Changes in RcppSpdlog version 0.0.16 (2024-01-12)

• Upgraded to upstream releases spdlog 1.13.0

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

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

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

Some facts Before I start I want to make a few things clear: The Linux desktop will be moving to Wayland² this is a fact at this point (and has been for a while), sticking to X11 makes no sense for future projects. From reading Wayland protocols and working with it at a much lower level than I ever wanted to, it is also very clear to me that Wayland is an exceptionally well-designed core protocol, and so are the additional extension protocols (xdg-shell & Co.). The modularity of Wayland is great, it gives it incredible flexibility and will for sure turn out to be good for the long-term viability of this project (and also provides a path to correct protocol issues in future, if one is found). In other words: Wayland is an amazing foundation to build on, and a lot of its design decisions make a lot of sense! The shift towards people seeing Linux more as an application developer platform, and taking PipeWire and XDG Portals into account when designing for Wayland is also an amazing development and I love to see this this holistic approach is something I always wanted! Furthermore, I think Wayland removes a lot of functionality that shouldn t exist in a modern compositor and that s a good thing too! Some of X11 s features and design decisions had clear drawbacks that we shouldn t replicate. I highly recommend to read Nate s blog post, it s very good and goes into more detail. And due to all of this, I firmly believe that any advancement in the Wayland space must come from within the project.

But! But! Of course there was a but coming I think while developing Wayland-as-an-ecosystem we are now entrenched into narrow concepts of how a desktop should work. While discussing Wayland protocol additions, a lot of concepts clash, people from different desktops with different design philosophies debate the merits of those over and over again never reaching any conclusion (just as you will never get an answer out of humans whether sushi or pizza is the clearly superior food, or whether CSD or SSD is better). Some people want to use Wayland as a vehicle to force applications to submit to their desktop s design philosophies, others prefer the smallest and leanest protocol possible, other developers want the most elegant behavior possible. To be clear, I think those are all very valid approaches. But this also creates problems: By switching to Wayland compositors, we are already forcing a lot of porting work onto toolkit developers and application developers. This is annoying, but just work that has to be done. It becomes frustrating though if Wayland provides toolkits with absolutely no way to reach their goal in any reasonable way. For Nate s Photoshop analogy: Of course Linux does not break Photoshop, it is Adobe s responsibility to port it. But what if Linux was missing a crucial syscall that Photoshop needed for proper functionality and Adobe couldn t port it without that? In that case it becomes much less clear on who is to blame for Photoshop not being available. A lot of Wayland protocol work is focused on the environment and design, while applications and work to port them often is considered less. I think this happens because the overlap between application developers and developers of the desktop environments is not necessarily large, and the overlap with people willing to engage with Wayland upstream is even smaller. The combination of Windows developers porting apps to Linux and having involvement with toolkits or Wayland is pretty much nonexistent. So they have less of a voice.

A quick detour through the neuroscience research lab I have been involved with Freedesktop, GNOME and KDE for an incredibly long time now (more than a decade), but my actual job (besides consulting for Purism) is that of a PhD candidate in a neuroscience research lab (working on the morphology of biological neurons and its relation to behavior). I am mostly involved with three research groups in our institute, which is about 35 people. Most of us do all our data analysis on powerful servers which we connect to using RDP (with KDE Plasma as desktop). Since I joined, I have been pushing the envelope a bit to extend Linux usage to data acquisition and regular clients, and to have our data acquisition hardware interface well with it. Linux brings some unique advantages for use in research, besides the obvious one of having every step of your data management platform introspectable with no black boxes left, a goal I value very highly in research (but this would be its own blogpost). In terms of operating system usage though, most systems are still Windows-based. Windows is what companies develop for, and what people use by default and are familiar with. The choice of operating system is very strongly driven by application availability, and WSL being really good makes this somewhat worse, as it removes the need for people to switch to a real Linux system entirely if there is the occasional software requiring it. Yet, we have a lot more Linux users than before, and use it in many places where it makes sense. I also developed a novel data acquisition software that even runs on Linux-only and uses the abilities of the platform to its fullest extent. All of this resulted in me asking existing software and hardware vendors for Linux support a lot more often. Vendor-customer relationship in science is usually pretty good, and vendors do usually want to help out. Same for open source projects, especially if you offer to do Linux porting work for them But overall, the ease of use and availability of required applications and their usability rules supreme. Most people are not technically knowledgeable and just want to get their research done in the best way possible, getting the best results with the least amount of friction.

KDE/Linux usage at a control station for a particle accelerator at Adlershof Technology Park, Germany, for reference (by 25years of KDE)³

Back to the point The point of that story is this: GNOME, KDE, RHEL, Debian or Ubuntu: They all do not matter if the necessary applications are not available for them. And as soon as they are, the easiest-to-use solution wins. There are many facets of easiest : In many cases this is RHEL due to Red Hat support contracts being available, in many other cases it is Ubuntu due to its mindshare and ease of use. KDE Plasma is also frequently seen, as it is perceived a bit easier to onboard Windows users with it (among other benefits). Ultimately, it comes down to applications and 3rd-party support though. Here s a dirty secret: In many cases, porting an application to Linux is not that difficult. The thing that companies (and FLOSS projects too!) struggle with and will calculate the merits of carefully in advance is whether it is worth the support cost as well as continuous QA/testing. Their staff will have to do all of that work, and they could spend that time on other tasks after all. So if they learn that porting to Linux not only means added testing and support, but also means to choose between the legacy X11 display server that allows for 1:1 porting from Windows or the new Wayland compositors that do not support the same features they need, they will quickly consider it not worth the effort at all. I have seen this happen. Of course many apps use a cross-platform toolkit like Qt, which greatly simplifies porting. But this just moves the issue one layer down, as now the toolkit needs to abstract Windows, macOS and Wayland. And Wayland does not contain features to do certain things or does them very differently from e.g. Windows, so toolkits have no way to actually implement the existing functionality in a way that works on all platforms. So in Qt s documentation you will often find texts like works everywhere except for on Wayland compositors or mobile ⁴. Many missing bits or altered behavior are just papercuts, but those add up. And if users will have a worse experience, this will translate to more support work, or people not wanting to use the software on the respective platform.

What s missing?

Window positioning SDI applications with multiple windows are very popular in the scientific world. For data acquisition (for example with microscopes) we often have one monitor with control elements and one larger one with the recorded image. There is also other configurations where multiple signal modalities are acquired, and the experimenter aligns windows exactly in the way they want and expects the layout to be stored and to be loaded upon reopening the application. Even in the image from Adlershof Technology Park above you can see this style of UI design, at mega-scale. Being able to pop-out elements as windows from a single-window application to move them around freely is another frequently used paradigm, and immensely useful with these complex apps. It is important to note that this is not a legacy design, but in many cases an intentional choice these kinds of apps work incredibly well on larger screens or many screens and are very flexible (you can have any window configuration you want, and switch between them using the (usually) great window management abilities of your desktop). Of course, these apps will work terribly on tablets and small form factors, but that is not the purpose they were designed for and nobody would use them that way. I assumed for sure these features would be implemented at some point, but when it became clear that that would not happen, I created the ext-placement protocol which had some good discussion but was ultimately rejected from the xdg namespace. I then tried another solution based on feedback, which turned out not to work for most apps, and now proposed xdg-placement (v2) in an attempt to maybe still get some protocol done that we can agree on, exploring more options before pushing the existing protocol for inclusion into the ext Wayland protocol namespace. Meanwhile though, we can not port any application that needs this feature, while at the same time we are switching desktops and distributions to Wayland by default.

Window position restoration Similarly, a protocol to save & restore window positions was already proposed in 2018, 6 years ago now, but it has still not been agreed upon, and may not even help multiwindow apps in its current form. The absence of this protocol means that applications can not restore their former window positions, and the user has to move them to their previous place again and again. Meanwhile, toolkits can not adopt these protocols and applications can not use them and can not be ported to Wayland without introducing papercuts.

Window icons Similarly, individual windows can not set their own icons, and not-installed applications can not have an icon at all because there is no desktop-entry file to load the icon from and no icon in the theme for them. You would think this is a niche issue, but for applications that create many windows, providing icons for them so the user can find them is fairly important. Of course it s not the end of the world if every window has the same icon, but it s one of those papercuts that make the software slightly less user-friendly. Even applications with fewer windows like LibrePCB are affected, so much so that they rather run their app through Xwayland for now. I decided to address this after I was working on data analysis of image data in a Python virtualenv, where my code and the Python libraries used created lots of windows all with the default yellow W icon, making it impossible to distinguish them at a glance. This is xdg-toplevel-icon now, but of course it is an uphill battle where the very premise of needing this is questioned. So applications can not use it yet.

Limited window abilities requiring specialized protocols Firefox has a picture-in-picture feature, allowing it to pop out media from a mediaplayer as separate floating window so the user can watch the media while doing other things. On X11 this is easily realized, but on Wayland the restrictions posed on windows necessitate a different solution. The xdg-pip protocol was proposed for this specialized usecase, but it is also not merged yet. So this feature does not work as well on Wayland.

Automated GUI testing / accessibility / automation Automation of GUI tasks is a powerful feature, so is the ability to auto-test GUIs. This is being worked on, with libei and wlheadless-run (and stuff like ydotool exists too), but we re not fully there yet.

Wayland is frustrating for (some) application authors As you see, there is valid applications and valid usecases that can not be ported yet to Wayland with the same feature range they enjoyed on X11, Windows or macOS. So, from an application author s perspective, Wayland does break things quite significantly, because things that worked before can no longer work and Wayland (the whole stack) does not provide any avenue to achieve the same result. Wayland does break screen sharing, global hotkeys, gaming latency (via no tearing ) etc, however for all of these there are solutions available that application authors can port to. And most developers will gladly do that work, especially since the newer APIs are usually a lot better and more robust. But if you give application authors no path forward except use Xwayland and be on emulation as second-class citizen forever , it just results in very frustrated application developers. For some application developers, switching to a Wayland compositor is like buying a canvas from the Linux shop that forces your brush to only draw triangles. But maybe for your avant-garde art, you need to draw a circle. You can approximate one with triangles, but it will never be as good as the artwork of your friends who got their canvases from the Windows or macOS art supply shop and have more freedom to create their art.

Triangles are proven to be the best shape! If you are drawing circles you are creating bad art! Wayland, via its protocol limitations, forces a certain way to build application UX often for the better, but also sometimes to the detriment of users and applications. The protocols are often fairly opinionated, a result of the lessons learned from X11. In any case though, it is the odd one out Windows and macOS do not pose the same limitations (for better or worse!), and the effort to port to Wayland is orders of magnitude bigger, or sometimes in case of the multiwindow UI paradigm impossible to achieve to the same level of polish. Desktop environments of course have a design philosophy that they want to push, and want applications to integrate as much as possible (same as macOS and Windows!). However, there are many applications out there, and pushing a design via protocol limitations will likely just result in fewer apps.

The porting dilemma I spent probably way too much time looking into how to get applications cross-platform and running on Linux, often talking to vendors (FLOSS and proprietary) as well. Wayland limitations aren t the biggest issue by far, but they do start to come come up now, especially in the scientific space with Ubuntu having switched to Wayland by default. For application authors there is often no way to address these issues. Many scientists do not even understand why their Python script that creates some GUIs suddenly behaves weirdly because Qt is now using the Wayland backend on Ubuntu instead of X11. They do not know the difference and also do not want to deal with these details even though they may be programmers as well, the real goal is not to fiddle with the display server, but to get to a scientific result somehow. Another issue is portability layers like Wine which need to run Windows applications as-is on Wayland. Apparently Wine s Wayland driver has some heuristics to make window positioning work (and I am amazed by the work done on this!), but that can only go so far.

A way out? So, how would we actually solve this? Fundamentally, this excessively long blog post boils down to just one essential question: Do we want to force applications to submit to a UX paradigm unconditionally, potentially loosing out on application ports or keeping apps on X11 eternally, or do we want to throw them some rope to get as many applications ported over to Wayland, even through we might sacrifice some protocol purity? I think we really have to answer that to make the discussions on wayland-protocols a lot less grueling. This question can be answered at the wayland-protocols level, but even more so it must be answered by the individual desktops and compositors. If the answer for your environment turns out to be Yes, we want the Wayland protocol to be more opinionated and will not make any compromises for application portability , then your desktop/compositor should just immediately NACK protocols that add something like this and you simply shouldn t engage in the discussion, as you reject the very premise of the new protocol: That it has any merit to exist and is needed in the first place. In this case contributors to Wayland and application authors also know where you stand, and a lot of debate is skipped. Of course, if application authors want to support your environment, you are basically asking them now to rewrite their UI, which they may or may not do. But at least they know what to expect and how to target your environment. If the answer turns out to be We do want some portability , the next question obviously becomes where the line should be drawn and which changes are acceptable and which aren t. We can t blindly copy all X11 behavior, some porting work to Wayland is simply inevitable. Some written rules for that might be nice, but probably more importantly, if you agree fundamentally that there is an issue to be fixed, please engage in the discussions for the respective MRs! We for sure do not want to repeat X11 mistakes, and I am certain that we can implement protocols which provide the required functionality in a way that is a nice compromise in allowing applications a path forward into the Wayland future, while also being as good as possible and improving upon X11. For example, the toplevel-icon proposal is already a lot better than anything X11 ever had. Relaxing ACK requirements for the ext namespace is also a good proposed administrative change, as it allows some compositors to add features they want to support to the shared repository easier, while also not mandating them for others. In my opinion, it would allow for a lot less friction between the two different ideas of how Wayland protocol development should work. Some compositors could move forward and support more protocol extensions, while more restrictive compositors could support less things. Applications can detect supported protocols at launch and change their behavior accordingly (ideally even abstracted by toolkits). You may now say that a lot of apps are ported, so surely this issue can not be that bad. And yes, what Wayland provides today may be enough for 80-90% of all apps. But what I hope the detour into the research lab has done is convince you that this smaller percentage of apps matters. A lot. And that it may be worthwhile to support them. To end on a positive note: When it came to porting concrete apps over to Wayland, the only real showstoppers so far⁵ were the missing window-positioning and window-position-restore features. I encountered them when porting my own software, and I got the issue as feedback from colleagues and fellow engineers. In second place was UI testing and automation support, the window-icon issue was mentioned twice, but being a cosmetic issue it likely simply hurts people less and they can ignore it easier. What this means is that the majority of apps are already fine, and many others are very, very close! A Wayland future for everyone is within our grasp! I will also bring my two protocol MRs to their conclusion for sure, because as application developers we need clarity on what the platform (either all desktops or even just a few) supports and will or will not support in future. And the only way to get something good done is by contribution and friendly discussion.

Footnotes

1. Apologies for the clickbait-y title it comes with the subject
2. When I talk about Wayland I mean the combined set of display server protocols and accepted protocol extensions, unless otherwise clarified.
3. I would have picked a picture from our lab, but that would have needed permission first
4. Qt has awesome platform issues pages, like for macOS and Linux/X11 which help with porting efforts, but Qt doesn t even list Linux/Wayland as supported platform. There is some information though, like window geometry peculiarities, which aren t particularly helpful when porting (but still essential to know).
5. Besides issues with Nvidia hardware CUDA for simulations and machine-learning is pretty much everywhere, so Nvidia cards are common, which causes trouble on Wayland still. It is improving though.

Changes in version 1.84.0-0 (2024-01-09)

• Upgrade to Boost 1.84.0
• Added qvm (requested in #97)

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

wget -q http://builds.trisquel.org/debian-installer-images/debian-installer-images_20210731+deb11u9+11.0trisquel15_arm64.tar.gz
tar xfa debian-installer-images_20210731+deb11u9+11.0trisquel15_arm64.tar.gz ./installer-arm64/20210731+deb11u9+11/images/netboot/mini.iso
echo '311732519cc8c7c1bb2fe873f134fdafb211ef3bcb5b0d2ecdc6ea4e3b336357  installer-arm64/20210731+deb11u9+11/images/netboot/mini.iso'   sha256sum -c
sudo wipefs -a /dev/sdX
sudo dd if=installer-arm64/20210731+deb11u9+11/images/netboot/mini.iso of=/dev/sdX conv=sync status=progress

root@ampel:~# update-grub
Sourcing file  /etc/default/grub'
Sourcing file  /etc/default/grub.d/background.cfg'
Sourcing file  /etc/default/grub.d/init-select.cfg'
Generating grub configuration file ...
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-5.15.0-91-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-5.15.0-91-generic
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-5.15.0-58-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-5.15.0-58-generic
Warning: os-prober will not be executed to detect other bootable partitions.
Systems on them will not be added to the GRUB boot configuration.
Check GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER documentation entry.
Adding boot menu entry for UEFI Firmware Settings ...
done
root@ampel:~# 

root@ampel:~# tasksel
Tasksel GNOME failed:
tasksel: apt-get failed (100)
root@ampel:~# apt-get install trisquel-gnome ssh

root@ampel:~# apt-get install linux-image-generic-hwe-11.0

Changes in Rcpp release version 1.0.12 (2024-01-08)

• Changes in Rcpp API:
  • Missing header includes as spotted by some recent tools were added in two places (Michael Chirico in #1272 closing #1271).
  • Casts to avoid integer overflow in matrix row/col selections have neem added (Aaron Lun #1281).
  • Three print format correction uncovered by R-devel were applied with thanks to Tomas Kalibera (Dirk in #1285).
  • Correct a print format correction in the RcppExports glue code (Dirk in #1288 fixing #1287).
  • The upcoming OBJSXP addition to R 4.4.0 is supported in the type2name mapper (Dirk and I aki in #1293).
• Changes in Rcpp Attributes:
  • Generated interface code from base R that fails under LTO is now corrected (I aki in #1274 fixing a StackOverflow issue).
• Changes in Rcpp Documentation:
  • The caption for third figure in the introductory vignette has been corrected (Dirk in #1277 fixing #1276).
  • A small formatting issue was correct in an Rd file as noticed by R-devel (Dirk in #1282).
  • The Rcpp FAQ vignette has been updated (Dirk in #1284).
  • The Rcpp.bib file has been refreshed to current package versions.
• Changes in Rcpp Deployment:
  • The RcppExports file for an included test package has been updated (Dirk in #1289).

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

• emacs-request ITP #1007113
• bui.el ITP #1007153
• emacs-posframe ITP #1007158
• lsp-treemacs ITP #1007119
• dap-mode ITP #1007160
• emacs-lsp-java ITP #1007162

• March 8th: Godspeed You! Black Emperor
• April 11th: Alexandra Str liski
• April 12th: Bikini Kill
• April 21th: Brigada Flores Magon, Union Thugs
• April 28th: Komintern Sect, The Outcasts, Violent Way, Ultra Razzia, Over the Hill
• May 3rd: First Fragment
• May 12th: Rhapsody of Fire, Wind Rose
• May 13th: Aeternam
• June 2nd: Mortier, La Gachette
• June 17th: Ultra Razzia, Total Nada, BLEMISH
• June 30th: Avishai Cohen Trio
• July 9th: Richard Galliano
• August 18th: Gojira, Mastodon, Lorna Shore
• September 14th: Jinjer
• September 22nd: CUIR, Salvaje Punk, Hysteric Polemix, Perestroika, Ultra Razzia, Ilusion, Over the Hill, Asbestos
• October 6th: Rancoeur, Street Code, Tenaz, Mortimer, Guernica, High Anxiety

Number of posts 2022 was the official 20th anniversary in any case, and that was one of my best years on record, with 46 posts, surpassed only by the noisy 2005 (62) and matching 2006 (46). 2023, in comparison, was underwhelming: a feeble 11 posts! What happened! Well, I was busy with other things, mostly away from keyboard, that I will not bore you with here... The other thing that happened is that the one-liner I used to collect stats was broken (it counted folders and other unrelated files) and wildly overestimated 2022! Turns out I didn't write that much then:

anarc.at$ ls blog   grep '^[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9].*.md'   se
d s/-.*//   sort   uniq -c    sort -n -k2
     57 2005
     43 2006
     20 2007
     20 2008
      7 2009
     13 2010
     16 2011
     11 2012
     13 2013
      5 2014
     13 2015
     18 2016
     29 2017
     27 2018
     17 2019
     18 2020
     14 2021
     28 2022
     10 2023
      1 2024

But even that is inaccurate because, in ikiwiki, I can tag any page as being featured on the blog. So we actually need to process the HTML itself because we don't have much better on hand without going through ikiwiki's internals:

anarcat@angela:anarc.at$ curl -sSL https://anarc.at/blog/   grep 'href="\./'   grep -o 20[0-9][0-9]   sort   uniq -c 
     56 2005
     42 2006
     19 2007
     18 2008
      6 2009
     12 2010
     15 2011
     10 2012
     11 2013
      3 2014
     15 2015
     32 2016
     50 2017
     37 2018
     19 2019
     19 2020
     15 2021
     28 2022
     13 2023

Which puts the top 10 years at:

$ curl -sSL https://anarc.at/blog/   grep 'href="\./'   grep -o 20[0-9][0-9]   sort   uniq -c    sort -nr   head -10
     56 2005
     50 2017
     42 2006
     37 2018
     32 2016
     28 2022
     19 2020
     19 2019
     19 2007
     18 2008

Anyway. 2023 is certainly not a glorious year in that regard, in any case.

Visitors In terms of visits, however, we had quite a few hits. According to Goatcounter, I had 122 300 visits in 2023! 2022, in comparison, had 89 363, so that's quite a rise.

What you read I seem to have hit the Hacker News front page at least twice. I say "seem" because it's actually pretty hard to tell what the HN frontpage actually is on any given day. I had 22k visits on 2023-03-13, in any case, and you can't see me on the front that day. We do see a post of mine on 2023-09-02, all the way down there, which seem to have generated another 10k visits. In any case, here were the most popular stories for you fine visitors:

• Framework 12th gen laptop review: 24k visits, which is surprising for a 13k words article "without images", as some critics have complained. 15k referred by Hacker News. Good reference and time-consuming benchmarks, slowly bit-rotting. That is, by far, my most popular article ever. A popular article in 2021 or 2022 was around 6k to 9k, so that's a big one. I suspect it will keep getting traffic for a long while.
• Calibre replacement considerations: 15k visits, most of which without a referrer. Was actually an old article, but I suspect HN brought it back to light. I keep updating that wiki page regularly when I find new things, but I'm still using Calibre to import ebooks.
• Hacking my Kobo Clara HD: is not new but always gathering more and more hits, it had 1800 hits in the first year, 4600 hits last year and now brought 6400 visitors to the blog! Not directly related, but this iFixit battery replacement guide I wrote also seem to be quite popular

Everything else was published before 2023. Replacing Smokeping with Prometheus is still around and Looking at Wayland terminal emulators makes an entry in the top five.

Where you've been People send less and less private information when they browse the web. The number of visitors without referrers was 41% in 2021, it rose to 44% in 2023. Most of the remaining traffic comes from Google, but Hacker News is now a significant chunk, almost as big as Google. In 2021, Google represented 23% of my traffic, in 2022, it was down to 15% so 18% is actually a rise from last year, even if it seems much smaller than what I usually think of.

Ratio	Referrer	Visits
18%	Google	22 098
13%	Hacker News	16 003
2%	duckduckgo.com	2 640
1%	community.frame.work	1 090
1%	missing.csail.mit.edu	918

Note that Facebook and Twitter do not appear at all in my referrers.

Where you are Unsurprisingly, most visits still come from the US:

Ratio	Country	Visits
26%	United States	32 010
14%	France	17 046
10%	Germany	11 650
6%	Canada	7 425
5%	United Kingdom	6 473
3%	Netherlands	3 436

Those ratios are nearly identical to last year, but quite different from 2021, where Germany and France were more or less reversed. Back in 2021, I mentioned there was a long tail of countries with at least one visit, with 160 countries listed. I expanded that and there's now 182 countries in that list, almost all of the 193 member states in the UN.

What you were Chrome's dominance continues to expand, even on readers of this blog, gaining two percentage points from Firefox compared to 2021.

Ratio	Browser	Visits
49%	Firefox	60 126
36%	Chrome	44 052
14%	Safari	17 463
1%	Others	N/A

It seems like, unfortunately, my Lynx and Haiku users have not visited in the past year. It seems like trying to read those metrics is like figuring out tea leaves... In terms of operating systems:

Ratio	OS	Visits
28%	Linux	34 010
23%	macOS	28 728
21%	Windows	26 303
17%	Android	20 614
10%	iOS	11 741

Again, Linux and Mac are over-represented, and Android and iOS are under-represented.

What is next I hope to write more next year. I've been thinking about a few posts I could write for work, about how things work behind the scenes at Tor, that could be informative for many people. We run a rather old setup, but things hold up pretty well for what we throw at it, and it's worth sharing that with the world... So anyway, thanks for coming, faithful reader, and see you in the coming 2024 year...

• [DLA 3686-1] xorg-server security update for two CVEs to fix privilege escalation
• [DLA 3686-2] xorg-server security update for one CVE to really fix privilege escalation. Unfortunately the first patches provided by upstream did not really solve the problem, so here we are in round 2
• [DLA 3699-1] libde265 security update for three CVEs to fix heap buffer or global buffer overflows
• [DLA 3700-1] cjson security update for one CVE to fix a segmentation violation
• [#1056934] Bookworm PU-bug for libde265; I could finally upload the package
• [#1056737] Bookworm PU-bug for minizip; I could finally upload the package
• [libde265]For the next round of CVEs of libde265 I prepared debdiffs for Bullseye and Bookworm and sent them to the maintainer.
• [cjson]I prepared debdiffs for Bullseye and Bookworm and sent them to the maintainer.

• [ELA-1019-1]xorg-server security update for two CVEs to fix privilege escalation
• [ELA-1019-2]xorg-server security update for to really fix privilege escalation. As with the DLAs above, the first patches provided by upstream did not really solve the problem, so here we are in round 2
• [ELA 1027-1] libde265 security update for three CVEs in Stretch to fix heap buffer or global buffer overflows

• cups/Bookworm to fix a bug related to color printing
• hplip to fix a bug related to /usr-merge

• libpktriggercord to fix a /usr-merge bug
• indi-nightscape to fix a /usr-merge bug
• indi-ffmv to fix a /usr-merge bug
• indi-armadillo-platypus to fix a /usr-merge bug
• indi-orion-ssg3 to fix a /usr-merge bug
• indi-sx to fix a /usr-merge bug

• usb-modeswitch-data to fix a /usr-merge bug
• libcontra it is sometimes a bit amazing what software phones home

Background Let s assume that these statements are true, which I think are well-supported by available evidence:

1. Every computer system (OS plus applications) that can do useful modern work has security vulnerabilities, some of which are unknown at any given point in time;
2. During the lifetime of that computer system, some of these vulnerabilities will be discovered. For a (hopefully large) subset of those vulnerabilities, timely patches will become available.

Now then, it follows that applying those timely patches is a critical part of having a system that it as secure as possible. Of course, you have to do other things as well good passwords, secure practices, etc but, fundamentally, if your system lacks patches for known vulnerabilities, you ve already lost at the security ballgame.

How to stay patched There is something of a continuum of how you might patch your system. It runs roughly like this, from best to worst:

1. All components are kept up-to-date automatically, with no intervention from the user/operator
2. The operator is automatically alerted to necessary patches, and they can be easily installed with minimal intervention
3. The operator is automatically alerted to necessary patches, but they require significant effort to apply
4. The operator has no way to detect vulnerabilities or necessary patches

It should be obvious that the first situation is ideal. Every other situation relies on the timeliness of human action to keep up-to-date with security patches. This is a fallible situation; humans are busy, take trips, dismiss alerts, miss alerts, etc. That said, it is rare to find any system living truly all the way in that scenario, as you ll see.

What is your system ? A critical point here is: what is your system ? It includes:

• Your kernel
• Your base operating system
• Your applications
• All the libraries needed to run all of the above

Some OSs, such as Debian, make little or no distinction between the base OS and the applications. Others, such as many BSDs, have a distinction there. And in some cases, people will compile or install applications outside of any OS mechanism. (It must be stressed that by doing so, you are taking the responsibility of patching them on your own shoulders.)

How do common systems stack up?

• Debian, with its support for unattended-upgrades, needrestart, debian-security-support, and such, is largely category 1. It can automatically apply security patches, in most cases can restart the necessary services for the patch to take effect, and will alert you when some processes or the system must be manually restarted for a patch to take effect (for instance, a kernel update). Those cases requiring manual intervention are category 2. The debian-security-support package will even warn you of gaps in the system. You can also use debsecan to scan for known vulnerabilities on a given installation.
• FreeBSD has no way to automatically install security patches for things in the packages collection. As with many rolling-release systems, you can t automate the installation of these security patches with FreeBSD because it is not safe to blindly update packages. It s not safe to blindly update packages because they may bring along more than just security patches: they may represent major upgrades that introduce incompatibilities, etc. Unlike Debian s practice of backporting fixes and thus producing narrowly-tailored patches, forcing upgrades to newer versions precludes a minimal intervention install. Therefore, rolling release systems are category 3.
• Things such as Snap, Flatpak, AppImage, Docker containers, Electron apps, and third-party binaries often contain embedded libraries and such for which you have no easy visibility into their status. For instance, if there was a bug in libpng, would you know how many of your containers had a vulnerability? These systems are category 4 you don t even know if you re vulnerable. It s for this reason that my Debian-based Docker containers apply security patches before starting processes, and also run unattended-upgrades and friends.

The pernicious library problem As mentioned in my last category above, hidden vulnerabilities can be a big problem. I ve been writing about this for years. Back in 2017, I wrote an article focused on Docker containers, but which applies to the other systems like Snap and so forth. I cited a study back then that Over 80% of the :latest versions of official images contained at least one high severity vulnerability. The situation is no better now. In December 2023, it was reported that, two years after the critical Log4Shell vulnerability, 25% of apps were still vulnerable to it. Also, only 21% of developers ever update third-party libraries after introducing them into their projects. Clearly, you can t rely on these images with embedded libraries to be secure. And since they are black box, they are difficult to audit. Debian s policy of always splitting libraries out from packages is hugely beneficial; it allows finegrained analysis of not just vulnerabilities, but also the dependency graph. If there s a vulnerability in libpng, you have one place to patch it and you also know exactly what components of your system use it. If you use snaps, or AppImages, you can t know if they contain a deeply embedded vulnerability, nor could you patch it yourself if you even knew. You are at the mercy of upstream detecting and remedying the problem a dicey situation at best.

Who makes the patches? Fundamentally, humans produce security patches. Often, but not always, patches originate with the authors of a program and then are integrated into distribution packages. It should be noted that every security team has finite resources; there will always be some CVEs that aren t patched in a given system for various reasons; perhaps they are not exploitable, or are too low-impact, or have better mitigations than patches. Debian has an excellent security team; they manage the process of integrating patches into Debian, produce Debian Security Advisories, maintain the Debian Security Tracker (which maintains cross-references with the CVE database), etc. Some distributions don t have this infrastructure. For instance, I was unable to find this kind of tracker for Devuan or Raspberry Pi OS. In contrast, Ubuntu and Arch Linux both seem to have active security teams with trackers and advisories.

Implications for Raspberry Pi OS and others As I mentioned above, I m transitioning my Pi devices off Raspberry Pi OS (Raspbian). Security is one reason. Although Raspbian is a fork of Debian, and you can install packages like unattended-upgrades on it, they don t work right because they use the Debian infrastructure, and Raspbian hasn t modified them to use their own infrastructure. I don t see any Raspberry Pi OS security advisories, trackers, etc. In short, they lack the infrastructure to support those Debian tools anyhow. Not only that, but Raspbian lags behind Debian in both new releases and new security patches, sometimes by days or weeks. Live Migrating from Raspberry Pi OS bullseye to Debian bookworm contains instructions for migrating Raspberry Pis to Debian.

Couldn't get a file descriptor referring to the console.

How does Shell Initialization Work? The precise files a shell reads at start-up is somewhat complex, and defined by this excellent chart ¹: For the purposes of what I m trying to fix, there are two paths that matter.

• Interactive login shell startup
• Interactive non-login shell startup

As you can see from the above, trying to distinguish these two paths in bash is an absolute mess. zsh, in contrast, is much cleaner and allows for a clear distinction between these two cases, with login shell configuration files as a superset of configuration files used by non-login shells.

How did we get here? I keep my configuration files in a config repository. Some time ago I got quite frustrated at this whole shell initialization thing, and just linked everything together in one profile file:

.mkshrc -> config/profile
.profile -> config/profile

This appears to have created this mess.

Move to ZSH I ve wanted to move to zsh for a while, and took this opportunity to do so. So my new configuration files are .zprofile and .zshrc instead of .mkshrc and .profile (though I m going to retain those symlinks to allow my old configurations to continue working). mksh is a nice simple shell, but using zsh here allows for more consistency between my home and $WORK environments, and will allow a lot more powerful extensions.

Updating my Prompt ZSH prompts use a totally different configuration via variable expansion. However, it also uses the PROMPT variable, so I set that to the needed values for zsh. There s an excellent ZSH prompt generator at https://zsh-prompt-generator.site that I used to get these variables, though I m sure they re in the zsh documentation somewhere as well. I wanted a simple prompt with user (%n), host (%m), and path (%d). I also wanted a % at the end to distinguish this from other shells.

PROMPT="%n@%m%d%% "

Fixing mksh prompts This worked but surprisingly mksh also looks at PROMPT, leaving my mksh prompt as the literal prompt string without expansion. Fixing this requires setting up a proper shrc and linking it to .mkshrc and .zshrc. I chose to move my existing aliases script to this file, as it also broke in non-login shells when moved to profile. Within this new shrc file we can check what shell we re running via $0:

if [ "$0" = "/bin/zsh" ]   [ "$0" = "zsh" ]   [ "$0" = "-zsh" ]

I chose to add plain zsh here in case I run it manually for whatever reason. I also added -zsh to support tmux as that s what it presents as $0. This also means you ll need to be careful to quote $0 or you ll get fun shell errors. There s probably a better way to do this, but I couldn t find something that was compatible with POSIX shell, which is what most of this has to be written in to be compatible with mksh and zsh². We can then setup different prompts for each:

if [ "$0" = "/bin/zsh" ]   [ "$0" = "zsh" ]   [ "$0" = "-zsh" ]
then
	PROMPT="%n@%m%d%% "
else
	# Borrowed from
	# http://www.unixmantra.com/2013/05/setting-custom-prompt-in-ksh.html
	PS1='$(id -un)@$(hostname -s)$PWD$ '
fi

Setting Console Font in a Better Way I ve been setting console font via setfont in my .profile for a while. I m not sure where I picked this up, but it s not the right way. I even tried to only run this in a console with -t but that only checks that output is a terminal, not specifically a console.

if [ -t 1 ]
then
	setfont /usr/share/consolefonts/Lat15-Terminus20x10.psf.gz
fi

This also only runs once the console is logged into, instead of initializing it on boot. The correct way to set this up, on Debian-based systems, is reconfiguring console-setup like so:

dpkg-reconfigure console-setup

From there you get a menu of encoding, character set, font, and then font size to configure for your consoles.

VIM mode To enable VIM mode for ZSH, you simply need to set:

bindkeys -v

This allows you to edit your shell commands with basic VIM keybinds.

Getting back Ctrl + Left Arrow and Ctrl + Right Arrow Moving around one word at a time with Ctrl and the arrow keys is broken by vim mode unfortunately, so we ll need to re-enable it:

bindkey "^[[1;5C" forward-word
bindkey "^[[1;5D" backward-word

Better History Search But of course we re now using zsh so we can do better than just the same configuration as we had before. There s an excellent substring history search plugin that we can just source without a plugin manager³

source $HOME/config/zsh-history-substring-search.zsh
# Keys are weird, should be ^[[ but it's not
bindkey '^[[A' history-substring-search-up
bindkey '^[OA' history-substring-search-up
bindkey '^[[B' history-substring-search-down
bindkey '^[OB' history-substring-search-down

For some reason my system uses ^[OA and ^[OB as up and down keys. It seems ^[[A and ^[[B are the defaults, so I ve left them in, but I m confused as to what differences would lead to this. If you know, please let me know and I ll add a footnote to this article explaining it. Back to history search. For this to work, we also need to setup history logging:

export SAVEHIST=1000000
export HISTFILE=$HOME/.zsh_history
export HISTFILESIZE=1000000
export HISTSIZE=1000000

Why did it show up twice for tmux? Because tmux creates a login shell. Adding:

echo PROFILE

to profile and:

echo SHRC

to shrc confirms this with:

PROFILE
SHRC
SHRC

For now, profile sources shrc so that running twice is expected. But after this exploration and diagram, it s clear we don t need that for zsh. Removing this will break remote bash shells (see above diagram), but I can live without those on my development laptop. Removing that line results in the expected output for a new terminal:

SHRC

And the full output for a new tmux session or console:

PROFILE
SHRC

So finally we re back to a normal state! This post is a bit unfocused but I hope it helps someone else repair or enhance their shell environment. If you liked this⁴, or know of any other ways to manage this I could use, let me know at fixmyshell@tookmund.com.

1. This chart comes from the excellent Shell Startup Scripts article by Peter Ward. I ve generated the SVG from the graphviz source linked in the article.
2. Technically it has be compatible with Korn shell, but a quick google seems to suggest that that s actually a subset of POSIX shell.
3. I use oh-my-zsh at $WORK but for now I m going to simplify my personal configuration. If I end up using a lot of plugins I ll reconsider this.
4. Or if you ve found any typos or other issues that I should fix.

DOM-XSS vulnerabilities are easy to write, but hard for security teams to catch It is very easy to accidentally introduce a client-side XSS problem. As an example of what not to do, suppose you are setting an element s text to the current URL, on the client side:

// Don't do this
para.innerHTML = location.href;

Unfortunately, an attacker can now manipulate the URL (and e.g. send this link in a phishing email), and any HTML tags they add will be interpreted by the user s browser. This could potentially be used by the attacker to send private data to a different server. Detecting DOM-XSS using vulnerability scanning tools is challenging - typically this requires crawling each page of the website and attempting to detect problems such as the one above, but there is a significant risk of false positives, especially as the complexity of the logic increases. There are already ways to avoid these exploits developers should validate untrusted input before making use of it. There are libraries such as DOMPurify which can help with sanitization.¹ However, if you are part of a security team with responsibility for preventing these issues, it can be complex to understand whether you are at risk. Different developer teams may be using different techniques and tools. It may be impossible for you to work closely with every developer so how can you know that the frontend team have used these libraries correctly?

Trusted Types closes the DevSecOps feedback loop for DOM-XSS, by allowing Ops and Security to verify good Developer practices Trusted Types enforces sanitization in the browser², by requiring the web developer to assign a particular kind of JavaScript object rather than a native string to .innerHTML and other dangerous properties. Provided these special types are created in an appropriate way, then they can be trusted not to expose XSS problems. This approach will work with whichever tools the frontend developers have chosen to use, and detection of issues can be rolled out by infrastructure engineers without requiring frontend code changes.

Content Security Policy allows enforcement of security policies in the browser itself Because enforcing this safer approach in the browser for all websites would break backwards-compatibility, each website must opt-in through Content Security Policy headers. Content Security Policy (CSP) is a mechanism that allows web pages to restrict what actions a browser should execute on their page, and a way for the site to receive reports if the policy is violated. Figure 1: Content-Security-Policy browser communication This is revolutionary, because it allows servers to receive feedback in real time on errors that may be appearing in the browser s console.

Trusted Types can be rolled out incrementally, with continuous feedback Web.dev s article on Trusted Types explains how to safely roll out the feature using the features of CSP itself:

• Deploy a CSP collector if you haven t already
• Switch on CSP reports without enforcement (via Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only headers)
• Iteratively review and fix the violations
• Switch to enforcing mode when there are a low enough rate of reports

Static analysis in a continuous integration pipeline is also sensible you want to prevent regressions shipping in new releases before they trigger a flood of CSP reports. This will also give you a chance of finding any low-traffic vulnerable pages.

Smart security teams will use techniques like Trusted Types to eliminate entire classes of bugs at a time Rather than playing whack-a-mole with unreliable vulnerability scanning or bug bounties, techniques such as Trusted Types are truly in the spirit of Secure by Design build high quality in from the start of the engineering process, and do this in a way which closes the DevSecOps feedback loop between your Developer, Operations and Security teams.

---

1. Sanitization libraries are especially needed when the examples become more complex, e.g. if the application must manipulate the input. DOMPurify version 1.0.9 also added Trusted Types support, so can still be used to help developers adopt this feature.
2. Trusted Types has existed in Chrome and Edge since 2020, and should soon be coming to Firefox as well. However, it s not necessary to wait for Firefox or Safari to add support, because the large market share of Chrome and Edge will let you identify and fix your site s DOM-XSS issues, even if you do not set enforcing mode, and users of all browsers will benefit. Even so, it is great that Mozilla is now on board.

"We're a mystery religion," said the abbess, when she'd had a bit more wine than usual, "for people who have too much work to do to bother with mysteries. So we simply get along as best we can. Occasionally someone has a vision, but [the goddess] doesn't seem to want anything much, and so we try to return the favor."

Marra had not managed to be pale and willowy and consumptive at any point in eighteen years of life and did not think she could achieve it before she died.

1. Free Software has always been a gift, freely given to society, to take and to use as seen fit, for whatever purpose. Free Software has proven to be an asset in our digital age and the proposed EU Cyber Resilience Act is going to be detrimental to it. a. As the Debian Social Contract states, our goal is "make the best system we can, so that free works will be widely distributed and used." Imposing requirements such as those proposed in the act makes it legally perilous for others to redistribute our work and endangers our commitment to "provide an integrated system of high-quality materials with no legal restrictions that would prevent such uses of the system". (2) b. Knowing whether software is commercial or not isn't feasible, neither in Debian nor in most free software projects - we don't track people's employment status or history, nor do we check who finances upstream projects (the original projects that we integrate in our operating system). c. If upstream projects stop making available their code for fear of being in the scope of CRA and its financial consequences, system security will actually get worse rather than better. d. Having to get legal advice before giving a gift to society will discourage many developers, especially those without a company or other organisation supporting them.
2. Debian is well known for its security track record through practices of responsible disclosure and coordination with upstream developers and other Free Software projects. We aim to live up to the commitment made in the Debian Social Contract: "We will not hide problems." (3) a.The Free Software community has developed a fine-tuned, tried-and-tested system of responsible disclosure in case of security issues which will be overturned by the mandatory reporting to European authorities within 24 hours (Art. 11 CRA). b. Debian spends a lot of volunteering time on security issues, provides quick security updates and works closely together with upstream projects and in coordination with other vendors. To protect its users, Debian regularly participates in limited embargos to coordinate fixes to security issues so that all other major Linux distributions can also have a complete fix when the vulnerability is disclosed. c. Security issue tracking and remediation is intentionally decentralized and distributed. The reporting of security issues to ENISA and the intended propagation to other authorities and national administrations would collect all software vulnerabilities in one place. This greatly increases the risk of leaking information about vulnerabilities to threat actors, representing a threat for all the users around the world, including European citizens. d. Activists use Debian (e.g. through derivatives such as Tails), among other reasons, to protect themselves from authoritarian governments; handing threat actors exploits they can use for oppression is against what Debian stands for. e. Developers and companies will downplay security issues because a "security" issue now comes with legal implications. Less clarity on what is truly a security issue will hurt users by leaving them vulnerable.
3. While proprietary software is developed behind closed doors, Free Software development is done in the open, transparent for everyone. To retain parity with proprietary software the open development process needs to be entirely exempt from CRA requirements, just as the development of software in private is. A "making available on the market" can only be considered after development is finished and the software is released.
4. Even if only "commercial activities" are in the scope of CRA, the Free Software community - and as a consequence, everybody - will lose a lot of small projects. CRA will force many small enterprises and most probably all self employed developers out of business because they simply cannot fulfill the requirements imposed by CRA. Debian and other Linux distributions depend on their work. If accepted as it is, CRA will undermine not only an established community but also a thriving market. CRA needs an exemption for small businesses and, at the very least, solo-entrepreneurs.