Recently, I was wondering why I was pushing off accepting contributions in Debian for longer than in other projects. It occurred to me that the effort to accept a contribution in Debian is way higher than in other FOSS projects. My remaining FOSS projects are on GitHub, where I can just click the Merge button after deciding a contribution looks good. In Debian, merging is actually a lot of work: I need to clone the repository, configure it, merge the patch, update the changelog, build and upload. I wondered how close we can bring Debian to a model where accepting a contribution is just a single click as well. In principle, I think it can be done. To demonstrate the feasibility and collect some feedback, I wrote a program called mergebot. The first stage is done: mergebot can be used on your local machine as a command-line tool. You provide it with the source package and bug number which contains the patch in question, and it will do the rest:

midna ~ $ mergebot -source_package=wit -bug=#831331
2016/07/17 12:06:06 will work on package "wit", bug "831331"
2016/07/17 12:06:07 Skipping MIME part with invalid Content-Disposition header (mime: no media type)
2016/07/17 12:06:07 gbp clone --pristine-tar git+ssh://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/wit.git /tmp/mergebot-743062986/repo
2016/07/17 12:06:09 git config push.default matching
2016/07/17 12:06:09 git config --add remote.origin.push +refs/heads/*:refs/heads/*
2016/07/17 12:06:09 git config --add remote.origin.push +refs/tags/*:refs/tags/*
2016/07/17 12:06:09 git config user.email stapelberg AT debian DOT org
2016/07/17 12:06:09 patch -p1 -i ../latest.patch
2016/07/17 12:06:09 git add .
2016/07/17 12:06:09 git commit -a --author Chris Lamb <lamby AT debian DOT org> --message Fix for  wit: please make the build reproducible  (Closes: #831331)
2016/07/17 12:06:09 gbp dch --release --git-author --commit
2016/07/17 12:06:09 gbp buildpackage --git-tag --git-export-dir=../export --git-builder=sbuild -v -As --dist=unstable
2016/07/17 12:07:16 Merge and build successful!
2016/07/17 12:07:16 Please introspect the resulting Debian package and git repository, then push and upload:
2016/07/17 12:07:16 cd "/tmp/mergebot-743062986"
2016/07/17 12:07:16 (cd repo && git push)
2016/07/17 12:07:16 (cd export && debsign *.changes && dput *.changes)
midna ~ $ cd /tmp/mergebot-743062986/repo
midna /tmp/mergebot-743062986/repo $ git log HEAD~2..
commit d983d242ee546b2249a866afe664bac002a06859
Author: Michael Stapelberg <stapelberg AT debian DOT org>
Date:   Sun Jul 17 13:32:41 2016 +0200
    Update changelog for 2.31a-3 release
commit 5a327f5d66e924afc656ad71d3bfb242a9bd6ddc
Author: Chris Lamb <lamby AT debian DOT org>
Date:   Sun Jul 17 13:32:41 2016 +0200
    Fix for  wit: please make the build reproducible  (Closes: #831331)
midna /tmp/mergebot-743062986/repo $ git push
Counting objects: 11, done.
Delta compression using up to 8 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (11/11), done.
Writing objects: 100% (11/11), 1.59 KiB   0 bytes/s, done.
Total 11 (delta 6), reused 0 (delta 0)
remote: Sending notification emails to: dispatch+wit_vcs@tracker.debian.org
remote: Sending notification emails to: dispatch+wit_vcs@tracker.debian.org
To git+ssh://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/wit.git
   650ee05..d983d24  master -> master
 * [new tag]         debian/2.31a-3 -> debian/2.31a-3
midna /tmp/mergebot-743062986/repo $ cd ../export
midna /tmp/mergebot-743062986/export $ debsign *.changes && dput *.changes
[ ]
Uploading wit_2.31a-3.dsc
Uploading wit_2.31a-3.debian.tar.xz
Uploading wit_2.31a-3_amd64.deb
Uploading wit_2.31a-3_amd64.changes

Of course, this is not quite as convenient as clicking a Merge button yet. I have some ideas on how to make that happen, but I need to know whether people are interested before I spend more time on this. Please see github.com/Debian/mergebot for more details, and please get in touch if you think this is worthwhile or would even like to help. Feedback is accepted in the GitHub issue tracker for mergebot or the project mailing list mergebot-discuss. Thanks!

After a long ~5 years (from 2011) journey with approx I finally wanted to switch to something new like apt-cacher-ng. And after a bit of changes I finally managed to get apt-cacher-ng into my work flow.

First week after DebCamp and DebConf! Both were incredible the debian project and it s contributors never fail to impress and delight me. None the less it felt great to have a few quiet, peaceful days of uninterrupted programming. Notes about last week: 1. Finished Mattia s final suggestions for the conversion of the package set pages script to python. Hopefully it will be deployed soon, awaiting final approval 2. Replace the bash code that produced the left navigation on the home page (and most other pages) with the mustache template the python scripts use. Previously, html was constructed and spat out from both a python and shell script now we have a single, DRY mustache template. (At the top of the bash function that produced the navigation html, you will find the comment: this is really quite incomprehensible and should be killed, the solution is to write all html pages with python . Turns out the intermediate solution is to use templates ) 3. Thought hard about navigation of the test website, and redesigned (by rearranging) links in the left hand navigation. After code review, you will see these changes as well! Things to look forward to include:
A link to the Debian dashboard on the top left of every page (except the package specific pages).
The title of each page (except the package pages) stretches across the whole page (instead of being squashed into the top left).
Hover text has been added to most links in the left navigation.
Links in left navigation have been reordered, and headers added. Once you see the changes, please let me know if you think anything is unintuitive or confusion, everything can be easily changed! 4. Cross suite and architecture navigation enabled for most pages. For most pages, you will be one click away from seeing the same statistics for a different suite or architecture! Whoo! Notes about next week: Last week I got carried away imagining minor improvements that can be made to the test websites UI, and I now have a backlog of ideas I d like to implement. I ve begun editing the script that makes most of the pages with statistics or package list (for example, all packages with notes, or all recently tested packages) to use templates and contain a bit more descriptive text. I d also like to do a some revamping of the package set pages I converted. These addition UI changes will be my first tasks for the coming week since they are fresh on my mind and I m quite excited about them. The following week I d like to get back to extensibility and database issues mentioned previously!

Around a year ago, I started hacking together a machine readable version of the OSI approved licenses list, and casually picking parts up until it was ready to launch. A few weeks ago, we officially announced the osi license api, which is now live at api.opensource.org. I also took a whack at writing a few API bindings, in Python, Ruby, and using the models from the API implementation itself in Go. In the following few weeks, Clint wrote one in Haskell, Eriol wrote one in Rust, and Oliver wrote one in R. The data is sourced from a repo on GitHub, the licenses repo under OpenSourceOrg. Pull Requests against that repo are wildly encouraged! Additional data ideas, cleanup or more hand collected data would be wonderful! In the meantime, use-cases for using this API range from language package managers pulling OSI approval of a licence programatically to using a license identifier as defined in one dataset (SPDX, for exampele), and using that to find the identifer as it exists in another system (DEP5, Wikipedia, TL;DR Legal). Patches are hugly welcome, as are bug reports or ideas! I'd also love more API wrappers for other languages!

Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In June, 158.25 work hours have been dispatched among 11 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

• Antoine Beaupr has been allocated 4 hours but did not publish his report yet.
• Balint Reczey did 3 hours (out of 16 hours allocated, thus keeping 13 extra hours for July).
• Ben Hutchings did 19 hours (out of 15 hours allocated + 5 remaining, keeping 1 extra hour for July).
• Brian May did 15 hours.
• Chris Lamb did 18 hours.
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 16 hours.
• Guido G nther did 8 hours.
• Markus Koschany did 19.75 hours (out of 18.75 hours allocated + 1 remaining).
• Ola Lundqvist did 10 hours.
• Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 15.5 hours (out of 18.75h allocated + 8 remaining, thus keeping 11.25 extra hours for July).
• Thorsten Alteholz did 18.75 hours.

DebConf 16 Presentation If you want to know more about how the LTS project is organized, you can watch the presentation I gave during DebConf 16 in Cape Town. Evolution of the situation The number of sponsored hours increased a little bit at 135 hours per month thanks to 3 new sponsors (Laboratoire LEGI UMR 5519 / CNRS, Quarantainenet BV, GNI MEDIA). Our funding goal is getting closer but it s not there yet. The security tracker currently lists 40 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file lists 38 packages awaiting an update. Thanks to our sponsors New sponsors are in bold.

• Platinum sponsors:
• TOSHIBA (for 9 months)
• Gold sponsors:
• The Positive Internet (for 25 months)
• Blablacar (for 24 months)
• Linode LLC (for 14 months)
• Babiel GmbH (for 3 months)
• Plat Home
• Silver sponsors:
• Domeneshop AS (for 24 months)
• Universit Lille 3 (for 24 months)
• Trollweb Solutions (for 22 months)
• Nantes M tropole (for 18 months)
• University of Luxembourg (for 16 months)
• Dalenys (for 15 months)
• Univention GmbH (for 10 months)
• Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 10 months)
• Sonus Networks (for 4 months)
• Bronze sponsors:
• David Ayers IntarS Austria (for 25 months)
• Evolix (for 25 months)
• Offensive Security (for 25 months)
• Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 25 months)
• Freeside Internet Service (for 24 months)
• MyTux (for 24 months)
• Linuxhotel GmbH (for 22 months)
• Intevation GmbH (for 21 months)
• Daevel SARL (for 20 months)
• Bitfolk LTD (for 19 months)
• Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 19 months)
• Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 18 months)
• NUMLOG (for 18 months)
• WinGo AG (for 17 months)
• Ecole Centrale de Nantes LHEEA (for 14 months)
• Sig-I/O (for 11 months)
• Entr ouvert (for 9 months)
• Adfinis SyGroup AG (for 6 months)
• Laboratoire LEGI UMR 5519 / CNRS
• Quarantainenet BV
• GNI MEDIA

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Warning: This blog post includes instructions for a procedure that can lead you to lock yourself out of your computer. Even if everything goes well, you'll be hunted by dragons. Keep backups, have a rescue system on a USB stick, and wear flameproof clothing. Also, have fun, and tell your loved ones you love them. I've recently gotten two U2F keys. U2F is a open standard for authentication using hardware tokens. It's probably mostly meant for website logins, but I wanted to have it for local logins on my laptop running Debian. (I also offer a line of stylish aluminium foil hats.) Having two-factor authentication (2FA) for local logins improves security if you need to log in (or unlock a screen lock) in a public or potentially hostile place, such as a cafe, a train, or a meeting room at a client. If they have video cameras, they can film you typing your password, and get the password that way. If you set up 2FA using a hardware token, your enemies will also need to lure you into a cave, where a dragon will use a precision flame to incinerate you in a way that leaves the U2F key intact, after which your enemies steal the key, log into your laptop and leak your cat GIF collection. Looking up information for how to set this up, I found a blog post by Sean Brewer, for Ubuntu 14.04. That got me started. Here's what I understand:

• PAM is the technology in Debian for handling authentication for logins and similar things. It has a plugin architecture.
• Yubico (maker of Yubikeys) have written a PAM plugin for U2F. It is packaged in Debian as libpam-u2f. The package includes documentation in /usr/share/doc/libpam-u2f/README.gz.
• By configuring PAM to use libpam-u2f, you can require both password and the hardware token for logging into your machine.

Here are the detailed steps for Debian stretch, with minute differences from those for Ubuntu 14.04. If you follow these, and lock yourself out of your system, it wasn't my fault, you can't blame me, and look, squirrels! Also not my fault if you don't wear sufficient protection against dragons.

1. Install pamu2fcfg and libpam-u2f.
2. As your normal user, mkdir ~/.config/Yubico. The list of allowed U2F keys will be put there.
3. Insert your U2F key and run pamu2fcfg -u$USER > ~/.config/Yubico/u2f_keys, and press the button on your U2F key when the key is blinking.
4. Edit /etc/pam.d/common-auth and append the line auth required pam_u2f.so cue.
5. Reboot (or at least log out and back in again).
6. Log in, type in your password, and when prompted and the U2F key is blinking, press its button to complete the login.

pamu2fcfg reads the hardware token and writes out its identifying data in a form that the PAM module understands; see the pam-u2f documentation for details. The data can be stored in the user's home directory (my preference) or in /etc/u2f_mappings. Once this is set up, anything that uses PAM for local authentication (console login, GUI login, sudo, desktop screen lock) will need to use the U2F key as well. ssh logins won't. Next, add a second key to your u2f_keys. This is important, because if you lose your first key, or it's damaged, you'll otherwise have no way to log in.

1. Insert your second U2F key and run pamu2fcfg -n > second, and press the second key's button when prompted.
2. Edit ~/.config/Yubico/u2f_keys and append the output of second to the line with your username.
3. Verify that you can log in using your second key as well as the first key. Note that you should have only one of the keys plugged in at the same time when logging in: the PAM module wants the first key it finds so you can't test both keys plugged in at once.

This is not too difficult, but rather fiddly, and it'd be nice if someone wrote at least a way to manage the list of U2F keys in a nicer way.

Categories:

• Debian-Blog
• General
• Computing

Keywords:

• SSL
• https
• let's encrypt
• eff

Like:

Recently Antirez made a post documenting a simple editor in 1k of pure C, the post was interesting in itself, and the editor is a cute toy because it doesn't use curses - instead using escape sequences. The github project became very popular and much interesting discussion took place on hacker news. My interest was piqued because I've obviously spent a few months working on my own console based program, and so I had to read the code, see what I could learn, and generally have some fun. As expected Salvatore's code is refreshingly simple, neat in some areas, terse in others, but always a pleasure to read. Also, as expected, a number of forks appeared adding various features. I figured I could do the same, so I did the obvious thing in adding Lua scripting support to the project. In my fork the core of the editor is mostly left alone, instead code was moved out of it into an external lua script. The highlight of my lua code is this magic:

  --
  -- Keymap of bound keys
  --
  local keymap =  
  --
  --  Default bindings
  --
  keymap['^A']        = sol
  keymap['^D']        = function() insert( os.date() ) end
  keymap['^E']        = eol
  keymap['^H']        = delete
  keymap['^L']        = eval
  keymap['^M']        = function() insert("\n") end

I wrote a function invoked on every key-press, and use that to lookup key-bindings. By adding a bunch of primitives to export/manipulate the core of the editor from Lua I simplified the editor's core logic, and allowed interesting facilities:

• Interactive evaluation of lua.
• The ability to remap keys on the fly.
• The ability to insert command output into the buffer.
• The implementation of copy/past entirely in Lua_.

All in all I had fun, and I continue to think a Lua-scripted editor would be a neat project - I'm just not sure there's a "market" for another editor. View my fork here, and see the sample kilo.lua config file.

After a bit of a debugging session, I ended up looking at some code in a large project

m_foo = std::make_shared<SomeQObject>();
/* plenty of lines and function boundaries left out */ 
(void)connect(m_foo.get(), &SomeQObject::someSignal, [m_foo]()  
  /* */
 );

The connection gets removed when the pointer inside m_foo gets de-allocated by the shared_ptr.
But the connection target is a lambda that has captured a copy of the shared_ptr There is at least a couple of solutions.

• Keep the connection object (QMetaObject::Connection) around and call disconnect in your destructor. That way the connection gets removed and the lamda object should get removed
• Capture the shared pointer by (const) reference. Capture the shared pointer as a weak pointer. Or as a raw pointer. All of this is safe because whenever the shared pointer gets a refcount of zero, the connection gets taken down with the object.

I guess the lesson learnt is be careful when capturing shared pointers.

Japanese authors have a tendency to commit suicide, it seems. I have read Ryunosuke Akutagawa ( , at 35), Yukio Mishima ( , at 45), and also Osamu Dazai ( , at 39). Their end often reflects in their writings, and one of these examples is the book I just finished, No Longer Human. Considered as Dazai s master piece, and with Soseki s Kokoro the best selling novels in Japan. The book recounts the life of Oba Yozo, from childhood to the end in a mental hospital. The early years, described in the first chapter ( Memorandum ), are filled with the feeling of differentness, alienation from the rest, and Oba starts his way of living by playing the clown, permanently making jokes. The Second Memorandom spans the time to university, where he drops out, tries to become a painter, indulges in alcohol, smoking and prostitutes, leading to a suicide attempt together with a married woman, but he survived. The first part of the Third Memorandom sees a short recovering due to his relationship with a woman. He stops drinking and works as cartoonist, but in the last part his drinking pal from university times shows up again and they return into an ever increasing vicious drinking. Eventually he is separated from his wife, and confined to a mental hospital. Very depressing to read, but written in a way that one cannot stop reading. The disturbing thing about this book is that, although the main actor conceives many bad actions, we feel somehow attached to him and feel pity for him. It is somehow a exercise how circumstances and small predispositions can make a huge change in our lives. And it warns us that each one of us can easily come to this brink.

Thanks to Lucas Nussbaum, we now have a UDD script to filter/select key packages. Some example use cases: Which key packages used compat 4?

# Data file compat-4-packages (one *source* package per line)
$ curl --silent --data-binary @compat-4-packages \
  https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/select-key-packages.cgi
alsamixergui
apg
[...]
sgml-base
wwwconfig-common

Also useful for things like bug#830997, which was my excuse for requesting this. Is package foo a key package (yet)?

$ is-key-pkg()   
 RES=$(echo "$1"   curl --silent --data-binary @- \
    https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/select-key-packages.cgi)
 if [ "$RES" ]; then
   echo yes
 else
   echo no
 fi
 
$ is-key-pkg bash
yes
$ is-key-pkg mscgen
no
$ is-key-pkg NotAPackage
no

Above shell snippets might need tweaking for better error handling, etc. Once again, thanks to Lucas for the server-side UDD script.
Filed under: Debian

Hello Markus Raab, the author of Elektra project, has created a survey to get FLOSS developer s point of view on the configuration of application. If you are a developer, please fill this survey to help Markus work on improving application configuration management. Feeling this survey should take about 15 mns. Note that the survey will close on July 18th. The fact that this blog comes 1 month after the beginning of the survey is entirely my fault. Sorry about that All the best
Tagged: configuration, Perl

Author: ceridwen After testing and looking at the code for Plumbum, I decided that it wouldn't work for my purposes. When a command is created by something like remote['ls'], it actually looks up which ls executable will be run and uses in the command object an internal representation of a path like /bin/ls. To make it work with autopkgtest's code would have required writing some kind of middle layer that would take all of the Plumbum code that makes subprocess calls, does path lookups, or uses the Python standard library to access OS functions and convert them into shell scripts. Another similar library, sh, has the same problems. I think there's a strong argument that something like Plumbum's or sh's API would be much easier to work with than adt_testbed, and I may take steps to improve it at some point, but for the moment I've focused on getting reprotest working with the existing autopkgtest/adt_testbed API. To do this, I created a minimalistic shell AST library in _shell_ast.py using the POSIX shell grammar. I omitted a lot of functionality that wasn't immediately relevant for reprotest and simplified the AST in some places to make it easier to work. Using this, it generates a shell script and runs it with adt_testbed.Testbed.execute(). With these pieces in place, the tests succeed for both null and schroot! I haven't tested the rest of the containers, but barring further issues with autopkgtest, I expect they should work. At this point, my goal is to push the next release out by next week, though as usual it will depend on how many snags I hit in the process. I see the following as the remaining blockers:

• Test chroot and qemu in addition to null and schroot.
• PyPi still doesn't install the scripts in virt/ properly.
• While I fixed part of adt_testbed's error handling, some build failures still cause it to hang, and I have to kill the process by hand.
• Better user documentation. I don't have time to be thorough, but I can provide a few more pointers.

Just finished my first book of Jonas Jonasson, a Swedish journalist and author. Most famous for his book The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, but author of two others. The one I read was The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden, which strange enough became in German Die Analphabetin die rechnen konnte (The analphabet who could compute). The story recounts the countless turns the life of Nombeko Mayeki, a black girl born in Soweto as latrine cleaner, who manages to save the Swedish king as well as most of the world from an atomic desaster by first getting driven over by a drunkard of South African nuclear bomb engineer, then meeting a clique of three Chinese sisters excelling in faking antiquities, and two Mossad agents. With the (unwilling) help of those agents she escapes to Sweden (including the atomic bomb) where she meets twins of a psychotic father who brought them up as one child so that the spare one can eradicate the Swedish monarchy. After many twists and setbacks, including several meetings with the Chinese premier Hu Jintao, she finally manages to get rid of the atomic bomb, get her undercover twin a real identity, and set up a proper life ah, and not to forget, save the King of Sweden! A fast paced, surprisingly funny and lovely story about how little things can change our lives completely.

At the begin of this week, I thought my architecture needed to be closer to the call . The goal was to create one class per call to save the different information. With this method, I only need to call the instance who I am interested and I can easly pull the information.
So, I began to rewrite my architecture on the daemon to create an instance of my class link directly with the callID.
After implementing it, I was really disappointed. This class was hardly to call from the upper software layers. Indeed, I didn t know what is the current call display on my client.
I change my mind and I rewrite the architecture again. I observed the information I want to pull (frame rate, bandwidth, resolution ) and they are all generating in my daemon. Therefore, it will update every time something change in the client. So, I just need to catch it and send it to the upper software layers. My new architecture is simply a singleton because I just need one instance and I need to pull it from everywhere in my program.

Beyond that, I wanted to pull some information about the video (frame rate, resolution, codec for the local and remote computer). So, I looked to understand how the frame generate work. Now I can pull:
-Local and remote video codec
-Local and remote frame rate
-Remote audio codec
-Remote resolution
-CallID

Next week, I will begin with working on creating an API on the client library. After that, I will continue to retrieve other information.

This recent book of the Austrian author Michael K hlmeier, Zwei Herren am Strand (Hanser Verlag), spins a story about an imaginative friendship between Charlie Chaplin and Winston Churchill. While there might not as be more different people than these two, in the book they are connected by a common fight the fight against their own depression, explicitly as well as implicitly by fighting Nazi Germany. Michael K hlmeier s recently released book Zwei Herren am Strand tells the fictive story of Charlie Chaplin and Winston Churchill meeting and becoming friends, helping each other fighting depression and suicide thoughts. Based on a bunch of (fictive) letters of a (fictive) private secretary of Churchill, as well as (fictive) book on Chaplin, the first person narrator dives into the interesting time of the mid-20ies to about the Second World War. Chaplin is having a hard time after the divorce from his wife Rita, paired with the difficulties at the production of The Circus, and is contemplating suicide. He is conveying this fact to Churchill during a walk on the beach. Churchill is reminded of his own depressions he suffers from early age on. The two of them agree to make a pact fighting the Black Dog inside. Later Churchill asks Chaplin about his method to overcome the phases of depression, and Chaplin explains him the Method of the Clown : Put a huge page of paper on the floor, lie yourself facing down onto the paper and start writing a letter to yourself while rotating clockwise and creating a spiral inward. According to Chaplin, he took this method from Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd (hard to verify), and it works by making oneself ridiculous, so that one part of oneself can laugh about the other part. The story continues into the early stages of the world war, with both sides fighting Hitler, one politically, one by comedy. The story finishes somewhere in the middle when the two meet while Chaplin is in a deep depression during cutting his movie
The great dictator, and together to manage once more to overcome the black dog .

---

The book is pure fiction, and K hlmeier dives into a debaucherous story telling, jumping back and forth between several strands of narration lines. An entertaining and very enjoyable book if you are the type of reader that enjoys story telling. For me this book is in best tradition of Michael K hlmeier, whom I consider an excellent story teller. I loved his (unfinished trilogy of) books on Greek mythology (Telemach and Calypso), but found that after these books he got lost too much in radio programs of story telling. While in itself good, I preferred his novels. Thus, I have to admit that I have forgotten about K hlmeier for some years, until recently I found this little book, which reminded me of him and his excellent stories. A book that is if you are versed in German well worth enjoying, especially if one likes funny and a bit queer stories.

A new release 0.4.4 of RProtoBuf is now on CRAN, and corresponds to the source archive for the Journal of Statistical Software paper about RProtoBuf as JSS vol71 issue 02. The paper is also included as a pre-print in the updated package. RProtoBuf provides R bindings for the Google Protocol Buffers ("Protobuf") data encoding library used and released by Google, and deployed as a language and operating-system agnostic protocol by numerous projects. This release brings small cleanups as well as build-system updates for the updated R 3.3.0 infrastructure based on g++ 4.9.*.

Changes in RProtoBuf version 0.4.4 (2016-07-10)

• New vignette based on our brand-new JSS publication (v71 i02)
• Some documentation enhancements were made, as well as other minor cleanups to file modes and operations
• Unit-test vignette no longer writes to /tmp per CRAN request
• The new Windows toolchain (based on g++ 4.9.*) is supported

CRANberries also provides a diff to the previous release. The RProtoBuf page has an older package vignette, a 'quick' overview vignette, a unit test summary vignette, and the pre-print for the JSS paper. Questions, comments etc should go to the GitHub issue tracker off the GitHub repo.

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

Now it s also implemented the functionality that allows a user to see his contacts presence. At first week I ve implemented only the Telepathy part of this methods and back then I didn t comprehend that this information would come in the form of a NOTIFY SIP message. I also needed to use the SUBSCRIPTION mechanism properly so the presence server could send me the NOTIFY message. To be able to create those messages was necessary a better understanding of resip/stack, resip/recon and resip/dum API s. Not that I master this libraries now, but at least I m not totally lost anymore =) Looking into this libraries I could see how much work was done by all of resiprocate contributors (and I imagine I don t even saw the tip of the iceberg). There is so many features ready for use that now I think twice before start implementing something. Since I didn t find any reference explicitly showing the contact s status in RFC3863 [1], I got this information by changing a contact presence (in a different machine logged in Jitsi [2]) and looking into the NOTIFY message received at resiprocate. Follow some images about contact s presence at Empathy:

Online status

Offline status

Busy DND status

Away status

In a meeting status

Unknow status

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3863 [2] https://jitsi.org/