Search Results: "sf"

24 January 2024

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RApiDatetime 0.0.9 on CRAN: Maintenance

A new maintenance release of our RApiDatetime package is now on CRAN RApiDatetime provides a number of entry points for C-level functions of the R API for Date and Datetime calculations. The functions asPOSIXlt and asPOSIXct convert between long and compact datetime representation, formatPOSIXlt and Rstrptime convert to and from character strings, and POSIXlt2D and D2POSIXlt convert between Date and POSIXlt datetime. Lastly, asDatePOSIXct converts to a date type. All these functions are rather useful, but were not previously exported by R for C-level use by other packages. Which this package aims to change. This release responds to a CRAN request to clean up empty macros and sections in Rd files. Moreover, because the windows portion of the corresponding R-internal code underwent some changes, our (#ifdef conditional) coverage here is a little behind and created a warning under the newer UCRT setup. So starting with this release we are back to OS_type: unix meaning there will not be any Windows builds at CRAN. If you would like that to change, and ideally can work in the Windows portion, do not hesitate to get in touch. Details of the release follow based on the NEWS file.

Changes in RApiDatetime version 0.0.9 (2024-01-23)
  • Replace auto-generated stale RApitDatetime-package.Rd with macro-filled stanza to satisfy CRAN request.

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: Montreal Subway Foot Traffic Data, 2023 edition

For the fifth year in a row, I've asked Soci t de Transport de Montr al, Montreal's transit agency, for the foot traffic data of Montreal's subway. By clicking on a subway station, you'll be redirected to a graph of the station's foot traffic. Licences

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppAnnoy 0.0.22 on CRAN: Maintenance

annoy image A very minor maintenance release, now at version 0.0.22, of RcppAnnoy has arrived on CRAN. RcppAnnoy is the Rcpp-based R integration of the nifty Annoy library by Erik Bernhardsson. Annoy is a small and lightweight C++ template header library for very fast approximate nearest neighbours originally developed to drive the Spotify music discovery algorithm. It had all the buzzwords already a decade ago: it is one of the algorithms behind (drum roll ) vector search as it finds approximate matches very quickly and also allows to persist the data. This release responds to a CRAN request to clean up empty macros and sections in Rd files. Details of the release follow based on the NEWS file.

Changes in version 0.0.22 (2024-01-23)
  • Replace empty examples macro to satisfy CRAN request.

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

20 January 2024

Niels Thykier: Making debputy: Writing declarative parsing logic

In this blog post, I will cover how debputy parses its manifest and the conceptual improvements I did to make parsing of the manifest easier. All instructions to debputy are provided via the debian/debputy.manifest file and said manifest is written in the YAML format. After the YAML parser has read the basic file structure, debputy does another pass over the data to extract the information from the basic structure. As an example, the following YAML file: 
manifest-version: "0.1"
installations:
  - install:
      source: foo
      dest-dir: usr/bin
would be transformed by the YAML parser into a structure resembling: 
 
  "manifest-version": "0.1",
  "installations": [
      
       "install":  
         "source": "foo",
         "dest-dir": "usr/bin",
        
      
  ]
This structure is then what debputy does a pass on to translate this into an even higher level format where the "install" part is translated into an InstallRule. In the original prototype of debputy, I would hand-write functions to extract the data that should be transformed into the internal in-memory high level format. However, it was quite tedious. Especially because I wanted to catch every possible error condition and report "You are missing the required field X at Y" rather than the opaque KeyError: X message that would have been the default. Beyond being tedious, it was also quite error prone. As an example, in debputy/0.1.4 I added support for the install rule and you should allegedly have been able to add a dest-dir: or an as: inside it. Except I crewed up the code and debputy was attempting to look up these keywords from a dict that could never have them. Hand-writing these parsers were so annoying that it demotivated me from making manifest related changes to debputy simply because I did not want to code the parsing logic. When I got this realization, I figured I had to solve this problem better. While reflecting on this, I also considered that I eventually wanted plugins to be able to add vocabulary to the manifest. If the API was "provide a callback to extract the details of whatever the user provided here", then the result would be bad.
  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.
So beyond me being unsatisfied with the current situation, it was also clear to me that I needed to come up with a better solution if I wanted externally provided plugins for debputy. To put a bit more perspective on what I expected from the end result:
  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.
At this point, I remembered that I had seen a Python (PYPI) package where you could give it a TypedDict and an arbitrary input (Sadly, I do not remember the name). The package would then validate the said input against the TypedDict. If the match was successful, you would get the result back casted as the TypedDict. If the match was unsuccessful, the code would raise an error for you. Conceptually, this seemed to be a good starting point for where I wanted to be. Then I looked a bit on the normalization requirement (point 3). What is really going on here is that you have two "schemas" for the input. One is what the programmer will see (the normalized form) and the other is what the user can input (the manifest form). The problem is providing an automatic normalization from the user input to the simplified programmer structure. To expand a bit on the following example: 
# User provides
- install: "foo"
# Which is normalized into:
- install:
    source: "foo"
Given that install has the attributes source, sources, dest-dir, as, into, and when, how exactly would you automatically normalize "foo" (str) into source: "foo"? Even if the code filtered by "type" for these attributes, you would end up with at least source, dest-dir, and as as candidates. Turns out that TypedDict actually got this covered. But the Python package was not going in this direction, so I parked it here and started looking into doing my own. At this point, I had a general idea of what I wanted. When defining an extension to the manifest, the plugin would provide debputy with one or two definitions of TypedDict. The first one would be the "parsed" or "target" format, which would be the normalized form that plugin provider wanted to work on. For this example, lets look at an earlier version of the install-examples rule: 
# 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]]
In this form, the install-examples has two attributes - both are list of strings. On the flip side, what the user can input would look something like this: 
# 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,
]
The idea was that the plugin provider would use these two definitions to tell debputy how to parse install-examples. Pseudo-registration code could look something like: 
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,
)
This was my conceptual target and while the current actual API ended up being slightly different, the core concept remains the same.
From concept to basic implementation Building this code is kind like swallowing an elephant. There was no way I would just sit down and write it from one end to the other. So the first prototype of this did not have all the features it has now. Spoiler warning, these next couple of sections will contain some Python typing details. When reading this, it might be helpful to know things such as Union[str, List[str]] being the Python type for either a str (string) or a List[str] (list of strings). If typing makes your head spin, these sections might less interesting for you. To build this required a lot of playing around with Python's introspection and typing APIs. My very first draft only had one "schema" (the normalized form) and had the following features:
  • Read TypedDict.__required_attributes__ and TypedDict.__optional_attributes__ to determine which attributes where present and which were required. This was used for reporting errors when the input did not match.
  • Read the types of the provided TypedDict, strip the Required / NotRequired markers and use basic isinstance checks based on the resulting type for str and List[str]. Again, used for reporting errors when the input did not match.
This prototype did not take a long (I remember it being within a day) and worked surprisingly well though with some poor error messages here and there. Now came the first challenge, adding the manifest format schema plus relevant normalization rules. The very first normalization I did was transforming into: Union[str, List[str]] into into: List[str]. At that time, source was not a separate attribute. Instead, sources was a Union[str, List[str]], so it was the only normalization I needed for all my use-cases at the time. There are two problems when writing a normalization. First is determining what the "source" type is, what the target type is and how they relate. The second is providing a runtime rule for normalizing from the manifest format into the target format. Keeping it simple, the runtime normalizer for Union[str, List[str]] -> List[str] was written as: 
def normalize_into_list(x: Union[str, List[str]]) -> List[str]:
    return x if isinstance(x, list) else [x]
This basic form basically works for all types (assuming none of the types will have List[List[...]]). The logic for determining when this rule is applicable is slightly more involved. My current code is about 100 lines of Python code that would probably lose most of the casual readers. For the interested, you are looking for _union_narrowing in declarative_parser.py With this, when the manifest format had Union[str, List[str]] and the target format had List[str] the generated parser would silently map a string into a list of strings for the plugin provider. But with that in place, I had covered the basics of what I needed to get started. I was quite excited about this milestone of having my first keyword parsed without handwriting the parser logic (at the expense of writing a more generic parse-generator framework).
Adding the first parse hint With the basic implementation done, I looked at what to do next. As mentioned, at the time sources in the manifest format was Union[str, List[str]] and I considered to split into a source: str and a sources: List[str] on the manifest side while keeping the normalized form as sources: List[str]. I ended up committing to this change and that meant I had to solve the problem getting my parser generator to understand the situation: 
# 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]]
There are two related problems to solve here:
  1. How will the parser generator understand that source should be normalized and then mapped into sources?
  2. Once that is solved, the parser generator has to understand that while source and sources are declared as NotRequired, they are part of a exactly one of rule (since sources in the target form is Required). This mainly came down to extra book keeping and an extra layer of validation once the previous step is solved.
While working on all of this type introspection for Python, I had noted the Annotated[X, ...] type. It is basically a fake type that enables you to attach metadata into the type system. A very random example: 
# For all intents and purposes,  foo  is a string despite all the  Annotated  stuff.
foo: Annotated[str, "hello world"] = "my string here"
The exciting thing is that you can put arbitrary details into the type field and read it out again in your introspection code. Which meant, I could add "parse hints" into the type. Some "quick" prototyping later (a day or so), I got the following to work: 
# 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]]
Without me (as a plugin provider) writing a line of code, I can have debputy rename or "merge" attributes from the manifest form into the normalized form. Obviously, this required me (as the debputy maintainer) to write a lot code so other me and future plugin providers did not have to write it.
High level typing At this point, basic normalization between one mapping to another mapping form worked. But one thing irked me with these install rules. The into was a list of strings when the parser handed them over to me. However, I needed to map them to the actual BinaryPackage (for technical reasons). While I felt I was careful with my manual mapping, I knew this was exactly the kind of case where a busy programmer would skip the "is this a known package name" check and some user would typo their package resulting in an opaque KeyError: foo. Side note: "Some user" was me today and I was super glad to see debputy tell me that I had typoed a package name (I would have been more happy if I had remembered to use debputy check-manifest, so I did not have to wait through the upstream part of the build that happened before debhelper passed control to debputy...) I thought adding this feature would be simple enough. It basically needs two things:
  1. Conversion table where the parser generator can tell that BinaryPackage requires an input of str and a callback to map from str to BinaryPackage. (That is probably lie. I think the conversion table came later, but honestly I do remember and I am not digging into the git history for this one)
  2. At runtime, said callback needed access to the list of known packages, so it could resolve the provided string.
It was not super difficult given the existing infrastructure, but it did take some hours of coding and debugging. Additionally, I added a parse hint to support making the into conditional based on whether it was a single binary package. With this done, you could now write something like: 
# 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()
        ]
    ]
Code-wise, I still had to check for into being absent and providing a default for that case (that is still true in the current codebase - I will hopefully fix that eventually). But I now had less room for mistakes and a standardized error message when you misspell the package name, which was a plus.
The added side-effect - Introspection A lovely side-effect of all the parsing logic being provided to debputy in a declarative form was that the generated parser snippets had fields containing all expected attributes with their types, which attributes were required, etc. This meant that adding an introspection feature where you can ask debputy "What does an install rule look like?" was quite easy. The code base already knew all of this, so the "hard" part was resolving the input the to concrete rule and then rendering it to the user. I added this feature recently along with the ability to provide online documentation for parser rules. I covered that in more details in my blog post Providing online reference documentation for debputy in case you are interested. :)
Wrapping it up This was a short insight into how debputy parses your input. With this declarative technique:
  • The parser engine handles most of the error reporting meaning users get most of the errors in a standard format without the plugin provider having to spend any effort on it. There will be some effort in more complex cases. But the common cases are done for you.
  • It is easy to provide flexibility to users while avoiding having to write code to normalize the user input into a simplified programmer oriented format.
  • The parser handles mapping from basic types into higher forms for you. These days, we have high level types like FileSystemMode (either an octal or a symbolic mode), different kind of file system matches depending on whether globs should be performed, etc. These types includes their own validation and parsing rules that debputy handles for you.
  • Introspection and support for providing online reference documentation. Also, debputy checks that the provided attribute documentation covers all the attributes in the manifest form. If you add a new attribute, debputy will remind you if you forget to document it as well. :)
In this way everybody wins. Yes, writing this parser generator code was more enjoyable than writing the ad-hoc manual parsers it replaced. :)

19 January 2024

Russell Coker: 2.5Gbit Ethernet

I just decided to upgrade the core of my home network from 1Gbit to 2.5Gbit. I didn t really need to do this, it was only about 5 years ago that I upgrade from 100Mbit to 1Gbit. but it s cheap and seemed interesting. I decided to do it because a 2.5Gbit switch was listed as cheap on Ozbargain Computing [1], that was $40.94 delivered. If you are in Australia and like computers then Ozbargain is a site worth polling, every day there s interesting things at low prices. The seller of the switch is KeeplinkStore [2] who distinguished themselves by phoning me from China to inform me that I had ordered a switch with a UK plug for delivery to Australia and suggesting that I cancel the order and make a new order with an Australian plug. It wouldn t have been a big deal if I had received a UK plug as I ve got a collection of adaptors but it was still nice of them to make it convenient for me. The switch basically does what it s expected to do and has no fan so it s quiet. I got a single port 2.5Gbit PCIe card for $18.77 and a dual port card for $34.07. Those cards are a little expensive when compared to 1Gbit cards but very cheap when compared to the computers they are installed in. These cards use the Realtek RTL8125 chipset and work well. I got a USB-3 2.5Gbit device for $17.43. I deliberately didn t get USB-C because I still use laptops without USB-C and most of the laptops with USB-C only have a single USB-C port which is used for power. I don t plan to stop using my 100Mbit USB ethernet device because most of the time I don t need a lot of speed. But sometimes I do things like testing auto-install on laptops and then having something faster than Gigabit is good. This card worked at 1Gbit speed on a 1Gbit network when used with a system running Debian/Bookworm with kernel 6.1 and worked at 2.5Gbit speed when connected to my LicheePi RISC-V system running Linux 5.10, but it would only do 100Mbit on my laptop running Debian/Unstable with kernel 6.6 (Debian Bug #1061095) [3]. It s a little disappointing but not many people have such hardware so it probably doesn t get a lot of testing. For the moment I plan to just use a 1Gbit USB Ethernet device most of the time and if I really need the speed I ll just use an older kernel. I did some tests with wget and curl to see if I could get decent speeds. When using wget 1.21.3 on Debian/Bookworm I got transfer speeds of 103MB/s and 18.8s of system CPU time out of 23.6s of elapsed time. Curl on Debian/Bookworm did 203MB/s and took 10.7s of system CPU time out of 11.8s elapsed time. The difference is that curl was using 100KB read buffers and a mix of 12K and 4K write buffers while wget was using 8KB read buffers and 4KB write buffers. On Debian/Unstable wget 1.21.4 uses 64K read buffers and a mix of 4K and 60K write buffers and gets a speed of 208MB/s. As an experiment I changed the read buffer size for wget to 256K and that got the speed up to around 220MB/s but it was difficult to measure as the occasional packet loss slowed things down. The pattern of writing 4K and then writing the rest continued, it seemed related to fwrite() buffering. For anyone else who wants to experiment with the code, the wget code is simpler (due to less features) and the package builds a lot faster (due to fewer tests) so that s the one to work on. The client machine for these tests has a E5-2696 v3 CPU, this doesn t compare well to some of the recent AMD CPUs on single-core performance but is still a decently powerful system. Getting good performance at Gigabit speeds on an ARM or RISC-V system is probably going to be a lot harder than getting good performance at 2.5Gbit speeds on this system. In conclusion 2.5Gbit basically works apart from a problem with new kernels and a problem with the old version of wget. I expect that when Debian/Trixie is released (probably mid 2025) things will work well. For good transfer rates use wget version 1.21.4 or newer or use curl. As an aside I use a 1500byte MTU because I have some 100baseT systems on my LAN and the settings regarding TCP acceleration etc are all the defaults.
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15 January 2024

Russ Allbery: Review: The Library of Broken Worlds

Review: The Library of Broken Worlds, by Alaya Dawn Johnson
Publisher: Scholastic Press
Copyright: June 2023
ISBN: 1-338-29064-9
Format: Kindle
Pages: 446
The Library of Broken Worlds is a young-adult far-future science fantasy. So far as I can tell, it's stand-alone, although more on that later in the review. Freida is the adopted daughter of Nadi, the Head Librarian, and her greatest wish is to become a librarian herself. When the book opens, she's a teenager in highly competitive training. Freida is low-wetware, without the advanced and expensive enhancements of many of the other students competing for rare and prized librarian positions, which she makes up for by being the most audacious. She doesn't need wetware to commune with the library material gods. If one ventures deep into their tunnels and consumes their crystals, direct physical communion is possible. The library tunnels are Freida's second home, in part because that's where she was born. She was created by the Library, and specifically by Iemaja, the youngest of the material gods. Precisely why is a mystery. To Nadi, Freida is her daughter. To Quinn, Nadi's main political rival within the library, Freida is a thing, a piece of the library, a secondary and possibly rogue AI. A disruptive annoyance. The Library of Broken Worlds is the sort of science fiction where figuring out what is going on is an integral part of the reading experience. It opens with a frame story of an unnamed girl (clearly Freida) waking the god Nameren and identifying herself as designed for deicide. She provokes Nameren's curiosity and offers an Arabian Nights bargain: if he wants to hear her story, he has to refrain from killing her for long enough for her to tell it. As one might expect, the main narrative doesn't catch up to the frame story until the very end of the book. The Library is indeed some type of library that librarians can search for knowledge that isn't available from more mundane sources, but Freida's personal experience of it is almost wholly religious and oracular. The library's material gods are identified as AIs, but good luck making sense of the story through a science fiction frame, even with a healthy allowance for sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic. The symbolism and tone is entirely fantasy, and late in the book it becomes clear that whatever the material gods are, they're not simple technological AIs in the vein of, say, Banks's Ship Minds. Also, the Library is not solely a repository of knowledge. It is the keeper of an interstellar peace. The Library was founded after the Great War, to prevent a recurrence. It functions as a sort of legal system and grand tribunal in ways that are never fully explained. As you might expect, that peace is based more on stability than fairness. Five of the players in this far future of humanity are the Awilu, the most advanced society and the first to leave Earth (or Tierra as it's called here); the Mah m, who possess the material war god Nameren of the frame story; the Lunars and Martians, who dominate the Sol system; and the surviving Tierrans, residents of a polluted and struggling planet that is ruthlessly exploited by the Lunars. The problem facing Freida and her friends at the start of the book is a petition brought by a young Tierran against Lunar exploitation of his homeland. His name is Joshua, and Freida is more than half in love with him. Joshua's legal argument involves interpretation of the freedom node of the treaty that ended the Great War, a node that precedent says gives the Lunars the freedom to exploit Tierra, but which Joshua claims has a still-valid originalist meaning granting Tierrans freedom from exploitation. There is, in short, a lot going on in this book, and "never fully explained" is something of a theme. Freida is telling a story to Nameren and only explains things Nameren may not already know. The reader has to puzzle out the rest from the occasional hint. This is made more difficult by the tendency of the material gods to communicate only in visions or guided hallucinations, full of symbolism that the characters only partly explain to the reader. Nonetheless, this did mostly work, at least for me. I started this book very confused, but by about the midpoint it felt like the background was coming together. I'm still not sure I understand the aurochs, baobab, and cicada symbolism that's so central to the framing story, but it's the pleasant sort of stretchy confusion that gives my brain a good workout. I wish Johnson had explained a few more things plainly, particularly near the end of the book, but my remaining level of confusion was within my tolerances. Unfortunately, the ending did not work for me. The first time I read it, I had no idea what it meant. Lots of baffling, symbolic things happened and then the book just stopped. After re-reading the last 10%, I think all the pieces of an ending and a bit of an explanation are there, but it's absurdly abbreviated. This is another book where the author appears to have been finished with the story before I was. This keeps happening to me, so this probably says something more about me than it says about books, but I want books to have an ending. If the characters have fought and suffered through the plot, I want them to have some space to be happy and to see how their sacrifices play out, with more detail than just a few vague promises. If much of the book has been puzzling out the nature of the world, I would like some concrete confirmation of at least some of my guesswork. And if you're going to end the book on radical transformation, I want to see the results of that transformation. Johnson does an excellent job showing how brutal the peace of the powerful can be, and is willing to light more things on fire over the course of this book than most authors would, but then doesn't offer the reader much in the way of payoff. For once, I wish this stand-alone turned out to be a series. I think an additional book could be written in the aftermath of this ending, and I would definitely read that novel. Johnson has me caring deeply about these characters and fascinated by the world background, and I'd happily spend another 450 pages finding out what happens next. But, frustratingly, I think this ending was indeed intended to wrap up the story. I think this book may fall between a few stools. Science fiction readers who want mysterious future worlds to be explained by the end of the book are going to be frustrated by the amount of symbolism, allusion, and poetic description. Literary fantasy readers, who have a higher tolerance for that style, are going to wish for more focused and polished writing. A lot of the story is firmly YA: trying and failing to fit in, developing one's identity, coming into power, relationship drama, great betrayals and regrets, overcoming trauma and abuse, and unraveling lies that adults tell you. But this is definitely not a straight-forward YA plot or world background. It demands a lot from the reader, and while I am confident many teenage readers would rise to that challenge, it seems like an awkward fit for the YA marketing category. About 75% of the way in, I would have told you this book was great and you should read it. The ending was a let-down and I'm still grumpy about it. I still think it's worth your attention if you're in the mood for a sink-or-swim type of reading experience. Just be warned that when the ride ends, I felt unceremoniously dumped on the pavement. Content warnings: Rape, torture, genocide. Rating: 7 out of 10

14 January 2024

Uwe Kleine-K nig: PGP Keysigning on FOSDEM'24

I'm going to FOSDEM'24. Assuming to meet Debian and Kernel folks there, this should be a good opportunity to do PGP keysigning. If you also go there and you're interested in keysigning: Send me your key via email to fosdem24-keysigning@kleine-koenig.org. I'll collect the keys, create a paper list for a keysigning party and send it back to you in the week before FOSDEM. The list will only be made available to other participants. Then maybe wear a "keysigning" badge (or a crepe tape with that caption) that allows us to identify others on the list. If there are not too many who are interested, I guess that should work fine. (If this idea becomes too successful, I'd close the list after the first 100 participants.) Update: Several people let me know there is another keysigning announced on Ludovic Hirlimann's blog. So you might want to bring some more paper slips with your fingerprint and show up there, too.

13 January 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: LXD/Incus backend bug, /usr-merge updates, gcc-for-host, and more! (by Utkarsh Gupta)

Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

LXD/Incus backend bug in autopkgtest by Stefano Rivera While working on the Python 3.12 transition, Stefano repeatedly ran into a bug in autopkgtest when using LXD (or in the future Incus), that caused it to hang when running cython s multi-hour autopkgtests. After some head-banging, the bug turned out to be fairly straightforward: LXD didn t shut down on receiving a SIGTERM, so when a testsuite timed out, it would hang forever. A simple fix has been applied.

/usr-merge, by Helmut Grohne Thanks to Christian Hofstaedtler and others, the effort is moving into a community effort and the work funded by Freexian becomes more difficult to separate from non-funded work. In particular, since the community fully handled all issues around lost udev rules, dh_installudev now installs rules to /usr. The story around diversions took another detour. We learned that conflicts do not reliably prevent concurrent unpack and the reiterated mitigation for molly-guard triggered this. After a bit of back and forth and consultation with the developer mailing list, we concluded that avoiding the problematic behavior when using apt or an apt-based upgrader combined with a loss mitigation would be good enough. The involved packages bfh-container, molly-guard, progress-linux-container and systemd have since been uploaded to unstable and the matter seems finally solved except that it doesn t quite work with sysvinit yet. The same approach is now being proposed for the diversions of zutils for gzip. We thank involved maintainers for their timely cooperation.

gcc-for-host, by Helmut Grohne Since forever, it has been difficult to correctly express a toolchain build dependency. This can be seen in the Build-Depends of the linux source package for instance. While this has been solved for binutils a while back, the patches for gcc have been unfinished. With lots of constructive feedback from gcc package maintainer Matthias Klose, Helmut worked on finalizing and testing these patches. Patch stacks are now available for gcc-13 and gcc-14 and Matthias already included parts of them in test builds for Ubuntu noble. Finishing this work would enable us to resolve around 1000 cross build dependency satisfiability issues in unstable.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Stefano continued work on the Python 3.12 transition, including uploads of cython, pycxx, numpy, python-greenlet, twisted, foolscap and dh-python.
  • Stefano reviewed and selected from a new round of DebConf 24 bids, as part of the DebConf Committee. Busan, South Korea was selected.
  • For debian-printing Thorsten uploaded hplip to unstable to fix a /usr-merge bug and cups to Bookworm to fix bugs related to printing in color.
  • Utkarsh helped newcomers in mentoring and reviewing their packaging; eg: golang-github-prometheus-community-pgbouncer-exporter.
  • Helmut sent patches for 42 cross build failures unrelated to the gcc-for-host work.
  • Helmut continues to maintain rebootstrap. In December, blt started depending on libjpeg and this poses a dependency loop. Ideally, Python would stop depending on blt. Also linux-libc-dev having become Multi-Arch: foreign poses non-trivial issues that are not fully resolved yet.
  • Enrico participated in /usr-merge discussions with Helmut.

11 January 2024

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in December 2023

Welcome to the December 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In these reports we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a rather rapid recap, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, almost all software is distributed to end users as pre-compiled binaries (more).

Reproducible Builds: Increasing the Integrity of Software Supply Chains awarded IEEE Software Best Paper award In February 2022, we announced in these reports that a paper written by Chris Lamb and Stefano Zacchiroli was now available in the March/April 2022 issue of IEEE Software. Titled Reproducible Builds: Increasing the Integrity of Software Supply Chains (PDF). This month, however, IEEE Software announced that this paper has won their Best Paper award for 2022.

Reproducibility to affect package migration policy in Debian In a post summarising the activities of the Debian Release Team at a recent in-person Debian event in Cambridge, UK, Paul Gevers announced a change to the way packages are migrated into the staging area for the next stable Debian release based on its reproducibility status:
The folks from the Reproducibility Project have come a long way since they started working on it 10 years ago, and we believe it s time for the next step in Debian. Several weeks ago, we enabled a migration policy in our migration software that checks for regression in reproducibility. At this moment, that is presented as just for info, but we intend to change that to delays in the not so distant future. We eventually want all packages to be reproducible. To stimulate maintainers to make their packages reproducible now, we ll soon start to apply a bounty [speedup] for reproducible builds, like we ve done with passing autopkgtests for years. We ll reduce the bounty for successful autopkgtests at that moment in time.

Speranza: Usable, privacy-friendly software signing Kelsey Merrill, Karen Sollins, Santiago Torres-Arias and Zachary Newman have developed a new system called Speranza, which is aimed at reassuring software consumers that the product they are getting has not been tampered with and is coming directly from a source they trust. A write-up on TechXplore.com goes into some more details:
What we have done, explains Sollins, is to develop, prove correct, and demonstrate the viability of an approach that allows the [software] maintainers to remain anonymous. Preserving anonymity is obviously important, given that almost everyone software developers included value their confidentiality. This new approach, Sollins adds, simultaneously allows [software] users to have confidence that the maintainers are, in fact, legitimate maintainers and, furthermore, that the code being downloaded is, in fact, the correct code of that maintainer. [ ]
The corresponding paper is published on the arXiv preprint server in various formats, and the announcement has also been covered in MIT News.

Nondeterministic Git bundles Paul Baecher published an interesting blog post on Reproducible git bundles. For those who are not familiar with them, Git bundles are used for the offline transfer of Git objects without an active server sitting on the other side of a network connection. Anyway, Paul wrote about writing a backup system for his entire system, but:
I noticed that a small but fixed subset of [Git] repositories are getting backed up despite having no changes made. That is odd because I would think that repeated bundling of the same repository state should create the exact same bundle. However [it] turns out that for some, repositories bundling is nondeterministic.
Paul goes on to to describe his solution, which involves forcing git to be single threaded makes the output deterministic . The article was also discussed on Hacker News.

Output from libxlst now deterministic libxslt is the XSLT C library developed for the GNOME project, where XSLT itself is an XML language to define transformations for XML files. This month, it was revealed that the result of the generate-id() XSLT function is now deterministic across multiple transformations, fixing many issues with reproducible builds. As the Git commit by Nick Wellnhofer describes: 
Rework the generate-id() function to return deterministic values. We use
a simple incrementing counter and store ids in the 'psvi' member of
nodes which was freed up by previous commits. The presence of an id is
indicated by a new "source node" flag.
This fixes long-standing problems with reproducible builds, see
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=751621
This also hardens security, as the old implementation leaked the
difference between a heap and a global pointer, see
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1356211
The old implementation could also generate the same id for dynamically
created nodes which happened to reuse the same memory. Ids for namespace
nodes were completely broken. They now use the id of the parent element
together with the hex-encoded namespace prefix.

Community updates There were made a number of improvements to our website, including Chris Lamb fixing the generate-draft script to not blow up if the input files have been corrupted today or even in the past [ ], Holger Levsen updated the Hamburg 2023 summit to add a link to farewell post [ ] & to add a picture of a Post-It note. [ ], and Pol Dellaiera updated the paragraph about tar and the --clamp-mtime flag [ ]. On our mailing list this month, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted an interesting summary on some of the reasons why packages are still not reproducible in 2023. 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, including processing objdump symbol comment filter inputs as Python byte (and not str) instances [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian extended diffoscope support for GNU Guix [ ] and updated the version in that distribution to version 253 [ ].

Challenges of Producing Software Bill Of Materials for Java Musard Balliu, Benoit Baudry, Sofia Bobadilla, Mathias Ekstedt, Martin Monperrus, Javier Ron, Aman Sharma, Gabriel Skoglund, C sar Soto-Valero and Martin Wittlinger (!) of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, have published an article in which they:
deep-dive into 6 tools and the accuracy of the SBOMs they produce for complex open-source Java projects. Our novel insights reveal some hard challenges regarding the accurate production and usage of software bills of materials.
The paper is available on arXiv.

Debian Non-Maintainer campaign As mentioned in previous reports, the Reproducible Builds team within Debian has been organising a series of online and offline sprints in order to clear the huge backlog of reproducible builds patches submitted by performing so-called NMUs (Non-Maintainer Uploads). During December, Vagrant Cascadian performed a number of such uploads, including: In addition, Holger Levsen performed three no-source-change NMUs in order to address the last packages without .buildinfo files in Debian trixie, specifically lorene (0.0.0~cvs20161116+dfsg-1.1), maria (1.3.5-4.2) and ruby-rinku (1.7.3-2.1).

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 December, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Fix matching packages for the [R programming language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(programming_language). [ ][ ][ ]
    • Add a Certbot configuration for the Nginx web server. [ ]
    • Enable debugging for the create-meta-pkgs tool. [ ][ ]
  • Arch Linux-related changes
    • The asp has been deprecated by pkgctl; thanks to dvzrv for the pointer. [ ]
    • Disable the Arch Linux builders for now. [ ]
    • Stop referring to the /trunk branch / subdirectory. [ ]
    • Use --protocol https when cloning repositories using the pkgctl tool. [ ]
  • Misc changes:
    • Install the python3-setuptools and swig packages, which are now needed to build OpenWrt. [ ]
    • Install pkg-config needed to build Coreboot artifacts. [ ]
    • Detect failures due to an issue where the fakeroot tool is implicitly required but not automatically installed. [ ]
    • Detect failures due to rename of the vmlinuz file. [ ]
    • Improve the grammar of an error message. [ ]
    • Document that freebsd-jenkins.debian.net has been updated to FreeBSD 14.0. [ ]
In addition, node maintenance was performed by Holger Levsen [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian [ ].

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to 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:
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:

9 January 2024

Thomas Koch: lsp-java coming to debian

Posted on March 12, 2022
Tags: debian
The Language Server Protocol (LSP) standardizes communication between editors and so called language servers for different programming languages. This reduces the old problem that every editor had to implement many different plugins for all different programming languages. With LSP an editor just needs to talk LSP and can immediately provide typicall IDE features. I already packaged the Emacs packages lsp-mode and lsp-haskell for Debian bullseye. Now lsp-java is waiting in the NEW queue. I m always worried about downloading and executing binaries from random places of the internet. It should be a matter of hygiene to only run binaries from official Debian repositories. Unfortunately this is not feasible when programming and many people don t see a problem with running multiple curl-sh pipes to set up their programming environment. I prefer to do such stuff only in virtual machines. With Emacs and LSP I can finally have a lightweight textmode programming environment even for Java. Unfortunately the lsp-java mode does not yet work over tramp. Once this is solved, I could run emacs on my host and only isolate the code and language server inside the VM. The next step would be to also keep the code on the host and mount it with Virtio FS in the VM. But so far the necessary daemon is not yet in Debian (RFP: #1007152). In Detail I uploaded these packages:

8 January 2024

Russ Allbery: Review: The Faithless

Review: The Faithless, by C.L. Clark
Series: Magic of the Lost #2
Publisher: Orbit
Copyright: March 2023
ISBN: 0-316-54283-0
Format: Kindle
Pages: 527
The Faithless is the second book in a political fantasy series that seems likely to be a trilogy. It is a direct sequel to The Unbroken, which you should read first. As usual, Orbit made it unnecessarily hard to get re-immersed in the world by refusing to provide memory aids for readers who read books as they come out instead of only when the series is complete, but this is not the fault of Clark or the book and you've heard me rant about this before. The Unbroken was set in Qaz l (not-Algeria). The Faithless, as readers of the first book might guess from the title, is set in Balladaire (not-France). This is the palace intrigue book. Princess Luca is fighting for her throne against her uncle, the regent. Touraine is trying to represent her people. Whether and to what extent those interests are aligned is much of the meat of this book. Normally I enjoy palace intrigue novels for the competence porn: watching someone navigate a complex political situation with skill and cunning, or upend the entire system by building unlikely coalitions or using unexpected routes to power. If you are similar, be warned that this is not what you're going to get. Touraine is a fish out of water with no idea how to navigate the Balladairan court, and does not magically become an expert in the course of this novel. Luca has the knowledge, but she's unsure, conflicted, and largely out-maneuvered. That means you will have to brace for some painful scenes of some of the worst people apparently getting what they want. Despite that, I could not put this down. It was infuriating, frustrating, and a much slower burn than I prefer, but the layers of complex motivations that Clark builds up provided a different sort of payoff. Two books in, the shape of this series is becoming clearer. This series is about empire and colonialism, but with considerably more complexity than fantasy normally brings to that topic. Power does not loosen its grasp easily, and it has numerous tools for subtle punishment after apparent upstart victories. Righteous causes rarely call banners to your side; instead, they create opportunities for other people to maneuver to their own advantage. Touraine has some amount of power now, but it's far from obvious how to use it. Her life's training tells her that exercising power will only cause trouble, and her enemies are more than happy to reinforce that message at every opportunity. Most notable to me is Clark's bitingly honest portrayal of the supposed allies within the colonial power. It is clear that Luca is attempting to take the most ethical actions as she defines them, but it's remarkable how those efforts inevitably imply that Touraine should help Luca now in exchange for Luca's tenuous and less-defined possible future aid. This is not even a lie; it may be an accurate summary of Balladairan politics. And yet, somehow what Balladaire needs always matters more than the needs of their abused colony. Underscoring this, Clark introduces another faction in the form of a populist movement against the Balladairan monarchy. The details of that setup in another fantasy novel would make them allies of the Qaz l. Here, as is so often the case in real life, a substantial portion of the populists are even more xenophobic and racist than the nobility. There are no easy alliances. The trump card that Qaz l holds is magic. They have it, and (for reasons explored in The Unbroken) Balladaire needs it, although that is a position held by Luca's faction and not by her uncle. But even Luca wants to reduce that magic to a manageable technology, like any other element of the Balladairan state. She wants to understand it, harness it, and bring it under local control. Touraine, trained by Balladaire and facing Balladairan political problems, has the same tendency. The magic, at least in this book, refuses not in the flashy, rebellious way that it would in most fantasy, but in a frustrating and incomprehensible lack of predictable or convenient rules. I think this will feel like a plot device to some readers, and that is to some extent true, but I think I see glimmers of Clark setting up a conflict of world views that will play out in the third book. I think some people are going to bounce off this book. It's frustrating, enraging, at times melodramatic, and does not offer the cathartic payoff typically offered in fantasy novels of this type. Usually these are things I would be complaining about as well. And yet, I found it satisfyingly challenging, engrossing, and memorable. I spent a lot of the book yelling "just kill him already" at the characters, but I think one of Clark's points is that overcoming colonial relationships requires a lot more than just killing one evil man. The characters profoundly fail to execute some clever and victorious strategy. Instead, as in the first book, they muddle through, making the best choice that they can see in each moment, making lots of mistakes, and paying heavy prices. It's realistic in a way that has nothing to do with blood or violence or grittiness. (Although I did appreciate having the thin thread of Pruett's story and its highly satisfying conclusion.) This is also a slow-burn romance, and there too I think opinions will differ. Touraine and Luca keep circling back to the same arguments and the same frustrations, and there were times that this felt repetitive. It also adds a lot of personal drama to the politics in a way that occasionally made me dubious. But here too, I think Clark is partly using the romance to illustrate the deeper political points. Luca is often insufferable, cruel and ambitious in ways she doesn't realize, and only vaguely able to understand the Qaz l perspective; in short, she's the pragmatic centrist reformer. I am dubious that her ethics would lead her to anything other than endless compromise without Touraine to push her. To Luca's credit, she also realizes that and wants to be a better person, but struggles to have the courage to act on it. Touraine both does and does not want to manipulate her; she wants Luca's help (and more), but it's not clear Luca will give it under acceptable terms, or even understand how much she's demanding. It's that foundational conflict that turns the romance into a slow burn by pushing them apart. Apparently I have more patience for this type of on-again, off-again relationship than one based on artificial miscommunication. The more I noticed the political subtext, the more engaging I found the romance on the surface. I picked this up because I'd read several books about black characters written by white authors, and while there was nothing that wrong with those books, the politics felt a little too reductionist and simplified. I wanted a book that was going to force me out of comfortable political assumptions. The Faithless did exactly what I was looking for, and I am definitely here for the rest of the series. In that sense, recommended, although do not go into this book hoping for adroit court maneuvering and competence porn. Followed by The Sovereign, which does not yet have a release date. Content warnings: Child death, attempted cultural genocide. Rating: 7 out of 10

7 January 2024

Jonathan McDowell: Free Software Activities for 2023

This year was hard from a personal and work point of view, which impacted the amount of Free Software bits I ended up doing - even when I had the time I often wasn t in the right head space to make progress on things. However writing this annual recap up has been a useful exercise, as I achieved more than I realised. For previous years see 2019, 2020, 2021 + 2022.

Conferences The only Free Software related conference I made it to this year was DebConf23 in Kochi, India. Changes with projects at work meant I couldn t justify anything work related. This year I m planning to make it to FOSDEM, and haven t made a decision on DebConf24 yet.

Debian Most of my contributions to Free software continue to happen within Debian. I started the year working on retrogaming with Kodi on Debian. I got this to a much better state for bookworm, with it being possible to run the bsnes-mercury emulator under Kodi using RetroArch. There are a few other libretro backends available for RetroArch, but Kodi needs some extra controller mappings packaged up first. Plenty of uploads were involved, though some of this was aligning all the dependencies and generally cleaning things up in iterations. I continued to work on a few packages within the Debian Electronics Packaging Team. OpenOCD produced a new release in time for the bookworm release, so I uploaded 0.12.0-1. There were a few minor sigrok cleanups - sigrok 0.3, libsigrokdecode 0.5.3-4 + libsigrok 0.5.2-4 / 0.5.2-5. While I didn t manage to get the work completed I did some renaming of the ESP8266 related packages - gcc-xtensa-lx106 (which saw a 13 upload pre-bookworm) has become gcc-xtensa (with 14) and binutils-xtensa-lx106 has become binutils-xtensa (with 6). Binary packages remain the same, but this is intended to allow for the generation of ESP32 compiler toolchains from the same source. onak saw 0.6.3-1 uploaded to match the upstream release. I also uploaded libgpg-error 1.47-1 (though I can claim no credit for any of the work in preparing the package) to help move things forward on updating gnupg2 in Debian. I NMUed tpm2-pkcs11 1.9.0-0.1 to fix some minor issues pre-bookworm release; I use this package myself to store my SSH key within my laptop TPM, so I care about it being in a decent state. sg3-utils also saw a bit of love with 1.46-2 + 1.46-3 - I don t work in the storage space these days, but I m still listed as an uploaded and there was an RC bug around the library package naming that I was qualified to fix and test pre-bookworm. Related to my retroarch work I sponsored uploads of mgba for Ryan Tandy: 0.10.0+dfsg-1, 0.10.0+dfsg-2, 0.10.1+dfsg-1, 0.10.2+dfsg-1, mgba 0.10.1+dfsg-1+deb12u1. As part of the Data Protection Team I responded to various inbound queries to that team, both from project members and those external to the project. I continue to keep an eye on Debian New Members, even though I m mostly inactive as an application manager - we generally seem to have enough available recently. Mostly my involvement is via Front Desk activities, helping out with queries to the team alias, and contributing to internal discussions as well as our panel at DebConf23. Finally the 3 month rotation for Debian Keyring continues to operate smoothly. I dealt with 2023.03.24, 2023.06.26, 2023.06.29, 2023.09.10, 2023.09.24 + 2023.12.24.

Linux I had a few minor patches accepted to the kernel this year. A pair of safexcel cleanups (improved error logging for firmware load fail and cleanup on load failure) came out of upgrading the kernel running on my RB5009. The rest were related to my work on repurposing my C.H.I.P.. The AXP209 driver needed extended to support GPIO3 (with associated DT schema update). That allowed Bluetooth to be enabled. Adding the AXP209 internal temperature ADC as an iio-hwmon node means it can be tracked using the normal sensor monitoring framework. And finally I added the pinmux settings for mmc2, which I use to support an external microSD slot on my C.H.I.P.

Personal projects 2023 saw another minor release of onak, 0.6.3, which resulted in a corresponding Debian upload (0.6.3-1). It has a couple of bug fixes (including a particularly annoying, if minor, one around systemd socket activation that felt very satisfying to get to the bottom of), but I still lack the time to do any of the major changes I would like to. I wrote listadmin3 to allow easy manipulation of moderation queues for Mailman3. It s basic, but it s drastically improved my timeliness on dealing with held messages.

6 January 2024

Valhalla's Things: Blog updates

Posted on January 6, 2024
Tags: madeof:bits, meta
After just a tiny1 delay I ve finally added support for tags to this blog. In the next few days I may go back and add / change tags to the older posts, or I may not, I ll decide. Also, I still need to render a tag cloud somewhere; maybe it will happen soon, maybe it will take another year. :D I hope I ve also succesfully worked around the bug in Friendica where the src for images got deleted instead of properly converted. The logo of this blog, just to see whether a random image is shown on Friendica and the Fediverse.
  1. less than one year!

3 January 2024

John Goerzen: Live Migrating from Raspberry Pi OS bullseye to Debian bookworm

I ve been getting annoyed with Raspberry Pi OS (Raspbian) for years now. It s a fork of Debian, but manages to omit some of the most useful things. So I ve decided to migrate all of my Pis to run pure Debian. These are my reasons:
  1. Raspberry Pi OS has, for years now, specified that there is no upgrade path. That is, to get to a newer major release, it s a reinstall. While I have sometimes worked around this, for a device that is frequently installed in hard-to-reach locations, this is even more important than usual. It s common for me to upgrade machines for a decade or more across Debian releases and there s no reason that it should be so much more difficult with Raspbian.
  2. As I noted in Consider Security First, the security situation for Raspberry Pi OS isn t as good as it is with Debian.
  3. Raspbian lags behind Debian often times by 6 months or more for major releases, and days or weeks for bug fixes and security patches.
  4. Raspbian has no direct backports support, though Raspberry Pi 3 and above can use Debian s backports (per my instructions as Installing Debian Backports on Raspberry Pi)
  5. Raspbian uses a custom kernel without initramfs support
It turns out it is actually possible to do an in-place migration from Raspberry Pi OS bullseye to Debian bookworm. Here I will describe how. Even if you don t have a Raspberry Pi, this might still be instructive on how Raspbian and Debian packages work.

WARNINGS Before continuing, back up your system. This process isn t for the neophyte and it is entirely possible to mess up your boot device to the point that you have to do a fresh install to get your Pi to boot. This isn t a supported process at all.

Architecture Confusion Debian has three ARM-based architectures:
  • armel, for the lowest-end 32-bit ARM devices without hardware floating point support
  • armhf, for the higher-end 32-bit ARM devices with hardware float (hence hf )
  • arm64, for 64-bit ARM devices (which all have hardware float)
Although the Raspberry Pi 0 and 1 do support hardware float, they lack support for other CPU features that Debian s armhf architecture assumes. Therefore, the Raspberry Pi 0 and 1 could only run Debian s armel architecture. Raspberry Pi 3 and above are capable of running 64-bit, and can run both armhf and arm64. Prior to the release of the Raspberry Pi 5 / Raspbian bookworm, Raspbian only shipped the armhf architecture. Well, it was an architecture they called armhf, but it was different from Debian s armhf in that everything was recompiled to work with the more limited set of features on the earlier Raspberry Pi boards. It was really somewhere between Debian s armel and armhf archs. You could run Debian armel on those, but it would run more slowly, due to doing floating point calculations without hardware support. Debian s raspi FAQ goes into this a bit. What I am going to describe here is going from Raspbian armhf to Debian armhf with a 64-bit kernel. Therefore, it will only work with Raspberry Pi 3 and above. It may theoretically be possible to take a Raspberry Pi 2 to Debian armhf with a 32-bit kernel, but I haven t tried this and it may be more difficult. I have seen conflicting information on whether armhf really works on a Pi 2. (If you do try it on a Pi 2, ignore everything about arm64 and 64-bit kernels below, and just go with the linux-image-armmp-lpae kernel per the ARMMP page) There is another wrinkle: Debian doesn t support running 32-bit ARM kernels on 64-bit ARM CPUs, though it does support running a 32-bit userland on them. So we will wind up with a system with kernel packages from arm64 and everything else from armhf. This is a perfectly valid configuration as the arm64 like x86_64 is multiarch (that is, the CPU can natively execute both the 32-bit and 64-bit instructions). (It is theoretically possible to crossgrade a system from 32-bit to 64-bit userland, but that felt like a rather heavy lift for dubious benefit on a Pi; nevertheless, if you want to make this process even more complicated, refer to the CrossGrading page.)

Prerequisites and Limitations In addition to the need for a Raspberry Pi 3 or above in order for this to work, there are a few other things to mention. If you are using the GPIO features of the Pi, I don t know if those work with Debian. I think Raspberry Pi OS modified the desktop environment more than other components. All of my Pis are headless, so I don t know if this process will work if you use a desktop environment. I am assuming you are booting from a MicroSD card as is typical in the Raspberry Pi world. The Pi s firmware looks for a FAT partition (MBR type 0x0c) and looks within it for boot information. Depending on how long ago you first installed an OS on your Pi, your /boot may be too small for Debian. Use df -h /boot to see how big it is. I recommend 200MB at minimum. If your /boot is smaller than that, stop now (or use some other system to shrink your root filesystem and rearrange your partitions; I ve done this, but it s outside the scope of this article.) You need to have stable power. Once you begin this process, your pi will mostly be left in a non-bootable state until you finish. (You did make a backup, right?)

Basic idea The basic idea here is that since bookworm has almost entirely newer packages then bullseye, we can just switch over to it and let the Debian packages replace the Raspbian ones as they are upgraded. Well, it s not quite that easy, but that s the main idea.

Preparation First, make a backup. Even an image of your MicroSD card might be nice. OK, I think I ve said that enough now. It would be a good idea to have a HDMI cable (with the appropriate size of connector for your particular Pi board) and a HDMI display handy so you can troubleshoot any bootup issues with a console.

Preparation: access The Raspberry Pi OS by default sets up a user named pi that can use sudo to gain root without a password. I think this is an insecure practice, but assuming you haven t changed it, you will need to ensure it still works once you move to Debian. Raspberry Pi OS had a patch in their sudo package to enable it, and that will be removed when Debian s sudo package is installed. So, put this in /etc/sudoers.d/010_picompat: 
pi ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
Also, there may be no password set for the root account. It would be a good idea to set one; it makes it easier to log in at the console. Use the passwd command as root to do so.

Preparation: bluetooth Debian doesn t correctly identify the Bluetooth hardware address. You can save it off to a file by running hcitool dev > /root/bluetooth-from-raspbian.txt. I don t use Bluetooth, but this should let you develop a script to bring it up properly.

Preparation: Debian archive keyring You will next need to install Debian s archive keyring so that apt can authenticate packages from Debian. Go to the bookworm download page for debian-archive-keyring and copy the URL for one of the files, then download it on the pi. For instance: 
wget http://http.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/d/debian-archive-keyring/debian-archive-keyring_2023.3+deb12u1_all.deb
Use sha256sum to verify the checksum of the downloaded file, comparing it to the package page on the Debian site. Now, you ll install it with: 
dpkg -i debian-archive-keyring_2023.3+deb12u1_all.deb

Package first steps From here on, we are making modifications to the system that can leave it in a non-bootable state. Examine /etc/apt/sources.list and all the files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d. Most likely you will want to delete or comment out all lines in all files there. Replace them with something like: 
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ bookworm main non-free-firmware contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security bookworm-security main non-free-firmware contrib non-free
deb https://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-backports main non-free-firmware contrib non-free
(you might leave off contrib and non-free depending on your needs) Now, we re going to tell it that we ll support arm64 packages: 
dpkg --add-architecture arm64
And finally, download the bookworm package lists: 
apt-get update
If there are any errors from that command, fix them and don t proceed until you have a clean run of apt-get update.

Moving /boot to /boot/firmware The boot FAT partition I mentioned above is mounted at /boot by Raspberry Pi OS, but Debian s scripts assume it will be at /boot/firmware. We need to fix this. First: 
umount /boot
mkdir /boot/firmware
Now, edit fstab and change the reference to /boot to be to /boot/firmware. Now: 
mount -v /boot/firmware
cd /boot/firmware
mv -vi * ..
This mounts the filesystem at the new location, and moves all its contents back to where apt believes it should be. Debian s packages will populate /boot/firmware later.

Installing the first packages Now we start by installing the first of the needed packages. Eventually we will wind up with roughly the same set Debian uses. 
apt-get install linux-image-arm64
apt-get install firmware-brcm80211=20230210-5
apt-get install raspi-firmware
If you get errors relating to firmware-brcm80211 from any commands, run that install firmware-brcm80211 command and then proceed. There are a few packages that Raspbian marked as newer than the version in bookworm (whether or not they really are), and that s one of them.

Configuring the bootloader We need to configure a few things in /etc/default/raspi-firmware before proceeding. Edit that file. First, uncomment (or add) a line like this: 
KERNEL_ARCH="arm64"
Next, in /boot/cmdline.txt you can find your old Raspbian boot command line. It will say something like: 
root=PARTUUID=...
Save off the bit starting with PARTUUID. Back in /etc/default/raspi-firmware, set a line like this: 
ROOTPART=PARTUUID=abcdef00
(substituting your real value for abcdef00). This is necessary because the microSD card device name often changes from /dev/mmcblk0 to /dev/mmcblk1 when switching to Debian s kernel. raspi-firmware will encode the current device name in /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt by default, which will be wrong once you boot into Debian s kernel. The PARTUUID approach lets it work regardless of the device name.

Purging the Raspbian kernel Run: 
dpkg --purge raspberrypi-kernel

Upgrading the system At this point, we are going to run the procedure beginning at section 4.4.3 of the Debian release notes. Generally, you will do: 
apt-get -u upgrade
apt full-upgrade
Fix any errors at each step before proceeding to the next. Now, to remove some cruft, run: 
apt-get --purge autoremove
Inspect the list to make sure nothing important isn t going to be removed.

Removing Raspbian cruft You can list some of the cruft with: 
apt list '~o'
And remove it with: 
apt purge '~o'
I also don t run Bluetooth, and it seemed to sometimes hang on boot becuase I didn t bother to fix it, so I did: 
apt-get --purge remove bluez

Installing some packages This makes sure some basic Debian infrastructure is available: 
apt-get install wpasupplicant parted dosfstools wireless-tools iw alsa-tools
apt-get --purge autoremove

Installing firmware Now run: 
apt-get install firmware-linux

Resolving firmware package version issues If it gives an error about the installed version of a package, you may need to force it to the bookworm version. For me, this often happened with firmware-atheros, firmware-libertas, and firmware-realtek. Here s how to resolve it, with firmware-realtek as an example:
  1. Go to https://packages.debian.org/PACKAGENAME for instance, https://packages.debian.org/firmware-realtek. Note the version number in bookworm in this case, 20230210-5.
  2. Now, you will force the installation of that package at that version: 
    apt-get install firmware-realtek=20230210-5
  3. Repeat with every conflicting package until done.
  4. Rerun apt-get install firmware-linux and make sure it runs cleanly.
Also, in the end you should be able to: 
apt-get install firmware-atheros firmware-libertas firmware-realtek firmware-linux

Dealing with other Raspbian packages The Debian release notes discuss removing non-Debian packages. There will still be a few of those. Run: 
apt list '?narrow(?installed, ?not(?origin(Debian)))'
Deal with them; mostly you will need to force the installation of a bookworm version using the procedure in the section Resolving firmware package version issues above (even if it s not for a firmware package). For non-firmware packages, you might possibly want to add --mark-auto to your apt-get install command line to allow the package to be autoremoved later if the things depending on it go away. If you aren t going to use Bluetooth, I recommend apt-get --purge remove bluez as well. Sometimes it can hang at boot if you don t fix it up as described above.

Set up networking We ll be switching to the Debian method of networking, so we ll create some files in /etc/network/interfaces.d. First, eth0 should look like this: 
allow-hotplug eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
iface eth0 inet6 auto
And wlan0 should look like this: 
allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
    wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
Raspbian is inconsistent about using eth0/wlan0 or renamed interface. Run ifconfig or ip addr. If you see a long-named interface such as enx<something> or wlp<something>, copy the eth0 file to the one named after the enx interface, or the wlan0 file to the one named after the wlp interface, and edit the internal references to eth0/wlan0 in this new file to name the long interface name. If using wifi, verify that your SSIDs and passwords are in /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf. It should have lines like: 
network= 
   ssid="NetworkName"
   psk="passwordHere"
(This is where Raspberry Pi OS put them).

Deal with DHCP Raspberry Pi OS used dhcpcd, whereas bookworm normally uses isc-dhcp-client. Verify the system is in the correct state: 
apt-get install isc-dhcp-client
apt-get --purge remove dhcpcd dhcpcd-base dhcpcd5 dhcpcd-dbus

Set up LEDs To set up the LEDs to trigger on MicroSD activity as they did with Raspbian, follow the Debian instructions. Run apt-get install sysfsutils. Then put this in a file at /etc/sysfs.d/local-raspi-leds.conf: 
class/leds/ACT/brightness = 1
class/leds/ACT/trigger = mmc1

Prepare for boot To make sure all the /boot/firmware files are updated, run update-initramfs -u. Verify that root in /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt references the PARTUUID as appropriate. Verify that /boot/firmware/config.txt contains the lines arm_64bit=1 and upstream_kernel=1. If not, go back to the section on modifying /etc/default/raspi-firmware and fix it up.

The moment arrives Cross your fingers and try rebooting into your Debian system: 
reboot
For some reason, I found that the first boot into Debian seems to hang for 30-60 seconds during bootstrap. I m not sure why; don t panic if that happens. It may be necessary to power cycle the Pi for this boot.

Troubleshooting If things don t work out, hook up the Pi to a HDMI display and see what s up. If I anticipated a particular problem, I would have documented it here (a lot of the things I documented here are because I ran into them!) So I can t give specific advice other than to watch boot messages on the console. If you don t even get kernel messages going, then there is some problem with your partition table or /boot/firmware FAT partition. Otherwise, you ve at least got the kernel going and can troubleshoot like usual from there.

Jacob Adams: Fixing My Shell

For an embarassingly long time, my shell has unnecessarily tried to initialize a console font in every kind of interactive terminal. This leaves the following error message in my terminal: 
Couldn't get a file descriptor referring to the console.
It even shows up twice when running tmux! Clearly I ve done something horrible to my configuration, and now I ve got to clean it up.

How does Shell Initialization Work? The precise files a shell reads at start-up is somewhat complex, and defined by this excellent chart 1: Shell Startup Flowchart For the purposes of what I m trying to fix, there are two paths that matter.
  • Interactive login shell startup
  • Interactive non-login shell startup
As you can see from the above, trying to distinguish these two paths in bash is an absolute mess. zsh, in contrast, is much cleaner and allows for a clear distinction between these two cases, with login shell configuration files as a superset of configuration files used by non-login shells.

How did we get here? I keep my configuration files in a config repository. Some time ago I got quite frustrated at this whole shell initialization thing, and just linked everything together in one profile file: 
.mkshrc -> config/profile
.profile -> config/profile
This appears to have created this mess.

Move to ZSH I ve wanted to move to zsh for a while, and took this opportunity to do so. So my new configuration files are .zprofile and .zshrc instead of .mkshrc and .profile (though I m going to retain those symlinks to allow my old configurations to continue working). mksh is a nice simple shell, but using zsh here allows for more consistency between my home and $WORK environments, and will allow a lot more powerful extensions.

Updating my Prompt ZSH prompts use a totally different configuration via variable expansion. However, it also uses the PROMPT variable, so I set that to the needed values for zsh. There s an excellent ZSH prompt generator at https://zsh-prompt-generator.site that I used to get these variables, though I m sure they re in the zsh documentation somewhere as well. I wanted a simple prompt with user (%n), host (%m), and path (%d). I also wanted a % at the end to distinguish this from other shells. 
PROMPT="%n@%m%d%% "

Fixing mksh prompts This worked but surprisingly mksh also looks at PROMPT, leaving my mksh prompt as the literal prompt string without expansion. Fixing this requires setting up a proper shrc and linking it to .mkshrc and .zshrc. I chose to move my existing aliases script to this file, as it also broke in non-login shells when moved to profile. Within this new shrc file we can check what shell we re running via $0: 
if [ "$0" = "/bin/zsh" ]   [ "$0" = "zsh" ]   [ "$0" = "-zsh" ]
I chose to add plain zsh here in case I run it manually for whatever reason. I also added -zsh to support tmux as that s what it presents as $0. This also means you ll need to be careful to quote $0 or you ll get fun shell errors. There s probably a better way to do this, but I couldn t find something that was compatible with POSIX shell, which is what most of this has to be written in to be compatible with mksh and zsh2. We can then setup different prompts for each: 
if [ "$0" = "/bin/zsh" ]   [ "$0" = "zsh" ]   [ "$0" = "-zsh" ]
then
	PROMPT="%n@%m%d%% "
else
	# Borrowed from
	# http://www.unixmantra.com/2013/05/setting-custom-prompt-in-ksh.html
	PS1='$(id -un)@$(hostname -s)$PWD$ '
fi

Setting Console Font in a Better Way I ve been setting console font via setfont in my .profile for a while. I m not sure where I picked this up, but it s not the right way. I even tried to only run this in a console with -t but that only checks that output is a terminal, not specifically a console. 
if [ -t 1 ]
then
	setfont /usr/share/consolefonts/Lat15-Terminus20x10.psf.gz
fi
This also only runs once the console is logged into, instead of initializing it on boot. The correct way to set this up, on Debian-based systems, is reconfiguring console-setup like so: 
dpkg-reconfigure console-setup
From there you get a menu of encoding, character set, font, and then font size to configure for your consoles.

VIM mode To enable VIM mode for ZSH, you simply need to set: 
bindkeys -v
This allows you to edit your shell commands with basic VIM keybinds.

Getting back Ctrl + Left Arrow and Ctrl + Right Arrow Moving around one word at a time with Ctrl and the arrow keys is broken by vim mode unfortunately, so we ll need to re-enable it: 
bindkey "^[[1;5C" forward-word
bindkey "^[[1;5D" backward-word

Why did it show up twice for tmux? Because tmux creates a login shell. Adding: 
echo PROFILE
to profile and: 
echo SHRC
to shrc confirms this with: 
PROFILE
SHRC
SHRC
For now, profile sources shrc so that running twice is expected. But after this exploration and diagram, it s clear we don t need that for zsh. Removing this will break remote bash shells (see above diagram), but I can live without those on my development laptop. Removing that line results in the expected output for a new terminal: 
SHRC
And the full output for a new tmux session or console: 
PROFILE
SHRC
So finally we re back to a normal state! This post is a bit unfocused but I hope it helps someone else repair or enhance their shell environment. If you liked this4, or know of any other ways to manage this I could use, let me know at fixmyshell@tookmund.com.
  1. This chart comes from the excellent Shell Startup Scripts article by Peter Ward. I ve generated the SVG from the graphviz source linked in the article.
  2. Technically it has be compatible with Korn shell, but a quick google seems to suggest that that s actually a subset of POSIX shell.
  3. I use oh-my-zsh at $WORK but for now I m going to simplify my personal configuration. If I end up using a lot of plugins I ll reconsider this.
  4. Or if you ve found any typos or other issues that I should fix.

31 December 2023

Chris Lamb: Favourites of 2023

This post should have marked the beginning of my yearly roundups of the favourite books and movies I read and watched in 2023. However, due to coming down with a nasty bout of flu recently and other sundry commitments, I wasn't able to undertake writing the necessary four or five blog posts In lieu of this, however, I will simply present my (unordered and unadorned) highlights for now. Do get in touch if this (or any of my previous posts) have spurred you into picking something up yourself

Books

Peter Watts: Blindsight (2006) Reymer Banham: Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (2006) Joanne McNeil: Lurking: How a Person Became a User (2020) J. L. Carr: A Month in the Country (1980) Hilary Mantel: A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing (2023) Adam Higginbotham: Midnight in Chernobyl (2019) Tony Judt: Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005) Tony Judt: Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (2008) Peter Apps: Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen (2021) Joan Didion: Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)Erik Larson: The Devil in the White City (2003)

Films Recent releases

Unenjoyable experiences included Alejandro G mez Monteverde's Sound of Freedom (2023), Alex Garland's Men (2022) and Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans (2022).
Older releases (Films released before 2022, and not including rewatches from previous years.) Distinctly unenjoyable watches included Ocean's Eleven (1960), El Topo (1970), L olo (1992), Hotel Mumbai (2018), Bulworth (1998) and and The Big Red One (1980).

30 December 2023

Russ Allbery: Review: The Hound of Justice

Review: The Hound of Justice, by Claire O'Dell
Series: Janet Watson Chronicles #2
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Copyright: July 2019
ISBN: 0-06-269938-5
Format: Kindle
Pages: 325
The Hound of Justice is a near-future thriller novel with Sherlock Holmes references. It is a direct sequel to A Study in Honor. This series is best read in order. Janet Watson is in a much better place than she was in the first book. She has proper physical therapy, a new arm, and a surgeon's job waiting for her as soon as she can master its features. A chance meeting due to an Inauguration Day terrorist attack may even develop into something more. She just needs to get back into the operating room and then she'll feel like her life is back on track. Sara Holmes, on the other hand, is restless, bored, and manic, rudely intruding on Watson's date. Then she disappears, upending Watson's living arrangements. She's on the trail of something. When mysterious destructible notes start appearing in Watson's books, it's clear that she wants help. The structure of this book didn't really work for me. The first third or so is a slice-of-life account of Watson's attempt to resume her career as a surgeon against a backdrop of ongoing depressing politics. This part sounds like the least interesting, but I was thoroughly engrossed. Watson is easy to care about, hospital politics are strangely interesting, and while the romance never quite clicked for me, it had potential. I was hoping for another book like A Study in Honor, where Watson's life and Holmes's investigations entwine and run in parallel. That was not to be. The middle third of the book pulls Watson away to Georgia and a complicated mix of family obligations and spy-novel machinations. If this had involved Sara's fae strangeness, verbal sparring, and odd tokens of appreciation, maybe it would have worked, but Sara Holmes is entirely off-camera. Watson is instead dealing with a minor supporting character from the first book, who drags her through disguises, vehicle changes, and border stops in a way that felt excessive and weirdly out of place. (Other reviews say that this character is the Mycroft Holmes equivalent; the first initial of Micha's name fits, but nothing else does so far as I can tell.) Then the last third of the novel turns into a heist. I like a heist novel as much as the next person, but a good heist story needs a team with chemistry and interplay, and I didn't know any of these people. There was way too little Sara Holmes, too much of Watson being out of her element in a rather generic way, and too many steps that Watson is led through without giving the reader a chance to enjoy the competence of the team. It felt jarring and disconnected, like Watson got pulled out of one story and dropped into an entirely different story without a proper groundwork. The Hound of Justice still has its moments. Watson is a great character and I'm still fully invested in her life. She was pulled into this mission because she's the person Holmes knows with the appropriate skills, and when she finally gets a chance to put those skills to use, it's quite satisfying. But, alas, the magic of A Study in Honor simply isn't here, in part because Sara Holmes is missing for most of the book and her replacements and stand-ins are nowhere near as intriguing. The villain's plan seems wildly impractical and highly likely to be detected, and although I can come up with some explanations to salvage it, those don't appear in the book. And, as in the first book, the villain seems very one-dimensional and simplistic. This is certainly not a villain worthy of Holmes. Fittingly, given the political movements O'Dell is commenting on, a lot of this book is about racial politics. O'Dell contrasts the microaggressions and more subtle dangers for Watson as a black woman in Washington, D.C., with the more explicit and active racism of the other places to which she travels over the course of the story. She's trying very hard to give the reader a feeling for what it's like to be black in the United States. I don't have any specific complaints about this, and I'm glad she's attempting it, but I came away from this book with a nagging feeling that Watson's reactions were a tiny bit off. It felt like a white person writing about racism rather than a black person writing about racism: nothing is entirely incorrect, but the emotional beats aren't quite where black authors would put them. I could be completely wrong about this, and am certainly much less qualified to comment than O'Dell is, but there were enough places that landed slightly wrong that I wanted to note it. I would still recommend A Study in Honor, but I'm not sure I can recommend this book. This is one of those series where the things that I enjoyed the most about the first book weren't what the author wanted to focus on in subsequent books. I would read more about the day-to-day of Watson's life, and I would certainly read more of Holmes and Watson sparring and circling and trying to understand each other. I'm less interested in somewhat generic thrillers with implausible plots and Sherlock Holmes references. At the moment, this is academic, since The Hound of Justice is the last book of the series so far. Rating: 6 out of 10

Valhalla's Things: I've been influenced

Posted on December 30, 2023
Tags: madeof:atoms
A woman wearing a red sleeveless dress; from the waist up it is fitted, while the skirt flares out. There is a white border with red embroidery and black fringe at the hem and a belt of the same material at the waist. By the influencers on the famous proprietary video platform1. When I m crafting with no powertools I tend to watch videos, and this autumn I ve seen a few in a row that were making red wool dresses, at least one or two medieval kirtles. I don t remember which channels they were, and I ve decided not to go back and look for them, at least for a time. A woman wearing a red shirt with wide sleeves, a short yoke, a small collar band and 3 buttons in the front. Anyway, my brain suddenly decided that I needed a red wool dress, fitted enough to give some bust support. I had already made a dress that satisfied the latter requirement and I still had more than half of the red wool faille I ve used for the Garibaldi blouse (still not blogged, but I will get to it), and this time I wanted it to be ready for this winter. While the pattern I was going to use is Victorian, it was designed for underwear, and this was designed to be outerwear, so from the very start I decided not to bother too much with any kind of historical details or techniques. A few meters of wool-imitation fringe trim rolled up; the fringe is black and is attached to a white band with a line of lozenge outlines in red and brown. I knew that I didn t have enough fabric to add a flounce to the hem, as in the cotton dress, but then I remembered that some time ago I fell for a piece of fringed trim in black, white and red. I did a quick check that the red wasn t clashing (it wasn t) and I knew I had a plan for the hem decoration. Then I spent a week finishing other projects, and the more I thought about this dress, the more I was tempted to have spiral lacing at the front rather than buttons, as a nod to the kirtle inspiration. It may end up be a bit of a hassle, but if it is too much I can always add a hidden zipper on a side seam, and only have to undo a bit of the lacing around the neckhole to wear the dress. Finally, I could start working on the dress: I cut all of the main pieces, and since the seam lines were quite curved I marked them with tailor s tacks, which I don t exactly enjoy doing or removing, but are the only method that was guaranteed to survive while manipulating this fabric (and not leave traces afterwards). A shaped piece of red fabric with the long edges bound in navy blue bias tape and all the seamlines marked with basting thread. While cutting the front pieces I accidentally cut the high neck line instead of the one I had used on the cotton dress: I decided to go for it also on the back pieces and decide later whether I wanted to lower it. Since this is a modern dress, with no historical accuracy at all, and I have access to a serger, I decided to use some dark blue cotton voile I ve had in my stash for quite some time, cut into bias strip, to bind the raw edges before sewing. This works significantly better than bought bias tape, which is a bit too stiff for this. A bigger piece of fabric with tailor's tacks for the seams and darts; at the top edge there is a strip of navy blue fabric sewn to a wide seaming allowance, with two rows of cording closest to the center front line. For the front opening, I ve decided to reinforce the areas where the lacing holes will be with cotton: I ve used some other navy blue cotton, also from the stash, and added two lines of cording to stiffen the front edge. So I ve cut the front in two pieces rather than on the fold, sewn the reinforcements to the sewing allowances in such a way that the corded edge was aligned with the center front and then sewn the bottom of the front seam from just before the end of the reinforcements to the hem. The front opening being worked on: on one side there are hand sewn eyelets in red silk that matches the fabric, on the other side the position for more eyelets are still marked with pins. There is also still basting to keep the folded allowance in place. The allowances are then folded back, and then they are kept in place by the worked lacing holes. The cotton was pinked, while for the wool I used the selvedge of the fabric and there was no need for any finishing. Behind the opening I ve added a modesty placket: I ve cut a strip of red wool, a strip of cotton, folded the edge of the strip of cotton to the center, added cording to the long sides, pressed the allowances of the wool towards the wrong side, and then handstitched the cotton to the wool, wrong sides facing. This was finally handstitched to one side of the sewing allowance of the center front. I ve also decided to add real pockets, rather than just slits, and for some reason I decided to add them by hand after I had sewn the dress, so I ve left opening in the side back seams, where the slits were in the cotton dress. I ve also already worn the dress, but haven t added the pockets yet, as I m still debating about their shape. This will be fixed in the near future. Another thing that will have to be fixed is the trim situation: I like the fringe at the bottom, and I had enough to also make a belt, but this makes the top of the dress a bit empty. I can t use the same fringe tape, as it is too wide, but it would be nice to have something smaller that matches the patterned part. And I think I can make something suitable with tablet weaving, but I m not sure on which materials to use, so it will have to be on hold for a while, until I decide on the supplies and have the time for making it. Another improvement I d like to add are detached sleeves, both matching (I should still have just enough fabric) and contrasting, but first I want to learn more about real kirtle construction, and maybe start making sleeves that would be suitable also for a real kirtle. Meanwhile, I ve worn it on Christmas (over my 1700s menswear shirt with big sleeves) and may wear it again tomorrow (if I bother to dress up to spend New Year s Eve at home :D )
  1. yep, that s YouTube, of course.

29 December 2023

Russ Allbery: Review: The Afterward

Review: The Afterward, by E.K. Johnston
Publisher: Dutton Books
Copyright: February 2019
Printing: 2020
ISBN: 0-7352-3190-7
Format: Kindle
Pages: 339
The Afterward is a standalone young adult high fantasy with a substantial romance component. The title is not misspelled. Sir Erris and her six companions, matching the number of the new gods, were successful in their quest for the godsgem. They defeated the Old God and destroyed Him forever, freeing King Dorrenta from his ensorcellment, and returned in triumph to Cadrium to live happily ever after. Or so the story goes. Sir Erris and three of the companions are knights. Another companion is the best mage in the kingdom. Kalanthe Ironheart, who distracted the Old God at a critical moment and allowed Sir Erris to strike, is only an apprentice due to her age, but surely will become a great knight. And then there is Olsa Rhetsdaughter, the lowborn thief, now somewhat mockingly called Thief of the Realm for all the good that does her. The reward was enough for her to buy her freedom from the Thief's Court. It was not enough to pay for food after that, or enough for her to change her profession, and the Thief's Court no longer has any incentive to give her easy (or survivable) assignments. Kalanthe is in a considerably better position, but she still needs a good marriage. Her reward paid off half of her debt, which broadens her options, but she's still a debt-knight, liable for the full cost of her training once she reaches the age of nineteen. She's mostly made her peace with the decisions she made given her family's modest means, but marriages of that type are usually for heirs, and Kalanthe is not looking forward to bearing a child. Or, for that matter, sleeping with a man. Olsa and Kalanthe fell in love during the Quest. Given Kalanthe's debt and the way it must be paid, and her iron-willed determination to keep vows, neither of them expected their relationship to survive the end of the Quest. Both of them wish that it had. The hook is that this novel picks up after the epic fantasy quest is over and everyone went home. This is not an entirely correct synopsis; chapters of The Afterward alternate between "After" and "Before" (and one chapter delightfully titled "More or less the exact moment of"), and by the end of the book we get much of the story of the Quest. It's not told from the perspective of the lead heroes, though; it's told by following Kalanthe and Olsa, who would be firmly relegated to supporting characters in a typical high fantasy. And it's largely told through the lens of their romance. This is not the best fantasy novel I've read, but I had a fun time with it. I am now curious about the intended audience and marketing, though. It was published by a YA imprint, and both the ages of the main characters and the general theme of late teenagers trying to chart a course in an adult world match that niche. But it's also clearly intended for readers who have read enough epic fantasy quests that they will both be amused by the homage and not care that the story elides a lot of the typical details. Anyone who read David Eddings at an impressionable age will enjoy the way Johnston pokes gentle fun at The Belgariad (this book is dedicated to David and Leigh Eddings), but surely the typical reader of YA fantasy these days isn't also reading Eddings. I'm therefore not quite sure who this book was for, but apparently that group included me. Johnston thankfully is not on board with the less savory parts of Eddings's writing, as you might have guessed from the sapphic romance. There is no obnoxious gender essentialism here, although there do appear to be gender roles that I never quite figured out. Knights are referred to as sir, but all of the knights in this story are women. Men still seem to run a lot of things (kingdoms, estates, mage colleges), but apart from the mage, everyone on the Quest was female, and there seems to be an expectation that women go out into the world and have adventures while men stay home. I'm not sure if there was an underlying system that escaped me, or if Johnston just mixed things up for the hell of it. (If the latter, I approve.) This book does suffer a bit from addressing some current-day representation issues without managing to fold them naturally into the story or setting. One of the Quest knights is transgender, something that's revealed in a awkward couple of paragraphs and then never mentioned again. Two of the characters have a painfully earnest conversation about the word "bisexual," complete with a strained attempt at in-universe etymology. Racial diversity (Olsa is black, and Kalanthe is also not white) seemed to be handled a bit better, although I am not the reader to notice if the discussions of hair maintenance were similarly awkward. This is way better than no representation and default-white characters, to be clear, but it felt a bit shoehorned in at times and could have used some more polish. These are quibbles, though. Olsa was the heart of the book for me, and is exactly the sort of character I like to read about. Kalanthe is pure stubborn paladin, but I liked her more and more as the story continued. She provides a good counterbalance to Olsa's natural chaos. I do wish Olsa had more opportunities to show her own competence (she's not a very good thief, she's just the thief that Sir Erris happened to know), but the climax of the story was satisfying. My main grumble is that I badly wanted to dwell on the happily-ever-after for at least another chapter, ideally two. Johnston was done with the story before I was. The writing was serviceable but not great and there are some bits that I don't think would stand up to a strong poke, but the characters carried the story for me. Recommended if you'd like some sapphic romance and lightweight class analysis complicating your Eddings-style quest fantasy. Rating: 7 out of 10

28 December 2023

Simon Josefsson: Validating debian/copyright: licenserecon

Recently I noticed a new tool called licenserecon written by Peter Blackman, and I helped get licenserecon into Debian. The purpose of licenserecon is to reconcile licenses from debian/copyright against the output from licensecheck, a tool written by Jonas Smedegaard. It assumes DEP5 copyright files. You run the tool in a directory that has a debian/ sub-directory, and its output when it notices mismatches (this is for resolv-wrapper): 
# sudo apt install licenserecon
jas@kaka:~/dpkg/resolv-wrapper$ lrc
Parsing Source Tree ....
Running licensecheck ....
d/copyright       licensecheck
BSD-3-Clauses     BSD-3-clause     src/resolv_wrapper.c
BSD-3-Clauses     BSD-3-clause     tests/dns_srv.c
BSD-3-Clauses     BSD-3-clause     tests/test_dns_fake.c
BSD-3-Clauses     BSD-3-clause     tests/test_res_query_search.c
BSD-3-Clauses     BSD-3-clause     tests/torture.c
BSD-3-Clauses     BSD-3-clause     tests/torture.h
jas@kaka:~/dpkg/resolv-wrapper$
Noticing one-character typos like this may not bring satisfaction except to the most obsessive-compulsive among us, however the tool has the potential of discovering more serious mistakes. Using it manually once in a while may be useful, however I tend to forget QA steps that are not automated. Could we add this to the Salsa CI/CD pipeline? I recently proposed a merge request to add a wrap-and-sort job to the Salsa CI/CD pipeline (disabled by default) and learned how easy it was to extend it. I think licenserecon is still a bit rough on the edges, and I haven t been able to successfully use it on any but the simplest packages yet. I wouldn t want to suggest it is added to the normal Salsa CI/CD pipeline, even if disabled. If you maintain a Debian package on Salsa and wish to add a licenserecon job to your pipeline, I wrote licenserecon.yml for you. The simplest way to use licenserecon.yml is to replace recipes/debian.yml@salsa-ci-team/pipeline as the Salsa CI/CD configuration file setting with debian/salsa-ci.yml@debian/licenserecon. If you use a debian/salsa-ci.yml file you may put something like this in it instead: 
---
include:
  - https://salsa.debian.org/salsa-ci-team/pipeline/raw/master/recipes/debian.yml
  - https://salsa.debian.org/debian/licenserecon/raw/main/debian/licenserecon.yml
Once you trigger the pipeline, this will result in a new job licenserecon that validates debian/copyright against licensecheck output on every build! I have added this to the libcpucycles package on Salsa and the pipeline contains a new job licenserecon whose output currently ends with: 
$ cd $ WORKING_DIR /$ SOURCE_DIR 
$ lrc
Parsing Source Tree ....
Running licensecheck ....
No differences found
Cleaning up project directory and file based variables
If upstream releases a new version with files not matching our debian/copyright file, we will detect that on the next Salsa build job rather than months later when somebody happens to run the tools manually or there is some license conflict. Incidentally licenserecon is written in Pascal which brought back old memories with Turbo Pascal back in the MS-DOS days. Thanks Peter for licenserecon, and Jonas for licensecheck making this possible!

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