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12 July 2024

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in June 2024

Welcome to the June 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In our reports, we outline what we ve been up to over the past month and highlight news items in software supply-chain security more broadly. As always, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. Table of contents:
  1. Next Reproducible Builds Summit dates announced
  2. GNU Guix patch review session for reproducibility
  3. New reproducibility-related academic papers
  4. Misc development news
  5. Website updates
  6. Reproducibility testing framework

Next Reproducible Builds Summit dates announced We are very pleased to announce the upcoming Reproducible Builds Summit, set to take place from September 17th 19th 2024 in Hamburg, Germany. We are thrilled to host the seventh edition of this exciting event, following the success of previous summits in various iconic locations around the world, including Venice, Marrakesh, Paris, Berlin and Athens. Our summits are a unique gathering that brings together attendees from diverse projects, united by a shared vision of advancing the Reproducible Builds effort. During this enriching event, participants will have the opportunity to engage in discussions, establish connections and exchange ideas to drive progress in this vital field. Our aim is to create an inclusive space that fosters collaboration, innovation and problem-solving. If you re interesting in joining us this year, please make sure to read the event page which has more details about the event and location. We are very much looking forward to seeing many readers of these reports there.

GNU Guix patch review session for reproducibility Vagrant Cascadian will be holding a Reproducible Builds session as part of the monthly Guix patch review series on July 11th at 17:00 UTC. These online events are intended to encourage everyone everyone becoming a patch reviewer and the goal of reviewing patches is to help Guix project accept contributions while maintaining our quality standards and learning how to do patch reviews together in a friendly hacking session.

Development news In Debian this month, 4 reviews of Debian packages were added, 11 were updated and 14 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Only one issue types was updated, though, explaining that we don t vary the build path anymore.
On our mailing list this month, Bernhard M. Wiedemann wrote that whilst he had previously collected issues that introduce non-determinism he has now moved on to discuss about mitigations , in the sense of how can we avoid whole categories of problem without patching an infinite number of individual packages . In addition, Janneke Nieuwenhuizen announced the release of two versions of GNU Mes. [ ][ ]
In openSUSE news, Bernhard M. Wiedemann published another report for that distribution.
In NixOS, with the 24.05 release out, it was again validated that our minimal ISO is reproducible by building it on a virtual machine with no access to the binary cache.
What s more, we continued to write patches in order to fix specific reproducibility issues, including Bernhard M. Wiedemann writing three patches (for qutebrowser, samba and systemd), Chris Lamb filing Debian bug #1074214 against the fastfetch package and Arnout Engelen proposing fixes to refind and for the Scala compiler [ .
Lastly, diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb uploaded two versions (270 and 271) to Debian, and made the following changes as well:
  • Drop Build-Depends on liblz4-tool in order to fix Debian bug #1072575. [ ]
  • Update tests to support zipdetails version 4.004 that is shipped with Perl 5.40. [ ]

Website updates There were a number of improvements made to our website this month, including Akihiro Suda very helpfully making the <h4> elements more distinguishable from the <h3> level [ ][ ] as well as adding a guide for Dockerfile reproducibility [ ]. In addition Fay Stegerman added two tools, apksigcopier and reproducible-apk-tools, to our Tools page.

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 June, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen, including:
  • Marking the virt(32 64)c-armhf nodes as down. [ ]
  • Granting a developer access to the osuosl4 node in order to debug a regression on the ppc64el architecture. [ ]
  • Granting a developer access to the osuosl4 node. [ ][ ]
In addition, Mattia Rizzolo re-aligned the /etc/default/jenkins file with changes performed upstream [ ] and changed how configuration files are handled on the rb-mail1 host. [ ], whilst Vagrant Cascadian documented the failure of the virt32c and virt64c nodes after initial investigation [ ].
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:

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, June 2024 (by Roberto C. S nchez)

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In June, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Adrian Bunk did 47.0h (out of 74.25h assigned and 11.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 39.0h to the next month.
  • Arturo Borrero Gonzalez did 6.0h (out of 6.0h assigned).
  • Bastien Roucari s did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
  • Ben Hutchings did 15.5h (out of 16.0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.5h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Daniel Leidert did 4.0h (out of 8.0h assigned and 2.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 6.0h to the next month.
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 23.25h (out of 49.5h assigned and 10.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 36.75h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 4.5h (out of 13.0h assigned and 7.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 15.5h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 17.0h (out of 25.0h assigned and 35.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 43.0h to the next month.
  • Lucas Kanashiro did 5.0h (out of 10.0h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 15.0h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 10.0h (out of 6.5h assigned and 17.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 14.0h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 5.25h (out of 7.75h assigned and 4.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 6.75h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 22.5h (out of 14.5h assigned and 8.0h from previous period).
  • Sean Whitton did 6.5h (out of 6.0h assigned and 0.5h from previous period).
  • Stefano Rivera did 0.5h (out of 0.0h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.5h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 9.0h (out of 24.5h assigned and 35.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 51.0h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).

Evolution of the situation In June, we have released 31 DLAs. Notable security updates in June included:
  • git: multiple vulnerabilities, which may result in privilege escalation, denial of service, and arbitrary code execution
  • sendmail: SMTP smuggling allowed remote attackers bypass SPF protection checks
  • cups: arbitrary remote code execution
Looking further afield to the broader Debian ecosystem, LTS contributor Bastien Roucari s also patched sendmail in Debian 12 (bookworm) and 11 (bullseye) in order to fix the previously mentioned SMTP smuggling vulnerability. Furthermore, LTS contributor Thorsten Alteholz provided fixes for the cups packages in Debian 12 (bookworm) and 11 (bullseye) in order to fix the aforementioned arbitrary remote code execution vulnerability. Additionally, LTS contributor Ben Hutchings has commenced work on an updated backport of Linux kernel 6.1 to Debian 11 (bullseye), in preparation for bullseye transitioning to the responsibility of the LTS (and the associated closure of the bullseye-backports repository). LTS Lucas Kanashiro also began the preparatory work of backporting parts of the rust/cargo toolchain to Debian 11 (bullseye) in order to make future updates of the clamav virus scanner possible. June was the final month of LTS for Debian 10 (as announced on the debian-lts-announce mailing list). No additional Debian 10 security updates will be made available on security.debian.org. However, Freexian and its team of paid Debian contributors will continue to maintain Debian 10 going forward for the customers of the Extended LTS offer. Subscribe right away if you sill have Debian 10 which must be kept secure (and which cannot yet be upgraded).

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10 July 2024

Russell Coker: Computer Adavances in the Last Decade

I wrote a comment on a social media post where someone claimed that there s no computer advances in the last 12 years which got long so it s worth a blog post. In the last decade or so new laptops have become cheaper than new desktop PCs. USB-C has taken over for phones and for laptop charging so all recent laptops support USB-C docks and monitors with USB-C docks built in have become common. 4K monitors have become cheap and common and higher than 4K is cheap for some use cases such as ultra wide. 4K TVs are cheap and TVs with built-in Android computers for playing internet content are now standard. For most use cases spinning media hard drives are obsolete, SSDs large enough for all the content most people need to store are cheap. We have gone from gigabit Ethernet being expensive to 2.5 gigabit being cheap. 12 years ago smart phones were very limited and every couple of years there would be significant improvements. Since about 2018 phones have been capable of doing most things most people want. 5yo Android phones can run the latest apps and take high quality pics. Any phone that supports VoLTE will be good for another 5+ years if it has security support. Phones without security support still work and are quite usable apart from being insecure. Google and Samsung have significantly increased their minimum security support for their phones and the GKI project from Google makes it easier for smaller vendors to give longer security support. There are a variety of open Android projects like LineageOS which give longer security support on a variety of phones. If you deliberately choose a phone that is likely to be well supported by projects like LineageOS (which pretty much means just Pixel phones) then you can expect to be able to actually use it when it is 10 years old. Compare this to the Samsung Galaxy S3 released in 2012 which was a massive improvement over the original Galaxy S (the S2 felt closer to the S than the S3). The Samsung Galaxy S4 released in 2013 was one of the first phones to have FullHD resolution which is high enough that most people can t easily recognise the benefits of higher resolution. It wasn t until 2015 that phones with 4G of RAM became common which is enough that for most phone use it s adequate today. Now that 16G of RAM is affordable in laptops running more secure OSs like Qubes is viable for more people. Even without Qubes, OS security has been improving a lot with better compiler features, new languages like Rust, and changes to software design and testing. Containers are being used more but we still aren t getting all the benefits of that. TPM has become usable in the last few years and we are only starting to take advantage of what it can offer. In 2012 BTRFS was still at an early stage of development and not many people wanted to use it in production, I was using it in production then and while I didn t lose any data from bugs I did have some downtime because of BTRFS issues. Now BTRFS is quite solid for server use. DDR4 was released in 2014 and gave significant improvements over DDR3 for performance and capacity. My home workstation now has 256G of DDR4 which wasn t particularly expensive while the previous biggest system I owned had 96G of DDR3 RAM. Now DDR5 is available to again increase performance and size while also making DDR4 cheap on the second hand market. This isn t a comprehensive list of all advances in the computer industry over the last 12 years or so, it s just some things that seem particularly noteworthy to me. Please comment about what you think are the most noteworthy advances I didn t mention.
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Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: YubiHSM packaging, unschroot, live-patching, and more! (by Stefano Rivera)

Debian Contributions: 2024-06 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.

YubiHSM packaging, by Colin Watson Freexian is starting to use YubiHSM devices (hardware security modules) as part of some projects, and we wanted to have the supporting software directly in Debian rather than needing to use third-party repositories. Since Yubico publish everything we need under free software licences, Colin packaged yubihsm-connector, yubihsm-shell, and python-yubihsm from https://developers.yubico.com/, in some cases based partly on the upstream packaging, and got them all into Debian unstable. Backports to bookworm will be forthcoming once they ve all reached testing.

unschroot by Helmut Grohne Following an in-person discussion at MiniDebConf Berlin, Helmut attempted splitting the containment functionality of sbuild --chroot-mode=unshare into a dedicated tool interfacing with sbuild as a variant of --chroot-mode=schroot providing a sufficiently compatible interface. While this seemed technically promising initially, a discussion on debian-devel indicated a desire to rely on an existing container runtime such as podman instead of using another Debian-specific tool with unclear long term maintenance. None of the existing container runtimes meet the specific needs of sbuild, so further advancing this matter implies a compromise one way or another.

Linux live-patching, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n In collaboration with Emmanuel Arias, Santiago is working on the development of linux live-patching for Debian. For the moment, this is in an exploratory phase, that includes how to handle the different patches that will need to be provided. kpatch could help significantly in this regard. However, kpatch was removed from unstable because there are some RC bugs affecting the version that was present in Debian unstable. Santiago packaged the most recent upstream version (0.9.9) and filed an Intent to Salvage bug. Santiago is waiting for an ACK by the maintainer, and will upload to unstable after July 10th, following the package salvaging rules. While kpatch 0.9.9 fixes the main issues, it still needs some work to properly support Debian and the Linux kernel versions packaged in our distribution. More on this in the report next month.

Salsa CI, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n The work by Santiago in Salsa CI this month includes a merge request to ease testing how the production images are built from the changes introduced by future merge requests. By default, the pipelines triggered by a merge request build a subset of the images built for production, to reduce the use of resources, and because most of the time the subset of staging images is enough to test the proposed modifications. However, sometimes it is needed to test how the full set of production images is built, and the above mentioned MR helps to do that. The changes include documentation, so hopefully this will make it easier to test future contributions. Also, for being able to include support for RISC-V, Salsa CI needs to replace kaniko as the tool used to build the images. Santiago tested buildah, but there are some issues when pushing built images for non-default platform architectures (i386, armhf, armel) to the container registry. Santiago will continue to work on this to find a solution.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Stefano Rivera prepared updates for a number of Python modules.
  • Stefano uploaded the latest point release of Python 3.12 and the latest Python 3.13 beta. Both uncovered upstream regressions that had to be addressed.
  • Stefano worked on preparations for DebConf 24.
  • Stefano helped SPI to reconcile their financial records for DebConf 23.
  • Colin did his usual routine work on the Python team, upgrading 36 packages to new upstream versions (including fixes for four CVEs in python-aiohttp), fixing RC bugs in ipykernel, ipywidgets, khard, and python-repoze.sphinx.autointerface, and packaging zope.deferredimport which was needed for a new upstream version of python-persistent.
  • Colin removed the user_readenv option from OpenSSH s PAM configuration (#1018260), and prepared a release note.
  • Thorsten Alteholz uploaded a new upstream version of cups.
  • Nicholas Skaggs updated xmacro to support reproducible builds (#1014428), DEP-3 and DEP-5 compatibility, along with utilizing hardening build flags. Helmut supported and uploaded package.
  • As a result of login having become non-essential, Helmut uploaded debvm to unstable and stable and fixed a crossqa.debian.net worker.
  • Santiago worked on the Content Team activities for DebConf24. Together with other DebConf25 team members, Santiago wrote a document for the head of the venue to describe the project of the conference.

8 July 2024

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in June 2024

FTP master This month I accepted 270 and rejected 23 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 279.

Debian LTS This was my hundred-twentieth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on: This month handling of the CVE of cups was a bit messy. After lifting the embargo of the CVE, a published patch did not work with all possible combinations of the configuration. In other words, in cases of having only one local domain socket configured, the cupsd did not start and failed with a strange error. Anyway, upstream published a new set of patches, which made cups work again. Unfortunately this happended just before the latest point release for Bullseye and Bookworm, so that the new packages did not make it into the release, but stopped in the corresponding p-u-queues: stable-p-u and old-p-u. I also continued to work on tiff and last but not least did a week of FD and attended the monthly LTS/ELTS meeting. Debian ELTS This month was the seventy-first ELTS month. During my allocated time I tried to upload a new version of cups for Jessie and Stretch. Unfortunately this was stopped due to an autopkgtest error, which I could not reproduce yet. I also wanted to finally upload a fixed version of exim4. Unfortunately this was stopped due to lots of CI-jobs for Buster. Updates for Buster are now also availble from ELTS, so some stuff had to prepared before the actual switch end of June. Additionally everything was delayed due to a crash of the CI worker. All in all this month was rather ill-fated. At least the exim4 upload will happen/already happened in July. I also continued to work on an update for libvirt, did a week of FD and attended the LTS/ELTS meeting. Debian Printing This month I uploaded new upstream or bugfix versions of: This work is generously funded by Freexian! Debian Astro This month I uploaded a new upstream or bugfix version of: All of those uploads are somehow related to /usr-move. Debian IoT This month I uploaded new upstream or bugfix versions of: Debian Mobcom The following packages have been prepared by the GSoC student Nathan: misc This month I uploaded new upstream or bugfix versions of: Here as well all uploads are somehow related to /usr-move

Russ Allbery: Review: Beyond Control

Review: Beyond Control, by Kit Rocha
Series: Beyond #2
Publisher: Kit Rocha
Copyright: December 2013
ASIN: B00GIA4GN8
Format: Kindle
Pages: 364
Beyond Control is science fiction erotica (dystopian erotic romance, per the marketing) and a direct sequel to Beyond Shame. These books shift protagonists with each volume and enough of the world background is explained that you could start here, but there are significant spoilers for the previous book. I read this book as part of the Beyond Series Bundle (Books 1-3), which is what the sidebar information is for. This is one of those reviews that I write because I'm stubborn about reviewing all the books I read, not because it's likely to be useful to anyone. There are also considerably more spoilers for the shape of the story than I normally include, so be warned. The Beyond series is erotica. Specifically, so far, consensual BDSM erotica with bisexuality but otherwise typical gender stereotypes. The authors (Kit Rocha is a pen name for Donna Herren and Bree Bridges) are women, so it's more female gaze than male gaze, but by erotica I don't mean romance with an above-average number of steamy scenes. I mean it felt like half the book by page count was descriptions of sex. This review is rather pointless because, one, I'm not going to review the sex that's the main point of the book, and two, I skimmed all the sex and read it for the story because I'm weird. Beyond Shame got me interested in these absurdly horny people and their post-apocalyptic survival struggles in the outskirts of a city run by a religious surveillance state, and I wanted to find out what happened next. Besides, this book promised to focus on my favorite character from the first novel, Lex, and I wanted to read more about her. Beyond Control uses a series pattern that I understand is common in romance but which is not often seen in SFF (my usual genre): each book focuses on a new couple adjacent to the previous couple, while the happily ever after of the previous couple plays out in the background. In this case, it also teases the protagonists of the next book. I can see why romance uses this structure: it's an excuse to provide satisfying interludes for the reader. In between Lex and Dallas's current relationship problems, one gets to enjoy how well everything worked out for Noelle and how much she's grown. In Beyond Shame, Lex was the sort-of partner of Dallas O'Kane, the leader of the street gang that is running Sector Four. (Picture a circle surrounding the rich-people-only city of Eden. That circle is divided into eight wedge-shaped sectors, which provide heavy industries, black-market pleasures, and slums for agricultural workers.) Dallas is an intensely possessive, personally charismatic semi-dictator who cultivates the image of a dangerous barbarian to everyone outside and most of the people inside Sector Four. Since he's supposed to be one of the good guys, this is more image than reality, but it's not entirely disconnected from reality. This book is about Lex and Dallas forming an actual relationship, instead of the fraught and complicated thing they had in the first book. I was hoping that this would involve Dallas becoming less of an asshole. It unfortunately does not, although some of what I attributed to malice may be adequately explained by stupidity. I'm not sure that's an improvement. Lex is great, just like she was in the first book. It's obvious by this point in the series that she does most of the emotional labor of keeping the gang running, and her support is central to Dallas's success. Like most of the people in this story, she has a nasty and abusive background that she's still dealing with in various ways. Dallas's possessiveness is intensely appealing to her, but she wants that possessiveness on different terms than Dallas may be willing to offer, or is even aware of. Lex was, I thought, exceptionally clear about what she wanted out of this relationship. Dallas thinks this is entirely about sex, and is, in general, dumber than a sack of hammers. That means fights. Also orgies, but, well, hopefully you knew what you were getting into if you picked up this book. I know, I know, it's erotica, that's the whole point, but these people have a truly absurd amount of sex. Eden puts birth control in the water supply, which is a neat way to simplify some of the in-story consequences of erotica. They must be putting aphrodisiacs in the water supply as well. There was a lot of sector politics in this book that I found way more interesting than it had any right to be. I really like most of these people, even Dallas when he manages to get his three brain cells connected for more than a few minutes. The events of the first book have a lot of significant fallout, Lex continues being a badass, the social dynamics between the women are very well-done (and pass the Bechdel test yet again even though this is mostly traditional-gender-role erotica), and if Dallas had managed to understand what he did wrong at a deeper-than-emotional level, I would have rather enjoyed the non-erotica story parts. Alas. I therefore wouldn't recommend this book even if I were willing to offer any recommendations about erotica (which I'm not). I was hoping it was going somewhere more rewarding than it did. But I still kind of want to read another one? I am weirdly fascinated with the lives of these people. The next book is about Six, who has the potential to turn into the sort of snarky, cynical character I love reading about. And it's not that hard to skim over the orgies. Maybe Dallas will get one additional brain cell per book? Followed by Beyond Pain. Rating: 5 out of 10

7 July 2024

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppSimdJson 0.1.12 on CRAN: Maintenance

A new maintenance release 0.1.12 of the RcppSimdJson package is now on CRAN. RcppSimdJson wraps the fantastic and genuinely impressive simdjson library by Daniel Lemire and collaborators. Via very clever algorithmic engineering to obtain largely branch-free code, coupled with modern C++ and newer compiler instructions, it results in parsing gigabytes of JSON parsed per second which is quite mindboggling. The best-case performance is faster than CPU speed as use of parallel SIMD instructions and careful branch avoidance can lead to less than one cpu cycle per byte parsed; see the video of the talk by Daniel Lemire at QCon. This release responds to another CRAN request, this time to accomodate compilation under C++20 with g++-14. As this was alreadt addressed upstream in simdjson it was simply a matter of upgrading to the current upstream which Daniel did in a PR. The (once again very short) NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in version 0.1.12 (2024-07-05)
  • Updated benchmarks now include 'yyjsonr'
  • simdjson was upgraded to version 3.95 (Daniel in #92 fixing #91)
  • Additional small update for C++20 compilation under g++-14

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. For questions, suggestions, or issues please use the issue tracker at the GitHub repo. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now 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.

Niels Thykier: Improving packaging file detection in Debian

Debian packaging consists of a directory (debian/) containing a number of "hard-coded" filenames such as debian/control, debian/changelog, debian/copyright. In addition to these, many packages will also use a number of optional files that are named via a pattern such as debian/ PACKAGE .install. At a high level the patterns looks deceptively simple. However, if you start working on trying to automatically classify files in debian/ (which could be helpful to tell the user they have a typo in the filename), you will quickly realize these patterns are not machine friendly at all for this purpose.
The patterns deconstructed To appreciate the problem fully, here is a primer on the pattern and all its issues. If you are already well-versed in these, you might want to skip the section. The most common patterns are debian/package.stem or debian/stem and usually the go to example is the install stem ( a concrete example being debian/debhelper.install). However, the full pattern consists of 4 parts where 3 of them are optional.
  • The package name followed by a period. Optional, but must be the first if present.
  • The name segment followed by a period. Optional, but must appear between the package name (if present) and the stem. If the package name is not present, then the name segment must be first.
  • The stem. Mandatory.
  • An architecture restriction prefixed by a period. Optional, must appear after the stem if present.
To visualize it with [foo] to mark optional parts, it looks like debian/[PACKAGE.][NAME.]STEM[.ARCH] Detecting whether a given file is in fact a packaging file now boils down to reverse engineering its name against this pattern. Again, so far, it might still look manageable. One major complication is that every part (except ARCH) can contain periods. So a trivial "split by period" is not going to cut it. As an example:
debian/g++-3.0.user.service
This example is deliberately crafted to be ambiguous and show this problem in its full glory. This file name can be in multiple ways:
  • Is the stem service or user.service? (both are known stems from dh_installsystemd and dh_installsystemduser respectively). In fact, it can be both at the same time with "clever" usage of --name=user passed to dh_installsystemd.
  • The g++-3.0 can be a package prefix or part of the name segment. Even if there is a g++-3.0 package in debian/control, then debhelper (until compat 15) will still happily match this file for the main package if you pass --name=g++-3.0 to the helper. Side bar: Woe is you if there is a g++-3 and a g++-3.0 package in debian/control, then we have multiple options for the package prefix! Though, I do not think that happens in practice.
Therefore, there are a lot of possible ways to split this filename that all matches the pattern but with vastly different meaning and consequences.
Making detection practical To make this detection practical, lets look at the first problems that we need to solve.
  1. We need the possible stems up front to have a chance at all. When multiple stems are an option, go for the longest match (that is, the one with most periods) since --name is rare and "code golfing" is even rarer.
  2. We can make the package prefix mandatory for files with the name segment. This way, the moment there is something before the stem, we know the package prefix will be part of it and can cut it. It does not solve the ambiguity if one package name is a prefix of another package name (from the same source), but it still a lot better. This made its way into debhelper compat 15 and now it is "just" a slow long way to a better future.
A simple solution to the first problem could be to have a static list of known stems. That will get you started but the debhelper eco-system strive on decentralization, so this feels like a mismatch. There is also a second problem with the static list. Namely, a given stem is only "valid" if the command in question is actually in use. Which means you now need to dumpster dive into the mess that is Turning-complete debhelper configuration file known as debian/rules to fully solve that. Thanks to the Turning-completeness, we will never get a perfect solution for a static analysis. Instead, it is time to back out and instead apply some simplifications. Here is a sample flow:
  1. Check whether the dh sequencer is used. If so, use some heuristics to figure out which addons are used.
  2. Delegate to dh_assistant to figure out which commands will be used and which debhelper config file stems it knows about. Here we need to know which sequences are in use from step one (if relevant). Combine this with any other sources for stems you have.
  3. Deconstruct all files in debian/ against the stems and known package names from debian/control. In theory, dumpster diving after --name options would be helpful here, but personally I skipped that part as I want to keep my debian/rules parsing to an absolute minimum.
With this logic, you can now:
  • Provide typo detection of the stem (debian/foo.intsall -> debian/foo.install) provided to have adequate handling of the corner cases (such as debian/*.conf not needing correction into debian/*.config)
  • Detect possible invalid package prefix (debian/foo.install without foo being a package). Note this has to be a weak warning unless the package is using debhelper compat 15 or you dumpster dived to validate that dh_install was not passed dh_install --name foo. Agreed, no one should do that, but they can and false positives are the worst kind of positives for a linting tool.
  • With some limitations, detect files used without the relevant command being active. As an example, the some integration modes of debputy removes dh_install, so a debian/foo.install would not be used.
  • Associate a given file with a given command to assist users with the documentation look up. Like debian/foo.user.service is related to dh_installsystemduser, so man dh_installsystemduser is a natural start for documentation.
I have added the logic for all these features in debputy though the documentation association is currently not in a user facing command. All the others are now diagnostics emitted by debputy in its editor support mode (debputy lsp server) or via debputy lint. In the editor mode, the diagnostics are currently associated with the package name in debian/control due to technical limitations of how the editor integration works. Some of these features will the latest version of debhelper (moving target at times). Check with debputy lsp features for the Extra dh support feature, which will be enabled if you got all you need. Note: The detection is currently (mostly) ignoring files with architecture restrictions. That might be lifted in the future. However, architecture restricted config files tend to be rare, so they were not a priority at this point. Additionally, debputy for technical reasons ignores stem typos with multiple matches. That sadly means that typos of debian/docs will often be unreported due to its proximity to debian/dirs and vice versa.
Diving a bit deeper on getting the stems To get the stems, debputy has 3 primary sources:
  1. Its own plugins can provide packager provided files. These are only relevant if the package is using debputy.
  2. It is als possible to provide a debputy plugin that identifies packaging files (either static or named ones). Though in practice, we probably do not want people to roll their own debputy plugin for this purpose, since the detection only works if the plugin is installed. I have used this mechanism to have debhelper provide a debhelper-documentation plugin to enrich the auto-detected data and we can assume most people interested in this feature would have debhelper installed.
  3. It asks dh_assistant list-guessed-dh-config-files for config files, which is covered below.
The dh_assistant command uses the same logic as dh to identify the active add-ons and loads them. From there, it scans all commands mentioned in the sequence for the PROMISE: DH NOOP WITHOUT ...-hint and a new INTROSPECTABLE: CONFIG-FILES ...-hint. When these hints reference a packaging file (as an example, via pkgfile(foo)) then dh_assistant records that as a known packaging file for that helper. Additionally, debhelper now also tracks commands that were removed from the sequence. Several of the dh_assistant subcommand now use this to enrich their (JSON) output with notes about these commands being known but not active.
The end result With all of this work, you now get: 
$ apt satisfy 'dh-debputy (>= 0.1.43~), debhelper (>= 13.16~), python3-lsprotocol, python3-levenshtein'
# For demo purposes, pull two known repos (feel free to use your own packages here)
$ git clone https://salsa.debian.org/debian/debhelper.git -b debian/13.16
$ git clone https://salsa.debian.org/debian/debputy.git -b debian/0.1.43
$ cd debhelper
$ mv debian/debhelper.install debian/debhelper.intsall
$ debputy lint
warning: File: debian/debhelper.intsall:1:0:1:0: The file "debian/debhelper.intsall" is likely a typo of "debian/debhelper.install"
    File-level diagnostic
$ mv debian/debhelper.intsall debian/debhleper.install
$ debputy lint
warning: File: debian/debhleper.install:1:0:1:0: Possible typo in "debian/debhleper.install". Consider renaming the file to "debian/debhelper.debhleper.install" or "debian/debhelper.install" if it is intended for debhelper
    File-level diagnostic
$ cd ../debputy
$ touch debian/install
$ debputy lint --no-warn-about-check-manifest
warning: File: debian/install:1:0:1:0: The file debian/install is related to a command that is not active in the dh sequence with the current addons
    File-level diagnostic
As mentioned, you also get these diagnostics in the editor via the debputy lsp server feature. Here the diagnostics appear in debian/control over the package name for technical reasons. The editor side still needs a bit more work. Notably, changes to the filename is not triggered automatically and will first be caught on the next change to debian/control. Likewise, changes to debian/rules to add --with to dh might also have some limitations depending on the editor. Saving both files and then triggering an edit of debian/control seems to work reliable but ideally it should not be that involved. The debhelper side could also do with some work to remove the unnecessary support for the name segment with many file stems that do not need them and announce that to debputy. Anyhow, it is still a vast improvement over the status quo that was "Why is my file silently ignored!?".

Russ Allbery: Review: Welcome to Boy.Net

Review: Welcome to Boy.Net, by Lyda Morehouse
Series: Earth's Shadow #1
Publisher: Wizard's Tower Press
Copyright: April 2024
ISBN: 1-913892-71-9
Format: Kindle
Pages: 355
Welcome to Boy.Net is a science fiction novel with cyberpunk vibes, the first of a possible series. Earth is a largely abandoned wasteland. Humanity has survived in the rest of the solar system and spread from Earth's moon to the outer planets. Mars is the power in the inner system, obsessed with all things Earth and effectively run by the Earth Nations' Peacekeeping Force, the ENForcers. An ENForcer soldier is raised in a creche from an early age, implanted with cybernetic wetware and nanite enhancements, and extensively trained to be an elite fighting unit. As befits a proper military, every ENForcer is, of course, male. The ENForcers thought Lucia Del Toro was a good, obedient soldier. They also thought she was a man. They were wrong about those and many other things. After her role in an atrocity that named her the Scourge of New Shanghai, she went AWOL and stole her command ship. Now she and her partner/girlfriend Hawk, a computer hacker from Luna, make a living with bounty hunting jobs in the outer system. The ENForcers rarely cross the asteroid belt; the United Miners see to that. The appearance of an F-class ENForcer battle cruiser in Jupiter orbit is a very unpleasant surprise. Lucia and Hawk hope it has nothing to do with them. That hope is dashed when ENForcers turn up in the middle of their next job: a bounty to retrieve an AI eye. I first found Lyda Morehouse via her AngeLINK cyberpunk series, the last of which was published in 2011. Since then, she's been writing paranormal romance and urban fantasy as Tate Hallaway. This return to science fiction is an adventure with trickster hackers, throwback anime-based cowboy bars, tense confrontations with fascist thugs, and unexpected mutual aid, but its core is a cyberpunk look at the people who are unwilling or unable to follow the rules of social conformity. Gender conformity, specifically. Once you understand what this book is about, Welcome to Boy.Net is a great title, but I'm not sure it serves its purpose as a marketing tool. This is not the book that I would have expected from that title in isolation, and I'm a bit worried that people who would like it might pass it by. Inside the story, Boy.Net is the slang term for the cybernetic network that links all ENForcers. If this were the derogatory term used by people outside the ENForcers, I could see it, but it's what the ENForcers themselves call it. That left me with a few suspension of disbelief problems, since the sort of macho assholes who are this obsessed with male gender conformance usually consider "boys" to be derogatory and wouldn't call their military cybernetic network something that sounds that belittling, even as a joke. It would be named after some sort of Orwellian reference to freedom, or something related to violence, dominance, brutality, or some other "traditional male" virtue. But although this term didn't work for me as world-building, it's a beautiful touch thematically. What Morehouse is doing here is the sort of concretized metaphor that science fiction is so good at: an element of world-building that is both an analogy for something the reader is familiar with and is also a concrete piece of world background that follows believable rules and can be manipulated by the characters. Boy.Net is trying to reconnect to Lucia against her will. If it succeeds, it will treat the body modifications she's made as damage and try to reverse all of them, attempting to convert her back to the model of an ENForcer. But it is also a sharp metaphor for how gender roles are enforced in our world: a child assigned male is connected to a pervasive network of gender expectations and is programmed, shaped, and monitored to match the social role of a boy. Even if they reject those expectations, the gender role keeps trying to reconnect and convert them back. I really enjoyed Morehouse's handling of the gender dynamics. It's an important part of the plot, but it's not the only thing going on or the only thing the characters think about. Lucia is occasionally caught by surprise by well-described gender euphoria, but mostly gender is something other people keep trying to impose on her because they're obsessed with forcing social conformity. The rest of the book is a fun romp with a few memorable characters and a couple of great moments with unexpected allies. Hawk and Lucia have an imperfect but low drama relationship that features a great combination of insight and the occasional misunderstanding. It's the kind of believable human relationship that I don't see very much in science fiction, written with the comfortable assurance of an author with over a dozen books under her belt. Some of the supporting characters are also excellent, including a non-binary deaf hacker that I wish had been a bit more central to the story. This is not the greatest science fiction novel I've read, but it was entertaining throughout and kept me turning the pages. Recommended if you want some solar-system cyberpunk in your life. Welcome to Boy.Net reaches a conclusion of sorts, but there's an obvious hook for a sequel and a lot of room left for more stories. I hope enough people buy this book so that I can read it. Rating: 7 out of 10

4 July 2024

Arturo Borrero Gonz lez: Wikimedia Toolforge: migrating Kubernetes from PodSecurityPolicy to Kyverno

Le ch teau de Val re et le Haut de Cry en juillet 2022 Christian David, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons This post was originally published in the Wikimedia Tech blog, authored by Arturo Borrero Gonzalez. Summary: this article shares the experience and learnings of migrating away from Kubernetes PodSecurityPolicy into Kyverno in the Wikimedia Toolforge platform. Wikimedia Toolforge is a Platform-as-a-Service, built with Kubernetes, and maintained by the Wikimedia Cloud Services team (WMCS). It is completely free and open, and we welcome anyone to use it to build and host tools (bots, webservices, scheduled jobs, etc) in support of Wikimedia projects. We provide a set of platform-specific services, command line interfaces, and shortcuts to help in the task of setting up webservices, jobs, and stuff like building container images, or using databases. Using these interfaces makes the underlying Kubernetes system pretty much invisible to users. We also allow direct access to the Kubernetes API, and some advanced users do directly interact with it. Each account has a Kubernetes namespace where they can freely deploy their workloads. We have a number of controls in place to ensure performance, stability, and fairness of the system, including quotas, RBAC permissions, and up until recently PodSecurityPolicies (PSP). At the time of this writing, we had around 3.500 Toolforge tool accounts in the system. We early adopted PSP in 2019 as a way to make sure Pods had the correct runtime configuration. We needed Pods to stay within the safe boundaries of a set of pre-defined parameters. Back when we adopted PSP there was already the option to use 3rd party agents, like OpenPolicyAgent Gatekeeper, but we decided not to invest in them, and went with a native, built-in mechanism instead. In 2021 it was announced that the PSP mechanism would be deprecated, and removed in Kubernetes 1.25. Even though we had been warned years in advance, we did not prioritize the migration of PSP until we were in Kubernetes 1.24, and blocked, unable to upgrade forward without taking actions. The WMCS team explored different alternatives for this migration, but eventually we decided to go with Kyverno as a replacement for PSP. And so with that decision it began the journey described in this blog post. First, we needed a source code refactor for one of the key components of our Toolforge Kubernetes: maintain-kubeusers. This custom piece of software that we built in-house, contains the logic to fetch accounts from LDAP and do the necessary instrumentation on Kubernetes to accommodate each one: create namespace, RBAC, quota, a kubeconfig file, etc. With the refactor, we introduced a proper reconciliation loop, in a way that the software would have a notion of what needs to be done for each account, what would be missing, what to delete, upgrade, and so on. This would allow us to easily deploy new resources for each account, or iterate on their definitions. The initial version of the refactor had a number of problems, though. For one, the new version of maintain-kubeusers was doing more filesystem interaction than the previous version, resulting in a slow reconciliation loop over all the accounts. We used NFS as the underlying storage system for Toolforge, and it could be very slow because of reasons beyond this blog post. This was corrected in the next few days after the initial refactor rollout. A side note with an implementation detail: we stored a configmap on each account namespace with the state of each resource. Storing more state on this configmap was our solution to avoid additional NFS latency. I initially estimated this refactor would take me a week to complete, but unfortunately it took me around three weeks instead. Previous to the refactor, there were several manual steps and cleanups required to be done when updating the definition of a resource. The process is now automated, more robust, performant, efficient and clean. So in my opinion it was worth it, even if it took more time than expected. Then, we worked on the Kyverno policies themselves. Because we had a very particular PSP setting, in order to ease the transition, we tried to replicate their semantics on a 1:1 basis as much as possible. This involved things like transparent mutation of Pod resources, then validation. Additionally, we had one different PSP definition for each account, so we decided to create one different Kyverno namespaced policy resource for each account namespace remember, we had 3.5k accounts. We created a Kyverno policy template that we would then render and inject for each account. For developing and testing all this, maintain-kubeusers and the Kyverno bits, we had a project called lima-kilo, which was a local Kubernetes setup replicating production Toolforge. This was used by each engineer in their laptop as a common development environment. We had planned the migration from PSP to Kyverno policies in stages, like this:
  1. update our internal template generators to make Pod security settings explicit
  2. introduce Kyverno policies in Audit mode
  3. see how the cluster would behave with them, and if we had any offending resources reported by the new policies, and correct them
  4. modify Kyverno policies and set them in Enforce mode
  5. drop PSP
In stage 1, we updated things like the toolforge-jobs-framework and tools-webservice. In stage 2, when we deployed the 3.5k Kyverno policy resources, our production cluster died almost immediately. Surprise. All the monitoring went red, the Kubernetes apiserver became irresponsibe, and we were unable to perform any administrative actions in the Kubernetes control plane, or even the underlying virtual machines. All Toolforge users were impacted. This was a full scale outage that required the energy of the whole WMCS team to recover from. We temporarily disabled Kyverno until we could learn what had occurred. This incident happened despite having tested before in lima-kilo and in another pre-production cluster we had, called Toolsbeta. But we had not tested that many policy resources. Clearly, this was something scale-related. After the incident, I went on and created 3.5k Kyverno policy resources on lima-kilo, and indeed I was able to reproduce the outage. We took a number of measures, corrected a few errors in our infrastructure, reached out to the Kyverno upstream developers, asking for advice, and at the end we did the following to accommodate the setup to our needs: I have to admit, I was briefly tempted to drop Kyverno, and even stop pursuing using an external policy agent entirely, and write our own custom admission controller out of concerns over performance of this architecture. However, after applying all the measures listed above, the system became very stable, so we decided to move forward. The second attempt at deploying it all went through just fine. No outage this time When we were in stage 4 we detected another bug. We had been following the Kubernetes upstream documentation for setting securityContext to the right values. In particular, we were enforcing the procMount to be set to the default value, which per the docs it was DefaultProcMount . However, that string is the name of the internal variable in the source code, whereas the actual default value is the string Default . This caused pods to be rightfully rejected by Kyverno while we figured the problem. I sent a patch upstream to fix this problem. We finally had everything in place, reached stage 5, and we were able to disable PSP. We unloaded the PSP controller from the kubernetes apiserver, and deleted every individual PSP definition. Everything was very smooth in this last step of the migration. This whole PSP project, including the maintain-kubeusers refactor, the outage, and all the different migration stages took roughly three months to complete. For me there are a number of valuable reasons to learn from this project. For one, the scale is something to consider, and test, when evaluating a new architecture or software component. Not doing so can lead to service outages, or unexpectedly poor performances. This is in the first chapter of the SRE handbook, but we got a reminder the hard way This post was originally published in the Wikimedia Tech blog, authored by Arturo Borrero Gonzalez.

Samuel Henrique: Debian's curl now supports HTTP3

tl;dr Starting with curl 8.0.0-2, you can now use HTTP3. 
curl --http3-only https://example.com
Or, if you would like to try it out in a container: 
podman run debian:unstable apt install --update -y curl && curl --http3-only https://example.com
(in case you haven't noticed, apt now has the --update option for the upgrade and install commands, although not available on stable yet)

Availability
  • Debian unstable - Since 2024-07-02
  • Debian testing - Since 2024-07-18
  • Debian 12/bookworm backports - Expected by the end of August 2024.
  • Debian 12/bookworm - Due to the mechanisms we have in place to make sure Debian stable is in fact stable, we will never be able to ship this in the regular repository. Users can make use of the backports repositories instead.
  • Debian derivatives - Rolling releases will get it by the time it's on Debian testing (e.g.: Kali Linux). Stable derivatives only in their next major release.

The challenge HTTP3 is fresh new, well... not really, but at least fresh enough that I'm not aware of any other Linux distribution supporting it on curl, the reason is likely two-fold:

  1. OpenSSL is not there yet OpenSSL still doesn't have proper HTTP3 support, and given that OpenSSL is so widely used, almost every curl distributor/packager will build curl with it and thus changing the TLS backend to something else is risky. Unfortunately, proper support for the OpenSSL libcurl is unlikely to come anytime before the end of this year, the OpenSSL performance is not good enough yet as of version 3.3. Daniel Stenberg has written about the state of this multiple times, most recently at HTTP/3 in curl mid 2024, if you're interested, I suggest reading through his other posts as well. Some might have noticed that nginx does support HTTP3 through OpenSSL, although when you look closely, it's not exactly perfect:
    An SSL library that provides QUIC support is recommended to build nginx, such as BoringSSL, LibreSSL, or QuicTLS. Otherwise, the OpenSSL compatibility layer will be used that does not support early data.
    As you can see, they don't recommend using OpenSSL, and when doing so, you don't get complete support.

  2. HTTP3 support for GnuTLS/nghttp3/ngtcp2 is recent The non-experimental support arrived back in October 2023, and so that's when I started seriously planning for this. curl has been working on HTTP3 support for years, and so it did support other TLS backends before that, but out of them, the one most feasible for a distribution to ship would be GnuTLS, which gets HTTP3 support through ngctp2 and nghttp3.

How it was done The Debian curl package has historically shipped at least two variants of libcurl, an OpenSSL and a GnuTLS one. The OpenSSL libcurl can't support HTTP3 for the reasons explained above, but the GnuTLS libcurl can (with ngtcp2 and nghtp3). Debian packages can choose which version of libcurl to link against (without having to modify any upstream source code). Debian's "git" package being a famous example of a package that links against the GnuTLS libcurl. Enabling HTTP3 on curl was done in three steps:
  1. Make sure all required dependencies fulfill the minimum requirements.
  2. Enable HTTP3 for GnuTLS libcurl.
  3. Change the libcurl used by the curl CLI, from OpenSSL to GnuTLS.
curl's HTTP3 support requires a somewhat recent version of nghttp3 and updating that required a transition (due to the SONAME bump), while we've also had months of freeze for transitions due to the time_t transition. After the dependencies were in place, enabling HTTP3 for the GnuTLS libcurl was straightforward. Then, for the last part, we had to switch the TLS backend used by the curl CLI. Doing the swap is also quite easy on the packaging level, but we have to consider the chances of this change breaking our users' environments.

Ensuring there are no breakages The first thing to consider regarding breakages is that this change is not going to be pushed directly to the current Debian stable releases, it will be present in the next stable release (13/trixie) but the current one will stick to the version that's already shipped. Secondly, we have to consider the risk of losing the ability to use certain parameters from the curl CLI which could be limited to the OpenSSL backend. During curl-up 2024, the curl developers pointed out the existence of a page that lists the TLS related options and the backends they work with. Analysing that page, ignoring all of the options that are suffixed with "BLOB" (only pertinent to the library, not the CLI), the only one left which is attention worthy is CURLOPT_ECH.
This experimental feature requires a special build of OpenSSL, as ECH is not yet supported in OpenSSL releases. In contrast ECH is supported by the latest BoringSSL and wolfSSL releases.
As it turns out, Encrypted Client Hello is experimental and it's not supported by the vanilla OpenSSL. This was enough of an investigation for me to go ahead with the change. Noting that even in the worst case scenario (we find a horrible regression), we can rollback without having affected a single stable release. Now that the package is on Debian unstable, the CI tests (autopkgtest) of every package that depends on curl is currently running, the results are compared against the migration-reference (in this case, the curl CLI with OpenSSL, before the change). If everything goes right, curl with HTTP3 support will migrate to Debian testing in around 5 days. If we spot any issues, we'll have to solve them first and it's going to be hard to predict how long it takes, although it's fair to expect less than a month.

Feedback Feel free to join the Matrix room for the Debian curl maintainers:
https://matrix.to/#/#debian-curl-maintainers:matrix.org

Acknowledgements It took us a bit longer than expected to be able to enable HTTP3, nonetheless it's still early enough to be excited about. A lot of people were crucial to make this happen. I should recognize in the first place, obviously, the curl developers and the developers of the supporting libraries: GnuTLS, nghttp3, ngtcp2. Participating in the curl-up 2024 conference helped me get motivated to push this through, besides becoming aware of the right documentation to research for impact. On the Debian side, Sakirnth Nagarasa <sakirnth> was responsible for updating and taking care of the transition for nghttp3 and ngtcp2. Also on the Debian side, I've got loads of help and support from the co-maintainers of the curl package: Sergio Durigan Junior <sergiodj> and Carlos Henrique Lima Melara <charles>.

Changes since publication

2024-07-18
  • Update date of availability for Debian testing and expected date for bookworm backports.
  • We have historically spoken Portuguese in the room but we'll switch to English in case anyone joins.

3 July 2024

Mike Gabriel: Polis - a FLOSS Tool for Civic Participation -- Initial Evaluation and Adaptation (episode 2/5)

Here comes the 2nd article of the 5-episode blog post series written by Guido Berh rster, member of staff at my company Fre(i)e Software GmbH. Enjoy also this read on Guido's work on Polis,
Mike Table of Contents of the Blog Post Series
  1. Introduction
  2. Initial evaluation and adaptation (this article)
  3. Issues extending Polis and adjusting our goals
  4. Creating (a) new frontend(s) for Polis
  5. Current status and roadmap
Polis - Initial evaluation and adaptation The Polis code base consists of a number of components, the administration and participation interfaces, a common web backend, and a statistics processing server. Both frontends and the backend are written in a mixture of JavaScript and TypeScript, only the statistics processing server is written in Clojure. In case of self hosting the preferred method of deployment is via Docker containers using Docker Compose or any other orchestrator. The participation frontend for conversations can either be used as a standalone web page or be embedded via an iframe. For our planned use case we initially defined the following goals: After a preliminary evaluation of our own and consulting with Policy Lab UK who were also evaluating and testing Polis and had already made a range of improvements related to self-hosting as well as bug fixes and modernization changes we decided to take their work as a base for our adaptations with the intent of submitting generally useful changes back to the Polis project. Subsequently, a number of changes were implemented, including the removal of hardcoded domain names, the elimination of unnecessary cookies and third-party requests, support for an alternative email sending service, and the option of disabling Facebook and X integration. For the branding our approach was to add an option allowing websites which are embedding conversations in an iframe to load an alternative stylesheet for overriding the native Polis branding. For this to be practical we intended to use CSS custom properties for defining branding-related styles such as colors and fonts. That approach turned out to be problematic because although the Polis participation frontend stylesheet is generated via SCSS and some of the colors are parameterized, however, they are not used consistently throughout the SCSS stylesheets, unfortunately. In addition the frontend templates contain a large amount of hardcoded style attributes. While we succeeded in implementing user-defined stylesheets, it took a disproportionate amount of development resources to parameterize all used colors and fonts via CSS custom properties aggravated by the fact that the SCSS and template files are huge and contain many unused rules and code.

Ian Jackson: derive-deftly is nearing 1.x - call for review/testing

derive-deftly, the template-based derive-macro facility for Rust, has been a great success. It s coming up to time to declare a stable 1.x version. If you d like to try it out, and have final comments / observations, now is the time. Introduction to derive-deftly Have you ever wished that you could that could write a new derive macro without having to mess with procedural macros? You can! derive-deftly lets you write a #[derive] macro, using a template syntax which looks a lot like macro_rules!: 
use derive_deftly:: define_derive_deftly, Deftly ;
define_derive_deftly!  
    ListVariants:
    impl $ttype  
        fn list_variants() -> Vec<&'static str>  
            vec![ $( stringify!( $vname ) , ) ]
         
     
 
#[derive(Deftly)]
#[derive_deftly(ListVariants)]
enum Enum  
    UnitVariant,
    StructVariant   a: u8, b: u16  ,
    TupleVariant(u8, u16),
 
assert_eq!(
    Enum::list_variants(),
    ["UnitVariant", "StructVariant", "TupleVariant"],
);
Status derive-deftly has a wide range of features, which can be used to easily write sophisticated and reliable derive macros. We ve been using it in Arti, the Tor Project s reimplementation of Tor in Rust, and we ve found it very useful. There is comprehensive reference documentation, and more discursive User Guide for a more gentle introduction. Naturally, everything is fully tested. History derive-deftly started out as a Tor Hackweek project. It used to be called derive-adhoc. But we renamed it because we found that many of the most interesting use cases were really not very ad-hoc at all. Over the past months we ve been ticking off our 1.0 blocker tickets. We ve taken the opportunity to improve syntax, terminology, and semantics. We hope we have now made the last breaking changes. Plans - call for review/testing In the near future, we plan to declare version 1.0. After 1.x, we intend to make breaking changes very rarely. So, right now, we d like last-minute feedback. Are there any wrinkles that need to be sorted out? Please file tickets or MRs on our gitlab. Ideally, anything which might imply breaking changes would be submitted on or before the 13th of August. In the medium to long term, we have many ideas for how to make derive-deftly even more convenient, and even more powerful. But we are going to proceed cautiously, because we don t want to introduce bad syntax or bad features, which will require difficult decisions in the future about forward compatibility.

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Sahil Dhiman: RTI to NPL Regarding Their NTP Infrastructure

I became interested in Network Time Protocol (NTP) last year after learning how fundamental this protocol is to the functioning of the global Internet. NTP helps synchronize clocks on devices over the Internet, which is essential for secure browsing, timestamping, keeping everyone in sync or just checking what time it is. Computers usually have a hardware real-time clock (RTC) but that deviates over time, so an occasional sync over NTP is required to keep the time accurate. Many network and IoT devices don t have hardware RTC so have even more reliance on NTP. Accurate time keeping starts with reference clocks like atomic clocks, GPS etc. Multiple government standard agencies host these reference clocks, which are regarded as Stratum 0. Stratum 1 servers are known as primary servers, and directly connect to Stratum 0 clocks for time. Stratum 1 servers then distribute time to Stratum 2 and further down the hierarchy. Computers typically connects to one or more Stratum 1/2/3 servers to get their time. Someone has to host these public Stratum 1,2,3 NTP servers. That s what NTP pool, a global effort by volunteers does. They provide NTP servers for the public to use. As of today, there are 4700+ servers in the pool which are free to use for anyone. Now let s come to the reason for writing this post. Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) in April 2022 released a set of cybersecurity directions which set the alarm bells ringing. Internet Society (and almost everyone else) wrote about it. And then there was this specific section about NTP:
All service providers, intermediaries, data centres, body corporate and Government organisations shall connect to the Network Time Protocol (NTP) Server of National Informatics Centre (NIC) or National Physical Laboratory (NPL) or with NTP servers traceable to these NTP servers, for synchronisation of all their ICT systems clocks. Entities having ICT infrastructure spanning multiple geographies may also use accurate and standard time source other than NPL and NIC, however it is to be ensured that their time source shall not deviate from NPL and NIC.
CSIR-National Physical Laboratory (NPL) is the official timekeeper for India and hosts the only public Stratum 1 clock in India, according to NTP pool website. So I was naturally curious to know what kind of infrastructure they re running for NTP. India has a Right to Information (RTI) Act which, like the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in the United States, gives citizens rights to request information from governmental entities, to which they have to respond in under 30 days. So last year, I filed two sets of RTI (one after the first reply came) inquiring about NPL s public NTP server setup. The first RTI had some generic questions: RTI 1
First RTI. Click to enlarge
This gave a vague idea about the setup, so I sat down and came with some specific questions in the next RTI. RTI 2
Second RTI. Click to enlarge
Feel free to make your conclusions from it now. Bear in mind these were filled last year so things might have changed. Do let me know if you have more information about it. Update (07/07/2024): Found an article from Medianama about Indian government time servers with information sourced through RTI.

Samuel Henrique: Announcing wcurl: a curl wrapper to download files

tl;dr Whenever you need to download files through the terminal and don't feel like using wget: 
wcurl example.com/filename.txt
Manpage:
https://manpages.debian.org/unstable/curl/wcurl.1.en.html

Availability (comes installed with the curl package):
  • Debian unstable - Since 2024-07-02
  • Debian testing - Since 2024-07-18
  • Debian 12/bookworm backports - Expected by the end of August 2024.
  • Debian 12/bookworm - Depends on whether Debian's release team will approve it, it could be available in the next point release.
  • Debian derivatives - Rolling releases will get it by the time it's on Debian testing (e.g.: Kali Linux). Stable derivatives only in their next major release.
If you don't want to wait for the package update to arrive, you can always copy the script and place it in your /usr/bin, the code is here:
https://github.com/Debian/wcurl/blob/main/wcurl
https://salsa.debian.org/debian/wcurl/-/blob/main/wcurl?ref_type=heads

Smoother CLI experience Starting with curl version 8.8.0-2, the Debian's curl package now ships a wcurl executable. wcurl is the solution for those who just need to download files without having to remember curl's parameters for things like automatically naming the files. Some people, myself included, would fall back to using wget whenever there was a need to download a file. Sometimes even installing wget just for that usecase. After all, it's easier to remember "apt install wget" rather than "curl -L -O -C - ...". wcurl consists of a simple shell script that provides sane defaults for the curl invocation, for when the use case is to just download files. By default, wcurl will:
  • Encode whitespaces in URLs;
  • Download multiple URLs in parallel if the installed curl's version is >= 7.66.0;
  • Follow redirects;
  • Automatically choose a filename as output;
  • Avoid overwriting files if the installed curl's version is >= 7.83.0 (--no-clobber);
  • Perform retries;
  • Set the downloaded file timestamp to the value provided by the server, if available;
  • Default to the protocol used as https if the URL doesn't contain any;
  • Disable curl's URL globbing parser so and [] characters in URLs are not treated specially.
Example to download a single file: 
wcurl example.com/filename.txt
If you ever need to set a custom flag, you can make use of the --curl-options wcurl option, anything set there will be passed to the curl invocation. Just beware that if you need to set any custom flags, it's likely you will be better served by calling curl directly. The --curl-options option is there to allow for some flexibility in unforeseen circumstances.

The need for wcurl I've always felt a bit ashamed of not remembering curl's parameters for downloading a file and automatically naming it, having resorted to wget most of the times this was needed (even installing wget when it wasn't there, just for this). I've spoken to a few other experienced people I know and confirmed what could be obvious to others: a lot of people struggle with this. Recently, the curl project released the results of 2024's curl survey, which also showed this is as a much needed feature, just look at some of the answers:

Q: Which curl command line option do you think needs improvement and how?
-O, I really want wget like functionality where I don't have to specify the name
Downloading a file (like wget) could be improved - with automatic naming of the file
downloading files - wget is much cleaner
I wish the default behaviour when GETting a binary was to drop it on disk. That's the only reason 'wget foo.tgz" is still ingrained in my muscle memory .
Maybe have a way to download without specifying something in -o (the only reason i used wget still)
--remote-time should be default
--remote-name-all could really use a short flag

Q: If you miss support for something, tell us what!
"Write the data to the file named in the URL (or in redirects if I'm feeling daring), and timestamp the file to the last-modified-date". This is the main reason I'm still using wget.
I can finally feel less bad about falling back to wget due to not remembering the parameters I want.

Idealization vs. reality I don't believe curl will ever change its default behavior in such a way that would accommodate this need, as that would have a side-effect of breaking things which expect the current behavior (the blast radius is literally the solar system). This means a new executable needs to be shipped side-by-side with curl, an opportunity to start fresh and work with a more focused use case (to download files). Ideally, this new executable would be maintained by the curl project, make use of libcurl under-the-hood, and be available everywhere. Nobody wants to worry if their systems have the tool or not, it should always be there. Given I'm just a Debian Developer, with not as much free time as I wish, I've decided to write a simple shell script wrapper calling the curl CLI under-the-hood. wcurl will come installed with the curl package from now on, and I will check with the release team about shipping it on the current Debian stable as well. Shipping wcurl in other distros will be up to them (Debian-derivatives should pick it up automatically, though). We've tried to make it easy for anyone to ship this by using the curl license, keeping the script POSIX-compliant, and shipping a manpage. Maybe if there's enough interest across distributions, someone might sign up for implementing this in upstream curl and increase its reach. I would be happy with the curl project reusing the wcurl name when that happens. It's unlikely that wcurl would be shipped by curl upstream as it is, assuming they would prefer a solution that uses libcurl direclty (more similar to curl the CLI, to maintain). In the worst case, wcurl becomes a Debian-specific tool that only a few people are aware of, in the best case, it becomes the new go-to CLI tool for simply downloading files. I would be happy if at least someone other than me finds it useful.

Naming is hard When I started working on it, I was calling the new executable "curld" (stands for "curl download"), but then when discussing this in one of our weekly calls in the Debian Bras lia community, it was mentioned that this could be confused for a daemon. We then settled for the name "wcurl", suggested by Carlos Henrique Lima Melara <charles>. It doesn't really stand for anything, but it's very easy to remember. You know... "it's that wget alternative for when you want to use curl instead" :)

Feedback I'm hosting the code on Github and Debian's GitLab instance, feel free to open an issue to provide feedback.
https://salsa.debian.org/debian/wcurl
https://github.com/Debian/wcurl We also have a Matrix room for the Debian curl maintainers:
https://matrix.to/#/#debian-curl-maintainers:matrix.org

Acknowledgments The idea for wcurl came a few days before the curl-up conference 2024. I've been thinking a lot about developer productivity in the terminal lately, different tools and better defaults. Before curl-up, I was also thinking about packaging improvements for the curl package. I don't remember what exactly happened, but I likely had to download something and felt a bit ashamed of maintaining curl and not remembering the parameters to download files the way I wanted. I first discussed this idea in the conference, where I asked the participants about it and there were no concerns raised, and some people said I should give it a go. Participating in curl-up was a really great experience and I'm thankful for the interactions I've had there. On the Debian side, I've got reviews of the code and manpage by Sergio Durigan Junior <sergiodj>, Guilherme Puida Moreira <puida> and Carlos Henrique Lima Melara <charles>. Sergio ended up rewriting the tool to be POSIX-compliant (my version was written in bash), so he takes all the credit for the portability.

Changes since publication

2024-07-18
  • Update date of availability for Debian testing and expected date for bookworm backports.
  • Mention charles as the person who suggested "wcurl" as a name.
  • Update wcurl's -o/--opts options, it's now just --curl-options.
  • Remove mention of language spoken in the Matrix room, we are using English now.
  • Update list of features of wcurl.

2 July 2024

Mike Gabriel: Polis - a FLOSS Tool for Civic Participation -- Introduction (episode 1/5)

This is the first article of a 5-episode blog post series written by Guido Berh rster, member of staff at my company Fre(i)e Software GmbH. Thanks, Guido for being on the Polis project. Enjoy the read on the work Guido has been doing over the past months,
Mike A team lead by Raoul Kramer/BetaBreak is currently adapting Polis for evaluation and testing by several Dutch provincial governments and central government ministries. Guido Berh rster (author of this article) who is an employee at Fre(i)e Software GmbH has been involved in this project as the main software developer. This series of blog posts describes how and why Polis was initially modified and adapted, what issues the team ran into and how this ultimately lead them to start a new Open Source project called Particiapp for accelerating the development of alternative Polis frontends compatible to but independent from the upstream project. Table of Contents of the Blog Post Series
  1. Introduction (this article)
  2. Initial evaluation and adaptation
  3. Issues extending Polis and adjusting our goals
  4. Creating (a) new frontend(s) for Polis
  5. Current status and roadmap
Polis - The Introduction What is Polis? Polis is a platform for participation which helps to gather, analyze and understand viewpoints of large groups of participants on complex issues. In practical terms participants take part in conversations on a predefined topic by voting on statements or submitting their own statements (referred to as comments in Polis) for others to vote on1. Through statistical analysis including machine learning participants are sorted into groups based on similarities in voting behavior. In addition, group-informed and overall consensus statements are identified and presented to participants in real-time. This allows for participants to react to and refine statements and either individually or through a predefined process to come to an overall consensus. Furthermore, the order in which statements are presented to participants is influenced by a complex weighting system based on a number of factors such as variance, recency, and frequency of skipping. This so called comment routing is intended to facilitate a meaningful contribution of participants without requiring them to vote on each of a potentially huge number of statements 2. Polis open-ended nature sets it apart from online surveys using pre-defined questions and allows its users to gather a more accurate picture of the public opinion. In contrast to a discussion forum or comment section where participants directly reply to each other, it discourages unproductive behavior such as provocations or personal attacks by not presenting statements in chronological order in combination with voting. Finally, its comment routing is intended to provide scalability towards a large number of participants which generate a potentially large number of statements. The project was developed and is maintained by The Computational Democracy Project, a USA-based non-profit organization which provides a hosted version and offers related services. It is also released as Open Source software under the AGPL 3.0 license. Polis has been used in a variety of different contexts as part of broader political processes facilitating broader political participation and opinion-forming, and gathering feedback and creative input. Use of Polis in Taiwan One prominent use case of Polis is its adoption as part of the vTaiwan participatory governance project. Established by the g0v civic tech community in the wake of the 2014 mass protests by the Sunflower movement, the vTaiwan project enables consultations on proposed legislation among a broad range of stakeholders including government ministries, lawmakers, experts, interest groups, civil society as well as the broader public. Although the resulting recommendations are non-binding, they exert pressure on the government to take action and recommendations have been adopted into legislation.345 vTaiwan uses Polis for large-scale online deliberations as part of a structured participation process. These deliberations take place after identifying and involving stakeholders and experts and providing through information about the topic at hand to the public. Citizens are then given the opportunity to vote on statements or provide alternative proposals which allows for the refinement of ideas and ideally leads to a consensus at the end. The results of these online deliberations are then curated, discussed in publicly broadcast face-to-face meetings which ultimately produce concrete policy recommendations. vTaiwan has in numerous cases given impulses resulting in government action and provided significant input e.g. on legislation regulating Uber or technological experiments by Fintech startups.35 See also
  1. https://compdemocracy.org/Polis/
  2. https://compdemocracy.org/comment-routing/
  3. https://info.vtaiwan.tw/
  4. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/27/taiwan-civic-hackers-polis-consensus-social-media-platform
  5. https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/08/21/240284/the-simple-but-ingenious-system-taiwan-uses-to-crowdsource-its-laws/

1 July 2024

Russell Coker: VoLTE in Australia

Introduction In Australia the 3G mobile frequencies are to be reused so they are in the process of shutting down the 3G service. That means that everyone has to use VoLTE (Voice Over LTE) for phone calls (including emergency calls). The shutdown time varies by telco, Kogan Mobile (one of the better services which has good value for money and generally works well) shut down their 3G service in January. Aldi Mobile (another one of the good services which is slightly more expensive but has included free calls to most first-world countries and uses the largest phone network) will shut theirs down at the end of August. For background there s a Fosdem talk about OpenSIPS with VoLTE and VoNR [1], it s more complex than you want to know. Also VoNR (Voice over New Radio) is the standard for 5G voice and it s different from VoLTE and has a fallback to VoLTE. Another good lecture for background information is the Fosdem talk on VoLTE at the handset end [2]. The PinePhonePro In October 2023 I tried using my PinePhonePro as my main phone but that only lasted a few days due to problems with calls and poor battery life [3]. Since then I went back to the Huawei Mate 10 Pro that I bought refurbished in June 2019 for $389. So that has been my main phone for 5 years now, giving a cost of $1.50 per week. I had tried using a Huawei Nova 7i running Android without Google Play as an experiment but that had failed, I do many things that need Android apps [4]. I followed the PinePhone wiki to get my PinePhonePro working with VoLTE [5]. That worked fine for me, the only difference from the instructions is that I had to use device /dev/ttyUSB3 and that the modem kept resetting itself during the process and when that happened I had to kill minicom and start again. After changing the setting and saving it the PinePhonePro seemed to work well with VoLTE on a Kogan Mobile SIM (so definitely not using 3G). One issue I have found is that Plasma Mobile (my preferred FOSS phone GUI) appears to have a library issue that results in polling every 14ms even when the screen is locked [6]. If you have a few processes doing that (which means the most lightly used Plasma system) it really hurts battery use. The maintainer has quite reasonably deferred action on this bug report given the KDE 6 transition. Later on in the Trixie development cycle I hope to get this issue resolved, I don t expect it to suddenly make battery life good. But it might make battery life acceptable. I am now idly considering carrying around my PinePhonePro in a powered off state for situations where I might need to do high security operations (root logins to servers or online banking) but for which carrying a laptop isn t convenient. It will do well for the turn on, do 30 mins of work that needs security, and then turn off scenario. Huawei Mate 10 Pro and Redmi 9A The Huawei Mate 10 Pro has been my main phone for 5 years and it has worked well, so it would be ideal if it could do VoLTE as the PinePhonePro isn t ready yet. All the web pages I ve seen about the Mate 10 Pro say that it will either allow upgrading to a VoLTE configuration if run with the right SIM or only support it with the right SIM. I did a test with a Chinese SIM which gave an option of turning on VoLTE but didn t allow any firmware updates and the VoLTE option went away when I put an Australian SIM in. Some forum comments had led me to believe that it would either permanently enable VoLTE or allow upgrading the firmware to one that enables VoLTE if I used a Chinese SIM but that is not the case. I didn t expect a high probability of success but I had to give it a go as it s a nice phone. I did some tests on a Redmi 9A (a terrible phone that has really bad latency on the UI in spite of having reasonably good hardware). The one I tested on didn t have VoLTE enabled when I got it, to test that I used the code *#*#4636#*#* in the dialler to get the menu of SIM information and it showed that VoLTE was not provisioned. I then had to update to the latest release of Android for that phone and enter *#*#86583#*#* in the dialler to enable VoLTE, the message displayed after entering that magic number must end in DISABLE . I get the impression that the code in question makes the phone not check certain aspects of whether the carrier is good for VoLTE and just do it. So apparently Kogan Mobile somehow gives the Redmi 9A the impression that VoLTE isn t supported but if the phone just goes ahead and connects it will work. I don t plan to use a Redmi 9A myself as it s too slow, but I added it to my collection to offer to anyone else I know who needs a phone with VoLTE and doesn t use the phone seriously or to someone who needs a known good phone for testing things. Samsung Galaxy Note 9 I got some Samsung Galaxy Note 9 phones to run Droidian as an experiment [7]. But Droidian dropped support for the Note 9 and I couldn t figure out how to enable VoLTE via Droidian, which was very annoying after I had spent $109 on a test phone and $215 on a phone for real use (I have no plans to try Droidian again at this time). I tried installing LineageOS on one Note 9 [8] which was much easier than expected (especially after previously installing Droidian). But VoLTE wasn t an option. According to Reddit LineageOS doesn t support VoLTE on Samsung devices and you can use a magisk module or a VoLTE enabler module but those aren t supported by LineageOS either [9]. I downloaded an original image for the Note 9 from SamsMobile.com [10]. That image booted past the orange stage (where if you have problems then your phone is probably permanently useless) but didn t boot into the OS. A friend helped me out with that and it turned out that the Heimdal flash tool on Linux didn t do something it needed to do and that Odin on Windows was required. After using Odin everything was fine and I have a Note 9 with VoLTE running the latest Samsung firmware which is security patch level 1st July 2022!!! So I have a choice between using a Note 9 for data and SMS while running a current version of Lineage OS with all security fixes or running a Samsung image with no security updates for 2 years which supports phone calls. So based on this I have to recommend Pixel as the phone of choice, it has a decent level of support from Google and long term support from LineageOS. According to the LineageOS web site you can run the current version of Lineage on the original Pixel phone from 2016! Of course getting VoLTE to work on it might be another saga, but it would probably be easier to do with LineageOS on a Pixel than on a Samsung phone. Conclusion The operation of the Note 9 for me is decent now apart from the potential security issues. The same goes for selling one of the phones. The PinePhonePro still has potential to become my daily driver at some future time if I and others can optimise power use. Also a complicating factor is that I want to have both Jabber and Matrix be actually instant IM systems not IM with a 5 minute delay, so suspend mode isn t a good option. Pixel phones will be a much higher priority when looking at phones to buy in future. The older Pixel phones go for as little as $100 on eBay and can still run the latest LineageOS. VoLTE seems needlessly complicated.
Related posts:
  1. Android vs FOSS Phones To achieve my aims regarding Convergence of mobile phone and...
  2. Is Lebara the Cheapest Mobile Phone company in Australia? My parents have just got a mobile phone with a...
  3. Changing Phone Prices in Australia 18 months ago when I signed up with Virgin Mobile...

Niels Thykier: Debian packaging with style black

When I started working on the language server for debputy, one of several reasons was about automatic applying a formatting style. Such that you would not have to remember to manually reformat the file. One of the problems with supporting automatic formatting is that no one agrees on the "one true style". To make this concrete, Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues did the numbers of which wrap-and-sort option that are most common in https://bugs.debian.org/895570#46. Unsurprising, we end up with 14-15 different styles with various degrees of popularity. To make matters worse, wrap-and-sort does not provide a way to declare "this package uses options -sat". So that begged the question, how would debputy know which style it should use when it was going to reformat file. After a couple of false-starts, Christian Hofstaedtler mentioned that we could just have a field in debian/control for supporting a "per-package" setting in responds to my concern about adding a new "per-package" config file. At first, I was not happy with it, because how would you specify all of these options in a field (in a decent manner)? But then I realized that one I do not want all these styles and that I could start simpler. The Python code formatter black is quite successful despite not having a lot of personalized style options. In fact, black makes a statement out of not allowing a lot of different styles. Combing that, the result was X-Style: black (to be added to the Source stanza of debian/control), which every possible reference to the black tool for how styling would work. Namely, you outsource the style management to the tool (debputy) and then start using your focus on something else than discussing styles. As with black, this packaging formatting style is going to be opinionated and it will evolve over time. At the starting point, it is similar to wrap-and-sort -sat for the deb822 files (debputy does not reformat other files at the moment). But as mentioned, it will likely evolve and possible diverge from wrap-and-sort over time. The choice of the starting point was based on the numbers posted by Johannes #895570. It was not my personal favorite but it seemed to have a majority and is also close to the one suggested by salsa pipeline maintainers. The delta being -kb which I had originally but removed in 0.1.34 at request of Otto Kek l inen after reviewing the numbers from Johannes one more time. To facilitate this new change, I uploaded debputy/0.1.30 (a while back) to Debian unstable with the following changes:
  • Support for the X-Style: black header.
  • When a style is defined, the debputy lsp server command will now automatically reformat deb822 files on save (if the editor supports it) or on explicit "reformat file" request from the editor (usually indirectly from the user).
  • New subcommand debputy reformat command that will reformat the files, when a style is defined.
  • A new pre-commit hook repo to run debputy lint and debputy reformat. These hooks are available from https://salsa.debian.org/debian/debputy-pre-commit-hooks version v0.1 and can be used with the pre-commit tool (from the package of same name).
The obvious omission is a salsa-pipeline feature for this. Otto has put that on to his personal todo list and I am looking forward to that.
Beyond black Another thing I dislike about our existing style tooling is that if you run wrap-and-sort without any arguments, you have a higher probability of "trashing" the style of the current package than getting the desired result. Part of this is because wrap-and-sort's defaults are out of sync with the usage (which is basically what https://bugs.debian.org/895570 is about). But I see another problem. The wrap-and-sort tool explicitly defined options to tweak the style but provided maintainers no way to record their preference in any machine readable way. The net result is that we have tons of diverging styles and that you (as a user of wrap-and-sort) have to manually tell wrap-and-sort which style you want every time you run the tool. In my opinion that is not playing to the strengths of neither human nor machine. Rather, it is playing to the weaknesses of the human if anything at all. But the salsa-CI pipeline people also ran into this issue and decided to work around this deficiency. To use wrap-and-sort in the salsa-CI pipeline, you have to set a variable to activate the job and another variable with the actual options you want. The salsa-CI pipeline is quite machine readable and wrap-and-sort is widely used. I had debputy reformat also check for the salsa-CI variables as a fallback. This fallback also works for the editor mode (debputy lsp server), so you might not even have to run debputy reformat. :) This was a deliberate trade-off. While I do not want all us to have all these options, I also want Debian packaging to be less painful and have fewer paper cuts. Having debputy go extra lengths to meet wrap-and-sort users where they are came out as the better solution for me. A nice side-effect of this trade-off is that debputy reformat now a good tool for drive-by contributors. You can safely run debputy reformat on any package and either it will apply the styling or it will back out and inform you that no obvious style was detected. In the latter case, you would have to fallback to manually deducing the style and applying it.
Differences to wrap-and-sort The debputy reformat has some limitations or known differences to wrap-and-sort. Notably, debputy reformat (nor debputy lsp server) will not invoke wrap-and-sort. Instead, debputy has its own reformatting engine that provides similar features. One reason for not running wrap-and-sort is that I want debputy reformat to match the style that debputy lsp server will give you. That way, you get consistent style across all debputy commands. Another reason is that it is important to me that reformatting is safe and does not change semantics. This leads to two regrettable known differences to the wrap-and-sort behavior due to safety in addition to one scope limitation in debputy:
  1. debputy will ignore requests to sort the stanzas when the "keep first" option is disabled (-b --no-keep-first). This combination is unsafe reformatting. I feel it was a mistake for wrap-and-sort to ever allow this but at least it is no longer the default (-b is now -bk by default). This will be less of a problem in debhelper-compat 15, since the concept of "main package" will disappear and all multi-binary source packages will be required to use debian/package.install rather than debian/install.
  2. debputy will not reorder the contents of debhelper packaging files such as debian/install. This is also an (theoretical) unsafe thing to do. While the average package will not experience issues with this, there are rare corner cases where the re-ordering can affect the end result. I happen to know this, because I ran into issues when trying to optimize dh_install in a way that assumed the order did not matter. Stuff broke and there is now special-case code in dh_install to back out of that optimization when that happens.
  3. debputy has a limited list of wrap-and-sort options it understands. Some options may cause debputy to back out and disable reformatting entirely with a remark that it cannot apply that style. If you run into a case of this, feel free to file a feature request to support it. I will not promise to support everything, but if it is safe and trivially doable with the engine already, then I probably will.
As stated, where debputy cannot implement the wrap-and-sort styles fully, then it will currently implement a subset that is safe if that can be identified or back out entirely of the formatting when it cannot. In all cases, debputy will not break the formatting if it is correct. It may just fail at correcting one aspect of the wrap-and-sort style if you happen to get it wrong. It is also important to remember that the prerequisite for debputy applying any wrap-and-sort style is that you have set the salsa-CI pipeline variables to trigger wrap-and-sort with the salsa-CI pipeline. So there is still a CI check before the merge that will run the wrap-and-sort in its full glory that provides the final safety net for you.
Just give me a style In conclusion, if you, like me, are more interested in getting a consistent style rather than discussing what that style should be, now you can get that with X-Style: black. You can also have your custom wrap-and-sort style be picked up automatically for drive-by contributors. 
$ apt satisfy 'dh-debputy (>= 0.1.30), python3-lsprotocol'
# Add  X-Style: black  to  debian/control  for "just give me a style"
#
# OR, if there is a specific  wrap-and-sort  style for you then set
# SALSA_CI_DISABLE_WRAP_AND_SORT=no plus set relevant options in
# SALSA_CI_WRAP_AND_SORT_ARGS in debian/salsa-ci.yml (or .gitlab-ci.yml)
$ debputy reformat
It is sadly not yet in the salsa-ci pipeline. Otto is looking into that and hopefully we will have it soon. :) And if you find yourself often doing archive-wide contributions and is tired of having to reverse engineer package formatting styles, consider using debputy reformat or debputy lsp server. If you use debputy in this way, please consider providing feedback on what would help you.

Guido G nther: Free Software Activities June 2024

A short status update of what happened on my side last month. Was able to test our Cellbroadcast bits, feedbackd became more flexible regarding LEDs, Phosh 0.40 is out, and some more. Phosh Phoc gmobile phosh-mobile-settings phosh-wallpapers emacs Debian ModemManager Feedbackd Livi Calls Chatty meta-phosh Libhandy If you want to support my work see donations.

Abhijith PA: A lazy local file sharing setup

At home, I have both a laptop and a *desktop PC. Most of my essential things, such as emails, repositories, password managers, contacts, and calendars are synced between the two devices. However, when I need to share some documents and I am lazy enough to go pick a flash drive, my only option is to push them to the Internet and download them on the other system, which is sitting at 20~ meters away. Typically, I do this either through email attachments or a matrix client. Occasionally, I think about setting up a network storage solution at home. But then I ask myself do I really need one. In my home network, I already have a Raspberry Pi running as my Wi-Fi router, doing DNS level ad blocking with Dnsmasq and DNS over TLS with stubby. Rpi has a 16GB memory card. I can mount RPi remote directory to both machines. I use pcmanfm as my file manager. It has the ability (like every other file managers) to mount remote storage over ssh. But one annoying thing is that whenever I open the mount directory, by default it shows the root file system of the remote device even when I explicitly mentioned the path. Then I discovered sshfs. I wrote the following script, which mount remote directory and open that in pcmanfm. 
#!/bin/bash
LOCMOUNT="/home/user/Public"
sshfs raspberrypi:Public $LOCMOUNT
pcmanfm $MOUNT
I haven t enabled any encryption for the memory until now since other than some logs RPi wasn t writing anything to it. I set up fscrypt on Rpi storage now. And ta-da, a lazy person s local sharing solution. *Desktop - Well, technically it s an old laptop with a broken keyboard and trackpad, connected to a monitor, keyboard and mouse. I don t feel keeping it on a shelf.

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