This post is the second and final part of my Malaysia-Thailand trip. Feel free to check out the Malaysia part here if you haven t already. Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok is around 1500 km by road, and so I took a Malaysian Airlines flight to travel to Bangkok. The flight staff at the Kuala Lumpur only asked me for a return/onward flight and Thailand immigration asked a few questions but did not check any documents (obviously they checked and stamped my passport ;)). The currency of Thailand is the Thai baht, and 1 Thai baht = 2.5 Indian Rupees. The Thailand time is 1.5 hours ahead of Indian time (For example, if it is 12 noon in India, it will be 13:30 in Thailand). I landed in Bangkok at around 3 PM local time. Fletcher was in Bangkok that time, leaving for Pattaya and we had booked the same hostel. So I took a bus to Pattaya from the airport. The next bus for which the tickets were available was at 7 PM, so I took tickets for that one. The bus ticket cost was 143 Thai Baht. I didn t buy SIM at the airport, thinking there must be better deals in the city. As a consequence, there was no way to contact Fletcher through internet. Although I had a few minutes call remaining out of my international roaming pack.

A welcome sign at Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi airport.

Bus from Suvarnabhumi Airport to Jomtien Beach in Pattaya.

Our accommodation was near Jomtien beach, so I got off at the last stop, as the bus terminates at the Jomtien beach. Then I decided to walk towards my accommodation. I was using OsmAnd for navigation. However, the place was not marked on OpenStreetMap, and it turned out I missed the street my hostel was on and walked around 1 km further as I was chasing a similarly named incorrect hostel on OpenStreetMap. Then I asked for help from two men sitting at a caf . One of them said he will help me find the street my hostel is on. So, I walked with him, and he told me he lives in Thailand for many years, but he is from Kuwait. He also gave me valuable information. Like, he told me about shared hail-and-ride songthaews which run along the Jomtien Second Road and charge 10 Baht for any distance on their route. This tip significantly reduced our expenses. Further, he suggested me 7-Eleven shops for buying a local SIM. Like Malaysia, Thailand has 24/7 7-Eleven convenience stores, a lot of them not even 100 m apart. The Kuwaiti person dropped me at the address where my hostel was. I tried searching for a person in-charge of that hostel, and soon I realized there was no reception. After asking for help from locals for some time, I bumped into Fletcher, who also came to this address and was searching for the same. After finding a friend, I felt a sigh of relief. Adjacent to the property, there was a hairdresser shop. We went there and asked about this property. The woman called the owner, and she also told us the required passcodes to go inside. Our accommodation was in a room on the second floor, which required us to put a passcode for opening. We entered the passcode and entered the room. So, we stayed at this hostel which had no reception. Due to this, it took 2 hours to find our room and enter. It reminded me of a difficult experience I had in Albania, where me and Akshat were not able to find our apartment in one of the hottest days and the owner didn t know our language. Traveling from the place where the bus dropped me to the hostel, I saw streets were filled with bars and massage parlors, which was expected. Prostitutes were everywhere. We went out at night towards the beach and also roamed around in 7-Elevens to buy a SIM card for myself. I got a SIM for 7 day unlimited internet for 399 baht. Turns out that the rates of SIM cards at the airport were not so different from inside the city.

Road near Jomtien beach in Pattaya

Photo of a songthaew in Pattaya. There are shared songthaews which run along Jomtien Second road and takes 10 bath to anywhere on the route.

Jomtien Beach in Pattaya.

In terms of speaking English, locals didn t know English at all in both Pattaya and Bangkok. I normally don t expect locals to know English in a non-English speaking country, but the fact that Bangkok is one of the most visited places by tourists made me expect locals to know some English. Talking to locals is an integral part of travel for me, which I couldn t do a lot in Thailand. This aspect is much more important for me than going to touristy places. So, we were in Pattaya. Next morning, Fletcher and I went to Tiger park using shared songthaew. After that, we planned to visit Pattaya Floating market which is near the Tiger Park, but we felt the ticket prices were higher than it was worth. Fletcher had to leave for Bangkok on that day. I suggested him to go to Suvarnabhumi Airport from the Jomtien beach bus terminal (this was the route I took the last day in opposite direction) to avoid traffic congestion inside Bangkok, as he can follow up with metro once he reaches the airport. From the floating market, we were walking in sweltering heat to reach the Jomtien beach. I tried asking for a lift and eventually got successful as a scooty stopped, and surprisingly the person gave a ride to both of us. He was from Delhi, so maybe that s the reason he stopped for us. Then we took a songthaew to the bus terminal and after having lunch, Fletcher left for Bangkok.

A welcome sign at Pattaya Floating market.

This Korean Vegetasty noodles pack was yummy and was available at many 7-Eleven stores.

Next day I went to Bangkok, but Fletcher already left for Kuala Lumpur. Here I had booked a private room in a hotel (instead of a hostel) for four nights, mainly because of my luggage. This costed 5600 INR for four nights. It was 2 km from the metro station, which I used to walk both sides. In Bangkok, I visited Sukhumvit and Siam by metro. Going to some areas require crossing the Chao Phraya river. For this, I took Chao Phraya Express Boat for going to places like Khao San road and Wat Arun. I would recommend taking the boat ride as it had very good views. In Bangkok, I met a person from Pakistan staying in my hotel and so here also I got some company. But by the time I met him, my days were almost over. So, we went to a random restaurant selling Indian food where we ate some paneer dish with naan and that restaurant person was from Myanmar.

Wat Arun temple stamps your hand upon entry

Wat Arun temple

Khao San Road

A food stall at Khao San Road

Chao Phraya Express Boat

For eating, I mainly relied on fruits and convenience stores. Bananas were very tasty. This was the first time I saw banana flesh being yellow. Mangoes were delicious and pineapples were smaller and flavorful. I also ate Rose Apple, which I never had before. I had Chhole Kulche once in Sukhumvit. That was a little expensive as it costed 164 baht. I also used to buy premix coffee packets from 7-Eleven convenience stores and prepare them inside the stores.

Banana with yellow flesh

Fruits at a stall in Bangkok

Trimmed pineapples from Thailand.

Corn in Bangkok.

A board showing coffee menu at a 7-Eleven store along with rates in Pattaya.

In this section of 7-Eleven, you can buy a premix coffee and mix it with hot water provided at the store to prepare.

My booking from Bangkok to Delhi was in Air India flight, and they were serving alcohol in the flight. I chose red wine, and this was my first time having alcohol in a flight.

Red wine being served in Air India

Notes

• In this whole trip spanning two weeks, I did not pay for drinking water (except for once in Pattaya which was 9 baht) and toilets. Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur have plenty of malls where you should find a free-of-cost toilet nearby. For drinking water, I relied mainly on my accommodation providing refillable water for my bottle.
• Thailand seemed more expensive than Malaysia on average. Malaysia had discounted price due to the Chinese New year.
• I liked Pattaya more than Bangkok. Maybe because Pattaya has beach and Bangkok doesn t. Pattaya seemed more lively, and I could meet and talk to a few people as opposed to Bangkok.
• Chao Phraya River express boat costs 150 baht for one day where you can hop on and off to any boat.

I ended 2022 with a musical retrospective and very much enjoyed writing that blog post. As such, I have decided to do the same for 2023! From now on, this will probably be an annual thing :) Albums In 2023, I added 73 new albums to my collection nearly 2 albums every three weeks! I listed them below in the order in which I acquired them. I purchased most of these albums when I could and borrowed the rest at libraries. If you want to browse though, I added links to the album covers pointing either to websites where you can buy them or to Discogs when digital copies weren't available. Once again this year, it seems that Punk (mostly O !) and Metal dominate my list, mostly fueled by Angry Metal Guy and the amazing Montr al Skinhead/Punk concert scene. Concerts A trend I started in 2022 was to go to as many concerts of artists I like as possible. I'm happy to report I went to around 80% more concerts in 2023 than in 2022! Looking back at my list, April was quite a busy month... Here are the concerts I went to in 2023:

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

Although metalfinder continues to work as intended, I'm very glad to have discovered the Montr al underground scene has departed from Facebook/Instagram and adopted en masse Gancio, a FOSS community agenda that supports ActivityPub. Our local instance, askapunk.net is pretty much all I could ask for :) That's it for 2023!

Official logo of DebConf23

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

Suresh and me celebrating Onam in Kochi.

Hotel overview The hotel had 14 floors, and featured a swimming pool and gym (these were included in our package). The hotel gave us elevator access for only our floor, along with public spaces like the reception, gym, swimming pool, and dining areas. The temperature inside the hotel was pretty cold and I had to buy a jacket to survive. Perhaps the hotel was in cahoots with winterwear companies? :)

Four Points Hotel by Sheraton was the venue of DebConf23. Photo credits: Bilal

Photo of the pool. Photo credits: Andreas Tille.

View from the hotel window.

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

This place served as lunch and dinner place and later as hacklab during debconf. Photo credits: Bilal

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

Picture of the awesome swag bag given at DebConf23. Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi

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

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

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

My presentation photo. Photo credits: Valessio

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

Selfie with Anisa and Kristi. Photo credits: Anisa.

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

Me helping with the Cheese and Wine Party.

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

This picture was taken when there were few people in my room for the party.

Sadhya Thali On the 12th of September, we had a sadhya thali for lunch. It is a vegetarian thali served on a banana leaf on the eve of Thiruvonam. It wasn t Thiruvonam on this day, but we got a special and filling lunch. The rasam and payasam were especially yummy.

Sadhya Thali: A vegetarian meal served on banana leaf. Payasam and rasam were especially yummy! Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi.

Sadhya thali being served at debconf23. Photo credits: Bilal

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

Group photo of our daytrip. Photo credits: Radhika Jhalani

A good friend lost When we came back from the daytrip, we received news that Abhraham Raji was involved in a fatal accident during a kayaking trip. Abraham Raji was a very good friend of mine. In my Albania-Kosovo-Dubai trip last year, he was my roommate at our Tirana apartment. I roamed around in Dubai with him, and we had many discussions during DebConf22 Kosovo. He was the one who took the photo of me on my homepage. I also met him in MiniDebConf22 Palakkad and MiniDebConf23 Tamil Nadu, and went to his flat in Kochi this year in June. We had many projects in common. He was a Free Software activist and was the designer of the DebConf23 logo, in addition to those for other Debian events in India.

A selfie in memory of Abraham.

We were all fairly shocked by the news. I was devastated. Food lost its taste, and it became difficult to sleep. That night, Anisa and Kristi cheered me up and gave me company. Thanks a lot to them. The next day, Joenio also tried to console me. I thank him for doing a great job. I thank everyone who helped me in coping with the difficult situation. On the next day (the 14th of September), the Debian project leader Jonathan Carter addressed and announced the news officially. THe Debian project also mentioned it on their website. Abraham was supposed to give a talk, but following the incident, all talks were cancelled for the day. The conference dinner was also cancelled. As I write, 9 days have passed since his death, but even now I cannot come to terms with it.

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

A Japanese gift I got a nice Japanese gift from Niibe Yutaka (Japan) - a folder to keep papers which had ancient Japanese manga characters. He said he felt guilty as he swapped his talk with me and so it got rescheduled from 12th September to 16 September which I withdrew later.

Thanks to Niibe Yutaka (the person towards your right hand) from Japan (FSIJ), who gave me a wonderful Japanese gift during debconf23: A folder to keep pages with ancient Japanese manga characters printed on it. I realized I immediately needed that :)

This is the Japanese gift I received.

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

Click to enlarge

Volunteer work and talks attended I attended the training session for the video team and worked as a camera operator. The Bits from DPL was nice. I enjoyed Abhas presentation on home automation. He basically demonstrated how he liberated Internet-enabled home devices. I also liked Kristi s presentation on ways to engage with the GNOME community.

Bits from the DPL. Photo credits: Bilal

Kristi on GNOME community. Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi.

Abhas' talk on home automation. Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi.

I also attended lightning talks on the last day. Badri, Wouter, and I gave a demo on how to register on the Prav app. Prav got a fair share of advertising during the last few days.

I was roaming around with a QR code on my T-shirt for downloading Prav.

The night of the 17th of September Suresh left the hotel and Badri joined me in my room. Thanks to the efforts of Abhijit PA, Kiran, and Ananthu, I wore a mundu.

Me in mundu. Picture credits: Abhijith PA

I then joined Kalyani, Mangesh, Ruchika, Anisa, Ananthu and Kiran. We took pictures and this marked the last night of DebConf23.

Departure day The 18th of September was the day of departure. Badri slept in my room and left early morning (06:30 AM). I dropped him off at the hotel gate. The breakfast was at the eatery (3rd floor) again, and it was good. Sahil, Saswata, Nilesh, and I hung out on the ground floor.

From left: Nilesh, Saswata, me, Sahil. Photo credits: Sahil.

I had an 8 PM flight from Kochi to Delhi, for which I took a cab with Rhonda (Austria), Michael (Nigeria) and Yash (India). We were joined by other DebConf23 attendees at the Kochi airport, where we took another selfie.

Ruchika (taking the selfie) and from left to right: Yash, Joost (Netherlands), me, Rhonda

Joost and I were on the same flight, and we sat next to each other. He then took a connecting flight from Delhi to Netherlands, while I went with Yash to the New Delhi Railway Station, where we took our respective trains. I reached home on the morning of the 19th of September, 2023.

Joost and me going to Delhi. Photo credits: Ravi.

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

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

After cycling the Northcape 4000 (from Italy to northern Norway) last year, I signed up for the transcontinental race this year. The Transcontinental is bikepacking race across Europe, self-routed (but with some mandatory checkpoints), unsupported and with a distance of usually somewhere around 4000 km. The cut-off time is 15 days, with the winner usually taking 7-10 days. This year, the route went from Belgium to Thessaloniki in Greece, with control points in northern Italy, Slovenia, Albania and Meteora (Greece). The event was great - it was well organised and communication was a lot better than at the Northcape. It did feel very different from the Northcape, though, being a proper race. Participants are not allowed to draft off each other or help each other, though a quick chat here or there as you pass people is possible, or when you re both stopped at a shop or control point.

While trying to stay warm in our first snow of the year, I got several apps tested and released in round 3 of https://www.scarlettgatelymoore.dev/kde-gear-snaps-round-2/ ! All of these are being ( re ) tested on both arm64 and amd64. Hence, the release is going slower than it will in the future. Thank you for your patience.

• Kalzium ( again ) Molecule editor works. Known bug downloading molecules. Just go to Home/Documents and rename the file hotsuff-access.xml to themolecule.cml and load molecule as a temporary work around until a permanent fix comes about. https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=461027
• Ktuberling
• Kbounce
• Kmplot
• Kbreakout
• Knavalbattle
• Kubrick ( Not on chromebook unfortunately, opengl errors need looking into. )
• Kbruch
• Knetwalk
• Kwordquiz
• Knights ( Sound is fixed! )
• Kollision
• Lokalize
• Kfourinline

More rounds of bug gardening has been done, if you find bugs, or know one of your bugs is related to it being a snap, please assign to me. https://bugs.kde.org Please consider a donation so I may bring many more apps your way. https://www.patreon.com/sgmoore I am working on one time donations.

Culture Just before I start, I would like to point out that this post may or would probably be NSFW. Again, what is SFW (Safe at Work) and NSFW that so much depends on culture and perception of culture from wherever we are or wherever we take birth? But still, to be on the safe side I have put it as NSFW. Now there have been a few statements and ideas that gave me a pause. This will be a sort of chaotic blog post as I am in such a phase today. For e.g. while I do not know which culture or which country this comes from, somebody shared that in some cultures one can talk/comment May your poop be easy and with a straight face. I dunno which culture is this but if somebody asked me that I would just die from laughing or maybe poop there itself. While I can understand if it is a constipated person, but a whole culture? Until and unless their DNA is really screwed, I don t think so but then what do I know? I do know that we shit when we have extreme reactions of either joy or fear. And IIRC, this comes from mammal response when they were in dangerous situations and we got the same as humans evolved. I would really be interested to know which culture is that. I did come to know that the Japanese do wish that you may not experience hard work or something to that effect while ironically they themselves are becoming extinct due to hard work and not enough relaxation, toxic workplace is common in Japan according to social scientists and population experts. Another term that I couldn t figure out is The Florida Man Strikes again and this term is usually used when somebody does something stupid or something weird. While it is exclusively used in the American context, I am curious to know how that came about. Why does Florida have such people or is it an exaggeration? I have heard the term e.g. What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas . Think it is also called Sin city although why just Vegas is beyond me?

Omicron-8712 Blood pressure machine I felt so stupid. I found another site or e-commerce site called Wellness Forever. They had the blood pressure machine I wanted, an Omron-8172. I bought it online and they delivered the same within half an hour. Amazon took six days and in the end, didn t deliver it at all. I tried taking measurements from it yesterday. I have yet to figure out what it all means but I did get measurements of 109 SYS, 88 DIA and Pulse is 72. As far as the pulse is concerned, guess that is normal, the others just don t know. If only I had known this couple of months ago. I was able to register the product as well as download and use the Omron Connect app. For roughly INR 2.5k you have a sort of health monitoring system. It isn t Star Trek Tricorder in any shape or form but it will have to do while the tricorder gets invented. And while we are on the subject let s not forget Elizabeth Holmes and the scam called Theranos. It really is something to see How Elizabeth Holmes modeled so much of herself on Steve Jobs mimicking how he left college/education halfway. A part of me is sad that Theranos is not real. Joe Scott just a few days ago shared some perspectives on the same just a few days ago. The idea in itself is pretty seductive, to say the least, and that is the reason the scam went on for more than a decade and perhaps would have been longer if some people hadn t gotten the truth out. I do see potentially, something like that coming on as A.I. takes a bigger role in automating testing. Half a decade to a decade from now, who knows if there is an algorithm that is able to do what is needed? If such a product were to come to the marketplace at a decent price, it would revolutionize medicine, especially in countries like India, South Africa, and all sorts of remote places. Especially, with all sorts of off-grid technologies coming and maturing in the marketplace. Before I forget, there is a game called Cell on Android that tells or shares about the evolution of life on earth. It also shares credence to the idea that life has come 6 times on Earth and has been destroyed multiple times by asteroids. It is in the idle sort of game format, so you can see the humble beginnings from the primordial soup to various kinds of cells and bacteria to finally a mammal. This is where I am and a long way to go.

Indian Bureaucracy One of the few things that Britishers gave to India, is the bureaucracy and the bureaucracy tests us in myriad ways. It would be full 2 months on 5th September and I haven t yet got a death certificate. And I need that for a sundry number of things. The same goes for a disability certificate. What is and was interesting is my trip to the local big hospital called Sassoon Hospital. My mum had shared incidents that occurred in the 1950s when she and the family had come to Pune. According to her, when she was alive, while Sassoon was the place to be, it was big and chaotic and you never knew where you are going. That was in 1950, I had the same experience in 2022. The term/adage the more things change, the more they remain the same seems to be held true for Sassoon Hospital. Btw, those of you who think the Devil exists, he is totally a fallacy. There is a popular myth that the devil comes to deal that he/she/they come to deal with you when somebody close to you passes, I was waiting desperately for him when mum passed. Any deal that he/she/they would have offered me I would have gladly taken, but all my wait was all for nothing. While I believe evil exists, that is manifested by humans and nobody else. The whole idea and story of the devil is just to control young children and nothing beyond that

Debconf 2023, friends, JPEGOptim, and EV s Quite a number of friends had gone to Albania this year as India won the right to host Debconf for the year 2023. While I did lurk on the Debconf orga IRC channel, I m not sure how helpful I would be currently. One news that warmed my heart is some people would be coming to India to check the site way before and make sure things go smoothly. Nothing like having more eyes (in this case bodies) to throw at a problem and hopefully it will be sorted. While I have not been working for the last couple of years, one of the things that I had to do and have been doing is moving a lot of stuff online. This is in part due to the Government s own intention of having everything on the cloud. One of the things I probably may have shared it more than enough times is that the storage most of these sites give is like the 1990s. I tried jpegoptim and while it works, it degrades the quality of the image quite a bit. The whole thing seems backward, especially as newer and newer smartphones are capturing more data per picture (megapixel resolution), case in point Samsung Galaxy A04 that is being introduced. But this is not only about newer phones, even my earlier phone, Samsung J-5/500 which I bought in 2016 took images at 5 MB. So it is not a new issue but a continuous issue. And almost all Govt. sites have the upper band fixed at 1 MB. But this is not limited to Govt. sites alone, most sites in India are somewhat frozen in the 1990s. And it isn t as if resources for designing web pages using HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, Python, or Java aren t available. If worse comes to worst, one can even use amp to make his, her or their point. But this is if they want to do stuff. I would be sharing a few photos with commentary, there are still places where I can put photos apart from social media

Friends Last week, Saturday suddenly all the friends decided to show up. I have no clue one way or the other why but am glad they showed up.

Mahendra, Akshat, Shirish and Sagar Sukhose (Mangesh s friend) at Bal Gandharva..

Electric scooter as shared by Akshat seen in Albania

Somebody making a real-life replica of Wall Street on F.C. Road (Commercial, all glass)

Ganesh Idol near my house

Wearing new clothes

I will have to be a bit rapid about what I am sharing above so here goes nothing

1. The first picture shows Mahendra, Akshat, me, and Sagar Sukhose (Mangesh s friend). The picture was taken by Mangesh Diwate. We talked quite a bit of various things that could be done in Debian. A few of the things that I shared were (bringing more stuff from BSD to Debian, I am sure there s still quite a lot of security software that could be advantageous to have in Debian.) The best person to talk to or guide about this would undoubtedly be Paul Wise or as he is affectionally called Pabs. He is one of the shy ones and yet knows so much about how things work. The one and only time I met him is 2016. The other thing that we talked about is porting Debian to one of the phones. This has been done in the past and done by a Puneitie some 4-5 years back. While I don t recollect the gentleman s name, I remember that the porting was done on a Motorola phone as that was the easiest to do. He had tried some other mobile but that didn t work. Making Debian available on phone is hard work. Just to have an idea, I went to the xda developers forum and found out that while M51 has been added, my specific phone model is not there. A Samsung Galaxy M52G Android (samsung; SM-M526B; lahaina; arm64-v8a) v12 . You look at the chat and you understand how difficult the process might be. One of the other ideas that Akshat pitched was Debian Astro, this is something that is close to the heart of many, including me. I also proposed to have some kind of web app or something where we can find and share about the various astronomy and related projects done by various agencies. While there is a NASA app, nothing comes close to JSR and that site just shares stuff, no speculation. There are so many projects taken or being done by the EU, JAXA, ISRO, and even middle-east countries are trying but other than people who are following some of the developments, we hear almost nothing. Even the Chinese have made some long strides but most people know nothing about the same. And it s sad to know that those developments are not being known, shared, or even speculated about as much as say NASA or SpaceX is. How do we go about it and how do we get people to contribute or ask questions around it would be interesting. 2. The second picture was something that was shared by Akshat. Akshat was sharing how in Albania people are moving on these electric scooters . I dunno if that is the right word for it or what. I had heard from a couple of friends who had gone to Vietnam a few years ago how most people in Vietnam had modified their scooters and they were snaking lines of electric wires charging scooters. I have no clue whether they were closer to Vespa or something like above. In India, the Govt. is in partnership with the oil, gas, and coal mafia just as it was in Australia (the new Govt. in Australia is making changes) the same thing is here. With the humongous profits that the oil sector provides the petro states and others, Corruption is bound to happen. We talk and that s the extent of things. 3. The third picture is from a nearby area called F.C. Road or Fergusson College Road. The area has come up quite sharply (commercially) in the last few years. Apparently, Mr. Kushal is making a real-life replica of Wall Street which would be given to commercial tenants. Right now the real estate market is tight in India, we will know how things pan out in the next few years. 4. Number four is an image of a Ganesh idol near my house. There is a 10-day festival of the elephant god that people used to celebrate every year. For the last couple of years because of the pandemic, people were unable to celebrate the festival as it is meant to celebrate. This time some people are going overboard while others are cautious and rightfully so. 5. Last and not least, one of the things that people do at this celebration is to have new clothes, so I shared a photo of a gentleman who had bought and was wearing new clothes. While most countries around the world are similar, Latin America is very similar to India in many ways, perhaps Gunnar can share. especially about religious activities. The elephant god is known for his penchant for sweets and that can be seen from his rounded stomach, that is also how he is celebrated. He is known to make problems disappear or that is supposed to be his thing. We do have something like 4 billion gods, so each one has to be given some work or quality to justify the same

Wait! Just like yesterday when I was accepted as an Outreachy intern and the first half of the internship is finished . How time flies when you are having a good time As part of the requirements for the final application during the contribution period for the Outreachy internship, I needed to provide a timeline to achieve our goal on my outreachy task which is transitioning of dependencies in node16 and webpack5. Having consulted my mentors who implied that the packages depending on webpack and nodejs combined are so numerous that its impossible to finish all within a space of three months but we have steps to guide us through the entire process to achieve most of our goals which are

• Find a list of packages(failing rebuild and testing with autopkgtest, of reverse dependencies of webpack and nodejs) to fix.
• See if new upstream versions are available that support nodejs16 and webpack5 respectively.
• See if the new upstream version works and doesn't fail while rebuilding or testing with autopkgtest.
• Report bug in Debian if any fails to rebuild or test with autopkgtest.
• Forward bugs upstream if needed.
• Fix packages and forward patches.

As of this writing(though a little late ) we have successfully rebuilt all reverse dependencies of webpack5 and split them equally each for I and my co-intern for all Javascript modules as ruby packages also depend on webpack which is a total of 44 packages. Filed a bug report on Debian bug tracking system for failing packages, also the original maintainer or uploader of the package to the Debian archive mostly Debian developers also get a mail in references to the package bug report. Sometimes the uploader who also receives the bug report decides to help out to fix the package and forward the patch upstream if need be. We have also filed an issue to upstream repo mostly via github where some respond and create PR to solve those errors and others are plain aversive to the whole idea. PR from the upstream developer is cherry-picked and a patch is created by us to incorporate the code into our own working repository. some package upstream maintainer rejects such issues or doesn't respond, we take it upon ourselves to fix the package. The total number of packages that are successfully updated and ready to be merged is 10 packages while 12 packages remain on my own end to be updated. One of the most challenging packages to update so far was prop-type as its runs its large test suite using jest of a lower version 19.0.2 compared to that of Debian OS which is version 27.5.1 updating and migrating its API's and methods to use the Debian updated version is so challenging after several googling, testing out the solution from StackOverflow, trials, and errors, reading documentations we eventually made progress with the help of my mentor, co-intern and the whole community member. It's so crazy that when I got it working I said to myself. phew it's not rocket science why can I figure it out sooner than expected I initially proposed that I would be halfway done with the project by now, I guess the reason am not able to achieve some of our goals which are finishing up with the packages for webpack and moving to transition some of the nodejs packages at all is DEBUGGING. Yes DEBUGGING! where you never can predict what the solution is. is the problem coming from Debian? or dependencies of the package you are working on, upstream bug, or dependencies of dependencies of the package you are working on, so many questions to answer. You can't easily find a solution to a bug as it takes time to try out so many guesses more of an educated guess, or even try out all the solutions from stack overflow and still no viable progress. Obviously, you cannot really know about something to set up a plan for unless you get right into it. One way of doing this, if I have to start again is the truly understand how the javascript package work under the hood, how its handles different interaction between packages, some of its dos and don't of transpiling, bundling, testing, e.t.c I guess my unrealistic goals need to be modified because some drawback that was not envisaged popped up and I underestimated the complexity of the tasks, which will be reducing the number of packages to update in transitioning of nodejs from what I planned My major focus for the second half of the internship is to fix bugs and errors I discover, file bug reports for future bugs to seek help from co-maintainer or developers, file issues upstream and close those whose bugs are already resolved for the remaining 12 packages, and ultimately successfully uploading all reverse dependencies. Also diving into transitioning of nodejs16. Thanks for stopping by

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

Changes

• https-everywhere: fix dwheeler.com
• bootstrappable: https (sent via IRC)
• harmony: https
• nsntrace: improve shell usage
• duck: detect deprecated projects (1 2)
• debbugs: support setting usertags for multiple users
• Debian BTS: reopen and triage bugs for reintroduced packages
• Debian BTS usertags: move usertags to correct users
• Debian package uploads: autorevision (1, 2), purple-discord, librecaptcha, harmony (1 2)
• Debian wiki pages: BisectDebian, CDDT, CDDTool, Citrix, CUPSAirPrint, CUPSDriverlessPrinting, DebConf, (11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 22, 23), DebianDevelopment, DebianEvents/be/2021/FOSDEM, DebianHosting, Debuginfod, Exploits, ExternalEntities, Firmware/Open, Fonts, Glossary, GoogleCloudPrint, Hardware (VideoAcceleration, Wanted), Horde, HowToGetABacktrace, InstallingDebianOn (GPD/MicroPC, Intel/NUC10i3FNB, PINE64/PinePhone, Purism, TUXEDO/NOTEBOOKS/TUXEDO-Aura-15-Gen1), IRC, irssi, Keysigning/Offers (1 2), LTS/Development, Mobile, PCI/Passthrough, PinePhone, PlanetDebian, Ports/ia64, PortTemplate, RaspberryPi4, SergioDuriganJunior/SponsorChecklist, ServicesHosting, SystemBuildTools, Teams (Dpkg/Spec/ProtectedField, DPL, TestingSecurity), WiFi/HowToUse, Zabbix
• FreeDestop wiki pages: pkg-config
• vcs-home wiki pages: index

Issues

• Syntax error in wordwarvi
• Features in lintian (1 2)
• Typos in litecli
• Missing documentation in thinkfan
• Branch cleanup for nsntrace
• AppArmor issues in libreoffice, apparmor-profiles-extra/apt-cacher-ng
• Missing copyright info in purple-discord
• Code issues in purple-discord (1, 2)
• Overzealous sandboxing in plocate
• Init porting for plocate
• Missing dependency in libemail-outlook-message-perl

Review

• Spam: reported 1 LWN comments, 2 Debian bug reports and 150 Debian mailing list posts
• Debian packages: sponsored opentype-sanitizer, iotop-c, duck
• Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month
• Debian BTS usertags: changes for the month
• Debian screenshots:
  • approved apticron-systemd bpfmon bspwm calamares chkrootkit corekeeper csoundqt daemonfs diffmon din distro-info dpkg drascula dunst elinks firefox freewheeling genisoimage gjacktransport gnome gnome-activity-journal gnome-gmail gnome-initial-setup gnome-phone-manager goverlay gromit killer kmidimon logcheck lutris lyricue manuskript materia-kde metadata-cleaner mwm nitrokey-authenticator ogmrip pdfchain plantuml python3-blockdiag python3-diagrams python3-seqdiag python-actdiag python-nwdiag q4wine ricochet-im rkhunter runescape sosreport stretchplayer sudo systraq tilem tint2 trader webcamoid wine1.6 xracer
  • rejected mat2 (website), higan (running proprietary game), tor (logo), firewalld (daemon), monodevelop (macOS), spyder/din/isomaster (Windows), kmplayer (web browser?), vim-athena (terminal instead of GUI), apt-offline (GUI instead of CLI)
  • approved deletion (despite bogus reason) of telegram-desktop (private data), pfm (spam reason but manual page),
  • rejected deletion of kcharselect (not a support site), kdenlive/auto-multiple-choice (screenshots are versioned), minetest/jwm/knavalbattle (nonsense), k3b (non-English), jack-keyboard/hashcat/knavalbattle (spam)

Administration

• Debian: fix permissions for XMPP anti-spam git
• Debian wiki: workaround moin bug with deleting deprecated pages, unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Communication

• Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC
• Edited and sent Debian DevNews #54

Sponsors The purple-discord/harmony/librecaptcha/libemail-outlook-message-perl work was sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

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

Changes

• samba: copy heimdal patch
• nsnstrace: doc fixes (1 2)
• devscripts: fix debbisect scripts path
• apt-listchanges: add bug script to report config
• Debian BTS usertags: fixes for ocaml, release, per-arch users
• Debian QA services: add CC option to usertags fixes, autofix ocaml usertags
• Debian welcome mail: clarify debian-private, fix URL, mention goodies
• Debian screenshots: deleted packeth (macOS), pamtester (manual page)
• Debian package uploads: pytest-rerunfailures, apt-listchanges, python-scrapy (and deps), foxtrotgps
• Debian wiki pages: AndroidTools, Brave, BSP, DebianDay (2021), DebianDeveloper, DebianEdu/Documentation/ITIL/AllInOne, DebianHistory, DebianHosting, DebianIndia, DebianKernel/UserspaceTools, DebianRepository/Setup, DebianWannaBuildInfrastructure, DebianWannaBuildInfrastructureOnOneServer, Derivatives/Census (Derivatives/CensusTemplate, BunsenLabs, Devuan, SerbianLinux, Ubuntu, Wazo), Firmware (1 2 3) (List, Open), FreedomBox/Features, Hardware/Database, InstallingDebianOn (LG/X130, Turris/Omnia), JetBrains (1 2), Keysigning/Need, LDAP/MigrationTools, LocalGroups/MeetingMinutes, LTS (Contact, Development), Mobile (1 2), NewInBullseye, PDF, Ports/ia64, PortTemplate, PressCoverage (2021), qa.debian.org/HowToHelpWithFixingWatchFiles, ReleaseParty (Bullseye), Samba (DcWithLdapBackend, ServerSimple (1 2)), SecureBoot, Sprints, Teams (Publicity/otherSN, ReleaseTeam/ReleaseCheckList (BullseyeCheckList (1 2 3))), UsrMerge, VMware (1 2), Year
• FOSSjobs wiki pages: Resources
• Wikipedia: Message-ID

Issues

• Missing dependencies in loggedfs, libvirt
• Porting needed in loggedfs
• Build failures in ddccontrol (1 2), python-scrapy
• Conffile removal needed in artikulate, thinkfan
• Features in gallery-dl, smartmontools (1, 2), how-can-i-help, lintian (1 2), samba, debiman
• New upstream location for p910nd
• New upstream release for asciidoc
• Memory leak in nsntrace
• Homepage update for smartmontools
• Apparmor denials in apparmor, torbrowser-launcher
• https needed in kiwix
• Warnings in seahorse, iamerican, ibritish, umtp-responder, memlockd
• Wayland issues in nethack-qt
• Unnecessary deps in python-testfixtures
• Missing patch in dnssec-trigger
• Off-putting description in python3-pylev
• Regression in evolution
• Removal needed for ddccontrol on ARM
• Verbosity in Debian testing migration
• Moving info needed for a Debian derivatives guidelines translation

Review

• Spam: reported 1 Debian bug reports and 151 Debian mailing list posts
• Patches: nsntrace, foxtrotgps
• Debian packages: sponsored debdelta NMU, gtranscribe/iotop-c new releases
• Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month
• Debian screenshots:
  • approved ack acm advancecomp alien-arena auto-multiple-choice bspwm darkradiant derivations fonts-radisnoir free42-nologo galois glogg gsequencer hamster-time-tracker ksystemlog mkvtoolnix ninka os-prober packeth pamtester pcmanfm qdacco refind rofi solaar ssh-audit tint2 tuptime xfce4 xfce4-taskmanager
  • rejected budgie-core (logo), checkinstall (screenshots code bug), angband (random Android app), python (duplicate), php-curl (random web page), command-not-found (not a bug reporting site)
  • approved deletion of thinkfan (daemon without a UI)
  • rejected deletion of knavalbattle (non-English screenshots are kept unless there is a replacement), vrms (nonsensical), apache2 (not a bug reporting site), acm/pev/auto-multiple-choice (screenshots are versioned, old ones are retained), konsole (screenshots serves Ubuntu users too, screenshots are versioned), hashcat/onboard/jack-keyboard/budgie-keyboard-autoswitch-applet/pcmanx-gtk2/akregator (spam)
• FOSSjobs: reviewed posts

Administration

• Debian ports: fix header on incoming.ports.d.o/buildd
• Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Communication

• Initiate discussions about aptly, Linux USB gadgets maintenance
• Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC
• Invite organisations to post on FOSSjobs

Sponsors The samba work, apt-listchanges work, pytest-rerunfailures upload, python-testfixtures/python-scrapy bugs and python-scrapy related backports were sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

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

Changes

• visdom: fix license metadata
• webdl: ABC iView livestream support
• check-all-the-things: update AFL dep
• duck: more redirect/deletion phrases (1 2)
• devscripts: typo
• spelling dictionaries: codespell (1 2), lintian (1 2)
• Debian QA services: more usertags fixing (1 2 3)
• Debian package uploads: apt-listchanges read-edid
• Debian screenshots: removed wsjtx (Windows screenshot)
• Debian usertags: fix some more typos and mistakes
• Debian wiki pages: ConfigPackages, DebianBookworm, DebianEvents/internet/2020/MiniDebConfOnline2/DebCamp, DebianKernel/GitBisect, DebianMentorsFaq, DebianTrixie, Derivatives/CensusTemplate, Glossary, Lintian (Spec/LintianHarness, Tags (build-depends-on-python-dev-with-no-arch-any, Contributing, DB, Template, test)), Mobile, PulseAudio, qa.debian.org, Sahil%20Dhiman, Teams/ReleaseTeam/ReleaseCheckList, timeshift, TroubleShooting, VMware
• FOSSjobs wiki pages: resources

Issues

• Crashes in lintian-brush, evince
• Non-distributable files in nmslib
• Silent failure in tweeper
• Usability issues in systemd
• Features in dctrl-tools, lintian, gedit translate plugin
• New versions of youtube-dl
• Incorrect case conversion in webext-debianbuttons
• Missing documentation in synaptic, samba
• Syntax error in yubico-piv-tool
• Warnings in samba-common-bin
• Packaging needed for darkreader

Review

• Spam: reported 175 Debian mailing list posts
• Debian packages: sponsored acr
• Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month
• Debian screenshots:
  • approved 2048 apparmor-notify apt-listdifferences apt-show-versions cataclysm-dda-curses ckb-next el-ixir growlight lazpaint-gtk2 lazpaint-qt5 nethack-console notcurses-bin pcsx2 performous-composer piu-piu projecteur puzzle-jigsaw ricochet setzer shotcut shotwell systray-mdstat tagainijisho tikzit vonsh wesnoth-1.14 wsjtx xsecurelock xserver-xorg-core
  • rejected mathgl (macOS), fceux (running proprietary game), photoflow (proprietary and problematic image), xserver-xorg-core (another package), xfce4-terminal (another XFCE package)
  • approved deletion of rpcbind (manual page)
  • rejected deletion of notcurses-bin (screenshots are versioned), gnome (Chromium is open source, the logo could be either), hashcat/onboard/knavalbattle/jack-keyboard/kcharselect (spam)

Administration

• Debian wiki: disable attachments due to security issue, approve accounts

Communication

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

Sponsors The visdom, apt-listchanges work and lintian-brush bug report were sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

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

Changes

• libicns: add 64x64 PNG support, fixup
• repology-webapp: mention alternatives
• git-imerge: fix makefile, https, sync description, mention alternatives
• foxtrotgps: bump max zoom to 20
• spelling dictionaries: codespell, lintian
• Debian package tracker: add Repology link
• Debian package uploads: pytest-rerunfailures (1 2), morfessor (1 2 3), pyemd (1 2), git-imerge (1 2 3), libforms (1 2)
• Debian wiki pages: CrossGrading, DebianDesktop/Artwork/Bullseye, DebianEvents/internet/2020/MiniDebConfOnline2/orga (1 2 3), DebianMentorsFaq, DebianRepository/Setup, Derivatives/Census (Bloss, DANOS, Purism (1 2)), DeveloperNews (1 2 3), EmbeddedCopies, LVM, ManualPage, MemberBenefits, Mentoring, Python/GitPackaging, RepairEDID, Statistics, tasksel
• FOSSjobs wiki pages: resources

Issues

• Crashes in hexedit, gnome-shell-timer
• Dependency issue in dh-python
• TLS breakage in purple-discord/NSS
• Features in api.ftp-master.debian.org, purple-discord, distro-info, lintian
• Embedded copies in rust-webpki-roots
• Broken apt sources in mmdebstrap, neurodebian, opendnssec, openstack-debian-images, openstack-tempest-ci, sbuild, shadowsocks-libev, xen-tools
• Conffile removal needed in metacity-common
• Misclassification in coreutils df
• User interface issues in bugs.debian.org
• Warnings in openjdk-11-jre-headless, gourmet

Review

• Spam: reported 2 Debian bug reports and 147 Debian mailing list posts
• Patches: merged libicns patches
• Debian packages: sponsored iotop-c
• Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month
• Debian screenshots:
  • approved asciinema bleachbit bpytop braillefont engrampa epiphany-browser flam3 games-console gdebi gedit-plugin-terminal gtkam gtkam-gimp kate knocker krusader nvme-cli pagemon pinta termtris tio xfce4-terminal
  • rejected nautilus-extension-gnome-terminal (gnome-software page), ddgr (web browser), fbless (help output), asciiart/googler (proprietary image), vim-conque (macOS), ncurses-term (package itself has no UI), kxterm/xvt/microcom (logo), aha (htop not aha), clipit (about dialog), lxde (leafpad, not all of LXDE)
  • approved deletion of dmz-cursor-theme (no cursors displayed
  • rejected deletion of usemod-wiki (homophobic), tuxpaint (not the place for bugs reports), kcharselect/hashcat/jack-keyboard/knavalbattle (spam)

Administration

• Debian: get us removed from an RBL
• Debian wiki: reset email addresses, approve accounts

Communication

• Sent Debian Misc Developer News (#53)
• Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors The pytest-rerunfailures/pyemd/morfessor work was sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

The 3rd day should have started with a Debian sprint and then a LibreOffice one, taking advantage I m still attending, as that s my last day. But plans don t always work out and we started 2 hours later. When everybody arrive we got everyone together for a short daily meeting (scrum style). The people were divided to 3 teams for translating: Debian Installer, LibreOffice and Gnome. For each team we did a short list of what left and with what to start. And in the end how does what so there will be no toe stepping. I was really proud with this and felt it was time well spent. The current translation percentage for Albanian in LibreOffice is 60%. So my recommendation to the team is translate master only and do not touch the help translation. My plans ahead would be to improve the translation as much as possible for LibreOffice 6.0 and near the branching point (Set to November 20th by the release schedule) decide if it s doable for the 6.0 life time or to set the goal at 6.1. In the 2nd case, we might try to backport translation back to 6.0. For the translation itself, I ve mentioned to the team about KeyID language pack and referred them to the nightly builds. These tools should help with keeping the translation quality high. For the Debian team, after deciding who works on what, I ve asked Silva to do review for the others, as doing it myself started to take more and more of my time. It s also good that the reviewer know the target language and not like me, can catch more the syntax only mistakes. Another point, as she s available more easily to the team while I m leaving soon, so I hope this role of reviewer will stay as part of the team. With the time left I mostly worked on my own tasks, which were packaging the Albanian dictionary, resulting in https://packages.debian.org/sid/myspell-sq and making sure the dictionary is also part of LibreOffice resulting in https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/#/c/41906/ . When it is accepted, I want to upload it to the LibreOffice repository so all users can download and use the dictionary. During the voyage home (ferry, bus, plain and train), I mailed Sergio Durigan Junior, my NM applicant, with a set of questions. My first action as an AM (: Overall FOSScamp results for Albanian translation were very close to the goal I set (100%):

• Albanian (sq) level1 99%
• Albanian (sq) level2 25% (the rest is pending at #874497)
• Albanian (sq) level3 100%

That s the result of work by Silva Arapi, Eva Vranici, Redon Skikuli, Anisa Kuci and Nafie Shehu.
Filed under: Debian GNU/Linux, i18n & l10n, LibreOffice

The morning stated by taking the bus to Kini beach. After some to enjoy the water (which were still cold in the morning), we sat for talking about the local Debian community and how can we help it grow. The main topic was localization (l10n), but we soon started to check other options. I reminded them that l10n isn t only translation and we also talked about dictionaries for spell checking, fonts and local software which might be relevant (e.g. hdate for the Jewish/Hebrew calendar or Jcal for the Jalali calendar). For example it seems that regular Latin fonts are missing two Albanian characters. We also talked about how to use Open Labs to better work together with two hats member of the local FOSS community and also as members of various open source projects (not forgetting open content / data ones projects as well). So people can cooperate both on the local level, the international level or to mix (using the other s project international resources). In short: connections, connections, connections. Another aspect I tried to push the guys toward is cooperating with local companies about open source, whether it s the local market, the municipal and general government. Such cooperation can take many forms, sponsoring events / giving resources (computers, physical space or employee s time) and of course creating more jobs for open source people, which in turn will support more people doing open source for longer period. One of the guys thought benefit the local community will benefit from a mirror server, but that also requires to see the network topology of Albania to make sure it makes sense to invest in one (resources and effort). We continued to how it would be best to contribute to open source, mostly that Debian, although great isn t always the best target, and they should always try to work with the relevant upstream. It s better to translate gnome upstream then sending the Debian maintainer the translation to be included in the package. That shortcut can work if there s something urgent like a really problematic typo or something what unless done before the release would require a long long wait (e.g. the next Debian release). I gave an example that for important RTL bugs in LibreOffice I ve asked Rene Engelhard to include the patch instead of waiting for the next release and its inclusion in Debian. When I started the conversation I mentioned that we have 33% females out of the 12 participants. And that s considered good comparing to other computer/technical events, especially open source. To my surprise the guys told me that in the Open Labs hackerspace the situation is the opposite, they have more female members than male (14 female to 12 male). Also in their last OSCAL event they had 220 women and 100 men. I think there s grounds to learn what happens there, as the gals do something damn right over there. Maybe Outreachy rules for Albania should be different (: Later that day I did another session with Redon Skikuli to be more practical, so I started to search on an Albanian dictionary for spell checking, found an old one and asked Redon to check the current status with the guy. And also check info about such technical stuff with Social Sciences and Albanological Section of the Academy of Sciences of Albania, who is officially the regulator for Albanian. In parallel I started to check how to include the dictionary in LibreOffice, and asked Rene Engelhard to enable Albanian language pack in Debian (as upstream already provide one). Checking the dictionaries I ve took the opportunity to update the Hebrew. It took me a little longer as I needed to get rust off my LibreOffice repositories (dictionaries is a different repository) and also the gerrit setup. But in the end: https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/#/c/41864/ With the talks toady and the starting to combine both Debian and LibreOffice work today (although much of it was talking) I felt like I m the right person on the right place. I m happy to be here and contribute to two projects in parallel (:
Filed under: Debian GNU/Linux, i18n & l10n, LibreOffice

During Debconf17 I was asked by Daniel Pocock if I can attend FOSScamp Syros to help with Debian s l10n in the Balkans. I said I would be happy to, although my visit would be short (2.5 days) due to previous plans. The main idea of camp is to have FOSS people meet for about 1 week near a beach. So it s sun, water and free software. This year it takes place in Syros, Greece. After take the morning ferry, I met with the guys at noon. I didn t know how would it be, as it s my first time with this group/meeting, but they were very nice and welcoming. 10 minutes after my arrival I found myself setting with two of the female attendees starting to work on Albanian (sq) translation of Debian Installer. It took my a few minutes to find my where to check out the current level1 files, as I thought they aren t in SVN anymore, but ended up learning the PO files is the only part of the installer still on SVN. As the girls were quick with the assinged levle1 sublevels, I started to look for the level2 and level3 files, and it was annoying to have the POT files very accessible, but no links to the relevant git repositories. I do want to have all the relevant links in one central place, so people who want to help with translation could do that. While some of the team member just used a text editor to edit the files, I suggested to them using either poedit or granslator, both I used a few years ago. Yaron Shahrabani also recommended virtaal to me, but after trying it for a while I didn t like it (expect it s great feature showing the diff with fuzzy messages). For the few people who also have Windows on their machine, both poedit and Virtaal have windows binaries for download. So you don t have to have Linux in order to help with translations. In parallel, I used the free time to work on the Hebrew translation for level1, as it s been a while since either me or Omer Zak worked on it. Quite soon the guys started to send me the files for review, and I did find some errors using diff. Especially when not everyone use a PO editor. I also missed a few strings during the review, which got fixed later on by Christian Perrier. Team work indeed (: I found it interesting to see the reactions and problems for the team to work with the PO files, and most projects now use some system (e.g. Pootle) for online web translation. Which saves some of the head ace, but also prevents from making some review and quality check before submitting the files. It s a good idea to explore this option for Debian as well. A tip for those who do want to work with PO files, either use git s diff features or use colordiff to check your changes (notice less will require -R parameter to keep the color). Although I met the guys only at noon, the day was very fruitful for Debian Installer l10n:

• Albanian (sq) level1 from 78% to 82% (Eva Vranici, Silva Arapi)
• Albanian (sq) level2 from 20% to 24% (Nafie Shehu)
• Hebrew (he) level1 from 96% to 97% (me)
• Greek (el) level1 from 96% to 97% (Sotirios Vrachas)

Some files are still work in progress and will be completed tomorrow. My goal is to have Albanian at 100% during the camp and ready for the next d-i alpha. I must admit that I remember d-i to have many more strings as part of the 3 levels, especially levels 2+3 which were huge (e.g. the iso codes). Except all the work and FOSS related conversations, I found a great group who welcomed me quickly, made me feel comfortable and taught me a thing or two about Greece and the Syros specifically. TIP: try the dark chocolate with red hot chili pepper in the icecream shop.
Filed under: Debian GNU/Linux, i18n & l10n

This is a difficult announcement to write. The summary is if you use Obnam you should switch to another backup program in the coming months. The first commit to Obnam's current code base is this:

commit 7eaf5a44534ffa7f9c0b9a4e9ee98d312f2fcb14
Author: Lars Wirzenius <liw@iki.fi>
Date:   Wed Sep 6 18:35:52 2006 +0300
    Initial commit.

It's followed by over 5200 more commits until the latest one, which is from yesterday. The NEWS file contains 58 releases. There are 20761 lines of Python, 15384 words in the English language manual, with translations in German and French. The yarn test suite, which is a kind of a manual, is another 13382 words in English and pseudo-English. That's a fair bit of code and prose. Not all of it mine, I've had help from some wonderful people. But most of it mine. I wrote all of that because backups were fun. It was pleasing to use my own program to guarantee the safety of my own data. The technical challenges of implmenting the kind of backup program I wanted were interesting, and solving interesting problems is a big part of why I am a programmer. Obnam has a kind user base. It's not a large user base: the Debian "popularity contest" service estimates it at around 500. But it's a user base that is kind and has treated me well. I have tried to reciprocate. Unfortunately, I have not had fun while developing Obnam for some time now. This has changed. A few years ago, I lived in Manchester, UK, and commuted by train to work. It was a short train ride, about 15 minutes. At times I would sit on the floor with my laptop on my knees, writing code or the manual. Back then Obnam was a lot of fun. I was excited, and enthusiastic. In the past two years or so, I've not been able to feel that excitement again. My native language, Finnish, has an expression describing unpleasant tasks: something is as much fun as drinking tar. That describes Obnam in recent years for me. Obnam has not turned out well, from a maintainability point of view. It seems that every time I try to fix something, I break something else. Usuaully what breaks is speed or memory use: Obnam gets slower or starts using even more memory. For several years now I've been working on a new repository format for Obnam, code names GREEN ALBATROSS. It was meant to solve Obnam's problems as far as extensibility, performance, and resource use were concerned. It seems to have failed. I'm afraid I've had enough. I'm going to retire Obnam as a project and as a program, and move on to doing something else, so I can feel excitement and pleasure again. After some careful thought, I fear that the maintainability problems of Obnam can realistically only be solved by a complete rewrite from scratch, and I'm not up to doing that. If you use Obnam, you should migrate to some other backup solution. Don't worry, you have until the end of the year. I will be around and I intend to fix any serious bugs in Obnam; in particular, security flaws. But you should start looking for a replacement sooner rather than later. I will be asking Obnam to be removed from the Debian unstable and testing branches. The next Debian release (buster, Debian 10) won't include Obnam. The Obnam mailing lists are kindly hosted by Daniel Silverstone, and they will remain, but later this year I will change them to be moderated. The Obnam git repository will remain. The web site will remain, but I will add a note that Obnam is no longer maintained. Other Obnam online resources may disappear. If you would like to take over the Obnam project, and try to resolve the various issues, please contact me to discuss that. Thank you, and may you never need to restore.

I've just released version 1.22 of Obnam, my backup application. It is the first release for this year. Packages are available on code.liw.fi/debian and in Debian unstable, and source is in git. A summary of the user-visible changes is below. For those interested in living dangerously and accidentally on purpose deleting all their data, the link below shows that status and roadmap for FORMAT GREEN ALBATROSS. http://distix.obnam.org/obnam-dev/182bd772889544d5867e1a0ce4e76652.html Version 1.22, released 2017-06-25

• Lars Wirzenius made Obnam log the full text of an Obnam exception/error message with more than one line. In particular this applies to encryption error messages, which now log the gpg output.
• Lars Wirzenius made obnam restore require absolute paths for files to be restored.
• Lars Wirzenius made obnam forget use a little less memory. The amount depends on the number of genrations and the chunks they refer to.
• Jan Niggemann updated the German translation of the Obnam manual to match recent changes in the English version.
• SanskritFritz and Ian Cambell fixed the kdirstat plugin.
• Lars Wirzenius changed Obnam to hide a Python stack trace when there's a problem with the SSH connection (e.g., failure to authenticate, or existing connection breaks).
• Lars Wirzenius made the Green Albatross version of obnam forget actually free chunks that are no longer used.

Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world (previous month):

• Wrote and released installation-birthday. Installing this package will celebrate the anniversary of installing your system by sending you an email via cron(8).
• Fixed an issue in the Django web development framework where you couldn't run the testsuite against a read-only copy of the source code. This was found by the Debian Continuous Integration service. (#26755)
• Provided a pull request for the "wammu" mobile phone manager to ensure the build is reproducible. (#49)

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Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday May 7 and Saturday May 13 2017: Report from Reproducible Builds Hamburg Hackathon We were 16 participants from 12 projects: 7 Debian, 2 repeatr.io, 1 ArchLinux, 1 coreboot + LEDE, 1 F-Droid, 1 ElectroBSD + privoxy, 1 GNU R, 1 in-toto.io, 1 Meson and 1 openSUSE. Three people came from the USA, 3 from the UK, 2 Finland, 1 Austria, 1 Denmark and 6 from Germany, plus we several guests from our gracious hosts at the CCCHH hackerspace as well as a guest from Australia We had four presentations:

• "Reproducible Builds everywhere" by h01ger
• https://in-toto.io by Justin Cappos
• http://repeatr.io by Eric Myhre
• http://mesonbuild.com by Jussi Pakkanen

Some of the things we worked on:

• h01ger did orga stuff for this very hackathon, discussed tests.r-b.o with various non-Debian contributors, filed some bugs and restarted the policy discussion in #844431. He also did some polishing work on tests.r-b.o which shall be covered in next issue of our weekly blog.
• Justin Cappos involved many of us in interesting discussions and started to write an academic paper about Reproducible Builds of which he shared an early beta on our mailinglist.
• Chris Lamb (lamby) filed a number of patches for individual packages, worked on diffoscope, merged many changes to strip-nondeterminism and also filed #862073 against dak to upload buildinfo files to external services.
• Maria Glukhova (siamezzze) fixed a bug with plots on tests.reproducible-builds.org and worked on diffoscope test coverage.
• Lynxis worked on a new squashfs upstream release improving support for reproducible squashfs filesystems and also had some time to hack on coreboot and show others how to install coreboot on real hardware.
• Michael Poehn worked on integrating F-Droid builds into tests.reproducible-builds.org, on the F-Droid verification utility and also ran some app reproducibility tests.
• Bernhard worked on various unreproducible issues upstream and submitted fixes for curl, bzr, ant.
• Erin Myhre worked on bootstrapping cleanroom builds of compiler components in Repeatr sandboxes.
• Calvin Behling merged improvements to reppl for a cleaner storage format and better error handling and did design work for next version of repeatr pipeline execution. Calvin also lead the reproducibility testing of restaurant mood lighting.
• Eric and Calvin also claim to have had all sorts of useful exchanges about the state of other projects, and learned a lot about where to look for more info about debian bootstrap and archive mirroring from steven and lamby
• Phil Hands came by to say hi and worked on testing d-i on jenkins.debian.net.
• Chris West (Faux) worked on extending misc.git:has-only.py, and started looking at Britney.

We had a Debian focussed meeting where we discussed a number of topics:

• IRC meetings: yes, we want to try again to have them, monthly, a poll for a good date is being held.
• Debian tests post Stretch: we'll add tests for stable/Stretch.
• .buildinfo files, how forward: we need sourceful uploads for any arch:all packages. dak should send .buildinfo files to buildinfo.debian.net.
• (pre?) Stretch release press release: we should do that, esp. as our achievements are largely unrelated to Stretch.
• Reproducible Builds Summit 3: yes, we want that.
• what to do (in notes.git) with resolved issues: keep the issues.
• strip-nondeterminism quo vadis: Justin reminded us that strip-nondeterminism is a workaround we want to get rid off.

And then we also had a lot of fun in the hackerspace, enjoying some of their gimmicks, such as being able to open physical doors with ssh or controlling light and music with an webbrowser without authentication (besides being in the right network). (This wasn't the hackathon per-se, but some of us appreciated these sights and so we thought you would too.) Many thanks to:

• Debian for sponsoring food and accomodation!
• Dock Europe for providing us with really nice accomodation in the house!
• CCC Hamburg for letting us use their hackerspace for >3 days non-stop!

News and media coverage openSUSE has had a security breach in their infrastructure, including their build services. As of this writing, the scope and impact are still unclear, however the incident illustrates that no one should rely on being able to secure their infrastructure at all times. Reproducible Builds help mitigate this by allowing independent verification of build results, by parties that are unaffected by the compromise. (Whilst this can happen to anyone. Kudos to openSUSE for being open about it. Now let's continue working on Reproducible Builds everywhere!) On May 13th Chris Lamb gave a talk on Reproducible Builds at OSCAL 2017 in Tirana, Albania. Toolchain bug reports and fixes

• Chris Lamb:
  • Fixed a long-standing toolchain issue (#842635, #858389) in docbook-to-man by adopting the package.
  • #862003 filed against debhelper.
  • #862073 filed against ftp.debian.org, to upload buildinfo files to buildinfo.debian.net.
• Steven Chamberlain:
  • #862059 filed against sbuild, for signing buildinfo files.
• Ximin Luo:
  • #862112 filed against r-base.
  • #862113 filed against gcc-6.
  • #862116 filed against dpkg.

Packages' bug reports

• Chris Lamb:
  • #862088 filed against compass-h5bp-plugin.
  • #862140 filed against ofxstatement-plugins.
  • #862179 filed against acct.
  • #862183 filed against libjgroups-java.
  • #862195 filed against sendip.
  • #862451 filed against wammu, forwarded upstream.
  • #862484 filed against seqan2.
  • #862553 filed against vim-command-t.
  • #862588 filed against tkhtml1.
  • #862592 filed against taskcoach.
• Chris West:
  • #862252 filed against dns-root-data.

Reviews of unreproducible packages 11 package reviews have been added, 2562 have been updated and 278 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Most of the updates were to move ~1800 packages affected by the generic catch-all captures_build_path (out of ~2600 total) to the more specific gcc_captures_build_path, fixed by our proposed patches to GCC. 5 issue types have been updated:

• Updated docbook_to_man_one_byte_delta
• Added ocaml_captures_build_path
• Added gcj_captures_build_path
• Added gcc_captures_build_path
• Re-added docbook_to_man_one_byte_delta

Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by:

• Adrian Bunk (1)
• Chris Lamb (2)
• Chris West (1)

diffoscope development diffoscope development continued on the experimental branch:

• Maria Glukhova:
  • Code refactoring and more tests.
• Chris Lamb:
  • Add safeguards against unpacking recursive or deeply-nested archives. (Closes: #780761)

strip-nondeterminism development

• strip-nondeterminism 0.033-1 and -2 were uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb. It included contributions from:
• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • Add cpio handler.
  • Code quality improvements.
• Chris Lamb:
  • Add documentation and increase verbosity, in support of the long-term aim of removing the need for this tool.

reprotest development

• reprotest 0.6.1 and 0.6.2 were uploaded to unstable by Ximin Luo. It included contributions from:
• Ximin Luo:
  • Add a documentation section on "Known bugs".
  • Move developer documentation away from the man page.
  • Mention release instructions in the previous changelog.
  • Preserve directory structure when copying artifacts. Otherwise hash output on a successful reproduction sometimes fails, because find(1) can't find the artifacts using the original artifact_pattern.
• Chris Lamb
  • Add proper release instructions and a keyring.

trydiffoscope development

• Chris Lamb:
  • Uses the diffoscope from Debian experimental if possible.

Misc. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Holger Levsen and Chris Lamb & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday April 30 and Saturday May 6 2017: Past and upcoming events Between May 5th-7th the Reproducible Builds Hackathon 2017 took place in Hamburg, Germany. On May 6th Mattia Rizzolo gave a talk on Reproducible Builds at DUCC-IT 17 in Vicenza, Italy. On May 13th Chris Lamb will give a talk on Reproducible Builds at OSCAL 2017 in Tirana, Albania. Media coverage

• Gunnar Wolf published an article in Spanish entitled "Construcciones Reproducibles".

Toolchain development and fixes

• Ximin updated his R patch to fix a few FTBFS and now we have 463/478 reproducible R packages. For more details, see his detailed write-up on this blog.
• Holger rebuilt dpkg, gcc-6 and r-base for our experimental toolchain for unstable on arm64, i386 and armhf.

Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed Chris Lamb:

• #861608 filed against sbt.
• #861672 filed against libwibble.
• #861756 filed against pd-pdstring.
• #861770 filed against fbreader.
• #861773 filed against armagetronad.
• #861893 filed against ironic.
• #861896 filed against manila.
• #861955 filed against canna.

Reviews of unreproducible packages 93 package reviews have been added, 12 have been updated and 98 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. The following issues have been added:

• timestamps_in_cbd_files_generated_by_canna_mkbindic toolchain issue.
• timestamps_in_manpages_created_by_libwibble toolchain issue

2 issue types have been updated:

• Add patch for timestamps_in_manpages_created_by_libwibble
• Add patch for timestamps_in_cbd_files_generated_by_canna_mkbindic

The following issues have been removed:

• disorderfs_sensitive
• nondeterministic_ordering_in_desktop_files_by_python_sugar3
• randomness_in_swf_files_generated_by_as3compile
• valac_permutes_get_type_calls
• docbook_to_man_one_byte_delta
• ghc_captures_build_path_via_tempdir
• dict_ordering_in_python_alabaster_sphinx_theme_extra_nav_links
• gpg_keyring_magic_bytes_differ
• varnish_vmodtool_random_file_id
• random_order_in_lua_version_substvar
• unsorted_lua_versions_in_control
• nondeterminstic_ordering_in_gsettings_glib_enums_xml
• random_order_in_init_py_generated_by_python-genpy
• randomness_in_r_rdb_rds_databases
• undeterministic_symlinking_by_rdfind
• random_order_in_ruby_rdoc_indices
• random_order_in_dh_haskell_substvars
• plist_weirdness
• randomness_in_python_setuptools_install_files_txt
• fileorder_in_gemspec_files_list
• timestamps_in_pdf_generated_by_reportlab
• method_may_never_be_called_in_documentation_generated_by_javadoc
• randomness_in_documentation_generated_by_yardoc
• random_ordering_in_pom
• random_anchor_names_generated_by_docbook_to_man
• random_order_in_static_library_by_icmake
• ftbfs_due_to_libtool
• postgres_9.5_transition

Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by:

• Chris Lamb (3)

diffoscope development

• Chris Lamb:
  • Refactor Presenter to a singleton manager
  • Drop passing has_differences around, fixing an issue with generating files called '-'
  • Prevent abstraction-level violation by defining visual diff support on the Presenter classes.
  • Split output and configuration of presenters.
  • Refactor html and text presenters so they fit the same Presenter interface.

strip-nondeterminism development

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • make get_normalizer_by_name O(1)
  • only call get_normalizer_by_name once

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This week's edition was written by Chris Lamb, Holger Levsen and Ximin Luo & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.