Pervasive technology contributes to the idea that the internet is immaterial With their search engine website design, Google has put in place an extremely simple and straightforward user interface. Since then, designers and psychologists have worked on making user interfaces more and more intuitive to use. The buzzwords are usability and user experience design . Besides this optimization of visual interfaces, haptic interfaces have evolved as well, specifically on smartphones and tablets where hand gestures have replaced more clumsy external haptic interfaces such as a mouse. And beyond interfaces, the devices themselves have become smaller and slicker. While in our generation many people have experienced opening a computer tower or a laptop to replace parts, with the side effect of seeing the parts the device is physically composed of, the new generation of end user devices makes this close to impossible, essentially transforming these devices into black boxes, and further contributing to the idea that the internet they are being used to access with would be something entirely intangible.

What do kids in 2022 really know about the internet? So, what do kids of that generation really know about the internet, beyond purely using services they do not control? In order to find out, I decided to interview children between 10 and 18. I conducted 5 interviews with kids aged 9, 10, 12, 15 and 17, two boys and three girls. Two live in rural Germany, one in a German urban area, and two live in the French capital. I wrote the questions in a way to stimulate the interviewees to tell me a story each time. I also told them that the interview is not a test and that there are no wrong answers. Except for the 9 year old, all interviewees possessed both, their own smartphone and their own laptop. All of them used the internet mostly for chatting, entertainment (video and music streaming, online games), social media (TikTok, Instagram, Youtube), and instant messaging. Let me introduce you to their concepts of the internet. That was my first story telling question to them:

If aliens had landed on Earth and would ask you what the internet is, what would you explain to them? The majority of respondents agreed in their replies that the internet is intangible while still being a place where one can do anything and everything . Before I tell you more about their detailed answers to the above question, let me show you how they visualize their internet.

If you had to make a drawing to explain to a person what the internet is, how would this drawing look like? Each interviewee had some minutes to come up with a drawing. As you will see, that drawing corresponds to what the kids would want an alien to know about the internet and how they are using the internet themselves.

Movies, series, videos The youngest respondent, a 9 year old girl, drew a screen with lots of people around it and the words film, series, network, video , as well as a play icon. She said that she mostly uses the internet to watch movies. She was the only one who used a shared tablet and smartphone that belonged to her family, not to herself. And she would explain the net like this to an alien:

"Internet is a er one cannot touch it it s an, er [I propose the word idea ], yes it s an idea. Many people use it not necessarily to watch things, but also to read things or do other stuff."

User interface elements A 10 year old boy represented the internet by recalling user interface elements he sees every day in his drawing: a magnifying glass (search engine), a play icon (video streaming), speech bubbles (instant messaging). He would explain the internet like this to an alien:

"You can use the internet to learn things or get information, listen to music, watch movies, and chat with friends. You can do nearly anything with it."

Another planet A 12 year old girl imagines the internet like a second, intangible, planet where Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Ebay, or H&M are continents that one enters into.

"And on [the] Ebay [continent] there s a country for clothes, and ,trousers , for example, would be a federal state in that country."

Something that was unique about this interview was that she told me she had an email address but she never writes emails. She only has an email account to receive confirmation emails, for example when doing online shopping, or when registering to a service and needing to confirm one s address. This is interesting because it s an anti-spam measure that might become outdated with a generation that uses email less or not at all.

Home network A 15 year old boy knew that his family s devices are connected to a home router (Freebox is a router from the French ISP Free) but lacked an imagination of the rest of the internet s functioning. When I asked him about what would be behind the router, on the other side, he said what s behind is like a black hole to him. However, he was the only interviewee who did actually draw cables, wifi waves, a router, and the local network. His drawing is even extremely precise, it just lacks the cable connecting the router to the rest of the internet.

Satellite internet A 17 year old girl would explain the internet to an alien as follows:

"The internet goes around the entire globe. One is networked with everyone else on Earth. One can find everything. But one cannot touch the internet. It s like a parallel world. With a device one can look into the internet. With search engines, one can find anything in the world, one can phone around the world, and write messages. [The internet] is a gigantic thing."

This interviewee stated as the only one that the internet is huge. And while she also is the only one who drew the internet as actually having some kind of physical extension beyond her own home, she seems to believe that internet connectivity is based on satellite technology and wireless communication.

Imagine that a wise and friendly dragon could teach you one thing about the internet that you ve always wanted to know. What would you ask the dragon to teach you about? A 10 year old boy said he d like to know how big are the servers behind all of this . That s the only interview in which the word server came up. A 12 year old girl said I would ask how to earn money with the internet. I always wanted to know how this works, and where the money comes from. I love the last part of her question! The 15 year old boy for whom everything behind the home router is out of his event horizon would ask How is it possible to be connected like we are? How does the internet work scientifically? A 17 year old girl said she d like to learn how the darknet works, what hidden things are there? Is it possible to get spied on via the internet? Would it be technically possible to influence devices in a way that one can listen to secret or telecommanded devices? Lastly, I wanted to learn about what they find annoying, or problematic about the internet.

Imagine you could make the internet better for everyone. What would you do first? Asked what she would change if she could, the 9 year old girl advocated for a global usage limit of the internet in order to protect the human brain. Also, she said, her parents spend way too much time on their phones and people should rather spend more time with their children. Three of the interviewees agreed that they see way too many advertisements and two of them would like ads to disappear entirely from the web. The other one said that she doesn t want to see ads, but that ads are fine if she can at least click them away. The 15 year old boy had different ambitions. He told me he would change:

"the age of access to the internet. More and more younger people access the internet ; especially with TikTok there is a recommendation algorithm that can influcence young people a lot. And influencing young people should be avoided but the internet does it too much. And that can be negative. If you don t yet have a critical spirit, and you watch certain videos you cannot yet moderate your stance. It can influence you a lot. There are so many things that have become indispensable and that happen on the internet and we have become dependent. What happens if one day it doesn t work anymore? If we connect more and more things to the net, that s not a good thing."

The internet - Oh, that s what you mean! On a sidenote, my first interview tentative was with an 8 year old girl from my family. I asked her if she uses the internet and she denied, so I abandoned interviewing her. Some days later, while talking to her, she proposed to look something up on Google, using her smartphone. I said: Oh, so you are using the internet! She replied: Oh, that s what you re talking about? I think she knows the word Google and she knows that she can search for information with this Google thing. But it appeared that she doesn t know that the Google search engine is located somewhere else on internet and not on her smartphone. I concluded that for her, using the services on the smartphone is as natural as switching on a light in the house: we also don t think about where the electricity comes from when we do that.

What can we learn from these few interviews? Unsurprisingly, social media, streaming, entertainment, and instant messaging are the main activities kids undertake on the internet. They are completely at the mercy of advertisements in apps and on websites, not knowing how to get rid of them. They interact on a daily basis with algorithms that are unregulated and known to perpetuate discrimination and to create filter bubbles, without necessarily being aware of it. The kids I interviewed act as mere service users and seem to be mostly confined to specific apps or websites. All of them perceived the internet as being something intangible. Only the older interviewees perceived that there must be some kind of physical expansion to it: the 17 year old girl by drawing a network of satellites around the globe, the 15 year old boy by drawing the local network in his home. To be continued

$ sudo apt install ubuntu-dev-tools

$ mkdir mesa-downgrade; cd mesa-downgrade

$ pull-lp-debs mesa 21.3.5-1ubuntu2

• pull-lp-source downloads source package from Launchpad.
• pull-lp-debs downloads debs package(s) from Launchpad.
• pull-lp-ddebs downloads dbgsym/ddebs package(s) from Launchpad.
• pull-lp-udebs downloads udebs package(s) from Launchpad.
• pull-debian-* same as pull-lp-* but for Debian packages.

$ sudo apt install --only-upgrade --mark-auto ./*.deb

$ sudo apt dist-upgrade

$ sudo apt-mark hold

$ cd .. ; rm -ri mesa-downgrade

$ sudo apt install libegl-mesa0/jammy

$ apt list --installed --all-versions  grep local] --after-context 1

 
  "m.homeserver":  
    "base_url": "https://luv.asn.au"
   
  "jitsi":  
    "preferredDomain": "jitsi.perthchat.org"
   
  "im.vector.riot.jitsi":  
    "preferredDomain": "jitsi.perthchat.org"
   
 

• [1] https://flounder.linux.org.au/
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/ydy7bpzb

• [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_(display_server_protocol)
• [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xephyr
• [3] https://wiki.debian.org/KDE
• [4] https://wiki.debian.org/Wayland
• [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQoQE_HDG8g
• [6] https://pipewire.org/

Anger workshop Based on my readings about the subject and a mediation training, I created a first workshop about dealing with one s own anger for the feminist hackers assembly in 2020. Many women who attended said they recognized themselves in what I was talking about. I created the exercises in the workshop with the goal of getting participants to share and self-reflect in small groups. I m not giving out solutions, instead proposals on how to deal with anger come from the participants themselves. (I added the last two content pages to the file after the workshop.) This is why this workshop is always different, depending on the group and what they want to share. The first time I did this workshop was a huge success and so I created an improved version for the assembly of 2021. Angry womxn* workshop

The act of saying NO We often say yes, despite wanting to say no, out of a sense of duty, or because we learned that we should always be nice and helpful, and that our own needs are best served last. Many people don t really know how to say no. Sarah Cooper, a former Google employee herself, makes fun of this in her fabulous book How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men s Feelings (highly recommended read!): That s why a discussion space about saying NO did not seem out of place at the feminist hackers assembly :) I based my workshop on the original, created by the Institute of War and Peace Reporting and distributed through their holistic security training manual. I like this workshop because sharing happens in a small groups and has an immediately felt effect. Several people reported that the exercises allowed them to identify the exact moment when they had said yes to something despite really having wanted to say no. The exercises from the workshop can easily be done with a friend or trusted person, and they can even be done alone by writing them down, although the effect in writing might be less pronounced. The act of saying NO workshop

Mapping capacities and desires Based on discussions with a friend, whose company uses SWOT analysis (strengths weaknesses opportunities threats) to regularly check in with their employees, and to allow employees to check in with themselves, I created a similar tool for myself which I thought would be nice to share with others. It s a very simple self-reflection that can help map out what works well, what doesn t work so well and where one wants to go in the future. I find it important to not use this tool narrow-mindedly only regarding work skills and expertise. Instead, I think it s useful to also include soft skills, hobbies, non-work capacities and whatever else comes to mind in order to create a truer map. Fun fact: During the assembly, a bunch of participants reported that they found it hard to distinguish between things they don t like doing and things they don t know how to do. Mapping capacities and desires

Known issues One important feedback point I got is that people felt the time for the exercises in all three workshops could have been longer. In case you want to try out these workshops, you might want to take this into account.

I am old... The only formal timestamp I can put is that my rebuilt .emacs.d git repository has its first commit in 2002. Some people reading this may be born after that time. This means I'm at least significantly older than those people, to put things gently. Clever history nerds will notice that the commit is obviously fake: Git itself did not exist until 2005. But ah-ah! I was already managing my home directory with CVS in 2001! I converted that repository into git some time in 2009, and therefore you can see all my embarrassing history, including changes from two decades ago. That includes my first known .emacs file which is just bizarre to read right now: 200 lines, most of which are "customize" stuff. Compare with the current, 1000+ lines init.el which is also still kind of a mess, but actually shares very little with the original, thankfully. All this to say that in those years (decades, really) of using Emacs, I have had a very different experience than credmp who wrote packages, sent patches, and got name dropping from other developers. My experience is just struggling to keep up with everything, in general, but also in Emacs.

... and Emacs is too fast for me It might sound odd to say, but Emacs is actually moving pretty fast right now. A lot of new packages are coming out, and I can hardly keep up.

• I am not using org mode, but did use it for time (and task) tracking for a while (and for invoicing too, funky stuff).
• I am not using mu4e, but maybe I'm using something better (notmuch) and yes, I am reading my mail in Emacs, which I find questionable from a security perspective. (Sandboxing untrusted inputs? Anyone?)
• I am using magit, but only when coding, so I do end up using git on the command line quite a bit anyways.
• I do have which-key enabled, and reading about it reminded me I wanted to turn it off because it's kind of noisy and I never remember I can actually use it for anything. Or, in other words, I don't even remember the prefix key or, when I do, there's too many possible commands after for it to be useful.
• I haven't setup lsp-mode, let alone Eglot, which I just learned about reading the article. I thought I would be super shiny and cool by setting up LSP instead of the (dying?) elpy package, but I never got around to it. And now it seems lsp-mode is uncool and I should really do eglot instead, and that doesn't help. UPDATE: I finally got tired and switched to lsp-mode. The main reason for choosing it over eglot is that it's in Debian (and eglot is not). (Apparently, eglot has more chance of being upstreamed, "when it's done", but I guess I'll cross that bridge when I get there.) lsp-mode feels slower than elpy but I haven't done any of the performance tuning and this will improve even more with native compilation (see below). I already had lsp-mode partially setup in Emacs so I only had to do this small tweak to switch and change the prefix key (because s-l or mod is used by my window manager). I also had to pin LSP packages to bookworm here and here.
• I am not using projectile. It's on some of my numerous todo lists somewhere, surely. I suspect it's important to getting my projects organised, but I still live halfway between the terminal and Emacs, so it's not quite clear what I would gain.
• I had to ask what native compilation was or why it mattered the first time I heard of it. And when I saw it again in the article, I had to click through to remember.

Overall, I feel there's a lot of cool stuff in Emacs out there. But I can't quite tell what's the best of which. I can barely remember which completion mechanism I use (company, maybe?) or what makes my mini-buffer completion work the way it does. Everything is lost in piles of customize and .emacs hacks that is constantly changing. Because a lot is in third-party packages, there are often many different options and it's hard to tell which one we should be using.

... or at least fast enough And really, Emacs feels fast enough for me. When I started, I was running Emacs on a Pentium I, 166MHz, with 8MB of RAM (eventually upgraded to 32MB, whoohoo!). Back in those days, the joke was that EMACS was an acronym for "Eight Megs, Always Scratching" and now that I write this down, I realize it's actually "Eight Megs, and Constantly Swapping", which doesn't sound as nice because you could actually hear Emacs running on those old hard drives back in the days. It would make a "scratching" noise as the hard drive heads would scramble maniacally to swap pages in and out of swap to make room for the memory-hungry editor. Now Emacs is pretty far down the list of processes in top(1) regardless of how you look at it. It's using 97MB of resident memory and close to 400MB of virtual memory, which does sound like an awful lot compared to my first computer... But it's absolutely nothing compared to things like Signal-desktop, which somehow manages to map a whopping 20.5GB virtual memory. (That's twenty Gigabytes of memory for old timers or time travelers from the past, and yes, that is now a thing.) I'm not exactly sure how much resident memory it uses (because it forks multiple processes), probably somewhere around 300MB of resident memory. Firefox also uses gigabytes of that good stuff, also spread around the multiple processes, per tab. Emacs "feels" super fast. Typing latency is noticeably better in Emacs than my web browser, and even beats most terminal emulators. It gets a little worse when font-locking is enabled, unfortunately, but it's still feels much better. And all my old stuff still works in Emacs, amazingly. (Good luck with your old Netscape or ICQ configuration from 2000.) I feel like an oldie, using Emacs, but I'm really happy to see younger people using it, and learning it, and especially improving it. If anything, one direction I would like to see it go is closer to what web browsers are doing (yes, I know how bad that sounds) and get better isolation between tasks. An attack on my email client shouldn't be able to edit my Puppet code, and/or all files on my system, for example. And I know, fundamentally, that's a really hard challenge in Emacs. But if you're going to treat your editor as your operating system (or vice versa, I lost track of where we are now that there's an Emacs Window Manager, which I do not use), at least we should get that kind of security. Otherwise I'll have to find a new mail client, and that's really something I try to limit to once a decade or so.

Shell? Rust! Not the first shell script I took and made a rust version of, but probably my largest yet. This time I took my little tm (tmux helper) tool which is (well, was) a bit more than 600 lines of shell, and converted it to Rust. I got most of the functionality done now, only one major part is missing.

What s tm? tm started as a tiny shell script to make handling tmux easier. The first commit in git was in July 2013, but I started writing and using it in 2011. It started out as a kind-of wrapper around ssh, opening tmux windows with an ssh session on some other hosts. It quickly gained support to open multiple ssh sessions in one window, telling tmux to synchronize input (send input to all targets at once), which is great when you have a set of machines that ought to get the same commands.

tm vs clusterssh / mussh In spirit it is similar to clusterssh or mussh, allowing to run the same command on many hosts at the same time. clusterssh sets out to open new terminals (xterm) per host and gives you an input line, that it sends everywhere. mussh appears to take your command and then send it to all the hosts. Both have disadvantages in my opinion: clusterssh opens lots of xterm windows, and you can not easily switch between multiple sessions, mussh just seems to send things over ssh and be done. tm instead just creates a tmux session, telling it to ssh to the targets, possibly setting the tmux option to send input to all panes. And leaves all the rest of the handling to tmux. So you can

• detach a session and reattach later easily,
• use tmux great builtin support for copy/paste,
• see all output, modify things even for one machine only,
• zoom in to one machine that needs just ONE bit different (cssh can do this too),
• let colleagues also connect to your tmux session, when needed,
• easily add more machines to the mix, if needed,
• and all the other extra features tmux brings.

More tm tm also supports just attaching to existing sessions as well as killing sessions, mostly for lazyness (less to type than using tmux directly). At some point tm gained support for setting up sessions according to some session file . It knows two formats now, one is simple and mostly a list of hostnames to open synchronized sessions for. This may contain LIST commands, which let tm execute that command, expected output is list of hostnames (or more LIST commands) for the session. That, combined with the replacement part, lets us have one config file that opens a set of VMs based on tags our Ganeti runs, based on tags. It is simply a LIST command asking for VMs tagged with the replacement arg and up. Very handy. Or also all VMs on host X . The second format is basically free form tmux commands . Mostly commandline tmux call, just drop the tmux in front collection. Both of them supporting a crude variable replacement.

Conversion to Rust Some while ago I started playing with Rust and it somehow clicked , I do like it. My local git tells me, that I tried starting off with go in 2017, but that appearently did not work out. Fun, everywhere I can read says that Rust ought to be harder to learn. So by now I have most of the functionality implemented in the Rust version, even if I am sure that the code isn t a good Rust example. I m learning, after all, and already have adjusted big parts of it, multiple times, whenever I learn (and understand) something more - and am also sure that this will happen again

Compatibility with old tm It turns out that my goal of staying compatible with the behaviour of the old shell script does make some things rather complicated. For example, the LIST commands in session config files - in shell I just execute them commands, and shell deals with variable/parameter expansion, I just set IFS to newline only and read in what I get back. Simple. Because shell is doing a lot of things for me. Now, in Rust, it is a different thing at all:

• Properly splitting the line into shell words, taking care of quoting (can t simply take whitespace) (there is shlex)
• Expanding specials like ~ and $HOME (there is home_dir).
• Supporting environment variables in general, tm has some that adjust behaviour of it. Which shell can use globally. Used lazy_static for a similar effect - they aren t going to change at runtime ever, anyways.

Properly supporting the commandline arguments also turned out to be a bit more work. Rust appearently has multiple crates supporting this, I settled on clap, but as tm supports getopts -style as well as free-form arguments (subcommands in clap), it takes a bit to get that interpreted right.

Speed Most of the time entirely unimportant in the tool that tm is (open a tmux with one to some ssh connections to some places is not exactly hard or time consuming), there are situations, where one can notice that it s calling out to tmux over and over again, for every single bit to do, and that just takes time: Configurations that open sessions to 20 and more hosts at the same time especially lag in setup time. (My largest setup goes to 443 panes in one window). The compiled Rust version is so much faster there, it s just great. Nice side effect, that is. And yes, in the end it is also only driving tmux, still, it takes less than half the time to do so.

Code, Fun parts As this is still me learning to write Rust, I am sure the code has lots to improve. Some of which I will sure find on my own, but if you have time, I love PRs (or just mails with hints).

Github Also the first time I used Github Actions to see how it goes. Letting it build, test, run clippy and also run a code coverage tool (Yay, more than 50% covered ) on it. Unsure my tests are good, I am not used to writing tests for code, but hey, coverage!

Up next I do have to implement the last missing feature, which is reading the other config file format. A little scared, as that means somehow translating those lines into correct calls within the tmux_interface I am using, not sure that is easy. I could be bad and just shell out to tmux on it all the time, but somehow I don t like the thought of doing that. Maybe (ab)using the control mode, but then, why would I use tmux_interface, so trying to handle it with that first. Afterwards I want to gain a new command, to save existing sessions and be able to recreate them easily. Shouldn t be too hard, tmux has a way to get at that info, somewhere.

• To active Debian contributors.
• To promote diversity: newcomers to Debian and/or DebConf, especially from under-represented communities.

Anyway, what is my talk about? My talk is titled Current challenges for the OpenPGP keyserver network. Is there a way forward?. The abstract I submitted follows:

Many free projects use OpenPGP encryption or signatures for various important tasks, like defining membership, authenticating participation, asserting identity over a vote, etc. The Web-of-Trust upon which its operation is based is a model many of us hold dear, allowing for a decentralized way to assign trust to the identity of a given person. But both the Web-of-Trust model and the software that serves as a basis for the above mentioned uses are at risk due to attacks on the key distribution protocol (not on the software itself!) With this talk, I will try to bring awareness to this situation, to some possible mitigations, and present some proposals to allow for the decentralized model to continue to thrive towards the future.

I am on the third semester of my PhD, trying to somehow keep a decentralized infrastructure for the OpenPGP Web of Trust viable and usable for the future. While this is still in the early stages of my PhD work (and I still don t have a solution to present), I will talk about what the main problems are and will sketch out the path I intend to develop. What is the relevance? Mainly, I think, that many free software projects use the OpenPGP Web of Trust for their identity definitions Are we anachronistic? Are we using tools unfit for this century? I don t think so. I think we are in time to fix the main sore spots for this great example of a decentralized infrastructure.

When is my talk scheduled? This Saturday, 2022.03.19, at

GMT / UTC time

19:25 20:10

Conference schedule time (EDT/GMT-4)

15:25 16:10

Mexico City time (GMT-6)

13:25 14:10

How to watch it? The streams are open online. I will be talking in the Saturn room, feel free to just appear there and watch! The FSF asks people to [register for the conference](https://my.fsf.org/civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=99) beforehand, in order to be able to have an active participation (i.e. ask questions and that). Of course, you might be interested in other talks take a look at the schedule! LibrePlanet keeps a video archive of their past conferences, and this talk will be linked from there. Of course, I will link to the recording once it is online. Update: As of 2022.03.30, LibrePlanet has posted the videos for all of their talks, all linked from the program. And of course, for convenience, I copied the talk over here: Current challenges for the OpenPGP keyserver network. Is there a way forward?

Changes in Rcpp hotfix release version 1.0.8.3 (2022-03-14)

• Changes in Rcpp API:
  • Accomodate C++98 compilation by adjusting attributes.cpp (Dirk in #1193 fixing #1192)
  • Accomodate newest compilers replacing deprecated std::unary_function and std::binary_function with std::function (Dirk in #1202 fixing #1201 and CRAN request)
• Changes in Rcpp Documentation:
  • Adjust one overflowing column (Bill Denney in #1196 fixing #1195)
• Changes in Rcpp Deployment:
  • Accomodate four digit version numbers in unit test (Dirk)
  • Do not run complete test suite to limit test time to CRAN preference (Dirk)

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

• In February Rapha l and the LTS worked on a survey of Debian developers meant to solicit ideas for improvements in the Debian project at large. You can see the results of the initial discussion here in the list of ideas of which there are already over 30.
• The full survey is due to be emailed to Debian Developers shortly.
• In February 2250 was put aside to fund Debian projects.

• Abhijith PA did 10h out of 10h available.
• Anton Gladky did 20h out of 20h available.
• Ben Hutchings did 16h out of 16h available.
• Chris Lamb did 18h out of 18h available.
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 42.75h out of 42.75h available.
• Jeremiah Foster worked 20 hours out of 20 available on LTS administration and 2.9 hours on funded projects.
• Markus Koschany did 30h (out of 40h available), thus carrying over 10h to March.
• Roberto C. S nchez did 12h out of 12h available.
• Sylvain Beucler did 13h (out of 40h available), thus carrying over 27h to March.
• Thorsten Alteholz did 40h out of 40h available.
• Utkarsh Gupta did 15.75h (out of 42.75h available), thus carrying over 27h to March.

• Platinum sponsors:
  • TOSHIBA (for 78 months)
  • GitHub (for 68 months)
  • Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) (for 46 months)
• Gold sponsors:
  • Roche Diagnostics International AG (for 89 months)
  • Linode (for 83 months)
  • Babiel GmbH (for 72 months)
  • Plat Home (for 71 months)
  • University of Oxford (for 28 months)
  • Deveryware (for 15 months)
  • VyOS Inc (for 10 months)
• Silver sponsors:
  • The Positive Internet Company (for 94 months)
  • Domeneshop AS (for 93 months)
  • Nantes M tropole (for 87 months)
  • Univention GmbH (for 79 months)
  • Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 79 months)
  • Ribbon Communications, Inc. (for 73 months)
  • Exonet B.V. (for 63 months)
  • Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 57 months)
  • CINECA (for 46 months)
  • Minist re de l Europe et des Affaires trang res (for 40 months)
  • Cloudways Ltd (for 29 months)
  • Dinahosting SL (for 27 months)
  • Platform.sh (for 22 months)
  • Bauer Xcel Media Deutschland KG (for 21 months)
  • Moxa Intelligence Co., Ltd. (for 16 months)
  • sipgate GmbH (for 13 months)
  • OVH US LLC (for 11 months)
  • Tilburg University (for 11 months)
  • GSI Helmholtzzentrum f r Schwerionenforschung GmbH
  • Telecats BV
  • Soliton Systems K.K.
• Bronze sponsors:
  • Evolix (for 94 months)
  • Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 94 months)
  • Linuxhotel GmbH (for 91 months)
  • Intevation GmbH (for 90 months)
  • Daevel SARL (for 89 months)
  • Bitfolk LTD (for 88 months)
  • Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 88 months)
  • Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 87 months)
  • NUMLOG (for 87 months)
  • WinGo AG (for 86 months)
  • Ecole Centrale de Nantes LHEEA (for 83 months)
  • Entr ouvert (for 78 months)
  • Adfinis AG (for 75 months)
  • Laboratoire LEGI UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 70 months)
  • Tesorion (for 70 months)
  • GNI MEDIA (for 69 months)
  • Bearstech (for 61 months)
  • LiHAS (for 61 months)
  • People Doc (for 57 months)
  • Catalyst IT Ltd (for 56 months)
  • Supagro (for 51 months)
  • Demarcq SAS (for 50 months)
  • Universit Grenoble Alpes (for 36 months)
  • TouchWeb SAS (for 28 months)
  • SPiN AG (for 24 months)
  • CoreFiling (for 20 months)
  • Institut des sciences cognitives Marc Jeannerod (for 15 months)
  • Observatoire des Sciences de l Univers de Grenoble (for 11 months)
  • Tem Innovations GmbH (for 6 months)
  • WordFinder.pro (for 6 months)
  • CNRS DT INSU R sif (for 4 months)

#!/usr/bin/python3
import sys
import logging
def warnme():
    # something bad happens
    logging.warning("warning")
    sys.exit(2)
def evil():
    # something evil happens
    logging.error("error")
    sys.exit(1)
def main():
    logging.basicConfig(
        level=logging.DEBUG,
    )   
    [..]

• exit code 0 on success
• exit code 1 on errors
• exit code 2 on warnings
• warnings or errors shall be logged in the function where they actually happen: the logging module will show the function name with a better format option: nice for debugging.
• one function that exits accordingly, preferrably main()

How to do better? As the application is using the logging module, we have a single point to collect warnings and errors that might happen accross all modules. This works by passing a custom handler to the logging module which tracks emitted messages. Heres an small example:

#!/usr/bin/python3
import sys
import logging
class logCount(logging.Handler):
    class LogType:
        def __init__(self):
            self.warnings = 0
            self.errors = 0
    def __init__(self):
        super().__init__()
        self.count = self.LogType()
    def emit(self, record):
        if record.levelname == "WARNING":
            self.count.warnings += 1
        if record.levelname == "ERROR":
            self.count.errors += 1
            
def infome():
    logging.info("hello world")
def warnme():
    logging.warning("help, an warning")
def evil():
    logging.error("yikes")
def main():
    EXIT_WARNING = 2
    EXIT_ERROR = 1
    counter = logCount()
    logging.basicConfig(
        level=logging.DEBUG,
        handlers=[counter, logging.StreamHandler(sys.stderr)],
    )
    infome()
    warnme()
    evil()
    if counter.count.errors != 0:
        raise SystemExit(EXIT_ERROR)
    if counter.count.warnings != 0:
        raise SystemExit(EXIT_WARNING)
if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

python3 count.py ; echo $?
INFO:root:hello world
WARNING:root:help, an warning
ERROR:root:yikes
1

This also makes easy to define something like:

• hey, got 2 warnings, change exit code to error?
• got 3 warnings, but no strict passed, ingore those, exit with success!
• etc..