Search Results: "andrea"

2 October 2017

James McCoy: Monthly FLOSS activity - 2017/09 edition

Debian devscripts Before deciding to take an indefinite hiatus from devscripts, I prepared one more upload merging various contributed patches and a bit of last minute cleanup. I also setup integration with Travis CI to hopefully catch issues sooner than "while preparing an upload", as was typically the case before. Anyone with push access to the Debian/devscripts GitHub repo can take advantage of this to test out changes, or keep the development branches up to date. In the process, I was able to make some improvements to travis.debian.net, namely support for DEB_BUILD_PROFILES and using a separate, minimal docker image for running autopkgtests. unibilium neovim Oddly, the mips64el builds were in BD-Uninstallable state, even though luajit's buildd status showed it was built. Looking further, I noticed the libluajit-5.1 ,-dev binary packages didn't have the mips64el architecture enabled, so I asked for it to be enabled. msgpack-c There were a few packages left which would FTBFS if I uploaded msgpack-c 2.x to unstable. All of the bug reports had either trivial work arounds (i.e., forcing use of the v1 C++ API) or trivial patches. However, I didn't want to continue waiting for the packages to get fixed since I knew other people had expressed interest in the new msgpack-c. Trying to avoid making other packages insta-buggy, I NMUed autobahn-cpp with the v1 work around. That didn't go over well, partly because I didn't send a finalized "Hey, I'd like to get this done and here's my plan to NMU" email. Based on that feedback, I decided to bump the remaining bugs to "serious" instead of NMUing and upload msgpack-c. Thanks to Jonas Smedegaard for quickly integrating my proposed fix for libdata-messagepack-perl. Hopefully, upstream has some time to review the PR soon. vim subversion
neovim

14 August 2017

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #119

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday July 30 and Saturday August 5 2017: Media coverage We were mentioned on Late Night Linux Episode 17, around 29:30. Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed Upstream packages: Debian packages: Reviews of unreproducible packages 29 package reviews have been added, 72 have been updated and 151 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 4 issue types have been updated: Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by: diffoscope development Version 85 was uploaded to unstable by Mattia Rizzolo. It included contributions from: as well as previous weeks' contributions, summarised in the changelog. There were also further commits in git, which will be released in a later version: Misc. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Bernhard M. Wiedemann and Chris Lamb & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

13 August 2017

Mike Gabriel: @DebConf17: Work for Debian and FLOSS I got done during DebCamp and DebConf... and Beyond...

People I Met and will Remember Topics I have worked on Talks and BoFs Packages Uploaded to Debian unstable Packages Uploaded to Debian NEW I also looked into lightdm-webkit2-greeter, but upstream is in the middle of a transition from Gtk3 to Qt5, so this has been suspended for now. Packages Uploaded to oldstable-/stable-proposed-updates or -security Other Package related Stuff Thanks to Everyone Making This Event Possible A big thanks to everyone who made it possible for me to attend this event!!!

25 July 2017

Gunnar Wolf: Getting ready for DebConf17 in Montreal!


(image shamelessly copied from Noodles' Emptiness) This year I will only make it to DebConf, not to DebCamp. But, still, I am very very happy and excited as the travel date looms nearer! I have ordered some of the delicacies for the Cheese and Wine party, signed up for the public bicycle system of Montreal, and done a fair share of work with the Content Team; finally today we sent out the announcement for the schedule of talks. Of course, there are several issues yet to fix, and a lot of things to do before traveling... But, no doubt about this: It will be an intense week! Oh, one more thing while we are at it: The schedule as it was published today does not really look like we have organized stuff into tracks But we have! This will be soon fixed, adding some color-coding to make tracks clearer on the schedule. This year, I pushed for the Content Team to recover the notion of tracks as an organizative measure, and as something that delivers value to DebConf as a whole. Several months ago, I created a Wiki page for the DebConf tracks, asking interested people to sign up for them. We currently have the following tracks registered:
Blends
Andreas Tille
Debian Science
Michael Banck
Cloud and containers
Luca Filipozzi
Embedded
Pending
Systems administration, automation and orchestation
Pending
Security
Gunnar Wolf
We have two tracks still needing a track coordinator. Do note that most of the tasks mentioned by the Wiki have already been carried out; what a track coordinator will now do is to serve as some sort of moderator, maybe a recurring talkmeister, ensuring continuity and probably providing for some commentary, giving some unity to its sessions. So, the responsibilities for a track coordinator right now are quite similar to what is expected for video team volunteers but to a set of contiguous sessions. If you are interested in being the track coordinator/moderator for Embedded or for Systems administration, automation and orchestation or even to share the job with any of the other, registered, coordinators, please speak up! Mail content@debconf.org and update the table in the Wiki page. See you very soon in Montreal!

12 July 2017

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: week 115 in Stretch cycle

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday July 2 and Saturday July 8 2017: Reproducible work in other projects Ed Maste pointed to a thread on the LLVM developer mailing list about container iteration being the main source of non-determinism in LLVM, together with discussion on how to solve this. Ignoring build path issues, container iteration order was also the main issue with rustc, which was fixed by using a fixed-order hash map for certain compiler structures. (It was unclear from the thread whether LLVM's builds are truly path-independent or rather that they haven't done comparisons between builds run under different paths.) Bugs filed Patches submitted upstream: Reviews of unreproducible packages 52 package reviews have been added, 62 have been updated and 20 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. No issue types were updated or added this week. Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by: diffoscope development Development continued in git with contributions from: With these changes, we are able to generate a dynamically loaded HTML diff for GCC-6 that can be displayed in a normal web browser. For more details see this mailing list post. Misc. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Bernhard M. Wiedemann and Chris Lamb & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

11 July 2017

Andreas Bombe: PDP-8/e Replicated Overview

This is an overview of the hardware and internals of the PDP-8/e replica I m building.

The front panel board
functional replica of the PDP-8/e front panel
If you know the original or remember the picture from the first post it is clear that this is a functional replica not aiming to be as pretty as those of the other projects I mentioned. I have reordered the switches into two rows to make the board more compact (which also means cheaper) without sacrificing usability. There s the two rows of display lights plus one run light the 8/e provides. The upper row is the address made up of 12 bits of memory address and 3 bits of extended memory address or field. Below are the 12 bits indicator which can show one data set out of six as selected by the user. All the switches of the original are implemented as more compact buttons1. While momentary switches are easily substituted by buttons, all buttons implementing two position switches toggle on/off with each press and they have a LED above that shows the current state. The six position rotary switch is implemented as a button cycling through all indicator displays together with six LEDs which show the active selection. Markings show the meaning of the indicator and switches as on the original, grouped in threes as the predominant numbering system for the PDPs was octal. The upper line shows the meaning for the state indicator, the middle for the status indicator and bit numbers for the rest. Note that on the PDP-8 and opposite to modern conventions, the most significant bit was numbered 0. I designed it as a pure front panel board without any PDP-8 simulation parts. The buttons and associated lights are controllable via SPI lines with a 3.3 V supply. The address and indicator lights have a separate common anode configuration with all cathodes individually available on a pin header without any resistors in the path, leaving voltage and current regulation up to the simulation board. This board is actually a few years old from a similar project where I emulated the PDP-8 in software on a microcontroller and the flexible design allowed me to reuse it unchanged.

The main board
main board with CPU and peripherals of the replicated PDP-8/e
This is where the magic happens. You can see three big ICs on the board: On the left is the STM32F405 microcontroller (with ARM Cortex-M4 core), the bigger one in the middle is the Altera2 MAX 10 FPGA and finally to the right is the SRAM that is large enough to hold all the main memory of the 32 KW maximum expansion of the PDP-8/e. The two smaller chips to the right of that are just buffers that drive the front panel address LEDs, the small chip at the top left is a RS-232 level shifter. The idea behind this is that the PDP-8 and peripherals that are simple to directly implement, such as GPIO or a serial port, are fully on the FPGA. Other peripherals such as paper and magnetic tape and disks, which are after all not connected to real PDP-8 drives but disk images on a microSD, are implemented on the microcontroller interfacing with stub devices in the FPGA. Compared to implementing everything everything in the FPGA, the STM32F4 has the advantage of useful built in peripherals such as two host/device capable USB ports. 5 V tolerant I/O pins are very useful and simply not available in any FPGA. I have to admit that this board was a bit of a rush job in order to have something at all to show at the Vintage Computer Festival Europe 18.0. Given that it was my first time designing a board with a large microcontroller and the first time with an FPGA, it wasn t exactly my fastest progressing project either and I got basic functionality (front panel allows toggling in small programs and running them) working just in time. For various reasons the project hasn t progressed much since, so the following is still just plans, but plans for which the hardware was designed. Since the aim is to have a cycle accurate PDP-8/e implementation, digital I/O was always planned. Rather than defining my own header I have included Arduino R3 compatible headers (for 3.3 V compatible boards only) that have become a popular even outside the Arduino world for this purpose. The digital Arduino pins are connected directly to the FPGA and will be directly controllable by PDP-8 software. The downside of choosing the Arduino headers is that the original PDP-8 digital I/O interface is not a perfect match since it naturally has 12 lines whereas the Arduino has 15. The analog inputs are not connected to the FPGA, the documentation of the MAX10 s ADC in the EQFP package are not very encouraging. They are connected to the STM32 instead3. Another interface connected directly to the FPGA and that would be directly under PDP-8 control is a standard 9 pin RS-232 interface. RX, TX, CTS and RTS are connected and level-shifted between 3.3 V and RS-232 levels by a MAX3232. Besides the PDP-8, I also plan to implement a full video terminal on the board. The idea is that with a power supply, keyboard and monitor this board would form a complete system without the need of connecting another computer to act as a terminal. To that end, there is a VGA port attached to the FPGA with simple resistor network DACs for 9 bits color (RGB with 3 bits each). This is another spot where I left myself room to expand, for e.g. a VT220 you really only need one color in two brightness levels. Keyboards will be connected either via the PS/2 connector on the right or the USB-A host port at the top left. Last of the interface ports is the USB micro-AB port on the left, which for now I am using only for power supply. I mainly plan to use it to provide alternative or additional serial ports to the PDP-8 or to export the video terminal serial port for testing purposes. Other possible uses are access to the image files on the microSD and firmware updates. This has gotten rather long again, so I m stopping here and leave some implementation notes for another post.
  1. They are also much cheaper. Given the large number of switches, the savings are substantial. Additionaly the buttons are nicer to operate than long rows of tiny switches. [return]
  2. Or rather Intel now. At least Altera s web site, documentation and software have already been thoroughly rebranded, but the chips I got were produced prior to that. [return]
  3. That s not to say that the analog conversions on the STM32 are necessarily better than those of the MAX10 when you can t follow their guidelines, I have no comparisons. Certainly following the guidelines would have been prohibitive given how many pins usage they restrict. [return]

25 June 2017

Andreas Bombe: PDP-8/e Replicated Introduction

I am creating a replica of the DEC PDP-8/e architecture in an FPGA from schematics of the original hardware. So how did I end up with a project like this? The story begins with me wanting to have a computer with one of those front panels that have many, many lights where you can really see, in real time, what the computer is doing while it is executing code. Not because I am nostalgic for a prior experience with any of those I was born a bit too late for that and my first computer as a kid was a Commodore 64. Now, the front panel era ended around 40 years ago with the advent of microprocessors and computers of that age and older that are complete and working are hard to find and not cheap. And even if you do, there s the issue of weight, size (complete systems with peripherals fill at least a rack) and power consumption. So what to do build myself a small one with modern technology of course. While there s many computer architectures of that era to choose from, the various PDP machines by DEC are significant and well known (and documented) due to their large numbers. The most important are probably the 12 bit PDP-8, the 16 bit PDP-11 and the 36 bit PDP-10. While the PDP-11 is enticing because of the possibility to run UNIX I wanted to start with something simpler, so I chose the PDP-8.
My implementation on display next to a real PDP-8/e at VCFe 18.0
My implementation on display next to a real PDP-8/e at VCFe 18.0

The Original DEC started the PDP-8 line of computers programmed data processors designed as low cost machines in 1965. It is a quite minimalist 12 bit architecture based on the earlier PDP-5, and by minimalist I mean seriously minimal. If you are familiar with early 8 bit microprocessors like the 6502 or 8080 you will find them luxuriously equipped in comparison. The PDP-8 base architecture has a program counter (PC) and an accumulator (AC)1. That s it. There are no pointer or index registers2. There is no stack. It has addition and AND instructions but subtractions and OR operations have to be manually coded. The optional Extended Arithmetic Element adds the MQ register but that s really it for visible registers. The Wikipedia page on the PDP-8 has a good detailed description. Regarding technology, the PDP-8 series has been in production long enough to get the whole range of implementations from discrete transistor logic to microprocessors. The 8/e which I target was right in the middle, implemented in TTL logic where each IC contains multiple logic elements. This allowed the CPU itself (including timing generator) to fit on three large circuit boards plugged into a backplane. Complete systems would have at least another board for the front panel and multiple boards for the core memory, then additional boards for whatever options and peripherals were desired.

Design Choices and Comparisons I m not the only one who had the idea to build something like that, of course. Among the other modern PDP-8 implementations with a front panel, probably the most prominent project is the Spare Time Gizmos SBC6120 which is a PDP-8 single board computer built around the Harris/Intersil HD-6120 microprocessor, which implementes the PDP-8 architecture, combined with a nice front panel. Another is the PiDP-8/I, which is another nice front panel (modeled after the 8/i which has even more lights) driven by the simh simulator running under Linux on a Raspberry Pi. My goal is to get front panel lights that appear exactly like the real ones in operation. This necessitates driving the lights at full speed as they change with every instruction or even within instructions for some display selections. For example, if you run a tight loop that does nothing but increment AC while displaying that register, it would appear that all lights are lit at equal but less than full brightness. The reason is that the loop runs at such a high speed that even the most significant bit, which is blinking the slowest, is too fast to see flicker. Hence they are all effectively 50% on, just at different frequencies, and appear to be constantly light at the same brightness. This is where the other projects lack what I am looking for. The PiDP-8/I is a multiplexed display which updates at something like 30 Hz or 60 Hz, taking whatever value is current in the simulation software at the time. All the states the lights took inbetween are lost and consequently there is flickering where there shouldn t be. On the SBC6120 at least the address lines appear to update at full speed as these are the actual RAM address lines. However the used 6120 microprocessor does not have required data for the indicator display externally available. Instead, the SBC6120 runs an interrupt at 30 Hz to trap into its firmware/monitor program which then reads the current state and writes it to the front panel display, which is essentially just another peripheral. A different considerable problem with the SBC6120 is its use of the 6100 microprocessor family ICs, which are themselves long out of production and not trivial (or cheaply) to come by. Given that the way to go is to drive all lights in step with every cycle3, this can be done by a software running on a dedicated microcontroller which is how I started or by implementing a real CPU with all the needed outputs in an FPGA which is the project I am writing about. In the next post I give an overview of the hardware I built so far and some of the features that are yet to be implemented.
  1. With an associated link bit which is a little different from a carry bit in that it is treated as a thirteenth bit, i.e. it will be flipped rather than set when a carry occurs. [return]
  2. Although there are 8 specially treated memory addresses that will pre-increment when used in indirect addressing. [return]
  3. Basic cycles on the PDP-8/e are 1.4 s for memory modifying cycles and fast cycles of 1.2 s for everything else. Instructions can be one to three cycles long. [return]

20 June 2017

Andreas Bombe: New Blog

So I finally got myself a blog to write about my software and hardware projects, my work in Debian and, I guess, stuff. Readers of planet.debian.org, hi! If you can see this I got the configuration right. For the curious, I m using a static site generator for this blog Hugo to be specific like all the cool kids do these days.

23 April 2017

Andreas Metzler: balance sheet snowboarding season 2016/17

Another year of minimal snow. Again there was early snowfall in the mountains at the start of November, but the snow was gone soon again. There was no snow up to 2000 meters of altitude until about January 3. Christmas week was spent hiking up and taking the lift down. I had my first day on board on January 6 on artificial snow, and the first one on natural snow on January 19. Down where I live (800m), snow was tight the whole winter, never topping 1m. Measuring station Diedamskopf at 1800m above sea-level topped at slightly above 200cm, on April 19. Last boarding day was yesterday (April 22) in Warth with hero-conditions. I had a preopening on the glacier in Pitztal at start of November with Pure Boarding. However due to the long waiting-period between pre-opening and start of season it did not pay off. By the time I rode regularily I had forgotten almost everything I learned at Carving-School. Nevertheless I strong season due to long periods on stable, sunny weather with 30 days on piste (counting the day I went up and barely managed a single blind run in superdense fog). Anyway, here is the balance-sheet:
2005/06 2006/07 2007/08 2008/09 2009/10 2010/11 2011/12 2012/13 2013/14 2014/15 2015/16 2016/17
number of (partial) days251729373030252330241730
Dam ls1010510162310429944
Diedamskopf154242313414191131223
Warth/Schr cken030413100213
total meters of altitude12463474096219936226774202089203918228588203562274706224909138037269819
highscore10247m8321m12108m11272m11888m10976m13076m13885m12848m132781101512245
# of runs309189503551462449516468597530354634

3 March 2017

Petter Reinholdtsen: Norwegian Bokm l translation of The Debian Administrator's Handbook complete, proofreading in progress

For almost a year now, we have been working on making a Norwegian Bokm l edition of The Debian Administrator's Handbook. Now, thanks to the tireless effort of Ole-Erik, Ingrid and Andreas, the initial translation is complete, and we are working on the proof reading to ensure consistent language and use of correct computer science terms. The plan is to make the book available on paper, as well as in electronic form. For that to happen, the proof reading must be completed and all the figures need to be translated. If you want to help out, get in touch. A fresh PDF edition in A4 format (the final book will have smaller pages) of the book created every morning is available for proofreading. If you find any errors, please visit Weblate and correct the error. The state of the translation including figures is a useful source for those provide Norwegian bokm l screen shots and figures.

5 February 2017

Andreas Metzler: Testing gnutls28 3.3.8-6+deb8u5 (stable)

I am in the process of trying to fix CVE-2017-533[4567] for jessie and have created a preliminary candidate for uploading to stable. Source (and amd64 binaries for the trusting) is available here and also on the gnutls28_jessie branch in GIT. I would appreciate testing and feedback to gnutls28 at packages.debian.org. Thanks!

30 December 2016

Andreas Metzler: I am wondering

I am wondering how many years it is going to take me to stop expecting snow below 2000m in December. This has now been the third year in a row with basically zero snow until christmas up to the top of the mountains around here. (And this year it is not going to change anymore, there might be a tiny bit of snow on January 3, but not enough to ride a board on.) I should have grown accustomed to it, but I have not managed yet, it still feels like a let-down. some illustrations.

21 November 2016

Mike Gabriel: Please Welcome D0n1elT to the FLOSS World

TL;DR; If you run a FLOSS development project and you notice D0n1elT appearing on your IRC channel, please give him a warm welcome. D0n1elT is a young man highy talented in various FLOSS related topics already. He probably needs some guidance at the beginning and I hope he won't be too shy to ask for it. But you can be sure: your channel has been joined by someone you should consider as a future resource. The Long Story During the last two weeks I had the great pleasure of supervising a fine young man (very young, still, indeed) in all sorts of IT topics. This young man turned out to be so skilled and interested in various FLOSS related areas, I really want to introduce him to all of you. The young man's real name is Daniel Teichmann. On IRC he may appear under his nick: D0n1elT. His GnuPG Fingerprint is: 6C6E 7F8F F7E8 B22E FC76 E9F7 8A79 028F DA56 7C6C. Daniel goes to a local school here in Nothern Germany, near where I live. He attends the 9th grade at his school, and as common for students of his age and grade, practical training was scheduled for the last two weeks. Daniel had originally applied for practical training at some other business near his place of living (which is quite far off from the school, actually). However, that company cancelled his training position two work days before the training was supposed to start. Daniel's teacher rang me up and asked for help. He advertised Daniel as someone who is far advanced in IT topics compared to his co-students. "He even writes his own programs (in Java and C++)." Spontaneously, Andreas Buchholz (CEO of LOGO EDV-Systeme GmbH) and I decided to accept Daniel as a trainee. Without having met him, with no application interview beforehand. The deal was: Daniel comes to Andreas business location in Kiel (40-50km away from Daniel's place of living) and I (working as freelancer for LOGO on a regular basis) do the supervising part. On day one and two, as a warm-up, Daniel installed a Debian Edu Main Server, worked himself through GOsa, LDAP, SSH, GnuPG, Jabber and IRC and configured two routers. All topics were new to him and I could hardly think of new tasks to give to him. As means of communication we set up a Jabber account, then an IRC account (as backup). However, it turned out that Daniel really got a hang of IRC over the next couple of days, so we used that as primary communication channel. Daniel had already programmed various projects in Java (whereas I have never touched Java, so far :-( ). He has written plugins for Minecraft servers. He knows well how to implement object oriented coding models. His coding style looks very good and clean (esp. for someone who has never head a nitpicking code reviewer). He started coding at the age of 9. Instead of diving into Java (where I would not have been of much help, anyway) I decided to provide him with some really basic and Unix-like knowledge: Bash scripting. I wanted to see how he handles another "language" and how he applies his Java knowledge to a lower level, syntactically weaker language. Guess what, he managed that assignment very well. Working on Impressive Display At Daniel's school we run substitute teacher info screens based on a fancy Bash script, named impressive-display, and the impressive PDF viewer. The Impressive Display tool is available in Debian testing/unstable under the same name. So over the next couple of days we worked on Impressive Display. Daniel contributed so many new code passages, conceptual ideas and security concerns, that I decided to make him co-copyright holder. Every change contributed by him received intensive testing before committing to Git. While working on Impressive Display, collaborating with Daniel via Git was a mere pleasure. In his spare time Daniel likes watching Github tutorials. Quite extraordinary. The result is a new major release of Impressive Display: Version 0.3.1 (bumped up from 0.2.3). We added the feature of handling info screen farms based on PXE boot images. It is now possible to configure as many different info screens as needed within the same PXE bootable chroot. Furthermore, Impressive Display now has a PDF presentation (written in LaTeX Beamer) that documents how to setup your own info screens. The PDF presentation is the default PDF that comes up when you start Impressive Display directly after installation. Investigating other Realms We also took a deeper look at remote desktop stuff, one of my most favourite topics. By that impulse Daniel set up his first Vserver machine at some hosting provider. He figured out how to run X2Go Server on that machine with an XFCE desktop. Next step was to run the irssi instance from his notebook inside a screen session on the Vserver. Some days later, Daniel PM'ed me: "I have an IRC bouncer now...". Quintessence It was a great pleasure meeting this young, highly curious and already highly skilled young man over the past two weeks. Daniel, it was an asset to me working with you. You are such a fast learner when it comes to getting accustomed to new working environments, it is amazing. I cannot deny having observed the tendency of preferring rather geeky tools. I was highly delighted, that What's-That and Facebook are nothing that rocks you so much. Unfortunately, all of the above makes you quite unique and non-mainstream among people of your age. My wish for you (and the FLOSS world) is that you start getting in touch with other (FLOSS) developers, maybe of your age, maybe older, and that you (if this is what you want) become an asset to the world of Free Software. The Free Software world can be a world where technical, political and spiritual work become one with friendship among people. Take care and farewell! I am sure, we will meet again. light+love Mike Gabriel (aka sunweaver on IRC and debian.org)

29 October 2016

Lars Wirzenius: Obnam 1.20 released

I have just released version 1.20 of Obnam, my backup program. It's been nine months since the previous release, and that's a long time: I've had an exciting year, and not entirely in a good way. Unfortuntely that's eaten up a lot of my free time and enthusiasm for my hobby projects. See below for a snippet of NEWS, with a summary of the user-visible changes. A lot of the effort has gone into improving FORMAT GREEN ALBATROSS, but that isn't documented in the NEWS file. I've received patches and actionable bug reports from a number of people, and I'm grateful for those. I try to credit them by name in the NEWS file. Obnam NEWS This file summarizes changes between releases of Obnam. NOTE: Obnam has an EXPERIMENTAL repository format under development, called green-albatross-20160813. It is NOT meant for real use. It is likely to change in incompatible ways without warning. DO NOT USE it unless you're willing to lose your backup. Version 1.20, released 2016-10-29 Minor changes: Bug fixes:

19 October 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: week 77 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday October 9 and Saturday October 15 2016: Media coverage Documentation update After discussions with HW42, Steven Chamberlain, Vagrant Cascadian, Daniel Shahaf, Christopher Berg, Daniel Kahn Gillmor and others, Ximin Luo has started writing up more concrete and detailed design plans for setting SOURCE_ROOT_DIR for reproducible debugging symbols, buildinfo security semantics and buildinfo security infrastructure. Toolchain development and fixes Dmitry Shachnev noted that our patch for #831779 has been temporarily rejected by docutils upstream; we are trying to persuade them again. Tony Mancill uploaded javatools/0.59 to unstable containing original patch by Chris Lamb. This fixed an issue where documentation Recommends: substvars would not be reproducible. Ximin Luo filed bug 77985 to GCC as a pre-requisite for future patches to make debugging symbols reproducible. Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed The following updated packages have become reproducible - in our current test setup - after being fixed: The following updated packages appear to be reproducible now, for reasons we were not able to figure out. (Relevant changelogs did not mention reproducible builds.) Some uploads have addressed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Some uploads have addressed nearly all reproducibility issues, except for build path issues: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Reviews of unreproducible packages 101 package reviews have been added, 49 have been updated and 4 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 3 issue types have been updated: Weekly QA work During of reproducibility testing, some FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by: tests.reproducible-builds.org Debian: Openwrt/LEDE/NetBSD/coreboot/Fedora/archlinux: Misc. We are running a poll to find a good time for an IRC meeting. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Holger Levsen & Chris Lamb and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.

20 September 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: week 73 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday September 11 and Saturday September 17 2016: Toolchain developments Ximin Luo started a new series of tools called (for now) debrepatch, to make it easier to automate checks that our old patches to Debian packages still apply to newer versions of those packages, and still make these reproducible. Ximin Luo updated one of our few remaining patches for dpkg in #787980 to make it cleaner and more minimal. The following tools were fixed to produce reproducible output: Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed The following updated packages have become reproducible - in our current test setup - after being fixed: The following updated packages appear to be reproducible now, for reasons we were not able to figure out. (Relevant changelogs did not mention reproducible builds.) The following 3 packages were not changed, but have become reproducible due to changes in their build-dependencies: jaxrs-api python-lua zope-mysqlda. Some uploads have addressed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Reviews of unreproducible packages 462 package reviews have been added, 524 have been updated and 166 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 25 issue types have been updated: Weekly QA work FTBFS bugs have been reported by: diffoscope development A new version of diffoscope 60 was uploaded to unstable by Mattia Rizzolo. It included contributions from: It also included from changes previous weeks; see either the changes or commits linked above, or previous blog posts 72 71 70. strip-nondeterminism development New versions of strip-nondeterminism 0.027-1 and 0.028-1 were uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb. It included contributions from: disorderfs development A new version of disorderfs 0.5.1 was uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb. It included contributions from: It also included from changes previous weeks; see either the changes or commits linked above, or previous blog posts 70. Misc. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.

9 August 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 67 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday July 31 and Saturday August 6 2016: Toolchain development and fixes Packages fixed and bugs filed The following 24 packages have become reproducible - in our current test setup - due to changes in their build-dependencies: alglib aspcud boomaga fcl flute haskell-hopenpgp indigo italc kst ktexteditor libgroove libjson-rpc-cpp libqes luminance-hdr openscenegraph palabos petri-foo pgagent sisl srm-ifce vera++ visp x42-plugins zbackup The following packages have become reproducible after being fixed: The following newly-uploaded packages appear to be reproducible now, for reasons we were not able to figure out. (Relevant changelogs did not mention reproducible builds.) Some uploads have addressed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Package reviews and QA These are reviews of reproduciblity issues of Debian packages. 276 package reviews have been added, 172 have been updated and 44 have been removed in this week. 7 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb. Reproducibility tools Test infrastructure For testing the impact of allowing variations of the buildpath (which up until now we required to be identical for reproducible rebuilds), Reiner Herrmann contribed a patch which enabled build path variations on testing/i386. This is possible now since dpkg 1.18.10 enables the --fixdebugpath build flag feature by default, which should result in reproducible builds (for C code) even with varying paths. So far we haven't had many results due to disturbances in our build network in the last days, but it seems this would mean roughly between 5-15% additional unreproducible packages - compared to what we see now. We'll keep you updated on the numbers (and problems with compilers and common frameworks) as we find them. lynxis continued work to test LEDE and OpenWrt on two different hosts, to include date variation in the tests. Mattia and Holger worked on the (mass) deployment scripts, so that the - for space reasons - only jenkins.debian.net GIT clone resides in ~jenkins-adm/ and not anymore in Holger's homedir, so that soon Mattia (and possibly others!) will be able to fully maintain this setup, while Holger is doing siesta. Miscellaneous Chris, dkg, h01ger and Ximin attended a Core Infrastricture Initiative summit meeting in New York City, to discuss and promote this Reproducible Builds project. The CII was set up in the wake of the Heartbleed SSL vulnerability to support software projects that are critical to the functioning of the internet. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo and Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.

1 August 2016

Shirish Agarwal: Doha and the past year in APT

A week has gone by and another small sharing about Doha and one package that quite a few of us use everyday but don t think much of them. Let s start with Doha with these two pictures which tells/shares a bit about what the Doha of today is like qatar-1 qatar-2 While I have more than a dozen snapshots of Doha, all of them show same thing, all are huge skyscrapers and overall Doha seems to be aping Dubai and is in a frenzy as World Cup 2022 is around the corner. We did see a few of the older places but these seemed to be more done for tourists rather than the real thing. We saw stuff like wooden_ship This was a picture taken by Ritesh Raj Saraff, a friend and a DD whom I met while I was going to Debconf. The place where this picture has been taken is known as a Souk or what we know as market-place. This was a place where you could get spices. Quite a few of the spices that we get and use in India were bought from Middle-East in the olden times. In fact, it has been argued that the whole Mughlai food that is part of Indian culture was imported from Middle-East when we were trading them before India or Akhand Bharat was invaded. What was interesting to both of us is that we could perceive that most of the buildings had a sort of fakeness to it, they tried to show that it had a lot of detailed work on the buildings but we could see it was all done recently so not that old as being led to believe. One of the other interesting bits that we came to know throughout our stay in Qatar that almost 80-90% of the staff we met inside Qatar airport as well as in the Souk were people from Asian sub-continent and more specifically from South India. I had few interesting conversations with some of the people who were managing the shops were that almost of them were just employees while the owners were Qataris . I could understand this as the distance and flight between Qatar and India is hardly 3 hours. It seemed very similar to how Mexicans look for work in United States. The most expensive thing there was water as it s desert other than housing and most workers seemed to have shared accommodation from anywhere between 5-15 people in one room. It s only the relative strength of the Qatari Rial which probably compels them to be there. The temperature was around 45 degrees with a bit of humidity as it s next to the Ocean. For all the money in the world, I wouldn t work there. It is true that you know your city s worth only when you go outside:) I do have some more stories about Qatar but that would have to wait for another day now. Also, I really don t want to talk much about this part as it s part depressing but probably would explore it a bit in a further blog-post. One of the more interesting topics that I attended was the apt talk . There are 3-4 tools in the Debian world i.e. apt, aptitude, apt-get, dpkg and dselect. More often than not people know aptitude and apt-get whereas the rest of the packages are not thought so much about. What I somewhat suspected about the history of apt was revealed to be true today, courtesy David K. julias-andreas-klose-year-in-apt You can see the talk/video about apt at http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2016/debconf16/The_past_year_in_APT.webm. I had been curious about apt,libapt,dpkg and the entire tool-chain which goes into updating packages and like. I had a couple of conversations here in India before on mail, in person and IRC as well as couple of conversations in South Africa as well before the APT talk where it was told that packages are not signed or it s not easy to figure out the integrity. Being a Debian fan-boy I could not believe this to be true. Hence I asked and to my dismay found it to be true . I also then asked the same with a bit more background on the mailing list as well and got to know that this has been a concern since 2005. As I do not have the requisite skills and the person would require probably knowledge of dpkg internals as well as have probably good social skills to have at least 1-2 DD s help her/im to work on it and have probably some server space where even some partial archive is re-built using debian packages which use dpkg-sig . I also had some concerns that even if somebody did do the work, it might come in the way of the reproducible builds concept where Neils shared ways in which it could be overcome. Having said the above, it is totally doable if somebody has the will, skills and the patience to do it. Just look at the amazing work done by the team which re-built almost all the archive using clang. See clang.debian.net for the amazing work that they have done. Now, one of the issues in India which comes in popularizing Debian or in fact any free software distribution in India is the bandwidth issue or rather the lack of it or how expensive it is. The situation for better lack of term is pathetic . While nothing can be done till the time the Govt. gives limited term oligopoly licenses to telecom operators and they have a cabal (cabal closed team where decisions and policies are made without any knowledge of and to other stakeholders.) we need to find ways to make the best of the situation. Anyways, while there are some ideas to tackle that but that s a long-term goal and I will share some aspects of it in probably another blog post. In the interim somethings can definitely be made better. Now one of the issues that is there for most people is getting the package updates. Before updating the packages, the package index needs to be updated. Now, both in home and work environments most people are cautious to update the package index. But many times, either due to bandwidth issues or some other issue which is outside your control, your package index is corrupted. I have put both the possible reasons of why and how the package index corruption takes place and a probable work-around of in the deity mail post. I do hope to put in a more coherent state by probably making smaller bug issues so they could be tackled or answered one by one. Any improvements would be better for stability of debian infrastructure only. If anybody does do the required work and need a guinea pig for testing, count me in. Just holler and share you will be working on this aspect and at least one of my workstations would definitely take part in seeing if its better or not. Even if you are able to just provide a way to make a copy of /var/lib/apt/lists after every successful update and do the comparison with time-stamp on next run and only change the copy when a successful update occurs, that will be a huge help in itself. Look forward to hearing form one and all.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #Debconf16, #feature-request, #Julian Andreas Klose, #shell-script ?, apt, aptitude

13 June 2016

Scarlett Clark: Debian: KDE: Reproducible Builds week 3, Randa Platforms Equals Busy times!

Debian: I am a smidgen late on post due to travel, sorry! choqok:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=825322
For this I was able to come up with a patch for kconfig_compiler to encode generated files to utf-8.
Review request is here:
https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/128102/
This has been approved and I will be pushing it as soon as I patch the qt5 frameworks version. kxmlgui:
WIP this has been a steep learning curve, according to the notes it was an easy embedded kernel version, that was not the case! After grueling hours of
trying to sort out randomness in debug output I finally narrowed it down to cases where QStringLiteral was used and there were non letter characters eg. ( <") These were causing debug symbols to generate with ( lambda() ) which caused unreproducible symbol/debug files. It is now a case of fixing all of these in the code to use QString::fromUtf8 seems to fix this. I am working on a mega patch for upstream and it should be ready early in the week.
This last week I spent a large portion making my through a mega patch for kxmlgui, when it was suggested to me to write a small qt app
to test QStringLiteral isolated and sure enough two build were byte for byte identical. So this means that QStringLiteral may not be the issue at all. With some
more assistance I am to expand my test app with several QStringLiterals of varying lengths, we have suspicion it is a padding issue, which complicates things. KDE:
On the KDE front, I have arrived safe and sound in Randa and aside from some major jetlag, reproducible builds, I have been quite busy with the KDE CI. I am reworking
my DSL to use friendly yaml files to generate jobs for all platforms ( linux, android, osx, windows, snappy, flatpak ) and can easily be extended later.
Major workpoints so far for Randa: TODO: Have a great day.

8 June 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 58 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between May 29th and June 4th 2016: Media coverage Ed Maste will present Reproducible Builds in FreeBSD at BDSCan 2016 in Ottawa, Canada on June 11th. GSoC and Outreachy updates Toolchain fixes Other upstream fixes Packages fixed The following 53 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build-dependencies: angband blktrace code-saturne coinor-symphony device-tree-compiler mpich rtslib ruby-bcrypt ruby-bson-ext ruby-byebug ruby-cairo ruby-charlock-holmes ruby-curb ruby-dataobjects-sqlite3 ruby-escape-utils ruby-ferret ruby-ffi ruby-fusefs ruby-github-markdown ruby-god ruby-gsl ruby-hdfeos5 ruby-hiredis ruby-hitimes ruby-hpricot ruby-kgio ruby-lapack ruby-ldap ruby-libvirt ruby-libxml ruby-msgpack ruby-ncurses ruby-nfc ruby-nio4r ruby-nokogiri ruby-odbc ruby-oj ruby-ox ruby-raindrops ruby-rdiscount ruby-redcarpet ruby-redcloth ruby-rinku ruby-rjb ruby-rmagick ruby-rugged ruby-sdl ruby-serialport ruby-sqlite3 ruby-unicode ruby-yajl ruby-zoom thin The following packages have become reproducible after being fixed: Some uploads have addressed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Uploads with an unknown result because they fail to build: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Package reviews 45 reviews have been added, 25 have been updated and 25 have been removed in this week. 12 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb and Niko Tyni. diffoscope development strip-nondeterminism development Mattia uploaded strip-nondeterminism 0.018-1 which improved support for *.epub files. tests.reproducible-builds.org Misc. Last week we also learned about progress of reproducible builds in FreeBSD. Ed Maste announced a change to record the build timestamp during ports building, which is required for later reproduction. This week's edition was written by Reiner Herrman, Holger Levsen and Chris Lamb and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible builds folks on IRC.

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