Search Results: "andi"

1 July 2024

Russ Allbery: Review: Snuff

Review: Snuff, by Terry Pratchett
Series: Discworld #39
Publisher: Harper
Copyright: October 2011
Printing: January 2013
ISBN: 0-06-221886-7
Format: Mass market
Pages: 470
Snuff is the 39th Discworld novel and the 8th (and last) Watch novel. This is not a good place to start reading. Sam Vines has been talked, cajoled, and coerced into taking a vacation. Since he is now the Duke of Ankh, he has a country estate that he's never visited. Lady Sybil is insistent on remedying this, as is Vetinari. Both of them may have ulterior motives. They may also be colluding. It does not take long for Vimes to realize that something is amiss in the countryside. It's not that the servants are uncomfortable with him talking to them, the senior servants are annoyed that he talks to the wrong servants, and the maids turn to face the wall at the sight of him. Those are just the strange customs of the aristocracy, for which he has little understanding and even less patience. There's something else going on. The nobility is wary, the town blacksmith is angry about something more than disliking the nobles, and the bartender doesn't want to get involved. Vimes smells something suspicious. When he's framed for a murder, the suspicions seem justified. It takes some time before the reader learns what the local nobility are squirming about, so I won't spoil it. What I will say is that Snuff is Pratchett hammering away at one of his favorite targets: prejudice, cruelty, and treating people like things. Vimes, with his uncompromising morality, is one of the first to realize the depth of the problem. It takes most of the rest longer to come around, even Sybil. It's both painful, and painfully accurate, to contemplate how often recognition of other people's worth only comes once they do something that you recognize as valuable. This is one of the better-plotted Discworld novels. Vimes starts out with nothing but suspicions and stubbornness, and manages to turn Snuff into a mystery novel through dogged persistence. The story is one continuous plot arc with the normal Pratchett color (Young Sam's obsession with types of poo, for example) but without extended digressions. It also has considerably better villains than most Pratchett novels: layers of foot soldiers and plotters, each of which have to be dealt with in a suitable way. Even the concluding action sequences worked for me, which is not always a given in Discworld. The problem, unfortunately, is that the writing is getting a bit wobbly. Pratchett died of early-onset Alzheimer's in 2015, four years after this book was first published, and this is the first novel where I can see some early effects. It mostly shows up in the dialogue: it's just a bit flabby and a bit repetitive, and the characters, particularly towards the end of the book, start repeating the name of the person they're talking to every other line. Once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it, and it was annoying enough to rob a bit of enjoyment from the end of the book. That aside, though, this was a solid Discworld novel. Vimes testing his moral certainty against the world and forcing it into a more ethical shape is always rewarding, and here he takes more risks, with better justification, than in most of the Watch novels. We also find out that Vimes has a legacy from the events of Thud!, which has interesting implications that I wish Pratchett had more time to explore. I think the best part of this book is how it models the process of social change through archetypes: the campaigner who knew the right choice early on, the person who formed their opinion the first time they saw injustice, the person who gets there through a more explicit moral code, the ones who have to be pushed by someone who was a bit faster, the ones who have to be convinced but then work to convince others, and of course the person who is willing to take on the unfair and far-too-heavy burden of being exceptional enough that they can be used as a tool to force other people to acknowledge them as a person. And, since this is Discworld, Vetinari is lurking in the scenery pulling strings, balancing threats, navigating politics, and giving Vimes just enough leeway to try to change the world without abusing his power. I love that the amount of leeway Vimes gets depends on how egregious the offense is, and Vetinari calibrates this quite carefully without ever saying so openly. Recommended, and as much as I don't want to see this series end, this is not a bad entry for the Watch novels to end on. Followed in publication order by Raising Steam. Rating: 8 out of 10

23 June 2024

Sahil Dhiman: How I Write Blogs - June 2024 Edition

I wrote about my blog writing methodology back April 2021. My writing method has undergone a significant shift now, so thought about writing this update. New blog topics are added to my note-taking app quite frequently now. Occasionally going through the list, I merge topics, change order to prioritize certain topics or purely drop ideas which seems not worth a write-up. Due to this, I have the liberty to work on blogs according to mood. Writing the last one was tiring, so I chose to work on an easy one, i.e. this blog now. Topic decided, everything starts on etherpad now. Etherpad has this nice font and sync feature, which helps me write from any device of choice. Actual writing usually happens in the morning, right after I wake up. For most topics, I quickly jot down pointers and keep on expanding them over the course of multiple days at a leisurely pace. Though, sometime it adds too many pieces in the puzzle and takes additional time to put everything in flow. New pointer addition keeps on happening along with writing. Nowadays, pictures too dot my blog, which I rarely use to do earlier. I have come to believe on less usage of external links. These breaks the flow of readers. If someone is sufficiently motivated to learn more about something, finding useful sources isn t. As the first draft comes into being, I run it through LanguageTool for spelling corrections (which typically are many) and fixing grammatical issues. Post that, for the first time I read the complete write-up in one go for formation of coherent storyline, moving paragraphs around for form a structure , adding explainers wherever something new or unexplained is introduced, removing elaborate sentences, making amends wherever required and moving paragraphs around for forming structure. Another round of LanguageTool follows. All set now, I try to space out my final read before publishing, which helps find additional mistakes or loopholes. When everything is set, I do hugo to generate the site and rsync everything to the web server. A final git sync closes the publication part. After a day or two, I come back to read the blog on the website. This entails another round finding and fixing trivial mistakes. After this, it s set for good. Nowadays, in addition to being on my blog, everything is syndicated on Planet FSCI and Planet Debian, which has given it more visibility. As someone who s into infrastructure and Internet as a lot, I do pay attention to logs on my server, but as a disconnected exercise to if the blog is being read or not. More hits on the blog doesn t translate to any gratification for me, at least for writers point of view. Occasionally, people do mention my blog, which does flatter me. Four years and nearly a hundred posts later, I still wonder how I kept on writing for this long.

19 June 2024

Sahil Dhiman: First Iteration of My Free Software Mirror

As I m gearing towards setting up a Free Software download mirror in India, it occurred to me that I haven t chronicled the work and motivation behind setting up the original mirror in the first place. Also, seems like it would be good to document stuff here for observing the progression, as the mirror is going multi-country now. Right now, my existing mirror i.e., mirrors.de.sahilister.net (was mirrors.sahilister.in), is hosted in Germany and serves traffic for Termux, NomadBSD, Blender, BlendOS and GIMP. For a while in between, it hosted OSMC project mirror as well. To explain what is a Free Software download mirror thing is first, I ll quote myself from work blog -
As most Free Software doesn t have commercial backing and require heavy downloads, the concept of software download mirrors helps take the traffic load off of the primary server, leading to geographical redundancy, higher availability and faster download in general.
So whenever someone wants to download a particular (mirrored) software and click download, upstream redirects the download to one of the mirror server which is geographical (or in other parameters) nearby to the user, leading to faster downloads and load sharing amongst all mirrors. Since the time I got into Linux and servers, I always wanted to help the community somehow, and mirroring seemed to be the most obvious thing. India seems to be a country which has traditionally seen less number of public download mirrors. IITB, TiFR, and some of the public institutions used to host them for popular Linux and Free Softwares, but they seem to be diminishing these days. In the last months of 2021, I started using Termux and saw that it had only a few mirrors (back then). I tried getting a high capacity, high bandwidth node in budget but it was hard in India in 2021-22. So after much deliberation, I decided to go where it s available and chose a German hosting provider with the thought of adding India node when conditions are favorable (thankfully that happened, and India node is live too now.). Termux required only 29 GB of storage, so went ahead and started mirroring it. I raised this issue in Termux s GitHub repository in January 2022. This blog post chronicles the start of the mirror. Termux has high request counts from a mirror point of view. Each Termux client, usually checks every mirror in selected group for availability before randomly selecting one for download (only other case is when client has explicitly selected a single mirror using termux-repo-change). The mirror started getting thousands of requests daily due to this but only a small percentage would actually get my mirror in selection, so download traffic was lower. Similar thing happened with OSMC too (which I started mirroring later). With this start, I started exploring various project that would be benefit from additional mirrors. Public information from Academic Computer Club in Ume s mirror and Freedif s mirror stats helped to figure out storage and bandwidth requirements for potential projects. Fun fact, Academic Computer Club in Ume (which is one of the prominent Debian, Ubuntu etc.) mirror, now has 200 Gbits/s uplink to the internet through SUNET. Later, I migrated to a different provider for better speeds and added LibreSpeed test on the mirror server. Those were fun times. Between OSMC, Termux and LibreSpeed, I was getting almost 1.2 millions hits/day on the server at its peak, crossing for the first time a TB/day traffic number. Next came Blender, which took the longest time to set up of around 9 10 months. Blender had a push-trigger requirement for rsync from upstream that took quite some back and forth. It now contributes the most amount of traffic on the mirror. On release days, mirror does more than 3 TB/day and normal days, it hovers around 2 TB/day. Gimp project is the latest addition. At one time, the mirror traffic touched 4.97 TB/day traffic number. That s when I decided on dropping LibreSpeed server to solely focus on mirroring for now, keeping the bandwidth allotment for serving downloads only. The mirror projects selection grew organically. I used to reach out many projects discussing the need of for additional mirrors. Some projects outright denied mirroring request as Germany already has a good academic mirrors boosting 20-25 Gbits/s speeds from FTP era, which seems fair. Finding the niche was essential to only add softwares, which would truly benefit from additional capacity. There were months when nothing much would happen with the mirror, rsync would continue to update the mirror while nginx would keep on serving the traffic. Nowadays, the mirror pushes around 70 TB/month. I occasionally check logs, vnstat, add new security stuff here and there and pay the bills. It now saturates the Gigabit link sometimes and goes beyond that, peaking around 1.42 Gbits/s (the hosting provider seems to be upping their game). The plan is to upgrade the link to better speeds. vnstat yearly
Yearly traffic stats (through vnstat -y )
On the way, learned quite a few things like - GeoIP Map of Clients from Yesterday Access Logs
GeoIP Map of Clients from Yesterday's Access Logs. Click to enlarge
Generated from IPinfo.io
In hindsight, the statistics look amazing, hundreds of TBs of traffic served from the mirror, month after month. That does show that there s still an appetite for public mirrors in time of commercially donated CDNs and GitHub. The world could have done with one less mirror, but it saved some time, lessened the burden for others, while providing redundancy and traffic localization with one additional mirror. And it s fun for someone like me who s into infrastructure that powers the Internet. Now, I ll try focusing and expanding the India mirror, which in itself started pushing almost half a TB/day. Long live Free Software and public download mirrors.

8 June 2024

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in May 2024

Welcome to the May 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In these reports, we try to outline what we have been up to over the past month and highlight news items in software supply-chain security more broadly. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. Table of contents:
  1. A peek into build provenance for Homebrew
  2. Distribution news
  3. Mailing list news
  4. Miscellaneous news
  5. Two new academic papers
  6. diffoscope
  7. Website updates
  8. Upstream patches
  9. Reproducibility testing framework


A peek into build provenance for Homebrew Joe Sweeney and William Woodruff on the Trail of Bits blog wrote an extensive post about build provenance for Homebrew, the third-party package manager for MacOS. Their post details how each bottle (i.e. each release):
[ ] built by Homebrew will come with a cryptographically verifiable statement binding the bottle s content to the specific workflow and other build-time metadata that produced it. [ ] In effect, this injects greater transparency into the Homebrew build process, and diminishes the threat posed by a compromised or malicious insider by making it impossible to trick ordinary users into installing non-CI-built bottles.
The post also briefly touches on future work, including work on source provenance:
Homebrew s formulae already hash-pin their source artifacts, but we can go a step further and additionally assert that source artifacts are produced by the repository (or other signing identity) that s latent in their URL or otherwise embedded into the formula specification.

Distribution news In Debian this month, Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues (aka josch) noticed that the Debian binary package bash version 5.2.15-2+b3 was uploaded to the archive twice. Once to bookworm and once to sid but with differing content. This is problem for reproducible builds in Debian due its assumption that the package name, version and architecture triplet is unique. However, josch highlighted that
This example with bash is especially problematic since bash is Essential:yes, so there will now be a large portion of .buildinfo files where it is not possible to figure out with which of the two differing bash packages the sources were compiled.
In response to this, Holger Levsen performed an analysis of all .buildinfo files and found that this needs almost 1,500 binNMUs to fix the fallout from this bug. Elsewhere in Debian, Vagrant Cascadian posted about a Non-Maintainer Upload (NMU) sprint to take place during early June, and it was announced that there is now a #debian-snapshot IRC channel on OFTC to discuss the creation of a new source code archiving service to, perhaps, replace snapshot.debian.org. Lastly, 11 reviews of Debian packages were added, 15 were updated and 48 were removed this month adding to our extensive knowledge about identified issues. A number of issue types have been updated by Chris Lamb as well. [ ][ ]
Elsewhere in the world of distributions, deep within a larger announcement from Colin Percival about the release of version 14.1-BETA2, it was mentioned that the FreeBSD kernels are now built reproducibly.
In Fedora, however, the change proposal mentioned in our report for April 2024 was approved, so, per the ReproduciblePackageBuilds wiki page, the add-determinism tool is now running in new builds for Fedora 41 ( rawhide ). The add-determinism tool is a Rust program which, as its name suggests, adds determinism to files that are given as input by attempting to standardize metadata contained in binary or source files to ensure consistency and clamping to $SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in all instances . This is essentially the Fedora version of Debian s strip-nondeterminism. However, strip-nondeterminism is written in Perl, and Fedora did not want to pull Perl in the buildroot for every package. The add-determinism tool eliminates many causes of non-determinism and work is ongoing to continue the scope of packages it can operate on.

Mailing list news On our mailing list this month, regular contributor kpcyrd wrote to the list with an update on their source code indexing project, whatsrc.org. The whatsrc.org project, which was launched last month in response to the XZ Utils backdoor, now contains and indexes almost 250,000 unique source code archives. In their post, kpcyrd gives an example of its intended purpose, noting that it shown that whilst there seems to be consensus about [the] source code for zsh 5.9 in various Linux distributions, it does not align with the contents of the zsh Git repository . Holger Levsen also posted to the list with a pre-announcement of sorts for the 2024 Reproducible Builds summit. In particular:
[Whilst] the dates and location are not fixed yet, however if you don help us with finding a suitable location soon, it is very likely that we ll meet again in Hamburg in the 2nd half of September 2024 [ ].
Lastly, Frederic-Emmanuel Picca wrote to the list asking for help understanding the non-reproducible status of the Debian silx package and received replies from both Vagrant Cascadian and Chris Lamb.

Miscellaneous news strip-nondeterminism is our tool to remove specific non-deterministic results from a completed build. This month strip-nondeterminism version 1.14.0-1 was uploaded to Debian unstable by Chris Lamb chiefly to incorporate a change from Alex Muntada to avoid a dependency on Sub::Override to perform monkey-patching and break circular dependencies related to debhelper [ ]. Elsewhere in our tooling, Jelle van der Waa modified reprotest because the pipes module will be removed in Python version 3.13 [ ].
It was also noticed that a new blog post by Daniel Stenberg detailing How to verify a Curl release mentions the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable. This is because:
The [curl] release tools document also contains another key component: the exact time stamp at which the release was done using integer second resolution. In order to generate a correct tarball clone, you need to also generate the new version using the old version s timestamp. Because the modification date of all files in the produced tarball will be set to this timestamp.

Furthermore, Fay Stegerman filed a bug against the Signal messenger app for Android to report that their reproducible builds cannot, in fact, be reproduced. However, Fay is quick to note that she has:
found zero evidence of any kind of compromise. Some differences are yet unexplained but everything I found seems to be benign. I am disappointed that Reproducible Builds have been broken for months but I have zero reason to doubt Signal s security in any way.

Lastly, it was observed that there was a concise and diagrammatic overview of supply chain threats on the SLSA website.

Two new academic papers Two new scholarly papers were published this month. Firstly, Mathieu Acher, Beno t Combemale, Georges Aaron Randrianaina and Jean-Marc J z quel of University of Rennes on Embracing Deep Variability For Reproducibility & Replicability. The authors describe their approach as follows:
In this short [vision] paper we delve into the application of software engineering techniques, specifically variability management, to systematically identify and explicit points of variability that may give rise to reproducibility issues (e.g., language, libraries, compiler, virtual machine, OS, environment variables, etc.). The primary objectives are: i) gaining insights into the variability layers and their possible interactions, ii) capturing and documenting configurations for the sake of reproducibility, and iii) exploring diverse configurations to replicate, and hence validate and ensure the robustness of results. By adopting these methodologies, we aim to address the complexities associated with reproducibility and replicability in modern software systems and environments, facilitating a more comprehensive and nuanced perspective on these critical aspects.
(A PDF of this article is available.)
Secondly, Ludovic Court s, Timothy Sample, Simon Tournier and Stefano Zacchiroli have collaborated to publish a paper on Source Code Archiving to the Rescue of Reproducible Deployment. Their paper was motivated because:
The ability to verify research results and to experiment with methodologies are core tenets of science. As research results are increasingly the outcome of computational processes, software plays a central role. GNU Guix is a software deployment tool that supports reproducible software deployment, making it a foundation for computational research workflows. To achieve reproducibility, we must first ensure the source code of software packages Guix deploys remains available.
(A PDF of this article is also available.)

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made a number of changes such as uploading versions 266, 267, 268 and 269 to Debian, making the following changes:
  • New features:
    • Use xz --list to supplement output when comparing .xz archives; essential when metadata differs. (#1069329)
    • Include xz --verbose --verbose (ie. double) output. (#1069329)
    • Strip the first line from the xz --list output. [ ]
    • Only include xz --list --verbose output if the xz has no other differences. [ ]
    • Actually append the xz --list after the container differences, as it simplifies a lot. [ ]
  • Testing improvements:
    • Allow Debian testing to fail right now. [ ]
    • Drop apktool from Build-Depends; we can still test APK functionality via autopkgtests. (#1071410)
    • Add a versioned dependency for at least version 5.4.5 for the xz tests as they fail under (at least) version 5.2.8. (#374)
    • Fix tests for 7zip 24.05. [ ][ ]
    • Fix all tests after additon of xz --list. [ ][ ]
  • Misc:
    • Update copyright years. [ ]
In addition, James Addison fixed an issue where the HTML output showed only the first difference in a file, while the text output shows all differences [ ][ ][ ], Sergei Trofimovich amended the 7zip version test for older 7z versions that include the string [64] [ ][ ] and Vagrant Cascadian relaxed the versioned dependency to allow version 5.4.1 for the xz tests [ ] and proposed updates to guix for versions 267, 268 and pushed version 269 to Guix. Furthermore, Eli Schwartz updated the diffoscope.org website in order to explain how to install diffoscope on Gentoo [ ].

Website updates There were a number of improvements made to our website this month, including Chris Lamb making the print CSS stylesheet nicer [ ]. Fay Stegerman made a number of updates to the page about the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable [ ][ ][ ] and Holger Levsen added some of their presentations to the Resources page. Furthermore, IOhannes zm lnig stipulated support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in clang version 16.0.0+ [ ], Jan Zerebecki expanded the Formal definition page and fixed a number of typos on the Buy-in page [ ] and Simon Josefsson fixed the link to Trisquel GNU/Linux on the Projects page [ ].

Upstream patches This month, we wrote a number of patches to fix specific reproducibility issues, including:

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework running primarily at tests.reproducible-builds.org in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In May, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Enable the rebuilder-snapshot API on osuosl4. [ ]
    • Schedule the i386 architecture a bit more often. [ ]
    • Adapt cleanup_nodes.sh to the new way of running our build services. [ ]
    • Add 8 more workers for the i386 architecture. [ ]
    • Update configuration now that the infom07 and infom08 nodes have been reinstalled as real i386 systems. [ ]
    • Make diffoscope timeouts more visible on the #debian-reproducible-changes IRC channel. [ ]
    • Mark the cbxi4a-armhf node as down. [ ][ ]
    • Only install the hdmi2usb-mode-switch package only on Debian bookworm and earlier [ ] and only install the haskell-platform package on Debian bullseye [ ].
  • Misc:
    • Install the ntpdate utility as we need it later. [ ]
    • Document the progress on the i386 architecture nodes at Infomaniak. [ ]
    • Drop an outdated and unnoticed notice. [ ]
    • Add live_setup_schroot to the list of so-called zombie jobs. [ ]
In addition, Mattia Rizzolo reinstalled the infom07 and infom08 nodes [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian marked the cbxi4a node as online [ ].

If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

5 June 2024

Scarlett Gately Moore: Kubuntu, KDE, Debian: I am still here, in loving memory of my brother.

I am still here, busy as ever, I just haven t found the inspiration to blog. So soon after the loss of my son, I have lost my only brother a couple weeks ago. It has been a tough year for our family. Thank you everyone for you love and support during this difficult time. I will do my best in re-capping my work, there has been quite a bit as I am keeping busy with work so I don t dwell to much on the sadness. KDE Snaps: Trying to debug the unable to save files breakage in the latest Krita builds without luck. KisOpenGLCanvas
Renderer::reportFailedShaderCompilation\[0m: Shad
er Compilation Failure: "Failed to add vertex sh
ader source from file: matrix_transform.vert - Ca
use: "
I have implemented everything from https://snapcraft.io/docs/gpu-support , it has worked for years and now suddenly it just stopped. I have had to put it on hold for now, it is unpaid work and I simply don t have time. With the help of my GSOC student we are improving the Qt6 snap MR: https://invent.kde.org/neon/snap-packaging/kde-qt6-core-sdk/-/merge_requests/3 and many improvements on top of that. This exposed many issues with the kf6 snap and the linking to static libs. Those are being worked on now. Updated qt to 6.7.1 Qt6 apps in the works: okular, ark, gwenview, kwrited, elisa Kubuntu: So many SRu s for the Noble release, I will probably miss a few. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ark/+bug/2068491 Ark cannot open 7-zip files. Sadly the patches were for qt6, waiting for a qt5 port upstream. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/noble/+source/merkuro/+bug/2065063 Crash due to missing qml. Fix is in git, no upload rights. Requested sponsor. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/tellico/+bug/2065915 Several applications no longer work on architectures that are not amd64 due to hard coded paths. All fixed in git. Several uploaded to oracular, several sponsorship has been requested. Noble updates rejected despite SRU, going to retry. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/sddm/+bug/2066275 The dreaded black screen on second boot bug is fixed in git and oracular. Noble was rejected despite the SRU. Will retry. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kubuntu-meta/+bug/2066028 Broken systray submenus. Fixed in git and oracular. Noble rejected despite SRU. Will retry. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/plasma-workspace/+bug/2067747 Long standing bug with plasma not loading with lightdm. Fixed in git and oracular. Noble rejected will retry. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/plasma-workspace/+bug/2067742 CVE-2024-36041Fixed in git and oracular, noble rejected, will retry. And many more I am applying for MOTU in hopes it will reduce all of my uploading issues. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/scarlettmoore/MOTUApplication Debian: kf6-knotifications and kapidox. Will jump into Plasma 6 next week ! Misc: Went to LinuxFest Northwest with Valorie! We had a great time and it was a huge success, we had many people stop by our booth.
As usual, if you like my work and want to see Plasma 6 in Kubuntu it all depends on you! Kubuntu will be out of funds soon and needs donations! Thank you for your consideration. https://kubuntu.org/donate/ Personal: Support for my grandson: https://www.gofundme.com/f/in-loving-memory-of-william-billy-dean-scalf

24 May 2024

Julian Andres Klode: Observations in Debian dependency solving

In my previous blog, I explored The New APT 3.0 solver. Since then I have been at work in the test suite making tests pass and fixing some bugs. You see for all intents and purposes, the new solver is a very stupid naive DPLL SAT solver (it just so happens we don t actually have any pure literals in there). We can control it in a bunch of ways:
  1. We can mark packages as install or reject
  2. We can order actions/clauses. When backtracking the action that came later will be the first we try to backtrack on
  3. We can order the choices of a dependency - we try them left to right.
This is about all that we really want to do, we can t go if we reach a conflict, say oh but this conflict was introduced by that upgrade, and it seems more important, so let s not backtrack on the upgrade request but on this dependency instead. . This forces us to think about lowering the dependency problem into this form, such that not only do we get formally correct solutions, but also semantically correct ones. This is nice because we can apply a systematic way to approach the issue rather than introducing ad-hoc rules in the old solver which had a which of these packages should I flip the opposite way to break the conflict kind of thinking. Now our test suite has a whole bunch of these semantics encoded in it, and I m going to share some problems and ideas for how to solve them. I can t wait to fix these and the error reporting and then turn it on in Ubuntu and later Debian (the defaults change is a post-trixie change, let s be honest).

apt upgrade is hard The apt upgrade commands implements a safe version of dist-upgrade that essentially calculates the dist-upgrade, and then undoes anything that would cause a package to be removed, but it (unlike its apt-get counterpart) allows the solver to install new packages. Now, consider the following package is installed:
X Depends: A (= 1)   B
An upgrade from A=1 to A=2 is available. What should happen? The classic solver would choose to remove X in a dist-upgrade, and then upgrade A, so it s answer is quite clear: Keep back the upgrade of A. The new solver however sees two possible solutions:
  1. Install B to satisfy X Depends A (= 1) B.
  2. Keep back the upgrade of A
Which one does it pick? This depends on the order in which it sees the upgrade action for A and the dependency, as it will backjump chronologically. So
  1. If it gets to the dependency first, it marks A=1 for install to satisfy A (= 1). Then it gets to the upgrade request, which is just A Depends A (= 2) A (= 1) and sees it is satisfied already and is content.
  2. If it gets to the upgrade request first, it marks A=2 for install to satisfy A (= 2). Then later it gets to X Depends: A (= 1) B, sees that A (= 1) is not satisfiable, and picks B.
We have two ways to approach this issue:
  1. We always order upgrade requests last, so they will be kept back in case of conflicting dependencies
  2. We require that, for apt upgrade a currently satisfied dependency must be satisfied by currently installed packages, hence eliminating B as a choice.

Recommends are hard too See if you have a X Recommends: A (= 1) and a new version of A, A (= 2), the solver currently will silently break the Recommends in some cases. But let s explore what the behavior of a X Recommends: A (= 1) in combination with an available upgrade of A (= 2) should be. We could say the rule should be:
  • An upgrade should keep back A instead of breaking the Recommends
  • A dist-upgrade should either keep back A or remove X (if it is obsolete)
This essentially leaves us the same choices as for the previous problem, but with an interesting twist. We can change the ordering (and we already did), but we could also introduce a new rule, promotions :
A Recommends in an installed package, or an upgrade to that installed package, where the Recommends existed in the installed version, that is currently satisfied, must continue to be satisfied, that is, it effectively is promoted to a Depends.
This neatly solves the problem for us. We will never break Recommends that are satisfied. Likewise, we already have a Recommends demotion rule:
A Recommends in an installed package, or an upgrade to that installed package, where the Recommends existed in the installed version, that is currently unsatisfied, will not be further evaluated (it is treated like a Suggests is in the default configuration).
Whether we should be allowed to break Suggests with our decisions or not (the old autoremover did not, for instance) is a different decision. Should we promote currently satisified Suggests to Depends as well? Should we follow currently satisified Suggests so the solver sees them and doesn t autoremove them, but treat them as optional?

tightening of versioned dependencies Another case of versioned dependencies with alternatives that has complex behavior is something like
X Depends: A (>= 2)   B
X Recommends: A (>= 2)   B
In both cases, installing X should upgrade an A < 2 in favour of installing B. But a naive SAT solver might not. If your request to keep A installed is encoded as A (= 1) A (= 2), then it first picks A (= 1). When it sees the Depends/Recommends it will switch to B. We can solve this again as in the previous example by ordering the keep A installed requests after any dependencies. Notably, we will enqueue the common dependencies of all A versions first before selecting a version of A, so something may select a version for us.

version narrowing instead of version choosing A different approach to dealing with the issue of version selection is to not select a version until the very last moment. So instead of selecting a version to satisfy A (>= 2) we instead translate
Depends: A (>= 2)
into two rules:
  1. The package selection rule:
     Depends: A
    
    This ensures that any version of A is installed (i.e. it adds a version choice clause, A (= 1) A (= 2) in an example with two versions for A.
  2. The version narrowing rule:
     Conflicts: A (<< 2)
    
    This outright would reject a choice of A (= 1).
So now we have 3 kinds of clauses:
  1. package selection
  2. version narrowing
  3. version selection
If we process them in that order, we should surely be able to find the solution that best matches the semantics of our Debian dependency model, i.e. selecting earlier choices in a dependency before later choices in the face of version restrictions. This still leaves one issue: What if our maintainer did not use Depends: A (>= 2) B but e.g. Depends: A (= 3) B A (= 2). He d expect us to fall back to B if A (= 3) is not installable, and not to B. But we d like to enqueue A and reject all choices other than 3 and 2. I think it s fair to say: Don t do that, then here.

Implementing strict pinning correctly APT knows a single candidate version per package, this makes the solver relatively deterministic: It will only ever pick the candidate, or an installed version. This also happens to significantly reduce the search space which is good - less backtracking. An uptodate system will only ever have one version per package that can be installed, so we never actually have to choose versions. But of course, APT allows you to specify a non-candidate version of a package to install, for example:
apt install foo/oracular-proposed
The way this works is that the core component of the previous solver, which is the pkgDepCache maintains what essentially amounts to an overlay of the policy that you could see with apt-cache policy. The solver currently however validates allowed version choices against the policy directly, and hence finds these versions are not allowed and craps out. This is an interesting problem because the solver should not be dependent on the pkgDepCache as the pkgDepCache initialization (Building dependency tree...) accounts for about half of the runtime of APT (until the Y/n prompt) and I d really like to get rid of it. But currently the frontend does go via the pkgDepCache. It marks the packages in there, building up what you could call a transaction, and then we translate it to the new solver, and once it is done, it translates the result back into the pkgDepCache. The current implementation of allowed version is implemented by reducing the search space, i.e. every dependency, we outright ignore any non-allowed versions. So if you have a version 3 of A that is ignored a Depends: A would be translated into A (= 2) A (= 1). However this has two disadvantages. (1) It means if we show you why A could not be installed, you don t even see A (= 3) in the list of choices and (2) you would need to keep the pkgDepCache around for the temporary overrides. So instead of actually enforcing the allowed version rule by filtering, a more reasonable model is that we apply the allowed version rule by just marking every other version as not allowed when discovering the package in the from depcache translation layer. This doesn t really increase the search space either but it solves both our problem of making overrides work and giving you a reasonable error message that lists all versions of A.

pulling up common dependencies to minimize backtracking cost One of the common issues we have is that when we have a dependency group
 A   B   C   D 
we try them in order, and if one fails, we undo everything it did, and move on to the next one. However, this isn t perhaps the best choice of operation. I explained before that one thing we do is queue the common dependencies of a package (i.e. dependencies shared in all versions) when marking a package for install, but we don t do this here: We have already lowered the representation of the dependency group into a list of versions, so we d need to extract the package back out of it. This can of course be done, but there may be a more interesting solution to the problem, in that we simply enqueue all the common dependencies. That is, we add n backtracking levels for n possible solutions:
  1. We enqueue the common dependencies of all possible solutions deps(A)&deps(B)&deps(C)&deps(D)
  2. We decide (adding a decision level) not to install D right now and enqueue deps(A)&deps(B)&deps(C)
  3. We decide (adding a decision level) not to install C right now and enqueue deps(A)&deps(B)
  4. We decide (adding a decision level) not to install B right now and enqueue A
Now if we need to backtrack from our choice of A we hopefully still have a lot of common dependencies queued that we do not need to redo. While we have more backtracking levels, each backtracking level would be significantly cheaper, especially if you have cheap backtracking (which admittedly we do not have, yet anyway). The caveat though is: It may be pretty expensive to find the common dependencies. We need to iterate over all dependency groups of A and see if they are in B, C, and D, so we have a complexity of roughly #A * (#B+#C+#D) Each dependency group we need to check i.e. is X Y in B meanwhile has linear cost: We need to compare the memory content of two pointer arrays containing the list of possible versions that solve the dependency group. This means that X Y and Y X are different dependencies of course, but that is to be expected they are. But any dependency of the same order will have the same memory layout. So really the cost is roughly N^4. This isn t nice. You can apply various heuristics here on how to improve that, or you can even apply binary logic:
  1. Enqueue common dependencies of A B C D
  2. Move into the left half, enqueue of A B
  3. Again divide and conquer and select A.
This has a significant advantage in long lists of choices, and also in the common case, where the first solution should be the right one. Or again, if you enqueue the package and a version restriction instead, you already get the common dependencies enqueued for the chosen package at least.

Freexian Collaborators: Discover release 0.3.0 of the debusine software factory (by Colin Watson)

Debusine is a Free Software project developed by Freexian to manage scheduling and distribution of Debian-related tasks to a network of worker machines. It was started some time back, but its development pace has recently increased significantly thanks to funding from the Sovereign Tech Fund. You can read more about it in its documentation. For more background, Enrico Zini and Carles Pina i Estany gave a talk on Debusine in November 2023 at the mini-DebConf in Cambridge. We described the work from our first funded milestone in a post to debian-devel-announce in March. We ve recently finished work on our second funded milestone, culminating in releasing version 0.3.0 to unstable. Our focus on this milestone was on new building blocks to allow us to automatically orchestrate QA tasks in bulk. Full details are in our release history document. As usual, debusine.debian.net is up to date with our latest work.

Collections In the previous milestone, debusine could store artifacts and run tasks against those artifacts. However, on its own this required the user to do a lot of manual work, because the only way to refer to an artifact was by its ID. We now have the concept of a collection, which can store references to other artifacts (or indeed to other collections) with some attached metadata. These are structured by category, so for example a debian:suite collection contains references to source and binary package artifacts with their names, versions, and architectures as metadata. This allows us to look up artifacts using a simple query language instead of just by ID. At the moment, the main visible effect of this is that our Getting started with debusine tutorial no longer needs users of debusine.debian.net to create their own build environments before being able to submit other work requests: they can refer to existing environments using something like debian/match:codename=trixie:variant=sbuild instead. We also have a basic user interface allowing you to browse existing collections, accessible via the relevant workspace (such as the default System workspace).

Workflows We ve always known that individual tasks were just a starting point: real-world requirements often involve chaining many tasks together, as many Debian developers already do using the Salsa CI pipeline. debusine intends to approach a similar problem from a different angle, defining common workflows that can be applied at the scale of a whole distribution without being tightly coupled to where each package s code is hosted. In time we intend to define a way for users to specify their own workflows, but rather than getting too bogged down in this we started by building a couple of predefined workflows into debusine. The update_environments workflow is used to create multiple build environments in bulk, while the sbuild workflow builds a source package for all the architectures that it supports and for which debusine has workers. (debusine.debian.net currently has amd64 and arm64 workers, supporting the amd64, arm64, armel, armhf, and i386 architectures between them.) Upcoming work will build on this by adding more workflows that chain tasks together in various ways, such as workflows that build a package and run QA tasks on the results, or a workflow that builds a package and uploads the result to an upload queue.

Next steps Our next planned milestone involves expanding debusine s capability as a build daemon. For that, we already know that there are a number of specific extra workflow steps we need to add, and we ve reached out to some members of Debian s buildd team to ask for feedback on what they consider necessary. We hope to be able to replace some of Freexian s own build infrastructure with debusine in the near future.

20 May 2024

Debian Brasil: MiniDebConf Belo Horizonte 2024 - um breve relato

De 27 a 30 de abril de 2024 foi realizada a MiniDebConf Belo Horizonte 2024 no Campus Pampulha da UFMG - Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, em Belo Horizonte - MG. MiniDebConf BH 2024 banners Esta foi a quinta vez que uma MiniDebConf (como um evento presencial exclusivo sobre Debian) aconteceu no Brasil. As edi es anteriores foram em Curitiba (2016, 2017, e 2018), e em Bras lia 2023. Tivemos outras edi es de MiniDebConfs realizadas dentro de eventos de Software Livre como o FISL e a Latinoware, e outros eventos online. Veja o nosso hist rico de eventos. Paralelamente MiniDebConf, no dia 27 (s bado) aconteceu o FLISOL - Festival Latino-americano de Instala o de Software Livre, maior evento da Am rica Latina de divulga o de Software Livre realizado desde o ano de 2005 simultaneamente em v rias cidades. A MiniDebConf Belo Horizonte 2024 foi um sucesso (assim como as edi es anteriores) gra as participa o de todos(as), independentemente do n vel de conhecimento sobre o Debian. Valorizamos a presen a tanto dos(as) usu rios(as) iniciantes que est o se familiarizando com o sistema quanto dos(as) desenvolvedores(as) oficiais do projeto. O esp rito de acolhimento e colabora o esteve presente em todos os momentos. MiniDebConf BH 2024 flisol N meros da edi o 2024 Durante os quatro dias de evento aconteceram diversas atividades para todos os n veis de usu rios(as) e colaboradores(as) do projeto Debian. A programa o oficial foi composta de: MiniDebConf BH 2024 palestra Os n meros finais da MiniDebConf Belo Horizonte 2024 mostram que tivemos um recorde de participantes. Dos 224 participantes, 15 eram contribuidores(as) oficiais brasileiros sendo 10 DDs (Debian Developers) e 05 (Debian Maintainers), al m de diversos(as) contribuidores(as) n o oficiais. A organiza o foi realizada por 14 pessoas que come aram a trabalhar ainda no final de 2023, entre elas o Prof. Lo c Cerf do Departamento de Computa o que viabilizou o evento na UFMG, e 37 volunt rios(as) que ajudaram durante o evento. Como a MiniDebConf foi realizado nas instala es da UFMG, tivemos a ajuda de mais de 10 funcion rios da Universidade. Veja a lista com os nomes das pessoas que ajudaram de alguma forma na realiza o da MiniDebConf Belo Horizonte 2024. A diferen a entre o n mero de pessoas inscritas e o n mero de pessoas presentes provavelmente se explica pelo fato de n o haver cobran a de inscri o, ent o se a pessoa desistir de ir ao evento ela n o ter preju zo financeiro. A edi o 2024 da MiniDebconf Belo Horizonte foi realmente grandiosa e mostra o resultado dos constantes esfor os realizados ao longo dos ltimos anos para atrair mais colaboradores(as) para a comunidade Debian no Brasil. A cada edi o os n meros s aumentam, com mais participantes, mais atividades, mais salas, e mais patrocinadores/apoiadores. MiniDebConf BH 2024 grupo

MiniDebConf BH 2024 grupo Atividades A programa o da MiniDebConf foi intensa e diversificada. Nos dias 27, 29 e 30 (s bado, segunda e ter a-feira) tivemos palestras, debates, oficinas e muitas atividades pr ticas. MiniDebConf BH 2024 palestra J no dia 28 (domingo), ocorreu o Day Trip, um dia dedicado a passeios pela cidade. Pela manh sa mos do hotel e fomos, em um nibus fretado, para o Mercado Central de Belo Horizonte. O pessoal aproveitou para comprar v rias coisas como queijos, doces, cacha as e lembrancinhas, al m de experimentar algumas comidas locais. MiniDebConf BH 2024 mercado Depois de 2 horas de passeio pelo Mercado, voltamos para o nibus e pegamos a estrada para almo armos em um restaurante de comida t pica mineira. MiniDebConf BH 2024 palestra Com todos bem alimentados, voltamos para Belo Horizonte para visitarmos o principal ponto tur stico da cidade: a Lagoa da Pampulha e a Capela S o Francisco de Assis, mais conhecida como Igrejinha da Pampulha. MiniDebConf BH 2024 palestra Voltamos para o hotel e o dia terminou no hacker space que montamos na sala de eventos para o pessoal conversar, empacotar, e comer umas pizzas. MiniDebConf BH 2024 palestra Financiamento coletivo Pela terceira vez fizemos uma campanha de financiamento coletivo e foi incr vel como as pessoas contribu ram! A meta inicial era arrecadar o valor equivalente a uma cota ouro de R$ 3.000,00. Ao atingirmos essa meta, definimos uma nova, equivalente a uma cota ouro + uma cota prata (R$ 5.000,00). E novamente atingimos essa meta. Ent o propusermos como meta final o valor de uma cota ouro + prata + bronze, que seria equivalente a R$ 6.000,00. O resultado foi que arrecadamos R$ 7.239,65 com a ajuda de mais de 100 pessoas! Muito obrigado as pessoas que contribu ram com qualquer valor. Como forma de agradecimento, listamos os nomes das pessoas que doaram. MiniDebConf BH 2024 doadores Bolsas de alimenta o, hospedagem e/ou passagens para participantes Cada edi o da MiniDebConf trouxe alguma inova o, ou algum benef cio diferente para os(a) participantes. Na edi o deste ano em Belo Horizonte, assim como acontece nas DebConfs, oferecemos bolsas de alimenta o, hospedagem e/ou passagens para ajudar aquelas pessoas que gostariam de vir para o evento mas que precisariam de algum tipo de ajuda. No formul rio de inscri o, colocamos a op o para a pessoa solicitar bolsa de alimenta o, hospedagem e/ou passagens, mas para isso, ela deveria se identificar como contribuidor(a) (oficial ou n o oficial) do Debian e escrever uma justificativa para o pedido. N mero de pessoas beneficiadas: A bolsa de alimenta o forneceu almo o e jantar todos os dias. Os almo os inclu ram pessoas que moram em Belo Horizonte e regi o. J o jantares foram pagos para os(as) participantes que tamb m receberam a bolsa de hospedagem e/ou passagens. A hospedagem foi realizada no Hotel BH Jaragu . E as passagens inclu ram de avi o ou de nibus, ou combust vel (para quem veio de carro ou moto). Boa parte do dinheiro para custear as bolsas vieram do Projeto Debian, principalmente para as passagens. Enviamos um or amento o ent o l der do Debian Jonathan Carter, e ele prontamente aprovou o nosso pedido. Al m deste or amento do evento, o l der tamb m aprovou os pedidos individuais enviados por alguns DDs que preferiram solicitar diretamente para ele. A experi ncia de oferecer as bolsas foi realmente muito boa porque permitiu a vinda de v rias pessoas de outras cidades. MiniDebConf BH 2024 grupo Fotos e v deos Voc pode assistir as grava es das palestras nos links abaixo: E ver as fotos feitas por v rios(as) colaboradores(as) nos links abaixo: Agradecimentos Gostar amos de agradecer a todos(as) os(as) participantes, organizadores(as), volunt rios(as), patrocinadores(as) e apoiadores(as) que contribu ram para o sucesso da MiniDebConf Belo Horizonte 2024. MiniDebConf BH 2024 grupo Patrocinadores Ouro: Prata: Bronze: Apoiadores Organiza o

16 May 2024

John Goerzen: Review of Reputable, Functional, and Secure Email Service

I last reviewed email services in 2019. That review focused a lot of attention on privacy. At the time, I selected mailbox.org as my provider, and have been using them for these 5 years since. However, both their service and their support have gone significantly downhill since, so it is time for me to look at other options. Here I am focusing strongly on email. Some of the providers mentioned here provide other services (IM, video calls, groupware, etc.), and to the extent they do, I am ignoring them.

What Matters in 2024
I want to start off by acknowledging that what you need in email probably depends on your circumstances and the country in which you live. For me, I begin by naming that the largest threat most of us face isn t from state actors but from criminals: hackers, ransomware gangs, etc. It is important to take as many steps as possible to secure one s account against that. Privacy and security are both part of the mix. I still value privacy but I am acknowledging, as Migadu does, that Email as we know it and encryption are incompatible. Although some of these services strongly protect parts of the conversation, the reality is that most people will be emailing people using plain old email services which don t. For stronger security, something like Signal would be needed. (I wrote about Signal in 2021 also.) Interestingly, OpenPGP support seems to be something of a standard feature in the providers I reviewed by this point. All or almost all of them provide integration with browser-based encryption as well as server-side encryption if you prefer that. Although mailbox.org can automatically PGP-encrypt every message that arrives in plaintext, for general use, this is unwieldy; there isn t good tooling for searching mailboxes where every message is encrypted, etc. So I never enabled that feature at Mailbox. I still value security and privacy, but a pragmatic approach addresses the most pressing threats first.

My criteria
The basic requirements for an email service include:
  1. Ability to use my own domains
  2. Strong privacy policy
  3. Ability for me to use my own IMAP and SMTP clients on both desktop and mobile
  4. It must be extremely reliable
  5. It must not be free
  6. It must have excellent support for those rare occasions when it is needed
  7. Support for basic aliases
Why do I say it must not be free? Because if someone is providing a service with the quality I m talking about here, and not charging for it, it implies something is fishy: either they are unscrupulous, are financially unstable, or the product is something else like ads. I am not aware of any provider that matches the other criteria with a free account anyhow. These providers range from about $30 to $90 per year, so cheaper than a Netflix subscription. Immediately, this rules out several options:
  • Proton doesn t let me use my own clients on mobile (their bridge is desktop-only)
  • Tuta also doesn t let me use my own clients
  • Posteo doesn t let me use my own domain
  • mxroute.com lacks a strong privacy policy, and its policy has numerous causes for concern (for instance, If you repeatedly send email to invalid/unroutable recipients, they may be published on our GitHub )
I will have a bit more to say about a couple of these providers below. There are some additional criteria that are strongly desired but not absolutely required:
  1. Ability to set individual access passwords for every device/app
  2. Support for two-factor authentication (2FA/TFA/TOTP) for web-based access
  3. Support for basics in filtering: ability to filter on envelope recipient (so if I get BCC d, I can still filter), and ability to execute more than one action on filter match (eg, deliver to two folders, or deliver to a folder and forward to someone else)
IMAP and SMTP don t really support 2FA, so by setting individual passwords for every device, you can at least limit the blast radius and cut off a specific device if something is (or might be) compromised.

The candidates
I considered these providers: Startmail, Mailfence, Runbox, Fastmail, Kolab, Mailbox.org, and Migadu. I ll review each, and highlight the pricing of the plan I would most likely use. Each provider offers multiple plans; some may be more expensive and some may be cheaper than the one I reviewed. I included a link to each provider s full pricing information so you can compare for your needs. I set up trials with each of these (except Mailbox.org, with which I already had a paid account). It so happend that I had actual questions for support for each one, which gave me an opportunity to see how support responded. I did not fabricate questions, and would not have contacted support if I didn t have real ones. (This means that I asked different questions of each provider, because they were the REAL questions I had.) I ll jump to the spoiler right now: I eventually chose Migadu, with Fastmail and Mailfence as close seconds. I looked for providers myself, and also solicited recommendations in a Mastodon thread.

Mailbox.org
I begin with Mailbox, as it was my top choice in 2019 and the incumbent. Until this year, I had been quite happy with it. I had cause to reach their support less than once a year on average, and each time they replied the same day or next day. Now, however, they are failing on reliability and on support. Their spam filter has become overly aggressive. It has blocked quite a bit of legitimate mail. When contacting their support about a prior issue earlier this year, they initially took 4 days to reply, and then 6 days to reply after that. Ouch. They had me disable some spam settings. It didn t really help. I continue to lose mail. I don t know how much, because they block a lot of it before it even hits the spam folder. One of my friends texted to say mail was dropping. I raised a new ticket with mailbox, which took them 5 days to reply to. Their reply was unhelpful. As the Internet is not a static system, unforeseen events can always occur. Well yes, that s true, and I get it, false positives exist with email. But this was from an ISP s mail system with an address that had been established for years, and it was part of a larger pattern of rejecting quite a bit of legit mail. And every interaction with them recently hasn t resulted in them actually doing anything to resolve anything. It s just a paragraph or two of reply that does nothing and helps nothing. When I complained that it took 5 days to reply, they said We have not been able to reply sooner as we are currently experiencing a high volume of customer enquiries. Even though their SLA for my account is a not-great 48 business hour turnaround, they still missed it and their reason is we re busy. I finally asked what RBL had caught the blocked email, since when I checked, the sender wasn t on any RBL. Mailbox s reply: they only keep their logs for 7 days, so next time I should contact them within 7 days. Which, of course, I DID; it was them that kept delaying. Ugh! It s like they ve become a cable company. Even worse is how they have been blocking mail from GrapheneOS s discussion form. See their thread about it. In short, Graphene s mail server has a clean reputation and Mailbox has no problem with it. But because one of Graphene s IPv6 webservers has an IPv6 allocation of a size Mailbox doesn t like, they drop mail. It s ridiculous, and Mailbox was dismissive of this well-known and well-regarded Open Source project. So if the likes of GrapheneOS can t get good faith effort to deliver their mail, what chance does an individual like me have? I m sorry, but I m literally paying you to deliver email for me and provide good support. If you can t do either of those, you don t get to push that problem down onto me. Hire appropriate staff. On the technical side, they support aliases, my own clients, and have a reasonable privacy policy. Their 2FA support exists for the web interface (though weirdly not the support site), though it is somewhat weird. They do not support app passwords. A somewhat unique feature is the @secure.mailbox.org domain. If you try to receive mail at that address, mailbox.org will block it unless it uses TLS. Same for sending. This isn t E2EE, but it does at least require things not be in plaintext for the last hop to Mailbox. Verdict: not recommended due to poor reliability and support. Mailbox.Org summary:
  • Website: https://mailbox.org/en/
  • Reliability: iffy due to over-aggressive spam filtering
  • Support: Poor; takes 4-6 days for a reply and replies are unhelpful
  • Individual access passwords: No
  • 2FA: Yes, but with a PIN instead of a password as the other factor
  • Filtering: Full SIEVE feature set and GUI editor
  • Spam settings: greylisting on/off, reject some/all spam, etc. But they re insufficient to address Mailbox s overzealousness, which support says I cannot workaround within the interface.
  • Server storage location: Germany
  • Plan as reviewed: standard [pricing link]
    • Cost per year: EUR 30 (about $33)
    • Mail storage included: 10GB
    • Limits on send/receive volume: none
    • Aliases: 50 on your domain name, 25 on mailbox.org
    • Additional mailboxes: Available; each one at the same fee as the primary mailbox

Startmail
I really wanted to like Startmail. Its vault is an interesting idea and should contribute to the security and privacy of an account. They clearly care about privacy. It falls down in filtering. They have no way to filter on envelope recipient (BCC or similar). Their support confirmed this to me and that s a showstopper. Startmail support was also as slow as Mailbox, taking 5 days to respond to me. Two showstoppers right there. Verdict: Not recommended due to slow support responsiveness and weak filtering. Startmail summary:
  • Website: https://www.startmail.com/
  • Reliability: Seems to be fine
  • Support: Mediocre; Took 5 days for a reply, but the reply was helpful
  • Individual app access passwords: Yes
  • 2FA: Yes
  • Filtering: Poor; cannot filter on envelope recipient, and can t build filters with multiple actions
  • Spam settings: None
  • Server storage location: The Netherlands
  • Plan as reviewed: Custom domain (trial was Personal), [pricing link]
    • Cost per year: $70
    • Mail storage included: 20GB
    • Limits on send/receive volume: none
    • Aliases: unlimited, with lots of features: can set expiration, etc.
    • Additional mailboxes: not available

Kolab
Kolab Now is mainly positioned as a full groupware service, but they do have a email-only option which I investigated. There isn t much documentation about it compared to other providers, and also not much in the way of settings. You can turn greylisting on or off. And . that s it. It has a full suite of filtering options. They set an X-Envelope-To header which you can use with the arbitrary header match to do the right thing even for BCC situations. Filters can have multiple conditions and multiple actions. It is SIEVE-based and you can download your SIEVE definitions. If you enable 2FA, you disable IMAP and SMTP; not great. Verdict: Not an impressive enough email featureset to justify going with it. Kolab Now summary:
  • Website: https://kolabnow.com/
  • Reliability: Seems to be fine
  • Support: Fine responsiveness (next day)
  • Invidiaul app passwords: no
  • 2FA: Yes, but if you enable it, they disable IMAP and SMTP
  • Filtering: Excellent
  • Spam settings: Only greylisting on/off
  • Server storage location: Switzerland; they have lots of details on their setup
  • Plan as reviewed: Just email [pricing link]
    • Cost per year: CHF 60, about $66
    • Mail storage included: 5GB
    • Limitations on send/receive volume: None
    • Aliases: Yes. Not sure if there are limits.
    • Additional mailboxes: Yes if you set up a group account. Flexible pricing based on user count is not documented anywhere I could find.

Mailfence
Mailfence is another option, somewhat similar to Startmail but without the unique vault. I had some questions about filters, and support was quite responsive, responding in a couple of hours. Some of their copy on their website is a bit misleading, but support clarified when I asked them. They do not offer encryption at rest (like most of the entries here). Mailfence s filtering system is the kind I d like to see. It allows multiple conditions and multiple actions for each rule, and has some unique actions as well (notify by SMS or XMPP). Support says that Recipients matches envelope recipients. However, one ommission is that I can t match on arbitrary headers; only the canned list of headers they provide. They have only two spam settings:
  • spam filter on/off
  • whitelist
Given some recent complaints about their spam filter being overly aggressive, I find this lack of control somewhat concerning. (However, I discount complaints about people begging for more features in free accounts; free won t provide the kind of service I m looking for with any provider.) There are generally just very few settings for email as well. Verdict: Response and helpful support, filtering has the right structure but lacks arbitrary header match. Could be a good option. Mailfence summary:
  • Website: https://mailfence.com/
  • Reliability: Seems to be fine
  • Support: Excellent responsiveness and helpful replies (after some initial confusion about my question of greylisting)
  • Individual app access passwords: No. You can set a per-service password (eg, an IMAP password), but those will be shared with all devices speaking that protocol.
  • 2FA: Yes
  • Filtering: Good; only misses the ability to filter on arbitrary headers
  • Spam settings: Very few
  • Server storage location: Belgium
  • Plan as reviewed: Entry [pricing link]
    • Cost per year: $42
    • Mail storage included: 10GB, with a maximum of 50,000 messages
    • Limits on send/receive volume: none
    • Aliases: 50. Aliases can t be deleted once created (there may be an exeption to this for aliases on your own domain rather than mailfence.com)
    • Additional mailboxes: Their page on this is a bit confusing, and the pricing page lacks the information promised. It looks like you can pay the same $42/year for additional mailboxes, with a limit of up to 2 additional paid mailboxes and 2 additional free mailboxes tied to the account.

Runbox
This one came recommended in a Mastodon thread. I had some questions about it, and support response was fantastic I heard from two people that were co-founders of the company! Even within hours, on a weekend. Incredible! This kind of response was only surpassed by Migadu. I initially wrote to Runbox with questions about the incoming and outgoing message limits, which I hadn t seen elsewhere, as well as the bandwidth limit. They said the bandwidth limit is no longer enforced on paid accounts. The incoming and outgoing limits are enforced, and all email (even spam) counts towards the limit. Notably the outgoing limit is per recipient, so if you send 10 messages to your 50-recipient family group, that s the limit. However, they also indicated a willingness to reset the limit if something happens. Unfortunately, hitting the limit results in a hard bounce (SMTP 5xx) rather than a temporary failure (SMTP 4xx) so it can result in lost mail. This means I d be worried about some attack or other weirdness causing me to lose mail. Their filter is a pain point. Here are the challenges:
  • You can t directly match on a BCC recipient. Support advised to use a headers match, which will search for something anywhere in the headers. This works and is probably good enough since this data is in the Received: headers, but it is a little more imprecise.
  • They only have a contains , not an equals operator. So, for instance, a pattern searching for test@example.com would also match newtest@example.com . Support advised to put the email address in angle brackets to avoid this. That will work mostly. Angle brackets aren t always required in headers.
  • There is no way to have multiple actions on the filter (there is just no way to file an incoming message into two folders). This was the ultimate showstopper for me.
Support advised they are planning to upgrade the filter system in the future, but these are the limitations today. Verdict: A good option if you don t need much from the filtering system. Lots of privacy emphasis. Runbox summary:
  • Website: https://runbox.com/
  • Reliability: Seems to be fine, except returning 5xx codes if per-day limits are exceeded
  • Support: Excellent responsiveness and replies from founders
  • Individual app passwords: Yes
  • 2FA: Yes
  • Filtering: Poor
  • Spam settings: Very few
  • Server storage location: Norway
  • Plan as reviewed: Mini [pricing link]
    • Cost per year: $35
    • Mail storage included: 10GB
    • Limited on send/receive volume: Receive 5000 messages/day, Send 500 recipients/day
    • Aliases: 100 on runbox.com; unlimited on your own domain
    • Additional mailboxes: $15/yr each, also with 10GB non-shared storage per mailbox

Fastmail
Fastmail came recommended to me by a friend I ve known for decades. Here s the thing about Fastmail, compared to all the services listed above: It all just works. Everything. Filtering, spam prevention, it is all there, all feature-complete, and all just does the right thing as you d hope. Their filtering system has a canned dropdown for To/Cc/Bcc , it supports multiple conditions and multiple actions, and just does the right thing. (Delivering to multiple folders is a little cumbersome but possible.) It has a particularly strong feature set around administering multiple accounts, including things like whether users can prevent admins from reading their mail. The not-so-great part of the picture is around privacy. Fastmail is based in Australia, where the government has extensive power around spying on data, even to the point of forcing companies to add wiretap capabilities. Fastmail s privacy policy states user data may be held in Australia, USA, India, and Netherlands. By default, they share data with unidentified spam companies , though you can disable this in settings. On the other hand, they do make a good effort towards privacy. I contacted support with some questions and got back a helpful response in three hours. However, one of the questions was about in which countries my particular data would be stored, and the support response said they would have to get back to me on that. It s been several days and no word back. Verdict: A featureful option that just works , with a lot of features for managing family accounts and the like, but lacking in the privacy area. Fastmail summary:
  • Website: https://www.fastmail.com/
  • Reliability: Seems to be fine
  • Support: Good response time on most questions; dropped the ball on one tha trequired research
  • Individual app access passwords: Yes
  • 2FA: Yes
  • Filtering: Excellent
  • Spam settings: Can set filter aggressiveness, decide whether to share spam data with spam-fighting companies , configure how to handle backscatter spam, and evaluate the personal learning filter.
  • Server storage locations: Australia, USA, India, and The Netherlands. Legal jurisdiction is Australia.
  • Plan as reviewed: Individual [pricing link]
    • Cost per year: $60
    • Mail storage included: 50GB
    • Limits on send/receive volume: 300/hour
    • Aliases: Unlimited from what I can see
    • Additional mailboxes: No; requires a different plan for that

Migadu
Migadu was a service I d never heard of, but came recommended to me on Mastodon. I listed Migadu last because it is a class of its own compared to all the other options. Every other service is basically a webmail interface with a few extra settings tacked on. Migadu has a full-featured email admin console in addition. By that I mean you can:
  • View usage graphs (incoming, outgoing, storage) over time
  • Manage DNS (if you want Migadu to run your nameservers)
  • Manage multiple domains, and cross-domain relationships with mailboxes
  • View a limited set of logs
  • Configure accounts, reset their passwords if needed/authorized, etc.
  • Configure email address rewrite rules with wildcards and so forth
Basically, if you were the sort of person that ran your own mail servers back in the day, here is Migadu giving you most of that functionality. Effectively you have a web interface to do all the useful stuff, and they handle the boring and annoying bits. This is a really attractive model. Migadu support has been fantastic. They are quick to respond, and went above and beyond. I pointed out that their X-Envelope-To header, which is needed for filtering by BCC, wasn t being added on emails I sent myself. They replied 5 hours later indicating they had added the feature to add X-Envelope-To even for internal mails! Wow! I am impressed. With Migadu, you buy a pool of resources: storage space and incoming/outgoing traffic. What you do within that pool is up to you. You can set up users ( mailboxes ), aliases, domains, whatever you like. It all just shares the pool. You can restrict users further so that an individual user has access to only a subset of the pool resources. I was initially concerned about Migadu s daily send/receive message count limits, but in visiting with support and reading the documentation, what really comes out is that Migadu is a service with a personal touch. Hitting the incoming traffic limit will cause a SMTP temporary fail (4xx) response so you won t lose legit mail and support will work with you if it s a problem for legit uses. In other words, restrictions are soft and they are interpreted reasonably. One interesting thing about Migadu is that they do not offer accounts under their domain. That is, you MUST bring your own domain. That s pretty easy and cheap, of course. It also puts you in a position of power, because it is easy to migrate email from one provider to another if you own the domain. Filtering is done via SIEVE. There is a GUI editor which lets you accomplish most things, though it has an odd blind spot where you can t file a message into multiple folders. However, you can edit a SIEVE ruleset directly and you get the full SIEVE featureset, which is extensive (and does support filing a message into multiple folders). I note that the SIEVE :envelope match doesn t work, but Migadu adds an X-Envelope-To header which is just as good. I particularly love a company that tells you all the reasons you might not want to use them. Migadu s pro/con list is an honest drawbacks list (of course, their homepage highlights all the features!). Verdict: Fantastically powerful, excellent support, and good privacy. I chose this one. Migadu summary:
  • Website: https://migadu.com/
  • Reliability: Excellent
  • Support: Fantastic. Good response times and they added a feature (or fixed a bug?) a few hours after I requested it.
  • Individual access passwords: Yes. Create identities to support them.
  • 2FA: Yes, on both the admin interface and the webmail interface
  • Filtering: Excellent, based on SIEVE. GUI editor doesn t support multiple actions when filing into a folder, but full SIEVE functionality is exposed.
  • Spam settings:
    • On the domain level, filter aggressiveness, Greylisting on/off, black and white lists
    • On the mailbox level, filter aggressiveness, black and whitelists, action to take with spam; compatible with filters.
  • Server storage location: France; legal jurisdiction Switzerland
  • Plan as reviewed: mini [pricing link]
    • Cost per year: $90
    • Mail storage included: 30GB ( soft quota)
    • Limits on send/receive volume: 1000 messgaes in/day, 100 messages out/day ( soft quotas)
    • Aliases: Unlimited on an unlimited number of domains
    • Additional mailboxes: Unlimited and free; uses pooled quotas, but individual quotas can be set

Others
Here are a few others that I didn t think worthy of getting a trial:
  • mxroute was recommended by several. Lots of concerning things in their policy, such as:
    • if you repeatedly send mail to unroutable recipients, they may publish the addresses on Github
    • they will terminate your account if they think you are rude or want to contest a charge
    • they reserve the right to cancel your service at any time for any (or no) reason.
  • Proton keeps coming up, and I will not consider it so long as I am locked into their client on mobile.
  • Skiff comes up sometimes, but they were acquired by Notion.
  • Disroot comes up; this discussion highlights a number of reasons why I avoid them. Their Terms of Service (ToS) is inconsistent with a general-purpose email account (I guess for targeting nonprofits and activists, that could make sense). Particularly laughable is that they claim to be friends of Open Source, but then would take down your account if you upload copyrighted material. News flash: in order for an Open Source license to be meaningful, the underlying work is copyrighted. It is perfectly legal to upload copyrighted material when you wrote it or have the license to do so!

Conclusions
There are a lot of good options for email hosting today, and in particular I appreciate the excellent personal support from companies like Migadu and Runbox. Support small businesses!

14 May 2024

Julian Andres Klode: The new APT 3.0 solver

APT 2.9.3 introduces the first iteration of the new solver codenamed solver3, and now available with the solver 3.0 option. The new solver works fundamentally different from the old one.

How does it work? Solver3 is a fully backtracking dependency solving algorithm that defers choices to as late as possible. It starts with an empty set of packages, then adds the manually installed packages, and then installs packages automatically as necessary to satisfy the dependencies. Deferring the choices is implemented multiple ways: First, all install requests recursively mark dependencies with a single solution for install, and any packages that are being rejected due to conflicts or user requests will cause their reverse dependencies to be transitively marked as rejected, provided their or group cannot be solved by a different package. Second, any dependency with more than one choice is pushed to a priority queue that is ordered by the number of possible solutions, such that we resolve a b before a b c. Not just by the number of solutions, though. One important point to note is that optional dependencies, that is, Recommends, are always sorting after mandatory dependencies. Do note on that: Recommended packages do not nest in backtracking - dependencies of a Recommended package themselves are not optional, so they will have to be resolved before the next Recommended package is seen in the queue. Another important step in deferring choices is extracting the common dependencies of a package across its version and then installing them before we even decide which of its versions we want to install - one of the dependencies might cycle back to a specific version after all. Decisions about package levels are recorded at a certain decision level, if we reach a conflict we backtrack to the previous decision level, mark the decision we made (install X) in the inverse (DO NOT INSTALL X), reset all the state all decisions made at the higher level, and restore any dependencies that are no longer resolved to the work queue.

Comparison to SAT solver design. If you have studied SAT solver design, you ll find that essentially this is a DPLL solver without pure literal elimination. A pure literal eliminitation phase would not work for a package manager: First negative pure literals (packages that everything conflicts with) do not exist, and positive pure literals (packages nothing conflicts with) we do not want to mark for install - we want to install as little as possible (well subject, to policy). As part of the solving phase, we also construct an implication graph, albeit a partial one: The first package installing another package is marked as the reason (A -> B), the same thing for conflicts (not A -> not B). Once we have added the ability to have multiple parents in the implication graph, it stands to reason that we can also implement the much more advanced method of conflict-driven clause learning; where we do not jump back to the previous decision level but exactly to the decision level that caused the conflict. This would massively speed up backtracking.

What changes can you expect in behavior? The most striking difference to the classic APT solver is that solver3 always keeps manually installed packages around, it never offers to remove them. We will relax that in a future iteration so that it can replace packages with new ones, that is, if your package is no longer available in the repository (obsolete), but there is one that Conflicts+Replaces+Provides it, solver3 will be allowed to install that and remove the other. Implementing that policy is rather trivial: We just need to queue obsolete replacement as a dependency to solve, rather than mark the obsolete package for install. Another critical difference is the change in the autoremove behavior: The new solver currently only knows the strongest dependency chain to each package, and hence it will not keep around any packages that are only reachable via weaker chains. A common example is when gcc-<version> packages accumulate on your system over the years. They all have Provides: c-compiler and the libtool Depends: gcc c-compiler is enough to keep them around.

New features The new option --no-strict-pinning instructs the solver to consider all versions of a package and not just the candidate version. For example, you could use apt install foo=2.0 --no-strict-pinning to install version 2.0 of foo and upgrade - or downgrade - packages as needed to satisfy foo=2.0 dependencies. This mostly comes in handy in use cases involving Debian experimental or the Ubuntu proposed pockets, where you want to install a package from there, but try to satisfy from the normal release as much as possible. The implication graph building allows us to implement an apt why command, that while not as nicely detailed as aptitude, at least tells you the exact reason why a package is installed. It will only show the strongest dependency chain at first of course, since that is what we record.

What is left to do? At the moment, error information is not stored across backtracking in any way, but we generally will want to show you the first conflict we reach as it is the most natural one; or all conflicts. Currently you get the last conflict which may not be particularly useful. Likewise, errors currently are just rendered as implication graphs of the form [not] A -> [not] B -> ..., and we need to put in some work to present those nicely. The test suite is not passing yet, I haven t really started working on it. A challenge is that most packages in the test suite are manually installed as they are mocked, and the solver now doesn t remove those. We plan to implement the replacement logic such that foo can be replaced by foo2 Conflicts/Replaces/Provides foo without needing to be automatically installed. Improving the backtracking to be non-chronological conflict-driven clause learning would vastly enhance our backtracking performance. Not that it seems to be an issue right now in my limited testing (mostly noble 64-bit-time_t upgrades). A lot of that complexity you have normally is not there because the manually installed packages and resulting unit propagation (single-solution Depends/Reverse-Depends for Conflicts) already ground us fairly far in what changes we can actually make. Once all the stuff has landed, we need to start rolling it out and gather feedback. On Ubuntu I d like automated feedback on regressions (running solver3 in parallel, checking if result is worse and then submitting an error to the error tracker), on Debian this could just be a role email address to send solver dumps to. At the same time, we can also incrementally start rolling this out. Like phased updates in Ubuntu, we can also roll out the new solver as the default to 10%, 20%, 50% of users before going to the full 100%. This will allow us to capture regressions early and fix them.

Matthew Palmer: "Is This Project Still Maintained?"

If you wander around a lot of open source repositories on the likes of GitHub, you ll invariably stumble over repos that have an issue (or more than one!) with a title like the above. Sometimes sitting open and unloved, often with a comment or two from the maintainer and a bunch of I ll help out! followups that never seemed to pan out. Very rarely, you ll find one that has been closed, with a happy ending. These issues always fascinate me, because they say a lot about what it means to maintain an open source project, the nature of succession (particularly in a post-Jia Tan world), and the expectations of users and the impedence mismatch between maintainers, contributors, and users. I ve also recently been thinking about pre-empting this sort of issue, and opening my own issue that answers the question before it s even asked.

Why These Issues Are Created As both a producer and consumer of open source software, I completely understand the reasons someone might want to know whether a project is abandoned. It s comforting to be able to believe that there s someone on the other end of the line , and that if you have a problem, you can ask for help with a non-zero chance of someone answering you. There s also a better chance that, if the maintainer is still interested in the software, that compatibility issues and at least show-stopper bugs might get fixed for you. But often there s more at play. There is a delusion that maintained open source software comes with entitlements an expectation that your questions, bug reports, and feature requests will be attended to in some fashion. This comes about, I think, in part because there are a lot of open source projects that are energetically supported, where generous volunteers do answer questions, fix reported bugs, and implement things that they don t personally need, but which random Internet strangers ask for. If you ve had that kind of user experience, it s not surprising that you might start to expect it from all open source projects. Of course, these wonders of cooperative collaboration are the exception, rather than the rule. In many (most?) cases, there is little practical difference between most projects that are maintained and those that are formally declared unmaintained . The contributors (or, most often, contributor singular) are unlikely to have the time or inclination to respond to your questions in a timely and effective manner. If you find a problem with the software, you re going to be paddling your own canoe, even if the maintainer swears that they re still maintaining it.

A Thought Appears With this in mind, I ve been considering how to get ahead of the problem and answer the question for the software projects I ve put out in the world. Nothing I ve built has anything like what you d call a community ; most have never seen an external PR, or even an issue. The last commit date on them might be years ago. By most measures, almost all of my repos look unmaintained . Yet, they don t feel unmaintained to me. I m still using the code, sometimes as often as every day, and if something broke for me, I d fix it. Anyone who needs the functionality I ve developed can use the code, and be pretty confident that it ll do what it says in the README. I m considering creating an issue in all my repos, titled Is This Project Still Maintained? , pinning it to the issues list, and pasting in something I m starting to think of as The Open Source Maintainer s Manifesto . It goes something like this:

Is This Project Still Maintained? Yes. Maybe. Actually, perhaps no. Well, really, it depends on what you mean by maintained . I wrote the software in this repo for my own benefit to solve the problems I had, when I had them. While I could have kept the software to myself, I instead released it publicly, under the terms of an open licence, with the hope that it might be useful to others, but with no guarantees of any kind. Thanks to the generosity of others, it costs me literally nothing for you to use, modify, and redistribute this project, so have at it!

OK, Whatever. What About Maintenance? In one sense, this software is maintained , and always will be. I fix the bugs that annoy me, I upgrade dependencies when not doing so causes me problems, and I add features that I need. To the degree that any on-going development is happening, it s because I want that development to happen. However, if maintained to you means responses to questions, bug fixes, upgrades, or new features, you may be somewhat disappointed. That s not maintenance , that s support , and if you expect support, you ll probably want to have a support contract , where we come to an agreement where you pay me money, and I help you with the things you need help with.

That Doesn t Sound Fair! If it makes you feel better, there are several things you are entitled to:
  1. The ability to use, study, modify, and redistribute the contents of this repository, under the terms stated in the applicable licence(s).
  2. That any interactions you may have with myself, other contributors, and anyone else in this project s spaces will be in line with the published Code of Conduct, and any transgressions of the Code of Conduct will be dealt with appropriately.
  3. actually, that s it.
Things that you are not entitled to include an answer to your question, a fix for your bug, an implementation of your feature request, or a merge (or even review) of your pull request. Sometimes I may respond, either immediately or at some time long afterwards. You may luck out, and I ll think hmm, yeah, that s an interesting thing and I ll work on it, but if I do that in any particular instance, it does not create an entitlement that I will continue to do so, or that I will ever do so again in the future.

But I ve Found a Huge and Terrible Bug! You have my full and complete sympathy. It s reasonable to assume that I haven t come across the same bug, or at least that it doesn t bother me, otherwise I d have fixed it for myself. Feel free to report it, if only to warn other people that there is a huge bug they might need to avoid (possibly by not using the software at all). Well-written bug reports are great contributions, and I appreciate the effort you ve put in, but the work that you ve done on your bug report still doesn t create any entitlement on me to fix it. If you really want that bug fixed, the source is available, and the licence gives you the right to modify it as you see fit. I encourage you to dig in and fix the bug. If you don t have the necessary skills to do so yourself, you can get someone else to fix it everyone has the same entitlements to use, study, modify, and redistribute as you do. You may also decide to pay me for a support contract, and get the bug fixed that way. That gets the bug fixed for everyone, and gives you the bonus warm fuzzies of contributing to the digital commons, which is always nice.

But My PR is a Gift! If you take the time and effort to make a PR, you re doing good work and I commend you for it. However, that doesn t mean I ll necessarily merge it into this repository, or even work with you to get it into a state suitable for merging. A PR is what is often called a gift of work . I ll have to make sure that, at the very least, it doesn t make anything actively worse. That includes introducing bugs, or causing maintenance headaches in the future (which includes my getting irrationally angry at indenting, because I m like that). Properly reviewing a PR takes me at least as much time as it would take me to write it from scratch, in almost all cases. So, if your PR languishes, it might not be that it s bad, or that the project is (dum dum dummmm!) unmaintained , but just that I don t accept this particular gift of work at this particular time. Don t forget that the terms of licence include permission to redistribute modified versions of the code I ve released. If you think your PR is all that and a bag of potato chips, fork away! I won t be offended if you decide to release a permanent fork of this software, as long as you comply with the terms of the licence(s) involved. (Note that I do not undertake support contracts solely to review and merge PRs; that reeks a little too much of pay to play for my liking)

Gee, You Sound Like an Asshole I prefer to think of myself as forthright and plain-speaking , but that brings to mind that third thing you re entitled to: your opinion. I ve written this out because I feel like clarifying the reality we re living in, in the hope that it prevents misunderstandings. If what I ve written makes you not want to use the software I ve written, that s fine you ve probably avoided future disappointment.

Opinions Sought What do you think? Too harsh? Too wishy-washy? Comment away!

12 May 2024

Elana Hashman: I am very sick

I have not been able to walk since February 18, 2023. When people ask me how I'm doing, this is the first thing that comes to mind. "Well, you know, the usual, but also I still can't walk," I think to myself. If I dream at night, I often see myself walking or running. In conversation, if I talk about going somewhere, I'll imagine walking there. Even though it's been over a year, I remember walking to the bus, riding to see my friends, going out for brunch, cooking community dinners. But these days, I can't manage going anywhere except by car, and I can't do the driving, and I can't dis/assemble and load my chair. When I'm resting in bed and follow a guided meditation, I might be asked to imagine walking up a staircase, step by step. Sometimes, I do. Other times, I imagine taking a little elevator in my chair, or wheeling up ramps. I feel like there is little I can say that can express the extent of what this illness has taken from me, but it's worth trying. To an able-bodied person, seeing me in a power wheelchair is usually "enough." One of my acquaintances cried when they last saw me in person. But frankly, I love my wheelchair. I am not "wheelchair-bound" I am bed-bound, and the wheelchair gets me out of bed. My chair hasn't taken anything from me. *** In October of 2022, I was diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis. Scientists and doctors don't really know what myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) is. Diseases like it have been described for over 200 years.1 It primarily affects women between the ages of 10-39, and the primary symptom is "post-exertional malaise" or PEM: debilitating, disproportionate fatigue following activity, often delayed by 24-72 hours and not relieved by sleep. That fatigue has earned the illness the misleading name of "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome" or CFS, as though we're all just very tired all the time. But tired people respond to exercise positively. People with ME/CFS do not.2 Given the dearth of research and complete lack of on-label treatments, you may think this illness is at least rare, but it is actually quite common: in the United States, an estimated 836k-2.5m people3 have ME/CFS. It is frequently misdiagnosed, and it is estimated that as many as 90% of cases are missed,4 due to mild or moderate symptoms that mimic other diseases. Furthermore, over half of Long COVID cases likely meet the diagnostic criteria for ME,5 so these numbers have increased greatly in recent years. That is, ME is at least as common as rheumatoid arthritis,6 another delightful illness I have. But while any doctor knows what rheumatoid arthritis is, not enough7 have heard of "myalgic encephalomylitis." Despite a high frequency and disease burden, post-viral associated conditions (PASCs) such as ME have been neglected for medical funding for decades.8 Indeed, many people, including medical care workers, find it hard to believe that after the acute phase of illness, severe symptoms can persist. PASCs such as ME and Long COVID defy the typical narrative around common illnesses. I was always told that if I got sick, I should expect to rest for a bit, maybe take some medications, and a week or two later, I'd get better, right? But I never got better. These are complex, multi-system diseases that do not neatly fit into the Western medical system's specializations. I have seen nearly every specialty because ME/CFS affects nearly every system of the body: cardiology, nephrology, pulmonology, neurology, opthalmology, and, many, many more. You'd think they'd hand out frequent flyer cards, or a medical passport with fun stamps, but nope. Just hundreds of pages of medical records. And when I don't fit neatly into one particular specialist's box, then I'm sent back to my primary care doctor to regroup while we try to troubleshoot my latest concerning symptoms. "Sorry, can't help you. Not my department." With little available medical expertise, a lot of my disease management has been self-directed in partnership with primary care. I've read hundreds of articles, papers, publications, CME material normally reserved for doctors. It's truly out of necessity, and I'm certain I would be much worse off if I lacked the skills and connections to do this; there are so few ME/CFS experts in the US that there isn't one in my state or any adjacent state.9 So I've done a lot of my own work, much of it while barely being able to read. (A text-to-speech service is a real lifesaver.) To facilitate managing my illness, I've built a mental model of how my particular flavour of ME/CFS works based on the available research I've been able to read and how I respond to treatments. Here is my best attempt to explain it: The best way I have learned to manage this is to prevent myself from doing activities where I will exceed that aerobic threshold by wearing a heartrate monitor,12 but the amount of activity that permits in my current state of health is laughably restrictive. Most days I'm unable to spend more than one to two hours out of bed. Over time, this has meant worsening from a persistent feeling of tiredness all the time and difficulty commuting into an office or sitting at a desk, to being unable to sit at a desk for an entire workday even while working from home and avoiding physically intense chores or exercise without really understanding why, to being unable to leave my apartment for days at a time, and finally, being unable to stand for more than a minute or two or walk. But it's not merely that I can't walk. Many folks in wheelchairs are able to live excellent lives with adaptive technology. The problem is that I am so fatigued, any activity can destroy my remaining quality of life. In my worst moments, I've been unable to read, move my arms or legs, or speak aloud. Every single one of my limbs burned, as though I had caught fire. Food sat in my stomach for hours, undigested, while my stomach seemingly lacked the energy to do its job. I currently rely on family and friends for full-time caretaking, plus a paid home health aide, as I am unable to prep meals, shower, or leave the house independently. This assistance has helped me slowly improve from my poorest levels of function. While I am doing better than I was at my worst, I've had to give up essentially all of my hobbies with physical components. These include singing, cooking, baking, taking care of my houseplants, cross-stitching, painting, and so on. Doing any of these result in post-exertional malaise so I've had to stop; this reduction of activity to prevent worsening the illness is referred to as "pacing." I've also had to cut back essentially all of my volunteering and work in open source; I am only cleared by my doctor to work 15h/wk (from bed) as of writing. *** CW: severe illness, death, and suicide (skip this section) The difficulty of living with a chronic illness is that there's no light at the end of the tunnel. Some diseases have a clear treatment path: you take the medications, you complete the procedures, you hit all the milestones, and then you're done, perhaps with some long-term maintenance work. But with ME, there isn't really an end in sight. The median duration of illness reported in one 1997 study was over 6 years, with some patients reporting 20 years of symptoms.13 While a small number of patients spontaneously recover, and many improve, the vast majority of patients are unable to regain their baseline function.14 My greatest fear since losing the ability to walk is getting worse still. Because, while I already require assistance with nearly every activity of daily living, there is still room for decline. The prognosis for extremely ill patients is dismal, and many require feeding tubes and daily nursing care. This may lead to life-threatening malnutrition;15 a number of these extremely severe patients have died, either due to medical neglect or suicide.16 Extremely severe patients cannot tolerate light, sound, touch, or cognitive exertion,17 and often spend most of their time lying flat in a darkened room with ear muffs or an eye mask.18 This is all to say, my prognosis is not great. But while I recognize that the odds aren't exactly in my favour, I am also damn stubborn. (A friend once cheerfully described me as "stubbornly optimistic!") I only get one shot at life, and I do not want to spend the entirety of it barely able to perceive what's going on around me. So while my prognosis is uncertain, there's lots of evidence that I can improve somewhat,19 and there's also lots of evidence that I can live 20+ years with this disease. It's a bitter pill to swallow, but it also means I might have the gift of time something that not all my friends with severe complex illnesses have had. I feel like I owe it to myself to do the best I can to improve; to try to help others in a similar situation; and to enjoy the time that I have. I already feel like my life has been moving in slow motion for the past 4 years there's no need to add more suffering. Finding joy, as much as I can, every day, is essential to keep up my strength for this marathon. Even if it takes 20 years to find a cure, I am convinced that the standard of care is going to improve. All the research and advocacy that's been happening over the past decade is plenty to feel hopeful about.20 Hope is a discipline,21 and I try to remind myself of this on the hardest days. *** I'm not entirely sure why I decided to write this. Certainly, today is International ME/CFS Awareness Day, and I'm hoping this post will raise awareness in spaces that aren't often thinking about chronic illnesses. But I think there is also a part of me that wants to share, reach out in some way to the people I've lost contact with while I've been treading water, managing the day to day of my illness. I experience this profound sense of loss, especially when I think back to the life I had before. Everyone hits limitations in what they can do and accomplish, but there is so little I can do with the time and energy that I have. And yet, I understand even this precious little could still be less. So I pace myself. Perhaps I can inspire you to take action on behalf of those of us too fatigued to do the advocacy we need and deserve. Should you donate to a charity or advocacy organization supporting ME/CFS research? In the US, there are many excellent organizations, such as ME Action, the Open Medicine Foundation, SolveME, the Bateman Horne Center, and the Workwell Foundation. I am also happy to match any donations through the end of May 2024 if you send me your receipts. But charitable giving only goes so far, and I think this problem deserves the backing of more powerful organizations. Proportionate government funding and support is desperately needed. It's critical for us to push governments22 to provide the funding required for research that will make an impact on patients' lives now. Many organizers are running campaigns around the world, advocating for this investment. There is a natural partnership between ME advocacy and Long COVID advocacy, for example, and we have an opportunity to make a great difference to many people by pushing for research and resources inclusive of all PASCs. Some examples I'm aware of include: But outside of collective organizing, there are a lot of sick individuals out there that need help, too. Please, don't forget about us. We need you to visit us, care for us, be our confidantes, show up as friends. There are a lot of people who are very sick out here and need your care. I'm one of them.

Daniel Lange: htop and PCP have a new home at Hack Club

After the unfortunate and somewhat surprising shutdown of the Open Collective Foundation (OCF), htop and Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) have migrated to Hack Club. Initially founded to improve STEM education, support high school computer science clubs and firmly founded in the hacker culture, Hack Club have created a US IRS approved 501(c)(3) charity that provides what Open Collective did/does1 and more at a flat 7% fee of the project income. Nathan Scott organized these moves with Paul Spitler. Many thanks! We considered other options for the projects, e.g. Gentoo has moved to Software in the Public Interest (SPI) and I know SPI quite well as they were created initially to host Debian. But PCP moved from SPI to OCF in 2021. Open Collective has a European branch that seems independent of the dissolved US foundation. But all-in-all Hack Club seemed the best fit. You can find the new fiscal sponsorship and donation landing pages at:
htophttps://hcb.hackclub.com/htop/https://hcb.hackclub.com/donations/start/htop
PCPhttps://hcb.hackclub.com/pcp/https://hcb.hackclub.com/donations/start/pcp

  1. Open Collective as in the fancy "manage your project donations and reimbursements" website still continues to run but the foundation of the same name that provided the actual fiscal sponsorship (i.e. managing the funds) got dissolved. It's ... complicated.

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Salsa CI updates, OpenSSH option review, and more! (by Utkarsh Gupta)

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. P.S. We ve completed over a year of writing these blogs. If you have any suggestions on how to make them better or what you d like us to cover, or any other opinions/reviews you might have, et al, please let us know by dropping an email to us. We d be happy to hear your thoughts. :)

Salsa CI updates & GSoC candidacy, by Santiago Ruano Rincon In the context of Google Summer of Code (GSoC), Santiago continued the mentoring work, following the applications of three of the candidates. This work started in March, but Aquila Macedo, Ahmed Siam and Piyush Raj continued in April to propose and review MRs. For example, Update CI pipeline to utilize specific blhc image per release and Remove references to buster-backports by Aquila, or the reviews the candidates made to Document the structure of the different components of the pipeline (see below). Unfortunately, the Salsa CI project didn t get any slot from the GSoC program in the end. Along with the Salsa CI related work, Santiago improved the documentation of Salsa CI, to make it easier for newcomers (as the GSoC candidates) or people willing to fork the project to understand its internals. Documentation is an aspect where a lot of improvements can be made.

OpenSSH option review, by Colin Watson In light of last month s xz-utils backdoor, Colin did an extensive review of some of the choices in Debian s OpenSSH packaging. Some work on this has already been done (removing uses of libsystemd and reducing tcp-wrappers linkage); the next step is likely to be to start work on the plan to split out GSS-API key exchange again.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Utkarsh Gupta started to put together and kickstart the bursary team ahead of DebConf 24, to be held in Busan, South Korea.
  • Utkarsh Gupta reviewed some MRs and docs for the bursary team for the DC24 website.
  • Helmut Grohne sent patches for 19 cross build failures and submitted a gcc patch removing LIMITS_H_TEST upstream.
  • Helmut sent 8 bug reports with 3 patches related to the /usr-move.
  • Helmut diagnosed why /dev/stdout is not accessible in sbuild --mode=unshare.
  • Helmut diagnosed the time64-induced glibc FTBFS.
  • Helmut sent patches for fixing initramfs triggers on firmware removal.
  • Thorsten Alteholz uploaded foo2zjs and fixed two bugs, one related to /usr-merge. Likewise the upload of cups-filters (from the 1.x branch) fixed three bugs. In order to fix an RC bug in cpdb-backends-cups, which was updated to the 2.x branch, the new package libcupsfilters has been introduced. Last but not least an upload of hplip fixed one RC bug and an upload of gutenprint fixed two of them. All of these RC bugs were more or less related to the time_t transition.
  • Santiago continued to work in the DebConf organization tasks, including some for the DebConf 24 Content Team, and looking to build a local community for DebConf 25.
  • Stefano Rivera made a couple of uploads of dh-python to Debian, and a few other general package update uploads.
  • Stefano did some winding up of DebConf 23 finances, including closing bursary claims and recording the amounts spent on travel bursaries.
  • Stefano opened DebConf 24 registration, which always requires some last-minute work on the website.
  • Colin released man-db 2.12.1.
  • Colin fixed a regression in groff s PDF output.
  • In the Python team, Colin fixed build/autopkgtest failures in seven packages, and updated ten packages to new upstream versions.

1 May 2024

Bits from Debian: Debian welcomes the 2024 GSOC contributors/students

GSoC logo We are very excited to announce that Debian has selected seven contributors to work under mentorship on a variety of projects with us during the Google Summer of Code. Here are the list of the projects, students, and details of the tasks to be performed.
Project: Android SDK Tools in Debian Deliverables of the project: Make the entire Android toolchain, Android Target Platform Framework, and SDK tools available in the Debian archives.
Project: Benchmarking Parallel Performance of Numerical MPI Packages Deliverables of the project: Deliver an automated method for Debian maintainers to test selected numerical Debian packages for their parallel performance in clusters, in particular to catch performance regressions from updates, and to verify expected performance gains, such as Amdahl s and Gufstafson s law, from increased cluster resources.
Project: Debian MobCom Deliverables of the project: Update the outdated mobile packages and recreate aged packages due to new dependencies. Bring in more mobile communication tools by adding about 5 new packages.
Project: Improve support of the Rust coreutils in Debian Deliverables of the project: Make uutils behave more like GNU s coreutils by improving compatibility with GNU coreutils test suit.
Project: Improve support of the Rust findutils in Debian Deliverables of the project: A safer and more performant implementation of the GNU suite's xargs, find, locate and updatedb tools in rust.
Project: Expanding ROCm support within Debian and derivatives Deliverables of the project: Building, packaging, and uploading missing ROCm software into Debian repositories, starting with simple tools and progressing to high-level applications like PyTorch, with the final deliverables comprising a series of ROCm packages meeting community quality assurance standards.
Project: procps: Development of System Monitoring, Statistics and Information Tools in Rust Deliverables of the project: Improve the usability of the entire Rust-based implementation of the procps utility on Linux.
Congratulations and welcome to all the contributors! The Google Summer of Code program is possible in Debian thanks to the efforts of Debian Developers and Debian Contributors that dedicate part of their free time to mentor contributors and outreach tasks. Join us and help extend Debian! You can follow the contributors' weekly reports on the debian-outreach mailing-list, chat with us on our IRC channel or reach out to the individual projects' team mailing lists.

Russ Allbery: Review: To Each This World

Review: To Each This World, by Julie E. Czerneda
Publisher: DAW
Copyright: November 2022
ISBN: 0-7564-1543-8
Format: Kindle
Pages: 676
To Each This World is a standalone science fiction novel. Henry m'Yama t'Nowak is the Arbiter of New Earth. This is somewhat akin to a president, but only in very specific ways. Henry's job is to deal with the Kmet. New Earth was settled by a slower-than-light colony ship from old Earth, our Earth. It is, so far as they know, the last of humanity in the universe. Origin Earth fell silent hundreds of years previous, before the colonists even landed. New Earth is now a carefully and thoughtfully managed world where humans survived, thrived, and at one point sent out six slower-than-light colony ships of its own. All were feared lost after a rushed launch due to a solar storm. As this story opens, a probe from one of those ships arrives. This is cause for rejoicing, but there are two small problems. The first is that the culture of New Earth has changed drastically since the days when they launched the Halcyon colony ships. New Earth is now part of the Duality, a new alliance with aliens painstakingly negotiated after their portal appeared in orbit. The Kmet were peaceful, eager to form an alliance and offer new technology, although they struggled with concepts such as individuality and insisted on interacting only with the Arbiter. Their technological gifts and the apparent loss of the Halcyon colony ships refocused New Earth on safety and caution. This unexpected message is a somewhat tricky political problem, a reminder of the path not taken. The other small problem is that the reaction of the Kmet to this message is... dramatic. This book has several problems, but the most serious is that it is simply too long. If you have read any other Czerneda novels, you know that she tends towards sprawling world-building, but usually there are enough twists and turns in the plot to keep the story moving while the protagonists slowly puzzle out the scientific mysteries. To Each This World is not sufficiently twisty for 676 pages. I think you could have cut half the novel without losing any major plot points. The interesting parts of this book, to me, were figuring out what's going on with the Kmet, some of the political tensions within the New Earth government, and understanding what Henry and Pilot Killian's story had to do with the apparently-unrelated but intriguing interludes following Beth Seeker in a strange place called Doublet. All that stuff is in here, but it's alongside a whole lot of Henry wrestling with lifeboat ethics in situations where he thinks he needs to lie to and manipulate people for their own good. We also get several extended tours of societies that, while vaguely interesting in a science fiction world-building way, have essentially nothing to do with the plot. We also get a whole lot of Henry's eagerly helpful AI polymorph Flip. I wanted to like this character, and I occasionally managed, but I felt like there was a constant mismatch between, in hindsight, how Czerneda meant for me to see Flip and what I thought she was signaling while I was reading. I wanted Flip to either be a fascinatingly weird companion or to be directly relevant to the plot, but instead there were hundreds of pages of unnerving creepiness mixed with obsequiousness and emotional neediness, all of which I think I read more into than Czerneda had intended. The overall experience was more exhausting than fun. The core of the plot is solid, and if you like SF novels built around world-building and scientific mysteries, there's a lot here to enjoy. I think Czerneda's Species Imperative series (starting with Survival) is a better execution of some of the same ideas, but I liked that series a lot and was willing to read another take on it. Czerneda is one of the SF writers who takes biology seriously and is willing to write very alien aliens, and that leads to a few satisfying twists. Also, Beth Seeker is a great character (I wish we'd seen more of her), and Killian, while a bit generic, is a serviceable protagonist when Czerneda needs someone to go poke things with a stick. Henry... I'm not sure what I think of Henry, and your enjoyment of this book may depend on how much you click with him. Henry is a diplomat and an extrovert. His greatest joy and talent is talking to people, navigating political situations, and negotiating. Science fiction is full of protagonists who should be this character, but they rarely are this character, probably because a lot of writers are introverts. I think Czerneda deserves real credit for making her charismatic politician sufficiently accurate that his thought processes occasionally felt alien. For me, Henry was easiest to appreciate when Killian was the viewpoint protagonist and I could look at him through someone else's eyes, but Henry's viewpoint mostly worked as well. There's a lot of competence porn enjoyment in watching him do his thing. The problem for me is that I thought several of his actions were unforgivably unethical, but no one in the book who matters seems to agree. I can see why he reached those unethical decisions, but they were profound violations of consent. He directly lies to people because he thinks telling the truth would be too risky and not get them to do what he wants them to do, and Czerneda sets up the story to imply that he might be right. This is not necessarily a bad choice in a novel, but the author has to do some work to bring me along, and Czerneda didn't do enough of that work. I kept wanting there to be some twist or sting or complication that forced Henry to come to terms with what he was doing, but it never happens. He has to pick between two moral principles that I consider rather finely balanced, if not tilted in the opposite direction that he does, and he treats one principle as inviolable and the other as mostly unimportant. The plans he makes on that basis work fine, and those on the other side of that decision are never heard from again. It left a bad taste in my mouth, particularly given how much of the book is built around Henry making tough, tricky decisions under pressure. I don't know about this book. I have a lot of mixed feelings. Parts of it I quite enjoyed. Parts of it I mostly enjoyed but wish were much less dragged out. Parts of it frustrated or bored me. It's one of those books where the more I thought about it after reading it, the more the parts I disliked annoyed me. If you like Czerneda's style of world-building and biology, and if you have more tolerance for Henry's decisions than I did, you may well like this, but read Species Imperative first. I should probably also warn that there is a lot of magical technology in this book that blatantly violates some core principles of physics. I have a high tolerance for that sort of thing, but if you don't, you're going to be grumbling. Rating: 6 out of 10

Matthew Palmer: The Mediocre Programmer's Guide to Rust

Me: Hi everyone, my name s Matt, and I m a mediocre programmer. Everyone: Hi, Matt. Facilitator: Are you an alcoholic, Matt? Me: No, not since I stopped reading Twitter. Facilitator: Then I think you re in the wrong room.
Yep, that s my little secret I m a mediocre programmer. The definition of the word hacker I most closely align with is someone who makes furniture with an axe . I write simple, straightforward code because trying to understand complexity makes my head hurt. Which is why I ve always avoided the more academic languages, like OCaml, Haskell, Clojure, and so on. I know they re good languages people far smarter than me are building amazing things with them but the time I hear the word endofunctor , I ve lost all focus (and most of my will to live). My preferred languages are the ones that come with less intellectual overhead, like C, PHP, Python, and Ruby. So it s interesting that I ve embraced Rust with significant vigour. It s by far the most complicated language that I feel at least vaguely comfortable with using in anger . Part of that is that I ve managed to assemble a set of principles that allow me to almost completely avoid arguing with Rust s dreaded borrow checker, lifetimes, and all the rest of the dark, scary corners of the language. It s also, I think, that Rust helps me to write better software, and I can feel it helping me (almost) all of the time. In the spirit of helping my fellow mediocre programmers to embrace Rust, I present the principles I ve assembled so far.

Neither a Borrower Nor a Lender Be If you know anything about Rust, you probably know about the dreaded borrow checker . It s the thing that makes sure you don t have two pieces of code trying to modify the same data at the same time, or using a value when it s no longer valid. While Rust s borrowing semantics allow excellent performance without compromising safety, for us mediocre programmers it gets very complicated, very quickly. So, the moment the compiler wants to start talking about explicit lifetimes , I shut it up by just using owned values instead. It s not that I never borrow anything; I have some situations that I know are borrow-safe for the mediocre programmer (I ll cover those later). But any time I m not sure how things will pan out, I ll go straight for an owned value. For example, if I need to store some text in a struct or enum, it s going straight into a String. I m not going to start thinking about lifetimes and &'a str; I ll leave that for smarter people. Similarly, if I need a list of things, it s a Vec<T> every time no &'b [T] in my structs, thank you very much.

Attack of the Clones Following on from the above, I ve come to not be afraid of .clone(). I scatter them around my code like seeds in a field. Life s too short to spend time trying to figure out who s borrowing what from whom, if I can just give everyone their own thing. There are warnings in the Rust book (and everywhere else) about how a clone can be expensive . While it s true that, yes, making clones of data structures consumes CPU cycles and memory, it very rarely matters. CPU cycles are (usually) plentiful and RAM (usually) relatively cheap. Mediocre programmer mental effort is expensive, and not to be spent on premature optimisation. Also, if you re coming from most any other modern language, Rust is already giving you so much more performance that you re probably ending up ahead of the game, even if you .clone() everything in sight. If, by some miracle, something I write gets so popular that the expense of all those spurious clones becomes a problem, it might make sense to pay someone much smarter than I to figure out how to make the program a zero-copy masterpiece of efficient code. Until then clone early and clone often, I say!

Derive Macros are Powerful Magicks If you start .clone()ing everywhere, pretty quickly you ll be hit with this error:

error[E0599]: no method named  clone  found for struct  Foo  in the current scope

This is because not everything can be cloned, and so if you want your thing to be cloned, you need to implement the method yourself. Well sort of. One of the things that I find absolutely outstanding about Rust is the derive macro . These allow you to put a little marker on a struct or enum, and the compiler will write a bunch of code for you! Clone is one of the available so-called derivable traits , so you add #[derive(Clone)] to your structs, and poof! you can .clone() to your heart s content. But there are other things that are commonly useful, and so I ve got a set of traits that basically all of my data structures derive:

#[derive(Clone, Debug, Default)]
struct Foo  
    // ...
 

Every time I write a struct or enum definition, that line #[derive(Clone, Debug, Default)] goes at the top. The Debug trait allows you to print a debug representation of the data structure, either with the dbg!() macro, or via the :? format in the format!() macro (and anywhere else that takes a format string). Being able to say what exactly is that? comes in handy so often, not having a Debug implementation is like programming with one arm tied behind your Aeron. Meanwhile, the Default trait lets you create an empty instance of your data structure, with all of the fields set to their own default values. This only works if all the fields themselves implement Default, but a lot of standard types do, so it s rare that you ll define a structure that can t have an auto-derived Default. Enums are easily handled too, you just mark one variant as the default:

#[derive(Clone, Debug, Default)]
enum Bar  
    Something(String),
    SomethingElse(i32),
    #[default]   // <== mischief managed
    Nothing,
 

Borrowing is OK, Sometimes While I previously said that I like and usually use owned values, there are a few situations where I know I can borrow without angering the borrow checker gods, and so I m comfortable doing it. The first is when I need to pass a value into a function that only needs to take a little look at the value to decide what to do. For example, if I want to know whether any values in a Vec<u32> are even, I could pass in a Vec, like this:

fn main()  
    let numbers = vec![0u32, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5];
    if has_evens(numbers)  
        println!("EVENS!");
     
 
fn has_evens(numbers: Vec<u32>) -> bool  
    numbers.iter().any( n  n % 2 == 0)
 

Howver, this gets ugly if I m going to use numbers later, like this:

fn main()  
    let numbers = vec![0u32, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5];
    if has_evens(numbers)  
        println!("EVENS!");
     
    // Compiler complains about "value borrowed here after move"
    println!("Sum:  ", numbers.iter().sum::<u32>());
 
fn has_evens(numbers: Vec<u32>) -> bool  
    numbers.iter().any( n  n % 2 == 0)
 

Helpfully, the compiler will suggest I use my old standby, .clone(), to fix this problem. But I know that the borrow checker won t have a problem with lending that Vec<u32> into has_evens() as a borrowed slice, &[u32], like this:

fn main()  
    let numbers = vec![0u32, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5];
    if has_evens(&numbers)  
        println!("EVENS!");
     
 
fn has_evens(numbers: &[u32]) -> bool  
    numbers.iter().any( n  n % 2 == 0)
 

The general rule I ve got is that if I can take advantage of lifetime elision (a fancy term meaning the compiler can figure it out ), I m probably OK. In less fancy terms, as long as the compiler doesn t tell me to put 'a anywhere, I m in the green. On the other hand, the moment the compiler starts using the words explicit lifetime , I nope the heck out of there and start cloning everything in sight. Another example of using lifetime elision is when I m returning the value of a field from a struct or enum. In that case, I can usually get away with returning a borrowed value, knowing that the caller will probably just be taking a peek at that value, and throwing it away before the struct itself goes out of scope. For example:

struct Foo  
    id: u32,
    desc: String,
 
impl Foo  
    fn description(&self) -> &str  
        &self.desc
     
 

Returning a reference from a function is practically always a mortal sin for mediocre programmers, but returning one from a struct method is often OK. In the rare case that the caller does want the reference I return to live for longer, they can always turn it into an owned value themselves, by calling .to_owned().

Avoid the String Tangle Rust has a couple of different types for representing strings String and &str being the ones you see most often. There are good reasons for this, however it complicates method signatures when you just want to take some sort of bunch of text , and don t care so much about the messy details. For example, let s say we have a function that wants to see if the length of the string is even. Using the logic that since we re just taking a peek at the value passed in, our function might take a string reference, &str, like this:

fn is_even_length(s: &str) -> bool  
    s.len() % 2 == 0
 

That seems to work fine, until someone wants to check a formatted string:

fn main()  
    // The compiler complains about "expected  &str , found  String "
    if is_even_length(format!("my string is  ", std::env::args().next().unwrap()))  
        println!("Even length string");
     
 

Since format! returns an owned string, String, rather than a string reference, &str, we ve got a problem. Of course, it s straightforward to turn the String from format!() into a &str (just prefix it with an &). But as mediocre programmers, we can t be expected to remember which sort of string all our functions take and add & wherever it s needed, and having to fix everything when the compiler complains is tedious. The converse can also happen: a method that wants an owned String, and we ve got a &str (say, because we re passing in a string literal, like "Hello, world!"). In this case, we need to use one of the plethora of available turn this into a String mechanisms (.to_string(), .to_owned(), String::from(), and probably a few others I ve forgotten), on the value before we pass it in, which gets ugly real fast. For these reasons, I never take a String or an &str as an argument. Instead, I use the Power of Traits to let callers pass in anything that is, or can be turned into, a string. Let us have some examples. First off, if I would normally use &str as the type, I instead use impl AsRef<str>:

fn is_even_length(s: impl AsRef<str>) -> bool  
    s.as_ref().len() % 2 == 0
 

Note that I had to throw in an extra as_ref() call in there, but now I can call this with either a String or a &str and get an answer. Now, if I want to be given a String (presumably because I plan on taking ownership of the value, say because I m creating a new instance of a struct with it), I use impl Into<String> as my type:

struct Foo  
    id: u32,
    desc: String,
 
impl Foo  
    fn new(id: u32, desc: impl Into<String>) -> Self  
        Self   id, desc: desc.into()  
     
 

We have to call .into() on our desc argument, which makes the struct building a bit uglier, but I d argue that s a small price to pay for being able to call both Foo::new(1, "this is a thing") and Foo::new(2, format!("This is a thing named name ")) without caring what sort of string is involved.

Always Have an Error Enum Rust s error handing mechanism (Results everywhere), along with the quality-of-life sugar surrounding it (like the short-circuit operator, ?), is a delightfully ergonomic approach to error handling. To make life easy for mediocre programmers, I recommend starting every project with an Error enum, that derives thiserror::Error, and using that in every method and function that returns a Result. How you structure your Error type from there is less cut-and-dried, but typically I ll create a separate enum variant for each type of error I want to have a different description. With thiserror, it s easy to then attach those descriptions:

#[derive(Clone, Debug, thiserror::Error)]
enum Error  
    #[error(" 0  caught fire")]
    Combustion(String),
    #[error(" 0  exploded")]
    Explosion(String),
 

I also implement functions to create each error variant, because that allows me to do the Into<String> trick, and can sometimes come in handy when creating errors from other places with .map_err() (more on that later). For example, the impl for the above Error would probably be:

impl Error  
    fn combustion(desc: impl Into<String>) -> Self  
        Self::Combustion(desc.into())
     
    fn explosion(desc: impl Into<String>) -> Self  
        Self::Explosion(desc.into())
     
 

It s a tedious bit of boilerplate, and you can use the thiserror-ext crate s thiserror_ext::Construct derive macro to do the hard work for you, if you like. It, too, knows all about the Into<String> trick.

Banish map_err (well, mostly) The newer mediocre programmer, who is just dipping their toe in the water of Rust, might write file handling code that looks like this:

fn read_u32_from_file(name: impl AsRef<str>) -> Result<u32, Error>  
    let mut f = File::open(name.as_ref())
        .map_err( e  Error::FileOpenError(name.as_ref().to_string(), e))?;
    let mut buf = vec![0u8; 30];
    f.read(&mut buf)
        .map_err( e  Error::ReadError(e))?;
    String::from_utf8(buf)
        .map_err( e  Error::EncodingError(e))?
        .parse::<u32>()
        .map_err( e  Error::ParseError(e))
 

This works great (or it probably does, I haven t actually tested it), but there are a lot of .map_err() calls in there. They take up over half the function, in fact. With the power of the From trait and the magic of the ? operator, we can make this a lot tidier. First off, assume we ve written boilerplate error creation functions (or used thiserror_ext::Construct to do it for us)). That allows us to simplify the file handling portion of the function a bit:

fn read_u32_from_file(name: impl AsRef<str>) -> Result<u32, Error>  
    let mut f = File::open(name.as_ref())
        // We've dropped the  .to_string()  out of here...
        .map_err( e  Error::file_open_error(name.as_ref(), e))?;
    let mut buf = vec![0u8; 30];
    f.read(&mut buf)
        // ... and the explicit parameter passing out of here
        .map_err(Error::read_error)?;
    // ...

If that latter .map_err() call looks weird, without the e and such, it s passing a function-as-closure, which just saves on a few characters typing. Just because we re mediocre, doesn t mean we re not also lazy. Next, if we implement the From trait for the other two errors, we can make the string-handling lines significantly cleaner. First, the trait impl:

impl From<std::string::FromUtf8Error> for Error  
    fn from(e: std::string::FromUtf8Error) -> Self  
        Self::EncodingError(e)
     
 
impl From<std::num::ParseIntError> for Error  
    fn from(e: std::num::ParseIntError) -> Self  
        Self::ParseError(e)
     
 

(Again, this is boilerplate that can be autogenerated, this time by adding a #[from] tag to the variants you want a From impl on, and thiserror will take care of it for you) In any event, no matter how you get the From impls, once you have them, the string-handling code becomes practically error-handling-free:

    Ok(
        String::from_utf8(buf)?
            .parse::<u32>()?
    )

The ? operator will automatically convert the error from the types returned from each method into the return error type, using From. The only tiny downside to this is that the ? at the end strips the Result, and so we ve got to wrap the returned value in Ok() to turn it back into a Result for returning. But I think that s a small price to pay for the removal of those .map_err() calls. In many cases, my coding process involves just putting a ? after every call that returns a Result, and adding a new Error variant whenever the compiler complains about not being able to convert some new error type. It s practically zero effort outstanding outcome for the mediocre programmer.

Just Because You re Mediocre, Doesn t Mean You Can t Get Better To finish off, I d like to point out that mediocrity doesn t imply shoddy work, nor does it mean that you shouldn t keep learning and improving your craft. One book that I ve recently found extremely helpful is Effective Rust, by David Drysdale. The author has very kindly put it up to read online, but buying a (paper or ebook) copy would no doubt be appreciated. The thing about this book, for me, is that it is very readable, even by us mediocre programmers. The sections are written in a way that really clicked with me. Some aspects of Rust that I d had trouble understanding for a long time such as lifetimes and the borrow checker, and particularly lifetime elision actually made sense after I d read the appropriate sections.

Finally, a Quick Beg I m currently subsisting on the kindness of strangers, so if you found something useful (or entertaining) in this post, why not buy me a refreshing beverage? It helps to know that people like what I m doing, and helps keep me from having to sell my soul to a private equity firm.

27 April 2024

Dirk Eddelbuettel: qlcal 0.0.11 on CRAN: Calendar Updates

The eleventh release of the qlcal package arrivied at CRAN today. qlcal delivers the calendaring parts of QuantLib. It is provided (for the R package) as a set of included files, so the package is self-contained and does not depend on an external QuantLib library (which can be demanding to build). qlcal covers over sixty country / market calendars and can compute holiday lists, its complement (i.e. business day lists) and much more. Examples are in the README at the repository, the package page, and course at the CRAN package page. This releases synchronizes qlcal with the QuantLib release 1.34 and contains more updates to 2024 calendars.

Changes in version 0.0.11 (2024-04-27)
  • Synchronized with QuantLib 1.34
  • Calendar updates for Brazil, India, Singapore, South Africa, Thailand, United States
  • Minor continuous integration update

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report for this release. See the project page and package documentation for more details, and more examples. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

26 April 2024

Robert McQueen: Update from the GNOME board

It s been around 6 months since the GNOME Foundation was joined by our new Executive Director, Holly Million, and the board and I wanted to update members on the Foundation s current status and some exciting upcoming changes.

Finances As you may be aware, the GNOME Foundation has operated at a deficit (nonprofit speak for a loss ie spending more than we ve been raising each year) for over three years, essentially running the Foundation on reserves from some substantial donations received 4-5 years ago. The Foundation has a reserves policy which specifies a minimum amount of money we have to keep in our accounts. This is so that if there is a significant interruption to our usual income, we can preserve our core operations while we work on new funding sources. We ve now hit the buffers of this reserves policy, meaning the Board can t approve any more deficit budgets to keep spending at the same level we must increase our income. One of the board s top priorities in hiring Holly was therefore her experience in communications and fundraising, and building broader and more diverse support for our mission and work. Her goals since joining as well as building her familiarity with the community and project have been to set up better financial controls and reporting, develop a strategic plan, and start fundraising. You may have noticed the Foundation being more cautious with spending this year, because Holly prepared a break-even budget for the Board to approve in October, so that we can steady the ship while we prepare and launch our new fundraising initiatives.

Strategy & Fundraising The biggest prerequisite for fundraising is a clear strategy we need to explain what we re doing and why it s important, and use that to convince people to support our plans. I m very pleased to report that Holly has been working hard on this and meeting with many stakeholders across the community, and has prepared a detailed and insightful five year strategic plan. The plan defines the areas where the Foundation will prioritise, develop and fund initiatives to support and grow the GNOME project and community. The board has approved a draft version of this plan, and over the coming weeks Holly and the Foundation team will be sharing this plan and running a consultation process to gather feedback input from GNOME foundation and community members. In parallel, Holly has been working on a fundraising plan to stabilise the Foundation, growing our revenue and ability to deliver on these plans. We will be launching a variety of fundraising activities over the coming months, including a development fund for people to directly support GNOME development, working with professional grant writers and managers to apply for government and private foundation funding opportunities, and building better communications to explain the importance of our work to corporate and individual donors.

Board Development Another observation that Holly had since joining was that we had, by general nonprofit standards, a very small board of just 7 directors. While we do have some committees which have (very much appreciated!) volunteers from outside the board, our officers are usually appointed from within the board, and many board members end up serving on multiple committees and wearing several hats. It also means the number of perspectives on the board is limited and less representative of the diverse contributors and users that make up the GNOME community. Holly has been working with the board and the governance committee to reduce how much we ask from individual board members, and improve representation from the community within the Foundation s governance. Firstly, the board has decided to increase its size from 7 to 9 members, effective from the upcoming elections this May & June, allowing more voices to be heard within the board discussions. After that, we re going to be working on opening up the board to more participants, creating non-voting officer seats to represent certain regions or interests from across the community, and take part in committees and board meetings. These new non-voting roles are likely to be appointed with some kind of application process, and we ll share details about these roles and how to be considered for them as we refine our plans over the coming year.

Elections We re really excited to develop and share these plans and increase the ways that people can get involved in shaping the Foundation s strategy and how we raise and spend money to support and grow the GNOME community. This brings me to my final point, which is that we re in the run up to the annual board elections which take place in the run up to GUADEC. Because of the expansion of the board, and four directors coming to the end of their terms, we ll be electing 6 seats this election. It s really important to Holly and the board that we use this opportunity to bring some new voices to the table, leading by example in growing and better representing our community. Allan wrote in the past about what the board does and what s expected from directors. As you can see we re working hard on reducing what we ask from each individual board member by increasing the number of directors, and bringing additional members in to committees and non-voting roles. If you re interested in seeing more diverse backgrounds and perspectives represented on the board, I would strongly encourage you consider standing for election and reach out to a board member to discuss their experience. Thanks for reading! Until next time. Best Wishes,
Rob
President, GNOME Foundation Update 2024-04-27: It was suggested in the Discourse thread that I clarify the interaction between the break-even budget and the 1M EUR committed by the STF project. This money is received in the form of a contract for services rather than a grant to the Foundation, and must be spent on the development areas agreed during the planning and application process. It s included within this year s budget (October 23 September 24) and is all expected to be spent during this fiscal year, so it doesn t have an impact on the Foundation s reserves position. The Foundation retains a small % fee to support its costs in connection with the project, including the new requirement to have our accounts externally audited at the end of the financial year. We are putting this money towards recruitment of an administrative assistant to improve financial and other operational support for the Foundation and community, including the STF project and future development initiatives. (also posted to GNOME Discourse, please head there if you have any questions or comments)

25 April 2024

Russ Allbery: Review: Nation

Review: Nation, by Terry Pratchett
Publisher: Harper
Copyright: 2008
Printing: 2009
ISBN: 0-06-143303-9
Format: Trade paperback
Pages: 369
Nation is a stand-alone young adult fantasy novel. It was published in the gap between Discworld novels Making Money and Unseen Academicals. Nation starts with a plague. The Russian influenza has ravaged Britain, including the royal family. The next in line to the throne is off on a remote island and must be retrieved and crowned as soon as possible, or an obscure provision in Magna Carta will cause no end of trouble. The Cutty Wren is sent on this mission, carrying the Gentlemen of Last Resort. Then comes the tsunami. In the midst of fire raining from the sky and a wave like no one has ever seen, Captain Roberts tied himself to the wheel of the Sweet Judy and steered it as best he could, straight into an island. The sole survivor of the shipwreck: one Ermintrude Fanshaw, daughter of the governor of some British island possessions. Oh, and a parrot. Mau was on the Boys' Island when the tsunami came, going through his rite of passage into manhood. He was to return to the Nation the next morning and receive his tattoos and his adult soul. He survived in a canoe. No one else in the Nation did. Terry Pratchett considered Nation to be his best book. It is not his best book, at least in my opinion; it's firmly below the top tier of Discworld novels, let alone Night Watch. It is, however, an interesting and enjoyable book that tackles gods and religion with a sledgehammer rather than a knife. It's also very, very dark and utterly depressing at the start, despite a few glimmers of Pratchett's humor. Mau is the main protagonist at first, and the book opens with everyone he cares about dying. This is the place where I thought Pratchett diverged the most from his Discworld style: in Discworld, I think most of that would have been off-screen, but here we follow Mau through the realization, the devastation, the disassociation, the burials at sea, the thoughts of suicide, and the complete upheaval of everything he thought he was or was about to become. I found the start of this book difficult to get through. The immediate transition into potentially tragic misunderstandings between Mau and Daphne (as Ermintrude names herself once there is no one to tell her not to) didn't help. As I got farther into the book, though, I warmed to it. The best parts early on are Daphne's baffled but scientific attempts to understand Mau's culture and her place in it. More survivors arrive, and they start to assemble a community, anchored in large part by Mau's stubborn determination to do what's right even though he's lost all of his moorings. That community eventually re-establishes contact with the rest of the world and the opening plot about the British monarchy, but not before Daphne has been changed profoundly by being part of it. I think Pratchett worked hard at keeping Mau's culture at the center of the story. It's notable that the community that reforms over the course of the book essentially follows the patterns of Mau's lost Nation and incorporates Daphne into it, rather than (as is so often the case) the other way around. The plot itself is fiercely anti-colonial in a way that mostly worked. Still, though, it's a quasi-Pacific-island culture written by a white British man, and I had some qualms. Pratchett quite rightfully makes it clear in the afterward that this is an alternate world and Mau's culture is not a real Pacific island culture. However, that also means that its starkly gender-essentialist nature was a free choice, rather than one based on some specific culture, and I found that choice somewhat off-putting. The religious rituals are all gendered, the dwelling places are gendered, and one's entire life course in Mau's world seems based on binary classification as a man or a woman. Based on Pratchett's other books, I assume this was more an unfortunate default than a deliberate choice, but it's still a choice he could have avoided. The end of this book wrestles directly with the relative worth of Mau's culture versus that of the British. I liked most of this, but the twists that Pratchett adds to avoid the colonialist results we saw in our world stumble partly into the trap of making Mau's culture valuable by British standards. (I'm being a bit vague here to avoid spoilers.) I think it is very hard to base this book on a different set of priorities and still bring the largely UK, US, and western European audience along, so I don't blame Pratchett for failing to do it, but I'm a bit sad that the world still revolved around a British axis. This felt quite similar to Discworld to me in its overall sensibilities, but with the roles of moral philosophy and humor reversed. Discworld novels usually start with some larger-than-life characters and an absurd plot, and then the moral philosophy sneaks up behind you when you're not looking and hits you over the head. Nation starts with the moral philosophy: Mau wrestles with his gods and the problem of evil in a way that reminded me of Job, except with a far different pantheon and rather less tolerance for divine excuses on the part of the protagonist. It's the humor, instead, that sneaks up on you and makes you laugh when the plot is a bit too much. But the mix arrives at much the same place: the absurd hand-in-hand with the profound, and all seen from an angle that makes it a bit easier to understand. I'm not sure I would recommend Nation as a good place to start with Pratchett. I felt like I benefited from having read a lot of Discworld to build up my willingness to trust where Pratchett was going. But it has the quality of writing of late Discworld without the (arguable) need to read 25 books to understand all of the backstory. Regardless, recommended, and you'll never hear Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in quite the same way again. Rating: 8 out of 10

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