Search Results: "ag"

11 March 2015

Richard Hartmann: 100g for deleting

On the assumption that the post titled "Delete file when you have more than 100g for deleting" on the "Linux.com - Content Feed" is not an elaborate joke, it's not unlikely that it will be deleted so I will conserve it here: Hello Linix community members, Today I would like to share a simple script for deleting files when you have more than 100g for deleting and when you try to delete using rm -rm /path/fo/files failed. To do this I use the following procedure; first I use a "for" ciclo to read file that I going to delete also you can use a mtime for calculate file's date that you're going to delete or you can to calculate previous date of a past day "x=TZ=GMT+24 date +%Y%m%d" Ex;

#!/bin/bash -x
x= TZ=GMT+24 date +%Y%m%d 
delcnt=0
for files in  find /path/of/file/to/eraser/ -name \*$x*.bin.gz 
do
echo "Deleting file $files"
/bin/rm -rf $files
delcnt=$(($delcnt + 1))
done

Best regards Charles E. Rivera Solaris Server Specialist Engeeneer But then, Linux.com still aggregates Phoronix, so their focus is not exactly on quality.

Tiago Bortoletto Vaz: Freeing myself from flickr

A flickr standard account gives you a free as in facebook service (I really wanted to reuse it!!!). I don't know about the pro account, but I don't believe it will give you much respect. Anyway, I realized that my photo albums in flickr are still online. And I'm currently unable to access my photos locally. I needed to download all them, then I decided to give flickrbackup a try. I started coding it a few years ago because at that time there was no free tools available for that. And then I abandoned it, too bad I feel. But for my surprise it worked without issues! And that's all I needed in my Debian box:

$ apt-get install flickrbackup $ mkdir myflickr $ flickrbackup -o myflickr/

(this will open a default browser for authentication and will automatically get the API key, then I just need an ENTER to start getting all my albums) I'm not sure whether there're other free tools (as in freedom) for that, but before paying for a license or trusting an online service for downloading your sets please give flickrbackup a chance :) I'll probably set a piwigo instance in a vps. But I fear php. So, suggestions on web galleries are very welcome.

10 March 2015

Joey Hess: 7drl 2015 day 4 coding through exhaustion

Slow start today; I was pretty exhausted after yesterday and last night's work. Somehow though, I got past the burn and made major progress today. All the complex movement of both the player and the scroll is finished now, and all that remains is to write interesting spells, and a system for learning spells, and to balance out the game difficulty.

I haven't quite said what Scroll is about yet, let's fix that: In Scroll, you're a bookworm that's stuck on a scroll. You have to dodge between words and use spells to make your way down the page as the scroll is read. Go too slow and you'll get wound up in the scroll and crushed. The character is multiple chars in size (size is the worm's only stat), and the worm interacts with the scroll in lots of ways, like swallowing letters, or diving through a hole to the other side of the scroll. While it can swallow some letters, if it gets too full, it can't move forward anymore, so letters are mostly consumed to be used as spell components. I think that I will manage to get away without adding any kind of monsters to the game; the scroll (and whoever is reading it) is the antagonist. As I'm writing this very post, I'm imagining the worm wending its way through my paragraphs. This dual experience of text, where you're both reading its content and hyper-aware of its form, is probably the main thing I wanted to explore in writing Scroll.

As to the text that fills the scroll, it's broadly procedurally generated, in what I hope are unusual and repeatedly surprising (and amusing) ways. I'm not showing any screenshots of the real text, because I don't want to give that surprise away. But, the other thing about Scroll is that it's scroll, a completely usable (if rather difficult..) Unix pager!

9 March 2015

Joey Hess: 7drl 2015 day 3 movement at last

Got the player moving in the map! And, got the map to be deadly in its own special way.

        HeadCrush -> do
                showMessage "You die."
                endThread

Even winning the game is implemented. The game has a beginning, a middle, and an end. I left the player movement mostly unconstrained, today, while I was working on things to do with the end of the game, since that makes it easier to play through and test them. Tomorrow, I will turn on fully constrained movement (an easy change), implement inventory (which is very connected to movement constraints in Scroll), and hope to start on the spell system too.

At this point, Scroll is 622 lines of code, including content. Of which, I notice, fully 119 are types and type classes. Only 4 days left! Eep! I'm very glad that scroll's central antagonist is already written. I don't plan to add other creatures, which will save some time.

Last night as I was drifting off to sleep, it came to me a way to implement my own threading system for my roguelike. Since time in a roguelike happens in discrete ticks, as the player takes each action, normal OS threads are not suitable. And in my case, I'm doing everything in pure code anyway and certianly cannot fork off a thread for some background job. But, since I'm using continuation passing style, I can just write my own fork, that takes two continuations and combines them, causing both to be run on each tick, and recursing to handle combining the resulting continuations. It was really quite simple to implement. Typechecked on the first try even!

fork :: M NextStep -> M NextStep -> M NextStep
fork job rest = do
        jn <- job
        rn <- rest
        runthread jn rn
  where
        runthread (NextStep _ (Just contjob)) (NextStep v (Just contr)) =
                return $ NextStep v $ Just $ \i -> do
                        jn <- contjob i
                        rn <- contr i
                        runthread jn rn
        runthread (NextStep _ Nothing) (NextStep v (Just contr)) =
                return $ NextStep v (Just contr)
        runthread _ (NextStep v Nothing) =
                return $ NextStep v Nothing
endThread :: M NextStep
endThread = nextStep Nothing
background :: M NextStep -> M NextStep
background job = fork job continue
demo :: M NextStep
demo = do
    showMessage "foo"
    background $ next $ const $
        clearMessage >> endThread

That has some warts, but it's good enough for my purposes, and pretty awesome for a threading system in 66 LOC.

Ulrike Uhlig: Final report from the Outreach Program round 9

Between december 9th 2014 and march 9th 2015 I ve been working as an intern for Debian on Improving AppArmor support in Debian. Progress Before the internship started, I had no clue about AppArmor at all. Reading the Wikipedia page and the AppArmor wiki did barely enlighten me. At least, until I got my hands dirty and installed and activated it. I was able to do this only because there was already some basic documentation on the Debian wiki on how to get AppArmor running on a Debian system. When the internship started I felt a little bit lost. I started to read the documentation and to play around with some AppArmor profiles. But the error messages I saw and the profiles I opened for reading overwhelmed me. What did all these lines mean? Then one mentor briefed me about the current status of AppArmor in Debian. I took many notes and tried to bring some order into the information I was being given. These notes became the first page of the documentation and my first blog post.
Surprise: suddenly I was in the middle of knowing what we were talking about and how the next few weeks would look like. To start with, I have set up a test environment and continued to test some of the profiles which came with the packages I had installed, namely apparmor-profiles-extra which provided me with a profile for Pidgin. I was very much interested in securing this several thousand lines long C-code application on my machine! As a Pidgin user, I noticed immediately that one of my favourite features pidgin blinklight threw an error in the logs. I tried to fix it on my test VM and eventually made it work. Now knowing that such fixes should first be done upstream, i cloned the corresponding upstream repository and sent my first patch. It was not easy at first to switch to another VCS than Git, although I had been using Bazaar and Subversion years ago. Shortly afterwards, I saw my patch showing up on the upstream mailing list, and some days later it got merged. That was a huge encouragement. I was now able to write more documentation on how to contribute upstream. In order to organize the documentation, we ve set up some User Stories. I did not know about this tool before and had quite a hard time to grasp all the details but it proved to be very useful as some pages started to become long and confusing. Writing the documentation took up a lot of time, but before being able to write anything down, I needed to work everything out! This way I incidentally learned how to interact with many parts of Debian s infrastructure:

Git repositories for packaging I imported my upstream patches into the AppArmor team s repositories. My previous experience in Debian packaging was not only helpful but indispensable for this task.
Debian bug tracker I learned more about reporting and usertagging bugs and filed some whishlist bugs which would make life easier.
Debian wiki I wrote documentation but I also read a lot of documentation, namely about using the Bug Tracking System and making things work on Alioth.
Ultimate Debian Database I wrote a Python script which queries the UDD and sends email notifications for new usertags. Writing the Python script was a lot of fun. I had some prior coding experience, but thanks to the mentors and upstream authors feedback I realized how important it is to write consistent code that can be easily understood and maintained by several people.
Setting up Git repositories, post commit hooks and cronjobs on Alioth for group maintaining scripts.

While playing around with the tools provided to inspect AppArmor status on the system, I even accidentally found a little bug in one of the upstream tools. It got fixed very quickly after I mentioned it on the AppArmor team s mailing list. Organization Although I was uncomfortable with this in the beginning, we organized public meetings every two weeks on IRC. These meetings were also attended by MeetBot who took care of taking notes and leaving a trace of our discussions.
Based on the meetings, I maintained a progress page and todo list on the Debian wiki, which helped us to know which tasks were planned for the next two weeks. Before each meeting I sent a status update to the mailing list, so the mentors could catch up with my work. During the meetings I was not only asked to provide feedback on progress but also on mentoring itself. It proved to be very useful to be able to say where I was stuck and if the mentoring process worked out well enough (it did!).
Furthermore, I got regular, detailed and pedantic (thanks for trying to push me to perfection!) feedback on the team s mailing list. The mentors had introduced me on the upstream IRC channel in the beginning, so most of the people who are active there knew about my existence, something which also proved to be handy! Future The internship time is over, but some work remains to be done. As a new member of the AppArmor Packaging team, I am committed to make it happen:

Think about a cross distro meeting there was a proposal to do that during DebConf
Write the migrate profile documentation after migrating a profile in a real world scenario together with intrigeri.
Fix Debian bug #702030 intrigeri should review my technical proposal before I work on it.

Thanks I feel much more confident after these three months, technically but also personally. Thank you: Holger Levsen and intrigeri for mentoring and encouraging me on this journey and to upstream contributors Christian Boltz, Steve Beattie (and everybody else I might forget here) for providing help and feedback. The Debian community (OPW organizers, sponsors, Alioth maintainers, planet.debian.org maintainers although my posts don t show up anymore

-and others) has been very friendly and welcoming and I am very happy to be part of it.

Axel Beckert: Do we need a zsh-static package in Debian?

Dear Planet Debian, the Debian Zsh Packaging Team (consisting of Michael Prokop, Frank Terbeck, Richard Hartmann and myself) wonders if there s still a reason to build and ship a zsh-static package in Debian. There are multiple reasons:

None of us packagers really use it. (A weak reason, yes.)
Low popcon: installed peak at ca. 150, decreasing; vote peak at ca. 40, decreasing as well.
The statically compiled Zsh has some annoying restrictions (#354631 et al) for over 9 years now, which only can be fixed if some other packages change: To cite Clint Adams, long time Debian Zsh package maintainer: the problem is that user/group lookups are disabled in the -static build because glibc s NSS ABI is unstable and static binaries still need to load NSS modules dynamically. One solution here would be to compile against dietlibc, but for that we d need an ncurses library built against dietlibc (#471208), too.

So we ask you, the Planet Debian reader:

Do you need Debian s zsh-static package? If so, please send an e-mail to us Debian Zsh Maintainers <pkg-zsh-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org> and state that you use zsh-static, and, if you want, please also state why or how you re using it. Thanks in advance! Mika, Frank, RichiH and Axel

Axel Beckert: Do we need a zsh-static package in Debian?

None of us packagers really use it. (A weak reason, yes.)
Low popcon: installed peak at ca. 150, decreasing; vote peak at ca. 40, decreasing as well.
The statically compiled Zsh has some annoying restrictions (#354631 et al) for over 9 years now, which only can be fixed if some other packages change: To cite Clint Adams, long time Debian Zsh package maintainer: the problem is that user/group lookups are disabled in the -static build because glibc s NSS ABI is unstable and static binaries still need to load NSS modules dynamically. One solution here would be to compile against dietlibc, but for that we d need an ncurses library built against dietlibc (#471208), too.

So we ask you, the Planet Debian reader:

Petter Reinholdtsen: Frikanalen, Norwegian TV channel for technical topics

The Norwegian Unix User Group, where I am a member, and where people interested in free software, open standards and UNIX like operating systems like Linux and the BSDs come together, record our monthly technical presentations on video. The purpose is to document the talks and spread them to a wider audience. For this, the the Norwegian nationwide open channel Frikanalen is a useful venue. Since a few days ago, when I figured out the REST API to program the channel time schedule, the channel has been filled with NUUG talks, related recordings and some Creative Commons licensed TED talks (from archive.org). I fill all "leftover bits" on the channel with content from NUUG, which at the moment is almost 17 of 24 hours every day. The list of NUUG videos uploaded so far include things like a one hour talk by John Perry Barlow when he visited Oslo, a presentation of Haiku, the BeOS re-implementation, the history of FiksGataMi, the Norwegian version of FixMyStreet, the good old Warriors of the net video and many others. We have a large backlog of NUUG talks not yet uploaded to Frikanalen, and plan to upload every useful bit to the channel to spread the word there. I also hope to find useful recordings from the Chaos Computer Club and Debian conferences and spread them on the channel as well. But this require locating the videos and their meta information (title, description, license, etc), and preparing the recordings for broadcast, and I have not yet had the spare time to focus on this. Perhaps you want to help. Please join us on IRC, #nuug on irc.freenode.net if you want to help make this happen. But as I said, already the channel is already almost exclusively filled with technical topics, and if you want to learn something new today, check out the Ogg Theora web stream or use one of the other ways to get access to the channel. Unfortunately the Ogg Theora recoding for distribution still do not properly sync the video and sound. It is generated by recoding a internal MPEG transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to Ogg Theora / Vorbis, and we have not been able to find a way that produces acceptable quality. Help needed, please get in touch if you know how to fix it using free software.

8 March 2015

Joey Hess: 7drl 2015 day 2 level generation and game concept

Much as I want to get my @ displayed and moving around screen, last night and today have focused on level generation instead. Scroll has kinda strange level generation method, compared to how I suppose most roguelikes do it. There are only 3 calls to rand in all of Scroll. Just a 3 random parameters, but that's enough to ensure a different level each time.

-- Random level generation function.
level :: Bool -> StdGen -> [String]
level randomize r = concat
        [ final (length tutorial + extra) $ concat $ rand mariner1body
        , concat $ rand mariner1end
        , concatMap rand kubla
        ]
  where
    -- here be spoilers

You could say there are two influences in Scroll's level generation method: Nick Montfort and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

I have thought some about Scroll before starting the 7drl week, but my idea for the game was missing some key concepts. There was nothing to keep the player engaged in moving forward, an unclear victory condition, no clue how to generate appropriate random levels, a large potential for getting stuck, and no way to lose the game. This is all a problem for a roguelike. But, I had an idea finally last night, about a single unified thing that all of that stuff falls out from. And it's right there in the name of the game! Now that I understand Scroll better, I wrote the tutorial level. It's a very meta tutorial level that sets the scene well and serves more purposes than are at first apparent. I count a total of 6 things that this "tutorial level" will let the user do. And interestingly, while the tutorial level is static, it interacts with the rest of the game in a way that will make it be experienced differently every time through.

The strangest line of code I wrote today is:

import GPL

Somehow, I have never before, in all my time programming, written a line like that one.

Finally, after 7 hours of nonstop coding, I got ncurses to display the generated game world, scrolling around in the display viewport. No @ yet; that will need to wait for tonight or tomorrow!

Carl Chenet: Verify your backups or lose them all

Follow me on Identi.ca

or Twitter

or Diaspora*

As a good sysadmin, you thought you had backups for your server but you didn t verify them before the major migration you attempted? When you need them, they re empty or full of useless files. And now it s too late

Wen you discover that you don t have usable backups lesjoiesdusysadmin.fr

You won t guess how often this situation occurs. Backup Checker is a command line software developed in Python 3.4 on GitHub (stars appreciated :) ) allowing users to verify the integrity of archives (tar, gz, bz2, lzma, zip, tree of files) and the state of the files inside an archive in order to find corruptions or intentional of accidental changes of states or removal of files inside an archive.

Install Backup Checker from PyPI The easiest way to install Backup Checker is from PyPi using the following command:

$ pip3.4 install backupchecker

Debian Wheezy and Squeeze packages for Backup Checker Backup Checker Debian packages are now available for your stable servers Wheezy and Squeeze in the MyTux Debian repositories. Debian Squeeze Just copy/paste the following command on your server to add the MyTux Debian Squeeze repository and install Backup Checker:

apt-key adv --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 2B24481A \
&& echo "deb http://debian.mytux.fr squeeze main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mytux.list \
&& apt-get update \
&& apt-get install backupchecker

Debian Wheezy Just copy/paste the following command on your server to add the MyTux Debian Wheezy repository and install Backup Checker:

apt-key adv --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 2B24481A \
 && echo "deb http://debian.mytux.fr wheezy main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mytux.list \
 && apt-get update \
 && apt-get install backupchecker

Using Backup Checker 2 steps are needed to secure your backups. First you need to generate the configuration files of your backups, using the following command: $ backupchecker -G /backups/backup-08032015.tar.gz This generates 2 files /backups/backup-08032015.conf and /backups/backup-08032015.list you need to store in order to verify this archive later (the -O option lets you define a custom location to store the files). Second step is to verify your backup. It is as simple as: $ backupchecker -c /etc/backupchecker/backup-08032015.conf -l /var/log/backupchecker.log Then check if warnings have been sent to /var/log/backupchecker.log. Really simple isn t it? Scripting this command, your backups are now verified and secured. If any modification occurs, it will be detected and pinpointed. What do you thing about it? As usual, any feedback is welcome, through bug reports, emails of the author or comments on this blog. Several companies now use Backup Checker to secure their backups. Let us know if we can help you.

Jonathan Dowland: archive.org is not backup

I thinking archiving is important, archive.org is great, and I'm proud of what little contribution I've made to date. Someone recently pointed out that an upload I had made is now inaccessible. In it's place is a short message: this item is unavailable due to issues with its content. What issues are not made clear. I've never been contacted by archive.org about this, not even to be admonished, should they have felt that to be necessary. I've tried contacting them to find out what the issues are but have heard nothing back. It's worth remembering: Just because it's available now, even on archive.org, doesn't mean it will be Tomorrow!

Gregor Herrmann: RC bugs 2015/07-10

finally, some simple RC bugs appeared, & I could contribute a bit towards the jessie release:

~~#775913~~ src:vala-0.26: "vala-0.26: CVE-2014-8154: Heap-buffer overflow in vala-gstreamer bindings at Gst.MapInfo()"
add upstream patch, upload to DELAYED/2
#776409 initramfs-tools: "Decryption problem with split /usr - cryptsetup/initramfs-tools"
bug metadata cleanup (which removes it from jessie bugs), later downgraded by maintainer
#776683 snmpd: "snmpd: SNMPd still tries to query PCI Bus"
tag unreproducible moreinfo, later downgraded by release team
~~#779114~~ patcher: "patcher: depend on perl instead of perl-modules"
update Depends, upload to DELAYED/6
~~#779115~~ polygen-data: "polygen-data: depend on perl instead of perl-modules"
update Depends, upload to DELAYED/6, then rescheduled to 0-day with maintainer's permission
~~#779116~~ pristine-tar: "pristine-tar: depend on perl instead of perl-modules"
update Depends, QA upload
~~#779117~~ pure-ftpd-common: "pure-ftpd-common: depend on perl instead of perl-modules"
update Depends, upload to DELAYED/6
~~#779121~~ tvtime: "tvtime: depend on perl instead of perl-modules"
update Depends, QA upload
~~#779985~~ libwww-youtube-download-perl: "libwww-youtube-download-perl: youtube-videos fail to download"
apply patches from upstream bug tracker (pkg-perl)

Jaldhar Vyas: No 7DRL for Me This Year

It's time once again for the Seven Day Roguelike Challenge but I've decided to try and force some discipline on myself and not participate until I actually complete one of my earlier entries into a properly playable game. I did have some fun thinking of names though.

Fifty Shades of Grue
The Intothegroundening
Game of Spiky Chairs

You may use them in your own entry free of charge.

Hideki Yamane: community booth @ "developers summit 2015" in Tokyo (19th&20th Feb)

I'm back to Developers Summit at (Meguro Gajoen), Tokyo. I was an attendee 2 years ago, and I'm at community booth this year :)

We were at booth "Debian JP Project" (Japanese local Debian community) and other distro people (Ubuntu Japanese Team, openSUSE, VineLinux)

Its conference mostly focuses "development style" in companies, not FLOSS -Keyword: Agile (Scrum), DevOps, using cloud infrastructure, IoT, etc. So, we're a bit stranger but enjoyed chat with some people.

7 March 2015

Joey Hess: 7drl 2015 day 1 groundwork

Scroll is a roguelike, with a twist, which I won't reveal until I've finished building it. I'll just say: A playable roguelike pun, set in a filesystem near you. I'm creating Scroll as part of the 7DRL Challange. If all goes well, I'll have a usable roguelike game finished in 7 days. This is my first time developing a roguelike, and my first time writing a game in Haskell, and my first time writing a game to a time limit. Wow!

First, some groundwork. I'm writing Scroll in Haskell, so let's get the core data types and monads and IO squared away. Then I can spend days 2-7 writing entirely pure functional code, in the Haskell happy place. To represent the current level, I'm using a Vector of Vectors of Chars. Actually, MVectors, which can be mutated safely by pure code running inside the ST monad, so it's fast and easy to read or write any particular location on the level.

-- Writes a Char to a position in the world.
writeWorld :: Pos -> Char -> M ()
writeWorld (x, y) c = modWorld $ \yv -> do
    xv <- V.read yv y
    V.write xv x c
showPlayer :: M ()
showPlayer = writeWorld (5,8) '@'

(I wish these Vectors had their size as part of their types. There are vector libraries on hackage that do, but not the standard vector library, which has mutable vectors. As it is, if I try to access outside the bounds of the world, it'll crash at runtime.) Since the game will need some other state, I'm using the state monad. The overall monad stack is type M = StateT S (ST RealWorld). (It could be forall s. StateT S (ST s), but I had some trouble getting that to type check, so I fixed s to RealWorld, which is ok since it'll be run using stToIO. Next, a concept of time, and the main event loop. I decided to use a continutation passing style, so the main loop takes the current continuation, and runs it to get a snapshot of the state to display, and a new continutation. The advantage of using continuations this way is that all the game logic can be handled in the pure code. I should probably be using the Cont monad in my monad stack, but I've not learned it and lack time. For now I'm handling the continuations by hand, which seems ok.

updateWorld :: Step
updateWorld (Just 'Q') = do
        addMessage "Are you sure you want to quit? [yn]"
        next $ \i -> case i of
                Just 'y' -> quit
                _ -> continue
updateWorld input = do
        addMessage ("pressed " ++ show input)
        continue

Finally, I wrote some ncurses display code, which is almost working.

Start time: After midnight last night. Will end by midnight next Friday. Lines of code written today: 368 Craziest type signature today: writeS :: forall a. ((Vec2 a -> ST RealWorld ()) -> M ()) -> Pos -> a -> M ()

By the way, there's a whole LambdaHack library for Haskell, targeted at just this kind of roguelike construction. It looks excellent. I'm not using it for two reasons:

Scroll is going to be unusual in a lot of ways, and LambdaHack probably makes some assumptions that don't fit.
mainSer :: (MonadAtomic m, MonadServerReadRequest m) => [String] -> COps -> (m () -> IO ()) -> (COps -> DebugModeCli -> ((FactionId -> ChanServer ResponseUI RequestUI -> IO ()) -> (FactionId -> ChanServer ResponseAI RequestAI -> IO ()) -> IO ()) -> IO ()) -> IO ()
That's a lot of stuff to figure out! I only have a week, so it's probably easier to build my own framework, and this gives me an opportunity to learn more generally useful stuff, like how to use mutable Vectors.

Holger Levsen: 20150307-reproducible-video

Video from the reproducible builds talk at FOSDEM 2015 and testing experimental The video from Lunar's and my talk Stretching out for trustworthy reproducible builds (follow this link if you're interested in the slides) given at the recent FOSDEM is finally available for download at both the FOSDEM video archive as well as the Debian video archive. (Update: the Debian video archive has a hires version now, I suspect the FOSDEM archive will follow soon.) To encourage maintainers uploading fixes to experimental and thanks to lots of work from Mattia Rizzolo we are now also testing packages in experimental for reproducibility! And even better: behind the scenes the site is prepared for stretch! Should you have wondered about the decrease in sid since we've been given the talk in early February: this is because we've added some more variations to the second build. Most notably building with a timezone difference of 25h lead to the decrease in the graphs showing the current prospects of reproducible builds... More work and joy to come!

Andrew Pollock: [tech] Honey, I wrote my first Chrome extension!

I love reading Linux Weekly News. It's a great source of high quality Linux and FOSS journalism, and I've been a subscriber for years. One mild annoyance I have with the site is the way articles are cross-linked. All the article URIs are in the format /Article/531114/, which isn't particularly descriptive about that article's content. When faced with an article that links to another article, with perhaps a word of anchor text, it's hard to tell if the new article is worth opening in a tab, is indeed already open in a tab, or has been previously read. (Yes, the "visited link" colour can help to a small degree, but even then, it doesn't tell you which previously read article it is). This is what ~~God~~ the W3C invented the title attribute for. Back in April 2011, I emailed Jonathan Corbet and asked if his content management system could just do this, but it was apparently a bit tricky, and it got filed in the "feature request" bucket. I was sufficiently irritated by this deficiency last Monday, when doing some heavy reading on a topic, and so I decided to take matters into my own hands, and also learn how to write a Chrome Extension into the bargain. I was delighted to have scratched the itch under 24 hours later and developed something that solved my particular problem - lwn4chrome I'm calling it. I'm just finalising an icon for it, and then I'll have a stab at putting it in the Chrome Web Store as a freebie. I might even have a crack at writing a Firefox extension as well for completeness, but I suspect the bulk of LWN's readership is using Chrome or Chromium.

6 March 2015

Eddy Petrișor: Occasional Rsnapshot v1.3.1

I was writing in the previous post about Occasional Rsnapshot and how I ended up writing it.

Just before releasing v1.2.1 I realized it would make sense Semantic Versioning which, in just a few words means:

Given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, increment the:

MAJOR version when you make incompatible API changes,
MINOR version when you add functionality in a backwards-compatible manner, and
PATCH version when you make backwards-compatible bug fixes.

I just released Occasional Rsnapshot v1.3.1 which mainly fixed issue 4:

When deciding to do a backup for interval INT, there should be a check that the oldest snapshot in INT-1 interval is older than the threshold for the INT interval. Otherwise the INT interval will be populated with backups more frequent than desired and it is possible older backups in INT interval to completely lost.
The condition should be:
ts(oldest(INT-1)) - ts(newest(INT)) >= threshold(INT)
For example:
if weekly.0 is from 15th of February and daily.6 is from 17th of February, weekly should not be triggered, but
if weekly.0 is from 15th of February and daily.6 is from 23rd of February, weekly shall be triggered
This extra check should probably added in can_backup_interval.

It was a small bug, but it might have lead to losing important older backups because newer and more frequent backups would be pushed from hourly, interval by interval up to the yearly interval, in spite of the fact that the distance between backups wouldn't have been respecting the upper interval minimum distance in time.

There was also a small syntax bugfix, but functionally nothing has changed because bash was doing the right thing even with that small error.

If you have started using Occasional Rsnapshot, you definitely want now Occasional Rsnapshot v1.3.1. If you haven't started and you don't have backups, please start doing backups, and while you're at it, you might want to try Occasional Rsnapshot (with Rsnapshot).

Richard Hartmann: Release Critical Bug report for Week 10

The UDD bugs interface currently knows about the following release critical bugs:

In Total: 1068 (Including 159 bugs affecting key packages)
- Affecting Jessie: 112 (key packages: 84) That's the number we need to get down to zero before the release. They can be split in two big categories:
  - Affecting Jessie and unstable: 82 (key packages: 60) Those need someone to find a fix, or to finish the work to upload a fix to unstable:
    - 14 bugs are tagged 'patch'. (key packages: 10) Please help by reviewing the patches, and (if you are a DD) by uploading them.
    - 1 bugs are marked as done, but still affect unstable. (key packages: 0) This can happen due to missing builds on some architectures, for example. Help investigate!
    - 67 bugs are neither tagged patch, nor marked done. (key packages: 50) Help make a first step towards resolution!
  - Affecting Jessie only: 30 (key packages: 24) Those are already fixed in unstable, but the fix still needs to migrate to Jessie. You can help by submitting unblock requests for fixed packages, by investigating why packages do not migrate, or by reviewing submitted unblock requests.
    - 16 bugs are in packages that are unblocked by the release team. (key packages: 12)
    - 14 bugs are in packages that are not unblocked. (key packages: 12)

How do we compare to the Squeeze and Wheezy release cycles?

Week	Squeeze	Wheezy	Jessie
43	284 (213+71)	468 (332+136)	319 (240+79)
44	261 (201+60)	408 (265+143)	274 (224+50)
45	261 (205+56)	425 (291+134)	295 (229+66)
46	271 (200+71)	401 (258+143)	427 (313+114)
47	283 (209+74)	366 (221+145)	342 (260+82)
48	256 (177+79)	378 (230+148)	274 (189+85)
49	256 (180+76)	360 (216+155)	226 (147+79)
50	204 (148+56)	339 (195+144)	???
51	178 (124+54)	323 (190+133)	189 (134+55)
52	115 (78+37)	289 (190+99)	147 (112+35)
1	93 (60+33)	287 (171+116)	140 (104+36)
2	82 (46+36)	271 (162+109)	157 (124+33)
3	25 (15+10)	249 (165+84)	172 (128+44)
4	14 (8+6)	244 (176+68)	187 (132+55)
5	2 (0+2)	224 (132+92)	175 (124+51)
6	release!	212 (129+83)	161 (109+52)
7	release+1	194 (128+66)	147 (106+41)
8	release+2	206 (144+62)	147 (96+51)
9	release+3	174 (105+69)	152 (101+51)
10	release+4	120 (72+48)	112 (82+30)
11	release+5	115 (74+41)
12	release+6	93 (47+46)
13	release+7	50 (24+26)
14	release+8	51 (32+19)
15	release+9	39 (32+7)
16	release+10	20 (12+8)
17	release+11	24 (19+5)
18	release+12	2 (2+0)

Graphical overview of bug stats thanks to azhag:

Raphaël Hertzog: My Free Software Activities in February 2015

My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donators (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me. Debian LTS This month I have been paid to work 14.5 hours on Debian LTS. I worked mostly on CVE triage (41 commits in the security tracker) and organizational issues. One maintainer complained that he had not been kept in the loop for an LTS update of his package. After some discussion, I decided to change the way I did CVE triage so that any time that I add a package to our list of packages needing an update, I also send a mail to the maintainer, thus offering him the opportunity to step in. To make this sustainable, I wrote a small helper script that will generate a mail out of a template. And to kickstart the process I mailed all maintainers of packages that were already listed in our queue of packages to update. To improve the email generated, I requested a JSON export of the security tracker data (see discussions in #761859). In the mean time, Holger worked on this already and after a few iterations we did converge on an output format that will be really useful both for my needs in terms of CVE triage but also for the Package Tracker to be able to display the list of security vulnerabilities affecting each release (see #761730). Last but not least, I don t want to be the only one doing CVE triage for our LTS release so I documented the process in our wiki page. As a side note, I sponsored an e2fsprogs update prepared by Nguyen Cong and I sent the DLA for the embargoed samba update that had been prepared by Ivo de Decker (thanks to both of them!). Tryton Like last month, I invested again a copious amount of time on Tryton, fixing some bugs that were affecting me and improving the French chart of accounts to properly manage purchases and sales within the European Union. Here are some links for more details:

#4523: Change account 58 into a real non-view account
Preserve the user-supplied date on account moves when it s valid
#4532: Rename some tax codes hosting base amounts to avoid having two codes with the same name
#4568: Fix the credit note base tax code and tax code for the sales in France (took quite some discussion to double check this with an accountant)
#4569: Track the amount invoiced in sales outside Europe
#4570: Properly handle EU-sales and EU-purchases in the VAT report (this was by far the most complicated issue I dealt with, it took several days and multiple tries to get it right).

Debian I did some work on Distro Tracker, I fixed #777453 (password reset not working because the generated email was using an invalid From email) and #779247 (obsolete build reproducibility action items were not dropped). I also started to work on restructuring the mail handling in distro-tracker (cf #754913) but it s not public yet. While I have no plans to stop contributing to Debian (it s part of my day job!), I reduced my non-work related involvement by officially recognizing that I was no longer properly assuming some of my responsibilities and that I was following too many mailing lists and RSS feeds. The most notable changes are that I removed myself from the maintenance of dpkg, developers-reference, quilt, sql-ledger, and a few perl/python modules. Misc Voting software. Part of the reason why I m reducing my involvement in Debian is that I got more involved in Nouvelle Donne (a French political party) and in particular in the handling of its digital infrastructure (currently running on Ubuntu, doh!). As part of this, I was looking for free software to handle secure votes and elections (and if possible adhering to the principles of liquid democracy). There s no perfect solution and no clear winner. That said I started following the evolution of AgoraVoting because it seems to have a good momentum and has some interesting features (it already supports votes with ranked choices, supports good crypto, has been used for elections involving large numbers of voters in the context of Podemos in Spain). But it still has some ways to go to establish itself as a truly international and community-backed project. GDM bug. Due to my work on Kali, I filed a bug against GDM (this one has been quickly fixed upstream, it s still open in Debian) and another one against accountsservice to request the possibility to define the default graphical session. Dirvish formula for Salt. I contributed another formula to manage backups with dirvish. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

One comment Liked this article? Click here. My blog is Flattr-enabled.

Next.

Previous.