Search Results: "rkd"

20 January 2025

Divine Attah-Ohiemi: Progress Report: First Half of My Outreachy Internship

Hello everyone!, I m excited to share a progress report on my Outreachy internship with the Debian community. As I reach the halfway point of this journey, I want to reflect on what I ve accomplished so far and outline my modified goals for the second half of the internship. In truth, there wasn t a strict timeline for my project migrating Debian webpage content to Hugo because the original repository contained thousands of pages. The initial goal was to develop a proof of concept for:

A backward compatible deployment setup
Migration of static text content pages
Migration of dynamic pages (Incorporating existing perl scripts)
Redirection for contents moved permanently (301)

Thanks to our daily standups, where we brainstorm and revise contributions, we ve made significant progress. The wiki documentation discussing the technical decisions taken to meet these goals is currently in progress here. During the first half of my internship, I have improved and refined my skills in several areas. I learned new Markdown syntaxes, studied and utilized Apache's mod_rewrite, and halfway studied GNU Make to use Perl scripts for processing data for dynamic content. I recommend Managing Projects with GNU Make by Robert Mecklenburg it's a great book for beginners! While I didn t get stuck on any particular goal, the most challenging aspect was adding Hugo aliases to help with Apache's multilingual content negotiation. The way the webwml repository generates multilingual content differs from debianhugo. For instance, in webwml, the structure looks like this: english/index.wml -> /index.en.html (with a symlink from index.html to index.en.html) and french/index.wml -> /index.fr.html. In contrast, debianhugo uses en/_index.md -> /index.html and fr/_index.md -> /fr/index.html. Apache's multilingual content negotiation checks for index.<user preferred lang code>.html in the current directory, which works well with webwml since all related translations are generated in the same directory. However, with debianhugo using subdirectories for languages other than English, we had to set up aliases for every other language page to be generated in the frontmatter. For example, in fr/_index.md, we added this to the front matter:

...
aliases:
  - /index.fr.html
...

This setup allows Hugo to generate multilingual HTML files in the initial home directory solely for the purpose of setting up a 301 redirect to the same page in the language subdirectory. However, if the client sets their preferred language to English, Apache content negotiation tries to find /index.en.html. If it doesn t find it, it defaults to any other language-suffixed file, which can lead to unexpected behavior. For example, if English is set as the preferred language, accessing the site may serve /index.fr.html, which then redirects to /fr/index.html. This was a significant challenge, and you can see a demo of this hosted here. If I were to start the project over, I would document every decision as I make them in the wiki, no matter how rough the documentation turns out. Waiting until the midpoint of the project to document was not a good idea. As I move into the second half of my internship, the goals we ve set include improving our project wiki documentation and continuing the migration process while enhancing the user experience of complicated sections. I m looking forward to making even more progress and sharing my journey with you all. Happy coding!

12 January 2025

Divine Attah-Ohiemi: My 30-Day Outreachy Experience with the Debian Community

Hey everyone! It s Divine Attah-Ohiemi here, and I m excited to share what I ve been up to in my internship with the Debian community. It s been a month since I began this journey, and if you re thinking about applying for Outreachy, let me give you a glimpse into my project and the amazing people I get to work with. So, what s it like in the Debian community? It s a fantastic mix of folks from all walks of life seasoned developers, curious newbies, and everyone in between. What really stands out is how welcoming everyone is. I m especially thankful to my mentors, Thomas Lange, Carsten Schoenert, and Subin Siby, for their guidance and for always clocking in whenever I have questions. It feels like a big family where you can share your ideas and learn from each other. The commitment to diversity and merit is palpable, making it a great place for anyone eager to jump in and contribute. Now, onto the project! We re working on improving the Debian website by switching from WML (Web Meta Language) to Hugo, a modern static site generator. This change doesn t just make the site faster; it significantly reduces the time it takes to build compared to WML. Plus, it makes it way easier for non-developers to contribute and add pages since the content is built from Markdown files. It s all about enhancing the experience for both new and existing users. My role involves developing a proof of concept for this transition. I m migrating existing pages while ensuring that old links still work, so users won t run into dead ends. It s a bit of a juggling act, but knowing that my work is helping to make Debian more accessible is incredibly rewarding. What gets me most excited is the chance to contribute to a project that s been around for over 20 years! It s an honor to be part of something so significant and to help shape its future. How cool is it to know that what I m doing will impact users around the globe? In the past month, I ve learned a bunch of new things. For instance, I ve been diving into Apache's mod_rewrite to automatically map old multilingual URLs to new ones. This is important since Hugo handles localization differently than WML. I ve also been figuring out how to set up 301 redirects to prevent dead links, which is crucial for a smooth user experience. One of the more confusing parts has been using GNU Make to manage Perl scripts for dynamic pages. It s a bit of a learning curve, but I m tackling it head-on. Each challenge is a chance to grow, and I m here for it! If you re considering applying to the Debian community through Outreachy, I say go for it! There s so much to learn and experience, and you ll be welcomed with open arms. Happy coding, everyone!

10 January 2025

Sergio Talens-Oliag: Testing New User Tools

On recent weeks I ve had some time to scratch my own itch on matters related to tools I use daily on my computer, namely the desktop / window manager and my text editor of choice. This post is a summary of what I tried, how it worked out and my short and medium-term plans related to them.

Desktop / WMOn the desktop / window manager front I ve been using Cinnamon on Debian and Ubuntu systems since Gnome 3 was published (I never liked version 3, so I decided to move to something similar to Gnome 2, including the keyboard shortcuts). In fact I ve never been a fan of Desktop environments, before Gnome I used OpenBox and IceWM because they where a lot faster than desktop systems on my hardware at the time and I was using them only to place one or two windows on multiple workspaces using mainly the keyboard for my interactions (well, except for the web browsers and the image manipulation programs). Although I was comfortable using Cinnamon, some years ago I tried to move to i3, a tilling window manager for X11 that looked like a good choice for me, but I didn t have much time to play with it and never used it enough to make me productive with it (I didn t prepare a complete configuration nor had enough time to learn the new shortcuts, so I went back to Cinnamon and never tried again). Anyway, some weeks ago I updated my work machine OS (it was using Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and I updated it to the 24.04 LTS version) and the Cinnamon systray applet stopped working as it used to do (in fact I still have to restart Cinnamon after starting a session to make it work) and, as I had some time, I decided to try a tilling window manager again, but now I decided to go for SwayWM, as it uses Wayland instead of X11.

Sway configurationOn my ~/.config/sway/config I tuned some things:

Set fuzzel as the application launcher.
Installed manually the shikane application and created a configuration to be executed always when sway is started / reloaded (I adjusted my configuration with wdisplays and used shikanectl to save it).
Added support for running the xdg-desktop-portal-wlr service.
Enabled the swayidle command to lock the screen after some time of inactivity.
Adjusted the keyboard to use the es key map
Added some keybindings to make my life easier, including the use of grimm and swappy to take screenshots
Configured waybar as the environment bar.

Added a shell script to start applications when sway is started (it uses swaymsg to execute background commands and the i3toolwait script to wait for the

#!/bin/sh
# VARIABLES
CHROMIUM_LOCAL_STATE="$HOME/.config/google-chrome/Local State"
I3_TOOLWAIT="$HOME/.config/sway/scripts/i3-toolwait"
# Functions
chromium_profile_dir()  
  jq -r ".profile.info_cache to_entries map( (.value.name): .key ) add .\"$1\" // \"\"" "$CHROMIUM_LOCAL_STATE"
 
# MAIN
IGZ_PROFILE_DIR="$(chromium_profile_dir "sergio.talens@intelygenz.com")"
OURO_PROFILE_DIR="$(chromium_profile_dir "sergio.talens@nxr.global")"
PERSONAL_PROFILE_DIR="$(chromium_profile_dir "stalens@gmail.com")"
# Common programs
swaymsg "exec nextcloud --background"
swaymsg "exec nm-applet"
# Run spotify on the first workspace (it is mapped to the laptop screen)
swaymsg -q "workspace 1"
$ I3_TOOLWAIT  "spotify"
# Run tmux on the
swaymsg -q "workspace 2"
$ I3_TOOLWAIT  -- foot tmux a -dt sto
wp_num="3"
if [ "$OURO_PROFILE_DIR" ]; then
  swaymsg -q "workspace $wp_num"
  $ I3_TOOLWAIT  -m ouro-browser -- google-chrome --profile-directory="$OURO_PROFILE_DIR"
  wp_num="$((wp_num+1))"
fi
if [ "$IGZ_PROFILE_DIR" ]; then
  swaymsg -q "workspace $wp_num"
  $ I3_TOOLWAIT  -m igz-browser -- google-chrome --profile-directory="$IGZ_PROFILE_DIR"
  wp_num="$((wp_num+1))"
fi
if [ "$PERSONAL_PROFILE_DIR" ]; then
  swaymsg -q "workspace $wp_num"
  $ I3_TOOLWAIT  -m personal-browser -- google-chrome --profile-directory="$PERSONAL_PROFILE_DIR"
  wp_num="$((wp_num+1))"
fi
# Open the browser without setting the profile directory if none was found
if [ "$wp_num" = "3" ]; then
  swaymsg -q "workspace $wp_num"
  $ I3_TOOLWAIT  google-chrome
  wp_num="$((wp_num+1))"
fi
swaymsg -q "workspace $wp_num"
$ I3_TOOLWAIT  evolution
wp_num="$((wp_num+1))"
swaymsg -q "workspace $wp_num"
$ I3_TOOLWAIT  slack
wp_num="$((wp_num+1))"
# Open a private browser and a console in the last workspace
swaymsg -q "workspace $wp_num"
$ I3_TOOLWAIT  -- google-chrome --incognito
$ I3_TOOLWAIT  foot
# Go back to the second workspace for keepassxc
swaymsg "workspace 2"
$ I3_TOOLWAIT  keepassxc

ConclusionAfter using Sway for some days I can confirm that it is a good choice for me, but some of the components needed to make it work as I want are too new and not available on the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS repositories, so I decided to go back to Cinnamon and try Sway again in the future, although I added more workspaces to my setup (now they are only available on the main monitor, the laptop screen is fixed while there is a big monitor connected), added some additional keyboard shortcuts and installed or updated some applets.

Text editorWhen I started using Linux many years ago I used vi/vim and emacs as my text editors (vi for plain text and emacs for programming and editing HTML/XML), but eventually I moved to vim as my main text editor and I ve been using it since (well, I moved to neovim some time ago, although I kept my old vim configuration). To be fair I m not as expert as I could be with vim, but I m productive with it and it has many plugins that make my life easier on my machines, while keeping my ability to edit text and configurations on any system that has a vi compatible editor installed. For work reasons I tried to use Visual Studio Code last year, but I ve never really liked it and almost everything I do with it I can do with neovim (i. e. I even use copilot with it). Besides, I m a heavy terminal user (I use tmux locally and via ssh) and I like to be able to use my text editor on my shell sessions, and code does not work like that. The only annoying thing about vim/neovim is its configuration (well, the problem is that I have a very old one and probably should spend some time fixing and updating it), but, as I said, it s been working well for me for a long time, so I never really had the motivation to do it. Anyway, after finishing my desktop tests I saw that I had the Helix editor installed for some time but I never tried it, so I decided to give it a try and see if it could be a good replacement for neovim on my environments (the only drawback is that as it is not vi compatible, I would need to switch back to vi mode when working on remote systems, but I guess I could live with that). I ran the helix tutorial and I liked it, so I decided to configure and install the Language Servers I can probably take advantage of on my daily work on my personal and work machines and see how it works.

Language server installationsA lot of manual installations are needed to get the language servers working what I did on my machines is more or less the following:

# AWK
sudo npm i -g 'awk-language-server@>=0.5.2'
# BASH
sudo apt-get install shellcheck shfmt
sudo npm i -g bash-language-server
# C/C++
sudo apt-get install clangd
# CSS, HTML, ESLint, JSON, SCS
sudo npm i -g vscode-langservers-extracted
# Docker
sudo npm install -g dockerfile-language-server-nodejs
# Docker compose
sudo npm install -g @microsoft/compose-language-service
# Helm
app="helm_ls_linux_amd64"
url="$(
  curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/mrjosh/helm-ls/releases/latest  
    jq -r ".assets[]   select(.name == \"$app\")   .browser_download_url"
)"
curl -L "$url" --output /tmp/helm_ls
sudo install /tmp/helm_ls /usr/local/bin
rm /tmp/helm_ls
# Markdown
app="marksman-linux-x64"
url="$(
  curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/artempyanykh/marksman/releases/latest  
    jq -r ".assets[]   select(.name == \"$app\")   .browser_download_url"
)"
curl -L "$url" --output /tmp/marksman
sudo install /tmp/marksman /usr/local/bin
rm /tmp/marksman
# Python
sudo npm i -g pyright
# Rust
rustup component add rust-analyzer
# SQL
sudo npm i -g sql-language-server
# Terraform
sudo apt-get install terraform-ls
# TOML
cargo install taplo-cli --locked --features lsp
# YAML
sudo npm install --global yaml-language-server
# JavaScript, TypeScript
sudo npm install -g typescript-language-server typescript
sudo npm install -g --save-dev --save-exact @biomejs/biome

Helix configurationThe helix configuration is done on a couple of toml files that are placed on the ~/.config/helix directory, the config.toml file I used is this one:

theme = "solarized_light"
[editor]
line-number = "relative"
mouse = false
[editor.statusline]
left = ["mode", "spinner"]
center = ["file-name"]
right = ["diagnostics", "selections", "position", "file-encoding", "file-line-ending", "file-type"]
separator = " "
mode.normal = "NORMAL"
mode.insert = "INSERT"
mode.select = "SELECT"
[editor.cursor-shape]
insert = "bar"
normal = "block"
select = "underline"
[editor.file-picker]
hidden = false
[editor.whitespace]
render = "all"
[editor.indent-guides]
render = true
character = " " # Some characters that work well: " ", " ", " ", " "
skip-levels = 1

And to configure the language servers I used the following language-servers.toml file:

[[language]]
name = "go"
auto-format = true
formatter =   command = "goimports"  
[[language]]
name = "javascript"
language-servers = [
  "typescript-language-server", # optional
  "vscode-eslint-language-server",
]
[language-server.rust-analyzer.config.check]
command = "clippy"
[language-server.sql-language-server]
command = "sql-language-server"
args = ["up", "--method", "stdio"]
[[language]]
name = "sql"
language-servers = [ "sql-language-server" ]
[[language]]
name = "hcl"
language-servers = [ "terraform-ls" ]
language-id = "terraform"
[[language]]
name = "tfvars"
language-servers = [ "terraform-ls" ]
language-id = "terraform-vars"
[language-server.terraform-ls]
command = "terraform-ls"
args = ["serve"]
[[language]]
name = "toml"
formatter =   command = "taplo", args = ["fmt", "-"]  
[[language]]
name = "typescript"
language-servers = [
  "typescript-language-server",
  "vscode-eslint-language-server",
]

Neovim configurationAfter a little while I noticed that I was going to need some time to get used to helix and the most interesting thing for me was the easy configuration and the language server integrations, but as I am already comfortable with neovim and just had installed the language server support tools on my machines I just need to configure them for neovim and I can keep using it for a while. As I said my configuration is old, to configure neovim I have the following init.vim file on my ~/.config/nvim folder:

set runtimepath^=~/.vim runtimepath+=~/.vim/after
let &packpath=&runtimepath
source ~/.vim/vimrc
" load lua configuration
lua require('config')

With that configuration I keep my old vimrc (it is a little bit messy, but it works) and I use a lua configuration file for the language servers and some additional neovim plugins on the ~/.config/nvim/lua/config.lua file:

-- -----------------------
-- BEG: LSP Configurations
-- -----------------------
-- AWS (awk_ls)
require'lspconfig'.awk_ls.setup 
-- Bash (bashls)
require'lspconfig'.bashls.setup 
-- C/C++ (clangd)
require'lspconfig'.clangd.setup 
-- CSS (cssls)
require'lspconfig'.cssls.setup 
-- Docker (dockerls)
require'lspconfig'.dockerls.setup 
-- Docker Compose
require'lspconfig'.docker_compose_language_service.setup 
-- Golang (gopls)
require'lspconfig'.gopls.setup 
-- Helm (helm_ls)
require'lspconfig'.helm_ls.setup 
-- Markdown
require'lspconfig'.marksman.setup 
-- Python (pyright)
require'lspconfig'.pyright.setup 
-- Rust (rust-analyzer)
require'lspconfig'.rust_analyzer.setup 
-- SQL (sqlls)
require'lspconfig'.sqlls.setup 
-- Terraform (terraformls)
require'lspconfig'.terraformls.setup 
-- TOML (taplo)
require'lspconfig'.taplo.setup 
-- Typescript (ts_ls)
require'lspconfig'.ts_ls.setup 
-- YAML (yamlls)
require'lspconfig'.yamlls.setup 
  settings =  
    yaml =  
      customTags =   "!reference sequence"  
     
   
 
-- -----------------------
-- END: LSP Configurations
-- -----------------------
-- ---------------------------------
-- BEG: Autocompletion configuration
-- ---------------------------------
-- Ref: https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lspconfig/wiki/Autocompletion
--
-- Pre requisites:
--
--   # Packer
--   git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/wbthomason/packer.nvim \
--      ~/.local/share/nvim/site/pack/packer/start/packer.nvim
--
--   # Start nvim and run :PackerSync or :PackerUpdate
-- ---------------------------------
local use = require('packer').use
require('packer').startup(function()
  use 'wbthomason/packer.nvim' -- Packer, useful to avoid removing it with PackerSync / PackerUpdate
  use 'neovim/nvim-lspconfig' -- Collection of configurations for built-in LSP client
  use 'hrsh7th/nvim-cmp' -- Autocompletion plugin
  use 'hrsh7th/cmp-nvim-lsp' -- LSP source for nvim-cmp
  use 'saadparwaiz1/cmp_luasnip' -- Snippets source for nvim-cmp
  use 'L3MON4D3/LuaSnip' -- Snippets plugin
end)
-- Add additional capabilities supported by nvim-cmp
local capabilities = require("cmp_nvim_lsp").default_capabilities()
local lspconfig = require('lspconfig')
-- Enable some language servers with the additional completion capabilities offered by nvim-cmp
local servers =   'clangd', 'rust_analyzer', 'pyright', 'ts_ls'  
for _, lsp in ipairs(servers) do
  lspconfig[lsp].setup  
    -- on_attach = my_custom_on_attach,
    capabilities = capabilities,
   
end
-- luasnip setup
local luasnip = require 'luasnip'
-- nvim-cmp setup
local cmp = require 'cmp'
cmp.setup  
  snippet =  
    expand = function(args)
      luasnip.lsp_expand(args.body)
    end,
   ,
  mapping = cmp.mapping.preset.insert( 
    ['<C-u>'] = cmp.mapping.scroll_docs(-4), -- Up
    ['<C-d>'] = cmp.mapping.scroll_docs(4), -- Down
    -- C-b (back) C-f (forward) for snippet placeholder navigation.
    ['<C-Space>'] = cmp.mapping.complete(),
    ['<CR>'] = cmp.mapping.confirm  
      behavior = cmp.ConfirmBehavior.Replace,
      select = true,
     ,
    ['<Tab>'] = cmp.mapping(function(fallback)
      if cmp.visible() then
        cmp.select_next_item()
      elseif luasnip.expand_or_jumpable() then
        luasnip.expand_or_jump()
      else
        fallback()
      end
    end,   'i', 's'  ),
    ['<S-Tab>'] = cmp.mapping(function(fallback)
      if cmp.visible() then
        cmp.select_prev_item()
      elseif luasnip.jumpable(-1) then
        luasnip.jump(-1)
      else
        fallback()
      end
    end,   'i', 's'  ),
   ),
  sources =  
      name = 'nvim_lsp'  ,
      name = 'luasnip'  ,
   ,
 
-- ---------------------------------
-- END: Autocompletion configuration
-- ---------------------------------

ConclusionI guess I ll keep `helix` installed and try it again on some of my personal projects to see if I can get used to it, but for now I ll stay with `neovim` as my main text editor and learn the shortcuts to use it with the language servers.

29 December 2024

Emmanuel Kasper: Accessing Atari ST disk images on Linux

This post leverages support for Atari Hard Disk Interface Partition (AHDI) partition tables in the Linux kernel, activated by default in Debian, and in the parted partition editor. Accessing the content of a partition using a user mounted loop device This is the easiest procedure and should be tried to first. Depending if your Linux kernel has support for AHDI partition tables, and the size of the FAT system on the partition, this procedure might not work. In that case, try the procedure using mtools further below. Attach a disk image called hd80mb.image to a loop device:

$ udisksctl loop-setup --file hd80mb.image
Mapped file hd80mb.image as /dev/loop0

Notice how the kernel detected the partition table:

$ dmesg   grep loop0
[160892.151941] loop0: detected capacity change from 0 to 164138
[160892.171061]  loop0: AHDI p1 p2 p3 p4

Inspect the block devices created for each partition:

$ lsblk   grep loop0

If the partitions are not already mounted by udisks2 under /media/, mount them manually:

$ sudo mount /dev/loop0p1 /mnt/
$ ls /mnt/
SHDRIVER.SYS

When you are finished copying data, unmount the partition, and detach the loop device.

$ sudo umount /mnt
$ udisksctl loop-delete --block-device /dev/loop0

Accessing the content of a partition using mtools and parted This procedure uses the mtools package and the support for the AHDI partition scheme in the parted partition editor. Display the partition table, with partitions offsets in bytes:

$ parted st_mint-1.5.img -- unit B print
...
Partition Table: atari
Disk Flags: 
Number  Start       End         Size        Type     File system  Flags
 1      1024B       133170175B  133169152B  primary               boot
 2      133170176B  266339327B  133169152B  primary
 3      266339328B  399508479B  133169152B  primary
 4      399508480B  532676607B  133168128B  primary

Set some Atari-friendly mtools options:

$ export MTOOLS_SKIP_CHECK=1
$ export MTOOLS_NO_VFAT=1

List the content of the partition, passing as parameter the offset in bytes of the partition: For instance here we are interested in the second partition, and the parted output above indicates that this partition starts at byte offset 133170176 in the disk image.

$ mdir -s -i st_mint-1.5.img@@133170176
 Volume in drive : has no label
Directory for ::/
demodata          2024-08-27  11:43 
        1 file                    0 bytes
Directory for ::/demodata

We can also use the command mcopy with a similar syntax to copy data from and to the disk image. For instance we copy a file named file.zip to the root directory of the second partition:

$ mcopy -s -i st_mint-1.5.img@@133170176 file.zip ::

Recompiling mtools to access large partitions With disk images having large AHDI partitions (well considered large in 1992 ), you might encounter the error

mdir -s -i cecile-falcon-singlepart-1GB.img@@1024
init: sector size too big
Cannot initialize '::'

This error is caused by the non-standard large logical sectors that the TOS uses for large FAT partitions (see the Atari Hard Disk Filesystem reference on page 41, TOS partitions size) We can inspect the logical sector size using fsck tools:

$ udiskctl loop-setup --file cecile-falcon-singlepart-1GB.img
$ sudo fsck.fat -Anv /dev/loop0p1
fsck.fat 4.2 (2021-01-31)
...
Media byte 0xf8 (hard disk)
16384 bytes per logical sector

To access the partition, you need to patch mtools, so that it supports a logical sector size of 16384 bytes. For this you need to change the MAX_SECTOR macro from 8192 to 16384 in msdos.h in the mtools distribution and recompile. A rebuilt mtools is then able to access the partition:

$ /usr/local/bin/mdir -s -i cecile-falcon-singlepart-1GB.img@@1024
 Volume in drive : has no label
Directory for ::/
CECILE   SYS      8462 1998-03-27  22:42 
NEWDESK  INF       804 2024-09-09   9:23 
        2 files               9 266 bytes
                      1 072 463 872 bytes free

22 December 2024

Junichi Uekawa: Looking at my private repositories for what language I wrote.

Looking at my private repositories for what language I wrote. I'm counting the number of days I wrote a certain file with specific file extension. Markdown was at the top, because I usually have a doc, that's fine. C++ is my top language. Then lilypond and then js. Rust came much lower. Lilypond was for my band scores it seems.

10 December 2024

Emmanuel Kasper: Too many open files in Minikube Pod

Right now playing with minikube, to run a three nodes highly available Kubernetes control plane. I am using the docker driver of minikube, so each Kubernetes node component is running inside a docker container, instead of using full blown VMs. In my experience this works better than Kind, as using Kind you cannot correctly restart a cluster deployed in highly available mode. This is the topology of the cluster:

$ minikube node list 
minikube        192.168.49.2
minikube-m02    192.168.49.3
minikube-m03    192.168.49.4

Each kubernetes node is actually a docker container:

$ docker ps
CONTAINER ID   IMAGE                                 COMMAND                  CREATED          STATUS         PORTS                                                                                                                                  NAMES
977046487e5e   gcr.io/k8s-minikube/kicbase:v0.0.45   "/usr/local/bin/entr "   31 minutes ago   Up 6 minutes   127.0.0.1:32812->22/tcp, 127.0.0.1:32811->2376/tcp, 127.0.0.1:32810->5000/tcp, 127.0.0.1:32809->8443/tcp, 127.0.0.1:32808->32443/tcp   minikube-m03
8be3549f0c4c   gcr.io/k8s-minikube/kicbase:v0.0.45   "/usr/local/bin/entr "   31 minutes ago   Up 6 minutes   127.0.0.1:32807->22/tcp, 127.0.0.1:32806->2376/tcp, 127.0.0.1:32805->5000/tcp, 127.0.0.1:32804->8443/tcp, 127.0.0.1:32803->32443/tcp   minikube-m02
4b39f1c47c23   gcr.io/k8s-minikube/kicbase:v0.0.45   "/usr/local/bin/entr "   31 minutes ago   Up 6 minutes   127.0.0.1:32802->22/tcp, 127.0.0.1:32801->2376/tcp, 127.0.0.1:32800->5000/tcp, 127.0.0.1:32799->8443/tcp, 127.0.0.1:32798->32443/tcp   minikube

The whole list of pods running in the cluster is as this:

$ minikube kubectl -- get pods --all-namespaces
kube-system   coredns-6f6b679f8f-85n9l               0/1     Running   1 (44s ago)   3m32s
kube-system   coredns-6f6b679f8f-pnhxv               0/1     Running   1 (44s ago)   3m32s
kube-system   etcd-minikube                          1/1     Running   1 (44s ago)   3m37s
kube-system   etcd-minikube-m02                      1/1     Running   1 (42s ago)   3m21s
...
kube-system   kube-proxy-84gm6                       0/1     Error     1 (31s ago)   3m4s

There is this container in Error status, let us check the logs

$ minikube kubectl -- logs -n kube-system kube-proxy-84gm6
E1210 11:50:42.117036       1 run.go:72] "command failed" err="failed complete: too many open files"

This can be fixed by increasing the number of inotify watchers:

# cat > /etc/sysctl.d/minikube.conf <<EOF
fs.inotify.max_user_watches = 524288
fs.inotify.max_user_instances = 512
EOF

# sysctl --system
...
* Applying /etc/sysctl.d/minikube.conf ...
* Applying /etc/sysctl.conf ...
...
fs.inotify.max_user_watches = 524288
fs.inotify.max_user_instances = 512

Restart the cluster

$ minikube stop
$ minikube start 
$ minikube kubectl -- get pods --all-namespaces   grep Error
$

8 December 2024

Dirk Eddelbuettel: pinp 0.0.11 on CRAN: Maintenance

A new version of our pinp package arrived on CRAN today, and is the first release in four years. The pinp package allows for snazzier one or two column Markdown-based pdf vignettes, and is now used by a few packages. A screenshot of the package vignette can be seen below. Additional screenshots are at the pinp page. pinp vignette

This release contains no new features or new user-facing changes but reflects the standard package and repository maintenance over the four-year window since the last release: updating of actions, updating of URLs and addressing small packaging changes spotted by ever-more-vigilant R checking code. The NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in pinp version 0.0.11 (2024-12-08)

Standard package maintenance for continuous integration, URL updates, and packaging conventions

Correct two minor nags in the Rd file

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the ping page. For questions or comments use the issue tracker off the GitHub repo. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

5 December 2024

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in November 2024

Welcome to the November 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! Our monthly reports outline what we ve been up to over the past month and highlight items of news from elsewhere in the world of software supply-chain security where relevant. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. Table of contents:

Reproducible Builds mourns the passing of Lunar The Reproducible Builds community sadly announced it has lost its founding member, Lunar. J r my Bobbio aka Lunar passed away on Friday November 8th in palliative care in Rennes, France. Lunar was instrumental in starting the Reproducible Builds project in 2013 as a loose initiative within the Debian project. He was the author of our earliest status reports and many of our key tools in use today are based on his design. Lunar s creativity, insight and kindness were often noted. You can view our full tribute elsewhere on our website. He will be greatly missed.

Introducing reproduce.debian.net In happier news, this month saw the introduction of reproduce.debian.net. Announced at the recent Debian MiniDebConf in Toulouse, reproduce.debian.net is an instance of rebuilderd operated by the Reproducible Builds project. rebuilderd is our server designed monitor the official package repositories of Linux distributions and attempts to reproduce the observed results there. In November, reproduce.debian.net began rebuilding Debian unstable on the `amd64` architecture, but throughout the MiniDebConf, it had attempted to rebuild 66% of the official archive. From this, it could be determined that it is currently possible to bit-for-bit reproduce and corroborate approximately 78% of the actual binaries distributed by Debian that is, using the `.buildinfo` files hosted by Debian itself. reproduce.debian.net also contains instructions how to setup one s own rebuilderd instance, and we very much invite everyone with a machine to spare to setup their own version and to share the results. Whilst rebuilderd is still in development, it has been used to reproduce Arch Linux since 2019. We are especially looking for installations targeting Debian architectures other than `i386` and `amd64`.

New landing page design As part of a very productive partnership with the Sovereign Tech Fund and Neighbourhoodie, we are pleased to unveil our new homepage/landing page. We are very happy with our collaboration with both STF and Neighbourhoodie (including many changes not directly related to the website), and look forward to working with them in the future.

SBOMs for Python packages The Python Software Foundation has announced a new cross-functional project for SBOMs and Python packages . Seth Michael Larson writes that the project is specifically looking to solve these issues :

Enable Python users that require SBOM documents (likely due to regulations like CRA or SSDF) to self-serve using existing SBOM generation tools.

Solve the phantom dependency problem, where non-Python software is bundled in Python packages but not recorded in any metadata. This makes the job of software composition analysis (SCA) tools difficult or impossible.

Make the adoption work by relevant projects such as build backends, auditwheel-esque tools, as minimal as possible. Empower users who are interested in having better SBOM data for the Python projects they are using to be able to contribute engineering time towards that goal.

A GitHub repository for the initiative is available, and there are a number of queries, comments and remarks on Seth s Discourse forum post.

Debian updates There was significant development within Debian this month. Firstly, at the recent MiniDebConf in Toulouse, France, Holger Levsen gave a Debian-specific talk on rebuilding packages distributed from `ftp.debian.org` that is to say, how to reproduce the results from the official Debian build servers: Holger described the talk as follows:
For more than ten years, the Reproducible Builds project has worked towards reproducible builds of many projects, and for ten years now we have build Debian packages twice with maximal variations applied to see if they can be build reproducible still. Since about a month, we ve also been rebuilding trying to exactly match the builds being distributed via `ftp.debian.org`. This talk will describe the setup and the lessons learned so far, and why the results currently are what they are (spoiler: they are less than 30% reproducible), and what we can do to fix that.
The Debian Project Leader, Andreas Tille, was present at the talk and remarked later in his Bits from the DPL update that:
It might be unfair to single out a specific talk from Toulouse, but I d like to highlight the one on reproducible builds. Beyond its technical focus, the talk also addressed the recent loss of Lunar, whom we mourn deeply. It served as a tribute to Lunar s contributions and legacy. Personally, I ve encountered packages maintained by Lunar and bugs he had filed. I believe that taking over his packages and addressing the bugs he reported is a meaningful way to honor his memory and acknowledge the value of his work.
Holger s slides and video in `.webm` format are available.
Next, rebuilderd is the server to monitor package repositories of Linux distributions and attempt to reproduce the observed results. This month, version 0.21.0 released, most notably with improved support for binNMUs by Jochen Sprickerhof and updating the `rebuilderd-debian.sh` integration to the latest `debrebuild` version by Holger Levsen. There has also been significant work to get the `rebuilderd` package into the Debian archive, in particular, both `rust-rebuilderd-common` version `0.20.0-1` and `rust-rust-lzma` version `0.6.0-1` were packaged by kpcyrd and uploaded by Holger Levsen. Related to this, Holger Levsen submitted three additional issues against rebuilderd as well:

`rebuildctl` should be more verbose when encountering issues. [ ]

Please add an option to used randomised queues. [ ]

Scheduling and re-scheduling multiple packages at once. [ ]

and lastly, Jochen Sprickerhof submitted one an issue requested that rebuilderd downloads the source package in addition to the `.buildinfo` file [ ] and kpcyrd also submitted and fixed an issue surrounding dependencies and clarifying the license [ ]
Separate to this, back in 2018, Chris Lamb filed a bug report against the `sphinx-gallery` package as it generates unreproducible content in various ways. This month, however, Dmitry Shachnev finally closed the bug, listing the multiple sub-issues that were part of the problem and how they were resolved.
Elsewhere, Roland Clobus posted to our mailing list this month, asking for input on a bug in Debian s `ca-certificates-java` package. The issue is that the Java key management tools embed timestamps in its output, and this output ends up in the `/etc/ssl/certs/java/cacerts` file on the generated ISO images. A discussion resulted from Roland s post suggesting some short- and medium-term solutions to the problem.
Holger Levsen uploaded some packages with reproducibility-related changes:

`devscripts` versions 2.24.3, 2.24.4 and 2.24.5 were uploaded, including several fixes for the `debrebuild` and `debootsnap` and scripts.

`cdbs` version 0.4.167 uploaded in order to drop `dh_buildinfo` support, as `dpkg` has generated `.buildinfo` files since 2016 and the results of `dh_buildinfo` are typically unreproducible. Related to this a mass bug filing by Helmut Grohne intended to remove the obsolete and deprecated `dh-buildinfo` package from the archive. At the time of writing, this still affects 311 packages in Debian unstable.

Lastly, 12 reviews of Debian packages were added, 5 were updated and 21 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues in Debian.

Reproducible builds by default in Maven 4 On our mailing list this month, Herv Boutemy reported the latest release of Maven (`4.0.0-beta-5`) has reproducible builds enabled by default. In his mailing list post, Herv mentions that this story started during our Reproducible Builds summit in Hamburg , where he created the upstream issue that builds on a multi-year effort to have Maven builds configured for reproducibility.

PyPI now supports digital attestations Elsewhere in the Python ecosystem and as reported on LWN and elsewhere, the Python Package Index (PyPI) has announced that it has finalised support for PEP 740 ( Index support for digital attestations ). Trail of Bits, who performed much of the development work, has an in-depth blog post about the work and its adoption, as well as what is left undone:
One thing is notably missing from all of this work: downstream verification. [ ] This isn t an acceptable end state (cryptographic attestations have defensive properties only insofar as they re actually verified), so we re looking into ways to bring verification to individual installing clients. In particular, we re currently working on a plugin architecture for `pip` that will enable users to load verification logic directly into their `pip install` flows.
There was an in-depth discussion on LWN s announcement page, as well as on Hacker News.

Dependency Challenges in OSS Package Registries At BENEVOL, the Belgium-Netherlands Software Evolution workshop in Namur, Belgium, Tom Mens and Alexandre Decan presented their paper, An Overview and Catalogue of Dependency Challenges in Open Source Software Package Registries . The abstract of their paper is as follows:
While open-source software has enabled significant levels of reuse to speed up software development, it has also given rise to the dreadful dependency hell that all software practitioners face on a regular basis. This article provides a catalogue of dependency-related challenges that come with relying on OSS packages or libraries. The catalogue is based on the scientific literature on empirical research that has been conducted to understand, quantify and overcome these challenges. [ ]
A PDF of the paper is available online.

Zig programming language demonstrated reproducible Motiejus Jak ty posted an interesting and practical blog post on his successful attempt to reproduce the Zig programming language without using the pre-compiled binaries checked into the repository, and despite the circular dependency inherent in its bootstrapping process. As a summary, Motiejus concludes that:
I can now confidently say (and you can also check, you don t need to trust me) that there is nothing hiding in `zig1.wasm` [the checked-in binary] that hasn t been checked-in as a source file.
The full post is full of practical details, and includes a few open questions.

Website updates Notwithstanding the significant change to the landing page (screenshot above), there were an enormous number of changes made to our website this month. This included:

Alex Feyerke and Mariano Gim nez:

Dramatically overhaul the website s landing page with new benefit cards tailored to the expected visitors to our website and a reworking of the visual hierarchy and design. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]

Bernhard M. Wiedemann:

Update the System images page to document the `e2fsprogs` approach. [ ]

Chris Lamb:

Cachebust every CSS file per-release. [ ]

Replace some inline markdown with HTML. [ ]

Use spaces on the Publications page. [ ]

Add a news article about the passing of Lunar. [ ][ ][ ][ ]

Add a black memorial band to the top of the page. [ ]

FC (Fay) Stegerman:

Replace more inline markdown with HTML on the Success stories page. [ ]

Add some links, fix some other links and correct some spelling errors on the Tools page. [ ]

Holger Levsen:

Add a historical presentation ( Reproducible builds everywhere eg. in Debian, OpenWrt and LEDE ) from October 2016. [ ]

Add `jochensp` and `Oejet` to the list of known contributors. [ ][ ]

Julia Kr ger:

Add a new Stripping of unreproducible information page to the documentation. [ ]

Ninette Adhikari & hulkoba:

Add/rework the list of success stories into a new page that clearly shows milestones in Reproducible Builds. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]

Philip Rinn:

Import 47 historical weekly reports. [ ]

hulkoba:

Add `alt` text to almost all images (!). [ ][ ]

Fix a number of links on the Talks . [ ][ ]

Avoid so-called ghost buttons by not using `<button>` elements as links, as the affordance of a `<button>` implies an action with (potentially) a side effect. [ ][ ]

Center the sponsor logos on the homepage. [ ]

Move publications and generate them instead from a `data.yml` file with an improved layout. [ ][ ]

Make a large number of small but impactful stylisting changes. [ ][ ][ ][ ]

Expand the Tools to include a number of missing tools, fix some styling issues and fix a number of stale/broken links. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:

Bernhard M. Wiedemann:

`clisp` (fix contributed by Bruno Haible)

`conky` (date-related issue)

`emacs-auctex` (date-related `gzip` issue)

`javadoc` (filesystem ordering issue)

`jboss-websocket-1.0-api` (embeds `uname -r`)

`lcms2` (CPU issue)

`LiE` (ASLR-related issue)

`make_ext4fs` (toolchain-related issue for for VM images)

`obs-build` (issue when running builds with certain CPU types or core numbers)

`perl-Time-modules` (fails to build far in the future)

`python-bson` (fails to build far in the future)

`python-exiv2` (fails to build far in the future)

`python-moto` (date-related `gzip` issue)

`python-pyhanko-certvalidator` (fails to build far in the future)

`python-python-gvm` (concurrency-related issue)

`python310` (fails to build far in the future)

`python313` (fails to build far in the future)

`reproducible-faketools` (toolchain for emacs)

`shadowsocks-rust` (date-related issue)

`swipl` (fails to build far in the future)

Chris Lamb:

#1087330 filed against `python-pydash`.

#1087485 filed against `fritzconnection`.

#1087486 filed against `tracy`.

#1088238 filed against `rust-broot`.

#1088353 filed against `python-aiovlc`.

#1088742 filed against `python-aiohomekit`.

James Addison:

#1088144 filed against `cdbs`.

Misc development news

Bernhard M. Wiedemann published another report for the openSUSE distribution.

Martin Abente Lahaye updated diffoscope to fix a crash when `objdump` is missing. [ ]

On our mailing list, Jan-Benedict Glaw announced the publication of the fifth NetBSD Reproducibility Report

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework running primarily at tests.reproducible-builds.org in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In November, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen, including:

reproduce.debian.net-related changes:

Create and introduce a new reproduce.debian.net service and subdomain [ ]

Make a large number of documentation changes relevant to `rebuilderd`. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]

Explain a temporary workaround for a specific issue in `rebuilderd`. [ ]

Setup another `rebuilderd` instance on the `o4` node and update installation documentation to match. [ ][ ]

Make a number of helpful/cosmetic changes to the interface, such as clarifying terms and adding links. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]

Deploy configuration to the `/opt` and `/var` directories. [ ][ ]

Add an infancy (or alpha ) disclaimer. [ ][ ]

Add more notes to the temporary `rebuilderd` documentation. [ ]

Commit an nginx configuration file for reproduce.debian.net s Stats page. [ ]

Commit a `rebuilder-worker.conf` configuration for the `o5` node. [ ]

Debian-related changes:

Grant `jspricke` and `jochensp` access to the `o5` node. [ ][ ]

Build the `qemu` package with the `nocheck` build flag. [ ]

Misc changes:

Adapt the `update_jdn.sh` script for new Debian trixie systems. [ ]

Stop installing the PostgreSQL database engine on the `o4` and `o5` nodes. [ ]

Prevent accidental reboots of the `o4` node because of a long-running job owned by `josch`. [ ][ ]

In addition, Mattia Rizzolo addressed a number of issues with reproduce.debian.net [ ][ ][ ][ ]. And lastly, both Holger Levsen [ ][ ][ ][ ] and Vagrant Cascadian [ ][ ][ ][ ] performed node maintenance.
If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

IRC: `#reproducible-builds` on `irc.oftc.net`.

Mastodon: @reproducible_builds@fosstodon.org

Mailing list: `rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org`

Twitter: @ReproBuilds

1 December 2024

Guido G nther: Free Software Activities November 2024

Another short status update of what happened on my side last month. The larger blocks are the Phosh 0.43 release, the initial file chooser portal, phosh-osk-stub now handling digit, number, phone and PIN input purpose via special layouts as well as Phoc mostly catching up with wlroots 0.18 and the current development version targeting 0.19. phosh

When taking a screenshot via keybinding or power button long press save screenshots to clipboard and disk (MR)
Robustify Screenshot CI job (MR)
Update CI pipeline (MR)
Fix notifications banners that aren't tall enough not being shown (MR). Another 4y old bug hopefully out of the way.
Add rfkill mock and docs (MR). Useful for HKS testing.
Release 0.43~rc1 and 0.43
Drop libsoup workaround (MR)
Ensure notification only takes its actual height (MR)

phoc

Move wlroots 0.18 update forward (MR). Needs a bit more work before we can make it default.
Catch up with wlroots development branch (MR) allowing us to test current wlroots again.
Some of the above already applies to main so schedule it for 0.44 (MR)

phosh-mobile-settings

Don't mark release notes as translatable to save some i18n effort (MR)
Release 0.43~rc1 and 0.43.0

libphosh-rs

Adjust to API change (MR)
Release 0.0.4 on crates.io

phosh-osk-stub

Add layouts for PIN, number and phone input purpose (MR)
Release 0.43~rc1
Ensure translation get picked up, various cleanups and release 0.43.0 (MR)
Make desktop file match app-id (MR)

phosh-tour

Fix typo and reduce number of strings to translate (MR)
Add translator comments (MR). This, the above and additional fixes in p-m-s were prompted by i18n feedback from Alexandre Franke, thanks a lot!
Release 0.43.0

pfs

Initial version of the adaptive file chooser dialog using gtk-rs. See demo.
Allow to activate via double click (for non-touch use) (MR)

xdg-desktop-portal-phosh

Use pfs to provide a file chooser portal (MR)

meta-phosh

Slightly improve point release handling (MR)
Improve string freeze announcements and add phosh-tour (MR)

Debian

Upload Phosh 0.43.0~rc1 and 0.43.0 (MR, MR, MR, MR, MR, MR, MR, MR, MR, MR, MR)
meta-phosh: Add Recommend: for xdg-desktop-portal-phosh (MR)
phosh-osk-data got accepted, create repo, brush up packaging and upload to unstable (MR
phosh-osk-stub: Recommend data packager (MR
Phosh: drop reverts (MR)
varnam-schemes: Fix autopkgtest (MR)
varnam-schemes: Improve packaging (MR)
Prepare govarnam 1.9.1 (MR)

Calls

ussd: Set input purpose and switch to AdwDialog (MR, Screenshot)

libcall-ui

Drop libhandy leftover (MR)

git-buildpackage

Improve docs and cleanup markdown (MR)
Mention gbp push in intro (MR)
Use application instead of productname entities to improve reading flow (MR)

wlroots

Drop mention of wlr_renderer_begin_with_buffer (MR)

python-dbusmock

Add mock for gsd-rfkill (MR)

xdg-spec

Sync notification categories with the portal spec (MR)
Add categories for SMS (MR)
Add a pubdate so it's clear the specs aren't stale (MR) (got fixed in a different and better way, thanks Matthias!)

ashpd

Allow to set filters in file chooser portal demo (MR)

govarnam

Robustify file generation (MR)

varnam-schemes

Unbreak tests on non intel/amd architectures (e.g. arm64) (MR)

Reviews This is not code by me but reviews I did on other peoples code. The list is incomplete, but I hope to improve on this in the upcoming months. Thanks for the contributions!

flathub: livi runtime and gst update (MR)
phosh: Split linters into their own test suite (MR)
phosh; QuickSettings follow-up (MR)
phosh: Accent color fixes (MR)
phosh: Notification animation (MR)
phosh: end-session dialog timeout fix (MR)
phosh: search daemon (MR)
phosh-ev: Migrate to newer gtk-rs and async_channel (MR)
phosh-mobile-settings: Update gmobile (MR)
phosh-mobile-settings: Make panel-switcher scrollable (MR)
phosh-mobile-settings: i18n comments (MR)
gbp doc updates (MR)
gbp handle suite names with number prefix (MR)
Debian libvirt dependency changes (MR
Chatty: misc improvements (MR
iio-sensor-proxy: buffer driver without trigger (MR)
gbp doc improvements (MR)
gbp: More doc improvements (MR)
gbp: Clean on failure (MR)
gbp: DEP naming consistency (MR)

Help Development If you want to support my work see donations. This includes a list of hardware we want to improve support for. Thanks a lot to all current and past donors. Comments? Join the Fediverse thread

27 November 2024

Bits from Debian: OpenStreetMap migrates to Debian 12

You may have seen this toot announcing OpenStreetMap's migration to Debian on their infrastructure.

After 18 years on Ubuntu, we've upgraded the @openstreetmap servers to Debian 12 (Bookworm). openstreetmap.org is now faster using Ruby 3.1. Onward to new mapping adventures! Thank you to the team for the smooth transition. #OpenStreetMap #Debian

We spoke with Grant Slater, the Senior Site Reliability Engineer for the OpenStreetMap Foundation. Grant shares: Why did you choose Debian?

There is a large overlap between OpenStreetMap mappers and the Debian community. Debian also has excellent coverage of OpenStreetMap tools and utilities, which helped with the decision to switch to Debian. The Debian package maintainers do an excellent job of maintaining their packages - e.g.: osm2pgsql, osmium-tool etc. Part of our reason to move to Debian was to get closer to the maintainers of the packages that we depend on. Debian maintainers appear to be heavily invested in the software packages that they support and we see critical bugs get fixed.

What drove this decision to migrate?

OpenStreetMap.org is primarily run on actual physical hardware that our team manages. We attempt to squeeze as much performance from our systems as possible, with some services being particularly I/O bound. We ran into some severe I/O performance issues with kernels ~6.0 to < ~6.6 on systems with NVMe storage. This pushed us onto newer mainline kernels, which led us toward Debian. On Debian 12 we could simply install the backport kernel and the performance issues were solved.

How was the transition managed?

Thankfully we manage our server setup nearly completely with code. We also use Test Kitchen with inspec to test this infrastructure code. Tests run locally using Podman or Docker containers, but also run as part of our git code pipeline. We added Debian as a test target platform and fixed up the infrastructure code until all the tests passed. The changes required were relatively small, simple package name or config filename changes mostly.

What was your timeline of transition?

In August 2024 we moved the www.openstreetmap.org Ruby on Rails servers across to Debian. We haven't yet finished moving everything across to Debian, but we will upgrade the rest when it makes sense. Some systems may wait until the next hardware upgrade cycle. Our focus is to build a stable and reliable platform for OpenStreetMap mappers.

How has the transition from another Linux distribution to Debian gone?

We are still in the process of fully migrating between Linux distributions, but we can share that we recently moved our frontend servers to Debian 12 (from Ubuntu 22.04) which bumped the Ruby version from 3.0 to 3.1 which allowed us to also upgrade the version of Ruby on Rails that we use for www.openstreetmap.org. We also changed our chef code for managing the network interfaces from using netplan (default in Ubuntu, made by Canonical) to directly using systemd-networkd to manage the network interfaces, to allow commonality between how we manage the interfaces in Ubuntu and our upcoming Debian systems. Over the years we've standardised our networking setup to use 802.3ad bonded interfaces for redundancy, with VLANs to segment traffic; this setup worked well with systemd-networkd. We use netboot.xyz for PXE networking booting OS installers for our systems and use IPMI for the out-of-band management. We remotely re-installed a test server to Debian 12, and fixed a few minor issues missed by our chef tests. We were pleasantly surprised how smoothly the migration to Debian went. In a few limited cases we've used Debian Backports for a few packages where we've absolutely had to have a newer feature. The Debian package maintainers are fantastic. What definitely helped us is our code is libre/free/open-source, with most of the core OpenStreetMap software like osm2pgsql already in Debian and well packaged. In some cases we do run pre-release or custom patches of OpenStreetMap software; with Ubuntu we used launchpad.net's Personal Package Archives (PPA) to build and host deb repositories for these custom packages. We were initially perplexed by the myriad of options in Debian (see this list - eeek!), but received some helpful guidance from a Debian contributor and we now manage our own deb repository using aptly. For the moment we're currently building deb packages locally and pushing to aptly; ideally we'd like to replace this with a git driven pipeline for building the custom packages in the future.

Thank you for taking the time to share your experience with us.

Thank you to all the awesome people who make Debian!

We are overjoyed to share this in-use case which demonstrates our commitment to stability, development, and long term support. Debian offers users, companies, and organisations the ability to plan, scope, develop, and maintain at their own pace using a rock solid stable Linux distribution with responsive developers. Does your organisation use Debian in some capacity? We would love to hear about it and your use of 'The Universal Operating System'. Reach out to us at Press@debian.org - we would be happy to add your organisation to our 'Who's Using Debian?' page and to share your story! About Debian The Debian Project is an association of individuals who have made common cause to create a free operating system. This operating system that we have created is called Debian. Installers and images, such as live systems, offline installers for systems without a network connection, installers for other CPU architectures, or cloud instances, can be found at Getting Debian.

24 October 2024

Emmanuel Kasper: back to blogging and running a feed reader as a containerized systemd service

After reading about Jonathan McDowell feed reader install and the back to blogging initiative, I decided to install a feed reader to follow all those nice blog posts. With a feed reader you can compose your own feed of news based on blog posts, websites, mastodon toots. And then you are independant from ad oriented ranking algorithms of social networks. Since Jonathan used FreshRSS as a feed reader, I started with the same software. On a quick glance on its github page, it sounded like a good project:

active contributions
different channels for stable and latest version of the software
container images pointing to the stable release
support multiple databases for storage, including PostgreSQL
correct documentation mentioning security caveats

I prefer to do the container image installation using podman since:

upgrades from FreshRSS are easy to do and can be done separately from operating system upgrades
I do not mess my based operating system with php (subjective) and in case of a compromized freshrss, the freshrss/apache install would be still restrained to its own Linux namespaces, separated from the rest of the system.

Podman is image compatible with Docker as they both implement the OCI runtime specification, and have a nearly identical command line interface. This installation will be done on a Debian server, but should work too on any Linux distribution. Initial setup

start a container image based on the start command provided by the FreshRSS project. The podman command line is nearly identical to the docker command line, excepts that podman expects the fully qualified domain name associated with the container image, and I chose to run the freshrss container on the localhost interface only. I also use a defined version tag, because using the latest tag makes it complicated to track which exact ersion I have installed.

# podman pull docker.io/freshrss/freshrss:1.20.1
# podman run --detach --restart unless-stopped --log-opt max-size=10m \
  --publish 127.0.0.1:8081:80 \
  --env TZ=Europe/Paris \
  --env 'CRON_MIN=1,31' \
  --volume freshrss_data:/var/www/FreshRSS/data \
  --volume freshrss_extensions:/var/www/FreshRSS/extensions \
  --name freshrss \
  docker.io/freshrss/freshrss:1.20.1

verify where the podman volumes have been created. This is where the user data of freshrss will be stored.

# podman volume ls
# podman volume inspect freshrss_data

now that freshrss is installed, you can start its configuration wizard at localhost:8081. You should keep the default sqlite choice
finally after running the wizard, you can login again and add some feeds
verify that your config has been stored outside the container, and inside the volume (so that it will not be erased in case of upgrages)

# ls -l /var/lib/containers/storage/volumes/freshrss_data/_data/users/

verify the state of sqlite database

echo '.tables'  sqlite3  /var/lib/containers/storage/volumes/freshrss_data/_data/users/<your freshrss user>/db.sqlite 
category  entry     entrytag  entrytmp  feed      tag

Going with FreshRSS in Production Podman has this very nice feature that it can generate a systemd unit from a running container, and use systemd to start a container on boot. This is in contrary to docker where the docker daemon does the stop/start of containers on boot. I prefer the systemd approach as it treats containers the same way as other system services. Once the freshrss container is running we can generate a systemd unit of it with:

# podman generate systemd --new --name freshrss   tee /etc/systemd/system/container-freshrss.service

Let s stop the container we started previously, and use systemd to manage it:

# podman stop freshrss
# systemctl enable --now container-freshrss.service

We can verify that we have a listening socket on the localhost interface, on the source port 8081

# systemctl status container-freshrss.service
  ...
# ss --listening --numeric --process '( sport = 8081 )'
Netid         State           Recv-Q          Send-Q                   Local Address:Port                   Peer Address:Port         Process         
tcp           LISTEN          0               4096                         127.0.0.1:8081                        0.0.0.0:*             users:(("conmon",pid=4464,fd=5))

Nota Bene: conmon (8) is the process managing the network namespace in which fresh-rss is running, hence it is displayed as the process owning the listening socket Exposing FreshRSS to the external world We have now a running service, but we need to make it reachable from the internet. The simplest, classical way, is to create a subdomain and a VirtualHost configured as a reverse proxy to access the service at 127.0.0.1:8081. Fortunately the FreshRSS authors have documented this setup in https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS/tree/edge/Docker#alternative-reverse-proxy-using-apache and those steps are no different from a standard application behind a web reverse proxy. Upgrading freshrss container to a newer version A documentation showing how to install a piece of software is nothing when it does not show how to upgrade that said software. Installing is easy, upgrading is where the challenge is. Fortunately to the good stateless design of freshrss (everything is in the sqlite database, which is backed by a non-epheremal volume in our setup), switchting versions is a peace of cake.

# podman pull docker.io/freshrss/freshrss:1.20.2
# systemctl stop container-freshrss.service
# sed -i 's,docker.io/freshrss/freshrss:1.20.1,docker.io/freshrss/freshrss:1.20.2,' /etc/systemd/system/container-freshrss.service
# systemctl daemon-reload
# systemctl start container-freshrss.service

If you need to rollback, you just need to revert version numbers in the instruction above. Enjoy your own reader feed ! I will add the following feeds of blogs I like, let us see if I follow them better with a feed reader !

15 October 2024

Lukas M rdian: Waiting for a Linux system to be online

What is an online system? Networking is a complex topic, and there is lots of confusion around the definition of an online system. Sometimes the boot process gets delayed up to two minutes, because the system still waits for one or more network interfaces to be ready. Systemd provides the network-online.target that other service units can rely on, if they are deemed to require network connectivity. But what does online actually mean in this context, is a link-local IP address enough, do we need a routable gateway and how about DNS name resolution? The requirements for an online network interface depend very much on the services using an interface. For some services it might be good enough to reach their local network segment (e.g. to announce Zeroconf services), while others need to reach domain names (e.g. to mount a NFS share) or reach the global internet to run a web server. On the other hand, the implementation of network-online.target varies, depending on which networking daemon is in use, e.g. systemd-networkd-wait-online.service or NetworkManager-wait-online.service. For Ubuntu, we created a specification that describes what we as a distro expect an online system to be. Having a definition in place, we are able to tackle the network-online-ordering issues that got reported over the years and can work out solutions to avoid delayed boot times on Ubuntu systems. In essence, we want systems to reach the following networking state to be considered online:

Do not wait for optional interfaces to receive network configuration

Have IPv6 and/or IPv4 link-local addresses on every network interface

Have at least one interface with a globally routable connection

Have functional domain name resolution on any routable interface

A common implementation NetworkManager and systemd-networkd are two very common networking daemons used on modern Linux systems. But they originate from different contexts and therefore show different behaviours in certain scenarios, such as wait-online. Luckily, on Ubuntu we already have Netplan as a unification layer on top of those networking daemons, that allows for common network configuration, and can also be used to tweak the wait-online logic. With the recent release of Netplan v1.1 we introduced initial functionality to tweak the behaviour of the systemd-networkd-wait-online.service, as used on Ubuntu Server systems. When Netplan is used to drive the systemd-networkd backend, it will emit an override configuration file in /run/systemd/system/systemd-networkd-wait-online.service.d/10-netplan.conf, listing the specific non-optional interfaces that should receive link-local IP configuration. In parallel to that, it defines a list of network interfaces that Netplan detected to be potential global connections, and waits for any of those interfaces to reach a globally routable state. Such override config file might look like this:

[Unit]
ConditionPathIsSymbolicLink=/run/systemd/generator/network-online.target.wants/systemd-networkd-wait-online.service

[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=/lib/systemd/systemd-networkd-wait-online -i eth99.43:carrier -i lo:carrier -i eth99.42:carrier -i eth99.44:degraded -i bond0:degraded
ExecStart=/lib/systemd/systemd-networkd-wait-online --any -o routable -i eth99.43 -i eth99.45 -i bond0

In addition to the new features implemented in Netplan, we reached out to upstream systemd, proposing an enhancement to the systemd-networkd-wait-online service, integrating it with systemd-resolved to check for the availability of DNS name resolution. Once this is implemented upstream, we re able to fully control the systemd-networkd backend on Ubuntu Server systems, to behave consistently and according to the definition of an online system that was lined out above.

Future work The story doesn t end there, because Ubuntu Desktop systems are using NetworkManager as their networking backend. This daemon provides its very own nm-online utility, utilized by the NetworkManager-wait-online systemd service. It implements a much higher-level approach, looking at the networking daemon in general instead of the individual network interfaces. By default, it considers a system to be online once every autoconnect profile got activated (or failed to activate), meaning that either a IPv4 or IPv6 address got assigned. There are considerable enhancements to be implemented to this tool, for it to be controllable in a fine-granular way similar to systemd-networkd-wait-online, so that it can be instructed to wait for specific networking states on selected interfaces.

A note of caution Making a service depend on network-online.target is considered an antipattern in most cases. This is because networking on Linux systems is very dynamic and the systemd target can only ever reflect the networking state at a single point in time. It cannot guarantee this state to be remained over the uptime of your system and has the potentially to delay the boot process considerably. Cables can be unplugged, wireless connectivity can drop, or remote routers can go down at any time, affecting the connectivity state of your local system. Therefore, instead of wondering what to do about network.target, please just fix your program to be friendly to dynamically changing network configuration. [source].

10 October 2024

Gunnar Wolf: Started a guide to writing FUSE filesystems in Python

As DebConf22 was coming to an end, in Kosovo, talking with Eeveelweezel they invited me to prepare a talk to give for the Chicago Python User Group. I replied that I m not really that much of a Python guy But would think about a topic. Two years passed. I meet Eeveelweezel again for DebConf24 in Busan, South Korea. And the topic came up again. I had thought of some ideas, but none really pleased me. Again, I do write some Python when needed, and I teach using Python, as it s the language I find my students can best cope with. But delivering a talk to ChiPy? On the other hand, I have long used a very simplistic and limited filesystem I ve designed as an implementation project at class: FIUnamFS (for Facultad de Ingenier a, Universidad Nacional Aut noma de M xico : the Engineering Faculty for Mexico s National University, where I teach. Sorry, the link is in Spanish but you will find several implementations of it from the students ). It is a toy filesystem, with as many bad characteristics you can think of, but easy to specify and implement. It is based on contiguous file allocation, has no support for sub-directories, and is often limited to the size of a 1.44MB floppy disk. As I give this filesystem as a project to my students (and not as a mere homework), I always ask them to try and provide a good, polished, professional interface, not just the simplistic menu I often get. And I tell them the best possible interface would be if they provide support for FIUnamFS transparently, usable by the user without thinking too much about it. With high probability, that would mean: Use FUSE.

But, in the six semesters I ve used this project (with 30-40 students per semester group), only one student has bitten the bullet and presented a FUSE implementation. Maybe this is because it s not easy to understand how to build a FUSE-based filesystem from a high-level language such as Python? Yes, I ve seen several implementation examples and even nice web pages (i.e. the examples shipped with thepython-fuse module Stavros passthrough filesystem, Dave Filesystem based upon, and further explaining, Stavros , and several others) explaining how to provide basic functionality. I found a particularly useful presentation by Matteo Bertozzi presented ~15 years ago at PyCon4 But none of those is IMO followable enough by itself. Also, most of them are very old (maybe the world is telling me something that I refuse to understand?). And of course, there isn t a single interface to work from. In Python only, we can find python-fuse, Pyfuse, Fusepy Where to start from? So I setup to try and help. Over the past couple of weeks, I have been slowly working on my own version, and presenting it as a progressive set of tasks, adding filesystem calls, and being careful to thoroughly document what I write (but maybe my documentation ends up obfuscating the intent? I hope not and, read on, I ve provided some remediation). I registered a GitLab project for a hand-holding guide to writing FUSE-based filesystems in Python. This is a project where I present several working FUSE filesystem implementations, some of them RAM-based, some passthrough-based, and I intend to add to this also filesystems backed on pseudo-block-devices (for implementations such as my FIUnamFS). So far, I have added five stepwise pieces, starting from the barest possible empty filesystem, and adding system calls (and functionality) until (so far) either a read-write filesystem in RAM with basicstat() support or a read-only passthrough filesystem. I think providing fun or useful examples is also a good way to get students to use what I m teaching, so I ve added some ideas I ve had: DNS Filesystem, on-the-fly markdown compiling filesystem, unzip filesystem and uncomment filesystem. They all provide something that could be seen as useful, in a way that s easy to teach, in just some tens of lines. And, in case my comments/documentation are too long to read, uncommentfs will happily strip all comments and whitespace automatically! So I will be delivering my talk tomorrow (2024.10.10, 18:30 GMT-6) at ChiPy (virtually). I am also presenting this talk virtually at Jornadas Regionales de Software Libre in Santa Fe, Argentina, next week (virtually as well). And also in November, in person, at nerdear.la, that will be held in Mexico City for the first time. Of course, I will also share this project with my students in the next couple of weeks And hope it manages to lure them into implementing FUSE in Python. At some point, I shall report! Update: After delivering my ChiPy talk, I have uploaded it to YouTube: A hand-holding guide to writing FUSE-based filesystems in Python, and after presenting at Jornadas Regionales, I present you the video in Spanish here: Aprendiendo y ense ando a escribir sistemas de archivo en espacio de usuario con FUSE y Python.

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Packaging Pydantic v2, Reworking of glib2.0 for cross bootstrap, Python archive rebuilds and more! (by Anupa Ann Joseph)

Debian Contributions: 2024-09 Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

Pydantic v2, by Colin Watson Pydantic is a useful library for validating data in Python using type hints: Freexian uses it in a number of projects, including Debusine. Its Debian packaging had been stalled at 1.10.17 in testing for some time, partly due to needing to make sure everything else could cope with the breaking changes introduced in 2.x, but mostly due to needing to sort out packaging of its new Rust dependencies. Several other people (notably Alexandre Detiste, Andreas Tille, Drew Parsons, and Timo R hling) had made some good progress on this, but nobody had quite got it over the line and it seemed a bit stuck. Colin upgraded a few Rust libraries to new upstream versions, packaged rust-jiter, and chased various failures in other packages. This eventually allowed getting current versions of both pydantic-core and pydantic into testing. It should now be much easier for us to stay up to date routinely.

Reworking of glib2.0 for cross bootstrap, by Helmut Grohne Simon McVittie (not affiliated with Freexian) earlier restructured the `libglib2.0-dev` such that it would absorb more functionality and in particular provide tools for working with `.gir` files. Those tools practically require being run for their host architecture (practically this means running under `qemu-user`) which is at odds with the requirements of architecture cross bootstrap. The `qemu` requirement was expressed in package dependencies and also made people unhappy attempting to use `libglib2.0-dev` for `i386` on `amd64` without resorting to `qemu`. The use of `qemu` in architecture bootstrap is particularly problematic as it tends to not be ready at the time bootstrapping is needed. As a result, Simon proposed and implemented the introduction of a `libgio-2.0-dev` package providing a subset of `libglib2.0-dev` that does not require `qemu`. Packages should continue to use `libglib2.0-dev` in their `Build-Depends` unless involved in architecture bootstrap. Helmut reviewed and tested the implementation and integrated the necessary changes into rebootstrap. He also prepared a patch for libverto to use the new package and proposed adding forward compatibility to glib2.0. Helmut continued working on adding cross-exe-wrapper to architecture-properties and implemented autopkgtests later improved by Simon. The `cross-exe-wrapper` package now provides a generic mechanism to a program on a different architecture by using `qemu` when needed only. For instance, a dependency on `cross-exe-wrapper:i386` provides a `i686-linux-gnu-cross-exe-wrapper` program that can be used to wrap an ELF executable for the `i386` architecture. When installed on `amd64` or `i386` it will skip installing or running `qemu`, but for other architectures `qemu` will be used automatically. This facility can be used to support cross building with targeted use of `qemu` in cases where running host code is unavoidable as is the case for GObject introspection. This concludes the joint work with Simon and Niels Thykier on `glib2.0` and `architecture-properties` resolving known architecture bootstrap regressions arising from the `glib2.0` refactoring earlier this year.

Analyzing binary package metadata, by Helmut Grohne As Guillem Jover (not affiliated with Freexian) continues to work on adding metadata tracking to `dpkg`, the question arises how this affects existing packages. The dedup.debian.net infrastructure provides an easy playground to answer such questions, so Helmut gathered file metadata from all binary packages in unstable and performed an explorative analysis. Some results include:

binutils-mipsen uses wrong file ownership

`/usr`-merge is not the only cause for aliasing problems in Debian.

mediawiki vs vistrails

bmake vs ros-mk

golang-github-eapache-go-resiliency-dev vs golang-gopkg-eapache-go-resiliency.v1-dev

node-markdown-it vs libjs-markdown-it

dokuwiki vs php-phpseclib

dokuwiki vs php-random-compat

Guillem also performed a cursory analysis and reported other problem categories such as mismatching directory permissions for directories installed by multiple packages and thus gained a better understanding of what consistency checks `dpkg` can enforce.

Python archive rebuilds, by Stefano Rivera Last month Stefano started to write some tooling to do large-scale rebuilds in debusine, starting with finding packages that had already started to fail to build from source (FTBFS) due to the removal of `setup.py test`. This month, Stefano did some more rebuilds, starting with experimental versions of `dh-python`. During the Python 3.12 transition, we had added a dependency on python3-setuptools to dh-python, to ease the transition. Python 3.12 removed distutils from the stdlib, but many packages were expecting it to still be available. Setuptools contains a version of distutils, and dh-python was a convenient place to depend on setuptools for most package builds. This dependency was never meant to be permanent. A rebuild without it resulted in mass-filing about 340 bugs (and around 80 more by mistake). A new feature in Python 3.12, was to have unittest s test runner exit with a non-zero return code, if no tests were run. We added this feature, to be able to detect tests that are not being discovered, by mistake. We are ignoring this failure, as we wouldn t want to suddenly cause hundreds of packages to fail to build, if they have no tests. Stefano did a rebuild to see how many packages were affected, and found that around 1000 were. The Debian Python community has not come to a conclusion on how to move forward with this. As soon as Python 3.13 release candidate 2 was available, Stefano did a rebuild of the Python packages in the archive against it. This was a more complex rebuild than the others, as it had to be done in stages. Many packages need other Python packages at build time, typically to run tests. So transitions like this involve some manual bootstrapping, followed by several rounds of builds. Not all packages could be tested, as not all their dependencies support 3.13 yet. The result was around 100 bugs in packages that need work to support Python 3.13. Many other packages will need additional work to properly support Python 3.13, but being able to build (and run tests) is an important first step.

Miscellaneous contributions

Carles prepared the update of python-pyaarlo package to a new upstream release.

Carles worked on updating python-ring-doorbell to a new upstream release. Unfinished, pending to package a new dependency python3-firebase-messaging RFP #1082958 and its dependency python3-http-ece RFP #1083020.

Carles improved po-debconf-manager. Main new feature is that it can open Salsa merge requests. Aiming for a lightning talk in MiniDebConf Toulouse (November) to be functional end to end and get feedback from the wider public for this proof of concept.

Carles helped one translator to use po-debconf-manager (added compatibility for bullseye, fixed other issues) and reviewed 17 package templates.

Colin upgraded the OpenSSH packaging to 9.9p1.

Colin upgraded the various YubiHSM packages to new upstream versions, enabled more tests, fixed yubihsm-shell build failures on some 32-bit architectures, made yubihsm-shell build reproducibly, and fixed yubihsm-connector to apply udev rules to existing devices when the package is installed. As usual, bookworm-backports is up to date with all these changes.

Colin fixed quite a bit of fallout from setuptools 72.0.0 removing `setup.py test`, backported a large upstream patch set to make buildbot work with SQLAlchemy 2.0, and upgraded 25 other Python packages to new upstream versions.

Enrico worked with Jakob Haufe to get him up to speed for managing sso.debian.org

Rapha l did remove spam entries in the list of teams on tracker.debian.org (see #1080446), and he applied a few external contributions, fixing a rendering issue and replacing the DDPO link with a more useful alternative. He also gave feedback on a couple of merge requests that required more work. As part of the analysis of the underlying problem, he suggested to the ftpmasters (via #1083068) to auto-reject packages having the too-many-contacts lintian error, and he raised the severity of #1076048 to serious to actually have that 4 year old bug fixed.

Rapha l uploaded zim and hamster-time-tracker to fix issues with Python 3.12 getting rid of setuptools. He also uploaded a new gnome-shell-extension-hamster to cope with the upcoming transition to GNOME 47.

Helmut sent seven patches and sponsored one upload for cross build failures.

Helmut uploaded a Nagios/Icinga plugin check-smart-attributes for monitoring the health of physical disks.

Helmut collaborated on `sbuild` reviewing and improving a MR for refactoring the unshare backend.

Helmut sent a patch fixing coinstallability of `gcc-defaults`.

Helmut continued to monitor the evolution of the `/usr`-move. With more and more key packages such as `libvirt` or `fuse3` fixed. We re moving into the boring long-tail of the transition.

Helmut proposed updating the meson buildsystem in debhelper to use env2mfile.

Helmut continued to update patches maintained in rebootstrap. Due to the work on `glib2.0` above, rebootstrap moves a lot further, but still fails for any architecture.

Santiago reviewed some Merge Request in Salsa CI, such as: !478, proposed by Otto to extend the information about how to use additional runners in the pipeline and !518, proposed by Ahmed to add support for Ubuntu images, that will help to test how some debian packages, including the complex MariaDB are built on Ubuntu. Santiago also prepared !545, which will make the reprotest job more consistent with the result seen on reproducible-builds.

Santiago worked on different tasks related to DebConf 25. Especially he drafted the fundraising brochure (which is almost ready).

Thorsten Alteholz uploaded package `libcupsfilter` to fix the autopkgtest and a dependency problem of this package. After package `splix` was abandoned by upstream and OpenPrinting.org adopted its maintenance, Thorsten uploaded their first release.

Anupa published posts on the Debian Administrators group in LinkedIn and moderated the group, one of the tasks of the Debian Publicity Team.

Anupa helped organize DebUtsav 2024. It had over 100 attendees with hand-on sessions on making initial contributions to Linux Kernel, Debian packaging, submitting documentation to Debian wiki and assisting Debian Installations.

1 October 2024

Guido G nther: Free Software Activities September 2024

Another short status update of what happened on my side last month. Besides the usual amount of housekeeping last month was a lot about getting old issues resolved by finishing some stale merge requests and work in pogress MRs. I also pushed out the Phosh 0.42.0 Release phosh

Mark mobile-data quick setting as insensitive when modem is off (MR)
Document handler naming (MR)
Phosh 0.41.1 (MR)
Phosh 0.42~rc1 (MR)
Phosh 0.42.0 (MR)
Handle per app notification enable setting (MR) (a 3y old MR cleaned up and out of the way)
Use parent's icon if child doesn't have one (MR (another 1y old MR moved out of draft status)
Fix Rust build and upcoming events .plugin file (MR)
Lint markdown (MR)
Sanitize versions as this otherwise breaks the libphosh-rs build (MR)
lockscreen: Swap deck and carousel to avoid triggering the plugins page when entering pin and let the lockscreen shrink to smaller sizes (MR) (two more year old usability issues out of the way)
Let bitfield values end up in the docs again (MR)
Don't focus incorrect app on launch (MR). This could happen with apps like calls that run a daemon (and needs more work for a clean solution).
Continue with wallpaper MR (MR) (still draft)
Brush up and land an old MR to avoid crashes on scale changes (MR). Another five month old MR out of the way.
API version the shared library (MR)
Ensure we send enough feedback when phone is blanked/locked (MR). This should be way easier now for apps as they don't need to do anything and we can avoid duplicate feedback sent from e.g. Chatty.
Fix possible use after free when activating notifications on the lock screen (MR)

phoc

Simplify layer-surface creation / destruction (MR)
Don't lose preedit when switching applications, opening menus, etc (MR). This fixes the case (e.g. with word completion in phosh-osk-stub enabled) where it looks to the user as if the last typed word would get lost when switching from a text editor to another app or when opening a menu
Ease focus debugging (MR)
Release 0.42~rc1 (MR)
Release 0.42.0 (MR)
Mention examples in docs and check more things (MR)

phosh-mobile-settings

Release 0.42~rc1 (MR)
Release 0.42 (MR)
Update ci-fairy (MR)

libphosh-rs

Update Phosh-0.gir with above phosh fixes to unbreak the build (MR)
Rework to work with API versioned libphosh (MR)

phosh-osk-stub

Add paste button to easy pasting text (MR)
Add copy button (draft) (MR)
Fix word salad with presage completer when entering cursor navigation mode (and in some other cases) (MR 1). Presage has the best completion but was marked experimental due to that.
Submit preedit on changes to terminal and emoji layout (MR)
Enable hint based completion by default (MR)
Release 0.42~r1 (MR)
Release 0.42.0 (MR)

phosh-wallpapers

Add sound for cellbroadcast (MR)
Release 0.42.0 (MR)

meta-phosh

Weekly image builds of nightly packages are now built in CI and uploaded.
Handle Fixes: tag in git commit messages as well (MR)
Let release prep handle non-RC versions as well (MR)
Add common markdown linter job (MR)

Debian

Update wlr-randr (MR)
Upload libqmi developement snapshot (MR) (Helps eSIM and CellBroadcast)
Update phosh to not crash with GSD from GNOME 47 (MR)
Fix systemd unit path in calls (MR)
Package wikietractor (MR)

ModemManager

More work on Cell Broadcast so we can finally undraft (MR)

Calls

Check consistency when building releases (MR
Object life cycle fixes (MR)
Use DBus activation (MR). This ensures it spawns quickly rather than phosh's splash screen timing out.

bluez

Add user unit for mpris proxy so it works out of the box (Patch) and one can skip e.g. songs in a cars media unit

gnome-text-editor

Wrap info-bar more (MR) to fit smalls screens
Forward metainfo/desktop file updates from Mobian (MR) (patch originally by Arnaud Ferraris)

feedbackd

Add udev rule to support haptic on Oneplus Fajita / Enchilada's (non-mailine driver) (MR)
Support alert-slider on OnePlus 6/6T (MR. Based on a script by "isyourbrain foss".
Release 0.5.0 (MR)
Improve spec a bit regarding notification events (MR)

Chatty

Don't send feedback for notifications (MR). The notification daemon does this already.
Add event for cellbroadcast messages (MR)
Switch to DBus activation (MR). This ensures the compositor sees the activation token and is will be useful for unified push.
Don't let scroll_down button take focus (MR). This prevents the OSK from folding when the text view is focused and ones scrolls to the bottom.
Use revealer to show/hide scroll_down button (MR) - just to make the visual more appealing
Unbreak messge display (MR)
Unbreak application icon (MR)
Drop special preedit handling (MR).

libcall-ui

Drop margin so we can fit on smaller screens (MR). This helps phosh on lower effective resolutions.
Backport margin patch (MR)

glib

Fix doc formatting for g_input_stream_read_all* (MR)

wlr-protocols

Add toplevel responsiveness state (MR) so phosh can inform about unresponsive apps

git-buildpackage

Modernize docs to use debian/latest instead of debian/sid (commit, commit).
Use pytest instead of nose as test runner (MR)
Release 0.9.35

iio-sensor-proxy

Unbreak and modernize CI a bit (MR). A passing CI is so much more motivating for contributers and reviewers.

Fotema

Fix app-id and hence the icon shown in Phosh's overview (MR)

Help Development If you want to support my work see donations. This includes a list of hardware we want to improve support for. Thanks a lot to all current and past donors.

15 September 2024

Raju Devidas: Setting a local test deployment of moinmoin wiki

~$ mkdir moin-test
~$ cd moin-test
~/d/moin-test python3 -m venv .                                00:04
~/d/moin-test ls                                        2.119s 00:04
bin/  include/  lib/  lib64@  pyvenv.cfg
~/d/moin-test source bin/activate.fish                         00:04
~/d/moin-test pip install --pre moin                 moin-test 00:04
Collecting moin
  Using cached moin-2.0.0b1-py3-none-any.whl.metadata (4.7 kB)
Collecting Babel>=2.10.0 (from moin)
  Using cached babel-2.16.0-py3-none-any.whl.metadata (1.5 kB)
Collecting blinker>=1.6.2 (from moin)
  Using cached blinker-1.8.2-py3-none-any.whl.metadata (1.6 kB)
Collecting docutils>=0.18.1 (from moin)
  Using cached docutils-0.21.2-py3-none-any.whl.metadata (2.8 kB)
Collecting Markdown>=3.4.1 (from moin)
  Using cached Markdown-3.7-py3-none-any.whl.metadata (7.0 kB)
Collecting mdx-wikilink-plus>=1.4.1 (from moin)
  Using cached mdx_wikilink_plus-1.4.1-py3-none-any.whl.metadata (6.6 kB)
Collecting Flask>=3.0.0 (from moin)
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Successfully installed Babel-2.16.0 Flask-3.0.3 Flask-Babel-4.0.0 Flask-Caching-2.3.0 Flask-Theme-0.3.6 Jinja2-3.1.4 Markdown-3.7 Werkzeug-3.0.4 XStatic-1.0.3 XStatic-Bootstrap-3.1.1.2 XStatic-CKEditor-3.6.4.0 XStatic-Font-Awesome-6.2.1.1 XStatic-JQuery.TableSorter-2.14.5.2 XStatic-Pygments-2.9.0.1 XStatic-autosize-1.17.2.1 XStatic-jQuery-3.5.1.1 XStatic-jQuery-File-Upload-10.31.0.1 XStatic-svg-edit-moin-2012.11.27.1 blinker-1.8.2 cachelib-0.9.0 cffi-1.17.1 charset-normalizer-3.3.2 click-8.1.7 cryptography-43.0.1 docutils-0.21.2 emeraldtree-0.11.0 feedgen-1.0.0 flatland-0.9.1 greenlet-3.1.0 itsdangerous-2.2.0 lxml-5.3.0 markupsafe-2.1.5 mdx-wikilink-plus-1.4.1 moin-2.0.0b1 passlib-1.7.4 pdfminer.six-20240706 pycparser-2.22 pygments-2.18.0 python-dateutil-2.9.0.post0 pytz-2024.2 six-1.16.0 sqlalchemy-2.0.34 typing-extensions-4.12.2 whoosh-2.7.4
~/d/moin-test[1] pip install setuptools       moin-test 0.241s 00:06
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~/d/moin-test moin create-instance --full     moin-test 1.457s 00:06
2024-09-16 00:06:36,812 INFO moin.cli.maint.create_instance:76 Directory /home/raj/dev/moin-test already exists, using as wikiconfig dir.
2024-09-16 00:06:36,813 INFO moin.cli.maint.create_instance:93 Instance creation finished.
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~/d/moin-test ls                             moin-test 15.295s 00:06
bin/      intermap.txt  lib64@      wiki/        wikiconfig.py
include/  lib/          pyvenv.cfg  wiki_local/
~/d/moin-test MOINCFG=wikiconfig.py                  moin-test 00:07
fish: Unsupported use of &apos=&apos. In fish, please use &aposset MOINCFG wikiconfig.py&apos.
~/d/moin-test[123] set MOINCFG wikiconfig.py         moin-test 00:07
~/d/moin-test[123] moin account-create --name test --email test@test.tld --password test123
Password not acceptable: For a password a minimum length of 8 characters is required.
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~/d/moin-test moin account-create --name test --email test@test.tld --password this-is-a-password
2024-09-16 00:08:43,798 INFO moin.cli.account.create:49 User c3608cafec184bd6a7a1d69d83109ad0 [&apostest&apos] test@test.tld - created.
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~/d/moin-test moin run --host 0.0.0.0 --port 5000 --no-debugger --no-reload
 * Debug mode: off
2024-09-16 00:09:26,146 INFO werkzeug:97 WARNING: This is a development server. Do not use it in a production deployment. Use a production WSGI server instead.
 * Running on all addresses (0.0.0.0)
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 * Running on http://192.168.1.2:5000
2024-09-16 00:09:26,146 INFO werkzeug:97 Press CTRL+C to quit

16 August 2024

Antoine Beaupr : Why I should be running Debian unstable right now

So a common theme on the Internet about Debian is so old. And right, I am getting close to the stage that I feel a little laggy: I am using a bunch of backports for packages I need, and I'm missing a bunch of other packages that just landed in unstable and didn't make it to backports for various reasons. I disagree that "old" is a bad thing: we definitely run Debian stable on a fleet of about 100 servers and can barely keep up, I would make it older. And "old" is a good thing: (port) wine and (any) beer needs time to age properly, and so do humans, although some humans never seem to grow old enough to find wisdom. But at this point, on my laptop, I am feeling like I'm missing out. This page, therefore, is an evolving document that is a twist on the classic NewIn game. Last time I played seems to be #newinwheezy (2013!), so really, I'm due for an update. (To be fair to myself, I do keep tabs on upgrades quite well at home and work, which do have their share of "new in", just after the fact.)

New packages to explore Those tools are shiny new things available in unstable or perhaps Trixie (testing) already that I am not using yet, but I find interesting enough to list here.

backdown: clever file deduplicator

codesearch: search all of Debian's source code (tens of thousands of packages) from the commandline! (see also dcs-cli, not in Debian)

dasel: JSON/YML/XML/CSV parser, similar to jq, but different syntax, not sure I'd grow into it, but often need to parse YML like JSON and failing

fyi: notify-send replacement

git-subrepo: git-submodule replacement I am considering

gtklock: swaylock replacement with bells and whistles, particularly interested in showing time, battery and so on

hyprland: possible Sway replacement, but there are rumors of a toxic community (rebuttal, I haven't reviewed either in detail), so approach carefully)

kooha: simple screen recorder with audio support, currently using `wf-recorder` which is a more.. minimalist option

linescroll: rate graphs on live logs, mostly useful on servers though

ruff: faster Python formatter and linter, flake8/black/isort replacement, alas not mypy/LSP unfortunately, designed to be ran alongside such a tool, which is not possible in Emacs eglot right now, but is possible in lsp-mode

sfwbar: pretty status bar, may replace waybar, which i am somewhat unhappy with (my UTC clock disappears randomly)

spytrap-adb: cool spy gear

New packages I won't use Those are packages that I have tested because I found them interesting, but ended up not using, but I think people could find interesting anyways.

kew: surprisingly fast music player, parsed my entire library (which is huge) instantaneously and just started playing (I still use Supersonic, for which I maintain a flatpak on my Navidrome server)

mdformat: good markdown formatter, think `black` or `gofmt` but for markdown), but it didn't actually do what I needed, and it's not quite as opinionated as it should (or could) be)

Backports already in use Those are packages I already use regularly, which have backports or that can just be installed from unstable:

asn: IP address forensics

markdownlint: markdown linter, I use that a lot

poweralertd: pops up "your battery is almost empty" messages

sway-notification-center: used as part of my status bar, yet another status bar basically, a little noisy, stuck in a libc dep update

tailspin: used to color logs

Out of date packages Those are packages that are in Debian stable (Bookworm) already, but that are somewhat lacking and could benefit from an upgrade.

firmware-iwlwifi: out of date, can install from unstable

fuzzel / foot: log level noises A, B, fuzzel fix not in debian yet, and if we get to 1.11, my scripts in `~/bin` should be patched to use `--cache`

nomacs: non-trivial backport, out of date version in sid

pandoc: 3.0 is ridiculously huge, but particularly remove spaces after list marker

podman: better systemd integration

pubpaste: out of date, can install from unstable

tremotesf: out of date backport

undertime: out of date, can install from unstable

yt-dlp: out of date, can install from unstable

Last words If you know of cool things I'm missing out of, then by all means let me know! That said, overall, this is a pretty short list! I have most of what I need in stable right now, and if I wasn't a Debian developer, I don't think I'd be doing the jump now. But considering how easier it is to develop Debian (and how important it is to test the next release!), I'll probably upgrade soon. Previously, I was running Debian testing (which why the slug on that article is `why-trixie`), but now I'm actually considering just running unstable on my laptop directly anyways. It's been a long time since we had any significant instability there, and I can typically deal with whatever happens, except maybe when I'm traveling, and then it's easy to prepare for that (just pin testing).

14 August 2024

Lukas M rdian: Netplan v1.1 released

I m happy to announce that Netplan version 1.1 is now available on GitHub and is soon to be deployed into a Debian and/or Ubuntu installation near you! Six months and 120 commits after the previous version (including one patch release v1.0.1), this release is brought to you by 17 free software contributors from around the globe.

Kudos to everybody involved!

Highlights

Custom `systemd-networkd-wait-online` logic override to wait for link-local and routable interfaces. (#456, #482)

Modification of the `embedded-switch-mode` setting without virtual-function (VF) definitions on SR-IOV devices (#454)

Parser flag to ignore individual, broken configurations, instead of not generating any backend configuration (#412)

Fixes for @ProtonVPN (#495) and @microsoft Azure Linux (#445), contributed by those companies

Releasing v1.1

CI: adopt autopkgtest for 1.0-1 on 22.04 by @slyon in #446

tools/keyfile_to_yaml: display the generated YAML by @daniloegea in #452

tests: import the config fuzzing tests by @daniloegea in #453

ATTN: parse/bonds: handle same primary in multiple bonds by @daniloegea in #451

sriov: accept setting the eswitch mode without VFs (LP#2020409) by @daniloegea in #454

Custom systemd-networkd-wait-online override to wait on interfaces. (Closes: #1008995) (LP#2060311) by @slyon in #456

Ignore bad NetDefs and files via parser flags by @daniloegea in #412

networkd:apply: Drop handling of legacy wpa@ instance units by @slyon in #471

migrate: support aliases by @Kristof0127 in #473

networkd: add ipv6 ra overrides (LP#1973222) by @KhooHaoYit in #461

netplan status diff fixes and improvements by @daniloegea in #466

apply: make sure that networkd is restarted when needed by @alfonsosanchezbeato in #449

Don t escape certain non-ascii characters by @daniloegea in #486

networkd: make s-n-wait-online wait for at least one routable interface by @slyon in #482

networkd: Implement ipv6-address-generation: stable-privacy by @tatokis in #480

Implementing advmss ip route option by @barvius in #489

meson: Add testing option by @slyon in #493

Add a scheduled workflow to run TICS by @daniloegea in #498

ci: migrate to Ubuntu 24.04 by @daniloegea in #465

Prepare Netplan v1.1 by @slyon in #504

Documentation

Fix wrong syntax in example by @fzakfeld in #459

Tutorial improvements by @rkratky in #458

added guide for contributing to the netplan documentation by @ade555 in #457

Add initial SECURITY.md policy by @slyon in #478

Create single-nic-vm-host.md by @ilvipero in #475

Create single-nic-vm-host-with-vlans.md by @ilvipero in #476

Create multi-nic-vm-host-with-bonds-and-vlans.md by @ilvipero in #477

bullet point removal by @shirleyherox in #483

Add netplan try to netplan tutorial by @davidekete in #494

Update the docs checks runner to ubuntu-latest by @rkratky in #500

Add spelling exceptions by @rkratky in #499

Bug fixes

Fix logging setup when python-rich is not present by @frhuelsz in #445

parse-nm: add a workaround for the DoT DNS option (LP#2055148) by @daniloegea in #447

parse: don t remove datalist items during iteration by @daniloegea in #450

parse: fix redefinition of gateway(4 6) by @daniloegea in #460

python: elements of all must be strings by @daniloegea in #464

CI: Fix DebCI check, using newer meson from unstable by @slyon in #467

tests: fix diff test with iproute2 6.8 by @daniloegea in #469

cli/generate: skip daemon_reload with mapping by @daniloegea in #470

CI: fork spread to get snapcore/spread#179 fixes by @slyon in #472

ctests: fix a memory leak in a unit test by @daniloegea in #474

nm/nd: fix a couple of crashes by @daniloegea in #468

test:integration: Try to improve test flakyness (Closes: #1069871) by @slyon in #481

Security fixes (CVE-2022-4968) by @daniloegea in #484

emitter: allow unicode characters in the emitter (LP#2071652) by @daniloegea in #485

CLI:apply: call udevadm trigger, using action=move (Closes: #1071220) (LP#2066344, LP#2071363) by @slyon in #479

CI: fix CodeQL permissions by @slyon in #491

ci: run meson tests with unbuffer by @daniloegea in #501

ci/tics: install expect as a dependency by @daniloegea in #502

generate: avoid calling udevadm control reload (LP#1999178) by @slyon in #488

netplan ignores NetworkManager ipv4.route-metric (LP#2076172) by @calexandru2018 in #495

Change default umask when creating dirctories (LP#2076319) by @rmalz-c in #497

New Contributors

@frhuelsz made their first contribution in #445

@fzakfeld made their first contribution in #459

@Kristof0127 made their first contribution in #473

@ade555 made their first contribution in #457

@KhooHaoYit made their first contribution in #461

@ilvipero made their first contribution in #475

@shirleyherox made their first contribution in #483

@tatokis made their first contribution in #480

@barvius made their first contribution in #489

@davidekete made their first contribution in #494

@calexandru2018 made their first contribution in #495

@rmalz-c made their first contribution in #497

Full Changelog: 1.0 1.1

22 July 2024

Martin-Éric Racine: dhcpcd replacing dhclient for Trixie... or perhaps networkd?

My work on overhauling dhcpcd as the prime replacement for ISC's discontinued DHCP client is done. The package has achieved stability, both upstream and at Debian. The only remaining points are bug #1038882 to swap the Priorities of isc-dhcp-client and dhcpcd-base in the repository's override, and swaping ifupdown's search order to put dhcpcd first. Meanwhile, ifupdown's de-facto maintainer prompted me to sollicit opinions on which of the 4 ifupdown implementations should ship with a minimal installation for Trixie. This, in turn, re-opened the debate of what should be Debian's default network configuation framework (see the thread starting with this post). networkd Given how most Debian ports (except for Hurd) ship with systemd, which includes a disabled networkd by standard, many people in the thread feel that this should become the default network configuration tool for minimal installations. As it happens, most of my hosts fit that scenario, so I figured that I would give another go at testing networkd on one host. I used the following minimalistic /etc/systemd/network/dhcp.network:

[Match]
Name=en* wl*
[Network]
DHCP=yes

This correctly configured IPv4 via DHCP, with the small caveat that it doesn't update /etc/resolv.conf without installing resolvconf or systemd-resolved. However, networkd's default IPv6 settings really are not suitable for public consumption. The key issues (see Bug #1076432):

Temporary addresses are not enabled by default. Worse, the setting is ignored if it was enabled by sysctl during bootup. This is a major privacy issue. Adding IPv6PrivacyExtensions=yes to the above exposed another issue: instead of using the fe80 address generated by the kernel, networkd adds a new one.
Networkd uses EUI64 addresses by default. This is another major privacy issue, since EUI64 addresses are forensically traceable to the interface's MAC address. Worse, the setting is ignored if stable-privacy was enabled by sysctl during bootup. To top it all, networkd does stable-privacy using systemd's time-proven brain-dead approach of reinventing the wheel: instead of merely setting the kernel's address generation mode to 3 and letting it configure the secret address, it expects the secret address to be spelled out in the systemd unit.

Conclusion: networkd works well enough for someone configuring an IPv4-only network from 20 years ago, but is utterly inadequate for IPv6 or dual-stack installations, doubly so on a software distribution that claims to care about privacy and network security.

8 July 2024

Russ Allbery: rra-c-util 11.0.0

rra-c-util is my collection of utility and test functions that I keep synchronized between my packages. The big change in this release is that I've switched to semantic versions, which I plan to do for all of my packages, and I've started using scriv to manage a Markdown change log. We've been using scriv for a while at work, so I have finally gotten on board the change log fragment train rather than assuming linear commits. This release also raises the minimum Perl version for all of the Perl support code to 5.12 so that I can use semantic versions for all modules, and updates the perltidy configuration with lots of improvements from Julien LIE. There are also the normal variaty of bug fixes and more minor improvements. You can get the latest version from the rra-c-util distribution page.

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