It's time for some new music. And given that this artist was suggested to me at least twice by different people I guess I finally have to feature her. This time it's about Sookee, a rapper from Berlin with queer-feministic background. I guess if you listen and see the first song you might know why she was suggested to me, and also why I consider her an important artist to share. So without further delay, here are the songs:

• D.R.A.G.: The saying you're born naked and the rest is drag couldn't be more true. Actually, that quote says it all, even though I try to use this drag to help people get my gender on a more regularly basis these days.
• Spuck auf Rechts: In a time of PEGIDA, of burning refugee centers and even middle-left based political parties doing right-winged propaganda this song is still very much current and important, maybe even more.
• Pro Homo: Wie kann man nur hassen, dass Menschen sich lieben. "How is it possible to hate that people love each other" - is there anything to add to this? I don't think so.

As you can see, Sookee isn't just some artist but transports a lot of messages. And even when you might not understand them because they are in German I hope you get the concept nevertheless. :) Enjoy!

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Over the past few years, a plethora of orchestration frameworks have been exploding onto the scene. Many have been around for quite a while but not all have the same sort of community behind them. For example there's a very interesting option in Joey Hess' Propellor but that is hurt by needing to be able to build Propellor on all the hosts you manage. On the other hand, Ansible is able to operate without installing extra software on your target hosts, but instead it ends up very latency-bound which can cause problems when your managed hosts are "far away". I have considered CFEngine, Chef, Puppet and Salt in addition to the above mentioned options, but none of them feel quite right to me. I am looking for a way to manage a small number of hosts, at least one of which is not always online (my laptop) and all of which are essentially snowflakes whose sparkleybits I want some reasonable control over. I have a few basic requirements which I worry would be hard to meet -- I want to be able to make changes to my hosts by editing a file and committing/pushing it to a git server. I want to be able to manage a host entirely over SSH from one or more systems, ideally without having to install the orchestration software on the target host, but where if the software is present it will get used to accelerate matters. I don't want to have to install Ruby or PHP on any system in order to have orchestration, and some of the systems I wish to manage simply can't compile Haskell stuff sanely. I'm not desperately interested in learning yet more DSLs, but I appreciate that it will be necessary, but I really don't want to have to learn more than one DSL simply to run one frameworks. I don't want to have to learn strange and confusing combinations of file formats. For example, Ansible quite sensibly uses YAML for its structured data except for its host/group lists. It uses Jinja2 for its templating and looping, except for some things which it generates its own looping constructs inside its YAML. I also personally find Ansible's sportsball oriented terminology to be confusing, but that might just be me. So what I'm hoping is that someone will be able to point me at a project which combines all the wonderful features of the above, with a need to learn only one DSL and which doesn't require to be installed on the managed host but which can benefit from being so installed, is driven from git, and won't hurt my already overly burdened brain. Dear Lazyweb, pls. kthxbye.

Hm, wasn't there a catchy tune that started that way? Just kidding. But about twenty years ago today I sent this email about a new Debian package upload -- and that makes it (as best as I can tell) the earliest trace of me doing Debian work. It so happened that I did upload two packages in July of 1995 as well, but it was so early in the project that we did not have a mailing list archive for such things yet (!!). And I have a vague recollection that the two in July were an adoption---whereas the post referenced above announced efax as my first new package added to the distribution. And there were more to come ... Anyway, thanks for all the fish! Twenty years with Debian has been a great, great ride. I learned a lot from a lot of fantastic people, and I hope I helped a few people along the way with a package or two I still maintain. Debian remains a truly fabulous project which I hope will go strongly for another 20 (or even 22).

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

I recently received Debian bug report #798350 where the user had a problem with wordpress. After upgrading to version 4.3, the webservers performance degrades over time. The problem is also reported at the wordpress site with bug WordPress ticket 33423 including the fix. I have backported the relevant changeset and uploaded Debian wordpress package 4.3+dfsg-2 which only contains this changeset. For a lot of people, including myself, you probably won t hit this bug but if it impacts you, then try this update.

Review: Dark Currents, by Jacqueline Carey

Series:	Agent of Hel #1
Publisher:	Roc
Copyright:	2012
Printing:	October 2013
ISBN:	0-451-41483-7
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	399

This is another much-belated review. Hopefully I can remember the book well enough to do it justice. Daisy Johanssen has normal urban fantasy problems: her father was an incubus who (somewhat unsurprisingly) didn't stick around, she has to keep careful control of her own demonic side, her father occasionally tries to tempt her to invoke demonic power, and it's possible that she could breach the walls protecting the world from demons and bring about Armageddon. The typical sort of thing. Also, there's an unexplained murder in her home town, a mid-western US resort town whose image does not go well with eldritch murders. Daisy's only official role with the town police department is as a part-time file clerk, but this is urban fantasy, so you know the protagonist is going to be hip-deep in some sort of crime investigation. In this case, that's because the Norse goddess Hel (as distinct from the origin of Daisy's father entirely different thing) also lives here, in a manner of speaking, and Daisy is her liaison. In this case, Hel decides she's the one who should dispense justice. Carey previously has primarily been an epic fantasy writer, and this is her first foray into urban fantasy. (Well, arguably Santa Olivia and its sequel count, but those felt closer to superhero fiction to me.) The language and tone of her epic fantasy is far different than the conventions of either urban fantasy or superhero fiction, and I thought Santa Olivia was somewhat awkward in places. (None of the profanity quite worked, for instance.) Dark Currents felt smoother and more comfortable, aided by a charming mid-western feel. A few of Daisy's first-person narrative quirks wore poorly, such as every reference to "the Seven Deadlies," but Carey did a solid job with a typical out-of-her-depth urban fantasy protagonist. I'm pretty tired of the standard mythology of urban fantasy, and that is a bit of a drawback here: vampires and werewolves both feature, and I think I could happily go ten years before reading another story about vampires or hunky werewolves. Carey adds her own take on ghouls, but it's still pretty similar to lots (and lots) of other series. Thankfully, there's a bit of Norse mythology, a bit of fairy, and one extremely memorable lamia (of the serpent-tail-below-the-waist variety, at least some of the time). Lurine, a reclusive, retired starlet, a friend of Daisy's mother, and Daisy's childhood babysitter, is the lamia in question. She absolutely steals the show. The dynamic between her and Daisy is perfect: Carey resists the urge to ruin it with dark hints or falling-outs to increase tension. Instead, she lets it be a bit quirky, a bit complicated, but full of the reliability of a deep friendship. And Lurine is a wonderful character, the kind that only works as a supporting character because she's best seen through other people's eyes. Daisy's mother just makes the dynamic better. The reader can believe she's the sort of person who would have an ill-advised fling with an incubus, but also the sort of person who could raise a daughter like Daisy without many resources other than sheer grit. She never loses her optimistic outlook on the world, but has enough backbone behind it to make Lurine's friendship with her entirely believable. The plot here is nothing particularly special. Daisy unravels various clues, gets deeper into complicated relationships between various factions, occasionally finds herself in serious trouble, and relies on the help of friends and allies. I would have enjoyed the book more with a lot less Cody and more of the less typical mythology. But the relationships between the female characters, and the sheer persistence of mid-western normality and ordinary life challenges in the face of so much supernatural meddling, help this book stand out from the crowd. Dark Currents is different from most of what Carey has written, and you may be a bit disappointed if you were hoping for the epic sweep of the Kushiel series. But I found myself charmed by it, and will be reading the next book of the series. Followed by Autumn Bones. Rating: 7 out of 10

Implementing the hardening When packaging in Debian, is very common to see the lintian messages 'hardening-no-relro' and 'hardening-no-fortify-functions' in some softwares written in C or C++. To solve these issues, we can use the 'blhc' tool (apt-get install blhc). Please, get the revision 1.11-9 of the icmpinfo package. You can get this revision from http://snapshot.debian.org or from http://eriberto.pro.br/debian/icmpinfo. As a shortcut, you can use the following command:

$ dget -u http://eriberto.pro.br/debian/icmpinfo/icmpinfo_1.11-9.dsc

The icmpinfo 1.11-9 is almost clean for lintian (in 2015-09-07, Standards-Version 3.9.6). The only problem is:

W: icmpinfo: hardening-no-relro usr/sbin/icmpinfo

To track the problem I will use blhc over the .build file:

$ blhc icmpinfo_1.11-9_amd64.build
LDFLAGS missing (-Wl,-z,relro): cc -g -O2 -fstack-protector-strong -Wformat -Werror=format-security -o icmpinfo recvping.o print.o err.o icmpinfo.o pid.o

Note that the problem is some missing options (-Wl,-z,relro) for LDFLAGS when building icmpinfo (for newbies, in GCC, -o is used to indicate the name to be used for the final binary after the compilation). If you are using the DebHelper compat 9 (debian/compat=9) and the DebHelper 9 (debhelper >= 9 in Build-Depends field in d/control), some variables as CFLAGS, LDFLAGS, CPPFLAGS and CXXFLAGS will be automatically passed during calls to dh_auto_* programs (yes, you should use the new and reduced d/rules format - see as example the debian/rules of the icmpinfo 1.11-9; if you still have doubts, $ man dh). Now, we need discover the reason why the LDFLAGS is being changed between its generation by the Debian build system and its utilization by the upstream's source code. So, we need to check the upstream Makefile. There is in Makefile (after a 'quilt push -a', to apply all current patches):

LDFLAGS= $(CFLAGS)
OBJECTS= recvping.o print.o err.o icmpinfo.o pid.o
TARGET = icmpinfo
$(TARGET): $(OBJECTS)
 $(CC) $(LDFLAGS) -o $@ $(OBJECTS) $(LDLIBS)

Hummm... The LDFLAGS content generated by Debian is being dropped by Makefile because it is saying that "LDFLAGS = CFLAGS content". This line is a problem because the upstream Makefile needs to take and use the CFLAGS and LDFLAGS independently. To fix the issue, you can use this patch:

--- icmpinfo-1.11.orig/Makefile
+++ icmpinfo-1.11/Makefile
@@ -20,13 +20,13 @@ VERS = 1.11
 
 RM = rm -f
 
-LDFLAGS= $(CFLAGS)
+#LDFLAGS= $(CFLAGS)
 
 OBJECTS= recvping.o print.o err.o icmpinfo.o pid.o
 TARGET = icmpinfo
 
 $(TARGET): $(OBJECTS)
- $(CC) $(LDFLAGS) -o $@ $(OBJECTS) $(LDLIBS)
+ $(CC) $(LDFLAGS) $(CFLAGS) -o $@ $(OBJECTS) $(LDLIBS)
 
 tgz: clean
 rm -f CHECKSUMS.asc

After a 'debuild' is a fact the problem is solved and the lintian is happy. See the blhc results:

$ blhc ../icmpinfo_1.11-9_amd64.build
$

Now, we can improve the hardening. To see the current status, we can use the 'blhc --all' command. See here:

blhc --all ../icmpinfo_1.11-9_amd64.build
CFLAGS missing (-fPIE): cc -g -O2 -fstack-protector-strong -Wformat -Werror=format-security -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -c -o recvping.o recvping.c
CFLAGS missing (-fPIE): cc -g -O2 -fstack-protector-strong -Wformat -Werror=format-security -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -c -o print.o print.c
CFLAGS missing (-fPIE): cc -g -O2 -fstack-protector-strong -Wformat -Werror=format-security -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -c -o err.o err.c
CFLAGS missing (-fPIE): cc -g -O2 -fstack-protector-strong -Wformat -Werror=format-security -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -c -o icmpinfo.o icmpinfo.c
CFLAGS missing (-fPIE): cc -g -O2 -fstack-protector-strong -Wformat -Werror=format-security -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -c -o pid.o pid.c
LDFLAGS missing (-fPIE -pie -Wl,-z,now): cc -Wl,-z,relro -g -O2 -fstack-protector-strong -Wformat -Werror=format-security -o icmpinfo recvping.o print.o err.o icmpinfo.o pid.o

Well, we know that CFLAGS and LDFLAGS are present. Now, we can force the DebHelper to pass some extra options to make hardening better. Generally, is only needed to add the following line to debian/rules:

export DEB_BUILD_MAINT_OPTIONS = hardening=+all

See the results (after a new debuild command):

$ blhc --all ../icmpinfo_1.11-9_amd64.build
$

More examples Let me to show other example. I will use the mac-robber 1.02-3 (however, I disabled the Makefile.patch in debian/patches/series). After a debuild, the following lintian messages are presented:

W: mac-robber: hardening-no-relro usr/bin/mac-robber
I: mac-robber: hardening-no-fortify-functions usr/bin/mac-robber

Using blhc:

$ blhc ../mac-robber_1.02-3_amd64.build 
CFLAGS missing (-g -O2 -fstack-protector-strong -Wformat -Werror=format-security): gcc -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -o mac-robber mac-robber.c
CPPFLAGS missing (-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2): gcc -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -o mac-robber mac-robber.c
LDFLAGS missing (-Wl,-z,relro): gcc -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -o mac-robber mac-robber.c

We need to verify what is the problem in Makefile with CFLAGS, CPPFLAGS and LDFLAGS when generating the binary 'mac-robber' (just recalling, -o mac-robber in GCC command). See:

linux_notstatic: 
 $(CC) -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -o mac-robber mac-robber.c

There are no references to CFLAGS, CPPFLAGS and LDFLAGS. To solve the problem, we need patch the Makefile to make this:

linux_notstatic: 
 $(CC) $(CFLAGS) $(LDFLAGS) $(CPPFLAGS) -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -o mac-robber mac-robber.c

As last example, is possible that the Makefile is overriding the content sent by DebHelper when building. See this line from a hypothetical Makefile:

CFLAGS = -g -Wall

As you can see, the Makefile is redefining CFLAGS; consequently, it is discarding any previous content sent by DebHelper. To solve this issue, we can use the following patch:

-CFLAGS = -g -Wall
+CFLAGS += -g -Wall

So, the content received from DebHelper will be added to '-g -Wall'. Default parameters As curiosity, to see the basic parameters created by DebHelper as hardening, use the command:

$ dpkg-buildflags

To see the all parameters, use the command:

$ DEB_BUILD_MAINT_OPTIONS=hardening=+all dpkg-buildflags

More information More information about the hardening can be viewed at two places: https://wiki.debian.org/Hardening https://wiki.debian.org/HardeningWalkthrough I hope this help. Enjoy!

I had the wonderful privilege to go camping and hiking with my kids scouting group, the Pathfinders of Tantallon SDA church. The day started with a quick trip to Pugwash with one of the leaders to bring back some chairs to their school, and then we headed back out to Blomidon to meet up with the group. Click the photo below to start the slideshow.

The road trip started early to fetch some chairs click to start

FTP assistant Another month passed and another statistic arrives: This month I marked 408 packages for accept and rejected only 32 of them. Almost like last month I had to send 14 emails to maintainers. Squeeze LTS This was my fourteenth month that I did some work for the Squeeze LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. As anybody else visited Debconf15, I got assigned a workload of 17h this month. I spent some time to prepare an upload of php5, which I did to people.d.o to let others do some tests with the package. I also uploaded some DLAs

• [DLA 290-1] xmltooling security update Thorsten Alteholz
• [DLA 290-2] opensaml2 security update Thorsten Alteholz
• [DLA 292-1] libstruts1.2-java security update Thorsten Alteholz
• [DLA 296-1] extplorer security update Thorsten Alteholz
• [DLA 297-1] wesnoth-1.8 security update Thorsten Alteholz
• [DLA 298-1] roundup security update Thorsten Alteholz

The patch for [DLA 290-1] was prepared by Ferenc Wagner. As opensaml2 needed a rebuild with the new version of xmltooling, that upload got [DLA-290-2] instead of an own DLA-number. This month I also had another term of doing frontdesk work. So I answered questions on the IRC channel and looked for CVEs that are important for Squeeze LTS or could be ignored. Other stuff As $WORK needed some time this month, my other activities had been almost nil. But expect more to come in September .

I have about 18 personal hosts, all running the Jessie release of Debian GNU/Linux. To keep up with security updates I use unattended-upgrades. The intention is that every day, via cron, the system will look for updates and apply them. Although I mostly expect it to handle security updates I also have it configured such that point-releases will be applied by magic too. Unfortunately this weekend, with the 8.2 release, things broke in a significant way - The cron deamon was left in a broken state, such that all cronjobs failed to execute. I was amazed that nobody had reported a bug, as several people on twitter had the same experience as me, but today I read through a lot of bug-reports and discovered that #783683 is to blame:

• Old-cron runs.
• Scheduled unattended-upgrades runs.
• This causes cron to restart.
• When cron restarts the jobs it was running are killed.
• The system is in a broken state.

The solution:

# dpkg --configure -a
# apt-get upgrade

I guess the good news is I spotted it promptly, with the benefit of hindsight the bug report does warn of this as being a concern, but I guess there wasn't a great solution. Anyway I hope others see this, or otherwise spot the problem themselves. In unrelated news the seaweedfs file-store I previously introduced is looking more and more attractive to me. I reported a documentation-related bug which was promptly handled, even though it turned out I was wrong, and I contributed CIDR support to whitelisting hosts which was merged in well. I've got a two-node "cluster" setup at the moment, and will be expanding that shortly. I've been doing a lot of little toy-projects in Go recently. This weekend I was mostly playing with the nats.io message-bus, and tying it together with sinatra.

Piwik told me that people are still sharing my post about the state of GNOME-Software and update notifications in Debian Jessie. So I thought it might be useful to publish a small update on that matter:

• If you are using GNOME or KDE Plasma with Debian 8 (Jessie), everything is fine you will receive update notifications through the GNOME-Shell/via g-s-d or Apper respectively. You can perform updates on GNOME with GNOME-PackageKit and with Apper on KDE Plasma.
• If you are using a desktop-environment not supporting PackageKit directly for example Xfce, which previously relied on external tools you might want to try pk-update-icon from jessie-backports. The small GTK+ tool will notify about updates and install them via GNOME-PackageKit, basically doing what GNOME-PackageKit did by itself before the functionality was moved into GNOME-Software.
• For Debian Stretch, the upcoming release of Debian, we will have gnome-software ready and fully working. However, one of the design decisions of upstream is to only allow offline-updates (= download updates in the background, install on request at next reboot) with GNOME-Software. In case you don t want to use that, GNOME-PackageKit will still be available, and so are of course all the CLI tools.
• For KDE Plasma 5 on Debian 9 (Stretch), a nice AppStream based software management solution with a user-friendly updater is also planned and being developed upstream. More information on that will come when there s something ready to show ;-).

I hope that clarifies things a little. Have fun using Debian 8!

---

UPDATE: It appears that many people have problems with getting update notifications in GNOME on Jessie. If you are affected by this, please try the following:

1. Open dconf-editor and navigate to org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.updates. Check if the key active is set to true
2. If that doesn t help, also check if at org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.updates the frequency-refresh-cache value is set to a sane value (e.g. 86400)
3. Consider increasing the priority value (if it isn t at 300 already)
4. If all of that doesn t help: I guess some internal logic in g-s-d is preventing a cache refresh then (e.g. because I thinks it is on a expensive network connection and therefore doesn t refresh the cache automatically, or thinks it is running on battery). This is a bug. If that still happens on Debian Stretch with GNOME-Software, please report a bug against the gnome-software package. As a workaround for Jessie you can enable unconditional cache refreshing via the APT cronjob by installing apt-config-auto-update.

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Dmitry Shachnev uploaded sphinx/1.3.1-6 with improved patches from Val Lorentz. Chris Lamb submitted a patch for ibus-table which makes the output of ibus-table-createdb deterministic. Niko Tyni wrote a patch to make libmodule-build-perl linking order deterministic. Santiago Vila has been leading discussions on the best way to fix timestamps coming from Gettext POT files. Packages fixed The following 35 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: apache-log4j2, dctrl-tools, dms, gitit, gnubik, isrcsubmit, mailutils, normaliz, oaklisp, octave-fpl, octave-specfun, octave-vrml, opencolorio, openvdb, pescetti, php-guzzlehttp, proofgeneral, pyblosxom, pyopencl, pyqi, python-expyriment, python-flask-httpauth, python-mzml, python-simpy, python-tidylib, reactive-streams, scmxx, shared-mime-info, sikuli, siproxd, srtp, tachyon, tcltk-defaults, urjtag, velvet. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• binutils-m68hc1x/1:2.18-7 by Santiago Vila.
• boa-constructor/0.6.1-15 by Santiago Vila.
• brian/1.4.1-3 by Yaroslav Halchenko.
• criticalmass/1:1.0.0-3 by Santiago Vila.
• cvs-buildpackage/5.25 by Santiago Vila.
• fcrackzip/1.0-6 uploaded by Adam Borowski, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• filters/2.54 prepared by Joey Hess, fixed by Marius Gavrilescu.
• fsvs/1.2.6-2 by Santiago Vila.
• fte/0.50.2b6-6 by Santiago Vila.
• gcc-mingw-w64/15.7 by Stephen Kitt.
• ircd-hybrid/1:8.2.8+dfsg.1-1 by Dominic Hargreaves.
• leveldb/1.18-3 uploaded by Laszlo Boszormenyi, patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• libavg/1.8.1-2 uploaded by Dimitri John Ledkov, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• lynx-cur/2.8.9dev6-4 uploaded by Axel Beckert, patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• maildir-utils/0.9.12-3 by Norbert Preining
• pd-iemnet/0.2-1 by IOhannes m zm lnig.
• photopc/3.05-8 by Santiago Vila.
• postgresql-plproxy/2.6-1 uploaded by Christoph Berg, report by Dhole.
• prometheus-pushgateway/0.2.0+ds-2 uploaded by Mart n Ferrari, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• shelxle/1.0.740-1 uploaded by Daniel Leidert, fixed upstream.
• sigil/0.8.7+dfsg-2 by Mattia Rizzolo.
• sks-ecc/0.93-5 by Santiago Vila.
• smartlist/3.15-25 by Santiago Vila.
• snd/11.7-4 by Santiago Vila.
• solarwolf/1.5-2.1 by Graham Inggs.
• sphinx/1.3.1-6 uploaded by Dmitry Shachnev, patches by Val Lorentz.
• tla/1.3.5+dfsg1-2 by Santiago Vila.
• zapping/0.10~cvs6-10 by Santiago Vila.

The package is not in yet in unstable, but linux/4.2-1~exp1 is now reproducible! Kudos to Ben Hutchings, and most fixes are already merged upstream. Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them:

• bochs/2.6-3 by Santiago Vila.
• oolite/1.82-1 by Nicolas Boulenguez.
• openjdk-7/7u85-2.6.1-1 uploaded by Matthias Klose, original patch by Emmanuel Bourg.
• python-dtcwt/0.10.1+dfsg1-2 uploaded by Ghislain Antony Vaillant, original patch by Chris Lamb.

Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #797432 on torus-trooper by Reiner Herrmann: set locale to C when sorting source file list.
• #797437 on flow-tools by Chris Lamb: use pre-defined hostname and date of the latest debian/changelog entry in build string.
• #797505 on cloudprint by Chris Lamb: remove embedded .pyc files.
• #797506 on comix by Chris Lamb: remove embedded .pyc files.
• #797508 on litl by Chris Lamb: remove date from documentation generated with LaTeX.
• #797518 on gyoto by Chris Lamb: set date in documentation generated with LaTeX to the latest debian/changelog entry.
• #797539 on cadabra by Chris Lamb: use date of the latest debian/changelog entry as build time.
• #797543 on xotcl by Chris Lamb: sort source list in Makefile.
• #797579 on ferret-vis by Chris Lamb: use date of the latest debian/changelog entry as build time.
• #797711 on libkinosearch1-perl by Niko Tyni: sort source list in Build.PL.
• #797871 on xbae by Chris Lamb: use date of the latest debian/changelog entry as build time.

reproducible.debian.net Some bugs that prevented packages to build successfully in the remote builders have been fixed. (h01ger) Two more amd64 build jobs have been removed from the Jenkins host in favor of six more on the new remote nodes. (h01ger) The munin graphs currently looks fine, so more amd64 jobs will probably be added in the next week. diffoscope development Version 32 of diffoscope has been released on September 3rd with the following new features:

• A new --fuzzy-threshold option to specify the TLSH score used as cut-off for fuzzy matching. Specifying 0 will disable fuzzy-matching entirely. Suggested by Jakub Wilk.
• A new --new-file option to treat absent files as empty. This make diffoscope a great tool to look at the content of an archive at once by comparing it with a non-existent file (example). Suggested by Jakub Wilk.
• Comparisons of symlinks and devices given on the command line is now possible.
• Default values are displayed in --help.

It also fixes many bugs. Head over to the changelog for the full list. Version 33 was released the day after to fix a bug introduced in the packaging. Documentation update Chris Lamb blessed the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH specification with the version number 1.0 . Lunar documented how the .file assembler directive can help with random filenames in debug symbols. Package reviews 235 reviews have been removed, 84 added and 277 updated this week. 29 new FTBFS bugs were filled by Chris Lamb, Chris West (Faux), Daniel Stender, and Niko Tyni. New issues identified this week: random_order_in_ibus_table_createdb_output, random_order_in_antlr_output, nondetermistic_link_order_in_module_build, and timestamps_in_tex_documents. Misc. Thanks to Dhole and Thomas Vincent, the talk held at DebConf15 now has subtitles! Void Linux started to merge changes to make packages produced by xbps reproducible.

This was my fourth month as a Freexian sponsored LTS contributor. I was assigned 4 hours which was enough for me to release a fix for screen and review CVEs for libvpx and determine that they did not apply to squeeze-lts. The screen update is covered under DLA 305-1.

A second maintenance release 0.1.4 of our RcppDE package, following on the heels of the recent 0.1.3. release arrived on CRAN today. RcppDE is a "port" of DEoptim, a popular package for derivative-free optimisation using differential optimization, to C++. By using RcppArmadillo, the code becomes a lot shorter and more legible. This version changes the package-internal code to use Rcpp Attributes which makes things a little simpler (and possibly more robust as well). Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release.

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

Todays Debian Jessie's update brings a fix in Akonadi that you certainly want in your system.

There was a bug in Akonadi that made it leak files. And if you use Kmail you will certainly want to keep reading: most of us who tested it before pushing it to testing (and now to stable) removed more than 4 GiB of useless data from our homes.

The bug that makes Akonadi leak files gets solved with the latest stable update (and has been in testing for a couple of months already). But you need to purge the leaked files. It's pretty easy: with your normal user account just run:

akonadictl fsck

That's all. After a while you will get back a lot of disk space. Note that you don't need the Akonadi fix in order to run this tool and recover your space. The fix just makes sure this won't happen again.

I knew it was about this time of the year 10 years ago when my Debian account was created, but I couldn't remember the exact date until I looked it up earlier this evening: today :). Rene Engelhard had been my advocate, and Marc Brockschmidt my AM. Thanks guys! A lot of time has passed since then, and I've worked in various parts of the project. I became an application manager almost immediately, and quickly got into the NM front desk as well, revamping parts of the NM process which had become pretty bureaucratic (I think we are now, 10 years later, back where we should be, thanks to almost all of the paperwork being automated, thanks Enrico!). I've processed 37 NMs, most of them between 2005 and 2008, later I was only active as front desk and eventually Debian account manager. I've recently picked up AMing again, which I still find quite refreshing as the AM will always also learn new things. Quality Assurance was and is the other big field. Starting by doing QA uploads of orphaned packages, I attended some QA meetings around Germany, and picked up maintenance of the DDPO pages, which I still maintain. The link between QA and NM is the MIA team where I was active for some years until they kindly kicked me out because I was MIA there myself. I'm glad they are still using some of the scripts I was writing to automate some things. My favorite MUA is mutt, of which I became co-maintainer in 2007, and later maintainer. I'm still listed in the uploaders field, but admittedly I haven't really done anything there lately. Also in 2007 I started working at credativ, after having been a research assistant at the university, which meant making my Debian work professional. Of course it also meant more real work and less time for the hobby part, but I was still very active around that time. Later in 2010 I was marrying, and we got two kids, at which point family was of course much more important, so my Debian involvement dropped to a minimum. (Mostly lurking on IRC ;) Being a PostgreSQL consultant at work, it was natural to start looking into the packaging, so I started submitting patches to postgresql-common in 2011, and became a co-maintainer in 2012. Since then, I've mostly been working on PostgreSQL-related packages, of which far too many have my (co-)maintainer stamp on them. To link the Debian and PostgreSQL worlds together, we started an external repository (apt.postgresql.org) that contains packages for the PostgreSQL major releases that Debian doesn't ship. Most of my open source time at the moment is spent on getting all PostgreSQL packages in shape for Debian and this repository. According to minechangelogs, currently 844 changelog entries in Debian mention my name, or were authored by me. Scrolling back yields memories of packages that are long gone again from unstable, or I passed on to other maintainers. There are way too many people in Debian that I enjoy(ed) working with to list them here, and many of them are my friends. Debian is really the extended family on the internet. My last DebConf before this year had been in Mar del Plata - I had met some people at other conferences like FOSDEM, but meeting (almost) everyone again in Heidelberg was very nice. I even remembered all basic Mao rules :D. So, thanks to everyone out there for making Debian such a wonderful place to be!

Thanks to hard work of Adam, Julien, Jonathan, Matthias, Scott, Simon and many others, the GCC-5/libstdc++ transition has progressed to a state, where we are ready to migrate the bulk of it to testing. It should be a mostly smooth ride. However, there will a few packages that are going to be uninstallable in testing for a few days and some packages will be temporarily removed from testing. If APT is unable to provide you with an upgrade for all of your packages, please try again in a few days. We apologise for the inconvenience. Currently, we expect about 36 binary packages to become temporarily uninstallable on amd64 and 34 on i386. This involves Britney accepting at least 4800 change items on testing (some of these are removals). Many thanks to Julien for providing a proposed set of hints and Adam extending them. Update: We now got a list of the packages being removed and a list of packages becoming uninstallable. It will be available on debian-devel within 20 minutes from now.
Filed under: Debian

Xperia X10 My first Android device was The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10i [1]. One of the reasons I chose it was for the large 4 screen, nowadays the desirable phones (the ones that are marketed as premium products) are all bigger than that (the Galaxy S6 is 5.1 ) and even the slightly less expensive phones are bigger. At the moment Aldi is advertising an Android phone with a 4.5 screen for $129. But at the time there was nothing better in the price range that I was willing to pay. I devoted a lot of my first review to the default apps for SMS and Email. Shortly after that I realised that the default email app is never going to be adequate (I now use K9 mail) and the SMS app is barely adequate (but I mostly use instant messaging). I ve got used to the fact that most apps that ship with an Android device are worthless, the camera app and the app to make calls are the only built in apps I regularly use nowadays. In the bug list from my first review the major issue was lack of Wifi tethering which was fixed by an update to Android 2.3. Unfortunately Android 2.3 ran significantly more slowly which decreased the utility of the phone. The construction of the phone is very good. Over the last 2 years the 2 Xperia X10 phones I own have been on loan to various relatives, many of whom aren t really into technology and can t be expected to take good care of things. But they have not failed in any way. Apart from buying new batteries there has been no hardware failure in either phone. While 2 is a small sample size I haven t see any other Android device last nearly as long without problems. Unfortunately I have no reason to believe that Sony has continued to design devices as well. The Xperia X10 phones crash more often than most Android phones with spontaneous reboots being a daily occurrence. While that is worse than any other Android device I ve used it s not much worse. My second review of the Xperia X10 had a section about ways of reducing battery use [2]. Wow, I d forgotten how much that sucked! When I was last using the Xperia X10 the Life360 app that my wife and I use to track each other was taking 15% of the battery, on more recent phones the same app takes about 2%. The design of modern phones seems to be significantly more energy efficient for background tasks and the larger brighter displays use more energy instead. My father is using one of the Xperia phones now, when I give him a better phone to replace it I will have both as emergency Wifi access points. They aren t useful for much else nowadays. Samsung Galaxy S In my first review of the Galaxy S I criticised it for being thin, oddly shaped, and slippery [3]. After using it for a while I found the shape convenient as I could easily determine the bottom of the phone in my pocket and hold it the right way up before looking at it. This is a good feature for a phone that s small enough to rotate in my pocket the Samsung Galaxy Note series of phones is large enough to not rotate in a pocket. In retrospect I think that being slippery isn t a big deal as almost everyone buys a phone case anyway. But it would still be better for use on a desk if the bulge was at the top. I wrote about my Galaxy S failing [4]. Two of my relatives had problems with those phones too. Including a warranty replacement I ve seen 4 of those phones in use and only one worked reliably. The one that worked reliably is now being used by my mother, it s considerably faster than the Xperia X10 because it has more RAM and will probably remain in regular use until it breaks. CyanogenMod I tried using CyanogenMod [5]. The phone became defective 9 months later so even though CyanogenMod is great I don t think I got good value for the amount of time spent installing it. I haven t tried replacing the OS of an Android phone since then. I really wish that they would start manufacturing phones that can have the OS replaced as easily as a PC. Samsung Galaxy S3 and Wireless Charging The Galaxy S3 was the first phone I owned which competes with phones that are currently on sale [6]. A relative bought one at the same time as me and her phone is running well with no problems. But my S3 had some damage to it s USB port which means that the vast majority of USB cables don t charge it (only Samsung cables can be expected to work). After I bought the S3 I bought a Qi wireless phone charging device [7]. One of the reasons for buying that is so if a phone gets a broken USB port then I can still use it. It s ironic that the one phone that had a damaged USB port also failed to work correctly with the Qi card installed. The Qi charger is gathering dust. One significant benefit of the S3 (and most Samsung phones) is that it has a SD socket. I installed a 32G SD card in the S3 and now one of my relatives is happily using it as a media player. Nexus 4 I bought a Nexus 4 [8] for my wife as she needed a better phone but didn t feel like paying for a Galaxy S3. The Nexus 4 is a nice phone in many ways but the lack of storage is a serious problem. At the moment I m only keeping it to use with Google Cardboard, I will lend it to my parents soon. In retrospect I made a mistake buying the Nexus 4. If I had spent a little more money on another Galaxy S3 then I would have had a phone with a longer usage life as well as being able to swap accessories with my wife. The Nexus 4 seems reasonably solid, the back of the case (which is glass) broke on mine after a significant impact but the phone continues to work well. That s a tribute to the construction of the phone and also the Ringke Fusion case [9]. Generally the Nexus 4 is a good phone so I don t regret buying it. I just think that the Galaxy S3 was a better choice. Galaxy Note 2 I got a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 in mid 2013 [10]. In retrospect it was a mistake to buy the Galaxy S3, the Note series is better suited to my use. If I had known how good it is to have a larger phone I d have bought the original Galaxy Note when it was first released. Generally everything is good about the Note 2. While it only has 16G of storage (which isn t much by today s standards) it has an SD socket to allow expansion. It s currently being used by a relative as a small tablet. With a 32G SD card it can fit a lot of movies. Bluetooth Speakers I received Bluetooth speakers in late 2013 [11]. I was very impressed by them but ended up not using them for a while. After they gathered dust for about a year I started using them again recently. While nothing has changed regarding my review of the Hive speakers (which I still like a lot) it seems that my need for such things isn t as great as I thought. One thing that made me start using the Bluetooth speakers again is that my phone case blocks the sound from my latest phone and makes it worse than phone sound usually is. I bought Bluetooth speakers for some relatives as presents, the relatives seemed to appreciate them but I wonder how much they actually use them. Nexus 5 The Nexus 5 [12] is a nice phone. When I first reviewed it there were serious problems with overheating when playing Ingress. I haven t noticed such problems recently so I think that an update to Android might have made it more energy efficient. In that review I was very impressed by the FullHD screen and it made me want a Note 3, at the time I planned to get a Note 3 in the second half of 2014 (which I did). Galaxy Note 3 Almost a year ago I bought the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 [13]. I m quite happy with it at the moment but I don t have enough data for a long term review of it. The only thing to note so far is that in my first review I was unhappy with the USB 3 socket as that made it more difficult to connect a USB cable in the dark. I ve got used to the socket and I can now reliably plug it in at night with ease. I wrote about Rivers jeans being the only brand that can fit a Samsung Galaxy Note series phone in the pocket [14]. The pockets of my jeans have just started wearing out and I think that it s partly due to the fact that I bought a Armourdillo Hybrid case [15] for my Note 3. I ve had the jeans for over 3 years with no noticable wear apart from the pockets starting to wear out after 10 months of using the Armourdillo case. I don t think that the Armourdillo case is bad, but the fact that it has deep grooves and hard plastic causes it to rub more on material when I take the phone out of my pocket. As I check my phone very frequently this causes some serious wear. This isn t necessarily a problem given that a phone costs 20* more than a pair of jeans, if the case was actually needed to save the phone then it would be worth having some jeans wear out. But I don t think I need more protection than a gel case offers. Another problem is that the Armourdillo case is very difficult to remove. This isn t a problem if you don t need access to your phone, IE if you use a phone like the Nexus 5 that doesn t permit changing batteries or SD cards. But if you need to change batteries, SD cards, etc then it s really annoying. My wife seems quite happy with her Armoudillo case but I don t think it was a good choice for me. I m considering abandoning it and getting one of the cheap gel cases. The sound on the Note 3 is awful. I don t know how much of that is due to a limitation in the speaker and how much is due to the case. It s quite OK for phone calls but not much good for music. Tablets I m currently on my third tablet. One was too cheap and nasty so I returned it. Another was still cheap and I hardly ever used it. The third is a Galaxy Note 10 which works really well. I guess the lesson is to buy something worthwhile so you can use it. A tablet that s slower and has less storage than a phone probably isn t going to get used much. Phone Longevity I owned the Xperia X10 for 22 months before getting the Galaxy S3. As that included 9 months of using a Galaxy S I only had 13 months of use out of that phone before lending it to other people. The Galaxy S3 turned out to be a mistake as I replaced it in only 7 months. I had the Note 2 for 15 months before getting the Note 3. I have now had the Note 3 for 11 months and have no plans for a replacement any time soon this is the longest I ve owned an Android phone and been totally satisfied with it. Also I only need to use it for another 4 months to set a record for using an Android phone. The Xperia was free as part of a telco contract. The other phones were somewhere between $500 and $600 each when counting the accessories (case, battery, etc) that I bought with them. So in 4 years and 7 months I ve spent somewhere between $1500 and $1800 on phones plus the cost of the Xperia that was built in to the contract. The Xperia probably cost about the same so I ll assume that I spent $2000 on phones and accessories. This seems like a lot. However that averages out to about $1.20 per day (and hopefully a lot less if my Note 3 lasts another couple of years). I could justify $1.20 per day for either the amount of paid work I do on Android phones or the amount of recreational activities that I perform (the Galaxy S3 was largely purchased for Ingress). Conclusion I think that phone companies will be struggling to maintain sales of high end phones in the future. When I chose the Xperia X10 I knew I was making a compromise, the screen resolution was an obvious limitation on the use of the device (even though it was one of the best devices available). The storage in the Xperia was also a limitation. Now FullHD is the minimum resolution for any sort of high-end device and 32G of storage is small. I think that most people would struggle to observe any improvement over a Nexus 5 or Note 3 at this time. I think that this explains the massive advertising campaign for the Galaxy S6 that is going on at the moment. Samsung can t sell the S6 based on it being better than previous phones because there s not much that they can do to make it obviously better. So they try and sell it for the image.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/02/18/xperia-x10i-first-experience/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/04/17/more-about-xperia-x10/
• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/11/21/galaxy-xperia-android-network/
• [4] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/09/11/back-to-xperia-x10/
• [5] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/12/05/cyanogenmod-galaxy-s/
• [6] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/12/21/galaxy-s3-power-case/
• [7] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2013/09/20/qi-phone-charging/
• [8] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2013/05/29/nexus-4/
• [9] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2013/08/13/nexus-4-ringke-fusion-case/
• [10] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2013/07/10/samsung-galaxy-note-2/
• [11] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2013/09/23/hive-bluetooth-speakers/
• [12] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2013/12/23/nexus-5/
• [13] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2014/10/31/samsung-galaxy-note-3/
• [14] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/11/17/geeky-jeans/
• [15] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2014/03/25/nexus5-armourdillo-hybrid-case/

So, yesterday, I unbroke dak twice even! It is of course slightly less awesome that one of the broken parts was in code written by yours truly. Anyhow: Unbreaking the dak auto-decrufter You may remember the auto-decrufter, which I added to dak. As a safety measure, it bails out when in doubt about which removal breaks what package. Turns out it was often in doubt, because the code had a bug. Of course, nothing that could not be solved with a patch. Thanks to Ansgar for merging this. :) Unbreaking dak generate-releases As a part of migrating apt-file to use APTs new acquire system (from experimental), I learned APT really likes having checksums for everything. Now including checksums for both the compressed file and the uncompressed file. Sadly, dak had optimised out the uncompressed checksums for Contents files, but even after removing that optimisation (and Ganneff unbreaking my dinstall breakage) some Contents files still did not have an checksum for the uncompressed Contents file. After some sophisticated debugging (read: printf-debugging ), I finally discovered the issue and submitted a patch. Thanks to Ansgar and Ganneff for merging (and fixing my dinstall breakage).
Filed under: Debian

We have enough debate about are things required by policy in Debian that, in my opinion we sometimes lose track of why things are a good idea to begin with. I just had a conversation via GitHub with a potential upstream developer (I m looking into packaging something he developed) that reminded me about some of the reasons some of the non-code we try to ship are a good idea. This is a Python based project. References to MANIFEST.in (manifest) translate to extra files to put in the tarball and references to sdist mean the source tarball. UPSTREAM: Thanks for the pull request. Is there any place where I can find more information about this manifest file, and why it s important to have one? ME: There are two files (LICENSE and CHANGELOG) that it would be good to have in the sdist, each for their own reason:
We want LICENSE because since Debian distributes both source and binary we want a copy of the exact license for the code in our source distribution so the the requirements are clear and self-contained. I think this is a good general practice anyway.
We want CHANGELOG so we can ship it in the package documentation to enable users to see what has changed over time with the package. MANIFEST.in is just a way to add files to the sdist (it s the normal way in distutils). I m not that versed in setuptools myself, but I do know there are other ways to do it. What s important (at least from our point of view) isn t the MANIFEST.in file itself, but the added files it would add to the sdist. If the MANIFEST.in isn t shipped with the sdist, then a downstream distributor that modified the package might get a different result. I believe it s a good general practice to include all the components of a package build system when you ship it. That s probably way more information than you wanted

So quite some time ago, I filed this. After some going back and forth, it lead to this. And finally we have a conclusion. It took only two years, but now we are there. Let s continue make Debian rock.