TL;DR; please help localizing Mailman3 [1]. You can find it on hosted Weblate [2].The next component releases are planned in 1-2 weeks from now. Thanks for your contribution! If you can't make it now, please consider working on Mailman3 translations at some later point of time. Thanks!
Time has come for Mailman3
Over the last months I have found an interest in Mailman3. Given the EOL of Python2 in January 2020 and also being a heavy Mailman2 provider for various of my projects and also for customers, I felt it was time to look at Mailman2's successor: Mailman3 [1].
One great novelty in Mailman3 is the strict split up between backend (Mailman Core), and the frontend components (django-mailman3, Postorius, Hyperkitty). All three are Django applications. Postorius is the list management web frontend whereas Hyperkitty is an archive viewer. Other than in Mailman2, you can also drop list posts into Hyperkitty directly (instead of sending a mail to the list). This makes Hyperkitty also some sort of forum software with a mailing list core in the back. The django-mailman3 module knits the previous two together (and handles account management, login dialog, profile settings, etc.).
Looking into Mailman3 Upstream Code
Some time back in midst 2019 I decided to deploy Mailman3 at a customer's site and also for my own business (which still is the test installation). Living and working in Germany, my customers' demand often is a fully localized WebUI. And at that time, Mailman3 could not provide this. Many exposed parts of the Mailman3 components were still not localized (or not localizable).
Together with my employee I put some hours of effort into providing merge requests, filing bug reports, request better Weblate integration (meaning: hosted Weblate), improving the membership scripting support, etc. It felt a bit like setting the whole i18n thing in motion.
Call for Translations
Over the past months I had to focus on other work and two days ago I was delighted that Abhilash Raj (one of the Mailman3 upstream maintainers) informed me (via closing one of the related bugs [3]) that Mailman3 is now fully integrated with the hosted Weblate service and a continous translation workflow is set to go.
The current translation stati of the Mailman3 components are at ~ 10%. We can do better than this, I sense.
So, if you are a non-native English speaker and feel like contributing to Mailman3, please visit the hosted Weblate site [2], sign up for an account (if you don't have one already), and chime in into the translation of one of the future mailing list software suites run by many FLOSS projects all around the globe. Thanks a lot for your help.
As a side note, if you plan working on translating Mailman Core into your language (and can't find it in the list of supported languages), please request this new language via the Weblate UI. All other components have all available languages enabled by default.
References:
@ sign
looks when compared to my previous font, Liberation Mono:
![A dark terminal window showing the prompt '[SIGPIPE]anarcat@angela:~(master)$' in the Liberation Mono font](https://anarc.at/tag/debian-planet/snap-2020.03.10-19.36.04-liberation.png)
Liberation Mono
![A dark terminal window showing the prompt '[SIGPIPE]anarcat@angela:~(master)$' in the Fira mono font](https://anarc.at/tag/debian-planet/snap-2020.03.10-19.35.25-fira-mono.png)
Fira Mono
.Xresources (no, I haven't switched to Wayland):
! font settings
Emacs*font: Fira mono
rofi*font: Fira mono 12
! Symbola is to get emojis to display correctly, apt install fonts-symbola
!URxvt*font: xft:Monospace,xft:Symbola
URxvt*font: xft:Fira mono,xft:Symbola
~/.local/share/fonts/download.sh, for
lack of a better way, to download all the fonts I'm interested in:
#!/bin/sh
set -e
set -u
wget --no-clobber --continue https://practicaltypography.com/fonts/charter.zip
unzip -u charter.zip
wget --no-clobber --continue https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-serif-pro/releases/download/3.001R/source-serif-pro-3.001R.zip
unzip -u source-serif-pro-3.001R.zip
wget --no-clobber --continue https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-sans-pro/releases/download/3.006R/source-sans-pro-3.006R.zip
unzip -u source-sans-pro-3.006R.zip
wget --no-clobber --continue https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-code-pro/releases/download/2.030R-ro%2F1.050R-it/source-code-pro-2.030R-ro-1.050R-it.zip
unzip -u source-code-pro-2.030R-ro-1.050R-it.zip
wget --no-clobber --continue -O Fira-4.202.zip https://github.com/mozilla/Fira/archive/4.202.zip true
unzip -u Fira-4.202.zip
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, body
/*
* Charter: Butterick's favorite, freely available, found on https://practicaltypography.com/free-fonts.html
* Palatino: Mac OS
* Palatino Linotype: Windows
* Noto serif: Android, packaged in Debian
* Liberation serif: Linux fallback
* Serif: fallback
*/
font-family: Charter, Palatino, "Palatino Linotype", "Noto serif", "Liberation serif", serif;
/* Charter is available from https://practicaltypography.com/charter.html under the liberal Bitstream license */
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5
font-style: italic;
/* enlarge body point size for charter for larger displays */
@media (min-device-width: 750px)
body
font-size: 20px;
line-height: 1.3; /* default in FF is ~1.48 */
max-width:
#content
/* about 2.5 alphabets with charter */
max-width: 35em;
/* some hacking at typefaces to get some fresh zest in here
* fallbacks from:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_typefaces_included_with_Microsoft_Windows
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_typefaces_included_with_macOS
*/
.navbar, .footer
/*
* Avenir: Mac, quite different but should still be pretty
* Gill sans: Mac, Windows, somewhat similar to Avenir (indulge me)
* Noto sans: Android, packaged in Debian
* Open sans: Texlive extras AKA Linux, packaged in Debian
* Fira sans: Mozilla's Firefox OS
* Liberation sans: Linux fallback
* Helvetica: general fallback
* Sans-serif: fallback
*/
font-family: Avenir, "Gill sans", "Noto sans", "Open sans", "Fira sans", "Liberation sans", Helvetica, sans-serif;
/* Fira is available from https://github.com/mozilla/Fira/ under the SIL Open Font License */
/* alternatively, just use system fonts for "controls" instead:
font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", "Roboto", "Oxygen", "Ubuntu", "Cantarell", "Fira Sans", "Droid Sans", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif;
gitlab uses: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, "Noto Sans", Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol", "Noto Color Emoji"
*/
@font-face. I'm still considering that option and might do
so if the performance cost is too big. The Fira mono font is
actually set like this for the preformatted sections of the site, but
because it's more common (and it's too big) I haven't added it as a
font-face. You might want to download the font locally to benefit from
the full experience as well.
PPS: As it turns out, an earlier version of this post featured exactly
that: a non-webfont version of Charter, which works fine if you have a
good Charter font available. But it looks absolutely terrible if, like
many Linux users, you have the nasty bitmap font shipped with
xfonts-100dpi and xfonts-75dpi. So I fixed the webfont and
it's unlikely this site will be able to load reasonably well in Linux
until those packages are removed or bitmap font rendering is disabled.
The new RcppArmadillo release 0.7.900.2.0 is now on CRAN, and the Debian package was just updated as well.
Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language--and is widely used by (currently) 350 other packages on CRAN---an increase of 32 since the last CRAN release of 0.7.800.2.0 in April!
With the 7.900.* series of Armadillo, Conrad has started to more fully utilize OpenMP (also see Wikipedia on OpenMP) for operations that can be parallelized. To use this in your package you need to update its src/Makevars ,.win file similarly to what the skeleton default now uses
PKG_CXXFLAGS = $(SHLIB_OPENMP_CXXFLAGS)
PKG_LIBS = $(SHLIB_OPENMP_CFLAGS) $(LAPACK_LIBS) $(BLAS_LIBS) $(FLIBS)$(SHLIB_OPENMP_CXXFLAGS) etc; see the fine WRE manual for details. That said, some operating systems make this harder than other, and macOS usually takes the crown. See for example this blog post by James for surviving in that environment. I am a little short of details because on Linux these things just work, and have for well over a decade. The rcpp-devel mailing list will be the best place for questions.
Changes in this release relative to the previous CRAN release are as follows:
Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a diffstat report. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.7.900.2.0 (2017-06-02)
- Upgraded to Armadillo release 7.900.2 (Evil Banana Republic)
- Expanded
clamp()to handle cubes- Computationally expensive element-wise functions (such as
exp(),log(),cos(), etc) can now be automatically sped up via OpenMP; this requires a C++11/C++14 compiler with OpenMP 3.0+ support for GCC and clang compilers- One caveat: when using GCC, use of
-march=nativein conjunction with-fopenmpmay lead to speed regressions on recent processors- Added gcc 7 to support compiler check (James Balamuta in #128 addressing #126).
- A unit test helper function for
rmultinomwas corrected (#133).- OpenMP support was added to the skeleton helper in
inline.R
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
Debian has many years of history, about 25 years already.
With such a long travel over the continous field of developing our Universal
Operating System, some myths, false accusations and bad reputation has arisen.
Today I had the opportunity to discuss this topic, I was invited to give a
Debian talk in the 11 Concurso Universitario de Software Libre , a
Spanish contest for students to develop and dig a bit into free-libre open
source software (and hardware).
In this talk, I walked through some of the most common Debian myths, and I
would like to summarize here some of them, with a short explanation of why I
think they should be debunked.
myth #1: Debian is old software
Please, use testing or stable-backports. If you use Debian stable your system
will in fact be stable and that means: updates contain no new software but
only fixes.
myth #2: Debian is slow
We compile and build most of our packages with industry-standard compilers and
options. I don t see a significant difference on how fast linux kernel or
mysql run in a CentOS or in Debian.
myth #3: Debian is difficult
I already discussed about this issue back in
Jan 2017, Debian is a puzzle: difficult.
myth #4: Debian has no graphical environment
This is, simply put, false. We have gnome, kde, xfce and more.
The basic Debian installer asks you what do you want at install time.
myth #5: since Debian isn t commercial, the quality is poor
Did you know that most of our package developers are experts in their packages
and in their upstream code? Not all, but most of them.
Besides, many package developers get paid to do their Debian job.
Also, there are external companies which do indeed offer support for
Debian (see freexian for example).
myth #6: I don t trust Debian
Why? Did we do something to gain this status? If so, please let us know.
You don t trust how we build or configure our packages? You don t trust
how we work?
Anyway, I m sorry, you have to trust someone if you want to use any kind
of computer. Supervising every single bit of your computer isn t practical
for you. Please trust us, we do our best.
myth #7: nobody uses Debian
I don t agree. Many people use Debian. They even run Debian in the
International Space Station. Do you count derivatives, such as Ubuntu?
I believe this myth is just pointless, but some people out there really think
nobody uses Debian.
myth #8: Debian uses systemd
Well, this is true. But you can run sysvinit if you want.
I prefer and recommend systemd though :-)
myth #9: Debian is only for servers
No. See myths #1, #2 and #4.
You may download my slides in PDF and in ODP format
(only in Spanish, sorry for English readers).
Large software ecosystems, such as GNU/Linux distributions, demand a large amount of effort to make sure all of its components work correctly invidually, and also integrate correctly with each other to form a coherent system. Automated Quality Assurance techniques can prevent issues from reaching end users. This paper presents a pattern language originated in the Debian project for automated software testing in production-like environments. Such environments are closer in similarity to the environment where software will be actually deployed and used, as opposed to the development environment under which developers and regular Continuous Integration mechanisms usually test software products. The pattern language covers the handling of issues arising from the difference between development and production-like environments, as well as solutions for writing new, exclusive tests for as-installed functional tests. Even though the patterns are documented here in the context of the Debian project, they can also be generalized to other contexts.In practical terms, the paper documents a set of patterns I have noticed in the last few years, when I have been pushing the Debian Continous Integration project. It should be an interesting read for people interested in the testing of Debian packages in their installed form, as done with autopkgtest. It should also be useful for people from other distributions interested in the subject, as the issues are not really Debian-specific. I have recently finished the final version of the paper, which should be published in the ACM Digital Library at any point now. You can download a copy of the paper in PDF. Source is also available, if you are into markdown, LaTeX, makefiles and this sort of thing. If everything goes according to plan, I should be presenting a talk on this at the next Debconf in Montreal.
As the freeze of the next release is closing in, I have updated a bunch of packages around TeX: All of the TeX Live packages (binaries and arch independent ones) and tex-common. I might see whether I get some updates of ConTeXt out, too.
The changes in the binaries are mostly cosmetic: one removal of a non-free (unclear-free) file, and several upstream patches got cherrypicked (dvips, tltexjp contact email, upmendex, dvipdfmx). I played around with including LuaTeX v1.0, but that breaks horribly with the current packages in TeX Live, so I refrained from it. The infrastructure package tex-common got a bugfix for updates from previous releases, and for the other packages there is the usual bunch of updates and new packages. Enjoy!
New packages
arimo, arphic-ttf, babel-japanese, conv-xkv, css-colors, dtxdescribe, fgruler, footmisx, halloweenmath, keyfloat, luahyphenrules, math-into-latex-4, mendex-doc, missaali, mpostinl, padauk, platexcheat, pstring, pst-shell, ptex-fontmaps, scsnowman, stanli, tinos, undergradmath, yaletter.
Updated packages
acmart, animate, apxproof, arabluatex, arsclassica, babel-french, babel-russian, baskervillef, beamer, beebe, biber, biber.x86_64-linux, biblatex, biblatex-apa, biblatex-chem, biblatex-dw, biblatex-gb7714-2015, biblatex-ieee, biblatex-philosophy, biblatex-sbl, bidi, calxxxx-yyyy, chemgreek, churchslavonic, cochineal, comicneue, cquthesis, csquotes, ctanify, ctex, cweb, dataref, denisbdoc, diagbox, dozenal, dtk, dvipdfmx, dvipng, elocalloc, epstopdf, erewhon, etoolbox, exam-n, fbb, fei, fithesis, forest, glossaries, glossaries-extra, glossaries-french, gost, gzt, historische-zeitschrift, inconsolata, japanese-otf, japanese-otf-uptex, jsclasses, latex-bin, latex-make, latexmk, lt3graph, luatexja, markdown, mathspec, mcf2graph, media9, mendex-doc, metafont, mhchem, mweights, nameauth, noto, nwejm, old-arrows, omegaware, onlyamsmath, optidef, pdfpages, pdftools, perception, phonrule, platex-tools, polynom, preview, prooftrees, pst-geo, pstricks, pst-solides3d, ptex, ptex2pdf, ptex-fonts, qcircuit, quran, raleway, reledmac, resphilosophica, sanskrit, scalerel, scanpages, showexpl, siunitx, skdoc, skmath, skrapport, smartdiagram, sourcesanspro, sparklines, tabstackengine, tetex, tex, tex4ht, texlive-scripts, tikzsymbols, tocdata, uantwerpendocs, updmap-map, uplatex, uptex, uptex-fonts, withargs, wtref, xcharter, xcntperchap, xecjk, xellipsis, xepersian, xint, xlop, yathesis.
Back in 2010, inspired by Juliet, I set about doing 101 things in 1001 days. I had various levels of success, but one of the things I did complete was the aim of watching half of the IMDB Top 250. I didn t stop at that point, but continued to work through it at a much slower pace until I realised that through the Queen s library I had access to quite a few DVDs of things I was missing, and that it was perfectly possible to complete the list by the end of 2016. So I did.
I should point out that I didn t set out to watch the list because I m some massive film buff. It was more a mixture of watching things that I wouldn t otherwise choose to, and also watching things I knew were providing cultural underpinnings to films I had already watched and enjoyed. That said, people have asked for some sort of write up when I was done. So here are some random observations, which are almost certainly not what they were looking for.
This would be a longish post. I had bought a Samsung Galaxy J-5/500 just a few days before Debconf16 which I had written about a bit earlier as well. As can be seen in the specs there isn t much to explore other than A-GPS. There were a couple of temperature apps. which I wanted to explore before buying the smartphone but as there were budget constraints and there weren t any good budget smartphones with environmental sensors built-in had to let go of those features.
I was looking for a free app. which would have OSM support and came across osmand . I was looking for an app. which would have support for OSM and support for the gpx format.
I was planning to use osmand in South Africa but due to the over-whelming nature of meeting people, seeing places and just being didn t actually get the time and place to try it.
Came back home and a month and a half passed. In-between I had done some simple small tracks but nothing major. This week-end I got the opportunity as I got some free data balance from my service provider (a princely 50 MB) as well an opportunity to go about 40 odd kms. from the city. I had read about osmand and was looking if the off-line method worked or not from the webpage
Works online (fast) or offline (no roaming charges when you are abroad)
So armed with a full battery I started the journey which took about an hour and half even though technically it was a holiday. On the way back, got a different route and recorded that as well. The app. worked flawlessly. I was able to get the speed of the vehicle and everything. The only thing I haven t understood till date is how to select waypoints but other than that I got the whole route on my mobile.
What was cool to see that on most roads, at least through the app. there were speed limits. Now I don t know from where the data was getting there. Most city roads had 65 and some roads had 55 at the maximum. I am assuming that it was at km/hr as also shared later.
Just for fun I also looked at the gpx file after copying it from mobile to hdd (an extract) https://paste.debian.net/853231/
While it s not a complete extract, What was interesting for me to note here is the time was in UTC . What was also interesting is that in the gpx tracks I also saw some entries about speed as can be seen in the paste above. Although it doesn t say whether it was in km/hr or mph, I believe it probably is km/hr. as that is the unit I defined in the app.
Anyways, the next step was trying to see which tool was good enough to show me the tracks with tiles underneath and labels of places, paths etc.
I tried three tools
1. jmapviewer this didn t work at all. [shirish@debian] - [~/osmand] - [10149]
[$] gnome-maps 2016-10-01_08-11_Sat.gpx
(gnome-maps:21017): Gtk-WARNING **: Theme parsing error: gtk.css:63:28: The :prelight pseudo-class is deprecated. Use :hover instead.
(gnome-maps:21017): Gtk-WARNING **: Theme parsing error: gtk.css:73:35: The :prelight pseudo-class is deprecated. Use :hover instead.
(gnome-maps:21017): Gtk-WARNING **: Theme parsing error: application.css:14:30: The style property GtkButton:image-spacing is deprecated and shouldn't be used anymore. It will be removed in a future version
(gnome-maps:21017): Gtk-WARNING **: Theme parsing error: application.css:15:31: The style property GtkWidget:interior-focus is deprecated and shouldn't be used anymore. It will be removed in a future version
(gnome-maps:21017): Gdk-WARNING **: /build/gtk+3.0-Tod2iD/gtk+3.0-3.22.0/./gdk/x11/gdkwindow-x11.c:5554 drawable is not a native X11 window
(gnome-maps:21017): Gdk-WARNING **: /build/gtk+3.0-Tod2iD/gtk+3.0-3.22.0/./gdk/x11/gdkwindow-x11.c:5554 drawable is not a native X11 window
(gnome-maps:21017): Gdk-WARNING **: /build/gtk+3.0-Tod2iD/gtk+3.0-3.22.0/./gdk/x11/gdkwindow-x11.c:5554 drawable is not a native X11 window
(gnome-maps:21017): Gdk-WARNING **: /build/gtk+3.0-Tod2iD/gtk+3.0-3.22.0/./gdk/x11/gdkwindow-x11.c:5554 drawable is not a native X11 window
(gnome-maps:21017): Gdk-WARNING **: /build/gtk+3.0-Tod2iD/gtk+3.0-3.22.0/./gdk/x11/gdkwindow-x11.c:5554 drawable is not a native X11 window
(gnome-maps:21017): Gdk-WARNING **: /build/gtk+3.0-Tod2iD/gtk+3.0-3.22.0/./gdk/x11/gdkwindow-x11.c:5554 drawable is not a native X11 window
(gnome-maps:21017): Gtk-WARNING **: GtkClutterOffscreen 0x4c4f3f0 is drawn without a current allocation. This should not happen.
(gnome-maps:21017): Gtk-WARNING **: GtkImage 0x4ed4140 is drawn without a current allocation. This should not happen.
Now I m not sure whether all of those are gtk3+ issues or me running them under Debian MATE. I know that there are issues with mate and gtk3+ as had been told/shared a few times in p.d.o.
Anyways, one of the issues I encountered is that gnome-maps doesn t work in offline-mode, saw https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=708799 . Also saw ~/.cache/champlain/osm-mapquest and the listing underneath is gibberish in the sense you don t know what it meant to do
[shirish@debian] - [~/.cache/champlain/osm-mapquest] - [10163]
[$] ll -h
drwx------ 6 shirish shirish 4.0K Jun 11 2015 10
drwx------ 26 shirish shirish 4.0K Oct 24 2014 11
drwx------ 10 shirish shirish 4.0K Jun 11 2015 12
drwx------ 11 shirish shirish 4.0K Jun 11 2015 13
drwx------ 12 shirish shirish 4.0K Jun 11 2015 14
drwx------ 12 shirish shirish 4.0K Jun 11 2015 15
drwx------ 27 shirish shirish 4.0K Oct 24 2014 16
drwx------ 25 shirish shirish 4.0K Oct 24 2014 17
drwx------ 4 shirish shirish 4.0K Mar 4 2014 3
drwx------ 5 shirish shirish 4.0K Mar 4 2014 8
drwx------ 9 shirish shirish 4.0K Mar 29 2014 9
What was/is interesting to see things like this
As I was in a moving vehicle, it isn t easy to know if the imagery is at fault or was it app. , sensor of my mobile ?
Did see http://learnosm.org/en/josm/correcting-imagery-offset/ but as can be seen that requires more effort from my side.
The last tool proved to be the most problematic
3. JOSM Getting the tracks into josm which was easily done. While firing up josm came across https://josm.openstreetmap.de/ticket/13735 which I subsequently filed.
One of the other first things which has been a major irritant for a long time is JOSM is, for a lack of better term, ugly. See the interface, especially the one having preferences, all cluttered look and specifically see the plugins corner/tab
The part about it being ugly, I dunno but have seen most java apps are a bit ugly. It is a bit generalist I know but that has been my experience with whatever little java apps. I have used.
I don t know what the reasons for that are, maybe because java is known/rumoured to use lot of memory which seems true in my case as well OR it doesn t have toolkits like gtk3+ or qt quick, although have to say that the looks have improved from before when I used it last some years ago
[shirish@debian] - [~] - [10340]
[$] ps -eo size,pid,user,command awk ' hr=$1/1024 ; printf("%13.6f Mb ",hr) for ( x=4 ; x<=NF ; x++ ) printf("%s ",$x) print "" ' grep josm
0.324219 Mb /bin/sh /usr/bin/josm
419.468750 Mb /usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk-amd64/bin/java -Djosm.restart=true -Djava.net.useSystemProxies=true -jar /usr/share/josm/josm.jar
This is when I m just opening josm and have not added any tracks or done any work.
Now I wanted to explore the routing in good amount of detail on josm. This was easily said than done. When trying to get imagery I got the Download area too large issue/defect . Multiple tries didn t get me anywhere. Then hunting on the web came across the continous-download plugin which is part of the plugin infrastructure . This I found to be a very good tool. It downloads the tiles and puts them in ~/.josm/cache/tiles
[shirish@debian] - [~/.josm/cache/tiles] - [10147]
[$] ll -h
total 28M
-rw-r--r-- 1 shirish shirish 28M Oct 2 02:13 TMS_BLOCK_v2.data
-rw-r--r-- 1 shirish shirish 290K Oct 3 12:59 TMS_BLOCK_v2.key
-rw-r--r-- 1 shirish shirish 4 Oct 3 12:59 WMS_BLOCK_v2.key
-rw-r--r-- 1 shirish shirish 4 Oct 3 12:59 WMTS_BLOCK_v2.key
While unfortunately I cannot see this/make sense of it I m guessing it is some sort of database with key and data files.
What did become apparent is that the OSM needs lots more love if it is to become something which can be used everyday. At the end I had to change the open-source gpx track file to a Google map kml file to be able to make sense as there are whole areas which need to be named, numbered etc.
One of the newbie mistakes that I did was trying to use the slippy map in josm (using Openstreetmap/Mapnik at the back-end) to move/pan using the left-hand mouse button. It took me quite sometime to figure out that it is with right-hand mouse button that you can make the slippy map pan. This is different from almost all maps, gnome-maps uses the traditional left-hand button, Google maps also uses the same. I have filed it in upstream as https://josm.openstreetmap.de/ticket/13751 .
So at least, in these rounds it is gnome-maps which has kind of won even though it doesn t do any of the things that josm claims to do.
I am sure there might be some interesting tricks and tips that people might have to share about mapping
The second day of TUG 2016 was again full of interesting talks spanning from user experiences to highly technical details about astrological chart drawing, and graphical user interfaces to TikZ to the invited talk by Robert Bringhurst on the Palatino family of fonts.
With all these interesting things there is only one thing to compain I cannot get out of the dark basement and enjoy the city
After a evening full of sake and a good night s sleep we were ready to dive into the second day of TUG.
Kaveh Bazargan A graphical user interface for TikZ
The opening speaker of Day 2 was Kaveh. He first gave us a quick run-down on what he is doing for business and what challenges publishers are facing in these times. After that he introduced us to his new development of a command line graphical user interface for TikZ. I wrote command line on purpose, because the editing operations are short commands issued on a kind of command line, which will give an immediate graphical feedback. Basic of the technique is a simplified TikZ-like meta language that is not only easy to write, but also easy to parse.
While the amount of supported commands and features of TikZ is still quite small, I think the basic idea is a good one, and there is a good potential in it.
Matthew Skala Astrological charts with horoscop and starfont
Next up was Matthew who introduced us to the involved task of typesetting astrological charts. He included comparisons with various commercial and open source solutions, where Matthew of course, but me too, felt that his charts came of quite well!
As an extra bonus we got some charts of famous singers, as well as the TUG 2016 horoscope.
David Tulett Development of an e-textbook using LaTeX and PStricks
David reported on his project to develop an e-textbook on decision modeling (lots of math!) using LaTeX and PStricks. His e-book is of course a PDF. There were a lot of very welcoming feedback free (CC-BY-NC-ND) textbooks for sciences are rare and we need more of them.
Christian Gagn An Emacs-based writing workflow inspired by TeX and WEB, targeting the Web
Christian s talk turned around editing and publishing using org-mode of Emacs and the various levels of macros one can use in this setup. He finished with a largely incomprehensible vision of a future equational logic based notation mode. I have used equational logic in my day-in-day-out job, and I am not completely convinced that this is a good approach for typesetting and publishing but who knows, I am looking forward to a more logic-based approach!
Barbara Beeton, Frank Mittelbach In memoriam: Sebastian Rahtz (1955-2016)
Frank recalled Sebastian s many contribution to a huge variety of fields, and recalled our much missed colleague with many photos and anecdotes.
Jim Hefferon A LaTeX reference manual
Jim reported about the current state of a LaTeX reference manual, which tries to provide a documentation orthogonally to the many introduction and user guides available, by providing a straight down-to-earth reference manual with all the technical bells and whistles necessary.
As I had to write myself a reference manual for a computer language, it was very interested to see how they dealt with many of the same problems I am facing.
Arthur Reutenauer, Mojca Miklavec Hyphenation past and future: hyph-utf8 and patgen
Arthur reports about the current statue of the hyphenation pattern project, and in particular the license and usage hell they recently came into with large cooperations simply grabbing the patterns without proper attribution.
In a second part he gave a rough sketch of his shot at a reimplementation of patgen. Unfortunately he wrote in rather unreadable hand-writing on a flip-chart, which made only the first line audience to actually see what he was writing.
Federico Garcia-De Castro TeXcel?
As an artist organizing large festivals Federico has to fight with financial planning and reports. He seemed not content with the abilities of the usual suspects, so he developed a way to do Excel like book-keeping in TeX. Nice idea, I hope I can use that system for the next conference I have to organize!
Jennifer Claudio A brief reflection on TeX and end-user needs
Last speaker in the morning session was Jennifer who gave us a new and end-user s view onto the TeX environment, and the respective needs. These kind of talks are a very much welcomed contrast to technical talks and hopefully all of us developers take home some of her suggestions.
Sungmin Kim, Jaeyoung Choi, Geunho Jeong MFCONFIG: Metafont plug-in module for the Freetype rasterizer
Jaeyoung reported about an impressive project to make Metafont fonts available to fontconfig and thus windowing systems. He also explained their development of a new font format Stemfont, which is a Metafont-like system that can work also for CJK fonts, and which they envisage to be built into all kind of mobile devices.
Michael Sharpe New font offerings Cochineal, Nimbus15 and LibertinusT1Math
Michael reports about his last font projects. The first two being extensions of the half-made half-butchered rereleased URW fonts, as well as his first (?) math font project.
I talked to him over lunch one day, and asked him how many man-days he need for these fonts, and his answer was speaking a lot: For the really messed up new URW fonts, like Cochineal, he guessed about 5 man-months of work, while other fonts only needed a few days. I think we all can be deeply thankful to all the work he is investing into all these font projects.
Robert Bringhurst The evolution of the Palatino tribe
The second invited talk was Robert Bringhurst, famous for his wide contributions to typpography, book culture in general, as well as poetry. He gave a quick historic overview on the development of the Palatino tribe of fonts, with lots of beautiful photos.
I was really looking forward to Robert s talk, and my expectations were extremely high. And unfortunately I must say I was quite disappointed. Maybe it is his style of presentation, but the feeling he transfered to me (the audience?) was that he was going through a necessary medical check, not much enjoying the presentation. Also, the content itself was not really full of his own ideas or thoughts, but a rather superficial listing of historical facts.
Of course, a person like Robert Bringhurst is so full of anecdotes and background knowledge still was a great pleasure to listen and lots of things to learn, I only hoped for a bit more enthusiasm.
TUG Annual General Meeting
The afternoon session finished with the TUG Annual General Meeting, reports will be sent out soon to all TUG members.
Herbert Schulz Optional workshop: TeXShop tips & tricks
After the AGM, Herbert from MacTeX and TeXShop gave an on-the-spot workshop on TeXShop. Since I am not a Mac user, I skipped on that.
debian/changelog entry as documentation timestamp.debian/changelog entry as documentation timestamp..pk3 archive.Makefile.SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH.SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to preset the ntp_era_split parameter.help2man./bin/sh in example Makefile..oct files.-fdebug-prefix-map to clang to match GCC, another patch against gcc-5 to backport the removal of -fdebug-prefix-map from DW_AT_producer, and finally by proposing the addition of a normalizedebugpath to the reproducible feature set of dpkg-buildflags that would use -fdebug-prefix-map to replace the current directory with . using -fdebug-prefix-map.
Sergey Poznyakoff merged the --clamp-mtime option so that it will be featured in the next Tar release. This option is likely to be used by dpkg-deb to implement deterministic mtimes for packaged files.
Packages fixed
The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their
build dependencies:
augeas,
gmtkbabel,
ktikz,
octave-control,
octave-general,
octave-image,
octave-ltfat,
octave-miscellaneous,
octave-mpi,
octave-nurbs,
octave-octcdf,
octave-sockets,
octave-strings,
openlayers,
python-structlog,
signond.
The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:
i386 build nodes have been setup by converting 2 of the 4 amd64 nodes to i386. (h01ger)
Package reviews
92 reviews have been removed, 66 added and 31 updated in the previous week.
New issues: timestamps_generated_by_xbean_spring, timestamps_generated_by_mangosdk_spiprocessor.
Chris Lamb filed 7 FTBFS bugs.
Misc.
On March 20th, Chris Lamb gave a talk at FOSSASIA 2016 in Singapore.
The very same day, but a few timezones apart, h01ger did a presentation at LibrePlanet 2016 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Seven GSoC/Outreachy applications were made by potential interns to work on various aspects of the reproducible builds effort. On top of interacting with several applicants, prospective mentors gathered to review the applications.
What happened in the reproducible
builds effort between March 20th and March 26th:
.oct files.-fdebug-prefix-map to clang to match GCC, another patch against gcc-5 to backport the removal of -fdebug-prefix-map from DW_AT_producer, and finally by proposing the addition of a normalizedebugpath to the reproducible feature set of dpkg-buildflags that would use -fdebug-prefix-map to replace the current directory with . using -fdebug-prefix-map.
As succesful result of lobbying at LibrePlanet 2016, the --clamp-mtime option will be featured in the next Tar release. This option is likely to be used by dpkg-deb to implement deterministic mtimes for packaged files.
i386 build nodes have been setup by converting 2 of the 4 amd64 nodes to i386. (h01ger)
But then, moving to further distances, things became less
straightforward. Shooting two pictures each time meant that usually
one of them was sharp, but the other not.
I got really confused at this step; the shutter speed was 1/2000s and
I also had VR on; either VR was unneeded (i.e. contributing blur
instead of helping) or something else was going on. After much head
scratching, I think it's a combination of the following factors:
I'm happy with the detail (at this distance), however I was not able
to correct the colour due to the haze between me and the mountains;
note that the trees on the bottom of the distance were not near me,
but on the next or after-next hill. This picture confirms that with
more practice things will get better.
Coming back to shorter distances, and shorter focal lengths, things
are looking better. We were passing somewhat near some people playing
with RC-controlled planes not near enough to hear them, but near
enough to see the plane quickly flying. Switched camera quickly to
AF-C and Dynamic-21 focus, and - to my surprise - I was able to
capture four good pictures, two so-so and four more clearly out of
focus. But, for such a heavy length, hand-held and on the short
notice, I was happy; the first picture is one of the so-so ones, but I
kept it as I like the way the propeller is seen. All pictures at 290mm
plus some cropping, 1/1250s, ISO between 900 and 1800, f/5.6 (i.e wide open):
From this exercise, the conclusion is that the lens is OK-ish for
tracking, although the not-so good keeper rate tells me that I need to
be careful; I'll have to see how a subject moving not left-right, but
instead approaching or moving away from the camera would be tracked.
But enough pictures of small planes. At 500mm, but still somewhat
close, trees:
At this step I'm starting to wonder if stopping down a bit would help
with the sharpness; I'll have to test that in the future.
Walking some more, finally a bird in flight; one of the hopes when I
took the camera/lens out was that I'll see some birds, but this was
the first. 500mm, heavily cropped, but quite good result for myself
(same autofocus settings as before):
The only problem here is, as always with crows (I think these are
crows), is the black bird against the light-blue sky (not even strong
blue), which means the picture has a high dynamic range; recovering
the shadows on the bird is difficult. But in any case, it's clear the
lens can deliver, if the photographer is good.
Next, a helicopter was gracious enough to pass by (pretty close):
Two minutes later, it was quite far, but since it was going in the
direction of the Alps, it gave the opportunity for a nice shot:
This picture is less sharp, but still I like it due to composition;
not successful on small screens though, only if you see it full
screen. Light is very difficult though and about 10 seconds earlier
would have been even better (more separation between the helicopter
and the mountain).
And since we're talking about planes, let's see a plane at 500m,
directly overhead, and quite high:
This picture (@500mm, cropped, 1/2000s) has the most detail of a plane
flying high enough to have trails (not sure how to estimate, but at
least 5km, maybe more around 7-8 I'd say) that I ever took. So yes,
the lens can deliver, but it's not easy. This shot, being shot more or
less straight up, had the least distance through low-altitude
atmosphere, so it has less problems compared to the mountains
pictures. It's still not really sharp (lens wide open), but the amount
of detail I'm sold 
And to finish on a more close note:
A long focal length lens allows one to get "close" without getting
close, which means animals are not disturbed. The first picture with
the cat (not shown) had the cat less alert; ears not fully up,
although eyes were still seeking; this picture shows it fully alert
and concentrated, like it was a wild cat hunting for its survival, and
not a city cat, out just for fun.
So, summary:
For the past fifteen years, I have been tweaking my ~/.emacs continously, most recently by switching to Spacemacs. With that switch done, I started to migrate a few more things to Emacs, an Atom/RSS reader being one that's been in the queue for years - ever since Google Reader shut down. Since March 2013, I have been a Feedly user, but I wanted to migrate to something better for a long time. I wanted to use Free Software, for one.I saw a mention of Elfeed somewhere a little while ago, and in the past few days, I decided to give it a go. The results are pretty amazing.blah
What happened in the reproducible
builds effort this week:
Toolchain fixes
Aur lien Jarno uploaded glibc/2.21-0experimental1 which will fix the issue were locales-all did not behave exactly like locales despite having it in the Provides field.
Lunar rebased the pu/reproducible_builds branch for dpkg on top of the released 1.18.2. This made visible an issue with udebs and automatically generated debug packages.
The summary from the meeting at DebConf15 between ftpmasters, dpkg mainatainers and reproducible builds folks has been posted to the revelant mailing lists.
Packages fixed
The following 70 packages became reproducible due to changes in their
build dependencies:
activemq-activeio,
async-http-client,
classworlds,
clirr,
compress-lzf,
dbus-c++,
felix-bundlerepository,
felix-framework,
felix-gogo-command,
felix-gogo-runtime,
felix-gogo-shell,
felix-main,
felix-shell-tui,
felix-shell,
findbugs-bcel,
gco,
gdebi,
gecode,
geronimo-ejb-3.2-spec,
git-repair,
gmetric4j,
gs-collections,
hawtbuf,
hawtdispatch,
jack-tools,
jackson-dataformat-cbor,
jackson-dataformat-yaml,
jackson-module-jaxb-annotations,
jmxetric,
json-simple,
kryo-serializers,
lhapdf,
libccrtp,
libclaw,
libcommoncpp2,
libftdi1,
libjboss-marshalling-java,
libmimic,
libphysfs,
libxstream-java,
limereg,
maven-debian-helper,
maven-filtering,
maven-invoker,
mochiweb,
mongo-java-driver,
mqtt-client,
netty-3.9,
openhft-chronicle-queue,
openhft-compiler,
openhft-lang,
pavucontrol,
plexus-ant-factory,
plexus-archiver,
plexus-bsh-factory,
plexus-cdc,
plexus-classworlds2,
plexus-component-metadata,
plexus-container-default,
plexus-io,
pytone,
scolasync,
sisu-ioc,
snappy-java,
spatial4j-0.4,
tika,
treeline,
wss4j,
xtalk,
zshdb.
The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:
pybuild to get rid of .pyc files.SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH.dpkg-parsechangelog in debian/rules.SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH for version string.SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to set manpage date.scm-safe which tells ResourceGen that no timestamps should be included.SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH have been improved to support systems without GNU date.
reproducible.debian.net
armhf is finally being tested, which also means the remote building of Debian packages finally works! This paves the way to perform the tests on even more architectures and doing variations on CPU and date. Some packages even produce the same binary Arch:all packages on different architectures (1, 2). (h01ger)
Tests for FreeBSD are finally running. (h01ger)
As it seems the gcc5 transition has cooled off, we schedule sid more often than testing again on amd64. (h01ger)
disorderfs has been built and installed on all build nodes (amd64 and armhf). One issue related to permissions for root and unpriviliged users needs to be solved before disorderfs can be used on reproducible.debian.net. (h01ger)
strip-nondeterminism
Version 0.011-1 has been released on August 29th. The new version updates dh_strip_nondeterminism to match recent changes in debhelper. (Andrew Ayer)
disorderfs
disorderfs, the new FUSE filesystem to ease testing of filesystem-related variations, is now almost ready to be used. Version 0.2.0 adds support for extended attributes. Since then Andrew Ayer also added support to reverse directory entries instead of shuffling them, and arbitrary padding to the number of blocks used by files.
Package reviews
142 reviews have
been removed, 48 added and 259 updated this week.
Santiago Vila renamed the not_using_dh_builddeb issue into varying_mtimes_in_data_tar_gz_or_control_tar_gz to align better with other tag names.
New issue identified this week: random_order_in_python_doit_completion.
37 FTBFS issues have been reported by Chris West (Faux) and Chris Lamb.
Misc.
h01ger gave a talk at FrOSCon on August 23rd. Recordings are already online.
These reports are being reviewed and enhanced every week by many people hanging out on #debian-reproducible. Huge thanks!
Next.