Search Results: "athos"

7 March 2025

Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana: Bits from FOSDEM 2025

This year I was at FOSDEM 2025, and it was the fifth edition in a row that I participated in person (before it was in 2019, 2020, 2023 and 2024). The event took place on February 1st and 2nd, as always at the ULB campus in Brussels. We arrived on Friday at lunchtime and went straight to the hotel to drop off our bags. This time we stayed at Ibis in the city center, very close to the hustle and bustle. The price was good and the location was really good for us to be able to go out in the city center and come back late at night. We found a Japanese restaurant near the hotel and it was definitely worth having lunch there because of the all-you-can-eat price. After taking a nap, we went out for a walk. Since January 31st is the last day of the winter sales in the city, the streets in the city center were crowded, there were lots of people in the stores, and the prices were discounted. We concluded that if we have the opportunity to go to Brussels again at this time, it would be better wait to buy clothes for cold weather there.
Fosdem 2025
Unlike in 2023 and 2024, the FOSDEM organization did not approve my request for the Translations DevRoom,so my goal was to participate in the event and collaborate at the Debian booth. And also as I always do, I volunteered to operate the broadcast camera in the main auditorium on both days, for two hours each. The Debian booth:
Fosdem 2025
Me in the auditorium helping with the broadcast:
Fosdem 2025
2 weeks before the event, the organization put out a call for interested people to request a room for their community s BoF (Birds of a Feather), and I requested a room for Debian and it was approved :-) It was great to see that people were really interested in participating at the BoF and the room was packed! As the host of the discussions, I tried to leave the space open for anyone who wanted to talk about any subject related to Debian. We started with a talk from MiniDebConf25 organizers, that will be taking place this year in France. Then other topics followed with people talking, asking and answering questions, etc. It was worth organizing this BoF. Who knows, the idea will remain in 2026.
Fosdem 2025
Carlos (a.k.a Charles), Athos, Ma ra and Melissa talked at Fosdem, and Kanashiro was one for organizers of Distributions DevRoom
Fosdem 2025
During the two days of the event, it didn t rain or get too cold. The days were sunny (and people celebrated the weather in Brussels). But I have to admit that it would have been nice to see snow like I did in 2019. Unlike last year, this time I felt more motivated to stay at the event the whole time. Deixo meu agradecimento especial para o Andreas Tille, atual L der do Debian que aprovou o meu pedido de passagens para que eu pudesse participar dos FOSDEM 2025. Como sempre, essa ajuda foi essencial para viabilizar a minha viagem para Bruxelas. I would like to give my special thanks to Andreas Tille, the current Debian Leader, who approved my request for flight tickets so that I could join FOSDEM 2025. As always, this help was essential in making my trip to Brussels possible. And once again Jandira was with me on this adventure. On Monday we went for a walk around Brussels and we also traveled to visit Bruges again. The visit to this city is really worth it because walking through the historic streets is like going back in time. This time we even took a boat trip through the canals, which was really cool.
Fosdem 2025

Fosdem 2025

28 January 2025

Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (November and December 2024)

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months: The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months: Congratulations!

2 January 2025

Colin Watson: Free software activity in December 2024

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

11 April 2024

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in March 2024

Welcome to the March 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In our reports, we attempt to outline what we have been up to over the past month, as well as mentioning some of the important things happening more generally in software supply-chain security. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. Table of contents:
  1. Arch Linux minimal container userland now 100% reproducible
  2. Validating Debian s build infrastructure after the XZ backdoor
  3. Making Fedora Linux (more) reproducible
  4. Increasing Trust in the Open Source Supply Chain with Reproducible Builds and Functional Package Management
  5. Software and source code identification with GNU Guix and reproducible builds
  6. Two new Rust-based tools for post-processing determinism
  7. Distribution work
  8. Mailing list highlights
  9. Website updates
  10. Delta chat clients now reproducible
  11. diffoscope updates
  12. Upstream patches
  13. Reproducibility testing framework

Arch Linux minimal container userland now 100% reproducible In remarkable news, Reproducible builds developer kpcyrd reported that that the Arch Linux minimal container userland is now 100% reproducible after work by developers dvzv and Foxboron on the one remaining package. This represents a real world , widely-used Linux distribution being reproducible. Their post, which kpcyrd suffixed with the question now what? , continues on to outline some potential next steps, including validating whether the container image itself could be reproduced bit-for-bit. The post, which was itself a followup for an Arch Linux update earlier in the month, generated a significant number of replies.

Validating Debian s build infrastructure after the XZ backdoor From our mailing list this month, Vagrant Cascadian wrote about being asked about trying to perform concrete reproducibility checks for recent Debian security updates, in an attempt to gain some confidence about Debian s build infrastructure given that they performed builds in environments running the high-profile XZ vulnerability. Vagrant reports (with some caveats):
So far, I have not found any reproducibility issues; everything I tested I was able to get to build bit-for-bit identical with what is in the Debian archive.
That is to say, reproducibility testing permitted Vagrant and Debian to claim with some confidence that builds performed when this vulnerable version of XZ was installed were not interfered with.

Making Fedora Linux (more) reproducible In March, Davide Cavalca gave a talk at the 2024 Southern California Linux Expo (aka SCALE 21x) about the ongoing effort to make the Fedora Linux distribution reproducible. Documented in more detail on Fedora s website, the talk touched on topics such as the specifics of implementing reproducible builds in Fedora, the challenges encountered, the current status and what s coming next. (YouTube video)

Increasing Trust in the Open Source Supply Chain with Reproducible Builds and Functional Package Management Julien Malka published a brief but interesting paper in the HAL open archive on Increasing Trust in the Open Source Supply Chain with Reproducible Builds and Functional Package Management:
Functional package managers (FPMs) and reproducible builds (R-B) are technologies and methodologies that are conceptually very different from the traditional software deployment model, and that have promising properties for software supply chain security. This thesis aims to evaluate the impact of FPMs and R-B on the security of the software supply chain and propose improvements to the FPM model to further improve trust in the open source supply chain. PDF
Julien s paper poses a number of research questions on how the model of distributions such as GNU Guix and NixOS can be leveraged to further improve the safety of the software supply chain , etc.

Software and source code identification with GNU Guix and reproducible builds In a long line of commendably detailed blog posts, Ludovic Court s, Maxim Cournoyer, Jan Nieuwenhuizen and Simon Tournier have together published two interesting posts on the GNU Guix blog this month. In early March, Ludovic Court s, Maxim Cournoyer, Jan Nieuwenhuizen and Simon Tournier wrote about software and source code identification and how that might be performed using Guix, rhetorically posing the questions: What does it take to identify software ? How can we tell what software is running on a machine to determine, for example, what security vulnerabilities might affect it? Later in the month, Ludovic Court s wrote a solo post describing adventures on the quest for long-term reproducible deployment. Ludovic s post touches on GNU Guix s aim to support time travel , the ability to reliably (and reproducibly) revert to an earlier point in time, employing the iconic image of Harold Lloyd hanging off the clock in Safety Last! (1925) to poetically illustrate both the slapstick nature of current modern technology and the gymnastics required to navigate hazards of our own making.

Two new Rust-based tools for post-processing determinism Zbigniew J drzejewski-Szmek announced add-determinism, a work-in-progress reimplementation of the Reproducible Builds project s own strip-nondeterminism tool in the Rust programming language, intended to be used as a post-processor in RPM-based distributions such as Fedora In addition, Yossi Kreinin published a blog post titled refix: fast, debuggable, reproducible builds that describes a tool that post-processes binaries in such a way that they are still debuggable with gdb, etc.. Yossi post details the motivation and techniques behind the (fast) performance of the tool.

Distribution work In Debian this month, since the testing framework no longer varies the build path, James Addison performed a bulk downgrade of the bug severity for issues filed with a level of normal to a new level of wishlist. In addition, 28 reviews of Debian packages were added, 38 were updated and 23 were removed this month adding to ever-growing knowledge about identified issues. As part of this effort, a number of issue types were updated, including Chris Lamb adding a new ocaml_include_directories toolchain issue [ ] and James Addison adding a new filesystem_order_in_java_jar_manifest_mf_include_resource issue [ ] and updating the random_uuid_in_notebooks_generated_by_nbsphinx to reference a relevant discussion thread [ ]. In addition, Roland Clobus posted his 24th status update of reproducible Debian ISO images. Roland highlights that the images for Debian unstable often cannot be generated due to changes in that distribution related to the 64-bit time_t transition. Lastly, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted another monthly update for his reproducibility work in openSUSE.

Mailing list highlights Elsewhere on our mailing list this month:

Website updates There were made a number of improvements to our website this month, including:
  • Pol Dellaiera noticed the frequent need to correctly cite the website itself in academic work. To facilitate easier citation across multiple formats, Pol contributed a Citation File Format (CIF) file. As a result, an export in BibTeX format is now available in the Academic Publications section. Pol encourages community contributions to further refine the CITATION.cff file. Pol also added an substantial new section to the buy in page documenting the role of Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs) and ephemeral development environments. [ ][ ]
  • Bernhard M. Wiedemann added a new commandments page to the documentation [ ][ ] and fixed some incorrect YAML elsewhere on the site [ ].
  • Chris Lamb add three recent academic papers to the publications page of the website. [ ]
  • Mattia Rizzolo and Holger Levsen collaborated to add Infomaniak as a sponsor of amd64 virtual machines. [ ][ ][ ]
  • Roland Clobus updated the stable outputs page, dropping version numbers from Python documentation pages [ ] and noting that Python s set data structure is also affected by the PYTHONHASHSEED functionality. [ ]

Delta chat clients now reproducible Delta Chat, an open source messaging application that can work over email, announced this month that the Rust-based core library underlying Delta chat application is now reproducible.

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 259, 260 and 261 to Debian and made the following additional changes:
  • New features:
    • Add support for the zipdetails tool from the Perl distribution. Thanks to Fay Stegerman and Larry Doolittle et al. for the pointer and thread about this tool. [ ]
  • Bug fixes:
    • Don t identify Redis database dumps as GNU R database files based simply on their filename. [ ]
    • Add a missing call to File.recognizes so we actually perform the filename check for GNU R data files. [ ]
    • Don t crash if we encounter an .rdb file without an equivalent .rdx file. (#1066991)
    • Correctly check for 7z being available and not lz4 when testing 7z. [ ]
    • Prevent a traceback when comparing a contentful .pyc file with an empty one. [ ]
  • Testsuite improvements:
    • Fix .epub tests after supporting the new zipdetails tool. [ ]
    • Don t use parenthesis within test skipping messages, as PyTest adds its own parenthesis. [ ]
    • Factor out Python version checking in test_zip.py. [ ]
    • Skip some Zip-related tests under Python 3.10.14, as a potential regression may have been backported to the 3.10.x series. [ ]
    • Actually test 7z support in the test_7z set of tests, not the lz4 functionality. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#359). [ ]
In addition, Fay Stegerman updated diffoscope s monkey patch for supporting the unusual Mozilla ZIP file format after Python s zipfile module changed to detect potentially insecure overlapping entries within .zip files. (#362) Chris Lamb also updated the trydiffoscope command line client, dropping a build-dependency on the deprecated python3-distutils package to fix Debian bug #1065988 [ ], taking a moment to also refresh the packaging to the latest Debian standards [ ]. Finally, Vagrant Cascadian submitted an update for diffoscope version 260 in GNU Guix. [ ]

Upstream patches This month, we wrote a large number of patches, including: Bernhard M. Wiedemann used reproducibility-tooling to detect and fix packages that added changes in their %check section, thus failing when built with the --no-checks option. Only half of all openSUSE packages were tested so far, but a large number of bugs were filed, including ones against caddy, exiv2, gnome-disk-utility, grisbi, gsl, itinerary, kosmindoormap, libQuotient, med-tools, plasma6-disks, pspp, python-pypuppetdb, python-urlextract, rsync, vagrant-libvirt and xsimd. Similarly, Jean-Pierre De Jesus DIAZ employed reproducible builds techniques in order to test a proposed refactor of the ath9k-htc-firmware package. As the change produced bit-for-bit identical binaries to the previously shipped pre-built binaries:
I don t have the hardware to test this firmware, but the build produces the same hashes for the firmware so it s safe to say that the firmware should keep working.

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 March, an enormous number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Sleep less after a so-called 404 package state has occurred. [ ]
    • Schedule package builds more often. [ ][ ]
    • Regenerate all our HTML indexes every hour, but only every 12h for the released suites. [ ]
    • Create and update unstable and experimental base systems on armhf again. [ ][ ]
    • Don t reschedule so many depwait packages due to the current size of the i386 architecture queue. [ ]
    • Redefine our scheduling thresholds and amounts. [ ]
    • Schedule untested packages with a higher priority, otherwise slow architectures cannot keep up with the experimental distribution growing. [ ]
    • Only create the stats_buildinfo.png graph once per day. [ ][ ]
    • Reproducible Debian dashboard: refactoring, update several more static stats only every 12h. [ ]
    • Document how to use systemctl with new systemd-based services. [ ]
    • Temporarily disable armhf and i386 continuous integration tests in order to get some stability back. [ ]
    • Use the deb.debian.org CDN everywhere. [ ]
    • Remove the rsyslog logging facility on bookworm systems. [ ]
    • Add zst to the list of packages which are false-positive diskspace issues. [ ]
    • Detect failures to bootstrap Debian base systems. [ ]
  • Arch Linux-related changes:
    • Temporarily disable builds because the pacman package manager is broken. [ ][ ]
    • Split reproducible_html_live_status and split the scheduling timing . [ ][ ][ ]
    • Improve handling when database is locked. [ ][ ]
  • Misc changes:
    • Show failed services that require manual cleanup. [ ][ ]
    • Integrate two new Infomaniak nodes. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Improve IRC notifications for artifacts. [ ]
    • Run diffoscope in different systemd slices. [ ]
    • Run the node health check more often, as it can now repair some issues. [ ][ ]
    • Also include the string Bot in the userAgent for Git. (Re: #929013). [ ]
    • Document increased tmpfs size on our OUSL nodes. [ ]
    • Disable memory account for the reproducible_build service. [ ][ ]
    • Allow 10 times as many open files for the Jenkins service. [ ]
    • Set OOMPolicy=continue and OOMScoreAdjust=-1000 for both the Jenkins and the reproducible_build service. [ ]
Mattia Rizzolo also made the following changes:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Define a systemd slice to group all relevant services. [ ][ ]
    • Add a bunch of quotes in scripts to assuage the shellcheck tool. [ ]
    • Add stats on how many packages have been built today so far. [ ]
    • Instruct systemd-run to handle diffoscope s exit codes specially. [ ]
    • Prefer the pgrep tool over grepping the output of ps. [ ]
    • Re-enable a couple of i386 and armhf architecture builders. [ ][ ]
    • Fix some stylistic issues flagged by the Python flake8 tool. [ ]
    • Cease scheduling Debian unstable and experimental on the armhf architecture due to the time_t transition. [ ]
    • Start a few more i386 & armhf workers. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Temporarly skip pbuilder updates in the unstable distribution, but only on the armhf architecture. [ ]
  • Other changes:
    • Perform some large-scale refactoring on how the systemd service operates. [ ][ ]
    • Move the list of workers into a separate file so it s accessible to a number of scripts. [ ]
    • Refactor the powercycle_x86_nodes.py script to use the new IONOS API and its new Python bindings. [ ]
    • Also fix nph-logwatch after the worker changes. [ ]
    • Do not install the stunnel tool anymore, it shouldn t be needed by anything anymore. [ ]
    • Move temporary directories related to Arch Linux into a single directory for clarity. [ ]
    • Update the arm64 architecture host keys. [ ]
    • Use a common Postfix configuration. [ ]
The following changes were also made by:
  • Jan-Benedict Glaw:
    • Initial work to clean up a messy NetBSD-related script. [ ][ ]
  • Roland Clobus:
    • Show the installer log if the installer fails to build. [ ]
    • Avoid the minus character (i.e. -) in a variable in order to allow for tags in openQA. [ ]
    • Update the schedule of Debian live image builds. [ ]
  • Vagrant Cascadian:
    • Maintenance on the virt* nodes is completed so bring them back online. [ ]
    • Use the fully qualified domain name in configuration. [ ]
Node maintenance was also performed by Holger Levsen, Mattia Rizzolo [ ][ ] and Vagrant Cascadian [ ][ ][ ][ ]
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:

30 November 2023

Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (September and October 2023)

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months: The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months: Congratulations!

8 December 2022

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: Debian Python Team 2022 Sprint Report

This is the report for the Debian Python Team remote sprint that took place on December 2-3-4 2022. Many thanks to those who participated, namely: Here is a list of issues we worked on: pybuild autodep8 feature About a year ago, Antonio Terceiro contributed code to pybuild to make it possible to automatically run the upstream test suite as autopkgtests. This feature has now been merged and uploaded to unstable. Although you can find out more about it in the pybuild-autopkgtest manpage, an email providing more details should be sent to the debian-python mailing list relatively soon. Fixing packages that run tests via python3 setup.py test Last August, Stefano Rivera poked the team about the deprecation of the python3 setup.py test command to run tests in pybuild. Although this feature has been deprecated upstream for 6 years now, many packages in the archive still use it to run the upstream test suite during build. Around 29 of the 67 packages that are team-maintained by the Debian Python Team were fixed during the sprint. Ideally, all of them would be before the feature is removed from pybuild. if a package you maintain still runs this command, please consider fixing it! Fixing packages that use nose nose, provided by the python3-nose package, is an obsolete testing framework for Python and has been unmaintained since 2015. During the sprint, people worked on fixing some of the many bugs filled against packages still running tests via nose, but there are still around 240 packages affected by this issue in the archive. Again, if a package you maintain still runs this command, please consider fixing it! Removal of the remaining Python2 packages With the upload of dh-python 5.20221202, Stefano Rivera officially removed support for dh_python2 and dh_pypy, thus closing the "Python2 removal in sid/bullseye" bug. It seems some work still needs to be done for complete Python2 removal from Sid, but I expect this will be done in time for the Bookworm release. Working on Lintian tags for the Team During the sprint, I managed to work on some Lintian issues that we had targeted, namely: I also worked on a few other Lintian tags, but they were unrelated to the Debian Python Team itself. I'm also happy to report many of the tags I wrote for the team in the past few months were merged by the awesome Russ Allbery and should land in unstable as soon as a new release is made. I'm particularly looking forward the new "uses-python-distutils" tag that should help us flag packages that still use the deprecated distutils library. Patching distro-tracker (tracker.debian.org) to show pending team MRs It's often hard to have a good overview of pending merge requests when working with team-maintained packages, as by default, Salsa doesn't notify anyone when a MR is opened. Although our workflow typically does not involve creating merge requests, some people still do and they end up sitting there, unnoticed. During the sprint, Kurt Kremitzki worked on solving this issue by having distro-tracker show the pending MRs on our team's tracker page. Sadly, it seems little progress was made, as the removal of python3-django-jsonfield from the archive and breaking changes in python3-selenium has broken the test suite. Migrate packages building with the flit plugin to the generic pyproject one pybuild has been supporting building with PEP-517 style pyproject.toml files via a generic plugin (pybuild-plugin-pyproject) for a while now. As this plugin supersedes the old flit plugin, we've been thinking of deprecating it in time for the Bookworm release. To make this possible, most of the packages in the archive that still used this plugin were migrated to the generic one and I opened bugs on the last handful of packages that were not team-maintained. Other work Many other things were done during the sprint, such as: Thanks Thanks again to everyone who joined the sprint, and three big cheers for all the folks who donate to Debian and made it possible for us to have a food budget for the event.

15 May 2021

Utkarsh Gupta: Hello, Canonical! o/

Today marks the 90th day of me joining Canonical to work on Ubuntu full-time! So since it s been a while already, this blog post is long due. :)

The News
I joined Canonical, this February, to work on Ubuntu full-time! \o/
Those who know, they know that this is really very exciting for me because Canonical has been a dream company for me, for real (more about this below!). And hey, this is my first job, ever, so all the more reason to be psyched about, isn t it? ^_^ P.S. Keep reading and we ll meet my squad really sooon!

The Story Being an undergrad student (batch 2017-2021), I ve been slightly worried during my last two semesters, naturally, thinking about how s it all gonna pan out and what will I be doing, et al, because I ve been seeing all my friends and batchmates getting placed in companies or going for masters or at least having some sort of plans for their future and I, on the other hand, was hopelessly clueless. :D Well, to be fair, I did Google Summer of Code twice, in 2019 and 2020, became a Debian Developer in 2019, been a part of GCI and Outreachy, contributed to over dozens of open-source projects, et al, et al. So I wasn t all completely hopeless but for sure was completely clueless , heh. And for full disclosure, I was only slightly panicking because firstly, I did get placed in several companies and secondly, I didn t really need a job immediately since I was already getting paid to work on Debian stuff by Freexian, which was good enough. :)
(and honestly, Freexian has my whole heart! - more on that later sometime.) But that s not the point. I was still confused and worried and my mom & dad, more so than anyone. Ugh. We were all figuring out and she asked me places that I was interested to work in. And whilst I wasn t clear about things I wanted to do (and still am!) but I was (very) clear about this and so I told her about Canonical and also did tell her that it s a bit too ambitious for me to think about it now so I ll probably apply after some experience or something. and as they say, the world works in mysterious ways and well, it did for me! So back during the Ruby sprints (Feb 20), Kanashiro, the guy ( ), mentioned that his team was hiring and has a vacant position but I won t be eligible since I was still in my junior year. It was since then I ve been actively praying for Cronus, the god of time, to wave his magic wand and align it in such a way that the next opening should be somewhere near my graduation. And guess what? IT HAPPENED! 9 months later, in November 20, Kanashiro told me his team is hiring yet again and that I could apply this time! Without much (since there was some ) delay, I applied and started asking all sorts of questions to Kanashiro. No words are enough for him, he literally helped me throughout the process; from referring me to answering all sorts of doubts I had! And roughly after 2 months of interviewing, et al, my ambitious dream did come true and I finalyyyy signed my contract! \o/
(the interview process and what went on during those 10 weeks is a story for later ;))

The Server Team! \o This position, which I didn t mention earlier, was for the Server Team which is a team of 15 people, working to make Ubuntu server the best! And as I tweeted sometime back, the team is absolutely lovely, super kind, and consists of the best of teammates one could possibly ask for! Here s a quick sneak peek into our weekly team meeting. Thanks to Rafael for taking such a lovely picture. And yes, the cat Luna is a part of our squad! And oh, did I mention that we re completely remote and distributed?
FUN FACT: Our team covers all the TZs, that is, at any point of time (during weekdays), you ll find someone or the other from the team around! \o/ Anyway, our squad, managed by Rick is divided into two halves: Squeaky Wheels and Table Flip. Cool names, right?
Squeaky Wheels does the distro side of stuff and consists of Christian, Andreas, Rafael, Robie, Bryce, Sergio, Kanashiro, Athos, and now myself as well! And OTOH, Table Flip consists of Dan, Chad, Paride, Lucas, James, and Grant. Even though I interact w/ Squeaky Wheels more (basically daily), each of my teammates is absolutely lovely and equally awesome! Whilst I ll talk more about things here in the upcoming months, this is it for now! If there s anything, in particular, you d like to know more about, let me know! And lastly, here s us vibing our way through, making Ubuntu server better, cause that s how we roll!
Until next time.
:wq for today.

1 September 2020

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities August 2020

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

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration
  • Debian: restarted RAM eating service
  • Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Sponsors The cython-blis/preshed/thinc/theano bugs and smart-open/python-importlib-metadata/python-pyfakefs/python-zipp/python-threadpoolctl backports were sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

6 August 2020

Chris Lamb: The Bringers of Beethoven

This is a curiously poignant work to me that I doubt I would ever be able to communicate. I found it about fifteen years ago, along with a friend who I am quite regrettably no longer in regular contact with, so there was some complicated nostalgia entangled with rediscovering it today. What might I say about it instead? One tell-tale sign of 'good' art is that you can find something new in it, or yourself, each time. In this sense, despite The Bringers of Beethoven being more than a little ridiculous, it is somehow 'good' music to me. For example, it only really dawned on me now that the whole poem is an allegory for a GDR-like totalitarianism. But I also realised that it is not an accident that it is Beethoven himself (quite literally the soundtrack for Enlightenment humanism) that is being weaponised here, rather than some fourth-rate composer of military marches or one with a problematic past. That is to say, not only is the poem arguing that something universally recognised as an unalloyed good can be subverted for propagandistic ends, but that is precisely the point being made by the regime. An inverted Clockwork Orange, if you like. Yet when I listen to it again I can't help but laugh. I think of the 18th-century poet Alexander Pope, who first used the word bathos to refer to those abrupt and often absurd transitions from the elevated to the ordinary, contrasting it with the concept of pathos, the sincere feeling of sadness and tragedy. I can't think of two better words.

5 March 2017

Shirish Agarwal: To say or not to say

Voltaire For people who are visually differently-abled, the above reads To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize Voltaire wrote this either in late 16th century or early 17th century and those words were as apt in those times, as it is in these turbulent times as well. Update 05/03 According to @bla these words are attributable to a neo-nazi and apparently a child abuser. While I don t know the context in which it was shared, it describes the environment in which we are perfectly. Please see his comment for a link and better understanding. The below topic requires a bit of maturity, so if you are easily offended, feel free not to read further. While this week-end I was supposed to share about the recent Science Day celebrations that we did last week Science Day celebrations at GMRT Would explore it probably next week. This week the attempt is to share thoughts which had been simmering at the back of my mind for more than 2 weeks or more and whose answers are not clear to me. My buttons were pressed when Martin f. Kraft shared about a CoC violation and the steps taken therein. While it is easy to say with 20:20 hind-sight to say that the gentleman acted foolishly, I don t really know the circumstances to pass the judgement so quickly. In reality, while I didn t understand the joke in itself, I have to share some background by way of anecdotes as to why it isn t so easy for me to give a judgement call. a. I don t know the topics chosen by stand-up comedians in other countries, in India, most of the stand-up acts are either about dating or sex or somewhere in-between, which is lovingly given the name Leela (dance of life) in Indian mythology. I have been to several such acts over the years at different events, different occasions and 99.99% of the time I would see them dealing with pedophilia, necrophilia and all sorts of deviants in sexuality and people laughing wildly, but couple of times when the comedian shared the term sex with people, educated, probably more than a few world-travelled middle to higher-middle class people were shocked into silence. I had seen this not in once but 2-3 times in different environments and was left wondering just couple of years back Is sex such a bad word that people get easily shocked ? Then how is it that we have 1.25 billion + people in India. There had to be some people having sex. I don t think that all 1.25 billion people are test-tube babies. b. This actually was what lead to my quandary last year when my sharing of My Experience with Debian which I had carefully prepared for newbies, seeing seasoned debian people, I knew my lame observations wouldn t cut ice with them and hence had to share my actual story which involved a bit of porn. I was in two minds whether or not to say it till my eyes caught a t-shirt on which it was said We make porn or something to that effect. That helped me share my point. c. Which brings me to another point, it seems it is becoming increasingly difficult to talk about anything either before apologizing to everyone and not really knowing who will take offence at what and what the repercussions might be. In local sharings, I always start with a blanket apology that if I say something that offends you, please let me know afterwards so I can work on it. As the term goes You can t please everyone and that is what happens. Somebody sooner or later would take offence at something and re-interpret it in ways which I had not thought of. Charlie Chaplin - King of self-deprecating humor From the little sharings and interactions I have been part of, I find people take offence at the most innocuous things. For instance, one of the easy routes of not offending anyone is to use self-deprecating humour (or so I thought) either of my race, caste, class or even my issues with weight and each of the above would offend somebody. Charlie Chaplin didn t have those problems. If somebody is from my caste, I m portraying the caste in a certain light, a certain slant. If I m talking about weight issues, then anybody who is like me (fat) feels that the world is laughing at them rather than at me or they will be discriminated against. While I find the last point a bit valid, it leaves with me no tools and no humour. I neither have the observational powers or the skills that Kapil Sharma has and have to be me. While I have no clue what to do next, I feel the need to also share why humour is important in any sharing.- a. Break When any speaker uses humour, the idea is to take a break from a serious topic. It helps to break the monotony of the talk especially if the topic is full of jargon talk and new concepts. A small comedic relief brings the attendees attention back to the topic as it tends to wander in a long monotonous talk. b. Bridge Some of the better speakers use one or more humourous anecdote to explain and/or bridge the chasm between two different concepts. Some are able to produce humour on the fly while others like me have to rely on tried and tested methods. There is one another thing as well, humour is seems to be a mixture of social, cultural and political context and its very easy to have it back-fired upon you. For instance, I attempted humour on refugees, probably not the best topic to try humour in the current political climate, and predictably, it didn t go down well. I had to share and explain about Robin Williams slightly dark yet humorous tale in Moscow on the Hudson The film provides comedy and pathos in equal measure. You are left identifying with Vladimir Ivanoff (Robin Williams character) especially in the last scene where he learns of his grand-mother dying and he remembers her and his motherland, Russia and plays a piece on his saxophone as a tribute both to his grand-mother and the motherland. Apparently, in the height of the cold war, if a Russian defected to United States (land of Satan and other such terms used) you couldn t return to Russia. The movie, seen some years back left a deep impact on me. For all the shortcomings and ills that India has, even if I could, would and could I be happy anywhere else ? The answers are not so easy. With most NRI s (Non-Resident Indians) who emigrated for good did it not so much for themselves but for their children. So the children would hopefully have a better upbringing, better facilities, better opportunities than they would have got here. I talked to more than a few NRI s and while most of them give standardized answers, talking awhile and couple of beers or their favourite alcohol later, you come across deeply conflicted human beings whose heart is in India and their job, profession and money interests compel them to be in the country where they are serving. And Indian movies further don t make it easy for the Indian populace when trying to integrate into a new place. Some of the biggest hits of yesteryear s were about having the distinct Indian culture in their new country while the message of most countries is integration. I know of friends who are living in Germany who have to struggle through their German in order to be counted as a citizen, the same I guess is true of other countries as well, not just the language but the customs as well. They also probably struggle with learning more than one language and having an amalgamation of values which somehow they and their children have to make sense of. I was mildly shocked last week to learn that Mishi Choudary had to train people in the U.S. to differentiate between Afghan turban styles of wearing and the Punjabi style of wearing the turban. A simple search on Afghani turban and Punjabi turban reveals that there are a lot of differences between the two cultures. In fact, the way they talk, the way they walk, there are lots that differentiate the two cultures. The second shocking video was of an African-American man racially abusing an Indian-American girl. At first, I didn t believe it till I saw the video on facebook. My point through all that is it seems humour, that clean, simple exercise which brings a smile to you and uplifts the spirit doesn t seem to be as easy as it once was. Comments, suggestions, criticisms all are welcome.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #Elusive, #Fear, #hind-sight, #Humour, #immigrant, #integration, #Mishi Choudary, #refugee, #Robin Williams, #self-deprecating, #SFLC, #two-minds

25 August 2010

Eddy Petrișor: [content:lang:ro] I wrote to my representative

This post concerns Romanian politics, internal affairs and improper direction of public funding for new hideous churches in spite of education, culture, health, technic development and old monuments. Thus I will write this in Romanian. Curious foreigners can try to read the text via Google's translation.



Din cauz c suntem n secolul XXI i consider c e o prostie imens s b g m bani n biserici n detrimentul educa iei, culturii, s n t ii, dezvolt rii tehnice i a vechilor monumente, iar politicul din Rom nia pare dornic s dea bani cultelor, am ajuns la concluzia c este cazul s -i scriu reprezntantului meu (teoretic) n Parlament, Deputatul Florin Iordache. Am aflat de ce colegiu apar in uit ndu-m aici i apoi n lista oficial cu deputa ii.




I-am trimis textul de mai jos:

M numesc Petri or Eddy i sunt unul dintre cei pe care i reprezenta i n Parlamentul Rom niei. Este pentru prima dat c nd scriu unui parlamentar care m reprezint n conducerea statului rom n i o fac pentru a-mi exprima n mod clar i r spicat ideile i opinia n ceea ce prive te subiectul pe care l voi discuta mai jos. Am 30 de ani, sunt programator, am muncit i mi-am pl tit taxele de c nd am fost angajat, din anul 4 de facultate p n n prezent, adic de vreo 6-7 ani. Nu, acest mesaj nu este un strig t de ajutor, nu a tept pomeni, nu am milogit niciodat , mereu am muncit de i v d c pentru unii parazitismul fiscal a devenit un mod de via . Din acest motiv sunt revoltat.

Sunt revoltat pentru c :
- de i pl tesc taxe i impozite care ajung la peste 60% din venitul brut, nu primesc n schimb nici un fel de servicii, nici un fel de infrastructur , nici un fel de respect, nici un fel de eficien
- de i lucrez de ceva timp, am observat c pe unde am lucrat competen a i performa a erau o necesitate; n aparatul de stat nu este cazul
- de i sunt destui ca mine care pl tesc taxe i impozite, vocile noastre sunt ignorate i banii no tri sunt arunca i pe fereastr de cei ce administreaz fondurile colectate.

Domnule deputat sunt revoltat c de 15 ani de zile dispar n medie aproximativ 4 coli zilnic i apare, tot n medie, o biseric la fiecare 2 zile, iar asta se nt mpl cu accep iunea aparatului politic. Spitalul din Caracal, ca orice alt spital din Rom nia, e prost dotat, nu exist personal suficient, nu are fonduri pentru medica ie pentru pacien i, pe scurt, este un dezastru care e pe cale s se nt mple. i cu toate astea, banii se duc spre biserici. Se fac dona ii de coli i terenuri c tre biseric , n mod ilegal i abuziv chiar n jude ul Olt.

Ultima perioad n care religia a condus lumea s-a numit Evul Mediu i cred c orice om care a tr it m car 5 ani n secolul XXI poate s observe c nu religia ne-a adus mari beneficii, ci tiin a i tehnologia. n Evul Mediu tratamentul se f cea prin s nger ri , t ieri sub limb , scoaterea argintului viu i tot felul de alte supersti ii f r nici un efect pozitiv sau chair cu efecte negative.

ntre timp umanitatea a progresat i am descoperit medicina, curentul electric, am explorat universul, am aterizat pe Lun , am pus zeci de sateli i artificiali pe orbit , am aflat foarte multe despre univers i lumea care ne nconjoar , am inventat noi materiale (plasticul, p nzele impermeabile, kevlarul), am investigat lumea f r idei preconcepute dup metoda tiin ific , iar lucrul acesta ne-a mbun t it via a n toate aspectele ei. Sperant de via a crescut de la aproximativ 30-40 de ani n Evul Mediu, la 70-80 de ani n prezent, totul datorit tiin ei aplicate. Datorit tehnologiei i tiin ei pot s v scriu aceste cuvinte i tiu c vor ajunge la dumneavoastr , nu datorit unor incanta ii sau ritualuri, nu datorit telepatiei, de i mediul sta de transmisie se apropie foarte mult de ceea ce define te ca fiind telepatie :-) . Cu toate astea, unii consider c religia trebuie finan at pentru c e religie, nici m car pentru c ar avea programe sociale, contribu ii cuantificabile reale, nu, doar pentru c este religie.


Am citit foarte multe articole din pres , articole bine documentate, i am senza ia c tr iesc ntr-o lume incon tient c nd v d cum banii care ar trebui s ajung n drumuri, coli, spitale, cercetare, medicamente, programe sociale cu real impact, ajung n noi i noi biserici de beton n timp ce monumentele istorice, bisericile din lemn, m n stirile cu adev rat valoroase sunt l sate n paragin . Asist cu o senza ie de dezgust continuu la felul n care ne batem joc de cei ce ne salveaz vie ile, medicii, de cei ce ar trebui s ne fac educa ia, profesorii, de cei ce ne sting casele dac iau foc, pompierii, i, de felul n care ridic m misticismul religios la rang de virtute. Este de-a dreptul jignitor i aberant ca alfabetizarea tiin ific n secolul XXI s fie at t de joas nc t s avem 42% din popula ie care cred c Terra este centrul universului, s avem oameni care cred c astrologia este tiin ific , s NU avem nici m car o universitate n top 500 n lume, este jignitor s fim n permanen n coada tuturor clasamentelor pozitive i n fruntea tuturor celor negative.

Recent money.ro a publicat un articol n care esitma foarte conservator c averea Bisericii Ortodoxe Rom ne se nv rte la peste 3 miliarde de euro, are scutiri de impozite, are zeci de afaceri i cu toate acestea, statul continu s scuteasc cultele de impozite, ba chiar le ofer bani ntr-una. La o asemenea avere nu cred c mai poate fi vorba de necesitatea finan rii de c tre stat. Oamenii pot decide s doneze direct c tre bisericile lor bani i nici nu mai implic pierderile inerente ce apar datorit administr rii fondurilor de c tre stat.


Statul nu este un organ aparte, statul trebuie s munceasc pentru mine, cet eanul, iar eu sunt mpotriva acestui tip de batjocorire i napoiere voluntar a noastr ndreptat mpotriva noastr . Alexandru Ioan Cuza a secularizat averile m n stirilor nchinate celor de la muntele Athos, deci unor ter i extreni rii, a a cum afl m din scrierile istoricului A.D. Xenopol, deci nu exist nici o obliga ie a statului s finan eze o institu ie anacronistic :

A.D. Xenopol Domnia lui Cuza Vod Vol.I , CAP. VIII. AI doile minister Cogalniceanu Secularizarea , pagina 291:
Nu vom atinge de c t mprejur rile care au condus la redob ndirea averilor, ajunse n st p nirea c lug rilor str ini, ating nd chestiunea nchin rei m n stirilor p n ntene c tre acele din R s rit, numai ntru c t va fi de nevoie, spre a n alege m sura seculariz rei nsu i.


Din aceste motive i multe altele, deoarece sunte i i reprezentantul meu n Parlamentul Rom niei, v cer ca s vota i pentru proiectul de lege ini iat de domnul Prigoan n ceea ce prive te t ierea finan rii personalui clerical de c tre stat i c t i a altor legi care ar putea duce la eliminarea privilegiilor pe care le au cultele, n condi iile n care singurul motiv real i corect pentru care o entitate ar putea beneficia de scutiri de taxe sau privilegii fiscale sunt doar cele ce nu urm resc interesul financiar i, totodat , au un impact social cuantificabil n mod clar.


Dac dori i, a fi bucuros s v r spund la eventualele ntreb ri sau neclarit i n ceea ce am scris, dac este nevoie.

V mul umesc anticipat!


L-am trimis joi, nc n-am primit r spuns de nici un fel. Pasul doi e s sun. M car s nnebuneasc dac tot sunt nesim i i. A a c , pute i afla de ce colegiu apar ine i i apoi pute i identifica pe cel/cea ce v reprezint n Parlament. Scrie i-le, suna i-i, a venit momentul m car s se enerveze, dac nu s - i fac m car o poleial de datorie.

13 December 2006

Clint Adams: Slapsticky slapsweet

Purse, the nice altruistic man is likely to be a figment of your imagination. Still, it is nice of you to acknowledge him, just as the legendary dugong keeps asking about you even though you are likely to be a figment of his. Nevertheless, we have but half the story, and holistically, half does not make a whole. You may reflect on that as you consume your stimulants in this sweet December rain while whales ride the A train to and from Penn Station, pursuant to the pre-agreed plan. Metapathos is a fickle bastard, and while you can never know if Vasya's powernaps are just the thing to alter time and space, the gestalt of the ol' Geist-manifdest, as it were, will continue to beckon to you, perhaps from Jupiter, perhaps from the steppes, perhaps from Atlantic City. I must insist that I am not your Secret Santa.