June was the second month I contributed to Debian LTS under the
Freexian umbrella. In total I spent ten hours working on:
The first upload of new packages after TeX Live 2015 hit unstable. Against my expectations, the bugs didn t come in in the thousands, more or less there were only some fixes necessary in the binary package, which lead to a few updates over the last week. This upload fixes an RC bug (missing replaces), and also takes a step further in the Debianization of the packages: I finally removed texconfig and texlinks programs, as they are not useful on Debian, and should actually not be used.
Besides a few other fixes, of course there was the usual chore of package updates.
Updated packages
babel-french, biblatex-fiwi, biblatex-opcit-booktitle, c90, chemformula, chemgreek, cjkutils, ctex, curve2e, dozenal, eledmac, elements, enotez, garuda-c90, koma-script, l3build, latex, leadsheets, norasi-c90, pkuthss, poemscol, pstricks, pst-solides3d, siunitx, termmenu, texlive-scripts, tudscr, upmethodology, xindy.
New packages
arabi-add, br-lex.
Enjoy.
apt-get install pcscd pcsc-tools openscpcsc_scan to see if it could see my smart card./usr/lib/opensc-pkcs11.soapt-get install icedtea-pluginsudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/javaapt-get updateapt-get install oracle-java7-installertar axf ArubaSign*.tar*cd ArubaSing-*/apps/distjava -jar ArubaSign.jar.p7m file ready for me. I
rejoiced, as now I might, just might actually get paid for my work.
Today saw the release of PostgreSQL 9.5 Alpha 1. Packages for all supported
Debian and Ubuntu releases are available on apt.postgresql.org:
deb http://apt.postgresql.org/pub/repos/apt/ YOUR_RELEASE_HERE-pgdg main 9.5
The package is also waiting in NEW to be accepted for Debian experimental.
Being curious which PostgreSQL releases have been in use over time, I pulled some graphics
from Debian's popularity contest data:
Before we included the PostgreSQL major version in the package name,
"postgresql" contained the server, so that line represents the installation
count of the pre-7.4 releases at the left end of the graph.
Interestingly, 7.4 reached its installation peak well past 8.1's. Does anyone have an
idea why that happened?
New features in DUCK
Carnivore-* data
DUCK now uses carnivore- names,email tables from UDD, giving a nice list of packages grouped by Maintainer/Uploader names.
Domain grouping
A per-domain-listing is now also available here.
DUCK challenge at DebConf15
After announcing DUCK in mid-june 2012, the number of source packages with issues is still somewhat stable around 1700.
After a recent update of the curl libs, i also managed to get rid of 200 false positives, caused by SSL-verification issues, as can be seen here.
To speed things up a bit and lower the number of broken links, i hereby propose the following challenge:
The first 99 persons who fix at least 1 broken URL and upload the fixed package before end of DebConf15 will get an awesome "200 OK" DUCK-branded lighter at DebConf15!
The challenge starts right now!
I will try hard to not forget anyone who fixes packages (note the s ;-), but if you feel missed out, please contact me at DC15.
Also, please remember that this is not a valid excuse to NMU packages ;-).
su
1.67 - Thu Jul 2 17:05:07 IST 2015
* Relax minimum window size to accomodate low res screens
* Fix variable name to comply with our "constants" assuptions
* Get more aggressive in power saving for Intel HD Audio
* Account Device Mapper devices
* Add swsusp freeze support
* Switch battery-level-polling default to True
* Detect ethernet carrier, early and relibaly
* changes the boolean setting *_ACTIVATE_SATA_POWER to a customizable
*_SATA_POLICY, with backward-compatible defaults and documentation
Thanks Yuir D'Elia
PS: On a side note, over the years, Linux's power savings functionality has improved a lot, all thanks to its use in the mobile worlds. At the same time, because of more companies shipping drivers depending on external firmware, stability has become less reliable. And to add to that, bare functionality of devices typically ask for disabling, you know what, LPM.
So, at the end, the result is the same.
Update on 2015-07-02 22:15 UTC: as Petter Reinholdtsen noted in the comments:
Try adding /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/90squid with content like this: Acquire::http::Pipeline-Depth 0; It turn off the feature in apt confusing proxies.this indeed avoids those Hash Sum mismatch failures with HAProxy as well. Thanks, Petter! Many of you might know apt s Hash Sum mismatch issue and there are plenty of bug reports about it (like #517874, #624122, #743298 + #762079). Recently I saw the Hash Sum mismatch usually only when using random mirrors with e.g. httpredir.debian.org in apt s sources.list, but with a static mirror such issues usually don t exist anymore. A customer of mine has a Debian mirror and this issue wasn t a problem there neither, until recently: Since the mirror also includes packages provided to customers and the mirror needs to be available 24/7 we decided to provide another instance of the mirror and put those systems behind HAProxy (version 1.5.8-3 as present in Debian/jessie). The HAProxy setup worked fine and we didn t notice any issues in our tests, until the daily Q/A builds randomly started to report failures:
Failed to fetch http://example.org/foobar_amd64.deb Hash Sum mismatchWhen repeating the download there was no problem though. This problem only appeared about once every 15-20 minutes with random package files and it affected only Debian/squeeze clients (wheezy and jessie aren t affected at all). The problem also didn t appear when directly accessing the mirrors behind HAproxy. We tried plenty of different options for apt (Acquire::http::No-Cache=true, Acquire::http::No-Partial=true, ) and also played with some HAProxy configurations, nothing really helped. With apt s Debug::Acquire::http=True we saw that there really was a checksum failure and HTTP status code 102 ( Processing , or in terms of apt: Waiting for headers ) seems to be involved. The actual problem between apt on Debian/squeeze and HAProxy is still unknown to us though. While digging deeper into this issue is on my todo list yet, I found a way to avoid those Hash Sum mismatch failures: switch from http to https in sources.list. As soon as https is used the problem doesn t appear anymore. I m documenting it here just in case anyone else should run into it.
So recently I posted on twitter about a sudden gain in strength:
I have conquered pull-ups!
On Saturday night I could do 1.5. Today I could do 11!
(Chinups were always easy.)
#fitness Steve Kemp (@Stolen_Souls) June 15, 2015
So pull-up vs. chin-up? This just relates to which way you place your hands: palm facing you (chin-up) and palm way from you (pull-up). Some technical details here but chinups are easier, and more bicep-centric.Anyway too much writing. My next challenge is the one-armed pushup. However long it takes, and I think it will take a while, that's what I'm working toward.
Well, there we are, trying to build another round of TeX Live packages for Debian, just to realize that the lintian error that should have been downgraded to warning (or removed) is still around, due to doubts about the license. Ok. Well, anyway, but what I found is even more funny:
E: texlive-extra source: license-problem-non-free-img-lenna texmf-dist/doc/latex/reflectgraphics/lenna.jpg |
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna, https://www.debian.org/vote/2012/vote_002, #771191How fortunate our generation is that we don t have anything else to care about Anyway, back to rebuilding orig.tars, source packages, and binary packages!
Info: The given source file is cropped from playboy centerfold. This image is a picture of Lena S derberg, shot by photographer Dwight Hooker, cropped from the centerfold of the November 1972 issue of Playboy magazine. According to Hutchison, Jamie (May June 2001). Culture, Communication, and an Information Age Madonna (PDF). IEEE Professional Communication Society Newsletter 45 (3). (page 5 second column second paragraph), this image is distributable but not free. Moreover, Lenna photo has been pointed to as an example of sexism in the sciences, reinforcing gender stereotypes. Please use well known and free test image. Please also submit md5sum, sha1sum, and sha256 of this file as a bug report for lintian.
I have just released version 1.10 of Obnam, my backup program. See the
website at http://obnam.org for details on what it does. The new
version is available from git (see http://git.liw.fi) and as Debian
packages from http://code.liw.fi/debian, and uploaded to Debian,
hopefully soon in unstable.
The NEWS file extract below gives the highlights of what's new in this
version.
Version 1.10, released 2015-07-01
Major bug fixes:
obnam backup command to lock the whole
repository, the same way as obnam forget does, when it removes
checkpoint generations. This means that during checkpoint removal,
no other client can make a backup, which is unfortunate. To avoid
that, set leave-checkpoints = yes in the configuration. That will
prevent obnam backup from removing checkpoints.obnam list-formats command to list all
repository formats.upload-queue-size setting is now 1024,
chosen based on some benchmarking made by Lars Wirzenius to balance
speed and memory use.green-albatross, as been
introduced. It is not ready for actual use, and is only added so
that its code doesn't diverge far from the main line of development.python setup.py build no longer formats the manual page into plain
text. This is now done in python setup.py docs instead. The latter
is an optional build step, and probably only works on Debian.obnam restore --to=DIR now requires that the directory DIR
either doesn't exist, or it is empty when the restore starts. This
is to prevent users from restore on top of a running system.
Hello dear readers,
It has been quite some time since I blogged on Planet Debian,so today,
I just want to give some news to fellow Debian pals.
My involvment in Debian is still there. I'm probably less visible
nowadays, but I'm still actively working on some packages, monotiring
some i18n activities and doing work on D-I.
But, as you know, running has taken precedence nowadays and is
still becoming a growing part of my life (along with my family, of
course).
This year, I had a first "summit" running the "Vulcain" trail race in
French "Massif Central" (mountains in Central France), which was 80km
and 3000m positive climb race. It was run mostly in snow and with
quite bad weather conditions, a good training for more difficult
races. I completed it in about more than 12 hours, for a race that
finally had less than 60% finishers.
Later on, most races were preparation races for the summer moutain
races : I mostly ran three 50km trail races in the Paris and
neighbourhood area. All of them were very good results with a good
feeling. Some were run along with friends from the Kikourou.net web
community, where I am now very active.
My training was also strongly increased wrt former years (yes that
*is* possible), peaking at more than 500km during May, where I was
mostly on holidays all month long (lucky man).
And now, the first Great Great Thing of the year is coming : La Montagn'hard, 110 kilometers,
about 9000 meters positive climb, around Les Contamines,
close to Mont-Blanc in French Alps.
That is a Big One, indeed. Technically more difficult than the TDS
race I ran last August, during DebConf (120km, but "only" 7000 meters
climb). Montagn'hard is indeed known as one of the most difficult
moutain trail races in France.
I plan to complete it in about 29 hours....but that can indeed be 30,
32 or even 35, who knows what can happen? Given the very high
temperatures over Europe this week (they'll peak at about 38 C on
Saturday in the Alps), that will be an incredibly difficult challenge
and we expect about only 40% finishers.
A live tracking will be available for thos who care at http://chrono.geofp.com/montagnhard2015/v3/. Wish
me luck !
Next challenge will be end of August, with the "Echappee Belle" race :
144km and 10.000 meters positive climb, still in French Alps
(Belledonne range, this time). About 48 hours, or even up to 55, two
nights out.....harder and hopefully better, faster, stronger...:-)
Jo and I spent a few days in Sweden and had an awesome time! The
main reason for being there was Leif and Maria's wedding way up north
in Skellefte . They cunningly organised their ceremony for the
Midsummer weekend, which was an excellent plan - we had a full weekend
of partying while we were there. :-)
We had some time to ourselves while we were there, so we wandered
about a little and got to see some of the beautiful coastal
countryside.
Then on the way home we stopped off in Ume to visit Mattias
Wadenstein (maswan) and his wife Melanie, and he showed me around some
of the machines that he's been admining on behalf of Debian. Maybe I'm
a sad geek, but I feel quite a bond with one of the machines there,
pettersson.debian.org. It's the official CD build
machine for Debian, and I've been responsible for thrashing it really
hard for the last 5 years or so... :-)
Massive thanks to the
University of Ume and
their Academic Computer Club for
hosting Debian machines and serving all the CD images for us!
The only downsides from the trip were the massive tiredness
(midnight sun is pretty, but notconducive to sleep!)
the mosquito bites and the nasty plague^Wcold that we picked up while
we were there... Ah well. :-)
While I mentioned last September that I had failed to be selected for an H-1B and had been having discussions at DebConf about alternative employment, I never got around to elaborating on what I d ended up doing.
Short answer: I ended up becoming a law student, studying for a Masters in Legal Science at Queen s University Belfast. I ve just completed my first year of the 2 year course and have managed to do well enough in the 6 modules so far to convince myself it wasn t a crazy choice.
Longer answer: After Vello went under in June I decided to take a couple of months before fully investigating what to do next, largely because I figured I d either find something that wanted me to start ASAP or fail to find anything and stress about it. During this period a friend happened to mention to me that the applications for the Queen s law course were still open. He happened to know that it was something I d considered before a few times. Various discussions (some of them over gin, I ll admit) ensued and I eventually decided to submit an application. This was towards the end of August, and I figured I d also talk to people at DebConf to see if there was anything out there tech-wise that I could get excited about.
It turned out that I was feeling a bit jaded about the whole tech scene. Another friend is of the strong opinion that you should take a break at least every 10 years. Heeding her advice I decided to go ahead with the law course. I haven t regretted it at all. My initial interest was largely driven by a belief that there are too few people who understand both tech and law. I started with interests around intellectual property and contract law as well as issues that arise from trying to legislate for the global nature of most tech these days. However the course is a complete UK qualifying degree (I can go on to do the professional qualification in NI or England & Wales) and the first year has been about public law. Which has been much more interesting than I was expecting (even, would you believe it, EU law). Especially given the potential changing constitutional landscape of the UK after the recent general election, with regard to talk of repeal of the Human Rights Act and a referendum on exit from the EU.
Next year will concentrate more on private law, and I m hoping to be able to tie that in better to what initially drove me to pursue this path. I m still not exactly sure which direction I ll go once I complete the course, but whatever happens I want to keep a linkage between my skill sets. That could be either leaning towards the legal side but with the appreciation of tech, returning to tech but with the appreciation of the legal side of things or perhaps specialising further down an academic path that links both. I guess I ll see what the next year brings. :)
What happened about the reproducible
builds effort this week:
Toolchain fixes
Norbert Preining uploaded texinfo/6.0.0.dfsg.1-2 which makes texinfo indices reproducible. Original patch by Chris Lamb.
Lunar submitted recently rebased patches to make the file order of files inside .deb stable.
akira filled #789843 to make tex4ht stop printing timestamps in its HTML output by default.
Dhole wrote a patch for xutils-dev to prevent timestamps when creating gzip compresed files.
Reiner Herrmann sent a follow-up patch for wheel to use UTC as timezone when outputing timestamps.
Mattia Rizzolo started a discussion regarding the failure to build from source of subversion when -Wdate-time is added to CPPFLAGS which happens when asking dpkg-buildflags to use the reproducible profile. SWIG errors out because it doesn't recognize the aforementioned flag.
Trying to get the .buildinfo specification to more definitive state, Lunar started a discussion on storing the checksums of the binary package used in dpkg status database.
akira discovered while proposing a fix for simgrid that CMake internal command to create tarballs would record a timestamp in the gzip header. A way to prevent it is to use the GZIP environment variable to ask gzip not to store timestamps, but this will soon become unsupported. It's up for discussion if the best place to fix the problem would be to fix it for all CMake users at once.
Infrastructure-related work
Andreas Henriksson did a delayed NMU upload of pbuilder which adds minimal support for build profiles and includes several fixes from Mattia Rizzolo affecting reproducibility tests.
Neils Thykier uploaded lintian which both raises the severity of package-contains-timestamped-gzip and avoids false positives for this tag (thanks to Tomasz Buchert).
Petter Reinholdtsen filled #789761 suggesting that how-can-i-help should prompt its users about fixing reproducibility issues.
Packages fixed
The following packages became reproducible due to changes in their
build dependencies:
autorun4linuxcd,
libwildmagic,
lifelines,
plexus-i18n,
texlive-base,
texlive-extra,
texlive-lang.
The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:
debian/changelog entry.CMakeLists.txt to give GZIP=-n for tar.__DATE__ and __TIME__ macros.HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO in Doxygen configuration.HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO to Doxygen.$datetime from footer.html used by Doxygen.HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO in Doxygen configuration.$Storable::canonical = 1 to make space_groups.db.PL output deterministic.HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO in Doxygen configuration.HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO in Doxygen configuration.HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO in Doxygen configuration.HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO in Doxygen configuration.HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO in Doxygen configuration.$datetime from the footer.HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO in Doxygen configuration.LC_ALL to C before sorting.debian/changelog as build datejavap, readelf, objdump, zipinfo, unsqusahfs; useless MD5 checksum and last modified date in javap output; bad handling of charsets in PO files; the destination path for gzip compressed files not ending in .gz; only metadata of cpio archives were actually compared. stat output was further trimmed to make directory comparison more useful.
Having the test suite enabled a refactoring of how comparators were written, switching from a forest of differences to a single tree. This helped removing dust from the oldest parts of the code.
Together with some other small changes, version 25 was released on June 27th. A follow up release was made the next day to fix a hole in the test suite and the resulting unidentified leftover from the comparator refactoring. (Lunar)
Documentation update
Ximin Luo improved code examples for some proposed environment variables for reference timestamps. Dhole added an example on how to fix timestamps C pre-processor macros by adding a way to set the build date externally. akira documented her fix for tex4ht timestamps.
Package reviews
94 obsolete
reviews have
been removed, 330 added and 153 updated this week.
Hats off for Chris West (Faux) who investigated many fail to build from source issues and reported the relevant bugs.
Slight improvements were made to the scripts for editing the review database, edit-notes and clean-notes. (Mattia Rizzolo)
Meetings
A meeting was held on June 23rd. Minutes are available.
The next meeting will happen on Tuesday 2015-07-07 at 17:00 UTC.
Misc.
The Linux Foundation announced that it was funding the work of Lunar and h01ger on reproducible builds in Debian and other distributions. This was further relayed in a Bits from Debian blog post.
Perhaps they are just playing dead.
Don't turn your back if you see one.
Folks may want to use this alien in free software.
The original photo is available on request.
To the extent possible under law, I have waived all copyright
and related or neighboring rights to this work.
The alien has signed a model release.
An email or a link to this page would be appreciated though.
After my last post on Portal, there was a sale of The Talos Principle, so I got it and started playing. And soon I got stuck at these kind of puzzles where one has to fit in pieces into a frame. As a logician I hate to solve something by trial and error, so I decided I write a solver for these kind of puzzles, based on a propositional logic encoding and satisfiability solver. Sometimes it is good to be logician!
In the Talos Principle, access to new worlds and specific items is often blocked by gates that open by putting Sigils into the frame. Of course, collecting the sigils is the most challenging part, but that is often solvable by logical thinking. On the other hand, solving these fitting puzzles drove me crazy, so let us solve them with a SAT solver.
Encoding
I used a propositional encoding that for each combination of cells and sigils assigns a propositional variable, which is true if the specific sigil rests in on that cell in the final solution. That is, we have variable (encoded as x_i_j_n) where runs over the cells of the frame, and over the (numbered) sigils.
Setup
I have written a perl program that for a definition of a puzzle (see later), outputs SMT2 code, which then is checked for satisfiability and generation of model with the z3 solver (which is available in Debian).
Necessary assertions
We have to state relations between these propositional variables to obtain a proper solution, in particular we have added the following statements:
(assert (or x_i_j_1 x_i_j_2 ... x_i_j_n)) |
(assert (and (not (and x_1_1_1 x_1_1_2)) (not (and x_1_1_1 x_1_1_3)) ... (assert (and (not (and x_1_2_1 x_1_2_2)) (not (and x_1_2_1 x_1_2_3)) ... |
(assert (or x_1_1_n x_1_2_n ... x_6_6_1)) |
(assert (or ... (and x_3_2_n x_4_2_n x_5_2_n x_4_3_n) (and x_3_3_n x_3_2_n x_3_1_n x_4_2_n) (and x_3_2_n x_4_2_n x_5_2_n x_4_1_n) ... |
create_smt2_def(8,6,'a','a','b','cl','cl','cr','cr','cr','q','q','sl','sl'); |
# for each piece, call the defining assertions for my $n (1..$nn) my $p = $pieces[$n-1]; print "(assert (or\n"; for my $i (1..$xx) for my $j (1..$yy) if ($p eq 'q') type_square($xx,$yy,$i,$j,$n); elsif ($p eq 'a') type_potest($xx,$yy,$i,$j,$n); .... |
sub type_potest my ($xx,$yy,$i,$j,$n) = @_; my ($il, $jl, $ir, $jr, $iu, $ju); $il = $i - 1; $ir = $i + 1; $iu = $i; $jl = $jr = $j; $ju = $j + 1; do_rotate_shipout($xx,$yy, $i, $j, $n, $il, $jl, $ir, $jr, $iu, $ju); |
sub do_rotate_shipout my ($xx,$yy, $i, $j, $n, @pairs) = @_ ; for my $g (0..3) @pairs = rotate90($i, $j, @pairs); check_and_shipout($xx,$yy, $n, $i, $j, @pairs); |
sub rotate90 my ($i, $j, @pairs) = @_ ; my @ret; while (@pairs) my $ii = shift @pairs; my $jj = shift @pairs; my $ni = $i - ($jj - $j); my $nj = $j + ($ii - $i); push @ret, $ni, $nj; return @ret; |
perl tangram.pl z3 -in egrep 'define-fun true false' sed -e 'h;s/.*//;G;N;s/\n//g' grep true sort |
(define-fun x_1_1_10 () Bool true) (define-fun x_1_2_10 () Bool true) (define-fun x_1_3_5 () Bool true) (define-fun x_1_4_6 () Bool true) (define-fun x_1_5_6 () Bool true) (define-fun x_1_6_6 () Bool true) (define-fun x_2_1_10 () Bool true) (define-fun x_2_2_10 () Bool true) (define-fun x_2_3_5 () Bool true) ... |
Here s a photo journal of a walk I just completed around the Pot Lake loop of the Bluff Wilderness Hiking Trail. Hope you enjoy it!
I was dissatisfied with my initial post, so have reduced the size to improve load time, changed the gallery software and have rewritten many of the captions.
[slb_group]
Click this photo to start the slideshow.
fastboot erase modemst1
fastboot erase modemst2
fastboot reboot
Next.