A Safe and Happy New Year to all. While Debconf India is still a pipe-dream as of now, did see that India has been gradually doing it easier for tourists and casual business visitors to come visit India. This I take as very positive development for India itself. The 1st condition is itself good for anybody visiting India

Eligibility International Travellers whose sole objective of visiting India is recreation , sight-seeing , casual visit to meet friends or relatives, short duration medical treatment or casual business visit.

https://indianvisaonline.gov.in/visa/tvoa.html That this facility is being given to 130 odd countries is better still

Albania, Andorra, Anguilla, Antigua & Barbuda, Argentina, Armenia, Aruba, Australia, Austria, Bahamas, Barbados, Belgium, Belize, Bolivia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Botswana, Brazil, Brunei, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Canada, Cape Verde, Cayman Island, Chile, China, China- SAR Hong-Kong, China- SAR Macau, Colombia, Comoros, Cook Islands, Costa Rica, Cote d lvoire, Croatia, Cuba, Czech Republic, Denmark, Djibouti, Dominica, Dominican Republic, East Timor, Ecuador, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Fiji, Finland, France, Gabon, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kenya, Kiribati, Laos, Latvia, Lesotho, Liberia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Malta, Marshall Islands, Mauritius, Mexico, Micronesia, Moldova, Monaco, Mongolia, Montenegro, Montserrat, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Nauru, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niue Island, Norway, Oman, Palau, Palestine, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Korea, Republic of Macedonia, Romania, Russia, Saint Christopher and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent & the Grenadines, Samoa, San Marino, Senegal, Serbia, Seychelles, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Swaziland, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Thailand, Tonga, Trinidad & Tobago, Turks & Caicos Island, Tuvalu, UAE, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Uruguay, USA, Vanuatu, Vatican City-Holy See, Venezuela, Vietnam, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

This should make it somewhat easier for any Indian organizer as well as any participants from any of the member countries shared. There is possibility that this list would even get longer, provided we are able to scale our airports and all and any necessary infrastructure that would be needed for International Visitors to have a good experience. What has been particularly interesting is to know which ports of call are being used by International Visitors as well as overall growth rate

The Percentage share of Foreign Tourist Arrivals (FTAs) in India during November, 2016 among the top 15 source countries was highest from USA (15.53%) followed by UK (11.21%), Bangladesh (10.72%), Canada (4.66%), Russian Fed (4.53%), Australia (4.04%), Malaysia (3.65%), Germany (3.53%), China (3.14%), France (2.88%), Sri Lanka (2.49%), Japan (2.49%), Singapore (2.16%), Nepal (1.46%) and Thailand (1.37%).

And port of call

The Percentage share of Foreign Tourist Arrivals (FTAs) in India during November 2016 among the top 15 ports was highest at Delhi Airport (32.71%) followed by Mumbai Airport (18.51%), Chennai Airport (6.83%), Bengaluru Airport (5.89%), Haridaspur Land check post (5.87%), Goa Airport (5.63%), Kolkata Airport (3.90%), Cochin Airport (3.29%), Hyderabad Airport (3.14%), Ahmadabad Airport (2.76%), Trivandrum Airport (1.54%), Trichy Airport (1.53%), Gede Rail (1.16%), Amritsar Airport (1.15%), and Ghojadanga land check post (0.82%) .

The Ghojadanga land check post seems to be between West Bengal, India and Bangladesh. Gede Railway Station is also in West Bengal as well. So all and any overlanders could take any of those ways.Even Hardispur Land Check post comes in the Bengal-Bangladesh border only. In the airports, Delhi Airport seems to be attracting lot more business than the Mumbai Airport. Part of the reason I *think* is the direct link of Delhi Airport to NDLS via the Delhi Airport Express Line . The same when it will happen in Mumbai should be a game-changer for city too. Now if you are wondering why I have been suddenly talking about visas and airports in India, it came because Hong Kong is going to Withdraw Visa Free Entry Facility For Indians. Although, as rightly pointed out in the article doesn t make sense from economic POV and seems to be somewhat politically motivated. Not that I or anybody else can do anything about that. Seeing that, I thought it was a good opportunity to see how good/Bad our Government is and it seems to be on the right path. Although the hawks (Intelligence and Counter-Terrorist Agencies) will probably become a bit more paranoid , their work becomes tougher.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #Airport Metro Line 3, #CSIA, #Incredible India, #India, #International Tourism

Whilst I managed to read almost sixty books in 2016 here are ten of my favourites in no particular order. Disappointments this year include Stewart Lee's Content Provider (nothing like his stand-up), Christopher Hitchens' And Yet (his best essays are already published) and Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land (great exposition, bizarre conclusion). The worst book I finished, by far, was Mark Edward's Follow You Home. Animal QC Gary Bell, QC Subtitled My Preposterous Life, this rags-to-riches story about a working-class boy turned eminent lawyer would be highly readable as a dry and factual account but I am compelled to include it here for its extremely entertaining style of writing. Full of unsurprising quotes that take one unaware: would you really expect a now-Queen's Counsel to "heartily suggest that if you find yourself suffering from dysentery in foreign climes you do not medicate it with lobster thermidor and a bottle of Ecuadorian red?" A real good yarn.

---

So You've Been Publically Shamed Jon Ronson The author was initially recommended to me by Brad but I believe I started out with the wrong book. In fact, I even had my doubts about this one, prematurely judging from the title that it was merely cashing-in on a fairly recent internet phenomenon like his more recent shallow take on Trump and the alt-Right but in the end I read Publically Shamed thrice in quick succession. I would particularly endorse the audiobook version: Ronson's deadpan drawl suits his writing perfectly.

---

The Obstacle is the Way Ryan Holiday Whilst everyone else appears to be obligated to include Ryan's recent Ego is the Enemy in their Best of 2016 lists I was actually taken by his earlier "introduction by stealth" to stoic philosophy. Certainly not your typical self-help book, this is "a manual to turn to in troubling times". Returning to this work at least three times over the year even splashing out on the audiobook at some point I feel like I learned a great deal, although it is now difficult to pinpoint exactly what. Perhaps another read in 2017 is thus in order

---

Layer Cake J.J. Connolly To judge a book in comparison to the film is to do both a disservice, but reading the book of Layer Cake really underscored just how well the film played to the strengths of that medium. All of the aspects that would not have worked had been carefully excised from the screenplay, ironically leaving more rewarding "layers" for readers attempting the book. A parallel adaption here might be No Country for Old Men - I would love to read (or write) a comparative essay between these two adaptions although McCarthy's novel is certainly the superior source material.

---

Lying Sam Harris I've absorbed a lot of Sam Harris's uvre this year in the form of his books but moreover via his compelling podcast. I'm especially fond of Waking Up on spirituality without religion and would rank that as my favourite work of his. Lying is a comparatively short read, more of a long essay in fact, where he argues that we can radically simplify our lives by merely telling the truth in situations where others invariably lie. Whilst it would take a brave soul to adopt his approach his case is superlatively well-argued and a delight to read.

---

Letters from a Stoic Seneca

Great pleasure is to be found not only in keeping up an old and established friendship but also in beginning and building up a new one. Reading this in a beautifully svelte hardback, I tackled a randomly-chosen letter per day rather than attempting to read it cover-to-cover. Breaking with a life-long tradition, I even decided to highlight sections in pen so I could return to them at ease. I hope it's not too hackneyed to claim I gained a lot from "building up" a relationship with this book. Alas, it is one of those books that is too easy to recommend given that it might make one appear wise and learned, but if you find yourself in a slump, either in life or in your reading habits, it certainly has my approval.

---

Solo: A James Bond Novel William Boyd I must have read all of the canonical Fleming novels as a teenager and Solo really rewards anyone who has done so. It would certainly punish anyone expecting a Goldeneye or at least be a little too foreign to be enjoyed. Indeed, its really a pastiche of these originals, both in terms of the time period, general tone (Bond is more somber; more vulnerable) and in various obsessions of Fleming's writing, such as the overly-detailed description of the gambling and dining tables. In this universe, 007's restaurant expenses probably contributed signifcantly to the downfall of the British Empire, let alone his waistline. Bond flicking through a ornithological book at one point was a cute touch

---

The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck Mark Manson Certainly a wildcard to include here and not without its problems, The Subtle Art is a curious manifesto on how to approach life. Whilst Manson expouses an age-old philosophy of grounding yourself and ignoring the accumulation of flatscreen TVs, etc. he manages to do so in a fresh and provocative "21st-centry gonzo" style. Highly entertaining, at one point the author posits an alternative superhero ("Disappointment Panda") that dishes out unsolicited and uncomfortable truths to strangers before simply walking away: "You know, if you make more money, that s not going to make your kids love you," or: "What you consider friendship is really just your constant attempts to impress people." Ouch.

---

The Fourth Protocol Frederick Forsyth I have a crystal-clear memory from my childhood of watching a single scene from a film in the dead of night: Pierce Brosnan sets a nuclear device to detonate after he can get away but a double-crossing accomplice surreptitiously brings the timetable forward in order that the bomb also disposes of him Anyway, at some point whilst reading The Fourth Protocol it dawned on me that this was that book. I might thus be giving the book more credit due to this highly satisfying connection but I think it stands alone as a superlative political page-turner and is still approachable outside the machinations of the Cold War.

---

The Partner John Grisham After indulging in a bit too much non-fiction and an aborted attempt at The Ministry of Fear, I turned to a few so-called lower-brow writers such as Jeffrey Archer, etc. However, it was The Partner that turned out to be a real page-turner for somewhat undefinable reasons. Alas, it appears the rest of the author's output is unfortunately in the same vein (laywers, etc.) so I am hesitant to immediately begin others but judging from various lists online I am glad I approached this one first.

---

Shogun: The First Novel of the Asian saga James Clavell Despite its length, I simply couldn't resist returning to Shogun this year although it did fatigue me to the point that I have still yet to commence on its sequel, Tai-Pan. Like any good musical composition, one is always rewarded by returning to a book and I took great delight in uncovering more symbolism throughout (such as noticing that one of the first words Blackthorne learns in Japanese is "truth") but also really savouring the tragic arcs that run throughout the novel, some beautiful phrases ("The day seemed to lose its warmth ") and its wistful themes of inevitability and karma.

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FOSDEM is one of the largest (5,000+ hackers!) gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each February in Brussels (Belgium, Europe). Once again, one of the tracks will be the Desktops DevRoom (formerly known as CrossDesktop DevRoom ), which will host Desktop-related talks. We are now inviting proposals for talks about Free/Libre/Open-source Software on the topics of Desktop development, Desktop applications and interoperability amongst Desktop Environments. This is a unique opportunity to show novel ideas and developments to a wide technical audience. Topics accepted include, but are not limited to:

• Open Desktops: Gnome, KDE, Unity, Enlightenment, XFCE, Razor, MATE, Cinnamon, ReactOS, CDE etc
• Closed desktops: Windows, Mac OS X, MorphOS, etc (when talking about a FLOSS topic)
• Software development for the desktop
• Development tools
• Applications that enhance desktops
• General desktop matters
• Cross-platform software development
• Web
• Thin clients, desktop virtualiation, etc

Talks can be very specific, such as the advantages/disadvantages of distributing a desktop application with snap vs flatpak, or as general as using HTML5 technologies to develop native applications. Topics that are of interest to the users and developers of all desktop environments are especially welcome. The FOSDEM 2016 schedule might give you some inspiration. Submissions Please include the following information when submitting a proposal:

• Your name
• The title of your talk (please be descriptive, as titles will be listed with around 400 from other projects)
• Short abstract of one or two paragraphs
• Short bio (with photo)
• Requested time: from 15 to 45 minutes. Normal duration is 30 minutes. Longer duration requests must be properly justified. You may be assigned LESS time than you request.

How to submit All submissions are made in the Pentabarf event planning tool: https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM17 To submit your talk, click on Create Event , then make sure to select the Desktops devroom as the Track . Otherwise your talk will not be even considered for any devroom at all. If you already have a Pentabarf account from a previous year, even if your talk was not accepted, please reuse it. Create an account if, and only if, you don t have one from a previous year. If you have any issues with Pentabarf, please contact desktops-devroom@lists.fosdem.org. Deadline The deadline for submissions is December 5th 2016. FOSDEM will be held on the weekend of 4 & 5 February 2017 and the Desktops DevRoom will take place on Sunday, February 5th 2017. We will contact every submitter with a yes or no before December 11th 2016. Recording permission The talks in the Desktops DevRoom will be audio and video recorded, and possibly streamed live too. In the Submission notes field, please indicate that you agree that your presentation will be licensed under the CC-By-SA-4.0 or CC-By-4.0 license and that you agree to have your presentation recorded. For example:

If my presentation is accepted for FOSDEM, I hereby agree to license all recordings, slides, and other associated materials under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International License. Sincerely, <NAME>.

If you want us to stop the recording in the Q & A part (should you have one), please tell us. We can do that but only for the Q & A part. More information The official communication channel for the Desktops DevRoom is its mailing list desktops-devroom@lists.fosdem.org. Use this page to manage your subscription: https://lists.fosdem.org/listinfo/desktops-devroom Organization The Desktops DevRoom 2017 is managed by a team representing the most notable open desktops:

• Pau Garcia i Quiles, KDE
• Christophe Fergeau, Gnome
• Michael Zanetti, Unity
• Philippe Caseiro, Enlightenment
• J rome Leclanche, Razor

If you want to join the team, please contact desktops-devroom@lists.fosdem.org

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday October 9 and Saturday October 15 2016: Media coverage

• despinosa wrote a blog post on Vala and reproducibility
• h01ger and lynxis gave a talk called "From Reproducible Debian builds to Reproducible OpenWrt, LEDE" (video, slides) at the OpenWrt Summit 2016 held in Berlin, together with ELCE, held by the Linux Foundation.
• A discussion on debian-devel@ resulted in a nice quotable comment from Paul Wise: "(Reproducible) builds from source (with continuous rechecking) is the only way to have enough confidence that a Debian user has the freedoms promised to them by the Debian social contract."
• Chris Lamb will present a talk at Software Freedom Kosovo on reproducible builds on Saturday 22nd October.

Documentation update After discussions with HW42, Steven Chamberlain, Vagrant Cascadian, Daniel Shahaf, Christopher Berg, Daniel Kahn Gillmor and others, Ximin Luo has started writing up more concrete and detailed design plans for setting SOURCE_ROOT_DIR for reproducible debugging symbols, buildinfo security semantics and buildinfo security infrastructure. Toolchain development and fixes Dmitry Shachnev noted that our patch for #831779 has been temporarily rejected by docutils upstream; we are trying to persuade them again. Tony Mancill uploaded javatools/0.59 to unstable containing original patch by Chris Lamb. This fixed an issue where documentation Recommends: substvars would not be reproducible. Ximin Luo filed bug 77985 to GCC as a pre-requisite for future patches to make debugging symbols reproducible. Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed The following updated packages have become reproducible - in our current test setup - after being fixed:

• cobbler/2.6.6+dfsg1-13 by Thomas Goirand, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• collectd/5.6.1-1 by Marc Fournier.
• fonts-tiresias/0.1-3 by G rkan Myczko, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• fntsample/4.0-2 by , original patch by Chris Lamb.
• fpga-icestorm/0~20160913git266e758-2 by Ruben Undheim, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• frog/0.13.5-1 by Maarten van Gompel, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• lambda-align/1.0.0-2 by Sascha Steinbiss, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• pleiades/1.7.0-2 by Hideki Yamane, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• sweethome3d/5.2+dfsg-1 by Markus Koschany, original fix by Gabriele Giacone.
• trac-subtickets/0.2.0-2 by W. Martin Borgert.

The following updated packages appear to be reproducible now, for reasons we were not able to figure out. (Relevant changelogs did not mention reproducible builds.)

• aodh/3.0.0-2 by Thomas Goirand.
• eog-plugins/3.16.5-1 by Michael Biebl.
• flam3/3.0.1-5 by Daniele Adriana Goulart Lopes.
• hyphy/2.2.7+dfsg-1 by Andreas Tille.
• libbson/1.4.1-1 by A. Jesse Jiryu Davis.
• libmongoc/1.4.1-1 by A. Jesse Jiryu Davis.
• lxc/1:2.0.5-1 by Evgeni Golov.
• spice-gtk/0.33-1 by Liang Guo.
• spice-vdagent/0.17.0-1 by Liang Guo.
• tnef/1.4.12-1 by Kevin Coyner.

Some uploads have addressed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them:

• chktex/1.7.6-1 by Thorsten Alteholz, original patch by Sascha Steinbiss.
• dbus/1.10.12-1 by Simon McVittie.
• doomsday/1.15.8-3 by Markus Koschany, #839338 by Lucas Nussbaum.
• emacs25/25.1+1-1 by Rob Browning.
• gpgme1.0/1.7.0-3 by Daniel Kahn Gillmor.
• monkeysign/2.2.0 by Antoine Beaupr .
• python-attrs/16.2.0-1 by Tristan Seligmann, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• shotwell/0.24.0-1 by J rg Frings-F rst, original patch by Alexis Bienven e.
• supple/1.0.6-2 by Daniel Silverstone.
• why/2.36-1 by Ralf Treinen, original patch by Valentin Lorentz.

Some uploads have addressed nearly all reproducibility issues, except for build path issues:

• palo/1.96 by Helge Deller, #778437 by Chris Lamb.
• rbdoom3bfg/1.1.0~preview3+dfsg+git20160807-1 by Tobias Frost.
• singular/4.0.3-p3+ds-1 by Jerome Benoit.
• varnish/5.0.0-3 by Stig Sandbeck Mathisen, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• yaml-cpp/0.5.2-4 by Paul Novotny, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.

Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #840741 filed against http-icons by Chris Lamb.
• #840177 filed against qconf by Chris Lamb.
• #840845 filed against python-pygraphviz by Chris Lamb.
• #840346 filed against qjoypad by Chris Lamb.

Reviews of unreproducible packages 101 package reviews have been added, 49 have been updated and 4 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 3 issue types have been updated:

• Added max_output_size_reached, ftbfs_due_to_jenkins_semaphore_setup, and build_id_differences_only.

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

• Anders Kaseorg (1)
• Chris Lamb (18)

tests.reproducible-builds.org Debian:

• h01ger has turned off the "Scheduled in testing+unstable+experimental" regular IRC notifications and turned them into emails to those running jenkins.d.n.
• Re-add opi2a armhf node and 3 new builder jobs for a total of 60 build jobs for armhf. (h01ger and vagrant)
• vagrant suggested to add a variation of init systems effecting the build, and h01ger added it to the TODO list.
• Steven Chamberlain submitted a patch so that now all buildinfo files are collected (unsigned yet) at submit@buildinfo.kfreebsd.eu.
• Holger enabled CPU type variation (Intel Haswell or AMD Opteron 62xx) for i386. Thanks to Profitbricks.com for their great and continued support!

Openwrt/LEDE/NetBSD/coreboot/Fedora/archlinux:

• Increase memory on the 2 build nodes from 12 to 16gb, thanks to profitbricks.com

Misc. We are running a poll to find a good time for an IRC meeting. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Holger Levsen & Chris Lamb and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.

I am happy to announce the release of OASIS v0.4.7. OASIS is a tool to help OCaml developers to integrate configure, build and install systems in their projects. It should help to create standard entry points in the source code build system, allowing external tools to analyse projects easily. This tool is freely inspired by Cabal which is the same kind of tool for Haskell. You can find the new release here and the changelog here. More information about OASIS in general on the OASIS website. Pull request for inclusion in OPAM is pending. Here is a quick summary of the important changes:

• Drop support for OASISFormat 0.2 and 0.1.
• New plugin "omake" to support build, doc and install actions.
• Improve automatic tests (Travis CI and AppVeyor)
• Trim down the dependencies (removed ocaml-gettext, camlp4, ocaml-data-notation)

Features:

• findlib_directory (beta): to install libraries in sub-directories of findlib.
• findlib_extra_files (beta): to install extra files with ocamlfind.
• source_patterns (alpha): to provide module to source file mapping.

This version contains a lot of changes and is the achievement of a huge amount of work. The addition of OMake as a plugin is a huge progress. The overall work has been targeted at making OASIS more library like. This is still a work in progress but we made some clear improvement by getting rid of various side effect (like the requirement of using "chdir" to handle the "-C", which leads to propage ~ctxt everywhere and design OASISFileSystem). I would like to thanks again the contributor for this release: Spiros Eliopoulos, Paul Snively, Jeremie Dimino, Christopher Zimmermann, Christophe Troestler, Max Mouratov, Jacques-Pascal Deplaix, Geoff Shannon, Simon Cruanes, Vladimir Brankov, Gabriel Radanne, Evgenii Lepikhin, Petter Urkedal, Gerd Stolpmann and Anton Bachin.

Last week-end, I was in Brussels, Belgium for the FOSDEM, one of the greatest open source developer conference. I was not sure to go there this year (I already skipped it in 2015), but it turned out I was requested to do a talk in the shared Lua & GNU Guile devroom. As a long time Lua user and developer, and a follower of GNU Guile for several years, the organizer asked me to run a talk that would be a link between the two languages. I've entitled my talk "How awesome ended up with Lua and not Guile" and gave it to a room full of interested users of the awesome window manager . We continued with a panel discussion entitled "The future of small languages Experience of Lua and Guile" composed of Andy Wingo, Christopher Webber, Ludovic Court s, Etiene Dalcol, Hisham Muhammaad and myself. It was a pretty interesting discussion, where both language shared their views on the state of their languages. It was a bit awkward to talk about Lua & Guile whereas most of my knowledge was year old, but it turns out many things didn't change. I hope I was able to provide interesting hindsight to both community. Finally, it was a pretty interesting FOSDEM to me, and it was a long time I didn't give talk here, so I really enjoyed it. See you next year!

My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donators (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me. Debian LTS I did not ask for any paid hours this month and won t be requesting paid hours for the next 5 months as I have a big project to handle with a deadline in June. That said I still did a few LTS related tasks:

• I uploaded a new version of debian-security-support (2016.01.07) to officialize that virtualbox-ose is no longer supported in Squeeze and that redmine was not really supportable ever since we dropped support for rails.
• Made a summary of the discussion about what to support in wheezy and started a new round of discussions with some open questions. I invited contributors to try to pickup one topic, study it and bring the discussion to some conclusion.
• I wrote a blog post to recruit new paid contributors. Brian May, Markus Koschany and Damyan Ivanov candidated and will do their first paid hours over February.

Distro Tracker Due to many nights spent on playing Splatoon (I m at level 33, rank B+, anyone else playing it?), I did not do much work on Distro Tracker. After having received the bug report #809211, I investigated the reasons why SQLite was no longer working satisfactorily in Django 1.9 and I opened the upstream ticket 26063 and I had a long discussion with two upstream developers to find out the best fix. The next point release (1.9.2) will fix that annoying regression. I also merged a couple of contributions (two patches from Christophe Siraut, one adding descriptions to keywords, cf #754413, one making it more obvious that chevrons in action items are actionable to show more data, a patch from Balasankar C in #810226 fixing a bad URL in an action item). I fixed a small bug in the unsubscribe command of the mail bot, it was not properly recognizing source packages. I updated the task notifying of new upstream versions to use the data generated by UDD (instead of the data generated by Christoph Berg s mole-based implementation which was suffering from a few bugs). Debian Packaging Testing experimental sbuild. While following the work of Johannes Schauer on sbuild, I installed the version from experimental to support his work and give him some feedback. In the process I uncovered #810248. Python sponsorship. I reviewed and uploaded many packages for Daniel Stender who keeps doing great work maintaining prospector and all its recursive dependencies: pylint-common, python-requirements-detector, sphinx-argparse, pylint-django, prospector. He also prepared an upload of python-bcrypt which I requested last month for Django. Django packaging. I uploaded Django 1.8.8 to jessie-backports.
My stable updates for Django 1.7.11 was not handled before the release of Debian 8.3 even though it was filed more than 1.5 months before. Misc stuff. My stable update for debian-handbook has been accepted fairly shortly after my last monthly report (thank you Adam!) so I uploaded the package once acked by a release manager. I also sponsor a backports upload of zim prepared by Joerg Desch. Kali related work Kernel work. The switch to Linux 4.3 in Kali resulted in a few bug reports that I investigated with the help of #debian-kernel and where I reported my findings back so that the Debian kernel could also benefit from the fixes I uploaded to Kali: first we included a patch for a regression in the vmwgfx video driver used by VMWare virtual machines (which broke the gdm login screen), then we fixed the input-modules udeb to fix support of some Logitech keyboards in debian-installer (see #796096). Misc work. I made a non-maintainer upload of python-maxminddb to fix #805689 which had been removed from stretch and that we needed in Kali. I also had to NMU libmaxminddb since it was no longer available on armel and we actually support armel in Kali. During that NMU, it occurred to me that dh-exec could offer a feature of optional install , that is installing a file that exists but not failing if it doesn t exist. I filed this as #811064 and it stirred up quite some debate. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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What happened in the reproducible builds effort between December 27th and January 2nd: Infrastructure dak now silently accepts and discards .buildinfo files (commit 1, 2), thanks to Niels Thykier and Ansgar Burchardt. This was later confirmed as working by Mattia Rizzolo. Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: banshee-community-extensions, javamail, mono-debugger-libs, python-avro. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• avrdude/6.2-5 by Milan Kupcevic.
• blosxom/2.1.2-2 uploaded by Rhonda D'Vine, original patches (#777292, #793001) by Chris Lamb and akira.
• buzztrax/0.10.2-2 uploaded by Sebastian Dr ge, original patch by Chris Lamb, fixed upstream.
• dx/1:4.4.4-8 by Graham Inggs.
• gap-guava/3.12+ds1-3 by Jerome Benoit.
• goffice/0.10.26-1 uploaded by Dmitry Smirnov, fixed upstream.
• gunroar/0.15.dfsg1-8 uploaded by Markus Koschany, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• iceweasel/43.0.2-1 by Mike Hommey.
• ii-esu/1.0a.dfsg1-7 uploaded by Markus Koschany, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• jing-trang/20131210+dfsg+1-4 by Samuel Thibault.
• mstflint/4.1.0+1.46.gb1cdaf7-1 by Mehdi Dogguy.
• mu-cade/0.11.dfsg1-9 uploaded by Markus Koschany, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• mumble/1.2.12-1 by Christopher Knadle.
• netris/0.52-10 by Rhonda D'Vine, original patches (#778201, #793707) by Chris Lamb and akira.
• onboard/1.1.2-2 uploaded by Mike Gabriel, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• parsec47/0.2.dfsg1-7 uploaded by Markus Koschany, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• pathological/1.1.3-14 by Markus Koschany.
• projectl/1.001.dfsg1-8 uploaded by Markus Koschany, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• re2c/0.15.3-1 by JCF Ploemen.
• s3d/0.2.2-14 by Sven Eckelmann.
• tulip/4.8.0dfsg-2 by Yann Dirson.
• val-and-rick/0.1a.dfsg1-5 uploaded by Markus Koschany, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• xterm/321-1 by Sven Joachim.

Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them:

• debian-installer/20160101 uploaded by Cyril Brulebois with several fixes from Steven Chamberlain.
• drbd-utils/8.9.5-1 by Apollon Oikonomopoulos.
• hhvm/3.11.0+dfsg-1 by Faidon Liambotis.
• rkward/0.6.4-1 uploaded by Thomas Friedrichsmeier, original patch by Philip Rinn.
• rsbackup/3.0-2 uploaded by Matthew Vernon, original patches (#777394, #793716) by Chris Lamb and akira.
• tin/1:2.3.2-1 by Marco d'Itri.
• transdecoder/2.0.1+dfsg-2 uploaded by Andreas Tille, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• tumiki-fighters/0.2.dfsg1-7 uploaded by Markus Koschany, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.

Untested changes:

• fltk1.1/1.1.10-20 by Aaron M. Ucko, currently FTBFS.
• fltk1.3/1.3.3-5 by Aaron M. Ucko, currently FTBFS.

reproducible.debian.net The testing distribution (the upcoming stretch) is now tested on armhf. (h01ger) Four new armhf build nodes provided by Vagrant Cascandian were integrated in the infrastructer. This allowed for 9 new armhf builder jobs. (h01ger) The RPM-based build system, koji, is now in unstable and testing. (Marek Marczykowski-G recki, Ximin Luo). Package reviews 131 reviews have been removed, 71 added and 53 updated in the previous week. 58 new FTBFS reports were made by Chris Lamb and Chris West. New issues identified this week: nondeterminstic_ordering_in_gsettings_glib_enums_xml, nondeterminstic_output_in_warnings_generated_by_breathe, qt_translate_noop_nondeterminstic_ordering. Misc. Steven Chamberlain explained in length why reproducible cross-building across architectures mattered, and posted results of his tests comparing a stage1 debootstrapped chroot of linux-i386 once done from official Debian packages, the others cross-built from kfreebsd-amd64.

A blog post from my fellow Debian developer Paul Wise titled "The GPL is not magic pixie dust" explain the importance of making sure the GPL is enforced. I quote the blog post from Paul in full here with his permission:

The GPL is not magic pixie dust. It does not work by itself.
The first step is to choose a copyleft license for your code.
The next step is, when someone fails to follow that copyleft license, it must be enforced
and its a simple fact of our modern society that such type of work
is incredibly expensive to do and incredibly difficult to do.

-- Bradley Kuhn, in FaiF episode 0x57 As the Debian Website used to imply, public domain and permissively licensed software can lead to the production of more proprietary software as people discover useful software, extend it and or incorporate it into their hardware or software products. Copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL were created to close off this avenue to the production of proprietary software but such licenses are not enough. With the ongoing adoption of Free Software by individuals and groups, inevitably the community's expectations of license compliance are violated, usually out of ignorance of the way Free Software works, but not always. As Karen and Bradley explained in FaiF episode 0x57, copyleft is nothing if no-one is willing and able to stand up in court to protect it. The reality of today's world is that legal representation is expensive, difficult and time consuming. With gpl-violations.org in hiatus until some time in 2016, the Software Freedom Conservancy (a tax-exempt charity) is the major defender of the Linux project, Debian and other groups against GPL violations. In March the SFC supported a lawsuit by Christoph Hellwig against VMware for refusing to comply with the GPL in relation to their use of parts of the Linux kernel. Since then two of their sponsors pulled corporate funding and conferences blocked or cancelled their talks. As a result they have decided to rely less on corporate funding and more on the broad community of individuals who support Free Software and copyleft. So the SFC has launched a campaign to create a community of folks who stand up for copyleft and the GPL by supporting their work on promoting and supporting copyleft and Free Software. If you support Free Software, like what the SFC do, agree with their compliance principles, are happy about their successes in 2015, work on a project that is an SFC member and or just want to stand up for copyleft, please join Christopher Allan Webber, Carol Smith, Jono Bacon, myself and others in becoming a supporter. For the next week your donation will be matched by an anonymous donor. Please also consider asking your employer to match your donation or become a sponsor of SFC. Don't forget to spread the word about your support for SFC via email, your blog and or social media accounts.

I agree with Paul on this topic and just signed up as a Supporter of Software Freedom Conservancy myself. Perhaps you should be a supporter too?

The GPL is not magic pixie dust. It does not work by itself.
The first step is to choose a copyleft license for your code.
The next step is, when someone fails to follow that copyleft license, it must be enforced
and its a simple fact of our modern society that such type of work
is incredibly expensive to do and incredibly difficult to do.

-- Bradley Kuhn, in FaiF episode 0x57 As the Debian Website used to imply, public domain and permissively licensed software can lead to the production of more proprietary software as people discover useful software, extend it and or incorporate it into their hardware or software products. Copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL were created to close off this avenue to the production of proprietary software but such licenses are not enough. With the ongoing adoption of Free Software by individuals and groups, inevitably the community's expectations of license compliance are violated, usually out of ignorance of the way Free Software works, but not always. As Karen and Bradley explained in FaiF episode 0x57, copyleft is nothing if no-one is willing and able to stand up in court to protect it. The reality of today's world is that legal representation is expensive, difficult and time consuming. With gpl-violations.org in hiatus until some time in 2016, the Software Freedom Conservancy (a tax-exempt charity) is the major defender of the Linux project, Debian and other groups against GPL violations. In March the SFC supported a lawsuit by Christoph Hellwig against VMware for refusing to comply with the GPL in relation to their use of parts of the Linux kernel. Since then two of their sponsors pulled corporate funding and conferences blocked or cancelled their talks. As a result they have decided to rely less on corporate funding and more on the broad community of individuals who support Free Software and copyleft. So the SFC has launched a campaign to create a community of folks who stand up for copyleft and the GPL by supporting their work on promoting and supporting copyleft and Free Software. If you support Free Software, like what the SFC do, agree with their compliance principles, are happy about their successes in 2015, work on a project that is an SFC member and or just want to stand up for copyleft, please join Christopher Allan Webber, Carol Smith, Jono Bacon, myself and others in becoming a supporter. For the next week your donation will be matched by an anonymous donor. Please also consider asking your employer to match your donation or become a sponsor of SFC. Don't forget to spread the word about your support for SFC via email, your blog and or social media accounts.

Over the rainy weekend we watched two movies: Monuments Men (in Japanese it is called Michelangelo Project!) and Interstellar. Both blockbuster movies from the usual American companies, they are light-years away when it comes to quality. The Monuments Men are boring, without a story, without depth, historically inaccurate, a complete failure. Interstellar, although a long movie, keeps you frozen in the seat while being as scientific as possible and starts your brain working heavily. My personal verdict: 3 rotten eggs (because Rotten Tomatoes are not stinky enough) for the Monuments Men, and 4 stars for Interstellar. Story First for the plot of the two movies: The Monuments Men is loosely based on a true story about rescuing pieces of art at the end of the second world war, before the Nazis destroy them or the Russian take them away. A group of art experts is sent into Europe and manages to find several hiding places of art taken by the Nazis. Interstellar is set in near future where the conditions on the earth are deteriorating to a degree that human life seems to be soon impossible. Some years before the movie plays a group of astronauts were sent through a wormhole into a different galaxy to search for new inhabitable planets. Now it is time to check out these planets, and try to establish colonies there. Cooper, a retired NASA officer and pilot, now working as farmer, and his daughter are guided by some mysterious way to a secret NASA facility. Cooper is drafted for being a pilot on the reconnaissance mission, and leaves earth and our galaxy through the same wormhole. (Not telling more!) Monuments Men Looking at the cast of Monuments Men (George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban, Hugh Bonneville, and Cate Blanchett) one would expect a great movie but from the very first to the very last scene, it is a slowly meandering shallow flow of sticked together scenes without much coherence. Tension is generated only through unrelated events (stepping onto a landmine, patting a horse), but never developed properly. Dialogs are shallow and boring with one exception: When Frank Stokes (George Clooney) meets the one German and inquires general about the art, predicting his future being hanged. Historically, the movie is as inaccurate as it can be despite Clooney stating that 80 percent of the story is still completely true and accurate, and almost all of the scenes happened . That contrasts starkly with the verdict of Nigel Pollard (Swansea University): There s a kernel of history there, but The Monuments Men plays fast and loose with it in ways that are probably necessary to make the story work as a film, but the viewer ends up with a fairly confused notion of what the organisation was, and what it achieved. The movie leaves a bitter aftertaste, hailing of American heroism paired with the usual stereotypes (French amour, German retarded, Russian ignorance, etc). Together with the half baked dialogues it feels like a permanent coitus interruptus. Interstellar Interstellar cannot serve with a similar cast, but still a few known people (Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, and Michael Caine!). But I believe this is actually a sign of quality. Well balancing scientific accuracy and the requirements for blockbusters, the movie successfully spans the bridge between complicated science, in particular general gravity, and entertainment. While not going so far to call the move edutainment (like both the old and new Cosmos), it is surprising how much of hard science is packed into this movie. This is mostly thanks to the theoretical physicist Kip Thorne acting as scientific consultant for the movie, but also due to the director Christopher Nolan being serious about it and studying relativity at Caltech. Of course, scientific accuracy has limits nobody knows what happens if one crosses the event horizon of a black hole, and even the existence of wormholes is purely theoretical by now. Still, throughout the movie it follows the two requirements laid out by Kip Thorne: First, that nothing would violate established physical laws. Second, that all the wild speculations would spring from science and not from the fertile mind of a screenwriter. I think the biggest compliment was that, despite the length, despite a long day out (see next blog), despite the rather unfamiliar topic, my wife, who is normally not interested in space movies and that kind, didn t fall asleep throughout the movie, and I had to stop several times to explain details of the theory of gravity and astronomy. So in some sense it was perfect edutainment!

MiniDebconf postings are being typed on my lap on a laptop real time.

I can't remember the consistent format of how I titled them last time :)

Thanks to all for coffee carrying, to Planet Debian for getting the postings up so quickly, to front desk, organisers, facilitators.

Next up - Network Performance Tuning: Lessons from the Coal Face by Christopher J Walker

[And yes, elgriff, I'm breaking all your good advice I heard less than an hour ago]

FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each February in Brussels (Belgium, Europe). One of the tracks will be the Desktops DevRoom (formerly known as CrossDesktop DevRoom ), which will host Desktop-related talks. We are now inviting proposals for talks about Free/Libre/Open-source Software on the topics of Desktop development, Desktop applications and interoperability amongst Desktop Environments. This is a unique opportunity to show novel ideas and developments to a wide technical audience. Topics accepted include, but are not limited to:

• Open Desktops: Gnome, KDE, Unity, Enlightenment, XFCE, Razor, MATE, Cinnamon, ReactOS, etc
• Closed desktops: Windows, Mac OS X, CDE, MorphOS, etc (when talking about a FLOSS topic)
• Software development for the desktop
• Development tools
• Applications that enhance desktops
• General desktop matters
• Cross-platform software development
• Web

Talks can be very specific, such as the advantages/disadvantages of development with Qt on Wayland over X11/Mir; or as general as predictions for the fusion of Desktop and web in 5 years time. Topics that are of interest to the users and developers of all desktop environments are especially welcome. The FOSDEM 2015 schedule might give you some inspiration. Submissions Please include the following information when submitting a proposal:

• Your name
• The title of your talk (please be descriptive, as titles will be listed with around 400 from other projects)
• Short abstract of one or two paragraphs
• Short bio (with photo)
• Requested time: from 15 to 45 minutes. Normal duration is 30 minutes. Longer duration requests must be properly justified. You may be assigned LESS time than you request.

How to submit All submissions are made in the Pentabarf event planning tool: https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM16 When submitting your talk, make sure to select the Desktops devroom as the Track . Otherwise your talk will not be even considered for any devroom. If you already have a Pentabarf account from a previous year, even if your talk was not accepted, please reuse it. Create an account if, and only if, you don t have one from a previous year. If you have any issues with Pentabarf, please contact pgquiles at elpauer dot org. Deadline The deadline for submissions is December 6th 2015. FOSDEM will be held on the weekend of January 30th and 31st 2015 and the Desktops DevRoom will take place on Sunday, January 31st 2015. We will contact every submitter with a yes or no before December 18th 2015. Recording permission The talks in the Desktops devroom will be audio and video recorded, and possibly streamed live too. By submitting a proposal you consent to be recorded and agree to license the content of your talk under a Creative Commons (CC-BY) license. If you want us to stop the recording in the Q & A part (should you have one), please tell us. We can do that but only for the Q & A part. More information The official communication channel for the Desktops DevRoom is its mailing list desktops-devroom@lists.fosdem.org. Use this page to manage your subscription: https://lists.fosdem.org/listinfo/desktops-devroom Organization The Desktops DevRoom 2016 is managed by a team representing the most notable open desktops:

• Pau Garcia i Quiles, KDE
• Christophe Fergeau, Gnome
• Michael Zanetti, Unity
• Philippe Caseiro, Enlightenment
• J rome Leclanche, Razor

If you want to join the team, please contact pgquiles at elpauer dot org

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes

• Robert Luberda uploaded ispell/3.4.00-4 which fixes another issue with uninitialized memory in ispell hashes. Original patch by Valentin Lorentz.
• Robert Luberda uploaded man2html/1.6g-8 which adds support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. Original patch by akira.
• gregor herrmann uploaded libdebian-copyright-perl/0.2-3 which sorts copyright files for deterministic ordering. Original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• Rafael Laboissiere uploaded octave-pkg-dev/1.3.2 which normalizes the name of the temporary build directory. This doesn't seem to be enough to make Octave packages reproducible just yet, though.
• Nicolas Boulenguez uploaded gprbuild/2015-1 which sets a deterministic date to the generated source.

Packages fixed The following packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: maven-plugin-tools, norwegian, ocaml-melt, python-biom-format, rivet. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• apache2/2.4.17-1 by Stefan Fritsch.
• autogen/1:5.18.6-3 by Andreas Metzler.
• debian-timeline/37 by Chris Lamb.
• fonty-rg/0.6 uploaded by Radovan Garab k, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• foxeye/0.10.2-2 by Andriy Grytsenko.
• hsqldb/2.3.3+dfsg2-1 by Markus Koschany.
• jasperreports/6.1.1+dfsg-1 uploaded by Markus Koschany, fix by Emmanuel Bourg.
• libmath-base-convert-perl/0.11-2 uploaded by Salvatore Bonaccorso, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• libsdl2-gfx/1.0.1+dfsg-2 uploaded by Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• libsdl2/2.0.2+dfsg1-8 uploaded by Gianfranco Costamagna, patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• linux/4.2.5-1 by Ben Hutchings.
• litl/0.1.7+dfsg-1 by Samuel Thibault, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• python-keystoneclient/1:1.7.1-4 by Thomas Goirand.
• sphinxbase/0.8+5prealpha-1 by Samuel Thibault.
• tatan/1.0.dfsg1-6 uploaded by Markus Koschany, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• v4l2loopback/0.9.1-4 uploaded by IOhannes m zm lnig, original patch.
• yadifa/2.1.4-2 uploaded by Markus Schade, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.

Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them:

• lcov/1.12-2 by Alastair McKinstry, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• libsdl1.2/1.2.15-12 uploaded by Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• metview/4.5.7-1 by Alastair McKinstry.
• mumble/1.2.10-2 by Christopher Knadle.

The following package is currently failing to build from source but should now be reproducible:

• p4vasp/0.3.29+dfsg-2 uploaded by Graham Inggs, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.

Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #803501 on fdroidserver by Reiner Herrmann: add support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to docs/gendocs.sh and normalizes tarball permissions. Sent upstream.
• #803547 on bbswitch by Reiner Herrmann: tell tar to normalize the permissions.
• #803583 on ndiswrapper by Reiner Herrmann: tell tar to normalize the permissions.
• #803601 on xtables-addons by Reiner Herrmann: tell tar to normalize the permissions.
• #803603 on usb-modeswitch-data by Reiner Herrmann: tell tar to normalize the permissions.

reproducible.debian.net A quick update on current statistics: testing is at 85% of packages tested reproducible with our modified packages, unstable on armhf caught up with amd64 with 80%. The schroot name used for running diffoscope when testing OpenWrt, NetBSD, Coreboot, and Arch Linux has been fixed. (h01ger, Mattia Rizzolo) Documentation update Paul Gevers documented timestamps in unit files created by the Free Pascal Compiler. reproducible-builds.org is now live. It contains a comprehensive documentation on all aspects that have been identified so far of what we call reproducible builds . It makes room for pointers to projects working on reproducible builds, news, dedicated tools, and community events. Package reviews 206 reviews have been removed, 171 added and 196 updated this week. Chris Lamb reported 28 failing to build from source issues. New issues identified this week: timestamps_in_pdf_content, different_encoding_in_html_by_docbook_xsl, timestamps_in_ppu_generated_by_fpc, method_may_never_be_called_in_documentation_generated_by_javadoc. Misc. Andrei Borzenkov has proposed a fix for uninitialized memory in GRUB's mkimage. Uninitialized memory is one source of hard to track down reproducibility errors. Holger Levsen presented the efforts on reproduible builds at Festival de Software Libre in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

It is now official: KDE will be present again at FOSDEM in the 2016 edition, on the 30th and 31st of January, 2016. Talks will take place at the Desktops DevRoom, on Sunday the 31st, but not exclusively: in past years, there were Qt and KDE-related talks at the mobile devroom, lightning talks, distributions, open document editors and more. KDE will be sharing the room with other desktop environments, as usual: Gnome, Unity, Enlightenment, Razor, etc. Representatives from those communities will be helping me in managing and organizing the devroom: Christophe Fergeau, Michael Zanetti, Philippe Caseiro and J rome Leclanche. I would like to extend the invitation to any other free/open source desktop environment and/or related stuff. Check last year s schedule for an example. Closed-source shops (Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, etc) are ALSO invited, provided that you will talk about something related to open source. We will publish the Call for Talks for the Desktops DevRoom 2016 soon. Stay tuned. In the meanwhile, you can subscribe to the Desktops DevRoom mailing list to be informed of important and useful information, and talk about FOSDEM and specific issues of the Desktops DevRoom.

Review: Firebird, by Jack McDevitt

Series:	Alex Benedict #6
Publisher:	Ace
Copyright:	November 2011
Printing:	October 2012
ISBN:	1-937007-80-4
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	357

Firebird is the sixth book in the Alex Benedict series about an antique hunter in the far future (albeit a far future that looks exactly like 1960s suburbia, but with spaceships). This is a very episodic series, though, and I don't think it would be hurt much by starting in the middle. There are references to earlier investigations, but they're fleeting, and I often didn't map them to remembered plots even though I've read the whole series to this point. The investigation in this book starts with the heir to an estate coming to Alex to sell some of the possessions of a physicist. Chase (Alex's assistant, and here, as in the last few books, the viewpoint character) doesn't even recognize the name, but Alex does: Christopher Robin disappeared forty-one years earlier, under circumstances that were never fully explained. He was also (and unusually for a physicist) interested in strange and marginal ideas: dark energy, new drive technology, parallel universes one could potentially cross into, and similar fringe concepts. The normal pattern of this series is that Alex will hear about some mystery, be unable to restrain his curiosity, and start poking around, usually turning up things that people would rather he didn't. It takes a while for that to happen here; instead, the story starts with Alex playing up popular interest in Robin's ideas in a rather mercenary attempt to increase the value of the estate. He stumbles into more mystery mostly by accident. Eventually he can't resist the allure of a revealed link between Christopher Robin and sightings of mysterious disappearing starships and the normal pattern kicks in, but he spends rather more of the book than normal being flippant and slightly unethical. I didn't much like the shift in tone. Alex is a lot harder to like this book, and not just for his business practices. His tone towards Chase also moves past the slightly superior smugness that's common to many books of this type (think Nero Wolfe) and well into condescending ass. Some of this may be intentional, as McDevitt uses this book to bring out a bit more of Alex and Chase's past and has some story reasons for making Alex less of a saint. But some of it feels accidental, or unnoticed, and it left a bad taste in my mouth. As with a lot of McDevitt, the actual mystery is slow, a bit scattered, and has a fair number of blind alleys. That property makes these books feel more like real investigations, but it works better when the characters are fully engaged in the investigation and are communicating a bit better than they are here. The plot also gets entangled in a subplot about a planet full of abandoned AIs, and while that was moderately interesting, it felt like an extended digression with dubious relevance to the main plot. McDevitt occasionally has trouble with plot focus, and I think I noticed more this time because the characters weren't as fun to spend time with. The end of Firebird was up to the usual standards of this series, albeit surprisingly traumatic. The rest of the book, though, felt markedly weaker. Alex decided to be obnoxious and play into his (previously mostly inaccurate) public perception as a money and glory hound. Chase seemed too flippant, uninterested, and a bit too much of a foil instead of a partner. And the plot felt like two different story ideas awkwardly smushed together. I think this was the weakest of the series to date. Hopefully the next book, which looks to be more of a direct sequel to this one, will improve. Followed by Coming Home. Rating: 6 out of 10

My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donators (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me. Debian LTS This month I have been paid to work 6.5 hours on Debian LTS. In that time I did the following:

• Prepared and released DLA-301-1 fixing 2 CVE in python-django.
• Did one week of LTS Frontdesk with CVE triaging. I pushed 11 commits to the security tracker.

Apart from that, I also gave a talk about Debian LTS at DebConf 15 in Heidelberg and also coordinated a work session to discuss our plans for Wheezy. Have a look at the video recordings:

• Debian Long Term Support: Past Present and Future (slides)
• Preparing for Wheezy LTS

DebConf 15 I attended DebConf 15 with great pleasure after having missed DebConf 14 last year. While I did not do lots of work there, I participated in many discussions and I certainly came back with a renewed motivation to work on Debian. That s always good. For the concrete work I did during DebConf, I can only claim two schroot uploads to fix the lack of support of the new overlay filesystem that replaces aufs in the official Debian kernel, and some Distro Tracker work (fixing an issue that some people had when they were logged in via Debian s SSO). While the numerous discussions I had during DebConf can t be qualified as work , they certainly contribute to build up work plans for the future: As a Kali developer, I attended multiple sessions related to derivatives (notably the Debian Derivatives Panel). I was also interested by the Debian in the corporate IT BoF led by Michael Meskes (Credativ s CEO). He pointed out a number of problems that corporate users might have when they first consider using Debian and we will try to do something about this. Expect further news and discussions on the topic. Martin Kraff, Luca Filipozzi, and me had a discussion with the Debian Project Leader (Neil) about how to revive/transform the Debian s Partner program. Nothing is fleshed out yet, but at least the process initiated by the former DPL (Lucas) is again moving forward. Other Debian work Sponsorship. I sponsored an NMU of pep8 by Daniel Stender as it was a requirement for prospector which I also sponsored since all the required dependencies are now available in Debian. \o/ Packaging. I NMUed libxml2 2.9.2+really2.9.1+dfsg1-0.1 fixing 3 security issues and a RC bug that was breaking publican. Since there s no upstream fix for more than 8 months, I went back to the former version 2.9.1. It s in line with the new requirement of release managers a package in unstable should migrate to testing reasonably quickly, it s not acceptable to keep it unfixed for months. With this annoying bug fixed, I could again upload a new upstream release of publican so I prepared and uploaded 4.3.2-1. It was my first source only upload. This release was more work than I expected and I filed no less than 3 bug to upstream (new bash-completion install path, request to provide sources of a minified javascript file, drop a .po file for an invalid language code). GPG issues with smartcard. Back from DebConf, when I wanted to sign some key, I stumbled again upon the problem which makes it impossible for me to use my two smartcards one after the other without first deleting the stubs for the private key. It s not a new issue but I decided that it was time to report it upstream, so I did it: #2079 on bugs.gnupg.org. Some research helped me to find a way to work-around the problem. Later in the month, after a dist-upgrade and a reboot, I was no longer able to use my smartcard as a SSH authentication key again it was already reported but there was no clear analysis, so I tried to do my own one and added the results of my investigation in #795368. It looks like the culprit is pinentry-gnome3 not working when started by the gpg-agent which is started before the DBUS session. Simple fix is to restart the gpg-agent in the session but I have no idea yet of what the proper fix should be (letting systemd manage the graphical user session and start gpg-agent would be my first answer, but that doesn t solve the issue for users of other init systems so it s not satisfying). Distro Tracker. I merged two patches from Orestis Ioannou fixing some bugs tagged newcomer. There are more such bugs (I even filed two: #797096 and #797223), go grab them and do a first contribution to Distro Tracker like Orestis just did! I also merged a change from Christophe Siraut who presented Distro Tracker at DebConf. I implemented in Distro Tracker the new authentication based on SSL client certificates that was recently announced by Enrico Zini. It s working nice, and this authentication scheme is far easier to support. Good job, Enrico! tracker.debian.org broke during DebConf, it stopped being updated with new data. I tracked this down to a problem in the archive (see #796892). Apparently Ansgar Burchardt changed the set of compression tools used on some jessie repositorie, replacing bz2 by xz. He dropped the old Packages.bz2 but missed some Sources.bz2 which were thus stale and APT reported Hashsum mismatch on the uncompressed content. Misc. I pushed some small improvement to my Salt formulas: schroot-formula and sbuild-formula. They will now auto-detect which overlay filesystem is available with the current kernel (previously aufs was hardcoded). Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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This is my August update, and by the far the coolest thing in it is Debconf. Debconf15 I don t get tired of saying it is the best conference I ever attended. First it s a mix of meeting both new people and old friends, having the chance to chat with people whose work you admire but never had a chance to meet before. Second, it s always quality time: an informal environment, interesting and constructive presentations and discussions. This year the venue was again very nice. Another thing that was very nice was having so many kids and families. This was no coincidence, since this was the first DebConf in which there was organized childcare. As the community gets older, this a very good way of keeping those who start having kids from being alienated from the community. Of course, not being a parent yet I have no idea how actually hard is to bring small kids to a conference like DebConf. ;-) I presented two talks:

• Tutorial: Functional Testing of Debian packages, where I introduced the basic concepts of DEP-8/autopkgtest, and went over several examples from my packages giving tips and tricks on how to write functional tests for Debian packages.
  • Video recording (webm, ~470MB)
  • slides (PDF)
• Packaging the Free Software Web for the end user, where I presented the motivation for, and the current state of shak, a project I am working on to make it trivial for end users to install server side applications in Debian. I spent quite some hacking time during DebConf finishing a prototype of the shak web interface, which was demonstrated live in the talk (of course, as usual with live demos, not everything worked :-)).
  • Video recording (webm, ~450MB)
  • slides (PDF)

There was also the now traditional Ruby BoF, where discussed the state and future of the Ruby ecosystem in Debian; and an in promptu Ruby packaging workshop where we introduced the basics of packaging in general, and Ruby packaging specifically. Besides shak, I was able to hack on a few cool things during DebConf:

• debci has been updated with a first version of the code to produce britney hints files that block packages that fail their tests from migrating to testing. There are some issues to be sorted out together with the release team to make sure we don t block packages unecessarily, e.g. we don t want to block packages that never passed their test suite most the test suite, and not the package, is broken.
• while hacking I ended up updating jquery to the newest version in the 1.x series, and in fact adopting it I guess. This allowed emeto drop the embedded jquery copy I used to have in the shak repository, and since then I was able to improve the build to produce an output that is identical, except for a build timestamp inside a comment and a few empty lines, to the one produced by upstream, without using grunt (.

Miscellaneous updates

• Rails 4.2 in unstable: in order to support Diaspora (currently in experimental), and an upcoming Gitlab package (WIP). This requires quite some updates, NEW packages, and also making sure that Redmine is updated to a new upstream version. I did a few updates as part of this effort:
  • rails 2:4.2.3-3
  • ruby-arel 6.0.3-1
  • ruby-coffee-script 2.4.1-1
  • ruby-coffee-script-source 1.9.1.1-1
  • ruby-commander 4.3.5-1
  • ruby-execjs 2.4.0-1
  • ruby-globalid 0.3.6-1
  • ruby-jbuilder 2.3.1-1
  • ruby-jquery-rails 4.0.4-2
  • ruby-minitest 5.8.0-1
  • ruby-multi-json 1.11.2-1
  • ruby-rack-test 0.6.3-1
  • ruby-sass-rails 5.0.3-1
  • ruby-spring 1.3.6-1
  • ruby-sprockets 3.3.0-1~exp2
  • ruby-sprockets-rails 2.3.2-1~exp1
  • ruby-sqlite3 1.3.10-1
  • ruby-turbolinks 2.5.3-1
• rerun (NEW), a tool to launch commands and restart them on filesystem change. Very useful when writing sinatra/rack applications.
• vagrant: new upstream relaese, supporting VirtualBox 5.0
• pinpoint: new upstream release, ported to clutter-gst-3.0
• chake: new upstream release
• gem2deb: new release with several improvements, and a bug fix followup
• chef: fix installation of initscripts
• pry: fixed imcompatibility with new ruby-slop (RC bug)
• foodcritic: fixed test suite run during build (RC bug)
• library updates:
  • ruby-grape-logging
  • ruby-hashie (2 RC bugs)
  • ruby-listen: new upstream release, fixed test suite (RC bug)
  • ruby-rspec-retry: new upstrean release, fixed test suite (RC bug)
  • ruby-dbf: new upstream release (sponsored, work by Christopher Baines)
  • ruby-bootstrap-sass: new upstream release + fixed to work on non-Rails apps
  • ruby-rails-dom-testing (NEW, dependency for rails 4.2)
  • ruby-rails-deprecated-sanitizer (NEW, dependency for rails 4.2)
  • ruby-rmagick new upstream release
  • ruby-uglifier new upstream release
  • ruby-cri (RC bug)
    • I was making source+arch:all uploads for a while, but this was my first ever source-only upload of an architecture-independent package to Debian, following the recent developments on the topic.