Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

• check-all-the-things: update dep
• Debian reportbug: allow defaults for multi-select menus
• Debian release website: link arch policy from arch qualification
• Debian BTS usertags: fix porter, reproducible, release tags
• Debian wiki pages: attachement:root-system-build.sh, attachement:root-system-changes.sh, DebianScience/ROOT, Games/GameDataPackager, PortsDocs/New

Issues

• Crashes in ognibuild
• Warnings in python3-binwalk, python3-extruct, offpunk
• Conversion missed in colorized-logs
• Features in reportbug, swh-web
• Conffile removal needed in fwupd
• Expired cert in ca-certificates

Review

• Spam: reported 1 Debian bug report
• Debian BTS usertags: changes for the month

Administration

• Debian BTS: unarchive/reopen/triage bugs for reintroduced packages: ovito, tahoe-lafs, tpm2-tss-engine
• Debian wiki: produce HTML dump for a user, unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Communication

• Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors The SWH work was sponsored. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

Mee Goreng, a dish made of noodles in Malaysia.

Me at Petronas Towers.

Photo with Malaysians.

Tips

• I bought local SIM from a shop at KL Sentral station complex which had news in their name (I forgot the exact name and there are two shops having news in their name) and it was the cheapest option I could find. The SIM was 10 MYR for 5 GB data for a week. If you want to make calls too, then you need to spend extra 5 MYR.
• 7-Eleven and KK Mart convenience stores are everywhere in the city and they are open all the time (24 hours a day). If you are a vegetarian, you can at least get some bread and cheese from there to eat.
• A lot of people know English (and many - Indians, Pakistanis, Nepalis - know Hindi) in Kuala Lumpur, so I had no language problems most of the time.
• For shopping on budget, you can go to Petaling Street, Berjaya Time Square or Bukit Bintang. In particular, there is a shop named I Love KL Gifts in Bukit Bintang which had very good prices. just near the metro/monorail stattion. Check out location of the shop on OpenStreetMap.

Changes in RcppEigen version 0.3.4.0.0 (2024-02-28)

• The Eigen version has been upgrade to release 3.4.0 (Yixuan)
• Extensive reverse-dependency checks ensure only three out of over 400 packages at CRAN are affected; PRs and patches helped other packages
• The long-running branch also contains substantial contributions from Mikael Jagan (for the lme4 interface) and Andrew Johnson (revdep PRs)

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

How to Fix it Yourself If what you, like me, need is simply for Bluetooth Audio to work with AAC in Debian s default desktop environment², then you ll need to rebuild the pipewire package to include the AAC codec. While the current version in Debian main has been built with AAC deliberately disabled, it is trivial to enable if you can install a version of the fdk-aac library. I preface this with the usual caveats when it comes to patent and licensing controversies. I am not a lawyer, building this package and/or using it could get you into legal trouble. These instructions have only been tested on an up-to-date copy of Debian 12.

1. Install pipewire s build dependencies

   sudo apt install build-essential devscripts
   sudo apt build-dep pipewire
   

2. Install libfdk-aac-dev

   sudo apt install libfdk-aac-dev
   

   If the above doesn t work you ll likely need to enable non-free and try again

   sudo sed -i 's/main/main non-free/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
   sudo apt update
   

   Alternatively, if you wish to ensure you are maximally license-compliant and patent un-infringing³, you can instead build fdk-aac-free which includes only those components of AAC that are known to be patent-free³. This is what should eventually end up in Debian to resolve this problem (see below).

   sudo apt install git-buildpackage
   mkdir fdk-aac-source
   cd fdk-aac-source
   git clone https://salsa.debian.org/multimedia-team/fdk-aac
   cd fdk-aac
   gbp buildpackage
   sudo dpkg -i ../libfdk-aac2_*deb ../libfdk-aac-dev_*deb
   

3. Get the pipewire source code

   mkdir pipewire-source
   cd pipewire-source
   apt source pipewire
   

   This will create a bunch of files within the pipewire-source directory, but you ll only need the pipewire-<version> folder, this contains all the files you ll need to build the package, with all the debian-specific patches already applied. Note that you don t want to run the apt source command as root, as it will then create files that your regular user cannot edit.
4. Fix the dependencies and build options To fix up the build scripts to use the fdk-aac library, you need to save the following as pipewire-source/aac.patch

   --- debian/control.orig
   +++ debian/control
   @@ -40,8 +40,8 @@
                modemmanager-dev,
                pkg-config,
                python3-docutils,
   -               systemd [linux-any]
   -Build-Conflicts: libfdk-aac-dev
   +               systemd [linux-any],
   +               libfdk-aac-dev
    Standards-Version: 4.6.2
    Vcs-Browser: https://salsa.debian.org/utopia-team/pipewire
    Vcs-Git: https://salsa.debian.org/utopia-team/pipewire.git
   --- debian/rules.orig
   +++ debian/rules
   @@ -37,7 +37,7 @@
    		-Dauto_features=enabled \
    		-Davahi=enabled \
    		-Dbluez5-backend-native-mm=enabled \
   -		-Dbluez5-codec-aac=disabled \
   +		-Dbluez5-codec-aac=enabled \
    		-Dbluez5-codec-aptx=enabled \
    		-Dbluez5-codec-lc3=enabled \
    		-Dbluez5-codec-lc3plus=disabled \
   

   Then you ll need to run patch from within the pipewire-<version> folder created by apt source:

   patch -p0 < ../aac.patch
   

5. Build pipewire

   cd pipewire-*
   debuild
   

   Note that you will likely see an error from debsign at the end of this process, this is harmless, you simply don t have a GPG key set up to sign your newly-built package⁴. Packages don t need to be signed to be installed, and debsign uses a somewhat non-standard signing process that dpkg does not check anyway.

1. Install libspa-0.2-bluetooth

   sudo dpkg -i libspa-0.2-bluetooth_*.deb
   

2. Restart PipeWire and/or Reboot

   sudo reboot
   

   Theoretically there s a set of services to restart here that would get pipewire to pick up the new library, probably just pipewire itself. But it s just as easy to restart and ensure everything is using the correct library.

Why This is a slightly unusual situation, as the fdk-aac library is licensed under what even the GNU project acknowledges is a free software license. However, this license explicitly informs the user that they need to acquire a patent license to use this software⁵:

3. NO PATENT LICENSE NO EXPRESS OR IMPLIED LICENSES TO ANY PATENT CLAIMS, including without limitation the patents of Fraunhofer, ARE GRANTED BY THIS SOFTWARE LICENSE. Fraunhofer provides no warranty of patent non-infringement with respect to this software. You may use this FDK AAC Codec software or modifications thereto only for purposes that are authorized by appropriate patent licenses.

To quote the GNU project:

Because of this, and because the license author is a known patent aggressor, we encourage you to be careful about using or redistributing software under this license: you should first consider whether the licensor might aim to lure you into patent infringement.

AAC is covered by a number of patents, which expire at some point in the 2030s⁶. As such the current version of the library is potentially legally dubious to ship with any other software, as it could be considered patent-infringing³.

Fedora s solution Since 2017, Fedora has included a modified version of the library as fdk-aac-free, see the announcement and the bugzilla bug requesting review. This version of the library includes only the AAC LC profile, which is believed to be entirely patent-free³. Based on this, there is an open bug report in Debian requesting that the fdk-aac package be moved to the main component and that the pipwire package be updated to build against it.

The Debian NEW queue To resolve these bugs, a version of fdk-aac-free has been uploaded to Debian by Jeremy Bicha. However, to make it into Debian proper, it must first pass through the ftpmaster s NEW queue. The current version of fdk-aac-free has been in the NEW queue since July 2023. Based on conversations in some of the bugs above, it s been there since at least 2022⁷. I hope this helps anyone stuck with AAC to get their hardware working for them while we wait for the package to eventually make it through the NEW queue. Discuss on Hacker News

1. Such as, for example, any Apple AirPods, which only support AAC AFAICT.
2. Which, as of Debian 12 is GNOME 3 under Wayland with PipeWire.
3. I m not a lawyer, I don t know what kinds of infringement might or might not be possible here, do your own research, etc. ^{2 3 4}
4. And if you DO have a key setup with debsign you almost certainly don t need these instructions.
5. This was originally phrased as explicitly does not grant any patent rights. It was pointed out on Hacker News that this is not exactly what it says, as it also includes a specific note that you ll need to acquire your own patent license. I ve now quoted the relevant section of the license for clarity.
6. Wikipedia claims the base patents expire in 2031, with the extensions expiring in 2038, but its source for these claims is some guy s spreadsheet in a forum. The same discussion also brings up Wikipedia s claim and casts some doubt on it, so I m not entirely sure what s correct here, but I didn t feel like doing a patent deep-dive today. If someone can provide a clear answer that would be much appreciated.
7. According to Jeremy B cha: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1021370#17

• The X- style prefixes for field names are now understood and handled. This means the language server now considers XC-Package-Type the same as Package-Type.

• More diagnostics:

  • Fields without values now trigger an error marker
  • Duplicated fields now trigger an error marker
  • Fields used in the wrong paragraph now trigger an error marker
  • Typos in field names or values now trigger a warning marker. For field names, X- style prefixes are stripped before typo detection is done.
  • The value of the Section field is now validated against a dataset of known sections and trigger a warning marker if not known.

• The "on-save trim end of line whitespace" now works. I had a logic bug in the server side code that made it submit "no change" edits to the editor.

• The language server now provides "hover" documentation for field names. There is a small screenshot of this below. Sadly, emacs does not support markdown or, if it does, it does not announce the support for markdown. For now, all the documentation is always in markdown format and the language server will tag it as either markdown or plaintext depending on the announced support.

• The language server now provides quick fixes for some of the more trivial problems such as deprecated fields or typos of fields and values.

• Added more known fields including the XS-Autobuild field for non-free packages along with a link to the relevant devref section in its hover doc.

• [X] No errors are raised if a field does not have a value.
• [X] No errors are raised if a field is duplicated inside a paragraph.
• [X] No errors are used if a field is used in the wrong paragraph.
• [ ] No spellchecking of the Description field.
• [X] No understanding that Foo and X[CBS]-Foo are related. As an example, XC-Package-Type is completely ignored despite being the old name for Package-Type.
• [X] Fixed the on-save trim end of line whitespace. Bug in the server end.
• [X] Hover text for field names

Top-level What-Now? A top-level domain (TLD) is the last part of a domain name (the collection of words, separated by periods, after the https:// in your web browser s location bar). It s the com in example.com, or the af in queer.af. There are two kinds of TLDs: country-code TLDs (ccTLDs) and generic TLDs (gTLDs). Despite all being TLDs, they re very different beasts under the hood.

What s the Difference? Generic TLDs are what most organisations and individuals register their domains under: old-school technobabble like com , net , or org , historical oddities like gov , and the new-fangled world of words like tech , social , and bank . These gTLDs are all regulated under a set of rules created and administered by ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ), which try to ensure that things aren t a complete wild-west, limiting things like price hikes (well, sometimes, anyway), and providing means for disputes over names¹. Country-code TLDs, in contrast, are all two letters long², and are given out to countries to do with as they please. While ICANN kinda-sorta has something to do with ccTLDs (in the sense that it makes them exist on the Internet), it has no authority to control how a ccTLD is managed. If a country decides to raise prices by 100x, or cancel all registrations that were made on the 12th of the month, there s nothing anyone can do about it. If that sounds bad, that s because it is. Also, it s not a theoretical problem the Taliban deciding to asssert its bigotry over the little corner of the Internet namespace it has taken control of is far from the first time that ccTLDs have caused grief.

Shifting Sands The queer.af cancellation is interesting because, at the time the domain was reportedly registered, 2018, Afghanistan had what one might describe as, at least, a different political climate. Since then, of course, things have changed, and the new bosses have decided to get a bit more active. Those running queer.af seem to have seen the writing on the wall, and were planning on moving to another, less fraught, domain, but hadn t completed that move when the Taliban came knocking.

The Curious Case of Brexit When the United Kingdom decided to leave the European Union, it fell foul of the EU s rules for the registration of domains under the eu ccTLD³. To register (and maintain) a domain name ending in .eu, you have to be a resident of the EU. When the UK ceased to be part of the EU, residents of the UK were no longer EU residents. Cue much unhappiness, wailing, and gnashing of teeth when this was pointed out to Britons. Some decided to give up their domains, and move to other parts of the Internet, while others managed to hold onto them by various legal sleight-of-hand (like having an EU company maintain the registration on their behalf). In any event, all very unpleasant for everyone involved.

Geopolitics on the Internet?!? After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the Ukranian Vice Prime Minister asked ICANN to suspend ccTLDs associated with Russia. While ICANN said that it wasn t going to do that, because it wouldn t do anything useful, some domain registrars (the companies you pay to register domain names) ceased to deal in Russian ccTLDs, and some websites restricted links to domains with Russian ccTLDs. Whether or not you agree with the sort of activism implied by these actions, the fact remains that even the actions of a government that aren t directly related to the Internet can have grave consequences for your domain name if it s registered under a ccTLD. I don t think any gTLD operator will be invading a neighbouring country any time soon.

Money, Money, Money, Must Be Funny When you register a domain name, you pay a registration fee to a registrar, who does administrative gubbins and causes you to be able to control the domain name in the DNS. However, you don t own that domain name⁴ you re only renting it. When the registration period comes to an end, you have to renew the domain name, or you ll cease to be able to control it. Given that a domain name is typically your brand or identity online, the chances are you d prefer to keep it over time, because moving to a new domain name is a massive pain, having to tell all your customers or users that now you re somewhere else, plus having to accept the risk of someone registering the domain name you used to have and capturing your traffic it s all a gigantic hassle. For gTLDs, ICANN has various rules around price increases and bait-and-switch pricing that tries to keep a lid on the worst excesses of registries. While there are any number of reasonable criticisms of the rules, and the Internet community has to stay on their toes to keep ICANN from totally succumbing to regulatory capture, at least in the gTLD space there s some degree of control over price gouging. On the other hand, ccTLDs have no effective controls over their pricing. For example, in 2008 the Seychelles increased the price of .sc domain names from US$25 to US$75. No reason, no warning, just pay up .

Who Is Even Getting That Money? A closely related concern about ccTLDs is that some of the cool ones are assigned to countries that are not great. The poster child for this is almost certainly Libya, which has the ccTLD ly . While Libya was being run by a terrorist-supporting extremist, companies thought it was a great idea to have domain names that ended in .ly. These domain registrations weren t (and aren t) cheap, and it s hard to imagine that at least some of that money wasn t going to benefit the Gaddafi regime. Similarly, the British Indian Ocean Territory, which has the io ccTLD, was created in a colonialist piece of chicanery that expelled thousands of native Chagossians from Diego Garcia. Money from the registration of .io domains doesn t go to the (former) residents of the Chagos islands, instead it gets paid to the UK government. Again, I m not trying to suggest that all gTLD operators are wonderful people, but it s not particularly likely that the direct beneficiaries of the operation of a gTLD stole an island chain and evicted the residents.

Are ccTLDs Ever Useful? The answer to that question is an unqualified maybe . I certainly don t think it s a good idea to register a domain under a ccTLD for vanity purposes: because it makes a word, is the same as a file extension you like, or because it looks cool. Those ccTLDs that clearly represent and are associated with a particular country are more likely to be OK, because there is less impetus for the registry to try a naked cash grab. Unfortunately, ccTLD registries have a disconcerting habit of changing their minds on whether they serve their geographic locality, such as when auDA decided to declare an open season in the .au namespace some years ago. Essentially, while a ccTLD may have geographic connotations now, there s not a lot of guarantee that they won t fall victim to scope creep in the future. Finally, it might be somewhat safer to register under a ccTLD if you live in the location involved. At least then you might have a better idea of whether your domain is likely to get pulled out from underneath you. Unfortunately, as the .eu example shows, living somewhere today is no guarantee you ll still be living there tomorrow, even if you don t move house. In short, I d suggest sticking to gTLDs. They re at least lower risk than ccTLDs.

+1, Helpful If you ve found this post informative, why not buy me a refreshing beverage? My typing fingers (both of them) thank you in advance for your generosity.

---

Footnotes

1. don t make the mistake of thinking that I approve of ICANN or how it operates; it s an omnishambles of poor governance and incomprehensible decision-making.
2. corresponding roughly, though not precisely (because everything has to be complicated, because humans are complicated), to the entries in the ISO standard for Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions , ISO 3166.
3. yes, the EU is not a country; it s part of the roughly, though not precisely caveat mentioned previously.
4. despite what domain registrars try very hard to imply, without falling foul of deceptive advertising regulations.

Where? We will meet at APUL Asociaci n de Personal no-docente de la Universidad Nacional del Litoral, in downtown Santa Fe, Argentina.

When? Saturday, 2024.03.09. It is quite likely we can get some spaces for continuing over Sunday if there is demand.

What are we planning? We have little time for planning but we want to have a space for Debian-related outreach (so, please think about a topic or two you d like to share with general free software-interested, not too technical, audience). Please tell me by mail (gwolf@debian.org) about any ideas you might have. We also want to have a general hacklab-style area to hang out, work a bit in our projects, and spend a good time together.

Logistics I have briefly commented about this with our dear and always mighty DPL, and Debian will support Debian-related people interested in attending; please check personally with me for specifics on how to handle this case by case. My intention is to cover costs for travel, accomodation (one or two nights) and food for whoever is interested in coming over.

More information As I don t want to direct people to keep an eye on my blog post for updates, I ll copy this information (and keep it updated!) at the Debian Wiki / DebianEvents / ar / 2024 / MiniDebConf / Santa Fe please refer to that page!

Contact

• By IRC: #debian-latam on OFTC
• By email: debian-dug-latinoamerica@lists.debian.org

Codes of Conduct DebConf and Debian Code of Conduct apply. See the DebConf Code of Conduct and the Debian Code of Conduct.

Registration Registration is free, but needed. See the separate Registration page.

Talks Please, send your proposal to gwolf@debian.org

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.8.0.0 (2024-02-06)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 12.8.0 (Cortisol Injector)
  • Faster detection of symmetric expressions by pinv() and rank()
  • Expanded shift() to handle sparse matrices
  • Expanded conv_to for more flexible conversions between sparse and dense matrices
  • Added cbrt()
  • More compact representation of integers when saving matrices in CSV format
• Five non-user facing top-level include files have been removed (#432 closing #400 and building on #395 and #396)

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

How we executed a critical supply chain attack on PyTorch John Stawinski and Adnan Khan published a lengthy blog post detailing how they executed a supply-chain attack against PyTorch, a popular machine learning platform used by titans like Google, Meta, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin :

Our exploit path resulted in the ability to upload malicious PyTorch releases to GitHub, upload releases to [Amazon Web Services], potentially add code to the main repository branch, backdoor PyTorch dependencies the list goes on. In short, it was bad. Quite bad.

The attack pivoted on PyTorch s use of self-hosted runners as well as submitting a pull request to address a trivial typo in the project s README file to gain access to repository secrets and API keys that could subsequently be used for malicious purposes.

New Arch Linux forensic filesystem tool On our mailing list this month, long-time Reproducible Builds developer kpcyrd announced a new tool designed to forensically analyse Arch Linux filesystem images. Called archlinux-userland-fs-cmp, the tool is supposed to be used from a rescue image (any Linux) with an Arch install mounted to, [for example], /mnt. Crucially, however, at no point is any file from the mounted filesystem eval d or otherwise executed. Parsers are written in a memory safe language. More information about the tool can be found on their announcement message, as well as on the tool s homepage. A GIF of the tool in action is also available.

Issues with our SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH code? Chris Lamb started a thread on our mailing list summarising some potential problems with the source code snippet the Reproducible Builds project has been using to parse the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable:

I m not 100% sure who originally wrote this code, but it was probably sometime in the ~2015 era, and it must be in a huge number of codebases by now. Anyway, Alejandro Colomar was working on the shadow security tool and pinged me regarding some potential issues with the code. You can see this conversation here.

Chris ends his message with a request that those with intimate or low-level knowledge of time_t, C types, overflows and the various parsing libraries in the C standard library (etc.) contribute with further info.

Distribution updates In Debian this month, Roland Clobus posted another detailed update of the status of reproducible ISO images on our mailing list. In particular, Roland helpfully summarised that all major desktops build reproducibly with bullseye, bookworm, trixie and sid provided they are built for a second time within the same DAK run (i.e. [within] 6 hours) . Additionally 7 of the 8 bookworm images from the official download link build reproducibly at any later time. In addition to this, three reviews of Debian packages were added, 17 were updated and 15 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Elsewhere, Bernhard posted another monthly update for his work elsewhere in openSUSE.

Community updates There were made a number of improvements to our website, including Bernhard M. Wiedemann fixing a number of typos of the term nondeterministic . [ ] and Jan Zerebecki adding a substantial and highly welcome section to our page about SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to document its interaction with distribution rebuilds. [ ].
diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made a number of changes such as uploading versions 254 and 255 to Debian but focusing on triaging and/or merging code from other contributors. This included adding support for comparing eXtensible ARchive (.XAR/.PKG) files courtesy of Seth Michael Larson [ ][ ], as well considerable work from Vekhir in order to fix compatibility between various and subtle incompatible versions of the progressbar libraries in Python [ ][ ][ ][ ]. Thanks!

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework (available at tests.reproducible-builds.org) in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In January, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:

• Debian-related changes:
  • Reduce the number of arm64 architecture workers from 24 to 16. [ ]
  • Use diffoscope from the Debian release being tested again. [ ]
  • Improve the handling when killing unwanted processes [ ][ ][ ] and be more verbose about it, too [ ].
  • Don t mark a job as failed if process marked as to-be-killed is already gone. [ ]
  • Display the architecture of builds that have been running for more than 48 hours. [ ]
  • Reboot arm64 nodes when they hit an OOM (out of memory) state. [ ]
• Package rescheduling changes:
  • Reduce IRC notifications to 1 when rescheduling due to package status changes. [ ]
  • Correctly set SUDO_USER when rescheduling packages. [ ]
  • Automatically reschedule packages regressing to FTBFS (build failure) or FTBR (build success, but unreproducible). [ ]
• OpenWrt-related changes:
  • Install the python3-dev and python3-pyelftools packages as they are now needed for the sunxi target. [ ][ ]
  • Also install the libpam0g-dev which is needed by some OpenWrt hardware targets. [ ]
• Misc:
  • As it s January, set the real_year variable to 2024 [ ] and bump various copyright years as well [ ].
  • Fix a large (!) number of spelling mistakes in various scripts. [ ][ ][ ]
  • Prevent Squid and Systemd processes from being killed by the kernel s OOM killer. [ ]
  • Install the iptables tool everywhere, else our custom rc.local script fails. [ ]
  • Cleanup the /srv/workspace/pbuilder directory on boot. [ ]
  • Automatically restart Squid if it fails. [ ]
  • Limit the execution of chroot-installation jobs to a maximum of 4 concurrent runs. [ ][ ]

Significant amounts of node maintenance was performed by Holger Levsen (eg. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ] etc.) and Vagrant Cascadian (eg. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]). Indeed, Vagrant Cascadian handled an extended power outage for the network running the Debian armhf architecture test infrastructure. This provided the incentive to replace the UPS batteries and consolidate infrastructure to reduce future UPS load. [ ] Elsewhere in our infrastructure, however, Holger Levsen also adjusted the email configuration for @reproducible-builds.org to deal with a new SMTP email attack. [ ]

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project tries to detects, dissects and fix as many (currently) unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • cython (nondeterminstic path issue)
  • deluge (issue with modification time of .egg file)
  • gap-ferret, gap-semigroups & gap-simpcomp (nondeterministic config.log file)
  • grpc (filesystem ordering issue )
  • hub (random)
  • kubernetes1.22 & kubernetes1.23 (sort-related issue)
  • kubernetes1.24 & kubernetes1.25 (go -trimpath vs random issue)
  • libjcat (drop test files with random bytes)
  • luajit (Use new d option for deterministic bytecode output)
  • meson [ ][ ] (sort the results from Python filesystem call)
  • python-rjsmin (drop GCC instrumentation artifacts)
  • qt6-virtualkeyboard+others (bug parallelism/race)
  • SoapySDR (parallelism-related issue)
  • systemd (sorting problem)
  • warewulf (CPIO modification time issue, etc.)
• Chris Lamb:
  • #1060254 filed against mumble.
• James Addison:
  • guake ( Schroedinger file due to race condition)
  • qhelpgenerator-qt5 (timezone localization; fix also merged upstream for QT6)
  • sphinx (search index doctitle sorting)

Separate to this, Vagrant Cascadian followed up with the relevant maintainers when reproducibility fixes were not included in newly-uploaded versions of the mm-common package in Debian this was quickly fixed, however. [ ]

---

If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

• IRC: #reproducible-builds on irc.oftc.net.
• Mailing list: rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org
• Mastodon: @reproducible_builds
• Twitter: @ReproBuilds

• I fixed a bug in my merge request adding the rsync method to dput-ng. (This has now been merged and included in the dput 1.38 release.)
• I updated the Linux kernel packages in various Debian suites:
  • buster: Updated linux (4.19) to upstream version 4.19.304, uploaded it, and issued DLA-3710-1.
  • buster: Updated linux-5.10 to the latest security update for bullseye, uploaded it, and issued DLA-3711-1.
  • bullseye-backports: Updated linux to the latest security update for bookworm, and uploaded it.
  • bookworm-backports: Updated linux to the latest version in sid, but didn't upload it as that version is not yet in testing.
• I uploaded kernel-wedge to bookworm-backports as it will be needed by later updates to the linux backport.
• I reviewed the enablement of bcachefs in Debian.
• I updated the Debian kernel upload checklist in line with recent changes to kernel ABI handling.
• I reviewed (again) Bastian's proposal to change the use of Git branches for the Debian kernel package.
• I discussed the support status of armel in the Debian kernel package.

comBIOS ver. 1.33  20070103  Copyright (C) 2000-2007 Soekris Engineering.
net5501
0512 Mbyte Memory                        CPU Geode LX 500 Mhz 
Pri Mas  WDC WD800VE-00HDT0              LBA Xlt 1024-255-63  78 Gbyte
Slot   Vend Dev  ClassRev Cmd  Stat CL LT HT  Base1    Base2   Int 
-------------------------------------------------------------------
0:01:2 1022 2082 10100000 0006 0220 08 00 00 A0000000 00000000 10
0:06:0 1106 3053 02000096 0117 0210 08 40 00 0000E101 A0004000 11
0:07:0 1106 3053 02000096 0117 0210 08 40 00 0000E201 A0004100 05
0:08:0 1106 3053 02000096 0117 0210 08 40 00 0000E301 A0004200 09
0:09:0 1106 3053 02000096 0117 0210 08 40 00 0000E401 A0004300 12
0:20:0 1022 2090 06010003 0009 02A0 08 40 80 00006001 00006101 
0:20:2 1022 209A 01018001 0005 02A0 08 00 00 00000000 00000000 
0:21:0 1022 2094 0C031002 0006 0230 08 00 80 A0005000 00000000 15
0:21:1 1022 2095 0C032002 0006 0230 08 00 00 A0006000 00000000 15
 4 Seconds to automatic boot.   Press Ctrl-P for entering Monitor.
 
                                            
                                                  ______
                                                    ____  __ ___  ___ 
            Welcome to FreeBSD!                     __   '__/ _ \/ _ \
                                                    __       __/  __/
                                                                      
    1. Boot FreeBSD [default]                     _     _   \___ \___ 
    2. Boot FreeBSD with ACPI enabled             ____   _____ _____
    3. Boot FreeBSD in Safe Mode                    _ \ / ____   __ \
    4. Boot FreeBSD in single user mode             _)   (___         
    5. Boot FreeBSD with verbose logging            _ < \___ \        
    6. Escape to loader prompt                      _)  ____)    __   
    7. Reboot                                                         
                                                  ____/ _____/ _____/
                                            
                                            
                                            
    Select option, [Enter] for default      
    or [Space] to pause timer  5            
  
Copyright (c) 1992-2013 The FreeBSD Project.
Copyright (c) 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994
        The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
FreeBSD is a registered trademark of The FreeBSD Foundation.
FreeBSD 8.4-RELEASE-p12 #5: Fri Jun  6 02:43:23 EDT 2014
    root@roadkiller.anarc.at:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/ROADKILL i386
gcc version 4.2.2 20070831 prerelease [FreeBSD]
Timecounter "i8254" frequency 1193182 Hz quality 0
CPU: Geode(TM) Integrated Processor by AMD PCS (499.90-MHz 586-class CPU)
  Origin = "AuthenticAMD"  Id = 0x5a2  Family = 5  Model = a  Stepping = 2
  Features=0x88a93d<FPU,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,CX8,SEP,PGE,CMOV,CLFLUSH,MMX>
  AMD Features=0xc0400000<MMX+,3DNow!+,3DNow!>
real memory  = 536870912 (512 MB)
avail memory = 506445824 (482 MB)
kbd1 at kbdmux0
K6-family MTRR support enabled (2 registers)
ACPI Error: A valid RSDP was not found (20101013/tbxfroot-309)
ACPI: Table initialisation failed: AE_NOT_FOUND
ACPI: Try disabling either ACPI or apic support.
cryptosoft0: <software crypto> on motherboard
pcib0 pcibus 0 on motherboard
pci0: <PCI bus> on pcib0
Geode LX: Soekris net5501 comBIOS ver. 1.33 20070103 Copyright (C) 2000-2007
pci0: <encrypt/decrypt, entertainment crypto> at device 1.2 (no driver attached)
vr0: <VIA VT6105M Rhine III 10/100BaseTX> port 0xe100-0xe1ff mem 0xa0004000-0xa00040ff irq 11 at device 6.0 on pci0
vr0: Quirks: 0x2
vr0: Revision: 0x96
miibus0: <MII bus> on vr0
ukphy0: <Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface> PHY 1 on miibus0
ukphy0:  none, 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto, auto-flow
vr0: Ethernet address: 00:00:24:cc:93:44
vr0: [ITHREAD]
vr1: <VIA VT6105M Rhine III 10/100BaseTX> port 0xe200-0xe2ff mem 0xa0004100-0xa00041ff irq 5 at device 7.0 on pci0
vr1: Quirks: 0x2
vr1: Revision: 0x96
miibus1: <MII bus> on vr1
ukphy1: <Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface> PHY 1 on miibus1
ukphy1:  none, 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto, auto-flow
vr1: Ethernet address: 00:00:24:cc:93:45
vr1: [ITHREAD]
vr2: <VIA VT6105M Rhine III 10/100BaseTX> port 0xe300-0xe3ff mem 0xa0004200-0xa00042ff irq 9 at device 8.0 on pci0
vr2: Quirks: 0x2
vr2: Revision: 0x96
miibus2: <MII bus> on vr2
ukphy2: <Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface> PHY 1 on miibus2
ukphy2:  none, 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto, auto-flow
vr2: Ethernet address: 00:00:24:cc:93:46
vr2: [ITHREAD]
vr3: <VIA VT6105M Rhine III 10/100BaseTX> port 0xe400-0xe4ff mem 0xa0004300-0xa00043ff irq 12 at device 9.0 on pci0
vr3: Quirks: 0x2
vr3: Revision: 0x96
miibus3: <MII bus> on vr3
ukphy3: <Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface> PHY 1 on miibus3
ukphy3:  none, 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto, auto-flow
vr3: Ethernet address: 00:00:24:cc:93:47
vr3: [ITHREAD]
isab0: <PCI-ISA bridge> at device 20.0 on pci0
isa0: <ISA bus> on isab0
atapci0: <AMD CS5536 UDMA100 controller> port 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6,0x170-0x177,0x376,0xe000-0xe00f at device 20.2 on pci0
ata0: <ATA channel> at channel 0 on atapci0
ata0: [ITHREAD]
ata1: <ATA channel> at channel 1 on atapci0
ata1: [ITHREAD]
ohci0: <OHCI (generic) USB controller> mem 0xa0005000-0xa0005fff irq 15 at device 21.0 on pci0
ohci0: [ITHREAD]
usbus0 on ohci0
ehci0: <AMD CS5536 (Geode) USB 2.0 controller> mem 0xa0006000-0xa0006fff irq 15 at device 21.1 on pci0
ehci0: [ITHREAD]
usbus1: EHCI version 1.0
usbus1 on ehci0
cpu0 on motherboard
pmtimer0 on isa0
orm0: <ISA Option ROM> at iomem 0xc8000-0xd27ff pnpid ORM0000 on isa0
atkbdc0: <Keyboard controller (i8042)> at port 0x60,0x64 on isa0
atkbd0: <AT Keyboard> irq 1 on atkbdc0
kbd0 at atkbd0
atkbd0: [GIANT-LOCKED]
atkbd0: [ITHREAD]
atrtc0: <AT Real Time Clock> at port 0x70 irq 8 on isa0
ppc0: parallel port not found.
uart0: <16550 or compatible> at port 0x3f8-0x3ff irq 4 flags 0x10 on isa0
uart0: [FILTER]
uart0: console (19200,n,8,1)
uart1: <16550 or compatible> at port 0x2f8-0x2ff irq 3 on isa0
uart1: [FILTER]
Timecounter "TSC" frequency 499903982 Hz quality 800
Timecounters tick every 1.000 msec
IPsec: Initialized Security Association Processing.
usbus0: 12Mbps Full Speed USB v1.0
usbus1: 480Mbps High Speed USB v2.0
ad0: 76319MB <WDC WD800VE-00HDT0 09.07D09> at ata0-master UDMA100 
ugen0.1: <AMD> at usbus0
uhub0: <AMD OHCI root HUB, class 9/0, rev 1.00/1.00, addr 1> on usbus0
ugen1.1: <AMD> at usbus1
uhub1: <AMD EHCI root HUB, class 9/0, rev 2.00/1.00, addr 1> on usbus1
GEOM: ad0s1: geometry does not match label (255h,63s != 16h,63s).
uhub0: 4 ports with 4 removable, self powered
Root mount waiting for: usbus1
Root mount waiting for: usbus1
uhub1: 4 ports with 4 removable, self powered
Trying to mount root from ufs:/dev/ad0s1a

[root@roadkiller /var/log]# stat /var/log/wtmp      
65 61783 -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 208219 1056 "Nov  1 05:00:01 2016" "Jan 18 22:29:16 2017" "Jan 18 22:29:16 2017" "Nov  1 05:00:01 2016" 16384 4 0 /var/log/wtmp

Dec 11 16:38:40 roadkiller mpd: [eicatL0] LCP: authorization successful
Dec 11 16:41:15 roadkiller mpd: [teksavvyL0] LCP: authorization successful

[root@roadkiller /var/log]# stat mpd.log 
65 47113 -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 193008 71939195 "Jan 18 22:39:18 2017" "Jan 18 22:39:59 2017" "Jan 18 22:39:59 2017" "Apr  2 10:41:37 2013" 16384 140640 0 mpd.log

[root@roadkiller /var/log]# stat /
63 2 drwxr-xr-x 21 root wheel 2120 512 "Jan 18 22:34:43 2017" "Jan 18 22:28:12 2017" "Jan 18 22:28:12 2017" "Jul 18 22:25:00 2010" 16384 4 0 /

[root@roadkiller /var]# tuptime 
System startups:        19   since   21:20:16 11/07/15
System shutdowns:       0 ok   -   18 bad
System uptime:          85.93 %   -   1 year, 11 days, 10 hours, 3 minutes and 36 seconds
System downtime:        14.07 %   -   61 days, 15 hours, 22 minutes and 45 seconds
System life:            1 year, 73 days, 1 hour, 26 minutes and 20 seconds
Largest uptime:         122 days, 9 hours, 17 minutes and 6 seconds   from   08:17:56 02/02/16
Shortest uptime:        5 minutes and 4 seconds   from   21:55:00 01/18/17
Average uptime:         19 days, 19 hours, 28 minutes and 37 seconds
Largest downtime:       57 days, 1 hour, 9 minutes and 59 seconds   from   20:45:01 11/22/16
Shortest downtime:      -1 years, 364 days, 23 hours, 58 minutes and 12 seconds   from   22:30:01 01/18/17
Average downtime:       3 days, 5 hours, 51 minutes and 43 seconds
Current uptime:         18 minutes and 23 seconds   since   22:28:13 01/18/17

[root@roadkiller /var]# tuptime -t
No.        Startup Date                                         Uptime       Shutdown Date   End                                                  Downtime
1     21:20:16 11/07/15      1 day, 0 hours, 40 minutes and 12 seconds   22:00:28 11/08/15   BAD                                  2 minutes and 37 seconds
2     22:03:05 11/08/15      1 day, 9 hours, 41 minutes and 57 seconds   07:45:02 11/10/15   BAD                                  3 minutes and 24 seconds
3     07:48:26 11/10/15    20 days, 2 hours, 41 minutes and 34 seconds   10:30:00 11/30/15   BAD                        4 hours, 50 minutes and 21 seconds
4     15:20:21 11/30/15                      19 minutes and 40 seconds   15:40:01 11/30/15   BAD                                   6 minutes and 5 seconds
5     15:46:06 11/30/15                      53 minutes and 55 seconds   16:40:01 11/30/15   BAD                           1 hour, 1 minute and 38 seconds
6     17:41:39 11/30/15     6 days, 16 hours, 3 minutes and 22 seconds   09:45:01 12/07/15   BAD                4 days, 6 hours, 53 minutes and 11 seconds
7     16:38:12 12/11/15   50 days, 17 hours, 56 minutes and 49 seconds   10:35:01 01/31/16   BAD                                 10 minutes and 52 seconds
8     10:45:53 01/31/16     1 day, 21 hours, 28 minutes and 16 seconds   08:14:09 02/02/16   BAD                                  3 minutes and 48 seconds
9     08:17:56 02/02/16    122 days, 9 hours, 17 minutes and 6 seconds   18:35:02 06/03/16   BAD                                 10 minutes and 16 seconds
10    18:45:18 06/03/16   29 days, 17 hours, 14 minutes and 43 seconds   12:00:01 07/03/16   BAD                                 12 minutes and 34 seconds
11    12:12:35 07/03/16   31 days, 17 hours, 17 minutes and 26 seconds   05:30:01 08/04/16   BAD                                 14 minutes and 25 seconds
12    05:44:26 08/04/16     15 days, 1 hour, 55 minutes and 35 seconds   07:40:01 08/19/16   BAD                                  6 minutes and 51 seconds
13    07:46:52 08/19/16     7 days, 5 hours, 23 minutes and 10 seconds   13:10:02 08/26/16   BAD                                  3 minutes and 45 seconds
14    13:13:47 08/26/16   27 days, 21 hours, 36 minutes and 14 seconds   10:50:01 09/23/16   BAD                                  2 minutes and 14 seconds
15    10:52:15 09/23/16   60 days, 10 hours, 52 minutes and 46 seconds   20:45:01 11/22/16   BAD                 57 days, 1 hour, 9 minutes and 59 seconds
16    21:55:00 01/18/17                        5 minutes and 4 seconds   22:00:04 01/18/17   BAD                                 11 minutes and 15 seconds
17    22:11:19 01/18/17                       8 minutes and 42 seconds   22:20:01 01/18/17   BAD                                   1 minute and 20 seconds
18    22:21:21 01/18/17                       8 minutes and 40 seconds   22:30:01 01/18/17   BAD   -1 years, 364 days, 23 hours, 58 minutes and 12 seconds
19    22:28:13 01/18/17                      20 minutes and 17 seconds

Wed Jan 18 23:05:38 EST 2017
FreeBSD/i386 (roadkiller.anarc.at) (ttyu0)
login: root
Password:
Jan 18 23:07:10 roadkiller login: ROOT LOGIN (root) ON ttyu0
Last login: Wed Jan 18 22:29:16 on ttyu0
Copyright (c) 1992-2013 The FreeBSD Project.
Copyright (c) 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994
        The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
FreeBSD 8.4-RELEASE-p12 (ROADKILL) #5: Fri Jun  6 02:43:23 EDT 2014
Reminders:
 * commit stuff in /etc
 * reload firewall (in screen!):
    pfctl -f /etc/pf.conf ; sleep 1
 * vim + syn on makes pf.conf more readable
 * monitoring the PPPoE uplink:
   tail -f /var/log/mpd.log
Current problems:
 * sometimes pf doesn't start properly on boot, if pppoe failed to come up, use
   this to resume:
     /etc/rc.d/pf start
   it will kill your shell, but fix NAT (2012-08-10)
 * babel fails to start on boot (2013-06-15):
     babeld -D -g 33123 tap0 vr3
 * DNS often fails, tried messing with unbound.conf (2014-10-05) and updating
   named.root (2016-01-28) and performance tweaks (ee63689)
 * asterisk and mpd4 are deprecated and should be uninstalled when we're sure
   their replacements (voipms + ata and mpd5) are working (2015-01-13)
 * if IPv6 fails, it's because netblocks are not being routed upstream. DHCPcd
   should do this, but doesn't start properly, use this to resume (2015-12-21):
     /usr/local/sbin/dhcpcd -6 --persistent --background --timeout 0 -C resolv.conf ng0
This machine is doomed to be replaced with the new omnia router, Indiegogo
campaign should ship in april 2016: http://igg.me/at/turris-omnia/x

> ?
comBIOS Monitor Commands
boot [drive][:partition] INT19 Boot
reboot                   cold boot
download                 download a file using XMODEM/CRC
flashupdate              update flash BIOS with downloaded file
time [HH:MM:SS]          show or set time
date [YYYY/MM/DD]        show or set date
d[b w d] [adr]           dump memory bytes/words/dwords
e[b w d] adr value [...] enter bytes/words/dwords
i[b w d] port            input from 8/16/32-bit port
o[b w d] port value      output to 8/16/32-bit port
run adr                  execute code at adr
cmosread [adr]           read CMOS RAM data
cmoswrite adr byte [...] write CMOS RAM data
cmoschecksum             update CMOS RAM Checksum
set parameter=value      set system parameter to value
show [parameter]         show one or all system parameters
?/help                   show this help
> show
ConSpeed = 19200
ConLock = Enabled
ConMute = Disabled
BIOSentry = Enabled
PCIROMS = Enabled
PXEBoot = Enabled
FLASH = Primary
BootDelay = 5
FastBoot = Disabled
BootPartition = Disabled
BootDrive = 80 81 F0 FF 
ShowPCI = Enabled
Reset = Hard
CpuSpeed = Default
> time
Current Date and Time is: 1980/01/01 00:56:47

[root@roadkiller ~/bin]# cat ppp_stats/downtimes.txt
11/03/2003 18:24:49 218
12/03/2003 09:10:49 118
12/03/2003 10:05:57 680
12/03/2003 10:14:50 106
12/03/2003 10:16:53 6
12/03/2003 10:35:28 146
12/03/2003 10:57:26 393
12/03/2003 11:16:35 5
12/03/2003 11:16:54 11
13/03/2003 06:15:57 18928
13/03/2003 09:43:36 9730
13/03/2003 10:47:10 23
13/03/2003 10:58:35 5
16/03/2003 01:32:36 338
16/03/2003 02:00:33 120
16/03/2003 11:14:31 14007
19/03/2003 00:56:27 11179
19/03/2003 00:56:43 5
19/03/2003 00:56:53 0
19/03/2003 00:56:55 1
19/03/2003 00:57:09 1
19/03/2003 00:57:10 1
19/03/2003 00:57:24 1
19/03/2003 00:57:25 1
19/03/2003 00:57:39 1
19/03/2003 00:57:40 1
19/03/2003 00:57:44 3
19/03/2003 00:57:53 0
19/03/2003 00:57:55 0
19/03/2003 00:58:08 0
19/03/2003 00:58:10 0
19/03/2003 00:58:23 0
19/03/2003 00:58:25 0
19/03/2003 00:58:39 1
19/03/2003 00:58:42 2
19/03/2003 00:58:58 5
19/03/2003 00:59:35 2
19/03/2003 00:59:47 3
19/03/2003 01:00:34 3
19/03/2003 01:00:39 0
19/03/2003 01:00:54 0
19/03/2003 01:01:11 2
19/03/2003 01:01:25 1
19/03/2003 01:01:48 1
19/03/2003 01:02:03 1
19/03/2003 01:02:10 2
19/03/2003 01:02:20 3
19/03/2003 01:02:44 3
19/03/2003 01:03:45 3
19/03/2003 01:04:39 2
19/03/2003 01:05:40 2
19/03/2003 01:06:35 2
19/03/2003 01:07:36 2
19/03/2003 01:08:31 2
19/03/2003 01:08:38 2
19/03/2003 01:10:07 3
19/03/2003 01:11:05 2
19/03/2003 01:12:03 3
19/03/2003 01:13:01 3
19/03/2003 01:13:58 2
19/03/2003 01:14:59 5
19/03/2003 01:15:54 2
19/03/2003 01:16:55 2
19/03/2003 01:17:50 2
19/03/2003 01:18:51 3
19/03/2003 01:19:46 2
19/03/2003 01:20:46 2
19/03/2003 01:21:42 3
19/03/2003 01:22:42 3
19/03/2003 01:23:37 2
19/03/2003 01:24:38 3
19/03/2003 01:25:33 2
19/03/2003 01:26:33 2
19/03/2003 01:27:30 3
19/03/2003 01:28:55 2
19/03/2003 01:29:56 2
19/03/2003 01:30:50 2
19/03/2003 01:31:42 3
19/03/2003 01:32:36 3
19/03/2003 01:33:27 2
19/03/2003 01:34:21 2
19/03/2003 01:35:22 2
19/03/2003 01:36:17 3
19/03/2003 01:37:18 2
19/03/2003 01:38:13 3
19/03/2003 01:39:39 2
19/03/2003 01:40:39 2
19/03/2003 01:41:35 3
19/03/2003 01:42:35 3
19/03/2003 01:43:31 3
19/03/2003 01:44:31 3
19/03/2003 01:45:53 3
19/03/2003 01:46:48 3
19/03/2003 01:47:48 2
19/03/2003 01:48:44 3
19/03/2003 01:49:44 2
19/03/2003 01:50:40 3
19/03/2003 01:51:39 1
19/03/2003 11:04:33 19   
19/03/2003 18:39:36 2833 
19/03/2003 18:54:05 825  
19/03/2003 19:04:00 454  
19/03/2003 19:08:11 210  
19/03/2003 19:41:44 272  
19/03/2003 21:18:41 208  
24/03/2003 04:51:16 6
27/03/2003 04:51:20 5
30/03/2003 04:51:25 5
31/03/2003 08:30:31 255  
03/04/2003 08:30:36 5
06/04/2003 01:16:00 621  
06/04/2003 22:18:08 17   
06/04/2003 22:32:44 13   
09/04/2003 22:33:12 28   
12/04/2003 22:33:17 6
15/04/2003 22:33:22 5
17/04/2003 15:03:43 18   
20/04/2003 15:03:48 5
23/04/2003 15:04:04 16   
23/04/2003 21:08:30 339  
23/04/2003 21:18:08 13   
23/04/2003 23:34:20 253  
26/04/2003 23:34:45 25   
29/04/2003 23:34:49 5
02/05/2003 13:10:01 185  
05/05/2003 13:10:06 5
08/05/2003 13:10:11 5
09/05/2003 14:00:36 63928
09/05/2003 16:58:52 2
11/05/2003 23:08:48 2
14/05/2003 23:08:53 6
17/05/2003 23:08:58 5
20/05/2003 23:09:03 5
23/05/2003 23:09:08 5
26/05/2003 23:09:14 5
29/05/2003 23:00:10 3
29/05/2003 23:03:01 10   
01/06/2003 23:03:05 4
04/06/2003 23:03:10 5
07/06/2003 23:03:38 28   
10/06/2003 23:03:50 12   
13/06/2003 23:03:55 6
14/06/2003 07:42:20 3
14/06/2003 14:37:08 3
15/06/2003 20:08:34 3
18/06/2003 20:08:39 6
21/06/2003 20:08:45 6
22/06/2003 03:05:19 138  
22/06/2003 04:06:28 3
25/06/2003 04:06:58 31   
28/06/2003 04:07:02 4
01/07/2003 04:07:06 4
04/07/2003 04:07:11 5
07/07/2003 04:07:16 5
12/07/2003 04:55:20 6
12/07/2003 19:09:51 1158 
12/07/2003 22:14:49 8025 
15/07/2003 22:14:54 6
16/07/2003 05:43:06 18   
19/07/2003 05:43:12 6
22/07/2003 05:43:17 5
23/07/2003 18:18:55 183  
23/07/2003 18:19:55 9
23/07/2003 18:29:15 158  
23/07/2003 19:48:44 4604 
23/07/2003 20:16:27 3
23/07/2003 20:37:29 1079 
23/07/2003 20:43:12 342  
23/07/2003 22:25:51 6158

-rw-r--r--   1 root    wheel        0 Jan 18 22:55 3@T3
-rw-r--r--   1 root    wheel        0 Jan 18 22:55 DY5

Waiting (max 60 seconds) for system process  bufdaemon' to stop...done
Waiting (max 60 seconds) for system process  syncer' to stop...
Syncing disks, vnodes remaining...3 3 0 1 1 0 0 done
All buffers synced.
Uptime: 36m43s
usbus0: Controller shutdown
uhub0: at usbus0, port 1, addr 1 (disconnected)
usbus0: Controller shutdown complete
usbus1: Controller shutdown
uhub1: at usbus1, port 1, addr 1 (disconnected)
usbus1: Controller shutdown complete
The operating system has halted.
Please press any key to reboot.

Assumptions I didn t want to build a general purpose RF simulator, anything particularly generic, or something that would solve for any more than the things right in front of me. To do this as simply (and quickly all this code took about a day to write, including the beamforming math) I had to reduce the amount of work in front of me. Given that I was concerend with visualizing what the antenna pattern would look like in 3-D given some antenna geometry, operating frequency and configured beam, I made the following assumptions: All anetnnas are perfectly isotropic they receive a signal that is exactly the same strength no matter what direction the signal originates from. There s a single point-source isotropic emitter in the far-field (I modeled this as being 1 million meters away 1000 kilometers) of the antenna system. There is no noise, multipath, loss or distortion in the signal as it travels through space. Antennas will never interfere with each other.

2-D Polar Plots The last time I wrote something like this, I generated 2-D GIFs which show a radiation pattern, not unlike the polar plots you d see on a microphone. These are handy because it lets you visualize what the directionality of the antenna looks like, as well as in what direction emissions are captured, and in what directions emissions are nulled out. You can see these plots on spec sheets for antennas in both 2-D and 3-D form. Now, let s port the 2-D approach to 3-D and see how well it works out.

Writing the 3-D simulator As an EM wave travels through free space, the place at which you sample the wave controls that phase you observe at each time-step. This means, assuming perfectly synchronized clocks, a transmitter and receiver exactly one RF wavelength apart will observe a signal in-phase, but a transmitter and receiver a half wavelength apart will observe a signal 180 degrees out of phase. This means that if we take the distance between our point-source and antenna element, divide it by the wavelength, we can use the fractional part of the resulting number to determine the phase observed. If we multiply that number (in the range of 0 to just under 1) by tau, we can generate a complex number by taking the cos and sin of the multiplied phase (in the range of 0 to tau), assuming the transmitter is emitting a carrier wave at a static amplitude and all clocks are in perfect sync.

 let observed_phases: Vec<Complex> = antennas
.iter()
.map( antenna   
let distance = (antenna - tx).magnitude();
let distance = distance - (distance as i64 as f64);
((distance / wavelength) * TAU)
 )
.map( phase  Complex(phase.cos(), phase.sin()))
.collect();

At this point, given some synthetic transmission point and each antenna, we know what the expected complex sample would be at each antenna. At this point, we can adjust the phase of each antenna according to the beamforming phase offset configuration, and add up every sample in order to determine what the entire system would collectively produce a sample as.

 let beamformed_phases: Vec<Complex> = ...;
let magnitude = beamformed_phases
.iter()
.zip(observed_phases.iter())
.map( (beamformed, observed)  observed * beamformed)
.reduce( acc, el  acc + el)
.unwrap()
.abs();

Armed with this information, it s straight forward to generate some number of (Azimuth, Elevation) points to sample, generate a transmission point far away in that direction, resolve what the resulting Complex sample would be, take its magnitude, and use that to create an (x, y, z) point at (azimuth, elevation, magnitude). The color attached two that point is based on its distance from (0, 0, 0). I opted to use the Life Aquatic table for this one. After this process is complete, I have a point cloud of ((x, y, z), (r, g, b)) points. I wrote a small program using kiss3d to render point cloud using tons of small spheres, and write out the frames to a set of PNGs, which get compiled into a GIF. Now for the fun part, let s take a look at some radiation patterns!

1x4 Phased Array The first configuration is a phased array where all the elements are in perfect alignment on the y and z axis, and separated by some offset in the x axis. This configuration can sweep 180 degrees (not the full 360), but can t be steared in elevation at all. Let s take a look at what this looks like for a well constructed 1x4 phased array: And now let s take a look at the renders as we play with the configuration of this array and make sure things look right. Our initial quarter-wavelength spacing is very effective and has some outstanding performance characteristics. Let s check to see that everything looks right as a first test. Nice. Looks perfect. When pointing forward at (0, 0), we d expect to see a torus, which we do. As we sweep between 0 and 360, astute observers will notice the pattern is mirrored along the axis of the antennas, when the beam is facing forward to 0 degrees, it ll also receive at 180 degrees just as strong. There s a small sidelobe that forms when it s configured along the array, but it also becomes the most directional, and the sidelobes remain fairly small.

Long compared to the wavelength (1 ) Let s try again, but rather than spacing each antenna of a wavelength apart, let s see about spacing each antenna 1 of a wavelength apart instead. The main lobe is a lot more narrow (not a bad thing!), but some significant sidelobes have formed (not ideal). This can cause a lot of confusion when doing things that require a lot of directional resolution unless they re compensated for.

Going from ( to 5 ) The last model begs the question - what do things look like when you separate the antennas from each other but without moving the beam? Let s simulate moving our antennas but not adjusting the configured beam or operating frequency. Very cool. As the spacing becomes longer in relation to the operating frequency, we can see the sidelobes start to form out of the end of the antenna system.

2x2 Phased Array The second configuration I want to try is a phased array where the elements are in perfect alignment on the z axis, and separated by a fixed offset in either the x or y axis by their neighbor, forming a square when viewed along the x/y axis. Let s take a look at what this looks like for a well constructed 2x2 phased array: Let s do the same as above and take a look at the renders as we play with the configuration of this array and see what things look like. This configuration should suppress the sidelobes and give us good performance, and even give us some amount of control in elevation while we re at it. Sweet. Heck yeah. The array is quite directional in the configured direction, and can even sweep a little bit in elevation, a definite improvement from the 1x4 above.

Long compared to the wavelength (1 ) Let s do the same thing as the 1x4 and take a look at what happens when the distance between elements is long compared to the frequency of operation say, 1 of a wavelength apart? What happens to the sidelobes given this spacing when the frequency of operation is much different than the physical geometry? Mesmerising. This is my favorate render. The sidelobes are very fun to watch come in and out of existence. It looks absolutely other-worldly.

Going from ( to 5 ) Finally, for completeness' sake, what do things look like when you separate the antennas from each other just as we did with the 1x4? Let s simulate moving our antennas but not adjusting the configured beam or operating frequency. Very very cool. The sidelobes wind up turning the very blobby cardioid into an electromagnetic dog toy. I think we ve proven to ourselves that using a phased array much outside its designed frequency of operation seems like a real bad idea.

Future Work Now that I have a system to test things out, I m a bit more confident that my beamforming code is close to right! I d love to push that code over the line and blog about it, since it s a really interesting topic on its own. Once I m sure the code involved isn t full of lies, I ll put it up on the hztools org, and post about it here and on mastodon.

manifest-version: "0.1"
installations:
  - install:
      source: foo
      dest-dir: usr/bin

 
  "manifest-version": "0.1",
  "installations": [
      
       "install":  
         "source": "foo",
         "dest-dir": "usr/bin",
        
      
  ]
 

1. Most plugins would probably throw KeyError: X or ValueError style errors for quite a while. Worst case, they would end on my table because the user would have a hard time telling where debputy ends and where the plugins starts. "Best" case, I would teach debputy to say "This poor error message was brought to you by plugin foo. Go complain to them". Either way, it would be a bad user experience.
2. This even assumes plugin providers would actually bother writing manifest parsing code. If it is that difficult, then just providing a custom file in debian might tempt plugin providers and that would undermine the idea of having the manifest be the sole input for debputy.

1. It had to cover as many parsing errors as possible. An error case this code would handle for you, would be an error where I could ensure it sufficient degree of detail and context for the user.
2. It should be type-safe / provide typing support such that IDEs/mypy could help you when you work on the parsed result.
3. It had to support "normalization" of the input, such as

           # User provides
           - install: "foo"
           # Which is normalized into:
           - install:
               source: "foo"
4) It must be simple to tell  debputy  what input you expected.

# User provides
- install: "foo"
# Which is normalized into:
- install:
    source: "foo"

# Example input matching this typed dict.
#    
#       "source": ["foo"]
#       "into": ["pkg"]
#    
class InstallExamplesTargetFormat(TypedDict):
    # Which source files to install (dest-dir is fixed)
    sources: List[str]
    # Which package(s) that should have these files installed.
    into: NotRequired[List[str]]

# Example input matching this typed dict.
#    
#       "source": "foo"
#       "into": "pkg"
#    
#
class InstallExamplesManifestFormat(TypedDict):
    # Note that sources here is split into source (str) vs. sources (List[str])
    sources: NotRequired[List[str]]
    source: NotRequired[str]
    # We allow the user to write  into: foo  in addition to  into: [foo] 
    into: Union[str, List[str]]
FullInstallExamplesManifestFormat = Union[
    InstallExamplesManifestFormat,
    List[str],
    str,
]

def _handler(
    normalized_form: InstallExamplesTargetFormat,
) -> InstallRule:
    ...  # Do something with the normalized form and return an InstallRule.
concept_debputy_api.add_install_rule(
  keyword="install-examples",
  target_form=InstallExamplesTargetFormat,
  manifest_form=FullInstallExamplesManifestFormat,
  handler=_handler,
)

def normalize_into_list(x: Union[str, List[str]]) -> List[str]:
    return x if isinstance(x, list) else [x]

# Map from
class InstallExamplesManifestFormat(TypedDict):
    # Note that sources here is split into source (str) vs. sources (List[str])
    sources: NotRequired[List[str]]
    source: NotRequired[str]
    # We allow the user to write  into: foo  in addition to  into: [foo] 
    into: Union[str, List[str]]
# ... into
class InstallExamplesTargetFormat(TypedDict):
    # Which source files to install (dest-dir is fixed)
    sources: List[str]
    # Which package(s) that should have these files installed.
    into: NotRequired[List[str]]

# For all intents and purposes,  foo  is a string despite all the  Annotated  stuff.
foo: Annotated[str, "hello world"] = "my string here"

# Map from
#      
#        "source": "foo"  # (or "sources": ["foo"])
#        "into": "pkg"
#      
class InstallExamplesManifestFormat(TypedDict):
    # Note that sources here is split into source (str) vs. sources (List[str])
    sources: NotRequired[List[str]]
    source: NotRequired[
        Annotated[
            str,
            DebputyParseHint.target_attribute("sources")
        ]
    ]
    # We allow the user to write  into: foo  in addition to  into: [foo] 
    into: Union[str, List[str]]
# ... into
#      
#        "source": ["foo"]
#        "into": ["pkg"]
#      
class InstallExamplesTargetFormat(TypedDict):
    # Which source files to install (dest-dir is fixed)
    sources: List[str]
    # Which package(s) that should have these files installed.
    into: NotRequired[List[str]]

# Map from
class InstallExamplesManifestFormat(TypedDict):
    # Note that sources here is split into source (str) vs. sources (List[str])
    sources: NotRequired[List[str]]
    source: NotRequired[
        Annotated[
            str,
            DebputyParseHint.target_attribute("sources")
        ]
    ]
    # We allow the user to write  into: foo  in addition to  into: [foo] 
    into: Union[BinaryPackage, List[BinaryPackage]]
# ... into
class InstallExamplesTargetFormat(TypedDict):
    # Which source files to install (dest-dir is fixed)
    sources: List[str]
    # Which package(s) that should have these files installed.
    into: NotRequired[
        Annotated[
            List[BinaryPackage],
            DebputyParseHint.required_when_multi_binary()
        ]
    ]