Search Results: "Nicolas Dandrimont"

9 November 2025

Stefano Rivera: Debian Video Team Sprint: November 2025

This week, some of the DebConf Video Team met in Herefordshire (UK) for a sprint. We didn't have a sprint in 2024, and it was sorely needed, now. At the sprint we made good progress towards using Voctomix 2 more reliably, and made plans for our future hardware needs. Attendees

Chris Boot (host)
Stefano Rivera
Kyle Robbertze
Carl Karsten
Nicolas Dandrimont

Voctomix 2 DebConf 25 was the first event that the team used Voctomix version 2. Testing it during DebCamp 25 (the week before DebConf), it seemed to work reliably. But during the event, we hit repeated audio dropout issues, that affected about 18 of our recordings (and live streams). We had attempted to use Voctomix 2 at DebConf 24, and quickly rolled back to version 1, on day 1 of the conference, when we hit similar issues. We thought these issues would be resolved for DebConf 25, by using more powerful (newer) mixing machines. Trying to get to the bottom of these issues was the main focus of the sprint. Nicolas brought 2 of Debian's cameras and the Framework laptop that we'd used at the conference, so we could reproduce the problem. It didn't take long to reproduce, in fact, we spent most of the week trying any configuration changes we could think of to avoid it. The issue we've been seeing feels like a gstreamer bug, rather than something voctomix is doing incorrectly. If anything, configuration changes are avoiding hitting it. Finally, on the last night of the sprint, we managed to run voctomix all night without the problem appearing. But... that isn't enough to feel confident that the issue is avoided. More testing will be required. Detecting audio breakage Kyle worked on a way to report the audio quality in our Prometheus exporter, so we can automatically detect this kind of audio breakage. This was implemented in helios our audio level monitor, and lead to some related code refactoring. Framework Laptops Historically, the video team has relied on borrowed and rented computer hardware at conferences for our (software) video mixing, streaming, storage and encoding. Many years ago, we'd even typically have a local Debian mirror and upload queue on site. Our video mixing machines had to be desktop size computers with 2 Blackmagic Declink Mini Recorder PCI-e cards installed in them, to capture video from our cameras. Now that we reliably have more Internet bandwidth than we really need, at our conference venues, we can rely on offsite cloud servers. We only need the video capture and mixing machines on site. Blackmagic also has UltraStudio Recorder thunderbolt capture boxes that we can use with a laptop. The project bought a couple of these and a Framework 13 AMD laptop to test at DebConf 25. We used it in production at DebConf, in the "Petit Amphi" room, where it seemed to work fairly well. It was very picky about thunderbolt cable and port combinations, refusing to even boot when they were connected. Since then, Framework firmware has fixed these issues, and in our testing at the sprint, it worked almost perfectly. (One of the capture boxes got into a broken state, and had to be unplugged and re-connected to fix it.) We think these are the best option for the future, and plan to ask the project to buy some more of them. HDCP Apple Silicon devices seem to like to HDCP-encrypt their HDMI output whenever possible. This causes our HDMI capture hardware to display an "Encrypted" error, rather than any useful image. Chris experimented with a few different devices to strip HDCP from HDMI video, at least 2 of them worked. Spring Cleaning Kyle dug through the open issues in our Salsa repositories and cleaned up some issues. DebConf 25 Video Encoding The core video team at DebConf 25 was a little under-staffed, significantly overlapping with core conference organization, which took priority. That, combined with the Voctomix 2 audio dropout issues we'd hit, meant that there was quite a bit of work left to be done to get the conference videos properly encoded and released. We found that the encodings had been done at the wrong resolution, which forced a re-encode of all videos. In the process, we reviewed videos for audio issues and made a list of the ones that need more work. We ran out of time and this work isn't done, yet. DebConf 26 Preparation Kyle reviewed floorplans and photographs of the proposed DebConf 26 talk venues, and build up a list of A/V kit that we'll need to hire. Carl's Video Box Carl uses much of the same stack as the video team, for many other events in the US. He has experimenting with using a Dell 7212 tablet in an all-in-one laser-cut box. Carl demonstrated this box, which could perfect for small miniDebConfs, at the sprint. Using voctomix 2 on the box requires some work, because it doesn't use Blackmagic cards for video capture. The Box: Front

gst-fallbacksrc Carl's box's needs lead to looking at gstfallbacksrc. This should let Voctomix 2 survive cameras (or network sources) going away for a moment. Matthias Geiger packaged it for us, and it's now in Debian NEW. Thanks! voctomix-outcasts Carl cut a release of voctomix-outcasts and Stefano uploaded it to unstable. Ansible Configuration The videoteam's stack is deployed with Ansible, and almost everything we do involves work on this stack. Carl upstreamed some of his features to us, and we updated our voctomix2 configuration to take advantage of our experiments at the sprint. Miscellaneous Voctomix contributions We fixed a couple of minor bugs in voctomix. More Nageru experimentation In 2023, we tried to configure Nageru (another live video mixer) for the video team's needs. Like voctomix it needs some configuration and scaffolding to adapt it to your needs. Practically, this means writing a "theme" in Lua that controls the mixer. The team still has a preference for Voctomix (as we're all very familiar with it), but would like to have Nageru available as an option when we need it. We fixed some minor issues in our theme, enough to get it running again, on the Framework laptop. Much more work is needed to really make it a useable option. Thank you Thanks to the Debian project for funding the costs of the sprint, and Chris Boot's extended family for providing us with a no-cost sprint venue. Thanks to c3voc for developing and maintaining voctomix, and helping us to debug issues in it. Thank you to everyone in the videoteam who attended or helped out remotely! And to employers who let us work on Debian on company time. We'll likely need to keep working on our stack remotely, in the leadup to DebConf 26, and/or have another sprint before then. Breakfast

29 July 2025

Christoph Berg: The Debian Conference 2025 in Brest

It's Sunday and I'm now sitting in the train from Brest to Paris where I will be changing to Germany, on the way back from the annual Debian conference. A full week of presentations, discussions, talks and socializing is laying behind me and my head is still spinning from the intensity.

Pollito and the gang of DebConf mascots wearing their conference badges

Table of Contents

Sunday, July 13th It started last Sunday with traveling to the conference. I got on the Eurostar in Duisburg and we left on time, but even before reaching Cologne, the train was already one hour delayed for external reasons, collecting yet another hour between Aachen and Liege for its own technical problems. "The train driver is working on trying to fix the problem." My original schedule had well over two hours for changing train stations in Paris, but being that late, I missed the connection to Brest in Montparnasse. At least in the end, the total delay was only one hour when finally arriving at the destination. Due to the French julliet quatorze fireworks approaching, buses in Brest were rerouted, but I managed to catch the right bus to the conference venue, already meeting a few Debian people on the way. The conference was hosted at the IMT Atlantique Brest campus, giving the event a nice university touch. I arrived shortly after 10 in the evening and after settling down a bit, got on one of the "magic" buses for transportation to the camping site where half of the attendees where stationed. I shared a mobile home with three other Debianites, where I got a small room for myself. Monday, July 14th Next morning, we took the bus back to the venue with a small breakfast and the opening session where Enrico Zini invited me to come to his and Nicolas Dandrimont's session about Debian community governance and curation, which I gladly did. Many ideas about conflict moderation and community steering were floated around. I hope some of that can be put into effect to make flamewars on the mailing lists less heated and more directed. After that, I attended Olly Betts' "Stemming with Snowball" session, which is the stemmer used also in PostgreSQL. Text search is one of the areas in PostgreSQL that I never really looked closely at, including the integration into the postgresql-common package, so it was nice to get more information about that. In preparation for the conference, a few of us Ham radio operators in Debian had decided to bring some radio gear to DebConf this year in order to perhaps spark more interest for our hobby among the fellow geeks. In the afternoon after the talks, I found a quieter spot just outside of the main hall and set up a shortwave antenna by attaching a 10m mast to one of the park benches there. The 40m band was still pretty much closed, but I could work a few stations from England, just across the channel from Bretagne, answering questions from interested passing-by Debian people between the contacts. Over time, the band opened and more European stations got into the log.

Tuesday, July 15th Tuesday started with Helmut Grohne's session about "Reviving (un)schroot". The schroot program has been Debian's standard way of managing build chroots for a long time, but it is more and more being regarded as obsolete with all kinds of newer containerization and virtualization technologies taking over. Since many bits of Debian infrastructure depend on schroot, and its user interface is still very useful, Helmut reimplemented it using Linux namespaces and the "unshare" systemcall. I had already worked with him at the Hamburg Minidebconf to replace the apt.postgresql.org buildd machinery with the new system, but we were not quite there yet (network isolation is nice, but we still sometimes need proper networking), so it was nice to see the effort is still progressing and I will give his new scripts a try when I'm back home. Next, Stefano Rivera and Colin Watson presented Debusine, a new package repository and workflow management system. It looks very promising for anyone running their own repository, so perhaps yet another bit of apt.postgresql.org infrastructure to replace in the future. After that, I went to the Debian LTS BoF session by Santiago Ruano Rinc n and Bastien Roucari s - Debian releases plus LTS is what we are covering with apt.postgresql.org. Then there were bits from the DPL (Debian Project Leader), and a session moderated by Stefano Rivera interesting to me as a member of the Debian Technical Committee on the future structure of the packages required for cross-building in Debian, a topic which had been brought to TC a while ago. I am happy that we could resolve the issue without having to issue a formal TC ruling as the involved parties (kernel, glibc, gcc and the cross-build people) found a promising way forward themselves. DebConf is really a good way to get such issues unstuck. Ten years ago at the 2015 Heidelberg DebConf, Enrico had given a seminal "Semi-serious stand-up comedy" talk, drawing parallels between the Debian Open Source community and the BDSM community - "People doing things consensually together". (Back then, the talk was announced as "probably unsuitable for people of all ages".) With his unique presentation style and witty insights, the session made a lasting impression on everyone attending. Now, ten years later (and he and many in the audience being ten years older), he gave an updated version of it. We are now looking forward to the sequel in 2035. The evening closed with the famous DebConf tradition of the Cheese & Wine party in a old fort next to the coast, just below the conference venue. Even when he's a fellow Debian Developer, Ham and also TC member, I had never met Paul Tagliamonte in person before, but we spent most of the evening together geeking out on all things Debian and Ham radio.

Wednesday, July 16th Wednesday already marked the end of the first half of the week, the day of the day trips. I had chosen to go to Ouessant island (Ushant in English) which marks the Western end of French mainland and hosts one of the lighthouses yielding the way into the English channel. The ferry trip included surprisingly big waves which left some participants seasick, but everyone recovered fast. After around one and a half hours we arrived, picked up the bicycles, and spent the rest of the day roaming the island. The weather forecast was originally very cloudy and 18 C, but over noon this turned into sunny and warm, so many got an unplanned sunburn. I enjoyed the trip very much - it made up for not having time visiting the city during the week. After returning, we spent the rest of the evening playing DebConf's standard game, Mao (spoiler alert: don't follow the link if you ever intend to play).

Thursday, July 17th The next day started with the traditional "Meet the Technical Committee" session. This year, we trimmed the usual slide deck down to remove the boring boilerplate parts, so after a very short introduction to the work of the committee by our chairman Matthew Vernon, we opened up the discussion with the audience, with seven (out of 8) TC members on stage. I think the format worked very well, with good input from attendees. Next up was "Don't fear the TPM" by Jonathan McDowell. A common misconception in the Free Software community is that the TPM is evil DRM hardware working against the user, but while it could be used in theory that way, the necessary TPM attestations seem to impossible to attain in practice, so that wouldn't happen anyway. Instead, it is a crypto coprocessor present in almost all modern computers that can be used to hold keys, for example to be used for SSH. It will also be interesting to research if we can make use of it for holding the Transparent Data Encryption keys for CYBERTEC's PostgreSQL Enterprise Edition. Aigars Mahinovs then directed everyone in place for the DebConf group picture, and Lucas Nussbaum started a discussion about archive-wide QA tasks in Debian, an area where I did a lot of work in the past and that still interests me. Antonio Terceiro and Paul Gevers followed up with techniques to track archive-wide rebuilding and testing of packages and in turn filing a lot of bugs to track the problems. The evening ended with the conference dinner, again in the fort close by the coast. DebConf is good for meeting new people, and I incidentally ran into another Chris, who happened to be one of the original maintainers of pgaccess, the pre-predecessor of today's pgadmin. I admit still missing this PostgreSQL frontend for its simplicity and ability to easily edit table data, but it disappeared around 2004. Friday, July 18th On Friday, I participated in discussion sessions around contributors.debian.org (PostgreSQL is planning to set up something similar) and the New Member process which I had helped to run and reform a decade or two ago. Agathe Porte (also a Ham radio operator, like so many others at the conference I had no idea of) then shared her work on rust-rewriting the slower parts of Lintian, the Debian package linter. Craig Small talked about "Free as in Bytes", the evolution of the Linux procps free command. Over the time and many kernel versions, the summary numbers printed became better and better, but there will probably never be a version that suits all use cases alike. Later over dinner, Craig (who is also a TC member) and I shared our experiences with these numbers and customers (not) understanding them. He pointed out that for PostgreSQL and looking at used memory in the presence of large shared memory buffers, USS (unique set size) and PSS (proportional set size) should be more realistic numbers than the standard RSS (resident set size) that the top utility is showing by default. Antonio Terceiro and Paul Gevers again joined to lead a session, now on ci.debian.net and autopkgtest, the test driver used for running tests on packages after then have been installed on a system. The PostgreSQL packages are heavily using this to make sure no regressions creep in even after builds have successfully completed and test re-runs are rescheduled periodically. The day ended with Bdale Garbee's electronics team BoF and Paul Tagliamonte and me setting up the radio station in the courtyard, again answering countless questions about ionospheric conditions and operating practice. Saturday, July 19th Saturday was the last conference day. In the first session, Nikos Tsipinakis and Federico Vaga from CERN announced that the LHC will be moving to Debian for the accelerator's frontend computers in their next "long shutdown" maintenance period in the next year. CentOS broke compatibility too often, and Debian trixie together with the extended LTS support will cover the time until the next long shutdown window in 2035, until when the computers should have all been replaced with newer processors covering higher x86_64 baseline versions. The audience was very delighted to hear that Debian is now also being used in this prestige project. Ben Hutchings then presented new Linux kernel features. Particularly interesting for me was the support for atomic writes spanning more than one filesystem block. When configured correctly, this would mean PostgreSQL didn't have to record full-page images in the WAL anymore, increasing throughput and performance. After that, the Debian ftp team discussed ways to improve review of new packages in the archive, and which of their processes could be relaxed with new US laws around Open Source and cryptography algorithms export. Emmanuel Arias led a session on Salsa CI, Debian's Gitlab instance and standard CI pipeline. (I think it's too slow, but the runners are not under their control.) Julian Klode then presented new features in APT, Debian's package manager. I like the new display format (and a tiny bit of that is also from me sending in wishlist bugs). In the last round of sessions this week, I then led the Ham radio BoF with an introduction into the hobby and how Debian can be used. Bdale mentioned that the sBitx family of SDR radios is natively running Debian, so stock packages can be used from the radio's touch display. We also briefly discussed his involvement in ARDC and the possibility to get grants from them for Ham radio projects. Finally, DebConf wrapped up with everyone gathering in the main auditorium and cheering the organizers for making the conference possible and passing Pollito, the DebConf mascot, to the next organizer team.

Sunday, July 20th Zoom back to the train: I made it through the Paris metro and I'm now on the Eurostar back to Germany. It has been an intense week with all the conference sessions and meeting all the people I had not seen so long. There are a lot of new ideas to follow up on both for my Debian and PostgreSQL work. Next year's DebConf will take place in Santa Fe, Argentina. I haven't yet decided if I will be going, but I can recommend the experience to everyone! The post The Debian Conference 2025 in Brest appeared first on CYBERTEC PostgreSQL Services & Support.

19 December 2024

Gregory Colpart: MiniDebConf Toulouse 2024

After the MiniDebConf Marseille 2019, COVID-19 made it impossible or difficult to organize new MiniDebConfs for a few years. With the gradual resumption of in-person events (like FOSDEM, DebConf, etc.), the idea emerged to host another MiniDebConf in France, but with a lighter organizational load. In 2023, we decided to reach out to the organizers of Capitole du Libre to repeat the experience of 2017: hosting a MiniDebConf alongside their annual event in Toulouse in November. However, our request came too late for 2023. After discussions with Capitole du Libre in November 2023 in Toulouse and again in February 2024 in Brussels, we confirmed that a MiniDebConf Toulouse would take place in November 2024! We then assembled a small organizing team and got to work: a Call for Papers in May 2024, adding a two-day MiniDebCamp, coordinating with the DebConf video team, securing sponsors, creating a logo, ordering T-shirts and stickers, planning the schedule, and managing registrations. Even with lighter logistics (conference rooms, badges, and catering during the weekend were handled by Capitole du Libre), there was still quite a bit of preparation to do. On Thursday, November 14, and Friday, November 15, 2024, about forty developers arrived from around the world (France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, England, Brazil, Uruguay, India, Brest, Marseille ) to spend two days at the MiniDebCamp in the beautiful collaborative spaces of Artilect in Toulouse city center.

Then, on Saturday, November 16, and Sunday, November 17, 2024, the MiniDebConf took place at ENSEEIHT as part of the Capitole du Libre event. The conference kicked off on Saturday morning with an opening session by J r my Lecour, which included a tribute to Lunar (Nicolas Dandrimont). This was followed by Reproducible Builds Rebuilding What is Distributed from ftp.debian.org (Holger Levsen) and Discussion on My Research Work on Sustainability of Debian OS (Eda). After lunch at the Capitole du Libre food trucks, the intense afternoon schedule began: What s New in the Linux Kernel (and What s Missing in Debian) (Ben Hutchings), Linux Live Patching in Debian (Santiago Ruano Rinc n), Trixie on Mobile: Are We There Yet? (Arnaud Ferraris), PostgreSQL Container Groups, aka cgroups Down the Road (C dric Villemain), Upgrading a Thousand Debian Hosts in Less Than an Hour (J r my Lecour and myself), and Using Debusine to Automate Your QA (Stefano Rivera & co). Sunday marked the second day, starting with a presentation on DebConf 25 (Benjamin Somers), which will be held in Brest in July 2025. The morning continued with talks: How LTS Goes Beyond LTS (Santiago Ruano Rinc n & Roberto C. S nchez), Cross-Building (Helmut Grohne), and State of JavaScript (Bastien Roucari s). In the afternoon, there were Lightning Talks, PyPI Security: Past, Present & Future (Salvo LtWorf Tomaselli), and the classic Bits from DPL (Andreas Tille), before closing with the final session led by Pierre-Elliott B cue. All talks are available on video (a huge thanks to the amazing DebConf video team), and many thanks to our sponsors (Viridien, Freexian, Evolix, Collabora, and Data Bene). A big thank-you as well to the entire Capitole du Libre team for hosting and supporting us see you in Brest in July 2025! Articles about (or mentioning) MiniDebConf Toulouse:

8 August 2024

Jonathan Carter: DebConf24 Busan, South Korea

I m finishing typing up this blog entry hours before my last 13 hour leg back home, after I spent 2 weeks in Busan, South Korea for DebCamp24 and DebCamp24. I had a rough year and decided to take it easy this DebConf. So this is the first DebConf in a long time where I didn t give any talks. I mostly caught up on a bit of packaging, worked on DebConf video stuff, attended a few BoFs and talked to people. Overall it was a very good DebConf, which also turned out to be more productive than I expeced it would. In the welcome session on the first day of DebConf, Nicolas Dandrimont mentioned that a benefit of DebConf is that it provides a sort of caffeine for your Debian motivation. I could certainly feel that affect swell as the days went past, and it s nice to be excited about some ideas again that would otherwise be fading.

Recovering DPL It s a bit of a gear shift being DPL for 4 years, and DebConf Committee for nearly 5 years before that, and then being at DebConf while some issue arise (as it always does during a conference). At first I jump into high alert mode, but then I have to remind myself it s not your problem anymore and let others deal with it. It was nice spending a little in-person time with Andreas Tille, our new DPL, we did some more handover and discussed some current issues. I still have a few dozen emails in my DPL inbox that I need to collate and forward to Andreas, I hope to finish all that up by the end of August. During the Bits from the DPL talk, the usual question came up whether Andreas will consider running for DPL again, to which he just responded in a slide Maybe . I think it s a good idea for a DPL to do at least two terms if it all works out for everyone, since it takes a while to get up to speed on everything. Also, having been DPL for four years, I have a lot to say about it, and I think there s a lot we can fix in the role, or at least discuss it. If I had the bandwidth for it I would have scheduled a BoF for it, but I ll very likely do that for the next DebConf instead!

Video team I set up the standby loop for the video streaming setup. We call it loopy, it s a bunch of OBS scenes that provide announcements, shows sponsors, the schedule and some social content. I wrote about it back in 2020, but it s evolved quite a bit since then, so I m probably due to write another blog post with a bunch of updates on it. I hope to organise a video team sprint in Cape Town in the first half of next year, so I ll summarize everything before then.

It would ve been great if we could have some displays in social areas that could show talks, the loop and other content, but we were just too pressed for time for that. This year s DebConf had a very compressed timeline, and there was just too much that had to be done and that had to be figured out on the last minute. This put quite a lot of strain on the organisers, but I was glad to see how, for the most part, most attendees were very sympathetic to some rough edges (but I digress ). I added more of the OBS machine setup to the videoteam s ansible repository, so as of now it just needs an ansible setup and the OBS data and it s good to go. The loopy data is already in the videoteam git repository, so I could probably just add a git pull and create some symlinks in ansible and then that machine can be installed from 0% to 100% by just installing via debian-installer with our ansible hooks. This DebConf I volunteered quite a bit for actual video roles during the conference, something I didn t have much time for in recent DebConfs, and it s been fun, especially in a session or two where nearly none of the other volunteers showed up. Sometimes chaos is just fun :-)
Baekyongee is the university mascot, who s visible throughout the university. So of course we included this four legged whale creature on the loop too!

Packaging I was hoping to do more packaging during DebCamp, but at least it was a non-zero amount:

Uploaded gdisk 1.0.10-2 to unstable (previously tested effects of adding dh-sequence-movetousr) (Closes: #1073679).

Worked a bit on bcachefs-tools (updating git to 1.9.4), but has a build failure that I need to look into (we might need a newer bindgen) update: I m probably going to ROM this package soon, it doesn t seem suitable for packaging in Debian.

Calamares: Tested a fix for encrypted installs, and uploaded it.

Calamares: Uploaded (3.3.8-1) to backports (at the time of writing it s still in backports-NEW).

Backport obs-gradient-source for bookworm.

Did some initial packaging on Cambalache, I ll upload to unstable once wlroots (0.18) hits unstable.

Pixelorama 1.0 I did some initial packaging for Pixelorama back when we did the MiniDebConf Gaming Edition, but it had a few stoppers back then. Version 1.0 seems to fix all of that, but it depends on Godot 4.2 and we re still on the 3 series in Debian, so I ll upload this once Godot 4.2 hits at least experimental. Godot software/games is otherwise quite easy to run, it s basically just source code / data that is installed and then run via godot-runner (godot3-runner package in Debian).

BoFs Python Team BoF Link to the etherpad / pad archive link and video can be found on the talk page: https://debconf24.debconf.org/talks/31-python-bof/ The session ended up being extended to a second part, since all the issues didn t fit into the first session. I was distracted by too many thing during the Python 3.12 transition (to the point where I thought that 3.11 was still new in Debian), so it was very useful listening to the retrospective of that transition. There was a discussion whether Python 3.13 could still make it to testing in time for freeze, and it seems that there is consensus that it can, although, likely with new experimental features like disabling the global interpreter lock and the just in time compiler disabled. I learned for the first time about the dead batteries project, PEP-0594, which removes ancient modules that have mostly been superseded, from the Python standard library. There was some talk about the process for changing team policy, and a policy discussion on whether we should require autopkgtests as a SHOULD or a MUST for migration to testing. As with many things, the devil is in the details and in my opinion you could go either way and achieve a similar result (the original MUST proposal allowed exceptions which imho made it the same as the SHOULD proposal). There s an idea to do some ongoing remote sprints, like having co-ordinated days for bug squashing / working on stuff together. This is a nice idea and probably a good way to energise the team and also to gain some interest from potential newcomers. Louis-Philipe V ronneau was added as a new team admin and there was some discussion on various Sphinx issues and which Lintian tags might be needed for Python 3.13. If you want to know more, you probably have to watch the videos / read the notes :)
Debian.net BoF Link to the etherpad / pad archive link can be found on the talk page: https://debconf24.debconf.org/talks/37-debiannet-team-bof Debian Developers can set up services on subdomains on debian.net, but a big problem we ve had before was that developers were on their own for hosting those services. This meant that they either hosted it on their DSL/fiber connection at home, paid for the hosting themselves, or hosted it at different services which became an accounting nightmare to claim back the used funds. So, a few of us started the debian.net hosting project (sometimes we just call it debian.net, this is probably a bit of a bug) so that Debian has accounts with cloud providers, and as admins we can create instances there that gets billed directly to Debian. We had an initial rush of services, but requests have slowed down since (not really a bad thing, we don t want lots of spurious requests). Last year we did a census, to check which of the instances were still used, whether they received system updates and to ask whether they are performing backups. It went well and some issues were found along the way, so we ll be doing that again. We also gained two potential volunteers to help run things, which is great. Debian Social BoF Link to the etherpad / pad archive link can be found on the talk page: https://debconf24.debconf.org/talks/34-debiansocial-bof We discussed the services we run, you can view the current state of things at: https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianSocial Pleroma has shown some cracks over the last year or so, and there are some forks that seem promising. At the same time, it might be worth while considering Mastodon too. So we ll do some comparison of features and maintenance and find a way forward. At the time when Pleroma was installed, it was way ahead in terms of moderation features. Pixelfed is doing well and chugging along nicely, we should probably promote it more. Peertube is working well, although we learned that we still don t have all the recent DebConf videos on there. A bunch of other issues should be fixed once we move it to a new machine that we plan to set up. We re removing writefreely and plume. Nice concepts, but it didn t get much traction yet, and no one who signed up for these actually used it, which is fine, some experimentation with services is good and sometimes they prove to be very popular and other times not. The WordPress multisite instance has some mild use, otherwise haven t had any issues. Matrix ended up to be much, much bigger than we thought, both in usage and in its requirements. It s very stateful and remembers discussions for as long as you let it, so it s Postgres database is continuously expanding, this will also be a lot easier to manage once we have this on the new host. Jitsi is also quite popular, but it could probably be on jitsi.debian.net instead (we created this on debian.social during the initial height of COVID-19 where we didn t have the debian.net hosting yet), although in practice it doesn t really matter where it lives. Most of our current challenges will be solved by moving everything to a new big machine that has a few public IPs available for some VMs, so we ll be doing that shortly. Debian Foundation Discussion BoF This was some brainstorming about the future structure of Debian, and what steps might be needed to get there. It s way too big a problem to take on in a BoF, but we made some progress in figuring out some smaller pieces of the larger puzzle. The DPL is going to get in touch with some legal advisors and our trusted organisations so that we can aim to formalise our relationships a bit more by the time it s DebConf again. I also introduced my intention to join the Debian Partners delegation. When I was DPL, I enjoyed talking with external organisations who wanted to help Debian, but helping external organisations help Debian turned out to be too much additional load on the usual DPL roles, so I m pursuing this with the Debian Partners team, more on that some other time. This session wasn t recorded, but if you feel like you missed something, don t worry, all intentions will be communicated and discussed with project members before anything moves forward. There was a strong agreement in the room though that we should push forward on this, and not reach another DebConf where we didn t make progress on formalising Debian s structure more.

Social Conference Dinner
Conference Dinner Photo from Santiago
The conference dinner took place in the university gymnasium. I hope not many people do sports there in the summer, because it got HOT. There was also some interesting observations on the thermodynamics of the attempted cooling solutions, which was amusing. On the plus side, the food was great, the company was good, and the speeches were kept to a minimum, so it was a great conference dinner, even though it was probably cut a bit short due to the heat. Cheese and Wine Cheese and Wine happened on 1 August, which happens to be the date I became a DD at DebConf17 in Montr al seven years before, so this was a nice accidental celebration of my Debiversary :) Since I m running out of time, I ll add some more photos to this post some time after publishing it :P Group Photo As per DebConf tradition, Aigars took the group photo. You can find the high resolution version on Debian s GitLab instance.
Debian annual conference Debconf 24, Busan, South Korea
Photography: Aigars Mahinovs aigarius@debian.org
License: CC-BYv3+ or GPLv2+
Talking Ah yes, talking to people is a big part of DebConf, but I didn t keep track of it very well.

I mostly listened to Alper a bit about his ideas for his talk about debian installer.

I talked to Rhonda a bit about ActivityPub and MQTT and whether they could be useful for publicising Debian activity.

Listened to Gunnar and Julian have a discussion about GPG and APT which was interesting.

I learned that you can learn Hangul, the Korean alphabet, in about an hour or so (I wish I knew that in all my years of playing StarCraft II).

We had the usual continuous keysigning party. Besides it s intended function, this is always a good ice breaker and a way to for shy people to meet other shy people.

and many other fly-by discussions.

Stuff that didn t happen this DebConf

loo.py A simple Python script that could eventually replace the obs-advanced-scene-switcher sequencer in OBS. It would also be extremely useful if we d ever replace OBS for loopy. I was hoping to have some time to hack on this, and try to recreate the current loopy in loo.py, but didn t have the time.

toetally This year videoteam had to scramble to get a bunch of resistors to assemble some tally light. Even when assembled, they were a bit troublesome. It would ve been nice to hack on toetally and get something ready for testing, but it mostly relies on having something like a rasbperry pi zero with an attached screen in order to work on further. I ll try to have something ready for the next mini conf though.

extrepo on debian live I think we should have extrepo installed by default on desktop systems, I meant to start a discussion on this, but perhaps it s just time I go ahead and do it and announce it.

Live stream to peertube server It would ve been nice to live stream DebConf to PeerTube, but the dependency tree to get this going got a bit too huge. Following our plans discussed in the Debian Social BoF, we should have this safely ready before the next MiniDebConf and should be able to test it there.

Desktop Egg there was this idea to get a stand-in theme for Debian testing/unstable until the artwork for the next release is finalized (Debian bug: #1038660), I have an idea that I meant to implement months ago, but too many things got in the way. It s based on Juliette Taka s Homeworld theme, and basically transforms the homeworld into an egg. Get it? Something that hasn t hatched yet? I also only recently noticed that we never used the actual homeworld graphics (featuring the world image) in the final bullseye release. lol.

So, another DebConf and another new plush animal. Last but not least, thanks to PKNU for being such a generous and fantastic host to us! See you again at DebConf25 in Brest, France next year!

13 November 2021

Ruby Team: Ruby Team Sprint 2020 in Paris - Day Four

On day four the transition to Ruby 2.7 and Rails 6 went on. Minor transitions took place too, for example the upload of ruby-faraday 1.0 or the upload of bundler 2.1 featuring the (first) contributions by bundler s upstream Deivid (yeah!). Further Red Hat s (and Debian s) Marc Dequ nes (Duck) joined us. We are proud to report, that updating and/or uploading the Kali packages is almost done. Most are in NEW or have already been accepted. The Release team was contacted to start the Ruby 2.7 transition and we already have a transition page. However, the Python 3.8 one is ongoing (almost finished) and the Release team does not want overlaps. So hopefully we can upload ruby-defaults to Debian Unstable soon. In the evening we got together for a well earned collective drink at Brewberry Bar and dinner, joined by local Debian colleague Nicolas Dandrimont (olasd).

Group photo of the Ruby Team in Brewbarry Bar, Paris

The evening ended at Paris famous (but heavily damaged) Notre-Dame cathedral.

21 February 2021

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: dput-ng or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Hooks

As my contributions to Debian continue to grow in number, I find myself uploading to the archive more and more often. Although I'm pretty happy with my current sbuild-based workflow, twice in the past few weeks I inadvertently made a binary upload instead of a source-only one.¹ As it turns out, I am not the only DD who has had this problem before. As Nicolas Dandrimont kindly pointed to me, dput-ng supports pre and post upload hooks that can be used to lint your uploads. Even better, it also ships with a check-debs hook that lets you block binary uploads. Pretty neat, right? In a perfect world, enabling the hook would only be a matter of adding it in the hook list of /etc/dput.d/metas/debian.json and using the following defaults:

"check-debs":  
    "enforce": "source",
    "skip": false
 ,

Sadly, bug #983160 currently makes this whole setup more complex than it should be and forces me to use two different dput-ng profiles pointing to two different files in /etc/dput.d/metas: a default source-only one (ftp-master) and a binary upload one (ftp-master-binary). Otherwise, one could use a single profile that disallows binary uploads and when needed, override the hook using something like this:

$ dput --override "check-debs.enforce=debs" foo_1.0.0-1_amd64.changes

I did start debugging the --override issue in dput-ng, but I'm not sure I'll have time to submit a patch anytime soon. In the meantime, I'm happy to report I shouldn't be uploading the wrong .changes file by mistake again!

Thanks to Holger Levsen and Adrian Bunk for catching those and notifying me.

16 July 2020

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: DebConf Videoteam Sprint Report -- DebConf20@Home

DebConf20 starts in about 5 weeks, and as always, the DebConf Videoteam is working hard to make sure it'll be a success. As such, we held a sprint from July 9th to 13th to work on our new infrastructure. A remote sprint certainly ain't as fun as an in-person one, but we nonetheless managed to enjoy ourselves. Many thanks to those who participated, namely:

Carl Karsten (CarlFK)
Ivo De Decker (ivodd)
Kyle Robbertze (paddatrapper)
Louis-Philippe V ronneau (pollo)
Nattie Mayer-Hutchings (nattie)
Nicolas Dandrimont (olasd)
Stefano Rivera (tumbleweed)
Wouter Verhelst (wouter)

We also wish to extend our thanks to Thomas Goirand and Infomaniak for providing us with virtual machines to experiment on and host the video infrastructure for DebConf20. Advice for presenters For DebConf20, we strongly encourage presenters to record their talks in advance and send us the resulting video. We understand this is more work, but we think it'll make for a more agreeable conference for everyone. Video conferencing is still pretty wonky and there is nothing worse than a talk ruined by a flaky internet connection or hardware failures. As such, if you are giving a talk at DebConf this year, we are asking you to read and follow our guide on how to record your presentation. Fear not: we are not getting rid of the Q&A period at the end of talks. Attendees will ask their questions either on IRC or on a collaborative pad and the Talkmeister will relay them to the speaker once the pre-recorded video has finished playing. New infrastructure, who dis? Organising a virtual DebConf implies migrating from our battle-tested on-premise workflow to a completely new remote one. One of the major changes this means for us is the addition of Jitsi Meet to our infrastructure. We normally have 3 different video sources in a room: two cameras and a slides grabber. With the new online workflow, directors will be able to play pre-recorded videos as a source, will get a feed from a Jitsi room and will see the audience questions as a third source. This might seem simple at first, but is in fact a very major change to our workflow and required a lot of work to implement.

               == On-premise ==                                          == Online ==
                                                      
              Camera 1                                                 Jitsi
                                                                          
                 v                 ---> Frontend                         v                 ---> Frontend
                                                                                            
    Slides -> Voctomix -> Backend -+--> Frontend         Questions -> Voctomix -> Backend -+--> Frontend
                                                                                            
                 ^                 ---> Frontend                         ^                 ---> Frontend
                                                                          
              Camera 2                                           Pre-recorded video

In our tests, playing back pre-recorded videos to voctomix worked well, but was sometimes unreliable due to inconsistent encoding settings. Presenters will thus upload their pre-recorded talks to SReview so we can make sure there aren't any obvious errors. Videos will then be re-encoded to ensure a consistent encoding and to normalise audio levels. This process will also let us stitch the Q&As at the end of the pre-recorded videos more easily prior to publication. Reducing the stream latency One of the pitfalls of the streaming infrastructure we have been using since 2016 is high video latency. In a worst case scenario, remote attendees could get up to 45 seconds of latency, making participation in events like BoFs arduous. In preparation for DebConf20, we added a new way to stream our talks: RTMP. Attendees will thus have the option of using either an HLS stream with higher latency or an RTMP stream with lower latency. Here is a comparative table that can help you decide between the two protocols:

	HLS	RTMP
Pros	Can be watched from a browser Auto-selects a stream encoding Single URL to remember	Lower latency (~5s)
Cons	Higher latency (up to 45s)	Requires a dedicated video player (VLC, mpv) Specific URLs for each encoding setting

Live mixing from home with VoctoWeb Since DebConf16, we have been using voctomix, a live video mixer developed by the CCC VOC. voctomix is conveniently divided in two: voctocore is the backend server while voctogui is a GTK+ UI frontend directors can use to live-mix. Although voctogui can connect to a remote server, it was primarily designed to run either on the same machine as voctocore or on the same LAN. Trying to use voctogui from a machine at home to connect to a voctocore running in a datacenter proved unreliable, especially for high-latency and low bandwidth connections. Inspired by the setup FOSDEM uses, we instead decided to go with a web frontend for voctocore. We initially used FOSDEM's code as a proof of concept, but quickly reimplemented it in Python, a language we are more familiar with as a team. Compared to the FOSDEM PHP implementation, voctoweb implements A / B source selection (akin to voctogui) as well as audio control, two very useful features. In the following screen captures, you can see the old PHP UI on the left and the new shiny Python one on the right. The old PHP voctoweb

Voctoweb is still under development and is likely to change quite a bit until DebConf20. Still, the current version seems to works well enough to be used in production if you ever need to. Python GeoIP redirector We run multiple geographically-distributed streaming frontend servers to minimize the load on our streaming backend and to reduce overall latency. Although users can connect to the frontends directly, we typically point them to live.debconf.org and redirect connections to the nearest server. Sadly, 6 months ago MaxMind decided to change the licence on their GeoLite2 database and left us scrambling. To fix this annoying issue, Stefano Rivera wrote a Python program that uses the new database and reworked our ansible frontend server role. Since the new database cannot be redistributed freely, you'll have to get a (free) license key from MaxMind if you to use this role. Ansible & CI improvements Infrastructure as code is a living process and needs constant care to fix bugs, follow changes in DSL and to implement new features. All that to say a large part of the sprint was spent making our ansible roles and continuous integration setup more reliable, less buggy and more featureful. All in all, we merged 26 separate ansible-related merge request during the sprint! As always, if you are good with ansible and wish to help, we accept merge requests on our ansible repository :)

18 November 2017

Matthieu Caneill: MiniDebconf in Toulouse

I attended the MiniDebconf in Toulouse, which was hosted in the larger Capitole du Libre, a free software event with talks, presentation of associations, and a keysigning party. I didn't expect the event to be that big, and I was very impressed by its organization. Cheers to all the volunteers, it has been an amazing week-end! Here's a sum-up of the talks I attended. Du logiciel libre la monnaie libre Speaker: lo s The first talk I attended was, translated to English, "from free software to free money". lo s compared the 4 freedoms of free software with money, and what properties money needs to exhibit in order to be considered free. He then introduced 1, a project of free (as in free speech!) money, started in the region around Toulouse. Contrary to some distributed ledgers such as Bitcoin, 1 isn't based on an hash-based proof-of-work, but rather around a web of trust of people certifying each other, hence limiting the energy consumption required by the network to function. YunoHost Speaker: Jimmy Monin I then attended a presentation of YunoHost. Being an happy user myself, it was very nice to discover the future expected features, and also meet two of the developers. YunoHost is a Debian-based project, aimed at providing all the tools necessary to self-host applications, including email, website, calendar, development tools, and dozens of other packages. Premiers pas dans l'univers de Debian Speaker: Nicolas Dandrimont For the first talk of the MiniDebConf, Nicolas Dandrimont introduced Debian, its philosophy, and how it works with regards to upstreams and downstreams. He gave many details on the teams, the infrastructure, and the internals of Debian. Trusting your computer and system Speaker: Jonas Smedegaard Jonas introduced some security concepts, and how they are abused and often meaningless (to quote his own words, "secure is bullshit"). He described a few projects which lean towards a more secure and open hardware, for both phones and laptops. Automatiser la gestion de configuration de Debian avec Ansible Speaker: J r my Lecour J r my, from Evolix, introduced Ansible, and how they use it to manage hundreds of Debian servers. Ansible is a very powerful tool, and a huge ecosystem, in many ways similar to Puppet or Chef, except it is agent-less, using only ssh connections to communicate with remote machines. Very nice to compare their use of Ansible with mine, since that's the software I use at work for deploying experiments. Making Debian for everybody Speaker: Samuel Thibault Samuel gave a talk about accessibility, and the general availability of the tools in today's operating systems, including Debian. The lesson to take home is that we often don't do enough in this domain, particularly when considering some issues people might have that we don't always think about. Accessibility on computers (and elsewhere) should be the default, and never require complex setups. Retour d'exp rience : mise jour de milliers de terminaux Debian Speaker: Cyril Brulebois Cyril described a problem he was hired for, an update of thousands of Debian servers from wheezy to jessie, which he discovered afterwards was worse than initially thought, since the machines were running the out-of-date squeeze. Since they were not always administered with the best sysadmin practices, they were all exhibiting different configurations and different packages lists, which raised many issues and gave him interesting challenges. They were solved using Ansible, which also had the effect of standardizing their system administration practices. Retour d'exp rience : utilisation de Debian chez Evolix Speaker: Gr gory Colpart Gr gory described Evolix, a company which manages servers for their clients, and how they were inspired by Debian, for both their internal tools and their practices. It is very interesting to see that some of the Debian values can be easily exported for a more open and collaborative business. Lightning talks To close the conference, two lightning talks were presented, describing the switch from Windows XP to Debian in an ecologic association near Toulouse; and how snapshot.debian.org can be used with bisections to find the source of some regressions. Conclusion A big thank you to all the organizers and the associations who contributed to make this event a success. Cheers!

14 June 2017

Nicolas Dandrimont: DebConf 17 bursaries: update your status now!

TL;DR: if you applied for a DebConf 17 travel bursary, and you haven t accepted it yet, login to the DebConf website and update your status before June 20th or your bursary grant will be gone. *blows dust off the blog* As you might be aware, DebConf 17 is coming soon and it s gonna be the biggest DebConf in Montr al ever. Of course, what makes DebConf great is the people who come together to work on Debian, share their achievements, and help draft our cunning plans to take over the world. Also cheese. Lots and lots of cheese. To that end, the DebConf team had initially budgeted US$40,000 for travel grants ($30,000 for contributors, $10,000 for diversity and inclusion grants), allowing the bursaries team to bring people from all around the world who couldn t have made it to the conference. Our team of volunteers rated the 188 applications, we ve made a ranking (technically, two rankings : one on contribution grounds and one on D&I grounds), and we finally sent out a first round of grants last week. After the first round, the team made a new budget assessment, and thanks to the support of our outstanding sponsors, an extra $15,000 has been allocated for travel stipends during this week s team meeting, with the blessing of the DPL. We ve therefore been able to send a second round of grants today. Now, if you got a grant, you have two things to do : you need to accept your grant, and you need to update your requested amount. Both of those steps allow us to use our budget more wisely: having grants expire frees money up to get more people to the conference earlier. Having updated amounts gives us a better view of our overall budget. (You can only lower your requested amount, as we can t inflate our budget) Our system has sent mails to everyone, but it s easy enough to let that email slip (or to not receive it for some reason). It takes 30 seconds to look at the status of your request on the DebConf 17 website, and even less to do the few clicks needed for you to accept the grant. Please do so now! OK, it might take a few minutes if your SSO certificate has expired and you have to look up the docs to renew it. The deadline for the first round of travel grants (which went out last week) is June 20th. The deadline for the second round (which went out today) is June 24th. If somehow you can t login to the website before the deadline, the bursaries team has an email address you can use. We want to send out a third round of grants on June 25th, using the money people freed up: our current acceptance ratio is around 40%, and a lot of very strong applications have been deferred. We don t want them to wait up until July to get a definitive answer, so thanks for helping us! bient t Montr al !

5 December 2016

Shirish Agarwal: The Anti-Pollito squad arrest and confession

Disclaimer This is an attempt at humor and hence entirely fictional in nature. While some incidents depicted are true, the context and the story woven around them are by yours truly. None of the Mascots of Debian were hurt during the blog post

. I also disavow any responsibility for any hurt (real or imagined) to any past, current and future mascots. The attempt should not be looked upon as demeaning people who are accused of false crimes, tortured and confessions eked out of them as this happens quite a lot (In India for sure, but guess it s the same world over in various degrees). The idea is loosely inspired by Chocolate:Deep Dark Secrets. (2005) On a more positive note, let s start Being a Sunday morning woke up late to find incessant knocking on the door, incidentally mum was not at home. Opening the door, found two official looking gentleman. They asked my name, asked my credentials, tortured and arrested me for Group conspiracy of Malicious Mischief in second and third degrees . The torture was done by means of making me forcefully watch endless reruns of Norbit . While I do love Eddie Murphy, this was one of his movies he could have done without

. I guess for many people watching it once was torture enough. I *think* they were nominated for razzie awards dunno if they won it or not, but this is beside the point. Unlike the 20 years it takes for a typical case to reach to its conclusion even in the smallest court in India, due to the torture, I was made to confess (due to endless torture) and was given summary judgement. The judgement was/is as follows a. Do 100 hours of Community service in Debian in 2017. This could be done via blog posts, raising tickets in the Debian BTS or in whichever way I could be helpful to Debian. b. Write a confessional with some photographic evidence sharing/detailing some of the other members who were part of the conspiracy in view of the reduced sentence. So now, have been forced to write this confession As you all know, I won a bursary this year for debconf16. What is not known by most people is that I also got an innocuous looking e-mail titled Pollito for DPL . While I can t name all the names as investigation is still ongoing about how far-reaching the conspiracy is . The email was purportedly written by members of cabal within cabal which are in Debian. I looked at the email header to see if this was genuine and I could trace the origin but was left none the wiser, as obviously these people are far more technically advanced than to fall in simple tricks like this Anyways, secretly happy that I have been invited to be part of these elites, I did the visa thing, packed my bags and came to Debconf16. At this point in juncture, I had no idea whether it was real or I had imagined the whole thing. Then to my surprise saw this evidence of conspiracy to have Pollito as DPL, Wifi Password

evidence of conspiracy to have Pollito as DPL, Wifi Password

Just like the Illuminati the conspiracy was for all to see those who knew about it. Most people were thinking of it as a joke, but those like me who had got e-mails knew better. I knew that the thing is real, now I only needed to bide my time and knew that the opportunity would present itself. And few days later, sure enough, there was a trip planned for Table Mountain, Cape Town . Few people planned to hike to the mountain, while few chose to take the cable car till up the mountain. First glance of the cable car with table mountain as background

First glance of the cable car with table mountain as background

Quite a few people came along with us and bought tickets for the to and fro to the mountain and back. Ticket for CPT Table mountain car cable

Incidentally, I was thinking if the South African Govt. were getting the tax or not. If you look at the ticket, there is just a bar-code. In India as well as the U.S. there is TIN Tax Identification Number TIN displayed on an invoice from channeltimes.com

TIN displayed on an invoice from channeltimes.com

Few links to share what it is all about . While these should be on all invoices, need to specially check when taking high-value items. In India as shared in the article the awareness, knowledge leaves a bit to be desired. While I m drifting from the incident, it would be nice if somebody from SA could share how things work there. Moving on, we boarded the cable car. It was quite spacious cable car with I guess around 30-40 people or some more who were able to see everything along with the controller. from inside the table mountain cable car 360 degrees

from inside the table mountain cable car 360 degrees

It was a pleasant cacophony of almost two dozen or more nationalities on this 360 degrees moving chamber. I was a little worried though as it essentially is a bucket and there is always a possibility that a severe wind could damage it. Later somebody did share that some frightful incidents had occurred not too long ago on the cable car. It took about 20-25 odd minutes to get to the top of table mountain and we were presented with views such as below View from Table Mountain cable car looking down

View from Table Mountain cable car looking down

The picture I am sharing is actually when we were going down as all the pictures of going up via the cable car were over-exposed. Also, it was pretty crowded on the way up then on the way down so handling the mobile camera was not so comfortable. Once we reached up, the wind was blowing at incredible speeds. Even with my jacket and everything I was feeling cold. Most of the group around 10-12 people looked around if we could find a place to have some refreshments and get some of the energy in the body. So we all ventured to a place and placed our orders the bleh... Irish coffee at top of Table Mountain

the bleh... Irish coffee at top of Table Mountain

I was introduced to Irish Coffee few years back and have had some incredible Irish Coffees in Pune and elsewhere. I do hope to be able to make Irish Coffee at home if and when I have my own house. This is hotter than brandy and is perfect if you are suffering from cold etc if done right, really needs some skills. This is the only drink which I wanted in SA which I never got right

. As South Africa was freezing for me, this would have been the perfect antidote but the one there as well as elsewhere were all bleh. What was interesting though, was the coffee caller besides it. It looked like a simple circuit mounted on a PCB board with lights, vibrations and RFID and it worked exactly like that. I am guessing as and when the order is ready, there is an interrupt signal sent via radio waves which causes the buzzer to light and vibrate. Here s the back panel if somebody wants to take inspiration and try it as a fun project backpanel of the buzz caller

Once we were somewhat strengthened by the snacks, chai, coffee etc. we made our move to seeing the mountain. The only way to describe it is that it s similar to Raigad Fort but the plateau seemed to be bigger. The wikipedia page of Table Mountain attempts to share but I guess it s more clearly envisioned by one of the pictures shared therein. table mountain panaromic image

I have to say while Table Mountain is beautiful and haunting as it has scenes like these Some of the oldest rocks known to wo/man.

There is something there which pulls you, which reminds you of a long lost past. I could have simply sat there for hours together but as was part of the group had to keep with them. Not that I minded. The moment I was watching this, I was transported to some memories of the Himalayas about 20 odd years or so. In that previous life, I had the opportunity to be with some of the most beautiful women and also been in the most happening places, the Himalayas. I had shared years before some of my experiences I had in the Himalayas. I discontinued it as I didn t have a decent camera at that point in time. While I don t wanna digress, I would challenge anybody to experience the Himalayas and then compare. It is just something inexplicable. The beauty and the rawness that Himalayas shows makes you feel insignificant and yet part of the whole cosmos. What Paulo Cohello expressed in The Valkyries is something that could be felt in the Himalayas. Leh, Ladakh, Himachal , Garwhal, Kumaon. The list will go on forever as there are so many places, each more beautiful than the other. Most places are also extremely backpacker-friendly so if you ask around you can get some awesome deals if you want to spend more than a few days in one place. Moving on, while making small talk @olasd or Nicolas Dandrimont , the headmaster of our trip made small talk to each of us and eked out from all of us that we wanted to have Pollito as our DPL (Debian Project Leader) for 2017. Few pictures being shared below as supporting evidence as well The Pollito as DPL cabal in action

where am I or more precisely how far am I from India.

While I do not know who further up than Nicolas was on the coup which would take place. The idea was this If the current DPL steps down, we would take all and any necessary actions to make Pollito our DPL. Pollito going to SA - photo taken by Jonathan Carter

Pollito going to SA - photo taken by Jonathan Carter

This has been taken from Pollito s adventure Being a responsible journalist, I also enquired about Pollito s true history as it would not have been complete without one. This is the e-mail I got from Gunnar Wolf, a friend and DD from Mexico

Turns out, Valessio has just spent a week staying at my house And
in any case, if somebody in Debian knows about Pollito s
childhood That is me. Pollito came to our lives when we went to Congreso Internacional de
Software Libre (CISOL) in Zacatecas city. I was strolling around the
very beautiful city with my wife Regina and our friend Alejandro
Miranda, and at a shop at either Ram n L pez Velarde or Vicente
Guerrero, we found a flock of pollitos. http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/22.77111/-102.57145 Even if this was comparable to a slave market, we bought one from
them, and adopted it as our own. Back then, we were a young couple Well, we were not that young
anymore. I mean, we didn t have children. Anyway, we took Pollito with
us on several road trips, such as the only time I have crossed an
international border driving: We went to Encuentro Centroamericano de
Software Libre at Guatemala city in 2012 (again with Alejandro), and
you can see several Pollito pics at: http://gwolf.org/album/road-trip-ecsl-2012-guatemala-0 Pollito likes travelling. Of course, when we were to Nicaragua for
DebConf, Pollito tagged along. It was his first flight as a passenger
(we never asked about his previous life in slavery; remember, Pollito
trust no one). Pollito felt much welcome with the DebConf crowd. Of course, as
Pollito is a free spirit, we never even thought about forcing him to
come back with us. Pollito went to Switzerland, and we agreed to meet
again every year or two. It s always nice to have a chat with him. Hugs!

So with that backdrop I would urge fellow Debianities to take up the slogans LONG LIVE THE DPL ! LONG LIVE POLLITO ! LONG LIVE POLLITO THE DPL ! The first step to make Pollito the DPL is to ensure he has a @debian.org (pollito@debian.org) We also need him to be made a DD because only then can he become a DPL. In solidarity and in peace

Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #caller, #confession, #Debconf16, #debian, #Fiction, #history, #Pollito, #Pollito as DPL, #Table Mountain, Cabal, memories, south africa

20 September 2016

Gunnar Wolf: Proposing a GR to repeal the 2005 vote for declassification of the debian-private mailing list

For the non-Debian people among my readers: The following post presents bits of the decision-taking process in the Debian project. You might find it interesting, or terribly dull and boring :-) Proceed at your own risk. My reason for posting this entry is to get more people to read the accompanying options for my proposed General Resolution (GR), and have as full a ballot as possible. Almost three weeks ago, I sent a mail to the debian-vote mailing list. I'm quoting it here in full:

Some weeks ago, Nicolas Dandrimont proposed a GR for declassifying
debian-private[1]. In the course of the following discussion, he
accepted[2] Don Armstrong's amendment[3], which intended to clarify the
meaning and implementation regarding the work of our delegates and the
powers of the DPL, and recognizing the historical value that could lie
within said list.
[1] https://www.debian.org/vote/2016/vote_002
[2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2016/07/msg00108.html
[3] https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2016/07/msg00078.html
In the process of the discussion, several people objected to the
amended wording, particularly to the fact that "sufficient time and
opportunity" might not be sufficiently bound and defined.
I am, as some of its initial seconders, a strong believer in Nicolas'
original proposal; repealing a GR that was never implemented in the
slightest way basically means the Debian project should stop lying,
both to itself and to the whole free software community within which
it exists, about something that would be nice but is effectively not
implementable.
While Don's proposal is a good contribution, given that in the
aforementioned GR "Further Discussion" won 134 votes against 118, I
hereby propose the following General Resolution:
=== BEGIN GR TEXT ===
Title: Acknowledge that the debian-private list will remain private.
1. The 2005 General Resolution titled "Declassification of debian-private
   list archives" is repealed.
2. In keeping with paragraph 3 of the Debian Social Contract, Debian
   Developers are strongly encouraged to use the debian-private mailing
   list only for discussions that should not be disclosed.
=== END GR TEXT ===
Thanks for your consideration,
--
Gunnar Wolf
(with thanks to Nicolas for writing the entirety of the GR text ;-) )

Yesterday, I spoke with the Debian project secretary, who confirmed my proposal has reached enough Seconds (that is, we have reached five people wanting the vote to happen), so I could now formally do a call for votes. Thing is, there are two other proposals I feel are interesting, and should be part of the same ballot, and both address part of the reasons why the GR initially proposed by Nicolas didn't succeed:

Ian Jackson's Acknowledge difficulty of declassifying debian-private makes explicit the role of the listmasters and allows for a formal declassification process to take place, as long as the privacy guarantees we had after the 2005 GR are not diminished.
Iain Lane's reply to Ian is not yet formally proposed, but makes it spelt out that no declassification should ever occur unless all of the involved authors have explicitly consented

So, once more (and finally!), why am I posting this?

To invite Iain to formally propose his text as an option to mine
To invite more DDs to second the available options
To publicize the ongoing discussion

~~I plan to do the formal call for votes by Friday 23.~~
[update] Kurt informed me that the discussion period started yesterday, when I received the 5th second. The minimum discussion period is two weeks, so I will be doing a call for votes at or after 2016-10-03.

4 December 2015

Lunar: Why is Jack so angry?

Last summer, Innuendo Studios made a series of 6 short videos trying to understand why would anyone get involved in a coordinated harrasment campaign. The recent articles making straw man arguments and gross mischaracterization of the actions of people trying to grow the pool of free software contributors reminded me of these videos, especially the fifth episode which describes why some people get so angry when others point out that maybe the general homogeneity of backgrounds is also related to how we treat people. Guess we can transpose one of the explanation in the video to free software communities:

Bad People do bad things; a sexist is a wife-beater or sexual assailant; I am neither; therefore I am a Good Person and the things I do are good; I work on free software where people report sexist biases; therefore they say I am a wife-beater or sexual assailant; this is a false and ridiculous claim; therefore they are bad.

This slightly helps to better understand why some people would attack efforts that don't concern them so strongly. Sadly, it doesn't help much with what we could do about it. Perhaps we can help them understand that they might be just as biased as everyone else living in an institutionally sexist and racist society. This does not make them bad people. It's just something we all need to keep in mind to improve the situation. (Also, be sure to read the follow-up post if you watch the series until the last episode.) Thanks to Nicolas Dandrimont for his comments and suggestions.

1 April 2015

Raphaël Hertzog: My Free Software Activities in March 2015

My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donators (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me. Debian LTS This month I have been paid to work 15.25 hours on Debian LTS. In that time I did the following:

CVE triage: I pushed 37 commits to the security tracker and contacted 20 maintainers about security issues affecting their packages.
I started a small helper script based on the new JSON output of the security tracker (see #761859 for details). It s not ready yet but will make it easier to detect issues where the LTS team lags behind the security team, and other divergences like this and will speed up future CVE triage work (once done).
I sent DLA-174-1 (tcpdump update fixing 3 CVE) after having received a debdiff from the Romain Fran oise.
I prepared DLA-175-1 on gnupg, fixing 3 CVE.
I prepared DLA-180-1 on gnutls26, fixing 3 CVE.

That s it for the paid work. But still about LTS, I proposed two events for Debconf 15:

Inner workings of an unusual team in Debian: the Long Term Support team: a generic presentation of the team and the project;
Preparing for Wheezy LTS: a work session between the security team and the LTS team.

In my last Freexian LTS report, I mentioned briefly that it would be nice to have a logo for the LTS project. Shortly after I got a first logo prepared by Damien Escoffier and a few more followed: they are available on a wiki page (and the logo you see above is from him!). Following a suggestion of Paul Wise, I registered the logo request on another wiki page dedicated to artwork requests. That kind of collaboration is awesome! Thanks to all the artists involved in Debian. Debian packaging Django. This month has seen no less than 3 upstream point releases packaged for Debian (1.7.5, 1.7.6 and 1.7.7) and they have been accepted by the release team into Jessie. I m pleased with this tolerance as I have argued the case for it multiple times in the past given the sane upstream release policy (bugfix only in a given released branch). Python code analysis. I discovered a few months ago a tool combining the power of multiple Python code analysis tools: it s prospector. I just filed a Request for Package for it (see #781165) and someone already volunteered to package it, yay \o/ update-rc.d and systemd. While working on a Kali version based on Jessie, I got hit by what boils down to a poor interaction between systemd and update-rc.d (see #746580) and after some exchanges with other affected users I raised the severity to serious as we really ought to do something about it before release. I also opened #781155 on openbsd-inetd as its usage of inetd.service instead of openbsd-inetd.service (which is only provided as a symlink to the former) leads to multiple small issues. Misc Debian France. The general assembly is over and the new board elected its new president: it s now official, I m no longer Debian France s president. Good luck to Nicolas Dandrimont who took on this responsibility. Salt s openssh formula. I improved salt s openssh formula to make it possible to manage the /etc/ssh/ssh_known_hosts file referencing the public SSH keys of other managed minions. Tendenci.com. I was looking for a free software solution to handle membership management of a large NPO and I discovered Tendenci. It looked very interesting feature wise and written with a language/framework that I enjoy (Python/Django). But while it s free software, there s no community at all. The company that wrote it released it under a free software license and it really looks like that they did intend to build a community but they failed at it. When I looked their development forums were web-based and mostly empty with only initial discussion of the current developers and no reply from anybody there s also no mention of an IRC channel or a mailing list. I sent them a mail to see what kind of collaboration we could expect if we opted for their software and got no reply. A pity, really. What free software membership management solution would you use when you have more than 10000 members to handle and when you want to use the underlying database to offer SSO authentication to multiple external services? Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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16 March 2015

Bits from Debian: Debian is now welcoming applicants for Outreachy and GSoC Summer 2015

We'd like to reshare a post from Nicolas Dandrimont. Hi all, I am delighted to announce that Debian will be participating in the next round of Outreachy and GSoC, and that we are currently welcoming applications!

Outreachy helps people from groups underrepresented in free and open source software get involved. The current round of internships is open to women (cis and trans), trans men, genderqueer people, and all participants of the Ascend Project regardless of gender. GSoC 2015 logo

Google Summer of Code is a global program, sponsored by Google, that offers post-secondary student developers ages 18 and older stipends to write code for various open source software projects. Interns for both programs are granted a $5500 stipend (in three installments) allowing them to dedicate their summer to working full-time on Debian. Our amazing team of mentors has listed their project ideas on the Debian wiki, and we are now welcoming applicants for both programs. If you want to apply for an internship with Debian this summer, please fill out the template for either Outreachy or GSoC. If you re eligible to both programs, we ll encourage you to apply to both (using the same application), as Debian only has funds for a single Outreachy intern this round. Don t wait up! The application period for Outreachy ends March 24th, and the GSoC application period ends March 27th. We really want applicants to start contributing to their project before making our selection, so that mentors can get a feel of how working with their intern will be like for three months. The small task is a requirement for Outreachy, and we re strongly encouraging GSoC applicants to abide by that rule too. To contribute in the best conditions, you shouldn t wait for the last minute to apply :-) I hope we ll work with a lot of great interns this summer. If you think you re up for the challenge, it s time to apply! If you have any doubts, or any question, drop us a line on the soc-coordination mailing list or come by on our IRC channel (#debian-soc on irc.debian.org) and we ll do our best to guide you.

19 February 2015

Nicolas Dandrimont: We need your help to make GSoC and Outreachy in Debian a success this summer!

Hi everyone, A quick announcement: Debian has applied to the Google Summer of Code, and will also participate in Outreachy (formerly known as the Outreach Program for Women) for the Summer 2015 round! Those two mentoring programs are a great way for our project to bootstrap new ideas, give an new impulse to some old ones, and of course to welcome an outstanding team of motivated, curious, lively new people among us. We need projects and mentors to sign up really soon (before February 27th, that s next week), as our project list is what Google uses to evaluate our application to GSoC. Projects proposals should be described on our wiki page. We have three sections:

Coding projects with confirmed mentors are proposed to both GSoC and Outreachy applicants
Non-Coding projects with confirmed mentors are proposed only to Outreachy applicants
Project ideas without confirmed mentors will only happen if a mentor appears. They are kept on the wiki page until the application period starts, as we don t want to give applicants false hopes of being picked for a project that won t happen.

Once you re done, or if you have any questions, drop us a line on our mailing-list (soc-coordination@lists.alioth.debian.org), or on #debian-soc on OFTC. We also would LOVE to be able to welcome more Outreachy interns. So far, and thanks to our DPL, Debian has committed to fund one internship (US$6500). If we want more Outreachy interns, we need your help :). If you, or your company, have some money to put towards an internship, please drop us a line at opw@debian.org and we ll be in touch. Some of the successes of our Outreachy alumni include the localization of the Debian Installer to a new locale, improvements in the sources.debian.net service, documentation of the debbugs codebase, and a better integration of AppArmor profiles in Debian. Thanks a lot for your help!

8 September 2014

Jaldhar Vyas: Debconf 14 - Days 1 and 2

Unfortunately I was not able to attend debconf this year but thanks to the awesome video team the all the talks are available for your viewing pleasure. In order to recreate an authentic Portland experience, I took my laptop into the shower along with a vegan donut and had my children stand outside yelling excerpts from salon.com in whiny Canadianesque accents. Here are some notes I took as I watched the talks. Welcome Talk

Why is everyone on stage wearing shorts? Is this a thing now?
Langasek is pronounced with a 'sh' I did not know that.
Kees is pronounced 'case' I also did not know that.
Steve missed a good opportunity for a "Who moved my cheese?" joke. (Hey its not any more obscure than the "white Chevy Nova" joke.)
A well-deserved award to Russ Allbery from some of the UK people for being the voice of reason on the mailing lists. See Vincent Sanders blog for details.

Debian in the Dark Ages of Free software - Stefan Zacchiroli

More shorts. I am starting to feel overdressed.
Stefan reminisces about how he got involved in Free Software and his philosophy of the same. A good introduction for anyone wondering what
makes a Debian hacker tick.
We should be concerned about software freedom in the new "cloud" environments. Debian can play an important role in this by making it really simple for
users to set up their own cloud environments. My take: the focus should
be on free standards and protocols. The power that Google, Facebook etc.
have is drastically reduced if it is easy to jump ship.

Weapons of the Geek - Gabriella Coleman

pro: no shorts con: womens slacks
Intriguing anthropological investigation into Anonymous and how it/they relate to Free Software.
Coc acknowledged then ignored. Why do we need it again?
"Anonymous has cabals ... [that] make the cabals within Debian look like childs play."

bugs.debian.org -- Database Ho! - Don Armstrong

I would settle for a lungi at this point but noooo shorts again. (plaid to boot.)
The return of my yearly guilt about undertaking to Don to add RSS support to debbugs way back at debconf 10 and not following up on it. Damn it, I am going to get this done now.
Sadly, the initial part of the stream is missing and it begans right in the middle of Don saying something interesting.

"I have to admit my primary motivation for giving a talk was to try to force myself into actually doing the work I'm talking about."
Stats porn. The BTS is growing at a phenomenal rate. bugs opened 142/day. But only 95/day closed.

Grub Ancient and Modern - Colin and Watson

pro: no shorts con: kilt
I was interested in this talk because one of these days I want to get GRUB 2 running on Debian Minix but a lot went over my head so I'll have to do some
more research first.

One year of fedmsg in Debian - Nicolas Dandrimont

trouser status: undetermined
Problem: There are many different services providing information in Debian but they do not interop very well.
fedmsg is a unified message bus originally developed by Fedora who were facing a similar problem.

It has now been implemented in Debian.

Coming of Age: My Life with Debian - Christine Spang

trouser sta- oh the hell with this.
Another talk which is more biographical than technical. Again, useful to help understand the motivations of hackers.
What interests me is that for younger generations it was open source which was a novel idea whereas for those of who grew up in the 8-bit era, having
to hack on a computer was expected (whether you wanted to or not and it was
proprietary software you couldn't share which was considered new and strange.

Status report of the Debian Printing Team - Didier Raboud

Ou est les pantalons? Je ne sais pas. (Apologies to Mme Terzini.)
Kudos to Didier for taking up this augean task mostly on his own. Despite the long-promised "paperless" office I need to be able to print and I was
pleasantly surprised that my new xerox all-in-one worked under Debian with
very little hassle.
Brother sucks. Don't buy their printers. Ditto for Epson and Samsung.
Buy HP instead.

31 August 2014

Alexander Wirt: cgit on alioth.debian.org

Recently I was doing some work on the alioth infrastructure like fixing things or cleaning up things. One of the more visible things I done was the switch from gitweb to cgit. cgit is a lot of faster and looks better than gitweb. The list of repositories is generated every hour. The move also has the nice effect that user repositories are available via the cgit index again. I don t plan to disable the old gitweb, but I created a bunch of redirect rules that - hopefully - redirect most use cases of gitweb to the equivalent cgit url. If I broke something, please tell me, if I missed a common use case, please tell me. You can usually reach me on #alioth@oftc or via mail (formorer@d.o) People also asked me to upload my cgit package to Debian, the package is now waiting in NEW. Thanks to Nicolas Dandrimont (olasd) we also have a patch included that generates proper HTTP returncodes if repos doesn t exist.

22 March 2014

Nicolas Dandrimont: Debian proposals in GSoC 2014

The GSoC student application period is over, and the last two days were pretty interesting. For a few years now, Olly Betts has provided us with a spreadsheet to graph the number of applicants to an organization over time. Here s the graph for Debian this year:

(Historical graphs: 2013, 2012. Spreadsheet available from Olly s blog) On Wednesday, I was thinking hmm, 30 applicants, this is a slow year . Well, the number of proposals more than doubled in the last two days, to conclude on a whooping 68 applications! The last one was submitted just three seconds before the deadline If you want to take a look at the proposals, head over to the Debian wiki. Time to get on reviewing! The final student acceptances will be published in just less than a month, on April 21st.

8 August 2013

Nicolas Dandrimont: Hello from DebCamp

Small update as someone was complaining about the lack of pictures from DebCamp on planet. Not to worry, everything is going fine, and some of the most important stuff is ready

You can see a few pictures from the gallery. The view from the venue is quite outstanding (it was better when there was some sun on Tuesday, but my camera battery was out ). On my TODO-list:

A lot of mentors.d.n related stuff : prototyping things to make our codebase more bearable by actually using other people s work, e.g. debianqueued, firehose, , and building upon Lucas s idea from his new contributor survey (see the quite vague idea at the bottom)
FedMsg stuff (will probably pick up when Simon arrives)
Some 3D-printing packaging stuff (actually getting software in NEW, I got started on Printrun, and maybe Slic3r)

See you there!

14 July 2013

Nicolas Dandrimont: Bootstrapping fedmsg for Debian

As you might (or might not) know, this summer, I have taken on mentoring of a GSoC project by Simon Chopin (a.k.a. laarmen) which goal is to bring fedmsg, the Fedora Infrastructure message bus, to Debian. Most of the work I ll be talking about here is Simon s work, please send all the praise towards him (I can take the blame, though). What is this about? As the project proposal states, the idea is to provide Debian with a unified, real-time, and open mechanism of communication between its services. This communication bus would allow anyone, anywhere, to start consuming messages and reacting to events happening in Debian s infrastructure:

trigger a test build on a git push to a source repository
trigger automated testing (piuparts, lintian) as soon as an upload hits the archive
get a desktop notification when a package you care about gets changed

When we told upstream about our plan of adapting fedmsg to work on Debian, they were thrilled. And they have been very supportive of the project. How is the project going? Are you excited? I know I m excited. yep, he's excited too

Well, the general idea was easy enough, but the task at hand is a challenge. First of all, fedmsg has a lot of (smallish) dependencies, most of them new to Debian. Thanks to Simon s work during the bonding period, and thanks to paultag s careful reviews, the first batch of packages (the first dependency level, comprising kitchen, bunch, m2ext, grapefruit, txws, txzmq and stomper) is currently sitting in the NEW queue. The four remaining packages (fabulous, moksha.common, moksha.hub and fedmsg proper) are mostly ready, waiting in the Debian Python Module Team SVN repository for a review and sponsorship. While we re waiting for the packages to trickle into Debian, Simon is not twiddling his thumbs. Work has taken place on a few fronts:

Getting fedmsg integrated to mentors.debian.net (actually sending the first messages from Debian s infrastructure)
Writing a (stop-gap) wrapper to convert some of our mail broadcasts (debian-devel-changes, debian-bugs-dist) into fedmsg messages, until a more proper integration can be done
Working on reliability of the message transport, following some concerns raised by DSA.

fedmsging mentors.debian.net Package backports mentors.debian.net was chosen because I m an admin and could do the integration quickly. That involved backporting the eleven aforementioned packages, plus zeromq3 and python-zmq (that only have TCP_KEEPALIVE on recent versions), to wheezy, as that s what the mentors.d.n host is running. (Also, python-zmq needs a new-ish cython to build so I had to backport that too). Thankfully, those were no-changes backports, that were easily scripted, using a pbuilder hook to allow the packages to depend on previously built packages. I have made a wheezy package repository available here. It s signed with my GnuPG key, ID 0xB8E5087766475AAF, which should be fairly well connected. Code changes After Simon s initial setup of debexpo (which is not an easy task), the code changes have been fairly simple (yes, this is just a proof of concept). You can see them on top of the live branch on debexpo s sources. I finally had the time to make them live earlier this week, and mentors.debian.net has been sending messages on Debian s fedmsg bus ever since. Deployment mentors.d.n sends its messages on five endpoints, tcp://mentors.debian.net:3000 through tcp://mentors.debian.net:3004. That is one endpoint per WSGI worker, plus one for the importer process(es). You can tap in directly, by following the instructions below. debmessenger Debmessenger is the stop-gap email-to-fedmsg bridge that Simon is developing. The goal is to create some activity on the bus without disrupting or modifying any infrastructure service. It s written in hy, and it leverages the existing Debian-related python modules to do its work, using inotify to react when a mail gets dropped in a Maildir. Right now, it s supposed to understand changes mails (received from debian-devel-changes) and bugs mail (from debian-bugs-dist). I ll work on deploying an instance of debmessenger this weekend, to create some more traffic on the bus. Reliability of the bus I suggested using fedmsg as this was something that already existed, and that solved a problem identical to the one we wanted to tackle (open interconnection of a distribution s infrastructure services). Reusing a piece of infrastructure that already works in another distro means that we can share tools, share ideas, and come up with solutions that we might not have considered when working alone. The drawback is that we have to either adapt to the tool s idiosyncrasies, or to adapt the tool to our way of working. One of the main points raised by DSA when the idea of using fedmsg was brought up, was that of reliability. Debian s infrastructure is spread in datacenters (and basements

) all over the world, and thus faces different challenges than Fedora s infrastructure, which is more tightly integrated. Therefore, we have to ensure that a critical consumer (say, a buildd) doesn t miss any message it would need for its operation (say, that a package got accepted). There has been work upstream, to ensure that fedmsg doesn t lose messages, but we need to take extra steps to make sure that a given consumer can replay the messages it has missed, should the need arise. Simon has started a discussion on the upstream mailing list, and is working on a prototype replay mechanism. Obviously, we need to test scenarios of endpoints dropping off the grid, hence the work on getting some activity on the bus. How can I take a look? a.k.a. Another one rides the bus

(Picture Yves-Laurent Allaert, CC-By-SA v2.5 / GFDL v1.2 license) So, the bus is pretty quiet right now, as only two kinds of events are triggering messages: a new upload to mentors.debian.net, and a new comment on a package there. Don t expect a lot of traffic. However, generating some traffic is easy enough: just login to mentors.d.n, pick a package of mine (not much choice there), or a real package you want to review, and leave a comment. poof, a message appears. For the lazy Join #debian-fedmsg on OFTC, and look for messages from the debmsg bot. Current example output:

01:30:25 <debmsg> debexpo.voms-api-java.upload (unsigned) --
02:03:16 <debmsg> debexpo.ocamlbricks.comment (unsigned) --

(definitely needs some work, but it s a start) Listening in by yourself You need to setup fedmsg. I have a repository of wheezy packages and one of sid packages, signed with my GnuPG key, ID 0xB8E5087766475AAF. You can add them to a file in /etc/apt/sources.list.d like this:

deb http://perso.crans.org/dandrimont/fedmsg-<sid wheezy>/ ./

Then, import my GnuPG key into apt (apt-key add), update your sources (apt-get update), and install fedmsg (apt-get install python-fedmsg). The versions are << to anything real, so you should get the real thing as soon as it hits the archive. Finally, in /etc/fedmsg.d/endpoints.py, you can comment-out the Fedora entries, and add a Debian entry like this:

    "debian": [
        "tcp://fedmsg.olasd.eu:9940",
    ],

fedmsg.olasd.eu runs a fedmsg gateway connected to the mentors.d.n endpoints, and thus forwards all the mentors messages. It ll be connected to debmessenger as soon as it s running too. To actually see mesages, disable validate_signatures in /etc/fedmsg.d/ssl.py, setting it to False. The Debian messages aren t signed yet (it s on the roadmap), and we don t ship the Fedora certificates so we can t authenticate their messages either. Finally, you can run fedmsg-tail --really-pretty in a terminal. As soon as there s some activity, you should get that kind of output (color omitted):

 
  "i": 1, 
  "msg":  
    "version": "2.0.9-1.1", 
    "uploader": "Emmanuel Bourg <ebourg@apache.org>"
   , 
  "topic": "org.debian.dev.debexpo.voms-api-java.upload", 
  "username": "expo", 
  "timestamp": 1373758221.491809

Enjoy real-time updates from your favorite piece of infrastructure! What s next? While Simon continues working on reliability, and gets started on message signing according to his schedule, I ll take a look at deploying the debmessenger bridge, and making the pretty-printer outputs useful for our topics. There will likely be some changes to the messages sent by debexpo, as we got some feedback from the upstream developers about making them work in the fedmsg tool ecosystem (datanommer and datagrepper come to mind). You can tune in to Simon s weekly reports on the soc-coordination list, and look at the discussions with upstream on the fedora messaging-sig list. You can also catch us on IRC, #debian-soc on OFTC. We re also hanging out on the upstream channel, #fedora-apps on freenode.

Next.