong person to try and solve these issues with.Apart from the constitutionally required responsibilities, the primary purpose of the Project Leader in my opinion, is to be an enabler: the Project Leader is not a front runner to lead the herd to victory, but a gentle shepherd to make them happy.HappyThere are many ways to make people happy. One such way is to enable them to pursue their passion - and not just enable them, but encourage and fuel that passion, too! -, to remove barriers, to empower them, or in a lot of cases, to include them in the first place. My vision is a project that is greater than just an amazing distribution. More than a role model for technical excellence. I want to do away with territorial pissings (with which I don't mean to imply that this would be the general atmosphere within the project - far from it!), and would rather see a warm, welcoming culture within the project - the kind of "I'm home!" feeling I had at the DebConfs I had the privilege to attend -, on public and private media alike.That is the vision I have, but I can't do it. At best, I can hope to enable people much better at the these things to do what needs to be done. I wish to take the burden of administration, bureaucracy off their shoulders, so they can focus on what they do best. I feel that this is the most important part of being a Project Leader: to enable the project to grow. And this is why I feel that most of you not knowing my name is an advantage here: When you look at a beautiful flower, you admire the flower itself, rarely the gardener.In the endI wish to be the Project Leader no one remembers. I'd rather see people remember all the great things the Project - as a whole - accomplished, for there are many. My purpose is to let You pursue your passion, which in turn enables even more people to pursue their happiness, and allows the greater Free Software community to bask in the warm glow of accomplished dreams.

I am happy to report that I on behalf of the Debian Edu team just sent out this announcement:

The Debian Edu Team is pleased to announce the release of Debian Edu
Jessie 8.0+edu0~alpha0
Debian Edu is a complete operating system for schools. Through its
various installation profiles you can install servers, workstations
and laptops which will work together on the school network. With
Debian Edu, the teachers themselves or their technical support can
roll out a complete multi-user multi-machine study environment within
hours or a few days. Debian Edu comes with hundreds of applications
pre-installed, but you can always add more packages from Debian.
For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
installation instructions are available, including detailed
instructions in the manual[1] explaining the first steps, such as
setting up a network or adding users. Please note that the password
for the user your prompted for during installation must have a length
of at least 5 characters!
 [1] <URL: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie >
Would you like to give your school's computer a longer life? Are you
tired of sneaker administration, running from computer to computer
reinstalling the operating system? Would you like to administrate all
the computers in your school using only a couple of hours every week?
Check out Debian Edu Jessie!
Skolelinux is used by at least two hundred schools all over the world,
mostly in Germany and Norway.
About Debian Edu and Skolelinux
===============================
Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux[2], is a Linux distribution based
on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa , a comfortable
Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
machines can be installed via the network.  The provided school server
provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
packages[3] and more are available from the Debian archive, and
schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
environment.
 [2] <URL: http://www.skolelinux.org/ >
 [3] <URL: http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html >
Full release notes and manual
=============================
Below the download URLs there is a list of some of the new features
and bugfixes of Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie. The full
list is part of the manual. (See the feature list in the manual[4] for
the English version.) For some languages manual translations are
available, see the manual translation overview[5].
 [4] <URL: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features >
 [5] <URL: http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/ >
Where to get it
---------------
To download the multiarch netinstall CD release (624 MiB) you can use
 * ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso
 * http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso
 * rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso .
The SHA1SUM of this image is: 361188818e036ce67280a572f757de82ebfeb095
New features for Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie released 2014-10-27
===============================================================================
Installation changes
--------------------
 * PXE installation now installs firmware automatically for the hardware present.
Software updates
----------------
Everything which is new in Debian Jessie 8.0, eg:
 * Linux kernel 3.16.x
 * Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.11.12, GNOME 3.14, Xfce 4.10,
   LXDE 0.5.6 and MATE 1.8 (KDE "Plasma" is installed by default; to
   choose one of the others see manual.)
 * the browsers Iceweasel 31 ESR and Chromium 38 
 * !LibreOffice 4.3.3
 * GOsa 2.7.4
 * LTSP 5.5.4
 * CUPS print system 1.7.5
 * new boot framework: systemd
 * Educational toolbox GCompris 14.07 
 * Music creator Rosegarden 14.02
 * Image editor Gimp 2.8.14
 * Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.13.0
 * golearn 0.9
 * tuxpaint 0.9.22
 * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
 * Debian Jessie includes about 42000 packages available for
   installation.
 * More information about Debian Jessie 8.0 is provided in the release
   notes[6] and the installation manual[7].
 [6] <URL: http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes >
 [7] <URL: http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual >
Fixed bugs
----------
 * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
   DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
   information is corrected (Debian bug #710362)
 * and many others.
Documentation and translation updates
------------------------------------- 
 * The Debian Edu Jessie Manual is fully translated to German, French,
   Italian, Danish and Dutch. Partly translated versions exist for
   Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.
Other changes
-------------
 * Due to new Squid settings, powering off or rebooting the main
   server takes more time.
 * To manage printers localhost:631 has to be used, currently www:631
   doesn't work.
Regressions / known problems
----------------------------
 * Installing LTSP chroot fails with a bug related to eatmydata about
   exim4-config failing to run its postinst (see Debian bug #765694
   and Debian bug #762103).
 * Munin collection is not properly configured on clients (Debian bug
   #764594).  The fix is available in a newer version of munin-node.
 * PXE setup for Main Server and Thin Client Server setup does not
   work when installing on a machine without direct Internet access.
   Will be fixed when Debian bug #766960 is fixed in Jessie.
See the status page[8] for the complete list.
 [8] <URL: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie >
How to report bugs
------------------
<URL: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs >
About Debian
============
The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a
huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
operating system.
Contact Information
For further information, please visit the Debian web pages[9] or send
mail to press@debian.org.
 [9] <URL: http://www.debian.org/ >

This brief announcement was released yesterday to the debian-devel-announce mailing list. Ciao! The Debian Multimedia Maintainers have been quite active since the Wheezy release, and have some interesting news to share for the Jessie release. Here we give you a brief update on what work has been done and work that is still ongoing. Let s see what s cooking for Jessie then. Frameworks and libraries Support for many new media formats and codecs. The codec library libavcodec, which is used by popular media playback applications including vlc, mpv, totem (using gstreamer1.0-libav), xine, and many more, has been updated to the latest upstream release version 11 provided by Libav. This provides Debian users with HEVC playback, a native Opus decoder, Matroska 3D support, Apple ProRes, and much more. Please see libav s changelog for a full list of functionality additions and updates. libebur128 libebur128 is a free implementation of the European Broadcasting Union Loudness Recommendation (EBU R128), which is essentially an alternative to ReplayGain. The library can be used to analyze audio perceived loudness and subsequentially normalize the volume during playback. libltc libltc provides functionalities to encode and decode Linear (or Longitudinal) Timecode (LTC) from/to SMPTE data timecode. libva libva and the driver for Intel GPUs has been updated to the 1.4.0 release. Support for new GPUs has been added. libva now also supports Wayland. Pure Data A number of new additional libraries (externals) will appear in Jessie, including (among others) Eric Lyon s fftease and lyonpotpourrie, Thomas Musil s iemlib, the pdstring library for string manipulation and pd-lua that allows to write Pd-objects in the popular lua scripting language. JACK and LADI LASH Audio Session Handler was abandoned upstream a long time ago in favor of the new session management system, called ladish (LADI Session Handler). ladish allows users to run many JACK applications at once and save/restore their configuration with few mouse clicks. The current status of the integration between the session handler and JACK may be summarized as follows:

• ladish provides the backend;
• laditools contains a number of useful graphical tools to tune the session management system s whole configuration (including JACK);
• gladish provides a easy-to-use graphical interface for the session handler.

Note that ladish uses the D-Bus interface to the jack daemon, therefore only Jessie s jackd2 provides support for and also cooperates fine with it. Plugins: LV2 and LADSPA Debian Jessie will bring the newest 1.10.0 version of the LV2 technology. Most changes affect the packaging of new plugins and extensions, a brief list of packaging guidelines is now available.
A number of new plugins and development tools too have been made available during the Jessie development cycle: LV2 Toolkit LVTK provides libraries that wrap the LV2 C API and extensions into easy to use C++ classes. The original work for this was mostly done by Lars Luthman in lv2-c++-tools. Vee One Suite The whole suite by Rui Nuno Capela is now available in Jessie, and consists of three components:

• drumkv1: old-school drum-kit sampler synthesizer
• samplv1: polyphonic sampler
• synthv1: analog-style 4-oscillator substractive synthesizer

All three are provided in both forms of LV2 plugins and stand-alone JACK client. JACK session, JACK MIDI, and ALSA MIDI are supported too. x42-plugins and zam-plugins LV2 bundles containing many audio plugins for high quality processing. Fomp Fomp is an LV2 port of the MCP, VCO, FIL, and WAH plugins by Fons Adriaensen. Some other components have been upgraded to more recent upstream versions:

• ab2gate: 1.1.7
• calf: 0.0.19+git20140915+5de5da28
• eq10q: 2.0~beta5.1
• NASPRO: 0.5.1

We ve packaged ste-plugins, Fons Adriaensen s new stereo LADSPA plugins bundle. A major upgrade of frei0r, namely the standard collection for the minimalistic plugin API for video effects, will be available in Jessie. New multimedia applications Advene Advene (Annotate Digital Video, Exchange on the NEt) is a flexible video
annotation application. Ardour3 The new generation of the popular digital audio workstation will make its very first appearance in Debian Jessie. Cantata Qt4 front-end for the MPD daemon. Csound Csound for jessie will feature the new major series 6, with the improved IDE CsoundQT. This new csound supports improved array data type handling, multi-core rendering and debugging features. din DIN Is Noise is a musical instrument and audio synthesizer that supports JACK audio output, MIDI, OSC, and IRC bot as input sources. It could be extended and customized with Tcl scripts too. dvd-slideshow dvd-slideshow consists of a suite of command line tools which come in handy to make slideshows from collections of pictures. Documentation is provided and available in /usr/share/doc/dvd-slideshow/ . dvdwizard DVDwizard can fully automate the creation of DVD-Video filesystem. It supports graphical menus, chapters, multiple titlesets and multi-language streams. It supports both PAL and NTSC video modes too. flowblade Flowblade is a video editor like the popular KDenlive based on the MLT engine, but more lightweight and with some difference in editing concepts. forked-daapd Forked-daapd switched to a new, active upstream again dropping Grand Central Dispatch in favor of libevent. The switch fixed several bugs and made forked-daapd available on all release architectures instead of shipping only on amd64 and i386. Now nothing prevents you from setting up a music streaming (DAAP/DACP) server on your favorite home server no matter if it is based on mips, arm or x86! harvid HTTP Ardour Video Daemon decodes still images from movie files and serves them via HTTP. It provides frame-accurate decoding and is main use-case is to act as backend and second level cache for rendering the
videotimeline in Ardour. Groove Basin Groove Basin is a music player server with a web-based user interface inspired by Amarok 1.4. It runs on a server optionally connected to speakers. Guests can control the music player by connecting with a laptop, tablet, or smart phone. Further, users can stream their music libraries remotely.
It comes with a fast, responsive web interface that supports keyboard shortcuts and drag drop. It also provides the ability to upload songs, download songs, and import songs by URL, including YouTube URLs. Groove Basin supports Dynamic Mode which automatically queues random songs, favoring songs that have not been queued recently.
It automatically performs ReplayGain scanning on every song using the EBU R128 loudness standard, and automatically switches between track and album mode. Groove Basin supports the MPD protocol, which means it is compatible with MPD clients. There is also a more powerful Groove Basin protocol which you can use if the MPD protocol does not meet your needs. HandBrake HandBrake, a versatile video transcoder, is now available for Jessie. It could convert video from nearly any format to a wide range of commonly supported codecs. jack-midi-clock New jackd midiclock utility made by Robin Gareus. laborejo Laborejo, Esperanto for Workshop , is used to craft music through notation. It is a LilyPond GUI frontend, a MIDI creator and a tool collection to inspire and help music composers. mpv mpv is a movie player based on MPlayer and mplayer2. It supports a wide variety of video file formats, audio and video codecs, and subtitle types. The project focuses mainly on modern systems and encourages developer activity. As such, large portions of outdated code originating from MPlayer have been removed, and many new features and improvements have been added. Note that, although there are still some similarities to its predecessors, mpv should be considered a completely different program (e.g. lacking compatibility with both mplayer and mplayer2 in terms of command-line arguments and configuration). smtube SMTube is a stand-alone graphical video browser and player, which makes YouTube s videos browsing, playing, and download such a piece of cake.
It has so many features that, we are sure, will make YouTube lovers very, very happy. sonic-visualiser Sonic Visualiser Application for viewing and analysing the contents of music audio files. SoundScapeRenderer SoundScapeRenderer (aka SSR) is a (rather) easy to use render engine for spatial audio, that provides a number of different rendering algorithms, ranging from binaural (headphone) playback via wave field synthesis to higher-order ambisonics. Videotrans videotrans is a set of scripts that allow its user to reformat existing movies into the VOB format that is used on DVDs. XBMC XBMC has been partially rebranded as XBMC from Debian to make it clear that it is changed to conform to Debian s Policy. The latest stable release, 13.2 Gotham will be part of Jessie making Debian a good choice for HTPC-s. zita-bls1 Binaural stereo signals converter made by Fons Adriaensen zita-mu1 Stereo monitoring organiser for jackd made by Fons Adriaensen zita-njbridge Jack clients to transmit multichannel audio over a local IP network made by Fons Adriaensen radium-compressor Radium Compressor is the system compressor of the Radium suite. It is provided in the form of stand-alone JACK application. Multimedia Tasks With Jessie we are shipping a set of multimedia related tasks.
They include package lists for doing several multimedia related tasks. If you are interested in defining new tasks, or tweaking the current, existing ones, we are very much interested in hearing from you. Upgraded applications and libraries

• Aeolus: 0.9.0
• Aliki: 0.3.0
• Ams: 2.1.1
• amsynth: 1.4.2
• Audacious: 3.5.2
• Audacity: 2.0.5
• Audio File Library: 0.3.6
• Blender: 2.72b
• Bristol: 0.60.11f
• C* Audio Plugin Suite: 0.9.23
• Cecilia: 5.0.9
• cmus: 2.5.0
• DeVeDe: 3.23.0-13-gbfd73f3
• DRC: 3.2.1
• EasyTag: 2.2.2
• ebumeter: 0.2.0
• faustworks: 0.5
• ffDiaporama: 1.5
• ffms: 2.20
• gmusicbrowser: 1.1.13
• Hydrogen: 0.9.6.1
• IDJC: 0.8.14
• jack-tools: 20131226
• LiVES: 2.2.6
• mhWaveEdit: 1.4.23
• Mixxx: 1.11.0
• mp3fs: 0.91
• MusE: 2.1.2
• Petri-Foo: 0.1.87
• PHASEX: 0.14.97
• QjackCtl: 0.3.12
• Qtractor: 0.6.3
• rtaudio: 4.1.1
• Rosegarden: 14.02
• rtmidi: 2.1.0
• SoundTouch: 1.8.0
• stk: 4.4.4
• streamtuner2: 2.1.3
• SuperCollider: 3.6.6
• Synfig Studio: 0.64.1
• TerminatorX: 3.90
• tsdecrypt: 10.0
• Vamp Plugins SDK: 2.5
• VLC: Jessie will release with the 2.2.x series of VLC
• XCFA: 4.3.8
• xwax: 1.5
• xjadeo: 0.8.0
• x264: 0.142.2431+gita5831aa
• zynaddsubfx: 2.4.3

What s not going to be in Jessie With the aim to improve the overall quality of the multimedia software available in Debian, we have dropped a number of packages which were abandoned upstream:

• beast
• flumotion
• jack-rack
• jokosher
• lv2fil (suggested replacement for users is eq10q or calf eq)
• phat
• plotmm
• specimen (suggested replacement for users is petri-foo fork of specimen)
• zynjacku (suggested replacement for users is jalv)

We ve also dropped mplayer, presently nobody seems interested in maintaining it.
The suggested replacements for users are mplayer2 or mpv. Whilst the former is mostly compatible with mplayer in terms of command-line arguments and configuration (and adds a few new features too), the latter adds a lot of new features and improvements, and it is actively maintained upstream. Please note that although the mencoder package is no longer available anymore, avconv and mpv do provide encoding functionality. For more information see avconv s manual page and documentation, and mpv s encoding documentation. Broken functionalities rtkit under systemd is broken at the moment. Activity statistics More information about team s activity are available. Where to reach us The Debian Multimedia Maintainers can be reached at pkg-multimedia-maintainers AT lists.alioth.debian.org for packaging related topics, or at debian-multimedia AT lists.debian.org for user and more general discussion.
We would like to invite everyone interested in multimedia to join us there. Some of the team members are also in the #debian-multimedia channel on OFTC. Cheers! Alessio Treglia
on behalf of the Debian Multimedia Maintainers