It gives me pleasure to announce RDiffFS, a virtual filesystem for browsing backups created by the rdiff-backup tool. Assuming that "/backup" is the location of a series of backups created using rdiff-backup, here is a usage example:

$ rdifffs /backup/dest/ /mnt
$ ls -l /mnt
total 5
drwxr-xr-x 4 jon jon 4096 Feb  7  2010 2010-09-04T16:38:10+01:00
drwxr-xr-x 4 jon jon 4096 Feb  7  2010 2010-12-29T10:51:50Z
drwxr-xr-x 4 jon jon 4096 Feb  7  2010 2010-12-29T10:52:30Z
lr-xr-xr-x 2 jon jon   11 Jan  1  1970 current -> 2010-12-29T10:52:30Z
$ for i in /mnt/*/a; do c=$(cat "$i"); printf "%32s:\t%s\n" "$i" "$c"; done
/mnt/2010-09-04T16:38:10+01:00/a:   foo
     /mnt/2010-12-29T10:51:50Z/a:   bar
     /mnt/2010-12-29T10:52:30Z/a:   baz
                  /mnt/current/a:   baz

I will write more about the creation of rdifffs at a later date: in particular my choice of implementation language, but I don't want to clutter up this announcement with all that. Suffice to say, I started writing a "quick tool" nearly a year ago, and I have become increasingly desperate to announce it. At present, rdifffs should be considered alpha quality software. It can browse my real-world backup, albeit slowly, and with several metadata bugs. This is more than archfs can manage. It can read files from the most recent backup, and most files from incremental backups, but not all.

As XTaran and uschebit asked yesterday at the 27C3 about my nice windowlist in irssi, here is what I use: adv_windowlist.pl. Download it, put it into you ~/.irssi/scripts and load it with /script load adv_windowlist. Now you have a list with all those window names in them, but it s still a bit ugly ;)First of all, get rid of the default Act list of irssi: /statusbar window remove actNow let s customize awl a bit:

• Shorten window names to 10 chars, so we can get more windows in one row:
  /set awl_block = 10
/set awl_sbar_maxlength = ON
• Display a maximum of 5 rows of windows so irssi is still usable on my Milestone with the 122 30 char screen:
  /set awl_maxlines = 5
• Shorten the windowname layout a bit, strip the shortcut display, remove the braces around the window number:
  /set awl_display_key = $N$H$C$S
/set awl_display_nokey = $N$H$C$S

Done! Your irssi should look like this now:

So when I was travveling to my parent's for christmas it looked like I'd have limited computer access. My Netbook is quite OK for reading mail but not really useable for any real hacking. And my trusty Thinkpad (Z61m) was oopsing when X was running so not much useable either. But as some Live CDs placed here were working well I decided that this would be fixed by an reinstall. And as I was reinstalling anyway I decided I could just choose kfreebsd-amd64. Turned out to be a quite entertaining decision with lots of stuff to hack away with wireless Bad news: there's no wireless support on Debian GNU/kFreeBSD at the moment. This problem is tracked as Bug #601803 so for wireless internet you will need a (plain) Freebsd chroot. Haven't tried this myself yet -- busy figuring other stuff out. SBCL Having a FreeBSD chroot I decided to give SBCL on GNU/kFreeBSD another try after having failed to get it working in a VM some time ago. With quite some help on SBCL's IRC channel I managed to build a patch that enables building (you need to force a :os-provides-dlopen to the feature list additionally). There's currently no multi-threading working so I hae a project for the rest of the hoidays (well lots of other stuff to do as well ;)) Audio Some more user-related stuff now. As it is this time of the year I wanted to listen to some 27c3 streams so I needed working audio. However there's no OSS device available. Turned out you just need to kldload the right module (here snd_hda) to get sound working. Volume was rather low although hardware controls of the soundcard where at max. As that's all OSS there's no point looking for alsamixer. Turns out aumix can do that here. IPv6 aiccu stuff Installing aiccu, copying the config in and starting did not work out as well. I already tried to do that from within the FreeBSD chroot already (which doesn't work for some reason) until I discovered just loading the if_tun kernel module solves the aiccu on Debian issue quite well. To get a default route up the last step was finding /lib/freebsd/route again -- /sbin/route is a wrapper around that abstracting differences in BSD route but not supporting IPv6.

Perhaps I am not very imaginative. Or perhaps insufficiently adventurous. But when I woke up today, a day that would actually get a little bit above freezing, I didn t have a thought of riding without a coat in the bed of a pickup. Nor did I expect to be involved with moving a piano. I didn t have any thought of listening to piano music outdoors. And I certainly didn t anticipate the fun to be had doing all of these things simultaneously. Now, let me back up and set the scene. This was our annual Goerzen Christmas today. We already ate and exchanged gifts. Here s the thing about moving pianos, especially the old heavy ones with the cast iron frame inside: it s not something where a group of people just get together, count to 3, and that s that. No, you ve got to start the project out right. You have to break the news that people will be moving a piano gently. And then, of course, you get a room full of people usually mostly men and at this point, before any lifting happens, you ve got to plan. Tape measures must be produced, measurements taken, plans made for how to lift and who should lift where. Differing points of view have to be considered carefully. Then, of course, you have too many people for each one to actually help lift so each person not lifting has to find a job. And then when things actually start going, you realize that not one of the plans fully accounted for the unprecedented weight and maddening stubbornness of the piano, and you have to stop every few feet to plan anew. I don t think I ve ever seen a piano move happen in any other fashion. So, today, my uncle, whose house our gathering was at this year, said, Ahh good, lots of young backs. Just what I need. Mildly concerned glances pass between my brothers, my cousins, and I. One brother looks like he s pretending not to have heard. We have a few things to move. Anticipation. A small couch probably not too bad, right? An upholstered chair maybe a bit unruly but still not too bad. And an old piano is going to a neighbor. Full alert now more glances, a pause for a second, and then acceptance: Oh! Uhm great! My uncle s friend Ken teaches music at the local college, and on the side, Ken also teaches children how to play piano. One of Ken s students didn t have a piano at home, and my uncle and aunt had an old one they weren t using, which they would give to the family of the student just a couple of blocks away. All that remained was moving it. There was the inevitable measuring, planning, re-planning, until we got it out of the house and onto the back of my uncle s pickup. We have about 8 men involved, plus my aunt. Most of us rode in the back of the pickup with the piano. And of course, there came the inevitable request: Ken, play for us! So Ken sat on the edge of the pickup, at the piano, playing as we and the piano went through town in the open air. He started with Joplin s Entertainer, then broke out into some Christmas music We Wish You a Merry Christmas, followed by Nun Ist Sie Erschienen and a few others. It must be said that small towns in Kansas are probably not accustomed to their Christmas carolers having a piano with them, much less being played from the bed of a pickup. But there we were, mostly laughing too hard or enjoying the ride too much to sing. To add excitement, or perhaps embarrassment, my uncle was sounding the horn. Some thought that his intent was to have it in time with the piano music from the back, but I ll give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he meant to sound the horn in that rather random fashion. Eventually we got to the neighbor s house, and my dad and another uncle who hadn t been on the pickup came running up. We hopped down and asked them where they wanted the piano. Upstairs! That got repeated among everyone there, producing laughter each time. More tape measures were produced, as it was a narrow staircase. The conclusion was that the piano could make it with about an inch (2.54cm) to spare. So we got it out of the pickup and onto the porch, then into the house. Now, how to get it upstairs? This called for an extra helping of planning and calculating. Ken, the unofficial piano moving boss, kept reminding us in jest that I grew up on a farm . He said he could be alone at the top of the piano while we pushed. This quickly turned out to not be practical; due to the incline, the weight at the bottom was just too much to get it up over the stairs. Ken then went and picked up a wooden contraption they use to move pianos at the college. We tried that, but its supports underneath got stuck on the steps as well. Various ideas were tossed around at this point, until I pointed out that four of us on the bottom couldn t get it up over a step, so when we get it into the stairway only wide enough for 2 we won t be able to get it up anyhow. That being considered a good point, various other ideas were tossed around. They all seemed to be wanting either for practicality or, perhaps, safety. Though the idea of having a dozen Goerzens stand at the top of the staircase pulling it up by a rope did have some excellent humor value. In the end, perhaps wanting our group of free, highly ambitious, but somewhat less effective piano movers out of their house, the neighbors found a place for it on the ground floor. We all piled back into the pickup for the ride back, which was rather more quiet due to lack of horn and piano music. So there you have it. The most fun I have ever had moving a piano. (Really, the only fun I have ever had moving a piano.)

One of the reasons I like the Digistan definition of "Free and Open Standard" is that this is a new term, and thus the meaning of the term has been decided by Digistan. The term "Open Standard" has become so misunderstood that it is no longer very useful when talking about standards. One end up discussing which definition is the best one and with such frame the only one gaining are the proponents of de-facto standards and proprietary solutions. But to give us an idea about the diversity of definitions of open standards, here are a few that I know about. This list is not complete, but can be a starting point for those that want to do a complete survey. More definitions are available on the wikipedia page. First off is my favourite, the definition from the European Interoperability Framework version 1.0. Really sad to notice that BSA and others has succeeded in getting it removed from version 2.0 of the framework by stacking the committee drafting the new version with their own people. Anyway, the definition is still available and it include the key properties needed to make sure everyone can use a specification on equal terms.

The following are the minimal characteristics that a specification and its attendant documents must have in order to be considered an open standard:

• The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties (consensus or majority decision etc.).
• The standard has been published and the standard specification document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a nominal fee.
• The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty- free basis.
• There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.

Another one originates from my friends over at DKUUG, who coined and gathered support for this definition in 2004. It even made it into the Danish parlament as their definition of a open standard. Another from a different part of the Danish government is available from the wikipedia page.

En ben standard opfylder f lgende krav:

1. Veldokumenteret med den fuldst ndige specifikation offentligt tilg ngelig.
2. Frit implementerbar uden konomiske, politiske eller juridiske begr nsninger p implementation og anvendelse.
3. Standardiseret og vedligeholdt i et bent forum (en s kaldt "standardiseringsorganisation") via en ben proces.

Then there is the definition from Free Software Foundation Europe.

An Open Standard refers to a format or protocol that is

1. subject to full public assessment and use without constraints in a manner equally available to all parties;
2. without any components or extensions that have dependencies on formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an Open Standard themselves;
3. free from legal or technical clauses that limit its utilisation by any party or in any business model;
4. managed and further developed independently of any single vendor in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third parties;
5. available in multiple complete implementations by competing vendors, or as a complete implementation equally available to all parties.

A long time ago, SUN Microsystems, now bought by Oracle, created its Open Standards Checklist with a fairly detailed description.

Creation and Management of an Open Standard

• Its development and management process must be collaborative and democratic:
  • Participation must be accessible to all those who wish to participate and can meet fair and reasonable criteria imposed by the organization under which it is developed and managed.
  • The processes must be documented and, through a known method, can be changed through input from all participants.
  • The process must be based on formal and binding commitments for the disclosure and licensing of intellectual property rights.
  • Development and management should strive for consensus, and an appeals process must be clearly outlined.
  • The standard specification must be open to extensive public review at least once in its life-cycle, with comments duly discussed and acted upon, if required.

Use and Licensing of an Open Standard

• The standard must describe an interface, not an implementation, and the industry must be capable of creating multiple, competing implementations to the interface described in the standard without undue or restrictive constraints. Interfaces include APIs, protocols, schemas, data formats and their encoding.
• The standard must not contain any proprietary "hooks" that create a technical or economic barriers
• Faithful implementations of the standard must interoperate. Interoperability means the ability of a computer program to communicate and exchange information with other computer programs and mutually to use the information which has been exchanged. This includes the ability to use, convert, or exchange file formats, protocols, schemas, interface information or conventions, so as to permit the computer program to work with other computer programs and users in all the ways in which they are intended to function.
• It must be permissible for anyone to copy, distribute and read the standard for a nominal fee, or even no fee. If there is a fee, it must be low enough to not preclude widespread use.
• It must be possible for anyone to obtain free (no royalties or fees; also known as "royalty free"), worldwide, non-exclusive and perpetual licenses to all essential patent claims to make, use and sell products based on the standard. The only exceptions are terminations per the reciprocity and defensive suspension terms outlined below. Essential patent claims include pending, unpublished patents, published patents, and patent applications. The license is only for the exact scope of the standard in question.
  • May be conditioned only on reciprocal licenses to any of licensees' patent claims essential to practice that standard (also known as a reciprocity clause)
  • May be terminated as to any licensee who sues the licensor or any other licensee for infringement of patent claims essential to practice that standard (also known as a "defensive suspension" clause)
  • The same licensing terms are available to every potential licensor
• The licensing terms of an open standards must not preclude implementations of that standard under open source licensing terms or restricted licensing terms

It is said that one of the nice things about standards is that there are so many of them. As you can see, the same holds true for open standard definitions. Most of the definitions have a lot in common, and it is not really controversial what properties a open standard should have, but the diversity of definitions have made it possible for those that want to avoid a level marked field and real competition to downplay the significance of open standards. I hope we can turn this tide by focusing on the advantages of Free and Open Standards.

Here at the Hollow in what can euphemistically be called a "cabin", there is no cell service, and I have not signed up for long distance, as all the phone is normally used for is to call a local dialup internet number. It would be nice to be able to occasionally make outgoing long distance calls in this situation though. With some difficulty, Google voice can be used in this situation. The difficulty is because my google voice number is itself a long distance call from here, so I can't just call it up and use it as intended. And google voice's web interface was not designed with dialup in mind; it assumes you have a phone line that's not carrying your internet connection. verifying the phone This is the tricky part. Google voice wants to call you back on your phone and have you verify a number. To start this process, you need to use the internet. It's impossible to hang up from the net before they call back. Since it's a one-off, I didn't try to automate this, and just had someone do the internet side of the verification, call me with the number, and then trigger google voice to call me back. (Google voice's forums are full of similar stories.) making outgoing long distance calls Here's the fun part. You'll need a shell account somewhere else, where you can download and install pygooglevoice. Then create a ~/.gvoice file, filling in your login info and your phone number.

[auth]
email=
password=
[gvoice]
forwardingNumber=
phoneType=1

Now to make a call, you can just run something like this on the shell account:

sleep 2m; ./gvoice --batch call XXX-XXX-XXXX

The sleep gives you time to free up the phone line. Google voice then calls you and connects you with the number you requested.

A few days ago an article in the Norwegian Computerworld magazine about how version 2.0 of European Interoperability Framework has been successfully lobbied by the proprietary software industry to remove the focus on free software. Nothing very surprising there, given earlier reports on how Microsoft and others have stacked the committees in this work. But I find this very sad. The definition of an open standard from version 1 was very good, and something I believe should be used also in the future, alongside the definition from Digistan. Version 2 have removed the open standard definition from its content. Anyway, the news reminded me of the great reply sent by Dr. Edgar Villanueva, congressman in Peru at the time, to Microsoft as a reply to Microsofts attack on his proposal regarding the use of free software in the public sector in Peru. As the text was not available from a few of the URLs where it used to be available, I copy it here from my source to ensure it is available also in the future. Some background information about that story is available in an article from Linux Journal in 2002.

Lima, 8th of April, 2002
To: Se or JUAN ALBERTO GONZ LEZ
General Manager of Microsoft Per Dear Sir: First of all, I thank you for your letter of March 25, 2002 in which you state the official position of Microsoft relative to Bill Number 1609, Free Software in Public Administration, which is indubitably inspired by the desire for Peru to find a suitable place in the global technological context. In the same spirit, and convinced that we will find the best solutions through an exchange of clear and open ideas, I will take this opportunity to reply to the commentaries included in your letter. While acknowledging that opinions such as yours constitute a significant contribution, it would have been even more worthwhile for me if, rather than formulating objections of a general nature (which we will analyze in detail later) you had gathered solid arguments for the advantages that proprietary software could bring to the Peruvian State, and to its citizens in general, since this would have allowed a more enlightening exchange in respect of each of our positions. With the aim of creating an orderly debate, we will assume that what you call "open source software" is what the Bill defines as "free software", since there exists software for which the source code is distributed together with the program, but which does not fall within the definition established by the Bill; and that what you call "commercial software" is what the Bill defines as "proprietary" or "unfree", given that there exists free software which is sold in the market for a price like any other good or service. It is also necessary to make it clear that the aim of the Bill we are discussing is not directly related to the amount of direct savings that can by made by using free software in state institutions. That is in any case a marginal aggregate value, but in no way is it the chief focus of the Bill. The basic principles which inspire the Bill are linked to the basic guarantees of a state of law, such as:

• Free access to public information by the citizen.
• Permanence of public data.
• Security of the State and citizens.

To guarantee the free access of citizens to public information, it is indispensable that the encoding of data is not tied to a single provider. The use of standard and open formats gives a guarantee of this free access, if necessary through the creation of compatible free software. To guarantee the permanence of public data, it is necessary that the usability and maintenance of the software does not depend on the goodwill of the suppliers, or on the monopoly conditions imposed by them. For this reason the State needs systems the development of which can be guaranteed due to the availability of the source code. To guarantee national security or the security of the State, it is indispensable to be able to rely on systems without elements which allow control from a distance or the undesired transmission of information to third parties. Systems with source code freely accessible to the public are required to allow their inspection by the State itself, by the citizens, and by a large number of independent experts throughout the world. Our proposal brings further security, since the knowledge of the source code will eliminate the growing number of programs with *spy code*. In the same way, our proposal strengthens the security of the citizens, both in their role as legitimate owners of information managed by the state, and in their role as consumers. In this second case, by allowing the growth of a widespread availability of free software not containing *spy code* able to put at risk privacy and individual freedoms. In this sense, the Bill is limited to establishing the conditions under which the state bodies will obtain software in the future, that is, in a way compatible with these basic principles. From reading the Bill it will be clear that once passed:

the law does not forbid the production of proprietary software

the law does not forbid the sale of proprietary software

the law does not specify which concrete software to use

the law does not dictate the supplier from whom software will be bought

the law does not limit the terms under which a software product can be licensed.

What the Bill does express clearly, is that, for software to be acceptable for the state it is not enough that it is technically capable of fulfilling a task, but that further the contractual conditions must satisfy a series of requirements regarding the license, without which the State cannot guarantee the citizen adequate processing of his data, watching over its integrity, confidentiality, and accessibility throughout time, as these are very critical aspects for its normal functioning. We agree, Mr. Gonzalez, that information and communication technology have a significant impact on the quality of life of the citizens (whether it be positive or negative). We surely also agree that the basic values I have pointed out above are fundamental in a democratic state like Peru. So we are very interested to know of any other way of guaranteeing these principles, other than through the use of free software in the terms defined by the Bill. As for the observations you have made, we will now go on to analyze them in detail: Firstly, you point out that: "1. The bill makes it compulsory for all public bodies to use only free software, that is to say open source software, which breaches the principles of equality before the law, that of non-discrimination and the right of free private enterprise, freedom of industry and of contract, protected by the constitution." This understanding is in error. The Bill in no way affects the rights you list; it limits itself entirely to establishing conditions for the use of software on the part of state institutions, without in any way meddling in private sector transactions. It is a well established principle that the State does not enjoy the wide spectrum of contractual freedom of the private sector, as it is limited in its actions precisely by the requirement for transparency of public acts; and in this sense, the preservation of the greater common interest must prevail when legislating on the matter. The Bill protects equality under the law, since no natural or legal person is excluded from the right of offering these goods to the State under the conditions defined in the Bill and without more limitations than those established by the Law of State Contracts and Purchasing (T.U.O. by Supreme Decree No. 012-2001-PCM). The Bill does not introduce any discrimination whatever, since it only establishes *how* the goods have to be provided (which is a state power) and not *who* has to provide them (which would effectively be discriminatory, if restrictions based on national origin, race religion, ideology, sexual preference etc. were imposed). On the contrary, the Bill is decidedly antidiscriminatory. This is so because by defining with no room for doubt the conditions for the provision of software, it prevents state bodies from using software which has a license including discriminatory conditions. It should be obvious from the preceding two paragraphs that the Bill does not harm free private enterprise, since the latter can always choose under what conditions it will produce software; some of these will be acceptable to the State, and others will not be since they contradict the guarantee of the basic principles listed above. This free initiative is of course compatible with the freedom of industry and freedom of contract (in the limited form in which the State can exercise the latter). Any private subject can produce software under the conditions which the State requires, or can refrain from doing so. Nobody is forced to adopt a model of production, but if they wish to provide software to the State, they must provide the mechanisms which guarantee the basic principles, and which are those described in the Bill. By way of an example: nothing in the text of the Bill would prevent your company offering the State bodies an office "suite", under the conditions defined in the Bill and setting the price that you consider satisfactory. If you did not, it would not be due to restrictions imposed by the law, but to business decisions relative to the method of commercializing your products, decisions with which the State is not involved. To continue; you note that:" 2. The bill, by making the use of open source software compulsory, would establish discriminatory and non competitive practices in the contracting and purchasing by public bodies..." This statement is just a reiteration of the previous one, and so the response can be found above. However, let us concern ourselves for a moment with your comment regarding "non-competitive ... practices." Of course, in defining any kind of purchase, the buyer sets conditions which relate to the proposed use of the good or service. From the start, this excludes certain manufacturers from the possibility of competing, but does not exclude them "a priori", but rather based on a series of principles determined by the autonomous will of the purchaser, and so the process takes place in conformance with the law. And in the Bill it is established that *no one* is excluded from competing as far as he guarantees the fulfillment of the basic principles. Furthermore, the Bill *stimulates* competition, since it tends to generate a supply of software with better conditions of usability, and to better existing work, in a model of continuous improvement. On the other hand, the central aspect of competivity is the chance to provide better choices to the consumer. Now, it is impossible to ignore the fact that marketing does not play a neutral role when the product is offered on the market (since accepting the opposite would lead one to suppose that firms' expenses in marketing lack any sense), and that therefore a significant expense under this heading can influence the decisions of the purchaser. This influence of marketing is in large measure reduced by the bill that we are backing, since the choice within the framework proposed is based on the *technical merits* of the product and not on the effort put into commercialization by the producer; in this sense, competitiveness is increased, since the smallest software producer can compete on equal terms with the most powerful corporations. It is necessary to stress that there is no position more anti-competitive than that of the big software producers, which frequently abuse their dominant position, since in innumerable cases they propose as a solution to problems raised by users: "update your software to the new version" (at the user's expense, naturally); furthermore, it is common to find arbitrary cessation of technical help for products, which, in the provider's judgment alone, are "old"; and so, to receive any kind of technical assistance, the user finds himself forced to migrate to new versions (with non-trivial costs, especially as changes in hardware platform are often involved). And as the whole infrastructure is based on proprietary data formats, the user stays "trapped" in the need to continue using products from the same supplier, or to make the huge effort to change to another environment (probably also proprietary). You add: "3. So, by compelling the State to favor a business model based entirely on open source, the bill would only discourage the local and international manufacturing companies, which are the ones which really undertake important expenditures, create a significant number of direct and indirect jobs, as well as contributing to the GNP, as opposed to a model of open source software which tends to have an ever weaker economic impact, since it mainly creates jobs in the service sector." I do not agree with your statement. Partly because of what you yourself point out in paragraph 6 of your letter, regarding the relative weight of services in the context of software use. This contradiction alone would invalidate your position. The service model, adopted by a large number of companies in the software industry, is much larger in economic terms, and with a tendency to increase, than the licensing of programs. On the other hand, the private sector of the economy has the widest possible freedom to choose the economic model which best suits its interests, even if this freedom of choice is often obscured subliminally by the disproportionate expenditure on marketing by the producers of proprietary software. In addition, a reading of your opinion would lead to the conclusion that the State market is crucial and essential for the proprietary software industry, to such a point that the choice made by the State in this bill would completely eliminate the market for these firms. If that is true, we can deduce that the State must be subsidizing the proprietary software industry. In the unlikely event that this were true, the State would have the right to apply the subsidies in the area it considered of greatest social value; it is undeniable, in this improbable hypothesis, that if the State decided to subsidize software, it would have to do so choosing the free over the proprietary, considering its social effect and the rational use of taxpayers money. In respect of the jobs generated by proprietary software in countries like ours, these mainly concern technical tasks of little aggregate value; at the local level, the technicians who provide support for proprietary software produced by transnational companies do not have the possibility of fixing bugs, not necessarily for lack of technical capability or of talent, but because they do not have access to the source code to fix it. With free software one creates more technically qualified employment and a framework of free competence where success is only tied to the ability to offer good technical support and quality of service, one stimulates the market, and one increases the shared fund of knowledge, opening up alternatives to generate services of greater total value and a higher quality level, to the benefit of all involved: producers, service organizations, and consumers. It is a common phenomenon in developing countries that local software industries obtain the majority of their takings in the service sector, or in the creation of "ad hoc" software. Therefore, any negative impact that the application of the Bill might have in this sector will be more than compensated by a growth in demand for services (as long as these are carried out to high quality standards). If the transnational software companies decide not to compete under these new rules of the game, it is likely that they will undergo some decrease in takings in terms of payment for licenses; however, considering that these firms continue to allege that much of the software used by the State has been illegally copied, one can see that the impact will not be very serious. Certainly, in any case their fortune will be determined by market laws, changes in which cannot be avoided; many firms traditionally associated with proprietary software have already set out on the road (supported by copious expense) of providing services associated with free software, which shows that the models are not mutually exclusive. With this bill the State is deciding that it needs to preserve certain fundamental values. And it is deciding this based on its sovereign power, without affecting any of the constitutional guarantees. If these values could be guaranteed without having to choose a particular economic model, the effects of the law would be even more beneficial. In any case, it should be clear that the State does not choose an economic model; if it happens that there only exists one economic model capable of providing software which provides the basic guarantee of these principles, this is because of historical circumstances, not because of an arbitrary choice of a given model. Your letter continues: "4. The bill imposes the use of open source software without considering the dangers that this can bring from the point of view of security, guarantee, and possible violation of the intellectual property rights of third parties." Alluding in an abstract way to "the dangers this can bring", without specifically mentioning a single one of these supposed dangers, shows at the least some lack of knowledge of the topic. So, allow me to enlighten you on these points. On security: National security has already been mentioned in general terms in the initial discussion of the basic principles of the bill. In more specific terms, relative to the security of the software itself, it is well known that all software (whether proprietary or free) contains errors or "bugs" (in programmers' slang). But it is also well known that the bugs in free software are fewer, and are fixed much more quickly, than in proprietary software. It is not in vain that numerous public bodies responsible for the IT security of state systems in developed countries require the use of free software for the same conditions of security and efficiency. What is impossible to prove is that proprietary software is more secure than free, without the public and open inspection of the scientific community and users in general. This demonstration is impossible because the model of proprietary software itself prevents this analysis, so that any guarantee of security is based only on promises of good intentions (biased, by any reckoning) made by the producer itself, or its contractors. It should be remembered that in many cases, the licensing conditions include Non-Disclosure clauses which prevent the user from publicly revealing security flaws found in the licensed proprietary product. In respect of the guarantee: As you know perfectly well, or could find out by reading the "End User License Agreement" of the products you license, in the great majority of cases the guarantees are limited to replacement of the storage medium in case of defects, but in no case is compensation given for direct or indirect damages, loss of profits, etc... If as a result of a security bug in one of your products, not fixed in time by yourselves, an attacker managed to compromise crucial State systems, what guarantees, reparations and compensation would your company make in accordance with your licensing conditions? The guarantees of proprietary software, inasmuch as programs are delivered AS IS'', that is, in the state in which they are, with no additional responsibility of the provider in respect of function, in no way differ from those normal with free software. On Intellectual Property: Questions of intellectual property fall outside the scope of this bill, since they are covered by specific other laws. The model of free software in no way implies ignorance of these laws, and in fact the great majority of free software is covered by copyright. In reality, the inclusion of this question in your observations shows your confusion in respect of the legal framework in which free software is developed. The inclusion of the intellectual property of others in works claimed as one's own is not a practice that has been noted in the free software community; whereas, unfortunately, it has been in the area of proprietary software. As an example, the condemnation by the Commercial Court of Nanterre, France, on 27th September 2001 of Microsoft Corp. to a penalty of 3 million francs in damages and interest, for violation of intellectual property (piracy, to use the unfortunate term that your firm commonly uses in its publicity). You go on to say that: "The bill uses the concept of open source software incorrectly, since it does not necessarily imply that the software is free or of zero cost, and so arrives at mistaken conclusions regarding State savings, with no cost-benefit analysis to validate its position." This observation is wrong; in principle, freedom and lack of cost are orthogonal concepts: there is software which is proprietary and charged for (for example, MS Office), software which is proprietary and free of charge (MS Internet Explorer), software which is free and charged for (Red Hat, SuSE etc GNU/Linux distributions), software which is free and not charged for (Apache, Open Office, Mozilla), and even software which can be licensed in a range of combinations (MySQL). Certainly free software is not necessarily free of charge. And the text of the bill does not state that it has to be so, as you will have noted after reading it. The definitions included in the Bill state clearly *what* should be considered free software, at no point referring to freedom from charges. Although the possibility of savings in payments for proprietary software licenses are mentioned, the foundations of the bill clearly refer to the fundamental guarantees to be preserved and to the stimulus to local technological development. Given that a democratic State must support these principles, it has no other choice than to use software with publicly available source code, and to exchange information only in standard formats. If the State does not use software with these characteristics, it will be weakening basic republican principles. Luckily, free software also implies lower total costs; however, even given the hypothesis (easily disproved) that it was more expensive than proprietary software, the simple existence of an effective free software tool for a particular IT function would oblige the State to use it; not by command of this Bill, but because of the basic principles we enumerated at the start, and which arise from the very essence of the lawful democratic State. You continue: "6. It is wrong to think that Open Source Software is free of charge. Research by the Gartner Group (an important investigator of the technological market recognized at world level) has shown that the cost of purchase of software (operating system and applications) is only 8% of the total cost which firms and institutions take on for a rational and truly beneficial use of the technology. The other 92% consists of: installation costs, enabling, support, maintenance, administration, and down-time." This argument repeats that already given in paragraph 5 and partly contradicts paragraph 3. For the sake of brevity we refer to the comments on those paragraphs. However, allow me to point out that your conclusion is logically false: even if according to Gartner Group the cost of software is on average only 8% of the total cost of use, this does not in any way deny the existence of software which is free of charge, that is, with a licensing cost of zero. In addition, in this paragraph you correctly point out that the service components and losses due to down-time make up the largest part of the total cost of software use, which, as you will note, contradicts your statement regarding the small value of services suggested in paragraph 3. Now the use of free software contributes significantly to reduce the remaining life-cycle costs. This reduction in the costs of installation, support etc. can be noted in several areas: in the first place, the competitive service model of free software, support and maintenance for which can be freely contracted out to a range of suppliers competing on the grounds of quality and low cost. This is true for installation, enabling, and support, and in large part for maintenance. In the second place, due to the reproductive characteristics of the model, maintenance carried out for an application is easily replicable, without incurring large costs (that is, without paying more than once for the same thing) since modifications, if one wishes, can be incorporated in the common fund of knowledge. Thirdly, the huge costs caused by non-functioning software ("blue screens of death", malicious code such as virus, worms, and trojans, exceptions, general protection faults and other well-known problems) are reduced considerably by using more stable software; and it is well known that one of the most notable virtues of free software is its stability. You further state that: "7. One of the arguments behind the bill is the supposed freedom from costs of open-source software, compared with the costs of commercial software, without taking into account the fact that there exist types of volume licensing which can be highly advantageous for the State, as has happened in other countries." I have already pointed out that what is in question is not the cost of the software but the principles of freedom of information, accessibility, and security. These arguments have been covered extensively in the preceding paragraphs to which I would refer you. On the other hand, there certainly exist types of volume licensing (although unfortunately proprietary software does not satisfy the basic principles). But as you correctly pointed out in the immediately preceding paragraph of your letter, they only manage to reduce the impact of a component which makes up no more than 8% of the total. You continue: "8. In addition, the alternative adopted by the bill (I) is clearly more expensive, due to the high costs of software migration, and (II) puts at risk compatibility and interoperability of the IT platforms within the State, and between the State and the private sector, given the hundreds of versions of open source software on the market." Let us analyze your statement in two parts. Your first argument, that migration implies high costs, is in reality an argument in favor of the Bill. Because the more time goes by, the more difficult migration to another technology will become; and at the same time, the security risks associated with proprietary software will continue to increase. In this way, the use of proprietary systems and formats will make the State ever more dependent on specific suppliers. Once a policy of using free software has been established (which certainly, does imply some cost) then on the contrary migration from one system to another becomes very simple, since all data is stored in open formats. On the other hand, migration to an open software context implies no more costs than migration between two different proprietary software contexts, which invalidates your argument completely. The second argument refers to "problems in interoperability of the IT platforms within the State, and between the State and the private sector" This statement implies a certain lack of knowledge of the way in which free software is built, which does not maximize the dependence of the user on a particular platform, as normally happens in the realm of proprietary software. Even when there are multiple free software distributions, and numerous programs which can be used for the same function, interoperability is guaranteed as much by the use of standard formats, as required by the bill, as by the possibility of creating interoperable software given the availability of the source code. You then say that: "9. The majority of open source code does not offer adequate levels of service nor the guarantee from recognized manufacturers of high productivity on the part of the users, which has led various public organizations to retract their decision to go with an open source software solution and to use commercial software in its place." This observation is without foundation. In respect of the guarantee, your argument was rebutted in the response to paragraph 4. In respect of support services, it is possible to use free software without them (just as also happens with proprietary software), but anyone who does need them can obtain support separately, whether from local firms or from international corporations, again just as in the case of proprietary software. On the other hand, it would contribute greatly to our analysis if you could inform us about free software projects *established* in public bodies which have already been abandoned in favor of proprietary software. We know of a good number of cases where the opposite has taken place, but not know of any where what you describe has taken place. You continue by observing that: "10. The bill discourages the creativity of the Peruvian software industry, which invoices 40 million US$/year, exports 4 million US$ (10th in ranking among non-traditional exports, more than handicrafts) and is a source of highly qualified employment. With a law that encourages the use of open source, software programmers lose their intellectual property rights and their main source of payment." It is clear enough that nobody is forced to commercialize their code as free software. The only thing to take into account is that if it is not free software, it cannot be sold to the public sector. This is not in any case the main market for the national software industry. We covered some questions referring to the influence of the Bill on the generation of employment which would be both highly technically qualified and in better conditions for competition above, so it seems unnecessary to insist on this point. What follows in your statement is incorrect. On the one hand, no author of free software loses his intellectual property rights, unless he expressly wishes to place his work in the public domain. The free software movement has always been very respectful of intellectual property, and has generated widespread public recognition of its authors. Names like those of Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Guido van Rossum, Larry Wall, Miguel de Icaza, Andrew Tridgell, Theo de Raadt, Andrea Arcangeli, Bruce Perens, Darren Reed, Alan Cox, Eric Raymond, and many others, are recognized world-wide for their contributions to the development of software that is used today by millions of people throughout the world. On the other hand, to say that the rewards for authors rights make up the main source of payment of Peruvian programmers is in any case a guess, in particular since there is no proof to this effect, nor a demonstration of how the use of free software by the State would influence these payments. You go on to say that: "11. Open source software, since it can be distributed without charge, does not allow the generation of income for its developers through exports. In this way, the multiplier effect of the sale of software to other countries is weakened, and so in turn is the growth of the industry, while Government rules ought on the contrary to stimulate local industry." This statement shows once again complete ignorance of the mechanisms of and market for free software. It tries to claim that the market of sale of non- exclusive rights for use (sale of licenses) is the only possible one for the software industry, when you yourself pointed out several paragraphs above that it is not even the most important one. The incentives that the bill offers for the growth of a supply of better qualified professionals, together with the increase in experience that working on a large scale with free software within the State will bring for Peruvian technicians, will place them in a highly competitive position to offer their services abroad. You then state that: "12. In the Forum, the use of open source software in education was discussed, without mentioning the complete collapse of this initiative in a country like Mexico, where precisely the State employees who founded the project now state that open source software did not make it possible to offer a learning experience to pupils in the schools, did not take into account the capability at a national level to give adequate support to the platform, and that the software did not and does not allow for the levels of platform integration that now exist in schools." In fact Mexico has gone into reverse with the Red Escolar (Schools Network) project. This is due precisely to the fact that the driving forces behind the Mexican project used license costs as their main argument, instead of the other reasons specified in our project, which are far more essential. Because of this conceptual mistake, and as a result of the lack of effective support from the SEP (Secretary of State for Public Education), the assumption was made that to implant free software in schools it would be enough to drop their software budget and send them a CD ROM with Gnu/Linux instead. Of course this failed, and it couldn't have been otherwise, just as school laboratories fail when they use proprietary software and have no budget for implementation and maintenance. That's exactly why our bill is not limited to making the use of free software mandatory, but recognizes the need to create a viable migration plan, in which the State undertakes the technical transition in an orderly way in order to then enjoy the advantages of free software. You end with a rhetorical question: "13. If open source software satisfies all the requirements of State bodies, why do you need a law to adopt it? Shouldn't it be the market which decides freely which products give most benefits or value?" We agree that in the private sector of the economy, it must be the market that decides which products to use, and no state interference is permissible there. However, in the case of the public sector, the reasoning is not the same: as we have already established, the state archives, handles, and transmits information which does not belong to it, but which is entrusted to it by citizens, who have no alternative under the rule of law. As a counterpart to this legal requirement, the State must take extreme measures to safeguard the integrity, confidentiality, and accessibility of this information. The use of proprietary software raises serious doubts as to whether these requirements can be fulfilled, lacks conclusive evidence in this respect, and so is not suitable for use in the public sector. The need for a law is based, firstly, on the realization of the fundamental principles listed above in the specific area of software; secondly, on the fact that the State is not an ideal homogeneous entity, but made up of multiple bodies with varying degrees of autonomy in decision making. Given that it is inappropriate to use proprietary software, the fact of establishing these rules in law will prevent the personal discretion of any state employee from putting at risk the information which belongs to citizens. And above all, because it constitutes an up-to-date reaffirmation in relation to the means of management and communication of information used today, it is based on the republican principle of openness to the public. In conformance with this universally accepted principle, the citizen has the right to know all information held by the State and not covered by well- founded declarations of secrecy based on law. Now, software deals with information and is itself information. Information in a special form, capable of being interpreted by a machine in order to execute actions, but crucial information all the same because the citizen has a legitimate right to know, for example, how his vote is computed or his taxes calculated. And for that he must have free access to the source code and be able to prove to his satisfaction the programs used for electoral computations or calculation of his taxes. I wish you the greatest respect, and would like to repeat that my office will always be open for you to expound your point of view to whatever level of detail you consider suitable. Cordially,
DR. EDGAR DAVID VILLANUEVA NU EZ
Congressman of the Republic of Per .

1. Go and buy a turkey.
2. Take a drink of whisky (scotch or bourbon).
3. Put turkey in the oven.
4. Take another two drinks of whisky.
5. Set the degree at 180 ovens.
6. Take three more whiskies of drink.
7. Turn oven the on.
8. Take four whisks of drinky.
9. Turk the bastey.
10. Whisky another bottle of get.
11. Stick a turkey in the thermometer.
12. Glass yourself a pour of whisky.
13. Bake the whisky for four hours.
14. Take the oven out of the turkey.
15. Take the oven out of the turkey
16. Floor the turkey up off the pick.
17. Turk the carvey.
18. Get yourself another scottle of botch.
19. Tet the sable and pour yourself a glass of turkey.
20. Bless the saying, pass and eat out.

Merry Christmas Everyone!

A couple of months ago, Debian project membership voted, after extensive discussion, to implement a fundamental change in the Debian community: to welcome as members people who make a valuable contribution to the project, even if they are contributing something other than source code. This was a tremendous milestone for Debian, and one which made me feel proud to have been a part of the project. Historically, only developers had been eligible for membership, including voting and other formal privileges. Although other kinds of contributions were welcome, this disparity gave the impression that they were less valued than code contributions. It seemed to me at the time that Debian s mission was to package all of the free software in the world, and if one s efforts didn t go directly to improving packages, they just weren t as important. I don t remember when I first installed Debian, but I made my first contributions to the project in 1999, and officially joined as a developer in 2000. After several fun and rewarding years of packaging and development, I started a very demanding day job, and spent more and more of my energy into that, and less and less coding for Debian as a volunteer. However, my job with Canonical involved working with Debian, and that was a primary reason why it was interesting to me. It was an opportunity to introduce a whole new population of people to the things I loved about Debian. The reality, of course, was more complicated. Following the launch in 2004, Ubuntu grew quickly in popularity and scope, diverged from Debian in significant ways, and relations between Debian and Ubuntu became strained. Canonical grew quickly as well, and the combination of a growing community, a growing company and growing user adoption was a challenge for everyone concerned. As a Canonical manager and a Debian developer, I felt the strain as much as anyone. Meanwhile, and I felt more and more alienated from Debian. Debian developers who had been friendly in the past became suspicious of Ubuntu and me and I quickly became an outsider. My code contributions to Debian continued to decline, and I was no longer maintaining any packages. In Debian at the time, that meant that I didn t exist. I saw it as an important part of my job to work with my counterparts in Debian, in a coordinating role, but found this increasingly impractical. In 2007, I received an inquiry from the Debian Account Manager, who had noticed I wasn t actively involved in packaging, and wished to disable my account for security reasons if I wasn t using it. Although I wanted to remain active in the Debian community, I had to agree that it wasn t good security practice for me to hold onto my developer privileges. I relinquished my upload rights, with the option to come back if I resumed my development work, and officially became a nobody: I lost the right to vote, my email address and mailing list subscriptions, and all other official ties with Debian, except for the record of my GPG key in a special emeritus keyring for informational purposes. Last month, Enrico Zini announced instructions for contributors to apply for membership under the new guidelines, which recognize many kinds of contributions, not only code. Today, after a three year hiatus, I am proud to be the first Debian member to be accepted through this new process. I expect to continue to submit the occasional patch, but my primary interest is in healing the rift which still exists between Debian and Ubuntu by contributing in a more personal way. Please feel free to contact me if you d like to work together on this. You can reach me as mdz at either debian.org or ubuntu.com, or on IRC. I would like to thank Stefano Zacchiroli, for proposing the General Resolution which enabled Debian to make this transition, and for all of his other work as Debian Project Leader to help Debian grow and improve. I also appreciate Enrico Zini, Jonathan McDowell and Martin Zobel-Helas for expediently processing me and working through the technical changes needed to implement the resolution correctly. It s good to be back.

This week:

• #606151 (nordugrid-arc-nox): cherry-picked a patch from upstream and uploaded to DELAYED/1
• #606670 (minitube): removal bug filed at request of maintainer
• #607762 (dbus-glib): bumped the build-dependency and uploaded to DELAYED/7 (later pushed into DELAYED/0 at maintainer s request)
• #607427 (opensc): applied security fixes from upstream and uploaded immediately

Not quite one fix per day, as zack s campaign originally called for. But true to his word, neither have I started receiving hate mail, so I must be doing something right. (I also made my first sponsoring upload an RC fix (#598945), for extra brownie points <g>)

For some reason¹ bug #607242 did not make it to the debian-x@d.o mailing list, I got aware of it only by the message shirish sent to my blog.
If he didn t write to me, this bug will have waited for what about 3 years until I got all the 800+ bugs triaged ? So please you can help triaging X bugs, first subscribe to the debian-x mailing list so you can get the feeling of what to respond to some bugs, and join the TXBW effort

• #607242 reassign & give+ask moreinfo.
• #403350 ping & try nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv: xset dpms force off does not turn off the backlight.
• #469104 config suggestions & close xserver-xorg-video-tdfx: screen resolution too low.
• #476198 closed xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd: Cannot turn on a secondary screen without restarting X (xrandr-related problem).
• #492783 ping, unreproducible vt switch key combination leaks to clients.
• #496150 ping xserver-xorg-core: shutting off monitor messes up display.
• #504104 ping & closed xserver-xorg-input-mouse: Emulate3Buttons stops working from time to time.

The X Strike Force (still) needs you ! You can have a look at the X Strike Force Bug Closing Procedure and check XSF unstable bugs sorted by date. Note 1: The Xorg.0.log file was so huge that the mailing list did not accept the mail.

Mehdi is a Debian developer for a bit more than a year, and he s already part of the Debian Release Team. His story is quite typical in that he started there by trying to help while observing the team do its work. That s a recurrent pattern for people who get co-opted in free software teams. Read on for more info about the release team, and Mehdi s opinion on many topics. My questions are in bold, the rest is by Mehdi (except for the additional information that I inserted in italics). Who are you? I m 27 years old. I grew up in Ariana in northern Tunisia, but have been living in Paris, France, since 2002. I m a PhD Student at the PPS laboratory where I study synchronous concurrent process calculi. I became interested in Debian when I saw one of my colleagues, Samuel Mimram (first sponsor and advocate) trying to resolve #440469, which is a bug reported against a program I wrote. We have never been able to resolve it but my intent to contribute was born there. Since then, I started to maintain some packages and help where I can. What s your biggest achievement within Debian? I don t think I had time to accomplish a lot yet I ve been mostly active in the OCaml team where we designed a tool to compute automatically the dependencies between OCaml packages, called dh-ocaml. This was a joint work with St phane Glondu, Sylvain Le Gall and Stefano Zacchiroli. I really appreciated the time spent with them while developing dh-ocaml. Some of the bits included in dh-ocaml have been included upstream in their latest release. I ve also tried to give a second life to the Buildd Status Pages because they were (kind of) abandoned. I intend to keep them alive and add new features to them. If you had a wand and could change one thing in Debian, what would that be? Make OCaml part of a default Debian installation But, since I m not a magician yet, I d stick to more realistic plans:

1. A lot of desktop users fear Debian. I think that the Desktop installation offered by Debian today is very user-friendly and we should be able to attract more and more desktop users. Still, there is some work to be done in various places to make it even more attractive. The idea is trying to enhance the usability and integration of various tools together. Each fix could be easy or trivial but the final result would be an improved Desktop experience for our users. Our packaged software run well. So, each person can participate since the most difficult part is to find the broken scenarios. Fixes could be found together with maintainers, upstream or other interested people.
   
   I ll try to come up with a plan, a list of things that need polishing or fixes and gather a group of people to work on it. I d definitely be interested in participating in such a project and I hope that I ll find other people to help. If the plan is clear enough and has well described objectives and criteria, it could be proposed to the Release Team to consider it as a Release Goal for Wheezy.
   
   
2. NMUs are a great way to make things move forward. But, sometimes, an NMU could break things or have some undesirable effects. For now, NMUers have to manually track the package s status for some time to be sure that everything is alright. It could be a good idea to be auto-subscribed to the bugs notifications of NMUed packages for some period of time (let s say for a month) to be aware of any new issues and try to fix them. NMUing a package is not just applying a patch and hitting enter after dput. It s also about making sure that the changes are correct and that no regressions have been introduced, etc
   
   
3. Orphaned packages: It could be considered as too strict and not desired, but what about not keeping orphaned and buggy packages in Testing? What about removing them from the archive if they are buggy and still unmaintained for some period? Our ftp archive is growing. It could make sense to do some (more strict) housekeeping. I believe that this question can be raised during the next QA meeting. We should think about what we want to do with those packages before they rot in the archive.

[Raphael Hertzog: I would like to point out that pts-subscribe provided by devscripts makes it easy to temporarily subscribe to bug notifications after an Non-Maintainer Upload (NMU).] You re a Debian developer since August 2009 and you re already an assistant within the Release Management team. How did that happen and what is this about? In the OCaml team, we have to start a transition each time we upload a new version of the OCaml compiler (actually, for each package). So, some coordination with the Release Team is needed to make the transition happen. When we are ready to upload a new version of the compiler, we ask the Release Team for permission and wait for their ack. Sometimes, their reply is fast (e.g. if their is no conflicting transition running), but it s not always the case. While waiting for an ack, I used to check what was happening on debian-release@l.d.o. It made me more and more interested in the activities of the Release Team. Then (before getting my Debian account), I had the chance to participate in DebConf9 where I met Luk and Phil. It was a good occasion to see more about the tools used by the Release Team. During April 2010, I had some spare time and was able to implement a little tool called Jamie to inspect the relations between transitions. It helps us to quickly see which transitions can run in parallel, or what should wait. And one day (in May 2010, IIRC), I got offered by Adam to join the team. As members of the Release Team, we have multiple areas to work on:

1. Taking care of transitions during the development cycle, which means making sure that some set of packages are correctly (re-)built or fixed against a specific (to each transition) set of packages, and finding a way to tell Britney that those packages can migrate and it would be great if she also shared the same opinion. [Raphael Hertzog: britney is the name of the software that controls the content of the Testing distribution.]
2. Paying attention to what is happening in the archive (uploads, reported RC bugs, etc ). The idea is to try to detect unexpected transitions, blocked packages, make sure that RC bug fixes reach Testing in a reasonable period of time, etc
3. During a freeze, making sure that unblock requests and freeze exceptions are not forgotten and try to make the RC bug count decrease.

There are other tasks that I ll let you discover by joining the game. Deciding what goes (or not) in the next stable release is a big responsibility and can be incredibly difficult at times. You have to make judgement calls all the time. What are your own criteria? That s a very hard to answer question (at least, for me). It really depends on the case . I try to follow the criteria that we publish in each release update. Sometimes, an unblock request doesn t match those criteria and we have to decide what to accept from the set of proposed changes. Generally, new features and non-fixes (read new upstream versions) changes are not the kind of changes that we would accept during the freeze. Some of them could be accepted if they are not intrusive, easy and well defended. When, I m not sure I try to ask other members of the Release Team to see if they share my opinion or if I missed something important during the review. The key point is to have a clear idea on what s the benefit of the proposed update, and compare it to the current situation. For example, accepting a new upstream release (even if it fixes some critical bugs) is taking a risk to break other features and that s why we (usually) ask for a backported fix. It s also worth noticing that (most of the time) we don t decide what goes in, but (more specifically) what version of a given package goes in and try to give to the contributors an idea on what kind of changes are acceptable during the freeze. There are some exceptions though. Most of them are to fix a critical package or feature. Do you have plans to improve the release process for Debian Wheezy? We do have plans to improve every bit in Debian. Wheezy will be the best release ever. We just don t know the details yet During our last meeting in Paris last October, the Release Team agreed to organize a meeting after Squeeze s release to discuss (among other questions) Wheezy s cycle. But the details of the meeting are not fixed yet (we still have plenty of time to organize it and other more important tasks to care about). We would like to be able to announce a clear roadmap for Wheezy and enhance our communication with the rest of the project. We certainly want to avoid what happened for Squeeze. Making things a bit more predictable for developers is one of our goals. Do you think the Constantly Usable Testing project will help? The original idea by Joey Hess is great because it allows d-i developers to work with a stable version of the archive. It allows them to focus on the new features they want to implement or the parts they want to fix (AIUI). It also allows to have constantly available and working installation images. Then, there is the idea of having a constantly usable Testing for users. The idea seems nice. People tend to like the idea behind CUT because they miss some software disappearing from Testing and because of the long delays for security fixes to reach Testing. If the Release Team has decided to remove a package from Testing, I think that there must be a reason for that. It either means that the software is broken, has unfixed security holes or was asked for the removal by its maintainer. I think that we should better try to spend some time to fix those packages, instead of throwing a broken version in a new suite. It could be argued that one could add experimental s version in CUT (or sid s) but every user is free to cherry-pick packages from the relevant suite when needed while still following Testing as a default branch. Besides, it s quite easy to see what was removed recently by checking the archive of debian-testing-changes or by querying UDD. IMO, It would be more useful to provide a better interface of that archive for our users. We could even imagine a program that alerts the user about installed software that got recently removed from Testing, to keep the user constantly aware any issue that could affect his machine. About the security or important updates, one has to recall the existence of Testing-security and testing-proposed-updates that are used specifically to let fixes reach Testing as soon as possible when it s not possible to go through Unstable. I m sure that the security team would appreciate some help to deal with security updates for Testing. We also have ways to speed migrate packages from Unstable to Testing. I have to admit that I m not convinced yet by the benefits brought by CUT for our users.

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Thank you to Mehdi for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Twitter and Facebook.

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In such cases, most people use to say "never saw this" and such common sentences. However, really, this time this is true: it's now 30 years since I live in the Paris area, a place where climate is not known to be a snowy one: Paris and its region are not that far from the Channel and the influence of Atlantic Ocean is supposedly important. And, really, I never saw this. For such reasons, here, winters are not really "continental" and we often have few snow during an entire winter, if any. Indeed, during the 200* years, we had several winters without any snow at all. Last year was already different: we had 3 snow episodes. A quite big one on Dec 17th (about 15cm in the western area of the region), another in mid-January where snow lasted for about one week because of very low temperatures (below -10 C) and a final one in February. Still, the 2010-2011 winter is something I never saw before. In less than one month, we had 6 different snow episodes: Nov 28th (roughly), Dec 8th, Dec 17th, Dec 18th, Dec 20th and now Dec 22th. My area (the western part of the region) was hardly hit with 20cm on Dec 8th and about 15cm on Dec 20th and 22th....up to a cumulated 80cm height. Really something unusual. And what that happens in a region where about 12M people live, sometimes at rush hours, you can expect a giant mess (and a giant mess it was on Dec 8th). During these weeks, I personnally experimented my new way of commuting: run/train/run, which means running the 3km desert country road from my house to the train station, catching a train, then running the final 4km in suburbs close to Paris. Both runs do actually replace a standard bus ride. This prove to be convenient as buses are often stopped during snow episodes (hey, there are hills in the Paris area!). That made things that I'll really remember for the future: this morning's run in the country with 15cm of fresh snow, without any single step mark (except the rabbit or wild pig ones), with the light of my head lamp, no noise and an entirely white landscape....is special and nearly unique when you live only 30km away from the town. Nevertheless, that might prefigure what we will experience in the upcoming years or dozen of years: a generally much colder winter over western Europe, much closer to what Central Europe always had. Personnally, I like that, but we probably need to prepare our facilities to such events: last week-end in UK, Belgium, France, Germany, etc. was really a giant mess (Heathrow airport closed, Roissy nearly closed, Brussels flooded with derouted planes, Frankfurt stuck, Eurostars stopped, gee). Is that climate change (as a consequence of Gulf Stream vanishing) or just a collection of random events? We'll see.

Cube-mate and friend, Kynan, put me on to pianobar today. This thing is 100% sheer awesome. A console Pandora client! No longer do I have to find the browser tab that Pandora is running in to pause it, or to see what the hell it is I'm listening to. Nor do I need to worry about Flash crashing. It's also extensible in that it can call out to an external program for various events, such as starting a new song. This makes desktop notifications of what the hell you're listening to trivial. It'll also read commands from a named pipe, so at work, where I have this crazy Microsoft Natural Keyboard with all sorts of multimedia keys, I've set up evrouter (which isn't in Debian for some strange reason) so that I can pause, skip and like/dislike using my keyboard (regardless of what application I'm in). So I can just kick off pianobar in a terminal somewhere and forget about it. This is so cool. Interestingly, it also doesn't play any advertising, so I've finally pulled my finger out and paid for a Pandora One account. Overall, this makes for a fantastic desktop Pandora client. Now I just need to figure out why I get weird HTTP errors from it at home...

A new version of our RcppExamples, package is now on CRAN. RcppExamples contains a few illustrations of how to use Rcpp. It grew out of documentation for the classic API (now in its own package RcppClassic) and we added more functions documenting how to do the same with the new API we have been focusing on for the last year or so. One of the things I added in the last few days was the example below showing how to use Rcpp::List with lookups to replace use of the old and deprecated RcppParams. It also show how to return values to R rather easily <quote>

#include <Rcpp.h>
RcppExport SEXP newRcppParamsExample(SEXP params)  
    try                                         // or use BEGIN_RCPP macro
        Rcpp::List rparam(params);              // Get parameters in params.
        std::string method   = Rcpp::as<std::string>(rparam["method"]);
        double tolerance     = Rcpp::as<double>(rparam["tolerance"]);
        int    maxIter       = Rcpp::as<int>(rparam["maxIter"]);
        Rcpp::Date startDate = Rcpp::Date(Rcpp::as<int>(rparam["startDate"])); // ctor from int
        
        Rprintf("\nIn C++, seeing the following value\n");
        Rprintf("Method argument    : %s\n", method.c_str());
        Rprintf("Tolerance argument : %f\n", tolerance);
        Rprintf("MaxIter argument   : %d\n", maxIter);
        Rprintf("Start date argument: %04d-%02d-%02d\n", 
                startDate.getYear(), startDate.getMonth(), startDate.getDay());
        return Rcpp::List::create(Rcpp::Named("method", method),
                                  Rcpp::Named("tolerance", tolerance),
                                  Rcpp::Named("maxIter", maxIter),
                                  Rcpp::Named("startDate", startDate),
                                  Rcpp::Named("params", params));  // or use rparam
      catch( std::exception &ex )               // or use END_RCPP macro
        forward_exception_to_r( ex );
      catch(...)   
        ::Rf_error( "c++ exception (unknown reason)" ); 
     
    return R_NilValue; // -Wall
 

</quote> The package is work-in-progress and needs way more general usage examples for Rcpp and particularly the new API. But it's a start. A few more details on the page are on the RcppExamples page.

(This is part of a series of posts on Why Linux?) I've run a number of distros in my time. I ended up on Debian near the end of 1999, and part of the drive for that was the number of packages available in one centralised location. Decent package management is a definite strength of Linux (or FreeBSD) over proprietary operating systems. It derives from the freedom aspect, but means you can end up with one source for all (or most) of your software, that's compiled against the same set of libraries, with one way to track what owns what. This may not seem like a big thing, especially if you're a hobbyist or are coming from a Windows background. Reinstalling is often seen as a necessary regular requirement. Personally I've got better things to do with my time. If I want to try out a piece of software I want to be able to install it safe in the knowledge I know exactly what files it owns and where there are. And I want it to be able to tell me what other common components it needs that I might not already have. Then if I decide it's not for me I can cleanly remove it and anything else it pulled in that I no longer need. Don't underestimate this. This is useful on all of my machines. I can query the version number of everything installed. I can check for updates with one command (no need for every piece of installed software to have its own updater implementation). Software can share libraries correctly rather than stashing their own private copies, meaning I get bug fixes and security updates. (Yes, sometimes authors bundle even in the Linux world. Stop it.) I'm a developer. I tend to interact with a lot of different systems, of different types. It's really handy to have access to a wide range of tools to help me with that, know that there's legally no problem with me installing them, be able to do so with a single command and, should they turn out to be unsuitable, know I can cleanly remove them with another single command. This is a definite win in the work context. Equally I've been a sysadmin for multiple machines at once. Being able to login to each of them and check that everything is up to date is damn handy. Being able to easily install software for customers tends to make you popular too. And being able to rebuild boxes (or build additional boxes to share load) with the same setup is a lot easier with a decent package manager too. And, to pre-empt any responses about how a lot of this is possible under, say, Windows, yes, it is. I've spent some time in the past building packages for commercial deployment using Novadigm's Radia tool. I'm aware that Windows integral package management has also got better over time. I still think dpkg/apt (or rpm/yum) is far more powerful. And, for the end user, mostly easier as well - distros are building pre-prepared packages for you, rather than you having to do it yourself like with Radia.

A few months ago, my company made the decision to switch from our previous mail provider, to use Google Apps. It was a no-brainer really, most of the company were using it already, for the calendars, and Documents, and well we were a bit fed up with our previous mail provider. So we made the move. As an online retailer, we obviously get a lot of Financial related emails, and our Accountancy Department has an email address setup as a group, where the group sends to all the members in the Accounts Team. A pretty simple setup. However, for the last 2 months, I ve been fighting an uphill battle to get this to work properly. When an email gets delivered to a Google Group, it stops there, and then Google re-sends the email to the people in the group. Somehow, this triggers the receiving account to believe that it s originated from the Google Groups servers, rather than the actual originating server. Google Apps emails have a pretty nifty spam filtering service. For those well-known services on the web, it ll check whether it actually came from them (I think through some combination of DKIM and SPF), and bounce it if not. Can you see where I m going yet? Google Groups has a nifty feature to stop it attempting to send emails to addresses that don t exist. If an email address bounces at a certain rate, it ll flag it as undeliverable. If all the emails in a group are flagged as undeliverable, it ll bounce that email to the original party, so that they know no-one received it. The Accounts team are setup to receive information regarding Paypal Payments, Disputes, etc etc. A couple of days in, I had our Financial controller tell us that the Accounts team had stopped receiving emails. Well, being who I am I sent a test email out guess what I got back? Hello <redacted>, Your message could not be delivered because of previous failures during delivery attempts to this mailing list. Please update the list with valid addresses. This is an example of some of the bounces we received: ----------------------------------------------
Recipient: pa.......@mobilefun.co.uk 550 550 5.7.1 Unauthenticated email is not accepted from this domain. u22si29486554yba.55 (state 18).
Message-Id: <redacted> ----------------------------------------------
Recipient: ni........@mobilefun.co.uk 550 550 5.7.1 Unauthenticated email is not accepted from this domain. u22si29486554yba.55 (state 18).
Message-Id: <redacted> ----------------------------------------------
Recipient: lu..........@mobilefun.co.uk 550 550 5.7.1 Unauthenticated email is not accepted from this domain. u22si29486554yba.55 (state 18).
Message-Id: <redacted> *sigh* time to play with the group. I change the members of the group to use one of our alias domains instead of the @mobilefun.co.uk this gets emails working again. 2 days later . our Financial Controller comes to me and complains that clients are complaining that they re receiving bounce emails when sending to his team I check, and once again, get the same message. Time to open a support ticket. That was in October since then we ve tried everything Changing to user-defined groups and switching off the spam filters, whitelisting the groups, setting up DKIM on our domain, changing the spam levels, clearing bounce statuses all to no avail I ve been back and forthing with Google Enterprise Support for 2 months and have still not found a suitable solution *sigh*. I must say however, that the person dealing with the case at Google (Josephine H) has been professional and helpful all the way along, even with my rising frustration at the issue. Today I ended up calling their service unusable number, after having tried a couple of times to change the groups so that the Accounts Team could receive emails again and finding that none of my previous tricks worked. While on hold, I found that I could use a local part extension to an email address, and the group would recognise it as a new email address and therefore have no bounce status. I ve now made a script using the Provisioning APIs, and a bit of python-fu that will generate a local part extension based on the current date/time, and replace the users in the group for the Accounts team with those. Say for example, the primary email address for a user was test@example.com it d add a user of test+20101221235641@example.com. This is set to run each day so it s pretty much the same as resetting the bounce status (which fixes things for a short while) on a daily basis. According to my latest email from Google Enterprise support:-

At the moment there is an incentive going on to fix this outright as messages from Paypal etc have been causing bounce s for other domains. This fix is supposedly due very early in the New Year and will solve this problem indefinitely.

I wait with baited breath but for now, I m happy with my hack.

I would appreciate if you could test the proposed fixes for the exim4 privilege escalation bug CVE-2010-4345. Preliminary binary and source packages for squeeze/sid and lenny are available here:
deb http://www.bebt.de/debian/ sid exim4+cve
deb-src http://www.bebt.de/debian/ sid exim4+cve
deb http://www.bebt.de/debian/ lenny exim4+cve
deb-src http://www.bebt.de/debian/ lenny exim4+cve
You can also browse the changes in SVN (lenny and sid) or build your own binaries.

---

Changelog:

• 67_unnecessaryCopt.dpatch: Do not use exim's -C option in utility scripts. This would not work with ALT_CONFIG_PREFIX.
• Pull changes related to fixing CVE-2010-4345 from exim 4.73 rc1. Closes: #606527
  • 1_cfile_norw_eximuid: Don't allow a configure file which is writeable by the Exim user or group.
  • 2_permcheck_configurefile: Check configure file permissions even for non-default files if still privileged.
  • 3_remove_ALT_CONFIG_ROOT_ONLY: Remove ALT_CONFIG_ROOT_ONLY build option, effectively making it always true.
  • 4_FD_CLOEXEC: Set FD_CLOEXEC on SMTP sockets after forking in the daemon, to ensure that rogue child processes cannot use them.
  • 5_TRUSTED_CONFIG_LIST: Add TRUSTED_CONFIG_LIST compile option.
  • 6_nonroot_system_filter_user: If the system filter needs to be run as root, let that be explicitly configured. The default is now the Exim run-time user.
  • 7_filter_D_option: Add a (compiletime) whitelist of acceptable values for the -D option.
  • 8_updatedocumentation: Update documentation to reflect the changes.
• 4_FD_CLOEXEC replaces 80_fdleak.dpatch, drop the latter.
• Build with WHITELIST_D_MACROS=OUTGOING. Post patch 7_filter_D_option exim will not regain root privileges (usually necessary for local delivery) if the -D option was used. Macro identifiers listed in WHITELIST_D_MACROS are exempted from this restriction. mailscanner (4.79.11-2.2) uses -DOUTGOING.
• Build with TRUSTED_CONFIG_LIST=/etc/exim4/trusted_configs. Post patch 3_remove_ALT_CONFIG_ROOT_ONLY exim will not re-gain root privileges (usually necessary for local delivery) if the -C option was used. This makes it impossible to start a fully functional damon with an alternate configuration file. /etc/exim4/trusted_configs (can) contain a list of filenames (one per line, full path given) to which this restriction does not apply.

NEWS entry: Exim versions up to and including 4.72 are vulnerable to CVE-2010-4345. This is a privilege escalation issue that allows the exim user to gain root privileges by specifying an alternate configuration file using the -C option. The macro override facility (-D) might also be misused for this purpose. In reaction to this security vulnerability upstream has made a number of user visible changes. This package includes these changes. If exim is invoked with the -C or -D option the daemon will not regain root privileges though re-execution. This is usually necessary for local delivery, though. Therefore it is generally not possible anymore to run an exim daemon with -D or -C options. However this version of exim has been built with TRUSTED_CONFIG_LIST=/etc/exim4/trusted_configs. TRUSTED_CONFIG_LIST defines a list of configuration files which are trusted; if a config file is owned by root and matches a pathname in the list, then it may be invoked by the Exim build-time user without Exim relinquishing root privileges. As a hotfix to not break existing installations of mailscanner we have also set WHITELIST_D_MACROS=OUTGOING. i.e. it is still possible to start exim with -DOUTGOING while being able to do local deliveries. If you previously were using -D switches you will need to change your setup to use a separate configuration file. The ".include" mechanism makes this easy. The system filter is run as exim_user instead of root by default. If your setup requies root privileges when running the system filter you will need to set the system_filter_user exim main configuration option.

When reviewing packages from mentors.debian.net I like to have them under version control so I can easily compare different versions, write patches and clean up autogenerated files. So when looking at a package I do a

git-import-dsc --download http://mentors.debian.net/debian/pool/main/x/xul-ext-firetray/xul-ext-firetray_0.2.8-1.dsc

This command first fetches the files via dget from devscripts and then imports the upstream sources onto the upstream branch (upstream by default) and the debian modifications onto the debian branch (master by default). I can then invoke git-buildpackage as usual. Since this works incrementally I can import newer versions into the same repository and use git diff to see the changes. If I'd like to hack on a random Debian package (say xul-ext-nostalgy) I usually use:

git-import-dsc --download xul-ext-nostalgy

This uses apt-get source to fetch the source package and imports it into git using the same branch layout as described above so I can use all the familiar git commands to generate patches, etc.. This blog is flattr enabled.

Debian unstable is not conceived as a product for end-users, and for very good reasons. There seems to be some misunderstanding and people trying to push end-users to use unstable. This blog post tries to address the claims raised and put them into proper light. 1. It contains mainly stable versions of the software The critical part here is the term mainly. Yes, developers are advised to only upload packages to unstable that they deem to be suitable for the next stable release. This is no hard requirement though and no one actually playing a gate-keeper enforcing this recommendation. Also, there is a fine amount of packages that follow either VCS snapshots or development branches, and only time can tell how stable those releases actually are. That's actually why there is a delay of several days before a package can transition over to testing. 2. It doesn't break badly every other day That's right but if you look at it, it also means that it does break badly eventually. And if you don't know how to move on from there, including knowing the location of maintainer scripts and how to edit them in those cases, or even resort to a rescue system, you are in troubles. 3. It's the basis of other distributions That's right in itself too, but it doesn't address the fact that those other distributions do put a lot of effort into quality assurance to work around the most nasty and annoying bugs that do affect unstable every other day. 4. It's not inherently less secure than Stable or Testing It's not inherently more secure than stable or testing either. And this is also ignoring the fact that some security bugs don't even get into stable or testing, they only affect unstable and have to get addressed just there. 5. I use it on my main computer This is the reason that you should ignore as most. People using unstable are often enough deeply involved into Debian maintenance, know how to write maintainer scripts, know where they are located in case of troubles, know how to use a rescue system in case of bootloader or kernel troubles. Just think about whether you would consider yourself to be at the same knowledge level than the person who wrote the blog article you read that used this as a convincing argument. Conclusion: Stories always have several truths attached to them. If you feel adventurous, like to understand what's going on and have a tendency for digging into things that go wrong, you most probably are using unstable already anyway and are reporting bugs that you find along your way. If you on the other hand rather just want to use your computer and don't want to work around (smaller) bugs every other day, you rather should stick with the release that is actually provided as purpose to suit the needs of end-users: stable.

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