Search Results: "Sandro Tosi"

9 January 2025

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Tracker.debian.org updates, Salsa CI improvements, Coinstallable build-essential, Python 3.13 transition, Ruby 3.3 transition and more! (by Anupa Ann Joseph, Stefano Rivera)

Debian Contributions: 2024-12 Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

Tracker.debian.org updates, by Rapha l Hertzog Profiting from end-of-year vacations, Rapha l prepared for tracker.debian.org to be upgraded to Debian 12 bookworm by getting rid of the remnants of python3-django-jsonfield in the code (it was superseded by a Django-native field). Thanks to Philipp Kern from the Debian System Administrators team, the upgrade happened on December 23rd. Rapha l also improved distro-tracker to better deal with invalid Maintainer fields which recently caused multiples issues in the regular data updates (#1089985, MR 105). While working on this, he filed #1089648 asking dpkg tools to error out early when maintainers make such mistakes. Finally he provided feedback to multiple issues and merge requests (MR 106, issues #21, #76, #77), there seems to be a surge of interest in distro-tracker lately. It would be nice if those new contributors could stick around and help out with the significant backlog of issues (in the Debian BTS, in Salsa).

Salsa CI improvements, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n Given that the Debian buildd network now relies on sbuild using the unshare backend, and that Salsa CI s reproducibility testing needs to be reworked (#399), Santiago resumed the work for moving the build job to use sbuild. There was some related work a few months ago that was focused on sbuild with the schroot and the sudo backends, but those attempts were stalled for different reasons, including discussions around the convenience of the move (#296). However, using sbuild and unshare avoids all of the drawbacks that have been identified so far. Santiago is preparing two merge requests: !568 to introduce a new build image, and !569 that moves all the extract-source related tasks to the build job. As mentioned in the previous reports, this change will make it possible for more projects to use the pipeline to build the packages (See #195). Additional advantages of this change include a more optimal way to test if a package builds twice in a row: instead of actually building it twice, the Salsa CI pipeline will configure sbuild to check if the clean target of debian/rules correctly restores the source tree, saving some CPU cycles by avoiding one build. Also, the images related to Ubuntu won t be needed anymore, since the build job will create chroots for different distributions and vendors from a single common build image. This will save space in the container registry. More changes are to come, especially those related to handling projects that customize the pipeline and make use of the extract-source job.

Coinstallable build-essential, by Helmut Grohne Building on the gcc-for-host work of last December, a notable patch turning build-essential Multi-Arch: same became feasible. Whilst the change is small, its implications and foundations are not. We still install crossbuild-essential-$ARCH for cross building and due to a britney2 limitation, we cannot have it depend on the host s C library. As a result, there are workarounds in place for sbuild and pbuilder. In turning build-essential Multi-Arch: same, we may actually express these dependencies directly as we install build-essential:$ARCH instead. The crossbuild-essential-$ARCH packages will continue to be available as transitional dummy packages.

Python 3.13 transition, by Colin Watson and Stefano Rivera Building on last month s work, Colin, Stefano, and other members of the Debian Python team fixed 3.13 compatibility bugs in many more packages, allowing 3.13 to now be a supported but non-default version in testing. The next stage will be to switch to it as the default version, which will start soon. Stefano did some test-rebuilds of packages that only build for the default Python 3 version, to find issues that will block the transition. The default version transition typically shakes out some more issues in applications that (unlike libraries) only test with the default Python version. Colin also fixed Sphinx 8.0 compatibility issues in many packages, which otherwise threatened to get in the way of this transition.

Ruby 3.3 transition, by Lucas Kanashiro The Debian Ruby team decided to ship Ruby 3.3 in the next Debian release, and Lucas took the lead of the interpreter transition with the assistance of the rest of the team. In order to understand the impact of the new interpreter in the ruby ecosystem, ruby-defaults was uploaded to experimental adding ruby3.3 as an alternative interpreter, and a mass rebuild of reverse dependencies was done here. Initially, a couple of hundred packages were failing to build, after many rounds of rebuilds, adjustments, and many uploads we are down to 30 package build failures, of those, 21 packages were asked to be removed from testing and for the other 9, bugs were filled. All the information to track this transition can be found here. Now, we are waiting for PHP 8.4 to finish to avoid any collision. Once it is done the Ruby 3.3 transition will start in unstable.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Enrico Zini redesigned the way nm.debian.org stores historical audit logs and personal data backups.
  • Carles Pina submitted a new package (python-firebase-messaging) and prepared updates for python3-ring-doorbell.
  • Carles Pina developed further po-debconf-manager: better state transition, fixed bugs, automated assigning translators and reviewers on edit, updating po header files automatically, fixed bugs, etc.
  • Carles Pina reviewed, submitted and followed up the debconf templates translation (more than 20 packages) and translated some packages (about 5).
  • Santiago continued to work on DebConf 25 organization related tasks, including handling the logo survey and results. Stefano spent time on DebConf 25 too.
  • Santiago continued the exploratory work about linux livepatching with Emmanuel Arias. Santiago and Emmanuel found a challenge since kpatch won t fully support linux in trixie and newer, so they are exploring alternatives such as klp-build.
  • Helmut maintained the /usr-move transition filing bugs in e.g. bubblewrap, e2fsprogs, libvpd-2.2-3, and pam-tmpdir and corresponding on related issues such as kexec-tools and live-build. The removal of the usrmerge package unfortunately broke debootstrap and was quickly reverted. Continued fallout is expected and will continue until trixie is released.
  • Helmut sent patches for 10 cross build failures and worked with Sandro Knau on stuck Qt/KDE patches related to cross building.
  • Helmut continued to maintain rebootstrap removing the need to build gnu-efi in the process.
  • Helmut collaborated with Emanuele Rocca and Jochen Sprickerhof on an interesting adventure in diagnosing why gcc would FTBFS in recent sbuild.
  • Helmut proposed supporting build concurrency limits in coreutils s nproc. As it turns out nproc is not a good place for this functionality.
  • Colin worked with Sandro Tosi and Andrej Shadura to finish resolving the multipart vs. python-multipart name conflict, as mentioned last month.
  • Colin upgraded 48 Python packages to new upstream versions, fixing four CVEs and a number of compatibility bugs with recent Python versions.
  • Colin issued an openssh bookworm update with a number of fixes that had accumulated over the last year, especially fixing GSS-API key exchange which had been quite broken in bookworm.
  • Stefano fixed a minor bug in debian-reimbursements that was disallowing combination PDFs containing JAL tickets, encoded in UTF-16.
  • Stefano uploaded a stable update to PyPy3 in bookworm, catching up with security issues resolved in cPython.
  • Stefano fixed a regression in the eventlet from his Python 3.13 porting patch.
  • Stefano continued discussing a forwarded patch (renaming the sysconfigdata module) with cPython upstream, ending in a decision to drop the patch from Debian. This will need some continued work.
  • Anupa participated in the Debian Publicity team meeting in December, which discussed the team activities done in 2024 and projects for 2025.

8 January 2025

Sandro Tosi: HOWTO remove Reddit (web) "Recent" list of communities

If you go on reddit.com via browser, on the left column you can see a section called "RECENT" with the list of the last 5 communities recently visited.If you want to remove them, say for privacy reasons (shared device, etc.), there's no simple way to do so: there's not "X" button next to it, your profile page doesn't offer a way to clear that out. you could clear all the data from the website, but that seems too extreme, no?Enter Chrome's "Developer Tools"While on reddit.com open Menu > More Tools > Developers tool, go on the Application tab, Storage > Local storage and select reddit.com; on the center panel you see a list of key-value pairs, look for the key "recent-subreddits-store"; you can see the list of the 5 communities in the JSON below.If you wanna get rid of the recently viewed communities list, simply delete that key, refresh reddit.com and voila, empty list.Note: I'm fairly sure i read about this method somewhere, i simply cant remember where, but it's definitely not me who came up with it. I just needed to use it recently and had to back track memories to figure it out again, so it's time to write it down.

2 January 2025

Colin Watson: Free software activity in December 2024

Most of my Debian contributions this month were sponsored by Freexian, as well as one direct donation via Liberapay (thanks!). OpenSSH I issued a bookworm update with a number of fixes that had accumulated over the last year, especially fixing GSS-API key exchange which was quite broken in bookworm. base-passwd A few months ago, the adduser maintainer started a discussion with me (as the base-passwd maintainer) and the shadow maintainer about bringing all three source packages under one team, since they often need to cooperate on things like user and group names. I agreed, but hadn t got round to doing anything about it until recently. I ve now officially moved it under team maintenance. debconf Gioele Barabucci has been working on eliminating duplicated code between debconf and cdebconf, ultimately with the goal of migrating to cdebconf (which I m not sure I m convinced of as a goal, but if we can make improvements to both packages as part of working towards it then there s no harm in that). I finally got round to reviewing and merging confmodule changes in each of debconf and cdebconf. This caused an installer regression due to a weirdness in cdebconf-udeb s packaging, which I fixed - sorry about that! I ve also been dealing with a few patch submissions that had been in my queue for a long time, but more on that next month if all goes well. CI issues I noticed and fixed a problem with Restrictions: needs-sudo in autopkgtest. I fixed broken aptly images in the Salsa CI pipeline. Python team Last month, I mentioned some progress on sorting out the multipart vs. python-multipart name conflict in Debian (#1085728), and said that I thought we d be able to finish it soon. I was right! We got it all done this month: The Python 3.13 transition continues, and last month we were able to add it to the supported Python versions in testing. (The next step will be to make it the default.) I fixed lots of problems in aid of this, including: Sphinx 8.0 removed some old intersphinx_mapping syntax which turned out to still be in use by many packages in Debian. The fixes for this were individually trivial, but there were a lot of them: I found that twisted 24.11.0 broke tests in buildbot and wokkel, and fixed those. I packaged python-flatdict, needed for a new upstream version of python-semantic-release. I tracked down a test failure in vdirsyncer (which I ve been using for some years, but had never previously needed to modify) and contributed a fix upstream. I fixed some packages to tolerate future versions of dh-python that will drop their dependency on python3-setuptools: I fixed django-cte to remove a build-dependency on the obsolete python3-nose package. I added Django 5.1 support to django-polymorphic. (There are a number of other packages that still need work here.) I fixed various other build/test failures: I upgraded these packages to new upstream versions: I updated the team s library style guide to remove material related to Python 2 and early versions of Python 3, which is no longer relevant to any current Python packaging work. Other Python upstream work I happened to notice a Twisted upstream issue requesting the removal of the deprecated twisted.internet.defer.returnValue, realized it was still used in many places in Debian, and went on a PR-filing spree informed by codesearch to try to reduce the future impact of such a change on Debian: Other small fixes Santiago Vila has been building the archive with make --shuffle (also see its author s explanation). I fixed associated bugs in cccc (contributed upstream), groff, and spectemu. I backported an upstream patch to putty to fix undefined behaviour that affected use of the small keypad . I removed groff s Recommends: libpaper1 (#1091375, #1091376), since it isn t currently all that useful and was getting in the way of a transition to libpaper2. I filed an upstream bug suggesting better integration in this area.

5 September 2024

Sandro Tosi: TL;DR belongs at the top of an article

TL;DR
It has happen to probably everyone to read an article, reach the end of it only to see a TL;DR section right at the bottom, and thinking: "eeh i wish this would have been at the top so i didnt have to read (DR) this long article (TL) to gather its core ideas".

If the reason for "Too Long; Didn't Read" to exist is to avoid the reader to go thru the whole article to get its main points, then the natural place to present it is at the very top of said article.

So if you're planning on writing something and to add a TL;DR section (you don't have to, of course, but if you do that work too) then please position it at the very beginning of your work.

10 August 2023

Sandro Tosi: Mastodon hook for dput-ng

If you use dput-ng, you may be familiar with the Twitter hook that tweets a message when uploading a package.A similar hook is now available for Mastodon too; if interested, give it a try and comment on the MR

4 November 2021

Sandro Tosi: Python: send emails with embedded images

to send emails with images you need to use MIMEMultipart, but the basic approach: 
import smtplib

from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart
from email.mime.image import MIMEImage

msg = MIMEMultipart('alternative')
msg['Subject'] = "subject"
msg['From'] = from_addr
msg['To'] = to_addr

part = MIMEImage(open('/path/to/image', 'rb').read())

s = smtplib.SMTP('localhost')
s.sendmail(from_addr, to_addr, msg.as_string())
s.quit()

will produce an email with empty body and the image as an attachment.The better way, ie to have the image as part of the body of the email, requires to write an HTML body that refers to that image: 
import smtplib

from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart
from email.mime.text import MIMEText
from email.mime.image import MIMEImage

msg = MIMEMultipart('alternative')
msg['Subject'] = "subject
msg['From'] = from_addr
msg['To'] = to_addr

text = MIMEText('<img src="cid:image1">', 'html')
msg.attach(text)

image = MIMEImage(open('/path/to/image', 'rb').read())

# Define the image's ID as referenced in the HTML body above
image.add_header('Content-ID', '<image1>')
msg.attach(image)

s = smtplib.SMTP('localhost')
s.sendmail(from_addr, to_addr, msg.as_string())
s.quit()

The trick is to define an image with a specific Content-ID and make that the only item in an HTML body: now you have an email with contains that specific image as the only content of the body, embedded in it.

Bonus point: if you want to take a snapshot of a webpage (which is kinda the reason i needed the code above) i found it extremely useful to use the Google PageSpeed Insights API; a good description on how to use that API with Python is available at this StackOverflow answer.

UPDATE (2020-12-26): I was made aware via email that some mail providers may not display images inline when the Content-ID value is too short (say, for example, Content-ID: 1). A solution that seems to work on most of the providers is using a sequence of random chars prefixed with a dot and suffixed with a valid mail domain.

Sandro Tosi: Python: send emails with embedded images

to send emails with images you need to use MIMEMultipart, but the basic approach: 
import smtplib

from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart
from email.mime.image import MIMEImage

msg = MIMEMultipart('alternative')
msg['Subject'] = "subject"
msg['From'] = from_addr
msg['To'] = to_addr

part = MIMEImage(open('/path/to/image', 'rb').read())

s = smtplib.SMTP('localhost')
s.sendmail(from_addr, to_addr, msg.as_string())
s.quit()

will produce an email with empty body and the image as an attachment.The better way, ie to have the image as part of the body of the email, requires to write an HTML body that refers to that image: 
import smtplib

from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart
from email.mime.text import MIMEText
from email.mime.image import MIMEImage

msg = MIMEMultipart('alternative')
msg['Subject'] = "subject
msg['From'] = from_addr
msg['To'] = to_addr

text = MIMEText('<img src="cid:image1">', 'html')
msg.attach(text)

image = MIMEImage(open('/path/to/image', 'rb').read())

# Define the image's ID as referenced in the HTML body above
image.add_header('Content-ID', '<image1>')
msg.attach(image)

s = smtplib.SMTP('localhost')
s.sendmail(from_addr, to_addr, msg.as_string())
s.quit()

The trick is to define an image with a specific Content-ID and make that the only item in an HTML body: now you have an email with contains that specific image as the only content of the body, embedded in it.

Bonus point: if you want to take a snapshot of a webpage (which is kinda the reason i needed the code above) i found it extremely useful to use the Google PageSpeed Insights API; a good description on how to use that API with Python is available at this StackOverflow answer.

UPDATE (2020-12-26): I was made aware via email that some mail providers may not display images inline when the Content-ID value is too short (say, for example, Content-ID: 1). A solution that seems to work on most of the providers is using a sequence of random chars prefixed with a dot and suffixed with a valid mail domain.

23 May 2021

Sandro Tosi: QNAP: control LCD panel and speaker

LCD PanelMost (if not all) QNAP models come with an LCD display, in my model i got a 2 lines by 16 characters each. The tool to control the panel is: 
/sbin/lcd_tool
but sometimes it's a bit stubborn in executing the commands, so as mentioned here you may want to killall -9 lcdmond and then issue the command you want; this is the snippet i'm using: 
# print a msg on the panel
killall -9 lcdmond
/sbin/lcd_tool -1 "$LINE1" -2 "$LINE2"
sleep 5
# turn off screen light
killall -9 lcdmond
/sbin/lcd_tool -f
it ain't pretty, but it gets the job done.

Speaker / BuzzerIf you look for how to make your system beep, you may find these commands: 
/sbin/pic_raw 80    Beep short
/sbin/pic_raw 81    Beep long
but they no longer work. So keep looking, i stumbled upon this post, mentioning hal_app, and that indeed works, but with a different syntax than the one presented at that link.In order to use hal_app to make a beep sound, the syntax that worked for me is: 
/sbin/hal_app --se_buzzer enc_id=0,mode=XXX
If you remove entirely mode=XXX, it produces a short beep, but here is the list of all the modes available and their results (found out via exhaustive search):

code output
0 short beep (0.5 secs)
1 long beep (1 sec)
2 3x short beeps (0.5 secs), long pause (1 sec)
3-7, 10,
15, 16, 17,
18, 19, 20		 2x long beeps (1 sec), very long pause (2 secs)
8, 9 3x long beeps (1 sec), very long pauses (2 secs)
12, 13 long beep, 2x very short pause (0.25) very short beep (0.25)
14 3x very short beep (0.25) very short pause (0.25)
(you can prepend as many 0 to the mode strings as you wish, so 000 is equivalent to 0, 000018 is equivalent to 18, and so on).PS: this article is based on my system, TVS-473 running firmware 4.5.3.1652PPS: friendly reminder that this is how you edit the crontab on a QNAP machine.

10 May 2021

Sandro Tosi: Empire State Building Lights iCalendar

I'm very lucky to be able to see the Empire State Building from my apartment windows, and at night the lights are fantastic! But i'm also curious to know what's going to be today's lights, and tomorrow, etc.I thought I'd easily find a calendar to add to gCal to show that, but i wasn't able to find any, so I made it myself: https://sandrotosi.github.io/esb-lights-calendar/

26 December 2020

Sandro Tosi: Gmail and tracker.debian.org: add a label to team emails

Recently the Python Team started the migration from Alioth mailing list to a tracker.debian.org team.Alioth mailing list, being a real ml, included a List-Id header, which is handled by Gmail natively and which you can use to create a filter based on it.Tracker.d.o instead uses a custom header, X-Distro-Tracker-Team, and Gmail doesn't allow to create filters on custom headers. But there's a solution: Google Apps Scripts.

1. Apps script and its configuration

To create a new apps script, click "New project" from the scripts dashboard: this will open a code editor, so now cut and paste this code (change the label name to match the one you want to use, and the header too if you're going to use this for another team):

function tagPythonTeamEmails()  
  
  // search for all recent threads (hours is the smallest interval searchable)
  var threads = GmailApp.search("newer_than:1h");
  // this is the label i want to apply to the messages
  var label = GmailApp.getUserLabelByName("Debian_Python_Pkgs");  // <-- EDIT THIS

  for (var i = 0; i < threads.length; i++)  
     
    // get all messages in a given thread
    var messages = threads[i].getMessages();

    // for each message in the thread
    for (var j = 0; j < messages.length; j++)  
      var message = messages[j];
      // needed to have access to the full email: headers + body
      var email = message.getRawContent();
      // this is the header i want to check for: if present, add label and archive
      if (email.indexOf("X-Distro-Tracker-Team: python") > -1)    // <-- EDIT THIS
        threads[i].addLabel(label);
        threads[i].moveToArchive();

(This code is largely inspired by this StackOverflow answer.)

Given we're going to perform changes to the emails, we need to add extra permissions to the script; first we need to toggle the option "View > Show manifest file" which will show the appsscript.json file. Once done, edit it and update the scope of the script to include: 

  "oauthScopes": [
    ...
    "https://www.googleapis.com/auth/gmail.readonly",
    "https://www.googleapis.com/auth/gmail.modify"
  ],

These new permission will be granted when we deploy the script, which we can actually do right now: from the editor window click on "Publish > Deploy from manifest..." and then "Install add-on"; it will make the app script available to operate on Gmail by opening the usual Google grants authorization popup.

2. Schedule the app script execution

Unlike filters defined on the web UI, apps scripts are not triggered every time a mail is received (there's a pub-sub mechanism, but it doesn't look like it would work for this), so if we want to execute periodically the new script, we need to create a time-driven trigger.

The simplest way is probably from the script editor (but you can also follow this doc): "View > Current project's triggers" and then "Add trigger" from there. For my specific use-case i set:

  • event source = time-driven
  • type of time based trigger = minutes timer
  • minute interval = 5 minutes
  • Failure notification settings = notify me immediately
it's not great that you have to wait 5 minutes for getting proper labels, and while it's true you can schedule the trigger for every minute, there are further considerations for that, discussed below.

3. Additional information

Be aware of quotas and limitations for Apps scripts; in particular the "Triggers total runtime" set to "90 min / day" is what led me to set the trigger every 510 mins.

Use the scripts dashboard (doc) to monitor the script execution logs, in the "My Executions" section, and specifically the "Duration" column: the script execution time depends exclusively on the number of emails to process at every execution, so fine-tune the trigger time to stay within your quota.

The newer_than search operator doesn't allow a granularity smaller than hours (although that's not even documented), so that means we're going to scan multiple times the same emails.

UPDATE (2020-12-26): I've already had to bump from every 5 to every 10 minutes, as otherwise i'd get Exception: Service invoked too many times for one day: gmail. (remember the quota!)

Sandro Tosi: QNAP firmware 4.5.1.1465: disable ssh management menu

as a good boy i just upgraded my QNAP NAS to the latest available firmware, 4.5.1.1465, but after the reboot there's an ugly surprise awaiting for meonce i ssh'd into the box to do my stuff, instead of a familiar bash prompt i'm greeted by a management menu that allows me to perform some basic management tasks or quit it and go back to the shell. i dont really need this menu (in particular because i have automations that regularly ssh into the box and they are not meant to be interactive).to disable it: edit /etc/profile and comment the line "[[ "admin" = "$USER" ]] && /sbin/qts-console-mgmt -f" (you can judge me later for sshing as root)UPDATE (2020-12-26): as pointed out in the comments, and discovered now after an upgrade, the menu comes back up after because /etc/profile is a system file for QNAP so gets replaced/updated by them often

25 December 2020

Sandro Tosi: Devils: Massimo Ruggiero's apartment building

If you enjoyed watching Devils, like me, and if you tend to obsess over tiny details that have absolutely nothing to do with the story being told, like me, and you lived in that general area, like me, then you may be curious of the location of Massimo's apartment.In several shots we can see views of both The Gherkin and the north side of Canary Wharf, so that means the building is in and around E1/E2/E3 zip codes. But London is huge, and while yes i tried to just browse Google Maps for clues, that didn't produce any result.The final clue is revealed in the 9th episode, at minute 20:10, and precisely with this shot:
at the bottom left we can see the entrance sign for Tobacco Dock, located at:So right there, just off to the right from the entrance, it's the apartment building: Park Vista Tower.The exact apartment number, i don't know, it's probably somewhere on the door or on the door frame, which can probably be seen one of the times when Sofia or others come to visit Massimo, but since that happened mid 9th episode, i'm not gonna go back to find that clue

24 October 2020

Sandro Tosi: Multiple git configurations depending on the repository path

For my work on Debian, i want to use my debian.org email address, while for my personal projects i want to use my gmail.com address.One way to change the user.email git config value is to git config --local in every repo, but that's tedious, error-prone and doesn't scale very well with many repositories (and the chances to forget to set the right one on a new repo are ~100%).The solution is to use the git-config ability to include extra configuration files, based on the repo path, by using includeIf: Content of ~/.gitconfig:
[user]
    name = Sandro Tosi
    email = <personal.address>@gmail.com

[includeIf "gitdir:~/deb/"]
    path = ~/.gitconfig-deb
Every time the git path is in ~/deb/ (which is where i have all Debian repos) the file ~/.gitconfig-deb will be included; its content:
[user]
    email = morph@debian.org
That results in my personal address being used on all repos not part of Debian, where i use my Debian email address. This approach can be extended to every other git configuration values.

11 June 2020

Sandro Tosi: Installing prometheus snmp_exporter on a QNAP nas

I've this project in the background about creating a grafana dashboard for a QNAP nas.

As the summer is ramping up, i wanted to figure out the temperature of the nas throughout the day, so.. prometheus + grafana to the rescue!

I wrote the instructions to install snmp_exporter on a linux-based QNAP nas. For now i'm using an already existing dashboard, but it's the first step to create my own.

9 May 2020

Sandro Tosi: It's a waiting game... but just how long we gotta wait?

While waiting for my priority date to become current, and with enough "quarantine time" on my hand, i just come up with a very simple Python tool to parse the USCIS Visa Bulletin to gather some data from that.

You can find code and images in this GitHub repo.

For now it only contains a single plot for the EB3 final action date; it answers a simple question: how many months ago your priority date should be if you want to file your AOS on that month. We started from FY2016, to cover the final full year of the Obama administration.

If you're interested in more classes/visas, let me know and the tool could be easily extended to cover that too. PRs are always welcome.

11 December 2016

Sandro Tosi: What's that code: Elementary S04E09

they hacked a car and around 7:27 in the episode they are analyzing the car's computer source code, that's some sweet compression they say, but it turns out it's Perl interpreter source code, with Perl replaced with Auto (after all it's the auto code right?)

https://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git/blob/HEAD:/perl.c#l431 and following lines

another interesting code copy was in The Americans (cant remember season or episode), when they were trying to acquire the ECHO program source code, what's on the screen is actually MATLAB source code

2 November 2016

Sandro Tosi: Debian source package name from the binary name

it looks like i forgot all the times how to do that, and apparently i'm not able to use google good enough to find it out quickly, let's write down one way to get the source package name from the binary package name:

dpkg-query -W -f='$ source:package \n' <list of bin pkgs>

(since it accepts a list of packages, you can xargs it).

there are probably another million ways to do that, so dont be shy and comment this post if you want to share your method

6 October 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: week 75 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday September 25 and Saturday October 1 2016: Statistics For the first time, we reached 91% reproducible packages in our testing framework on testing/amd64 using a determistic build path. (This is what we recommend to make packages in Stretch reproducible.) For unstable/amd64, where we additionally test for reproducibility across different build paths we are at almost 76% again. IRC meetings We have a poll to set a time for a new regular IRC meeting. If you would like to attend, please input your available times and we will try to accommodate for you. There was a trial IRC meeting on Friday, 2016-09-31 1800 UTC. Unfortunately, we did not activate meetbot. Despite this participants consider the meeting a success as several topics where discussed (eg changes to IRC notifications of tests.r-b.o) and the meeting stayed within one our length. Upcoming events Reproduce and Verify Filesystems - Vincent Batts, Red Hat - Berlin (Germany), 5th October, 14:30 - 15:20 @ LinuxCon + ContainerCon Europe 2016. From Reproducible Debian builds to Reproducible OpenWrt, LEDE & coreboot - Holger "h01ger" Levsen and Alexander "lynxis" Couzens - Berlin (Germany), 13th October, 11:00 - 11:25 @ OpenWrt Summit 2016. Introduction to Reproducible Builds - Vagrant Cascadian will be presenting at the SeaGL.org Conference In Seattle (USA), November 11th-12th, 2016. Previous events GHC Determinism - Bartosz Nitka, Facebook - Nara (Japan), 24th September, ICPF 2016. Toolchain development and fixes Michael Meskes uploaded bsdmainutils/9.0.11 to unstable with a fix for #830259 based on Reiner Herrmann's patch. This fixed locale_dependent_symbol_order_by_lorder issue in the affected packages (freebsd-libs, mmh). devscripts/2.16.8 was uploaded to unstable. It includes a debrepro script by Antonio Terceiro which is similar in purpose to reprotest but more lightweight; specific to Debian packages and without support for virtual servers or configurable variations. Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed The following updated packages have become reproducible in our testing framework after being fixed: The following updated packages appear to be reproducible now for reasons we were not able to figure out. (Relevant changelogs did not mention reproducible builds.) Some uploads have addressed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Reviews of unreproducible packages 77 package reviews have been added, 178 have been updated and 80 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 6 issue types have been updated: Weekly QA work As part of reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by: diffoscope development A new version of diffoscope 61 was uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb. It included contributions from: Post-release there were further contributions from: reprotest development A new version of reprotest 0.3.2 was uploaded to unstable by Ximin Luo. It included contributions from: Post-release there were further contributions from: tests.reproducible-builds.org Misc. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Holger Levsen & Chris Lamb and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.

9 August 2015

Simon Kainz: DUCK challenge: week 5

Slighthly delayed, but here are the stats for week 5 of the DUCK challenge: So we had 10 packages fixed and uploaded by 10 different uploaders. A big "Thank You" to you!! Since the start of this challenge, a total of 59 packages, were fixed. Here is a quick overview:
Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4 Week 5 Week 6 Week 7
# Packages 10 15 10 14 10 - -
Total 10 25 35 49 59 - -
The list of the fixed and updated packages is availabe here. I will try to update this ~daily. If I missed one of your uploads, please drop me a line. Only 2 more weeks to DebConf15 so please get involved: The DUCK Challenge is running until end of DebConf15! Pevious articles are here: Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4.

25 July 2015

Sandro Tosi: How to change your Google services location

Several services in Google depends on your location, in particular on Google Play (things like apps, devices, contents can be restricted to some countries), but what to do if you relocate and want to update your information to access those exclusive services? Lots of stories out there to make a payment on the playstore with updated credit card info etc etc, it's actually a bit different, but not that much.

There are 3 places where you need to update your location information, all of them on Google Payments:

  1. in Payment Methods, change the billing address of all your payment methods;
  2. in Address Book, change the default shipping address;
  3. in Settings, change your home address.
Once that's done, wait some minutes, and you might also want to logout/login again in your Google account (even tho Google support will tell it's not necessary, it didnt work for me otherwise) and you should be ready to go.

Next.