Upcoming Improvements to Salsa CI, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n Santiago started picking up the work made by Outreachy Intern, Enock Kashada (a big thanks to him!), to solve some long-standing issues in Salsa CI. Currently, the first job in a Salsa CI pipeline is the extract-source job, used to produce a debianize source tree of the project. This job was introduced to make it possible to build the projects on different architectures, on the subsequent build jobs. However, that extract-source approach is sub-optimal: not only it increases the execution time of the pipeline by some minutes, but also projects whose source tree is too large are not able to use the pipeline. The debianize source tree is passed as an artifact to the build jobs, and for those large projects, the size of their source tree exceeds the Salsa s limits. This is specific issue is documented as issue #195, and the proposed solution is to get rid of the extract-source job, relying on sbuild in the very build job (see issue #296). Switching to sbuild would also help to improve the build source job, solving issues such as #187 and #298. The current work-in-progress is very preliminary, but it has already been possible to run the build (amd64), build-i386 and build-source job using sbuild with the unshare mode. The image on the right shows a pipeline that builds grep. All the test jobs use the artifacts of the new build job. There is a lot of remaining work, mainly making the integration with ccache work. This change could break some things, it will also be important to test how the new pipeline works with complex projects. Also, thanks to Emmanuel Arias, we are proposing a Google Summer of Code 2024 project to improve Salsa CI. As part of the ongoing work in preparation for the GSoC 2024 project, Santiago has proposed a merge request to make more efficient how contributors can test their changes on the Salsa CI pipeline.

/usr-move, by Helmut Grohne In January, we sent most of the moving patches for the set of packages involved with debootstrap. Notably missing is glibc, which turns out harder than anticipated via dumat, because it has Conflicts between different architectures, which dumat does not analyze. Patches for diversion mitigations have been updated in a way to not exhibit any loss anymore. The main change here is that packages which are being diverted now support the diverting packages in transitioning their diversions. We also supported a few packages with non-trivial changes such as netplan.io. dumat has been enhanced to better support derivatives such as Ubuntu.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Python 3.12 migration trundles on. Stefano Rivera helped port several new packages to support 3.12.
• Stefano updated the Sphinx configuration of DebConf Video Team s documentation, which was broken by Sphinx 7.
• Stefano published the videos from the Cambridge MiniDebConf to YouTube and PeerTube.
• DebConf 24 planning has begun, and Stefano & Utkarsh have started work on this.
• Utkarsh re-sponsored the upload of golang-github-prometheus-community-pgbouncer-exporter for Lena.
• Colin Watson added Incus support to autopkgtest.
• Colin discovered Perl::Critic and used it to tidy up some poor practices in several of his packages, including debconf.
• Colin did some overdue debconf maintenance, mainly around tidying up error message handling in several places (1, 2, 3).
• Colin figured out how to update the mirror size documentation in debmirror, last updated in 2010. It should now be much easier to keep it up to date regularly.
• Colin issued a man-db buster update to clean up some irritations due to strict sandboxing.
• Thorsten Alteholz adopted two more packages, magicfilter and ifhp, for the debian-printing team. Those packages are the last ones of the latest round of adoptions to preserve the old printing protocol within Debian. If you know of other packages that should be retained, please don t hesitate to contact Thorsten.
• Enrico participated in /usr-merge discussions with Helmut.
• Helmut sent patches for 16 cross build failures.
• Helmut supported Matthias Klose (not affiliated with Freexian) with adding -for-host support to gcc-defaults.
• Helmut uploaded dput-ng enabling dcut migrate and merging two MRs of Ben Hutchings.
• Santiago took part in the discussions relating to the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) and the Debian public statement that was published last year. He participated in a meeting with Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), Marcel Kolaja and Karen Melchior, and their teams to clarify some points about the impact of the CRA and Debian and downstream projects, and the improvements in the last version of the proposed regulation.

• [DLA 3726-1] bind9 security update for one CVEs to fix stack exhaustion
• [#1060186] Bookworm PU-bug for libde265; yes, this is a new one.
• [#1056935] Bullseye PU-bug for libde; yes, this is a new one as well

• [ELA-1031-1]xerces-c security update for one CVE to fix an out-of-bound access in Jessie and Stretch
• [ELA-1036-1] jasper security update for one CVE to fix an invalid memory write

• ifhp
• magicfilter

• astap
• astap-cli
• udm

• pyicloud to remove the deprecated dependency python3-future

• a56

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

• tested a laptop that had a defective battery with a known good one (the problem was indeed with the battery :D)
• renewed his expiring OpenPGP key
• worked on removing trapperkeeper-scheduler-clojure from the DebCI reject_list
• helped anarcat with packaging sigal
• managed to feed most of the people present :)

• worked with lavamind to upload new upstream release of smokeping

• migrated from lxd to incus on his servers
• helped anarcat with flashing his AirGradient

• submitted a bug report on r-cran-rserve (promptly fixed/uploaded by maintainer!)
• reviewed and uploaded smokeping
• bug triaged the facter package
• worked on puppet-agent new upstream version 8.4.0

• updated puppet-strings from 2.9.0 to 4.2.1
• reported upstream test failures on puppet-strings with recent versions of mdl

• drafted a call & request for funding for the Vanier College FLOSS Club hardware marathon at Eastern Bloc
• worked on an application to conduct research at Vanier College on Debian usability
• babysitted :-)

• worked on his AirGradient
• debugged the WiFi and VPN setup on his new laptop

• worked on packaging sigal
• worked on flashing his AirGradient boards
• rewrote a Prometheus exporter for Airgradient devices
• brought over a car full of old computer gear to donate

• I made a merge request to get rid of the manual split between old and current changelogs in the Debian linux source package. As there wasn't agreement on this I've since closed it.
• I updated the linux (4.19) package for buster to upstream version 4.19.302, but didn't upload it.
• I reported a bug in libnfsidmap packages involving aliased file locations that can (in principle) result in file loss on upgrade.

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

Changes

• OpenStreetMap: fixed a bunch of broken website URLs
• Debian pass-otp: oathtool safety
• reportbug: fix crash
• Debian BTS usertags: fix Python, Ruby, QA, porter, archive, release tags
• Debian wiki pages: TransitionUploadHook

Issues

• Warnings in python3-qgis, androguard, qbrz

Review

• Debian BTS usertags: changes for the month
• Debian screenshots:
  • approved arch-test vasttrafik-cli
  • rejected freecell-solver-bin (non-GUI package), nginx-full (photo)

Administration

• Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Communication

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

Sponsors All work was done on a volunteer basis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three ingredients For example, it was him that suggested that for each proposal we have one committee member be the Shepherd , overseeing the discussion. I believe this was one ingredient for the process effectiveness: There is always one person in charge, and thus we avoid the delays incurred when any one of a non-singleton set of volunteers have to do the next step (and everyone hopes someone else does it). The next ingredient was that we do not usually require a vote among all members (again, not easy with volunteers with limited bandwidth and occasional phases of absence). Instead, the shepherd makes a recommendation (accept/reject), and if the other committee members do not complain, this silence is taken as consent, and we come to a decision. It seems this idea can also be traced back on Richard, who suggested that once a decision is requested, the shepherd [generates] consensus. If consensus is elusive, then we vote. At the end of the year we agreed and wrote down these rules, created the mailing list for our internal, but publicly archived committee discussions, and began accepting proposals, starting with Adam Gundry s OverloadedRecordFields. At that point, there was no secretary role yet, so how I did become one? It seems that in February 2017 I started to clean-up and refine the process documentation, fixing bugs in the process (like requiring authors to set Github labels when they don t even have permissions to do that). This in particular meant that someone from the committee had to manually handle submissions and so on, and by the aforementioned principle that at every step there ought to be exactly one person in change, the role of a secretary followed naturally. In the email in which I described that role I wrote:

Simon already shoved me towards picking up the secretary hat, to reduce load on Ben.

So when I merged the updated process documentation, I already listed myself secretary . It wasn t just Simon s shoving that put my into the role, though. I dug out my original self-nomination email to Ben, and among other things I wrote:

I also hope that there is going to be clear responsibilities and a clear workflow among the committee. E.g. someone (possibly rotating), maybe called the secretary, who is in charge of having an initial look at proposals and then assigning it to a member who shepherds the proposal.

So it is hardly a surprise that I became secretary, when it was dear to my heart to have a smooth continuous process here. I am rather content with the result: These three ingredients single secretary, per-proposal shepherds, silence-is-consent helped the committee to be effective throughout its existence, even as every once in a while individual members dropped out.

Ulterior motivation I must admit, however, there was an ulterior motivation behind me grabbing the secretary role: Yes, I did want the committee to succeed, and I did want that authors receive timely, good and decisive feedback on their proposals but I did not really want to have to do that part. I am, in fact, a lousy proposal reviewer. I am too generous when reading proposals, and more likely mentally fill gaps in a specification rather than spotting them. Always optimistically assuming that the authors surely know what they are doing, rather than critically assessing the impact, the implementation cost and the interaction with other language features. And, maybe more importantly: why should I know which changes are good and which are not so good in the long run? Clearly, the authors cared enough about a proposal to put it forward, so there is some need and I do believe that Haskell should stay an evolving and innovating language but how does this help me decide about this or that particular feature. I even, during the formation of the committee, explicitly asked that we write down some guidance on Vision and Guideline ; do we want to foster change or innovation, or be selective gatekeepers? Should we accept features that are proven to be useful, or should we accept features so that they can prove to be useful? This discussion, however, did not lead to a concrete result, and the assessment of proposals relied on the sum of each member s personal preference, expertise and gut feeling. I am not saying that this was a mistake: It is hard to come up with a general guideline here, and even harder to find one that does justice to each individual proposal. So the secret motivation for me to grab the secretary post was that I could contribute without having to judge proposals. Being secretary allowed me to assign most proposals to others to shepherd, and only once in a while myself took care of a proposal, when it seemed to be very straight-forward. Sneaky, ain t it?

7 Years later For years to come I happily played secretary: When an author finished their proposal and public discussion ebbed down they would ping me on GitHub, I would pick a suitable shepherd among the committee and ask them to judge the proposal. Eventually, the committee would come to a conclusion, usually by implicit consent, sometimes by voting, and I d merge the pull request and update the metadata thereon. Every few months I d summarize the current state of affairs to the committee (what happened since the last update, which proposals are currently on our plate), and once per year gathered the data for Simon Peyton Jones annually GHC Status Report. Sometimes some members needed a nudge or two to act. Some would eventually step down, and I d sent around a call for nominations and when the nominations came in, distributed them off-list among the committee and tallied the votes. Initially, that was exciting. For a long while it was a pleasant and rewarding routine. Eventually, it became a mere chore. I noticed that I didn t quite care so much anymore about some of the discussion, and there was a decent amount of naval-gazing, meta-discussions and some wrangling about claims of authority that was probably useful and necessary, but wasn t particularly fun. I also began to notice weaknesses in the processes that I helped shape: We could really use some more automation for showing proposal statuses, notifying people when they have to act, and nudging them when they don t. The whole silence-is-assent approach is good for throughput, but not necessary great for quality, and maybe the committee members need to be pushed more firmly to engage with each proposal. Like GHC itself, the committee processes deserve continuous refinement and refactoring, and since I could not muster the motivation to change my now well-trod secretarial ways, it was time for me to step down. Luckily, Adam Gundry volunteered to take over, and that makes me feel much less bad for quitting. Thanks for that! And although I am for my day job now enjoying a language that has many of the things out of the box that for Haskell are still only language extensions or even just future proposals (dependent types, BlockArguments, do notation with ( foo) expressions and Unicode), I m still around, hosting the Haskell Interlude Podcast, writing on this blog and hanging out at ZuriHac etc.

avahi-daemon[pid]: Host name conflict, retrying with hostname-2

What didn't work The first attempt I made at fixing this was to look for known bugs in Avahi. Neither of the work-arounds I found worked:

• the one proposed in https://github.com/avahi/avahi/issues/117#issuecomment-1651475104:

    [publish]
    publish-aaaa-on-ipv4=no
    publish-a-on-ipv6=no
  

• nor the one proposed in https://github.com/avahi/avahi/issues/117#issuecomment-442201162:

    [server]
    cache-entries-max=0
  

What worked The real problem turned out to be the fact that NetworkManager turns on full mDNS support in systemd-resolved which conflicts with the mDNS support in avahi-daemon. You can see this in the output of resolvectl status:

Global
       Protocols: -LLMNR +mDNS -DNSOverTLS DNSSEC=no/unsupported
resolv.conf mode: stub
Link 2 (enp6s0)
    Current Scopes: DNS mDNS/IPv4 mDNS/IPv6
         Protocols: +DefaultRoute -LLMNR +mDNS -DNSOverTLS
                    DNSSEC=no/unsupported
Current DNS Server: 192.168.1.1
       DNS Servers: 192.168.1.1
        DNS Domain: lan

which includes +mDNS for the main network adapter. I initially thought that I could just uninstall avahi-daemon and rely on the systemd-resolved mDNS stack, but it's not actually compatible with CUPS. The solution was to tell NetworkManager to set mDNS to resolve-only mode in systemd-resolved by adding the following to /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/mdns.conf:

[connection]
connection.mdns=1

leaving /etc/avahi/avahi-daemon.conf to the default Debian configuration.

Verifying the configuration After rebooting, resolvectl status now shows the following:

Global
       Protocols: -LLMNR +mDNS -DNSOverTLS DNSSEC=no/unsupported
resolv.conf mode: stub
Link 2 (enp6s0)
    Current Scopes: DNS mDNS/IPv4 mDNS/IPv6
         Protocols: +DefaultRoute -LLMNR mDNS=resolve -DNSOverTLS
                    DNSSEC=no/unsupported
Current DNS Server: 192.168.1.1
       DNS Servers: 192.168.1.1
        DNS Domain: lan

Avahi finally sees my printer (called hp in the output below):

$ avahi-browse -at   grep Printer
+ enp6s0 IPv6 hp @ myprintserver   Secure Internet Printer local
+ enp6s0 IPv4 hp @ myprintserver   Secure Internet Printer local
+ enp6s0 IPv6 hp @ myprintserver   Internet Printer        local
+ enp6s0 IPv4 hp @ myprintserver   Internet Printer        local
+ enp6s0 IPv6 hp @ myprintserver   UNIX Printer            local
+ enp6s0 IPv4 hp @ myprintserver   UNIX Printer            local

and so does CUPS:

$ sudo lpinfo --include-schemes dnssd -v
network dnssd://myprintserver%20%40%20hp._ipp._tcp.local/cups?uuid=d46942a2-b730-11ee-b05c-a75251a34287

Firewall rules Since printer discovery in CUPS relies on mDNS, another thing to double-check is that the correct ports are open on the firewall. This is what I have in /etc/network/iptables.up.rules:

# Allow mDNS for local service discovery
-A INPUT -d 100.64.0.0/10 -p udp --dport 5353 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -d 192.168.1.0/24 -p udp --dport 5353 -j ACCEPT

and in etc/network/ip6tables.up.rules:

# Allow mDNS for local service discovery
-A INPUT -d ff02::/16 -p udp --dport 5353 -j ACCEPT

• [1] https://www.ozbargain.com.au/cat/computing
• [2] https://keeplink.aliexpress.com/store/911812257
• [3] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1061095

• free software throughout
• storage under my control
• ability to annotate tasks with URLs (especially bugs and merge requests)
• lightweight time tracking (I m OK with having to explicitly tell it when I start and stop tasks)
• ability to drive everything from the command line
• decent filtering so I don t have to look at my entire to-do list all the time
• ability to easily generate billing information for multiple clients
• optionally, integration with Android (mainly so I can tick off personal tasks like change bedroom lightbulb or whatever that don t involve being near a computer)

$ task ls
ID A Project     Tags                 Description
17   Freexian                         Add Incus support to autopkgtest [2]
 7   Columbiform                      Figure out Lloyds online banking [1]
 2   Debian                           Fix troffcvt for groff 1.23.0 [1]
11   Personal                         Replace living room curtain rail

$ task 25 start
Starting task 00a9516f 'Write blog post about task tracking'.
Started 1 task.
Note: '"Write blog post about task tracking"' is a new tag.
Tracking Columbiform "Write blog post about task tracking"
  Started 2024-01-10T11:28:38
  Current                  38
  Total               0:00:00
You have more urgent tasks.
Project 'Columbiform' is 25% complete (3 of 4 tasks remaining).

#! /bin/sh
set -eu
cert_name=taskd.example.org
found=false
for domain in $RENEWED_DOMAINS; do
    case "$domain" in
        $cert_name)
            found=:
            ;;
    esac
done
$found   exit 0
install -m 644 "/etc/letsencrypt/live/$cert_name/fullchain.pem" \
    /var/lib/taskd/pki/fullchain.pem
install -m 640 -g Debian-taskd "/etc/letsencrypt/live/$cert_name/privkey.pem" \
    /var/lib/taskd/pki/privkey.pem
systemctl restart taskd.service

server.key=/var/lib/taskd/pki/privkey.pem
server.cert=/var/lib/taskd/pki/fullchain.pem
server.crl=/var/lib/taskd/pki/server.crl.pem
ca.cert=/var/lib/taskd/pki/ca.cert.pem

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.

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:

• crack [ ] (#1021521 & #1021522)
• dustmite [ ] (#1020878 & #1020879)
• edid-decode [ ] (#1020877)
• gentoo [ ] (#1024284)
• haskell98-report [ ] (#1024007)
• infinipath-psm [ ] (#990862)
• lcm [ ] (#1024286)
• libapache-mod-evasive [ ] (#1020800)
• libccrtp [ ] (#860470)
• libinput [ ] (#995809)
• lirc [ ] (#979019, #979023 & #979024)
• mm-common [ ] (#977177)
• mpl-sphinx-theme [ ] (#1005826)
• psi [ ] (#1017473)
• python-parse-type [ ] (#1002671)
• ruby-tioga [ ] (#1005727)
• ucspi-proxy [ ] (#1024125)
• ypserv [ ] (#983138)

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:

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • apr (hostname issue)
  • dune (parallelism)
  • epy (time-based .pyc issue)
  • fpc (Year 2038)
  • gap (date)
  • gh (FTBFS in 2024)
  • kubernetes (fixed random build path)
  • libgda (date)
  • libguestfs (tar)
  • metamail (date)
  • mpi-selector (date)
  • neovim (randomness in Lua)
  • nml (time-based .pyc)
  • pommed (parallelism)
  • procmail (benchmarking)
  • pysnmp (FTBFS in 2038)
  • python-efl (drop Sphinx doctrees)
  • python-pyface (time)
  • python-pytest-salt-factories (time-based .pyc issue)
  • python-quimb (fails to build on single-CPU systems)
  • python-rdflib (random)
  • python-yarl (random path)
  • qt6-webengine (parallelism issue in documentation)
  • texlive (Gzip modification time issue)
  • waf (time-based .pyc)
  • warewulf (CPIO modification time and inode issue)
  • xemacs (toolchain hostname)
• Chris Lamb:
  • #1057710 filed against python-aiostream.
  • #1057721 filed against openpyxl.
  • #1058681 filed against python-multipletau.
  • #1059013 filed against wxmplot.
  • #1059014 filed against stunnel4.
• James Addison:
  • #1059592 & #1059631 filed against qttools-opensource-src.

---

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

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

Changes in Rcpp release version 1.0.12 (2024-01-08)

• Changes in Rcpp API:
  • Missing header includes as spotted by some recent tools were added in two places (Michael Chirico in #1272 closing #1271).
  • Casts to avoid integer overflow in matrix row/col selections have neem added (Aaron Lun #1281).
  • Three print format correction uncovered by R-devel were applied with thanks to Tomas Kalibera (Dirk in #1285).
  • Correct a print format correction in the RcppExports glue code (Dirk in #1288 fixing #1287).
  • The upcoming OBJSXP addition to R 4.4.0 is supported in the type2name mapper (Dirk and I aki in #1293).
• Changes in Rcpp Attributes:
  • Generated interface code from base R that fails under LTO is now corrected (I aki in #1274 fixing a StackOverflow issue).
• Changes in Rcpp Documentation:
  • The caption for third figure in the introductory vignette has been corrected (Dirk in #1277 fixing #1276).
  • A small formatting issue was correct in an Rd file as noticed by R-devel (Dirk in #1282).
  • The Rcpp FAQ vignette has been updated (Dirk in #1284).
  • The Rcpp.bib file has been refreshed to current package versions.
• Changes in Rcpp Deployment:
  • The RcppExports file for an included test package has been updated (Dirk in #1289).

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

• emacs-request ITP #1007113
• bui.el ITP #1007153
• emacs-posframe ITP #1007158
• lsp-treemacs ITP #1007119
• dap-mode ITP #1007160
• emacs-lsp-java ITP #1007162

• March 8th: Godspeed You! Black Emperor
• April 11th: Alexandra Str liski
• April 12th: Bikini Kill
• April 21th: Brigada Flores Magon, Union Thugs
• April 28th: Komintern Sect, The Outcasts, Violent Way, Ultra Razzia, Over the Hill
• May 3rd: First Fragment
• May 12th: Rhapsody of Fire, Wind Rose
• May 13th: Aeternam
• June 2nd: Mortier, La Gachette
• June 17th: Ultra Razzia, Total Nada, BLEMISH
• June 30th: Avishai Cohen Trio
• July 9th: Richard Galliano
• August 18th: Gojira, Mastodon, Lorna Shore
• September 14th: Jinjer
• September 22nd: CUIR, Salvaje Punk, Hysteric Polemix, Perestroika, Ultra Razzia, Ilusion, Over the Hill, Asbestos
• October 6th: Rancoeur, Street Code, Tenaz, Mortimer, Guernica, High Anxiety

• [DLA 3686-1] xorg-server security update for two CVEs to fix privilege escalation
• [DLA 3686-2] xorg-server security update for one CVE to really fix privilege escalation. Unfortunately the first patches provided by upstream did not really solve the problem, so here we are in round 2
• [DLA 3699-1] libde265 security update for three CVEs to fix heap buffer or global buffer overflows
• [DLA 3700-1] cjson security update for one CVE to fix a segmentation violation
• [#1056934] Bookworm PU-bug for libde265; I could finally upload the package
• [#1056737] Bookworm PU-bug for minizip; I could finally upload the package
• [libde265]For the next round of CVEs of libde265 I prepared debdiffs for Bullseye and Bookworm and sent them to the maintainer.
• [cjson]I prepared debdiffs for Bullseye and Bookworm and sent them to the maintainer.

• [ELA-1019-1]xorg-server security update for two CVEs to fix privilege escalation
• [ELA-1019-2]xorg-server security update for to really fix privilege escalation. As with the DLAs above, the first patches provided by upstream did not really solve the problem, so here we are in round 2
• [ELA 1027-1] libde265 security update for three CVEs in Stretch to fix heap buffer or global buffer overflows

• cups/Bookworm to fix a bug related to color printing
• hplip to fix a bug related to /usr-merge

• libpktriggercord to fix a /usr-merge bug
• indi-nightscape to fix a /usr-merge bug
• indi-ffmv to fix a /usr-merge bug
• indi-armadillo-platypus to fix a /usr-merge bug
• indi-orion-ssg3 to fix a /usr-merge bug
• indi-sx to fix a /usr-merge bug

• usb-modeswitch-data to fix a /usr-merge bug
• libcontra it is sometimes a bit amazing what software phones home