Search Results: "ed"

9 September 2016

Jonathan Dowland: Metropolis

Every year since 2010 the Whitley Bay Film Festival has put on a programme of movies in my home town, often with some quirk or gimmick. A few years back we watched "Dawn Of The Dead" in a shopping centre the last act was interrupted by a fake film-reel break, then a load of zombies emerged from the shops. Sometime after that, we saw "The Graduate" within a Church as part of their annual "Secret Cinema" showing. Other famous stunts (which I personally did not witness) include a screening of Jaws on the beach and John Carpenter's "The Fog" in Whitley Bay Lighthouse. This year I only went to one showing, Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Two twists this time: it was being shown in The Rendezvous Cafe, an Art-Deco themed building on the sea front; the whole film was accompanied by a live, improvised synthesizer jam by a group of friends and synth/sound enthusiasts who branded themselves "The Mediators" for the evening. I've been meaning to watch Metropolis for a long time (I've got the Blu-Ray still sat in the shrink-wrap) and it was great to see the newly restored version, but the live synth accompaniment was what really made the night special for me. They used a bunch of equipment, most notably a set of Korg Volcas. The soundtrack varied in style and intensity to suit the scenes, with the various under-city scenes backed by a pumping, industrial-style improvisation which sounded quite excellent. I've had an interest in playing with synthesisers and making music for years, but haven't put the time in to do it properly. I left newly inspired and energised to finally try to make the time to explore it.

8 September 2016

Jamie McClelland: Wait... is that how you are supposed to configure your SSD card?

I bought a laptop with only SSD drives a while ago and based on a limited amount of reading, added the "discard" option to my /etc/fstab file for all partitions and happily went on my way expecting to avoid the performance degradation problems that happen on SSD cards without this setting). Yesterday, after a several month ordeal, I finally installed SSD drives in one of May First/People Link's servers and started doing more research to find the best way to set things up. I was quite surprised to learn that my change in /etc/fstab accomplished nothing. Well, not entirely true, my /boot partition was still getting empty sectors reported to the SSD card. Since my filesystem is on top of LVM and LVM is on top of an encrypted disk, those messages from the files system to the disk were not getting through. I learned that when I tried to run the fstrim command on one of the partitions and received the message that the disk didn't support it. Since my /boot partition is not in LVM or encrypted, it worked on /boot. I then made the necessary changes to /etc/lvm/lvm.conf and /etc/crypttab, restarted and... same result. Then I ran update-initramfs -u and rebooted and now fstrim works. I decided to remove the discard option from /etc/fstab and will set a cron job to run fstrim periodically. Also, I learned of some security implications of using trim on an encrypted disk which don't seem to outweigh the benefits.

Wouter Verhelst: Installing files for other applications with autotools

Let's say you have a configure.ac file which contains this: 
PKG_CHECK_VAR([p11_moduledir], "p11-kit-1", "p11_module_path")
AC_SUBST([p11_moduledir])
and that it goes with a Makefile.am which contains this: 
dist_p11_module_DATA = foo.module
Then things should work fine, right? When you run make install, your modules install to the right location, and p11-kit will pick up everything the way it should. Well, no. Not exactly. That is, it will work for the common case, but not for some other cases. You see, if you do that, then make distcheck will fail pretty spectacularly. At least if you run that as non-root (which you really really should do). The problem is that by specifying the p11_moduledir variable in that way, you hardcode it; it doesn't honour any $prefix or $DESTDIR variables that way. The result of that is that when a user installs your package by specifying --prefix=/opt/testmeout, it will still overwrite files in the system directory. Obviously, that's not desireable. The $DESTDIR bit is especially troublesome, as it makes packaging your software for the common distributions complicated (most packaging software heavily relies on DESTDIR support to "install" your software in a staging area before turning it into an installable package). So what's the right way then? I've been wondering about that myself, and asked for the right way to do something like that on the automake mailinglist a while back. The answer I got there wasn't entirely satisfying, and at the time I decided to take the easy way out (EXTRA_DIST the file, but don't actually install it). Recently, however, I ran against a similar problem for something else, and decided to try to do it the proper way this time around. p11-kit, like systemd, ships pkg-config files which contain variables for the default locations to install files into. These variables' values are meant to be easy to use from scripts, so that no munging of them is required if you want to directly install to the system-wide default location. The downside of this is that, if you want to install to the system-wide default location by default from an autotools package (but still allow the user to --prefix your installation into some other place, accepting that then things won't work out of the box), you do need to do the aforementioned munging. Luckily, that munging isn't too hard, provided whatever package you're installing for did the right thing: 
PKG_CHECK_VAR([p11_moduledir], "p11-kit-1", "p11_module_path")
PKG_CHECK_VAR([p11kit_libdir], "p11-kit-1", "libdir")
if test -z $ac_cv_env_p11_moduledir_set; then
    p11_moduledir=$(echo $p11_moduledir sed -e "s,$p11kit_libdir,\$ libdir ,g")
fi
AC_SUBST([p11_moduledir])
Whoa, what just happened? First, we ask p11-kit-1 where it expects modules to be. After that, we ask p11-kit-1 what was used as "libdir" at installation time. Usually that should be something like /usr/lib or /usr/lib/gnu arch triplet or some such, but it could really be anything. Next, we test to see whether the user set the p11_moduledir variable on the command line. If so, we don't want to munge it. The next line looks for the value of whatever libdir was set to when p11-kit-1 was installed in the value of p11_module_path, and replaces it with the literal string $ libdir . Finally, we exit our if and AC_SUBST our value into the rest of the build system. The resulting package will have the following semantics: I suppose it would've been easier if the PKG_CHECK_VAR macro could (optionally) do that munging by itself, but then, can't have everything.

7 September 2016

Antonio Terceiro: Debian CI updates for September 2016

debci 1.4 was released just a few days ago. Among general improvements, I would like to highlight: ci.debian.net has been upgraded to debci 1.4 just after that. At the same time I have also upgraded autodep8 and autopkgtest to their latest versions, available in jessie-backports. This means that it is now safe for Debian packages to assume the changes in autopkgtest 4.0 are available, in special the $AUTOPKGTEST_* environment variables. In other news, for several weeks there were had issues with tests not being scheduled when they should have. I was just assuming that the issue was due to the existing test scheduler, debci-batch, being broken. Today I was working on a new implementation that is going to be a lot faster, I started to hit a similar issue on my local tests, and finally realized what was wrong. The fact is that debci-batch stores the timestamp of the last time a package has been scheduled to run, and it there are no test result after that timestamp, it assumes the package is still in the queue to be tested, and does not schedule it again. It turns out that a few weeks ago, during maintainance work, I had cleared the queue, discarding all jobs that were there, but forgot to reset those timestamps, so when debci-batch came around again, it checked the timestamp of the last request and did not make new requests because there was no test result after that timestamp! I cleared all those timestamps, and the system should now go back to normal. That is it for now. I you want to contribute to the Debian CI project and want to get in touch, you can pop up on the #debci channel on the OFTC IRC network, or mail the autopkgtest-devel mailing list.

Julian Andres Klode: New software: sicherboot

Fork me on GitHub Today, I wrote sicherboot, a tool to integrate systemd-boot into a Linux distribution in an entirely new way: With secure boot support. To be precise: The use case here is to only run trusted code which then unmounts an otherwise fully encrypted disk, as in my setup: screenshot-from-2016-09-06-04-09-52 If you want, sicherboot automatically creates db, KEK, and PK keys, and puts the public keys on your EFI System Partition (ESP) together with the KeyTool tool, so you can enroll the keys in UEFI. You can of course also use other keys, you just need to drop a db.crt and a db.key file into /etc/sicherboot/keys. It would be nice if sicherboot could enroll the keys directly in Linux, but there seems to be a bug in efitools preventing that at the moment. For some background: The Platform Key (PK) signs the Key Exchange Key (KEK) which signs the database key (db). The db key is the one signing binaries. sicherboot also handles installing new kernels to your ESP. For this, it combines the kernel with its initramfs into one executable UEFI image, and then signs that. Combined with a fully encrypted disk setup, this assures that only you can run UEFI binaries on the system, and attackers cannot boot any other operating system or modify parts of your operating system (except for, well, any block of your encrypted data, as XTS does not authenticate the data; but then you do have to know which blocks are which which is somewhat hard). sicherboot integrates with various parts of Debian: It can work together by dracut via an evil hack (diverting dracut s kernel/postinst.d config file, so we can run sicherboot after running dracut), it should support initramfs-tools (untested), and it also integrates with systemd upgrades via triggers on the /usr/lib/systemd/boot/efi directory. Currently sicherboot only supports Debian-style setups with /boot/vmlinuz-<version> and /boot/initrd.img-<version> files, it cannot automatically create combined boot images from or install boot loader entries for other naming schemes yet. Fixing that should be trivial though, with a configuration setting and some eval magic (or string substitution). Future planned features include: (1) support for multiple ESP partitions, so you can have a fallback partition on a different drive (think RAID type situation, keep one ESP on each drive, so you can remove a failing one); and (2) a tool to create a self-contained rescue disk image from a directory (which will act as initramfs) and a kernel (falling back to a vmlinuz file ) It might also be interesting to add support for other bootloaders and setups, so you could automatically sign a grub cryptodisk image for example. Not sure how much sense that makes. I published the source at https://github.com/julian-klode/sicherboot (MIT licensed) and uploaded the package to Debian, it should enter the NEW queue soon (or be in NEW by the time you read this). Give it a try, and let me know what you think.
Filed under: Debian, sicherboot

Mike Gabriel: Debian's GTK-3+ v3.21 breaks Debian MATE 1.14

sunweaver sighs... This short post is to inform all Debian MATE users that the recent GTK-3+ upload to Debian (GTK-3+ v3.21) broke most parts of the MATE 1.14 desktop environment as currently available in Debian testing (aka stretch). This raises some questions here on the MATE maintainers' side... Questions
  1. Isn't GTK-3+ a shared library? This one was rhetorical... Yes, it is.
  2. One that breaks other application with every point release? Well, unfortunately, as experience over the past years has shown: Yes, this has happened several times, so far and it happened again.
  3. Why is it that GTK-3+ uploads appear in Debian without going through a proper transition? This question is not rhetorical. If someone has an answer, please enlighten me.
Potential Counter Measures For Debian MATE users running on Debian testing: This is untested, but it is quite likely that your MATE desktop environment will work again, once you have reverted your GTK-3+ library back to v3.20. For obtaining old Debian package versions, please visit the https://snapshots.debian.org site. Prospective The MATE 1.16 release is expected for Sep 20th, 2016. We will do our best to provide MATE 1.16 in Debian before this month is over. MATE 1.16 will again run smoothly (so I heard) on GTK-3+ 3.21.
light+love
sunweaver (who is already scared of the 3.22 GTK+ release, luckily the last development release of the GTK+ 3-series)

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: week 71 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday August 28 and Saturday September 3 2016: Media coverage Antonio Terceiro blogged about testing build reprodubility with debrepro . GSoC and Outreachy updates The next round is being planned now: see their page with a timeline and participating organizations listing. Maybe you want to participate this time? Then please reach out to us as soon as possible! Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed The following packages have addressed reproducibility issues in other packages: The following updated packages have become reproducible in our current test setup after being fixed: The following updated packages appear to be reproducible now, for reasons we were not able to figure out yet. (Relevant changelogs did not mention reproducible builds.) The following 4 packages were not changed, but have become reproducible due to changes in their build-dependencies: Some uploads have addressed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Reviews of unreproducible packages 706 package reviews have been added, 22 have been updated and 16 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 5 issue types have been added: 1 issue type has been updated: Weekly QA work FTBFS bugs have been reported by: diffoscope development diffoscope development on the next version (60) continued in git, taking in contributions from: strip-nondeterminism development Mattia Rizzolo uploaded strip-nondeterminism 0.023-2~bpo8+1 to jessie-backports. A new version of strip-nondeterminism 0.024-1 was uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb. It included contributions from: Holger added jobs on jenkins.debian.net to run testsuites on every commit. There is one job for the master branch and one for the other branches. disorderfs development Holger added jobs on jenkins.debian.net to run testsuites on every commit. There is one job for the master branch and one for the other branches. tests.reproducible-builds.org Debian: We now vary the GECOS records of the two build users. Thanks to Paul Wise for providing the patch. Misc. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Holger Levsen & Chris Lamb and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.

6 September 2016

Markus Koschany: My Free Software Activities in August 2016

Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you re interested in Android, Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you. Debian Android Debian Games Debian Java Debian LTS This was my seventh month as a paid contributor and I have been paid to work 14,75 hours on Debian LTS, a project started by Rapha l Hertzog. In that time I did the following: Non-maintainer uploads QA

Guido G nther: Debian Fun in August 2016

Debian LTS August marked the sixteenth month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. I spent 9 hours (of allocated 8) mostly on Rails related CVEs which resulted in DLA-603-1 and DLA-604-1 fixing 6 CVEs and marking others as not affecting the packages. The hardest part was proper testing since the split packages in Wheezy don't allow to run the upstream test suite as is. There's still CVE-2016-0753 which I need to check if it affects activerecord or activesupport. Additionally I had one relatively quiet week of LTS frontdesk work triaging 10 CVEs. Other Debian stuff

Andrew Shadura: Manual control of OpenEmbedded -dbg packages

In December last year, OpenEmbebbed introduced automatic debug packages. Prior to that, you d need to manually construct FILES_$ PN -dbg variable in your recipe. If you need to retain manual control over precisely what does into debug packages, set an undocumented NOAUTOPACKAGEDEBUG variable to 1, the same way Qt recipe does: 
NOAUTOPACKAGEDEBUG = "1"
FILES_$ PN -dev = "$ includedir /$ QT_DIR_NAME /Qt/*"
FILES_$ PN -dbg = "/usr/src/debug/"
FILES_$ QT_BASE_NAME -demos-doc = "$ docdir /$ QT_DIR_NAME /qch/qt.qch"
P.S. Knowing this would have saved me and my colleagues days of work.

Norbert Preining: Yukio Mishima: Patriotism ( )

A masterpiece by Yukio Mishima Patriotism the story of love and dead. A short story about the double suicide of a Lieutenant and his wife following the Ni Ni Roku Incident where some parts of the military tried to overthrow government and military leaders. Although Lieutenant Takeyama wasn t involved into the coup, because his friends wanted to safeguard him and his new wife, he found himself facing a fight and execution of his friends. Not being able to cope with this situation he commits suicide, followed by his wife.
mishima-patriotism Written in 1960 by one of the most interesting writers of Japanese modern history, Yukio Mishima, this book and the movie made by Mishima himself, are very disturbing images of the relation between human and state. Although the English title says Patriotism, the Japanese one is (Yukoku) which is closer to Concern for one s own country. This concern, and the feeling of devotion to the Imperial system and the country that leads the two into their deed. We are guided through the whole book and movie by a large scroll with (shisei, devotion) written on it. But indeed, Patriotism is a good title I think one of the most dangerous concepts mankind has brought forth. If Patriotism would be only the love for one s own country, all would be fine. But reality shows that patriotism unfailingly brings along xenophobia and the feeling of superiority. For someone coming from a small and unimportant country, I never had even the slightest allure to be patriotic in the bad sense. And looking at the world and people around me, I often have the feeling that mainly big countries produce the biggest and worst style of patriotism. This is obvious in countries like China, but having recently learned that all US pupils have to recite (obviously without understanding) the Pledge of Allegiance, the shock of how bad patriotism can start washing the brains of even the smallest kids in a seemingly free country is still present. But back to the book: Here the patriotism is exhibited by the presence of the Imperial images and shrine in the entrance, in front of which the two pray the last time before executing themselves. patriotism1 Not only the book is a masterpiece by itself, also the movie is a special piece of art: Filmed in silent movie style with text inserts, the whole story takes place on a Noh stage. This is in particular interesting as Mishima was one of the few, if not the only, modern Noh play writer. He has written several Noh plays. Another very impressive scene for me was when, after her husbands suicide, Reiko returns from putting up her final make-up into the central room. Her kimono is already blood soaked and the trailing kimono leaves traces on the Noh stage resembling the strokes of a calligraphy, as if her movement is guided, too, by . The final scene of the movie shows the two of them in a Zen stone garden, forming the stone, the unreachable island of happiness. patriotism2 Very impressive, both the book as well as the movie.

Guido G nther: Debian Fun in Augst 2016

Debian LTS August marked the sixteenth month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. I spent 9 hours (of allocated 8) mostly on Rails related CVEs which resulted in DLA-603-1 and DLA-604-1 fixing 6 CVEs and marking others as not affecting the packages. The hardest part was proper testing since the split packages in Wheezy don't allow to run the upstream test suite as is. There's still CVE-2016-0753 which I need to check if it affects activerecord or activesupport. Additionally I had one relatively quiet week of LTS frontdesk work triaging 10 CVEs. Other Debian stuff

5 September 2016

Joachim Breitner: The new CIS-194

The Haskell minicourse at the University of Pennsylvania, also known as CIS-194, has always had a reach beyond the students of Penn. At least since Brent Yorgey gave the course in 2013, who wrote extensive lecture notes and eventually put the material on Github. This year, it is my turn to give the course. I could not resist making some changes, at least to the first few weeks: Instead of starting with a locally installed compiler, doing execises that revolve mostly around arithmetic and lists, I send my students to CodeWorld, which is a web programming environment created by Chris Smith1. This greatly lowers the initial hurlde of having to set up the local toolchain, and is inclusive towards those who have had little expose to the command line before. Not that I do not expect my students to handle that, but it does not hurt to move that towards later in the course. But more importantly: CodeWorld comes with a nicely designed simple API to create vector graphics, to animate these graphics and even create interactive programs. This means that instead of having to come up with yet another set of exercieses revolving around lists and numbers, I can have the students create Haskell programs that are visual. I believe that this is more motivating and stimulating, and will nudge the students to spend more time programming and thus practicing. In fact, the goal is that in their third homework assignemnt, the students will implement a fully functional, interactive Sokoban game. And all that before talking about the built-in lists or tuples, just with higher order functions and custom datatypes. (Click on the picture above, which is part of the second weeks s homework. You can use the arrow keys to move the figure around and press the escape key to reset the game. Boxes cannot be moved yet -- that will be part of homework 3.) If this sounds interesting to you, and you always wanted to learn Haskell from scratch, feel free to tag along. The lecture notes should be elaborate enough to learn from that, and with the homework problems, you should be able to tell whether you have solved it yourself. Just do not publish your solutions before the due date. Let me know if you have any comments about the course so far. Eventually, I will move to local compilation, use of the interpreter and text-based IO and then start using more of the material of previous iterations of the course, which were held by Richard Eisenberg in 2014 and by Noam Zilberstein in 2015.
  1. Chris has been very helpful in making sure CodeWorld works in a way that suits my course, thanks for that!

Chris Lamb: How to write your first Lintian check

Lintian's humble description of "Debian package checker" belies its importance within the Debian GNU/Linux project. An extensive static analysis tool, it's not only used by the vast majority of developers, falling foul of some of its checks even cause uploads to be automatically rejected by the archive maintenance software. As you may have read in my recent monthly report, I've recently been hacking on Lintian itself. In particular:

However, this rest of this post will go through the steps needed to start contributing yourself. To demonstrate this I will be walking through submitting a patch for bug #831864 which warns about Python packages that ship .coverage files generated by Coverage.py.
Getting started First, let's obtain the Lintian sources and create a branch for our work: 
$ git clone https://anonscm.debian.org/git/lintian/lintian.git
[ ]
$ cd lintian
$ git checkout -b warn-about-dotcoverage-files
Switched to a new branch 'warn-about-dotcoverage-files'
The most interesting files are under checks/*: 
$ ls -l checks/   head -n 9
total 1356
-rw-r--r-- 1 lamby lamby  6393 Jul 29 14:19 apache2.desc
-rw-r--r-- 1 lamby lamby  8619 Jul 29 14:19 apache2.pm
-rw-r--r-- 1 lamby lamby  1956 Jul 29 14:19 application-not-library.desc
-rw-r--r-- 1 lamby lamby  3285 Jul 29 14:19 application-not-library.pm
-rw-r--r-- 1 lamby lamby   544 Jul 29 14:19 automake.desc
-rw-r--r-- 1 lamby lamby  1354 Jul 29 14:19 automake.pm
-rw-r--r-- 1 lamby lamby 19506 Jul 29 14:19 binaries.desc
-rw-r--r-- 1 lamby lamby 25204 Jul 29 14:19 binaries.pm
-rw-r--r-- 1 lamby lamby 15641 Aug 24 21:42 changelog-file.desc
-rw-r--r-- 1 lamby lamby 19606 Jul 29 14:19 changelog-file.pm
Note that the files are in pairs; a foo.desc file that contains description of the tags and a sibling foo.pm Perl module that actually performs the checks.

Let's add our new tag before we go any further. After poking around, it looks like files. pm,desc would be most appropriate, so we'll add our new tag definition to files.desc: 
Tag: package-contains-python-coverage-file
Severity: normal
Certainty: certain
Info: The package contains a file that looks like output from the Python
 coverage.py tool.  These are generated by python ,3 -coverage during a test
 run, noting which parts of the code have been executed.  They can then be
 subsequently analyzed to identify code that could have been executed but was
 not.
 .
 As they are are unlikely to be of utility to end-users, these files should
 be removed from the package.
The Severity and Certainty fields are documented in the manual. Note the convention of using double spaces after full stops in the Info section.
Extending the testsuite Lintian has many moving parts based on regular expressions and other subtle logic, so it's especially important to provide tests in order to handle edge cases and to catch any regressions in the future. We create tests by combining a tiny Debian package that will deliberately violate our check, along with some metadata and the expected output of running Lintian against this package. The tests themselves are stored under t/tests. There may be an existing test that it would be more appropriate to extend, but I've gone with creating a new directory called files-python-coverage: 
$ mkdir -p t/tests/files-python-coverage
$ cd t/tests/files-python-coverage
First, we create a simple package, installing dummy file to trigger the check: 
$ mkdir -p debian/debian
$ touch debian/.coverage
$ echo ".coverage /usr/share/files-python-coverage" > debian/debian/install
Note that we do not need a debian/rules file as long as we do not deviate from a "skeleton" debhelper style. We then add the aforementioned metadata to t/tests/files-python-coverage/desc: 
Testname: files-python-coverage
Sequence: 6000
Version: 1.0
Description: Check for Python .coverage files
Test-For:
 package-contains-python-coverage-file
and the expected warning to t/tests/files-python-coverage/tags: 
$ echo "W: files-python-coverage: package-contains-python-coverage-file" \
      "usr/share/files-python-coverage/.coverage" > tags

When we run the testsuite, it should fail because we don't emit the check yet: 
$ cd $(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)
$ debian/rules runtests onlyrun=tag:package-contains-python-coverage-file
[ ]
--- t/tests/files-python-coverage/tags
+++ debian/test-out/tests/files-python-coverage/tags.files-python-coverage
@@ -1 +0,0 @@
-W: files-python-coverage: package-contains-python-coverage-file usr/share/files-python-coverage/.coverage
fail tests::files-python-coverage: output differs!
Failed tests (1)
    tests::files-python-coverage
debian/rules:48: recipe for target 'runtests' failed
make: *** [runtests] Error 1
$ echo $?
1
Specifying onlyrun= means we only run the tests that are designed to trigger this tag rather than the whole testsuite. This is controlled by the Test-For key in our desc file, not by scanning the tags files. This recipe for creating a testcase could be used when submitting a regular bug against Lintian providing a failing testcase not only clarifies misunderstandings resulting from the use of natural language, it also makes it easier, quicker and safer to correct the offending code itself.
Emitting the tag Now, let's actually implement the check: 
             tag 'package-installs-python-egg', $file;
          
+        # ---------------- .coverage (coverage.py output)
+        if ($file->basename eq ".coverage")  
+            tag 'package-contains-python-coverage-file', $file;
+         
         # ---------------- /usr/lib/site-python
Our testsuite now passes: 
$ debian/rules runtests onlyrun=tag:package-contains-python-coverage-file
private/generate-profiles.pl
.... running tests ....
mkdir -p "debian/test-out"
t/runtests -k -j 9 t "debian/test-out" tag:package-contains-python-coverage-file
ENV[PATH]=[..]
pass tests::files-python-coverage
if [ "tag:package-contains-python-coverage-file" = "" ]; then touch runtests; fi
$ echo $?
0
Submitting the patch Lastly, we create a patch for submission to the bug tracking system: 
$ git commit -a -m "c/files: Warn about Python packages which ship" \
      "coverage.py information. (Closes: #831864)"
$ git format-patch HEAD~
0001-c-files-Warn-about-Python-packages-which-ship-covera.patch
and we finally attach it to the existing bug: 
To: 831864@bugs.debian.org
Cc: 831864-submitter@bugs.debian.org
Bcc: control@bugs.debian.org
tags 831864 + patch
thanks
Patch attached.
/lamby

Summary I hope this post will encourage at some extra contributions towards this important tool. (Be aware that I'm not a Lintian maintainer, so not only should you not treat anything here as gospel and expect this post may be edited over time if clarifications arise.)

Bits from Debian: DebConf17 organization started

DebConf17 will take place in Montreal, Canada from August 6 to August 12, 2017. It will be preceded by DebCamp, July 31 to August 4, and Debian Day, August 5. We invite everyone to join us in organizing DebConf17. There are different areas where your help could be very valuable, and we are always looking forward to your ideas. The DebConf content team is open to suggestions for invited speakers. If you'd like to propose somebody who is not a regular DebConf attendee follow the details in the call for speaker proposals blog post. We are also beginning to contact potential sponsors from all around the globe. If you know any organization that could be interested, please consider handing them the sponsorship brochure or contact the fundraising team with any leads. The DebConf team is holding IRC meetings every two weeks. Have a look at the DebConf17 website and wiki page, and engage in the IRC channels and the mailing list. Let s work together, as every year, on making the best DebConf ever!

Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: My Free Software Activities in August 2016

My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donators (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me. This months is rather light since I was away in vacation for two weeks. Kali related work The new pkg-security team is working full steam and I reviewed/sponsored many packages during the month: polenum, accheck, braa, t50, ncrack, websploit. I filed bug #834515 against sbuild since sbuild-createchroot was no longer usable for kali-rolling due to the embedded dash. That misfeature has been reverted and implemented through an explicit option. I brought the attention of ftpmasters on #832163 since we had unexpected packages in the standard section (they have been discovered in the Kali live ISO while we did not want them). I uploaded two fontconfig NMU to finally push to Debian a somewhat cleaner fix for the problem of various captions being displayed as squares after a font upgrade (see #828037 and #835142). I tested (twice) a live-build patch from Adrian Gibanel Lopez implementing EFI boot with grub and merged it into the official git repository (see #731709). I filed bug #835983 on python-pypdf2 since it has an invalid dependency forbidding co-installation with python-pypdf. I orphaned splint since its maintainer was missing in action (MIA) and immediately made a QA upload to fix the RC bug which kicked it out of testing (this package is a build dependency of a Kali package). django-jsonfield I wrote a patch to make python-django-jsonfield compatible with Django 1.10 (#828668) and I committed that patch in the upstream repository. Distro Tracker I made some changes to make the codebase compatible with Django 1.10 (and added Django 1.10 to the tox test matrix). I added a Debian Maintainer Dashboard link next to people s name on request of Lucas Nussbaum (#830548). I made a preliminary review of Paul Wise s patch to add multiarch hints (#833623) and improved the handling of the mailbot when it gets MIME Headers referencing an unknown charset (like cp-850 , Python only knows of cp850 ) I also helped Peter Palfrader to enabled a .onion address for tracker.debian.org, see onion.debian.org for the full list of services available over Tor. Misc stuff I updated my letsencrypt.sh salt formula to work with the latest version of letsencrypt.sh (0.2.0) I merged updated translations for the Debian Administrator s Handbook from weblate.org and uploaded a new version to Debian. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

No comment Liked this article? Click here. My blog is Flattr-enabled.

Paul Tagliamonte: go-haversine

In the spirit of blogging about some of the code i ve written in the past year or two, I wrote a small utility library called go-haversine, which uses the Haversine Forumla to compute the distance between two points. This is super helpful when working with GPS data - but remember, this assumes everything s squarely on the face of the planet.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp 0.12.7: More updates

The seventh update in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp just arrived on the CRAN network for GNU R as well as in Debian. This 0.12.7 release follows the 0.12.0 release from late July, the 0.12.1 release in September, the 0.12.2 release in November, the 0.12.3 release in January, the 0.12.4 release in March, the 0.12.5 release in May, and the 0.12.6 release in July --- making it the eleventh release at the steady bi-montly release frequency. Keeping with the established pattern, this is again more of a maintenance release which addresses small bugs, nuisances or documentation issues without adding any major new features. One issue that got to a few people was our casual use of NORET in the definition of Rcpp::stop(). We had (ahem) overlooked that NORET is only defined by R 3.2.0 or later, and several folks trying to build on older releases of R (why?) got bitten. Well, at least we have a new record for most frequently reported bug ... Kidding aside, this is now fixed. Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing GNU R with C or C++ code. As of today, 759 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further. That is up by well over fifty packages since the last release in mid-July! We are once again fortunate to have a number of pull request, from first-timers to regulars. James "coatless" Balamuta in particular relentlessly pushed for better documentation and cleanup of numerous dangling issue tickets. Artem Klevtsov also contributed again. Qiang, Kevin and I also got some changes in for the Rcpp Core team. More details are again below.
Changes in Rcpp version 0.12.7 (2016-09-04)
  • Changes in Rcpp API:
    • The NORET macro is now defined if it was not already defined by R itself (Kevin fixing issue #512).
    • Environment functions get() & find() now accept a Symbol (James Balamuta in #513 addressing issue #326).
    • Several uses of Rf_eval were replaced by the preferred Rcpp::Rcpp_eval (Qiang in PR #523 closing #498).
    • Improved Autogeneration Warning for RcppExports (James Balamuta in #528 addressing issue #526).
    • Fixed invalid C++ prefix identifiers in auto-generated code (James Balamuta in #528 and #531 addressing issue #387; Simon Dirmeier in #548).
    • String constructors now set default UTF-8 encoding (Qiang Kou in #529 fixing #263).
    • Add variadic variants of the RCPP_RETURN_VECTOR and RCPP_RETURN_MATRIX macro when C++11 compiler used (Artem Klevtsov in #537 fixing #38).
  • Changes in Rcpp build system
    • Travis CI is now driven via run.sh from our fork, and deploys all packages as .deb binaries using our PPA where needed (Dirk in #540 addressing issue #517).
  • Changes in Rcpp unit tests
    • New unit tests for random number generators the R namespace which call the standalone Rmath library. (James Balamuta in #514 addressing issue #28).
  • Changes in Rcpp Examples:
    • Examples that used cxxfunction() from the inline package have been rewritten to use either sourceCpp() or cppFunction() (James Balamuta in #541, #535, #534, and #532 addressing issue #56).
Thanks to CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release. As always, even fuller details are on the Rcpp Changelog page and the Rcpp page which also leads to the downloads page, the browseable doxygen docs and zip files of doxygen output for the standard formats. A local directory has source and documentation too. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

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

4 September 2016

Carl Chenet: Retweet 0.9: Automatically retweet & like

Retweet 0.9, a self-hosted Python app to automatically retweet and like tweets from another user-defined Twitter account, was released this September, 2nd. Retweet 0.9 is already in production for Le Journal du hacker, a French-speaking Hacker News-like website, LinuxJobs.fr, a French-speaking job board and this very blog. fiesta What s the purpose of Retweet? Let s face it, it s more and more difficult to communicate about our projects. Even writing an awesome app is not enough any more. If you don t appear on a regular basis on social networks, everybody thinks you quit or that the project is stalled. But what if you already have built an audience on Twitter for, let s say, your personal account. Now you want to automatically retweet and like all tweets from the account of your new project, to push it forward. Sure, you can do it manually, like in the old good 90 s or you can use Retweet! Twitter Out Of The Browser Have a look at my Github account for my other Twitter automation tools: What about you? Do you use tools to automate the management of your Twitter account? Feel free to give me feedback in the comments below.

Iustin Pop: Usefulness of real-time data during cycling

Wow, a mouthful of a title, for a much simpler post. Up until earlier this year, I had only one sport GPS device, and that was a watch. Made sense, as my "main" sport was running (not that I did it very consistently). Upgraded over a few generations of Garmins, I mainly used it to record my track and statistics (pace, heart rate, etc.) The newest generation of watch and heart rate monitor even give more statistics (left-right leg balance, ground contact time, so on). Most of this data can be looked at while running, but only as an exception; after all, it's very hard to run with one hand up in front of your face. The other useful features guided workouts and alerts during normal runs I've used, but not consistently. So when I started biking a bit more seriously, I wondered whether it would make sense to buy a bike computer. The feature intersection between watch and bike GPS is quite large, so clearly this is a "want" not a "need" by far. Reading forum posts showed the same question repeated multiple times What convinced me to nevertheless buy such a bike GPS were the mapping/routing features. A bike GPS with good routing features, or even just maps on which tracks can be overlayed, can certainly ease the discovery of new routes. After a few months of use, my most useful feature is one that I didn't expect. While the mapping is useful and I do use it, the one that actually is significantly better than my watch is the large display with data fields that I can trivially check almost continuously on road biking, and during technically easy climbing sections for mountain biking. My setup looks like this: It's a 9-field setup; the Edge 1000 can go to 10, but I like "headline" field. The watch can only go to four, and is basically not usable during rides, unless one would use a quick-release kit for mounting on the handle bar. This setup allowed me to learn much better my physical capabilities, why I sometimes run out of energy, and how the terrain affects me. Random things that I learned: Seeing all this data only after the ride is less useful since you don't remember exactly how you felt during specific points in the ride. But as real-time data, one can easily see/feel the correlation between how the body feels and what data says. One thing that would be also useful would be real-time power data (3 sec average, not instantaneous) to correlate even better with the body state. I now use heart rate and cadence as a proxy for that, but being able to see actual power numbers would increase the usefulness of the data even more. Unfortunately, none of these makes the climbs easier. But at least it allows me to understand why one climb feels hard and another easy (relatively speaking). I wonder if, and how this could be applied to running; maybe with smart glasses? Conclusion: yes, I do recommend a bike computer with a large display (to be able to see many fields at once). Just in case one has disposable income at hand and doesn't know which hobby to spend it on ;-)

Next.

Previous.