Search Results: "cts"

24 January 2025

Sam Hartman: Feeling Targeted: Executive Order Ending Wasteful DEIA Efforts

As most here know, I m totally blind. One of my roles involves a contract for the US Government, under which I have a government email account. The department recently received a message talking about our work to end, to the maximum extend permitted by law, all diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility efforts in the government in accordance with the recently signed executive order. We are all reminded that if we timely identify the contracts and positions that are related to these efforts, there will be no consequences. There are a lot of times in my life when I have felt marginalized frustrated and angry that people weren t interested in working with me to make the small changes that would help me fit in. As an example with this government job, I asked to have access to a screen reader so that I could use my computer. My preferred adaptive software was not approved, even though it was thousands of dollars cheaper than the option the government wanted and could have been installed instantly rather than waiting for a multi-week ordering process. When the screen reader eventually became available, the government-provided installer was not accessible: a blind person could not use it. When I asked for help, the government added an additional multi-week delay because they weren t sure that the license management technology for the software they had chosen met the government s security and privacy policies. Which is to say that even with people actively working toward accessibility, sharing a commitment that accessibility is important, we have a lot of work to do. I feel very targeted at the current time. Now we are removing as many of the resources that help me be effective and feel welcome as we can. Talking about the lack of consequences now is just a way to remind everyone that there will be consequences later and get the fear going. The witch hunt is coming, and if people do a good enough job of turning in all the people who could help me feel welcome, they won t face consequences. Yes, I understand that the Americans with Disabilities act is still law, but its effectiveness will be very different in a climate where you need to eliminate accessibility positions to avoid consequences than in a climate where accessibility is a goal.

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20 January 2025

Divine Attah-Ohiemi: Progress Report: First Half of My Outreachy Internship

Hello everyone!, I m excited to share a progress report on my Outreachy internship with the Debian community. As I reach the halfway point of this journey, I want to reflect on what I ve accomplished so far and outline my modified goals for the second half of the internship. In truth, there wasn t a strict timeline for my project migrating Debian webpage content to Hugo because the original repository contained thousands of pages. The initial goal was to develop a proof of concept for: Thanks to our daily standups, where we brainstorm and revise contributions, we ve made significant progress. The wiki documentation discussing the technical decisions taken to meet these goals is currently in progress here. During the first half of my internship, I have improved and refined my skills in several areas. I learned new Markdown syntaxes, studied and utilized Apache's mod_rewrite, and halfway studied GNU Make to use Perl scripts for processing data for dynamic content. I recommend Managing Projects with GNU Make by Robert Mecklenburg it's a great book for beginners! While I didn t get stuck on any particular goal, the most challenging aspect was adding Hugo aliases to help with Apache's multilingual content negotiation. The way the webwml repository generates multilingual content differs from debianhugo. For instance, in webwml, the structure looks like this: english/index.wml -> /index.en.html (with a symlink from index.html to index.en.html) and french/index.wml -> /index.fr.html. In contrast, debianhugo uses en/_index.md -> /index.html and fr/_index.md -> /fr/index.html. Apache's multilingual content negotiation checks for index.<user preferred lang code>.html in the current directory, which works well with webwml since all related translations are generated in the same directory. However, with debianhugo using subdirectories for languages other than English, we had to set up aliases for every other language page to be generated in the frontmatter. For example, in fr/_index.md, we added this to the front matter:
...
aliases:
  - /index.fr.html
...
This setup allows Hugo to generate multilingual HTML files in the initial home directory solely for the purpose of setting up a 301 redirect to the same page in the language subdirectory. However, if the client sets their preferred language to English, Apache content negotiation tries to find /index.en.html. If it doesn t find it, it defaults to any other language-suffixed file, which can lead to unexpected behavior. For example, if English is set as the preferred language, accessing the site may serve /index.fr.html, which then redirects to /fr/index.html. This was a significant challenge, and you can see a demo of this hosted here. If I were to start the project over, I would document every decision as I make them in the wiki, no matter how rough the documentation turns out. Waiting until the midpoint of the project to document was not a good idea. As I move into the second half of my internship, the goals we ve set include improving our project wiki documentation and continuing the migration process while enhancing the user experience of complicated sections. I m looking forward to making even more progress and sharing my journey with you all. Happy coding!

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppMsgPack 0.2.4 on CRAN: Maintenance

Another maintenance release of RcppMsgPack got onto CRAN today. MessagePack itself is an efficient binary serialization format. It lets you exchange data among multiple languages like JSON. But it is faster and smaller. Small integers are encoded into a single byte, and typical short strings require only one extra byte in addition to the strings themselves. RcppMsgPack brings both the C++ headers of MessagePack as well as clever code (in both R and C++) Travers wrote to access MsgPack-encoded objects directly from R. This is the first release in over six years, and contains mostly maintenance. One somewhat embarassing aspect is that Travers and I forgot about a PR that had been ready all this since the last release, it has now been integrated. Details follow from the NEWS file.

Changes in version 0.2.4 (2025-01-19)
  • Use Rcpp::RawVector instead of std::vector<unsigned char> saving extra copy (Travers in #16)
  • Several updates to README.md with R Journal paper, add badges, add Authors@R, add CITATION file, add repo info to DESCRIPTION
  • Update continuous integration via r-ci
  • Update to no longer require compilation standard

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. For questions, suggestions, or issues please use the [issue tracker][issue tickets] at the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

19 January 2025

Fran ois Marier: Blocking comment spammers on an Ikiwiki blog

Despite comments on my ikiwiki blog being fully moderated, spammers have been increasingly posting link spam comments on my blog. While I used to use the blogspam plugin, the underlying service was likely retired circa 2017 and its public repositories are all archived. It turns out that there is a relatively simple way to drastically reduce the amount of spam submitted to the moderation queue: ban the datacentre IP addresses that spammers are using.

Looking up AS numbers It all starts by looking at the IP address of a submitted comment: From there, we can look it up using whois:
$ whois -r 2a0b:7140:1:1:5054:ff:fe66:85c5
% This is the RIPE Database query service.
% The objects are in RPSL format.
%
% The RIPE Database is subject to Terms and Conditions.
% See https://docs.db.ripe.net/terms-conditions.html
% Note: this output has been filtered.
%       To receive output for a database update, use the "-B" flag.
% Information related to '2a0b:7140:1::/48'
% Abuse contact for '2a0b:7140:1::/48' is 'abuse@servinga.com'
inet6num:       2a0b:7140:1::/48
netname:        EE-SERVINGA-2022083002
descr:          servinga.com - Estonia
geoloc:         59.4424455 24.7442221
country:        EE
org:            ORG-SG262-RIPE
mnt-domains:    HANNASKE-MNT
admin-c:        CL8090-RIPE
tech-c:         CL8090-RIPE
status:         ASSIGNED
mnt-by:         MNT-SERVINGA
created:        2020-02-18T11:12:49Z
last-modified:  2024-12-04T12:07:26Z
source:         RIPE
% Information related to '2a0b:7140:1::/48AS207408'
route6:         2a0b:7140:1::/48
descr:          servinga.com - Estonia
origin:         AS207408
mnt-by:         MNT-SERVINGA
created:        2020-02-18T11:18:11Z
last-modified:  2024-12-11T23:09:19Z
source:         RIPE
% This query was served by the RIPE Database Query Service version 1.114 (SHETLAND)
The important bit here is this line:
origin:         AS207408
which referts to Autonomous System 207408, owned by a hosting company in Germany called Servinga.

Looking up IP blocks Autonomous Systems are essentially organizations to which IPv4 and IPv6 blocks have been allocated. These allocations can be looked up easily on the command line either using a third-party service:
$ curl -sL https://ip.guide/as207408   jq .routes.v4 >> servinga
$ curl -sL https://ip.guide/as207408   jq .routes.v6 >> servinga
or a local database downloaded from IPtoASN. This is what I ended up with in the case of Servinga:
[
  "45.11.183.0/24",
  "80.77.25.0/24",
  "194.76.227.0/24"
]
[
  "2a0b:7140:1::/48"
]

Preventing comment submission While I do want to eliminate this source of spam, I don't want to block these datacentre IP addresses outright since legitimate users could be using these servers as VPN endpoints or crawlers. I therefore added the following to my Apache config to restrict the CGI endpoint (used only for write operations such as commenting):
<Location /blog.cgi>
        Include /etc/apache2/spammers.include
        Options +ExecCGI
        AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
</Location>
and then put the following in /etc/apache2/spammers.include:
<RequireAll>
    Require all granted
    # https://ipinfo.io/AS207408
    Require not ip 46.11.183.0/24
    Require not ip 80.77.25.0/24
    Require not ip 194.76.227.0/24
    Require not ip 2a0b:7140:1::/48
</RequireAll>
Finally, I can restart the website and commit my changes:
$ apache2ctl configtest && systemctl restart apache2.service
$ git commit -a -m "Ban all IP blocks from Servinga"

Future improvements I will likely automate this process in the future, but at the moment my blog can go for a week without a single spam message (down from dozens every day). It's possible that I've already cut off the worst offenders. I have published the list I am currently using.

18 January 2025

Dominique Dumont: How we solved storage API throttling on our Azure Kubernetes clusters

Hi This issue was quite puzzling, so I m sharing how we investigated this issue. I hope it can be useful for you. My client informed me that he was no longer able to install new instances of his application. k9s showed that only some pods could not be created, only the ones that created physical volume (PV). The description of these pods showed a HTTP error 429 when creating pods: New PVC could not be created because we were throttled by Azure storage API. This issue was confirmed by Azure diagnostic console on Kubernetes ( menu Diagnose and solve problems Cluster and Control Plane Availability and Performance Azure Resource Request Throttling ). We had a lot of throttling:
2025-01-18_11-01-k8s-throttles.png
Which were explained by the high call rate:
2025-01-18_11-01-k8s-calls.png
The first clue was found at the bottom of Azure diagnostic page:
2025-01-18_11-27-throttles-by-user-agent.png
According, to this page, throttling is done by services whose user agent is:
Go/go1.23.1 (amd64-linux) go-autorest/v14.2.1 Azure-SDK-For-Go/v68.0.0
storage/2021-09-01microsoft.com/aks-operat azsdk-go-armcompute/v1.0.0 (go1.22.3; linux)
The main information is Azure-SDK-For-Go, which means the program making all these calls to storage API is written in Go. All our services are written in Typescript or Rust, so they are not suspect. That leaves controllers running in kube-systems namespace. I could not find anything suspects in the logs of these services. At that point I was convinced that a component in Kubernetes control plane was making all those calls. Unfortunately, AKS is managed by Microsoft and I don t have access to the control plane logs. However, we re realized that we had quite a lot of volumesnapshots that are created in our clusters using k8s-scheduled-volume-snapshotter: We suspected that kubernetes reconciliation loop is throttled when checking the status of all these snapshots. May be so, but we also had the same issues and throttle rates on preprod and prod were the number of snapshots were quite different. We tried to get more information using Azure console on our snapshot account, but it was also broken by the throttling issue. We were so puzzled that we decided to try L odagan s advice (tout cr mer pour repartir sur des bases saines, loosely translated as burn everything down to start from scratch ) and we destroyed piece by piece our dev cluster while checking if the throttling stopped. First, we removed all our applications, no change. Then, all ancillary components like rabbitmq, cert-manager were removed, no change. Then, we tried remove the namespace containing our applications. But, we faced another issue: Kubernetes was unable to remove the namespace because it could not destroy some PVC and volumesnapshots. That was actually good news, because it meant that we were close to the actual issue. We managed to destroy the PVC and volumesnapshots by removing their finalizers. Finalizers are some kind of markers that tell kubernetes that something needs to be done before actually deleting a resource. The finalizers were removed with a command like:
kubectl patch volumesnapshots $ volumesnapshot  \
  -p ' \"metadata\": \"finalizers\":null '  --type merge
Then, we got the first progress : the throttling and high call rate stopped on our dev cluster. To make sure that the snapshots were the issue, we re-installed the ancillary components and our applications. Everything was copacetic. So, the problem was indeed with PVC and snapshots. Even though we have backups outside of Azure, we weren t really thrilled at trying L odagan s method on our prod cluster So we looked for a better fix to try on our preprod cluster. Poking around in PVC and volumesnapshots, I finally found this error message in the description on a volumesnapshotcontents:
Code="ShareSnapshotCountExceeded" Message="The total number of snapshots
for the share is over the limit."
The number of snapshots found in our cluster was not that high. So I wanted to check the snapshots present in our storage account using Azure console, which was still broken. Fortunately, Azure CLI is able to retry HTTP calls when getting 429 errors. I managed to get a list of snapshots with
az storage share list --account-name [redacted] --include-snapshots \
      tee preprod-list.json
There, I found a lot of snapshots dating back from 2024. These were no longer managed by Kubernetes and should have been cleaned up. That was our smoking gun. I guess that we had a chain of events like: To make things worse, k8s-scheduled-volume-snapshotter creates new snapshots when it cannot list the old ones. So we had 4 new snapshots per day instead of one. Since we had the chain of events, fixing the issue was not too difficult (but quite long ):
  1. stop k8s-scheduled-volume-snapshotter by disabling its cron job
  2. delete all volumesnapshots and volume snapshots contents from k8s.
  3. since Azure API was throttled, we also had to remove their finalizers
  4. delete all snapshots from azure using az command and a Perl script (this step took several hours)
  5. re-enable k8s-scheduled-volume-snapshotter
After these steps, preprod was back to normal. I m now applying the same recipe on prod. We still don t know why we had all these stale snapshots. It may have been a human error or a bug in k8s-scheduled-volume-snapshotter. Anyway, to avoid this problem is the future, we will: My name is Dominique Dumont, I m a devops freelance. You can find the devops and audit services I propose on my website or reach out to me on LinkedIn. All the best

17 January 2025

Russell Coker: Systemd Hardening and Sending Mail

A feature of systemd is the ability to reduce the access that daemons have to the system. The restrictions include access to certain directories, system calls, capabilities, and more. The systemd.exec(5) man page describes them all [1]. To see an overview of the security of daemons run systemd-analyze security and to get details of one particular daemon run a command like systemd-analyze security mon.service . I created a Debian wiki page for a systemd-analyze security goal [2]. At this time release goals aren t a serious thing for Debian so this won t result in release critical bug reports, but it is still something we can aim for. For a simple daemon (EG BIND, dhcpd, and syslogd) this isn t difficult to do. It might be difficult to understand the implications of some changes (especially when restricting system calls) but you can do some quick tests. The functionality of such programs has a limited scope and once you get it basically working it s done. For some daemons it s harder. Network-Manager is one of the well known slightly more difficult cases as it could do things like starting a VPN connection. The larger scope and the use of plugins makes it difficult to test the combinations. The systemd restrictions apply to child processes too unlike restrictions by SE Linux and AppArmor which permit a child process to run in a different security context. The messages when a daemon fails due to systemd restrictions are usually unclear which makes things harder to setup and makes it more important to get it right. My mon package (which I forked upstream as etbe-mon [3] is one of the difficult daemons as local test can involve probing large parts of the system. But I have got that working reasonably well for most cases. I have a bug report about running mon with Exim [4]. The problem with this is that Exim has a single process model which means that the process doing local delivery can be a child of the process that initially received the message. So the main mon process needs all the access for delivering mail (writing to /home etc). This also means that every other child of mon will get such access including programs that receive untrusted data from the Internet. Most of the extra access needed by Exim is not a problem, but /home access is a potential risk. It also means that more effort is needed when reviewing the access control. The problem with this Exim design is that it applies to many daemons. Every daemon that sends email or that potentially could send email in some configuration needs extra access to be granted. Can Exim be configured to have it s sendmail -T type operation just write a file in a spool directory for another program to process? Do we need to grant permissions to most of the system just for Exim?

16 January 2025

Sergio Talens-Oliag: Command line tools to process templates

I ve always been a fan of template engines that work with text files, mainly to work with static site generators, but also to generate code, configuration files, and other text-based files. For my own web projects I used to go with Jinja2, as all my projects were written in Python, while for static web sites I used the template engines included with the tools I was using, i.e. Liquid with Jekyll and Go Templates (based on the text/template and the html/template go packages) for Hugo. When I needed to generate code snippets or configuration files from shell scripts I used to go with sed and/or envsubst, but lately things got complicated and I started to use a command line application called tmpl that uses the Go Template Language with functions from the Sprig library.

tmplI ve been using my fork of the tmpl program to process templates on CI/CD pipelines (gitlab-ci) to generate configuration files and code snippets because it uses the same syntax used by helm (easier to use by other DevOps already familiar with the format) and the binary is small and can be easily included into the docker images used by the pipeline jobs. One interesting feature of the tmpl tool is that it can read values from command line arguments and from multiple files in different formats (YAML, JSON, TOML, etc) and merge them into a single object that can be used to render the templates. There are alternatives to the tmpl tool and I ve looked at them (i.e. simple ones like go-template-cli or complex ones like gomplate), but I haven t found one that fits my needs. For my next project I plan to evaluate a move to a different tool or template format, as tmpl is not being actively maintained (as I said, I m using my own fork) and it is not included on existing GNU/Linux distributions (I packaged it for Debian and Alpine, but I don t want to maintain something like that without an active community and I m not interested in being the upstream myself, as I m trying to move to Rust instead of Go as the compiled programming language for my projects).

Mini JinjaLooking for alternate tools to process templates on the command line I found the minijinja rust crate, a minimal implementation of the Jinja2 template engine that also includes a small command line utility (minijinja-cli) and I believe I ll give it a try on the future for various reasons:
  • I m already familiar with the Jinja2 syntax and it is widely used on the industry.
  • On my code I can use the original Jinja2 module for Python projects and MiniJinja for Rust programs.
  • The included command line utility is small and easy to use, and the binaries distributed by the project are good enough to add them to the docker container images used by CI/CD pipelines.
  • As I want to move to Rust I can try to add functionalities to the existing command line client or create my own version of it if they are needed (don t think so, but who knows).

15 January 2025

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppFastFloat 0.0.5 on CRAN: New Upstream, Updates

A new minor release of RcppFastFloat just arrived on CRAN. The package wraps fast_float, another nice library by Daniel Lemire. For details, see the arXiv preprint or published paper showing that one can convert character representations of numbers into floating point at rates at or exceeding one gigabyte per second. This release updates the underlying fast_float library version to the current version 7.0.0, and updates a few packaging aspects.

Changes in version 0.0.5 (2025-01-15)
  • No longer set a compilation standard
  • Updates to continuous integration, badges, URLs, DESCRIPTION
  • Update to fast_float 7.0.0
  • Per CRAN Policy comment-out compiler 'diagnostic ignore' instances

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. For questions, suggestions, or issues please use the [issue tracker][issue tickets] at the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

14 January 2025

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RProtoBuf 0.4.23 on CRAN: Mulitple Updates

A new maintenance release 0.4.23 of RProtoBuf arrived on CRAN earlier today, about one year after the previous update. RProtoBuf provides R with bindings for the Google Protocol Buffers ( ProtoBuf ) data encoding and serialization library used and released by Google, and deployed very widely in numerous projects as a language and operating-system agnostic protocol. This release brings a number of contributed PRs which are truly appreciate. As the package dates back fifteen+ years, some code corners can be crufty which was addressed in several PRs, as were two updates for ongoing changes / new releases of ProtoBuf itself. I also made the usual changes one does to continuous integrations, README badges and URL as well as correcting one issue the checkbashism script complained about. The following section from the NEWS.Rd file has full details.

Changes in RProtoBuf version 0.4.23 (2022-12-13)
  • More robust tests using toTextFormat() (Xufei Tan in #99 addressing #98)
  • Various standard packaging updates to CI and badges (Dirk)
  • Improvements to string construction in error messages (Michael Chirico in #102 and #103)
  • Accommodate ProtoBuf 26.x and later (Matteo Gianella in #104)
  • Accommodate ProtoBuf 6.30.9 and later (Lev Kandel in #106)
  • Correct bashism issues in configure.ac (Dirk)

Thanks to my CRANberries, there is a diff to the previous release. The RProtoBuf page has copies of the (older) package vignette, the quick overview vignette, and the pre-print of our JSS paper. Questions, comments etc should go to the GitHub issue tracker off the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

12 January 2025

Divine Attah-Ohiemi: My 30-Day Outreachy Experience with the Debian Community

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!

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp 1.0.14 on CRAN: Regular Semi-Annual Update

rcpp logo The Rcpp Core Team is once again thrilled, pleased, and chuffed (am I doing this right for LinkedIn?) to announce a new release (now at 1.0.14) of the Rcpp package. It arrived on CRAN earlier today, and has since been uploaded to Debian. Windows and macOS builds should appear at CRAN in the next few days, as will builds in different Linux distribution and of course r2u should catch up tomorrow too. The release was only uploaded yesterday, and as always get flagged because of the grandfathered .Call(symbol) as well as for the url to the Rcpp book (which has remained unchanged for years) failing . My email reply was promptly dealt with under European morning hours and by the time I got up the submission was in state waiting over a single reverse-dependency failure which is also spurious, appears on some systems and not others, and also not new. Imagine that: nearly 3000 reverse dependencies and only one (spurious) change to worse. Solid testing seems to help. My thanks as always to the CRAN for responding promptly. This release continues with the six-months January-July cycle started with release 1.0.5 in July 2020. This time we also need a one-off hotfix release 1.0.13-1: we had (accidentally) conditioned an upcoming R change on 4.5.0, but it already came with 4.4.2 so we needed to adjust our code. As a reminder, we do of course make interim snapshot dev or rc releases available via the Rcpp drat repo as well as the r-universe page and repo and strongly encourage their use and testing I run my systems with these versions which tend to work just as well, and are also fully tested against all reverse-dependencies. Rcpp has long established itself as the most popular way of enhancing R with C or C++ code. Right now, 2977 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further. On CRAN, 13.6% of all packages depend (directly) on Rcpp, and 60.8% of all compiled packages do. From the cloud mirror of CRAN (which is but a subset of all CRAN downloads), Rcpp has been downloaded 93.7 million times. The two published papers (also included in the package as preprint vignettes) have, respectively, 1947 (JSS, 2011) and 354 (TAS, 2018) citations, while the the book (Springer useR!, 2013) has another 676. This release is primarily incremental as usual, generally preserving existing capabilities faithfully while smoothing our corners and / or extending slightly, sometimes in response to changing and tightened demands from CRAN or R standards. The move towards a more standardized approach for the C API of R once again to a few changes; Kevin did once again did most of these PRs. Other contributed PRs include G bor permitting builds on yet another BSD variant, Simon Guest correcting sourceCpp() to work on read-only files, Marco Colombo correcting a (surprisingly large) number of vignette typos, I aki rebuilding some documentation files that tickled (false) alerts, and I took care of a number of other maintenance items along the way. The full list below details all changes, their respective PRs and, if applicable, issue tickets. Big thanks from all of us to all contributors!

Changes in Rcpp release version 1.0.14 (2025-01-11)
  • Changes in Rcpp API:
    • Support for user-defined databases has been removed (Kevin in #1314 fixing #1313)
    • The SET_TYPEOF function and macro is no longer used (Kevin in #1315 fixing #1312)
    • An errorneous cast to int affecting large return object has been removed (Dirk in #1335 fixing #1334)
    • Compilation on DragonFlyBSD is now supported (G bor Cs rdi in #1338)
    • Use read-only VECTOR_PTR and STRING_PTR only with with R 4.5.0 or later (Kevin in #1342 fixing #1341)
  • Changes in Rcpp Attributes:
    • The sourceCpp() function can now handle input files with read-only modes (Simon Guest in #1346 fixing #1345)
  • Changes in Rcpp Deployment:
    • One unit tests for arm64 macOS has been adjusted; a macOS continuous integration runner was added (Dirk in #1324)
    • Authors@R is now used in DESCRIPTION as mandated by CRAN, the Rcpp.package.skeleton() function also creates it (Dirk in #1325 and #1327)
    • A single datetime format test has been adjusted to match a change in R-devel (Dirk in #1348 fixing #1347)
  • Changes in Rcpp Documentation:
    • The Rcpp Modules vignette was extended slightly following #1322 (Dirk)
    • Pdf vignettes have been regenerated under Ghostscript 10.03.1 to avoid a false positive by a Windows virus scanner (I aki in #1331)
    • A (large) number of (old) typos have been corrected in the vignettes (Marco Colombo in #1344)

Thanks to my CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page. Bugs reports are welcome at the GitHub issue tracker as well (where one can also search among open or closed issues).

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

10 January 2025

Sergio Talens-Oliag: Testing New User Tools

On recent weeks I ve had some time to scratch my own itch on matters related to tools I use daily on my computer, namely the desktop / window manager and my text editor of choice. This post is a summary of what I tried, how it worked out and my short and medium-term plans related to them.

Desktop / WMOn the desktop / window manager front I ve been using Cinnamon on Debian and Ubuntu systems since Gnome 3 was published (I never liked version 3, so I decided to move to something similar to Gnome 2, including the keyboard shortcuts). In fact I ve never been a fan of Desktop environments, before Gnome I used OpenBox and IceWM because they where a lot faster than desktop systems on my hardware at the time and I was using them only to place one or two windows on multiple workspaces using mainly the keyboard for my interactions (well, except for the web browsers and the image manipulation programs). Although I was comfortable using Cinnamon, some years ago I tried to move to i3, a tilling window manager for X11 that looked like a good choice for me, but I didn t have much time to play with it and never used it enough to make me productive with it (I didn t prepare a complete configuration nor had enough time to learn the new shortcuts, so I went back to Cinnamon and never tried again). Anyway, some weeks ago I updated my work machine OS (it was using Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and I updated it to the 24.04 LTS version) and the Cinnamon systray applet stopped working as it used to do (in fact I still have to restart Cinnamon after starting a session to make it work) and, as I had some time, I decided to try a tilling window manager again, but now I decided to go for SwayWM, as it uses Wayland instead of X11.

Sway configurationOn my ~/.config/sway/config I tuned some things:
  • Set fuzzel as the application launcher.
  • Installed manually the shikane application and created a configuration to be executed always when sway is started / reloaded (I adjusted my configuration with wdisplays and used shikanectl to save it).
  • Added support for running the xdg-desktop-portal-wlr service.
  • Enabled the swayidle command to lock the screen after some time of inactivity.
  • Adjusted the keyboard to use the es key map
  • Added some keybindings to make my life easier, including the use of grimm and swappy to take screenshots
  • Configured waybar as the environment bar.
  • Added a shell script to start applications when sway is started (it uses swaymsg to execute background commands and the i3toolwait script to wait for the
    #!/bin/sh
    # VARIABLES
    CHROMIUM_LOCAL_STATE="$HOME/.config/google-chrome/Local State"
    I3_TOOLWAIT="$HOME/.config/sway/scripts/i3-toolwait"
    # Functions
    chromium_profile_dir()  
      jq -r ".profile.info_cache to_entries map( (.value.name): .key ) add .\"$1\" // \"\"" "$CHROMIUM_LOCAL_STATE"
     
    # MAIN
    IGZ_PROFILE_DIR="$(chromium_profile_dir "sergio.talens@intelygenz.com")"
    OURO_PROFILE_DIR="$(chromium_profile_dir "sergio.talens@nxr.global")"
    PERSONAL_PROFILE_DIR="$(chromium_profile_dir "stalens@gmail.com")"
    # Common programs
    swaymsg "exec nextcloud --background"
    swaymsg "exec nm-applet"
    # Run spotify on the first workspace (it is mapped to the laptop screen)
    swaymsg -q "workspace 1"
    $ I3_TOOLWAIT  "spotify"
    # Run tmux on the
    swaymsg -q "workspace 2"
    $ I3_TOOLWAIT  -- foot tmux a -dt sto
    wp_num="3"
    if [ "$OURO_PROFILE_DIR" ]; then
      swaymsg -q "workspace $wp_num"
      $ I3_TOOLWAIT  -m ouro-browser -- google-chrome --profile-directory="$OURO_PROFILE_DIR"
      wp_num="$((wp_num+1))"
    fi
    if [ "$IGZ_PROFILE_DIR" ]; then
      swaymsg -q "workspace $wp_num"
      $ I3_TOOLWAIT  -m igz-browser -- google-chrome --profile-directory="$IGZ_PROFILE_DIR"
      wp_num="$((wp_num+1))"
    fi
    if [ "$PERSONAL_PROFILE_DIR" ]; then
      swaymsg -q "workspace $wp_num"
      $ I3_TOOLWAIT  -m personal-browser -- google-chrome --profile-directory="$PERSONAL_PROFILE_DIR"
      wp_num="$((wp_num+1))"
    fi
    # Open the browser without setting the profile directory if none was found
    if [ "$wp_num" = "3" ]; then
      swaymsg -q "workspace $wp_num"
      $ I3_TOOLWAIT  google-chrome
      wp_num="$((wp_num+1))"
    fi
    swaymsg -q "workspace $wp_num"
    $ I3_TOOLWAIT  evolution
    wp_num="$((wp_num+1))"
    swaymsg -q "workspace $wp_num"
    $ I3_TOOLWAIT  slack
    wp_num="$((wp_num+1))"
    # Open a private browser and a console in the last workspace
    swaymsg -q "workspace $wp_num"
    $ I3_TOOLWAIT  -- google-chrome --incognito
    $ I3_TOOLWAIT  foot
    # Go back to the second workspace for keepassxc
    swaymsg "workspace 2"
    $ I3_TOOLWAIT  keepassxc

ConclusionAfter using Sway for some days I can confirm that it is a good choice for me, but some of the components needed to make it work as I want are too new and not available on the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS repositories, so I decided to go back to Cinnamon and try Sway again in the future, although I added more workspaces to my setup (now they are only available on the main monitor, the laptop screen is fixed while there is a big monitor connected), added some additional keyboard shortcuts and installed or updated some applets.

Text editorWhen I started using Linux many years ago I used vi/vim and emacs as my text editors (vi for plain text and emacs for programming and editing HTML/XML), but eventually I moved to vim as my main text editor and I ve been using it since (well, I moved to neovim some time ago, although I kept my old vim configuration). To be fair I m not as expert as I could be with vim, but I m productive with it and it has many plugins that make my life easier on my machines, while keeping my ability to edit text and configurations on any system that has a vi compatible editor installed. For work reasons I tried to use Visual Studio Code last year, but I ve never really liked it and almost everything I do with it I can do with neovim (i. e. I even use copilot with it). Besides, I m a heavy terminal user (I use tmux locally and via ssh) and I like to be able to use my text editor on my shell sessions, and code does not work like that. The only annoying thing about vim/neovim is its configuration (well, the problem is that I have a very old one and probably should spend some time fixing and updating it), but, as I said, it s been working well for me for a long time, so I never really had the motivation to do it. Anyway, after finishing my desktop tests I saw that I had the Helix editor installed for some time but I never tried it, so I decided to give it a try and see if it could be a good replacement for neovim on my environments (the only drawback is that as it is not vi compatible, I would need to switch back to vi mode when working on remote systems, but I guess I could live with that). I ran the helix tutorial and I liked it, so I decided to configure and install the Language Servers I can probably take advantage of on my daily work on my personal and work machines and see how it works.

Language server installationsA lot of manual installations are needed to get the language servers working what I did on my machines is more or less the following:
# AWK
sudo npm i -g 'awk-language-server@>=0.5.2'
# BASH
sudo apt-get install shellcheck shfmt
sudo npm i -g bash-language-server
# C/C++
sudo apt-get install clangd
# CSS, HTML, ESLint, JSON, SCS
sudo npm i -g vscode-langservers-extracted
# Docker
sudo npm install -g dockerfile-language-server-nodejs
# Docker compose
sudo npm install -g @microsoft/compose-language-service
# Helm
app="helm_ls_linux_amd64"
url="$(
  curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/mrjosh/helm-ls/releases/latest  
    jq -r ".assets[]   select(.name == \"$app\")   .browser_download_url"
)"
curl -L "$url" --output /tmp/helm_ls
sudo install /tmp/helm_ls /usr/local/bin
rm /tmp/helm_ls
# Markdown
app="marksman-linux-x64"
url="$(
  curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/artempyanykh/marksman/releases/latest  
    jq -r ".assets[]   select(.name == \"$app\")   .browser_download_url"
)"
curl -L "$url" --output /tmp/marksman
sudo install /tmp/marksman /usr/local/bin
rm /tmp/marksman
# Python
sudo npm i -g pyright
# Rust
rustup component add rust-analyzer
# SQL
sudo npm i -g sql-language-server
# Terraform
sudo apt-get install terraform-ls
# TOML
cargo install taplo-cli --locked --features lsp
# YAML
sudo npm install --global yaml-language-server
# JavaScript, TypeScript
sudo npm install -g typescript-language-server typescript
sudo npm install -g --save-dev --save-exact @biomejs/biome

Helix configurationThe helix configuration is done on a couple of toml files that are placed on the ~/.config/helix directory, the config.toml file I used is this one:
theme = "solarized_light"
[editor]
line-number = "relative"
mouse = false
[editor.statusline]
left = ["mode", "spinner"]
center = ["file-name"]
right = ["diagnostics", "selections", "position", "file-encoding", "file-line-ending", "file-type"]
separator = " "
mode.normal = "NORMAL"
mode.insert = "INSERT"
mode.select = "SELECT"
[editor.cursor-shape]
insert = "bar"
normal = "block"
select = "underline"
[editor.file-picker]
hidden = false
[editor.whitespace]
render = "all"
[editor.indent-guides]
render = true
character = " " # Some characters that work well: " ", " ", " ", " "
skip-levels = 1
And to configure the language servers I used the following language-servers.toml file:
[[language]]
name = "go"
auto-format = true
formatter =   command = "goimports"  
[[language]]
name = "javascript"
language-servers = [
  "typescript-language-server", # optional
  "vscode-eslint-language-server",
]
[language-server.rust-analyzer.config.check]
command = "clippy"
[language-server.sql-language-server]
command = "sql-language-server"
args = ["up", "--method", "stdio"]
[[language]]
name = "sql"
language-servers = [ "sql-language-server" ]
[[language]]
name = "hcl"
language-servers = [ "terraform-ls" ]
language-id = "terraform"
[[language]]
name = "tfvars"
language-servers = [ "terraform-ls" ]
language-id = "terraform-vars"
[language-server.terraform-ls]
command = "terraform-ls"
args = ["serve"]
[[language]]
name = "toml"
formatter =   command = "taplo", args = ["fmt", "-"]  
[[language]]
name = "typescript"
language-servers = [
  "typescript-language-server",
  "vscode-eslint-language-server",
]

Neovim configurationAfter a little while I noticed that I was going to need some time to get used to helix and the most interesting thing for me was the easy configuration and the language server integrations, but as I am already comfortable with neovim and just had installed the language server support tools on my machines I just need to configure them for neovim and I can keep using it for a while. As I said my configuration is old, to configure neovim I have the following init.vim file on my ~/.config/nvim folder:
set runtimepath^=~/.vim runtimepath+=~/.vim/after
let &packpath=&runtimepath
source ~/.vim/vimrc
" load lua configuration
lua require('config')
With that configuration I keep my old vimrc (it is a little bit messy, but it works) and I use a lua configuration file for the language servers and some additional neovim plugins on the ~/.config/nvim/lua/config.lua file:
-- -----------------------
-- BEG: LSP Configurations
-- -----------------------
-- AWS (awk_ls)
require'lspconfig'.awk_ls.setup 
-- Bash (bashls)
require'lspconfig'.bashls.setup 
-- C/C++ (clangd)
require'lspconfig'.clangd.setup 
-- CSS (cssls)
require'lspconfig'.cssls.setup 
-- Docker (dockerls)
require'lspconfig'.dockerls.setup 
-- Docker Compose
require'lspconfig'.docker_compose_language_service.setup 
-- Golang (gopls)
require'lspconfig'.gopls.setup 
-- Helm (helm_ls)
require'lspconfig'.helm_ls.setup 
-- Markdown
require'lspconfig'.marksman.setup 
-- Python (pyright)
require'lspconfig'.pyright.setup 
-- Rust (rust-analyzer)
require'lspconfig'.rust_analyzer.setup 
-- SQL (sqlls)
require'lspconfig'.sqlls.setup 
-- Terraform (terraformls)
require'lspconfig'.terraformls.setup 
-- TOML (taplo)
require'lspconfig'.taplo.setup 
-- Typescript (ts_ls)
require'lspconfig'.ts_ls.setup 
-- YAML (yamlls)
require'lspconfig'.yamlls.setup 
  settings =  
    yaml =  
      customTags =   "!reference sequence"  
     
   
 
-- -----------------------
-- END: LSP Configurations
-- -----------------------
-- ---------------------------------
-- BEG: Autocompletion configuration
-- ---------------------------------
-- Ref: https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lspconfig/wiki/Autocompletion
--
-- Pre requisites:
--
--   # Packer
--   git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/wbthomason/packer.nvim \
--      ~/.local/share/nvim/site/pack/packer/start/packer.nvim
--
--   # Start nvim and run :PackerSync or :PackerUpdate
-- ---------------------------------
local use = require('packer').use
require('packer').startup(function()
  use 'wbthomason/packer.nvim' -- Packer, useful to avoid removing it with PackerSync / PackerUpdate
  use 'neovim/nvim-lspconfig' -- Collection of configurations for built-in LSP client
  use 'hrsh7th/nvim-cmp' -- Autocompletion plugin
  use 'hrsh7th/cmp-nvim-lsp' -- LSP source for nvim-cmp
  use 'saadparwaiz1/cmp_luasnip' -- Snippets source for nvim-cmp
  use 'L3MON4D3/LuaSnip' -- Snippets plugin
end)
-- Add additional capabilities supported by nvim-cmp
local capabilities = require("cmp_nvim_lsp").default_capabilities()
local lspconfig = require('lspconfig')
-- Enable some language servers with the additional completion capabilities offered by nvim-cmp
local servers =   'clangd', 'rust_analyzer', 'pyright', 'ts_ls'  
for _, lsp in ipairs(servers) do
  lspconfig[lsp].setup  
    -- on_attach = my_custom_on_attach,
    capabilities = capabilities,
   
end
-- luasnip setup
local luasnip = require 'luasnip'
-- nvim-cmp setup
local cmp = require 'cmp'
cmp.setup  
  snippet =  
    expand = function(args)
      luasnip.lsp_expand(args.body)
    end,
   ,
  mapping = cmp.mapping.preset.insert( 
    ['<C-u>'] = cmp.mapping.scroll_docs(-4), -- Up
    ['<C-d>'] = cmp.mapping.scroll_docs(4), -- Down
    -- C-b (back) C-f (forward) for snippet placeholder navigation.
    ['<C-Space>'] = cmp.mapping.complete(),
    ['<CR>'] = cmp.mapping.confirm  
      behavior = cmp.ConfirmBehavior.Replace,
      select = true,
     ,
    ['<Tab>'] = cmp.mapping(function(fallback)
      if cmp.visible() then
        cmp.select_next_item()
      elseif luasnip.expand_or_jumpable() then
        luasnip.expand_or_jump()
      else
        fallback()
      end
    end,   'i', 's'  ),
    ['<S-Tab>'] = cmp.mapping(function(fallback)
      if cmp.visible() then
        cmp.select_prev_item()
      elseif luasnip.jumpable(-1) then
        luasnip.jump(-1)
      else
        fallback()
      end
    end,   'i', 's'  ),
   ),
  sources =  
      name = 'nvim_lsp'  ,
      name = 'luasnip'  ,
   ,
 
-- ---------------------------------
-- END: Autocompletion configuration
-- ---------------------------------

ConclusionI guess I ll keep helix installed and try it again on some of my personal projects to see if I can get used to it, but for now I ll stay with neovim as my main text editor and learn the shortcuts to use it with the language servers.

9 January 2025

Dirk Eddelbuettel: inline 0.3.21: Minor Polish

A fresh minor release of the inline package got to CRAN today, following on the November release which had marked the first release in three and half years. inline facilitates writing code in-line in simple string expressions or short files. The package was used quite extensively by Rcpp in the very early days before Rcpp Attributes arrived on the scene providing an even better alternative for its use cases. inline is still used by rstan and a number of other packages. In the November release we accommodated upcoming R-devel changes on setting R_NO_REMAP by conditioning on the release version. It turns that this does not get when the #define independently so this needed a small refinement which this version brings. No other changes were made. The NEWS extract follows and details the changes some more.

Changes in inline version 0.3.21 (2025-01-08)
  • Refine use of Rf_warning in cfunction setting -DR_NO_REMAP ourselves to get R version independent state

Thanks to my CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page. Bugs reports are welcome at the GitHub issue tracker as well (where one can also search among open or closed issues).

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in December 2024

Welcome to the December 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! Our monthly reports outline what we ve been up to over the past month and highlight items of news from elsewhere in the world of software supply-chain security when relevant. As ever, however, if you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. Table of contents:
  1. reproduce.debian.net
  2. debian-repro-status
  3. On our mailing list
  4. Enhancing the Security of Software Supply Chains
  5. diffoscope
  6. Supply-chain attack in the Solana ecosystem
  7. Website updates
  8. Debian changes
  9. Other development news
  10. Upstream patches
  11. Reproducibility testing framework

reproduce.debian.net Last month saw the introduction of reproduce.debian.net. Announced at the recent Debian MiniDebConf in Toulouse, reproduce.debian.net is an instance of rebuilderd operated by the Reproducible Builds project. rebuilderd is our server designed monitor the official package repositories of Linux distributions and attempts to reproduce the observed results there. This month, however, we are pleased to announce that not only does the service now produce graphs, the reproduce.debian.net homepage itself has become a start page of sorts, and the amd64.reproduce.debian.net and i386.reproduce.debian.net pages have emerged. The first of these rebuilds the amd64 architecture, naturally, but it also is building Debian packages that are marked with the no architecture label, all. The second builder is, however, only rebuilding the i386 architecture. Both of these services were also switched to reproduce the Debian trixie distribution instead of unstable, which started with 43% of the archive rebuild with 79.3% reproduced successfully. This is very much a work in progress, and we ll start reproducing Debian unstable soon. Our i386 hosts are very kindly sponsored by Infomaniak whilst the amd64 node is sponsored by OSUOSL thank you! Indeed, we are looking for more workers for more Debian architectures; please contact us if you are able to help.

debian-repro-status Reproducible builds developer kpcyrd has published a client program for reproduce.debian.net (see above) that queries the status of the locally installed packages and rates the system with a percentage score. This tool works analogously to arch-repro-status for the Arch Linux Reproducible Builds setup. The tool was packaged for Debian and is currently available in Debian trixie: it can be installed with apt install debian-repro-status.

On our mailing list On our mailing list this month:
  • Bernhard M. Wiedemann wrote a detailed post on his long journey towards a bit-reproducible Emacs package. In his interesting message, Bernhard goes into depth about the tools that they used and the lower-level technical details of, for instance, compatibility with the version for glibc within openSUSE.
  • Shivanand Kunijadar posed a question pertaining to the reproducibility issues with encrypted images. Shivanand explains that they must use a random IV for encryption with AES CBC. The resulting artifact is not reproducible due to the random IV used. The message resulted in a handful of replies, hopefully helpful!
  • User Danilo posted an in interesting question related to their attempts in trying to achieve reproducible builds for Threema Desktop 2.0. The question resulted in a number of replies attempting to find the right combination of compiler and linker flags (for example).
  • Longstanding contributor David A. Wheeler wrote to our list announcing the release of the Census III of Free and Open Source Software: Application Libraries report written by Frank Nagle, Kate Powell, Richie Zitomer and David himself. As David writes in his message, the report attempts to answer the question what is the most popular Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)? .
  • Lastly, kpcyrd followed-up to a post from September 2024 which mentioned their desire for someone to implement a hashset of allowed module hashes that is generated during the kernel build and then embedded in the kernel image , thus enabling a deterministic and reproducible build. However, they are now reporting that somebody implemented the hash-based allow list feature and submitted it to the Linux kernel mailing list . Like kpcyrd, we hope it gets merged.

Enhancing the Security of Software Supply Chains: Methods and Practices Mehdi Keshani of the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands has published their thesis on Enhancing the Security of Software Supply Chains: Methods and Practices . Their introductory summary first begins with an outline of software supply chains and the importance of the Maven ecosystem before outlining the issues that it faces that threaten its security and effectiveness . To address these:
First, we propose an automated approach for library reproducibility to enhance library security during the deployment phase. We then develop a scalable call graph generation technique to support various use cases, such as method-level vulnerability analysis and change impact analysis, which help mitigate security challenges within the ecosystem. Utilizing the generated call graphs, we explore the impact of libraries on their users. Finally, through empirical research and mining techniques, we investigate the current state of the Maven ecosystem, identify harmful practices, and propose recommendations to address them.
A PDF of Mehdi s entire thesis is available to download.

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made the following changes, including preparing and uploading versions 283 and 284 to Debian:
  • Update copyright years. [ ]
  • Update tests to support file 5.46. [ ][ ]
  • Simplify tests_quines.py::test_ differences,differences_deb to simply use assert_diff and not mangle the test fixture. [ ]

Supply-chain attack in the Solana ecosystem A significant supply-chain attack impacted Solana, an ecosystem for decentralised applications running on a blockchain. Hackers targeted the @solana/web3.js JavaScript library and embedded malicious code that extracted private keys and drained funds from cryptocurrency wallets. According to some reports, about $160,000 worth of assets were stolen, not including SOL tokens and other crypto assets.

Website updates Similar to last month, there was a large number of changes made to our website this month, including:
  • Chris Lamb:
    • Make the landing page hero look nicer when the vertical height component of the viewport is restricted, not just the horizontal width.
    • Rename the Buy-in page to Why Reproducible Builds? [ ]
    • Removing the top black border. [ ][ ]
  • Holger Levsen:
  • hulkoba:
    • Remove the sidebar-type layout and move to a static navigation element. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Create and merge a new Success stories page, which highlights the success stories of Reproducible Builds, showcasing real-world examples of projects shipping with verifiable, reproducible builds. These stories aim to enhance the technical resilience of the initiative by encouraging community involvement and inspiring new contributions. . [ ]
    • Further changes to the homepage. [ ]
    • Remove the translation icon from the navigation bar. [ ]
    • Remove unused CSS styles pertaining to the sidebar. [ ]
    • Add sponsors to the global footer. [ ]
    • Add extra space on large screens on the Who page. [ ]
    • Hide the side navigation on small screens on the Documentation pages. [ ]

Debian changes There were a significant number of reproducibility-related changes within Debian this month, including:
  • Santiago Vila uploaded version 0.11+nmu4 of the dh-buildinfo package. In this release, the dh_buildinfo becomes a no-op ie. it no longer does anything beyond warning the developer that the dh-buildinfo package is now obsolete. In his upload, Santiago wrote that We still want packages to drop their [dependency] on dh-buildinfo, but now they will immediately benefit from this change after a simple rebuild.
  • Holger Levsen filed Debian bug #1091550 requesting a rebuild of a number of packages that were built with a very old version of dpkg.
  • Fay Stegerman contributed to an extensive thread on the debian-devel development mailing list on the topic of Supporting alternative zlib implementations . In particular, Fay wrote about her results experimenting whether zlib-ng produces identical results or not.
  • kpcyrd uploaded a new rust-rebuilderd-worker, rust-derp, rust-in-toto and debian-repro-status to Debian, which passed successfully through the so-called NEW queue.
  • Gioele Barabucci filed a number of bugs against the debrebuild component/script of the devscripts package, including:
    • #1089087: Address a spurious extra subdirectory in the build path.
    • #1089201: Extra zero bytes added to .dynstr when rebuilding CMake projects.
    • #1089088: Some binNMUs have a 1-second offset in some timestamps.
  • Gioele Barabucci also filed a bug against the dh-r package to report that the Recommends and Suggests fields are missing from rebuilt R packages. At the time of writing, this bug has no patch and needs some help to make over 350 binary packages reproducible.
  • Lastly, 8 reviews of Debian packages were added, 11 were updated and 11 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues.

Other development news In other ecosystem and distribution news:
  • Lastly, in openSUSE, Bernhard M. Wiedemann published another report for the distribution. There, Bernhard reports about the success of building R-B-OS , a partial fork of openSUSE with only 100% bit-reproducible packages. This effort was sponsored by the NLNet NGI0 initiative.

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework running primarily at tests.reproducible-builds.org in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In November, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen, including:
  • reproduce.debian.net-related:
    • Add a new i386.reproduce.debian.net rebuilder. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Make a number of updates to the documentation. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Run i386.reproduce.debian.net run on a public port to allow external workers. [ ]
    • Add a link to the /api/v0/pkgs/list endpoint. [ ]
    • Add support for a statistics page. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Limit build logs to 20 MiB and diffoscope output to 10 MiB. [ ]
    • Improve the frontpage. [ ][ ]
    • Explain that we re testing arch:any and arch:all on the amd64 architecture, but only arch:any on i386. [ ]
  • Misc:
    • Remove code for testing Arch Linux, which has moved to reproduce.archlinux.org. [ ][ ]
    • Don t install dstat on Jenkins nodes anymore as its been removed from Debian trixie. [ ]
    • Prepare the infom08-i386 node to become another rebuilder. [ ]
    • Add debug date output for benchmarking the reproducible_pool_buildinfos.sh script. [ ]
    • Install installation-birthday everywhere. [ ]
    • Temporarily disable automatic updates of pool links on buildinfos.debian.net. [ ]
    • Install Recommends by default on Jenkins nodes. [ ]
    • Rename rebuilder_stats.py to rebuilderd_stats.py. [ ]
    • r.d.n/stats: minor formatting changes. [ ]
    • Install files under /etc/cron.d/ with the correct permissions. [ ]
and Jochen Sprickerhof made the following changes: Lastly, Gioele Barabucci also classified packages affected by 1-second offset issue filed as Debian bug #1089088 [ ][ ][ ][ ], Chris Hofstaedtler updated the URL for Grml s dpkg.selections file [ ], Roland Clobus updated the Jenkins log parser to parse warnings from diffoscope [ ] and Mattia Rizzolo banned a number of bots and crawlers from the service [ ][ ].
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:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5 January 2025

Jonathan McDowell: Free Software Activities for 2024

I tailed off on blog posts towards the end of the year; I blame a bunch of travel (personal + business), catching the flu, then December being its usual busy self. Anyway, to try and start off the year a bit better I thought I d do my annual recap of my Free Software activities. For previous years see 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 + 2023.

Conferences In 2024 I managed to make it to FOSDEM again. It s a hectic conference, and I know there are legitimate concerns about it being a super spreader event, but it has the advantage of being relatively close and having a lot of different groups of people I want to talk to / see talk at it. I m already booked to go this year as well. I spoke at All Systems Go in Berlin about Using TPMs at scale for protecting keys. It was nice to actually be able to talk publicly about some of the work stuff my team and I have been working on. I d a talk submission in for FOSDEM about our use of attestation and why it s not necessarily the evil some folk claim, but there were a lot of good talks submitted and I wasn t selected. Maybe I ll find somewhere else suitable to do it. BSides Belfast may or may not count - it s a security conference, but there s a lot of overlap with various bits of Free software, so I feel it deserves a mention. I skipped DebConf for 2024 for a variety of reasons, but I m expecting to make DebConf25 in Brest, France in July.

Debian Most of my contributions to Free software continue to happen within Debian. In 2023 I d done a bunch of work on retrogaming with Kodi on Debian, so I made an effort to try and keep those bits more up to date, even if I m not actually regularly using them at present. RetroArch got 1.18.0+dfsg-1 and 1.19.1+dfsg-1 uploads. libretro-core-info got associated 1.18.0-1 and 1.19.0-1 uploads too. I note 1.20.0 has been released recently, so I ll have to find some time to build the appropriate DFSG tarball and update it. rcheevos saw 11.2.0-1, 11.5.0-1 + 11.6.0-1 uploaded. kodi-game-libretro itself had 20.2.7-1 uploaded, then 21.0.7-1. Latest upstream is 22.1.0, but that s tracking Kodi 22 and we re still on Kodi 21 so I plan to follow the Omega branch for now. Which I ve just noticed had a 21.0.8 release this week. Finally in the games space I uploaded mgba 0.10.3+dfsg-1 and 0.10.3+dfsg-2 for Ryan Tandy, before realising he was already a Debian Maintainer and granting him the appropriate ACL access so he can upload it himself; I ve had zero concerns about any of his packaging. The Debian Electronics Packaging Team continues to be home for a bunch of packages I care about. There was nothing big there, for me, in 2024, but a few bits of cleanup here and there. I seem to have become one of the main uploaders for sdcc - I have some interest in the space, and the sigrok firmware requires it to build, so I at least like to ensure it s in half decent state. I uploaded 4.4.0+dfsg-1, 4.4.0+dfsg-2, and, just in time to count for 2024, 4.4.0+dfsg-3. The sdcc 4.4 upload lead to some compilation issues for sigrok-firmware-fx2laf so I uploaded 0.1.7-2 fixing that, then 0.1.7-3 doing some further cleanups. OpenOCD had 0.12.0-2 uploaded to disable the libgpiod backend thanks to incompatible changes upstream. There were some in-discussion patches with OpenOCD upstream at the time, but they didn t seem to be ready yet so I held off on pulling them in. 0.12.0-3 fixed builds with more recent versions of jimtcl. It looks like the next upstream release is about a year away, so Trixie will in all probability ship with 0.12.0 as well. libjaylink had a new upstream release, so 0.4.0-1 was uploaded. libserialsport also had a new upstream release, leading to 0.1.2-1. I finally cracked and uploaded sg3-utils 1.48-1 into experimental. I m not the primary maintainer, but 1.46 is nearly 4 years old now and I wanted to get it updated in enough time to shake out any problems before we get to a Trixie freeze. Outside of team owned packages, libcli had compilation issues with GCC 14, leading to 1.10.7-2. I also added a new package, sedutil 1.20.0-2 back in April; it looks fairly unmaintained upstream (there s been some recent activity, but it doesn t seem to be release quality), but there was an outstanding ITP and I ve some familiarity with the space as we ve been using it at work as part of investigating TCG OPAL encryption. I continue to keep an eye on Debian New Members, even though I m mostly inactive as an application manager - we generally seem to have enough available recently. Mostly my involvement is via Front Desk activities, helping out with queries to the team alias, and contributing to internal discussions. Finally the 3 month rotation for Debian Keyring continues to operate smoothly. I dealt with 2023.03.24, 2023.06.24, 2023.09.22 + 2023.11.24.

Linux I d a single kernel contribution this year, to Clean up TPM space after command failure. That was based on some issues we saw at work. I ve another fix in progress that I hope to submit in 2025, but it s for an intermittent failure so confirming the fix is necessary + sufficient is taking a little while.

Personal projects I didn t end up doing much in the way of externally published personal project work in 2024. Despite the release of OpenPGP v6 in RFC 9580 I did not manage to really work on onak. I started on the v6 support, but have not had sufficient time to complete anything worth pushing external yet. listadmin3 got some minor updates based on external feedback / MRs. It s nice to know it s useful to other folk even in its basic state. That wraps up 2024. I ve got no particular goals for this year at present. Ideally I d get v6 support into onak, and it would be nice to implement some of the wishlist items people have provided for listadmin3, but I ll settle for making sure all my Debian packages are in reasonable state for Trixie.

1 January 2025

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: 2024 A Musical Retrospective

Another musical retrospective. If you enjoy this, I also did a 2022 and a 2023 one. Albums In 2024, I added 88 new albums to my collection that's a lot! This year again, I bought the vast majority of my music on Bandcamp. To be honest, I'm quite distraught by what's become of that website. Although it stays a wonderful place to buy underground music, Songtradr, the new owner of the platform, has been shown to be viciously anti-union. Money continues to ruin the world, I guess. Concerts I continued to go to a lot of concerts in 2024 (25!). Over the past 3 years, I have been going to more and more concerts, and I think I've reached my "peak". A mean of a concert every two weeks is quite a lot :) If you also like music and concerts, but find yourself not going to as many as you would like, the real secret is not to be afraid to go to concerts alone. Going with friends is always fun, but if I restricted myself to only going to concerts in a group, I'd barely see a few each year. Another good advice is to bring a book or something else1 to pass the time between sets. It can often take 30-45 minutes between sets for the artists to get their instruments ready, which can get quite boring if you just stand there and wait. Anyway, here are the concerts I went to in 2024: Shout out to the Gancio project and to the folks running the Montreal instance. It continues to be a smash hit and most of the interesting concerts end up being advertised there. See you all in 2025!

  1. I bought a Miyoo Mini Plus, a handheld Linux console running OnionOS, for that express reason. So far it's been great and I've been very happy to revisit some childhood classics.

31 December 2024

Russ Allbery: Review: Metal from Heaven

Review: Metal from Heaven, by August Clarke
Publisher: Erewhon
Copyright: November 2024
ISBN: 1-64566-099-0
Format: Kindle
Pages: 443
Metal from Heaven is industrial-era secondary-world fantasy with a literary bent. It is a complete story in one book, and I would be very surprised by a sequel. Clarke previously wrote the Scapegracers young-adult trilogy, which got excellent reviews and a few award nominations, as H.A. Clarke. This is his first adult novel.
Know I adore you. Look out over the glow. The cities sundered, their machines inverted, mountains split and prairies blazing, that long foreseen Hereafter crowning fast. This calamity is a promise made to you. A prayer to you, and to your shadow which has become my second self, tucked behind my eye and growing in tandem with me, pressing outwards through the pupil, the smarter, truer, almost bursting reason for our wrath. Do not doubt me. Just look. Watch us rise as the sun comes up over the beauty. The future stains the bleakness so pink. When my violence subsides, we will have nothing, and be champions.
Marney Honeycutt is twelve years old, a factory worker, and lustertouched. She works in the Yann I. Chauncey Ichorite Foundry in Ignavia City, alongside her family and her best friend, shaping the magical metal ichorite into the valuable industrial products of a new age of commerce and industry. She is the oldest of the lustertouched, the children born to factory workers and poisoned by the metal. It has made her allergic, prone to fits at any contact with ichorite, but also able to exert a strange control over the metal if she's willing to pay the price of spasms and hallucinations for hours afterwards. As Metal from Heaven opens, the workers have declared a strike. Her older sister is the spokesperson, demanding shorter hours, safer working conditions, and an investigation into the health of the lustertouched children. Chauncey's response is to send enforcer snipers to kill the workers, including the entirety of her family.
The girl sang, "Unalone toward dawn we go, toward the glory of the new morning." An enforcer shot her in the belly, and when she did not fall, her head.
Marney survives, fleeing into the city, swearing an impossible personal revenge against Yann Chauncey. An act of charity gets her a ticket on a train into the countryside. The woman who bought her ticket is a bandit who is on the train to rob it. Marney's ability to control ichorite allows her to help the bandits in return, winning her a place with the Highwayman's Choir who have been preying on the shipments of the rich and powerful and then disappearing into the hills. The Choir's secret is that the agoraphobic and paranoid Baron of the Fingerbluffs is dead and has been for years. He was killed by his staff, Hereafterist idealists, who have turned his remote territory into an anarchist commune and haven for pirates and bandits. This becomes Marney's home and the Choir becomes her family, but she never forgets her oath of revenge or the childhood friend she left behind in the piles of bodies and to whom this story is narrated. First, Clarke's writing is absolutely gorgeous.
We scaled the viny mountain jags at Montrose Barony's legal edge, the place where land was and wasn't Ignavia, Royston, and Drustland alike. There was a border but it was diffuse and hallucinatory, even more so than most. On legal papers and state maps there were harsh lines that squashed topography and sanded down the mountains into even hills in planter's rows, but here among the jutting rocks and craggy heather, the ground was lineless.
The rhythm of it, the grasp of contrast and metaphor, the word choice! That climactic word "lineless," with its echo of limitless. So good. Second, this is the rarest of books: a political fantasy that takes class and religion seriously and uses them for more than plot drivers. This is not at all our world, and the technology level is somewhat ambiguous, but the parallels to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era are unmistakable. The Hereafterists that Marney joins are political anarchists, not in the sense of alternative governance structures and political theory sanitized for middle-class liberals, but in the sense of Emma Goldman and Peter Kropotkin. The society they have built in the Fingerbluffs is temporary, threatened, and contingent, but it is sincere and wildly popular among the people who already lived there. Even beyond politics, class is a tangible force in this book. Marney is a factory worker and the child of factory workers. She barely knows how to read and doesn't magically learn over the course of the book. She has friends who are clever in the sense rewarded by politics and nobility, who navigate bureaucracies and political nuance, but that is not Marney's world. When, towards the end of the book, she has to deal with a gathering of high-class women, the contrast is stark, and she navigates that gathering only by being entirely unexpected. Perhaps the best illustration of the subtlety of this is the terminology in the book for lesbian. Marney is a crawly, which is a slur thrown at people like her (and one of the rare fictional slurs that work exactly as the author intended) but is also simply what she calls herself. Whether or not it functions as a slur depends on context, and the context is never hard to understand. The high-class lesbians she meets later are Lunarists, and react to crawly as a vile and insulting word. They use language to separate themselves from both the insult and from the social class that uses it. Language is an indication of culture and manners and therefore of morality, unlike deeds, which admit endless justifications.
Conversation was fleeting. Perdita managed with whomever stood near her, chipper about every prettiness she saw, the flitting butterflies, the dappled light between the leaves, the lushness and the fragrance of untamed land, and her walking companions took turns sharing in her delight. It was infectious, how happy she was. She was going to slaughter millions. She was going to skip like this all the while.
The handling of religion is perhaps even better. Marney was raised a Tullian, which sits alongside two other fleshed-out fictional religions and sketches of several more. Tullians tend to be conservative and patriarchal, and Marney has a realistically complicated relationship with faith: sticking with some Tullian worship practices and gestures because they're part of who she is, feeling a kinship to other Tullians, discarding beliefs that don't fit her, and revising others. Every major religion has a Hereafterist spin or reinterpretation that upends or reverses the parts of the religion that were used to prop up the existing social order and brings it more in line with Hereafterist ideals. We see the Tullian Hereafterist variation in detail, and as someone who has studied a lot of methods of reinterpreting Christianity, I was impressed by how well Clarke invents both a belief system and its revisionist rewrite. This is exactly how religions work in human history, but one almost never sees this subtlety in fantasy novels. Marney's allergy to ichorite causes her internal dialogue to dissolve into hallucinatory synesthesia when she's manipulating or exposed to it. Since that's most of the book, substantial portions read like drug trips with growing body horror. I normally hate this type of narration, so it's a sign of just how good Clarke's writing is that I tolerated it and even enjoyed parts. It helps that the descriptions are irreverent and often surprising, full of unexpected metaphors and sudden turns. It's very hard not to quote paragraph after paragraph of this book. Clarke is also doing a lot with gender that I don't feel qualified to comment in detail on, but it would not surprise me to see this book in the Otherwise Award recommendation list. I can think of three significant male characters, all of whom are well-done, but every other major character is female by at least some gender definition. Within that group, though, is huge gender diversity of the complicated and personal type that doesn't force people into defined boxes. Marney's sexuality is similarly unclassified and sometimes surprising. My one complaint is that I thought the sex scenes (which, to warn, are often graphic) fell into the literary fiction trap of being described so closely and physically that it didn't feel like anyone involved was actually enjoying themselves. (This is almost certainly a matter of personal taste.) I had absolutely no idea how Clarke was going to end this book, and the last couple of chapters caught me by surprise. I'm still not sure what I think about the climax. It's not the ending that I wanted, but one of the merits of this book is that it never did what I thought I wanted and yet made me enjoy the journey anyway. It is, at least, a genre ending, not a literary ending: The reader gets a full explanation of what is going on, and the setting is not static the way that it so often is in literary fiction. The characters can change the world, for good or for ill. The story felt frustrating and incomplete when I first finished it, but I haven't stopped thinking about this book and I think I like the shape of it a bit more now. It was certainly unexpected, at least by me. Clarke names Dhalgren as one of their influences in the acknowledgments, and yes, Metal from Heaven is that kind of book. This is the first 2024 novel I've read that felt like the kind of book that should be on award shortlists. I'm not sure it was entirely successful, and there are parts of it that I didn't like or that weren't for me, but it's trying to do something different and challenging and uncomfortable, and I think it mostly worked. And the writing is so good.
She looked like a mythic princess from the old woodcuts, who ruled nature by force of goodness and faith and had no legal power.
Metal from Heaven is not going to be everyone's taste. If you do not like literary fantasy, there is a real chance that you will hate this. I am very glad that I read it, and also am going to take a significant break from difficult books before I tackle another one. But then I'm probably going to try the Scapegracers series, because Clarke is an author I want to follow. Content notes: Explicit sex, including sadomasochistic sex. Political violence, mostly by authorities. Murdered children, some body horror, and a lot of serious injuries and death. Rating: 8 out of 10

27 December 2024

Wouter Verhelst: Writing an extensible JSON-based DSL with Moose

At work, I've been maintaining a perl script that needs to run a number of steps as part of a release workflow. Initially, that script was very simple, but over time it has grown to do a number of things. And then some of those things did not need to be run all the time. And then we wanted to do this one exceptional thing for this one case. And so on; eventually the script became a big mess of configuration options and unreadable flow, and so I decided that I wanted it to be more configurable. I sat down and spent some time on this, and eventually came up with what I now realize is a domain-specific language (DSL) in JSON, implemented by creating objects in Moose, extensible by writing more object classes. Let me explain how it works. In order to explain, however, I need to explain some perl and Moose basics first. If you already know all that, you can safely skip ahead past the "Preliminaries" section that's next.

Preliminaries

Moose object creation, references. In Moose, creating a class is done something like this:
package Foo;
use v5.40;
use Moose;
has 'attribute' => (
    is  => 'ro',
    isa => 'Str',
    required => 1
);
sub say_something  
    my $self = shift;
    say "Hello there, our attribute is " . $self->attribute;
 
The above is a class that has a single attribute called attribute. To create an object, you use the Moose constructor on the class, and pass it the attributes you want:
use v5.40;
use Foo;
my $foo = Foo->new(attribute => "foo");
$foo->say_something;
(output: Hello there, our attribute is foo) This creates a new object with the attribute attribute set to bar. The attribute accessor is a method generated by Moose, which functions both as a getter and a setter (though in this particular case we made the attribute "ro", meaning read-only, so while it can be set at object creation time it cannot be changed by the setter anymore). So yay, an object. And it has methods, things that we set ourselves. Basic OO, all that. One of the peculiarities of perl is its concept of "lists". Not to be confused with the lists of python -- a concept that is called "arrays" in perl and is somewhat different -- in perl, lists are enumerations of values. They can be used as initializers for arrays or hashes, and they are used as arguments to subroutines. Lists cannot be nested; whenever a hash or array is passed in a list, the list is "flattened", that is, it becomes one big list. This means that the below script is functionally equivalent to the above script that uses our "Foo" object:
use v5.40;
use Foo;
my %args;
$args attribute  = "foo";
my $foo = Foo->new(%args);
$foo->say_something;
(output: Hello there, our attribute is foo) This creates a hash %args wherein we set the attributes that we want to pass to our constructor. We set one attribute in %args, the one called attribute, and then use %args and rely on list flattening to create the object with the same attribute set (list flattening turns a hash into a list of key-value pairs). Perl also has a concept of "references". These are scalar values that point to other values; the other value can be a hash, a list, or another scalar. There is syntax to create a non-scalar value at assignment time, called anonymous references, which is useful when one wants to remember non-scoped values. By default, references are not flattened, and this is what allows you to create multidimensional values in perl; however, it is possible to request list flattening by dereferencing the reference. The below example, again functionally equivalent to the previous two examples, demonstrates this:
use v5.40;
use Foo;
my $args =  ;
$args-> attribute  = "foo";
my $foo = Foo->new(%$args);
$foo->say_something;
(output: Hello there, our attribute is foo) This creates a scalar $args, which is a reference to an anonymous hash. Then, we set the key attribute of that anonymous hash to bar (note the use arrow operator here, which is used to indicate that we want to dereference a reference to a hash), and create the object using that reference, requesting hash dereferencing and flattening by using a double sigil, %$. As a side note, objects in perl are references too, hence the fact that we have to use the dereferencing arrow to access the attributes and methods of Moose objects. Moose attributes don't have to be strings or even simple scalars. They can also be references to hashes or arrays, or even other objects:
package Bar;
use v5.40;
use Moose;
extends 'Foo';
has 'hash_attribute' => (
    is => 'ro',
    isa => 'HashRef[Str]',
    predicate => 'has_hash_attribute',
);
has 'object_attribute' => (
    is => 'ro',
    isa => 'Foo',
    predicate => 'has_object_attribute',
);
sub say_something  
    my $self = shift;
    if($self->has_object_attribute)  
        $self->object_attribute->say_something;
     
    $self->SUPER::say_something unless $self->has_hash_attribute;
    say "We have a hash attribute!"
 
This creates a subclass of Foo called Bar that has a hash attribute called hash_attribute, and an object attribute called object_attribute. Both of them are references; one to a hash, the other to an object. The hash ref is further limited in that it requires that each value in the hash must be a string (this is optional but can occasionally be useful), and the object ref in that it must refer to an object of the class Foo, or any of its subclasses. The predicates used here are extra subroutines that Moose provides if you ask for them, and which allow you to see if an object's attribute has a value or not. The example script would use an object like this:
use v5.40;
use Bar;
my $foo = Foo->new(attribute => "foo");
my $bar = Bar->new(object_attribute => $foo, attribute => "bar");
$bar->say_something;
(output: Hello there, our attribute is foo) This example also shows object inheritance, and methods implemented in child classes. Okay, that's it for perl and Moose basics. On to...

Moose Coercion Moose has a concept of "value coercion". Value coercion allows you to tell Moose that if it sees one thing but expects another, it should convert is using a passed subroutine before assigning the value. That sounds a bit dense without example, so let me show you how it works. Reimaginging the Bar package, we could use coercion to eliminate one object creation step from the creation of a Bar object:
package "Bar";
use v5.40;
use Moose;
use Moose::Util::TypeConstraints;
extends "Foo";
coerce "Foo",
    from "HashRef",
    via   Foo->new(%$_)  ;
has 'hash_attribute' => (
    is => 'ro',
    isa => 'HashRef',
    predicate => 'has_hash_attribute',
);
has 'object_attribute' => (
    is => 'ro',
    isa => 'Foo',
    coerce => 1,
    predicate => 'has_object_attribute',
);
sub say_something  
    my $self = shift;
    if($self->has_object_attribute)  
        $self->object_attribute->say_something;
     
    $self->SUPER::say_something unless $self->has_hash_attribute;
    say "We have a hash attribute!"
 
Okay, let's unpack that a bit. First, we add the Moose::Util::TypeConstraints module to our package. This is required to declare coercions. Then, we declare a coercion to tell Moose how to convert a HashRef to a Foo object: by using the Foo constructor on a flattened list created from the hashref that it is given. Then, we update the definition of the object_attribute to say that it should use coercions. This is not the default, because going through the list of coercions to find the right one has a performance penalty, so if the coercion is not requested then we do not do it. This allows us to simplify declarations. With the updated Bar class, we can simplify our example script to this:
use v5.40;
use Bar;
my $bar = Bar->new(attribute => "bar", object_attribute =>   attribute => "foo"  );
$bar->say_something
(output: Hello there, our attribute is foo) Here, the coercion kicks in because the value object_attribute, which is supposed to be an object of class Foo, is instead a hash ref. Without the coercion, this would produce an error message saying that the type of the object_attribute attribute is not a Foo object. With the coercion, however, the value that we pass to object_attribute is passed to a Foo constructor using list flattening, and then the resulting Foo object is assigned to the object_attribute attribute. Coercion works for more complicated things, too; for instance, you can use coercion to coerce an array of hashes into an array of objects, by creating a subtype first:
package MyCoercions;
use v5.40;
use Moose;
use Moose::Util::TypeConstraints;
use Foo;
subtype "ArrayOfFoo", as "ArrayRef[Foo]";
subtype "ArrayOfHashes", as "ArrayRef[HashRef]";
coerce "ArrayOfFoo", from "ArrayOfHashes", via   [ map   Foo->create(%$_)   @ $_  ]  ;
Ick. That's a bit more complex. What happens here is that we use the map function to iterate over a list of values. The given list of values is @ $_ , which is perl for "dereference the default value as an array reference, and flatten the list of values in that array reference". So the ArrayRef of HashRefs is dereferenced and flattened, and each HashRef in the ArrayRef is passed to the map function. The map function then takes each hash ref in turn and passes it to the block of code that it is also given. In this case, that block is Foo->create(%$_) . In other words, we invoke the create factory method with the flattened hashref as an argument. This returns an object of the correct implementation (assuming our hash ref has a type attribute set), and with all attributes of their object set to the correct value. That value is then returned from the block (this could be made more explicit with a return call, but that is optional, perl defaults a return value to the rvalue of the last expression in a block). The map function then returns a list of all the created objects, which we capture in an anonymous array ref (the [] square brackets), i.e., an ArrayRef of Foo object, passing the Moose requirement of ArrayRef[Foo]. Usually, I tend to put my coercions in a special-purpose package. Although it is not strictly required by Moose, I find that it is useful to do this, because Moose does not allow a coercion to be defined if a coercion for the same type had already been done in a different package. And while it is theoretically possible to make sure you only ever declare a coercion once in your entire codebase, I find that doing so is easier to remember if you put all your coercions in a specific package. Okay, now you understand Moose object coercion! On to...

Dynamic module loading Perl allows loading modules at runtime. In the most simple case, you just use require inside a stringy eval:
my $module = "Foo";
eval "require $module";
This loads "Foo" at runtime. Obviously, the $module string could be a computed value, it does not have to be hardcoded. There are some obvious downsides to doing things this way, mostly in the fact that a computed value can basically be anything and so without proper checks this can quickly become an arbitrary code vulnerability. As such, there are a number of distributions on CPAN to help you with the low-level stuff of figuring out what the possible modules are, and how to load them. For the purposes of my script, I used Module::Pluggable. Its API is fairly simple and straightforward:
package Foo;
use v5.40;
use Moose;
use Module::Pluggable require => 1;
has 'attribute' => (
    is => 'ro',
    isa => 'Str',
);
has 'type' => (
    is => 'ro',
    isa => 'Str',
    required => 1,
);
sub handles_type  
    return 0;
 
sub create  
    my $class = shift;
    my %data = @_;
    foreach my $impl($class->plugins)  
        if($impl->can("handles_type") && $impl->handles_type($data type ))  
            return $impl->new(%data);
         
     
    die "could not find a plugin for type " . $data type ;
 
sub say_something  
    my $self = shift;
    say "Hello there, I am a " . $self->type;
 
The new concept here is the plugins class method, which is added by Module::Pluggable, and which searches perl's library paths for all modules that are in our namespace. The namespace is configurable, but by default it is the name of our module; so in the above example, if there were a package "Foo::Bar" which
  • has a subroutine handles_type
  • that returns a truthy value when passed the value of the type key in a hash that is passed to the create subroutine,
  • then the create subroutine creates a new object with the passed key/value pairs used as attribute initializers.
Let's implement a Foo::Bar package:
package Foo::Bar;
use v5.40;
use Moose;
extends 'Foo';
has 'type' => (
    is => 'ro',
    isa => 'Str',
    required => 1,
);
has 'serves_drinks' => (
    is => 'ro',
    isa => 'Bool',
    default => 0,
);
sub handles_type  
    my $class = shift;
    my $type = shift;
    return $type eq "bar";
 
sub say_something  
    my $self = shift;
    $self->SUPER::say_something;
    say "I serve drinks!" if $self->serves_drinks;
 
We can now indirectly use the Foo::Bar package in our script:
use v5.40;
use Foo;
my $obj = Foo->create(type => bar, serves_drinks => 1);
$obj->say_something;
output:
Hello there, I am a bar.
I serve drinks!
Okay, now you understand all the bits and pieces that are needed to understand how I created the DSL engine. On to...

Putting it all together We're actually quite close already. The create factory method in the last version of our Foo package allows us to decide at run time which module to instantiate an object of, and to load that module at run time. We can use coercion and list flattening to turn a reference to a hash into an object of the correct type. We haven't looked yet at how to turn a JSON data structure into a hash, but that bit is actually ridiculously trivial:
use JSON::MaybeXS;
my $data = decode_json($json_string);
Tada, now $data is a reference to a deserialized version of the JSON string: if the JSON string contained an object, $data is a hashref; if the JSON string contained an array, $data is an arrayref, etc. So, in other words, to create an extensible JSON-based DSL that is implemented by Moose objects, all we need to do is create a system that
  • takes hash refs to set arguments
  • has factory methods to create objects, which
    • uses Module::Pluggable to find the available object classes, and
    • uses the type attribute to figure out which object class to use to create the object
  • uses coercion to convert hash refs into objects using these factory methods
In practice, we could have a JSON file with the following structure:
 
    "description": "do stuff",
    "actions": [
         
            "type": "bar",
            "serves_drinks": true,
         ,
         
            "type": "bar",
            "serves_drinks": false,
         
    ]
 
... and then we could have a Moose object definition like this:
package MyDSL;
use v5.40;
use Moose;
use MyCoercions;
has "description" => (
    is => 'ro',
    isa => 'Str',
);
has 'actions' => (
    is => 'ro',
    isa => 'ArrayOfFoo'
    coerce => 1,
    required => 1,
);
sub say_something  
    say "Hello there, I am described as " . $self->description . " and I am performing my actions: ";
    foreach my $action(@ $self->actions )  
        $action->say_something;
     
 
Now, we can write a script that loads this JSON file and create a new object using the flattened arguments:
use v5.40;
use MyDSL;
use JSON::MaybeXS;
my $input_file_name = shift;
my $args = do  
    local $/ = undef;
    open my $input_fh, "<", $input_file_name or die "could not open file";
    <$input_fh>;
 ;
$args = decode_json($args);
my $dsl = MyDSL->new(%$args);
$dsl->say_something
Output:
Hello there, I am described as do stuff and I am performing my actions:
Hello there, I am a bar
I am serving drinks!
Hello there, I am a bar
In some more detail, this will:
  • Read the JSON file and deserialize it;
  • Pass the object keys in the JSON file as arguments to a constructor of the MyDSL class;
  • The MyDSL class then uses those arguments to set its attributes, using Moose coercion to convert the "actions" array of hashes into an array of Foo::Bar objects.
  • Perform the say_something method on the MyDSL object
Once this is written, extending the scheme to also support a "quux" type simply requires writing a Foo::Quux class, making sure it has a method handles_type that returns a truthy value when called with quux as the argument, and installing it into the perl library path. This is rather easy to do. It can even be extended deeper, too; if the quux type requires a list of arguments rather than just a single argument, it could itself also have an array attribute with relevant coercions. These coercions could then be used to convert the list of arguments into an array of objects of the correct type, using the same schema as above. The actual DSL is of course somewhat more complex, and also actually does something useful, in contrast to the DSL that we define here which just says things. Creating an object that actually performs some action when required is left as an exercise to the reader.

24 December 2024

Divine Attah-Ohiemi: Seamless Transitions: Mastering Apache Redirects for a Smooth Hugo Migration

This week, I dove into setting up redirects with Apache to make the transition to Hugo's multilingual system smoother. The challenge? Ensuring that all those old links still worked while I migrated to the new URL format. For instance, I needed to redirect: /es/distrib to /distrib/index.es.html
/es/social_contract to /social_contract.es.html
/es/intro/about to /intro/about.es.html
/da to /index.da.html

To tackle this, I turned to Apache's mod_rewrite. Here s the magic I came up with in my .htaccess file: RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI ^/([a-z] 2 (?:-[a-z] 2 )?)/(.*)$
RewriteCond % DOCUMENT_ROOT /$2/index.%1.html -f
RewriteCond % DOCUMENT_ROOT /$1/$2 !-d
RewriteRule ^/([a-z] 2 (?:-[a-z] 2 )?)/(.*)$ /$2/index.%1.html [last,redirect]

RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI ^/([a-z] 2 (?:-[a-z] 2 )?)/(.*)$
RewriteCond % DOCUMENT_ROOT /$2.%1.html -f
RewriteCond % DOCUMENT_ROOT /$1/$2 !-d
RewriteRule ^/([a-z] 2 (?:-[a-z] 2 )?)/(.*)$ /$2.%1.html [last,redirect]

What s happening here? The rules check if the URL starts with a language code (like /es or /da). Then, they verify whether the corresponding HTML file exists. If it does, and the path isn t a directory, voil ! The user gets redirected to the new format. It s a bit of a dance with conditions and rules, but it s satisfying to see everything working seamlessly. Now, as I continue migrating content, users clicking on old links won t end up in a digital dead end. It s all about keeping the flow smooth and maintaining that user experience. So, if you re also juggling multilingual pages and thinking about making the switch to Hugo, don t underestimate the power of mod_rewrite. It s your best friend in the world of redirects! Happy coding!

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