When uploading a new library package which changes its API/behavior in a subtle way, typically you will only hear about the downstream breakage after you ve uploaded the new library package (via bug reports telling you that your package FTBFS, fails to build from source). I prefer quality-assurance to happen proactively rather than reactively whenever possible, so I set out to write a tool which automates the rebuild of reverse-build-dependencies, i.e. all packages whose build process could be affected by the package one is about to upload. The result is a tool called ratt, which is short for Rebuild All The Things! . It injects the newly-built Debian package you provide it, figures out all the reverse-build-dependencies, invokes sbuild for all of them, and finally presents you with a list of packages that failed to build. To demonstrate how the tool works, let s assume we want to upload a new version of the Go library github.com/jacobsa/gcloud. To keep this example brief, we don t actually do anything to the package but bump its version number:

midna /tmp $ debcheckout golang-github-jacobsa-gcloud-dev
declared git repository at git://anonscm.debian.org/pkg-go/packages/golang-github-jacobsa-gcloud.git
git clone git://anonscm.debian.org/pkg-go/packages/golang-github-jacobsa-gcloud.git golang-github-jacobsa-gcloud-dev ...
Cloning into 'golang-github-jacobsa-gcloud-dev'...
remote: Counting objects: 84, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (73/73), done.
remote: Total 84 (delta 19), reused 0 (delta 0)
Receiving objects: 100% (84/84), 87.70 KiB   0 bytes/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (19/19), done.
Checking connectivity... done.
midna /tmp $ cd golang-github-jacobsa-gcloud-dev
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-gcloud-dev $ dch -i -m 'dummy new version'
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-gcloud-dev $ git commit -a -m 'dummy new version'
midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-gcloud-dev $ gbp buildpackage --git-pbuilder
[ ]

So far, so good. Now let s invoke ratt to rebuild all reverse-build-dependencies:

midna /tmp/golang-github-jacobsa-gcloud-dev $ ratt golang-github-jacobsa-gcloud_0.0\~git20150709-2_amd64.changes         
2015/08/16 11:48:41 Loading changes file "golang-github-jacobsa-gcloud_0.0~git20150709-2_amd64.changes"
2015/08/16 11:48:41  - 1 binary packages: golang-github-jacobsa-gcloud-dev
2015/08/16 11:48:41  - corresponding .debs (will be injected when building):
2015/08/16 11:48:41     golang-github-jacobsa-gcloud-dev_0.0~git20150709-2_all.deb
2015/08/16 11:48:41 Loading sources index "/var/lib/apt/lists/ftp.ch.debian.org_debian_dists_sid_contrib_source_Sources"
2015/08/16 11:48:41 Loading sources index "/var/lib/apt/lists/ftp.ch.debian.org_debian_dists_sid_main_source_Sources"
2015/08/16 11:48:43 Loading sources index "/var/lib/apt/lists/ftp.ch.debian.org_debian_dists_sid_non-free_source_Sources"
2015/08/16 11:48:43 Building golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit_0.0~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1 (commandline: [sbuild --arch-all --dist=sid --nolog golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit_0.0~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1 --extra-package=golang-github-jacobsa-gcloud-dev_0.0~git20150709-2_all.deb])
2015/08/16 11:49:19 Build results:
2015/08/16 11:49:19 PASSED: golang-github-jacobsa-ratelimit_0.0~git20150723.0.2ca5e0c-1

Thanks for reading this far, and I hope ratt makes your life a tiny bit easier. As ratt just entered Debian unstable, you can install it using apt-get install ratt. If you have any feedback, I m eager to hear it.

My friend Ross Mayhew and I enjoyed a perfect Autumn afternoon yesterday, full of colours on the Bluff Trail. Not all of these photos do justice to the splendour and intricate detail I had hoped to capture, but I hope you enjoy them all the same. Click the photo to start the slideshow.

Late afternoon at the top of Pot Lake loop

Hello Thanks to the help of Daniel Dehennin and Paul Cochrane, The rakudo implementation of Perl 6 is now up to date on Debian/sid. Unlike previous version, Perl 6 on Debian uses moarvm backend. No other backend is provided. Please use the following command to install Perl6 on Debian:

sudo apt-get install rakudo

All the best
Tagged: debian, package, Perl6

I praise etckeeper enough. That you use or not formal configuration management tools, you should have etckeeper installed, even if to do ad-hoc changes in an emergency. For example, I just thought I could use it to figure out which Debian release I originally installed on this machine, and when I did the upgrades. Turns out it's amazingly easy:

cd /etc
sudo git log --oneline -p --no-prefix  /etc/issue

Here is the result here:

root@marcos:/etc# git log --oneline -p --no-prefix --pretty=format:'%s (%ai)' /etc/issue   cat
Initial commit (2011-02-23 00:14:08 -0500)
diff --git issue issue
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9d52ed2
--- /dev/null
+++ issue
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 \n \l
+
saving uncommitted changes in /etc prior to apt run (2011-05-22 19:08:20 -0400)
diff --git issue issue
index 9d52ed2..647d490 100644
--- issue
+++ issue
@@ -1,2 +1,2 @@
-Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 \n \l
+Debian GNU/Linux wheezy/sid \n \l
committing changes in /etc after apt run (2013-01-23 09:40:27 -0500)
diff --git issue issue
index 647d490..d363ace 100644
--- issue
+++ issue
@@ -1,2 +1,2 @@
-Debian GNU/Linux wheezy/sid \n \l
+Debian GNU/Linux 7.0 \n \l
committing changes in /etc after apt run (2013-06-15 13:02:04 -0400)
diff --git issue issue
index d363ace..efc8255 100644
--- issue
+++ issue
@@ -1,2 +1,2 @@
-Debian GNU/Linux 7.0 \n \l
+Debian GNU/Linux 7 \n \l
committing changes in /etc after apt run (2014-02-02 23:28:12 -0500)
diff --git issue issue
index efc8255..e65d112 100644
--- issue
+++ issue
@@ -1,2 +1,2 @@
-Debian GNU/Linux 7 \n \l
+Debian GNU/Linux jessie/sid \n \l
committing changes in /etc after apt run (2014-12-18 11:32:43 -0500)
diff --git issue issue
index e65d112..6478eed 100644
--- issue
+++ issue
@@ -1,2 +1,2 @@
-Debian GNU/Linux jessie/sid \n \l
+Debian GNU/Linux 8 \n \l

In other words:

• 2011-02-23: installed etckeeper, running Debian 6.0 ("squeeze", fresh from the stable release from 2011-02-06)
• 2011-05-22: upgraded to wheezy/sid ("testing", at that point)
• 2013-01-23: some upgrade to testing, unclear (although wheezy is in freeze since 2012-06-30 at that point, it seems the version string changed then in base-files 7)
• 2013-06-15: wheezy 7.1 point release drops the digit
• 2014-02-02: switch to jessie/sid (back to "testing", a few months after the freeze is announced)
• 2014-12-18: upgrade to Debian 8 (one month after the freeze, still not released)

Unfortunately, there isn't much more details about the exact upgrade points, especially since /etc/os-release is a symlink starting with Jessie. Besides things are much more in flux than we would like to believe, especially when you run a rolling distribution like "testing", but it still gives a good idea of my upgrade history:

• i ran 3 different major releases of Debian on this machine, always upgrading from the previous one without reinstalling
• i probably installed etckeeper from the start, as configuration mentions the machine was online on 2011-03-08
• i generally run stable until i get tired and upgrade to testing, generally at some point close to the freeze time

There is of course more information available directly in git log, namely the exact package version changes. With some more commandline filtering, we can see exactly when each upgrade was done, including minor releases:

# git log --date iso --grep base-files --reverse   egrep "^commit ^Date base-files"
commit 34ad962ff10c6e4e201378698e0fe0d4b03c8c39
Date:   2011-04-02 22:21:11 -0400
    -base-files 6.0
    +base-files 6.0squeeze1
commit 1cba7d2e097091e86eba1a2d8e4f5a9771e746a1
Date:   2011-07-09 19:40:05 -0400
    -base-files 6.3
    +base-files 6.4
commit cb409a0fbe2f95c3cd6a7c1ff0af263b55c7d597
Date:   2011-09-28 17:54:57 -0400
    -base-files 6.4
    +base-files 6.5
commit cf6d9dab6f79f4b50e5bd80dcba1769b0aa6c84b
Date:   2012-03-25 19:18:44 -0400
    -base-files 6.5
    +base-files 6.7
commit bb1b6aab4406276388542cefd7b4eff92d960533
Date:   2012-06-29 00:42:32 -0400
    -base-files 6.7
    +base-files 6.9
commit c6d9218ba75b3276ea44d949ef3410c35713d487
Date:   2012-09-29 14:25:01 -0400
    -base-files 6.9
    +base-files 6.11
commit bd730398e572c8403b2b9c0421df64a407669877
Date:   2013-01-23 09:40:27 -0500
    -base-files 6.11
    +base-files 7.1
commit af42616d72c4fe5c4a0e43ee8948031732735ec5
Date:   2013-06-15 13:02:04 -0400
    -base-files 7.1
    +base-files 7.1wheezy1
commit d2ef5df9c689073b62b4898a12e42bb8488c8cdc
Date:   2013-10-14 18:15:11 -0400
    -base-files 7.1wheezy1
    +base-files 7.1wheezy2
commit 104ea49559eb2b6b2aff21817b3980b274882a28
Date:   2013-12-14 11:07:09 -0500
    -base-files 7.1wheezy2
    +base-files 7.1wheezy3
commit bfa19b7ad737cb22c495af9429e922e6ec46202d
Date:   2014-02-02 23:28:12 -0500
    -base-files 7.1wheezy3
    +base-files 7.2
commit 830570ca4083af0c4b87c6c7c746c9513e260cf7
Date:   2014-05-15 11:20:13 -0400
    -base-files 7.2
    +base-files 7.3
commit 4c9e6ca21bb8189810199e6d518250432a62391d
Date:   2014-07-27 19:50:14 -0400
    -base-files 7.3
    +base-files 7.5
commit 4bc6abe2ba193cb6fac4eae00fa855eb32b86400
Date:   2014-10-20 16:14:09 -0400
    -base-files 7.5
    +base-files 7.6
commit a5e2ce476982201338220a314b1f9ccb03c99517
Date:   2014-11-28 19:45:56 -0500
    -base-files 7.6
    +base-files 7.10
commit eaa69b112fee60ef71938d9a725c07f9f29b2011
Date:   2014-12-18 11:32:43 -0500
    -base-files 7.10
    +base-files 8
commit f95a199df77030dc9ee6ab55bf4fa246fa88c959
Date:   2015-07-24 12:34:04 -0400
    -base-files 8
    +base-files 8+deb8u1
commit db4ab55b7327cecea54c5fe6a65560ba0e385978
Date:   2015-09-07 19:09:47 -0400
    -base-files 8+deb8u1
    +base-files 8+deb8u2

The definition of thick-skinned in different dictionaries ranges from not easily offended to largely unaffected by the needs and feelings of other people; insensitive , going through able to ignore personal criticism , ability to withstand criticism and show no signs of any criticism you may receive getting to you , an insensitive nature or impervious to criticism . It essentially describes an emotionally detached attitude regarding one s social environment, the capacity or ignoring or minimizing the effects of others criticism and the priorization of the protection of one s current state over the capacity of empathizing and taking into account what others may say that don t conform to one s current way of thinking. It is essentially setting up barriers against whatever others may do that might provoke any kind of crisis or change in you. There are a few underlying assumptions in the use of this term as a something good to have, when it comes to interactions with your own community: In the first place, it assumes that your own community is essentially hostile to you, and you will have to be constantly in guard against them. It assumes that it is better to set up barriers against the influence of others within your own comunity, because in fact your own peers are out there essentially to hurt you. Or, at least, they do not care a damn about you. In second place, it assumes that changes are wrong, that personal evolution is wrong, and that the more insensitive you are to your peer s opinions, the best, because they really have nothing to contribute to help you grow as a person. I m smart; you re dumb. I m big; you re little. I m right; you re wrong; And there s nothing you can do about it. (from the film Matilda). Matilda s dad is in fact the first reference that comes to my mind when we re talking about really thick skin. When the main recommendation when the level of aggressiveness within a community is that someone has to make their skin thicker, they are assuming that a bullying environment will help the results. This is nothing new. It s the same theoretical base that you can see in hazing and in other activities involving harassment, abuse or humiliation in college, when initiating a person into some groups. It s supposed to build character, to make someone closer to the alpha male stereotype and, in essence, make us better men (yes, I am using the word men on purpose, because insensitiveness is not usually seen as a positive trait in females). The assumption is that a community with a hard environment and individuals prepared for the war is more effective than a more civilized one. Luckily, that s not the point of view of most members of the Debian Community, and many other Free/Open Source projects. The Code of Conduct is very explicit when it says that a community in which people feel threatened is not a healthy community , and that is good. The Debian Project welcomes and encourages participation by everyone (Diversity Statement), including those with a thin skin, and I m happy about that. There are still a lot of things to improve, of course, but I have the feeling that -despite the occasional complains that having to be respectful to others take the fun away- we re moving in the right direction. The best tip I can give you on thickening your skin = don t. That is, don t thicken your skin. Having a thin skin means you re letting the world in, you re letting what s out there affect what s in you. It means you re connected. You re open. You re considerate and you ll consider it whatever it might be. Having a thin skin may be dangerous, sure, because you might take in so much that you pop, like that blueberry girl from Willy Wonka. But life is dangerous. A thick skin protects you from everything, but it also protects you from everything from the gentle touches of life, from the subtle emotions of others, the deep connections, the meaningful interactions. (Top Ten Tips on how to Thicken your Skin).

Extracting XML payload from Italian Fattura Elettronica zipfiles This system does not even export to PDF. In order to provide my accountant with something better than a DER-encoded file with a random-looking name stored inside a zipfile, here is a script that at least extracts the unsigned XML payload out of a saved Fattura Elettronica. If you're giving a python course in Italy, this sounds like a nice early programming assignment.

I will join Lars and Tincho in stating this, and presenting a version contrary to what Norbert portraits. I am very glad and very proud that the community I am most involved in, the Debian project, has kept its core identity over the years, at least for the slightly-over-a-decade I have been involved in it. And I am very glad and very proud that being less aggressive, more welcoming and in general more respectful to each other does not counter this. When I joined Debian, part of the mantra chants we had is that in order to join a Free Software project you had to grow a thick skin, as sooner or later we'd all be exposed to flamefests. But, yes, the median age of the DD was way lower back then I don't have the data at hand, but IIRC I have always been close to our median. Which means we are all growing old and grumpy. But old and wiser. A very successful, important and dear subproject to many of us is the Debian Women Project. Its original aim was, as the name shows, to try to reduce the imbalance between men and women participants in Debian IIRC back in 2004 we had 3 female DDs, and >950 male DDs. Soon, the project started morphing into pushing all of Debian to be less hostile, more open to contributions from any- and everyone (as today our diversity statement reads). And yes, we are still a long, long, long way from reaching equality. But we have done great steps. And not just WRT women, but all of the different minorities, as well as to diverging opinions within our community. Many people don't enjoy us abiding by a code of conduct; I also find it irritating sometimes to have to abide by certain codes if we mostly know each other and know we won't be offended by a given comment... Or will we? So, being more open and more welcoming also means being more civil. I cannot get myself to agree with Linus' quote, when he says that respect is not just given to everybody but must be earned. We should always start, and I enjoy feeling that in Debian this is becoming the norm, by granting respect to everybody And not losing it, even if things get out of hand. Thick skins are not good for communication.

I disagree with pretty much everything Norbert Preining says in his blog post about Sarah Sharp in response to Sharp's blog post Closing a door about leaving Linux kernel development. I think Preining mis-characterises what happens on the Linux kernel mailing list, and in Debian, in free software development in general, and what Sarah Sharp has said and done. I do not wish to participate in yet another discussion on the Debian Code of Conduct, respect, appropriate behaviour, or whether these things result in worse software. I won't spend any further of my time on debating, point-by-point, the arguments and straw-men Preining makes. Those discussions have happened often enough, without any effect on Preining and those who think like him. Likewise, despite the many times he makes the arguments, I continue to think he is wrong about everything on this topic. I do feel it is important to make it clear to the people reading Planet Debian, where both Preining's and my blogs are published, that his opinions are not mainstream in the Debian project, and that despite what he says, Debian development continues to be fun.

This video should be watched by every single person that cares to make something out of their life. It is so awesome and I don't want to spoil it by talking about it but I at least suggest that everyone in Debian community should take an hour and watch it. Enjoy!

I got home from a law lecture[1] today and took apart my TV. As you do. I d a couple of motivations for this. The TV is an LG 55LM8600-UC. That -UC is important - it means it s the US model. I shipped it back to the UK along with the rest of my belongings at the start of the year. It s a lovely TV, and I m very happy with the picture quality. Up until now I ve been running it through a 240v->120v transformer, because the back clearly states 120v 50/60Hz. Having had success converting my Roomba PSU to UK voltage I was wondering if it might be easy enough to do the same for the TV. So the first reason for taking it apart was to look at the PSU board and work out if I could replace it with a UK version, or fix up a handful of components myself. Turns out its rated for 100-240v 50/60Hz so it looks like it should be fine to plug into UK mains directly. And, having done so, it all seems fine. However I don t take any responsibility if you try this yourself and it all goes up in smoke. The other reason was to have a general poke at trying to get access to the onboard CPU - the firmware updates are signed and encrypted so I m a bit stuck working from just those. My TV is from the US; it therefore has an ATSC tuner, and is no good for picking up the DVB-T/T2 broadcast in the UK. It also has a range of smart apps built in. Of course are also tailored to the US, so the Amazon Instant Video app connects to amazon.com and is no use with my Amazon UK account. Netflix is smarter about this and detects where you re located rather than requiring logging in to the appropriate geographic site. However the Netflix app is old and doesn t support user profiles. Which causes a problem when I spend an afternoon watching Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and it screws up the recommendations for my girlfriend. In an ideal world I d easily be able to update the apps on my TV to recent versions appropriate for my geographic location. Instead, the current state of home entertainment software platforms is at least 10 years behind mobile phones. Some devices allow you to get hold of SDKs even as an end user, but you re stuck with a multiple ecosystems even between different models from the same manufacturer. LG has no interest in updating my 2012-era TV. They d rather I buy a nice new 2015 TV. Which means at present my TV is mostly a really nice monitor for my XBMC/Kodi box. I can get away with using my Blu-ray player for Netflix, as it does user profile, but it s also a US model and again Amazon Instant Video doesn t work with a UK account. I should point out /that/ box is from Panasonic, just in case anyone thinks I m needlessly picking on LG. My amp is an Onkyo and it would be nice if it could stream music from Amazon/Google as well (it supports Spotify and a couple of others already), but again no joy there. I understand there are DRM issues around video and audio content, but these problems seem to have largely been solved in the Android world while still providing a fairly standard development environment and allowing end users to install their own software. It would seem to make more sense if there was a standard TV / Blu-ray platform that the likes of Netflix and Amazon could write apps once for, reducing the effort required on both sides to get the latest and greatest services on end user equipment. I guess this is some of what Google was trying to achieve with Google TV, but it s probably less interesting to them than mobile devices as I certainly don t tend to do things like search on my TV; I just want to view content and would be mighty pissed off if it started advertising things at me unexpectedly. While I m not planning to buy a new TV any time soon, I could do with a UK spec 3D-capable Blu-ray player. Is there anything out there with some commitment to open apps / proper updates? I haven t found anything, but I d love to be proved wrong. [1] It was on the duty of care and negligence, if you care.

Today, Norbert Preining wrote a blog post syndicated in planet talking about Sarah Sharp quitting Linux development, and making a parallel with the Debian community. Once again, he's complaining about how the fun from Debian has been lost because making sexist jokes, or treating other people like shit is not allowed any more. He seems to think the LKML is the ideal environment and that Debian should be more like it. He also celebrates that Ms Sharp12 left Linux, because evidently the freedom to be a jerk to each other is more important than the contributions that she -or any other person that finds that atmosphere toxic, like mjg- has produced or could have produced in the future.

---

I would like to tell readers of Planet Debian that this view is not the norm in Debian any more. We are working hard to make the project more inclusive, fun, and welcoming to everybody. Sadly, some people are still pining for the good ol' days, and won't give up so easily on their privilege. 6 comments

The movie "The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz" is both inspiring and depressing at the same time. The work of Aaron Swartz has inspired me in my work, and I am grateful of all the improvements he was able to initiate or complete. I wish I am able to do as much good in my life as he did in his. Every minute of this 1:45 long movie is inspiring in documenting how much impact a single person can have on improving the society and this world. And it is depressing in documenting how the law enforcement of USA (and other countries) is corrupted to a point where they can push a bright kid to his death for downloading too many scientific articles. Aaron is dead. Let us all weep. The movie is also available on Youtube. I wish there were Norwegian subtitles available, so I could show it to my parents.

The movie "The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz" is both inspiring and depressing at the same time. The work of Aaron Swartz has inspired me in my work, and I am grateful of all the improvements he was able to initiate or complete. I wish I am able to do as much good in my life as he did in his. Every minute of this 1:45 long movie is inspiring in documenting how much impact a single person can have on improving the society and this world. And it is depressing in documenting how the law enforcement of USA (and other countries) is corrupted to a point where they can push a bright kid to his death for downloading too many scientific articles. Aron is dead. Let us all weep. The movie is also available on Youtube. I wish there were Norwegian subtitles available, so I could show it to my parents.

Swirlone

While I was sewing the small swirl plushie http://blog.zouish.org/posts/swirl_how_to/ for the Racoon http://social.gl-como.it/display/3e3ce0df1855db8250aae3a718529027 I thought that it would have been nice to have a bigger one, and I already had enough felt for it, so here it comes.

http://social.gl-como.it/photo/99335297f698a6692c32e47fbdaded5e.jpg

Completely random sheet of A4 paper included for size comparison.

And now comes the hard part: to draw the pattern I enlarged the official swirl fit onto A3 and pdfposter-ed it to print it, then roughly followed the outline in pencil to get something cuttable. The problem is that this doesn't fit into the scanner, so publishing the sources is going to involve some manual work that I've been postponing because of lazyness O:)

They will be available. promise! Before the Release! (not necessarily Jessie, but...)

P.S. -one is the italian suffix for "big".

@Debian

Much has been written around the internet about this geeky kernel maintainer Sarah Sharp who left kernel development. I have now spent two hours reading through lkml posts, and want to summarize a few mails from the long thread, since most of the usual news sites just rewrap the original blog of hers without adding any background. The whole thread evolved out call for stable kernel review by Greg Kroah-Hartman where he complained about too many patches that are not actually in rc1 before going into stable: from where it developed into a typical Linus rant on people flagging crap for stable, followed by some jokes: and Ingo Molnar giving advice to Greg KH: with Greg KH taking a funny position in answering: Up to now a pretty decent and normal thread with some jokes and poking, nobody minded, and reading through it I had a good time. The thread continues with a discussion on requirements what to submit to stable, and some side threads on particular commits. And then, out of the blue, Social Justice Warrior (SJW) Sarah Sharp pops in with a very important contribution: Onto which Linus answers in a great way: On goes Sarah, gearing up in her SJW mode and starting to rant: Linus himself made clear what he thinks of her: It is easy to verify what Linus said, by reading the above two links and the answers of the maintainers, both agreed that it was their failure and were sorry. (Mauro s answer, Rafael s answer) It is just the geeky SJW that was not even attacked (who would dare to attack a woman nowadays?). The overall reaction to her by the maintainers can be exemplified by Thomas Gleixner s post: What follows is a nearly endless discussion with Sarah meandering around, changing permanently her opinion what is acceptable. Linus tried to explain to her in simple words, without success, she continues to rant around. Here arguments are so weak I had nothing but good laugh: Fortunately, she was immediately corrected and Ingo Molnar wrote an excellent refutation (starting another funny thread) of all her emails, statements, accusations (all of the email is a good read): (He retracted that last statement, though I don t see a reason for it) Last but not least, let us return to her blog post, where she states herself that: and she made lots of use of it, I counted at least 10 instances. She seems to remove or fart fart fart any comment that is not in line with her opinion. Further evidence is provided by this post on lkml. Everyone is free to have his own opinion (sorry, his/her), and I am free to form my own opinion on Sarah Sharp by just simply reading the facts. I am more than happy that one more SJW has left Linux development, as the proliferation of cleaning of speech from any personality has taken too far a grip. Coming to my home-base in Debian, unfortunately there is no one in the position and the state of mind of Linus, so we are suffering the same stupidities imposed by social justice worriers and some brainless feminists (no, don t get me wrong, these are two independent attributes. I do NOT state that feminism is brainless) that Linus and the maintainer crew was able to fend of this time. I finish with my favorite post from that thread, by Steven Rosted (from whom I also stole the above image!): Post Scriptum (after a bike ride) The last point by Linus is what I criticize most on Debian nowdays, it has become a sterilized over-governed entity, where most fun is gone. Making fun is practically forbidden, since there is the slight chance that some minority somewhere on this planet might feel hurt, and by this we are breaking the CoC. Emotions are restricted to the Happy happy how nice we are and how good we are level of US and also Japanese self-reenforcement society. Post Post Scriptum I just read Sarah Sharp s post on What makes a good community? , and without giving a full account or review, I am just pi**ed by the usage of the word microaggressions I can only recommend everyone to read this article and this article to get a feeling how bs the idea of microaggressions has taken over academia and obviously not only academia. Post³ Scriptum I am happy to see Lars Wirzenius, Gunnar Wolf, and Mart n Ferrari opposing my view. I agree with them that my comments concerning Debian are not mainstream in Debian something that is not very surprising, though, and I think it is great that they have fun in Debian, like many other contributors. Post⁴ Scriptum Although nobody will read this, here is a great response from a female developer: Nothing to add here!

For my 10th month working on Debian LTS, I was assigned 14.5 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative, but only worked for 9 hours. Front desk I had another week in the 'front desk' role, where I triaged new security issues for squeeze. Happily, few of them affected squeeze. linux-2.6 I reviewed a new upstream stable update, 2.6.32.68, and then applied it to our package once it was released. I backported a further 3 security fixes, uploaded the package and issued DLA-310-1. binutils binutils had several buffer overflow bugs to be fixed. They aren't very likely to be exploitable as most users won't be processing untrusted input with binutils. Nevertheless, I backported the fixes from upstream and (early this month) issued DLA-324-1.

Debian LTS August was the fifth month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. In total I spent eight hours working on:

• glibc: I fixed four security issues resulting in DLA-316-1 mostly by backporting fixes from current Git. This involved some issues that didn't have a CVE assigned yet. Salvatore gave a nice summary on how to handle these.
• nss: The backport of the fixes for CVE-2015-2721 and CVE-2015-2730 resulted in DLA-315-1.

Besides that I did CVE triaging of 9 CVEs to check if and how they affect oldoldstable security as part of my LTS front desk work. Other Debian work I finally sent out the summary of the 8th Debian Groupware Meeting we had in the Linuxhotel earlier this year and gave a short talk about Debian at the Zarafa Tour in the Netherlands.

I've been allowing users to upload SSH public-keys, and displaying them online in a form. Displaying an SSH public key is a pain, because they're typically long. That means you need to wrap them, or truncate them, or you introduce a horizontal scroll-bar. So rather than displaying them I figured I'd generate a fingerprint when the key was uploaded and show that instead - This is exactly how github shows your ssh-keys. Annoyingly there is only one reasonable way to get a fingerprint from a key:

• Write it to a temporary file.
• Run "ssh-keygen -lf temporary/file/name".

You can sometimes calculate the key via more direct, but less obvious methods:

awk ' print $2 ' ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub   base64 -d   md5sum

But that won't work for all key-types. It is interesting to look at the various key-types which are available these days:

mkdir ~/ssh/
cd ~/ssh/
for i in dsa ecdsa ed25519 rsa rsa1 ; do
  ssh-keygen -P "" -t $i -f $ i -key
done

I've never seen an ed25519 key in the wild. It looks like this:

$ cat ~/ssh/ed25519-key.pub
ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAIMcT04t6UpewqQHWI4gfyBpP/ueSjbcGEze22vdlq0mW skx@shelob

Similarly curve-based keys are short too, but not as short:

ecdsa-sha2-nistp256 AAAAE2VjZHNhLXNoYTItbmlzdHAyNTYAAAAIbmlzdHAyNTYAAABBBLTJ5+  \
 rWoq5cNcjXdhzRiEK3Yq6tFSYr4DBsqkRI0ZqJdb+7RxbhJYUOq5jsBlHUzktYhOahEDlc9Lezz3ZUqXg= skx@shelob

Remember what I said about wrapping? Ha! Anyway for the moment I've hacked up a simple perl module SSH::Key::Fingerprint which will accept a public key and return the fingerprint, as well as validating the key is well-formed and of a known-type. I might make it public in the future, but I think the name is all wrong. The only code I could easily find to do a similar job is this node.js package, but it doesn't work on all key-types. Shame. And that concludes this weeks super-happy fun-time TODO-list item.

Today I want to talk a bit about some cool features of systemd, the default Debian init system since the release of Jessie. Ubuntu has also adopted systemd in 15.04, meaning that you are going to find it literally everywhere.