In exciting professional news, it was recently announced that I got an National Science Foundation CAREER award! The CAREER is the US NSF s most prestigious award for early-career faculty. In addition to the recognition, the award involves a bunch of money for me to put toward my research over the next 5 years. The Department of Communication at the University of Washington has put up a very nice web page announcing the thing. It s all very exciting and a huge honor. I m very humbled. The grant will support a bunch of new research to develop and test a theory about the relationship between governance and online community lifecycles. If you ve been reading this blog for a while, you ll know that I ve been involved in a bunch of research to describe how peer production communities tend to follow common patterns of growth and decline as well as a studies that show that many open communities become increasingly closed in ways that deter lots of the kinds contributions that made the communities successful in the first place. Over the last few years, I ve worked with Aaron Shaw to develop the outlines of an explanation for why many communities because increasingly closed over time in ways that hurt their ability to integrate contributions from newcomers. Over the course of the work on the CAREER, I ll be continuing that project with Aaron and I ll also be working to test that explanation empirically and to develop new strategies about what online communities can do as a result. In addition to supporting research, the grant will support a bunch of new outreach and community building within the Community Data Science Collective. In particular, I m planning to use the grant to do a better job of building relationships with community participants, community managers, and others in the platforms we study. I m also hoping to use the resources to help the CDSC do a better job of sharing our stuff out in ways that are useful as well doing a better job of listening and learning from the communities that our research seeks to inform. There are many to thank. The proposed work was the direct research of the work I did as the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford where I got to spend the 2018-2019 academic year in Claude Shannon s old office and talking through these ideas with an incredible range of other scholars over lunch every day. It s also the product of years of conversations with Aaron Shaw and Yochai Benkler. The proposal itself reflects the excellent work of the whole CDSC who did the work that made the award possible and provided me with detailed feedback on the proposal itself.

No doubt it was someone's idea of a joke to release Silence of the Lambs on Valentine's Day, thirty years ago today. Although it references Valentines at one point and hints at a deeper relationship between Starling and Lecter, it was clearly too tempting to jeopardise so many date nights. After all, how many couples were going to enjoy their ribeyes medium-rare after watching this? Given the muted success of Manhunter (1986), Silence of the Lambs was our first real introduction to Dr. Lecter. Indeed, many of the best scenes in this film are introductions: Starling's first encounter with Lecter is probably the best introduction in the whole of cinema, but our preceding introduction to the asylum's factotum carries a lot of cultural weight too, if only because the camera's measured pan around the environment before alighting on Barney has been emulated by so many first-person video games since.

We first see Buffalo Bill at the thirty-two minute mark. (Or, more tellingly, he sees us.) Delaying the viewer's introduction to the film's villain is the mark of a secure and confident screenplay, even if it was popularised by the budget-restricted Jaws (1975) which hides the eponymous shark for one hour and 21 minutes.

It is no mistake that the first thing we see of Starling do is, quite literally, pull herself up out of the unknown. With all of the focus on the Starling Lecter repartee, the viewer's first introduction to Starling is as underappreciated as she herself is to the FBI. Indeed, even before Starling tells Lecter her innermost dreams, we learn almost everything we need to about Starling in the first few minutes: we see her training on an obstacle course in the forest, the unused rope telling us that she is here entirely voluntarily. And we can surely guess why; the passing grade for a woman in the FBI is to top of the class, and Starling's not going to let an early February in Virginia get in the way of that. We need to wait a full three minutes before we get our first line of dialogue, and in just eight words ("Crawford wants to see you in his office...") we get our confirmation about the FBI too. With no other information other than he can send a messenger out into the cold, we can intuit that Crawford tends to get what Crawford wants. It's just plain "Crawford" too; everyone knows his actual title, his power, "his" office. The opening minutes also introduce us to the film's use of visual hierarchy. Our Hermes towers above Starling throughout the brief exchange (she must push herself even to stay within the camera's frame). Later, Starling always descends to meet her demons: to the asylum's basement to visit Lecter and down the stairs to meet Buffalo Bill. Conversely, she feels safe enough to reveal her innermost self to Lecter on the fifth floor of the courthouse. (Bong Joon-ho's Parasite (2019) uses elevation in an analogous way, although a little more subtly.)

The messenger turns to watch Starling run off to Crawford. Are his eyes involuntarily following the movement or he is impressed by Starling's gumption? Or, almost two decades after John Berger's male gaze, is he simply checking her out? The film, thankfully, leaves it to us.

Crawford is our next real introduction, and our glimpse into the film's sympathetic treatment of law enforcement. Note that the first thing that the head of the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit does is to lie to Starling about the reason to interview Lecter, despite it being coded as justified within the film's logic. We learn in the book that even Barney deceives Starling, recording her conversations with Lecter and selling her out to the press. (Buffalo Bill always lies to Starling, of course, but I think we can forgive him for that.) Crawford's quasi-compliment of "You grilled me pretty hard on the Bureau's civil rights record in the Hoover years..." then encourages the viewer to conclude that the FBI's has been a paragon of virtue since 1972... All this (as well as her stellar academic record, Crawford's wielding of Starling's fragile femininity at the funeral home and the cool reception she receives from a power-suited Senator Ruth Martin), Starling must be constantly asking herself what it must take for anyone to take her seriously. Indeed, it would be unsurprising if she takes unnecessary risks to make that happen.

The cold open of Hannibal (2001) makes for a worthy comparison. The audience remembers they loved the dialogue between Starling and Lecter, so it is clumsily mentioned. We remember Barney too, so he is shoehorned in as well. Lacking the confidence to introduce new signifiers to its universe, Red Dragon (2002) aside, the hollow, 'clip show' feel of Hannibal is a taste of the zero-calorie sequels to come in the next two decades.

The film is not perfect, and likely never was. Much has been written on the fairly transparent transphobia in Buffalo Bill's desire to wear a suit made out of women's skin, but the film then doubles down on its unflattering portrayal by trying to have it both ways. Starling tells the camera that "there's no correlation between transsexualism and violence," and Lecter (the film's psychoanalytic authority, remember) assures us that Buffalo Bill is "not a real transsexual" anyway. Yet despite those caveats, we are continually shown a TERFy cartoon of a man in a wig tucking his "precious" between his legs and an absurdly phallic gun. And, just we didn't quite get the message, a decent collection of Nazi memorabilia. The film's director repeated the novel's contention that Buffalo Bill is not actually transgender, but someone so damaged that they are seeking some kind of transformation. This, for a brief moment, almost sounds true, and the film's deranged depiction of what it might be like to be transgender combined with its ambivalence feels distinctly disingenuous to me, especially given that on an audience and Oscar-adjusted basis Silence of the Lambs may very well be the most transphobic film to come out of Hollywood. Still, I remain torn on the death of the author, especially when I discover that Jonathan Demme went on to direct Philadelphia (1993), likely the most positive film about homophobia and HIV.

Nevertheless, as an adaption of Thomas Harris' original novel, the movie is almost flawless. The screenplay excises red herrings and tuns down the volume on some secondary characters. Crucially for the format, it amplifies Lecter's genius by not revealing that he knew everything all along and cuts Buffalo Bill's origin story for good measure too good horror, after all, does not achieve its effect on the screen, but in the mind of the viewer. The added benefit of removing material from the original means that the film has time to slowly ratchet up the tension, and can remain patient and respectful of the viewer's intelligence throughout: it is, you could almost say, "Ready when you are, Sgt. Pembury". Otherwise, the film does not deviate too far from the original, taking the most liberty when it interleaves two narratives for the famous 'two doorbells' feint.

Dr. Lecter's upright stance when we meet him reminds me of the third act of Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious (1946), another picture freighted with meaningful stairs. Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956) began the now-shopworn trope of concealing a weapon in a flower box.

Two other points of deviation from the novel might be worthy of mention. In the book, a great deal is made of Dr. Lecter's penchant for Bach's Goldberg Variations, inducing a cultural resonance with other cinematic villains who have a taste for high art. It is also stressed in the book that it is the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould's recording too, although this is likely an attempt by Harris to demonstrate his own refined sensibilities Lecter would surely have prefered a more historically-informed performance on the harpsichord. Yet it is glaringly obvious that it isn't Gould playing in the film at all; Gould's hypercanonical 1955 recording is faster and focused, whilst his 1981 release is much slower and contemplative. No doubt tedious issues around rights prevented the use of either recording, but I like to imagine that Gould himself nixed the idea. The second change revolves around the film's most iconic quote. Deep underground, Dr. Lecter tries to spook Starling:

A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.

The novel has this as "some fava beans and a big Amarone". No doubt the movie-going audience could not be trusted to know what an Amarone was, just as they were not to capable of recognising a philosopher. Nevertheless, substituting Chianti works better here as it cleverly foreshadows Tuscany (we discover that Lecter is living in Florence in the sequel), and it avoids the un-Lecterian tautology of 'big' Amarone's, I am reliably informed, are big-bodied wines. Like Buffalo Bill's victims. Yet that's not all. "The audience", according to TV Tropes:

... believe Lecter is merely confessing to one of his crimes. What most people would not know is that a common treatment for Lecter's "brand of crazy" is to use drugs of a class known as MAOIs (monoamine oxidase inhibitors). There are several things one must not eat when taking MAOIs, as they can case fatally low blood pressure, and as a physician and psychiatrist himself, Dr. Lecter would be well aware of this. These things include liver, fava beans, and red wine. In short, Lecter was telling Clarice that he was off his medication.

I could write more, but as they say, I'm having an old friend for dinner. The starling may be a common bird, but The Silence of the Lambs is that extremely rara avis indeed the film that's better than the book. Ta ta...

A new maintenance release, now at version 0.0.18, of RcppAnnoy is now on CRAN. RcppAnnoy is the Rcpp-based R integration of the nifty Annoy library by Erik Bernhardsson. Annoy is a small and lightweight C++ template header library for very fast approximate nearest neighbours originally developed to drive the famous Spotify music discovery algorithm. This release is follow-up to release 0.0.17 which was made four weeks ago, and which brought the new upstream release 1.17 of Annoy. We now have an updated upstream with a PR by Aaron aiming for improved control of RNG seeding to ensure better reproducibility, along with extended tests and new helpers for RcppAnnoy and Annoy version numbers. The release was once again coordinated with Annoy and James whose BiocNeighbors and uwot packages both consume the Annoy header library shipped here. Detailed changes follow below.

Changes in version 0.0.18 (2020-12-15)

• Small tweaks to threading policy header defines (Dirk closing #65)
• Vignette code is again compiled during testing (Aaron Lum and Dirk in #66 addressing #64)
• Upstream code (with Aaron's PR) was synchronized once more (Dirk in #67)
• A new helper function was added to report the Annoy version (Aaron in #68)

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this 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.

A new release 0.0.17 of RcppAnnoy is now on CRAN. RcppAnnoy is the Rcpp-based R integration of the nifty Annoy library by Erik Bernhardsson. Annoy is a small and lightweight C++ template header library for very fast approximate nearest neighbours originally developed to drive the famous Spotify music discovery algorithm. This release brings a new upstream version 1.17, released a few weeks ago, which adds multithreaded index building. This changes the API by adding a new threading policy parameter requiring code using the main Annoy header to update. For this reason we waited a little for the dust to settle on the BioConductor 3.12 release before bringing the changes to BiocNeighbors via this commit and to uwot via this simple PR. Aaron and James updated their packages accordingly so by the time I uploaded RcppAnnoy it made for very smooth sailing as we all had done our homework with proper conditional builds, and the package had no other issue preventing automated processing at CRAN. Yay. I also added a (somewhat overdue one may argue) header file RcppAnnoy.h regrouping defines and includes which should help going forward. Detailed changes follow below.

Changes in version 0.0.17 (2020-11-15)

• Upgrade to Annoy 1.17, but default to serial use.
• Add new header file to regroup includes and defines.
• Upgrade CI script to use R with bspm on focal.

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

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

Review: Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?, edited by Maya Schenwar, et al.

Editor:	Maya Schenwar
Editor:	Joe Macar
Editor:	Alana Yu-lan Price
Publisher:	Haymarket Books
Copyright:	June 2016
ISBN:	1-60846-684-1
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	250

Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? is an anthology of essays about policing in the United States. It's divided into two sections: one that enumerates ways that police are failing to serve or protect communities, and one that describes how communities are building resistance and alternatives. Haymarket Books (a progressive press in Chicago) has made it available for free in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing and resulting protests in the United States. I'm going to be a bit unfair to this book, so let me start by admitting that the mismatch between it and the book I was looking for is not entirely its fault. My primary goal was to orient myself in the discussion on the left about alternatives to policing. I also wanted to sample something from Haymarket Books; a free book was a good way to do that. I was hoping for a collection of short introductions to current lines of thinking that I could selectively follow in longer writing, and an essay collection seemed ideal for that. What I had not realized (which was my fault for not doing simple research) is that this is a compilation of articles previously published by Truthout, a non-profit progressive journalism site, in 2014 and 2015. The essays are a mix of reporting and opinion but lean towards reporting. The earliest pieces in this book date from shortly after the police killing of Michael Brown, when racist police violence was (again) reaching national white attention. The first half of the book is therefore devoted to providing evidence of police abuse and violence. This is important to do, but it's sadly no longer as revelatory in 2020, when most of us have seen similar things on video, as it was to white America in 2014. If you live in the United States today, while you may not be aware of the specific events described here, you're unlikely to be surprised that Detroit police paid off jailhouse informants to provide false testimony ("Ring of Snitches" by Aaron Miguel Cant ), or that Chicago police routinely use excessive deadly force with no consequences ("Amid Shootings, Chicago Police Department Upholds Culture of Impunity" by Sarah Macaraeg and Alison Flowers), or that there is a long history of police abuse and degradation of pregnant women ("Your Pregnancy May Subject You to Even More Law Enforcement Violence" by Victoria Law). There are about eight essays along those lines. Unfortunately, the people who excuse or disbelieve these stories are rarely willing to seek out new evidence, let alone read a book like this. That raises the question of intended audience for the catalog of horrors part of this book. The answer to that question may also be the publication date; in 2014, the base of evidence and example for discussion had not been fully constructed. This sort of reporting is also obviously relevant in the original publication context of web-based journalism, where people may encounter these accounts individually through social media or other news coverage. In 2020, they offer reinforcement and rhetorical evidence, but I'm dubious that the people who would benefit from this knowledge will ever see it in this form. Those of us who will are already sickened, angry, and depressed. My primary interest was therefore in the second half of the book: the section on how communities are building resistance and alternatives. This is where I'm going to be somewhat unfair because the state of that conversation may have been different in 2015 than it is now in 2020. But these essays were lacking the depth of analysis that I was looking for. There is a human tendency, when one becomes aware of an obvious wrong, to simply publicize the horrible thing that is happening and expect someone to do something about it. It's obviously and egregiously wrong, so if more people knew about it, certainly it would be stopped! That has happened repeatedly with racial violence in the United States. It's also part of the common (and school-taught) understanding of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s: activists succeeded in getting the violence on the cover of newspapers and on television, people were shocked and appalled, and the backlash against the violence created political change. Putting aside the fact that this is too simplistic of a picture of the Civil Rights era, it's abundantly clear at this point in 2020 that publicizing racist and violent policing isn't going to stop it. We're going to have to do something more than draw attention to the problem. Deciding what to do requires political and social analysis, not just of the better world that we want to see but of how our current world can become that world. There is very little in that direction in this book. Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? does not answer the question of its title beyond "not us" and "white supremacy." While those answers are not exactly wrong, they're also not pushing the analysis in the direction that I wanted to read. For example (and this is a long-standing pet peeve of mine in US political writing), it would be hard to tell from most of the essays in this book that any country besides the United States exists. One essay ("Killing Africa" by William C. Anderson) talks about colonialism and draws comparisons between police violence in the United States and international treatment of African and other majority-Black countries. One essay talks about US military behavior oversees ("Beyond Homan Square" by Adam Hudson). That's about it for international perspective. Notably, there is no analysis here of what other countries might be doing better. Police violence against out-groups is not unique to the United States. No one has entirely solved this problem, but versions of this problem have been handled with far more success than here. The US has a comparatively appalling record; many countries in the world, particularly among comparable liberal democracies in Europe, are doing far better on metrics of racial oppression by agents of the government and of law enforcement violence. And yet it's common to approach these problems as if we have to develop a solution de novo, rather than ask what other countries are doing differently and if we could do some of those things. The US has some unique challenges, both historical and with the nature of endemic violence in the country, so perhaps such an analysis would turn up too many US-specific factors to copy other people's solutions. But we need to do the analysis, not give up before we start. Novel solutions can lead to novel new problems; other countries have tested, working improvements that could provide a starting framework and some map of potential pitfalls. More fundamentally, only the last two essays of this book propose solutions more complex than "stop." The authors are very clear about what the police are doing, seem less interested in why, and are nearly silent on how to change it. I suspect I am largely in political agreement with most of the authors, but obviously a substantial portion of the country (let alone its power structures) is not, and therefore nothing is changing. Part of the project of ending police violence is understanding why the violence exists, picking apart the motives and potential fracture lines in the political forces supporting the status quo, and building a strategy to change the politics. That isn't even attempted here. For example, the "who do you serve?" question of the book's title is more interesting than the essays give it credit. Police are not a monolith. Why do Black people become police officers? What are their experiences? Are there police forces in the United States that are doing better than others? What makes them different? Why do police act with violence in the moment? What set of cultural expectations, training experiences, anxieties, and fears lead to that outcome? How do we change those factors? Or, to take another tack, why are police not held accountable even when there is substantial public outrage? What political coalition supports that immunity from consequences, what are its fault lines and internal frictions, and what portions of that coalition could be broken off, pealed away, or removed from power? To whom, institutionally, are police forces accountable? What public offices can aspiring candidates run for that would give them oversight capability? This varies wildly throughout the United States; political approaches that work in large cities may not work in small towns, or with county sheriffs, or with the FBI, or with prison guards. To treat these organizations as a monolith and their motives as uniform is bad political tactics. It gives up points of leverage. I thought the best essays of this collection were the last two. "Community Groups Work to Provide Emergency Medical Alternatives, Separate from Police," by Candice Bernd, is a profile of several local emergency response systems that divert emergency calls from the police to paramedics, mental health experts, or social workers. This is an idea that's now relatively mainstream, and it seems to be finding modest success where it has been tried. It's more of a harm mitigation strategy than an attempt to deal with the root problem, but we're going to need both. The last essay, "Building Community Safety" by Ejeris Dixon, is the only essay in this book that is pushing in the direction that I was hoping to read. Dixon describes building an alternative system that can intervene in violent situations without using the police. This is fascinating and I'm glad that I read it. It's also frustrating in context because Dixon's essay should be part of a discussion. Dixon describes spending years learning de-escalation techniques, doing hard work of community discussion and collective decision-making, and making deep investment in the skills required to handle violence without calling in a dangerous outside force. I greatly admire this approach (also common in parts of the anarchist community) and the people who are willing to commit to it. But it's an immense amount of work, and as Dixon points out, that work often falls on the people who are least able to afford it. Marginalized communities, for whom the police are often dangerous, are also likely to lack both time and energy to invest in this type of skill training. And many people simply will not do this work even if they do have the resources to do it. More fundamentally, this approach conflicts somewhat with division of labor. De-escalation and social work are both professional skills that require significant time and practice to hone, and as much as I too would love to live in a world where everyone knows how to do some amount of this work, I find it hard to imagine scaling this approach without trained professionals. The point of paying someone to do this work as their job is that the money frees up their time to focus on learning those skills at a level that is difficult to do in one's free time. But once you have an organized group of professionals who do this work, you have to find a way to keep them from falling prey to the problems that plague the police, which requires understanding the origins of those problems. And that's putting aside the question of how large the residual of dangerous crime that cannot be addressed through any form of de-escalation might be, and what organization we should use to address it. Dixon's essay is great; I wouldn't change anything about it. But I wanted to see the next essay engaging with Dixon's perspective and looking for weaknesses and scaling concerns, and then the next essay that attempts to shore up those weaknesses, and yet another essay that grapples with the challenging philosophical question of a government monopoly on force and how that can and should come into play in violent crime. And then essays on grass-roots organizing in the context of police reform or abolition, and on restorative justice, and on the experience of attempting police reform from the inside, and on how to support public defenders, and on the merits and weaknesses of focusing on electing reform-minded district attorneys. Unfortunately, none of those are here. Overall, Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? was a disappointment. It was free, so I suppose I got what I paid for, and I may have had a different reaction if I read it in 2015. But if you're looking for a deep discussion on the trade-offs and challenges of stopping police violence in 2020, I don't think this is the place to start. Rating: 3 out of 10

So many good books, so little reading time. Jairus Banaji A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism (nonfiction)
Steven Brust The Baron of Magister Valley (sff)
Micaiah Johnson The Space Between Worlds (sff)
Ian McDonald Luna: New Moon (sff)
Elizabeth Moon Trading in Danger (sff)
Tamsyn Muir Harrow the Ninth (sff)
Suzanne Palmer Finder (sff)
Kit Rocha Beyond Shame (sff)
Kit Rocha Beyond Control (sff)
Kit Rocha Beyond Pain (sff)
Arundhati Roy Azadi (nonfiction)
Jeff VanderMeer Authority (sff)
Jeff VanderMeer Acceptance (sff)
K.B. Wagers Behind the Throne (sff)
Jarrett Walker Human Transit (nonfiction) I took advantage of a few sales to get books I know I'm going to want to read eventually for a buck or two.

I was a police officer for nearly ten years and I was a bastard. We all were.

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As nationwide protests over the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor are met with police brutality, John Oliver discusses how the histories of policing ...

La morte di Stefano Cucchi avvenne a Roma il 22 ottobre 2009 mentre il giovane era sottoposto a custodia cautelare. Le cause della morte e le responsabilit sono oggetto di procedimenti giudiziari che hanno coinvolto da un lato i medici dell'ospedale Pertini,[1][2][3][4] dall'altro continuano a coinvolgere, a vario titolo, pi militari dell Arma dei Carabinieri[5][6]. Il caso ha attirato l'attenzione dell'opinione pubblica a seguito della pubblicazione delle foto dell'autopsia, poi riprese da agenzie di stampa, giornali e telegiornali italiani[7]. La vicenda ha ispirato, altres , documentari e lungometraggi cinematografici.[8][9][10]

La morte di Giuseppe Uva avvenne il 14 giugno 2008 dopo che, nella notte tra il 13 e il 14 giugno, era stato fermato ubriaco da due carabinieri che lo portarono in caserma, dalla quale venne poi trasferito, per un trattamento sanitario obbligatorio, nell'ospedale di Varese, dove mor la mattina successiva per arresto cardiaco. Secondo la tesi dell'accusa, la morte fu causata dalla costrizione fisica subita durante l'arresto e dalle successive violenze e torture che ha subito in caserma. Il processo contro i due carabinieri che eseguirono l'arresto e contro altri sei agenti di polizia ha assolto gli imputati dalle accuse di omicidio preterintenzionale e sequestro di persona[1][2][3][4]. Alla vicenda dedicato il documentario Viva la sposa di Ascanio Celestini[1][5].

Il caso Aldrovandi la vicenda giudiziaria causata dall'uccisione di Federico Aldrovandi, uno studente ferrarese, avvenuta il 25 settembre 2005 a seguito di un controllo di polizia.[1][2][3] I procedimenti giudiziari hanno condannato, il 6 luglio 2009, quattro poliziotti a 3 anni e 6 mesi di reclusione, per "eccesso colposo nell'uso legittimo delle armi";[1][4] il 21 giugno 2012 la Corte di cassazione ha confermato la condanna.[1] All'inchiesta per stabilire la cause della morte ne sono seguite altre per presunti depistaggi e per le querele fra le parti interessate.[1] Il caso stato oggetto di grande attenzione mediatica e ha ispirato un documentario, stato morto un ragazzo.[1][5]

Federico Aldrovandi (17 July 1987 in Ferrara 25 September 2005 in Ferrara) was an Italian student, who was killed by four policemen.[1]

24 Giugno 2020

Following up on the initial 0.0.1 release of linl, Aaron and I are happy to announce release 0.0.2 which reached the CRAN network on Sunday in a smooth 'CRAN-pretest-publish' auto-admittance. linl provides a simple-yet-powerful Markdown---and RMarkdown---wrapper around the venerable LaTeX letter class; see below for an expanded example also included as the package vignette. This versions sets a few sensible default values for font, font size, margins, signature (non-)indentation and more; it also expands the documentation. The NEWS entry follows:

Changes in tint version 0.0.2 (2017-10-29)

• Set a few defaults for a decent-looking skeleton and template: font, fontsize, margins, left-justify closing (#3)
• Blockquote display is now a default as well (#4).
• Updated skeleton.Rmd and vignette source accordingly
• Documented new default options (#5 and #6).
• Links are now by default printed as footnotes (#9).

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a comparison to the previous release. More information is on the tint page. For questions or comments use the issue tracker off the GitHub repo. For questions or comments use the issue tracker off the GitHub repo.

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

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday October 15 and Saturday October 21 2017:

• The Tails project published a report on how they made their ISO images reproducible.
• dpkg 1.19.0 was uploaded, including support for:
  • Ordering the "unused substitution" warnings to prevent superfluous differences between logs of package builds on the Reproducible Builds test framework. (#870221)
  • A new Build-Kernel-Version field in .buildinfo files that can be generated with a new dpkg-genbuildinfo --always-include-kernel option. (#873937)

Past events

• On Saturday 21st October, Holger Levsen presented at All Systems Go! in Berlin, Germany on reproducible builds. A video recording is available already.

Upcoming events

• On Tuesday 24th October, Chris Lamb will present at All Things Open 2017 in Raleigh, NC, USA.
• On Wednesday 25th October, Holger Levsen will present at the Open Source Summit Europe in Prague, Czech Republic.
• On Saturday 28th October, Chris Lamb will present at freenode.live in Bristol, UK.
• From October 31st November 2nd we will be holding the 3rd Reproducible Builds summit in Berlin, Germany. If you are working in the field of reproducible builds, you should definitely attend. Please see our public invitation mail and contact us if you have any questions.

New York University sessions A three week session will be held at New York University to work on reproducibilty issues in conjunction with the reproducible builds community. Students from the Application Security course will be working for two weeks to work on the reproducible builds effort.

• On Tuesday 24th Oct Ed Maste from FreeBSD will be presenting some reproducible builds work for students.
• On From Tuesday 24th of October to Monday 7th of November students will work on fixing reproducibility issues brought up by the community. A milestone presentation will be held by Santiago Torres-Arias and Preston Moore.
• On Tuesday 7th November Holger Levsen will join the NYU team to wrap up the work.

Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed

• Adrian Bunk:
  • #878883 filed against stoken.
  • #878896 filed against liquidsoap.
  • #878980 filed against belenios.
  • #879042 filed against tuxpaint-config.
  • #879223 filed against websockify.
• Chris Lamb:
  • #878707 filed against python-amqp (randomness in documentation).
  • #878708 filed against geographiclib (build paths).
  • #879169 filed against live-build (timestamps).
• Gilles Filippini:
  • #878818 filed against ovito.

The following reproducible builds-related NMUs were accepted:

• Chris Lamb:
  • gerstensaft (#777414)
  • miniupnpd (#860266)
  • rest2web (#833438)

Patches sent upstream:

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • singularity (tar+gz)
  • redis (date)
  • tbb (date)
  • nested (sort)
  • nested (date)

Reviews of unreproducible packages 41 package reviews have been added, 119 have been updated and 54 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 2 issue types were removed as they were fixed:

• too_much_input_for_diff
• docbook_to_man_one_byte_delta

Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by:

• Aaron M. Ucko (1)
• Adrian Bunk (49)
• Anthony DeRobertis (1)
• Daniel Schepler (1)
• Gilles Filippini (1)
• James Cowgill (1)
• Matthias Klose (1)
• Matthias Klumpp (1)
• Nobuhiro Iwamatsu (1)

diffoscope development

• Ximin Luo:
  • Tentative support for for parallel diffs

strip-nondeterminism development Version 0.039-1 was uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb. It included contributions already covered by posts of the previous weeks, including:

• Chris Lamb:
  • Clojure considers the .class file to be stale if it shares the same timestamp of the .clj. We thus adjust the timestamps of the .clj to always be younger. (#877418)
  • dh_strip_nondeterminism: Log which handler processed a file. (#876140)
  • bin/strip-nondeterminism: Print a warning in --verbose mode if no canonical time specified.
  • Use HTTPS URI in debian/watch.

reprotest development

• Ximin Luo:
  • Hopefully fix the autopkgtest tests
• Santiago Torres-Arias:
  • An Arch Linux User Repository package for reprotest has been created.]

tests.reproducible-builds.org

• Holger Levsen:
  • Install rustc on Jenkins for the reproducible-html-build-path-prefix-map-spec job.
• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • health_check: Include the running kernel version when reporting multiple kernel installed in /boot.

Website updates

• Holger Levsen:
  • Berlin 2017:
    • add Qubes OS to participating projects
    • Add NetBSD and EdgeBSD to participating projects
    • Add repeatr.io to participating projects
    • Add disclaimer why only so few projects are listed
    • Add link to Google maps and name the 2nd next subway station on a different line
    • Add first 4 participating projects

Misc. This week's edition was written by Bernhard M. Wiedemann, Chris Lamb, Holger Levsen, Santiago Torres & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

Aaron Wolen and I are pleased to announce the availability of the initial 0.0.1 release of our new linl package on the CRAN network. It provides a simple-yet-powerful Markdown---and RMarkdown---wrapper the venerable LaTeX letter class. Aaron had done the legwork in the underlying pandoc-letter repository upon which we build via proper rmarkdown integration. The package also includes a LaTeX trick or two: optional header and signature files, nicer font, better size, saner default geometry and more. See the following screenshot which shows the package vignette---itself a simple letter---along with (most of) its source: The initial (short) NEWS entry follows:

Changes in tint version 0.0.1 (2017-10-17)

• Initial CRAN release

The date is a little off; it took a little longer than usual for the good folks at CRAN to process the initial submission. We expect future releases to be more timely. For questions or comments use the issue tracker off the GitHub repo.

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

Changes

• myrepos: mention related software
• icns: OpenJPEG 2 fixes (1 2 3 4), fix minor buffer overrun
• check-all-the-things: fix cwd usage, dependencies updates (1, 2), increased verbosity, TODO items (for errcheck, coccinelle, DR.CHECKER, RATS, qmllint, xmlpatternsvalidator, gfapy-validate, phpstan, psalm, ansible-lint)
• spelling dictionaries:
  • codespell: delte, defualt, Debiab, aiffer, syntesis, reprociblbe, thether, suport, mimimum, isssue, reseting
  • lintian: delte, Debiab, aiffer, syntesis, reprociblbe
• Debian Planets: add BCCD, Pardus
• Debian derivatives census: improve db handling
• Debian PTS: fix backports issue
• Debian member portfolio: https (1, 2, 3), drop alioth files, fix duck & lists search
• Debian security tracker: BlueBourne NFUs, u-boot issues, kanboard CVE list fixes, fix version typo
• Debian puppet: SSL exception (1, 2), comment fixes
• Debian website: add missing section title
• Debian wiki pages: AutomaticPackagingTools, CrossCompiling, DebianDevelopment, DebianLive/buster, DebianYeeloong/ko, Derivatives/Census (QA, BCCD, EmmabuntusDE (1, 2), ev3dev, Netrunner (1, 2), Pardus), DeveloperNews, Diagrams, EmDebian/CrossDebootstrap, InstallingDebianOn/Asus/Transformer T300 Chi/Stretch, IRC, JamesAmontgomery, JensKorte/reportbug-by-mail, LocalGroupsTemplate, Mobile, MultimediaFetchingTools, OfflineMasterKey (1, 2), Outreachy/Round15 (Projects/SocialEventAndConferenceCalendars), PaulWise/InterestingSoftware, PortTemplate, qa.debian.org, research/publications, RISC-V, Sprints/2017/DebianCloudOct2017, SystemBuildTools, Teams (Dpkg/FAQ, Publicity/micronews, ReleaseTeam/ReleaseCheckList), template
• File Formats wiki pages: ZED (1, 2)

Issues

• Crashes in firefox-esr, lugaru, minetest-mod-animals
• Conffile removal in fonts-beng-extra
• Upstream renamed openggsn
• Strictness in ftp.d.o
• Features in unattended-upgrades
• Missing hashes in caffeine-developers PPA
• Missing conffile removal in di-netboot-assistant
• Incorrect upgrades in unattended-upgrades
• Incorrect URL in reproducible-check
• Verbosity in github-backup
• Minor issues in unattended-upgrades
• Usability issue in Firefox
• Upstreaming needed for Hone Linux-Sensor
• New upstream version of samba

Review

• Spam: reported 1 LWN comment, 5 Debian bug reports and 338 Debian mailing list posts
• Debian packages: sponsored minetest-mod-unifieddyes 20170925-1
• Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month
• Debian screenshots:
  • approved banshee, blender, bsdgames, chromium, eficas, elpa-visual-fill-column, elpa-writegood-mode, glirc, gnome-builder, gnome-shell-extension-taskbar, gwenview, knocker, krita, ksysguard, masscan, mediainfo-gui, mousepad, mysql-workbench, nitrogen, ola, pavucontrol, qupzilla, tiger, transmission-gtk, virtualbox, vlc, wavemon, wfuzz
  • deleted mysql-workbench (ugly, Windows), udisks2 (of other software)
  • rejected elpa-* (MacOS and taken from upstream), 0ad (RPi logo), synaptic (weird overlaid stuff), dehydrated (hilarious but not a screenshot), di-netboot-assistant (of other software), wfuzz (help output)
  • approved deletion of udisks2 (of other software), scottfree (manual page), agenda.app (of other software)
  • rejected deletion of reportbug/abe/nlkt (bogus reason)

Administration

• icns: merged patches
• Debian: help guest user with access, investigate/escalate broken network, restart broken stunnels, investigate static.d.o storage, investigate weird RAID mails, ask hoster to investigate power issue,
• Debian mentors: lintian/security updates & reboot
• Debian wiki: merged & deployed patch, redirect DDTSS translator, redirect user support requests, whitelist email addresses, update email for accounts with bouncing email,
• Debian derivatives census: merged/deployed patches
• Debian PTS: debugged cron mails, deployed changes, reran scripts, fixed configuration file
• Openmoko: debug reboot issue, debug load issues

Communication

• Inform derivatives that are using Alioth about the pending shutdown
• Inquire about Netrunner, Pardus in the Debian derivatives census.
• Invite OB2D Linux to the Debian derivatives census
• Welcome Rohan Garg (of Netrunner), Aaron Weeden (of BCCD), Muhammet Kara (of Pardus) to the Debian derivatives census

Sponsors The samba bug was sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

This is to announce that finally all MATE Desktop 1.18 components have landed in Debian testing (aka buster). Credits Again a big thanks to the packaging team (esp. Vangelis Mouhtsis and Martin Wimpress, but also to Jeremy Bicha for constant advice and Aron Xu for joining the Debian+Ubuntu MATE Packaging Team and merging all the Ubuntu zesty and artful branches back to master). Fully Available on all Debian-supported Architectures The very special thing about this MATE 1.18 release for Debian is that MATE is now available on all Debian hardware architectures. See "Buildd" column on our DDPO overview page [1]. Thanks to all the people from the Debian porters realm for providing feedback to my porting questions. References

• [1] https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-mate-team@lists.alioth.deb...

During Debconf17 I was asked by Daniel Pocock if I can attend FOSScamp Syros to help with Debian s l10n in the Balkans. I said I would be happy to, although my visit would be short (2.5 days) due to previous plans. The main idea of camp is to have FOSS people meet for about 1 week near a beach. So it s sun, water and free software. This year it takes place in Syros, Greece. After take the morning ferry, I met with the guys at noon. I didn t know how would it be, as it s my first time with this group/meeting, but they were very nice and welcoming. 10 minutes after my arrival I found myself setting with two of the female attendees starting to work on Albanian (sq) translation of Debian Installer. It took my a few minutes to find my where to check out the current level1 files, as I thought they aren t in SVN anymore, but ended up learning the PO files is the only part of the installer still on SVN. As the girls were quick with the assinged levle1 sublevels, I started to look for the level2 and level3 files, and it was annoying to have the POT files very accessible, but no links to the relevant git repositories. I do want to have all the relevant links in one central place, so people who want to help with translation could do that. While some of the team member just used a text editor to edit the files, I suggested to them using either poedit or granslator, both I used a few years ago. Yaron Shahrabani also recommended virtaal to me, but after trying it for a while I didn t like it (expect it s great feature showing the diff with fuzzy messages). For the few people who also have Windows on their machine, both poedit and Virtaal have windows binaries for download. So you don t have to have Linux in order to help with translations. In parallel, I used the free time to work on the Hebrew translation for level1, as it s been a while since either me or Omer Zak worked on it. Quite soon the guys started to send me the files for review, and I did find some errors using diff. Especially when not everyone use a PO editor. I also missed a few strings during the review, which got fixed later on by Christian Perrier. Team work indeed (: I found it interesting to see the reactions and problems for the team to work with the PO files, and most projects now use some system (e.g. Pootle) for online web translation. Which saves some of the head ace, but also prevents from making some review and quality check before submitting the files. It s a good idea to explore this option for Debian as well. A tip for those who do want to work with PO files, either use git s diff features or use colordiff to check your changes (notice less will require -R parameter to keep the color). Although I met the guys only at noon, the day was very fruitful for Debian Installer l10n:

• Albanian (sq) level1 from 78% to 82% (Eva Vranici, Silva Arapi)
• Albanian (sq) level2 from 20% to 24% (Nafie Shehu)
• Hebrew (he) level1 from 96% to 97% (me)
• Greek (el) level1 from 96% to 97% (Sotirios Vrachas)

Some files are still work in progress and will be completed tomorrow. My goal is to have Albanian at 100% during the camp and ready for the next d-i alpha. I must admit that I remember d-i to have many more strings as part of the 3 levels, especially levels 2+3 which were huge (e.g. the iso codes). Except all the work and FOSS related conversations, I found a great group who welcomed me quickly, made me feel comfortable and taught me a thing or two about Greece and the Syros specifically. TIP: try the dark chocolate with red hot chili pepper in the icecream shop.
Filed under: Debian GNU/Linux, i18n & l10n

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday July 23 and Saturday July 29 2017:

• Mattia posted an extensive status update from the Debian Reproducible Builds project to the debian-devel-announce mailing list. There were subsequent discussions on Hacker News and Reddit.
• A NASA presentation on "Real system failures" contained an interesting slide pertaining to reproducible builds.
• A 2015 article on Reproducible Builds ("How Debian Is Trying to Shut Down the CIA and Make Software Trustworthy Again") resurfaced in popularity, possibly due to the recent Wikileaks "Vault 7" exposure of malware whose effects can be ameliorated or detected by adopting Reproducible Builds.

Toolchain development and fixes

• Chris Lamb sent an experimental patch to apt to make the output of apt-ftparchive reproducible. Thanks to David Kalnischkies for reworking the result. (#869557)

Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed

• Adrian Bunk:
  • #869578 filed against gdmap.
  • #869580 filed against teg.
  • #869583 filed against gnome-specimen.
  • #869884 filed against chemical-mime-data.
  • #870047 filed against imagemagick.
  • #870068 filed against kde4libs.
• Chris Lamb:
  • #869516 filed against libcdio.
  • A previous pull request against wheel was merged upstream.
• Helmut Grohne:
  • #869584 filed against fontconfig.
  • #869588 filed against libcap2.

Reviews of unreproducible packages 4 package reviews have been added, 2 have been updated and 24 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by:

• Aaron M. Ucko (1)
• Adrian Bunk (35)
• Helmut Grohne (4)
• Stefan Tatschner (1)

diffoscope development

• Juliana Oliveira Rodrigues:
  • Refactor XML comparator to use File.recognizes logic
  • Fix test_ico_image for identify >= 6.9.8
  • Fix test_no_android_manifest from test_apk
  • Fix test_android_manifest from test_apk
  • Fix test_xml_expected_diff output encoding to UTF-8
• Ximin Luo:
  • Improve method for detecting APKs
  • Factor common logic from various comparators into File.recognizes

Misc. This week's edition was written by Chris Lamb, Mattia Rizzolo & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

I recently finished a paper that presents a novel social computing system called the Wikipedia Adventure. The system was a gamified tutorial for new Wikipedia editors. Working with the tutorial creators, we conducted both a survey of its users and a randomized field experiment testing its effectiveness in encouraging subsequent contributions. We found that although users loved it, it did not affect subsequent participation rates.

Start screen for the Wikipedia Adventure.

A major concern that many online communities face is how to attract and retain new contributors. Despite it s success, Wikipedia is no different. In fact, researchers have shown that after experiencing a massive initial surge in activity, the number of active editors on Wikipedia has been in slow decline since 2007.

The number of active, registered editors ( 5 edits per month) to Wikipedia over time. From Halfaker, Geiger, and Morgan 2012.

Research has attributed a large part of this decline to the hostile environment that newcomers experience when begin contributing. New editors often attempt to make contributions which are subsequently reverted by more experienced editors for not following Wikipedia s increasingly long list of rules and guidelines for effective participation. This problem has led many researchers and Wikipedians to wonder how to more effectively onboard newcomers to the community. How do you ensure that new editors Wikipedia quickly gain the knowledge they need in order to make contributions that are in line with community norms? To this end, Jake Orlowitz and Jonathan Morgan from the Wikimedia Foundation worked with a team of Wikipedians to create a structured, interactive tutorial called The Wikipedia Adventure. The idea behind this system was that new editors would be invited to use it shortly after creating a new account on Wikipedia, and it would provide a step-by-step overview of the basics of editing.

The Wikipedia Adventure was designed to address issues that new editors frequently encountered while learning how to contribute to Wikipedia. It is structured into different missions that guide users through various aspects of participation on Wikipedia, including how to communicate with other editors, how to cite sources, and how to ensure that edits present a neutral point of view. The sequence of the missions gives newbies an overview of what they need to know instead of having to figure everything out themselves. Additionally, the theme and tone of the tutorial sought to engage new users, rather than just redirecting them to the troves of policy pages. Those who play the tutorial receive automated badges on their user page for every mission they complete. This signals to veteran editors that the user is acting in good-faith by attempting to learn the norms of Wikipedia.

An example of a badge that a user receives after demonstrating the skills to communicate with other users on Wikipedia.

Once the system was built, we were interested in knowing whether people enjoyed using it and found it helpful. So we conducted a survey asking editors who played the Wikipedia Adventure a number of questions about its design and educational effectiveness. Overall, we found that users had a very favorable opinion of the system and found it useful.

Survey responses about how users felt about TWA.

Survey responses about what users learned through TWA.

We were heartened by these results. We d sought to build an orientation system that was engaging and educational, and our survey responses suggested that we succeeded on that front. This led us to ask the question could an intervention like the Wikipedia Adventure help reverse the trend of a declining editor base on Wikipedia? In particular, would exposing new editors to the Wikipedia Adventure lead them to make more contributions to the community? To find out, we conducted a field experiment on a population of new editors on Wikipedia. We identified 1,967 newly created accounts that passed a basic test of making good-faith edits. We then randomly invited 1,751 of these users via their talk page to play the Wikipedia Adventure. The rest were sent no invitation. Out of those who were invited, 386 completed at least some portion of the tutorial. We were interested in knowing whether those we invited to play the tutorial (our treatment group) and those we didn t (our control group) contributed differently in the first six months after they created accounts on Wikipedia. Specifically, we wanted to know whether there was a difference in the total number of edits they made to Wikipedia, the number of edits they made to talk pages, and the average quality of their edits as measured by content persistence. We conducted two kinds of analyses on our dataset. First, we estimated the effect of inviting users to play the Wikipedia Adventure on our three outcomes of interest. Second, we estimated the effect of playing the Wikipedia Adventure, conditional on having been invited to do so, on those same outcomes. To our surprise, we found that in both cases there were no significant effects on any of the outcomes of interest. Being invited to play the Wikipedia Adventure therefore had no effect on new users volume of participation either on Wikipedia in general, or on talk pages specifically, nor did it have any effect on the average quality of edits made by the users in our study. Despite the very positive feedback that the system received in the survey evaluation stage, it did not produce a significant change in newcomer contribution behavior. We concluded that the system by itself could not reverse the trend of newcomer attrition on Wikipedia. Why would a system that was received so positively ultimately produce no aggregate effect on newcomer participation? We ve identified a few possible reasons. One is that perhaps a tutorial by itself would not be sufficient to counter hostile behavior that newcomers might experience from experienced editors. Indeed, the friendly, welcoming tone of the Wikipedia Adventure might contrast with strongly worded messages that new editors receive from veteran editors or bots. Another explanation might be that users enjoyed playing the Wikipedia Adventure, but did not enjoy editing Wikipedia. After all, the two activities draw on different kinds of motivations. Finally, the system required new users to choose to play the tutorial. Maybe people who chose to play would have gone on to edit in similar ways without the tutorial. Ultimately, this work shows us the importance of testing systems outside of lab studies. The Wikipedia Adventure was built by community members to address known gaps in the onboarding process, and our survey showed that users responded well to its design. While it would have been easy to declare victory at that stage, the field deployment study painted a different picture. Systems like the Wikipedia Adventure may inform the design of future orientation systems. That said, more profound changes to the interface or modes of interaction between editors might also be needed to increase contributions from newcomers.

This blog post, and the open access paper that it describes, is a collaborative project with Sneha Narayan, Jake Orlowitz, Jonathan Morgan, and Aaron Shaw. Financial support came from the US National Science Foundation (grants IIS-1617129 and IIS-1617468), Northwestern University, and the University of Washington. We also published all the data and code necessary to reproduce our analysis in a repository in the Harvard Dataverse. Sneha posted the material in this blog post over on the Community Data Science Collective Blog.

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Guilhem Moulin (guilhem)
• Lisa Baron (jeffity)
• Punit Agrawal (punit)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Sebastien Jodogne
• F lix Lechner
• Uli Scholler
• Aur lien Couderc
• Ond ej Kobli ek
• Patricio Paez

Congratulations!

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday April 23 and Saturday April 29 2017: Past and upcoming events On April 26th Chris Lamb gave a talk at foss-north 2017 in Gothenburg, Sweden on Reproducible Builds. Between May 5th-7th the Reproducible Builds Hackathon 2017 will take place in Hamburg, Germany. Then on May 26th Bernhard M. Wiedemann will give a talk titled reproducible builds in openSUSE (2017) at the openSUSE Conference 2017 in N rnberg, Germany. Media coverage Already on April 19th Sylvain Beucler wrote a yet another follow-up post Practical basics of reproducible builds 3, after part 1 and part 2 of his series. Toolchain development and fixes Michael Woerister of the Rust project has implemented file maps that affect all path-related compiler information, including "error messages, metadata, debuginfo, and the file!() macro alike". Ximin Luo with support from some other Rust developers and contributors helped steer the final result into something that was compatible with reproducible builds. Many thanks to all involved, especially for the patience of discussing this over several months. Ximin wrote a first-attempt patch to fix R build-path issues. It made 460/477 R packages reproducible, but also caused 3 of these to FTBFS. See randomness_in_r_rdb_rds_databases for details. Bugs filed and patches sent upstream Chris Lamb:

• #861133 filed against tf.
• #861443 filed against ora2pg.

Bernhard M. Wiedemann filed a number of patches upstream:

• intltool
• xine-ui
• tboot
• javapackages
• mxml, which got merged already.
• calibre, also merged.
• wammu, merged as well.

Reviews of unreproducible packages 102 package reviews have been added, 64 have been updated and 24 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 3 issue types have been updated:

• Added captures_build_path_in_beam_files, recategorise some erlang packages with captures_build_path into this issue instead.
• Removed timestamps_in_beam_files.
• Holger started reviewing blacklisted_on_jenkins and blacklisted_on_jenkins_armhf_only and found quite some packages which don't need to be blacklisted anymore.

Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by:

• Aaron M. Ucko (1)
• Adrian Bunk (1)
• Chris Lamb (4)
• Santiago Vila (2)

diffoscope development diffoscope 82 was uploaded to experimental by Chris Lamb. It included contributions from:

• Chris Lamb:
  • Add support for Ogg Vorbis files.
• Vagrant Cascadian:
  • Add support for .dtb (device tree blob) files. (Closes: #861109).

Changes from previous weeks that were also released with 82:

• Ximin Luo
  • Add support for R .rds and .rdb object files.
• Chris Lamb
  • Add support for comparing Pcap files.
  • Add support for .docx and .odt files via docx2txt & odt2txt.
  • Add support for PGP files via pgpdump.
  • Various documentation and test improvements.
  • Various bug fixes and code quality improvements.
• Sylvain Beucler
  • Display differences in zip platform-specific timestamps.

Misc. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Chris Lamb and Holger Levsen & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world (previous month):

• I was elected Debian Project Leader for 2017. I'd like to sincerely thank everyone who voted for me as well as everyone who took part in the election in general especially Mehdi Dogguy for being a worthy opponent. The result was covered on LWN, Phoronix, DistroWatch, iTWire, etc.
• Added support for the Monzo banking API in social-core, a Python library to allow web applications to authenticate using third-parties. (#68)
• Fixed a HTML injection attack in a demo of Russell Keith-Magee's BeeWare presentation library. (#3)
• Updated systemd's documentation to explain why we suggest explicitly calling make all despite the Makefile's "check" target calling it. (#5830)
• Updated the documentation of a breadth-first version of find(1) called bfs to refer to the newly-uploaded Debian package. (#23)
• Updated the configuration for the ticketbot IRC bot (zwiebelbot on OFTC) to identify #reproducible-builds as a Debian-related channel. This is so that bug Debian bug numbers are automatically expanded by the bot. (#7)

---

I was in two minds when I read Ritesh s blog post about the Indian Economy. I was angry with Ritesh as he seemed to selectively take facts and present it rather than taking it whole. Even if he had searched even a little bit, he would have got much more better material and everybody would have been the gainer. I have to also admit, I feel very much like a hypocrite as I have never slaved in a farm so my understanding and conclusions are a mix of media and limited interaction with farmers some years ago. There is also lots of local customs and politics that come into the picture and it s not as straight-forward as Ritesh thinks. What he has failed to share/account for is the far worse bad and stressed debts for the industry so just saying farm loan waivers are bad without sharing any of the context makes it seem much more worse. This is when our Current Chief Economic Adviser states about loan waivers to corporates You need to be able to forgive those debts because this is how capitalism works. People make mistakes, those have to be forgiven to some extent Let me start though with words from a book I read sometime back On a peasant uprising erupted in . The farmers were angry with high interest rates, high taxes, high inflation and low-government prices for their crops. The system had let them into debt, and debt had meant foreclosure and loss of their fields to the land barons. I intentionally have made a fill in the blanks as both the dates and places was true in India 100 years back and even today, the only difference between the two is the absence of taxes. Many people would think I m talking about Champaran whose tale while well-known in India is sadly a stub-class article in wikipedia with quite a few citation needed tags as well but is also true today as will be seen below. Interestingly, there is/was a remark by some unknown person who said gora sahab gays, bhura sahab aaya meaning the white officer has gone, in his place the brown officer has come. The evidence of this is very much in the Telegraph Act and the story about its usage and its place in Indian politics Surprisingly, sadly and coincidentally, the quote minus the dates and place didn t happen in India but also in Cambodia. The above quote has been taken from for the sake of all living things by John M. Del Vecchio. The quote itself appears in the first 10 odd pages (historical summation) of the somewhat 1200 odd pages book. I actually got an old edition which tops out at 900 pages so probably some more updated input/news isn t available but it still packs a powerful wallop. I want to dedicate a separate blog post for the book itself so will not say more on that book and what it shares. Sadly and coincidentally, there were news reports yesterday itself of farmers agitating for better prices just yesterday. Some of the interesting work if you want to understand the farmer s indebtedness is to study the Income, Expenditure, Productive Assets and Indebtedness of Agricultural Households in India done by NSSO. Again, one does not need to read the whole report, there were some of the analysis shared by the Hindu here and here. This was also echoed by Logical Indian It really boggles the mind to know than an average farming household earns around INR 200 per day. Even if you take a family of four people that comes to INR 50/- per person. Most rural joint families at the very least have 3-4 kids at the very least. Sadly Agricultural incomes do not keep sync even with the inflation index as there is no fair minimum age and wage for the Indian farmer, the concept does not exist for her(im) . Just me and mum going onto a restaurant and having one dish each easily can run anywhere between INR 200~250 easily . Cooking in the house is the same if you add/input the labor (which is usually not calculated) used to make lunch/dinner. There was the idea that contract farming might be a solution but even that was corrupted by Multi-national companies such as Pepsi and others that the Government is showing movement to have a model contracting law . There are loads of stories on downtoearth magazine which deals with the above and all sorts of issues the farmer faces. I should talk about Maharashtra and even here there was/has been an irrigation scam with figures given from 35k to 70k crores or 350 to 700 billion INR . The latest finding by the PAC has been shared here. I will cut the blog post short as I find the whole thing personally very depressing. As far as local customs go this was from one of the farmers interaction some years ago where me and some other friends had gone across a village and came to know that all of them grew the same crop with some minor variances. When asked why is it so, while many said its fate, one of the elderly gentleman shared an experience where a farmer had planted some other thing. The gentleman prospered while the other villagers were suffering from glut of whatever they produced. Knowing he prospered, the other villagers damaged his crops and all sorts of unlucky things started happening for the farmer. In the end he realized his best bet is to follow the ways of the other villagers, at least they would be in peace. What I have shared isn t either unique or even unknown, even Toronto Star of Canada reported on the issue some years ago. At the end of it all, the story is one of no education and limited skill-set and I don t see it changing any time soon. There are some who are earning big figures, but majority of the farmers will always be in the red
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #Agricultal Economy, #Champaran, #Contract farming, #Corruption, #farmer suicide, #irrigation scam, #Loan waivers, #planet-debian, poverty

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday April 2 and Saturday April 8 2017: Media coverage

• Daniel Peebles reported that tar still has problem with deterministic output and long filenames.
• Dustin Kirkland wrote a blog post referencing reproducible builds as a followup to a recent thread on Hacker News.

Toolchain development and fixes

• Ximin Luo uploaded custom version of GCC6 to our repository to test BUILD_PATH_PREFIX_MAP patches.

Reviews of unreproducible packages 27 package reviews have been added, 14 have been updated and 17 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by:

• Aaron M. Ucko (1)
• Adrian Bunk (1)
• Chris Lamb (2)

tests.reproducible-builds.org

• Chris Lamb added support for a .bz2 version of reproducible.json, available at https://reproducible.debian.net/reproducible.json.bz2
• FreeGeek donated a network switch to make room for some additional boards on the armhf build network.

Misc. This week's edition was written by Chris Lamb, Vagrant Cascadian & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.