Search Results: "js"

7 October 2015

Steve Kemp: Generating fingerprints from SSH keys

I've been allowing users to upload SSH public-keys, and displaying them online in a form. Displaying an SSH public key is a pain, because they're typically long. That means you need to wrap them, or truncate them, or you introduce a horizontal scroll-bar. So rather than displaying them I figured I'd generate a fingerprint when the key was uploaded and show that instead - This is exactly how github shows your ssh-keys. Annoyingly there is only one reasonable way to get a fingerprint from a key: You can sometimes calculate the key via more direct, but less obvious methods: 
awk ' print $2 ' ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub   base64 -d   md5sum
But that won't work for all key-types. It is interesting to look at the various key-types which are available these days: 
mkdir ~/ssh/
cd ~/ssh/
for i in dsa ecdsa ed25519 rsa rsa1 ; do
  ssh-keygen -P "" -t $i -f $ i -key
done
I've never seen an ed25519 key in the wild. It looks like this: 
$ cat ~/ssh/ed25519-key.pub
ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAIMcT04t6UpewqQHWI4gfyBpP/ueSjbcGEze22vdlq0mW skx@shelob
Similarly curve-based keys are short too, but not as short: 
ecdsa-sha2-nistp256 AAAAE2VjZHNhLXNoYTItbmlzdHAyNTYAAAAIbmlzdHAyNTYAAABBBLTJ5+  \
 rWoq5cNcjXdhzRiEK3Yq6tFSYr4DBsqkRI0ZqJdb+7RxbhJYUOq5jsBlHUzktYhOahEDlc9Lezz3ZUqXg= skx@shelob
Remember what I said about wrapping? Ha! Anyway for the moment I've hacked up a simple perl module SSH::Key::Fingerprint which will accept a public key and return the fingerprint, as well as validating the key is well-formed and of a known-type. I might make it public in the future, but I think the name is all wrong. The only code I could easily find to do a similar job is this node.js package, but it doesn't work on all key-types. Shame. And that concludes this weeks super-happy fun-time TODO-list item.

6 October 2015

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in September 2015

FTP assistant Another month passed and another statistic arrives: This month I marked 341 packages for accept and rejected only 48 of them. Almost like last month I had to send 14 emails to maintainers. Squeeze LTS This was my fifteenth month that I did some work for the Squeeze LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This month I only got a workload of 14.5h. I finally uploaded a new version of php5. Unfortunately in one library a parameter to a function call introduced new values. As a result all running processes that used the old version of that library produced an error message until they got restarted. As complaints showed up on all channels, I rechecked my patches again and again but could not find an error. I wonder whether this happened once before. At least the php package does not have a mechanism to restart something
Altogether I uploaded those DLAs: I also started to work on an upload of freeimage and the next upload of php5. This month I also had another term of doing frontdesk work. So I answered questions on the IRC channel and looked for CVEs that are important for Squeeze LTS or could be ignored. Other stuff Some time ago someone mentioned pump.io and that it would be nice to have it in Debian. I found a Wiki page listing dependencies, with lots of stuff already done and just a few holes. It didn t look like much work todo until I realized that this page showed only the surface and the shoals are hidden below. Anyway, I started to work on it and up to now are uploaded and are still in NEW. Luckily most of them could be handled by npm2deb, so it was mainly routine piece of work. So, expect more to come I also polished some smaller packages and could even close some bugs:

5 October 2015

Julien Danjou: Gnocchi talk at OpenStack Paris Meetup #16

Last week, I've been invited to the OpenStack Paris meetup #16, whose subject was about metrics in OpenStack. Last time I spoke at this meetup was back in 2012, during the OpenStack Paris meetup #2. A very long time ago!
I talked for half an hour about Gnocchi, the OpenStack project I've been running for 18 months now. I started by explaining the story behind the project and why we needed to build it. Ceilometer has an interesting history and had a curious roadmap these last year, and I summarized that briefly. Then I talk about how Gnocchi works and what it offers to users and operators. The slides where full of JSON, but I imagine it offered a interesting view of what the API looks like and how easy it is to operate. This also allowed me to emphasize how many use cases are actually really covered and solved, contrary to what Ceilometer did so far. The talk has been well received and I got a few interesting questions at the end. The video of the talk (in French) and my slides are available on my talk page and below. I hope you'll enjoy it.

4 October 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 23 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Andreas Metzler uploaded autogen/1:5.18.6-1 in experimental with several patches for reproducibility issues written by Valentin Lorentz. Groovy upstream has merged a change proposed by Emmanuel Bourg to remove timestamps generated by groovydoc. Ben Hutchings submitted a patch to add support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in linux-kbuild as an alternate way to specify the build timestamp. Reiner Herrman has sent a patch adding support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in docbook-utils. Packages fixed The following packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: commons-csv. fest-reflect, sunxi-tools, xfce4-terminal, The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: Tomasz Rybak uploaded pycuda/2015.1.3-1 which should fix reproducibility issues. The package has not been tested as it is in contrib. akira found an embedded code copy of texi2html in fftw. reproducible.debian.net Email notifications are now only sent once a day per package, instead of on each status change. (h01ger) disorderfs has been temporarily disabled to see if it had any impact on the disk space issues. (h01ger) When running out of disk space, build nodes will now automatically detect the problem. This means test results will not be recorded as FTBFS and the problem will be reported to Jenkins maintainers. (h01ger) The navigation menu of package pages has been improved. (h01ger) The two amd64 builders now use two different kernel versions: 3.16 from stable and 4.1 from backports on the other. (h01ger) We now graph the number of packages which needs to be fixed. (h01ger) Munin now creates graphs on how many builds were performed by build nodes (example). (h01ger) A migration plan has been agreed with DSA on how to turn Jenkins into an official Debian service. A backport of jenkins-job-builder for Jessie is currently missing. (h01ger) Package reviews 119 reviews have been removed, 103 added and 45 updated this week. 16 fail to build from source issues were reported by Chris Lamb and Mattia Rizzolo. New issue this week: timestamps_in_manpages_generated_by_docbook_utils. Misc. Allan McRae has submitted a patch to make ArchLinux pacman record a .BUILDINFO file.

2 October 2015

Daniel Pocock: Want to be selected for Google Summer of Code 2016?

I've mentored a number of students in 2013, 2014 and 2015 for Debian and Ganglia and most of the companies I've worked with have run internships and graduate programs from time to time. GSoC 2015 has just finished and with all the excitement, many students are already asking what they can do to prepare and be selected for Outreachy or GSoC in 2016. My own observation is that the more time the organization has to get to know the student, the more confident they can be selecting that student. Furthermore, the more time that the student has spent getting to know the free software community, the more easily they can complete GSoC. Here I present a list of things that students can do to maximize their chance of selection and career opportunities at the same time. These tips are useful for people applying for GSoC itself and related programs such as GNOME's Outreachy or graduate placements in companies. Disclaimers There is no guarantee that Google will run the program again in 2016 or any future year until the Google announcement. There is no guarantee that any organization or mentor (including myself) will be involved until the official list of organizations is published by Google. Do not follow the advice of web sites that invite you to send pizza or anything else of value to prospective mentors. Following the steps in this page doesn't guarantee selection. That said, people who do follow these steps are much more likely to be considered and interviewed than somebody who hasn't done any of the things in this list. Understand what free software really is You may hear terms like free software and open source software used interchangeably. They don't mean exactly the same thing and many people use the term free software for the wrong things. Not all projects declaring themselves to be "free" or "open source" meet the definition of free software. Those that don't, usually as a result of deficiencies in their licenses, are fundamentally incompatible with the majority of software that does use genuinely free licenses. Google Summer of Code is about both writing and publishing your code and it is also about community. It is fundamental that you know the basics of licensing and how to choose a free license that empowers the community to collaborate on your code well after GSoC has finished. Please review the definition of free software early on and come back and review it from time to time. The The GNU Project / Free Software Foundation have excellent resources to help you understand what a free software license is and how it works to maximize community collaboration. Don't look for shortcuts There is no shortcut to GSoC selection and there is no shortcut to GSoC completion. The student stipend (USD $5,500 in 2014) is not paid to students unless they complete a minimum amount of valid code. This means that even if a student did find some shortcut to selection, it is unlikely they would be paid without completing meaningful work. If you are the right candidate for GSoC, you will not need a shortcut anyway. Are you the sort of person who can't leave a coding problem until you really feel it is fixed, even if you keep going all night? Have you ever woken up in the night with a dream about writing code still in your head? Do you become irritated by tedious or repetitive tasks and often think of ways to write code to eliminate such tasks? Does your family get cross with you because you take your laptop to Christmas dinner or some other significant occasion and start coding? If some of these statements summarize the way you think or feel you are probably a natural fit for GSoC. An opportunity money can't buy The GSoC stipend will not make you rich. It is intended to make sure you have enough money to survive through the summer and focus on your project. Professional developers make this much money in a week in leading business centers like New York, London and Singapore. When you get to that stage in 3-5 years, you will not even be thinking about exactly how much you made during internships. GSoC gives you an edge over other internships because it involves publicly promoting your work. Many companies still try to hide the potential of their best recruits for fear they will be poached or that they will be able to demand higher salaries. Everything you complete in GSoC is intended to be published and you get full credit for it. Imagine a young musician getting the opportunity to perform on the main stage at a rock festival. This is how the free software community works. It is a meritocracy and there is nobody to hold you back. Having a portfolio of free software that you have created or collaborated on and a wide network of professional contacts that you develop before, during and after GSoC will continue to pay you back for years to come. While other graduates are being screened through group interviews and testing days run by employers, people with a track record in a free software project often find they go straight to the final interview round. Register your domain name and make a permanent email address Free software is all about community and collaboration. Register your own domain name as this will become a focal point for your work and for people to get to know you as you become part of the community. This is sound advice for anybody working in IT, not just programmers. It gives the impression that you are confident and have a long term interest in a technology career. Choosing the provider: as a minimum, you want a provider that offers DNS management, static web site hosting, email forwarding and XMPP services all linked to your domain. You do not need to choose the provider that is linked to your internet connection at home and that is often not the best choice anyway. The XMPP foundation maintains a list of providers known to support XMPP. Create an email address within your domain name. The most basic domain hosting providers will let you forward the email address to a webmail or university email account of your choice. Configure your webmail to send replies using your personalized email address in the From header. Update your ~/.gitconfig file to use your personalized email address in your Git commits. Create a web site and blog Start writing a blog. Host it using your domain name. Some people blog every day, other people just blog once every two or three months. Create links from your web site to your other profiles, such as a Github profile page. This helps reinforce the pages/profiles that are genuinely related to you and avoid confusion with the pages of other developers. Many mentors are keen to see their students writing a weekly report on a blog during GSoC so starting a blog now gives you a head start. Mentors look at blogs during the selection process to try and gain insight into which topics a student is most suitable for. Create a profile on Github Github is one of the most widely used software development web sites. Github makes it quick and easy for you to publish your work and collaborate on the work of other people. Create an account today and get in the habbit of forking other projects, improving them, committing your changes and pushing the work back into your Github account. Github will quickly build a profile of your commits and this allows mentors to see and understand your interests and your strengths. In your Github profile, add a link to your web site/blog and make sure the email address you are using for Git commits (in the ~/.gitconfig file) is based on your personal domain. Start using PGP Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is the industry standard in protecting your identity online. All serious free software projects use PGP to sign tags in Git, to sign official emails and to sign official release files. The most common way to start using PGP is with the GnuPG (GNU Privacy Guard) utility. It is installed by the package manager on most Linux systems. When you create your own PGP key, use the email address involving your domain name. This is the most permanent and stable solution. Print your key fingerprint using the gpg-key2ps command, it is in the signing-party package on most Linux systems. Keep copies of the fingerprint slips with you. This is what my own PGP fingerprint slip looks like. You can also print the key fingerprint on a business card for a more professional look. Using PGP, it is recommend that you sign any important messages you send but you do not have to encrypt the messages you send, especially if some of the people you send messages to (like family and friends) do not yet have the PGP software to decrypt them. If using the Thunderbird (Icedove) email client from Mozilla, you can easily send signed messages and validate the messages you receive using the Enigmail plugin. Get your PGP key signed Once you have a PGP key, you will need to find other developers to sign it. For people I mentor personally in GSoC, I'm keen to see that you try and find another Debian Developer in your area to sign your key as early as possible. Free software events Try and find all the free software events in your area in the months between now and the end of the next Google Summer of Code season. Aim to attend at least two of them before GSoC. Look closely at the schedules and find out about the individual speakers, the companies and the free software projects that are participating. For events that span more than one day, find out about the dinners, pub nights and other social parts of the event. Try and identify people who will attend the event who have been GSoC mentors or who intend to be. Contact them before the event, if you are keen to work on something in their domain they may be able to make time to discuss it with you in person. Take your PGP fingerprint slips. Even if you don't participate in a formal key-signing party at the event, you will still find some developers to sign your PGP key individually. You must take a photo ID document (such as your passport) for the other developer to check the name on your fingerprint but you do not give them a copy of the ID document. Events come in all shapes and sizes. FOSDEM is an example of one of the bigger events in Europe, linux.conf.au is a similarly large event in Australia. There are many, many more local events such as the Debian UK mini-DebConf in Cambridge, November 2015. Many events are either free or free for students but please check carefully if there is a requirement to register before attending. On your blog, discuss which events you are attending and which sessions interest you. Write a blog during or after the event too, including photos. Quantcast generously hosted the Ganglia community meeting in San Francisco, October 2013. We had a wild time in their offices with mini-scooters, burgers, beers and the Ganglia book. That's me on the pink mini-scooter and Bernard Li, one of the other Ganglia GSoC 2014 admins is on the right. Install Linux GSoC is fundamentally about free software. Linux is to free software what a tree is to the forest. Using Linux every day on your personal computer dramatically increases your ability to interact with the free software community and increases the number of potential GSoC projects that you can participate in. This is not to say that people using Mac OS or Windows are unwelcome. I have worked with some great developers who were not Linux users. Linux gives you an edge though and the best time to gain that edge is now, while you are a student and well before you apply for GSoC. If you must run Windows for some applications used in your course, it will run just fine in a virtual machine using Virtual Box, a free software solution for desktop virtualization. Use Linux as the primary operating system. Here are links to download ISO DVD (and CD) images for some of the main Linux distributions: If you are nervous about getting started with Linux, install it on a spare PC or in a virtual machine before you install it on your main PC or laptop. Linux is much less demanding on the hardware than Windows so you can easily run it on a machine that is 5-10 years old. Having just 4GB of RAM and 20GB of hard disk is usually more than enough for a basic graphical desktop environment although having better hardware makes it faster. Your experiences installing and running Linux, especially if it requires some special effort to make it work with some of your hardware, make interesting topics for your blog. Decide which technologies you know best Personally, I have mentored students working with C, C++, Java, Python and JavaScript/HTML5. In a GSoC program, you will typically do most of your work in just one of these languages. From the outset, decide which language you will focus on and do everything you can to improve your competence with that language. For example, if you have already used Java in most of your course, plan on using Java in GSoC and make sure you read Effective Java (2nd Edition) by Joshua Bloch. Decide which themes appeal to you Find a topic that has long-term appeal for you. Maybe the topic relates to your course or maybe you already know what type of company you would like to work in. Here is a list of some topics and some of the relevant software projects:
  • System administration, servers and networking: consider projects involving monitoring, automation, packaging. Ganglia is a great community to get involved with and you will encounter the Ganglia software in many large companies and academic/research networks. Contributing to a Linux distribution like Debian or Fedora packaging is another great way to get into system administration.
  • Desktop and user interface: consider projects involving window managers and desktop tools or adding to the user interface of just about any other software.
  • Big data and data science: this can apply to just about any other theme. For example, data science techniques are frequently used now to improve system administration.
  • Business and accounting: consider accounting, CRM and ERP software.
  • Finance and trading: consider projects like R, market data software like OpenMAMA and connectivity software (Apache Camel)
  • Real-time communication (RTC), VoIP, webcam and chat: look at the JSCommunicator or the Jitsi project
  • Web (JavaScript, HTML5): look at the JSCommunicator
Before the GSoC application process begins, you should aim to learn as much as possible about the theme you prefer and also gain practical experience using the software relating to that theme. For example, if you are attracted to the business and accounting theme, install the PostBooks suite and get to know it. Maybe you know somebody who runs a small business: help them to upgrade to PostBooks and use it to prepare some reports. Make something Make some small project, less than two week's work, to demonstrate your skills. It is important to make something that somebody will use for a practical purpose, this will help you gain experience communicating with other users through Github. For an example, see the servlet Juliana Louback created for fixing phone numbers in December 2013. It has since been used as part of the Lumicall web site and Juliana was selected for a GSoC 2014 project with Debian. There is no better way to demonstrate to a prospective mentor that you are ready for GSoC than by completing and publishing some small project like this yourself. If you don't have any immediate project ideas, many developers will also be able to give you tips on small projects like this that you can attempt, just come and ask us on one of the mailing lists. Ideally, the project will be something that you would use anyway even if you do not end up participating in GSoC. Such projects are the most motivating and rewarding and usually end up becoming an example of your best work. To continue the example of somebody with a preference for business and accounting software, a small project you might create is a plugin or extension for PostBooks. Getting to know prospective mentors Many web sites provide useful information about the developers who contribute to free software projects. Some of these developers may be willing to be a GSoC mentor. For example, look through some of the following: Getting on the mentor's shortlist Once you have identified projects that are interesting to you and developers who work on those projects, it is important to get yourself on the developer's shortlist. Basically, the shortlist is a list of all students who the developer believes can complete the project. If I feel that a student is unlikely to complete a project or if I don't have enough information to judge a student's probability of success, that student will not be on my shortlist. If I don't have any student on my shortlist, then a project will not go ahead at all. If there are multiple students on the shortlist, then I will be looking more closely at each of them to try and work out who is the best match. One way to get a developer's attention is to look at bug reports they have created. Github makes it easy to see complaints or bug reports they have made about their own projects or other projects they depend on. Another way to do this is to search through their code for strings like FIXME and TODO. Projects with standalone bug trackers like the Debian bug tracker also provide an easy way to search for bug reports that a specific person has created or commented on. Once you find some relevant bug reports, email the developer. Ask if anybody else is working on those issues. Try and start with an issue that is particularly easy and where the solution is interesting for you. This will help you learn to compile and test the program before you try to fix any more complicated bugs. It may even be something you can work on as part of your academic program. Find successful projects from the previous year Contact organizations and ask them which GSoC projects were most successful. In many organizations, you can find the past students' project plans and their final reports published on the web. Read through the plans submitted by the students who were chosen. Then read through the final reports by the same students and see how they compare to the original plans. Start building your project proposal now Don't wait for the application period to begin. Start writing a project proposal now. When writing a proposal, it is important to include several things:
  • Think big: what is the goal at the end of the project? Does your work help the greater good in some way, such as increasing the market share of Linux on the desktop?
  • Details: what are specific challenges? What tools will you use?
  • Time management: what will you do each week? Are there weeks where you will not work on GSoC due to vacation or other events? These things are permitted but they must be in your plan if you know them in advance. If an accident or death in the family cut a week out of your GSoC project, which work would you skip and would your project still be useful without that? Having two weeks of flexible time in your plan makes it more resilient against interruptions.
  • Communication: are you on mailing lists, IRC and XMPP chat? Will you make a weekly report on your blog?
  • Users: who will benefit from your work?
  • Testing: who will test and validate your work throughout the project? Ideally, this should involve more than just the mentor.
If your project plan is good enough, could you put it on Kickstarter or another crowdfunding site? This is a good test of whether or not a project is going to be supported by a GSoC mentor. Learn about packaging and distributing software Packaging is a vital part of the free software lifecycle. It is very easy to upload a project to Github but it takes more effort to have it become an official package in systems like Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu. Packaging and the communities around Linux distributions help you reach out to users of your software and get valuable feedback and new contributors. This boosts the impact of your work. To start with, you may want to help the maintainer of an existing package. Debian packaging teams are existing communities that work in a team and welcome new contributors. The Debian Mentors initiative is another great starting place. In the Fedora world, the place to start may be in one of the Special Interest Groups (SIGs). Think from the mentor's perspective After the application deadline, mentors have just 2 or 3 weeks to choose the students. This is actually not a lot of time to be certain if a particular student is capable of completing a project. If the student has a published history of free software activity, the mentor feels a lot more confident about choosing the student. Some mentors have more than one good student while other mentors receive no applications from capable students. In this situation, it is very common for mentors to send each other details of students who may be suitable. Once again, if a student has a good Github profile and a blog, it is much easier for mentors to try and match that student with another project. GSoC logo generic Conclusion Getting into the world of software engineering is much like joining any other profession or even joining a new hobby or sporting activity. If you run, you probably have various types of shoe and a running watch and you may even spend a couple of nights at the track each week. If you enjoy playing a musical instrument, you probably have a collection of sheet music, accessories for your instrument and you may even aspire to build a recording studio in your garage (or you probably know somebody else who already did that). The things listed on this page will not just help you walk the walk and talk the talk of a software developer, they will put you on a track to being one of the leaders. If you look over the profiles of other software developers on the Internet, you will find they are doing most of the things on this page already. Even if you are not selected for GSoC at all or decide not to apply, working through the steps on this page will help you clarify your own ideas about your career and help you make new friends in the software engineering community.

30 September 2015

Chris Lamb: Free software activities in September 2015

Inspired by Rapha l Hertzog, here is a monthly update covering a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world:
Debian The Reproducible Builds project was also covered in depth on LWN as well as in Lunar's weekly reports (#18, #19, #20, #21, #22).
Uploads
  • redis A new upstream release, as well as overhauling the systemd configuration, maintaining feature parity with sysvinit and adding various security hardening features.
  • python-redis Attempting to get its Debian Continuous Integration tests to pass successfully.
  • libfiu Ensuring we do not FTBFS under exotic locales.
  • gunicorn Dropping a dependency on python-tox now that tests are disabled.
RC bugs


I also filed FTBFS bugs against actdiag, actdiag, bangarang, bmon, bppphyview, cervisia, choqok, cinnamon-control-center, clasp, composer, cpl-plugin-naco, dirspec, django-countries, dmapi, dolphin-plugins, dulwich, elki, eqonomize, eztrace, fontmatrix, freedink, galera-3, golang-git2go, golang-github-golang-leveldb, gopher, gst-plugins-bad0.10, jbofihe, k3b, kalgebra, kbibtex, kde-baseapps, kde-dev-utils, kdesdk-kioslaves, kdesvn, kdevelop-php-docs, kdewebdev, kftpgrabber, kile, kmess, kmix, kmldonkey, knights, konsole4, kpartsplugin, kplayer, kraft, krecipes, krusader, ktp-auth-handler, ktp-common-internals, ktp-text-ui, libdevice-cdio-perl, libdr-tarantool-perl, libevent-rpc-perl, libmime-util-java, libmoosex-app-cmd-perl, libmoosex-app-cmd-perl, librdkafka, libxml-easyobj-perl, maven-dependency-plugin, mmtk, murano-dashboard, node-expat, node-iconv, node-raw-body, node-srs, node-websocket, ocaml-estring, ocaml-estring, oce, odb, oslo-config, oslo.messaging, ovirt-guest-agent, packagesearch, php-svn, php5-midgard2, phpunit-story, pike8.0, plasma-widget-adjustableclock, plowshare4, procps, pygpgme, pylibmc, pyroma, python-admesh, python-bleach, python-dmidecode, python-libdiscid, python-mne, python-mne, python-nmap, python-nmap, python-oslo.middleware, python-riemann-client, python-traceback2, qdjango, qsapecng, ruby-em-synchrony, ruby-ffi-rzmq, ruby-nokogiri, ruby-opengraph-parser, ruby-thread-safe, shortuuid, skrooge, smb4k, snp-sites, soprano, stopmotion, subtitlecomposer, svgpart, thin-provisioning-tools, umbrello, validator.js, vdr-plugin-prefermenu, vdr-plugin-vnsiserver, vdr-plugin-weather, webkitkde, xbmc-pvr-addons, xfsdump & zanshin.

Dominique Dumont: Using custom cache object with AngularJS $http

Hello At work, I ve been bitten by the way AngularJS handles cache by default when using $https service. This post will show a simple way to improve cache handling with $http service. The service I m working on must perform the followings tasks: At first, I ve naively used $http.get cache parameter to enable or disable caching using a sequence like:
  1. $http.get(url, cache: true )
  2. $http.post(url)
  3. $http.get(url, cache: false )
  4. $http.get(url, cache: true )
Let s say the calls above use the following data:
  1. $http.get(url, cache: true ) returns foo
  2. $http.post(url) stores bar
  3. $http.get(url, cache: false ) returns bar
I expected the next call $http.get(url, cache: false ) to return bar . But no, I got foo , i.e. the obsolete data. Turns out that cache object is completely left alone when cache: false is passed to $http.get. ok. Fair enough. But this means that the value of the cache parameter should not change for a given URL. The default cache provided by $https cannot be cleared. (Well, actually, you can clear the cache under AngularJS s hood, but that will probably not improve the readability of your code). The naive approach does not work. Let s try another solution by using a custom cache object as suggested by AngularJS doc. This cache object should be created by $cacheFactory service. This cache object can then be passed to $http.get to be used as cache. When needed, the cache can be cleared. In the example above, the cache must be cleared after saving some data to the remote service. There s 2 possibilities to clear a cache: So, we have to use the first solution and create a cache object for each API entry point: 
angular.module('app').factory('myService', function ($http, $cacheFactory)  
  var myFooUrl = '/foo-rest-service';
  
  // create cache object. The cache id must be unique
  var fooCache = $cacheFactory('myService.foo'); 
  function getFooData ()  
    return $http.get( myFooUrl,   cache: fooCache  );
   ;
 
  function saveFooData(data)  
    return $http.post( myFooUrl,   cache: fooCache  ).then(function()  
      myCache.removeAll() ;
     );
   
 );
The code above ensures that: This simple approach has the following limitations: If you need more a more advance cache mechanism, you may want to check jmdobry s angular cache project All the best

27 September 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 22 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Packages fixed The following 22 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: breathe, cdi-api, geronimo-jpa-2.0-spec, geronimo-validation-1.0-spec, gradle-propdeps-plugin, jansi, javaparser, libjsr311-api-java, mac-widgets, mockito, mojarra, pastescript, plexus-utils2, powerline, python-psutil, python-sfml, python-tldap, pythondialog, tox, trident, truffle, zookeeper. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: diffoscope development The changes to make diffoscope run under Python 3, along with many small fixes, entered the archive with version 35 on September 21th. Another release was made the very next day fixed two encoding-related issues discovered when running diffoscope on more Debian packages. strip-nondeterminism development Version 0.12.0 now preserves file permissions on modified zip files and dh_strip_nondeterminism has been made compatible with older debhelper. disorderfs development Version 0.3.0 implemented a multi-user mode that was required to build Debian packages using disorderfs. It also added command line options to control the ordering of files in directory (either shuffled or reversed) and another to do arbitrary changes to the reported space used by files on disk. A couple days later, version 0.4.0 was released to support locks, flush, fsync, fsyncdir, read_buf, and write_buf. Almost all known issues have now been fixed. reproducible.debian.net disorderfs is now used during the second build. This makes file ordering issue very easy to identify as such. (h01ger) Work has been done on making the distributed build setup more reliable. (h01ger) Documentation update Matt Kraii fixed the example on how to fix issues related to dates in Sphinx. Recent Sphinx versions should also be compatible with SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. Package reviews 53 reviews have been removed, 85 added and 13 updated this week. 46 packages failing to build from source has been identified by Chris Lamb, Chris West, and Niko Tyni. Chris Lamb was the lucky reporter of bug #800000 on vdr-plugin-prefermenu. Issues related to disorderfs are being tracked with a new issue.

24 September 2015

Joachim Breitner: The Incredible Proof Machine

In a few weeks, I will have the opportunity to offer a weekend workshop to selected and motivated high school students1 to a topic of my choice. My idea is to tell them something about logic, proofs, and the joy of searching and finding proofs, and the gratification of irrevocable truths. While proving things on paper is already quite nice, it is much more fun to use an interactive theorem prover, such as Isabelle, Coq or Agda: You get immediate feedback, you can experiment and play around if you are stuck, and you get lots of small successes. Someone2 once called interactive theorem proving the worlds most geekiest videogame . Unfortunately, I don t think one can get high school students without any prior knowledge in logic, or programming, or fancy mathematical symbols, to do something meaningful with a system like Isabelle, so I need something that is (much) easier to use. I always had this idea in the back of my head that proving is not so much about writing text (as in normally written proofs) or programs (as in Agda) or labeled statements (as in Hilbert-style proofs), but rather something involving facts that I have proven so far floating around freely, and way to combine these facts to new facts, without the need to name them, or put them in a particular order or sequence. In a way, I m looking for labVIEW wrestled through the Curry-Horward-isomorphism. Something like this:
A proof of implication currying

A proof of implication currying

So I set out, rounded up a few contributors (Thanks!), implemented this, and now I proudly present: The Incredible Proof Machine3 This interactive theorem prover allows you to do perform proofs purely by dragging blocks (representing proof steps) onto the paper and connecting them properly. There is no need to learn syntax, and hence no frustration about getting that wrong. Furthermore, it comes with a number of example tasks to experiment with, so you can simply see it as a challenging computer came and work through them one by one, learning something about the logical connectives and how they work as you go. For the actual workshop, my plan is to let the students first try to solve the tasks of one session on their own, let them draw their own conclusions and come up with an idea of what they just did, and then deliver an explanation of the logical meaning of what they did. The implementation is heavily influenced by Isabelle: The software does not know anything about, say, conjunction ( ) and implication ( ). To the core, everything is but an untyped lambda expression, and when two blocks are connected, it does unification4 of the proposition present on either side. This general framework is then instantiated by specifying the basic rules (or axioms) in a descriptive manner. It is quite feasible to implement other logics or formal systems on top of this as well. Another influence of Isabelle is the non-linear editing: You neither have to create the proof in a particular order nor have to manually manage a proof focus . Instead, you can edit any bit of the proof at any time, and the system checks all of it continuously. As always, I am keen on feedback. Also, if you want to use this for your own teaching or experimenting needs, let me know. We have a mailing list for the project, the code is on GitHub, where you can also file bug reports and feature requests. Contributions are welcome! All aspects of the logic are implemented in Haskell and compiled to JavaScript using GHCJS, the UI is plain hand-written and messy JavaScript code, using JointJS to handle the graph interaction. Obviously, there is still plenty that can be done to improve the machine. In particular, the ability to create your own proof blocks, such as proof by contradiction, prove them to be valid and then use them in further proofs, is currently being worked on. And while the page will store your current progress, including all proofs you create, in your browser, it needs better ways to save, load and share tasks, blocks and proofs. Also, we d like to add some gamification, i.e. achievements ( First proof by contradiction , 50 theorems proven ), statistics, maybe a share theorem on twitter button. As the UI becomes more complicated, I d like to investigating moving more of it into Haskell world and use Functional Reactive Programming, i.e. Ryan Trickle s reflex, to stay sane. Customers who liked The Incredible Proof Machine might also like these artifacts, that I found while looking whether something like this exists:
  1. Students with migration background supported by the START scholarship
  2. Does anyone know the reference?
  3. We almost named it Proofcraft , which would be a name our current Minecraft-wild youth would appreciate, but it is alreay taken by Gerwin Kleins blog. Also, the irony of a theorem prover being in-credible is worth something.
  4. Luckily, two decades ago, Tobias Nipkow published a nice implementation of higher order pattern unification as ML code, which I transliterated to Haskell for this project.

21 September 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 21 in Stretch cycle

If you see someone on the Debian ReproducibleBuilds project, buy him/her a beer. This work is awesome. What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Media coverage Nathan Willis covered our DebConf15 status update in Linux Weekly News. Access to non-LWN subscribers will be given on Thursday 24th. Linux Journal published a more general piece last Tuesday. Unexpected praise for reproducible builds appeared this week in the form of several iOS applications identified as including spyware. The malware was undetected by Apple screening. This actually happened because application developers had simply downloaded a trojaned version of XCode through an unofficial source. While reproducible builds can't really help users of non-free software, this is exactly the kind of attacks that we are trying to prevent in our systems. Toolchain fixes Niko Tyni wrote and uploaded a better patch for the source order problem in libmodule-build-perl. Tristan Seligmann identified how the code generated by python-cffi could be emitted in random order in some cases. Upstream has already fixed the problem. Packages fixed The following 24 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: apache-curator, checkbox-ng, gant, gnome-clocks, hawtjni, jackrabbit, jersey1, libjsr305-java, mathjax-docs, mlpy, moap, octave-geometry, paste, pdf.js, pyinotify, pytango, python-asyncssh, python-mock, python-openid, python-repoze.who, shadow, swift, tcpwatch-httpproxy, transfig. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: reproducible.debian.net Tests for Coreboot, OpenWrt, NetBSD, and FreeBSD now runs weekly (instead of monthly). diffoscope development Python 3 offers new features (namely yield from and concurrent.futures) that could help implement parallel processing. The clear separation of bytes and unicode strings is also likely to reduce encoding related issues. Mattia Rizolo thus kicked the effort of porting diffoscope to Python 3. tlsh was the only dependency missing a Python 3 module. This got quickly fixed by a new upload. The rest of the code has been moved to the point where only incompatibilities between Python 2.7 and Pyhon 3.4 had to be changed. The commit stream still require some cleanups but all tests are now passing under Python 3. Documentation update The documentation on how to assemble the weekly reports has been updated. (Lunar) The example on how to use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH with CMake has been improved. (Ben Beockel, Daniel Kahn Gillmor) The solution for timestamps in man pages generated by Sphinx now uses SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. (Mattia Rizzolo) Package reviews 45 reviews have been removed, 141 added and 62 updated this week. 67 new FTBFS reports have been filled by Chris Lamb, Niko Tyni, and Lisandro Dami n Nicanor P rez Meyer. New issues added this week: randomness_in_r_rdb_rds_databases, python-ply_compiled_parse_tables. Misc. The prebuilder script is now properly testing umask variations again. Santiago Villa started a discussion on debian-devel on how binNMUs would work for reproducible builds.

17 September 2015

Norbert Preining: Debian/TeX Live 2015.20150917-1

Usual regular update of the TeX Live packages. Now that Debian/unstable is back to full development speed thanks to the end of the bit gcc transition, probably this TeX Live update will be lost between the hundreds of others. Anyway a few interesting changes are still in there. Debian - TeX Live 2015 Most importantly the fix for unicode-math that was broken for a short time, and for the Japanese users it seems that the LaTeX3 packages have gained support for upTeX. Good to hear. Of course, these are not the only updates and newcomers, see the list below. Updated packages abc, acro, alegreya, animate, arabxetex, babel-bosnian, babel-french, babel-greek, babel-latin, babel-welsh, beamer-FUBerlin, bidi, bigfoot, blochsphere, bxjscls, chemformula, chemmacros, chet, classicthesis, crossrefware, csplain, ctable, ctanify, datetime2, datetime2-basque, detlev-cm, disser, doclicense, drm, dtxgen, dtxtut, dvips, ecclesiastic, eledmac, embrac, etex-pkg, etoc, factura, fbb, fithesis, font-change, fontname, glossaries, gothic, greek-fontenc, IEEEtran, l3build, l3experimental, l3kernel, l3packages, latexconfig, lettrine, luatexja, mathastext, mcf2graph, media9, metrix, mhequ, minted, moderntimeline, newtx, ocgx2, pagecolor, pdftex, pgf, pstricks, reledmac, resphilosophica, roboto, shdoc, siunitx, suftesi, tetex, tex4ht, texlive-scripts, tikz-bayesnet, translations, ucharcat, udesoftec, ulthese, unicode-math, ut-thesis, withargs, xint. New packages checklistings, cleanthesis, easyreview, fei, medstarbeamer, mfirstuc, nevelok, old-arrows, proofread, uassign, xebaposter. Enjoy.

14 September 2015

Julien Danjou: Visualize your OpenStack cloud: Gnocchi & Grafana

We've been hard working with the Gnocchi team these last months to store your metrics, and I guess it's time to show off a bit. So far Gnocchi offers scalable metric storage and resource indexation, especially for OpenStack cloud but not only, we're generic. It's cool to store metrics, but it can be even better to have a way to visualize them! Prototyping We very soon started to build a little HTML interface. Being REST-friendly guys, we enabled it on the same endpoints that were being used to retrieve information and measures about metric, sending back text/html instead of application/json if you were requesting those pages from a Web browser. But let's face it: we are back-end developers, we suck at any kind front-end development. CSS, HTML, JavaScript? Bwah! So what we built was a starting point, hoping some magical Web developer would jump in and finish the job. Obviously it never happened. Ok, so what's out there? It turns out there are back-end agnostic solutions out there, and we decided to pick Grafana. Grafana is a complete graphing dashboard solution that can be plugged on top of any back-end. It already supports timeseries databases such as Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB. That was largely enough for that my fellow developer Mehdi Abaakouk to jump in and start writing a Gnocchi plugin for Grafana! Consequently, there is now a basic but solid and working back-end for Grafana that lies in the grafana-plugins repository.
With that plugin, you can graph anything that is stored in Gnocchi, from raw metrics to metrics tied to resources. You can use templating, but no annotation yet. The back-end supports Gnocchi with or without Keystone involved, and any type of authentication (basic auth or Keystone token). So yes, it even works if you're not running Gnocchi with the rest of OpenStack.
It also supports advanced queries, so you can search for resources based on some criterion and graphs their metrics. I want to try it! If you want to deploy it, all you need to do is to install Grafana and its plugins, and create a new datasource pointing to Gnocchi. It is that simple. There's some CORS middleware configuration involved if you're planning on using Keystone authentication, but it's pretty straightforward just set the cors.allowed_origin option to the URL of your Grafana dashboard. We added support of Grafana directly in Gnocchi devstack plugin. If you're running DevStack you can follow the instructions which are basically adding the line enable_service gnocchi-grafana. Moving to Grafana core Mehdi just opened a pull request a few days ago to merge the plugin into Grafana core. It's actually one of the most unit-tested plugin in Grafana so far, so it should be on a good path to be merged in the future and have support of Gnocchi directly into Grafana without any plugin involved.

4 September 2015

Julien Danjou: Data validation in Python with voluptuous

Continuing my post series on the tools I use these days in Python, this time I would like to talk about a library I really like, named voluptuous. It's no secret that most of the time, when a program receives data from the outside, it's a big deal to handle it. Indeed, most of the time your program has no guarantee that the stream is valid and that it contains what is expected. The robustness principle says you should be liberal in what you accept, though that is not always a good idea neither. Whatever policy you chose, you need to process those data and implement a policy that will work lax or not. That means that the program need to look into the data received, check that it finds everything it needs, complete what might be missing (e.g. set some default), transform some data, and maybe reject those data in the end.
Data validation The first step is to validate the data, which means checking all the fields are there and all the types are right or understandable (parseable). Voluptuous provides a single interface for all that called a Schema. 
>>> from voluptuous import Schema
>>> s = Schema( 
...   'q': str,
...   'per_page': int,
...   'page': int,
...  )
>>> s( "q": "hello" )
 'q': 'hello' 
>>> s( "q": "hello", "page": "world" )
voluptuous.MultipleInvalid: expected int for dictionary value @ data['page']
>>> s( "q": "hello", "unknown": "key" )
voluptuous.MultipleInvalid: extra keys not allowed @ data['unknown']

The argument to voluptuous.Schema should be the data structure that you expect. Voluptuous accepts any kind of data structure, so it could also be a simple string or an array of dict of array of integer. You get it. Here it's a dict with a few keys that if present should be validated as certain types. By default, Voluptuous does not raise an error if some keys are missing. However, it is invalid to have extra keys in a dict by default. If you want to allow extra keys, it is possible to specify it. 
>>> from voluptuous import Schema
>>> s = Schema( "foo": str , extra=True)
>>> s( "bar": 2 )
 "bar": 2

It is also possible to make some keys mandatory. 
>>> from voluptuous import Schema, Required
>>> s = Schema( Required("foo"): str )
>>> s( )
voluptuous.MultipleInvalid: required key not provided @ data['foo']

You can create custom data type very easily. Voluptuous data types are actually just functions that are called with one argument, the value, and that should either return the value or raise an Invalid or ValueError exception. 
>>> from voluptuous import Schema, Invalid
>>> def StringWithLength5(value):
...     if isinstance(value, str) and len(value) == 5:
...             return value
...     raise Invalid("Not a string with 5 chars")
...
>>> s = Schema(StringWithLength5)
>>> s("hello")
'hello'
>>> s("hello world")
voluptuous.MultipleInvalid: Not a string with 5 chars

Most of the time though, there is no need to create your own data types. Voluptuous provides logical operators that can, combined with a few others provided primitives such as voluptuous.Length or voluptuous.Range, create a large range of validation scheme. 
>>> from voluptuous import Schema, Length, All
>>> s = Schema(All(str, Length(min=3, max=5)))
>>> s("hello")
"hello"
>>> s("hello world")
voluptuous.MultipleInvalid: length of value must be at most 5

The voluptuous documentation has a good set of examples that you can check to have a good overview of what you can do. Data transformation
What's important to remember, is that each data type that you use is a function that is called and returns a value, if the value is considered valid. That value returned is what is actually used and returned after the schema validation: 
>>> import uuid
>>> from voluptuous import Schema
>>> def UUID(value):
...     return uuid.UUID(value)
...
>>> s = Schema( "foo": UUID )
>>> data_converted = s( "foo": "uuid?" )
voluptuous.MultipleInvalid: not a valid value for dictionary value @ data['foo']
>>> data_converted = s( "foo": "8B7BA51C-DFF5-45DD-B28C-6911A2317D1D" )
>>> data_converted
 'foo': UUID('8b7ba51c-dff5-45dd-b28c-6911a2317d1d')

By defining a custom UUID function that converts a value to a UUID, the schema converts the string passed in the data to a Python UUID object validating the format at the same time. Note a little trick here: it's not possible to use directly uuid.UUID in the schema, otherwise Voluptuous would check that the data is actually an instance of uuid.UUID: 
>>> from voluptuous import Schema
>>> s = Schema( "foo": uuid.UUID )
>>> s( "foo": "8B7BA51C-DFF5-45DD-B28C-6911A2317D1D" )
voluptuous.MultipleInvalid: expected UUID for dictionary value @ data['foo']
>>> s( "foo": uuid.uuid4() )
 'foo': UUID('60b6d6c4-e719-47a7-8e2e-b4a4a30631ed')

And that's not what is wanted here. That mechanism is really neat to transform, for example, strings to timestamps. 
>>> import datetime
>>> from voluptuous import Schema
>>> def Timestamp(value):
...     return datetime.datetime.strptime(value, "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S")
...
>>> s = Schema( "foo": Timestamp )
>>> s( "foo": '2015-03-03T12:12:12' )
 'foo': datetime.datetime(2015, 3, 3, 12, 12, 12) 
>>> s( "foo": '2015-03-03T12:12' )
voluptuous.MultipleInvalid: not a valid value for dictionary value @ data['foo']

Recursive schemas So far, Voluptuous has one limitation so far: the ability to have recursive schemas. The simplest way to circumvent it is by using another function as an indirection. 
>>> from voluptuous import Schema, Any
>>> def _MySchema(value):
...     return MySchema(value)
...
>>> from voluptuous import Any
>>> MySchema = Schema( "foo": Any("bar", _MySchema) )
>>> MySchema( "foo":  "foo": "bar" )
 'foo':  'foo': 'bar' 
>>> MySchema( "foo":  "foo": "baz" )
voluptuous.MultipleInvalid: not a valid value for dictionary value @ data['foo']['foo']

Usage in REST API
I started to use Voluptuous to validate data in a the REST API provided by Gnocchi. So far it has been a really good tool, and we've been able to create a complete REST API that is very easy to validate on the server side. I would definitely recommend it for that. It blends with any Web framework easily. One of the upside compared to solution like JSON Schema, is the ability to create or re-use your own custom data types while converting values at validation time. It is also very Pythonic, and extensible it's pretty great to use for all of that. It's also not tied to any serialization format. On the other hand, JSON Schema is language agnostic and is serializable itself as JSON. That makes it easy to be exported and provided to a consumer so it can understand the API and validate the data potentially on its side.

1 September 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 18 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Aur lien Jarno uploaded glibc/2.21-0experimental1 which will fix the issue were locales-all did not behave exactly like locales despite having it in the Provides field. Lunar rebased the pu/reproducible_builds branch for dpkg on top of the released 1.18.2. This made visible an issue with udebs and automatically generated debug packages. The summary from the meeting at DebConf15 between ftpmasters, dpkg mainatainers and reproducible builds folks has been posted to the revelant mailing lists. Packages fixed The following 70 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: activemq-activeio, async-http-client, classworlds, clirr, compress-lzf, dbus-c++, felix-bundlerepository, felix-framework, felix-gogo-command, felix-gogo-runtime, felix-gogo-shell, felix-main, felix-shell-tui, felix-shell, findbugs-bcel, gco, gdebi, gecode, geronimo-ejb-3.2-spec, git-repair, gmetric4j, gs-collections, hawtbuf, hawtdispatch, jack-tools, jackson-dataformat-cbor, jackson-dataformat-yaml, jackson-module-jaxb-annotations, jmxetric, json-simple, kryo-serializers, lhapdf, libccrtp, libclaw, libcommoncpp2, libftdi1, libjboss-marshalling-java, libmimic, libphysfs, libxstream-java, limereg, maven-debian-helper, maven-filtering, maven-invoker, mochiweb, mongo-java-driver, mqtt-client, netty-3.9, openhft-chronicle-queue, openhft-compiler, openhft-lang, pavucontrol, plexus-ant-factory, plexus-archiver, plexus-bsh-factory, plexus-cdc, plexus-classworlds2, plexus-component-metadata, plexus-container-default, plexus-io, pytone, scolasync, sisu-ioc, snappy-java, spatial4j-0.4, tika, treeline, wss4j, xtalk, zshdb. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: Chris Lamb also noticed that binaries shipped with libsilo-bin did not work. Documentation update Chris Lamb and Ximin Luo assembled a proper specification for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in the hope to convince more upstreams to adopt it. Thanks to Holger it is published under a non-Debian domain name. Lunar documented easiest way to solve issues with file ordering and timestamps in tarballs that came with tar/1.28-1. Some examples on how to use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH have been improved to support systems without GNU date. reproducible.debian.net armhf is finally being tested, which also means the remote building of Debian packages finally works! This paves the way to perform the tests on even more architectures and doing variations on CPU and date. Some packages even produce the same binary Arch:all packages on different architectures (1, 2). (h01ger) Tests for FreeBSD are finally running. (h01ger) As it seems the gcc5 transition has cooled off, we schedule sid more often than testing again on amd64. (h01ger) disorderfs has been built and installed on all build nodes (amd64 and armhf). One issue related to permissions for root and unpriviliged users needs to be solved before disorderfs can be used on reproducible.debian.net. (h01ger) strip-nondeterminism Version 0.011-1 has been released on August 29th. The new version updates dh_strip_nondeterminism to match recent changes in debhelper. (Andrew Ayer) disorderfs disorderfs, the new FUSE filesystem to ease testing of filesystem-related variations, is now almost ready to be used. Version 0.2.0 adds support for extended attributes. Since then Andrew Ayer also added support to reverse directory entries instead of shuffling them, and arbitrary padding to the number of blocks used by files. Package reviews 142 reviews have been removed, 48 added and 259 updated this week. Santiago Vila renamed the not_using_dh_builddeb issue into varying_mtimes_in_data_tar_gz_or_control_tar_gz to align better with other tag names. New issue identified this week: random_order_in_python_doit_completion. 37 FTBFS issues have been reported by Chris West (Faux) and Chris Lamb. Misc. h01ger gave a talk at FrOSCon on August 23rd. Recordings are already online. These reports are being reviewed and enhanced every week by many people hanging out on #debian-reproducible. Huge thanks!

30 August 2015

Antonio Terceiro: DebConf15, testing debian packages, and packaging the free software web

This is my August update, and by the far the coolest thing in it is Debconf. Debconf15 I don t get tired of saying it is the best conference I ever attended. First it s a mix of meeting both new people and old friends, having the chance to chat with people whose work you admire but never had a chance to meet before. Second, it s always quality time: an informal environment, interesting and constructive presentations and discussions. This year the venue was again very nice. Another thing that was very nice was having so many kids and families. This was no coincidence, since this was the first DebConf in which there was organized childcare. As the community gets older, this a very good way of keeping those who start having kids from being alienated from the community. Of course, not being a parent yet I have no idea how actually hard is to bring small kids to a conference like DebConf. ;-) I presented two talks: There was also the now traditional Ruby BoF, where discussed the state and future of the Ruby ecosystem in Debian; and an in promptu Ruby packaging workshop where we introduced the basics of packaging in general, and Ruby packaging specifically. Besides shak, I was able to hack on a few cool things during DebConf: Miscellaneous updates

21 August 2015

Simon Kainz: DUCK challenge: Final week

Well, here are the stats for the final week of the DUCK challenge as well as DebConf15: So we had 21 packages fixed and uploaded by 14 different uploaders. People were really working hard on this during DebConf. A big "Thank You" to you!! Since the start of this challenge, a total of 89 packages, were fixed. Here is a quick overview:
Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4 Week 5 Week 6 Week 7
# Packages 10 15 10 14 10 9 21
Total 10 25 35 49 59 68 89
Thank you all for participating - either on purpose or "accidentially": Some people were really surprised as i sneaked up on them at DebConf15, confronting them with a green lighter! I just tried to put even more fun into Debian, i hope this worked out Pevious articles are here: Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, Week 5,Week 6.

18 August 2015

Aigars Mahinovs: Debconf 15 group photo

The long awaited group photo from Debconf15 is now available: here and here. Due to its spectacular glory, the Google Photos could not handle the massive 52 Mb, and 19283*8740=168.5Mpix of awesomness, so there is only a half-size version. Also I plan to have a lightning talk on Thursday on how exactly such things are made :)

Bastian Venthur: Please Help to Port python-debianbts to Python3

Dear Lazyweb, I m currently trying to find a way to port python-debianbts to Python3. Debian s standard bugreport tool reportbug depends on python-debianbts and can thus not convert to Python3 if python-debianbts does not as well. Unfortunately python-debianbts depends on SoapPy for parsing the Debian bugtracker s responses, and that library is not ported to Python3 yet, and probably never will. I m planning to replace SoapPy with pysimplesoap which is available for Python2 and Python3. Unfortunately debbugs does not support WSDL which makes parsing of the replies extremely painful and error-prone. I wonder if there is a SOAP/Python expert out there who d be willing to give some assistance in porting python-reportbug to pysimplesoap? python-reportbug s repository is on GitHub and patches are very welcome. Since SOAP is quite a beast and debbugs uses it for read-only purposes only, another attractive solution would be to replace/augment debbugs API with something much more simple, like JSON. That would make parsing extremely easy as many programming languages including Python support JSON without any external libraries. In theory this could be quite easy but requires some serious Perl skills.

17 August 2015

Gunnar Wolf: report @mx (that means, sadly, gwolf DebConf15)

<Sigh/> For the second time since I joined Debian, I missed DebConf. This time, mostly for two completely happy reasons (which have, of course, grown up quite significatively): But adding to that very important factor, early-to-mid August is possibly the worst date for me to attend DebConf As that's when we start classes at UNAM, and I really don't want to delegate introducing my class to somebody else (besides it being or not possible). Life has been quite busy here. Besides starting my seventh semester as a teacher (finally being able to present my book on operating systems to the students!), I also took on teaching two modules for a diploma-course on embedded Linux. I'm co- teaching the "User-space Linux" module together with Gabriel Salda a, and will teach the "Boot process" module with Sandino Araico. There are many things that should be improved about the covered program, but we are having good fun working our way on it; Gabriel and I have given two (out of six) 6hr sessions each, and have reached the point where it is actually becoming fun :) As for Debian... I have been doing minimal maintenance work. Answering to some keyring tickets, or taking care of only high-profile important issues. I do not have time to do much. I have been wanting to do some interesting analysis on the evolution of our keyring for several months, but have not had the time to follow it up. Will do at some point, /mehopes. Anyway... This post is probably just because I need to somehow be there at our community's highest social, technical exchange period in the year. That is, there's not much to report, it's only me waving from home!

16 August 2015

Russ Allbery: Net::Duo 1.01

Net::Duo is a Perl implementation of the Duo API that's a bit more comprehensive and sophisticated than the sample code provided by Duo Security. This release is a compatibility bug fix that adjusts for a change in JSON::XS 3.0 that broke automatic mapping of boolean values in some JSON generation. It should hopefully continue to work with older versions of JSON::XS as well. You can get the latest versiom from the Net::Duo distribution page.

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