Search Results: "ed"

21 March 2017

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: week 99 in Stretch cycle

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday March 12 and Saturday March 18 2017: Upcoming events Reproducible Builds Hackathon Hamburg 2017 The Reproducible Builds Hamburg Hackathon 2017, or RB-HH-2017 for short is a 3 day hacking event taking place May 5th-7th in the CCC Hamburg Hackerspace located inside Frappant, as collective art space located in a historical monument in Hamburg, Germany. The aim of the hackathon is to spent some days working on Reproducible Builds in every distribution and project. The event is open to anybody interested on working on Reproducible Builds issues, with or without prior experience! Accomodation is available and travel sponsorship may be available by agreement. Please register your interest as soon as possible. Reproducible Builds Summit Berlin 2016 This is just a quick note, that all the pads we've written during the Berlin summit in December 2016 are now online (thanks to Holger), nicely complementing the report by Aspiration Tech. Request For Comments for new specification: BUILD_PATH_PREFIX_MAP Ximin Luo posted a draft version of our BUILD_PATH_PREFIX_MAP specification for passing build-time paths between high-level and low-level build tools. This is meant to help eliminate irreproducibility caused by different paths being used at build time. At the time of writing, this affects an estimated 15-20% of 25000 Debian packages. This is a continuation of an older proposal SOURCE_PREFIX_MAP, which has been updated based on feedback on our patches from GCC upstream, attendees of our Berlin 2016 summit, and participants on our mailing list. Thanks to everyone that contributed! The specification also contains runnable source code examples and test cases; see our git repo. Please comment on this draft ASAP - we plan to release version 1.0 of this in a few weeks. Toolchain changes Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed Chris Lamb: Reviews of unreproducible packages 5 package reviews have been added, 274 have been updated and 800 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 1 issue type has been added: Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by: diffoscope development diffoscope 79 and 80 were uploaded to experimental by Chris Lamb. It included contributions from: Chris Lamb: Maria Glukhova: strip-nondeterminism development strip-nondeterminism 0.032-1 was uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb. It included contributions from: Chris Lamb: tests.reproducible-builds.org Misc. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Holger Levsen and Chris Lamb & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

Tanguy Ortolo: Bad support of ZIP archives with extra fields

For sharing multiple files, it is often convenient to pack them into an archive, and the most widely supported format to do so is probably ZIP. Under *nix, you can archive a directory with Info-ZIP: 
% zip -r something.zip something/
(When you have several files, it is recommended to archive them in a directory, to avoid cluttering the directory where people will extract them.)Unsupported ZIP archive Unfortunately, while we would expect ZIP files to be widely supported, I found out that this is not always the case, and I had many recipients failing to open them under operating systems such as iOS. Avoid extra fields That issue seems to be linked to the usage of extra file attributes, that are enabled by default, in order to store Unix file metadata. The field designed to store such extra attributes was designed from the beginning so each implementation can take into account attributes it supports and ignore any other ones, but some buggy ZIP implementation appear not to function at all with them. Therefore, unless you actually need to preserve Unix file metadata, you should avoid using extra fields. With Info-ZIP, you would have to add the option -X: 
% zip -rX something.zip something/

20 March 2017

Matthew Garrett: Buying a Utah teapot

The Utah teapot was one of the early 3D reference objects. It's canonically a Melitta but hasn't been part of their range in a long time, so I'd been watching Ebay in the hope of one turning up. Until last week, when I discovered that a company called Friesland had apparently bought a chunk of Melitta's range some years ago and sell the original teapot[1]. I've just ordered one, and am utterly unreasonably excited about this.

Update: Friesland have apparently always produced the Utah teapot, but were part of the Melitta group for some time - they didn't buy the range from Melitta.

[1] They have them in 0.35, 0.85 and 1.4 litre sizes. I believe (based on the measurements here) that the 1.4 litre one matches the Utah teapot.

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Shirish Agarwal: Tale of two countries, India and Canada

Apologies the first blog post got sent out by mistake. Weather comparisons between the two countries Last year, I had come to know that this year s debconf is happening in Canada, a cold country. Hence, few weeks/month back, I started trying to find information online when I stumbled across few discussion boards where people were discussing about Innerwear and Outerwear and I couldn t understand what that was all about. Then somehow stumbled across this Video, which is of a game called the Long Dark and just seeing couple of episodes it became pretty clear to me why the people there were obsessing with getting the right clothes and everything about it. Couple of Debconf people were talking about the weather in Montreal, and surprise, surprise it was snowing there, in fact supposed to be near the storm of the century. Was amazed to see that they have a website to track how much snow has been lifted. If we compare that to Pune, India weather-wise we are polar opposites. There used to be a time, when I was very young, maybe 5 yrs. old that once the weather went above 30 degree celsius, rains would fall, but now its gonna touch 40 degrees soon. And April and May, the two hottest months are yet to come. China Gate Before I venture further, I was gifted the book China Gate written by an author named William Arnold. When I read the cover and the back cover, it seemed the story was set between China and Taiwan, later when I started reading it, it shares history of Taiwan going back 200 or so odd years. This became relevant as next year s Debconf, Debconf 2018 will be in Taiwan, yes in Asia very much near to India. I am ashamed to say that except for the Tiananmen Square Massacre and the Chinese High-Speed Rail there wasn t much that I knew. According to the book, and I m paraphrasing here the gist I got was that for a long time, the Americans promised Taiwan it will be an Independent country forever, but due to budgetary and other political constraints, the United States took the same stand as China from 1979. Interestingly, now it seems Mr. Trump wants to again recognize Taiwan as a separate entity from China itself but as is with Mr. Trump you can t be sure of why he does, what he does. Is it just a manoeuvrer designed to out-smart the chinese and have a trade war or something else, only time will tell. One thing which hasn t been shared in the book but came to know via web is that Taiwan calls itself Republic of China . If Taiwan wants to be independent then why the name Republic of China ? Doesn t that strengthen China s claim that Taiwan is an integral part of China. I don t understand it. The book does seduce you into thinking that the events are happening in real-time, as in happening now. That s enough OT for now. null Population Density As well in the game and whatever I could find on the web, Canada seems to be on the lower side as far as population is concerned. IIRC, few years back, Canadians invited Indian farmers and gave them large land-holdings for over 100 years on some small pittance. While the link I have shared is from 2006, I read it online and in newspapers even as late as in 2013/2014. The point being there seems to be lot of open spaces in Canada, whereas in India we fight for even one inch literally, due to overpopulation. This sharing reminded me of Mark of Gideon . While I was young, I didn t understand the political meaning of it and still struggle to understand about whom the show was talking about. Was it India, Africa or some other continent they were talking about ? This also becomes obvious when you figure out the surface area of the two countries. When I had started to learn about Canada, I had no idea, nor a clue that Canada is three times the size of India. And this is when I know India is a large country. but seeing that Canada is thrice larger just boggled my mind. As a typical urbanite, would probably become mad if in a rural area in Canada. Montreal, however seems to be something like Gwalior or Bangalore before IT stormed in, seems to be a place where people can work, play and have quite a few gardens as well. Rail This is one thing that is similar in both the great countries. India has Indian Railways and while the Canadians have their own mountain railway called viarail. India chugs on its 68k kilometre network, Canada is at fourth position with 52k network. With thrice the land size, it should have been somewhere where Russia is or even better than them. It would be interesting if a Canadian/s comment about their railway network and why it is so bad in terms of reach. As far as food is concerned, somebody shared this Also, have no idea if Canadian trains are as entertaining as Indian ones, in terms of diverse group of people as well as variety of food to eat as also shared a bit in the video. I am not aware whether Via Rail is the only network operator and there are other network operators unlike Indian Railways which has monopoly on most of the operations. Countries which have first past the post system - Wikipedia Business houses, Political Families This is again something that is similar in both the countries, it seems (from afar) that its only few business houses and more importantly political families which have governed for years. From what little I could understand, both India and Canada have first past the post system which as shared by its critics is unfair to new and small parties. It would be interesting to see if Canada does a re-think. For India, it would need a massive public education outreach policy and implementation. We just had elections in 5 states of India with U.P. (with respect to area-size and population density) and from the last several years, the EVM s (Electronic Voting Machines) tries to make sure that nobody could know which area which party got the most votes. This is to make sure the winning party is not able to take revenge on people or areas which did not vote for them. Instead you have general region counting of votes with probably even the Election Commission not knowing which EVM went to what area and what results are there in sort of double-blind methodology. As far as Business houses are concerned, I am guessing it s the same world-over, only certain people hold the wealth while majority of us are in hard-working, non-wealthy status. Northern Lights - Aurora Borealis Northern Lights, Aurora Borealis Apart from all the social activities that Montreal is famous for, somebody told/shared with me that it is possible to see the Northern Lights, Aurora Borealis can be seen in Canada. I dunno how true or not it is, while probably in Montreal it isn t possible to see due to light pollution, but maybe around 40-50 kms. from the city ? Can people see it from Canada ? IF yes, how far would you have to go ? Are there any companies or people who take people to see the Northern Lights. While I still have to apply for bursary, and if that gets ok, then try getting the visa, but if that goes through, apart from debconf and social activities happening in and around Montreal, Museums, Music etc. , this would be something I would like to experience if it s possible. While I certainly would have to be prepared for the cold that would be, if it s possible, no offence to debconf or anybody else but it probably would be the highlight of the entire trip if its possible. This should be called/labelled as the greatest show on earth TM.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: # Population Density, #Area size, #Aurora Borealis, #Canada, #Trains, DebConf, India, politics

Shirish Agarwal: Canada and India, similarities and differences.

Weather comparisons between the two countries Few days/weeks back, I had come to know that Canada, where this year s debconf is happening is cold country. I started trying to find information online when I stumbled across few boards where people were discussing about innerwear and outerwear and I couldn t understand what that was all about. Then somehow stumbled across this game, it s called the Long Dark and just seeing couple of episodes it became pretty clear to me why the people there were obsessing with getting the right clothes and everything about it. Couple of Debconf people were talking about weather in Montreal, and surprise, surprise it was snowing there, in fact supposed to be near the storm of the century. Was amazed to see that they have a website to track how much snow has been lifted. If we compare that to Pune, India weather-wise we are polar opposites. There used to be a time, when I was very young, maybe 5 yrs. old that once the weather went above 30 degree celcius, rains would fall, but now its gonna touch 40 degrees soon. And April and May, the two hottest months are yet to come. China Gate Before I venture further, I was gifted the book China Gate written by an author named William Arnold. When I read the cover and the backcover, it seemed the story was set between China and Taiwan, later when I started reading it, it shares history of Taiwan going back 200 or so odd years. This became relevant as next year s Debconf, Debconf 2018 will be in Taiwan, yes in Asia very much near to India. I am ashamed to say that except for the Tiananmen Square Massacre and the Chinese High-Speed Rail there wasn t much that I knew. According to the book, and I m paraphrasing here the gist I got was that for a long time, the Americans promised Taiwan it will be an Independent country forever, but due to budgetary and other political constraints, the United States took the same stand as China from 1979 and now it seems Mr. Trump wants to again recognize Taiwan as a separate entity from China itself. One thing which hasn t been shared in the book but came to know via web is that Taiwan calls itself Republic of China . If Taiwan wants to be independent then why the name Republic of China ? Doesn t that strengthen China s claim that Taiwan is an integral part of China. I don t understand it. The book does seduce you into thinking that the events are happening in real-time, as in happening now. That s enough OT for now. null Population Density As well in the game and whatever I could find on the web, Canada seems to be on the lower side as far as population is concerned. IIRC, few years back, Canadians invited Indian farmers and gave them large land-holdings for over 100 years on some small pittance. While the link I have shared is from 2006, I read it online and in newspapers even as late as in 2013/2014. The point being there seems to be lot of open spaces in Canada, whereas in India we fight for even one inch literally, due to overpopulation. This sharing reminded me of Mark of Gideon . While I was young, I didn t understand the political meaning of it and still struggle to understand about whom the show was talking about. Was it India, Africa or some other continent they were talking about ? This also becomes obvious when you figure out the surface area of the two countries. When I had started to learn about Canada, I had no idea, nor a clue that Canada is three times the size of India. And this is when I know India is a large country. but seeing that Canada is thrice larger just boggled my mind. As a typical urbanite, would probably become mad if in a rural area in Canada. Montreal, however seems to be something like Gwalior or Bangalore before IT stormed in, seems to be a place where people can work, play and have quite a few gardens as well. Rail This is one thing that is similar in both the great countries. India has Indian Railways and while the Canadians have their own mountain railway called viarail. India chugs on its 68k kilometre network, Canada is at fourth position with 52k network. With thrice the land size, it should have been somewhere where Russia is or even better than them. It would be interesting if Canadians comment about their railway network and why it is so bad in terms of reach. Business houses, Political Families This is again something that is similar in both the countries, it seems (from afar) that its only few business houses and more importantly political families which have governed for years.
Filed under: Miscellenous

Bits from Debian: DebConf17 welcomes its first eighteen sponsors!

DebConf17 logo DebConf17 will take place in Montreal, Canada in August 2017. We are working hard to provide fuel for hearts and minds, to make this conference once again a fertile soil for the Debian Project flourishing. Please join us and support this landmark in the Free Software calendar. Eighteen companies have already committed to sponsor DebConf17! With a warm welcome, we'd like to introduce them to you. Our first Platinum sponsor is Savoir-faire Linux, a Montreal-based Free/Open-Source Software company which offers Linux and Free Software integration solutions and actively contributes to many free software projects. "We believe that it's an essential piece [Debian], in a social and political way, to the freedom of users using modern technological systems", said Cyrille B raud, president of Savoir-faire Linux. Our first Gold sponsor is Valve, a company developing games, social entertainment platform, and game engine technologies. And our second Gold sponsor is Collabora, which offers a comprehensive range of services to help its clients to navigate the ever-evolving world of Open Source. As Silver sponsors we have credativ (a service-oriented company focusing on open-source software and also a Debian development partner), Mojatatu Networks (a Canadian company developing Software Defined Networking (SDN) solutions), the Bern University of Applied Sciences (with over 6,600 students enrolled, located in the Swiss capital), Microsoft (an American multinational technology company), Evolix (an IT managed services and support company located in Montreal), Ubuntu (the OS supported by Canonical) and Roche (a major international pharmaceutical provider and research company dedicated to personalized healthcare). ISG.EE, IBM, Bluemosh, Univention and Skroutz are our Bronze sponsors so far. And finally, The Linux foundation, R seau Koumbit and adte.ca are our supporter sponsors. Become a sponsor too! Would you like to become a sponsor? Do you know of or work in a company or organization that may consider sponsorship? Please have a look at our sponsorship brochure (or a summarized flyer), in which we outline all the details and describe the sponsor benefits. For further details, feel free to contact us through sponsors@debconf.org, and visit the DebConf17 website at https://debconf17.debconf.org.

19 March 2017

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp 0.12.10: Some small fixes

The tenth update in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp just made it to the main CRAN repository providing GNU R with by now over 10,000 packages. Windows binaries for Rcpp, as well as updated Debian packages will follow in due course. This 0.12.10 release follows the 0.12.0 release from late July, the 0.12.1 release in September, the 0.12.2 release in November, the 0.12.3 release in January, the 0.12.4 release in March, the 0.12.5 release in May, the 0.12.6 release in July, the 0.12.7 release in September, the 0.12.8 release in November, and the 0.12.9 release in January --- making it the fourteenth release at the steady and predictable bi-montly release frequency. Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing GNU R with C or C++ code. As of today, 975 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further. That is up by sixtynine packages over the two months since the last release -- or just over a package a day! The changes in this release are almost exclusively minor bugfixes and enhancements to documentation and features: James "coatless" Balamuta rounded out the API, I aki Ucar fixed a bug concerning one-character output, Jeroen Ooms allowed for finalizers on XPtr objects, Nathan Russell corrected handling of lower (upper) triangular matrices, Dan Dillon and I dealt with Intel compiler quirks for his algorithm.h header, and I added a C++17 plugin along with some (overdue!) documentation regarding the various C++ standards that are supported by Rcpp (which is in essence whatever your compiler supports, i.e., C++98, C++11, C++14 all the way to C++17 but always keep in mind what CRAN and different users may deploy).

Changes in Rcpp version 0.12.10 (2017-03-17)
  • Changes in Rcpp API:
    • Added new size attribute aliases for number of rows and columns in DataFrame (James Balamuta in #638 addressing #630).
    • Fixed single-character handling in Rstreambuf (I aki Ucar in #649 addressing #647).
    • XPtr gains a parameter finalizeOnExit to enable running the finalizer when R quits (Jeroen Ooms in #656 addressing #655).
  • Changes in Rcpp Sugar:
    • Fixed sugar functions upper_tri() and lower_tri() (Nathan Russell in #642 addressing #641).
    • The algorithm.h file now accomodates the Intel compiler (Dirk in #643 and Dan in #645 addressing issue #640).
  • Changes in Rcpp Attributes
    • The C++17 standard is supported with a new plugin (used eg for g++-6.2).
  • Changes in Rcpp Documentation:
    • An overdue explanation of how C++11, C++14, and C++17 can be used was added to the Rcpp FAQ.

Thanks to CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release. As always, even fuller details are on the Rcpp Changelog page and the Rcpp page which also leads to the downloads page, the browseable doxygen docs and zip files of doxygen output for the standard formats. A local directory has source and documentation too. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

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

Petter Reinholdtsen: Free software archive system Nikita now able to store documents

The Nikita Noark 5 core project is implementing the Norwegian standard for keeping an electronic archive of government documents. The Noark 5 standard document the requirement for data systems used by the archives in the Norwegian government, and the Noark 5 web interface specification document a REST web service for storing, searching and retrieving documents and metadata in such archive. I've been involved in the project since a few weeks before Christmas, when the Norwegian Unix User Group announced it supported the project. I believe this is an important project, and hope it can make it possible for the government archives in the future to use free software to keep the archives we citizens depend on. But as I do not hold such archive myself, personally my first use case is to store and analyse public mail journal metadata published from the government. I find it useful to have a clear use case in mind when developing, to make sure the system scratches one of my itches. If you would like to help make sure there is a free software alternatives for the archives, please join our IRC channel (#nikita on irc.freenode.net) and the project mailing list. When I got involved, the web service could store metadata about documents. But a few weeks ago, a new milestone was reached when it became possible to store full text documents too. Yesterday, I completed an implementation of a command line tool archive-pdf to upload a PDF file to the archive using this API. The tool is very simple at the moment, and find existing fonds, series and files while asking the user to select which one to use if more than one exist. Once a file is identified, the PDF is associated with the file and uploaded, using the title extracted from the PDF itself. The process is fairly similar to visiting the archive, opening a cabinet, locating a file and storing a piece of paper in the archive. Here is a test run directly after populating the database with test data using our API tester: 
~/src//noark5-tester$ ./archive-pdf mangelmelding/mangler.pdf
using arkiv: Title of the test fonds created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
using arkivdel: Title of the test series created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
 0 - Title of the test case file created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
 1 - Title of the test file created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
Select which mappe you want (or search term): 0
Uploading mangelmelding/mangler.pdf
  PDF title: Mangler i spesifikasjonsdokumentet for NOARK 5 Tjenestegrensesnitt
  File 2017/1: Title of the test case file created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
~/src//noark5-tester$
You can see here how the fonds (arkiv) and serie (arkivdel) only had one option, while the user need to choose which file (mappe) to use among the two created by the API tester. The archive-pdf tool can be found in the git repository for the API tester. In the project, I have been mostly working on the API tester so far, while getting to know the code base. The API tester currently use the HATEOAS links to traverse the entire exposed service API and verify that the exposed operations and objects match the specification, as well as trying to create objects holding metadata and uploading a simple XML file to store. The tester has proved very useful for finding flaws in our implementation, as well as flaws in the reference site and the specification. The test document I uploaded is a summary of all the specification defects we have collected so far while implementing the web service. There are several unclear and conflicting parts of the specification, and we have started writing down the questions we get from implementing it. We use a format inspired by how The Austin Group collect defect reports for the POSIX standard with their instructions for the MANTIS defect tracker system, in lack of an official way to structure defect reports for Noark 5 (our first submitted defect report was a request for a procedure for submitting defect reports :). The Nikita project is implemented using Java and Spring, and is fairly easy to get up and running using Docker containers for those that want to test the current code base. The API tester is implemented in Python.

Clint Adams: Measure once, devein twice

Ophira lived in a wee house in University Square, Tampa. It had one floor, three bedrooms, two baths, a handful of family members, a couple pets, some plants, and an occasional staring contest. Mauricio lived in Lowry Park North, but Ophira wasn t allowed to go there because Mauricio was afraid that someone would tell his girlfriend. Ophira didn t like Mauricio s girlfriend and Mauricio s girlfriend did not like Ophira. Mauricio did not bring his girlfriend along when he and Ophira went to St. Pete Beach. They frolicked in the ocean water, and attempted to have sex. Mauricio and Ophira were big fans of science, so Somewhat quickly they concluded that it is impossible to have sex underwater, and absconded to Ophira s car to have sex therein. I hate Mauricio s girlfriend, Ophira told Amit on the telephone. She s not even pretty. Hey, listen, said Amit. I m going to a wedding on Captiva. Oh, my family used to go to Captiva every year. There s bioluminescent algae and little crabs and stuff. Yeah? Do you want to come along? You could pick me up at the airport. Why would I want to go to a wedding? Well, it s on the beach and they re going to have a bouncy castle. A bouncy castle Are you serious? Yes. Well, okay. Amit prepared to go to the wedding and Ophira became terse then unresponsive. After he landed at RSW, he called Ophira, but instead of answering the phone she startled and fell out of her chair. Amit arranged for other transportation toward the Sanibel Causeway. Ophira bit her nails for a few hours, then went to her car and drove to Cape Coral. Ophira cruised around Cape Coral for a while, until she spotted a teenager cleaning a minivan. She parked her car and approached him. Whatcha doing? asked Ophira, pretending to chew on imaginary gum. The youth slid the minivan door open. I m cleaning, he said hesitantly. Didn t your parents teach you not to talk to strangers? I could do all kinds of horrible things to you. They conversed for a bit. She recounted a story of her personal hero, a twelve-year-old girl who seduced and manipulated older men into ruin. She rehashed the mysteries of Mauricio s girlfriend. She waxed poetic on her love of bouncy castles. The youth listened, hypnotized. What s your name, kid? Ophira yawned. Arjun, he replied. How old are you? Arjun thought about it. 15, he said. Hmm, Ophira stroked her chin. Can you sneak me into your room so that your parents never find out about it? Arjun s eyes went wide. MEANWHILE, on Captiva Island, Amit had learned that even though the Tenderly had multiple indoor jacuzzis, General Fitzpatrick and Mrs. Fitzpatrick had decided it prudent to have sex in the hot tub on the deck; that the execution of this plan had somehow necessitated a lengthy cleaning process before the hot tub could be used again; that that s why workmen were cleaning the hot tub; and that the Fitzpatrick children had gotten General Fitzpatrick and Mrs. Fitzpatrick to agree to not do that again, with an added suggestion that they not be seen doing anything else naked in public. A girl walked up to Amit. Hey, I heard you lost your plus-one. Are you here alone? What a loser! she giggled nervously, then stared. Leave me alone, Darlene, sighed Amit. Darlene s face reddened as she spun on her heels and stormed over to Lisette. Oh my god, did you see that? I practically threw myself at him and he was abusive toward me. He probably has all the classic signs of being an abuser. Did you hear about that girl he dated in Ohio? I bet I know why that ended. Oh really? said Lisette distractedly, looking Amit up and down. So he s single now? Darlene glared at Lisette as Amit wandered back outside to stare at the hot tub. Hey kid, said Ophira, bring me some snacks. I don t bring food into my room, said Arjun. It attracts pests. Is that what your parents told you? scoffed Ophira. Don t be such a wuss. Three minutes later, Ophira was finishing a bag of paprika puffs. These are great, Arjun! Where do you get these? My cousin sends them from Europe, he explained. Now get me a diet soda. Amit strolled along the beach, then yelped. What s biting my legs? he cried out. Those are sand fleas, said Nessarose. What are sand fleas? asked Amit incredulously. Nessarose rolled her eyes. Stop being a baby and have a drink. After the sun went down, Amit began to notice the crabs, and this made him drink more. When everyone was soused, General Fitzpatrick announced that they were going for a swim in the Gulf, in direct contravention of safety guidelines. Most of the guests were wise enough to refuse, but an eightsome swam out, occasionally stopping to slap the algae, but continuing until they reached the sandbar that General Fitzpatrick correctly claimed was there. Then screams echoed through the night as all the jellyfish attacked everyone invading their sandbar. The crestfallen swimming party eventually made it back to shore. Pee on the jellyfish sting, commanded Nessarose. It s the best cure. No! shouted General Fitzpatrick s daughter. Urine makes it worse. Things quickly escalated from Nessarose and General Fitzpatrick s daughter screaming at each other to the beach dividing into three factions: those siding with Nessarose, those siding with General Fitzpatrick s daughter, and those who had no idea what was going on. General Fitzpatrick had no interest in any of this, and went straight to bed. It s getting late, kid, said Ophira. I m taking your bed. What? squeaked Arjun. Look, said Ophira, your bed is small and there isn t room for both of us. You may sleep on the floor if you re quiet and don t bother me. What? squeaked Arjun. Are you deaf, kid? Ophira grunted and then went to bed. Arjun blinked in confusion, then tried to fall asleep on the floor, without much success. Ophira got up in the morning and said, Before I go, I want to teach you a valuable lesson. What? groaned Arjun, getting to his feet. You should be careful talking to strangers. Now, I told you that I could do horrible things to you, so this is not my fault; it s yours, she announced, then sucker-punched him in the gut. Ophira climbed out the window as Arjun doubled over. As the ceremony began, only a small minority of the wedding party was visibly suffering from jellyfish stings, which may or may not have helped with ignoring the sand fleas. The ceremony ended shortly thereafter, and now that marriage had been accomplished, everyone turned their attention to food and drink and swimming less irresponsibly than the night before. Guests that needed to return home sooner departed in waves and Amit started to appreciate the more peaceful environment. He heard the deck door slide open behind him and turned his attention away from the hot tub. Hey, mofo, Ophira shouted as strode stylishly out onto the deck. Where s this bouncy castle? Amit blinked in surprise. That was yesterday. You missed it. Oh, she frowned. So I met this South Slav guy with a really sexy forehead, and I need some advice. I don t know if I should call him or wait. Amit pointed to the hot tub and told her the story of General Fitzpatrick and Mrs. Fitzpatrick and the hot tub. What? said Ophira. How could they have sex underwater? What do you mean? asked Amit. Well, it s impossible, she replied.
Posted on 2017-03-19
Tags: mintings

18 March 2017

Vincent Sanders: A rose by any other name would smell as sweet

Often I end up dealing with code that works but might not be of the highest quality. While quality is subjective I like to use the idea of "code smell" to convey what I mean, these are a list of indicators that, in total, help to identify code that might benefit from some improvement.

Such smells may include:
I am most certainly not alone in using this approach and Fowler et al have covered this subject in the literature much better than I can here. One point I will raise though is some programmers dismiss code that exhibits these traits as "legacy" and immediately suggest a fresh implementation. There are varying opinions on when a rewrite is the appropriate solution from never to always but in my experience making the old working code smell nice is almost always less effort and risk than a re-write.
TestsWhen I come across smelly code, and I decide it is worthwhile improving it, I often discover the biggest smell is lack of test coverage. Now do remember this is just one code smell and on its own might not be indicative, my experience is smelly code seldom has effective test coverage while fresh code often does.

Test coverage is generally understood to be the percentage of source code lines and decision paths used when instrumented code is exercised by a set of tests. Like many metrics developer tools produce, "coverage percentage" is often misused by managers as a proxy for code quality. Both Fowler and Marick have written about this but sufficient to say that for a developer test coverage is a useful tool but should not be misapplied.

Although refactoring without tests is possible the chances for unintended consequences are proportionally higher. I often approach such a refactor by enumerating all the callers and constructing a description of the used interface beforehand and check that that interface is not broken by the refactor. At which point is is probably worth writing a unit test to automate the checks.

Because of this I have changed my approach to such refactoring to start by ensuring there is at least basic API code coverage. This may not yield the fashionable 85% coverage target but is useful and may be extended later if desired.

It is widely known and equally widely ignored that for maximum effectiveness unit tests must be run frequently and developers take action to rectify failures promptly. A test that is not being run or acted upon is a waste of resources both to implement and maintain which might be better spent elsewhere.

For projects I contribute to frequently I try to ensure that the CI system is running the coverage target, and hence the unit tests, which automatically ensures any test breaking changes will be highlighted promptly. I believe the slight extra overhead of executing the instrumented tests is repaid by having the coverage metrics available to the developers to aid in spotting areas with inadequate tests.
ExampleA short example will help illustrate my point. When a web browser receives an object over HTTP the server can supply a MIME type in a content-type header that helps the browser interpret the resource. However this meta-data is often problematic (sorry that should read "a misleading lie") so the actual content must be examined to get a better answer for the user. This is known as mime sniffing and of course there is a living specification.

The source code that provides this API (Linked to it rather than included for brevity) has a few smells:
While some of these are obvious the non-use of the global string table and the API complexity needed detailed knowledge of the codebase, just to highlight how subjective the sniff test can be. There is also one huge air freshener in all of this which definitely comes from experience and that is the modules author. Their name at the top of this would ordinarily be cause for me to move on, but I needed an example!

First thing to check is the API use

$ git grep -i -e mimesniff_compute_effective_type --or -e mimesniff_init --or -e mimesniff_fini
content/hlcache.c:              error = mimesniff_compute_effective_type(handle, NULL, 0,
content/hlcache.c:              error = mimesniff_compute_effective_type(handle,
content/hlcache.c:              error = mimesniff_compute_effective_type(handle,
content/mimesniff.c:nserror mimesniff_init(void)
content/mimesniff.c:void mimesniff_fini(void)
content/mimesniff.c:nserror mimesniff_compute_effective_type(llcache_handle *handle,
content/mimesniff.h:nserror mimesniff_compute_effective_type(struct llcache_handle *handle,
content/mimesniff.h:nserror mimesniff_init(void);
content/mimesniff.h:void mimesniff_fini(void);
desktop/netsurf.c:      ret = mimesniff_init();
desktop/netsurf.c:      mimesniff_fini();

This immediately shows me that this API is used in only a very small area, this is often not the case but the general approach still applies.

After a little investigation the usage is effectively that the mimesniff_init API must be called before the mimesniff_compute_effective_type API and the mimesniff_fini releases the initialised resources.

A simple test case was added to cover the API, this exercised the behaviour both when the init was called before the computation and not. Also some simple tests for a limited number of well behaved inputs.

By changing to using the global string table the initialisation and finalisation API can be removed altogether along with a large amount of global context and pre-processor macros. This single change removes a lot of smell from the module and raises test coverage both because the global string table already has good coverage and because there are now many fewer lines and conditionals to check in the mimesniff module.

I stopped the refactor at this point but were this more than an example I probably would have:
ConclusionThe approach examined here reduce the smell of code in an incremental, testable way to improve the codebase going forward. This is mainly necessary on larger complex codebases where technical debt and bit-rot are real issues that can quickly overwhelm a codebase if not kept in check.

This technique is subjective but helps a programmer to quantify and examine a piece of code in a structured fashion. However it is only a tool and should not be over applied nor used as a metric to proxy for code quality.

17 March 2017

Shirish Agarwal: Science Day at GMRT, Khodad 2017

The whole team posing at the end of day 2 The above picture is the blend of the two communities from foss community and mozilla India. And unless you were there you wouldn t know who is from which community which is what FOSS is all about. But as always I m getting a bit ahead of myself. Akshat, who works at NCRA as a programmer, the standing guy on the left shared with me in January this year that this year too, we should have two stalls, foss community and mozilla India stalls next to each other. While we had the banners, we were missing stickers and flyers. Funds were and are always an issue and this year too, it would have been emptier if we didn t get some money saved from last year minidebconf 2016 that we had in Mumbai. Our major expenses included printing stickers, stationery and flyers which came to around INR 5000/- and couple of LCD TV monitors which came for around INR 2k/- as rent. All the labour was voluntary in nature, but both me and Akshat easily spending upto 100 hours before the event. Next year, we want to raise to around INR 10-15k so we can buy 1 or 2 LCD monitors and we don t have to think for funds for next couple of years. How will we do that I have no idea atm. Printing leaflets Me and Akshat did all the printing and stationery runs and hence had not been using my lappy for about 3-4 days. Come to the evening before the event and the laptop would not start. Coincidentally, or not few months or even last at last year s Debconf people had commented on IBM/Lenovo s obsession with proprietary power cords and adaptors. I hadn t given it much thought but when I got no power even after putting it on AC power for 3-4 hours, I looked up on the web and saw that the power cord and power adaptors were all different even in T440 and even that under existing models. In fact I couldn t find mine hence sharing it via pictures below. thinkpad power cord male thinkpad power adaptor female I knew/suspected that thinkpads would be rare where I was going, it would be rarer still to find the exact power cord and I was unsure whether it was the power cord at fault or adaptor or whatever goes for SMPS in laptop or memory or motherboard/CPU itself. I did look up the documentation at support.lenovo.com and was surprised at the extensive documentation that Lenovo has for remote troubleshooting. I did the usual take out the battery, put it back in, twiddle with the little hole in the bottom of the laptop, trying to switch on without the battery on AC mains, trying to switch on with battery power only but nothing worked. Couple of hours had gone by and with a resigned thought went to bed, convincing myself that anyways it s good I am not taking the lappy as it is extra-dusty there and who needs a dead laptop anyways. Update After the event was over, I did contact Lenovo support and within a week, with one visit from a service engineer, he was able to identify that it was a faulty cable which was at fault and not the the other things which I was afraid of. Another week gone by and lenovo replaced the cable. Going by service standards that I have seen of other companies, Lenovo deserves a gold star here for the prompt service they provided. I probably would end up subscribing to their extended 2-year warranty service when my existing 3 year warranty is about to be over. Next day, woke up early morning, two students from COEP hostel were volunteering and we made our way to NCRA, Pune University Campus. Ironically, though we were under the impression that we would be the late arrivals, it turned out we were the early birds. 5-10 minutes passed by and soon enough we were joined by Aniket and we played catch-up for a while. We hadn t met each other for a while so it was good to catch-up. Then slowly other people starting coming in and around 07:10-07:15 we started for GMRT, Khodad. Now I had been curious as had been hearing for years that the Pune-Nashik NH-50 highway would be concreted and widened to six-lane highways but the experience was below par. Came back and realized the proposal has now been pushed back to 2020. From the mozilla team, only Aniket was with us, the rest of the group was coming straight from Nashik. Interestingly, all the six people who came, came on bikes which depending upon how you look at it was either brave or stupid. Travelling on bikes on Indian highways you either have to be brave or stupid or both, we have more than enough accidents due to quality of road construction, road design, lane-changing drivers and many other issues. This is probably not the place for it hence will use some other blog post to rant about that. We reached around 10:00 hrs. IST and hung around till lunch as Akshat had all the marketing material, monitors etc. The only thing we had were couple of lappies and couple of SBC s, an RPI 3 and a BBB. Aarti Kashyap sharing something about SBC Our find for the event was Aarti Kashyap who you can see above. She is a third-year student at COEP and one of the rare people who chose to interact with hardware rather than software. From last several years, we had been trying, successfully and unsuccessfully to get more Indian women and girls interested into technology. It is a vicious circle as till a girl/woman doesn t volunteer we are unable to share our knowledge to the extent we can which leads them to not have much interest in FOSS or even technology in general. While there are groups are djangogirls, Pyladies and railgirls and even Outreachy which tries to motivate getting girls into computing but it s a long road ahead. We are short of both funds and ideas as to how to motivate more girls to get into computing and then to get into playing with hardware. I don t know where to start and end for whoever wants to play with hardware. From SBC s, routers to blade servers the sky is the limit. Again this probably isn t the place for it, hence probably we can chew it on more at some other blog post. This year, we had a lowish turnout due to the fact that the 12th board exams 1st paper was on the day we had opened. So instead of 20-25k, we probably had 5-7k fewer people pass through. There were two-three things that we were showing, we were showing Debian on one of the systems, we were showing the output from the SBC s on the other monitor but the glare kept hitting the monitors. While the organizers had done exemplary work over last year. They had taped the carpets on the ground so there was hardly any dust moving around. However, I wished the organizers had taken the pains to have two cloth roofs over our head instead of just one, the other roof head could be say 2 feet up, this would have done two things a. It probably would have cooled the place a bit more as b. We could get diffused sunlight which would have lessened the glare and reflection the LCD s kept throwing back. At times we also got people to come to our side as can be seen in Aarti s photo as can be seen above. If these improvements can be made for next year, this would result in everybody in our Pandal would benefit, not just us and mozilla. This would be benefiting around 10-15 organizations which were within the same temporary structure. Of course, it depends very much on the budget they are able to have and people who are executing, we can just advise. The other thing which had been missing last year and this year is writing about Single Board Computers in Marathi. If we are to promote them as something to replace a computer or something for a younger brother/sister to learn computing upon at a lower cost, we need leaflets written in their language to be more effective. And this needs to be in the language and mannerisms that people in that region understand. India, as probably people might have experienced is a dialect-prone country. Which means every 2-5 kms, the way the language is spoken is different from anywhere else. The Marathi spoken by somebody who has lived in Ravivar Peth for his whole life and a person who has lived in say Kothrud are different. The same goes from any place and this place, Khodad, Narayangaon would have its own dialect, its own mini-codespeak. Just to share, we did have one in English but it would have been a vast improvement if we could do it in the local language. Maybe we can discuss about this and ask for help from people. Outside, Looking in Mozillians helping FOSS community and vice-versa What had been interesting about the whole journey were the new people who were bringing all their passion and creativity to the fore. From the mozilla community, we had Akshay who is supposed to be a wizard on graphics, animation, editing anything to do with the visual medium. He shared some of the work he had done and also shared a bit about how blender works with people who wanted to learn about that. Mayur, whom you see in the picture pointing out something about FOSS and this was the culture that we strove to have. I know and love and hate the browser but haven t been able to fathom the recklessness that Mozilla has been doing the last few years, which has just been having one mis-adventure after another. For instance, mozstumbler was an effort which I thought would go places. From what little I understood, it served/serves as a user-friendly interface to a potential user while still sharing all the data with OSM . They (Mozilla) seems/seemed to have a fatalistic take as it provided initial funding but then never fully committing to the project. Later, at night we had the whole free software and open-source sharings where I tried to emphasize that without free software, the term open-source would not have come into existence. We talked and talked and somewhere around 02:00 I slept, the next day was an extension of the first day itself where we ribbed each other good-naturedly and still shared whatever we could share with each other. I do hope that we continue this tradition for great many years to come and engage with more and more people every passing year.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #budget, #COEP< #volunteering, #debian, #Events, #Expenses, #mozstumbler, #printing, #SBC's, #Science Day 2017, #thinkpad cable issue, FOSS, mozilla

Antonio Terceiro: Patterns for Testing Debian Packages

At the and of 2016 I had the pleasure to attend the 11th Latin American Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs, a.k.a SugarLoaf PLoP. PLoP is a series of conferences on Patterns (as in Design Patterns ), a subject that I appreciate a lot. Each of the PLoP conferences but the original main big conference has a funny name. SugarLoaf PLoP is called that way because its very first edition was held in Rio de Janeiro, so the organizers named it after a very famous mountain in Rio. The name stuck even though a long time has passed since it was held in Rio for the last time. 2016 was actually the first time SugarLoaf PLoP was held outside of Brazil, finally justifying the Latin American part of its name. I was presenting a paper I wrote on patterns for testing Debian packages. The Debian project funded my travel expenses through the generous donations of its supporters. PLoP s are very fun conferences with a relaxed atmosphere, and is amazing how many smart (and interesting!) people gather together for them. My paper is titled Patterns for Writing As-Installed Tests for Debian Packages , and has the following abstract:
Large software ecosystems, such as GNU/Linux distributions, demand a large amount of effort to make sure all of its components work correctly invidually, and also integrate correctly with each other to form a coherent system. Automated Quality Assurance techniques can prevent issues from reaching end users. This paper presents a pattern language originated in the Debian project for automated software testing in production-like environments. Such environments are closer in similarity to the environment where software will be actually deployed and used, as opposed to the development environment under which developers and regular Continuous Integration mechanisms usually test software products. The pattern language covers the handling of issues arising from the difference between development and production-like environments, as well as solutions for writing new, exclusive tests for as-installed functional tests. Even though the patterns are documented here in the context of the Debian project, they can also be generalized to other contexts.
In practical terms, the paper documents a set of patterns I have noticed in the last few years, when I have been pushing the Debian Continous Integration project. It should be an interesting read for people interested in the testing of Debian packages in their installed form, as done with autopkgtest. It should also be useful for people from other distributions interested in the subject, as the issues are not really Debian-specific. I have recently finished the final version of the paper, which should be published in the ACM Digital Library at any point now. You can download a copy of the paper in PDF. Source is also available, if you are into markdown, LaTeX, makefiles and this sort of thing. If everything goes according to plan, I should be presenting a talk on this at the next Debconf in Montreal.

16 March 2017

Thorsten Glaser: Updates to the last two posts

Someone from the FSF s licencing department posted an official-looking thing saying they don t believe GitHub s new ToS to be problematic with copyleft. Well, my lawyer (not my personal one, nor for The MirOS Project, but related to another association, informally) does agree with my reading of the new ToS, and I can point out at least a clause in the GPLv1 (I really don t have time right now) which says contrary (but does this mean the FSF generally waives the restrictions of the GPL for anything on GitHub?). I ll eMail GitHub Legal directly and will try to continue getting this fixed (as soon as I have enough time for it) as I ll otherwise be forced to force GitHub to remove stuff from me (but with someone else as original author) under GPL, such as tinyirc and e3. My dbconfig-common Debian packaging example got a rather hefty upgrade because dbconfig-common (unlike any other DB schema framework I know of) doesn t apply the upgrades on a fresh install (and doesn t automatically put the upgrades into a transaction either) but only upgrades between Debian package versions (which can be funny with backports, but AFAICT that part is handled correctly). I now append the upgrades to the initial-version-as-seen-in-the-source to generate the initial-version-as-shipped-in-the-binary-package (optionally, only if it s named .in) removing all transaction stuff from the upgrade files and wrapping the whole shit in BEGIN; and COMMIT; after merging. (This should at least not break n n-PostgreSQL databases and well, database-like-ish things I cannot test for obvious (SQLite is illegal, at least in Germany, but potentially worldwide, and then PostgreSQL is the only remaining Open Source database left ;) reasons.) Update: Yes, this does mean that maintainers of databases and webservers should send me patches to make this work with not-PostgreSQL (new install/name.in, upgrade files) and not-Apache-2.2/2.4 (new debian/*/*.conf snippets) to make this packaging example even more generally usable. Natureshadow already forked this and made a Python/Flask package from it, so I ll prod him to provide a similarily versatile hello-python-world example package.

Joey Hess: end of an era

I'm at home downloading hundreds of megabytes of stuff. This is the first time I've been in position of "at home" + "reasonably fast internet" since I moved here in 2012. It's weird! Satellite internet dish with solar panels in foreground While I was renting here, I didn't mind dialup much. In a way it helps to focus the mind and build interesting stuff. But since I bought the house, the prospect of only dialup at home ongoing became more painful. While I hope to get on the fiber line that's only a few miles away eventually, I have not convinced that ISP to build out to me yet. Not enough neighbors. So, satellite internet for now. 9.1 dB SNR speedtest results: 15 megabit down / 4.5 up with significant variation Dish seems well aligned, speed varies a lot, but is easily hundreds of times faster than dialup. Latency is 2x dialup. The equipment uses more power than my laptop, so with the current solar panels, I anticipate using it only 6-9 months of the year. So I may be back to dialup most days come winter, until I get around to adding more PV capacity. It seems very cool that my house can capture sunlight and use it to beam signals 20 thousand miles into space. Who knows, perhaps there will even be running water one day. Satellite dish

Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, February 2017

A Debian LTS logoLike each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In January, about 154 work hours have been dispatched among 13 paid contributors. Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation The number of sponsored hours increased slightly thanks to Bearstech and LiHAS joining us. The security tracker currently lists 45 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file 39. The number of open issues continued its slight increase, this time it could be explained by the fact that many contributors did not spend all the hours allocated (for various reasons). There s nothing worrisome at this point. Thanks to our sponsors New sponsors are in bold.

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Enrico Zini: Django signing signs, does not encrypt

As is says in the documentation. django.core.signing signs, and does not encyrpt. Even though signing.dumps creates obscure-looking tokens, they are not encrypted, and here's a proof: 
>>> from django.core import signing
>>> a = signing.dumps( "action":"set-password", "username": "enrico", "password": "SECRET" )
>>> from django.utils.encoding import force_bytes
>>> print(signing.b64_decode(force_bytes(a.split(":",1)[0])))
b' "action":"set-password","password":"SECRET","username":"enrico" '
I'm writing it down so one day I won't be tempted to think otherwise.

Wouter Verhelst: Codes of Conduct

These days, most large FLOSS communities have a "Code of Conduct"; a document that outlines the acceptable (and possibly not acceptable) behaviour that contributors to the community should or should not exhibit. By writing such a document, a community can arm itself more strongly in the fight against trolls, harassment, and other forms of antisocial behaviour that is rampant on the anonymous medium that the Internet still is. Writing a good code of conduct is no easy matter, however. I should know -- I've been involved in such a process twice; once for Debian, and once for FOSDEM. While I was the primary author for the Debian code of conduct, the same is not true for the FOSDEM one; I was involved, and I did comment on a few early drafts, but the core of FOSDEM's current code was written by another author. I had wanted to write a draft myself, but then this one arrived and I didn't feel like I could improve it, so it remained. While it's not easy to come up with a Code of Conduct, there (luckily) are others who walked this path before you. On the "geek feminism" wiki, there is an interesting overview of existing Open Source community and conference codes of conduct, and reading one or more of them can provide one with some inspiration as to things to put in one's own code of conduct. That wiki page also contains a paragraph "Effective codes of conduct", which says (amongst others) that a good code of conduct should include
Specific descriptions of common but unacceptable behaviour (sexist jokes, etc.)
The attentive reader will notice that such specific descriptions are noticeably absent from both the Debian and the FOSDEM codes of conduct. This is not because I hadn't seen the above recommendation (I had); it is because I disagree with it. I do not believe that adding a list of "don't"s to a code of conduct is a net positive to it. Why, I hear you ask? Surely having a list of things that are not welcome behaviour is a good thing, which should be encouraged? Surely such a list clarifies the kind of things your does not want to see? Having such a list will discourage that bad behaviour, right? Well, no, I don't think so. And here's why.

Enumerating badness A list of things not to do is like a virus scanner. For those not familiar with these: on some operating systems, there is specific piece of software that everyone recommends you run, which checks if particular blobs of data appear in files on the disk. If they do, then these files are assumed to be bad, and are kicked out. If they do not, then these files are assumed to be not bad, and are left alone (for the most part). This works if we know all the possible types of badness; but as soon as someone invents a new form of badness, suddenly your virus scanner is ineffective. Additionally, it also means you're bound to continually have to update your virus scanner (or, as the case may be, code of conduct) to a continually changing hostile world. For these (and other) reasons, enumerating badness is listed as number 2 in security expert Markus Ranum's "six dumbest ideas in computer security," which was written in 2005. In short, a list of "things not to do" is bound to be incomplete; if the goal is to clarify the kind of behaviour that is not welcome in your community, it is usually much better to explain the behaviour that is wanted, so that people can infer (by their absense) the kind of behaviour that isn't welcome. This neatly brings me to my next point...

Black vs White vs Gray. The world isn't black-and-white. We could define a list of welcome behaviour -- let's call that the whitelist -- or a list of unwelcome behaviour -- the blacklist -- and assume that the work is done after doing so. However, that wouldn't be true. For every item on either the white or black list, there's going to be a number of things that fall somewhere in between. Let's call those things as being on the "gray" list. They're not the kind of outstanding behaviour that we would like to see -- they'd be on the white list if they were -- but they're not really obvious CoC violations, either. You'd prefer it if people don't do those things, but it'd be a stretch to say they're jerks if they do. Let's clarify that with an example: Is it a code of conduct violation if you post links to pornography websites on your community's main development mailinglist? What about jokes involving porn stars? Or jokes that denigrate women, or that explicitly involve some gender-specific part of the body? What about an earring joke? Or a remark about a user interacting with your software, where the women are depicted as not understanding things as well as men? Or a remark about users in general, that isn't written in a gender-neutral manner? What about a piece of self-deprecating humor? What about praising someone else for doing something outstanding? I'm sure most people would agree that the first case in the above paragraph should be a code of conduct violation, whereas the last case should not be. Some of the items in the list in between are clearly on one or the other side of the argument, but for others the jury is out. Let's call those as being in the gray zone. (Note: no, I did not mean to imply that the list is ordered in any way ;-) If you write a list of things not to do, then by implication (because you didn't mention them), the things in the gray area are okay. This is especially problematic when it comes to things that are borderline blacklisted behaviour (or that should be blacklisted but aren't, because your list is incomplete -- see above). In such a situation, you're dealing with people who are jerks but can argue about it because your definition of jerk didn't cover teir behaviour. Because they're jerks, you can be sure they'll do everything in their power to waste your time about it, rather than improving their behaviour. In contrast, if you write a list of things that you want people to do, then by implication (because you didn't mention it), the things in the gray area are not okay. If someone slips and does something in that gray area anyway, then that probably means they're doing something borderline not-whitelisted, which would be mildly annoying but doesn't make them jerks. If you point that out to them, they might go "oh, right, didn't think of it that way, sorry, will aspire to be better next time". Additionally, the actual jerks and trolls will have been given less tools to argue about borderline violations (because the border of your code of conduct is far, far away from jerky behaviour), so less time is wasted for those of your community who have to police it (yay!). In theory, the result of a whitelist is a community of people who aspire to be nice people, rather than a community of people who simply aspire to be "not jerks". I know which kind of community I prefer.

Giving the wrong impression During one of the BOFs that were held while I was drafting the Debian code of conduct, it was pointed out to me that a list of things not to do may give the impression to people that all these things on this list do actually happen in the code's community. If that is true, then a very long list may produce the impression that the given community is a community with a lot of problems. Instead, a whitelist-based code of conduct will provide the impression that you're dealing with a healthy community. Whether that is the case obviously depends on more factors than just the code of conduct itself, but it will put people in the right mindset for this to become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Conclusion Given all of the above, I think a whitelist-based code of conduct is a better idea than a blacklist-based one. Additionally, in the few years since the Debian code of conduct was accepted, it is my impression that the general atmosphere in the Debian project has improved, which would seem to confirm that the method works (but YMMV, of course). At any rate, I'm not saying that blacklist-based codes of conduct are useless. However, I do think that whitelist-based ones are better; and hopefully, you now agree, too ;-)

Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, February 2017

I was assigned 13 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative and carried over 15.25 from January. I worked 19 hours and have returned the remaining 9.25 hours to the general pool. I prepared a security update for the Linux kernel and issued DLA-833-1. However, I spent most of my time catching up with a backlog of fixes for the Linux 3.2 longterm stable branch. I issued two stable updates (3.2.85, 3.2.86).

15 March 2017

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppEigen 0.3.2.9.1

A new maintenance release 0.3.2.9.1 of RcppEigen, still based on Eigen 3.2.9 is now on CRAN and is now going into Debian soon. This update ensures that RcppEigen and the Matrix package agree on their #define statements for the CholMod / SuiteSparse library. Thanks to Martin Maechler for the pull request. I also added a file src/init.c as now suggested (soon: requested) by the R CMD check package validation. The complete NEWS file entry follows.

Changes in RcppEigen version 0.3.2.9.1 (2017-03-14)
  • Synchronize CholMod header file with Matrix package to ensure binary compatibility on all platforms (Martin Maechler in #42)
  • Added file init.c with calls to R_registerRoutines() and R_useDynamicSymbols(); also use .registration=TRUE in useDynLib in NAMESPACE

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release.

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

Michal &#268;iha&#345;: Life of free software project

During last week I've noticed several interesting posts about challenges being free software maintainer. After being active in open source for 16 years I can share much of the feelings I've read and I can also share my dealings with the things. First of all let me link some of the other posts on the topic: I guess everybody involved in in some popular free software project knows it - there is much more work to be done than people behind the project can handle. It really doesn't matter it those are bug reports, support requests, new features or technical debt, it's simply too much of that. If you are the only one behind the project it can feel even more pressing. There can be several approaches how to deal with that, but you have to choose what you prefer and what is going to work for you and your project. I've used all of the below mentioned approaches on some of the projects, but I don't think there is a silver bullet. Finding more people Obviously if you can not cope with the work, let's find more people to do the work. Unfortunately it's not that easy. Sometimes people come by, contribute few patches, but it's not that easy to turn them into regular contributor. You should encourage them to stay and to care about the part of the project they have touched. You can try to attract completely new contributors through programs as Google Summer of Code (GSoC) or Outreachy, but that has it's own challenges as well. With phpMyAdmin we're participating regularly in GSoC (we've only missed last year as we were not chosen by Google that year) and it indeed helps to bring new people on the board. Many of them even stay around your project (currently 3 of 5 phpMyAdmin team members are former GSoC students). But I think this approach really works only for bigger organizations. You can also motivate people by money. It's way which is not really much used on free software projects, partly because lack of funding (I'll get to that later) and partly because it doesn't necessarily bring long time contributors, just cash hunters. I've been using Bountysource for some of my projects (Weblate and Gammu) and so far it mostly works other way around - if somebody posts bounty on the issue, it means it's quite important for him to get that fixed, so I use that as indication for myself. On attracting new developers it never really worked well, even when I've tried to post bounties to some easy to fix issues, where newbies could learn our code base and get paid for that. These issues stayed opened for months and in the end I've fixed them myself because they annoyed me. Don't care too much I think this is most important aspect - you simply can never fix all the problems. Let's face it and work according to that. There can be various levels of don't caring. I find it always better to try to encourage people to fix their problem, but you can't expect big success rate in that, so you might find it not worth of the time. What I currently do: If you still can't handle that, you should consider abandoning the project as well. Does it bring something to you other than frustration of not completed work? I know it can be hard decision, in the end it is your child, but sometimes it's the best think you can do. Get paid to do the work Are you doing your fulltime job and then work on free software on nights or weekends? It can probably work for some time, but unless you find some way to make these two match, you will lack free time to relax and spend with friends or family. There are several options to make these work together. You can find job where doing free software will be natural part of it. This worked for me pretty well at SUSE, but I'm sure there are more companies where it will work. It can happen that the job will not cover all your free software activities, but this still helps. You can also make your project to become your employer. This can be sometimes challenging to make volunteers and paid contractors to work on one project, but I think this can be handled. Such setup currently works currently quite well for phpMyAdmin (we will announce second contractor soon) and works quite well for me with Weblate as well. Funding free software projects Once your project is well funded, you can fix many problems by money. You can pay yourself to do the work, hire additional developers, get better infrastructure or travel to conferences to spread word about it. But the question is how to get to the point of being well funded. There are several crowdfunding platforms which can help you with that (Liberapay, Bountysource salt, Gratipay or Snowdrift to mention some). You can also administer the funding yourself or using some legal entity such as Software Freedom Conservancy which handles this for phpMyAdmin. But the most important thing is to persuade people and companies to give back. You know there are lot of companies relying on your project, but how to make them fund the project? I really don't know, I still struggle with this as I don't want to be too pushy in asking for money, but I'd really like to see them to give back. What kind of works is giving your sponsors logo / link placement on your website. If your website is well ranked, you can expect to get quite a lot of SEO sponsors and the question is where to draw a line what you still find acceptable. Obviously the most willing to pay companies will have nothing to do with what you do and they just want to get the link. The industry you can expect is porn, gambling, binary options and various MFA sites. You will get some legitimate sponsors related to your project as well. We felt we've gone too far with phpMyAdmin last year and we've stricten the rules recently, but the outcome is still not visible on our website (as we've just limited new sponsors, but existing contracts will be honored). Another option is to monetize your project more directly. You can offer consulting services or provide it as a service (this is what I currently do with Weblate). It really depends on the product if you can build customer base on that or not, but certainly this is not something what would work well for all projects. Thanks for reading this and I hope it's not too chaotic, as I've moved parts there and back while writing and I'm afraid it got too long in the end.

Filed under: Debian English Gammu phpMyAdmin SUSE Weblate 0 comments

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