Search Results: "Andreas Tille"

22 September 2023

Ravi Dwivedi: Debconf23

Official logo of DebConf23

Introduction DebConf23, the 24th annual Debian Conference, was held in India in the city of Kochi, Kerala from the 3rd to the 17th of September, 2023. Ever since I got to know about it (which was more than an year ago), I was excited to attend DebConf in my home country. This was my second DebConf, as I attended one last year in Kosovo. I was very happy that I didn t need to apply for a visa to attend. I got full bursary to attend the event (thanks a lot to Debian for that!) which is always helpful in covering the expenses, especially if the venue is a five star hotel :) For the conference, I submitted two talks. One was suggested by Sahil on Debian packaging for beginners, while the other was suggested by Praveen who opined that a talk covering broader topics about freedom in self-hosting services will be better, when I started discussing about submitting a talk about prav app project. So I submitted one on Debian packaging for beginners and the other on ideas on sustainable solutions for self-hosting. My friend Suresh - who is enthusiastic about Debian and free software - wanted to attend the DebConf as well. When the registration started, I reminded him about applying. We landed in Kochi on the 28th of August 2023 during the festival of Onam. We celebrated Onam in Kochi, had a trip to Wayanad, and returned to Kochi. On the evening of the 3rd of September, we reached the venue - Four Points Hotel by Sheraton, at Infopark Kochi, Ernakulam, Kerala, India.
Suresh and me celebrating Onam in Kochi.

Hotel overview The hotel had 14 floors, and featured a swimming pool and gym (these were included in our package). The hotel gave us elevator access for only our floor, along with public spaces like the reception, gym, swimming pool, and dining areas. The temperature inside the hotel was pretty cold and I had to buy a jacket to survive. Perhaps the hotel was in cahoots with winterwear companies? :)
Four Points Hotel by Sheraton was the venue of DebConf23. Photo credits: Bilal
Photo of the pool. Photo credits: Andreas Tille.
View from the hotel window.

Meals On the first day, Suresh and I had dinner at the eatery on the third floor. At the entrance, a member of the hotel staff asked us about how many people we wanted a table for. I told her that it s just the two of us at the moment, but (as we are attending a conference) we might be joined by others. Regardless, they gave us a table for just two. Within a few minutes, we were joined by Alper from Turkey and urbec from Germany. So we shifted to a larger table but then we were joined by even more people, so we were busy adding more chairs to our table. urbec had already been in Kerala for the past 5-6 days and was, on one hand, very happy already with the quality and taste of bananas in Kerala and on the other, rather afraid of the spicy food :) Two days later, the lunch and dinner were shifted to the All Spice Restaurant on the 14th floor, but the breakfast was still served at the eatery. Since the eatery (on the 3rd floor) had greater variety of food than the other venue, this move made breakfast the best meal for me and many others. Many attendees from outside India were not accustomed to the spicy food. It is difficult for locals to help them, because what we consider mild can be spicy for others. It is not easy to satisfy everyone at the dining table, but I think the organizing team did a very good job in the food department. (That said, it didn t matter for me after a point, and you will know why.) The pappadam were really good, and I liked the rice labelled Kerala rice . I actually brought that exact rice and pappadam home during my last trip to Kochi and everyone at my home liked it too (thanks to Abhijit PA). I also wished to eat all types of payasams from Kerala and this really happened (thanks to Sruthi who designed the menu). Every meal had a different variety of payasam and it was awesome, although I didn t like some of them, mostly because they were very sweet. Meals were later shifted to the ground floor (taking away the best breakfast option which was the eatery).
This place served as lunch and dinner place and later as hacklab during debconf. Photo credits: Bilal

The excellent Swag Bag The DebConf registration desk was at the second floor. We were given a very nice swag bag. They were available in multiple colors - grey, green, blue, red - and included an umbrella, a steel mug, a multiboot USB drive by Mostly Harmless, a thermal flask, a mug by Canonical, a paper coaster, and stickers. It rained almost every day in Kochi during our stay, so handing out an umbrella to every attendee was a good idea.
Picture of the awesome swag bag given at DebConf23. Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi

A gift for Nattie During breakfast one day, Nattie (Belgium) expressed the desire to buy a coffee filter. The next time I went to the market, I bought a coffee filter for her as a gift. She seemed happy with the gift and was flattered to receive a gift from a young man :)

Being a mentor There were many newbies who were eager to learn and contribute to Debian. So, I mentored whoever came to me and was interested in learning. I conducted a packaging workshop in the bootcamp, but could only cover how to set up the Debian Unstable environment, and had to leave out how to package (but I covered that in my talk). Carlos (Brazil) gave a keysigning session in the bootcamp. Praveen was also mentoring in the bootcamp. I helped people understand why we sign GPG keys and how to sign them. I planned to take a workshop on it but cancelled it later.

My talk My Debian packaging talk was on the 10th of September, 2023. I had not prepared slides for my Debian packaging talk in advance - I thought that I could do it during the trip, but I didn t get the time so I prepared them on the day before the talk. Since it was mostly a tutorial, the slides did not need much preparation. My thanks to Suresh, who helped me with the slides and made it possible to complete them in such a short time frame. My talk was well-received by the audience, going by their comments. I am glad that I could give an interesting presentation.
My presentation photo. Photo credits: Valessio

Visiting a saree shop After my talk, Suresh, Alper, and I went with Anisa and Kristi - who are both from Albania, and have a never-ending fascination for Indian culture :) - to buy them sarees. We took autos to Kakkanad market and found a shop with a great variety of sarees. I was slightly familiar with the area around the hotel, as I had been there for a week. Indian women usually don t try on sarees while buying - they just select the design. But Anisa wanted to put one on and take a few photos as well. The shop staff did not have a trial saree for this purpose, so they took a saree from a mannequin. It took about an hour for the lady at the shop to help Anisa put on that saree but you could tell that she was in heaven wearing that saree, and she bought it immediately :) Alper also bought a saree to take back to Turkey for his mother. Me and Suresh wanted to buy a kurta which would go well with the mundu we already had, but we could not find anything to our liking.
Selfie with Anisa and Kristi. Photo credits: Anisa.

Cheese and Wine Party On the 11th of September we had the Cheese and Wine Party, a tradition of every DebConf. I brought Kaju Samosa and Nankhatai from home. Many attendees expressed their appreciation for the samosas. During the party, I was with Abhas and had a lot of fun. Abhas brought packets of paan and served them at the Cheese and Wine Party. We discussed interesting things and ate burgers. But due to the restrictive alcohol laws in the state, it was less fun compared to the previous DebConfs - you could only drink alcohol served by the hotel in public places. If you bought your own alcohol, you could only drink in private places (such as in your room, or a friend s room), but not in public places.
Me helping with the Cheese and Wine Party.

Party at my room Last year, Joenio (Brazilian) brought pastis from France which I liked. He brought the same alocholic drink this year too. So I invited him to my room after the Cheese and Wine party to have pastis. My idea was to have them with my roommate Suresh and Joenio. But then we permitted Joenio to bring as many people as he wanted and he ended up bringing some ten people. Suddenly, the room was crowded. I was having good time at the party, serving them the snacks given to me by Abhas. The news of an alcohol party at my room spread like wildfire. Soon there were so many people that the AC became ineffective and I found myself sweating. I left the room and roamed around in the hotel for some fresh air. I came back after about 1.5 hours - for most part, I was sitting at the ground floor with TK Saurabh. And then I met Abraham near the gym (which was my last meeting with him). I came back to my room at around 2:30 AM. Nobody seemed to have realized that I was gone. They were thanking me for hosting such a good party. A lot of people left at that point and the remaining people were playing songs and dancing (everyone was dancing all along!). I had no energy left to dance and to join them. They left around 03:00 AM. But I am glad that people enjoyed partying in my room.
This picture was taken when there were few people in my room for the party.

Sadhya Thali On the 12th of September, we had a sadhya thali for lunch. It is a vegetarian thali served on a banana leaf on the eve of Thiruvonam. It wasn t Thiruvonam on this day, but we got a special and filling lunch. The rasam and payasam were especially yummy.
Sadhya Thali: A vegetarian meal served on banana leaf. Payasam and rasam were especially yummy! Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi.
Sadhya thali being served at debconf23. Photo credits: Bilal

Day trip On the 13th of September, we had a daytrip. I chose the daytrip houseboat in Allepey. Suresh chose the same, and we registered for it as soon as it was open. This was the most sought-after daytrip by the DebConf attendees - around 80 people registered for it. Our bus was set to leave at 9 AM on the 13th of September. Me and Suresh woke up at 8:40 and hurried to get to the bus in time. It took two hours to reach the venue where we get the houseboat. The houseboat experience was good. The trip featured some good scenery. I got to experience the renowned Kerala backwaters. We were served food on the boat. We also stopped at a place and had coconut water. By evening, we came back to the place where we had boarded the boat.
Group photo of our daytrip. Photo credits: Radhika Jhalani

A good friend lost When we came back from the daytrip, we received news that Abhraham Raji was involved in a fatal accident during a kayaking trip. Abraham Raji was a very good friend of mine. In my Albania-Kosovo-Dubai trip last year, he was my roommate at our Tirana apartment. I roamed around in Dubai with him, and we had many discussions during DebConf22 Kosovo. He was the one who took the photo of me on my homepage. I also met him in MiniDebConf22 Palakkad and MiniDebConf23 Tamil Nadu, and went to his flat in Kochi this year in June. We had many projects in common. He was a Free Software activist and was the designer of the DebConf23 logo, in addition to those for other Debian events in India.
A selfie in memory of Abraham.
We were all fairly shocked by the news. I was devastated. Food lost its taste, and it became difficult to sleep. That night, Anisa and Kristi cheered me up and gave me company. Thanks a lot to them. The next day, Joenio also tried to console me. I thank him for doing a great job. I thank everyone who helped me in coping with the difficult situation. On the next day (the 14th of September), the Debian project leader Jonathan Carter addressed and announced the news officially. THe Debian project also mentioned it on their website. Abraham was supposed to give a talk, but following the incident, all talks were cancelled for the day. The conference dinner was also cancelled. As I write, 9 days have passed since his death, but even now I cannot come to terms with it.

Visiting Abraham s house On the 15th of September, the conference ran two buses from the hotel to Abraham s house in Kottayam (2 hours ride). I hopped in the first bus and my mood was not very good. Evangelos (Germany) was sitting opposite me, and he began conversing with me. The distraction helped and I was back to normal for a while. Thanks to Evangelos as he supported me a lot on that trip. He was also very impressed by my use of the StreetComplete app which I was using to edit OpenStreetMap. In two hours, we reached Abraham s house. I couldn t control myself and burst into tears. I went to see the body. I met his family (mother, father and sister), but I had nothing to say and I felt helpless. Owing to the loss of sleep and appetite over the past few days, I had no energy, and didn t think it was good idea for me to stay there. I went back by taking the bus after one hour and had lunch at the hotel. I withdrew my talk scheduled for the 16th of September.

A Japanese gift I got a nice Japanese gift from Niibe Yutaka (Japan) - a folder to keep papers which had ancient Japanese manga characters. He said he felt guilty as he swapped his talk with me and so it got rescheduled from 12th September to 16 September which I withdrew later.
Thanks to Niibe Yutaka (the person towards your right hand) from Japan (FSIJ), who gave me a wonderful Japanese gift during debconf23: A folder to keep pages with ancient Japanese manga characters printed on it. I realized I immediately needed that :)
This is the Japanese gift I received.

Group photo On the 16th of September, we had a group photo. I am glad that this year I was more clear in this picture than in DebConf22.
Click to enlarge

Volunteer work and talks attended I attended the training session for the video team and worked as a camera operator. The Bits from DPL was nice. I enjoyed Abhas presentation on home automation. He basically demonstrated how he liberated Internet-enabled home devices. I also liked Kristi s presentation on ways to engage with the GNOME community.
Bits from the DPL. Photo credits: Bilal
Kristi on GNOME community. Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi.
Abhas' talk on home automation. Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi.
I also attended lightning talks on the last day. Badri, Wouter, and I gave a demo on how to register on the Prav app. Prav got a fair share of advertising during the last few days.
I was roaming around with a QR code on my T-shirt for downloading Prav.

The night of the 17th of September Suresh left the hotel and Badri joined me in my room. Thanks to the efforts of Abhijit PA, Kiran, and Ananthu, I wore a mundu.
Me in mundu. Picture credits: Abhijith PA
I then joined Kalyani, Mangesh, Ruchika, Anisa, Ananthu and Kiran. We took pictures and this marked the last night of DebConf23.

Departure day The 18th of September was the day of departure. Badri slept in my room and left early morning (06:30 AM). I dropped him off at the hotel gate. The breakfast was at the eatery (3rd floor) again, and it was good. Sahil, Saswata, Nilesh, and I hung out on the ground floor.
From left: Nilesh, Saswata, me, Sahil. Photo credits: Sahil.
I had an 8 PM flight from Kochi to Delhi, for which I took a cab with Rhonda (Austria), Michael (Nigeria) and Yash (India). We were joined by other DebConf23 attendees at the Kochi airport, where we took another selfie.
Ruchika (taking the selfie) and from left to right: Yash, Joost (Netherlands), me, Rhonda
Joost and I were on the same flight, and we sat next to each other. He then took a connecting flight from Delhi to Netherlands, while I went with Yash to the New Delhi Railway Station, where we took our respective trains. I reached home on the morning of the 19th of September, 2023.
Joost and me going to Delhi. Photo credits: Ravi.

Big thanks to the organizers DebConf23 was hard to organize - strict alcohol laws, weird hotel rules, death of a close friend (almost a family member), and a scary notice by the immigration bureau. The people from the team are my close friends and I am proud of them for organizing such a good event. None of this would have been possible without the organizers who put more than a year-long voluntary effort to produce this. In the meanwhile, many of them had organized local events in the time leading up to DebConf. Kudos to them. The organizers also tried their best to get clearance for countries not approved by the ministry. I am also sad that people from China, Kosovo, and Iran could not join. In particular, I feel bad for people from Kosovo who wanted to attend but could not (as India does not consider their passport to be a valid travel document), considering how we Indians were so well-received in their country last year.

Note about myself I am writing this on the 22nd of September, 2023. It took me three days to put up this post - this was one of the tragic and hard posts for me to write. I have literally forced myself to write this. I have still not recovered from the loss of my friend. Thanks a lot to all those who helped me. PS: Credits to contrapunctus for making grammar, phrasing, and capitalization changes.

8 August 2020

Holger Levsen: 20200808-debconf8

DebConf8 This tshirt is 12 years old and from DebConf8. DebConf8 was my 6th DebConf and took place in Mar de la Plata, Argentina. Also this is my 6th post in this series of posts about DebConfs and for the last two days for the first time I failed my plan to do one post per day. And while two days ago I still planned to catch up on this by doing more than one post in a day, I have now decided to give in to realities, which mostly translates to sudden fantastic weather in Hamburg and other summer related changes in life. So yeah, I still plan to do short posts about all the DebConfs I was lucky to attend, but there might be days without a blog post. Anyhow, Mar de la Plata. When we held DebConf in Argentina it was winter there, meaning locals and other folks would wear jackets, scarfs, probably gloves, while many Debian folks not so much. Andreas Tille freaked out and/or amazed local people by going swimming in the sea every morning. And when I told Stephen Gran that even I would find it a bit cold with just a tshirt he replied "na, the weather is fine, just like british summer", while it was 14 celcius and mildly raining. DebConf8 was the first time I've met Valessio Brito, who I had worked together since at least DebConf6. That meeting was really super nice, Valessio is such a lovely person. Back in 2008 however, there was just one problem: his spoken English was worse than his written one, and that was already hard to parse sometimes. Fast forward eleven years to Curitiba last year and boom, Valessio speaks really nice English now. And, you might wonder why I'm telling this, especially if you were exposed to my Spanish back then and also now. So my point in telling this story about Valessio is to illustrate two things: a.) one can contribute to Debian without speaking/writing much English, Valessio did lots of great artwork since DebConf6 and b.) one can learn English by doing Debian stuff. It worked for me too! During set up of the conference there was one very memorable moment, some time after the openssl maintainer, Kurt Roeckx arrived at the venue: Shortly before DebConf8 Luciano Bello, from Argentina no less, had found CVE-2008-0166 which basically compromised the security of sshd of all Debian and Ubuntu installations done in the last 4 years (IIRC two Debian releases were affected) and which was commented heavily and noticed everywhere. So poor Kurt arrived and wondered whether we would all hate him, how many toilets he would have to clean and what not... And then, someone rather quickly noticed this, approached some people and suddenly a bunch of people at DebConf were group-hugging Kurt and then we were all smiling and continuing doing set up of the conference. That moment is one of my most joyful memories of all DebConfs and partly explains why I remember little about the conference itself, everything else pales in comparison and most things pale over the years anyway. As I remember it, the conference ran very smoothly in the end, despite quite some organisational problems right before the start. But as usual, once the geeks arrive and are happily geeking, things start to run smooth, also because Debian people are kind and smart and give hands and brain were needed. And like other DebConfs, Mar de la Plata also had moments which I want to share but I will only hint about, so it's up to you to imagine the special leaves which were brought to that cheese and wine party! ;-) Update: added another xkcd link, spelled out Kurt's name after talking to him and added a link to a video of the group hug.

29 May 2020

Gunnar Wolf: Heads up Online MiniDebConf is Online

I know most Debian people know about this already But in case you don t follow the usual Debian communications channels, this might interest you! Given most of the world is still under COVID-19 restrictions, and that we want to work on Debian, given there is no certainty as to what the future holds in store for us Our DPL fearless as they always are had the bold initiative to make this weekend into the first-ever miniDebConf Online (MDCO)! miniDebConf Online So, we are already halfway through DebCamp (which means, you can come and hang out with us in the debian.social DebCamp Jitsi lounge, where some impromptu presentations might happen (or not). Starting tomorrow morning (11AM UTC), we will have a quite interesting set of talks. I am reproducing the schedule here:

Saturday 2020.05.30
Time (UTC) Speaker Talk
11:00 - 11:10 MDCO team members Hello + Welcome
11:30 - 11:50 Wouter Verhelst Extrepo
12:00 - 12:45 JP Mengual Debian France, trust european organization
13:00 - 13:20 Arnaud Ferraris Bringing Debian to mobile phones, one package at a time
13:30 - 15:00 Lunch Break A chance for the teams to catch some air
15:00 - 15:45 JP Mengual The community team, United Nations Organizations of Debian?
16:00 - 16:45 Christoph Biedl Clevis and tang - overcoming the disk unlocking problem
17:00 - 17:45 Antonio Terceiro I m a programmer, how can I help Debian

Sunday 2020.05.31
Time (UTC) Speaker Talk
11:00 - 11:45 Andreas Tille The effect of Covid-19 on the Debian Med project
12:00 - 12:45 Paul Gevers BoF: running autopkgtest for your package
13:00 - 13:20 Ben Hutchings debplate: Build many binary packages with templates
13:30 - 15:00 Lunch break A chance for the teams to catch some air
15:00 - 15:45 Holger Levsen Reproducing bullseye in practice
16:00 - 16:45 Jonathan Carter Striving towards excellence
17:00 - 17:45 Delib* Organizing Peer-to-Peer Debian Facilitation Training
18:00 - 18:15 MDCO team members Closing
  • subject to confirmation

Timezone Remember this is an online event, meant for all of the world! Yes, the chosen times seem quite Europe-centric (but they are mostly a function of the times the talk submitters requested). Talks are 11:00 18:00UTC, which means, 06:00 13:00 Mexico (GMT-5), 20:00 03:00 Japan (GMT+9), 04:00 11:00 Western Canada/USA/Mexico (GMT-7) and the rest of the world, somewhere in between. (No, this was clearly not optimized for our dear usual beer team. Sorry! I guess we need you to be fully awake at beertime!)

[update] Connecting! Of course, I didn t make it clear at first how to connect to the Online miniDebConf, silly me!
  • The video streams are available at: https://video.debconf.org/
  • Suggested: tune in to the #minidebconf-online IRC channel in OFTC.
That should be it. Hope to see you there! (Stay home, stay safe )

Gunnar Wolf: Heads up Online MiniDebConf is Online

I know most Debian people know about this already But in case you don t follow the usual Debian communications channels, this might interest you! Given most of the world is still under COVID-19 restrictions, and that we want to work on Debian, given there is no certainty as to what the future holds in store for us Our DPL fearless as they always are had the bold initiative to make this weekend into the first-ever miniDebConf Online (MDCO)! miniDebConf Online So, we are already halfway through DebCamp (which means, you can come and hang out with us in the debian.social DebCamp Jitsi lounge, where some impromptu presentations might happen (or not). Starting tomorrow morning (11AM UTC), we will have a quite interesting set of talks. I am reproducing the schedule here:

Saturday 2020.05.30
Time (UTC) Speaker Talk
11:00 - 11:10 MDCO team members Hello + Welcome
11:30 - 11:50 Wouter Verhelst Extrepo
12:00 - 12:45 JP Mengual Debian France, trust european organization
13:00 - 13:20 Arnaud Ferraris Bringing Debian to mobile phones, one package at a time
13:30 - 15:00 Lunch Break A chance for the teams to catch some air
15:00 - 15:45 JP Mengual The community team, United Nations Organizations of Debian?
16:00 - 16:45 Christoph Biedl Clevis and tang - overcoming the disk unlocking problem
17:00 - 17:45 Antonio Terceiro I m a programmer, how can I help Debian

Sunday 2020.05.31
Time (UTC) Speaker Talk
11:00 - 11:45 Andreas Tille The effect of Covid-19 on the Debian Med project
12:00 - 12:45 Paul Gevers BoF: running autopkgtest for your package
13:00 - 13:20 Ben Hutchings debplate: Build many binary packages with templates
13:30 - 15:00 Lunch break A chance for the teams to catch some air
15:00 - 15:45 Holger Levsen Reproducing bullseye in practice
16:00 - 16:45 Jonathan Carter Striving towards excellence
17:00 - 17:45 Delib* Organizing Peer-to-Peer Debian Facilitation Training
18:00 - 18:15 MDCO team members Closing
  • subject to confirmation

Timezone Remember this is an online event, meant for all of the world! Yes, the chosen times seem quite Europe-centric (but they are mostly a function of the times the talk submitters requested). Talks are 11:00 18:00UTC, which means, 06:00 13:00 Mexico (GMT-5), 20:00 03:00 Japan (GMT+9), 04:00 11:00 Western Canada/USA/Mexico (GMT-7) and the rest of the world, somewhere in between. (No, this was clearly not optimized for our dear usual beer team. Sorry! I guess we need you to be fully awake at beertime!)

[update] Connecting! Of course, I didn t make it clear at first how to connect to the Online miniDebConf, silly me!
  • The video streams are available at: https://video.debconf.org/
  • Suggested: tune in to the #minidebconf-online IRC channel in OFTC.
That should be it. Hope to see you there! (Stay home, stay safe )

25 July 2017

Gunnar Wolf: Getting ready for DebConf17 in Montreal!


(image shamelessly copied from Noodles' Emptiness) This year I will only make it to DebConf, not to DebCamp. But, still, I am very very happy and excited as the travel date looms nearer! I have ordered some of the delicacies for the Cheese and Wine party, signed up for the public bicycle system of Montreal, and done a fair share of work with the Content Team; finally today we sent out the announcement for the schedule of talks. Of course, there are several issues yet to fix, and a lot of things to do before traveling... But, no doubt about this: It will be an intense week! Oh, one more thing while we are at it: The schedule as it was published today does not really look like we have organized stuff into tracks But we have! This will be soon fixed, adding some color-coding to make tracks clearer on the schedule. This year, I pushed for the Content Team to recover the notion of tracks as an organizative measure, and as something that delivers value to DebConf as a whole. Several months ago, I created a Wiki page for the DebConf tracks, asking interested people to sign up for them. We currently have the following tracks registered:
Blends
Andreas Tille
Debian Science
Michael Banck
Cloud and containers
Luca Filipozzi
Embedded
Pending
Systems administration, automation and orchestation
Pending
Security
Gunnar Wolf
We have two tracks still needing a track coordinator. Do note that most of the tasks mentioned by the Wiki have already been carried out; what a track coordinator will now do is to serve as some sort of moderator, maybe a recurring talkmeister, ensuring continuity and probably providing for some commentary, giving some unity to its sessions. So, the responsibilities for a track coordinator right now are quite similar to what is expected for video team volunteers but to a set of contiguous sessions. If you are interested in being the track coordinator/moderator for Embedded or for Systems administration, automation and orchestation or even to share the job with any of the other, registered, coordinators, please speak up! Mail content@debconf.org and update the table in the Wiki page. See you very soon in Montreal!

19 October 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: week 77 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday October 9 and Saturday October 15 2016: Media coverage Documentation update After discussions with HW42, Steven Chamberlain, Vagrant Cascadian, Daniel Shahaf, Christopher Berg, Daniel Kahn Gillmor and others, Ximin Luo has started writing up more concrete and detailed design plans for setting SOURCE_ROOT_DIR for reproducible debugging symbols, buildinfo security semantics and buildinfo security infrastructure. Toolchain development and fixes Dmitry Shachnev noted that our patch for #831779 has been temporarily rejected by docutils upstream; we are trying to persuade them again. Tony Mancill uploaded javatools/0.59 to unstable containing original patch by Chris Lamb. This fixed an issue where documentation Recommends: substvars would not be reproducible. Ximin Luo filed bug 77985 to GCC as a pre-requisite for future patches to make debugging symbols reproducible. Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed The following updated packages have become reproducible - in our current test setup - after being fixed: The following updated packages appear to be reproducible now, for reasons we were not able to figure out. (Relevant changelogs did not mention reproducible builds.) Some uploads have addressed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Some uploads have addressed nearly all reproducibility issues, except for build path issues: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Reviews of unreproducible packages 101 package reviews have been added, 49 have been updated and 4 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 3 issue types have been updated: Weekly QA work During of reproducibility testing, some FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by: tests.reproducible-builds.org Debian: Openwrt/LEDE/NetBSD/coreboot/Fedora/archlinux: Misc. We are running a poll to find a good time for an IRC meeting. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Holger Levsen & Chris Lamb and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.

9 August 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 67 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday July 31 and Saturday August 6 2016: Toolchain development and fixes Packages fixed and bugs filed The following 24 packages have become reproducible - in our current test setup - due to changes in their build-dependencies: alglib aspcud boomaga fcl flute haskell-hopenpgp indigo italc kst ktexteditor libgroove libjson-rpc-cpp libqes luminance-hdr openscenegraph palabos petri-foo pgagent sisl srm-ifce vera++ visp x42-plugins zbackup The following packages have become reproducible after being fixed: The following newly-uploaded packages appear to be reproducible now, for reasons we were not able to figure out. (Relevant changelogs did not mention reproducible builds.) Some uploads have addressed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Package reviews and QA These are reviews of reproduciblity issues of Debian packages. 276 package reviews have been added, 172 have been updated and 44 have been removed in this week. 7 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb. Reproducibility tools Test infrastructure For testing the impact of allowing variations of the buildpath (which up until now we required to be identical for reproducible rebuilds), Reiner Herrmann contribed a patch which enabled build path variations on testing/i386. This is possible now since dpkg 1.18.10 enables the --fixdebugpath build flag feature by default, which should result in reproducible builds (for C code) even with varying paths. So far we haven't had many results due to disturbances in our build network in the last days, but it seems this would mean roughly between 5-15% additional unreproducible packages - compared to what we see now. We'll keep you updated on the numbers (and problems with compilers and common frameworks) as we find them. lynxis continued work to test LEDE and OpenWrt on two different hosts, to include date variation in the tests. Mattia and Holger worked on the (mass) deployment scripts, so that the - for space reasons - only jenkins.debian.net GIT clone resides in ~jenkins-adm/ and not anymore in Holger's homedir, so that soon Mattia (and possibly others!) will be able to fully maintain this setup, while Holger is doing siesta. Miscellaneous Chris, dkg, h01ger and Ximin attended a Core Infrastricture Initiative summit meeting in New York City, to discuss and promote this Reproducible Builds project. The CII was set up in the wake of the Heartbleed SSL vulnerability to support software projects that are critical to the functioning of the internet. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo and Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.

8 June 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 58 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between May 29th and June 4th 2016: Media coverage Ed Maste will present Reproducible Builds in FreeBSD at BDSCan 2016 in Ottawa, Canada on June 11th. GSoC and Outreachy updates Toolchain fixes Other upstream fixes Packages fixed The following 53 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build-dependencies: angband blktrace code-saturne coinor-symphony device-tree-compiler mpich rtslib ruby-bcrypt ruby-bson-ext ruby-byebug ruby-cairo ruby-charlock-holmes ruby-curb ruby-dataobjects-sqlite3 ruby-escape-utils ruby-ferret ruby-ffi ruby-fusefs ruby-github-markdown ruby-god ruby-gsl ruby-hdfeos5 ruby-hiredis ruby-hitimes ruby-hpricot ruby-kgio ruby-lapack ruby-ldap ruby-libvirt ruby-libxml ruby-msgpack ruby-ncurses ruby-nfc ruby-nio4r ruby-nokogiri ruby-odbc ruby-oj ruby-ox ruby-raindrops ruby-rdiscount ruby-redcarpet ruby-redcloth ruby-rinku ruby-rjb ruby-rmagick ruby-rugged ruby-sdl ruby-serialport ruby-sqlite3 ruby-unicode ruby-yajl ruby-zoom thin The following packages have become reproducible after being fixed: Some uploads have addressed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Uploads with an unknown result because they fail to build: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Package reviews 45 reviews have been added, 25 have been updated and 25 have been removed in this week. 12 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb and Niko Tyni. diffoscope development strip-nondeterminism development Mattia uploaded strip-nondeterminism 0.018-1 which improved support for *.epub files. tests.reproducible-builds.org Misc. Last week we also learned about progress of reproducible builds in FreeBSD. Ed Maste announced a change to record the build timestamp during ports building, which is required for later reproduction. This week's edition was written by Reiner Herrman, Holger Levsen and Chris Lamb and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible builds folks on IRC.

22 May 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 56 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between May 15th and May 21st 2016: Media coverage Blog posts from our GSoC and Outreachy contributors: Documentation update Ximin Luo clarified instructions on how to set SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. Toolchain fixes Other upstream fixes Packages fixed The following 18 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: abiword angband apt-listbugs asn1c bacula-doc bittornado cdbackup fenix gap-autpgrp gerbv jboss-logging-tools invokebinder modplugtools objenesis pmw r-cran-rniftilib x-loader zsnes The following packages have become reproducible after being fixed: Some uploads have fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Reproducibility-related bugs filed: Package reviews 51 reviews have been added, 19 have been updated and 15 have been removed in this week. 22 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb, Santiago Vila, Niko Tyni and Daniel Schepler. tests.reproducible-builds.org Misc. This week's edition was written by Reiner Herrmann and Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible builds folks on IRC.

20 April 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 51 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between April 10th and April 16th 2016: Toolchain fixes Antoine Beaupr suggested that gitpkg stops recording timestamps when creating upstream archives. Antoine Beaupr also pointed out that git-buildpackage diverges from the default gzip settings which is a problem for reproducibly recreating released tarballs which were made using the defaults. Alexis Bienven e submitted a patch extending sphinx SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH support to copyright year. Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: atinject-jsr330, avis, brailleutils, charactermanaj, classycle, commons-io, commons-javaflow, commons-jci, gap-radiroot, jebl2, jetty, libcommons-el-java, libcommons-jxpath-java, libjackson-json-java, libjogl2-java, libmicroba-java, libproxool-java, libregexp-java, mobile-atlas-creator, octave-econometrics, octave-linear-algebra, octave-odepkg, octave-optiminterp, rapidsvn, remotetea, ruby-rinku, tachyon, xhtmlrenderer. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: diffoscope development Zbigniew J drzejewski-Szmek noted in #820631 that diffoscope doesn't work properly when a file contains several cpio archives. Package reviews 21 reviews have been added, 14 updated and 22 removed in this week. New issue found: timestamps_in_htm_by_gap. Chris Lamb reported 10 new FTBFS issues. Misc. The video and the slides from the talk "Reproducible builds ecosystem" at LibrePlanet 2016 have been published now. This week's edition was written by Lunar and Holger Levsen. h01ger automated the maintenance and publishing of this weekly newsletter via git.

18 April 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 50 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between April 3rd and April 9th 2016: Media coverage Emily Ratliff wrote an article for SecurityWeek called Establishing Correspondence Between an Application and its Source Code - How Combining Two Completely Separate Open Source Projects Can Make Us All More Secure. Tails have started work on a design for freezable APT repositories to make it easier and practical to perform reproductions of an entire distribution at a given point in time, which will be needed to create reproducible installation- or live-media. Toolchain fixes Alexis Bienven e submitted patches adding support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in several tools: transfig, imagemagick, rdtool, and asciidoctor. boyska submitted one for python-reportlab. Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: atinject-jsr330 brailleutils cglib3 gnugo libcobra-java libgnumail-java libjchart2d-java libjcommon-java libjfreechart-java libjide-oss-java liblaf-widget-java liblastfm-java liboptions-java octave-control octave-mpi octave-nan octave-parallel octave-stk octave-struct octave-tsa oar The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Several uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: Other upstream fixes Alexander Batischev made a commit to make newsbeuter reproducible. tests.reproducible-builds.org Package reviews 93 reviews have been removed, 66 added and 21 updated in the previous week. 12 new FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb and Niko Tyni. Misc. This week's edition was written by Lunar, Holger Levsen, Reiner Herrmann, Mattia Rizzolo and Ximin Luo. With the departure of Lunar as a full-time contributor, Reproducible Builds Weekly News (this thing you're reading) has moved from his personal Debian blog on Debian People to the Reproducible Builds team web site on Debian Alioth. You may want to update your RSS or Atom feeds. Very many thanks to Lunar for writing and publishing this weekly news for so long, well & continously!

21 March 2016

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 47 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between March 13th and March 19th 2016:

Toolchain fixes
  • Petter Reinholdtsen uploaded naturaldocs/1.51-1.1 which makes the output reproducible. Original patch by Chris Lamb.
  • Damyan Ivanov uploaded libpdf-api2-perl/2.025-2 which will make internal font ID reproducible.
  • Christian Hofstaedtler uploaded ruby2.3/2.3.0-5 which sets gzip embedded mtime field to fixed value for rdoc-generated compressed javascript data.

Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: diction, doublecmd, ruby-hiredis, vdr-plugin-epgsearch. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:
  • #818128 on nethack by Reiner Herrmann: implement support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH, set LC_ALL to C, and ensure deterministic build order when running parallel builds.
  • #818111 on debian-keyring by Satyam Zode: fix the order of files in md5sums.
  • #818067 on ncurses by Niels Thykier: strip trailing whitespaces introduced when using dash as system shell.
  • #818230 on aircrack-ng by Reiner Herrmann: build assembly code as a separate .o file.
  • #818419 on mutt by Daniel Shahaf: use C locale when listing files to be put in README.Patches.
  • #818430 on ruby-coveralls by Dhole: ensure UTC is used as the timezone when generating the documentation.
  • #818686 on littlewizard by Reiner Herrmann: use the C locale in the script for iterating over the files.
  • #818704 on strigi by Reiner Herrmann: sort keys when traversing hashes in makecode.pl.

Package reviews 44 reviews have been removed, 40 added and 5 updated in the previous week. Chris Lamb has reported 16 FTBFS.

8 March 2016

Tassia Camoes Araujo: Some impressions of a flourishing community bits from the MiniDebConf Curitiba @ Montreal

Last month I more-or-less accepted an invitation that got me scared at first, panicking after a while. Why do I put myself in such an uncomfortable position? Well, I think that s how we grow up ;-) I was first contacted to talk about women participation in Debian, which I kindly refused, but I said I would maybe talk about motivating new contributors, possibly with some more friends that would maybe join me at the stage. I need to confess that at that moment I had no idea (ok, a vague idea ) about what I was going to talk. So I promptly emailed some Debian friends, shared the invitation, shared some thoughts, got feedbacks, got encouragement, and we finally made it! talk_transmission For the video conference we used mconf.org which worked super well (the downside is that it requires flash, maybe you could help them get rid of it?). I had also recorded a backup video with vokoscreen, just in case Murphy would decide to go to Curitiba but everything worked well. We a single moment with connection issues, but the torrent user kindly released the bandwidth The main point I made in the talk is that Debian as a Universal Operating System is still an utopia, especially when we extend our understanding of universality to our contributors. And as an utopia, it serves to make us walk! The more we advance, the more it gets further away, so we need to keep walking. Another important point was that diversity is not an issue that touches only woman. My audience was full of Portuguese native speakers, from a third world country, a few women, many more man, a couple of DDs, some longtime contributors, some newbies, and most of them are also part of minorities in our community. I bet many of them has already felt like a weed growing surrounded by concrete at least once in their lifetimes Solidarity towards our utopia was my final message. Just for fun, and to make a recap of our conversation at the end, I made a list of 10 steps that we could all give to contribute to a more universal Debian: 1. Read our Social Contract and make sure we are all at the same page
2. Improve Debian documentation
3. Remember that diversity does not concern only women
4. Keep an eye on minority groups and show solidarity
5. Be open and alert to the needs of newbies
6. Help Debian teams to be prepared to welcome new contributors
7. Reserve part of our time to integrate new members to the community
8. Promote hands-on meetings (local and remote)
9. Promote peer-mentoring among newbie contributors
10. Do not see Debian members as special beings, we are all humans! You can check my slides or the video of the live transmission if you want to see more. In case you can not follow the audio, I d be happy to provide subtitles (but I probably won t work on that if I don t receive have any request). And if you invite me to another conference, we can have a similar chat at with your community. Note: in person is more fun ;-) Finally, I d like to thank the participants of the mini-DebConf, those that followed this session and those who were practicing how to package on the other room, Paulo Santana and all the local organization team for the invitation, Ana Guerrero and Laura Arjona for the remote support and feedback, Andreas Tille for the efforts in integrating new contributors, Christian Perrier for the developer statistics, Val ssio for being in the audience and the Debian Project for the inspiration. What we had we Brazil this weekend was a taste of a flourishing and welcoming community, I am proud and honored to be part of it!

4 January 2016

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 36 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between December 27th and January 2nd: Infrastructure dak now silently accepts and discards .buildinfo files (commit 1, 2), thanks to Niels Thykier and Ansgar Burchardt. This was later confirmed as working by Mattia Rizzolo. Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: banshee-community-extensions, javamail, mono-debugger-libs, python-avro. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Untested changes: reproducible.debian.net The testing distribution (the upcoming stretch) is now tested on armhf. (h01ger) Four new armhf build nodes provided by Vagrant Cascandian were integrated in the infrastructer. This allowed for 9 new armhf builder jobs. (h01ger) The RPM-based build system, koji, is now in unstable and testing. (Marek Marczykowski-G recki, Ximin Luo). Package reviews 131 reviews have been removed, 71 added and 53 updated in the previous week. 58 new FTBFS reports were made by Chris Lamb and Chris West. New issues identified this week: nondeterminstic_ordering_in_gsettings_glib_enums_xml, nondeterminstic_output_in_warnings_generated_by_breathe, qt_translate_noop_nondeterminstic_ordering. Misc. Steven Chamberlain explained in length why reproducible cross-building across architectures mattered, and posted results of his tests comparing a stage1 debootstrapped chroot of linux-i386 once done from official Debian packages, the others cross-built from kfreebsd-amd64.

20 December 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 34 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between December 13th to December 19th: Infrastructure Niels Thykier started implementing support for .buildinfo files in dak. A very preliminary commit was made by Ansgar Burchardt to prevent .buildinfo files from being removed from the upload queue. Toolchain fixes Mattia Rizzolo rebased our experimental debhelper with the changes from the latest upload. New fixes have been merged by OCaml upstream. Packages fixed The following 39 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: apache-mime4j, avahi-sharp, blam, bless, cecil-flowanalysis, cecil, coco-cs, cowbell, cppformat, dbus-sharp-glib, dbus-sharp, gdcm, gnome-keyring-sharp, gudev-sharp-1.0, jackson-annotations, jackson-core, jboss-classfilewriter, jboss-jdeparser2, jetty8, json-spirit, lat, leveldb-sharp, libdecentxml-java, libjavaewah-java, libkarma, mono.reflection, monobristol, nuget, pinta, snakeyaml, taglib-sharp, tangerine, themonospot, tomboy-latex, widemargin, wordpress, xsddiagram, xsp, zeitgeist-sharp. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: reproducible.debian.net Packages in experimental are now tested on armhf. (h01ger) Arch Linux packages in the multilib and community repositories (4,000 more source packages) are also being tested. All of these test results are better analyzed and nicely displayed together with each package. (h01ger) For Fedora, build jobs can now run in parallel. Two are currently running, now testing reproducibility of 785 source packages from Fedora 23. mock/1.2.3-1.1 has been uploaded to experimental to better build RPMs. (h01ger) Work has started on having automatic build node pools to maximize use of armhf build nodes. (Vagrant Cascadian) diffoscope development Version 43 has been released on December 15th. It has been dubbed as epic! as it contains many contributions that were written around the summit in Athens. Baptiste Daroussin found that running diffoscope on some Tar archives could overwrite arbitrary files. This has been fixed by using libarchive instead of Python internal Tar library and adding a sanity check for destination paths. In any cases, until proper sandboxing is implemented, don't run diffosope on unstrusted inputs outside an isolated, throw-away system. Mike Hommey identified that the CBFS comparator would needlessly waste time scanning big files. It will now not consider any files bigger than 24 MiB 8 MiB more than the largest ROM created by coreboot at this time. An encoding issue related to Zip files has also been fixed. (Lunar) New comparators have been added: Android dex files (Reiner Herrmann), filesystem images using libguestfs (Reiner Herrmann), icons and JPEG images using libcaca (Chris Lamb), and OS X binaries (Clemens Lang). The comparator for Free Pascal Compilation Unit will now only be used when the unit version matches the compiler one. (Levente Polyak) A new multi-file HTML output with on-demand loading of long diffs is available through the --html-dir option. On-demand loading requires jQuery which path can be specified through the --jquery option. The diffs can also be simply browsed for non-JavaScript users or when jQuery is not available. (Joachim Breitner) Example of on-demand loading in diffosope Portability toward other systems has been improved: old versions of GNU diff are now supported (Mike McQuaid), suggestion of the appropriate locale is now the more generic en_US.UTF-8 (Ed Maste), the --list-tools option can now support multiple systems (Mattia Rizzolo, Levente Polyak, Lunar). Many internal changes and code clean-ups have been made, paving the way for parallel processing. (Lunar) Version 44 was released on December 18th fixing an issue affecting .deb lacking a md5sums file introduced in a previous refactoring (Lunar). Support has been added for Mozilla optimized Zip files. (Mike Hommey). The HTML output has been optimized in size (Mike Hommey, Esa Peuha, Lunar), speed (Lunar), and will now properly number lines (Mike Hommey). A message will always be displayed when lines are ignored at the end of a diff (Lunar). For portability and consistency, Python os.walk() function is now used instead of find to perform directory listing. (Lunar) Documentation update Package reviews 143 reviews have been removed, 69 added and 22 updated in the previous week. Chris Lamb reported 12 new FTBFS issues. News issues identified this week: random_order_in_init_py_generated_by_python-genpy, timestamps_in_copyright_added_by_perl_dist_zilla, random_contents_in_dat_files_generated_by_chasen-dictutils_makemat, timestamps_in_documentation_generated_by_pandoc. Chris West did some improvements on the scripts used to manage notes in the misc repository. Misc. Accounts of the reproducible builds summit in Athens were written by Thomas Klausner from NetBSD and Hans-Christoph Steiner from The Guardian Project. Some openSUSE developers are working on a hackweek on reproducible builds which was discussed on the opensuse-packaging mailing-list.

11 December 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 32 in Stretch cycle

The first reproducible world summit was held in Athens, Greece, from December 1st-3rd with the support of the Linux Foundation, the Open Tech Fund, and Google. Faidon Liambotis has been an amazing help to sort out all local details. People at ImpactHub Athens have been perfect hosts. North of Athens from the Acropolis with ImpactHub in the center Nearly 40 participants from 14 different free software project had very busy days sharing knowledge, building understanding, and producing actual patches. Anyone interested in cross project discussions should join the rb-general mailing-list. What follows focuses mostly on what happened for Debian this previous week. A more detailed report about the summit will follow soon. You can also read the ones from Joachim Breitner from Debian, Clemens Lang from MacPorts, Georg Koppen from Tor, Dhiru Kholia from Fedora, and Ludovic Court s wrote one for Guix and for the GNU project. The Acropolis from  Infrastructure Several discussions at the meeting helped refine a shared understanding of what kind of information should be recorded on a build, and how they could be used. Daniel Kahn Gillmor sent a detailed update on how .buildinfo files should become part of the Debian archive. Some key changes compared to what we had in mind at DebConf15: Hopefully, ftpmasters will be able to comment on the updated proposal soon. Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: fades, triplane, caml-crush, globus-authz. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: akira sent proposals on how to make bash reproducible. Alexander Couzens submitted a patch upstream to add support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in grub image generator (#787795). reproducible.debian.net An issue with some armhf build nodes was tracked down to a bad interaction between uname26 personality and new glibc (Vagrant Cascadian). A Debian package was created for koji, the RPM building and tracking system used by Fedora amongst others. It is currently waiting for review in the NEW queue. (Ximin Luo, Marek Marczykowski-G recki) diffoscope development diffoscope now has a dedicated mailing list to better accommodate its growing user and developer base. Going through diffoscope's guts together enabled several new contributors. Baptiste Daroussin, Ed Maste, Clemens Lang, Mike McQuaid, Joachim Breitner all contributed their first patches to improve portability or add new features. Regular contributors Chris Lamb, Reiner Herrmann, and Levente Polyak also submitted improvements. diffoscope hacking session in Athens The next release should support more operating systems, filesystem image comparison via libguestfs, HTML reports with on-demand loading, and parallel processing for the most noticeable improvements. Package reviews 27 reviews have been removed, 17 added and 14 updated in the previous week. Chris Lamb and Val Lorentz filed 4 new FTBFS reports. Misc. Baptiste Daroussin has started to implement support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in FreeBSD in libpkg and the ports tree. Thanks Joachim Breitner and h01ger for the pictures.

15 October 2015

Laura Arjona: Long summer story, Welcome team, and I am a Debian Developer now

Note: 2015/10/16: I need to add some links but I won t delay this more, posting now, will edit later. Summer ended long time ago, but believe me, I m still catching up with all the things that I began in June/July, all the things I left in August when I went holidays, and more things that appeared in August and September. This is a long overdue post, I hope you bear with me for waiting so long, and writing (now) so long too! June In June, I was 100% sure that I would not attend DebConf15 (well, I was 98% sure until then), and when the new Outreach Sponsorship grants were announced, I decided to write some mails to several Debian contributors, so they consider applying for the grant and attend DebConf (and maybe trigger some i18n/l10n meeting ). They kindly declined, and I understood their reasons, but also wondered what would have happened if the proposal would have come from somebody more official instead of a random contributor that they don t know. I also hoped that lots of other Debianites also write to newbies or not-yet-DD-contributors or non-packaging contributors to invite them to DebConf, and I hoped that they had better luck than me in convincing them :) July In July I usually work hard preparing the computer labs for next academic year at my workplace in the University, but I also have more free time in the long afternoons and evenings, since I don t sleep much, and there is not much to do outside with the summer hot. So I used that month to go on contributing to DebConf publicity and think a bit more about Debian and the other free software communities. I didn t put much time in advancing my selfhosting (no SSL yet in *.larjona.net! booooo!) but I decided to deep my toe in Sandstorm.io, and try to selfhost an instance ( http://lacaja.larjona.net ) and try Etherpad inside Sandstorm (since I failed in deploying Etherpad by myself in my jessie+nginx+postgres box). Sandstorm worked, and Etherpad was packaged in Sandstorm so it worked too; and I have my free-software-base pads now for writing and share. So I joined #sandstorm IRC channel since then, and there I learnt that Asheesh Laroia (who works in Sandstorm.io and is also a Debian Developer and was going to give a talk about Sandstorm.io in DebConf15) was offering mentorship for people wanting to learn Sandstorm packaging, and his proposal was to begin packaging Framadate. I also failed in selfhosting Dudle (prepared for Apache + FastCGI, couldn t make it work in my Nginx), so Asheesh s proposal looked suitable for me. We talked and decided to invest the rest of July and first days of August in learning to package Framadate. I learned a lot, but couldn t finish the task. I encountered many issues (setting my dev environment, and later trying to package), and we solved some of them but my time ran out. I posted my work in the list, and I hope that my feedback on the documentation and the issues I encountered helped Asheesh and the Sandstorm community. Framadate is packaged in Sandstorm.io now, Drew Fisher packaged it, not sure if my stuff was useful or not (it s been useful for me, for learning, at least). I ll talk more about Sandstorm.io in a future blog post updating on my selfhosting adventures. What I liked most was the kind of proposal of mentoring that Asheesh made. It was very detailed in every aspect: the task, the things you need to accomplish it, details about his availability for mentorship I try to be welcoming in the teams in which I participate, but the fact is that I fail in actually mentor, maybe because of not making specific proposals to people (until now, I was like Hi, newcomer! Go read this, this and this, and try for yourself any task you feel you like it, and come back if you have issues , la Debian ). This, plus the thoughts about my mails in June for diversity outreach in DebConf, made me feel the need of having a team where people willing to welcome newcomers share tricks and procedures, write together more specific proposals, and follow up the newcomers experiences in a regular way. I talked with Enrico Zini and we wrote down some notes for a Welcome Team in Debian; he said he would spread the word during DebCamp/DebConf and we would see what people thinks about it. August August came, and the day before going on holidays I was really tired: too much luggage to prepare, too many hours in front of the computer, and the usual stress of traveling; and I took the bad decision of signing some GPG keys of several Debianites that I met in July. I say bad decision because the lack of sleep showed its black magic and I accidentally deleted my secring.gpg file. I knew I had a backup but I didn t have too much time to invest and I didn t want to mess it with the backup too, and my laptop was going to stay at home, powered off, during the whole month, so I just went on holidays and left the GPG issue for later. The day after, meanwhile I was waiting in the airport for my boarding time, I received a mail accepting me as Debian Developer. Wow!! Really, I was not expecting that the process was already finished, I had interchanged several mails with my Application Manager (who happens to be the current DPL!) and I thought that his summer could be quite packed of Debian/DebConf work and my process could wait a bit. So it was a very happy news and very motivating after one month (July) full of free software work. On the other side, I was a bit scared: what type of Debian Developer are you, larjona, not capable to sign some GPG keys without breaking your setup?! but I answered myself well, I m the type of Debian Developer that has backups :) and then, with that mixed feelings of excitement and impostor syndrome, I took my plane and went on holidays, not expecting to touch any computer until the end of the month. August is probably the month in the year when I have more free time (holidays), but less time to dedicate to free software. I devote most of the month to visit family and stay with them, with no internet connection available or no free time to look at the mailbox or social networks or IRC But DebCamp and DebConf15 were happening during my holidays. And this DebConf15 was the first one in which I participated in the organization, and the first one in which I felt more than being a consumer of Debian videos . I could not follow the streamings, my only internet-capable device was my Android 2.x phone, but when I had wifi I fetched the mail, and during the nights, while everybody else was sleeping and I was laying on the terrace, below the sky full of stars, I could read batches of hundred of mails from debconf-discuss mailing list. And I could get some feeling from DebConf life, because I learned about the ad-hoc BoFs and discussions, the morning bike rides and swimming proposals, and the dancing classes, the i18m/l10n meeting, and many other things. I could answer some mail from time to time, and I also knew that a fellow Debianite from Madrid was going to bring me some stickers, maybe a t-shirt, and shake hands in my name to some persons. September and October September was about finishing reading all the mails and try to answer the pending ones, and preparing my computer to use my new Debian identity (and stop using larjona-guest). I still have some things to do, pending technical work, and some mails that I should have answered and I ve forgotten, for sure (if you sent me a mail that needs answer or would be fine that I answer (even if it was months ago!), please resend or ping me). I recovered my secring.gpg but and just now I added larjona@debian.org to the ID in my GPG key, but didn t signed the pending keys again (sorry dkg and holger! will catch up there soon). My subkeys expired and I m trying to find out how to proceed (they are in my FSFE SmartCard) :/ About the Debian teams, I ve resumed my work in publicity team (this year I ll try to be more involved, in Debian Project News in particular), partially in the website team, and recently I ve finished catching up with the Spanish translation of the website. I ve also joined the DebConf team again (for DebConf16, no matter I probably won t attend) and documented the Publicity task for DebConf, and I try to engage the mailing list and the IRC meetings. I finally could have time to watch some DebConf15 videos and Andreas Tille s talk ( Creating a more inviting environment for newcomers New experiences from MoM, SoB, Teammetrics ) helped me to step ahead in welcoming people with more useful stuff than Hi, newcomer! Go read this (general URLs), try for yourself whatever you like . I have made specific proposals for two people. In mid September I accepted an interview about Debian for a podcast with quite a lot audience (in Spanish), in which I explained the idea of the Welcome Team and offered myself as first-contact. Since then, two more people have contacted me and I have offered specific tasks I think are suitable for them. I also try to be more available in the IRC and offer some time spans for new contributors to DebConf to explain the git setup, the wiki, and all this stuff that looks more complicated than what it is. And I think that s all. My Debianite friend kindly brought me some stickers and a DebConf t-shirt, plus the organization t-shirt that the team gave me as present for my contributions in DebConf15. Neil McGovern kindly sent me a certificate of my new Debian Developer status (thanks!!), and it s posted in my wall at work. Here you are a photo! larjona_dd.JPG (Note: my wall is full of stickers and pieces of papers with things I need, things I like and things I use to explain my work (sometimes sarcastically/ironically ). Maybe some day I ll make a blog post about that!) I feel very proud and happy. Still, a lot of things to learn and work to do, but my intentions are: to keep on progressing (sometimes fast, sometimes slowly), never give up, and enjoy the multiple flowers I find in my way :) Thanks everybody! October and future Some other ideas/plans for the future (the ones I didn t say yet): Comments? If you want to comment you can use this pump.io thread.
Filed under: My experiences and opinion, News Tagged: Communities, Contributing to libre software, Debian, Developer motivations, encryption, English, Free Software, gpg, libre software

21 September 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 21 in Stretch cycle

If you see someone on the Debian ReproducibleBuilds project, buy him/her a beer. This work is awesome. What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Media coverage Nathan Willis covered our DebConf15 status update in Linux Weekly News. Access to non-LWN subscribers will be given on Thursday 24th. Linux Journal published a more general piece last Tuesday. Unexpected praise for reproducible builds appeared this week in the form of several iOS applications identified as including spyware. The malware was undetected by Apple screening. This actually happened because application developers had simply downloaded a trojaned version of XCode through an unofficial source. While reproducible builds can't really help users of non-free software, this is exactly the kind of attacks that we are trying to prevent in our systems. Toolchain fixes Niko Tyni wrote and uploaded a better patch for the source order problem in libmodule-build-perl. Tristan Seligmann identified how the code generated by python-cffi could be emitted in random order in some cases. Upstream has already fixed the problem. Packages fixed The following 24 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: apache-curator, checkbox-ng, gant, gnome-clocks, hawtjni, jackrabbit, jersey1, libjsr305-java, mathjax-docs, mlpy, moap, octave-geometry, paste, pdf.js, pyinotify, pytango, python-asyncssh, python-mock, python-openid, python-repoze.who, shadow, swift, tcpwatch-httpproxy, transfig. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: reproducible.debian.net Tests for Coreboot, OpenWrt, NetBSD, and FreeBSD now runs weekly (instead of monthly). diffoscope development Python 3 offers new features (namely yield from and concurrent.futures) that could help implement parallel processing. The clear separation of bytes and unicode strings is also likely to reduce encoding related issues. Mattia Rizolo thus kicked the effort of porting diffoscope to Python 3. tlsh was the only dependency missing a Python 3 module. This got quickly fixed by a new upload. The rest of the code has been moved to the point where only incompatibilities between Python 2.7 and Pyhon 3.4 had to be changed. The commit stream still require some cleanups but all tests are now passing under Python 3. Documentation update The documentation on how to assemble the weekly reports has been updated. (Lunar) The example on how to use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH with CMake has been improved. (Ben Beockel, Daniel Kahn Gillmor) The solution for timestamps in man pages generated by Sphinx now uses SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. (Mattia Rizzolo) Package reviews 45 reviews have been removed, 141 added and 62 updated this week. 67 new FTBFS reports have been filled by Chris Lamb, Niko Tyni, and Lisandro Dami n Nicanor P rez Meyer. New issues added this week: randomness_in_r_rdb_rds_databases, python-ply_compiled_parse_tables. Misc. The prebuilder script is now properly testing umask variations again. Santiago Villa started a discussion on debian-devel on how binNMUs would work for reproducible builds.

25 August 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 17 in Stretch cycle

A good amount of the Debian reproducible builds team had the chance to enjoy face-to-face interactions during DebConf15.
Names in red and blue were all present at DebConf15
Picture of the  reproducible builds  talk during DebConf15
Hugging people with whom one has been working tirelessly for months gives a lot of warm-fuzzy feelings. Several recorded and hallway discussions paved the way to solve the remaining issues to get reproducible builds part of Debian proper. Both talks from the Debian Project Leader and the release team mentioned the effort as important for the future of Debian. A forty-five minutes talk presented the state of the reproducible builds effort. It was then followed by an hour long roundtable to discuss current blockers regarding dpkg, .buildinfo and their integration in the archive. Picture of the  reproducible builds  roundtable during DebConf15 Toolchain fixes Reiner Herrmann submitted a patch to make rdfind sort the processed files before doing any operation. Chris Lamb proposed a new patch for wheel implementing support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH instead of the custom WHEEL_FORCE_TIMESTAMP. akira sent one making man2html SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH aware. St phane Glondu reported that dpkg-source would not respect tarball permissions when unpacking under a umask of 002. After hours of iterative testing during the DebConf workshop, Sandro Knau created a test case showing how pdflatex output can be non-deterministic with some PNG files. Packages fixed The following 65 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: alacarte, arbtt, bullet, ccfits, commons-daemon, crack-attack, d-conf, ejabberd-contrib, erlang-bear, erlang-cherly, erlang-cowlib, erlang-folsom, erlang-goldrush, erlang-ibrowse, erlang-jiffy, erlang-lager, erlang-lhttpc, erlang-meck, erlang-p1-cache-tab, erlang-p1-iconv, erlang-p1-logger, erlang-p1-mysql, erlang-p1-pam, erlang-p1-pgsql, erlang-p1-sip, erlang-p1-stringprep, erlang-p1-stun, erlang-p1-tls, erlang-p1-utils, erlang-p1-xml, erlang-p1-yaml, erlang-p1-zlib, erlang-ranch, erlang-redis-client, erlang-uuid, freecontact, givaro, glade, gnome-shell, gupnp, gvfs, htseq, jags, jana, knot, libconfig, libkolab, libmatio, libvsqlitepp, mpmath, octave-zenity, openigtlink, paman, pisa, pynifti, qof, ruby-blankslate, ruby-xml-simple, timingframework, trace-cmd, tsung, wings3d, xdg-user-dirs, xz-utils, zpspell. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Uploads that might have fixed reproducibility issues: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: St phane Glondu reported two issues regarding embedded build date in omake and cduce. Aur lien Jarno submitted a fix for the breakage of make-dfsg test suite. As binutils now creates deterministic libraries by default, Aur lien's patch makes use of a wrapper to give the U flag to ar. Reiner Herrmann reported an issue with pound which embeds random dhparams in its code during the build. Better solutions are yet to be found. reproducible.debian.net Package pages on reproducible.debian.net now have a new layout improving readability designed by Mattia Rizzolo, h01ger, and Ulrike. The navigation is now on the left as vertical space is more valuable nowadays. armhf is now enabled on all pages except the dashboard. Actual tests on armhf are expected to start shortly. (Mattia Rizzolo, h01ger) The limit on how many packages people can schedule using the reschedule script on Alioth has been bumped to 200. (h01ger) mod_rewrite is now used instead of JavaScript for the form in the dashboard. (h01ger) Following the rename of the software, debbindiff has mostly been replaced by either diffoscope or differences in generated HTML and IRC notification output. Connections to UDD have been made more robust. (Mattia Rizzolo) diffoscope development diffoscope version 31 was released on August 21st. This version improves fuzzy-matching by using the tlsh algorithm instead of ssdeep. New command line options are available: --max-diff-input-lines and --max-diff-block-lines to override limits on diff input and output (Reiner Herrmann), --debugger to dump the user into pdb in case of crashes (Mattia Rizzolo). jar archives should now be detected properly (Reiner Herrman). Several general code cleanups were also done by Chris Lamb. strip-nondeterminism development Andrew Ayer released strip-nondeterminism version 0.010-1. Java properties file in jar should now be detected more accurately. A missing dependency spotted by St phane Glondu has been added. Testing directory ordering issues: disorderfs During the reproducible builds workshop at DebConf, participants identified that we were still short of a good way to test variations on filesystem behaviors (e.g. file ordering or disk usage). Andrew Ayer took a couple of hours to create disorderfs. Based on FUSE, disorderfs in an overlay filesystem that will mount the content of a directory at another location. For this first version, it will make the order in which files appear in a directory random. Documentation update Dhole documented how to implement support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in Python, bash, Makefiles, CMake, and C. Chris Lamb started to convert the wiki page describing SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH into a Freedesktop-like specification in the hope that it will convince more upstream to adopt it. Package reviews 44 reviews have been removed, 192 added and 77 updated this week. New issues identified this week: locale_dependent_order_in_devlibs_depends, randomness_in_ocaml_startup_files, randomness_in_ocaml_packed_libraries, randomness_in_ocaml_custom_executables, undeterministic_symlinking_by_rdfind, random_build_path_by_golang_compiler, and images_in_pdf_generated_by_latex. 117 new FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb, Chris West (Faux), and Niko Tyni. Misc. Some reproducibility issues might face us very late. Chris Lamb noticed that the test suite for python-pykmip was now failing because its test certificates have expired. Let's hope no packages are hiding a certificate valid for 10 years somewhere in their source! Pictures courtesy and copyright of Debian's own paparazzi: Aigars Mahinovs.

16 August 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 16 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Valentin Lorentz sent a patch for ispell to initialize memory structures before dumping their content. In our experimental repository, qt4-x11 has been rebased on the latest version (Dhole), as was doxygen (akira). Packages fixed The following packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: backup-manager, cheese, coinor-csdp, coinor-dylp, ebook-speaker, freefem, indent, libjbcrypt-java, qtquick1-opensource-src, ruby-coffee-script, ruby-distribution, schroot, twittering-mode. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: akira found another embedded code copy of texi2html in maxima. reproducible.debian.net Work on testing several architectures has continued. (Mattia/h01ger) Package reviews 29 reviews have been removed, 187 added and 34 updated this week. 172 new FTBFS reports were filled, 137 solely by Chris West (Faux). josch spent time investigating the issue with fonts in PDF files. Chris Lamb documented the issue affecting documentation generated by ocamldoc. Misc. Lunar presented a general Reproducible builds HOWTO talk at the Chaos Communication Camp 2015 in Germany on August 13th. Recordings are already available, as well as slides and script. h01ger and Lunar also used CCCamp15 as an opportunity to have discussions with members of several different projects about reproducible builds. Good news should be coming soon.

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