Je ne me souviens plus de la derni re fois o j'ai utilis la commande make clean. Si j'empaqu te pour Debian, le travail se fait dans un d p t git, et j'utilise les commandes git clean -fdx ; git checkout . que je peux rappeler depuis mon historique des commandes via Ctrl-r la plupart du temps. Et dans les autres cas, si les sources ne sont pas d j dans git, alors les commandes git init . ; git add . ; git commit -m 'hopla' r glent le probl me.

I previously wrote that when Firefox receives a file whose media type is text/markdown, it prompts the user to download it, whereas other browsers display rendered results. Now it is possible to upvote a proposal on connect.mozilla.org asking that Firefox renders Markdown by default.

Update: thanks to the very kind involvment of the widow of our wemaster, we could provide enough private information to Dreamhost, who finally accepted to reset the password and the MFA. We have recovered evrything! Many thanks to everybody who helped us! Due to tragic circumstances, one association that I am part of, Sciencescope got locked out of its account at Dreamhost. Locked out, we can not pay the annual bill. Dreamhost contacted us about the payment, but will not let us recover the access to our account in order to pay. So they will soon close the account. Our website, mailing lists and archives, will be erased. We provided plenty of evidence that we are not scammers and that we are the legitimate owners of the account, but reviewing it is above the pay grade of the custommer support (I don't blame them) and I could not convince them to let somebody higher have a look at our case. If you work at Dreamhost and want to keep us as custommers instead of kicking us like that, please ask the support service in charge of ticket 225948648 to send the recovery URL to the secondary email adddresses (the ones you used to contact us about the bill!) in addition to the primary one (which nobody will read anymore). You can encrypt it for my Debian Developer key 73471499CC60ED9EEE805946C5BD6C8F2295D502 if you worry it gets in wrong hands. If you still have doubts I am available for calls any time. If you know somebody working at Dreamhost can you pass them the message? This would be a big, big, relief for our non-profit association.

When Firefox receives a file with media type text/markdown, it prompts the user to download it, while other browsers display it as plain text. In the ticket 1319262, it is proposed to display Markdown files by default, but there needs a patch

A discussion on the debian-project mailing list caught my attention to an Italian word meaning something like would you be so kind to please go somewhere else? , but in a more direct and vulgar manner. I then used http://codesearch.debian.net to study its usage more in detail. I found it in:

• the source code of XEmacs;
• a list of bad words to filter conversations in BZflag;
• the random sentence generator PolyGen;
• the source code of the board game Tagua;
• a database of offensive fortunes for the educative platform WIMS;
• the crossword game parolottero;
• a database of offensive fortunes for login screens and email signatures;
• a list of (too) frequent passwords;
• a source code comment aimed at somebody called Wolf;
• a collection of rude gestures in the xwrists package.

That was a refreshing and pleasant recreation in the Debian package universe.

At the beginning of this year I updated a hundred of media types associated with file name extensions in the file called /etc/mime.types, distributed by the media-types package. Most changes are additions originating from recent submissions to the IANA. Amon the themes that caught my attention, there are telecommunications, computer security, commerce, healthcare and industrial automation. The vast majority of the update come from western provenance. Did the rest of the World decide to move ahead without us?

Via my work on the media-types package, I wanted to know which packages were using the media type application/x-xcf, which apparently is not correct (#991158). The https://codesearch.debian.net site gives the answer. (Thanks!) Moreover, one can create a user key, for command-line remote access; here is an example below (the file dcs-apikeyHeader-plessy.txt contains x-dcs-apikey: followed by my access key).

curl -X GET "https://codesearch.debian.net/api/v1/searchperpackage?query=application/x-xcf&match_mode=literal" -H @dcs-apikeyHeader-plessy.txt > result.json

The result is serialised in JSON. Here is how I transformed it to make a list of email addresses that I could easily paste in mutt.

cat result.json  
  jq --raw-output '.[]."package"'  
  dd-list --stdin  
  sed -e '/^ /d' -e '/^$/'d -e 's/$/,/' -e 's/^/  /'

I am trying R 4.1 in a schroot experimental container, while waiting that Bullseye's release will allow the package to be uploaded to Sid and the needed dependencies to be recompiled. The schroot:

sudo debootstrap sid /srv/chroot/r-4.1 http://deb.debian.org/debian
sudo vi /etc/schroot/chroot.d/r-4.1
# Edit it to have something like
    [r-4.1]
    description=R 4.1 (experimental)
    type=directory
    directory=/srv/chroot/r-4.1
    users=  # Here put your username
    root-groups=root
    profile=desktop
    personality=linux
    preserve-environment=true
sudo schroot -c r-4.1
vi /etc/apt/sources.list # To add the experimental distribution
apt update
apt install sudo vim wget
exit

Installation of R:

schroot -c r-4.1
sudo apt install r-base/experimental -texperimental
sudo apt install -texperimental pandoc libxml2-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev git libssl-dev texlive

And RStudio (preview version needed)

wget https://s3.amazonaws.com/rstudio-ide-build/desktop/bionic/amd64/rstudio-1.4.1714-amd64.deb
sudo apt install libnss3 libasound2
sudo dpkg -i rstudio-1.4.1714-amd64.deb 
sudo apt -f install -texperimental

Debian Bullseye will provide the command /usr/bin/open for your greatest comfort at the command line. On a system with a graphical desktop environment, the command should have a similar result as when opening a document from a mouse-and-click file browser. Technically, /usr/bin/open is a symbolic link managed by update-alternatives to point towards xdg-open if available and otherwise run-mailcap.

A couple of days ago I wrote on debian-vote@ that a junior analyst could study the tally sheets of our general resolutions and find the cracks in our community. In the end, with a quite na ve approach and a time budget of a few hours, I did not manage anything of interest. The figure below shows one circle per voter and my position as a red dot. The circles are spaces according to the similarity of the vote profiles after I concatenated the results of all GRs until 2010. So if there is something to extract from these data, it will need a more expert analyst This said, I think that our future votes should all be anonymous, and that we should stop distributing that kind of data.

Many quickly reacted to the return of rms to the FSF and asked that he leaves again; some also asked for the whole board of directors to resign and some not. Meanwhile, Debian discusses a general resolution on that matter. Maybe it was not the original intent, but in practice the object of the GR is about FSF's board of directors. Perhaps we will have the result after rms resigns? Like many GRs, it will divide Debian and leave scars, at least a tally sheet of who voted what, and who voted like whom. I think that most other organisations did not go through a process as plenary and collegial, but also heavy and cleaving, to decide which way to go. What if our two DPL candidates would issue a statement that, if elected, they would refuse to fund events linked to the FSF until rms quits again (and also the directors, if that is what the DPL candidate wishes to propose). This would let Debian be part of the wave of reaction on time, and maybe allow us to cancel this GR?

I was using a container for a bioinformatics tool released two weeks ago, but my shell script wrapping the tools could not run because the container was built around an old version of Debian (Jessie) that was released in 2015. I was asked to use a container for bioinformatics, based on conda, and found one that distributes coreutils, but it did not include a real version of sed. I try Debian's docker image. No luck; it does not contain ps, which my workflow manager needs. But fortunately I eventually figured out that Ubuntu's Docker image contains coreutils, sed and ps together! In the world of containers, this sounds like a little miracle.

I use everyday a VAIO Pro mk2 that I bought 5 years ago with 3 years of warranty. It has been a few months that I was noticing that something was slowly inflating inside. In July, things accelerated to the point that its thickness had doubled. After we called the customer service of VAIO, somebody came to pick up the laptop in order to make a cost estimate. Then we learned on the phone that it would be free. It is back in my hands in less than two weeks. Bravo VAIO !

Last month, there has been an interesting discussion about off-line GnuPG keys and their storage systems on the debian-project@l.d.o mailing list. I tried to summarise it in the Debian wiki, in particular by creating two new pages.

Since I updated this evening, touch to click with my touchpad is almost totally broken. Fortunately, a correction is pending. update: To reinstall packages version 1.5.5-4 solves the problem in the meantime.

...oh wow, it still works... I never had realised that network-manager did not need ifupdown.

I liked it a lot. There are already many comments on Internet (thanks Russ for making me discover these novels), so I will not go into details. And it is hard to summarise without spoiling. In brief: The first tome, Ancillary Justice, makes us visit various worlds and cultures, and give us an impression of what it feels to be a demigod. The main culture does not make a difference between the two sexes, and the grammar of its language does not have genders. This gives an original taste to the story, for instance when the hero speaks a foreign language, he has difficulties to correctly address people without risking to frown them. Unfortunately the English language itself does not use gender very much, so the literary effect is a bit weakened. Perhaps the French translation (which I have not read) could be more interesting in that respect? The second tome, Ancillary Sword, shows us how one can communicate things in a surveillance society without privacy, by subtle variations on how to serve tea. Gallons of tea are drunk in this tome, of which the main interest is the relation between the characters and heir conversations. In the third tome, Ancillary Mercy, asks the question of what makes us human. Among the most interesting characters, there is a kind of synthetic human, who acts as ambassador for an alien race. At first, he indeed behaves completely alien, but in the end, he is not very different from a newborn who would happen by miracle to know how to speak: in the beginning the World makes no sense, but step by step and by experimenting, he deduces how it works. This is how this character ends up understanding that what is called "war" is a complex phenomenon where one of the consequences is a shortage of fish sauce. I was a bit surprised that no book lead us at the heart of the Radch empire, but I just see on Wikipedia that one more novel is in preparation... One can speculate that central Radch resembles to a future dystopian West, in which surveillance of everybody is total and constant, but where people think they are happy, and peace and well-being inside are kept possible thanks to military operations outside, mostly performed by killer robots controlled by artificial intelligences. A not so distant future ? It is a matter of course that there does not seem to by any Free software in the Radch empire. That reminds me that I did not contribute much to Debian while I was reading...

Many people worked on finishing DEP 5. I think that the blog of Lars does not show enough how collective the effort was. Looking in the specification's text, one finds:

The following alphabetical list is incomplete; please suggest missing people:
Russ Allbery, Ben Finney, Sam Hocevar, Steve Langasek, Charles Plessy, Noah
Slater, Jonas Smedegaard, Lars Wirzenius.

The Policy's changelog mentions:

  * Include the new (optional) copyright format that was drafted as
    DEP-5.  This is not yet a final version; that's expected to come in
    the 3.9.3.0 release.  Thanks to all the DEP-5 contributors and to
    Lars Wirzenius and Charles Plessy for the integration into the
    Policy package.  (Closes: #609160)
 -- Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>  Wed, 06 Apr 2011 22:48:55 -0700

and

debian-policy (3.9.3.0) unstable; urgency=low
  [ Russ Allbery ]
  * Update the copyright format document to the version of DEP-5 from the
    DEP web site and apply additional changes from subsequent discussion
    in debian-devel and debian-project.  Revise for clarity, to add more
    examples, and to update the GFDL license versions.  Thanks, Steve
    Langasek, Charles Plessy, Justin B Rye, and Jonathan Nieder.
    (Closes: #658209, #648387)

On my side, I am very grateful to Bill Alombert for having committed the document in the Git repository, which ended the debates.

For a few years I did not attempt any serious task on the Amazon cloud. It took me a bit of time to get back my automatisms and adapt myself to the changes. In particular, the cheapest instances, t2.nano, are only accessible via virtual private clouds (VPC), and it was a bit difficult for me to find how to create a simple one. Perhaps this is because all AWS accounts created after March 18, 2013, automatically have a default VPC, and everybody else who needed their own simple VPC have created it a long time ago already. In the end, this was not complicated at all. This is probably why I could not find a tutorial. In brief, one needs first to create a VPC. If it is just for spawning an instance from time to time, the IP range does not matter much. Default VPCs are using 172.31.0.0/16, so let's do the same.

CIDR_BLOCK=172.31.0.0/16
aws ec2 create-vpc --cidr-block $CIDR_BLOCK

In the command's output, there is the VPC's identifier, that I paste by hand in a variable called VPC. The same pattern will be repeated for each command creating something. One can also find the VPC's identifier with the command aws ec2 describe-vpcs.

VPC=vpc-XXXXXXXX

Then, create a subnet. Again, no need for complications, in our simple case one can give the full IP range. I cut and paste the returned identifier in the variable SUBNET. In order that the instances receive a public IP address like in default VPCs and like in the usual behaviour of the VPC-less Cloud, one needs to set the attribute MapPublicIpOnLaunch.

aws ec2 create-subnet --vpc-id $VPC --cidr-block $CIDR_BLOCK
SUBNET=subnet-XXXXXXXX
aws ec2 modify-subnet-attribute --subnet-id $SUBNET --map-public-ip-on-launch 

Then, create a gateway (paste the identifier in GATEWAY) and attach it to the VPC.

aws ec2 create-internet-gateway
GATEWAY=igw-XXXXXXXX
aws ec2 attach-internet-gateway --internet-gateway-id $GATEWAY --vpc-id $VPC

A routing table was created automatically, and one can find its identifier via the command describe-route-tables. Then, create a default route to the gateway.

aws ec2 describe-route-tables
ROUTETABLE=rtb-XXXXXXXX
aws ec2 create-route --route-table-id $ROUTETABLE --destination-cidr-block 0.0.0.0/0 --gateway-id $GATEWAY

Of course, if one does not open the traffic, no instance can be contacted from outside... Here I open port 22 for SSH.

aws ec2 describe-security-groups
SECURITY_GROUP=sg-XXXXXXXX
aws ec2 authorize-security-group-ingress --group-id $SECURITY_GROUP --protocol tcp --port 22 --cidr 0.0.0.0/0

Other novelty, now Amazon distributes some Free tools for the command line, that are more comprehensive than euca2ools. Next, I will try again the Debian Installer in the Cloud.

For the first time in our history, a woman joins the Technical Committee. Congratulations, Marga, and thanks for volunteering.