Search Results: "ag"

28 August 2015

Ben Hutchings: Securing debcheckout of git repositories

Some source packages have Vcs-Git URLs using the git: scheme, which is plain-text and unauthenticated. It's probably harder to MITM than HTTP, but still we can do better than this even for anonymous checkouts. git is now nearly as efficient at cloning/pulling over HTTP-S, so why not make that the default? Adding the following lines to ~/.gitconfig will make git consistently use HTTP-S to access Alioth. It's not quite HTTPS-Everywhere, but it's a step in that direction: 
[url "https://anonscm.debian.org/git/"]
	insteadOf = git://anonscm.debian.org/
	insteadOf = git://git.debian.org/
Additionally you can automatically fix up the push URL in case you have or are later given commit access to the repository on Alioth: 
[url "git+ssh://git.debian.org/git/"]
	pushInsteadOf = git://anonscm.debian.org/
	pushInsteadOf = git://git.debian.org/
Similar for git.kernel.org: 
[url "https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/"]
	insteadOf = git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/
[url "git+ssh://ra.kernel.org/pub/scm/"]
	pushInsteadOf = git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/
RTFM for more information on these configuration variables.

27 August 2015

Norbert Preining: Kobo Japanese Dictionary Enhancer 1.1

Lots of releases in quick succession the new Kobo Japanese Dictionary Enhancer brings multi-dictionary support and merged translation support. Using the Wadoku project s edict2 database we can now add also German translations. kobo-japanese-dictionary-enhancer Looking at the numbers, we have now 326064 translated entries when using the English edict2, and 368943 translated entries when using the German Wadoku edict version. And more than that, as an extra feature it is now also possible to have merged translations, so to have both German and English translations added. kobo-dict-de-en Please head over to the main page of the project for details and download instructions. If you need my help in creating the updated dictionary, please feel free to contact me. Enjoy.

Thorsten Glaser: Go enjoy shell

Dimitri, I personally enjoy shell 

tglase@tglase:~ $ x= 
tglase@tglase:~ $ echo $ x::12 
 
tglase@tglase:~ $ printf '%s\n' 'import sys' 'print(sys.argv[1][:12])' >x.py
tglase@tglase:~ $ python x.py $x

much more than Python, actually. (Python is the language in which you do not want to write code dealing with strings, due to UnicodeDecodeError and all; even py3k is not much better.) I would have commented on your post if it allowed doing so without getting a proprietary Google+ account.

Joey Hess: then and now

It's 2004 and I'm in Oldenburg DE, working on the Debian Installer. Colin and I pair program on partman, its new partitioner, to get it into shape. We've somewhat reluctantly decided to use it. Partman is in some ways a beautful piece of work, a mass of semi-object-oriented, super extensible shell code that sprang fully formed from the brow of Anton. And in many ways, it's mad, full of sector alignment twiddling math implemented in tens of thousands of lines of shell script scattered amoung hundreds of tiny files that are impossible to keep straight. In the tiny Oldenburg Developers Meeting, full of obscure hardware and crazy intensity of ideas like porting Debian to VAXen, we hack late into the night, night after night, and crash on the floor. sepia toned hackers round a table It's 2015 and I'm at a Chinese bakery, then at the Berkeley pier, then in a SF food truck lot, catching half an hour here and there in my vacation to add some features to Propellor. Mostly writing down data types for things like filesystem formats, partition layouts, and then some small amount of haskell code to use them in generic ways. Putting these peices together and reusing stuff already in Propellor (like chroot creation). Before long I have this, which is only 2 undefined functions away from (probably) working: 
let chroot d = Chroot.debootstrapped (System (Debian Unstable) "amd64") mempty d
        & Apt.installed ["openssh-server"]
        & ...
    partitions = fitChrootSize MSDOS
        [ (Just "/boot", mkPartiton EXT2)
        , (Just "/", mkPartition EXT4)
        , (Nothing, const (mkPartition LinuxSwap (MegaBytes 256)))
        ]
 in Diskimage.built chroot partitions (grubBooted PC)
This is at least a replication of vmdebootstrap, generating a bootable disk image from that config and 400 lines of code, with enormous customizability of the disk image contents, using all the abilities of Propellor. But is also, effectively, a replication of everything partman is used for (aside from UI and RAID/LVM). sailboat on the SF bay What a difference a decade and better choices of architecture make! In many ways, this is the loosely coupled, extensible, highly configurable system partman aspired to be. Plus elegance. And I'm writing it on a lark, because I have some spare half hours in my vacation. Past Debian Installer team lead Tollef stops by for lunch, I show him the code, and we have the conversation old d-i developers always have about partman. I can't say that partman was a failure, because it's been used by millions to install Debian and Ubuntu and etc for a decade. Anything that deletes that many Windows partitions is a success. But it's been an unhappy success. Nobody has ever had a good time writing partman recipes; the code has grown duplication and unmaintainability. I can't say that these extensions to Propellor will be a success; there's no plan here to replace Debian Installer (although with a few hundred more lines of code, propellor is d-i 2.0); indeed I'm just adding generic useful stuff and building further stuff out of it without any particular end goal. Perhaps that's the real difference.

26 August 2015

Carl Chenet: Retweet 0.2 : bump to Python 3

Follow me on Identi.ca or Twitter or Diaspora*diaspora-banner Don t know Retweet? My last post about it introduced this small Twitter bot whichs just retweets (for now) every tweets from a Twitter account to another one. Retweet Retweet was created in order to improve the Journal du hacker Twitter account. The Journal du hacker is a Hacker News-like French-speaking website. logo-journal-du-hacker Especially useful to broadcast news through a network of Twitter accounts, Retweet was improved to bump Python version to 3.4 and to improve pep8 compliance (work in progress). The project is also well documented and should be quite simple to install, configure and use. After my first blog post about Retweet, new users gave me feedback about it and I now have great ideas for future features for the next release. Twitter_logo_blue What about you? If you try it, please tell me what you think about it, opening a bug request or ask for new features. Or just write your comment here ;)

Holger Levsen: 20150826-jenkins-fourth-state

jenkins has a fourth state So, at the jenkins.debian.org BOF (very short summary: j.d.o will be coming soonish, long summary thanks to the awesome video team) I shared a trick I discovered almost a year ago, but had never really announced anywhere yet, which enables one to programatically use a fourth state to the existing three jenkins job states ("success", "unstable" and "failed"), which is "aborted". Common knowledge is that it's only possible to abort jobs manually, but it's also possible to do that like this: 
TMPFILE=$(mktemp)
curl https://jenkins.debian.net/jnlpJars/jenkins-cli.jar -o $TMPFILE
java -jar $TMPFILE -s http://localhost:8080/ set-build-result aborted
rm $TMPFILE
exit
The nice thing about aborted job runs is that these don't cause any notifications (neither mail nor IRC), so I intend to use this for several cases: I've no idea when I'll get along to actually implement that, so help doing this is very much welcome and I'd also be glad to help hooking this into the existing jenkins.debian.net.git codebase. In related news, I'm back home since Monday and am thankful for having shared a very nice and productive DebConf15 with many old and new friends in Heidelberg. Many thanks to everyone involved in making this happen!

Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, July 2015

A Debian LTS logoLike each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In July, 79.50 work hours have been dispatched among 7 paid contributors. Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation August has seen a small decrease in terms of sponsored hours (71.50 hours per month) because two sponsors did not pay their renewal invoice on time. That said they reconfirmed their willingness to support us and things should be fixed after the summer. And we should be able to reach our first milestone of funding the equivalent of a half-time position, in particular since a new platinum sponsor might join the project. DebConf 15 happened this month and Debian LTS was featured in a talk and in a work session. Have a look at the video recordings: In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation is better than last month: the dla-needed.txt file lists 20 packages awaiting an update (4 less than last month), the list of open vulnerabilities in Squeeze shows about 22 affected packages in total (11 less than last month). The new LTS frontdesk ensures regular triage of CVE reports and the difference between both counts dropped significantly. That s good! Thanks to our sponsors Thanks to Sig-I/O, a new bronze sponsor, which joins our 35 other sponsors.

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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RProtoBuf 0.4.3

A new maintenance release 0.4.3 of RProtoBuf is now on CRAN. RProtoBuf provides R bindings for the Google Protocol Buffers ("Protobuf") data encoding library used and released by Google, and deployed as a language and operating-system agnostic protocol by numerous projects. This release comes upon the request of CRAN and adds additional import statements to the NAMESPACE file. While we were at it, a few more things got cleaned up and edited---but no new code was added. Full details are below.
Changes in RProtoBuf version 0.4.3 (2015-08-25)
  • Declare additional imports from methods in NAMESPACE.
  • Travis CI tests now run faster as all CRAN dependencies are installed as binaries.
  • The tools/winlibs.R script now tests for R (< 3.3.0) before calling the (soon-to-be phased out) setInternet2() function.
  • Several small edits were made to DESCRIPTION to clarify library dependencies, provide additonal references and conform to now-current R packaging standards.
CRANberries also provides a diff to the previous release. The RProtoBuf page has a package vignette, a a 'quick' overview vignette, and a unit test summary vignette. Questions, comments etc should go to the GitHub issue tracker off the GitHub repo.

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

25 August 2015

Norbert Preining: Plex Home Theater 1.4.1 updated for Debian/sid

Debian/sid is going through a big restructuring with the switch to a new gcc and libstc++. Furthermore, libcec3 is now the default. So I have updated my PHT builds for Debian/sid to build and install on the current status, both for amd64 and i386. plex-debian-new Add the following lines to your sources.list: 
deb http://www.preining.info/debian/ sid pht
deb-src http://www.preining.info/debian/ sid pht
You can also grab the binary for amd64 directly here for amd64 and i386, you can get the source package with 
dget http://www.preining.info/debian/pool/pht/p/plexhometheater/plexhometheater_1.4.1-2.dsc
The release file and changes file are signed with my official Debian key 0x860CDC13. For Debian/testing I am waiting until the transition has settled. Please wait a bit more. Now be ready for enjoying the next movie!

Richard Hartmann: Tor-enabled Debian mirror, part 2

Well, that was quite some feedback to my last post; via blog, email, irc, and in person. I actually think this may be the most feedback I ever got to any single blog post. If you are still waiting for a reply after this new post, I will get back to you. To handle common question/information at once: So this whole thing is a lot easier now: 
# apt-get install torsocks apt-transport-tor
# mv /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list--backup2
# > /etc/apt/sources.list << EOF
deb tor+http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free
deb tor+http://earthqfvaeuv5bla.onion/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free
EOF
# apt-get update
# apt-get install vcsh

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 17 in Stretch cycle

A good amount of the Debian reproducible builds team had the chance to enjoy face-to-face interactions during DebConf15.
Names in red and blue were all present at DebConf15
Picture of the reproducible builds talk during DebConf15
Hugging people with whom one has been working tirelessly for months gives a lot of warm-fuzzy feelings. Several recorded and hallway discussions paved the way to solve the remaining issues to get reproducible builds part of Debian proper. Both talks from the Debian Project Leader and the release team mentioned the effort as important for the future of Debian. A forty-five minutes talk presented the state of the reproducible builds effort. It was then followed by an hour long roundtable to discuss current blockers regarding dpkg, .buildinfo and their integration in the archive. Picture of the reproducible builds roundtable during DebConf15 Toolchain fixes Reiner Herrmann submitted a patch to make rdfind sort the processed files before doing any operation. Chris Lamb proposed a new patch for wheel implementing support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH instead of the custom WHEEL_FORCE_TIMESTAMP. akira sent one making man2html SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH aware. St phane Glondu reported that dpkg-source would not respect tarball permissions when unpacking under a umask of 002. After hours of iterative testing during the DebConf workshop, Sandro Knau created a test case showing how pdflatex output can be non-deterministic with some PNG files. Packages fixed The following 65 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: alacarte, arbtt, bullet, ccfits, commons-daemon, crack-attack, d-conf, ejabberd-contrib, erlang-bear, erlang-cherly, erlang-cowlib, erlang-folsom, erlang-goldrush, erlang-ibrowse, erlang-jiffy, erlang-lager, erlang-lhttpc, erlang-meck, erlang-p1-cache-tab, erlang-p1-iconv, erlang-p1-logger, erlang-p1-mysql, erlang-p1-pam, erlang-p1-pgsql, erlang-p1-sip, erlang-p1-stringprep, erlang-p1-stun, erlang-p1-tls, erlang-p1-utils, erlang-p1-xml, erlang-p1-yaml, erlang-p1-zlib, erlang-ranch, erlang-redis-client, erlang-uuid, freecontact, givaro, glade, gnome-shell, gupnp, gvfs, htseq, jags, jana, knot, libconfig, libkolab, libmatio, libvsqlitepp, mpmath, octave-zenity, openigtlink, paman, pisa, pynifti, qof, ruby-blankslate, ruby-xml-simple, timingframework, trace-cmd, tsung, wings3d, xdg-user-dirs, xz-utils, zpspell. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Uploads that might have fixed reproducibility issues: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: St phane Glondu reported two issues regarding embedded build date in omake and cduce. Aur lien Jarno submitted a fix for the breakage of make-dfsg test suite. As binutils now creates deterministic libraries by default, Aur lien's patch makes use of a wrapper to give the U flag to ar. Reiner Herrmann reported an issue with pound which embeds random dhparams in its code during the build. Better solutions are yet to be found. reproducible.debian.net Package pages on reproducible.debian.net now have a new layout improving readability designed by Mattia Rizzolo, h01ger, and Ulrike. The navigation is now on the left as vertical space is more valuable nowadays. armhf is now enabled on all pages except the dashboard. Actual tests on armhf are expected to start shortly. (Mattia Rizzolo, h01ger) The limit on how many packages people can schedule using the reschedule script on Alioth has been bumped to 200. (h01ger) mod_rewrite is now used instead of JavaScript for the form in the dashboard. (h01ger) Following the rename of the software, debbindiff has mostly been replaced by either diffoscope or differences in generated HTML and IRC notification output. Connections to UDD have been made more robust. (Mattia Rizzolo) diffoscope development diffoscope version 31 was released on August 21st. This version improves fuzzy-matching by using the tlsh algorithm instead of ssdeep. New command line options are available: --max-diff-input-lines and --max-diff-block-lines to override limits on diff input and output (Reiner Herrmann), --debugger to dump the user into pdb in case of crashes (Mattia Rizzolo). jar archives should now be detected properly (Reiner Herrman). Several general code cleanups were also done by Chris Lamb. strip-nondeterminism development Andrew Ayer released strip-nondeterminism version 0.010-1. Java properties file in jar should now be detected more accurately. A missing dependency spotted by St phane Glondu has been added. Testing directory ordering issues: disorderfs During the reproducible builds workshop at DebConf, participants identified that we were still short of a good way to test variations on filesystem behaviors (e.g. file ordering or disk usage). Andrew Ayer took a couple of hours to create disorderfs. Based on FUSE, disorderfs in an overlay filesystem that will mount the content of a directory at another location. For this first version, it will make the order in which files appear in a directory random. Documentation update Dhole documented how to implement support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in Python, bash, Makefiles, CMake, and C. Chris Lamb started to convert the wiki page describing SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH into a Freedesktop-like specification in the hope that it will convince more upstream to adopt it. Package reviews 44 reviews have been removed, 192 added and 77 updated this week. New issues identified this week: locale_dependent_order_in_devlibs_depends, randomness_in_ocaml_startup_files, randomness_in_ocaml_packed_libraries, randomness_in_ocaml_custom_executables, undeterministic_symlinking_by_rdfind, random_build_path_by_golang_compiler, and images_in_pdf_generated_by_latex. 117 new FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb, Chris West (Faux), and Niko Tyni. Misc. Some reproducibility issues might face us very late. Chris Lamb noticed that the test suite for python-pykmip was now failing because its test certificates have expired. Let's hope no packages are hiding a certificate valid for 10 years somewhere in their source! Pictures courtesy and copyright of Debian's own paparazzi: Aigars Mahinovs.

Richard Hartmann: Tor-enabled Debian mirror

During Jacob Applebaum's talk at DebConf15, he noted that Debian should TLS-enable all services, especially the mirrors. His reasoning was that when a high-value target downloads a security update for package foo, an adversary knows that they are still using a vulnerable version of foo and try to attack before the security update has been installed. In this specific case, TLS is not of much use though. If the target downloads 4.7 MiB right after a security update with 4.7 MiB has been released, or downloads from security.debian.org, it's still obvious what's happening. Even padding won't help much as the 5 MiB download will also be suspicious. The mere act of downloading anything from the mirrors after an update has been released is reason enough to try an attack. The solution, is, of course, Tor. weasel was nice enough to set up a hidden service on Debian's infrastructure; initally we agreed that he would just give me a VM and I would do the actual work, but he went the full way on his own. Thanks :) This service is not redundant, it uses a key which is stored on the local drive, the .onion will change, and things are expected to break. But at least this service exists now and can be used, tested, and put under some load: 
http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion/
I couldn't get apt-get to be content with a .onion in /etc/apt/sources.list and Acquire::socks::proxy "socks://127.0.0.1:9050"; in /etc/apt/apt.conf, but the torify wrapper worked like a charm. What follows is, to the best of my knowledge, the first ever download from Debian's "official" Tor-enabled mirror: 
~ # apt-get install torsocks
~ # mv /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.backup
~ # echo 'deb http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion/debian/ unstable main non-free contrib' > /etc/apt/sources.list
~ # torify apt-get update
Get:1 http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion unstable InRelease [215 kB]
Get:2 http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion unstable/main amd64 Packages [7548 kB]
Get:3 http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion unstable/non-free amd64 Packages [91.9 kB]
Get:4 http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion unstable/contrib amd64 Packages [58.5 kB]
Get:5 http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion unstable/main i386 Packages [7541 kB]
Get:6 http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion unstable/non-free i386 Packages [85.4 kB]
Get:7 http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion unstable/contrib i386 Packages [58.1 kB]
Get:8 http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion unstable/contrib Translation-en [45.7 kB]
Get:9 http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion unstable/main Translation-en [5060 kB]
Get:10 http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion unstable/non-free Translation-en [80.8 kB]
Fetched 20.8 MB in 2min 0s (172 kB/s)
Reading package lists... Done
~ # torify apt-get install vim
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  vim-common vim-nox vim-runtime vim-tiny
Suggested packages:
  ctags vim-doc vim-scripts cscope indent
The following packages will be upgraded:
  vim vim-common vim-nox vim-runtime vim-tiny
5 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 661 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B/7719 kB of archives.
After this operation, 2048 B disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] 
Retrieving bug reports... Done
Parsing Found/Fixed information... Done
Reading changelogs... Done
(Reading database ... 316427 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../vim-nox_2%3a7.4.826-1_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking vim-nox (2:7.4.826-1) over (2:7.4.712-3) ...
Preparing to unpack .../vim_2%3a7.4.826-1_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking vim (2:7.4.826-1) over (2:7.4.712-3) ...
Preparing to unpack .../vim-tiny_2%3a7.4.826-1_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking vim-tiny (2:7.4.826-1) over (2:7.4.712-3) ...
Preparing to unpack .../vim-runtime_2%3a7.4.826-1_all.deb ...
Unpacking vim-runtime (2:7.4.826-1) over (2:7.4.712-3) ...
Preparing to unpack .../vim-common_2%3a7.4.826-1_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking vim-common (2:7.4.826-1) over (2:7.4.712-3) ...
Processing triggers for man-db (2.7.0.2-5) ...
Processing triggers for mime-support (3.58) ...
Processing triggers for desktop-file-utils (0.22-1) ...
Processing triggers for hicolor-icon-theme (0.13-1) ...
Setting up vim-common (2:7.4.826-1) ...
Setting up vim-runtime (2:7.4.826-1) ...
Processing /usr/share/vim/addons/doc
Setting up vim-nox (2:7.4.826-1) ...
Setting up vim (2:7.4.826-1) ...
Setting up vim-tiny (2:7.4.826-1) ...
~ #
More services will follow. noodles, weasel, and me agreed that the project as a whole should aim to Tor-enable the complete package lifecycle, package information, and the website. Maybe a more secure install option on the official images which, amongst others, sets up apt, apt-listbugs, dput, reportbug, et al up to use Tor without further configuration could even be a realistic stretch goal.

Norbert Preining: Kobo Japanese Dictionary Enhancer 1.0

I have just released a wastly improved new version of the Kobo Japanese Dictionary Enhancer. It allows you to enhance the Kobo Japanese dictionary with English translations. kobo-japanese-dictionary-enhancer The new version provides now 326064 translated entries, which covers most non-compound words, including Hiragana. In my daily life reading Harry Potter and some other books in Japanese, I haven t found many untranslated words by now. Please head over to the main page of the project for details and download instructions. If you need my help in creating the updated dictionary, please feel free to contact me. Enjoy.

Raphael Geissert: Updates to the sources.debian.net editor

Debconf is a great opportunity to meet people in real life, to express and share ideas in a different way, and to work on all sort of stuff.

I therefore spent some time to finish a couple of features in the editor for sources.debian.net. Here are some of the changes:



Get it for chromium, and iceweasel.

If your browser performs automatic updates of the extensions (the default), you should soon be upgraded to version 0.1.0 or later, bringing all those changes to your browser.

Want to see more? multi-file editing? in-browser storage of the editing session? that and more can be done, so feel free to join me and contribute to the Debian sources online editor!

24 August 2015

Iustin Pop: Finally, systemd!

Even though Debian has moved to systemd as default a long while ago now, I've stayed with sysv as I have somewhat custom setups (self-built trimmed down kernels, separate /usr not pre-mounted by initrd, etc.). After installing a new system with Jessie and playing a bit with systemd on it a couple of months ago, I said it's finally time to upgrade. Easier said than starting to actually do it . The first system I upgraded was a recent (~1 year old) install. It was a trimmed-down system with Debian's kernel, so everything went smoothly. So smoothly that I soon forgot I made the change, and didn't do any more switches for a while. Systemd was therefore out of my mind until this recent Friday when I got a bug report about mt's rcS init script and shipping a proper systemd unit. The first step should be to actually start using systemd, so I said - let's convert some more things! During the weekend I upgraded one system, still a reasonably small install, but older - probably 6-7 years. First reboot into systemd flagged the fact that I had some forced-load modules which no longer exist, fact that was too easy to ignore with sysv. Nice! The only downside was that there seems to be some race condition between and ntp, as it fails to start on boot (port listen conflict). I'll see if it repeats. Another small issue is that systemd doesn't like duplicate fstab entries (i.e. two devices which both refer to the same mount point), while this works fine for mount itself (when specifying the block device). I said that after that system, I'll wait a while until to upgrade the next. But so it happened that today another system had an issue and I had to reboot it (damn lost uptimes!). The kernel was old so I booted into a newer one (this time compiled with the required systemd options), so I had a though - what if I take the opportunity and also switch to systemd on this system? Caution said to wait, since this was the oldest system - installed sometime during or before 2004. Plus it doesn't use an initrd (long story), and it has a split /usr. Caution excitement caution lost and I proceeded. It turns out that systemd does warn about split /usr but itself has no problems. I learned that I also had very old sysfs entries that no longer exist, and which I didn't know about as sysv doesn't make it obvious. I also had a crypttab entry which was obsolete, and I forgot about it, until I met the nice red moving ASCII bar which fortunately had a timeout. To be honest, I believed I'll have to rescue boot and fix things on this "always-unstable" machine, on which I install and run random things, and which has a hackish /etc/fstab setup. I'm quite surprised it just worked. On unstable. So thanks a lot to the Debian systemd team. It was much simpler than I thought, and now, on to exploring systemd! P.S.: the sad part is that usually I'm a strong proponent of declarative configuration, but for some reason I was reluctant to migrate to systemd also on account on losing the "power" of shell scripts. Humans

Jonathan McDowell: Random post-DebConf 15 thoughts

There are a bunch of things I mean to blog about, but as I have just got fully home from Heidelberg and DebConf15 this afternoon that seems most appropriate to start with. It s a bit of a set of disjoint thoughts, but I figure I should write them down while they re in my head. DebConf is an interesting conference. It s the best opportunity the Debian project has every year to come together and actually spend a decent amount of time with each other. As a result it s a fairly full on experience, with lots of planned talks as a basis and a wide range of technical discussions and general social interaction filling in whatever gaps are available. I always find it a thoroughly enjoyable experience, but equally I m glad to be home and doing delightfully dull things like washing my clothes and buying fresh milk. I have always been of the opinion that the key aspect of DebConf is the face time. It was thus great to see so many people there - we were told several times that this was the largest DebConf so far (~ 570 people IIRC). That s good in the sense that it meant I got to speak to a lot of people (both old friends and new), but does mean that there are various people I know I didn t spend enough, or in some cases any, time with. My apologies, but I think many of us were in the same situation. I don t feel it made the conference any less productive for me - I managed to get a bunch of hacking done, discuss a number of open questions in person with various people and get pulled into various interesting discussions I hadn t expected. In short, a typical DebConf. Also I d like to say that the venue worked out really well. I ll admit I was dubious when I heard it was in a hostel, but it was well located (about a 30 minute walk into town, and a reasonable bus service available from just outside the door), self-contained with decent facilities (I m a big believer in having DebConf talks + accommodation be as close as possible to each other) and the room was much better than expected (well, aside from the snoring but I can t blame the DebConf organisers for that). One of the surprising and interesting things for me that was different from previous DebConfs was the opportunity to have more conversations with a legal leaning. I expect to go to DebConf and do OpenPGP/general crypto related bits. I wasn t expecting affirmation about the things I have learnt on my course over the past year, in terms of feeling that I could use that knowledge in the process of helping Debian. It provided me with some hope that I ll be able to tie my technology and law skills together in a way that I will find suitably entertaining (as did various conversations where people expressed significant interest in the crossover). Next year is in Cape Town, South Africa. It s a long way (though I suppose no worse than Portland and I get to stay in the same time zone), and a quick look at flights indicates they re quite expensive at the moment. The bid presentation did look pretty good though so as soon as the dates are confirmed (I believe this will happen as soon as there are signed contracts in place) I ll take another look at flights. In short, excellent DebConf, thanks to the organisers, lovely to see everyone I managed to speak to, apologies to those of you I didn t manage to speak to. Hopefully see you in Cape Town next year.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppDE 0.1.3

A pure maintenance release 0.1.3 of the RcppDE package arrived on CRAN yesterday. RcppDE is a "port" of DEoptim, a popular package for derivative-free optimisation using differential optimization, to C++. By using RcppArmadillo, the code becomes a lot shorter and more legible. This version simply fixes a typo in the vignette metadata noticed by Kurt, and updates the package in a few other spots to update it to current CRAN Repository Policy standards. Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release.

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

Michael Prokop: DebConf15: Continuous Delivery of Debian packages talk

At the Debian Conference 2015 I gave a talk about Continuous Delivery of Debian packages. My slides are available online (PDF, 753KB). Thanks to the fantastic video team there s also a recording of the talk available: WebM (471MB) and on YouTube.

23 August 2015

Norbert Preining: Debian/TeX Live complete update

Triggered by all the bugs around font problems I spent my weekend instead of mountaineering with crawling through the TeX Live history for changes and fixes to dvipdfm-x. Thanks to for his hints, I have pulled out the changes necessary to fix Type1 support in dvipdfm-x and have reincluded them into the Debian texlive-bin package. The uploaded binaries (version 2015.20150524.37493-6) are already compiled against the new C++ ABI, see the Debian transition, so most systems will still need to wait for the update to be installable. Debian - TeX Live 2015 At the same time I did an update to the whole set of arch: all packages (texlive-base, texlive-lang, texlive-extra (version 2015.20150823-1). This was triggered by bug that seems to be caused by bad interplay between fontspec and l3 packages. Furthermore, I needed to remove the activation for fontconfig of the URW++ Base35 fonts, to ensure that fontconfig returns always the ones from the gsfonts package, instead of a mixture between TeX Live and gsfonts. Unrelated bug fix: libpaper intergration has been fixed and should work again. So for now all the bugs are now hopefully settled and we are back to normal. What remains is trying to fix jessie which is also broken in some respects. Updated packages acro, animate, babel-bosnian, babel-french, babel-latin, beamer-FUBerlin, beebe, breqn, chemformula, chet, cnltx, crossrefware, dantelogo, datetime2-it-fulltext, disser, drm, dvipdfmx-def, ecclesiastic, eledform, gradstudentresume, idxcmds, l3build, mcf2graph, media9, pageslts, pdfpages, reledmac, siunitx, tcolorbox, tex4ht, texlive-docindex, texlive-scripts, udesoftec, upmethodology, xindy. New packages blochsphere, e-french, fitbox, nar Enjoy.

22 August 2015

Joachim Breitner: Quickest path to a local apt repository

As I m writing this, DebConf 15 is coming to an end. I spend most of my time improving the situation of the Haskell Packages in Debian, by improving the tooling and upgrading our packages to match Stackage 3.0 and build against GHC 7.10. But that is mostly of special interest (see this mail for a partial summary), so I d like to use this post to advertise a very small and simple package I just uploaded to Debian: During one of the discussion here I noticed that it is rather tricky to make a locally built package available to apt-get. The latest version in unstable allows one to install a debian package simply by running apt-get install on it, but in some cases, e.g. when you want a convenient way to list all packages that you made available for local use, this is insufficient. So the usual approach is to create a local apt repository with your packages. Which is non-trivial: You can use dpkg-scanpackage, apt-ftparchive or reprepro. You need to create the directories, run the commands, add the repository to your local sources. You need to worry about signing it or setting the right options to make apt-get accept it without signing. It is precisely this work that my new package local-apt-repository automates for you: Once it is installed, you simply drop the .deb file into /srv/local-apt-repository/ and after the next apt-get update the package can be installed like any other package from the archive. I chose to use the advanced features that systemd provides namely activation upon path changes so works best with systemd as the init system. If you want to contribute, or test it before it passes the NEW queue, check out the git repository.

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