Search Results: "ema"

1 September 2023

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities August 2023

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

Debugging
  • Investigated test failures after Debian pybuild distutils update

Issues

Review
  • Debian BTS usertags: changes for the month

Administration
  • Debian IRC: rescue an alternate channel and make it harder to join accidentally
  • Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts, update emails for accounts

Communication
  • Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors The libpst work was sponsored. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

29 August 2023

Andrew Cater: 20230828 - OMGWTFBBQ - Breakfast is happening more or less

And nothing changes: rediscovered from past Andrew at his first Cambridge BBQ and almost the first blog post here:

"House full of people I knew only from email, some very old friends. Wires and leads filling the front room floor - laptops _everywhere_ .

...

Thirty second rule on sofa space - if you left for more than about 30 seconds you had to sit on the floor when you got back (I jammed myself onto a corner of the sofa once I realised I'd barely get through the crush :) )
[Forget students in a mini / UK telephone box - how many DDs can you fit into a very narrow kitchen :) ]

It's a huge, dysfunctional family with its own rules, geeky humour and in-jokes but it's MINE - it's the people I want to hang out with and, as perverse as it sounds, just being there gave me a whole new reaffirmed sense of identity and a large amount of determination to carry on "wasting my time with Linux" and Debian"

The *frightening* thing - this is from August 31st 2009 ... where have the years gone in between.

Jonathan Dowland: Gazelle Twin

A couple of releases A couple of releases
I discovered Gazelle Twin last year via Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone (two of her tracks ended up on my 2022 Halloween playlist). Through her website I learned of The Horror Show! exhibition at Somerset House1 in London that I managed to visit earlier this year. I've been intending to write a 5-track blog post (a la Underworld, the Cure, Coil) for a while but I have been spurred on by the excellent news that she's got a new album on the way, and, she's performing at the Sage Gateshead in November. Buy tickets now!! Here's the five tracks I recommend to get started:
  1. Anti-Body, from 2014's UNFLESH. I particularly love the percussion. Perc did a good hard-house-style remix on Fleshed Out, the companion remix album. Anti-Body by Gazelle Twin
  2. Fire Leap, from Gazelle Twin and NYX's collaborative album Deep England. The album is a re-interpretation of material from Gazelle Twin's earlier album, Pastoral, with the exception of this track, which is a cover of Paul Giovanni's song from The Wicker Man. There's a common aesthetic in all three works: eerie-folk, England's self-mythologising as seen through a warped and cracked lens. Anti-Body by Gazelle Twin There's a fantastic performance video of the whole album, directed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, available on YouTube.
  3. Better In My Day, from the aforementioned Pastoral. This track and this album are, I think, less accessible, more challenging than the re-interpreted material. That's not a bad thing: I'm still working on digesting it! This is one of the more abrasive, confrontational tracks. Better In My Day by Gazelle Twin
  4. I am Shell I am Bone, from way back to her first release, The Entire City in 2011. Composed, recorded, self-produced, self-released. It's remarkable to me how different each phase of GT's work are to one another. This album evokes a strong sense of atmosphere and place to me. There's a hint of possible influence of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures (or New Order's Movement) in places. The b-side to this song is a cover of Joy Division's The Eternal. I Am Shell I Am Bone by Gazelle Twin
  5. GT re-issued This Entire City in 2022 along with a companion-piece EP of newly-released material from the same era, The Wastelands. This isn't cutting room floor stuff, though, as evidenced by the strength of my final pick, Hole in my Heart. Hole In My Heart by Gazelle Twin
It's hard to pick just five tracks when doing these (that's the point I suppose). I note that I haven't picked anything from her wide-ranging soundtrack work: her last three or four of her releases have been soundtrack works, released on the well-respected UK label Invada, as will be her forthcoming album. You can find all the released stuff on Gazelle Twin's Bandcamp Page.
  1. I recently learned that PJ Harvey once hosted album sessions in Somerset House, and allowed fans to watch her at work during the recording: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jan/16/pj-harvey-somerset-house-recording-in-progress

27 August 2023

Shirish Agarwal: FSCKing /home

There is a bit of context that needs to be shared before I get to this and would be a long one. For reasons known and unknown, I have a lot of sudden electricity outages. Not just me, all those who are on my line. A discussion with a lineman revealed that around 200+ families and businesses are on the same line and when for whatever reason the electricity goes for all. Even some of the traffic lights don t work. This affects software more than hardware or in some cases, both. And more specifically HDD s are vulnerable. I had bought an APC unit several years for precisely this, but over period of time it just couldn t function and trips also when the electricity goes out. It s been 6-7 years so can t even ask customer service to fix the issue and from whatever discussions I have had with APC personnel, the only meaningful difference is to buy a new unit but even then not sure this is an issue that can be resolved, even with that. That comes to the issue that happens once in a while where the system fsck is unable to repair /home and you need to use an external pen drive for the same. This is my how my hdd stacks up
/ is on dev/sda7 /boot is on /dev/sda6, /boot/efi is on /dev/sda2 and /home is on /dev/sda8 so theoretically, if /home for some reason doesn t work I should be able drop down on /dev/sda7, unmount /dev/sda8, run fsck and carry on with my work. I tried it number of times but it didn t work. I was dropping down on tty1 and attempting the same, no dice as root/superuser getting the barest x-term. So first I tried asking couple of friends who live nearby me. Unfortunately, both are MS-Windows users and both use what are called as company-owned laptops . Surfing on those systems were a nightmare. Especially the number of pop-ups of ads that the web has become. And to think about how much harassment ublock origin has saved me over the years. One of the more interesting bits from both their devices were showing all and any downloads from fosshub was showing up as malware. I dunno how much of that is true or not as haven t had to use it as most software we get through debian archives or if needed, download from github or wherever and run/install it and you are in business. Some of them even get compiled into a good .deb package but that s outside the conversation atm. My only experience with fosshub was few years before the pandemic and that was good. I dunno if fosshub really has malware or malwarebytes was giving false positives. It also isn t easy to upload a 600 MB+ ISO file somewhere to see whether it really has malware or not. I used to know of a site or two where you could upload a suspicious file and almost 20-30 famous and known antivirus and anti-malware engines would check it and tell you the result. Unfortunately, I have forgotten the URL and seeing things from MS-Windows perspective, things have gotten way worse than before. So left with no choice, I turned to the local LUG for help. Fortunately, my mobile does have e-mail and I could use gmail to solicit help. While there could have been any number of live CD s that could have helped but one of my first experiences with GNU/Linux was that of Knoppix that I had got from Linux For You (now known as OSFY) sometime in 2003. IIRC, had read an interview of Mr. Klaus Knopper as well and was impressed by it. In those days, Debian wasn t accessible to non-technical users then and Knoppix was a good tool to see it. In fact, think he was the first to come up with the idea of a Live CD and run with it while Canonical/Ubuntu took another 2 years to do it. I think both the CD and the interview by distrowatch was shared by LFY in those early days. Of course, later the story changes after he got married, but I think that is more about Adriane rather than Knoppix. So Vishal Rao helped me out. I got an HP USB 3.2 32GB Type C OTG Flash Drive x5600c (Grey & Black) from a local hardware dealer around similar price point. The dealer is a big one and has almost 200+ people scattered around the city doing channel sales who in turn sell to end users. Asking one of the representatives about their opinion on stopping electronic imports (apparently more things were added later to the list including all sorts of sundry items from digital cameras to shavers and whatnot.) The gentleman replied that he hopes that it would not happen otherwise more than 90% would have to leave their jobs. They already have started into lighting fixtures (LED bulbs, tubelights etc.) but even those would come in the same ban The main argument as have shared before is that Indian Govt. thinks we need our home grown CPU and while I have no issues with that, as shared before except for RISC-V there is no other space where India could look into doing that. Especially after the Chip Act, Biden has made that any new fabs or any new thing in chip fabrication will only be shared with Five Eyes only. Also, while India is looking to generate about 2000 GW by 2030 by solar, China has an ambitious 20,000 GW generation capacity by the end of this year and the Chinese are the ones who are actually driving down the module prices. The Chinese are also automating their factories as if there s no tomorrow. The end result of both is that China will continue to be the world s factory floor for the foreseeable future and whoever may try whatever policies, it probably is gonna be difficult to compete with them on prices of electronic products. That s the reason the U.S. has been trying so that China doesn t get the latest technology but that perhaps is a story for another day.

HP USB 3.2 Type C OTG Flash Drive x5600c For people who have had read this blog they know that most of the flash drives today are MLC Drives and do not have the longevity of the SLC Drives. For those who maybe are new, this short brochure/explainer from Kingston should enhance your understanding. SLC Drives are rare and expensive. There are also a huge number of counterfeit flash drives available in the market and almost all the companies efforts whether it s Kingston, HP or any other manufacturer, they have been like a drop in the bucket. Coming back to the topic at hand. While there are some tools that can help you to figure out whether a pen drive is genuine or not. While there are products that can tell you whether they are genuine or not (basically by probing the memory controller and the info. you get from that.) that probably is a discussion left for another day. It took me couple of days and finally I was able to find time to go Vishal s place. The journey of back and forth lasted almost 6 hours, with crazy traffic jams. Tells you why Pune or specifically the Swargate, Hadapsar patch really needs a Metro. While an in-principle nod has been given, it probably is more than 5-7 years or more before we actually have a functioning metro. Even the current route the Metro has was supposed to be done almost 5 years to the date and even the modified plan was of 3 years ago. And even now, most of the Stations still need a lot of work to be done. PMC, Deccan as examples etc. still have loads to be done. Even PMT (Pune Muncipal Transport) that that is supposed to do the last mile connections via its buses has been putting half-hearted attempts

Vishal Rao While Vishal had apparently seen me and perhaps we had also interacted, this was my first memory of him although we have been on a few boards now and then including stackexchange. He was genuine and warm and shared 4-5 distros with me, including Knoppix and System Rescue as shared by Arun Khan. While this is and was the first time I had heard about Ventoy apparently Vishal has been using it for couple of years now. It s a simple shell script that you need to download and run on your pen drive and then just dump all the .iso images. The easiest way to explain ventoy is that it looks and feels like Grub. Which also reminds me an interaction I had with Vishal on mobile. While troubleshooting the issue, I was unsure whether it was filesystem that was the issue or also systemd was corrupted. Vishal reminded me of putting fastboot to the kernel parameters to see if I m able to boot without fscking and get into userspace i.e. /home. Although journalctl and systemctl were responding even on tty1 still was a bit apprehensive. Using fastboot was able to mount the whole thing and get into userspace and that told me that it s only some of the inodes that need clearing and there probably are some orphaned inodes. While Vishal had got a mini-pc he uses that a server, downloads stuff to it and then downloads stuff from it. From both privacy, backup etc. it is a better way to do things but then you need to laptop to access it. I am sure he probably uses it for virtualization and other ways as well but we just didn t have time for that discussion. Also a mini-pc can set you back anywhere from 25 to 40k depending on the mini-pc and the RAM and the SSD. And you need either a lappy or an Raspberry Pi with some kinda visual display to interact with the mini-pc. While he did share some of the things, there probably could have been a far longer interaction just on that but probably best left for another day. Now at my end, the system I had bought is about 5-6 years old. At that time it only had 6 USB 2.0 drives and 2 USB 3.0 (A) drives.
The above image does tell of the various form factors. One of the other things is that I found the pendrive and its connectors to be extremely fiddly. It took me number of times fiddling around with it when I was finally able to put in and able to access the pen drive partitions. Unfortunately, was unable to see/use systemrescue but Knoppix booted up fine. I mounted the partitions briefly to see where is what and sure enough /dev/sda8 showed my /home files and folders. Unmounted it, then used $fsck -y /dev/sda8 and back in business. This concludes what happened. Updates Quite a bit was left out on the original post, part of which I didn t know and partly stuff which is interesting and perhaps need a blog post of their own. It s sad I won t be part of debconf otherwise who knows what else I would have come to know.
  1. One of the interesting bits that I came to know about last week is the Alibaba T-Head T-Head TH1520 RISC-V CPU and saw it first being demoed on a laptop and then a standalone tablet. The laptop is an interesting proposition considering Alibaba opened up it s chip thing only couple of years ago. To have an SOC within 18 months and then under production for lappies and tablets is practically unheard of especially of a newbie/startup. Even AMD took 3-4 years for its first chip.It seems they (Alibaba) would be parceling them out by quarter end 2023 and another 1000 pieces/Units first quarter next year, while the scale is nothing compared to the behemoths, I think this would be more as a matter of getting feedback on both the hardware and software. The value proposition is much better than what most of us get, at least in India. For example, they are doing a warranty for 5 years and also giving spare parts. RISC-V has been having a lot of resurgence in China in part as its an open standard and partly development will be far cheaper and faster than trying x86 or x86-64. If you look into both the manufacturers, due to monopoly, both of them now give 5-8% increment per year, and if you look back in history, you would find that when more chips were in competition, they used to give 15-20% performance increment per year.
2. While Vishal did share with me what he used and the various ways he uses the mini-pc, I did have a fun speculating on what he could use it. As shared by Romane as his case has shared, the first thing to my mind was backups. Filesystems are notorious in the sense they can be corrupted or can be prone to be corrupted very easily as can be seen above . Backups certainly make a lot of sense, especially rsync. The other thing that came to my mind was having some sort of A.I. and chat server. IIRC, somebody has put quite a bit of open source public domain data in debian servers that could be used to run either a chatbot or an A.I. or both and use that similar to how chatGPT but with much limited scope than what chatgpt uses. I was also thinking a media server which Vishal did share he does. I may probably visit him sometime to see what choices he did and what he learned in the process, if anything. Another thing that could be done is just take a dump of any of commodity markets or any markets and have some sort of predictive A.I. or whatever. A whole bunch of people have scammed thousands of Indian users on this, but if you do it on your own and for your own purposes to aid you buy and sell stocks or whatever commodity you may fancy. After all, nowadays markets themselves are virtual. While Vishal s mini-pc doesn t have any graphics, if it was an AMD APU mini-pc, something like this he could have hosted games in the way of thick server, thin client where all graphics processing happens on the server rather than the client. With virtual reality I think the case for the same case could be made or much more. The only problem with VR/AR is that we don t really have mass-market googles, eye pieces or headset. The only notable project that Google has/had in that place is the Google VR Cardboard headset and the experience is not that great or at least was not that great few years back when I could hear and experience the same. Most of the VR headsets say for example the Meta Quest 2 is for around INR 44k/- while Quest 3 is INR 50k+ and officially not available. As have shared before, the holy grail of VR would be when it falls below INR 10k/- so it becomes just another accessory, not something you really have to save for. There also isn t much content on that but then that is also the whole chicken or egg situation. This again is a non-stop discussion as so much has been happening in that space it needs its own blog post/article whatever. Till later.

25 August 2023

Debian Brasil: Debian Day 30 anos online no Brasil

Em 2023 o tradicional Debian Day est sendo celebrado de forma especial, afinal no dia 16 de agostoo Debian completou 30 anos! Para comemorar este marco especial na vida do Debian, a comunidade Debian Brasil organizou uma semana de palestras online de 14 a 18 de agosto. O evento foi chamado de Debian 30 anos. Foram realizadas 2 palestras por noite, das 19h s 22h, transmitidas pelo canal Debian Brasil no YouTube totalizando 10 palestras. As grava es j est o dispon veis tamb m no canal Debian Brasil no Peertube. Nas 10 atividades tivemos as participa es de 9 DDs, 1 DM, 3 contribuidores(as). A audi ncia ao vivo variou bastante, e o pico foi na palestra sobre preseed com o Eriberto Mota quando tivemos 47 pessoas assistindo. Obrigado a todos(as) participantes pela contribui o que voc s deram para o sucesso do nosso evento. Veja abaixo as fotos de cada atividade: Nova gera o: uma entrevista com iniciantes no projeto Debian
Nova gera o: uma entrevista com iniciantes no projeto Debian Instala o personalizada e automatizada do Debian com preseed
Instala o personalizada e automatizada do Debian com preseed Manipulando patches com git-buildpackage
Manipulando patches com git-buildpackage debian.social: Socializando Debian do jeito Debian
debian.social: Socializando Debian do jeito Debian Proxy reverso com WireGuard
Proxy reverso com WireGuard Celebra o dos 30 anos do Debian!
Celebra o dos 30 anos do Debian! Instalando o Debian em disco criptografado com LUKS
Instalando o Debian em disco criptografado com LUKS O que a equipe de localiza o j conquistou nesses 30 anos
O que a equipe de localiza o j conquistou nesses 30 anos Debian - Projeto e Comunidade!
Debian - Projeto e Comunidade! Design Gr fico e Software livre, o que fazer e por onde come ar
Design Gr fico e Software livre, o que fazer e por onde come ar

21 August 2023

Melissa Wen: AMD Driver-specific Properties for Color Management on Linux (Part 1)

TL;DR: Color is a visual perception. Human eyes can detect a broader range of colors than any devices in the graphics chain. Since each device can generate, capture or reproduce a specific subset of colors and tones, color management controls color conversion and calibration across devices to ensure a more accurate and consistent color representation. We can expose a GPU-accelerated display color management pipeline to support this process and enhance results, and this is what we are doing on Linux to improve color management on Gamescope/SteamDeck. Even with the challenges of being external developers, we have been working on mapping AMD GPU color capabilities to the Linux kernel color management interface, which is a combination of DRM and AMD driver-specific color properties. This more extensive color management pipeline includes pre-defined Transfer Functions, 1-Dimensional LookUp Tables (1D LUTs), and 3D LUTs before and after the plane composition/blending.
The study of color is well-established and has been explored for many years. Color science and research findings have also guided technology innovations. As a result, color in Computer Graphics is a very complex topic that I m putting a lot of effort into becoming familiar with. I always find myself rereading all the materials I have collected about color space and operations since I started this journey (about one year ago). I also understand how hard it is to find consensus on some color subjects, as exemplified by all explanations around the 2015 online viral phenomenon of The Black and Blue Dress. Have you heard about it? What is the color of the dress for you? So, taking into account my skills with colors and building consensus, this blog post only focuses on GPU hardware capabilities to support color management :-D If you want to learn more about color concepts and color on Linux, you can find useful links at the end of this blog post.

Linux Kernel, show me the colors ;D DRM color management interface only exposes a small set of post-blending color properties. Proposals to enhance the DRM color API from different vendors have landed the subsystem mailing list over the last few years. On one hand, we got some suggestions to extend DRM post-blending/CRTC color API: DRM CRTC 3D LUT for R-Car (2020 version); DRM CRTC 3D LUT for Intel (draft - 2020); DRM CRTC 3D LUT for AMD by Igalia (v2 - 2023); DRM CRTC 3D LUT for R-Car (v2 - 2023). On the other hand, some proposals to extend DRM pre-blending/plane API: DRM plane colors for Intel (v2 - 2021); DRM plane API for AMD (v3 - 2021); DRM plane 3D LUT for AMD - 2021. Finally, Simon Ser sent the latest proposal in May 2023: Plane color pipeline KMS uAPI, from discussions in the 2023 Display/HDR Hackfest, and it is still under evaluation by the Linux Graphics community. All previous proposals seek a generic solution for expanding the API, but many seem to have stalled due to the uncertainty of matching well the hardware capabilities of all vendors. Meanwhile, the use of AMD color capabilities on Linux remained limited by the DRM interface, as the DCN 3.0 family color caps and mapping diagram below shows the Linux/DRM color interface without driver-specific color properties [*]: Bearing in mind that we need to know the variety of color pipelines in the subsystem to be clear about a generic solution, we decided to approach the issue from a different perspective and worked on enabling a set of Driver-Specific Color Properties for AMD Display Drivers. As a result, I recently sent another round of the AMD driver-specific color mgmt API. For those who have been following the AMD driver-specific proposal since the beginning (see [RFC][V1]), the main new features of the latest version [v2] are the addition of pre-blending Color Transformation Matrix (plane CTM) and the differentiation of Pre-defined Transfer Functions (TF) supported by color blocks. For those who just got here, I will recap this work in two blog posts. This one describes the current status of the AMD display driver in the Linux kernel/DRM subsystem and what changes with the driver-specific properties. In the next post, we go deeper to describe the features of each color block and provide a better picture of what is available in terms of color management for Linux.

The Linux kernel color management API and AMD hardware color capabilities Before discussing colors in the Linux kernel with AMD hardware, consider accessing the Linux kernel documentation (version 6.5.0-rc5). In the AMD Display documentation, you will find my previous work documenting AMD hardware color capabilities and the Color Management Properties. It describes how AMD Display Manager (DM) intermediates requests between the AMD Display Core component (DC) and the Linux/DRM kernel interface for color management features. It also describes the relevant function to call the AMD color module in building curves for content space transformations. A subsection also describes hardware color capabilities and how they evolve between versions. This subsection, DC Color Capabilities between DCN generations, is a good starting point to understand what we have been doing on the kernel side to provide a broader color management API with AMD driver-specific properties.

Why do we need more kernel color properties on Linux? Blending is the process of combining multiple planes (framebuffers abstraction) according to their mode settings. Before blending, we can manage the colors of various planes separately; after blending, we have combined those planes in only one output per CRTC. Color conversions after blending would be enough in a single-plane scenario or when dealing with planes in the same color space on the kernel side. Still, it cannot help to handle the blending of multiple planes with different color spaces and luminance levels. With plane color management properties, userspace can get a more accurate representation of colors to deal with the diversity of color profiles of devices in the graphics chain, bring a wide color gamut (WCG), convert High-Dynamic-Range (HDR) content to Standard-Dynamic-Range (SDR) content (and vice-versa). With a GPU-accelerated display color management pipeline, we can use hardware blocks for color conversions and color mapping and support advanced color management. The current DRM color management API enables us to perform some color conversions after blending, but there is no interface to calibrate input space by planes. Note that here I m not considering some workarounds in the AMD display manager mapping of DRM CRTC de-gamma and DRM CRTC CTM property to pre-blending DC de-gamma and gamut remap block, respectively. So, in more detail, it only exposes three post-blending features:
  • DRM CRTC de-gamma: used to convert the framebuffer s colors to linear gamma;
  • DRM CRTC CTM: used for color space conversion;
  • DRM CRTC gamma: used to convert colors to the gamma space of the connected screen.

AMD driver-specific color management interface We can compare the Linux color management API with and without the driver-specific color properties. From now, we denote driver-specific properties with the AMD prefix and generic properties with the DRM prefix. For visual comparison, I bring the DCN 3.0 family color caps and mapping diagram closer and present it here again: Mixing AMD driver-specific color properties with DRM generic color properties, we have a broader Linux color management system with the following features exposed by properties in the plane and CRTC interface, as summarized by this updated diagram: The blocks highlighted by red lines are the new properties in the driver-specific interface developed by me (Igalia) and Joshua (Valve). The red dashed lines are new links between API and AMD driver components implemented by us to connect the Linux/DRM interface to AMD hardware blocks, mapping components accordingly. In short, we have the following color management properties exposed by the DRM/AMD display driver:
  • Pre-blending - AMD Display Pipe and Plane (DPP):
    • AMD plane de-gamma: 1D LUT and pre-defined transfer functions; used to linearize the input space of a plane;
    • AMD plane CTM: 3x4 matrix; used to convert plane color space;
    • AMD plane shaper: 1D LUT and pre-defined transfer functions; used to delinearize and/or normalize colors before applying 3D LUT;
    • AMD plane 3D LUT: 17x17x17 size with 12 bit-depth; three dimensional lookup table used for advanced color mapping;
    • AMD plane blend/out gamma: 1D LUT and pre-defined transfer functions; used to linearize back the color space after 3D LUT for blending.
  • Post-blending - AMD Multiple Pipe/Plane Combined (MPC):
    • DRM CRTC de-gamma: 1D LUT (can t be set together with plane de-gamma);
    • DRM CRTC CTM: 3x3 matrix (remapped to post-blending matrix);
    • DRM CRTC gamma: 1D LUT + AMD CRTC gamma TF; added to take advantage of driver pre-defined transfer functions;
Note: You can find more about AMD display blocks in the Display Core Next (DCN) - Linux kernel documentation, provided by Rodrigo Siqueira (Linux/AMD display developer) in a 2021-documentation series. In the next post, I ll revisit this topic, explaining display and color blocks in detail.

How did we get a large set of color features from AMD display hardware? So, looking at AMD hardware color capabilities in the first diagram, we can see no post-blending (MPC) de-gamma block in any hardware families. We can also see that the AMD display driver maps CRTC/post-blending CTM to pre-blending (DPP) gamut_remap, but there is post-blending (MPC) gamut_remap (DRM CTM) from newer hardware versions that include SteamDeck hardware. You can find more details about hardware versions in the Linux kernel documentation/AMDGPU Product Information. I needed to rework these two mappings mentioned above to provide pre-blending/plane de-gamma and CTM for SteamDeck. I changed the DC mapping to detach stream gamut remap matrixes from the DPP gamut remap block. That means mapping AMD plane CTM directly to DPP/pre-blending gamut remap block and DRM CRTC CTM to MPC/post-blending gamut remap block. In this sense, I also limited plane CTM properties to those hardware versions with MPC/post-blending gamut_remap capabilities since older versions cannot support this feature without clashes with DRM CRTC CTM. Unfortunately, I couldn t prevent conflict between AMD plane de-gamma and DRM plane de-gamma since post-blending de-gamma isn t available in any AMD hardware versions until now. The fact is that a post-blending de-gamma makes little sense in the AMD color pipeline, where plane blending works better in a linear space, and there are enough color blocks to linearize content before blending. To deal with this conflict, the driver now rejects atomic commits if users try to set both AMD plane de-gamma and DRM CRTC de-gamma simultaneously. Finally, we had no other clashes when enabling other AMD driver-specific color properties for our use case, Gamescope/SteamDeck. Our main work for the remaining properties was understanding the data flow of each property, the hardware capabilities and limitations, and how to shape the data for programming the registers - AMD color block capabilities (and limitations) are the topics of the next blog post. Besides that, we fixed some driver bugs along the way since it was the first Linux use case for most of the new color properties, and some behaviors are only exposed when exercising the engine. Take a look at the Gamescope/Steam Deck Color Pipeline[**], and see how Gamescope uses the new API to manage color space conversions and calibration (please click on the image for a better view): In the next blog post, I ll describe the implementation and technical details of each pre- and post-blending color block/property on the AMD display driver. * Thank Harry Wentland for helping with diagrams, color concepts and AMD capabilities. ** Thank Joshua Ashton for providing and explaining Gamescope/Steam Deck color pipeline. *** Thanks to the Linux Graphics community - explicitly Harry, Joshua, Pekka, Simon, Sebastian, Siqueira, Alex H. and Ville - to all the learning during this Linux DRM/AMD color journey. Also, Carlos and Tomas for organizing the 2023 Display/HDR Hackfest where we have a great and immersive opportunity to discuss Color & HDR on Linux.

Russ Allbery: Review: Some Desperate Glory

Review: Some Desperate Glory, by Emily Tesh
Publisher: Tordotcom
Copyright: 2023
ISBN: 1-250-83499-6
Format: Kindle
Pages: 438
Some Desperate Glory is a far-future space... opera? That's probably the right genre classification given the setting, but this book is much more intense and character-focused than most space opera. It is Emily Tesh's first novel, although she has two previous novellas that were published as books. The alien majo and their nearly all-powerful Wisdom have won the war by destroying Earth with an antimatter bomb. The remnants of humanity were absorbed into the sprawling majo civilization. Gaea Station is the lone exception: a marginally viable station deep in space, formed from a lifeless rocky planetoid and the coupled hulks of the last four human dreadnoughts. Gaea Station survives on military discipline, ruthless use of every available resource, and constant training, raising new generations of soldiers for the war that it refuses to let end. While Earth's children live, the enemy shall fear us. Kyr is a warbreed, one of a genetically engineered line of soldiers that, following an accident, Gaea Station has lost the ability to make except the old-fashioned way. Among the Sparrows, her mess group, she is the best at the simulated combat exercises they use for training. She may be the best of her age cohort except her twin Magnus. As this novel opens, she and the rest of the Sparrows are about to get their adult assignments. Kyr is absolutely focused on living up to her potential and the attention of her uncle Jole, the leader of the station. Kyr's future will look nothing like what she expects. This book was so good, and I despair of explaining why it was so good without unforgivable spoilers. I can tell you a few things about it, but be warned that I'll be reduced to helpless gestures and telling you to just go read it. It's been a very long time since I was this surprised by a novel, possibly since I read Code Name: Verity for the first time. Some Desperate Glory follows Kyr in close third-person throughout the book, which makes the start of this book daring. If you're getting a fascist vibe from the setup, you're not wrong, and this is intentional on Tesh's part. But Kyr is a true believer at the start of the book, so the first quarter has a protagonist who is sometimes nasty and cruel and who makes some frustratingly bad decisions. Stay with it, though; Tesh knows exactly what she's doing. This is a coming of age story, in a way. Kyr has a lot to learn and a lot to process, and Some Desperate Glory is about that process. But by the middle of part three, halfway through the book, I had absolutely no idea where Tesh was going with the story. She then pulled the rug out from under me, in the best way, at least twice more. Part five of this book is an absolute triumph, the payoff for everything that's happened over the course of the novel, and there is no way I could have predicted it in advance. It was deeply satisfying in that way where I felt like I learned some things along with the characters, and where the characters find a better ending than I could possibly have worked out myself. Tesh does use some world-building trickery, which is at its most complicated in part four. That was the one place where I can point to a few chapters where I thought the world-building got a bit too convenient in order to enable the plot. But it also allows for some truly incredible character work. I can't describe that in detail because it would be a major spoiler, but it's one of my favorite tropes in fiction and Tesh pulls it off beautifully. The character growth and interaction in this book is just so good: deep and complicated and nuanced and thoughtful in a way that revises reader impressions of earlier chapters. The other great thing about this book is that for a 400+ page novel, it moves right along. Both plot and character development is beautifully paced with only a few lulls. Tesh also doesn't belabor conversations. This is a book that provides just the right amount of context for the reader to fully understand what's going on, and then trusts the reader to be following along and moves straight to the next twist. That makes it propulsively readable. I had so much trouble putting this book down at any time during the second half. I can't give any specifics, again because of spoilers, but this is not just a character story. Some Desperate Glory has strong opinions on how to ethically approach the world, and those ethics are at the center of the plot. Unlike a lot of books with a moral stance, though, this novel shows the difficulty of the work of deriving that moral stance. I have rarely read a book that more perfectly captures the interior experience of changing one's mind with all of its emotional difficulty and internal resistance. Tesh provides all the payoff I was looking for as a reader, but she never makes it easy or gratuitous (with the arguable exception of one moment at the very end of the book that I think some people will dislike but that I personally needed). This is truly great stuff, probably the best science fiction novel that I've read in several years. Since I read it (I'm late on reviews again), I've pushed it on several other people, and I've not had a miss yet. The subject matter is pretty heavy, and this book also uses several tropes that I personally adore and am therefore incapable of being objective about, but with those caveats, this gets my highest possible recommendation. Some Desperate Glory is a complete story in one novel with a definite end, although I love these characters so much that I'd happily read their further adventures, even if those are thematically unnecessary. Content warnings: Uh, a lot. Genocide, suicide, sexual assault, racism, sexism, homophobia, misgendering, and torture, and I'm probably forgetting a few things. Tesh doesn't linger on these long, but most of them are on-screen. You may have to brace yourself for this one. Rating: 10 out of 10

20 August 2023

Debian Brasil: Debian Day 30 years in Brazil

This year's Debian day was a pretty special one, we are celebrating 30 years! Giving the importance of this event, the Brazilian community planned a very special week. Instead of only local gatherings, we had a week of online talks streamed via Debian Brazil's youtube channel (soon the recordings will be uploaded to Debian's peertube instance). Nonetheless the local celebrations happened around the country and I've organized one in S o Carlos with the help of GELOS, the FLOSS group at University of S o Paulo. The event happened on August 19th and went on the whole afternoon. We had some talks about Debian and free software (see table below), a coffee break where we had the chance to talk, and finished with a group photo (check this one and many others below). Actually, it wasn't the end, we carried on the conversation about Debian and free software in a local bar :-) We had around 30 people in the event and reached a greater audience via the announcements across the university's press releases and emails sent to our Brazilian mailing lists. You can check some of them below. Below you can check the list of talks.
Time Author Title
14:10 GELOS Intro to GELOS
14:30 Carlos Melara (Charles) A not so Brief Introdution to the Debian Project
15:15 Guilherme Paix o Debian and the Free Culture
15:45 z Free Software: the paths to a free life
16:15 -- Coffee Break
17:15 Prof. Dr. Francisco Jos Monaco The FOSS Ecosystem and You
Here are some photos taken during the event! Preparation for Debian Day
Getting things ready for the event. Intro to GELOS
Intro to GELOS talk. Debian intro
A not so Brief Introdution to the Debian Project talk. Everyone knows Debian
Everyone already knew Debian! Free software
Debian and the Free Culture talk Auditorium
People in the auditorium space. Free software
Free Software: the paths to a free life talk Coffee Break
Coffee Break. FOSS Ecosystem
The FOSS Ecosystem and You talk. Group photo
Group photo. Celebration afterwards
Celebration goes on in the bar.

18 August 2023

Dirk Eddelbuettel: #43: r2u Faster Than the Alternatives

Welcome to the 43th post in the $R^4 series. And with that, a good laugh. When I set up Sunday s post, I was excited enough about the (indeed exciting !!) topic of r2u via browser or vscode that I mistakenly labeled it as the 41th post. And overlooked the existing 41th post from July! So it really is as if Douglas Adams, Arthur Dent, and, for good measure, Dirk Gently, looked over my shoulder and declared there shall not be a 42th post!! So now we have two 41th post: Sunday s and July s. Back the current topic, which is of course r2u. Earlier this week we had a failure in (an R based) CI run (using a default action which I had not set up). A package was newer in source than binary, so a build from source was attempted. And of course failed as it was a package needing a system dependency to build. Which the default action did not install. I am familiar with the problem via my general use of r2u (or my r-ci which uses it under the hood). And there we use a bspm variable to prefer binary over possibly newer source. So I was curious how one would address this with the default actions. It so happens that the same morning I spotted a StackOverflow question on the same topic, where the original poster had suffered the exact same issue! I offered my approach (via r2u) as a comment and was later notified of a follow-up answer by the OP. Turns our there is a new, more powerful action that does all this, potentially flipping to a newer version and building it, all while using a cache. Now I was curious, and in the evening cloned the repo to study the new approach and compare the new action to what r2u offers. In particular, I was curious if a use of caches would be benficial on repeated runs. A screenshot of the resulting Actions and their times follows. Turns out maybe not so much (yet ?). As the actions page of my cloned comparison repo shows in this screenshot, r2u is consistently faster at always below one minute compared to new entrant at always over two minutes. (I should clarify that the original actions sets up dependencies, then scrapes, and commits. I am timing only the setup of dependencies here.) We can also extract the six datapoints and quickly visualize them. Now, this is of course entirely possibly that not all possible venues for speedups were exploited in how the action setup was setup. If so, please file an issue at the repo and I will try to update accordingly. But for now it seems that a default of setup r2u is easily more than twice as fast as an otherwise very compelling alternative (with arguably much broader scope). However, where r2u choses to play, on the increasingly common, popular and powerful Ubuntu LTS setup, it clearly continues to run circles around alternate approaches. So the saying remains: r2u: fast, easy, reliable. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

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

Originally posted 2023-08-13, minimally edited 2023-08-15 which changed the timestamo and URL.

16 August 2023

Bits from Debian: Debian Celebrates 30 years!

Debian 30 years by Jeff Maier Over 30 years ago the late Ian Murdock wrote to the comp.os.linux.development newsgroup about the completion of a brand-new Linux release which he named "The Debian Linux Release". He built the release by hand, from scratch, so to speak. Ian laid out guidelines for how this new release would work, what approach the release would take regarding its size, manner of upgrades, installation procedures; and with great care of consideration for users without Internet connection. Unaware that he had sparked a movement in the fledgling F/OSS community, Ian worked on and continued to work on Debian. The release, now aided by volunteers from the newsgroup and around the world, grew and continues to grow as one of the largest and oldest FREE operating systems that still exist today. Debian at its core is comprised of Users, Contributors, Developers, and Sponsors, but most importantly, People. Ians drive and focus remains embedded in the core of Debian, it remains in all of our work, it remains in the minds and hands of the users of The Universal Operating System. The Debian Project is proud and happy to share our anniversary not exclusively unto ourselves, instead we share this moment with everyone, as we come together in celebration of a resounding community that works together, effects change, and continues to make a difference, not just in our work but around the world. Debian is present in cluster systems, datacenters, desktop computers, embedded systems, IoT devices, laptops, servers, it may possibly be powering the web server and device you are reading this article on, and it can also be found in Spacecraft. Closer to earth, Debian fully supports projects for accessibility: Debian Edu/Skolelinux - an operating system designed for educational use in schools and communities, Debian Science - providing free scientific software across many established and emerging fields, Debian Hamradio - for amateur radio enthusiasts, Debian-Accessibility - a project focused on the design of an operating system suited to fit the requirements of people with disabilites, and Debian Astro - focused on supporting professional and hobbyist astronomers. Debian strives to give, reach, embrace, mentor, share, and teach with internships through many programs internally and externally such as the Google Summer of Code, Outreachy, and the Open Source Promotion Plan. None of this could be possible without the vast amount of support, care, and contributions from what started as and is still an all volunteer project. We celebrate with each and every one who has helped shape Debian over all of these years and toward the future. Today we all certainly celebrate 30 years of Debian, but know that Debian celebrates with each and every one of you all at the same time. Over the next few days Celebration parties are planned to take place in Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, France, Germany (CCCcamp), India, Iran, Portugal, Serbia, South Africa, and Turkey. You are of course, invited to join us! Check out, attend, or form your very own DebianDay 2023 Event. See you then! Thank you, thank you all so very much. With Love, The Debian Project

Wouter Verhelst: Perl test suites in GitLab

I've been maintaining a number of Perl software packages recently. There's SReview, my video review and transcoding system of which I split off Media::Convert a while back; and as of about a year ago, I've also added PtLink, an RSS aggregator (with future plans for more than just that). All these come with extensive test suites which can help me ensure that things continue to work properly when I play with things; and all of these are hosted on salsa.debian.org, Debian's gitlab instance. Since we're there anyway, I configured GitLab CI/CD to run a full test suite of all the software, so that I can't forget, and also so that I know sooner rather than later when things start breaking. GitLab has extensive support for various test-related reports, and while it took a while to be able to enable all of them, I'm happy to report that today, my perl test suites generate all three possible reports. They are: Additionally, I also store the native perl Devel::Cover report as job artifacts, as they show some information that GitLab does not. It's important to recognize that not all data is useful. For instance, the JUnit report allows for a test name and for details of the test. However, the module that generates the JUnit report from TAP test suites does not make a distinction here; both the test name and the test details are reported as the same. Additionally, the time a test took is measured as the time between the end of the previous test and the end of the current one; there is no "start" marker in the TAP protocol. That being said, it's still useful to see all the available information in GitLab. And it's not even all that hard to do: 
test:
  stage: test
  image: perl:latest
  coverage: '/^Total.* (\d+.\d+)$/'
  before_script:
    - cpanm ExtUtils::Depends Devel::Cover TAP::Harness::JUnit Devel::Cover::Report::Cobertura
    - cpanm --notest --installdeps .
    - perl Makefile.PL
  script:
    - cover -delete
    - HARNESS_PERL_SWITCHES='-MDevel::Cover' prove -v -l -s --harness TAP::Harness::JUnit
    - cover
    - cover -report cobertura
  artifacts:
    paths:
    - cover_db
    reports:
      junit: junit_output.xml
      coverage_report:
        path: cover_db/cobertura.xml
        coverage_format: cobertura
Let's expand on that a bit. The first three lines should be clear for anyone who's used GitLab CI/CD in the past. We create a job called test; we start it in the test stage, and we run it in the perl:latest docker image. Nothing spectacular here. The coverage line contains a regular expression. This is applied by GitLab to the output of the job; if it matches, then the first bracket match is extracted, and whatever that contains is assumed to contain the code coverage percentage for the code; it will be reported as such in the GitLab UI for the job that was ran, and graphs may be drawn to show how the coverage changes over time. Additionally, merge requests will show the delta in the code coverage, which may help deciding whether to accept a merge request. This regular expression will match on a line of that the cover program will generate on standard output. The before_script section installs various perl modules we'll need later on. First, we intall ExtUtils::Depends. My code uses ExtUtils::MakeMaker, which ExtUtils::Depends depends on (no pun intended); obviously, if your perl code doesn't use that, then you don't need to install it. The next three modules -- Devel::Cover, TAP::Harness::JUnit and Devel::Cover::Report::Cobertura are necessary for the reports, and you should include them if you want to copy what I'm doing. Next, we install declared dependencies, which is probably a good idea for you as well, and then we run perl Makefile.PL, which will generate the Makefile. If you don't use ExtUtils::MakeMaker, update that part to do what your build system uses. That should be fairly straightforward. You'll notice that we don't actually use the Makefile. This is because we only want to run the test suite, which in our case (since these are PurePerl modules) doesn't require us to build the software first. One might consider that this makes the call of perl Makefile.PL useless, but I think it's a useful test regardless; if that fails, then obviously we did something wrong and shouldn't even try to go further. The actual tests are run inside a script snippet, as is usual for GitLab. However we do a bit more than you would normally expect; this is required for the reports that we want to generate. Let's unpack what we do there: 
cover -delete
This deletes any coverage database that might exist (e.g., due to caching or some such). We don't actually expect any coverage database, but it doesn't hurt. 
HARNESS_PERL_SWITCHES='-MDevel::Cover'
This tells the TAP harness that we want it to load the Devel::Cover addon, which can generate code coverage statistics. It stores that in the cover_db directory, and allows you to generate all kinds of reports on the code coverage later (but we don't do that here, yet). 
prove -v -l -s
Runs the actual test suite, with verbose output, shuffling (aka, randomizing) the test suite, and adding the lib directory to perl's include path. This works for us, again, because we don't actually need to compile anything; if you do, then -b (for blib) may be required. ExtUtils::MakeMaker creates a test target in its Makefile, and usually this is how you invoke the test suite. However, it's not the only way to do so, and indeed if you want to generate a JUnit XML report then you can't do that. Instead, in that case, you need to use the prove, so that you can tell it to load the TAP::Harness::JUnit module by way of the --harness option, which will then generate the JUnit XML report. By default, the JUnit XML report is generated in a file junit_output.xml. It's possible to customize the filename for this report, but GitLab doesn't care and neither do I, so I don't. Uploading the JUnit XML format tells GitLab which tests were run and Finally, we invoke the cover script twice to generate two coverage reports; once we generate the default report (which generates HTML files with detailed information on all the code that was triggered in your test suite), and once with the -report cobertura parameter, which generates the cobertura XML format. Once we've generated all our reports, we then need to upload them to GitLab in the right way. The native perl report, which is in the cover_db directory, is uploaded as a regular job artifact, which we can then look at through a web browser, and the two XML reports are uploaded in the correct way for their respective formats. All in all, I find that doing this makes it easier to understand how my code is tested, and why things go wrong when they do.

15 August 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, July 2023 (by Santiago Ruano Rinc n)

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In July, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 2.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 24.75h (out of 18.25h assigned and 6.5h from previous period).
  • Anton Gladky did 5.0h (out of 5.0h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 17.0h (out of 17.0h assigned and 3.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 3.0h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 14.0h (out of 24.0h assigned), thus carrying over 9.5h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 24.0h (out of 24.75h assigned), thus carrying over 0.25h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 23.25h (out of 24.75h assigned), thus carrying over 1.5h to the next month.
  • Jochen Sprickerhof did 10.0h (out of 20.0h assigned), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 16.0h (out of 9.75h assigned and 15.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.25h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 24.75h (out of 24.75h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 0.0h (out of 13.0h assigned and 11.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 24.0h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 19.25h (out of 14.75h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.5h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 25.5h (out of 10.5h assigned and 15.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 0.25h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 16.0h (out of 21.25h assigned and 3.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.75h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 16.0h (out of 16.0h assigned).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 1.5h (out of 0h assigned and 13.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 12.25h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In July, we have released 35 DLAs. LTS contributor Lee Garrett, has continued his hard work to prepare a testing framework for Samba, that can now provision bootable VMs with little effort, both for Debian and for Windows. This work included the introduction of a new package to Debian, rhsrvany, which allows turning any Windows program or script into a Windows service. As the Samba testing framework matures it will be possible to perform functional tests which cannot be performed with other available test mechanisms and aspects of this framework will be generalizable to other package ecosystems beyond Samba. July included a notable security update of bind9 by LTS contributor Chris Lamb. This update addressed a potential denial of service attack in this critical network infrastructure component.

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

13 August 2023

Jonathan Dowland: Terrain base for 3D castle

terrain base for the castle
I designed and printed a "terrain" base for my 3D castle in OpenSCAD. The castle was the first thing I designed and printed on our (then new) office 3D printer. I use it as a test bed if I want to try something new, and this time I wanted to try procedurally generating a model. I've released the OpenSCAD source for the terrain generator under the name Zarchscape. mid 90s terrain generation
Lots of mid-90s games had very boxy floors Lots of mid-90s games had very boxy floors
Terrain generation, 90s-style. From [this article](https://web.archive.org/web/19990822085321/http://www.gamedesign.net/tutorials/pavlock/cool-ass-terrain/) Terrain generation, 90s-style. From this article
Back in the 90s I spent some time designing maps/levels/arenas for Quake and its sibling games (like Half-Life), mostly in the tool Worldcraft. A lot of beginner maps (including my own), ended up looking pretty boxy. I once stumbled across an article blog post that taught my a useful trick for making more natural-looking terrain. In brief: tessellate the floor region with triangle polygons, then randomly add some jitter to the z-dimension for their vertices. A really simple technique with fairly dramatic results. OpenSCAD Doing the same in OpenSCAD stretched me, and I think stretched OpenSCAD. It left me with some opinions which I'll try to write up in a future blog post. Final results
multicolour
I've generated and printed the result a couple of times, including an attempt a multicolour print. At home, I have a large spool of brown-coloured recycled PLA, and many small lengths of samples in various colours (that I picked up at Maker Faire Czech Republic last year), including some short lengths of green. My home printer is a Prusa Mini, and I cheaped out and didn't buy the filament runout sensor, which would detect when the current filament ran out and let me handle the situation gracefully. Instead, I added several colour change instructions to the g-code at various heights, hoping that whatever plastic I loaded for each layer was enough to get the print to the next colour change instruction. The results are a little mixed I think. I didn't catch the final layer running out in time (forgetting that the Bowden tube also means I need to catch it running out before the loading gear, a few inches earlier than the nozzle), so the final lush green colour ends prematurely. I've also got a fair bit of stringing to clean up. Finally, all these non-flat planes really show up some of the limitations of regular Slicing. It would be interesting to try this with a non-planar Slicer.

10 August 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: PTS tracker, DebConf23 Bursary, and more! (by Utkarsh Gupta)

Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

tracker.debian.org work by Rapha l Hertzog Rapha l spent some time during his vacation to update distro-tracker to be fully compatible with Django 3.2 so that the codebase and the whole testsuite can run on Debian 12. There s one exception though with the functional test suite that still needs further work to cope with the latest version of Selenium. By dropping support of Django 2.2, Rapha l could also start to work toward support of Django 4.2 since Django helpfully emits deprecation warnings of things that will break in future versions. All the warnings have been fixed but the codebase still fails its testsuite in Django 4.2 because we have to get rid of the python3-django-jsonfield dependency (that is rightfully dead upstream since Django has native support nowadays). All the JSONField have been converted to use Django s native field, but the migration system still requires that dependency at this point. This will require either some fresh reboot of the migration history, or some other trickery to erase the jsonfield dependency from the history of migrations. If you have experience with that, don t hesitate to share it (mail at hertzog@debian.org, or reach out to buxy on IRC). At this point, tracker.debian.org runs with Django 3.2 on Debian 11 since Debian System Administrators are not yet ready to upgrade debian.org hosts to Debian 12.

DebConf 23 bursary work by Utkarsh Gupta Utkarsh led the bursary team this year. The bursary team got a ton of requests this time. Rolling out the results in 4 batches, the bursary team catered over 165 bursary requests - which is superb! The team managed to address all the requests and answered a bit over 120 emails in the process. With that, the bursaries are officially closed for DebConf 2023. The team also intends to roll out some of the statistics closer to DebConf.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Stefano implemented meson support in pybuild, the tool for building Python packages in Debian against multiple Python versions.
  • Santiago did some work on Salsa CI to enhance the ARM support on the autopkgtest job and make Josch s branch work. MR to come soon.
  • Helmut sent patches for 6 cross build failures.
  • Stefano has been preparing for DebConf 23: Working on the website, and assisting the local teams.
  • Stefano attended the DebConf Video team sprint in Paris, mostly looking at new hardware and software options for video capture and live-mixing. Full sprint report.

9 August 2023

Antoine Beaupr : OpenPGP key transition

This is a short announcement to say that I have changed my main OpenPGP key. A signed statement is available with the cryptographic details but, in short, the reason is that I stopped using my old YubiKey NEO that I have worn on my keyring since 2015. I now have a YubiKey 5 which supports ED25519 which features much shorter keys and faster decryption. It allowed me to move all my secret subkeys on the key (including encryption keys) while retaining reasonable performance. I have written extensive documentation on how to do that OpenPGP key rotation and also YubiKey OpenPGP operations.

Warning on storing encryption keys on a YubiKey People wishing to move their private encryption keys to such a security token should be very careful as there are special precautions to take for disaster recovery. I am toying with the idea of writing an article specifically about disaster recovery for secrets and backups, dealing specifically with cases of death or disabilities.

Autocrypt changes One nice change is the impact on Autocrypt headers, which are considerably shorter. Before, the header didn't even fit on a single line in an email, it overflowed to five lines: 
Autocrypt: addr=anarcat@torproject.org; prefer-encrypt=nopreference;
 keydata=xsFNBEogKJ4BEADHRk8dXcT3VmnEZQQdiAaNw8pmnoRG2QkoAvv42q9Ua+DRVe/yAEUd03EOXbMJl++YKWpVuzSFr7IlZ+/lJHOCqDeSsBD6LKBSx/7uH2EOIDizGwfZNF3u7X+gVBMy2V7rTClDJM1eT9QuLMfMakpZkIe2PpGE4g5zbGZixn9er+wEmzk2mt20RImMeLK3jyd6vPb1/Ph9+bTEuEXi6/WDxJ6+b5peWydKOdY1tSbkWZgdi+Bup72DLUGZATE3+Ju5+rFXtb/1/po5dZirhaSRZjZA6sQhyFM/ZhIj92mUM8JJrhkeAC0iJejn4SW8ps2NoPm0kAfVu6apgVACaNmFb4nBAb2k1KWru+UMQnV+VxDVdxhpV628Tn9+8oDg6c+dO3RCCmw+nUUPjeGU0k19S6fNIbNPRlElS31QGL4H0IazZqnE+kw6ojn4Q44h8u7iOfpeanVumtp0lJs6dE2nRw0EdAlt535iQbxHIOy2x5m9IdJ6q1wWFFQDskG+ybN2Qy7SZMQtjjOqM+CmdeAnQGVwxowSDPbHfFpYeCEb+Wzya337Jy9yJwkfa+V7e7Lkv9/OysEsV4hJrOh8YXu9a4qBWZvZHnIO7zRbz7cqVBKmdrL2iGqpEUv/x5onjNQwpjSVX5S+ZRBZTzah0w186IpXVxsU8dSk0yeQskblrwARAQABzSlBbnRvaW5lIEJlYXVwcsOpIDxhbmFyY2F0QHRvcnByb2plY3Qub3JnPsLBlAQTAQgAPgIbAwULCQgHAwUVCgkICwUWAgMBAAIeAQIXgBYhBI3JAc5kFGwEitUPu3khUlJ7dZIeBQJihnFIBQkacFLiAAoJEHkhUlJ7dZIeXNAP/RsX+27l9K5uGspEaMH6jabAFTQVWD8Ch1om9YvrBgfYtq2k/m4WlkMh9IpT89Ahmlf0eq+V1Vph4wwXBS5McK0dzoFuHXJa1WHThNMaexgHhqJOs
 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
After the change, the entire key fits on a single line, neat! 
Autocrypt: addr=anarcat@torproject.org; prefer-encrypt=nopreference;
 keydata=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
Note that I have implemented my own kind of ridiculous Autocrypt support for the Notmuch Emacs email client I use, see this elisp code. To import keys, I pipe the message into this script which is basically just: 
sq autocrypt decode   gpg --import
... thanks to Sequoia best-of-class Autocrypt support.

Note on OpenPGP usage While some have claimed OpenPGP's death, I believe those are overstated. Maybe it's just me, but I still use OpenPGP for my password management, to authenticate users and messages, and it's the interface to my YubiKey for authenticating with SSH servers. I understand people feel that OpenPGP is possibly insecure, counter-intuitive and full of problems, but I think most of those problems should instead be attributed to its current flagship implementation, GnuPG. I have tried to work with GnuPG for years, and it keeps surprising me with evilness and oddities. I have high hopes that the Sequoia project can bring some sanity into this space, and I also hope that RFC4880bis can eventually get somewhere so we have a more solid specification with more robust crypto. It's kind of a shame that this has dragged on for so long, but Update: there's a separate draft called openpgp-crypto-refresh that might actually be adopted as the "OpenPGP RFC" soon! And it doesn't keep real work from happening in Sequoia and other implementations. Thunderbird rewrote their OpenPGP implementation with RNP (which was, granted, a bumpy road because it lost compatibility with GnuPG) and Sequoia now has a certificate store with trust management (but still no secret storage), preliminary OpenPGP card support and even a basic GnuPG compatibility layer. I'm also curious to try out the OpenPGP CA capabilities. So maybe it's just because I'm becoming an old fart that doesn't want to change tools, but so far I haven't seen a good incentive in switching away from OpenPGP, and haven't found a good set of tools that completely replace it. Maybe OpenSSH's keys and CA can eventually replace it, but I suspect they will end up rebuilding most of OpenPGP anyway, just more slowly. If they do, let's hope they avoid the mistakes our community has done in the past at least...

5 August 2023

Bits from Debian: Debian Project Bits Volume 1, Issue 1

Debian Project Bits Volume 1, Issue 1 August 05, 2023 Welcome to the inaugural issue of Debian Project Bits! Those remembering the Debian Weekly News (DwN) will recognize some of the sections here which served as our inspiration. Debian Project Bits posts will allow for a faster turnaround of some project news on a monthly basis. The Debian Micronews service will continue to share shorter news items, the Debian Project News remains as our official newsletter which may move to a biannual archive format. News Debian Day The Debian Project was officially founded by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. Since then we have celebrated our Anniversary of that date each year with events around the world. We would love it if you could join our revels this very special year as we have the honor of turning 30! Attend or organize a local Debian Day celebration. You're invited to plan your own event: from Bug Squashing parties to Key Signing parties, Meet-Ups, or any type of social event whether large or small. And be sure to check our Debian reimbursement How To if you need such resources. You can share your days, events, thoughts, or notes with us and the rest of the community with the #debianday tag that will be used across most social media platforms. See you then! Events: Upcoming and Reports Upcoming Debian 30 anos The Debian Brasil Community is organizing the event Debian 30 anos to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Debian Project. From August 14 to 18, between 7pm and 22pm (UTC-3) contributors will talk online in Portuguese and we will live stream on Debian Brasil YouTube channel. DebConf23: Debian Developers Camp and Conference The 2023 Debian Developers Camp (DebCamp) and Conference (DebConf23) will be hosted this year in Infopark, Kochi, India. DebCamp is slated to run from September 3 through 9, immediately followed by the larger DebConf, September 10 through 17. If you are planning on attending the conference this year, now is the time to ensure your travel documentation, visa information, bursary submissions, papers and relevant equipment are prepared. For more information contact: debconf@debconf. MiniDebConf Cambridge 2023 There will be a MiniDebConf held in Cambridge, UK, hosted by ARM for 4 days in November: 2 days for a mini-DebCamp (Thu 23 - Fri 24), with space for dedicated development / sprint / team meetings, then two days for a more regular MiniDebConf (Sat 25 - Sun 26) with space for more general talks, up to 80 people. Reports During the last months, the Debian Community has organized some Bug Squashing Parties:
Tilburg, Netherlands. October 2022. St-Cergue, Switzerland. January 2023 Montreal, Canada. February 2023 In January, Debian India hosted the MiniDebConf Tamil Nadu in Viluppuram, Tamil Nadu, India (Sat 28 - Sun 26). The following month, the MiniDebConf Portugal 2023 was held in Lisbon (12 - 16 February 2023). These events, seen as a stunning success by some of their attendees, demonstrate the vitality of our community.
Debian Brasil Community at Campus Party Brazil 2023 Another edition of Campus Party Brazil took place in the city of S o Paulo between July 25th and 30th. And one more time the Debian Brazil Community was present. During the days in the available space, we carry out some activities such as: For more info and a few photos, check out the organizers' report. MiniDebConf Bras lia 2023 From May 25 to 27, Bras lia hosted the MiniDebConf Bras lia 2023. This gathering was composed of various activities such as talks, workshops, sprints, BSPs (Bug Squashing Party), key signings, social events, and hacking, aimed to bring the community together and celebrate the world's largest Free Software project: Debian. For more information please see the full report written by the organizers. Debian Reunion Hamburg 2023 This year the annual Debian Reunion Hamburg was held from Tuesday 23 to 30 May starting with four days of hacking followed by two days of talks, and then two more days of hacking. As usual, people - more than forty-five attendees from Germany, Czechia, France, Slovakia, and Switzerland - were happy to meet in person, to hack and chat together, and much more. If you missed the live streams, the video recordings are available. Translation workshops from the pt_BR team The Brazilian translation team, debian-l10n-portuguese, had their first workshop of 2023 in February with great results. The workshop was aimed at beginners, working in DDTP/DDTSS. For more information please see the full report written by the organizers. And on June 13 another workshop took place to translate The Debian Administrator's Handbook). The main goal was to show beginners how to collaborate in the translation of this important material, which has existed since 2004. The manual's translations are hosted on Weblate. Releases Stable Release Debian 12 bookworm was released on June 10, 2023. This new version becomes the stable release of Debian and moves the prior Debian 11 bullseye release to oldstable status. The Debian community celebrated the release with 23 Release Parties all around the world. Bookworm's first point release 12.1 address miscellaneous bug fixes affecting 88 packages, documentation, and installer updates was made available on July 22, 2023. RISC-V support riscv64 has recently been added to the official Debian architectures for support of 64-bit little-endian RISC-V hardware running the Linux kernel. We expect to have full riscv64 support in Debian 13 trixie. Updates on bootstrap, build daemon, porterbox, and development progress were recently shared by the team in a Bits from the Debian riscv64 porters post. non-free-firmware The Debian 12 bookworm archive now includes non-free-firmware; please be sure to update your apt sources.list if your systems requires such components for operation. If your previous sources.list included non-free for this purpose it may safely be removed. apt sources.list The Debian archive holds several components: Example of the sources.list file 
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm main
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm main
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian-security/ bookworm-security main
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian-security/ bookworm-security main
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-updates main
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-updates main
Example using the components: 
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm main non-free-firmware
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm main non-free-firmware
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian-security/ bookworm-security main non-free-firmware
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian-security/ bookworm-security main non-free-firmware
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-updates main non-free-firmware
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-updates main non-free-firmware
For more information and guidelines on proper configuration of the apt source.list file please see the Configuring Apt Sources - Wiki page. Inside Debian New Debian Members Please welcome the following newest Debian Project Members: To find out more about our newest members or any Debian Developer, look for them on the Debian People list. Security Debian's Security Team releases current advisories on a daily basis. Some recently released advisories concern these packages: trafficserver Several vulnerabilities were discovered in Apache Traffic Server, a reverse and forward proxy server, which could result in information disclosure or denial of service. asterisk A flaw was found in Asterisk, an Open Source Private Branch Exchange. A buffer overflow vulnerability affects users that use PJSIP DNS resolver. This vulnerability is related to CVE-2022-24793. The difference is that this issue is in parsing the query record parse_query(), while the issue in CVE-2022-24793 is in parse_rr(). A workaround is to disable DNS resolution in PJSIP config (by setting nameserver_count to zero) or use an external resolver implementation instead. flask It was discovered that in some conditions the Flask web framework may disclose a session cookie. chromium Multiple security issues were discovered in Chromium, which could result in the execution of arbitrary code, denial of service or information disclosure. Other Popular packages gpgv - GNU privacy guard signature verification tool. 99,053 installations. gpgv is actually a stripped-down version of gpg which is only able to check signatures. It is somewhat smaller than the fully-blown gpg and uses a different (and simpler) way to check that the public keys used to make the signature are valid. There are no configuration files and only a few options are implemented. dmsetup - Linux Kernel Device Mapper userspace library. 77,769 installations. The Linux Kernel Device Mapper is the LVM (Linux Logical Volume Management) Team's implementation of a minimalistic kernel-space driver that handles volume management, while keeping knowledge of the underlying device layout in user-space. This makes it useful for not only LVM, but software raid, and other drivers that create "virtual" block devices. sensible-utils - Utilities for sensible alternative selection. 96,001 daily users. This package provides a number of small utilities which are used by programs to sensibly select and spawn an appropriate browser, editor, or pager. The specific utilities included are: sensible-browser sensible-editor sensible-pager. popularity-contest - The popularity-contest package. 90,758 daily users. The popularity-contest package sets up a cron job that will periodically anonymously submit to the Debian developers statistics about the most used Debian packages on the system. This information helps Debian make decisions such as which packages should go on the first CD. It also lets Debian improve future versions of the distribution so that the most popular packages are the ones which are installed automatically for new users. New and noteworthy packages in unstable Toolkit for scalable simulation of distributed applications SimGrid is a toolkit that provides core functionalities for the simulation of distributed applications in heterogeneous distributed environments. SimGrid can be used as a Grid simulator, a P2P simulator, a Cloud simulator, a MPI simulator, or a mix of all of them. The typical use-cases of SimGrid include heuristic evaluation, application prototyping, and real application development and tuning. This package contains the dynamic libraries and runtime. LDraw mklist program 3D CAD programs and rendering programs using the LDraw parts library of LEGO parts rely on a file called parts.lst containing a list of all available parts. The program ldraw-mklist is used to generate this list from a directory of LDraw parts. Open Lighting Architecture - RDM Responder Tests The DMX512 standard for Digital MultipleX is used for digital communication networks commonly used to control stage lighting and effects. The Remote Device Management protocol is an extension to DMX512, allowing bi-directional communication between RDM-compliant devices without disturbing other devices on the same connection. The Open Lighting Architecture (OLA) provides a plugin framework for distributing DMX512 control signals. The ola-rdm-tests package provides an automated way to check protocol compliance in RDM devices. parsec-service Parsec is an abstraction layer that can be used to interact with hardware-backed security facilities such as the Hardware Security Module (HSM), the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), as well as firmware-backed and isolated software services. The core component of Parsec is the security service, provided by this package. The service is a background process that runs on the host platform and provides connectivity with the secure facilities of that host, exposing a platform-neutral API that can be consumed into different programming languages using a client library. For a client library implemented in Rust see the package librust-parsec-interface-dev. Simple network calculator and lookup tool Process and lookup network addresses from the command line or CSV with ripalc. Output has a variety of customisable formats. High performance, open source CPU/GPU miner and RandomX benchmark XMRig is a high performance, open source, cross platform RandomX, KawPow, CryptoNight, and GhostRider unified CPU/GPU miner and RandomX benchmark. Ping, but with a graph - Rust source code This package contains the source for the Rust gping crate, packaged by debcargo for use with cargo and dh-cargo. Once upon a time in Debian: 2014-07-31 The Technical committee choose libjpeg-turbo as the default JPEG decoder. 2010-08-01 DebConf10 starts New York City, USA 2007-08-05 Debian Maintainers approved by vote 2009-08-05 Jeff Chimene files bug #540000 against live-initramfs. Calls for help The Publicity team calls for volunteers and help! Your Publicity team is asking for help from you our readers, developers, and interested parties to contribute to the Debian news effort. We implore you to submit items that may be of interest to our community and also ask for your assistance with translations of the news into (your!) other languages along with the needed second or third set of eyes to assist in editing our work before publishing. If you can share a small amount of your time to aid our team which strives to keep all of us informed, we need you. Please reach out to us via IRC on #debian-publicity on OFTC.net, or our public mailing list, or via email at press@debian.org for sensitive or private inquiries.

4 August 2023

Shirish Agarwal: License Raj 2.0, 2023

About a week back Jio launched a laptop called JioBook that will be manufactured in China
The most interesting thing is that the whole thing will be produced in Hunan, China. Then 3 days later India mandates a licensing requirement for Apple, Dell and other laptop/tablet manufacturers. And all of these in the guise of Make in India . It is similar how India has exempted Adani and the Tatas from buying as much solar cells as are needed and then sell the same in India. Reliance will be basically monopolizing the laptop business. And if people think that projects like Raspberry Pi, Arduino etc. will be exempted they have another think coming.

History of License Raj After India became free, in the 1980s the Congress wanted to open its markets to the world just like China did. But at that time, the BJP, though small via Jan Sangh made the argument that we are not ready for the world. The indian businessman needs a bit more time. And hence a compromise was made. The compromise was simple. Indian Industry and people who wanted to get anything from the west, needed a license. This was very much in line how the Russian economy was evolving. All the three nations, India, China and Russia were on similar paths. China broke away where it opened up limited markets for competition and gave state support to its firms. Russia and Japan on the other hand, kept their markets relatively closed. The same thing happened in India, what happened in Russia and elsewhere. The businessman got what he wanted, he just corrupted the system. Reliance, the conglomerate today abused the same system as much as it could. Its defence was to be seen as the small guy. I wouldn t go into that as that itself would be a big story in itself. Whatever was sold in India was sold with huge commissions and just like Russia scarcity became the order of the day. Monopolies flourished and competition was nowhere. These remained till 1991 when Prime Minister Mr. Manmohan Singh was forced to liberalize and open up the markets. Even at that time, the RSS through its Swadeshi Jagran Manch was sharing the end of the world prophecies for the Indian businessman.

2014 Current Regime In 2010, in U.K. the Conservative party came in power under the leadership of David Cameron who was influenced by the policies of Margaret Thatcher who arguably ditched manufacturing in the UK. David Cameron and his party did the same 2010 onwards but for public services under the name austerity. India has been doing the same. The inequality has gone up while people s purchasing power has gone drastically down. CMIE figures are much more drastic and education is a joke.
Add to that since 2016 funding for scientists have gone to the dogs and now they are even playing with doctor s careers. I do not have to remind people that a woman scientist took almost a quarter century to find a drug delivery system that others said was impossible. And she did it using public finance. Science is hard. I have already shared in a previous blog post how it took the Chinese 20 years to reach where they are and somehow we think we will be able to both China and Japan. Of the 160 odd countries that are on planet earth, only a handful of countries have both the means and the knowledge to use and expand on that. While I was not part of Taiwan Debconf, later I came to know that even Taiwan in many ways is similar to Japan in the sense that a majority of its population is stuck in low-paid jobs (apart from those employed in TSMC) which is similar to Keiretsu or Chabeol from either Japan or South Korea. In all these cases, only a small percentage of the economy is going forward while the rest is stagnating or even going backwards. Similar is the case in India as well Unlike the Americans who chose the path to have more competition, we have chosen the path to have more monopolies. So even though, I very much liked Louis es project sooner or later finding the devices itself would be hard. While the recent notification is for laptops, what stops them from doing the same with mobiles or even desktop systems. As it is, both smartphones as well as desktop systems has been contracting since last year as food inflation has gone up. Add to that availability of products has been made scarce (whether by design or not, unknown.) The end result, the latest processor launched overseas becomes the new thing here 3-4 years later. And that was before this notification. This will only decrease competition and make Ambanis rich at cost of everyone else. So much for east of doing business . Also the backlash has been pretty much been tepid. So what I shared will probably happen again sooner or later. The only interesting thing is that it s based on Android, probably in part due to the issues people seeing in both Windows 10, 11 and whatnot. Till later. Update :- The print tried a decluttering but instead cluttered the topic. While what he shared all was true, and certainly it is a step backwards but he didn t need to show how most Indians had to go to RBI for the same. I remember my Mamaji doing the same and sharing afterwards that all he had was $100 for a day which while being a big sum was paltry if you were staying in a hotel and were there for company business. He survived on bananas and whatver cheap veg. he could find then. This is almost 35-40 odd years ago. As shared the Govt. has been doing missteps for quite sometime now. The print does try to take a balanced take so it doesn t run counter of the Government but even it knows that this is a bad take. The whole thing about security is just laughable, did they wake up after 9 years. And now in its own wisdom it apparently has shifted the ban instead from now to 3 months afterwards. Of course, most people on the right just applauding without understanding the complexities and implications of the same. Vendors like Samsung and Apple who have made assembly operations would do a double-think and shift to Taiwan, Vietnam, Mexico anywhere. Global money follows global trends. And such missteps do not help

Implications in A.I. products One of the things that has not been thought about how companies that are making A.I. products in India or even MNC s will suffer. Most of them right now are in stealth mode but are made for Intel or AMD or ARM depending upon how it works for them. There is nothing to tell if the companies made their plea and was it heard or unheard. If the Government doesn t revert it then sooner or later they would either have to go abroad or cash out/sell to somebody else. Some people on the right also know this but for whatever reason have chosen to remain silent. Till later

Shirish Agarwal: Birth Control, Consent, Rape & Violence.

Consent, Violence, Sexual Abuse This again would be somewhat of a mature post. So children, please refrain from reading. When I hear the above words, my first thought goes to Aamir Khan s Season 1 Episode 2 in Satyamev Jayate. This was the first time that the topic of child sexual abuse was bought in the forefront in the hall rather than a topic to be discussed in the corner. Unfortunately, that episode is still in Hindi and no English subtitles available even today shows a lack of sensitivity in Indian s part to still come to terms with Child abuse that happens in India. The numbers that they had shared at that time were shocking. More than 50 per cent children experience sexual abuse and mostly from friends or relatives. That means 1 in every 2 children. And this was in 2012. But the problem of child sexual abuse didn t start then, it started in the 1960 s, 70 s. In the 1960 s, 1970s we didn t have much of cinema and TV and whatever there was pretty limited. There were few B movie producers, but most of them came into their own in the 1980s. So what influenced Indians in those days were softcore magazines that either had a mature aunt or a teen and they would tease and sooner or later the man would sort of overpower them and fulfill his needs. Even mainstream Indian cinema used similar tropes. One of the most memorable songs of that era Wada Karo Nahi Chodoge Tum Meera Saath from Aa Gale Lag jaa. A bit of context for the song. This is where Shashi Kapoor sees, he tries to ask her to date him, she says no. He tries to put an act where he shows he can t skate or rather pretends. And kinda takes a promise from her that she will date him if he is able to skate. And viola, the next moment he is not just skating, but dancing and singing as well. And the whole he touches her and you can see that is uncomfortable and yet after a while he woos her. Now this is problematic today because we are seeing it from today s lens. It might also have problematic with the feminists of that time, but they probably would have been called overly sensitive or something like that. And this is what went in Universal cinema. But this is just tip of the surface. There were and are multiple poems and even art in those times that flirted and even sort of engaged with sexual molestation, rape both in poems as well as literature, both in Hindi and various regional literature. Similar to stuff that Keats and some other poets (problematic stuff) they wrote and where both men and women were in two minds, whether to take all the other good literature out or kinda make the difference between the art and artist. Now, while Aamir spoke about consent it wasn t in any official capacity or even a legal capacity. The interesting thing was that there was an Act that kinda put some safeguards but had been doing rounds for almost a decade. Because the extremists on both sides, Hindus and Muslims were not in favor of that Act, it was still doing rounds. Aamir s episode on 6th May 2012 and the discussions in mainstream media following that forced the Indian legislature to make POSCO as a law on 22nd May 2012. Almost 6 months to 2 weeks, Nirbhaya happened and changes to the law happened in another 6 months. Both voyeurism and stalking were made jailable offenses and consent became part of lingua franca in the Supreme Court. Couple of weeks back, I had shared in the Manipur case the part about fingering . In the same Act, another change that was done that insertion of any part including foreign objects in any of the openings would be classed as rape . So in that Manipur case, at least those 2-3 people who have been identified as clear perpetrators according to the law of land would be rapists and should have the highest punishment. Unfortunately, the system is rigged against women as Vrinda Grover had shared just couple of weeks back. How a 6 month fast track case (to be completed within 6 months) becomes a 10 year old case tells you the efficacy of the system. The reality is far more worse than is shared or known. Just a few months ago, GOI shared some data on Sexual Harassment in 2018-19. And this is after constant pressurizing by Activists that GOI doesn t like. In fact, in 2021, Unicef had shared data about how India was one of the five countries where child brides are still prevalent. India denied but didn t produce any alternative data. The firing of Mr. James over NHFS data sets doesn t give it any brownie points to the present Government. What has happened in the last few years is that the Government for reasons of its own had been scrubbing and censoring a lot of data. I won t go far, just 2 day old story which I had shared just couple of days back. Roughly a 25 year old RPF constable kills his superior and kills 3 Muslims after going to various coaches and then the Government uses the defence of temporary insanity.
Even the mental instability defence has twists and turns
Incidentally, Press Trust of India is s private organization and not the public broadcaster of the old. And incidentally, just a few days back, it came to light that they hadn t paid Income tax for last 2-3 years. Because of issues in reward money, the public came to know otherwise they wouldn t have known. Coming back to the topic itself, there was a video where you could hear and see the accused stating after killing the three Muslims that if you want to remain in India, then you have to vote for only Modi or Yogi, otherwise this will happen. That video was scrubbed both from Twitter as well as YouTube. All centralized platforms at the very least, whether it is Google (Youtube) or Twitter or Meta uses its own media ID. Meta s being most problematic but that probably being a discussion for another day. The same censorship tools are applied rigorously and lot of incidents are buried. Cases of girls being thrown in lakes just after lakes or low numbers of conviction in case of gang rapes are more often than not disappears.
The above article shared just a few days ago that how low the conviction rates of gang rapes are in Gujarat tells you the story. You might get the story today, but wait for a few weeks and you will find that the story has disappeared. What most people do not know or understand is that the web is increasingly a public repository of idea, imaginations and trust and authoritarian regimes like Government of India is increasingly using both official as well as unofficial methods to suppress the same. To see that in the last 9 odd years, GOI has made the highest number of takedown requests and been either number one or number two tells all. My question is where we do from here ??? If even the Minister and her Ministry can do only whataboutery rather than answer the questions, then how we are supposed to come up solutions. And even if a solution exists, without the state and Center agreeing and co-operating with civil society, any solution will be far off the desired result. I am sorry that I at least have no answers

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in July 2023

Welcome to the July 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project. In our reports, we try to outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit the Contribute page on our website.
Marcel Fourn et al. presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in San Francisco, CA on The Importance and Challenges of Reproducible Builds for Software Supply Chain Security. As summarised in last month s report, the abstract of their paper begins:
The 2020 Solarwinds attack was a tipping point that caused a heightened awareness about the security of the software supply chain and in particular the large amount of trust placed in build systems. Reproducible Builds (R-Bs) provide a strong foundation to build defenses for arbitrary attacks against build systems by ensuring that given the same source code, build environment, and build instructions, bitwise-identical artifacts are created. (PDF)
Chris Lamb published an interview with Simon Butler, associate senior lecturer in the School of Informatics at the University of Sk vde, on the business adoption of Reproducible Builds. (This is actually the seventh instalment in a series featuring the projects, companies and individuals who support our project. We started this series by featuring the Civil Infrastructure Platform project, and followed this up with a post about the Ford Foundation as well as recent ones about ARDC, the Google Open Source Security Team (GOSST), Bootstrappable Builds, the F-Droid project and David A. Wheeler.) Vagrant Cascadian presented Breaking the Chains of Trusting Trust at FOSSY 2023.
Rahul Bajaj has been working with Roland Clobus on merging an overview of environment variations to our website:
I have identified 16 root causes for unreproducible builds in my empirical study, which I have linked to the corresponding documentation. The initial MR right now contains information about 10 root causes. For each root cause, I have provided a definition, a notable instance, and a workaround. However, I have only found workarounds for 5 out of the 10 root causes listed in this merge request. In the upcoming commits, I plan to add an additional 6 root causes. I kindly request you review the text for any necessary refinements, modifications, or corrections. Additionally, I would appreciate the help with documentation for the solutions/workarounds for the remaining root causes: Archive Metadata, Build ID, File System Ordering, File Permissions, and Snippet Encoding. Your input on the identified root causes for unreproducible builds would be greatly appreciated. [ ]
Just a reminder that our upcoming Reproducible Builds Summit is set to take place from October 31st November 2nd 2023 in Hamburg, Germany. Our summits are a unique gathering that brings together attendees from diverse projects, united by a shared vision of advancing the Reproducible Builds effort. During this enriching event, participants will have the opportunity to engage in discussions, establish connections and exchange ideas to drive progress in this vital field. If you re interested in joining us this year, please make sure to read the event page which has more details about the event and location.
There was more progress towards making the Go programming language ecosystem reproducible this month, including: In addition, kpcyrd posted to our mailing list to report that:
while packaging govulncheck for Arch Linux I noticed a checksum mismatch for a tar file I downloaded from go.googlesource.com. I used diffoscope to compare the .tar file I downloaded with the .tar file the build server downloaded, and noticed the timestamps are different.
In Debian, 20 reviews of Debian packages were added, 25 were updated and 25 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. A number of issue types were updated, including marking ffile_prefix_map_passed_to_clang being fixed since Debian bullseye [ ] and adding a Debian bug tracker reference for the nondeterminism_added_by_pyqt5_pyrcc5 issue [ ]. In addition, Roland Clobus posted another detailed update of the status of reproducible Debian ISO images on our mailing list. In particular, Roland helpfully summarised that live images are looking good, and the number of (passing) automated tests is growing .
Bernhard M. Wiedemann published another monthly report about reproducibility within openSUSE.
F-Droid added 20 new reproducible apps in July, making 165 apps in total that are published with Reproducible Builds and using the upstream developer s signature. [ ]
The Sphinx documentation tool recently accepted a change to improve deterministic reproducibility of documentation. It s internal util.inspect.object_description attempts to sort collections, but this can fail. The change handles the failure case by using string-based object descriptions as a fallback deterministic sort ordering, as well as adding recursive object-description calls for list and tuple datatypes. As a result, documentation generated by Sphinx will be more likely to be automatically reproducible. Lastly in news, kpcyrd posted to our mailing list announcing a new repro-env tool:
My initial interest in reproducible builds was how do I distribute pre-compiled binaries on GitHub without people raising security concerns about them . I ve cycled back to this original problem about 5 years later and built a tool that is meant to address this. [ ]

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:
In diffoscope development this month, versions 244, 245 and 246 were uploaded to Debian unstable by Chris Lamb, who also made the following changes:
  • Don t include the file size in image metadata. It is, at best, distracting, and it is already in the directory metadata. [ ]
  • Add compatibility with libarchive-5. [ ]
  • Mark that the test_dex::test_javap_14_differences test requires the procyon tool. [ ]
  • Initial work on DOS/MBR extraction. [ ]
  • Move to using assert_diff in the .ico and .jpeg tests. [ ]
  • Temporarily mark some Android-related as XFAIL due to Debian bugs #1040941 & #1040916. [ ]
  • Fix the test skipped reason generation in the case of a version outside of the required range. [ ]
  • Update copyright years. [ ][ ]
  • Fix try.diffoscope.org. [ ]
In addition, Gianfranco Costamagna added support for LLVM version 16. [ ]

Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework (available at tests.reproducible-builds.org) in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In July, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:
  • General changes:
    • Upgrade Jenkins host to Debian bookworm now that Debian 12.1 is out. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • djm: improve UX when rebooting a node fails. [ ]
    • djm: reduce wait time between rebooting nodes. [ ]
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Various refactoring of the Debian scheduler. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Make Debian live builds more robust with respect to salsa.debian.org returning HTTP 502 errors. [ ][ ]
    • Use the legacy SCP protocol instead of the SFTP protocol when transfering Debian live builds. [ ][ ]
    • Speed up a number of database queries thanks, Myon! [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Split create_meta_pkg_sets job into two (for Debian unstable and Debian testing) to half the job runtime to approximately 90 minutes. [ ][ ]
    • Split scheduler job into four separate jobs, one for each tested architecture. [ ][ ]
    • Treat more PostgreSQL errors as serious (for some jobs). [ ]
    • Re-enable automatic database documentation now that postgresql_autodoc is back in Debian bookworm. [ ]
    • Remove various hardcoding of Debian release names. [ ]
    • Drop some i386 special casing. [ ]
  • Other distributions:
    • Speed up Alpine SQL queries. [ ]
    • Adjust CSS layout for Arch Linux pages to match 3 and not 4 repos being tested. [ ]
    • Drop the community Arch Linux repo as it has now been merged into the extra repo. [ ]
    • Speed up a number of Arch-related database queries. [ ]
    • Try harder to properly cleanup after building OpenWrt packages. [ ]
    • Drop all kfreebsd-related tests now that it s officially dead. [ ]
  • System health:
    • Always ignore some well-known harmless orphan processes. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Detect another case of job failure due to Jenkins shutdown. [ ]
    • Show all non co-installable package sets on the status page. [ ]
    • Warn that some specific reboot nodes are currently false-positives. [ ]
  • Node health checks:
    • Run system and node health checks for Jenkins less frequently. [ ]
    • Try to restart any failed dpkg-db-backup [ ] and munin-node services [ ].
In addition, Vagrant Cascadian updated the paths in our automated to tests to use the same paths used by the official Debian build servers. [ ]
If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

2 August 2023

Shirish Agarwal: Kaalkoot

Kaalkoot This post would be mature and would talk about death and other things. So if there are young kids or whatever kindly refrain from reading it. Just saw this series in 2 days. In a way the series encompasses all that which is wrong in India and partly the World perhaps. IMDB describes it as A police officer must deal with society s and his mother s pressure to marry, as well as frequent bullying and pressure from his superiors. But that hardly does justice to either the story or the script or the various ebbs and flows it takes. A very bit part of the series of the series is about patriarchy and the various forms it takes. It tells how we would use women and then throw them, many a times by willing relatives who want to save face . And it s so many ways and so many times that people do not even pay attention. I will not share the story as it needs to be experienced as well as the many paths the story takes as well as many paths it could have taken. What is remarkable about this series is that everyone is grey apart from the women who are victims in all of these. Even our hero, the protagonist uses it to take advantage of a woman. There are multiple stories and timelines that are just touched upon. For e.g. curing the gay and boasting he has cured many guys and now have their married with families. How many families suffered god only knows, both sexes dissatisfied At the end of the series while a slightly progressive end is shown, in reality you are left wondering whether the decision taken by the protagonist and the woman having just no agency. The hero knowing he is superior to her because of her perceived weakness. A deep-rooted malaise that is difficult to break out of. His father too and the relationship the hero longs for to have with his father who is no more. He does share some of his feelings with his mum, which touches the cord of probably every child whose mother father left them early and all those things they wanted to talk or would have chatted out if they knew this would be the last conversation they will ever have with them. Couldn t even say sorry for all the wrongs and the pain we have given them. There are just too many layers in the webseries that I would need to see it a few times to be aware of. I could sense the undercurrents but sometimes you need to see such series or movies multiple times to understand them or it could simply be the case of me being just too thick. There are also poems and poems as we know may have multiple meanings and is or can be more contextual to the person reading it rather than the creator. At the end, while it does show a positive end, in reality I feel there is no redemption for us. I am talking about men. We are too proud, too haughty and too insecure. And if things don t go the way we want, it s the women who pay the price I am not going to talk about any news either about Manipur or anywhere else because hate crimes have become normal. An RPF personnel plans, and goes from coach to coach to find Muslims and shoot them and then say only the tallest leaders in RW should be voted for. A mob then burns down Muslim s homes and businesses, all par for the course. The mentally unstable moniker taken right from the American far-right notebook.
The Americans have taken it much further than anyone else using open carry and stand your ground, laws to make blacks afraid and going further. I don t really wanna go down that route as it s a whole another pandora s box and what little I have read tells me it starts from the very beginning when the European settlers invaded America and took indigenous people s lands and giving it the moniker of Wild West . Just too much to deal with.

Mental Health But these spate of bad news, of murders, rapes and whatnot does take a toll on the mental health of people. Take this tweet as instance
I think the above tweet is an expression that is felt by many Indians, whatsoever their religion might be. Most of them unable to express it as many have responsibilities in which they are the only caretakers or the only earner in the family. So even though, we have huge inflation especially in foods and whatnot the daily struggle to put food on the table extinguishes everything else. And for those who may want to go through for whatever reasons, there is nothing like MAID in India. There was a good debate that I saw few months ago about it, and I think both the for and against miss a very crucial point. People have their own idea or imagination of what dignity in living as well as dignity of dying. I was seeing some videos of NHS doctors (UK) where many doctors couldn t do anything as their patients died as they couldn t pay bills for heating. Many of the patients wanted the doctors to end their suffering. The case against it is that people should reach out and have community services. While that is a great theory, practically it is difficult. Whether it is in dense populated area like Pune (population around 10 odd million) or the whole country of Japan which is heavily being depopulated, in both the extreme scenarios the access to mental health is and would be low. And even if there is someway that the Government, the community, business community etc. come altogether and solve it, it just shifts the problem. All the shit, our fears, our uncertainties, our doubts we unload on the medical health professional but where do they go to get rid of it. It s a vicious circular problem. I did read somewhere that mental health professionals are four times prone to suicide than other doctors. And all emergency care professionals like firefighters and whatnot are again 4 times more likely to commit suicide than the general population. How much those stats are true, have no clue as again most of such kinds of data is not collected by NCRB (National Crime Records Bureau) in India. In fact, NCRB often describes such deaths as accidental deaths as otherwise the person would be termed as loser or something else. Even in and after death, people are worried about labels. But that I guess is what s it all about. I do not know but do guess most of the 160 odd countries would have similar issues and most of them keep quiet about it. Till later

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