Search Results: "ag"

8 March 2016

Michal Čihař: Weekly phpMyAdmin contributions 2016-W09

The last week was mostly spent on bugfixing and cleanup after security releases. Hopefully the amount of security reports will go down now. Most of the bug fixes were in the SQL parser which influences quite a lot of parts of phpMyAdmin. It is responsible for splitting queries on import, generating queries for export or linting the queries as users type them. Additionally Debian packages were also updated, for both unstable and testing and for Ubuntu PPA. Handled issues:

Filed under: Debian English phpMyAdmin 0 comments

Bits from Debian: Hewlett Packard Enterprise Platinum Sponsor of DebConf16

HPElogo We are very pleased to announce that Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has committed support to DebConf16 as a Platinum sponsor. "We're excited to support Debian's annual conference which brings together Debian contributors from all around the world. In addition to our sponsorship, we will actively participate in DebConf", said Steve Geary, Senior Director at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. HPE is one of the largest computer companies in the world, providing a wide range of products and services, such as servers, storage, networking, consulting and support, software, and financial services. HPE is also a development partner of Debian, and provides hardware for port development, Debian mirrors, and other Debian services (hardware donations are listed in the Debian machines page). With this additional commitment as Platinum Sponsor, HPE contributes to make possible our annual conference, and directly supports the progress of Debian and Free Software helping to strengthen the community that continues to collaborate on Debian projects throughout the rest of the year. Thank you very much Hewlett Packard Enterprise, for your support of DebConf16! Become a sponsor too! DebConf16 is still accepting sponsors. Interested companies and organizations may contact the DebConf team through sponsors@debconf.org, and visit the DebConf16 website at http://debconf16.debconf.org.

Guido G nther: Debian Fun in February 2016

Debian LTS February was the tenth month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. In total I spent 7 hours (of allocated 11.15 hours) working on squeeze-lts: and to make sure we have fewer issues that are fixed in squeeze-lts but affect wheezy On non LTS time I cooked up a script to make it simpler to check if a package has security support in a certain release. Now that squeeze-lts is history I'd like to thank the Debian Security Team for their help and answers to all the questions related to security tracker, DSAs, DLAs and whatnot. I'm looking forward to wheezy-lts now Other Debian stuff

Tassia Camoes Araujo: Some impressions of a flourishing community bits from the MiniDebConf Curitiba @ Montreal

Last month I more-or-less accepted an invitation that got me scared at first, panicking after a while. Why do I put myself in such an uncomfortable position? Well, I think that s how we grow up ;-) I was first contacted to talk about women participation in Debian, which I kindly refused, but I said I would maybe talk about motivating new contributors, possibly with some more friends that would maybe join me at the stage. I need to confess that at that moment I had no idea (ok, a vague idea ) about what I was going to talk. So I promptly emailed some Debian friends, shared the invitation, shared some thoughts, got feedbacks, got encouragement, and we finally made it! talk_transmission For the video conference we used mconf.org which worked super well (the downside is that it requires flash, maybe you could help them get rid of it?). I had also recorded a backup video with vokoscreen, just in case Murphy would decide to go to Curitiba but everything worked well. We a single moment with connection issues, but the torrent user kindly released the bandwidth The main point I made in the talk is that Debian as a Universal Operating System is still an utopia, especially when we extend our understanding of universality to our contributors. And as an utopia, it serves to make us walk! The more we advance, the more it gets further away, so we need to keep walking. Another important point was that diversity is not an issue that touches only woman. My audience was full of Portuguese native speakers, from a third world country, a few women, many more man, a couple of DDs, some longtime contributors, some newbies, and most of them are also part of minorities in our community. I bet many of them has already felt like a weed growing surrounded by concrete at least once in their lifetimes Solidarity towards our utopia was my final message. Just for fun, and to make a recap of our conversation at the end, I made a list of 10 steps that we could all give to contribute to a more universal Debian: 1. Read our Social Contract and make sure we are all at the same page
2. Improve Debian documentation
3. Remember that diversity does not concern only women
4. Keep an eye on minority groups and show solidarity
5. Be open and alert to the needs of newbies
6. Help Debian teams to be prepared to welcome new contributors
7. Reserve part of our time to integrate new members to the community
8. Promote hands-on meetings (local and remote)
9. Promote peer-mentoring among newbie contributors
10. Do not see Debian members as special beings, we are all humans! You can check my slides or the video of the live transmission if you want to see more. In case you can not follow the audio, I d be happy to provide subtitles (but I probably won t work on that if I don t receive have any request). And if you invite me to another conference, we can have a similar chat at with your community. Note: in person is more fun ;-) Finally, I d like to thank the participants of the mini-DebConf, those that followed this session and those who were practicing how to package on the other room, Paulo Santana and all the local organization team for the invitation, Ana Guerrero and Laura Arjona for the remote support and feedback, Andreas Tille for the efforts in integrating new contributors, Christian Perrier for the developer statistics, Val ssio for being in the audience and the Debian Project for the inspiration. What we had we Brazil this weekend was a taste of a flourishing and welcoming community, I am proud and honored to be part of it!

7 March 2016

Junichi Uekawa: Wrote a cowfs in FUSE for fun.

Wrote a cowfs in FUSE for fun. 10 and half years ago when I was writing cowdancer initially, FUSE wasn't really a viable option, but it has been something in the back of my head that it should be possible. Now I've done it I realize a lot of existing FUSE projects that claim to do similar thing.

Holger Levsen: 20160307-TorDevMeeting and InternetFreedomFestival

Some impressions from the TorDevMeeting and the Internet Freedom Festival (IFF) in Valencia Overheard at the Tor Dev meeting in Valencia, from people speaking about online identities: "You were on top of the list of the people I thought were you." It was really good to be there as my plan to meet people and work on torbrowser-launcher issues worked out nicely: in total seven bugs got fixed upstream and resulted in an torbrowser-launcher upload to sid after the meeting. So now only three bugs are open in sid and it's clear how to fix #811499 in stable so that torbrowser-launcher doesn't stop working on May 3rd 2016. So yay. At the IFF we also had a small reproducible builds Debian meeting, where I took these raw notes: (please ask for clarifications, how to help or correct me if you think other things are blockers right now as well!) Too bad IFF was not really well known in advance amongst some local free software advocates, I hope this improves next year!

Laura Arjona Reina: More involved in the Debian Publicity team

More than 6months since I am Debian Developer and I m learning new things every day and trying to organize my time better to accomplish all the things I would like to do.
In September I became publicity delegate (and we joined Press+Publicity into the Publicity team). We continued discussing how the team works, and hopefully revitalizing it.
I became more active in the IRC channel, installed quassel in my home server and then I could read all the backlog too.
I ve tried to contribute more to Debian Project News (less than I d like), to bits.debian.org and to the social networks (Pump.io and GNU Social).
Since November I ve been failing to call for meeting but finally on 2016/02/29 we had it. I hope to resume semi-regular meetings each 1-2 months.
At the beginning of the year I helped to handle all the news and announcements about the loss of Ian Murdock. It has been hard work but I feel that I could turn some of the sadness into something useful for others. There is still work to be done: parse the condolence emails and setup a website to publish them.
About bits.debian.org, DPN and announcements, I ve learned how to perform the parts of the work that require membership permissions (building the blog, actually publishing the announcement, sending the DPN/announcement mail to the corresponding lists). Not without mistakes, but I guess no matter how much you care, sometimes things happen, and then you learn and then things get better and you too.
Some things I discovered Some clarifications
  • I ve written hard word 4 times in this post (well, 5 now!) but that does not mean I don t want to do those tasks. I feel going out of my comfort zone and that s ok, needed to learn and experience. I m having a good time in Debian in the last months, as always!
  • We re 4 people delegated and more team members and contributors, so anybody could think: Publicity is well covered, let s go to do other things in Debian . It s perfectly ok if you want to do other things in Debian, but please consider combining your contributions with some minutes for the publicity team. Aiming to be the universal operating system, our community and target audience is big and diverse and we d like to show that diversity to the world. The more we are, the merrier!
Comments?
You can comment about this blog post in this pump.io thread.

Filed under: My experiences and opinion Tagged: Communities, Contributing to libre software, Debian, Developer motivations, English, Free Software

Enrico Zini: Polite invitations

It is DPL nomination time again. A gentle reminder to avoid making people uncomfortable:
Inviting people to candidate for DPL is like inviting them for sex. It can be flattering. And if you insist after one says "no", it becomes harassment.

Ritesh Raj Sarraf: Laptop Mode Tools 1.69 Released

Today is an auspicious day. For those who know (or follow) the Hindu religion will be familiar; Today is Maha Shivaratri On this day, It is great delight for me to be able to release Laptop Mode Tools, version 1.69 This release adds on many bug fixes and some enhancements. There is a new module (disabled by default) for cpuhotplug. The release tarball also includes a basic PolicyKit file for convenience, that packagers can use for the Laptop Mode Tools Graphical Configuration Interface. Apart from the policykit file, the graphical invocation script has been slightly fine tuned to work under pkexec and sudo. Some defaults have been tuned based on user requests - This should improve in situations where your External USB Mouse/Keyboard used to suspend after idle time periods. In January this year, I had the pleasure of meeting Bart Samwel in person at his office in Amsterdam. For those who don't know, Bart started off Laptop Mode Tools around 2004, and I took over maintenance around 2008. Meeting in person has been a delight, especially with the ones you work over email for years; This is something I cherished last year at Debconf 15 too. IMPORTANT:- Until now, Laptop Mode Tools project was hosted on Bart's webserver. Now, as you read, the homepage and mailing lists have changed. I'd urge all users to subscribe to the new mailing list and update their bookmarks. Homepage: https://github.com/rickysarraf/laptop-mode-tools/wiki Mailing List: https://groups.google.com/d/forum/laptop-mode-tools Note: For users who are not comfortable with creating a google a/c for mailing list subscription, you should still be able to subscribe with your personal email address. Please follow the steps in the mentioned homepage. Since last couple releases, I've also been providing RPM packages for Opensuse Tumbleweed and Fedora. The same should be available on the github release page. The Debian package will follow shortly in the Debian repository. Thank you and a Happy Maha Shivaratri. Har Har Mahadev. 
1.69 - Mon Mar  7 17:44:42 IST 2016
    * Wait for all forked modules to complete
    * Add new module: cputhotplug
    * CPU online/offine is reverse here
    * Fix shell syntax
    * Install policykit file
    * Detach polling daemon from main process
    * Do NOT touch speed if throttling is not set
    * Restore to MAX speed when back to AC Power
    * Fix manpage about DISABLE_ETHERNET_ON_BATTERY setting
    * Update documentation about ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE_ON_AC setting
    * Change powersaving default for USB class devices
    * Drop usbhid from default (black)list
    * Add usb keyboard driver to the list default list
    * Be consistent with passing args to LMT from different invokers
    * Honor device plug/unplug events on a per device basis;
      like how Chromium initially submitted this patch
    * Also be consistent with option in the event parser
    * Update links in README.md
    * Update new github homepage location
    * Add lmt-config-gui shell script

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Hideki Yamane: Debian meeting in Tokyo (2016 March)

5th March, we've held Debian (Debian meeting) in Tokyo. (Cybozu, Inc.) kindly provides their office for meeting, thanks for folks in Cybozu.



This time, three talks were given:

    • Kentaro is "groonga"(an open-source fulltext search engine and column store) upstream author and package maintainer in Debian and Fedora. This talk is about his experience how to use Debian "porterbox" for non-DDs.
  • "Porting Debian to tilegx" by @wskoka
    • About his experience porting Debian to tilegx architecture, multicore processor family by Tilera. He is not porting expert ("I'm sale person", he said :), but did try&error and now apt is working on that machine.
  • "Introduction to Debian Ports" by John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
    • Adrian comes from Germany(!) and gave a talk about debian-ports.


During break time, did some discussion, GPG keysigning and enjoyed coffee and sweets provided by Cybozu, thanks!

And thanks for all participates!

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rblpapi 'Release Candidate' 0.3.2.5

We have a made numerous changes to Rblpapi since the previous release 0.3.2 in early December. You can see the commits, or look at the ChangeLog or NEWS.Rd to get an indea of the changes. We have new functions, improved internals, bug fixes and more. In order to facilitate more widespread testing, I have just placed source and (Windows) binaries in the ghrr drat repo from which you can install the new version simply via 
drat:::add("ghrr")          # if you have drat installed
install.packages("Rblpapi") # uses the drat version b/c higher version number than release
Alternatively you can also do 
drat:::add("ghrr")          # if you have drat installed
update.packages()           # refresh all packages against all repos
We would appreciate wider testing, and feedback / bug reports / ... via the issue tracker. PRs with unit test suggestions would also be most welcome -- we now use RUnit and run the tests if a file ~/.R/rblpapiOptions.R exists which sets the options() values for automatic connection (see help(blpConnect)) as well as the blpUnitTests=TRUE option. This is needed to 'opt-in' as standard test setups at [Travis])(https://travis-ci.org/) or CRAN will not have access to a Bloomberg terminal.

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

6 March 2016

Enrico Zini: Live preview of Markdown documentation

At work, to simplify build dependencies of DB-All.e we decided to port the documentation from LaTeX to Markdown. Shortly after starting with the porting I resented not having a live preview of my work. I guess I got addicted to it with staticsite. Actually, staticsite does preview interlinked Markdown files. I wonder if GitHub supports cross-linking between Markdown files in the same repo? It does, and incidentally it uses the same syntax as staticfile. It shouldn't take long to build a different front-end on top of the staticsite engine just for this purpose. Indeed it didn't take long: here it is: mdpreview. So, as you are editing the README.md of your project, you can now run mdpreview in the project directory, and you get live preview on your browser. If your README.md links to other documentation in your project, those links will work, too. mdpreview uses the same themes as staticsite, so you can even tweak its appearance. And if you need to render the documentation and put it online somewhere, then staticsite can render it for you. I experimented with it splitting staticsite's documentation into several parts, a I had great fun with it. So, you want live preview of your project's Markdown documentation? mdpreview When you are happy with it you can commit it to GitHub and it will show just fine. You want it to show on your website instead? Build it with staticsite. I'm considering merging staticsite and mdpreview somehow. Maybe mdpreview could just be a different command line front-end to staticsite's functionality. That's food for though for the next days. Would you prefer to preview something else instead of Markdown? There is actually nothing markup specific in staticsite, so you can take this file as inspiration and implement support for the markup language of your choice in this whole toolchain. Except maybe for GitHub's website: that doesn't run on staticsite (yet).

Jaldhar Vyas: 7DRL 2016

It's time once again for the annual 7 Day Roguelike Challenge. I know I said I wasn't going to take part again until I properly finished one of my previous entries but I've thought of an interesting and novel game mechanic that I'm eager to try out so what the hell. If you are interested in following my progress, I will blog about it here starting from Monday and (hopefully successfully) finishing on the following Sunday. Of course the best part of it is coming up with names. Here are this years choices:
  • letsen[terthe]crypt
  • Make Narnia Great Again
  • Thane of Groans
  • I Am The Black Wizards

Thorsten Glaser: mksh R52c, paxmirabilis 20160306 released; PA4 paper size PDF manpages

The MirBSD Korn Shell R52c was published today as bugfix-accumulating release of low upto medium importance. Thanks to everyone who helped squashing all those bugs; this includes our bug reporters who always include reproducer testcases; you re wonderful! MirCPIO was also resynchronised from OpenBSD, to address the CVE-2015- 1193,1194 test cases, after a downstream (wow there are so many?) reminded us of it; thanks!
This is mostly to prevent extracting ../foo either directly or from a symlink(7) from actually ending up being placed in the parent directory. As such the severity is medium-high. And it has a page now initially just a landing page / stub; will be fleshed out later. Uploads for both should make their way into Debian very soon (these are the packages mksh and pax). Uploading backports for mksh (jessie and wheezy-sloppy) have been requested by several users, but none of the four(?) DDs asked about sponsoring them even answered at all, and the regular (current) sponsors don t have experience with bpo, so SOL I ve also tweaked a bug in sed(1), in MirBSD. Unfortunately, this means it now comes with the GNUism -i too: don t use it, use ed(1) (much nicer anyway) or perlrun(1) -p/-n Finally, our PDF manpages now use the PA4 paper size instead of DIN ISO A4, meaning they can be printed without cropping or scaling on both A4 and US-american letter paper. And a from the last announcement: we now use Gentium and Inconsolata as body text and monospace fonts, respectively. (And propos, the website ought to be more legible due to text justification and better line spacing now.) I managed to hack this up in GNU groff and Ghostscript, thankfully. (LaTeX too) Currently there are PDF manpages for joe (jupp), mksh, and cpio/pax/tar. And we had Gr nkohl today! Also, new console-setup package in the WTF APT repository since upstream managed to do actual work on it (even fixed some bugs). Read its feed if interested, as its news will not be repeated here usually. (That means, subscribe as there won t be many future reminders in this place.) The netboot.me service appears to be gone. I ll not remove our images, but if someone knows what became of it drop us a message (IRC or mailing list will work just fine). PS: This was originally written on 20160304 but opax refused to be merged in time Happy Birthday, gecko2! In the meantime, the Street Food festival weekend provided wonderful food at BaseCamp, and headache prevented this from being finished on the fifth. Update 06.03.2016: The pax changes were too intrusive, so I decided to only backport the fixes OpenBSD did (both those they mentioned and those silently included), well, the applicable parts of them, anyway, instead. There will be a MirCPIO release completely rebased later after all changes are merged and, more importantly, tested. Another release although not set for immediate future should bring a more sensible (and mksh-like) buildsystem for improved portability (and thus some more changes we had to exclude at first). I ve also cloned the halfwidth part of the FixedMisc [MirOS] font as FixedMiscHW for use with Qt5 applications, xfonts-base in the WTF APT repo. (Debian #809979) tl;dr: mksh R52c (bugfix-only, low-medium); mircpio 20160306 (security backport; high) with future complete rebase (medium) upstream and in Debian. No mksh backports due to lacking a bpo capable sponsor. New console-setup in WTF APT repo, and mksh there as usual. xfonts-base too. netboot.me gone?

5 March 2016

Antonio Terceiro: Debian Ruby Sprint 2016 - day 5: More Reproducible Builds, Retrospective, and A Little Bit of Tourism

Earlier today I was made aware by Holger of the results of our reproducibility efforts during the sprint. I would like to thank Lunar for pinging us about the issue, and Holger for pointing me to updated results. The figure below depicts a stacked area chart where the X axis is time and the green area is reproducible packages. Red is packages that fail to build, and Orange are unreproducible packages I was able to book accommodation for the sprint attendees very close to both my place and the sprint venue, what was very useful but also had this downside of them not being able to see much of city. As the final day of the sprint was getting closer, we decided to have a different lunch to allow them to see one of the most famous local landmarks, the botanical gardens. So we headed down to the botanical gardens, grabbed a few items for lunch at the park coffee shop, and set out to visit this very beautiful place. I have to say that there is the place were I usually take every visitor I have. We were joined by Gioavani who had just arrived for the the MiniDebconf on the following weekend. The final lists of accomplishments of the day was again very impressive
  • r10k 2.1.1-2
  • run massive update on team repositories
    • bump Standards-Version
    • fix Vcs-* fields
    • drop version in gem2deb build-dependency
    • set debhelper compatibility level to 9
    • update the default ruby-tests.rake
  • day 4 report
  • uploaded ruby-faraday-middleware-multi-json 0.0.6-2
  • uploaded ruby-powerpack 0.1.1-2
  • uploaded ruby-contracts 0.13.0-1
  • uploaded ruby-chef-config 12.7.2-1 (NEW)
  • uploaded ruby-foreigner #808530 and asked it removal from the NEW queue (was already ROMed)
  • filled for RM ruby-opengraph-parser (#816752)
  • new how-can-i-help version developed and uploaded
  • uploaded ruby-romkan to unstable (from exp)
  • uploaded ruby-rinku to unstable (from exp)
  • uploaded ruby-ole to unstable (from exp)
  • uploaded ruby-net-ldap to unstable (from exp)
  • uploaded ruby-rack-mobile-detect to unstable (from exp)
  • uploaded gem2deb 0.28 to help with reproducible builds: filenames are now sorted
  • uploaded rails 2:4.2.5.2-2 with packaging improvements
    • run unit tests during the build and on CI
    • apply upstream patch to fix ActiveRecord breakage under Ruby 2.3
  • pushed a ton of tags for existing uploads
  • merged improvements to the team master repository
    • review/cleanup the contents of the repository
    • improved helper scripts to automate the workflow (upload, build, new-upstream, etc)
  • followed up on ruby2.3 transition, filed #816698 against subversion because of ftbfs on mips, mipsel
  • put ruby-cocoon into a better state
  • uploaded ruby-plist
  • gem2deb: gem2tgz will now create foo.gemspec (easier to patch) instead of metadata.yml
  • gemwatch: ditto
  • close #794139 jekyll bug (unreproducible)
  • close #798934 ruby-ffi-rzmq bug (unreproducible)
  • closed ftbfs #816586 #800057 #784699 as unreproducible
  • reassigned #760952 #680297 to ruby2.3 (from ruby2.2)
  • investigated how to list packages with non-buildd-binary uploads
  • ScottK has removed ruby2.1 from unstable!
By the end of the afternoon I asked everyone to fill out a simple retrospective list, what we can use later to make future sprints better and better. Below are the results we got. What was good:
  • restricted room hours actually made for a nice rhythm (did not apply for a long time )
  • very good food
  • very cheap food!
  • longer period makes the effort of travel more worthwhile
  • many participants and longer sprint than usual allowing more work to be done
  • good preparation with clear goals, make the sprint usefull
  • patience with the less experienced participants
  • RFS very fast
  • Ant nio is an excellent host
  • You all are so helpful
  • great dinners
What could be better:
  • room too close to the street, too much vehicle noise, but sometimes nice music
  • more coffee ^W meat
  • could know more portugues so ordering food would have been easier
  • debian infra could have not been down during the sprint
The night ended at Bar do Alem o ( The German s Bar ). Both their beer and their food are very good, but I don t have enough elements to vouch for their authenticity. :) We were joined by Giovani (who we also met earlier in the botanic gardens), and by Paulo and Daniel who are organizing the MiniDebconf. And that is the end of this year s Debian Ruby team sprint. I hope we do it all over again next year.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: gunsales 0.1.1

A minor update to our recently released gunsales package is now on the CRAN network. The changes are completely internal and deal with automagic discovery of the X-13ARIMA-SEATS program via our associated x13binary package. More precisely, we let Solaris and the Windows old-release builds fail more gracefully. Others, ie current Windows builds, OS X and Linux, are entirely unaffected in their functionality. For simplicity, all examples now have an \dontrun wrapper, and the vignette makes its code conditional on the platform it is running on. Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release.

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

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 44 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between February 21th and February 27th:

Toolchain fixes Didier Raboud uploaded pyppd/1.0.2-4 which makes PPD generation deterministic. Emmanuel Bourg uploaded plexus-maven-plugin/1.3.8-10 which sorts the components in the components.xml files generated by the plugin. Guillem Jover has implemented stable ordering for members of the control archives in .debs. Chris Lamb submitted another patch to improve reproducibility of files generated by cython.

Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: dctrl-tools, debian-edu, dvdwizard, dymo-cups-drivers, ekg2, epson-inkjet-printer-escpr, expeyes, fades, foomatic-db, galternatives, gnuradio, gpodder, gutenprint icewm, invesalius, jodconverter-cli latex-mk, libiio, libimobiledevice, libmcrypt, libopendbx, lives, lttnganalyses, m2300w, microdc2, navit, po4a, ptouch-driver, pxljr, tasksel, tilda, vdr-plugin-infosatepg, xaos. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them:

tests.reproducible-builds.org The reproducibly tests for Debian now vary the provider of /bin/sh between bash and dash. (Reiner Herrmann)

diffoscope development diffoscope version 50 was released on February 27th. It adds a new comparator for PostScript files, makes the directory tests pass on slower hardware, and line ordering variations in .deb md5sums files will not be hidden anymore. Version 51 uploaded the next day re-added test data missing from the previous tarball. diffoscope is looking for a new primary maintainer.

Package reviews 87 reviews have been removed, 61 added and 43 updated in the previous week. New issues: captures_shell_variable_in_autofoo_script, varying_ordering_in_data_tar_gz_or_control_tar_gz. 30 new FTBFS have been reported by Chris Lamb, Antonio Terceiro, Aaron M. Ucko, Michael Tautschnig, and Tobias Frost.

Misc. The release team reported on their discussion about the topic of rebuilding all of Stretch to make it self-contained (in respect to reproducibility). Christian Boltz is hoping someone could talk about reproducible builds at the openSUSE conference happening June 22nd-26th in N rnberg, Germany.

Mart n Ferrari: Serendipity

So I was reading G+, and saw there a post by Bernd Zeimetz about some "marble machine". Which turns out to be a very cool device that is programmed to play a single tune, and it is just mesmerising to watch:
Youtube video
So, naturally, I click through to see if there is more music made with this machine. It turns out the machine has been on the making for a while, and the first complete song (the one embedded above) was released only a few days ago. It is obviously porn for nerds, and Wired had already posted an article about it. So instead I found a band called like the machine: Wintergatan, which sounds pretty great. It took me a while to realise the guy who built the machine is one of the members of the band. They even have a page collecting all the videos about the machine.
Youtube video
After a while, and noticing the suggestions from Youtube, I realise that two of the members of Wintergatan were previously in Detektivbyr n, which is another band I love, and about which I wrote a post on this very blog, 7.5 years ago!1. So the sad news is that Detektivbyran disbanded, the good news is that this guy keeps making great music, now with insane machines.
Youtube video
I only discovered Detektivbyran in the first place thanks to an article the -now sadly defunct- Coilhouse Magazine. I find this 8-year long loop that closes unexpectedly during a late-night idle browsing session pretty amusing.
  1. I keep telling my friends that I was a hipster before it was cool to do so...
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4 March 2016

Daniel Pocock: Machine Learning for Hackers with Debian and Ubuntu

Data Science and Machine Learning are hot topics at the moment. Many people are considering how to extend their skills into these areas and many solutions have appeared, including full online degrees, free online courses combined with free software and for those who prefer hard copy, a staggering choice of books on the topic. One of those books is O'Reilly's Machine Learning for Hackers by John Myles White and Drew Conway. The book uses R to demonstrate a series of techniques for analysis and prediction. The book offers a great opportunity to simultaneously get an introduction to basic machine learning techniques and also an introduction to the increasingly popular R platform. On page 11 they list all the major R packages needed to run their examples (available on Github). I had a look over this list to see how many could be installed on a Debian system using apt-get and found that about half of them were already present. Five of them and one dependency, however, were not already available so I've whipped up packages for them and they are now in jessie-backports for all users of the current stable release. If you are following the exercises in this book, you can get all the software you need with one convenient command: 
$ sudo apt-get install -t jessie-backports \
  r-cran-ggplot2 r-cran-lme4 r-cran-rcurl \
  r-cran-reshape r-cran-xml r-cran-arm \
  r-cran-glmnet r-cran-igraph r-cran-lubridate \
  r-cran-rjsonio r-cran-tm
Thanks to all those who already packaged other parts of R and backported the relevant packages. Note that the RJSONIO package's authors have not provided a valid free software license so it is in non-free. It is there to support people using the book but I would encourage people to use RJSON for any new projects as it does have a valid license.

Antonio Terceiro: Debian Ruby Sprint 2016 - day 4: Steady Progress, Deferred Spring Cleaning, and Capital Sins

As the day 4 of the Debian Ruby team sprint in Curitiba unfolded, we have now fixed a total of more than 70 build failure bugs, managed to almost finish the Ruby 2.3 transition to be good to migrate into testing, and bootstrapped some documentation that will help new contributors get up to speed with Ruby packaging faster. We have also requested the removal of several packages that are either severely outdated, abandoned upstream, beyond repair, utterly wrong, or in some cases, all of the above. The full list of work items finished yesterday is:
  • filed for RM ruby-rubysl-test-unit (no rdeps, duplicates ruby-test-unit)
  • filed for RM ruby-literati (no rdeps left)
  • uploaded ruby-certificate-authority 0.1.6-2
  • uploaded ruby-pdf-reader 1.4 (Closes: FTBFS #795763)
  • uploaded ruby-http 1.0.2-1 (Closes: #795752)
  • raise severity of FTBFS bugs with ruby2.3
  • day 3 report
  • NMU pcs and upload to DELAYED/2 to remove dependency on ruby-monkey-lib and build-dependency on ruby2.1-dev
  • upload ruby-parslet (Closes: #795046)
  • initial documentation of packaging workflow with updated helper scripts in the team repo https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Ruby/Workflow
  • ask for the removal of ruby-rspec-longrun
  • ruby-opengraph-parser upstream bug; upstream unresponsive; asked uploader about removal (no rdeps)
  • fix ruby-celluloid-io for ruby2.3
  • fixed ruby-buff-extension to work on ruby2.3
  • uploaded newer ruby-varia-model upstream to work with newer ruby-hashie
  • ask for the removal of mdpress
  • uploaded ruby-buff-config, ruby-semverse, ruby-buff-ruby-engine, ruby-buff-ignore, ruby-buff-shell-out to remove spork
  • filed for RM spork (obsolete, broken)
  • filed for RM ruby-gsl on failing archs
  • upload ruby-solve (Closes: #816359, thanks zeha!)
  • update ruby-standalone to work properly with ruby2.3 (needs to remove the rake binary)
  • upload ruby-memfs
  • ruby-rack (1.6.4-3) (ROM ruby-memcache-client)
  • ruby-parslet 1.7.1-1 #795046
  • upload ruby-listen
  • upload ruby-clockwork
  • upload ruby-bio with a patch to avoid transient FTBFS because of undefined class names
  • fixed ruby-fakeweb ftbfs
  • cleaned up old repositories on git.d.o
  • investigated PET status (appears to somewhat work, but mostly decaying)
  • uploaded ruby-ogginfo
  • upload ruby-libxml (agan!)
  • upload racc 1.4.14-1
  • upload ruby-sidekiq-cron
  • how-can-i-help updated
  • racc 1.4.14-1 (not ruby-racc ;-))
We also managed to flirt with 2 capital sins. For those who care about these things, which I don t (but I still care about you), I guess 2 out of 7 still means we are good? :-) I few people that I will not name complained that they hadn t had enough steak on the previous night, so we set out to visit a traditional all-you-can-eat Brazilian steakhouse ( churrascaria ). I made a reservation at Jardins Grill and there you have gluttony. I am pretty sure that not enough steak wasn t an issue last night. You can see how happy, despite being full to almost the point of being sick, everyone was. A disjunct set of people, who I will also not name, were very disappointed to find out that the ruby-tinder package has absolutely nothing to do with Tinder but were still very active on the later. Maybe Friday night we will have to split the group into a lust-free family party and a Tinder party.

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