Me: Hi everyone, my name s Matt, and I m a mediocre programmer. Everyone: Hi, Matt. Facilitator: Are you an alcoholic, Matt? Me: No, not since I stopped reading Twitter. Facilitator: Then I think you re in the wrong room.

Neither a Borrower Nor a Lender Be If you know anything about Rust, you probably know about the dreaded borrow checker . It s the thing that makes sure you don t have two pieces of code trying to modify the same data at the same time, or using a value when it s no longer valid. While Rust s borrowing semantics allow excellent performance without compromising safety, for us mediocre programmers it gets very complicated, very quickly. So, the moment the compiler wants to start talking about explicit lifetimes , I shut it up by just using owned values instead. It s not that I never borrow anything; I have some situations that I know are borrow-safe for the mediocre programmer (I ll cover those later). But any time I m not sure how things will pan out, I ll go straight for an owned value. For example, if I need to store some text in a struct or enum, it s going straight into a String. I m not going to start thinking about lifetimes and &'a str; I ll leave that for smarter people. Similarly, if I need a list of things, it s a Vec<T> every time no &'b [T] in my structs, thank you very much.

Attack of the Clones Following on from the above, I ve come to not be afraid of .clone(). I scatter them around my code like seeds in a field. Life s too short to spend time trying to figure out who s borrowing what from whom, if I can just give everyone their own thing. There are warnings in the Rust book (and everywhere else) about how a clone can be expensive . While it s true that, yes, making clones of data structures consumes CPU cycles and memory, it very rarely matters. CPU cycles are (usually) plentiful and RAM (usually) relatively cheap. Mediocre programmer mental effort is expensive, and not to be spent on premature optimisation. Also, if you re coming from most any other modern language, Rust is already giving you so much more performance that you re probably ending up ahead of the game, even if you .clone() everything in sight. If, by some miracle, something I write gets so popular that the expense of all those spurious clones becomes a problem, it might make sense to pay someone much smarter than I to figure out how to make the program a zero-copy masterpiece of efficient code. Until then clone early and clone often, I say!

Derive Macros are Powerful Magicks If you start .clone()ing everywhere, pretty quickly you ll be hit with this error:

error[E0599]: no method named  clone  found for struct  Foo  in the current scope

This is because not everything can be cloned, and so if you want your thing to be cloned, you need to implement the method yourself. Well sort of. One of the things that I find absolutely outstanding about Rust is the derive macro . These allow you to put a little marker on a struct or enum, and the compiler will write a bunch of code for you! Clone is one of the available so-called derivable traits , so you add #[derive(Clone)] to your structs, and poof! you can .clone() to your heart s content. But there are other things that are commonly useful, and so I ve got a set of traits that basically all of my data structures derive:

#[derive(Clone, Debug, Default)]
struct Foo  
    // ...
 

Every time I write a struct or enum definition, that line #[derive(Clone, Debug, Default)] goes at the top. The Debug trait allows you to print a debug representation of the data structure, either with the dbg!() macro, or via the :? format in the format!() macro (and anywhere else that takes a format string). Being able to say what exactly is that? comes in handy so often, not having a Debug implementation is like programming with one arm tied behind your Aeron. Meanwhile, the Default trait lets you create an empty instance of your data structure, with all of the fields set to their own default values. This only works if all the fields themselves implement Default, but a lot of standard types do, so it s rare that you ll define a structure that can t have an auto-derived Default. Enums are easily handled too, you just mark one variant as the default:

#[derive(Clone, Debug, Default)]
enum Bar  
    Something(String),
    SomethingElse(i32),
    #[default]   // <== mischief managed
    Nothing,
 

Borrowing is OK, Sometimes While I previously said that I like and usually use owned values, there are a few situations where I know I can borrow without angering the borrow checker gods, and so I m comfortable doing it. The first is when I need to pass a value into a function that only needs to take a little look at the value to decide what to do. For example, if I want to know whether any values in a Vec<u32> are even, I could pass in a Vec, like this:

fn main()  
    let numbers = vec![0u32, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5];
    if has_evens(numbers)  
        println!("EVENS!");
     
 
fn has_evens(numbers: Vec<u32>) -> bool  
    numbers.iter().any( n  n % 2 == 0)
 

Howver, this gets ugly if I m going to use numbers later, like this:

fn main()  
    let numbers = vec![0u32, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5];
    if has_evens(numbers)  
        println!("EVENS!");
     
    // Compiler complains about "value borrowed here after move"
    println!("Sum:  ", numbers.iter().sum::<u32>());
 
fn has_evens(numbers: Vec<u32>) -> bool  
    numbers.iter().any( n  n % 2 == 0)
 

Helpfully, the compiler will suggest I use my old standby, .clone(), to fix this problem. But I know that the borrow checker won t have a problem with lending that Vec<u32> into has_evens() as a borrowed slice, &[u32], like this:

fn main()  
    let numbers = vec![0u32, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5];
    if has_evens(&numbers)  
        println!("EVENS!");
     
 
fn has_evens(numbers: &[u32]) -> bool  
    numbers.iter().any( n  n % 2 == 0)
 

The general rule I ve got is that if I can take advantage of lifetime elision (a fancy term meaning the compiler can figure it out ), I m probably OK. In less fancy terms, as long as the compiler doesn t tell me to put 'a anywhere, I m in the green. On the other hand, the moment the compiler starts using the words explicit lifetime , I nope the heck out of there and start cloning everything in sight. Another example of using lifetime elision is when I m returning the value of a field from a struct or enum. In that case, I can usually get away with returning a borrowed value, knowing that the caller will probably just be taking a peek at that value, and throwing it away before the struct itself goes out of scope. For example:

struct Foo  
    id: u32,
    desc: String,
 
impl Foo  
    fn description(&self) -> &str  
        &self.desc
     
 

Returning a reference from a function is practically always a mortal sin for mediocre programmers, but returning one from a struct method is often OK. In the rare case that the caller does want the reference I return to live for longer, they can always turn it into an owned value themselves, by calling .to_owned().

Avoid the String Tangle Rust has a couple of different types for representing strings String and &str being the ones you see most often. There are good reasons for this, however it complicates method signatures when you just want to take some sort of bunch of text , and don t care so much about the messy details. For example, let s say we have a function that wants to see if the length of the string is even. Using the logic that since we re just taking a peek at the value passed in, our function might take a string reference, &str, like this:

fn is_even_length(s: &str) -> bool  
    s.len() % 2 == 0
 

That seems to work fine, until someone wants to check a formatted string:

fn main()  
    // The compiler complains about "expected  &str , found  String "
    if is_even_length(format!("my string is  ", std::env::args().next().unwrap()))  
        println!("Even length string");
     
 

Since format! returns an owned string, String, rather than a string reference, &str, we ve got a problem. Of course, it s straightforward to turn the String from format!() into a &str (just prefix it with an &). But as mediocre programmers, we can t be expected to remember which sort of string all our functions take and add & wherever it s needed, and having to fix everything when the compiler complains is tedious. The converse can also happen: a method that wants an owned String, and we ve got a &str (say, because we re passing in a string literal, like "Hello, world!"). In this case, we need to use one of the plethora of available turn this into a String mechanisms (.to_string(), .to_owned(), String::from(), and probably a few others I ve forgotten), on the value before we pass it in, which gets ugly real fast. For these reasons, I never take a String or an &str as an argument. Instead, I use the Power of Traits to let callers pass in anything that is, or can be turned into, a string. Let us have some examples. First off, if I would normally use &str as the type, I instead use impl AsRef<str>:

fn is_even_length(s: impl AsRef<str>) -> bool  
    s.as_ref().len() % 2 == 0
 

Note that I had to throw in an extra as_ref() call in there, but now I can call this with either a String or a &str and get an answer. Now, if I want to be given a String (presumably because I plan on taking ownership of the value, say because I m creating a new instance of a struct with it), I use impl Into<String> as my type:

struct Foo  
    id: u32,
    desc: String,
 
impl Foo  
    fn new(id: u32, desc: impl Into<String>) -> Self  
        Self   id, desc: desc.into()  
     
 

We have to call .into() on our desc argument, which makes the struct building a bit uglier, but I d argue that s a small price to pay for being able to call both Foo::new(1, "this is a thing") and Foo::new(2, format!("This is a thing named name ")) without caring what sort of string is involved.

Always Have an Error Enum Rust s error handing mechanism (Results everywhere), along with the quality-of-life sugar surrounding it (like the short-circuit operator, ?), is a delightfully ergonomic approach to error handling. To make life easy for mediocre programmers, I recommend starting every project with an Error enum, that derives thiserror::Error, and using that in every method and function that returns a Result. How you structure your Error type from there is less cut-and-dried, but typically I ll create a separate enum variant for each type of error I want to have a different description. With thiserror, it s easy to then attach those descriptions:

#[derive(Clone, Debug, thiserror::Error)]
enum Error  
    #[error(" 0  caught fire")]
    Combustion(String),
    #[error(" 0  exploded")]
    Explosion(String),
 

I also implement functions to create each error variant, because that allows me to do the Into<String> trick, and can sometimes come in handy when creating errors from other places with .map_err() (more on that later). For example, the impl for the above Error would probably be:

impl Error  
    fn combustion(desc: impl Into<String>) -> Self  
        Self::Combustion(desc.into())
     
    fn explosion(desc: impl Into<String>) -> Self  
        Self::Explosion(desc.into())
     
 

It s a tedious bit of boilerplate, and you can use the thiserror-ext crate s thiserror_ext::Construct derive macro to do the hard work for you, if you like. It, too, knows all about the Into<String> trick.

Banish map_err (well, mostly) The newer mediocre programmer, who is just dipping their toe in the water of Rust, might write file handling code that looks like this:

fn read_u32_from_file(name: impl AsRef<str>) -> Result<u32, Error>  
    let mut f = File::open(name.as_ref())
        .map_err( e  Error::FileOpenError(name.as_ref().to_string(), e))?;
    let mut buf = vec![0u8; 30];
    f.read(&mut buf)
        .map_err( e  Error::ReadError(e))?;
    String::from_utf8(buf)
        .map_err( e  Error::EncodingError(e))?
        .parse::<u32>()
        .map_err( e  Error::ParseError(e))
 

This works great (or it probably does, I haven t actually tested it), but there are a lot of .map_err() calls in there. They take up over half the function, in fact. With the power of the From trait and the magic of the ? operator, we can make this a lot tidier. First off, assume we ve written boilerplate error creation functions (or used thiserror_ext::Construct to do it for us)). That allows us to simplify the file handling portion of the function a bit:

fn read_u32_from_file(name: impl AsRef<str>) -> Result<u32, Error>  
    let mut f = File::open(name.as_ref())
        // We've dropped the  .to_string()  out of here...
        .map_err( e  Error::file_open_error(name.as_ref(), e))?;
    let mut buf = vec![0u8; 30];
    f.read(&mut buf)
        // ... and the explicit parameter passing out of here
        .map_err(Error::read_error)?;
    // ...

If that latter .map_err() call looks weird, without the e and such, it s passing a function-as-closure, which just saves on a few characters typing. Just because we re mediocre, doesn t mean we re not also lazy. Next, if we implement the From trait for the other two errors, we can make the string-handling lines significantly cleaner. First, the trait impl:

impl From<std::string::FromUtf8Error> for Error  
    fn from(e: std::string::FromUtf8Error) -> Self  
        Self::EncodingError(e)
     
 
impl From<std::num::ParseIntError> for Error  
    fn from(e: std::num::ParseIntError) -> Self  
        Self::ParseError(e)
     
 

(Again, this is boilerplate that can be autogenerated, this time by adding a #[from] tag to the variants you want a From impl on, and thiserror will take care of it for you) In any event, no matter how you get the From impls, once you have them, the string-handling code becomes practically error-handling-free:

    Ok(
        String::from_utf8(buf)?
            .parse::<u32>()?
    )

The ? operator will automatically convert the error from the types returned from each method into the return error type, using From. The only tiny downside to this is that the ? at the end strips the Result, and so we ve got to wrap the returned value in Ok() to turn it back into a Result for returning. But I think that s a small price to pay for the removal of those .map_err() calls. In many cases, my coding process involves just putting a ? after every call that returns a Result, and adding a new Error variant whenever the compiler complains about not being able to convert some new error type. It s practically zero effort outstanding outcome for the mediocre programmer.

Just Because You re Mediocre, Doesn t Mean You Can t Get Better To finish off, I d like to point out that mediocrity doesn t imply shoddy work, nor does it mean that you shouldn t keep learning and improving your craft. One book that I ve recently found extremely helpful is Effective Rust, by David Drysdale. The author has very kindly put it up to read online, but buying a (paper or ebook) copy would no doubt be appreciated. The thing about this book, for me, is that it is very readable, even by us mediocre programmers. The sections are written in a way that really clicked with me. Some aspects of Rust that I d had trouble understanding for a long time such as lifetimes and the borrow checker, and particularly lifetime elision actually made sense after I d read the appropriate sections.

Finally, a Quick Beg I m currently subsisting on the kindness of strangers, so if you found something useful (or entertaining) in this post, why not buy me a refreshing beverage? It helps to know that people like what I m doing, and helps keep me from having to sell my soul to a private equity firm.

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/2cyrnulm
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/24bfy2x7
• [3] https://tinyurl.com/277o2wt3
• [4] https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/
• [5] https://tinyurl.com/27sl85ml
• [6] https://tinyurl.com/25vtw89m
• [7] https://tinyurl.com/26m7h9ro
• [8] https://tinyurl.com/2ajjetba

% pytest --molecule roles/

% molecule test --help
Usage: molecule test [OPTIONS] [ANSIBLE_ARGS]...
 
  --parallel / --no-parallel      Enable or disable parallel mode. Default is disabled.
 

% MOLECULE_OPTS="--parallel" pytest --numprocesses auto --molecule roles/

• MOLECULE_OPTS passes random options to the Molecule call pytest does, and we need to add --parallel there.
• --numprocesses auto tells pytest-xdist to create as many workers as you have CPUs and balance the work across those.

% MOLECULE_OPTS="--parallel" pytest --numprocesses auto --molecule roles/
 
WARNING  Driver podman does not provide a schema.
INFO     debian scenario test matrix: dependency, cleanup, destroy, syntax, create, prepare, converge, idempotence, side_effect, verify, cleanup, destroy
INFO     Performing prerun with role_name_check=0...
WARNING  Retrying execution failure 250 of: ansible-galaxy collection install -vvv --force ../..
ERROR    Command returned 250 code:
 
OSError: [Errno 39] Directory not empty: 'roles'
 
FileExistsError: [Errno 17] File exists: b'/home/user/namespace.collection/collections/ansible_collections/namespace/collection'
 
FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: b'/home/user/namespace.collection//collections/ansible_collections/namespace/collection/roles/my_role/molecule/debian/molecule.yml'

INFO     Performing prerun with role_name_check=0...

% mkdir -p .config/molecule
% echo 'prerun: false' >> .config/molecule/config.yml

OSError: [Errno 39] Directory not empty: 'tests'

FileExistsError: [Errno 17] File exists: b'remote.sh' -> b'/home/runner/work/namespace.collection/namespace.collection/collections/ansible_collections/ansible/posix/tests/utils/shippable/aix.sh'

ansible_compat.errors.InvalidPrerequisiteError: Found collection at '/home/runner/work/namespace.collection/namespace.collection/collections/ansible_collections/ansible/posix' but missing MANIFEST.json, cannot get info.

$ molecule dependency --scenario <scenario>

diff --git a/.config/molecule/config.yml b/.config/molecule/config.yml
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..32ed66d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.config/molecule/config.yml
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+prerun: false
diff --git a/.github/workflows/test.yml b/.github/workflows/test.yml
index 0f9da0d..df55a15 100644
--- a/.github/workflows/test.yml
+++ b/.github/workflows/test.yml
@@ -58,9 +58,13 @@ jobs:
       - name: Install Ansible
         run: pip install --upgrade https://github.com/ansible/ansible/archive/$  matrix.ansible  .tar.gz
       - name: Install dependencies
-        run: pip install molecule molecule-plugins pytest pytest-ansible
+        run: pip install molecule molecule-plugins pytest pytest-ansible pytest-xdist
+      - name: Install collection dependencies
+        run: cd roles/repository && molecule dependency -s suse
       - name: Run tests
-        run: pytest -vv --molecule roles/
+        run: pytest -vv --numprocesses auto --molecule roles/
+        env:
+          MOLECULE_OPTS: --parallel
   ansible-lint:
     runs-on: ubuntu-latest

Finances As you may be aware, the GNOME Foundation has operated at a deficit (nonprofit speak for a loss ie spending more than we ve been raising each year) for over three years, essentially running the Foundation on reserves from some substantial donations received 4-5 years ago. The Foundation has a reserves policy which specifies a minimum amount of money we have to keep in our accounts. This is so that if there is a significant interruption to our usual income, we can preserve our core operations while we work on new funding sources. We ve now hit the buffers of this reserves policy, meaning the Board can t approve any more deficit budgets to keep spending at the same level we must increase our income. One of the board s top priorities in hiring Holly was therefore her experience in communications and fundraising, and building broader and more diverse support for our mission and work. Her goals since joining as well as building her familiarity with the community and project have been to set up better financial controls and reporting, develop a strategic plan, and start fundraising. You may have noticed the Foundation being more cautious with spending this year, because Holly prepared a break-even budget for the Board to approve in October, so that we can steady the ship while we prepare and launch our new fundraising initiatives.

Strategy & Fundraising The biggest prerequisite for fundraising is a clear strategy we need to explain what we re doing and why it s important, and use that to convince people to support our plans. I m very pleased to report that Holly has been working hard on this and meeting with many stakeholders across the community, and has prepared a detailed and insightful five year strategic plan. The plan defines the areas where the Foundation will prioritise, develop and fund initiatives to support and grow the GNOME project and community. The board has approved a draft version of this plan, and over the coming weeks Holly and the Foundation team will be sharing this plan and running a consultation process to gather feedback input from GNOME foundation and community members. In parallel, Holly has been working on a fundraising plan to stabilise the Foundation, growing our revenue and ability to deliver on these plans. We will be launching a variety of fundraising activities over the coming months, including a development fund for people to directly support GNOME development, working with professional grant writers and managers to apply for government and private foundation funding opportunities, and building better communications to explain the importance of our work to corporate and individual donors.

Board Development Another observation that Holly had since joining was that we had, by general nonprofit standards, a very small board of just 7 directors. While we do have some committees which have (very much appreciated!) volunteers from outside the board, our officers are usually appointed from within the board, and many board members end up serving on multiple committees and wearing several hats. It also means the number of perspectives on the board is limited and less representative of the diverse contributors and users that make up the GNOME community. Holly has been working with the board and the governance committee to reduce how much we ask from individual board members, and improve representation from the community within the Foundation s governance. Firstly, the board has decided to increase its size from 7 to 9 members, effective from the upcoming elections this May & June, allowing more voices to be heard within the board discussions. After that, we re going to be working on opening up the board to more participants, creating non-voting officer seats to represent certain regions or interests from across the community, and take part in committees and board meetings. These new non-voting roles are likely to be appointed with some kind of application process, and we ll share details about these roles and how to be considered for them as we refine our plans over the coming year.

Elections We re really excited to develop and share these plans and increase the ways that people can get involved in shaping the Foundation s strategy and how we raise and spend money to support and grow the GNOME community. This brings me to my final point, which is that we re in the run up to the annual board elections which take place in the run up to GUADEC. Because of the expansion of the board, and four directors coming to the end of their terms, we ll be electing 6 seats this election. It s really important to Holly and the board that we use this opportunity to bring some new voices to the table, leading by example in growing and better representing our community. Allan wrote in the past about what the board does and what s expected from directors. As you can see we re working hard on reducing what we ask from each individual board member by increasing the number of directors, and bringing additional members in to committees and non-voting roles. If you re interested in seeing more diverse backgrounds and perspectives represented on the board, I would strongly encourage you consider standing for election and reach out to a board member to discuss their experience. Thanks for reading! Until next time. Best Wishes,
Rob
President, GNOME Foundation Update 2024-04-27: It was suggested in the Discourse thread that I clarify the interaction between the break-even budget and the 1M EUR committed by the STF project. This money is received in the form of a contract for services rather than a grant to the Foundation, and must be spent on the development areas agreed during the planning and application process. It s included within this year s budget (October 23 September 24) and is all expected to be spent during this fiscal year, so it doesn t have an impact on the Foundation s reserves position. The Foundation retains a small % fee to support its costs in connection with the project, including the new requirement to have our accounts externally audited at the end of the financial year. We are putting this money towards recruitment of an administrative assistant to improve financial and other operational support for the Foundation and community, including the STF project and future development initiatives. (also posted to GNOME Discourse, please head there if you have any questions or comments)

1. Voice input for dictation
2. Voice assistant like Google/Apple
3. Voice output
4. Full operation for visually impaired people

• [1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2024/03/13/shape-computers/
• [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TitZV6k8zfA
• [3] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/10/11/pinephone-status/
• [4] https://wiki.debian.org/MobileApps
• [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O2yTG3n1Vc
• [6] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/05/29/considering-convergence/
• [7] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2024/04/26/convergence-vs-transference/

PGPASSWORD="udd-mirror" psql --port=5432 --host=udd-mirror.debian.net \
  --username=udd-mirror udd -c "select source from sources \
   where release = 'sid' and (vcs_url ilike '%anonscm.debian.org%' \
   OR vcs_browser ilike '%anonscm.debian.org%' or vcs_url IS NULL \
   OR vcs_browser IS NULL) AND maintainer ilike '%packages@qa.debian.org%' \
   order by random() limit 10;"

#!/bin/sh
#
# See also https://bugs.debian.org/804722#31
set -e
# Move to this Standards-Version.
SV_LATEST=4.7.0
PKG="$1"
if [ -z "$PKG" ]; then
    echo "usage: $0 "
    exit 1
fi
if [ -e "$ PKG -salsa" ]; then
    echo "error: $ PKG -salsa already exist, aborting."
    exit 1
fi
if [ -z "ALLOWFAILURE" ] ; then
    ALLOWFAILURE=false
fi
# Fetch every snapshotted source package.  Manually loop until all
# transfers succeed, as 'gbp import-dscs --debsnap' do not fail on
# download failures.
until debsnap --force -v $PKG   $ALLOWFAILURE ; do sleep 1; done
mkdir $ PKG -salsa; cd $ PKG -salsa
git init
# Specify branches to override any debian/gbp.conf file present in the
# source package.
gbp import-dscs  --debian-branch=master --upstream-branch=upstream \
    --pristine-tar ../source-$PKG/*.dsc
# Add Vcs pointing to Salsa Debian project (must be manually created
# and pushed to).
if ! grep -q ^Vcs- debian/control ; then
    awk "BEGIN   s=1   /^\$/   if (s==1)   print \"Vcs-Browser: https://salsa.debian.org/debian/$PKG\"; print \"Vcs-Git: https://salsa.debian.org/debian/$PKG.git\"  ; s=0     print  " < debian/control > debian/control.new && mv debian/control.new debian/control
    git commit -m "Updated vcs in d/control to Salsa." debian/control
fi
# Tell gbp to enforce the use of pristine-tar.
inifile +inifile debian/gbp.conf +create +section DEFAULT +key pristine-tar +value True
git add debian/gbp.conf
git commit -m "Added d/gbp.conf to enforce the use of pristine-tar." debian/gbp.conf
# Update to latest Standards-Version.
SV="$(grep ^Standards-Version: debian/control awk ' print $2 ')"
if [ $SV_LATEST != $SV ]; then
    sed -i "s/\(Standards-Version: \)\(.*\)/\1$SV_LATEST/" debian/control
    git commit -m "Updated Standards-Version from $SV to $SV_LATEST." debian/control
fi
if grep -q pkg-config debian/control; then
    sed -i s/pkg-config/pkgconf/ debian/control
    git commit -m "Replaced obsolete pkg-config build dependency with pkgconf." debian/control
fi
if grep -q libncurses5-dev debian/control; then
    sed -i s/libncurses5-dev/libncurses-dev/ debian/control
    git commit -m "Replaced obsolete libncurses5-dev build dependency with libncurses-dev." debian/control
fi

git remote add origin git@salsa.debian.org:debian/perl-byacc.git
git push --set-upstream origin master upstream pristine-tar
git push --tags

$ mkdir d-i_bookworm && cd d-i_bookworm
$ apt install ovmf qemu-utils qemu-system-x86

$ wget https://people.ubuntu.com/~slyon/d-i/bookworm/mini.iso
$ wget https://people.ubuntu.com/~slyon/d-i/bookworm/linux
$ wget https://people.ubuntu.com/~slyon/d-i/bookworm/initrd.gz

$ cp /usr/share/OVMF/OVMF_CODE_4M.fd .
$ cp /usr/share/OVMF/OVMF_VARS_4M.fd .
$ qemu-img create -f qcow2 ./data.qcow2 5G

# Install minimal Netplan generator binary
d-i preseed/late_command string in-target apt-get -y install netplan-generator

• Netplan + systemd-resolved configuration
  • https://people.ubuntu.com/~slyon/d-i/bookworm/netplan-preseed+networkd.cfg
• Netplan + NetworkManager configuration
  • https://people.ubuntu.com/~slyon/d-i/bookworm/netplan-preseed+nm.cfg

$ export U=https://people.ubuntu.com/~slyon/d-i/bookworm/netplan-preseed+networkd.cfg
$ qemu-system-x86_64 \
	-M q35 -enable-kvm -cpu host -smp 4 -m 2G \
	-drive if=pflash,format=raw,unit=0,file=OVMF_CODE_4M.fd,readonly=on \
	-drive if=pflash,format=raw,unit=1,file=OVMF_VARS_4M.fd,readonly=off \
	-device qemu-xhci -device usb-kbd -device usb-mouse \
	-vga none -device virtio-gpu-pci \
	-net nic,model=virtio -net user \
	-kernel ./linux -initrd ./initrd.gz -append "url=$U" \
	-hda ./data.qcow2 -cdrom ./mini.iso;

$ cp ./OVMF_VARS_4M.fd ./EFIVARS.fd
$ qemu-system-x86_64 \
        -M q35 -enable-kvm -cpu host -smp 4 -m 2G \
        -drive if=pflash,format=raw,unit=0,file=OVMF_CODE_4M.fd,readonly=on \
        -drive if=pflash,format=raw,unit=1,file=EFIVARS.fd,readonly=off \
        -device qemu-xhci -device usb-kbd -device usb-mouse \
        -vga none -device virtio-gpu-pci \
        -net nic,model=virtio -net user \
        -drive file=./data.qcow2,if=none,format=qcow2,id=disk0 \
        -device virtio-blk-pci,drive=disk0,bootindex=1
        -serial mon:stdio

There was no way of telling when the threshold would be reached. Perhaps not for hours, and perhaps the next moment. Biron remained standing helplessly, flashlight held loosely in his damp hands. Half an hour before, the visiphone had awakened him, and he had been at peace then. Now he knew he was going to die. Biron didn't want to die, but he was penned in hopelessly, and there was no place to hide.

• did some clerical work for the DebConf videoteam
• tried to book a plane ticket for DC24
• triaged #1067620 (dependency problem with whipper)
• closed #1067121 (flaky test in supysonic)
• closed #1065514 (qpdfview crossbuilding)

• organized his custom Application Manager stuff in a private repo
• did some coding for the New Maintainers website to make sure applicants agree with the Debian Code of Conduct alongside the SC/DFSG/DMUP
• closed #1057910 (new apticron upload)

• planned & brainstormed for the upcoming Debian usability tests
• mentored a student/new contributor (justin)
• babysat a future contributor!
• closed #1067649
• learnt about fabre.debian.net & element.debian.social (thanks, pollo!)

• uploaded puppet-strings 4.1.2-1 to unstable
• updated various services in personal infra
• cleaned vagrant-hostmanager and worked on packaging the new upstream release (1.8.10)
• extended GPG key expiry
• looked at options for a new backup machine

• updated puppetdb to 8.4.1

• opened #1068152 after a misfortune with #1068151
• created new contributor accounts (salsa & wiki)

• 2023-08-28, OSNews: The end of the Googleverse
• 2023-07-28, Cory Doctorow: Microincentives and Enshittification
• 2023-10-03, Cory Doctorow: Google s enshittification memos
• 2024-01-15, Tim Bray: Mourning Google

• More people are searching for alternatives to Google.
• Mainstream hard discs are incredibly big.
• Mainstream internet connection is incredibly fast.
• Google is bleeding talent.
• Most of the building blocks are available as free software.
• Success depends on your definition

A mildly technical computer user (able to install software) has access to a search engine that provides them with superior search results compared to Google for at least a few predefined areas of interest.

Glenda enjoyed her job. She didn't have a career; they were for people who could not hold down jobs.

The Patrician took a sip of his beer. "I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I'm sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature's wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining on mother and children. And that's when I first learned about evil. It is built into the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior."

git clone https://gitlab.com/gsasl/libntlm.git
cd libntlm
git checkout v1.8
./bootstrap
./configure
make distcheck
gpg -b libntlm-1.8.tar.gz

make srcdist
gpg -b libntlm-1.8-src.tar.gz

91de864224913b9493c7a6cec2890e6eded3610d34c3d983132823de348ec2ca  libntlm-1.8-src.tar.gz
ce6569a47a21173ba69c990965f73eb82d9a093eb871f935ab64ee13df47fda1  libntlm-1.8.tar.gz

podman run -it --rm ubuntu:22.04
apt-get update
apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends autoconf automake libtool make git ca-certificates
git clone https://gitlab.com/gsasl/libntlm.git
cd libntlm
git checkout v1.8
./bootstrap
./configure
make dist srcdist
sha256sum libntlm-*.tar.gz

podman run -it --rm almalinux:8
dnf update -y
dnf install -y make wget gcc
wget https://download.savannah.nongnu.org/releases/libntlm/libntlm-1.8.tar.gz
tar xfa libntlm-1.8.tar.gz
cd libntlm-1.8
./configure
make dist
sha256sum libntlm-1.8.tar.gz

podman run -it --rm debian:11
apt-get update
apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends make git ca-certificates
git clone https://gitlab.com/gsasl/libntlm.git
cd libntlm
git checkout v1.8
make -f cfg.mk srcdist
sha256sum libntlm-1.8-src.tar.gz 

podman run -it --rm docker.io/kpengboy/trisquel:11.0
apt-get update
apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends autoconf automake libtool make wget git ca-certificates
wget https://download.savannah.nongnu.org/releases/libntlm/libntlm-1.8-src.tar.gz
tar xfa libntlm-1.8-src.tar.gz
cd libntlm-v1.8
./bootstrap
./configure
make dist
sha256sum libntlm-1.8.tar.gz

git archive --prefix=libntlm-v1.8/ -o libntlm-1.8-src.tar.gz HEAD

Back to the Future Time to admit something. I really love Plan 9. It s just so good. So many ideas from Plan 9 are just so prescient, and everything just feels right. Not just right like, feels good like, correct. The bit that I ve always liked the most is 9p, the network protocol for serving a filesystem over a network. This leads to all sorts of fun programs, like the Plan 9 ftp client being a 9p server you mount the ftp server and access files like any other files. It s kinda like if fuse were more fully a part of how the operating system worked, but fuse is all running client-side. With 9p there s a single client, and different servers that you can connect to, which may be backed by a hard drive, remote resources over something like SFTP, FTP, HTTP or even purely synthetic. The interesting (maybe sad?) part here is that 9p wound up outliving Plan 9 in terms of adoption 9p is in all sorts of places folks don t usually expect. For instance, the Windows Subsystem for Linux uses the 9p protocol to share files between Windows and Linux. ChromeOS uses it to share files with Crostini, and qemu uses 9p (virtio-p9) to share files between guest and host. If you re noticing a pattern here, you d be right; for some reason 9p is the go-to protocol to exchange files between hypervisor and guest. Why? I have no idea, except maybe due to being designed well, simple to implement, and it s a lot easier to validate the data being shared and validate security boundaries. Simplicity has its value. As a result, there s a lot of lingering 9p support kicking around. Turns out Linux can even handle mounting 9p filesystems out of the box. This means that I can deploy a filesystem to my LAN or my localhost by running a process on top of a computer that needs nothing special, and mount it over the network on an unmodified machine unlike fuse, where you d need client-specific software to run in order to mount the directory. For instance, let s mount a 9p filesystem running on my localhost machine, serving requests on 127.0.0.1:564 (tcp) that goes by the name mountpointname to /mnt.

$ mount -t 9p \
-o trans=tcp,port=564,version=9p2000.u,aname=mountpointname \
127.0.0.1 \
/mnt

Linux will mount away, and attach to the filesystem as the root user, and by default, attach to that mountpoint again for each local user that attempts to use it. Nifty, right? I think so. The server is able to keep track of per-user access and authorization along with the host OS.

WHEREIN I STYX WITH IT Since I wanted to push myself a bit more with rust and tokio specifically, I opted to implement the whole stack myself, without third party libraries on the critical path where I could avoid it. The 9p protocol (sometimes called Styx, the original name for it) is incredibly simple. It s a series of client to server requests, which receive a server to client response. These are, respectively, T messages, which transmit a request to the server, which trigger an R message in response (Reply messages). These messages are TLV payload with a very straight forward structure so straight forward, in fact, that I was able to implement a working server off nothing more than a handful of man pages. Later on after the basics worked, I found a more complete spec page that contains more information about the unix specific variant that I opted to use (9P2000.u rather than 9P2000) due to the level of Linux specific support for the 9P2000.u variant over the 9P2000 protocol.

MR ROBOTO The backend stack over at zoo is rust and tokio running i/o for an HTTP and WebRTC server. I figured I d pick something fairly similar to write my filesystem with, since 9P can be implemented on basically anything with I/O. That means tokio tcp server bits, which construct and use a 9p server, which has an idiomatic Rusty API that partially abstracts the raw R and T messages, but not so much as to cause issues with hiding implementation possibilities. At each abstraction level, there s an escape hatch allowing someone to implement any of the layers if required. I called this framework arigato which can be found over on docs.rs and crates.io.

/// Simplified version of the arigato File trait; this isn't actually
/// the same trait; there's some small cosmetic differences. The
/// actual trait can be found at:
///
/// https://docs.rs/arigato/latest/arigato/server/trait.File.html
trait File  
/// OpenFile is the type returned by this File via an Open call.
 type OpenFile: OpenFile;
/// Return the 9p Qid for this file. A file is the same if the Qid is
 /// the same. A Qid contains information about the mode of the file,
 /// version of the file, and a unique 64 bit identifier.
 fn qid(&self) -> Qid;
/// Construct the 9p Stat struct with metadata about a file.
 async fn stat(&self) -> FileResult<Stat>;
/// Attempt to update the file metadata.
 async fn wstat(&mut self, s: &Stat) -> FileResult<()>;
/// Traverse the filesystem tree.
 async fn walk(&self, path: &[&str]) -> FileResult<(Option<Self>, Vec<Self>)>;
/// Request that a file's reference be removed from the file tree.
 async fn unlink(&mut self) -> FileResult<()>;
/// Create a file at a specific location in the file tree.
 async fn create(
&mut self,
name: &str,
perm: u16,
ty: FileType,
mode: OpenMode,
extension: &str,
) -> FileResult<Self>;
/// Open the File, returning a handle to the open file, which handles
 /// file i/o. This is split into a second type since it is genuinely
 /// unrelated -- and the fact that a file is Open or Closed can be
 /// handled by the  arigato  server for us.
 async fn open(&mut self, mode: OpenMode) -> FileResult<Self::OpenFile>;
 
/// Simplified version of the arigato OpenFile trait; this isn't actually
/// the same trait; there's some small cosmetic differences. The
/// actual trait can be found at:
///
/// https://docs.rs/arigato/latest/arigato/server/trait.OpenFile.html
trait OpenFile  
/// iounit to report for this file. The iounit reported is used for Read
 /// or Write operations to signal, if non-zero, the maximum size that is
 /// guaranteed to be transferred atomically.
 fn iounit(&self) -> u32;
/// Read some number of bytes up to  buf.len()  from the provided
 ///  offset  of the underlying file. The number of bytes read is
 /// returned.
 async fn read_at(
&mut self,
buf: &mut [u8],
offset: u64,
) -> FileResult<u32>;
/// Write some number of bytes up to  buf.len()  from the provided
 ///  offset  of the underlying file. The number of bytes written
 /// is returned.
 fn write_at(
&mut self,
buf: &mut [u8],
offset: u64,
) -> FileResult<u32>;
 

Thanks, decade ago paultag! Let s do it! Let s use arigato to implement a 9p filesystem we ll call debugfs that will serve all the debug files shipped according to the Packages metadata from the apt archive. We ll fetch the Packages file and construct a filesystem based on the reported Build-Id entries. For those who don t know much about how an apt repo works, here s the 2-second crash course on what we re doing. The first is to fetch the Packages file, which is specific to a binary architecture (such as amd64, arm64 or riscv64). That architecture is specific to a component (such as main, contrib or non-free). That component is specific to a suite, such as stable, unstable or any of its aliases (bullseye, bookworm, etc). Let s take a look at the Packages.xz file for the unstable-debug suite, main component, for all amd64 binaries.

$ curl \
https://deb.debian.org/debian-debug/dists/unstable-debug/main/binary-amd64/Packages.xz \
  unxz

This will return the Debian-style rfc2822-like headers, which is an export of the metadata contained inside each .deb file which apt (or other tools that can use the apt repo format) use to fetch information about debs. Let s take a look at the debug headers for the netlabel-tools package in unstable which is a package named netlabel-tools-dbgsym in unstable-debug.

Package: netlabel-tools-dbgsym
Source: netlabel-tools (0.30.0-1)
Version: 0.30.0-1+b1
Installed-Size: 79
Maintainer: Paul Tagliamonte <paultag@debian.org>
Architecture: amd64
Depends: netlabel-tools (= 0.30.0-1+b1)
Description: debug symbols for netlabel-tools
Auto-Built-Package: debug-symbols
Build-Ids: e59f81f6573dadd5d95a6e4474d9388ab2777e2a
Description-md5: a0e587a0cf730c88a4010f78562e6db7
Section: debug
Priority: optional
Filename: pool/main/n/netlabel-tools/netlabel-tools-dbgsym_0.30.0-1+b1_amd64.deb
Size: 62776
SHA256: 0e9bdb087617f0350995a84fb9aa84541bc4df45c6cd717f2157aa83711d0c60

So here, we can parse the package headers in the Packages.xz file, and store, for each Build-Id, the Filename where we can fetch the .deb at. Each .deb contains a number of files but we re only really interested in the files inside the .deb located at or under /usr/lib/debug/.build-id/, which you can find in debugfs under rfc822.rs. It s crude, and very single-purpose, but I m feeling a bit lazy.

Who needs dpkg?! For folks who haven t seen it yet, a .deb file is a special type of .ar file, that contains (usually) three files inside debian-binary, control.tar.xz and data.tar.xz. The core of an .ar file is a fixed size (60 byte) entry header, followed by the specified size number of bytes.

[8 byte .ar file magic]
[60 byte entry header]
[N bytes of data]
[60 byte entry header]
[N bytes of data]
[60 byte entry header]
[N bytes of data]
...

First up was to implement a basic ar parser in ar.rs. Before we get into using it to parse a deb, as a quick diversion, let s break apart a .deb file by hand something that is a bit of a rite of passage (or at least it used to be? I m getting old) during the Debian nm (new member) process, to take a look at where exactly the .debug file lives inside the .deb file.

$ ar x netlabel-tools-dbgsym_0.30.0-1+b1_amd64.deb
$ ls
control.tar.xz debian-binary
data.tar.xz netlabel-tools-dbgsym_0.30.0-1+b1_amd64.deb
$ tar --list -f data.tar.xz   grep '.debug$'
./usr/lib/debug/.build-id/e5/9f81f6573dadd5d95a6e4474d9388ab2777e2a.debug

Since we know quite a bit about the structure of a .deb file, and I had to implement support from scratch anyway, I opted to implement a (very!) basic debfile parser using HTTP Range requests. HTTP Range requests, if supported by the server (denoted by a accept-ranges: bytes HTTP header in response to an HTTP HEAD request to that file) means that we can add a header such as range: bytes=8-68 to specifically request that the returned GET body be the byte range provided (in the above case, the bytes starting from byte offset 8 until byte offset 68). This means we can fetch just the ar file entry from the .deb file until we get to the file inside the .deb we are interested in (in our case, the data.tar.xz file) at which point we can request the body of that file with a final range request. I wound up writing a struct to handle a read_at-style API surface in hrange.rs, which we can pair with ar.rs above and start to find our data in the .deb remotely without downloading and unpacking the .deb at all. After we have the body of the data.tar.xz coming back through the HTTP response, we get to pipe it through an xz decompressor (this kinda sucked in Rust, since a tokio AsyncRead is not the same as an http Body response is not the same as std::io::Read, is not the same as an async (or sync) Iterator is not the same as what the xz2 crate expects; leading me to read blocks of data to a buffer and stuff them through the decoder by looping over the buffer for each lzma2 packet in a loop), and tarfile parser (similarly troublesome). From there we get to iterate over all entries in the tarfile, stopping when we reach our file of interest. Since we can t seek, but gdb needs to, we ll pull it out of the stream into a Cursor<Vec<u8>> in-memory and pass a handle to it back to the user. From here on out its a matter of gluing together a File traited struct in debugfs, and serving the filesystem over TCP using arigato. Done deal!

A quick diversion about compression I was originally hoping to avoid transferring the whole tar file over the network (and therefore also reading the whole debug file into ram, which objectively sucks), but quickly hit issues with figuring out a way around seeking around an xz file. What s interesting is xz has a great primitive to solve this specific problem (specifically, use a block size that allows you to seek to the block as close to your desired seek position just before it, only discarding at most block size - 1 bytes), but data.tar.xz files generated by dpkg appear to have a single mega-huge block for the whole file. I don t know why I would have expected any different, in retrospect. That means that this now devolves into the base case of How do I seek around an lzma2 compressed data stream ; which is a lot more complex of a question. Thankfully, notoriously brilliant tianon was nice enough to introduce me to Jon Johnson who did something super similar adapted a technique to seek inside a compressed gzip file, which lets his service oci.dag.dev seek through Docker container images super fast based on some prior work such as soci-snapshotter, gztool, and zran.c. He also pulled this party trick off for apk based distros over at apk.dag.dev, which seems apropos. Jon was nice enough to publish a lot of his work on this specifically in a central place under the name targz on his GitHub, which has been a ton of fun to read through. The gist is that, by dumping the decompressor s state (window of previous bytes, in-memory data derived from the last N-1 bytes) at specific checkpoints along with the compressed data stream offset in bytes and decompressed offset in bytes, one can seek to that checkpoint in the compressed stream and pick up where you left off creating a similar block mechanism against the wishes of gzip. It means you d need to do an O(n) run over the file, but every request after that will be sped up according to the number of checkpoints you ve taken. Given the complexity of xz and lzma2, I don t think this is possible for me at the moment especially given most of the files I ll be requesting will not be loaded from again especially when I can just cache the debug header by Build-Id. I want to implement this (because I m generally curious and Jon has a way of getting someone excited about compression schemes, which is not a sentence I thought I d ever say out loud), but for now I m going to move on without this optimization. Such a shame, since it kills a lot of the work that went into seeking around the .deb file in the first place, given the debian-binary and control.tar.gz members are so small.

The Good First, the good news right? It works! That s pretty cool. I m positive my younger self would be amused and happy to see this working; as is current day paultag. Let s take debugfs out for a spin! First, we need to mount the filesystem. It even works on an entirely unmodified, stock Debian box on my LAN, which is huge. Let s take it for a spin:

$ mount \
-t 9p \
-o trans=tcp,version=9p2000.u,aname=unstable-debug \
192.168.0.2 \
/usr/lib/debug/.build-id/

And, let s prove to ourselves that this actually mounted before we go trying to use it:

$ mount   grep build-id
192.168.0.2 on /usr/lib/debug/.build-id type 9p (rw,relatime,aname=unstable-debug,access=user,trans=tcp,version=9p2000.u,port=564)

Slick. We ve got an open connection to the server, where our host will keep a connection alive as root, attached to the filesystem provided in aname. Let s take a look at it.

$ ls /usr/lib/debug/.build-id/
00 0d 1a 27 34 41 4e 5b 68 75 82 8E 9b a8 b5 c2 CE db e7 f3
01 0e 1b 28 35 42 4f 5c 69 76 83 8f 9c a9 b6 c3 cf dc E7 f4
02 0f 1c 29 36 43 50 5d 6a 77 84 90 9d aa b7 c4 d0 dd e8 f5
03 10 1d 2a 37 44 51 5e 6b 78 85 91 9e ab b8 c5 d1 de e9 f6
04 11 1e 2b 38 45 52 5f 6c 79 86 92 9f ac b9 c6 d2 df ea f7
05 12 1f 2c 39 46 53 60 6d 7a 87 93 a0 ad ba c7 d3 e0 eb f8
06 13 20 2d 3a 47 54 61 6e 7b 88 94 a1 ae bb c8 d4 e1 ec f9
07 14 21 2e 3b 48 55 62 6f 7c 89 95 a2 af bc c9 d5 e2 ed fa
08 15 22 2f 3c 49 56 63 70 7d 8a 96 a3 b0 bd ca d6 e3 ee fb
09 16 23 30 3d 4a 57 64 71 7e 8b 97 a4 b1 be cb d7 e4 ef fc
0a 17 24 31 3e 4b 58 65 72 7f 8c 98 a5 b2 bf cc d8 E4 f0 fd
0b 18 25 32 3f 4c 59 66 73 80 8d 99 a6 b3 c0 cd d9 e5 f1 fe
0c 19 26 33 40 4d 5a 67 74 81 8e 9a a7 b4 c1 ce da e6 f2 ff

Outstanding. Let s try using gdb to debug a binary that was provided by the Debian archive, and see if it ll load the ELF by build-id from the right .deb in the unstable-debug suite:

$ gdb -q /usr/sbin/netlabelctl
Reading symbols from /usr/sbin/netlabelctl...
Reading symbols from /usr/lib/debug/.build-id/e5/9f81f6573dadd5d95a6e4474d9388ab2777e2a.debug...
(gdb)

Yes! Yes it will!

$ file /usr/lib/debug/.build-id/e5/9f81f6573dadd5d95a6e4474d9388ab2777e2a.debug
/usr/lib/debug/.build-id/e5/9f81f6573dadd5d95a6e4474d9388ab2777e2a.debug: ELF 64-bit LSB shared object, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter *empty*, BuildID[sha1]=e59f81f6573dadd5d95a6e4474d9388ab2777e2a, for GNU/Linux 3.2.0, with debug_info, not stripped

The Bad Linux s support for 9p is mainline, which is great, but it s not robust. Network issues or server restarts will wedge the mountpoint (Linux can t reconnect when the tcp connection breaks), and things that work fine on local filesystems get translated in a way that causes a lot of network chatter for instance, just due to the way the syscalls are translated, doing an ls, will result in a stat call for each file in the directory, even though linux had just got a stat entry for every file while it was resolving directory names. On top of that, Linux will serialize all I/O with the server, so there s no concurrent requests for file information, writes, or reads pending at the same time to the server; and read and write throughput will degrade as latency increases due to increasing round-trip time, even though there are offsets included in the read and write calls. It works well enough, but is frustrating to run up against, since there s not a lot you can do server-side to help with this beyond implementing the 9P2000.L variant (which, maybe is worth it).

The Ugly Unfortunately, we don t know the file size(s) until we ve actually opened the underlying tar file and found the correct member, so for most files, we don t know the real size to report when getting a stat. We can t parse the tarfiles for every stat call, since that d make ls even slower (bummer). Only hiccup is that when I report a filesize of zero, gdb throws a bit of a fit; let s try with a size of 0 to start:

$ ls -lah /usr/lib/debug/.build-id/e5/9f81f6573dadd5d95a6e4474d9388ab2777e2a.debug
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 Dec 31 1969 /usr/lib/debug/.build-id/e5/9f81f6573dadd5d95a6e4474d9388ab2777e2a.debug
$ gdb -q /usr/sbin/netlabelctl
Reading symbols from /usr/sbin/netlabelctl...
Reading symbols from /usr/lib/debug/.build-id/e5/9f81f6573dadd5d95a6e4474d9388ab2777e2a.debug...
warning: Discarding section .note.gnu.build-id which has a section size (24) larger than the file size [in module /usr/lib/debug/.build-id/e5/9f81f6573dadd5d95a6e4474d9388ab2777e2a.debug]
[...]

This obviously won t work since gdb will throw away all our hard work because of stat s output, and neither will loading the real size of the underlying file. That only leaves us with hardcoding a file size and hope nothing else breaks significantly as a result. Let s try it again:

$ ls -lah /usr/lib/debug/.build-id/e5/9f81f6573dadd5d95a6e4474d9388ab2777e2a.debug
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 954M Dec 31 1969 /usr/lib/debug/.build-id/e5/9f81f6573dadd5d95a6e4474d9388ab2777e2a.debug
$ gdb -q /usr/sbin/netlabelctl
Reading symbols from /usr/sbin/netlabelctl...
Reading symbols from /usr/lib/debug/.build-id/e5/9f81f6573dadd5d95a6e4474d9388ab2777e2a.debug...
(gdb)

Much better. I mean, terrible but better. Better for now, anyway.

Kilroy was here Do I think this is a particularly good idea? I mean; kinda. I m probably going to make some fun 9p arigato-based filesystems for use around my LAN, but I don t think I ll be moving to use debugfs until I can figure out how to ensure the connection is more resilient to changing networks, server restarts and fixes on i/o performance. I think it was a useful exercise and is a pretty great hack, but I don t think this ll be shipping anywhere anytime soon. Along with me publishing this post, I ve pushed up all my repos; so you should be able to play along at home! There s a lot more work to be done on arigato; but it does handshake and successfully export a working 9P2000.u filesystem. Check it out on on my github at arigato, debugfs and also on crates.io and docs.rs. At least I can say I was here and I got it working after all these years.

SSO Authentication for jitsi.debian.social, by Stefano Rivera Debian.social s jitsi instance has been getting some abuse by (non-Debian) people sharing sexually explicit content on the service. After playing whack-a-mole with this for a month, and shutting the instance off for another month, we opened it up again and the abuse immediately re-started. Stefano sat down and wrote an SSO Implementation that hooks into Jitsi s existing JWT SSO support. This requires everyone using jitsi.debian.social to have a Salsa account. With only a little bit of effort, we could change this in future, to only require an account to open a room, and allow guests to join the call.

/usr-move, by Helmut Grohne The biggest task this month was sending mitigation patches for all of the /usr-move issues arising from package renames due to the 2038 transition. As a result, we can now say that every affected package in unstable can either be converted with dh-sequence-movetousr or has an open bug report. The package set relevant to debootstrap except for the set that has to be uploaded concurrently has been moved to /usr and is awaiting migration. The move of coreutils happened to affect piuparts which hard codes the location of /bin/sync and received multiple updates as a result.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Stefano Rivera uploaded a stable release update to python3.11 for bookworm, fixing a use-after-free crash.
• Stefano uploaded a new version of python-html2text, and updated python3-defaults to build with it.
• In support of Python 3.12, Stefano dropped distutils as a Build-Dependency from a few packages, and uploaded a complex set of patches to python-mitogen.
• Stefano landed some merge requests to clean up dead code in dh-python, removed the flit plugin, and uploaded it.
• Stefano uploaded new upstream versions of twisted, hatchling, python-flexmock, python-authlib, python mitogen, python-pipx, and xonsh.
• Stefano requested removal of a few packages supporting the Opsis HDMI2USB hardware that DebConf Video team used to use for HDMI capture, as they are not being maintained upstream. They started to FTBFS, with recent sdcc changes.
• DebConf 24 is getting ready to open registration, Stefano spent some time fixing bugs in the website, caused by infrastructure updates.
• Stefano reviewed all the DebConf 23 travel reimbursements, filing requests for more information from SPI where our records mismatched.
• Stefano spun up a Wafer website for the Berlin 2024 mini DebConf.
• Roberto C. S nchez worked on facilitating the transfer of upstream maintenance responsibility for the dormant Shorewall project to a new team led by the current maintainer of the Shorewall packages in Debian.
• Colin Watson fixed build failures in celery-haystack-ng, db1-compat, jsonpickle, libsdl-perl, kali, knews, openssh-ssh1, python-json-log-formatter, python-typing-extensions, trn4, vigor, and wcwidth. Some of these were related to the 64-bit time_t transition, since that involved enabling -Werror=implicit-function-declaration.
• Colin fixed an off-by-one error in neovim, which was already causing a build failure in Ubuntu and would eventually have caused a build failure in Debian with stricter toolchain settings.
• Colin added an sshd@.service template to openssh to help newer systemd versions make containers and VMs SSH-accessible over AF_VSOCK sockets.
• Following the xz-utils backdoor, Colin spent some time testing and discussing OpenSSH upstream s proposed inline systemd notification patch, since the current implementation via libsystemd was part of the attack vector used by that backdoor.
• Utkarsh reviewed and sponsored some Go packages for Lena Voytek and Rajudev.
• Utkarsh also helped Mitchell Dzurick with the adoption of pyparted package.
• Helmut sent 10 patches for cross build failures.
• Helmut partially fixed architecture cross bootstrap tooling to deal with changes in linux-libc-dev and the recent gcc-for-host changes and also fixed a 64bit-time_t FTBFS in libtextwrap.
• Thorsten Alteholz uploaded several packages from debian-printing: cjet, lprng, rlpr and epson-inkjet-printer-escpr were affected by the newly enabled compiler switch -Werror=implicit-function-declaration. Besides fixing these serious bugs, Thorsten also worked on other bugs and could fix one or the other.
• Carles updated simplemonitor and python-ring-doorbell packages with new upstream versions.
• Santiago is still working on the Salsa CI MRs to adapt the build jobs so they can rely on sbuild. Current work includes adapting the images used by the build job, implementing the basic sbuild support the related jobs, and adjusting the support for experimental and *-backports releases..
  Additionally, Santiago reviewed some MR such as Make timeout action explicit in the logs and the subsequent Implement conditional timeout verbosity, and the batch of MRs included in https://salsa.debian.org/salsa-ci-team/pipeline/-/merge_requests/482.
• Santiago also reviewed applications for the improving Salsa CI in Debian GSoC 2024 project. We received applications from four very talented candidates. The selection process is currently ongoing. A huge thanks to all of them!
• As part of the DebConf 24 organization, Santiago has taken part in the Content team discussions.

Debian LTS contributors In March, 19 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:

• Abhijith PA did 0.0h (out of 10.0h assigned and 4.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 14.0h to the next month.
• Adrian Bunk did 59.5h (out of 47.5h assigned and 52.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 40.5h to the next month.
• Bastien Roucari s did 22.0h (out of 20.0h assigned and 2.0h from previous period).
• Ben Hutchings did 9.0h (out of 2.0h assigned and 22.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 15.0h to the next month.
• Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
• Daniel Leidert did 12.0h (out of 12.0h assigned).
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 0.0h (out of 3.0h assigned and 57.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 60.0h to the next month.
• Guilhem Moulin did 22.5h (out of 7.25h assigned and 15.25h from previous period).
• Holger Levsen did 0.0h (out of 0.5h assigned and 11.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 12.0h to the next month.
• Lee Garrett did 0.0h (out of 0.0h assigned and 60.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 60.0h to the next month.
• Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
• Ola Lundqvist did 19.5h (out of 24.0h assigned), thus carrying over 4.5h to the next month.
• Roberto C. S nchez did 9.25h (out of 3.5h assigned and 8.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.75h to the next month.
• Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 19.0h (out of 16.5h assigned and 2.5h from previous period).
• Sean Whitton did 4.5h (out of 4.5h assigned and 1.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 1.5h to the next month.
• Sylvain Beucler did 25.0h (out of 24.5h assigned and 35.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 35.0h to the next month.
• Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
• Tobias Frost did 12.0h (out of 12.0h assigned).
• Utkarsh Gupta did 19.5h (out of 0.0h assigned and 48.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 29.25h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In March, we have released 31 DLAs. Adrian Bunk was responsible for updating gtkwave not only in LTS, but also in unstable, stable, and old-stable as well. This update involved an upload of a new upstream release of gtkwave to each target suite to address 82 separate CVEs. Guilhem Moulin prepared an update of libvirt which was particularly notable, as it fixed multiple vulnerabilities which would lead to denial of service or information disclosure. In addition to the normal security updates, multiple LTS contributors worked at getting various packages updated in more recent Debian releases, including gross for bullseye/bookworm (by Adrian Bunk), imlib2 for bullseye, jetty9 and tomcat9/10 for bullseye/bookworm (by Markus Koschany), samba for bullseye, py7zr for bullseye (by Santiago Ruano Rinc n), cacti for bullseye/bookwork (by Sylvain Beucler), and libmicrohttpd for bullseye (by Thorsten Alteholz). Additionally, Sylvain actively coordinated with cacti upstream concerning an incomplete fix for CVE-2024-29894.

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

• Platinum sponsors:
  • TOSHIBA (for 103 months)
  • Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) (for 71 months)
• Gold sponsors:
  • Roche Diagnostics International AG (for 114 months)
  • Linode (for 108 months)
  • Babiel GmbH (for 97 months)
  • Plat Home (for 97 months)
  • CINECA (for 71 months)
  • University of Oxford (for 53 months)
  • Deveryware (for 40 months)
  • VyOS Inc (for 35 months)
  • EDF SA (for 24 months)
• Silver sponsors:
  • Domeneshop AS (for 118 months)
  • Nantes M tropole (for 112 months)
  • Univention GmbH (for 104 months)
  • Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 104 months)
  • Ribbon Communications, Inc. (for 98 months)
  • Exonet B.V. (for 88 months)
  • Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 82 months)
  • Minist re de l Europe et des Affaires trang res (for 65 months)
  • Cloudways by DigitalOcean (for 55 months)
  • Dinahosting SL (for 53 months)
  • Bauer Xcel Media Deutschland KG (for 47 months)
  • Platform.sh SAS (for 47 months)
  • Moxa Inc. (for 41 months)
  • sipgate GmbH (for 38 months)
  • OVH US LLC (for 36 months)
  • Tilburg University (for 36 months)
  • GSI Helmholtzzentrum f r Schwerionenforschung GmbH (for 28 months)
  • Soliton Systems K.K. (for 25 months)
  • THINline s.r.o.
• Bronze sponsors:
  • Evolix (for 119 months)
  • Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 119 months)
  • Intevation GmbH (for 116 months)
  • Linuxhotel GmbH (for 116 months)
  • Daevel SARL (for 114 months)
  • Bitfolk LTD (for 113 months)
  • Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 113 months)
  • Greenbone AG (for 112 months)
  • NUMLOG (for 112 months)
  • WinGo AG (for 112 months)
  • Ecole Centrale de Nantes - LHEEA (for 108 months)
  • Entr ouvert (for 103 months)
  • Adfinis AG (for 100 months)
  • GNI MEDIA (for 95 months)
  • Laboratoire LEGI - UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 95 months)
  • Tesorion (for 95 months)
  • Bearstech (for 86 months)
  • LiHAS (for 86 months)
  • Catalyst IT Ltd (for 81 months)
  • Supagro (for 76 months)
  • Demarcq SAS (for 75 months)
  • Universit Grenoble Alpes (for 61 months)
  • TouchWeb SAS (for 53 months)
  • SPiN AG (for 50 months)
  • CoreFiling (for 45 months)
  • Institut des sciences cognitives Marc Jeannerod (for 40 months)
  • Observatoire des Sciences de l Univers de Grenoble (for 37 months)
  • Tem Innovations GmbH (for 32 months)
  • WordFinder.pro (for 31 months)
  • CNRS DT INSU R sif (for 30 months)
  • Alter Way (for 23 months)
  • Institut Camille Jordan (for 12 months)