Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In August, 21 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:

• Abhijith PA did 10.0h (out of 0.0h assigned and 14.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 4.0h to the next month.
• Andrej Shadura did 12.0h (out of 9.0h assigned and 3.0h from previous period).
• Bastien Roucari s did 20.0h (out of 19.75h assigned and 0.25h from previous period).
• Ben Hutchings did 22.75h (out of 16.5h assigned and 6.25h from previous period).
• Carlos Henrique Lima Melara did 10.0h (out of 10.0h assigned).
• Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
• Daniel Leidert did 23.25h (out of 23.25h assigned).
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 23.25h (out of 23.25h assigned).
• Guilhem Moulin did 15.0h (out of 15.0h assigned).
• Jochen Sprickerhof did 11.0h (out of 6.0h assigned and 16.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.75h to the next month.
• Lee Garrett did 16.25h (out of 0.0h assigned and 16.25h from previous period).
• Lucas Kanashiro did 20.0h (out of 1.25h assigned and 18.75h from previous period).
• Markus Koschany did 5.0h (out of 13.0h assigned and 9.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 17.75h to the next month.
• Paride Legovini did 8.0h (out of 0.0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period).
• Roberto C. S nchez did 7.5h (out of 11.75h assigned and 11.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 15.25h to the next month.
• Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 13.5h (out of 7.25h assigned and 7.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 1.5h to the next month.
• Stefano Rivera did 0.5h (out of 0.0h assigned and 3.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.5h to the next month.
• Sylvain Beucler did 10.0h (out of 23.25h assigned), thus carrying over 13.25h to the next month.
• Thorsten Alteholz did 22.75h (out of 22.75h assigned).
• Tobias Frost did 4.0h (out of 0.0h assigned and 12.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.0h to the next month.
• Utkarsh Gupta did 16.0h (out of 22.75h assigned), thus carrying over 6.75h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In August, we released 27 DLAs. The month of August marked the release of Debian 13 (codename trixie ). This is worth noting because it brought with it the return of the customary fast development pace of Debian unstable, which included several contributions from LTS Team members. More on that below. Of the many security updates which were published (and a few non-security updates as well), some notable ones are highlighted here.

• Notable security updates:
  • gnutls28 prepared by Adrian Bunk, fixes several potential denial of service vulnerabilities
  • apache2, prepared by Bastien Roucari s, fixes several vulnerabilities including a potential denial of service and SSL/TLS-related access control
  • mbedtls (original update, regression update) prepared by Andrej Shadura, fixes several potential denial of service and information disclosure vulnerabilities
  • openjdk-17, prepared by Emilio Pozuelo Monfort, fixes several vulnerabilities which could result in denial of service, information disclosure or weakened TLS connections
• Notable non-security updates:
  • distro-info-data, prepared by Stefano Rivera, adds information concerning future Debian and Ubuntu releases
  • ca-certificates-java, prepared by Bastien Roucari s, fixes some bugs which could disrupt future updates

The LTS Team continues to welcome the collaboration of maintainers from across the Debian community. The contributions of maintainers from outside the LTS Team include: postgresql-13 (Christoph Berg), sope (Jordi Mallach), thunderbird (Carsten Schoenert), and iperf3 (Roberto Lumbreras). Finally, LTS Team members also contributed updates of the following packages:

• redis (to stable), prepared by Chris Lamb
• firebird3.0 (to oldstable and stable), prepared by Adrian Bunk
• node-tmp (to oldstable, stable, and unstable), prepared by Adrian Bunk
• openjpeg2 (to oldstable, stable, and unstable), prepared by Adrian Bunk
• apache2 (to oldstable), prepared by Bastien Roucari s
• unbound (to oldstable), prepared by Guilhem Moulin
• luajit (to oldstable), prepared by Guilhem Moulin
• golang-github-gin-contrib-cors (to oldstable and stable), prepared by Thorsten Alteholz
• libcoap3 (to stable), prepared by Thorsten Alteholz
• libcommons-lang-java and libcommons-lang3-java (both to unstable), prepared by Daniel Leidert
• python-flask-cors (to oldstable), prepared by Daniel Leidert

The LTS Team would especially like to thank our many longtime friends and sponsors for their support and collaboration.

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

• Platinum sponsors:
  • Toshiba Corporation (for 119 months)
  • Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) (for 87 months)
  • VyOS Inc (for 51 months)
• Gold sponsors:
  • F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG (for 129 months)
  • Akamai - Linode (for 123 months)
  • Babiel GmbH (for 113 months)
  • Plat Home (for 112 months)
  • University of Oxford (for 69 months)
  • Deveryware (for 56 months)
  • EDF SA (for 41 months)
  • Dataport A R (for 16 months)
  • CERN (for 14 months)
• Silver sponsors:
  • Domeneshop AS (for 134 months)
  • Nantes M tropole (for 128 months)
  • Univention GmbH (for 120 months)
  • Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 120 months)
  • Ribbon Communications, Inc. (for 114 months)
  • Exonet B.V. (for 103 months)
  • Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 98 months)
  • Minist re de l Europe et des Affaires trang res (for 81 months)
  • Cloudways by DigitalOcean (for 71 months)
  • Dinahosting SL (for 69 months)
  • Platform.sh SAS (for 63 months)
  • Moxa Inc. (for 57 months)
  • sipgate GmbH (for 55 months)
  • OVH US LLC (for 53 months)
  • Tilburg University (for 53 months)
  • GSI Helmholtzzentrum f r Schwerionenforschung GmbH (for 44 months)
  • THINline s.r.o. (for 17 months)
  • Copenhagen Airports A/S (for 11 months)
• Bronze sponsors:
  • Evolix (for 134 months)
  • Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 134 months)
  • Intevation GmbH (for 131 months)
  • Linuxhotel GmbH (for 131 months)
  • Daevel SARL (for 130 months)
  • Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 129 months)
  • Greenbone AG (for 128 months)
  • NUMLOG (for 128 months)
  • WinGo AG (for 127 months)
  • Entr ouvert (for 118 months)
  • Adfinis AG (for 116 months)
  • Tesorion (for 111 months)
  • Laboratoire LEGI - UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 110 months)
  • Bearstech (for 102 months)
  • LiHAS (for 102 months)
  • Catalyst IT Ltd (for 97 months)
  • Demarcq SAS (for 91 months)
  • Universit Grenoble Alpes (for 77 months)
  • TouchWeb SAS (for 69 months)
  • SPiN AG (for 66 months)
  • CoreFiling (for 62 months)
  • Institut des sciences cognitives Marc Jeannerod (for 57 months)
  • Observatoire des Sciences de l Univers de Grenoble (for 53 months)
  • Tem Innovations GmbH (for 48 months)
  • WordFinder.pro (for 47 months)
  • CNRS DT INSU R sif (for 46 months)
  • Soliton Systems K.K. (for 41 months)
  • Alter Way (for 39 months)
  • Institut Camille Jordan (for 29 months)
  • SOBIS Software GmbH (for 14 months)
  • Tuxera Inc. (for 5 months)

Hey everyone! It s Divine Attah-Ohiemi here, and I m excited to share what I ve been up to in my internship with the Debian community. It s been a month since I began this journey, and if you re thinking about applying for Outreachy, let me give you a glimpse into my project and the amazing people I get to work with. So, what s it like in the Debian community? It s a fantastic mix of folks from all walks of life seasoned developers, curious newbies, and everyone in between. What really stands out is how welcoming everyone is. I m especially thankful to my mentors, Thomas Lange, Carsten Schoenert, and Subin Siby, for their guidance and for always clocking in whenever I have questions. It feels like a big family where you can share your ideas and learn from each other. The commitment to diversity and merit is palpable, making it a great place for anyone eager to jump in and contribute. Now, onto the project! We re working on improving the Debian website by switching from WML (Web Meta Language) to Hugo, a modern static site generator. This change doesn t just make the site faster; it significantly reduces the time it takes to build compared to WML. Plus, it makes it way easier for non-developers to contribute and add pages since the content is built from Markdown files. It s all about enhancing the experience for both new and existing users. My role involves developing a proof of concept for this transition. I m migrating existing pages while ensuring that old links still work, so users won t run into dead ends. It s a bit of a juggling act, but knowing that my work is helping to make Debian more accessible is incredibly rewarding. What gets me most excited is the chance to contribute to a project that s been around for over 20 years! It s an honor to be part of something so significant and to help shape its future. How cool is it to know that what I m doing will impact users around the globe? In the past month, I ve learned a bunch of new things. For instance, I ve been diving into Apache's mod_rewrite to automatically map old multilingual URLs to new ones. This is important since Hugo handles localization differently than WML. I ve also been figuring out how to set up 301 redirects to prevent dead links, which is crucial for a smooth user experience. One of the more confusing parts has been using GNU Make to manage Perl scripts for dynamic pages. It s a bit of a learning curve, but I m tackling it head-on. Each challenge is a chance to grow, and I m here for it! If you re considering applying to the Debian community through Outreachy, I say go for it! There s so much to learn and experience, and you ll be welcomed with open arms. Happy coding, everyone!

Debian continues participating in Outreachy, and we're excited to announce that Debian has selected two interns for the Outreachy December 2024 - March 2025 round. Patrick Noblet Appiah will work on Automatic Indi-3rd-party driver update, mentored by Thorsten Alteholz. Divine Attah-Ohiemi will work on Making the Debian main website more attractive by switching to HuGo as site generator, mentored by Carsten Schoenert, Subin Siby and Thomas Lange.

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Congratulations and welcome Patrick Noblet Appiah and Divine Attah-Ohiemi! From the official website: Outreachy provides three-month internships for people from groups traditionally underrepresented in tech. Interns work remotely with mentors from Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities on projects ranging from programming, user experience, documentation, illustration and graphical design, to data science. The Outreachy programme is possible in Debian thanks to the efforts of Debian developers and contributors who dedicate their free time to mentor students and outreach tasks, and the Software Freedom Conservancy's administrative support, as well as the continued support of Debian's donors, who provide funding for the internships. Join us and help extend Debian! You can follow the work of the Outreachy interns reading their blogs (they are syndicated in Planet Debian), and chat with us in the #debian-outreach IRC channel and mailing list.

Debian continues participating in Outreachy, and we're excited to announce that Debian has selected two interns for the Outreachy December 2024 - March 2025 round. Patrick Noblet Appiah will work on Automatic Indi-3rd-party driver update, mentored by Thorsten Alteholz. Divine Attah-Ohiemi will work on Making the Debian main website more attractive by switching to HuGo as site generator, mentored by Carsten Schoenert, Subin Siby and Thomas Lange.

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Congratulations and welcome Patrick Noblet Appiah and Divine Attah-Ohiemi! From the official website: Outreachy provides three-month internships for people from groups traditionally underrepresented in tech. Interns work remotely with mentors from Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities on projects ranging from programming, user experience, documentation, illustration and graphical design, to data science. The Outreachy programme is possible in Debian thanks to the efforts of Debian developers and contributors who dedicate their free time to mentor students and outreach tasks, and the Software Freedom Conservancy's administrative support, as well as the continued support of Debian's donors, who provide funding for the internships. Join us and help extend Debian! You can follow the work of the Outreachy interns reading their blogs (they are syndicated in Planet Debian), and chat with us in the #debian-outreach IRC channel and mailing list.

In January I've removed tens of thousands of web pages on www.debian.org. Have you noticed it? In the past From 1997 onwards, we had web pages for security announcements. We had to manually prepare a .data and a .wml file which then generated a web page for each security announcement (DSA or DLA). We have listed the 6 most recent messages in a short list that was created from these files. Most of the work that went into the Debian web pages was creating these files. Our search engine often listed the pages with security announcements instead of a more relevant web page for a particular topic. Preparation At DebConf Kosovo (2022) I started with a proof of concept and wrote a script, that generates this list without using the .data/.wml files in the Git repository, but instead reading the primary sources of security information[1]. This new list now includes links to the security tracker and the email of the announcement. Following web pages and scripts were also using these .data and .wml files:

• OVAL files
• RSS feeds for security announcements (and LTS)
• Apache config file for mapping URLs from dsa-NNN to YEAR/dsa-NNN
• A huge list of crossreferences between DSA and CVE numbers

Before I could remove all the security web pages, I had to adjust the scripts, that create the above information. When I looked at the OVAL files and the apache logs of our web server, I saw that more than 99% of the web traffic was generated by these XML files (134TB of 135TB total in two weeks). They were not compressed and were around 50MB in size. With the help of Carsten Sch nert we managed to modify the python scripts that generate this OVAL file without using the .data/.wml files and now we only provide bzip2 compressed XML files[2]. The RSS feeds are created by the new Perl script which reads the DSA/DLA list the security tracker and determines the URL of the email of all entries. This script also generates the list of the most recent DSA/DLA entries. Currently we show the last 350 entries which covers more than the last year and includes links to the announcement email and the security tracker. The huge list of crossreferences is not needed any more, since the mapping of CVE to DSA is already included in the DSA list[3] of the security tracker. The amount of translations of the DSA/DLA was very different. French translations were almost all done, but all other languages did translations for a couple of months or years only. E.g. in 2022, Italian had 2 translations, Russian 15, Danish 212, French and English each 279. But from 2023 on only French translations were made. By generating the list of DSA/DLA we lost the ability to translate these web pages, but since these announcements are made of simple, identical sentences it is easy to use an automatic translation service if needed. Now the translation statistics of all web pages are more accurate. Instead of 12200 pages that need to be translated (including all these old DSA/DLA) there are now only 2500 pages to translate[4]. Languages that had a lot of old translations of DSA/DLA lost some percentage but languages that are doing translations of newer web pages won in the statistics of how many pages are translated. Examples: Before

German (de)   3501  28.5%
Italian (it)  1005   8.2%
Danish (da)   6336  51.7%

After

German (de)   1486  59.0%
Italian (it)   909  36.1%
Danish (da)    982  39.0%

Cleanup of all the security web pages Finally in January, I could remove all web pages of the security announcements in one git commit[5]. Using several git rm -rf commands this commit removed 54335 files, including around 9650 DSA/DLA data files, 44189 wml files, nearly 500 Makefiles. Outcome No more manual work is needed for the security team and we now have direct links from a DSA-NNN/DLA-NNN to the email in our mailing list archive. This was not possible before. The search results became more accurate. But we still host a lot of other old content on the Debian web pages which may be removed in the future. [1] https://www.debian.org/security/#infos [2] https://www.debian.org/security/oval/ [3] https://salsa.debian.org/security-tracker-team/security-tracker/-/raw/master/data/DSA/list [4] https://www.debian.org/devel/website/stats [5] https://salsa.debian.org/webmaster-team/webwml/-/commit/2aa73ff15bfc4eb2afd85c

src:developers-reference translations wanted I've just uploaded developers-reference 12.19, bringing the German translation status back to 100% complete, thanks to Carsten Schoenert. Some other translations however could use some updates:

$ make status
for l in de fr it ja ru; do     \
    if [ -d source/locales/$l/LC_MESSAGES ] ; then  \
        echo -n "Stats for $l: " ;          \
        msgcat --use-first source/locales/$l/LC_MESSAGES/*.po   msgfmt --statistics - 2>&1 ; \
    fi ;                            \
done
Stats for de: 1374 translated messages.
Stats for fr: 1286 translated messages, 39 fuzzy translations, 49 untranslated messages.
Stats for it: 869 translated messages, 46 fuzzy translations, 459 untranslated messages.
Stats for ja: 891 translated messages, 26 fuzzy translations, 457 untranslated messages.
Stats for ru: 870 translated messages, 44 fuzzy translations, 460 untranslated messages.

The Debian Electronics Team is happy to announce that the latest version of Arduino, probably the most widespread platform for programming AVR micro-controllers, is now packaged and uploaded onto Debian unstable. The last version of Arduino that was readily available in Debian was 1.0.5, which dates back to 2013. It's been years of trying and failing but finally, after a great months-long effort from Carsten Schoenert and Rock Storm, we have got a working package for the latest Arduino. After over 7 years now, users will be able to install the Arduino IDE as easy as "apt install arduino" again. "The purpose of this post is not just to announce this new upload but actually more of a request for testing" said Rock Storm. " The title could very well be WANTED: Beta Testers for Arduino (dead or alive :P).". The Debian Electronics Team would appreciate if anyone with the tools and knowledge for it could give the package a try and let us know if he/she finds any issues with it. With this post we thank the Debian Electronics Team and all previous contributors to the package. This feat would have not been achievable without them.

One of my workstations is running Debian/Unstable with KDE and SDDM on an AMD Radeon R7 260X video card. Recently it stopped displaying things correctly after a reboot, all the icons failed to display as well as many of the Qt controls. When I ran a KDE application from the command line I got the error QSGTextureAtlas: texture atlas allocation failed, code=501 . Googling that error gave a blog post about a very similar issue in 2017 [1]. From that blog post I learned that I could stop the problem by setting MESA_EXTENSION_OVERRIDE= -GL_EXT_bgra -GL_EXT_texture_format_BGRA8888 in the environment. In a quick test I found that the environment variable setting worked, making the KDE apps display correctly and not report an error about a texture atlas. I created a file ~/.config/plasma-workspace/env/bgra.sh with the following contents:

export MESA_EXTENSION_OVERRIDE="-GL_EXT_bgra -GL_EXT_texture_format_BGRA8888"

Then after the next login things worked as desired! Now the issue is, where is the bug? GL, X, and the internals of KDE are things I don t track much. I welcome suggestions from readers of my blog as to what the culprit might be and where to file a Debian bug or a URL to a Debian bug report if someone has already filed one. Update When I run the game warzone2100 with this setting it crashes with the below output. So this Mesa extension override isn t always a good thing, just solves one corner case of a bug.

$ warzone2100 
/usr/bin/gdb: warning: Couldn't determine a path for the index cache directory.
27      ../sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/wait4.c: No such file or directory.
No frame at level 0x7ffc3392ab50.
Saved dump file to '/home/etbe/.local/share/warzone2100-3.3.0//logs/warzone2100.gdmp-VuGo2s'
If you create a bugreport regarding this crash, please include this file.
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

Update 2 Carsten provided the REAL solution to this, run apt remove libqt5quick5-gles which will automatically install libqt5quick5 which makes things work. Another workstation I run that tracks Testing had libqt5quick5 installed which was why it didn t have the problem. The system in question had most of KDE removed due to package dependency issues when tracking Unstable and when I reinstalled it I guess the wrong one was installed.

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/y5y3cpgq

tl;dr: Use MessagePack, rather than CBOR. Introduction I recently wanted to choose a binary encoding. This was for a project using Rust serde, so I looked at the list of formats there. I ended up reading about CBOR and MessagePack. Both of these are binary formats for a JSON-like data model. Both of them are "schemaless", meaning you can decode them without knowing the structure. (This also provides some forwards compatibility.) They are, in fact, quite similar (although they are totally incompatible). This is no accident: CBOR is, effectively, a fork of MessagePack. Both formats continue to exist and both are being used in new programs. I needed to make a choice but lacked enough information. I thought I would try to examine the reasons and nature of the split, and to make some kind of judgement about the situation. So I did a lot of reading [11]. Here are my conclusions. History and politics Between about 2010 and 2013 there was only MessagePack. Unfortunately, MessagePack had some problems. The biggest of these was that it lacked a separate string type. Strings were to be encoded simply as byte blocks. This caused serious problems for many MessagePack library implementors: for example, when decoding a MessagePack file the Python library wouldn't know whether to produce a Python bytes object, or a string. Straightforward data structures wouldn't round trip through MessagePack. [1] [2] It seems that in late 2012 this came to the attention to someone with an IETF background. According to them, after unsatisfactory conversations with MessagePack upstream, they decided they would have to fork. They submitted an Internet Draft for a partially-incompatible protocol [3] [4]. Little seemed to happen in the IETF until soon before the Orlando in-person IETF meeting in February 2013.[5] These conversations sparked some discussion in the MessagePack issue tracker. There were long threads including about process [1,2,4 ibid]. But there was also a useful technical discussion, about proposed backward compatible improves to the MessagePack spec.[5] The prominent IETF contributor provided some helpful input in these discussions in the MessagePack community - but also pushed quite hard for a "tagging" system, which suggestion was not accepted (see my technical analysis, below). An improved MessagePack spec resulted, with string support, developed largely by the MessagePack community. It seems to have been available in useable form since mid-2013 and was officially published as canonical in August 2013. Meanwhile a parallel process was pursued in the IETF, based on the IETF contributor's fork, with 11 Internet-Drafts from February[7] to September[8]. This seems to have continued even though the original technical reason for the fork - lack of string vs binary distinction - no longer applied. The IETF proponent expressed unhappiness about MessagePack's stewardship and process as much as they did about the technical details [4, ibid]. The IETF process culminated in the CBOR RFC[9]. The discussion on process questions between the IETF proponent and MessagePack upstream, in the MessagePack issue tracker [4, ibid] should make uncomfortable reading for IETF members. The IETF acceptance of CBOR despite clear and fundamental objections from MessagePack upstream[13] and indeed other respected IETF members[14], does not reflect well on the IETF. The much vaunted openness of the IETF process seems to have been rather one-sided. The IETF proponent here was an IETF Chair. Certainly the CBOR author was very well-spoken and constantly talks about politeness and cooperation and process; but what they actually did was very hostile. They accused the MessagePack community of an "us and them" attitude while simultaneously pursuing a forked specification! The CBOR RFC does mention MessagePack in Appendix E.2. But not to acknowledge that CBOR was inspired by MessagePack. Rather, it does so to make a set of tendentious criticisms of MessagePack. Perhaps these criticisms were true when they were first written in an I-D but they were certainly false by the time the RFC was actually published, which occurred after the MessagePack improvement process was completely concluded, with a formal spec issued. Since then both formats have existed in parallel. Occasionally people discuss which one is better, and sometimes it is alleged that "yes CBOR is the successor to MessagePack", which is not really fair.[9][10] Technical differences The two formats have a similar arrangement: initial byte which can encode small integers, or type and length, or type and specify a longer length encoding. But there are important differences. Overall, MessagePack is very significantly simpler. Floating point CBOR supports five floating point formats! Not only three sizes of IEEE754, but also decimal floating point, and bigfloats. This seems astonishing for a supposedly-simple format. (Some of these are supported via the semi-optional tag mechanism - see below.) Indefinite strings and arrays Like MessagePack, CBOR mostly precedes items with their length. But CBOR also supports "indefinite" strings, arrays, and so on, where the length is not specified at the beginning. The object (array, string, whatever) is terminated by a special "break" item. This seems to me to be a mistake. If you wanted the kind of application where MessagePack or CBOR would be useful, streaming sub-objects of unknown length is not that important. This possibility considerably complicates decoders. CBOR tagging system CBOR has a second layer of sort-of-type which can be attached to each data item. The set of possible tags is open-ended and extensible, but the CBOR spec itself gives tag values for: two kinds of date format; positive and negative bignums; decimal floats (see above); binary but expected to be encoded if converted to JSON (in base64url, base64, or base16); nestedly encoded CBOR; URIs; base64 data (two formats); regexps; MIME messages; and a special tag to make file(1) work. In practice it is not clear how many of these are used, but a decoder must be prepared to at least discard them. The amount of additional spec complexity here is quite astonishing. IMO binary formats like this will (just like JSON) be used by a next layer which always has an idea of what the data means, including (where the data is a binary blob) what encoding it is in etc. So these tags are not useful. These tags might look like a middle way between (i) extending the binary protocol with a whole new type such as an extension type (incompatible with old readers) and encoding your new kind data in a existing type (leaving all readers who don't know the schema to print it as just integers or bytes or string). But I think they are more trouble than they are worth. The tags are uncomfortably similar to the ASN.1 tag system, which is widely regarded as one of ASN.1's unfortunate complexities. MessagePack extension mechanism MessagePack explicitly reserves some encoding space for users and for future extensions: there is an "extension type". The payload is an extension type byte plus some more data bytes; the data bytes are in a format to be defined by the extension type byte. Half of the possible extension byte values are reserved for future specification, and half are designated for application use. This is pleasingly straightforward. (There is also one unused primary initial byte value, but that would be rejected by existing decoders and doesn't seem like a likely direction for future expansion.) Minor other differences in integer encoding The encodings of integers differ. In MessagePack, signed and unsigned integers have different typecodes. In CBOR, signed and unsigned positive integers have the same typecodes; negative integers have a different set of typecodes. This means that a CBOR reader which knows it is expecting a signed value will have to do a top-bit-set check on the actual data value! And a CBOR writer must check the value to choose a typecode. MessagePack reserves fewer shortcodes for small negative integers, than for small positive integers. Conclusions and lessons MessagePack seems to have been prompted into fixing the missing string type problem, but only by the threat of a fork. However, this fork went ahead even after MessagePack clearly accepted the need for a string type. MessagePack had a fixed protocol spec before the IETF did. The continued pursuit of the IETF fork was ostensibly been motivated by a disapproval of the development process and in particular a sense that the IETF process was superior. However, it seems to me that the IETF process was abused by CBOR's proponent, who just wanted things their own way. I have seen claims by IETF proponents that the open decisionmaking system inherently produces superior results. However, in this case the IETF process produced a bad specification. To the extent that other IETF contributors had influence over the ultimate CBOR RFC, I don't think they significantly improved it. CBOR has been described as MessagePack bikeshedded by the IETF. That would have been bad enough, but I think it's worse than that. To a large extent CBOR is one person's NIH-induced bad design rubber stamped by the IETF. CBOR's problems are not simply matters of taste: it's significantly overcomplicated. One lesson for the rest of us is that although being the upstream and nominally in charge of a project seems to give us a lot of power, it's wise to listen carefully to one's users and downstreams. Once people are annoyed enough to fork, the fork will have a life of its own. Another lesson is that many of us should be much warier of the supposed moral authority of the IETF. Many IETF standards are awful (Oauth 2 [12]; IKE; DNSSEC; the list goes on). Sometimes (especially when network adoption effects are weak, as with MessagePack vs CBOR) better results can be obtained from a smaller group, or even an individual, who simply need the thing for their own uses. Finally, governance systems of public institutions like the IETF need to be robust in defending the interests of outsiders (and hence of society at large) against eloquent insiders who know how to work the process machinery. Any institution which nominally serves the public good faces a constant risk of devolving into self-servingness. This risk gets worse the more powerful and respected the institution becomes. References

1. #13: First-class string type in serialization specification (MessagePack issue tracker, June 2010 - August 2013)
2. #121: Msgpack can't differentiate between raw binary data and text strings (MessagePack issue tracker, November 2012 - February 2013)
3. draft-bormann-apparea-bpack-00: The binarypack JSON-like representation format (IETF Internet-Draft, October 2012)
4. #129: MessagePack should be developed in an open process (MessagePack issue tracker, February 2013 - March 2013)
5. Re: JSON mailing list and BoF (IETF apps-discuss mailing list message from Carsten Bormann, 18 February 2013)
6. #128: Discussions on the upcoming MessagePack spec that adds the string type to the protocol (MessagePack issue tracker, February 2013 - August 2013)
7. draft-bormann-apparea-bpack-01: The binarypack JSON-like representation format (IETF Internet-Draft, February 2013)
8. draft-bormann-cbor: Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) (IETF Internet-Drafts, May 2013 - September 2013)
9. RFC 7049: Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) (October 2013)
10. "MessagePack should be replaced with [CBOR] everywhere ..." (floatboth on Hacker News, 8th April 2017)
11. Discussion with very useful set of history links (camgunz on Hacker News, 9th April 2017)
12. OAuth 2.0 and the Road to Hell (Eran Hammer, blog posting from 2012, via Wayback Machine)
13. Re: [apps-discuss] [Json] msgpack/binarypack (Re: JSON mailing list and BoF) (IETF list message from Sadyuki Furuhashi, 4th March 2013)
14. "no apologies for complaining about this farce" (IETF list message from Phillip Hallam-Baker, 15th August 2013)
    Edited 2020-07-14 18:55 to fix a minor formatting issue, and 2020-07-14 22:54 to fix two typos

comments

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Allison Randal (wendar)
• Carsten Schoenert (tijuca)
• Jeremy Bicha (jbicha)
• Luca Boccassi (bluca)
• Michael Hudson-Doyle (mwhudson)
• Elana Hashman (ehashman)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Ervin Heged s
• Tom Marble
• Lukas Schwaighofer
• Philippe Thierry

Congratulations!

Changes

• myrepos: fix syntax error
• spelling dictionaries:
  • codespell: wipoing, formend, localation
  • lintian: wipoing, formend, localation
• Debian Planets: add GreenboneOS, Purism PureOS, update Kali logo
• Debian derivatives census: noise removal (1, 2)
• Debian debcheck: update for Debian Policy 4.0.1
• Debian security tracker: glibc CVE-2017-12133
• Debian TLS: video.d.n cert
• Debian puppet: deb.d.o & trailing slashes, video.d.n https
• Debian package uploads: gravitation, passage, primrose, glewmx
• Debian wiki config: drop blacklist for reading (got reverted later), whitespace
• Debian wiki pages: CarstenSchoenert, CrossGrading, Debtags/FAQ, dedup.debian.net, Derivatives (Meetings, Census (Template, BlankOn, CumulusLinux, EmmabuntusDE, GNUSTEP, GreenboneOS, PureOS, Purism (1, 2), SparkyLinux)), DeveloperNews (1, 2), DioPutra, fakechroot, Games, MasterBootRecord, Mobile (1, 2), PaulWise (InterestingSoftware), qa.debian.org, research/publications, SSH, Statistics, Steam, SystemBuildTools, Teams (DebianPerlGroup/OpenTasks, ReleaseTeam (ReleaseCheckList)), TedMarynicz
• Debian website scripts: whitespace fix
• DebConf wiki pages: DebConf17/Accommodation

Issues

• Crashes in mc, aspell, gnome-software
• Umask in cowbuilder
• Errors in confclerk
• Embedded code copies in samba
• Renaming of qupzilla
• Race conditions in gnome-shell-extension-show-ip
• Broken links in debian-policy
• Missing debtags in ftp.debian.org
• Configuration mixing in grub-pc
• Dependency issues in anarchism, fortune-anarchism
• Security issues in SKS keyserver network
• Conffile issues in libqt5gui5
• Weirdness in gdb

Review

• Spam: reported 1 Debian bug reports and 336 Debian mailing list posts
• Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month
• Debian screenshots:
  • approved amule, audacious, bochs-wx, bochs-x, clipit, conkeror, drumgizmo, gfpoken, gtk-3-examples, julia, kmines, mnemosyne, nedit, pidgin-otr, qdirstat, scram-gui, scram, tcvt, wine, xli
  • rejected doom-wad-shareware (non-free), scram-gui (wrong software?)
  • approved deletion of gtk3-nocsd
  • rejected deletion of drumgizmo (we do not remove old screenshots)

Administration

• myrepos: get commit/admin access from joeyh at DebConf17, add commit/admin access for other patch submitters, apply my stack of patches
• Debian: fix weird log file issues, redirect hardware donor, cleaned up a weird dir, fix some OOB info, ask for TLS on meetings-archive.d.n, check an I/O error, restart broken stunnels, powercycle 1 borked machine,
• Debian mentors: lintian/security updates & reboot
• Debian wiki: remove some stray cache files, whitelist 3 email domains, whitelist some email addresses, disable 1 spammer account, disable 1 accounts with bouncing email,
• Debian QA: apply patch to fix PTS watch file errors, deploy changes
• Debian derivatives census: run scripts for Purism, remove some noise from logs, trigger a recheck, merge fix by Unit193, deploy changes
• Openmoko: security updates, reboots, enable unattended-upgrades

Communication

• Attended DebConf17 and provided some input in BoFs
• Sent Misc Dev News #44
• Invite Google gLinux (on IRC) to the Debian derivatives census
• Welcome Sven Haardiek (of GreenboneOS) to the Debian derivatives census
• Inquire about the status of Canaima

Sponsors The samba bug report was sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

Debian LTS October marked the eighteenth month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. I spent 10 hours (out of allocated 9)

• updating Icedove to 45.4 resulting in DLA-658-1
• looking into current xen issues and handling the communication with credativ
• investigating QEMU CVE-2016-7466 in Wheezy and Jessie
• backporting patches for qemu-kvm to fix 9 CVEs resulting in DLA-689-1
• starting with lts frontdesk (more on that next month)

Other Debian stuff

• Carsten and myself had the chance to talk at the Kopano conference about Debian and the state of Kopano in Debian (slides)
• Uploaded kopanocore to unstable, currently waiting in new
• Several Libvirt and Libvirt (2.3.0, 2.4.0~rc*) related uploads (libvirt 2.3.0, libvirt-python, ruby-libvirt 0.7.0)
• Uploaded libosinfo 1.0.0 to experimental. This version has the osinfo database split out into its own source package (osinfo-db, waiting in new) so the operating system and hypervisor information is updateable during a stable release without having to update the library itself

Some other Free Software activities

• Fixed some issues in ansible-spec
• Made specinfra handle libvirt lxc containers like lxc containers
• Fixed an error in calypso that made us potentially remove the wrong entries, added travis ci support and started looking into python-vobjects unicode breackage

Today was a nice day with a surprising number of early Christmas presents:

• I submitted my Ph.D. thesis Lazy Evaluation: From formal semantics to to a machine-checked compiler transformation about an Isabelle formalisation of Launchbury s natural semantics (also found in the Launchbury entry in the Archive of Formal Proofs), about the GHC optimization Call Arity that I developed (see the TFP 2014 paper) and a formal proof that it is indeed an optimization (Haskell Symposium 2015 paper, AFP entry). After 243 pages, it is finally done and I can now turn to new things. Speaking of something new : I m hunting jobs right now. I am in particular interested in academic post-doc positions in my field (functional programming languages and/or interactive theorem proving), but I d also like to hear about attractive non-academic positions that fit my profile.
• Someone who I value and respect a lot asked me to co-author a paper with him. I am not sure whether further details at this stage belong to a public blog post, so I ll keep them back. But nevertheless this is very nice.
• A paper on information flow control by my colleagues J rgen Graf, Martin Hecker and Martin Mohr, my advisor Gregor Snelting and (although only marginally) me was accepted at POST 2016, and the notification reached us today.
• Together with Carsten Podszun, I have written an article about the Ravensburger Tip-toi pen and how to create your own books for that using the tttool program that I have created for the German magazine Make:, and it is included in issue 6/2015, which arrived today in my mailbox.
• The Incredible Proof Machine attracts new contributors. Well, one. But a few days ago, I heard that a 11 year old girl has great fun with it!
• Tonight, my group is having their Christmas party and I can expect to be fed well by home-cooked Mexican something. Got to go...

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• ChangZhuo Chen (czchen)
• Eugene Zhukov (eugene)
• Hugo Lefeuvre (hle)
• Milan Kupcevic (milan)
• Timo Weing rtner (tiwe)
• Uwe Kleine-K nig (ukleinek)
• Bernhard Schmidt (berni)
• Stein Magnus Jodal (jodal)
• Prach Pongpanich (prach)
• Markus Koschany (apo)
• Andy Simpkins (rattustrattus)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Miguel A. Col n V lez
• Afif Elghraoui
• Bastien Roucari s
• Carsten Schoenert
• Tomasz Nitecki
• Christoph Ulrich Scholler
• Mechtilde Stehmann
• Alexandre Viau
• Daniele Tricoli
• Russell Sim
• Benda Xu
• Andrew Kelley
• Ivan Udovichenko
• Shih-Yuan Lee
• Edward Betts
• Punit Agrawal
• Andreas Boll
• Dave Hibberd
• Alexandre Detiste
• Marcio de Souza Oliveira
• Andrew Ayer
• Alf Gaida

Congratulations!

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Guillem Jover uploaded dpkg/1.18.2 which makes dependency comparisons deep by comparing not only the first dependency alternative, to get them sorted in a reproducible way. Original patch by Chris Lamb. Dhole updated the patch adding support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in gettext. A modified package is in the experimental reproducible repository. Valentin Lorentz submitted a patch adding support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to ocamldoc. Valentin Lorentz also opened a bug about the inability to set an arbitrary RNG seed for ocamlopt which would be a way to fix an issue affecting many OCaml packages. Dhole submitted a patch adding support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in qhelpgenerator. A modified package has been sent to the experimental repository as well. Several packages have been updated for the experimental toolchain: doxygen (akira), and dpkg (h01ger). Also, h01ger has built and uploaded all experimental packages having arch:any packages for armhf: dpkg, gettext, doxygen, fontforge, libxslt and texlive-bin. We are now providing our toolchain for armhf and amd64. Packages fixed As you might have noticed, Debian sid is currently largely uninstallable, due to the GCC 5 transition, which also can be see in our reproducibility test setup. Please help! The following packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: glosstex, indent, ktikz, liblouis, libmicrohttpd, linkchecker, multiboot, qterm, rrep, trueprint, twittering-mode. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• aegisub/3.2.2+dfsg-1 uploaded by Sebastian Reichel, original patch.
• libinline-java-perl/0.56-2 uploaded by Jonas Smedegaard, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• mime-support/3.59 uploaded by Charles Plessy, original patch by akira.
• osmo/0.2.14-1 by Markus Koschany.
• python-cyclone/1.1-2 by Lunar.

Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #794395 on classified-ads by Reiner Herrmann: removes timestamps in embedded PNG images. Already merged upstream.
• #794398 on clhep by Reiner Herrmann: sort with LC_ALL set to C.
• #794399 on parsec47 by Reiner Herrmann: sort with LC_ALL set to C.
• #794400 on tumiki-fighters by Reiner Herrmann: sort with LC_ALL set to C.
• #794603 on xchat by Valentin Lorentz: call strip-nondeterminism and remove time C pre-processor macros.
• #794740 on camitk by akira: use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH as build date.
• #794779 on foxyproxy by Dhole: set TZ to UTC when using zip.
• #794781 on xul-ext-monkeysphere by Dhole: set TZ to UTC when using zip.
• #794792 on freeipmi by Dhole: use latest entry from debian/changelog as build date.
• #794793 on doc-base by Dhole: use UTC timezone when generating source date string.
• #794795 on debiandoc-sgml-doc by Dhole: remove date. A better approach has been suggested by maintainer.
• #794892 on autogen by Valentin Lorentz: use a constant time as timeout instead of measuring how long it takes for ./configure to run, use C locale when sorting, and use UTC when converting dates. Upstream made a new pre-release providing a --enable-timeout option. Date related issues will need more work to have portable solutions.

Lunar reported an issue on an unstable ABI from a generated header in icedove reminding of an issue affecting libical-dev. The bug has since been fixed by Carsten Schoenert. akira identified an unreferenced embeded code copy (causing unreproducibility!) in gperf. reproducible.debian.net The scheduler has temporarily been changed to not schedule any already tested packages for sid and experimental, due to the the GCC 5 transitions, which are well visible in our graphs now. On the plus side this has caused our stretch testing to catch up (and improve stats). (h01ger) depwait packages (packages where the Build-Depends cannot be satisfied) are now listed in the last 24h and last 48h pages (Mattia Rizzolo) Two new amd64 build nodes (with 8 cores and 32 GB RAM each) have been added, kindly sponsored by Profitbricks. (h01ger) The 4 armhf (setup last week by Vagrant Cascadian) and 2 amd64 build nodes have been made available to Jenkins. Remote job scheduling has been implemented and 35 new jobs have been added for pbuilder and schroot creation and maintenance of the nodes. (h01ger) The manual scheduler gained a flag (-a/--architecture) to select which arch to schedule in. (Mattia Rizzolo) armhf will only be testing stretch for now, due to limited hardware ressources. (h01ger) The page listing maintainers of unreproducible packages gained internal anchors. As an example, one can now link to unreproducible orphaned packages. (Mattia Rizzolo) Packages with a bug tagged pending are marked using a new symbol: a brown P (Mattia Rizzolo) diffoscope development debbindiff is now called diffoscope! It also has a website at diffoscope.org. The name was changed to better reflect that it became a general purpose tool, capable of comparing many different archive formats, or directories. Version 29 is the renaming release. Amongst a couple of other cosmetic changes a favicon showing the new logo has been added to the generated HTML reports. Version 30 replaces the file matching algorithm for files listed in .changes to a smarter one that removes only the version number. It also fixes a bug where squashfs directories were being extracted even if their content was being compared at a later stage. It also fixes an issue with the test suite that was detected by debci. Documentation update More rationale have been added for supporting SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH The unfinished Reproducible Builds HOWTO is now visible on the web, feedback and patches most welcome. Package reviews 261 obsolete reviews have been removed, 73 added and 145 updated this week.

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes

• Joachim Breitner uploaded haskell-devscripts/0.9.11 which ads support for UTF-8 encoded debian/control file with all locales. Original patch by Chris Lamb.
• Jonas Smedegaard uploaded ghostscript which adds support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. Original patch by Dhole.

akira submitted a patch to make cdbs export SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. She uploded a package with the enhancement to the experimental reproducible repository. Packages fixed The following 15 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: dracut, editorconfig-core, elasticsearch, fish, libftdi1, liblouisxml, mk-configure, nanoc, octave-bim, octave-data-smoothing, octave-financial, octave-ga, octave-missing-functions, octave-secs1d, octave-splines, valgrind. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• ant-contrib/1.0~b3+svn177-7 by Emmanuel Bourg.
• authbind/2.1.1+nmu1 uploaded by Johannes Schauer, original patch by akira.
• elektra/0.8.12-1 uploaded by Pino Toscano, original patch by akira.
• glance/2015.1.0-3 by Thomas Goirand.
• gnumeric/1.12.23-1 uploaded by Dmitry Smirnov, original patch by Daniel Kahn Gillmor.
• libdevice-cdio-perl/0.3.0-5 uploaded by gregor herrmann, report by Chris Lamb.
• libxray-scattering-perl/3.0.1-1.1 uploaded by gregor herrmann, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• libxray-spacegroup-perl/0.1.1-2.1 uploaded by gregor herrmann, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• ryu/3.23-2 by Dariusz Dwornikowski.

Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them:

• apophenia/0.999e+ds-1 uploaded by Jerome Benoit, original patch by akira.
• xbs/0-10 uploaded by Matthew Vernon, original patch by Colin Watson.
• bbswitch/0.8-2 uploaded by Vincent Cheng, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• mariadb-10.0/10.0.20-3 by Otto Kek l inen.
• icedove/38.0.1-1 uploaded by Christoph Goehre, improvements by Carsten Schoenert.
• apache2/2.4.16-1 uploaded by Stefan Fritsch, improvements by Jean-Michel Vourg re.

In contrib, Dmitry Smirnov improved libdvd-pkg with 1.3.99-1-1. Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #793705 on mime-support by akira: set the mtimes of all files which are modified during builds to the latest debian/changelog entry.
• #793922 on polymake by Chris Lamb: sort Perl hash keys.
• #793980 on lsof by Valentin Lorentz: removes extra informations from the build system..
• #793996 on at by Valentin Lorentz: use absolute values for chmod.
• #794005 on python-dtcwt by Chris Lamb: use a constant seed for the random number generator.
• #794011 on gzip by Valentin Lorentz: remove date from texinfo header.
• #794014 on moin by Dhole: normalizes the timezone and fixes timestamps from the files compressed with zip.
• #794106 on cryptsetup by Valentin Lorentz: use date from latest debian/changelog entry in manpage.
• #794130 on coq by Valentin Lorentz: use C locale and UTC timezone when generating the build date.
• #794225 on libsyncml by akira: export SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH.
• #794239 on zipios++ by akira: export SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH.
• #794247 on whizzytex by Dhole: remove current date from documentation.
• #794248 on cortado by Dhole: allow the build date to be set externally and use time from the latest debian/changelog entry.
• #794395 on classified-ads by Reiner Herrmann: remove timestamps from PNG images.
• #794398 on clhep by Reiner Herrmann: sort source file list.
• #794399 on parsec47 by Reiner Herrmann: use C locale when sorting source files.
• #794400 on tumiki-fighters by Reiner Herrmann: use C locale when sorting source files.

reproducible.debian.net Four armhf build hosts were provided by Vagrant Cascadian and have been configured to be used by jenkins.debian.net. Work on including armhf builds in the reproducible.debian.net webpages has begun. So far the repository comparison page just shows us which armhf binary packages are currently missing in our repo. (h01ger) The scheduler has been changed to re-schedule more packages from stretch than sid, as the gcc5 transition has started This mostly affects build log age. (h01ger) A new depwait status has been introduced for packages which can't be built because of missing build dependencies. (Mattia Rizzolo) debbindiff development Finally, on August 31st, Lunar released debbindiff 27 containing a complete overhaul of the code for the comparison stage. The new architecture is more versatile and extensible while minimizing code duplication. libarchive is now used to handle cpio archives and iso9660 images through the newly packaged python-libarchive-c. This should also help support a couple other archive formats in the future. Symlinks and devices are now properly compared. Text files are compared as Unicode after being decoded, and encoding differences are reported. Support for Sqlite3 and Mono/.NET executables has been added. Thanks to Valentin Lorentz, the test suite should now run on more systems. A small defiency in unquashfs has been identified in the process. A long standing optimization is now performed on Debian package: based on the content of the md5sums control file, we skip comparing files with matching hashes. This makes debbindiff usable on packages with many files. Fuzzy-matching is now performed for files in the same container (like a tarball) to handle renames. Also, for Debian .changes, listed files are now compared without looking the embedded version number. This makes debbindiff a lot more useful when comparing different versions of the same package. Based on the rearchitecturing work has been done to allow parallel processing. The branch now seems to work most of the time. More test needs to be done before it can be merged. The current fuzzy-matching algorithm, ssdeep, has showed disappointing results. One important use case is being able to properly compare debug symbols. Their path is made using the Build ID. As this identifier is made with a checksum of the binary content, finding things like CPP macros is much easier when a diff of the debug symbols is available. Good news is that TLSH, another fuzzy-matching algorithm, has been tested with much better results. A package is waiting in NEW and the code is ready for it to become available. A follow-up release 28 was made on August 2nd fixing content label used for gzip2, bzip2 and xz files and an error on text files only differing in their encoding. It also contains a small code improvement on how comments on Difference object are handled. This is the last release name debbindiff. A new name has been chosen to better reflect that it is not a Debian specific tool. Stay tuned! Documentation update Valentin Lorentz updated the patch submission template to suggest to write the kind of issue in the bug subject. Small progress have been made on the Reproducible Builds HOWTO while preparing the related CCCamp15 talk. Package reviews 235 obsolete reviews have been removed, 47 added and 113 updated this week. 42 reports for packages failing to build from source have been made by Chris West (Faux). New issue added this week: haskell_devscripts_locale_substvars. Misc. Valentin Lorentz wrote a script to report packages tested as unreproducible installed on a system. We encourage everyone to run it on their systems and give feedback!

What happened about the reproducible builds effort for this week: Toolchain fixes

• Guillem Jover uploaded dpkg/1.18.0 which now uses an approximation to compute Installed-Size, making it indpendent from the underlying filesystem. It now always sort the Dpkg::Dist::Files files list on output to make the output stable with parallel builds.
• Lunar uploaded mozilla-devscripts/0.40 which told xpi-pack to skip saving extra zip attributes when making jar.
• Dominique Dumont uploaded libmodule-build-perl/0.421100-2 which makes the output deterministic. Original patch by Lunar.

Lunar rebased our custom dpkg on the new release, removing a now unneeded patch identified by Guillem Jover. An extra sort in the buildinfo generator prevented a stable order and was quickly fixed once identified. Mattia Rizzolo also rebased our custom debhelper on the latest release. Packages fixed The following 30 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: animal-sniffer, asciidoctor, autodock-vina, camping, cookie-monster, downthemall, flashblock, gamera, httpcomponents-core, https-finder, icedove-l10n, istack-commons, jdeb, libmodule-build-perl, libur-perl, livehttpheaders, maven-dependency-plugin, maven-ejb-plugin, mozilla-noscript, nosquint, requestpolicy, ruby-benchmark-ips, ruby-benchmark-suite, ruby-expression-parser, ruby-github-markup, ruby-http-connection, ruby-settingslogic, ruby-uuidtools, webkit2gtk, wot. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• aisleriot/1:3.16.2-1 uploaded by Andreas Henriksson, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• aws-sdk-for-php/2.8.5-1 by David Pr vot.
• bamtools/2.3.0+dfsg-3 uploaded by Andreas Tille, fix by Michael R. Crusoe.
• base-files/9.2 by Santiago Vila, some patches by Lunar.
• debian-keyring/2015.05.17 by Daniel Kahn Gillmor.
• debram/2.0.0.2 by Thaddeus H. Black.
• dianara/1.3.0-2 by M nica Ram rez Arceda.
• gazebo/5.0.1+dfsg-1~exp1 by Jose Luis Rivero.
• glassfish/1:2.1.1-b31g+dfsg1-3 uploaded by Emmanuel Bourg, original patch by Daniel Kahn Gillmor.
• lcdproc/0.5.7-3 by Dominique Dumont.
• libalien-sdl-perl/1.446-2 by Dominique Dumont.
• libvirt-python/1.2.15-1 uploaded by Guido G nther, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• libxmpcore-java/5.1.2-3 by Emmanuel Bourg.
• pdb2pqr/2.0.0+dfsg-1 uploaded by Andreas Tille, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• puredata/0.46.6-2 by Paul Brossier.
• qt-gstreamer/1.2.0-2 by Diane Trout.
• socat/1.7.3.0-1 uploaded by Laszlo Boszormenyi, original patch by Lunar.
• swaks/20130209.0-5 by Andreas Metzler, some patches by Chris Lamb.
• tf/1:4.0s1-19 by Jan Niehusmann.
• unzip/6.0-17 uploaded by Santiago Vila, original patch by Lunar.
• yorick/2.2.04+dfsg1-2 by by Thibaut Paumard.
• zip/3.0-10 by Santiago Vila, some patches by Chris Lamb.

Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them:

• bible-kjv/4.27 uploaded by Matthew Vernon, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• calendar/2.04-1 by St phane Glondu.
• cupt/2.9.0 uploaded by Eugene V. Lyubimkin, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• dactyl/1.2~hg7166-1 uploaded by Michael Schutte, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• ghc/7.10.1-5 by Joachim Breitner.
• icedove/38.0~b5-1 by Carsten Schoenert.
• jd/1:2.8.9-150226-2 by Hideki Yamane.
• libparse-debianchangelog-perl/1.2.0-2 by intrigeri.
• winswitch/0.12.21+dfsg-1 by Dmitry Smirnov.

Patches submitted which did not make their way to the archive yet:

• #775531 on console-setup by Reiner Herrmann: update and split patch written in January.
• #785535 on maradns by Reiner Herrmann: use latest entry in debian/changelog as build date.
• #785549 on dist by Reiner Herrmann: set hostname and domainname to predefined value.
• #785583 on s5 by Juan Picca: set timezone to UTC when unzipping files.
• #785617 on python-carrot by Juan Picca: use latest entry in debian/changelog as documentation build date.
• #785774 on afterstep by Juan Picca: modify documentation generator to allow a build date to be set instead of the current time, then use latest entry in debian/changelog as reference.
• #786508 on ttyload by Juan Picca: remove timestamp from documentation.
• #786568 on linux-minidisc by Lunar: use latest entry in debian/changelog as build date.
• #786615 on kfreebsd-10 by Steven Chamberlain: make order of file in source tarballs stable.
• #786633 on webkit2pdf by Reiner Herrmann: use latest entry in debian/changelog as documentation build date.
• #786634 on libxray-scattering-perl by Reiner Herrmann: tell Storable::nstore to produce sorted output.
• #786637 on nvidia-settings by Lunar: define DATE, WHOAMI, andHOSTNAME_CMD to stable values.
• #786710 on armada-backlight by Reiner Herrmann: use latest entry in debian/changelog as documentation build date.
• #786711 on leafpad by Reiner Herrmann: use latest entry in debian/changelog as documentation build date.
• #786714 on equivs by Reiner Herrmann: use latest entry in debian/changelog as documentation build date.

Also, the following bugs have been reported:

• #785536 on maradns by Reiner Herrmann: unreproducible deadwood binary.
• #785624 on doxygen by Christoph Berg: timestamps in manpages generated makes builds non-reproducible.
• #785736 on git-annex by Daniel Kahn Gillmor: documentation should be made reproducible.
• #786593 on wordwarvi by Holger Levsen: please provide a --distrobuild build switch.
• #786601 on sbcl by Holger Levsen: FTBFS when locales-all is installed instead of locales.
• #786669 on ruby-celluloid by Holger Levsen: tests sometimes fail, causing ftbfs sometimes.
• #786743 on obnam by Holger Levsen: FTBFS.

reproducible.debian.net Holger Levsen made several small bug fixes and a few more visible changes:

• For packages in testing, comparisions will be done using the sid version of debbindiff.
• The scheduler will now schedule old packages from sid twice often as the ones in testing as we care more about the former at the moment.
• More statistics are now visible and the layout has been improved.
• Variations between the first and second build are now explained on the statistics page.

strip-nondeterminism Version 0.007-1 of strip-nondeterminism the tool to post-process various file formats to normalize them has been uploaded by Holger Levsen. Version 0.006-1 was already in the reproducible repository, the new version mainly improve the detection of Maven's pom.properties files. debbindiff development At the request of Emmanuel Bourg, Reiner Herrmann added a comparator for Java .class files. Documentation update Christoph Berg created a new page for the timestamps in manpages created by Doxygen. Package reviews 93 obsolete reviews have been removed, 76 added and 43 updated this week. New identified issues: timestamps in manpages generated by Doxygen, modification time differences in files extracted by unzip, tstamp task used in Ant build.xml, timestamps in documentation generated by ASDocGen. The description for build id related issues has been clarified. Meetings Holger Levsen announced a first meeting on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2015, 19:00 UTC. The agenda is amendable on the wiki. Misc. Lunar worked on a proof-of-concept script to import the build environment found in .buildinfo files to UDD. Lucas Nussbaum has positively reviewed the proposed schema. Holger Levsen cleaned up various experimental toolchain repositories, marking merged brances as such.

The seventh Debian Groupware Meeting was held in the LinuxHotel, Essen, Germany. We had one remote hacker from NYC which brings the number of attendants up to 9. This is a short summary of what happened during the weekend:

• We decided to abandon Iceowl (based on the standalone calendar sunbird) since Mozilla started to actively remove the code. Unfortunately this leaves us without a proper GUI stand alone calendar client with GSSAPI support.
• The icedove package got a major cleanup including the switch from CDBS to dh and the removal of the rebranding logic. This will hopefully allow us to better keep in sync with upstream. Carsten's git repo usually carries the most up to date version and a automated build of these version is in the works.
• The sogo connector extension for icedove got uploaded and tested including a wiki page
• The Groupware Page got updated
• We discussed the possibility of caldav/carddav servers in Debian using autopkgtest. This resulted in caldav-tester being packaged. It's currently waiting for an updated dependency before it can be uploaded.
• Based on that we added minimal autopkg tests to calypso. The later also gained GSSAPI support.
• OpenChange got updated in experimental (now moved to sid) and got a debug package. There were also some upstream improvements to ease provisioning.
• Dovecot's installation of the Sieve ext_programs was fixed
• SOPE and SOGo got updated to the latest upstream versions
• The SOGo-OpenChange plugin got build against the OpenChange package in experimental
• Giraffe (aka Zarafa packaging) made nice progress including the switch to free artwork and further renaming of the services. For Details on the current state check the wiki page.
• Due to the warm spring we had two nice barbecues for lunch.

Since we had a nice mix of first time Debian contributors, Debian Maintainers and Debian Developers we had lots of room for discussion and co-working which made this an exciting weekend.

The sixth Debian Groupware Meeting was held in the LinuxHotel, Essen, Germany. We had one remote hacker from NYC which brings the number of attendants up to nine - an all time high! This is a short summary of what happened during the weekend:

• Sogo 2.0.5 got uploaded to unstable and work on OpenChange support is advancing.
• D-push (the rebranded version of z-push) got split and restructured to better handle different backends. An update in experimental is pending.
• Giraffe's git (the rebranded version of zaraffa) got updated to 7.1. There's some more work needed to get this into the archive though.
• There's been progress on getting Kolab3 into Debian starting with libkolabxml 0.8.4 and libkolab 0.4.2 (also needed by kde-pim).
• mozilla-devscripts now handles Iceowl as well so packaging calendaring extensions like this one becomes even more useful.
• Icedove and Iceowl bugsquashing. New versions were uploaded to unstable and experimental. The bug count trends look quiet promising but we really need help for #658664.
• We did some davmail <-> iceowl/icedove interop testing.
• The Groupware Page got updated
• We had some discussions about calendar and addressbook detection and autoconfiguration. For CalDAV/CardDAV there's a specification available already but there seems to be no client implementation in Debian so we started13 to work on it.
• We had a nice barbecue enjoying the first warm days.