Building a mirror for rpm-based distributions.
I've already described in brief how I built a mirror that currently mirrors Debian and Ubuntu on a daily basis. That was relatively straightforward given that I know how to install Debian and configure a basic system without a GUI and the ftpsync scripts are well maintained, I can pull some archives and get one pushed to me such that I've always got up to date copies of Debian and Ubuntu.I wanted to do something similar using Rocky Linux to pull in archives for Almalinux, Rocky Linux, CentOS, CentOS Stream and (optionally) Fedora.(This was originally set up using Red Hat Enterprise Linux on a developer's subscription and rebuilt using Rocky Linux so that the machine could be passed on to someone else if necessary. Red Hat 9.1 has moved to x86_64v2 - on the machine I have (HP Microserver gen 8) 9.1 it fails immediately. It has been rebuilt to use Rocky 8.8).This is a minimal install of Rocky as console only - the machine it's on only has 4G of memory so won't run a GUI reliably. It will run Cockpit so can be remotely administered. One user to run everything - mirror.
Minimal install of Rocky 8.7 from DVD .iso. SELinux is enabled, SSH works for remote access. SELinux had to be tweaked to allow /srv/ the appropriate permissions to be served by nginx. /srv is a large LVM volume rather than a RAID 6 - I didn't have enough disks
Adding nginx, enabling Cockpit and editing the Rocky Linux mirroring scripts resulted in something straightforward to reproduce.

nginx

I cheated and stole large parts of my Debian config. The crucial part to remember is that there is no autoindexing by default and I had to dig to find the correct configuration snippet.

# Load configuration files for the default server block.

include /etc/nginx/default.d/*.conf;

location /
autoindex on;
autoindex_exact_size off;
autoindex_format html;
autoindex_localtime off;
# First attempt to serve request as file, then
# as directory, then fall back to displaying a 404.
try_files $uri $uri/ =404;

Rocky Linux mirroring scripts

Systemd unit file for service

[Unit]
Description=Rocky Linux Mirroring script

[Service]
Type=simple
User=mirror
Group=mirror
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/rockylinux

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Rocky linux timer file

[Unit]
Description=Run Rocky Linux mirroring script daily

[Timer]
OnCalendar=*-*-* 08:13:00
OnCalendar=*-*-* 22:13:00
Persistent=true

[Install]
WantedBy=timers.target

Mirror script

#!/bin/env bash
#
# mirrorsync - Synchronize a Rocky Linux mirror
# By: Dennis Koerner <koerner@netzwerge.de>
#
# The latest version of this script can be found at:
# https://github.com/rocky-linux/rocky-tools
#
# Please read https://docs.rockylinux.org/en/rocky/8/guides/add_mirror_manager
# for further information on setting up a Rocky mirror.
#
# Copyright (c) 2021 Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation

This is a very long script in total.
Crucial parts I changed only listed the mirror to pull from and the place to put it.

# A complete list of mirrors can be found at
# https://mirrors.rockylinux.org/mirrormanager/mirrors/Rocky
src="mirrors.vinters.com::rocky"

# Your local path. Change to whatever fits your system.
# $mirrormodule is also used in syslog output.
mirrormodule="rocky-linux"
dst="/srv/$ mirrormodule "

filelistfile="fullfiletimelist-rocky"
lockfile="/home/mirror/rocky.lockfile"
logfile="/home/mirror/rocky.log"

Logfile looks something like this: the single time spec file is used to check whether another rsync needs to be run

deleting 9.1/plus/x86_64/os/repodata/3585b8b5-90e0-4856-9df2-95f646bc62c7-PRIMARY.xml.gz

sent 606,565 bytes received 38,808,194,155 bytes 44,839,746.64 bytes/sec
total size is 1,072,593,052,385 speedup is 27.64
End: Fri 27 Jan 2023 08:27:49 GMT
fullfiletimelist-rocky unchanged. Not updating at Fri 27 Jan 2023 22:13:16 GMT
fullfiletimelist-rocky unchanged. Not updating at Sat 28 Jan 2023 08:13:16 GMT

It was essentially easier to store fullfiletimelist-rocky in /home/mirror than anywhere else.

Very similar small modifications to the Rocky mirroring scripts were used to mirror the other distributions I'm mirroring. (Almalinux, CentOS, CentOS Stream, EPEL and Rocky Linux).

I bought myself a cheap wearable Bluetooth LE heart rate monitor in order to play with it, and this is a simple Python script to monitor it and plot data. Bluetooth LE I was surprised that these things seem decently interoperable. You can use hcitool to scan for devices: You can then use gatttool to connect to device and poke at them interactively from a command line. Bluetooth LE from Python There is a nice library called Bleak which is also packaged in Debian. It's modern Python with asyncio and works beautifully! Heart rate monitors Things I learnt:

• The UUID for the heart rate interface starts with 00002a37.
• The UUID for checking battery status starts with 00002a19.
• A longer list of UUIDs is here.
• The layout of heart rate data packets and some Python code to parse them
• What are RR values

How about a proper fitness tracker? I found OpenTracks, also on F-Droid, which seems nice Why script it from a desktop computer? The question is: why not? A fitness tracker on a phone is useful, but there are lots of silly things one can do from one's computer that one can't do from a phone. A heart rate monitor is, after all, one more input device, and there are never enough input devices! There are so many extremely important use cases that seem entirely unexplored:

• Log your heart rate with your git commits!
• Add your heart rate as a header in your emails!
• Correlate heart rate information with your work activity tracker to find out what tasks stress you the most!
• Sync ping intervals with your own heartbeat, so you get faster replies when you're more anxious!
• Configure workrave to block your keyboard if you get too excited, to improve the quality of your mailing list contributions!
• You can monitor the monitor script of the heart rate monitor that monitors you! Forget buffalo, be your monitor monitor monitor monitor monitor monitor monitor monitor...

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

• Dennis Braun (snd)
• Ra l Benencia (rul)

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

• Gioele Barabucci
• Agathe Porte
• Braulio Henrique Marques Souto
• Matthias Geiger
• Alper Nebi Yasak
• Fabian Gr nbichler
• Lance Lin

Congratulations!

(The below was written by Rob Pike, copied here for posterity from The Wayback Machine) Long ago, as the design of the Unix file system was being worked out, the entries . and .. appeared, to make navigation easier. I m not sure but I believe .. went in during the Version 2 rewrite, when the file system became hierarchical (it had a very different structure early on). When one typed ls, however, these files appeared, so either Ken or Dennis added a simple test to the program. It was in assembler then, but the code in question was equivalent to something like this: This statement was a little shorter than what it should have been, which is but hey, it was easy. Two things resulted. First, a bad precedent was set. A lot of other lazy programmers introduced bugs by making the same simplification. Actual files beginning with periods are often skipped when they should be counted. Second, and much worse, the idea of a hidden or dot file was created. As a consequence, more lazy programmers started dropping files into everyone s home directory. I don t have all that much stuff installed on the machine I m using to type this, but my home directory has about a hundred dot files and I don t even know what most of them are or whether they re still needed. Every file name evaluation that goes through my home directory is slowed down by this accumulated sludge. I m pretty sure the concept of a hidden file was an unintended consequence. It was certainly a mistake. How many bugs and wasted CPU cycles and instances of human frustration (not to mention bad design) have resulted from that one small shortcut about 40 years ago? Keep that in mind next time you want to cut a corner in your code. (For those who object that dot files serve a purpose, I don t dispute that but counter that it s the files that serve the purpose, not the convention for their names. They could just as easily be in $HOME/cfg or $HOME/lib, which is what we did in Plan 9, which had no dot files. Lessons can be learned.)

Review: The Silver Chair, by C.S. Lewis

Illustrator:	Pauline Baynes
Series:	Chronicles of Narnia #4
Publisher:	Collier
Copyright:	1953
Printing:	1978
ISBN:	0-02-044250-5
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	217

The Silver Chair is a sequel to The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and the fourth book of the Chronicles of Narnia in original publication order. (For more about publication order, see the introduction to my review of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.) Apart from a few references to The Voyage of the Dawn Treader at the start, it stands sufficiently on its own that you could read it without reading the other books, although I have no idea why you'd want to. We have finally arrived at my least favorite of the Narnia books and the one that I sometimes skipped during re-reads. (One of my objections to the new publication order is that it puts The Silver Chair and The Last Battle back-to-back, and I don't think you should do that to yourself as a reader.) I was hoping that there would be previously unnoticed depth to this book that would redeem it as an adult reader. Sadly, no; with one very notable exception, it's just not very good. MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW. The Silver Chair opens on the grounds of the awful school to which Eustace's parents sent him: Experiment House. That means it opens (and closes) with a more extended version of Lewis's rant about schools. I won't get into this in detail since it's mostly a framing device, but Lewis is remarkably vicious and petty. His snide contempt for putting girls and boys in the same school did not age well, nor did his emphasis at the end of the book that the incompetent head of the school is a woman. I also raised an eyebrow at holding up ordinary British schools as a model of preventing bullying. Thankfully, as Lewis says at the start, this is not a school story. This is prelude to Jill meeting Eustace and the two of them escaping the bullies via a magical door into Narnia. Unfortunately, that's the second place The Silver Chair gets off on the wrong foot. Jill and Eustace end up in what the reader of the series will recognize as Aslan's country and almost walk off the vast cliff at the end of the world, last seen from the bottom in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Eustace freaks out, Jill (who has a much better head for heights) goes intentionally close to the cliff in a momentary impulse of arrogance before realizing how high it is, Eustace tries to pull her back, and somehow Eustace falls over the edge. I do not have a good head for heights, and I wonder how much of it is due to this memorable scene. I certainly blame Lewis for my belief that pulling someone else back from the edge of a cliff can result in you being pushed off, something that on adult reflection makes very little sense but which is seared into my lizard brain. But worse, this sets the tone for the rest of the story: everything is constantly going wrong because Eustace and Jill either have normal human failings that are disproportionately punished or don't successfully follow esoteric and unreasonably opaque instructions from Aslan. Eustace is safe, of course; Aslan blows him to Narnia and then gives Jill instructions before sending her afterwards. (I suspect the whole business with the cliff was an authorial cheat to set up Jill's interaction with Aslan without Eustace there to explain anything.) She and Eustace have been summoned to Narnia to find the lost Prince, and she has to memorize four Signs that will lead her on the right path. Gah, the Signs. If you were the sort of kid that I was, you immediately went back and re-read the Signs several times to memorize them like Jill was told to. The rest of this book was then an exercise in anxious frustration. First, Eustace is an ass to Jill and refuses to even listen to the first Sign. They kind of follow the second but only with heavy foreshadowing that Jill isn't memorizing the Signs every day like she's supposed to. They mostly botch the third and have to backtrack to follow it. Meanwhile, the narrator is constantly reminding you that the kids (and Jill in particular) are screwing up their instructions. On re-reading, it's clear they're not doing that poorly given how obscure the Signs are, but the ominous foreshadowing is enough to leave a reader a nervous wreck. Worse, Eustace and Jill are just miserable to each other through the whole book. They constantly bicker and snipe, Eustace doesn't want to listen to her and blames her for everything, and the hard traveling makes it all worse. Lewis does know how to tell a satisfying redemption arc; one of the things I have always liked about Edmund's story is that he learns his lesson and becomes my favorite character in the subsequent stories. But, sadly, Eustace's redemption arc is another matter. He's totally different here than he was at the start of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (to the degree that if he didn't have the same name in both books, I wouldn't recognize him as the same person), but rather than a better person he seems to have become a different sort of ass. There's no sign here of the humility and appreciation for friendship that he supposedly learned from his time as a dragon. On top of that, the story isn't very interesting. Rilian, the lost Prince, is a damp squib who talks in the irritating archaic accent that Lewis insists on using for all Narnian royalty. His story feels like Lewis lifted it from medieval Arthurian literature; most of it could be dropped into a collection of stories of knights of the Round Table without seeming out of place. When you have a country full of talking animals and weirdly fascinating bits of theology, it's disappointing to get a garden-variety story about an evil enchantress in which everyone is noble and tragic and extremely stupid. Thankfully, The Silver Chair has one important redeeming quality: Puddleglum. Puddleglum is a Marsh-wiggle, a bipedal amphibious sort who lives alone in the northern marshes. He's recruited by the owls to help the kids with their mission when they fail to get King Caspian's help after blowing the first Sign. Puddleglum is an absolute delight: endlessly pessimistic, certain the worst possible thing will happen at any moment, but also weirdly cheerful about it. I love Eeyore characters in general, but Puddleglum is even better because he gives the kids' endless bickering exactly the respect that it deserves.

"But we all need to be very careful about our tempers, seeing all the hard times we shall have to go through together. Won't do to quarrel, you know. At any rate, don't begin it too soon. I know these expeditions usually end that way; knifing one another, I shouldn't wonder, before all's done. But the longer we can keep off it "

It's even more obvious on re-reading that Puddleglum is the only effective member of the party. Jill has only a couple of moments where she gets the three of them past some obstacle. Eustace is completely useless; I can't remember a single helpful thing he does in the entire book. Puddleglum and his pessimistic determination, on the other hand, is right about nearly everything at each step. And he's the one who takes decisive action to break the Lady of the Green Kirtle's spell near the end. I was expecting a bit of sexism and (mostly in upcoming books) racism when re-reading these books as an adult given when they were written and who Lewis was, but what has caught me by surprise is the colonialism. Lewis is weirdly insistent on importing humans from England to fill all the important roles in stories, even stories that are entirely about Narnians. I know this is the inherent weakness of portal fantasy, but it bothers me how little Lewis believes in Narnians solving their own problems. The Silver Chair makes this blatantly obvious: if Aslan had just told Puddleglum the same information he told Jill and sent a Badger or a Beaver or a Mouse along with him, all the evidence in the book says the whole affair would have been sorted out with much less fuss and anxiety. Jill and Eustace are far more of a hindrance than a help, which makes for frustrating reading when they're supposedly the protagonists. The best part of this book is the underground bits, once they finally get through the first three Signs and stumble into the Lady's kingdom far below the surface. Rilian is a great disappointment, but the fight against the Lady's mind-altering magic leads to one of the great quotes of the series, on par with Reepicheep's speech in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

"Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we're leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that's small loss if the world's as dull a place as you say."

This is Puddleglum, of course. And yes, I know that this is apologetics and Lewis is talking about Christianity and making the case for faith without proof, but put that aside for the moment, because this is still powerful life philosophy. It's a cynic's litany against cynicism. It's a pessimist's defense of hope. Suppose we have only dreamed all those things like justice and fairness and equality, community and consensus and collaboration, universal basic income and effective environmentalism. The dreary magic of the realists and the pragmatists say that such things are baby's games, silly fantasies. But you can still choose to live like you believe in them. In Alasdair Gray's reworking of a line from Dennis Lee, "work as if you live in the early days of a better nation." That's one moment that I'll always remember from this book. The other is after they kill the Lady of the Green Kirtle and her magic starts to fade, they have to escape from the underground caverns while surrounded by the Earthmen who served her and who they believe are hostile. It's a tense moment that turns into a delightful celebration when they realize that the Earthmen were just as much prisoners as the Prince was. They were forced from a far deeper land below, full of living metals and salamanders who speak from rivers of fire. It's the one moment in this book that I thought captured the magical strangeness of Narnia, that sense that there are wonderful things just out of sight that don't follow the normal patterns of medieval-ish fantasy. Other than a few great lines from Puddleglum and some moments in Aslan's country, the first 60% of this book is a loss and remarkably frustrating to read. The last 40% isn't bad, although I wish Rilian had any discernible character other than generic Arthurian knight. I don't know what Eustace is doing in this book at all other than providing a way for Jill to get into Narnia, and I wish Lewis had realized Puddleglum could be the protagonist. But as frustrating as The Silver Chair can be, I am still glad I re-read it. Puddleglum is one of the truly memorable characters of children's literature, and it's a shame he's buried in a weak mid-series book. Followed, in the original publication order, by The Horse and His Boy. Rating: 6 out of 10

I released version 2.6 of ledger2beancount, a ledger to beancount converter. Here are the changes in 2.6:

• Round calculated total if needed for price==cost comparison
• Add narration_tag config variable to set narration from metadata
• Retain unconsummated payee/payer metadata
• Ensure UTF-8 output and assume UTF-8 input
• Document UTF-8 issue on Windows systems
• Add option to move posting-level tags to the transaction itself
• Add support for the alias sub-directive of account declarations
• Add support for the payee sub-directive of account declarations
• Support configuration file called .ledger2beancount.yaml
• Fix uninitialised value warning in hledger mode
• Print warning if account in assertion has sub-accounts
• Set commodity for commodity-less balance assertion
• Expand path name of beancount_header config variable
• Document handling of buckets
• Document pre- and post-processing examples
• Add Dockerfile to create Docker image

Thanks to Alexander Baier, Daniele Nicolodi, and GitHub users bratekarate, faaafo and mefromthepast for various bug reports and other input. Thanks to Dennis Lee for adding a Dockerfile and to Vinod Kurup for fixing a bug. Thanks to Stefano Zacchiroli for testing. You can get ledger2beancount from GitHub.

I won't reveal precisely how many books I read in 2020, but it was definitely an improvement on 74 in 2019, 53 in 2018 and 50 in 2017. But not only did I read more in a quantitative sense, the quality seemed higher as well. There were certainly fewer disappointments: given its cultural resonance, I was nonplussed by Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch and whilst Ian Fleming's The Man with the Golden Gun was a little thin (again, given the obvious influence of the Bond franchise) the booked lacked 'thinness' in a way that made it interesting to critique. The weakest novel I read this year was probably J. M. Berger's Optimal, but even this hybrid of Ready Player One late-period Black Mirror wasn't that cringeworthy, all things considered. Alas, graphic novels continue to not quite be my thing, I'm afraid. I perhaps experienced more disappointments in the non-fiction section. Paul Bloom's Against Empathy was frustrating, particularly in that it expended unnecessary energy battling its misleading title and accepted terminology, and it could so easily have been an 20-minute video essay instead). (Elsewhere in the social sciences, David and Goliath will likely be the last Malcolm Gladwell book I voluntarily read.) After so many positive citations, I was also more than a little underwhelmed by Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, and after Ryan Holiday's many engaging reboots of Stoic philosophy, his Conspiracy (on Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan taking on Gawker) was slightly wide of the mark for me. Anyway, here follows a selection of my favourites from 2020, in no particular order:

Fiction Wolf Hall & Bring Up the Bodies & The Mirror and the Light Hilary Mantel During the early weeks of 2020, I re-read the first two parts of Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell trilogy in time for the March release of The Mirror and the Light. I had actually spent the last few years eagerly following any news of the final instalment, feigning outrage whenever Mantel appeared to be spending time on other projects. Wolf Hall turned out to be an even better book than I remembered, and when The Mirror and the Light finally landed at midnight on 5th March, I began in earnest the next morning. Note that date carefully; this was early 2020, and the book swiftly became something of a heavy-handed allegory about the world at the time. That is to say and without claiming that I am Monsieur Cromuel in any meaningful sense it was an uneasy experience to be reading about a man whose confident grasp on his world, friends and life was slipping beyond his control, and at least in Cromwell's case, was heading inexorably towards its denouement. The final instalment in Mantel's trilogy is not perfect, and despite my love of her writing I would concur with the judges who decided against awarding her a third Booker Prize. For instance, there is something of the longueur that readers dislike in the second novel, although this might not be entirely Mantel's fault after all, the rise of the "ugly" Anne of Cleves and laborious trade negotiations for an uninspiring mineral (this is no Herbertian 'spice') will never match the court intrigues of Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour and that man for all seasons, Thomas More. Still, I am already looking forward to returning to the verbal sparring between King Henry and Cromwell when I read the entire trilogy once again, tentatively planned for 2022.

The Fault in Our Stars John Green I came across John Green's The Fault in Our Stars via a fantastic video by Lindsay Ellis discussing Roland Barthes famous 1967 essay on authorial intent. However, I might have eventually come across The Fault in Our Stars regardless, not because of Green's status as an internet celebrity of sorts but because I'm a complete sucker for this kind of emotionally-manipulative bildungsroman, likely due to reading Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials a few too many times in my teens. Although its title is taken from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, The Fault in Our Stars is actually more Romeo & Juliet. Hazel, a 16-year-old cancer patient falls in love with Gus, an equally ill teen from her cancer support group. Hazel and Gus share the same acerbic (and distinctly unteenage) wit and a love of books, centred around Hazel's obsession of An Imperial Affliction, a novel by the meta-fictional author Peter Van Houten. Through a kind of American version of Jim'll Fix It, Gus and Hazel go and visit Van Houten in Amsterdam. I'm afraid it's even cheesier than I'm describing it. Yet just as there is a time and a place for Michelin stars and Haribo Starmix, there's surely a place for this kind of well-constructed but altogether maudlin literature. One test for emotionally manipulative works like this is how well it can mask its internal contradictions while Green's story focuses on the universalities of love, fate and the shortness of life (as do almost all of his works, it seems), The Fault in Our Stars manages to hide, for example, that this is an exceedingly favourable treatment of terminal illness that is only possible for the better off. The 2014 film adaptation does somewhat worse in peddling this fantasy (and has a much weaker treatment of the relationship between the teens' parents too, an underappreciated subtlety of the book). The novel, however, is pretty slick stuff, and it is difficult to fault it for what it is. For some comparison, I later read Green's Looking for Alaska and Paper Towns which, as I mention, tug at many of the same strings, but they don't come together nearly as well as The Fault in Our Stars. James Joyce claimed that "sentimentality is unearned emotion", and in this respect, The Fault in Our Stars really does earn it.

The Plague Albert Camus P. D. James' The Children of Men, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon ... dystopian fiction was already a theme of my reading in 2020, so given world events it was an inevitability that I would end up with Camus's novel about a plague that swept through the Algerian city of Oran. Is The Plague an allegory about the Nazi occupation of France during World War Two? Where are all the female characters? Where are the Arab ones? Since its original publication in 1947, there's been so much written about The Plague that it's hard to say anything new today. Nevertheless, I was taken aback by how well it captured so much of the nuance of 2020. Whilst we were saying just how 'unprecedented' these times were, it was eerie how a novel written in the 1940s could accurately how many of us were feeling well over seventy years on later: the attitudes of the people; the confident declarations from the institutions; the misaligned conversations that led to accidental misunderstandings. The disconnected lovers. The only thing that perhaps did not work for me in The Plague was the 'character' of the church. Although I could appreciate most of the allusion and metaphor, it was difficult for me to relate to the significance of Father Paneloux, particularly regarding his change of view on the doctrinal implications of the virus, and spoiler alert that he finally died of a "doubtful case" of the disease, beyond the idea that Paneloux's beliefs are in themselves "doubtful". Answers on a postcard, perhaps. The Plague even seemed to predict how we, at least speaking of the UK, would react when the waves of the virus waxed and waned as well:

The disease stiffened and carried off three or four patients who were expected to recover. These were the unfortunates of the plague, those whom it killed when hope was high

It somehow captured the nostalgic yearning for high-definition videos of cities and public transport; one character even visits the completely deserted railway station in Oman simply to read the timetables on the wall.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy John le Carr There's absolutely none of the Mad Men glamour of James Bond in John le Carr 's icy world of Cold War spies:

Small, podgy, and at best middle-aged, Smiley was by appearance one of London's meek who do not inherit the earth. His legs were short, his gait anything but agile, his dress costly, ill-fitting, and extremely wet.

Almost a direct rebuttal to Ian Fleming's 007, Tinker, Tailor has broken-down cars, bad clothes, women with their own internal and external lives (!), pathetically primitive gadgets, and (contra Mad Men) hangovers that significantly longer than ten minutes. In fact, the main aspect that the mostly excellent 2011 film adaption doesn't really capture is the smoggy and run-down nature of 1970s London this is not your proto-Cool Britannia of Austin Powers or GTA:1969, the city is truly 'gritty' in the sense there is a thin film of dirt and grime on every surface imaginable. Another angle that the film cannot capture well is just how purposefully the novel does not mention the United States. Despite the US obviously being the dominant power, the British vacillate between pretending it doesn't exist or implying its irrelevance to the matter at hand. This is no mistake on Le Carr 's part, as careful readers are rewarded by finding this denial of US hegemony in metaphor throughout --pace Ian Fleming, there is no obvious Felix Leiter to loudly throw money at the problem or a Sheriff Pepper to serve as cartoon racist for the Brits to feel superior about. By contrast, I recall that a clever allusion to "dusty teabags" is subtly mirrored a few paragraphs later with a reference to the installation of a coffee machine in the office, likely symbolic of the omnipresent and unavoidable influence of America. (The officer class convince themselves that coffee is a European import.) Indeed, Le Carr communicates a feeling of being surrounded on all sides by the peeling wallpaper of Empire. Oftentimes, the writing style matches the graceless and inelegance of the world it depicts. The sentences are dense and you find your brain performing a fair amount of mid-flight sentence reconstruction, reparsing clauses, commas and conjunctions to interpret Le Carr 's intended meaning. In fact, in his eulogy-cum-analysis of Le Carr 's writing style, William Boyd, himself a ventrioquilist of Ian Fleming, named this intentional technique 'staccato'. Like the musical term, I suspect the effect of this literary staccato is as much about the impact it makes on a sentence as the imperceptible space it generates after it. Lastly, the large cast in this sprawling novel is completely believable, all the way from the Russian spymaster Karla to minor schoolboy Roach the latter possibly a stand-in for Le Carr himself. I got through the 500-odd pages in just a few days, somehow managing to hold the almost-absurdly complicated plot in my head. This is one of those classic books of the genre that made me wonder why I had not got around to it before.

The Nickel Boys Colson Whitehead According to the judges who awarded it the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The Nickel Boys is "a devastating exploration of abuse at a reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida" that serves as a "powerful tale of human perseverance, dignity and redemption". But whilst there is plenty of this perseverance and dignity on display, I found little redemption in this deeply cynical novel. It could almost be read as a follow-up book to Whitehead's popular The Underground Railroad, which itself won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017. Indeed, each book focuses on a young protagonist who might be euphemistically referred to as 'downtrodden'. But The Nickel Boys is not only far darker in tone, it feels much closer and more connected to us today. Perhaps this is unsurprising, given that it is based on the story of the Dozier School in northern Florida which operated for over a century before its long history of institutional abuse and racism was exposed a 2012 investigation. Nevertheless, if you liked the social commentary in The Underground Railroad, then there is much more of that in The Nickel Boys:

Perhaps his life might have veered elsewhere if the US government had opened the country to colored advancement like they opened the army. But it was one thing to allow someone to kill for you and another to let him live next door.

Sardonic aper us of this kind are pretty relentless throughout the book, but it never tips its hand too far into on nihilism, especially when some of the visual metaphors are often first-rate: "An American flag sighed on a pole" is one I can easily recall from memory. In general though, The Nickel Boys is not only more world-weary in tenor than his previous novel, the United States it describes seems almost too beaten down to have the energy conjure up the Swiftian magical realism that prevented The Underground Railroad from being overly lachrymose. Indeed, even we Whitehead transports us a present-day New York City, we can't indulge in another kind of fantasy, the one where America has solved its problems:

The Daily News review described the [Manhattan restaurant] as nouveau Southern, "down-home plates with a twist." What was the twist that it was soul food made by white people?

It might be overly reductionist to connect Whitehead's tonal downshift with the racial justice movements of the past few years, but whatever the reason, we've ended up with a hard-hitting, crushing and frankly excellent book.

True Grit & No Country for Old Men Charles Portis & Cormac McCarthy It's one of the most tedious cliches to claim the book is better than the film, but these two books are of such high quality that even the Coen Brothers at their best cannot transcend them. I'm grouping these books together here though, not because their respective adaptations will exemplify some of the best cinema of the 21st century, but because of their superb treatment of language. Take the use of dialogue. Cormac McCarthy famously does not use any punctuation "I believe in periods, in capitals, in the occasional comma, and that's it" but the conversations in No Country for Old Men together feel familiar and commonplace, despite being relayed through this unconventional technique. In lesser hands, McCarthy's written-out Texan drawl would be the novelistic equivalent of white rap or Jar Jar Binks, but not only is the effect entirely gripping, it helps you to believe you are physically present in the many intimate and domestic conversations that hold this book together. Perhaps the cinematic familiarity helps, as you can almost hear Tommy Lee Jones' voice as Sheriff Bell from the opening page to the last. Charles Portis' True Grit excels in its dialogue too, but in this book it is not so much in how it flows (although that is delightful in its own way) but in how forthright and sardonic Maddie Ross is:

"Earlier tonight I gave some thought to stealing a kiss from you, though you are very young, and sick and unattractive to boot, but now I am of a mind to give you five or six good licks with my belt." "One would be as unpleasant as the other."

Perhaps this should be unsurprising. Maddie, a fourteen-year-old girl from Yell County, Arkansas, can barely fire her father's heavy pistol, so she can only has words to wield as her weapon. Anyway, it's not just me who treasures this book. In her encomium that presages most modern editions, Donna Tartt of The Secret History fame traces the novels origins through Huckleberry Finn, praising its elegance and economy: "The plot of True Grit is uncomplicated and as pure in its way as one of the Canterbury Tales". I've read any Chaucer, but I am inclined to agree. Tartt also recalls that True Grit vanished almost entirely from the public eye after the release of John Wayne's flimsy cinematic vehicle in 1969 this earlier film was, Tartt believes, "good enough, but doesn't do the book justice". As it happens, reading a book with its big screen adaptation as a chaser has been a minor theme of my 2020, including P. D. James' The Children of Men, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train, James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia, John Green's The Fault in Our Stars, John le Carr 's Tinker, Tailor Soldier, Spy and even a staged production of Charles Dicken's A Christmas Carol streamed from The Old Vic. For an autodidact with no academic background in literature or cinema, I've been finding this an effective and enjoyable means of getting closer to these fine books and films it is precisely where they deviate (or perhaps where they are deficient) that offers a means by which one can see how they were constructed. I've also found that adaptations can also tell you a lot about the culture in which they were made: take the 'straightwashing' in the film version of Strangers on a Train (1951) compared to the original novel, for example. It is certainly true that adaptions rarely (as Tartt put it) "do the book justice", but she might be also right to alight on a legal metaphor, for as the saying goes, to judge a movie in comparison to the book is to do both a disservice.

The Glass Hotel Emily St. John Mandel In The Glass Hotel, Mandel somehow pulls off the impossible; writing a loose roman- -clef on Bernie Madoff, a Ponzi scheme and the ephemeral nature of finance capital that is tranquil and shimmeringly beautiful. Indeed, don't get the wrong idea about the subject matter; this is no over over-caffeinated The Big Short, as The Glass Hotel is less about a Madoff or coked-up financebros but the fragile unreality of the late 2010s, a time which was, as we indeed discovered in 2020, one event away from almost shattering completely. Mandel's prose has that translucent, phantom quality to it where the chapters slip through your fingers when you try to grasp at them, and the plot is like a ghost ship that that slips silently, like the Mary Celeste, onto the Canadian water next to which the eponymous 'Glass Hotel' resides. Indeed, not unlike The Overlook Hotel, the novel so overflows with symbolism so that even the title needs to evoke the idea of impermanence permanently living in a hotel might serve as a house, but it won't provide a home. It's risky to generalise about such things post-2016, but the whole story sits in that the infinitesimally small distance between perception and reality, a self-constructed culture that is not so much 'post truth' but between them. There's something to consider in almost every character too. Take the stand-in for Bernie Madoff: no caricature of Wall Street out of a 1920s political cartoon or Brechtian satire, Jonathan Alkaitis has none of the oleaginous sleaze of a Dominic Strauss-Kahn, the cold sociopathy of a Marcus Halberstam nor the well-exercised sinuses of, say, Jordan Belford. Alkaitis is dare I say it? eminently likeable, and the book is all the better for it. Even the C-level characters have something to say: Enrico, trivially escaping from the regulators (who are pathetically late to the fraud without Mandel ever telling us explicitly), is daydreaming about the girlfriend he abandoned in New York: "He wished he'd realised he loved her before he left". What was in his previous life that prevented him from doing so? Perhaps he was never in love at all, or is love itself just as transient as the imaginary money in all those bank accounts? Maybe he fell in love just as he crossed safely into Mexico? When, precisely, do we fall in love anyway? I went on to read Mandel's Last Night in Montreal, an early work where you can feel her reaching for that other-worldly quality that she so masterfully achieves in The Glass Hotel. Her f ted Station Eleven is on my must-read list for 2021. "What is truth?" asked Pontius Pilate. Not even Mandel cannot give us the answer, but this will certainly do for now.

Running the Light Sam Tallent Although it trades in all of the clich s and stereotypes of the stand-up comedian (the triumvirate of drink, drugs and divorce), Sam Tallent's debut novel depicts an extremely convincing fictional account of a touring road comic. The comedian Doug Stanhope (who himself released a fairly decent No Encore for the Donkey memoir in 2020) hyped Sam's book relentlessly on his podcast during lockdown... and justifiably so. I ripped through Running the Light in a few short hours, the only disappointment being that I can't seem to find videos online of Sam that come anywhere close to match up to his writing style. If you liked the rollercoaster energy of Paul Beatty's The Sellout, the cynicism of George Carlin and the car-crash invertibility of final season Breaking Bad, check this great book out.

Non-fiction Inside Story Martin Amis This was my first introduction to Martin Amis's work after hearing that his "novelised autobiography" contained a fair amount about Christopher Hitchens, an author with whom I had a one of those rather clich d parasocial relationship with in the early days of YouTube. (Hey, it could have been much worse.) Amis calls his book a "novelised autobiography", and just as much has been made of its quasi-fictional nature as the many diversions into didactic writing advice that betwixt each chapter: "Not content with being a novel, this book also wants to tell you how to write novels", complained Tim Adams in The Guardian. I suspect that reviewers who grew up with Martin since his debut book in 1973 rolled their eyes at yet another demonstration of his manifest cleverness, but as my first exposure to Amis's gift of observation, I confess that I was thought it was actually kinda clever. Try, for example, "it remains a maddening truth that both sexual success and sexual failure are steeply self-perpetuating" or "a hospital gym is a contradiction like a young Conservative", etc. Then again, perhaps I was experiencing a form of nostalgia for a pre-Gamergate YouTube, when everything in the world was a lot simpler... or at least things could be solved by articulate gentlemen who honed their art of rhetoric at the Oxford Union. I went on to read Martin's first novel, The Rachel Papers (is it 'arrogance' if you are, indeed, that confident?), as well as his 1997 Night Train. I plan to read more of him in the future.

The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters: Volume 1 & Volume 2 & Volume 3 & Volume 4 George Orwell These deceptively bulky four volumes contain all of George Orwell's essays, reviews and correspondence, from his teenage letters sent to local newspapers to notes to his literary executor on his deathbed in 1950. Reading this was part of a larger, multi-year project of mine to cover the entirety of his output. By including this here, however, I'm not recommending that you read everything that came out of Orwell's typewriter. The letters to friends and publishers will only be interesting to biographers or hardcore fans (although I would recommend Dorian Lynskey's The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell's 1984 first). Furthermore, many of his book reviews will be of little interest today. Still, some insights can be gleaned; if there is any inconsistency in this huge corpus is that his best work is almost 'too' good and too impactful, making his merely-average writing appear like hackwork. There are some gems that don't make the usual essay collections too, and some of Orwell's most astute social commentary came out of series of articles he wrote for the left-leaning newspaper Tribune, related in many ways to the US Jacobin. You can also see some of his most famous ideas start to take shape years if not decades before they appear in his novels in these prototype blog posts. I also read Dennis Glover's novelised account of the writing of Nineteen-Eighty Four called The Last Man in Europe, and I plan to re-read some of Orwell's earlier novels during 2021 too, including A Clergyman's Daughter and his 'antebellum' Coming Up for Air that he wrote just before the Second World War; his most under-rated novel in my estimation. As it happens, and with the exception of the US and Spain, copyright in the works published in his lifetime ends on 1st January 2021. Make of that what you will.

Capitalist Realism & Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class Mark Fisher & Owen Jones These two books are not natural companions to one another and there is likely much that Jones and Fisher would vehemently disagree on, but I am pairing these books together here because they represent the best of the 'political' books I read in 2020. Mark Fisher was a dedicated leftist whose first book, Capitalist Realism, marked an important contribution to political philosophy in the UK. However, since his suicide in early 2017, the currency of his writing has markedly risen, and Fisher is now frequently referenced due to his belief that the prevalence of mental health conditions in modern life is a side-effect of various material conditions, rather than a natural or unalterable fact "like weather". (Of course, our 'weather' is being increasingly determined by a combination of politics, economics and petrochemistry than pure randomness.) Still, Fisher wrote on all manner of topics, from the 2012 London Olympics and "weird and eerie" electronic music that yearns for a lost future that will never arrive, possibly prefiguring or influencing the Fallout video game series. Saying that, I suspect Fisher will resonate better with a UK audience more than one across the Atlantic, not necessarily because he was minded to write about the parochial politics and culture of Britain, but because his writing often carries some exasperation at the suppression of class in favour of identity-oriented politics, a viewpoint not entirely prevalent in the United States outside of, say, Tour F. Reed or the late Michael Brooks. (Indeed, Fisher is likely best known in the US as the author of his controversial 2013 essay, Exiting the Vampire Castle, but that does not figure greatly in this book). Regardless, Capitalist Realism is an insightful, damning and deeply unoptimistic book, best enjoyed in the warm sunshine I found it an ironic compliment that I had quoted so many paragraphs that my Kindle's copy protection routines prevented me from clipping any further. Owen Jones needs no introduction to anyone who regularly reads a British newspaper, especially since 2015 where he unofficially served as a proxy and punching bag for expressing frustrations with the then-Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn. However, as the subtitle of Jones' 2012 book suggests, Chavs attempts to reveal the "demonisation of the working class" in post-financial crisis Britain. Indeed, the timing of the book is central to Jones' analysis, specifically that the stereotype of the "chav" is used by government and the media as a convenient figleaf to avoid meaningful engagement with economic and social problems on an austerity ridden island. (I'm not quite sure what the US equivalent to 'chav' might be. Perhaps Florida Man without the implications of mental health.) Anyway, Jones certainly has a point. From Vicky Pollard to the attacks on Jade Goody, there is an ignorance and prejudice at the heart of the 'chav' backlash, and that would be bad enough even if it was not being co-opted or criminalised for ideological ends. Elsewhere in political science, I also caught Michael Brooks' Against the Web and David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs, although they are not quite methodical enough to recommend here. However, Graeber's award-winning Debt: The First 5000 Years will be read in 2021. Matt Taibbi's Hate Inc: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another is worth a brief mention here though, but its sprawling nature felt very much like I was reading a set of Substack articles loosely edited together. And, indeed, I was.

The Golden Thread: The Story of Writing Ewan Clayton A recommendation from a dear friend, Ewan Clayton's The Golden Thread is a journey through the long history of the writing from the Dawn of Man to present day. Whether you are a linguist, a graphic designer, a visual artist, a typographer, an archaeologist or 'just' a reader, there is probably something in here for you. I was already dipping my quill into calligraphy this year so I suspect I would have liked this book in any case, but highlights would definitely include the changing role of writing due to the influence of textual forms in the workplace as well as digression on ergonomic desks employed by monks and scribes in the Middle Ages. A lot of books by otherwise-sensible authors overstretch themselves when they write about computers or other technology from the Information Age, at best resulting in bizarre non-sequiturs and dangerously Panglossian viewpoints at worst. But Clayton surprised me by writing extremely cogently and accurate on the role of text in this new and unpredictable era. After finishing it I realised why for a number of years, Clayton was a consultant for the legendary Xerox PARC where he worked in a group focusing on documents and contemporary communications whilst his colleagues were busy inventing the graphical user interface, laser printing, text editors and the computer mouse.

New Dark Age & Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life James Bridle & Adam Greenfield I struggled to describe these two books to friends, so I doubt I will suddenly do a better job here. Allow me to quote from Will Self's review of James Bridle's New Dark Age in the Guardian:

We're accustomed to worrying about AI systems being built that will either "go rogue" and attack us, or succeed us in a bizarre evolution of, um, evolution what we didn't reckon on is the sheer inscrutability of these manufactured minds. And minds is not a misnomer. How else should we think about the neural network Google has built so its translator can model the interrelation of all words in all languages, in a kind of three-dimensional "semantic space"?

New Dark Age also turns its attention to the weird, algorithmically-derived products offered for sale on Amazon as well as the disturbing and abusive videos that are automatically uploaded by bots to YouTube. It should, by rights, be a mess of disparate ideas and concerns, but Bridle has a flair for introducing topics which reveals he comes to computer science from another discipline altogether; indeed, on a four-part series he made for Radio 4, he's primarily referred to as "an artist". Whilst New Dark Age has rather abstract section topics, Adam Greenfield's Radical Technologies is a rather different book altogether. Each chapter dissects one of the so-called 'radical' technologies that condition the choices available to us, asking how do they work, what challenges do they present to us and who ultimately benefits from their adoption. Greenfield takes his scalpel to smartphones, machine learning, cryptocurrencies, artificial intelligence, etc., and I don't think it would be unfair to say that starts and ends with a cynical point of view. He is no reactionary Luddite, though, and this is both informed and extremely well-explained, and it also lacks the lazy, affected and Private Eye-like cynicism of, say, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain. The books aren't a natural pair, for Bridle's writing contains quite a bit of air in places, ironically mimics the very 'clouds' he inveighs against. Greenfield's book, by contrast, as little air and much lower pH value. Still, it was more than refreshing to read two technology books that do not limit themselves to platitudinal booleans, be those dangerously naive (e.g. Kevin Kelly's The Inevitable) or relentlessly nihilistic (Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism). Sure, they are both anti-technology screeds, but they tend to make arguments about systems of power rather than specific companies and avoid being too anti-'Big Tech' through a narrower, Silicon Valley obsessed lens for that (dipping into some other 2020 reading of mine) I might suggest Wendy Liu's Abolish Silicon Valley or Scott Galloway's The Four. Still, both books are superlatively written. In fact, Adam Greenfield has some of the best non-fiction writing around, both in terms of how he can explain complicated concepts (particularly the smart contract mechanism of the Ethereum cryptocurrency) as well as in the extremely finely-crafted sentences I often felt that the writing style almost had no need to be that poetic, and I particularly enjoyed his fictional scenarios at the end of the book.

The Algebra of Happiness & Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life Scott Galloway & Nir Eyal A cocktail of insight, informality and abrasiveness makes NYU Professor Scott Galloway uncannily appealing to guys around my age. Although Galloway definitely has his own wisdom and experience, similar to Joe Rogan I suspect that a crucial part of Galloway's appeal is that you feel you are learning right alongside him. Thankfully, 'Prof G' is far less err problematic than Rogan (Galloway is more of a well-meaning, spirited centrist), although he, too, has some pretty awful takes at time. This is a shame, because removed from the whirlwind of social media he can be really quite considered, such as in this long-form interview with Stephanie Ruhle. In fact, it is this kind of sentiment that he captured in his 2019 Algebra of Happiness. When I look over my highlighted sections, it's clear that it's rather schmaltzy out of context ("Things you hate become just inconveniences in the presence of people you love..."), but his one-two punch of cynicism and saccharine ("Ask somebody who purchased a home in 2007 if their 'American Dream' came true...") is weirdly effective, especially when he uses his own family experiences as part of his story:

A better proxy for your life isn't your first home, but your last. Where you draw your last breath is more meaningful, as it's a reflection of your success and, more important, the number of people who care about your well-being. Your first house signals the meaningful your future and possibility. Your last home signals the profound the people who love you. Where you die, and who is around you at the end, is a strong signal of your success or failure in life.

Nir Eyal's Indistractable, however, is a totally different kind of 'self-help' book. The important background story is that Eyal was the author of the widely-read Hooked which turned into a secular Bible of so-called 'addictive design'. (If you've ever been cornered by a techbro wielding a Wikipedia-thin knowledge of B. F. Skinner's behaviourist psychology and how it can get you to click 'Like' more often, it ultimately came from Hooked.) However, Eyal's latest effort is actually an extended mea culpa for his previous sin and he offers both high and low-level palliative advice on how to avoid falling for the tricks he so studiously espoused before. I suppose we should be thankful to capitalism for selling both cause and cure. Speaking of markets, there appears to be a growing appetite for books in this 'anti-distraction' category, and whilst I cannot claim to have done an exhausting study of this nascent field, Indistractable argues its points well without relying on accurate-but-dry "studies show..." or, worse, Gladwellian gotchas. My main criticism, however, would be that Eyal doesn't acknowledge the limits of a self-help approach to this problem; it seems that many of the issues he outlines are an inescapable part of the alienation in modern Western society, and the only way one can really avoid distraction is to move up the income ladder or move out to a 500-acre ranch.

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

• Richard Laager (rlaager)
• Thiago Andrade Marques (andrade)
• Vincent Prat (vivi)
• Michael Robin Crusoe (crusoe)
• Jordan Justen (jljusten)
• Anuradha Weeraman (anuradha)
• Bernelle Verster (indiebio)
• Gabriel F. T. Gomes (gabriel)
• Kurt Kremitzki (kkremitzki)
• Nicolas Mora (babelouest)
• Birger Schacht (birger)
• Sudip Mukherjee (sudip)

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

• Marco Trevisan
• Dennis Braun
• Stephane Neveu
• Seunghun Han
• Alexander Johan Georg Kj ll
• Friedrich Beckmann
• Diego M. Rodriguez
• Nilesh Patra
• Hiroshi Yokota

Congratulations!

People that know me know that I do whatever I can in order to avoid watching videos online if there's any other way to get to the content. It may be that I'm too old-fashioned, or that I have low attention and prefer to use a media where I can quickly scroll up and down a paragraph, or that I feel the time between bits of content is just a useless transition or whatever... But I bit. And I loved it. A couple of days ago, OS News featured a post titled From the AT&T Archives: The UNIX Operating System. It links to a couple of videos in AT&T's Youtube channel. I watched
AT&T Archives: The UNIX Operating System, an amazing historic evidence: A 27 minute long documentary produced in 1981 covering... What is Unix. Why Unix is so unique, useful and friendly. What's the big deal about it? That this document shows first-hand that we are not repeating myths we came up with along the way: The same principles of process composition, of simplicity and robustness, but spoken directly by many core actors of the era Brian Kernighan (who drove a great deal of the technical explanation), Alfred Aho, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson... And several more I didn't actually catch the names of. Of course, the video includes casual shots of life at AT&T, including lots of terminals (even some of which are quite similar to the first ones I used here in Mexico, of course), then-amazing color animation videos showing the state of the art of computer video 35 years ago... A delightful way to lose half an hour of productivity. And a bit of material that will surely find its way into my classes for some future semester :) [ps] Yes, I don't watch videos in Youtube. I don't want to enable its dirty Javascript. So, of course, I use the great Youtube-dl tool. I cannot share the video file itself here due to Youtube's service terms, but Youtube-dl is legal and free.

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday January 29 and Saturday February 4 2017: Media coverage Dennis Gilmore and Holger Levsen presented "Reproducible Builds and Fedora" (Video, Slides) at Devconf.cz on February 27th 2017. On February 1st, stretch/armhf reached 90% reproducible packages in our test framework, so that now all four tested architectures are 90% reproducible in stretch. Yay! For armhf this means 22472 reproducible source packages (in main); for amd64, arm64 and i386 these figures are 23363, 23062 and 22607 respectively. Chris Lamb appeared on the Changelog podcast to talk about reproducible builds: Holger Levsen pitched Reproducible Builds and our need for a logo in the "Open Source Design" room at FOSDEM 2017 (Video, 09:36 - 12:00). Upcoming Events

• The Reproducible Build Zoo will be presented by Vagrant Cascadian at the Embedded Linux Conference in Portland, Oregon, February 22nd.
• Introduction to Reproducible Builds will be presented by Vagrant Cascadian at Scale15x in Pasadena, California, March 5th.
• Verifying Software Freedom with Reproducible Builds will be presented by Vagrant Cascadian at Libreplanet2017 in Boston, March 25th-26th.

Reproducible work in other projects We learned that the "slightly more secure" Heads firmware (a Coreboot payload) is now reproducibly built regardless of host system or build directory. A picture says more than a thousand words: Docker started preliminary work on making image builds reproducible. Toolchain development and fixes Ximin Luo continued to write code and test cases for the BUILD_PATH_PREFIX_MAP environment variable. He also did extensive research on cross-platform and cross-language issues with enviroment variables, filesystem paths, and character encodings, and started preparing a draft specification document to describe all of this. Chris Lamb asked CPython to implement an environment variable PYTHONREVERSEDICTKEYORDER to add an an option to reverse iteration order of items in a dict. However this was rejected because they are planning to formally fix this order in the next language version. Bernhard Wiedemann and Florian Festi added support for our SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable, to the RPM Package Manager. James McCoy uploaded devscripts 2.17.1 with a change from Guillem Jover for dscverify(1), adding support for .buildinfo files. (Closes: #852801) Piotr O arowski uploaded dh-python 2.20170125 with a change from Chris Lamb for a patch to fix #835805. Chris Lamb added documentation to diffoscope, strip-nondeterminism, disorderfs, reprotest and trydiffoscope about uploading signed tarballs when releasing. He also added a link to these on our website's tools page. Packages reviewed and bugs filed Bugs filed:

• "Z. Ren":
  • #854293 filed against manpages-tr.
  • #854294 filed against regina-rexx.
• Chris Lamb:
  • #853039 filed against fontypython.
  • #853912 filed against python-testfixtures, merged upstream as PR #56.
  • #854111 filed against aprx.
  • #854112 filed against pnmixer.
• Reiner Herrmann:
  • #854145 filed against daemontools.
  • #854146 filed against diploma.

Reviews of unreproducible packages 83 package reviews have been added, 86 have been updated and 276 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 2 issue types have been updated:

• captures_build_path_via_assert
• randomness_in_documentation_generated_by_epydoc

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

• Chris Lamb (6)

diffoscope development Work on the next version (71) continued in git this week:

• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Override a lintian warning.
• Chris Lamb:
  • Update and consolidate documentation
  • Many test additions and improvements
  • Various code quality and software architecture improvements
• anthraxx:
  • Update arch package, cdrkit -> cdrtools.

reproducible-website development Daniel Shahaf added more notes on our "How to chair a meeting" document. tests.reproducible-builds.org Holger unblacklisted pspp and tiledarray. If you think further packages should also be unblacklisted (possibly only on some architectures), please tell us. Misc. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Holger Levsen and Chris Lamb & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

So last weekend I attended Devconf.cz in Brno and together with Dennis Gilmore gave a talk about Reproducible Builds and Fedora (Slides) which was fun and - I think - pretty well received. Then on the following Tuesday, so three days ago, after using Debian as the primary OS on my primary computer for more than two decades, I finally made the long anticipated switch and I must say, so far I'm really happy with my new environment, even though I'm not yet again using a tiled window manager (but instead Xfce), cannot yet do all the things I could do before and even have to reconfigure a VM twice and restart another to get back wireless network after suspend and resume So what have I done? Nothing too dramatic: I've switched to Qubes OS and now I'm running Debian jessie and stretch and Fedora and Whonix on my primary computer, just not as my primary OS IOW: hardware is basically software and while I want the red pill, who knows what's really inside the box? If you have no idea what I'm talking about, this intro about Qubes OS might be helpful. Or you dive directly into this six year old post, where Joanna Rutkowska described how she partitioned her digital life using Qubes. I'm not sure where this journey will lead me to, but I'm confident this is the right direction. And in case you wondered, I'll keep working on Debian, as far as I know now

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday January 22 and Saturday January 28 2017: Media coverage

• The Reproducible Build Zoo was presented by Vagrant Cascadian at the Embedded Linux Conference in Portland, Oregon on February 22nd.
• Dennis Gilmore and Holger Levsen presented "Reproducible Builds and Fedora" at Devconf.cz on February 27th.

Upcoming Events

• Introduction to Reproducible Builds will be presented by Vagrant Cascadian at Scale15x in Pasadena, California, March 5th.
• "Verifying Software Freedom with Reproducible Builds" will be presented by Vagrant Cascadian at Libreplanet2017 in Boston, March 25th-26th.

Reproducible work in other projects John Gilmore wrote an interesting mail about how Cygnus.com worked on reproducible builds in the early 1990s. It's eye opening to see how the dealt with basically the very same problems we're dealing with today, how they solved them and then to realize that most of this has been forgotten and bit-rotted in the last 20 years. How will we prevent history repeating itself here? Toolchain development and fixes Christoph Biedl wrote a mail describing an interesting problem in to the way binNMUs are done in Debian. Guillem Jover made a number of changes to dpkg that affect the Reproducible Builds effort within Debian:

• Always set SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in dpkg-buildpackage and dpkg-source. Use the current date if the changelog does not have one. Closes: #849081
• Add initial support for DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS to dpkg-genbuildinfo. This will make it possible to enable or disable specific features that should be recorded in the .buildinfo file. For now only all and path are supported. Closes: #848705
• Include .buildinfo files also for source-only uploads in dpkg-genchanges. Closes: #846164
• Add support for signed .buildinfo files to dpkg-buildpackage. Add new -ui and --unsigned-buildinfo options. Closes: #843925
• Make dpkg-buildpackage --unsigned-changes not sign .buildinfo either. This breaks the expectations of users and tools, because there was no way previously to request no signing at all. Closes: #852822

Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed Chris Lamb:

• #852482 filed against flask-limiter.
• #853039 filed against fontypython.

Dhole:

• #852289 filed against python-passlib.

Reviews of unreproducible packages 17 package reviews have been added, 4 have been updated and 6 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 2 issue types have been added:

• python_versioneer_uses_parentdir
• captures_kernel_version_via_CMAKE_SYSTEM

1 issue type has been removed:

• ftbfs_due_to_jenkins_semaphore_setup

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

• Chris Lamb (6)
• Holger Levsen (1)

diffoscope development

• diffoscope 70 was uploaded to unstable by Mattia Rizzolo. It included contributions from:
• Chris Lamb:
  • tests.presenters: Prevent FTBFS by loading fixtures as UTF-8 in case surrounding terminal is not Unicode-aware. (Closes: #852926)
  • comparators: Tidy re_tests with list comprehensions and implicit "x, y" unpacking over indexing; lambda/filter is not idiomatic Python 3.
  • tests: Increase coverage by adding "# noqa" in relevant parts.
  • tests: Test that no arguments (beyond the filenames) prints the text output.
  • tests: Test --text-color output format.
  • tests: Add a test comparing two empty directories.
  • tests: Don't warn about coverage lines that raise NotImplementedError.
• anthraxx:
  • tools: switch Arch Linux dependency for pedump to mono
• Ximin Luo:
  • Fix lazy expression, filter is lazy in Python 3
  • Fix bug introduced in commit 36d1c964 that only worked "accidentally"

reprotest development

• reprotest 0.6 was uploaded to unstable by Holger Levsen. It included contributions:
• Ximin Luo:
  • Test the extra variations we added recently and ensure they don't get missed in the future
  • Better logging messages that actually get controlled by the verbosity flag
  • Add a man page using rst2man and help2man
  • Add a --config-file option and fix the loading of configs
  • Fix the reading of config options
  • Fix a bug where the sha256sum of a reproduction won't be displayed if --store-dir is not given

buildinfo.debian.net development

• Chris Lamb:
  • Show SHA256 checksums on larger displays
  • Move default storage to S3.
  • Store files directly onto S3.
  • Add tool to move data to S3.
  • Load data from S3 if we don't have it locally.

tests.reproducible-builds.org

• h01ger experimented with reusing SSH control connections but stopped that experiment when we ran into more network issues than before. To be continued, as we're having 10k SSH connections per day and saving 2 seconds each time would sum up, especially on the Jenkins host itself.
• h01ger made the scheduler run 3 times a day, 2.5h after dinstall runs, instead of every 3h as before.
• h01ger restructured the https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/index_breakages.html and improved the corresponding Jenins job.
• h01ger also unblacklisted xmds2, sofia-sip and ck - if you think other packages should be unblacklisted (maybe only on some architectures), please do tell us.

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

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday January 15 and Saturday January 21 2017: Media Coverage

• Valerie Young presented Reproducible Builds for a Better Future (video) at linux.conf.au 2017.
• Chris Lamb presented Reproducible Builds: Two years in the trenches (video) at linux.conf.au 2017.

Upcoming Events

• The Reproducible Build Zoo will be presented by Vagrant Cascadian at the Embedded Linux Conference in Portland, Oregon, February 22nd.
• Dennis Gilmore and Holger Levsen will present on "Reproducible Builds and Fedora" at Devconf.cz on February 27th.
• Introduction to Reproducible Builds will be presented by Vagrant Cascadian at Scale15x in Pasadena, California, March 5th.
• Verifying Software Freedom with Reproducible Builds will be presented by Vagrant Cascadian at Libreplanet2017 in Boston, March 25th-26th.

Toolchain development and fixes Ximin Luo continued work on data formats, code, and test cases for SOURCE_PREFIX_MAP. He also continued to talk with the rustc team on the topic. Chris Lamb submitted a patch to implement SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH for wordwarvi, a game which gave extra points to people who built it from source within one hour. This fixes Debian #786593. Launchpad bug 1657704 was filed for them to start accepting buildinfo files. Bugs filed

• Chris Lamb:
  • #851809 filed against mono.
• Daniel Shahaf:
  • #851764 filed against hhsuite.

Reviews of unreproducible packages 10 package reviews have been added, 149 have been updated and 153 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 2 issue types have been updated:

• ftbfs_due_to_jenkins_semaphore_setup
• clilibs_line_order

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

• Chris Lamb (3)
• Ond ej Kobli ek (1)

diffoscope development diffoscope 69 was uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb. It included contributions from:

• Maria Glukhova:
  • Bug fixes: #850055, #850501.
  • Improve comparison of APK files: #850502.
  • Add comparison of image metadata: #849395.
• Chris Lamb:
  • Many bug fixes: #849411, #850485, #850807, #850850, #851588.
  • Add comparison of ICO files: #850730.
  • Optimisations: disable profiling unless needed, and pre-compile regexes.
  • Many code quality improvements.
• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Deduplicate code for recognising file types based on RE_FILE_TYPE and RE_FILE_EXTENSION.
  • Improve code quality in tests.

Further development continued in Git, and will be released as version 70 next week:

• Chris Lamb:
  • Add tests for --html-dir output and improve code quality elsewhere in tests.
  • Add markdown and reStructuredText output, as well as tests for these.
  • Improve software architecture of presenters.
  • Fix error-checking in the Haskell comparator.
• James Clarke:
  • Haskell comparator: properly extract version from interface files.
• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Improve some documentation.
• Brett Smith:
  • Improve documentation including --help output.

reproducible-builds.org website development

• Brett Smith:
  • berlin2016: List Conservancy consistently as a participant.
• Chris Lamb:
  • Add Valerie's talk to resources page.
• Daniel Shahaf:
  • Improved the "How to chair a meeting" section.

tests.reproducible-builds.org

• Holger added arm64 to https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/index_variations.html
• Mattia improved our process for building the performance page so that stats for new architectures are computed correctly without manual intervention.
• Holger enhanced the build node maintenance scripts to correctly detect if /dev/shm is mounted incorrectly (due to #851427) and deployed an /etc/rc.local startup script to all systems which works around it. As a result, jenkins_semaphore_setup_issue should be obsolete.
• Mattia improved the diskspace monitoring visible at our munin page for the 44 nodes we're currently running.
• Holger added 6GB more RAM to jenkins.debian.net, for a total of 64GB RAM, to better cope with the new jobs due to arm64. As usual, thanks to profitbricks.com for the hardware resources enabling this work.

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

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday January 8 and Saturday January 14 2017: Upcoming Events

• The Reproducible Build Zoo will be presented by Vagrant Cascadian at the Embedded Linux Conference in Portland, Oregon, February 22nd
• Dennis Gilmore and Holger Levsen will present about "Reproducible Builds and Fedora" at Devconf.cz on February, 27th.
• Introduction to Reproducible Builds will be presented by Vagrant Cascadian at Scale15x in Pasadena, California, March 5th

Reproducible work in other projects Reproducible Builds have been mentioned in the FSF high-priority project list. The F-Droid Verification Server has been launched. It rebuilds apps from source that were built by f-droid.org and checks that the results match. Bernhard M. Wiedemann did some more work on reproducibility for openSUSE. Bootstrappable.org (unfortunately no HTTPS yet) was launched after the initial work was started at our recent summit in Berlin. This is another topic related to reproducible builds and both will be needed in order to perform "Diverse Double Compilation" in practice in the future. Toolchain development and fixes Ximin Luo researched data formats for SOURCE_PREFIX_MAP and explored different options for encoding a map data structure in a single environment variable. He also continued to talk with the rustc team on the topic. Daniel Shahaf filed #851225 ('udd: patches: index by DEP-3 "Forwarded" status') to make it easier to track our patches. Chris Lamb forwarded #849972 upstream to yard, a Ruby documentation generator. Upstream has fixed the issue as of release 0.9.6. Alexander Couzens (lynxis) has made mksquashfs reproducible and is looking for testers. It compiles on BSD systems such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. Bugs filed Chris Lamb:

• #850683 filed against gerbv.

Lucas Nussbaum:

• #850973 filed against shogun.

Nicola Corna:

• #851190 filed against gerbv.

Reviews of unreproducible packages 13 package reviews have been added and 13 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 1 issue type has been added:

• help2man_puts_traceback_in_generated_man_page

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

• Chris Lamb (3)
• Lucas Nussbaum (11)
• Nicola Corna (1)

diffoscope development Many bugs were opened in diffoscope during the past few weeks, which probably is a good sign as it shows that diffoscope is much more widely used than a year ago. We have been working hard to squash many of them in time for Debian stable, though we will see how that goes in the end

• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Code quality and style improvements.
• Maria Glukhova:
  • Add image metadata comparison.
  • Zipinfo included in APK files comparison. (Closes: #850502)
  • Remove archive name from apktool.yml and rename it. (Closes: #850501)
• Chris Lamb:
  • Correctly escape value of href="" elements (re. #849411)
  • Support comparing .ico files using img2txt (Closes: #850730) and fixes and extra tests in subsequent commits.
  • comparators.utils.file: Include magic file type when we know the file format but can't find file-specific details. (Closes: #850850)
  • And other code quality and style improvements.

reproducible-website development

• Daniel Shahaf:
  • Add how-to-chair-a-meeting.md.
• Holger Levsen:
  • Add links to reports by several attendees of berlin2016

tests.reproducible-builds.org

• Ximin Luo and Holger Levsen worked on stricter tests to check that /dev/shm and /run/shm are both mounted with the correct permissions. Some of our build machines currently still fail this test, and the problem is probably the root cause of the FTBFS of some packages (which fails with issues regarding sem_open). The proper fix is still being discussed in #851427.
• Valerie Young worked on creating and linking autogenerated schema documentation for our database used to store the results.
• Holger Levsen added a graph with diffoscope crashes and timeouts.
• Holger also further improved the daily mail notifications about problems.

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

I have just released version 1.14 of Obnam, my backup program. See the website at http://obnam.org for details on what the program does. The new version is available from git (see http://git.liw.fi) and as Debian packages from http://code.liw.fi/debian, and uploaded to Debian, and soon in unstable. The NEWS file extract below gives the highlights of what's new in this version. Version 1.14, released 2015-08-14 Bug fixes:

• Since 1.9, Obnam has had trouble with sftp URLs for backup roots, particularly for URLs specifying the server's root directory. Dennis Jacobfeuerborn found the reason: the backup plugin was treating URLs as filenames. This should now be fixed.

Jebediah boarded the airplane. It was a Bombardier CRJ900 with two turbofan jet engines. Run by SPARK, a subset of Ada. He sat down in his assigned seat and listened to the purser inform him that he was free to use his phone door-to-door on all Delta Connection flights. As long as the Airplane Mode was switched on. Jebediah knew that this was why Delta owned 49% of Virgin Atlantic. On the plane ride, a woman in too much makeup asked Jebediah to get the man next to him so she could borrow his copy of the Economist. The man said she could keep it and that it was old. He had stubby little fingers. She was foreign. At Terminal 2, they passed by Kids on the Fly, an exhibit of the Chicago Children's Museum at Chicago O'Hare International Airport. A play area. Jebediah thought of Dennis. The Blue Line of the Chicago Transit Authority was disrupted by weekend construction, so they had to take a small detour through Wicker Park. Wicker Park is a neighborhood. In Chicago. Jebediah looked at Glazed & Infused Doughnuts. He wondered if they made doughnuts there. Because of the meeting, he knocked someone off a Divvy bike and pedaled it to the Loop. The Berghoff was opened in 1898 by Herman Joseph Berghoff. Once he got to the Berghoff, he got a table for seven on the west wall. He eyed the electrical outlet and groaned. He had brought 3 cigarette lighter adapters with him, but nothing to plug into an AC outlet. How would he charge his device? An older gentleman came in. And greeted him. Hello, I'm Detective Chief Inspector Detweiler. Did you bring the evidence? Said the man. Jebediah coughed and said that he had to go downstairs. He went downstairs and looked at the doors. He breathed a sigh of relief. Seeing the word washroom in print reminded him of his home state of Canada. Back at the table he opened a bag, glared angrily at a cigarette lighter adapter, and pulled out a Palm m125. Running Palm OS 4.0. He noticed a third person at the table. It was the ghost of Bob Ross. , said the ghost of Bob Ross. It was good for him to communicate telepathically with Sarah Palin. This has eight megabytes of RAM, Jebediah informed the newcomer. Bob Ross's ghost right-clicked on his face and rated him one star. Jebediah looked angrily at the AC outlet and fidgeted with two of his cigarette lighter adapters. DCI Detweiler said, I had a Handspring Visor Deluxe, and pulled out a Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 8.0 eight-inch Android-based tablet computer running the Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean operating system by Google. This also has eight megabytes of RAM, he continued. As you requested, I brought the video of your nemesis at the Robie House. Jebediah stared at the tablet. He could see a compressed video file, compressed with NetBSD compression and GNU encryption. It was on the tablet. Some bridges you just don't cross, he hissed. Meanwhile, in Gloucestershire, someone who looked suspiciously like Bobby Rainsbury opened up a MacBook Air and typed in a three-digit passcode. Across the street a wall safe slid out of the wall. And dropped onto someone's head. She closed the laptop. And went to Dumfries. Not far from the fallen safe, a group of men held a discussion. FBI: Why are we here on this junket? CIA: Where are we? DIA: We're here. JIA: This is confusing. NSA: I have to get back to that place in Germany where I don't work. ATF: We're talking about giant robots here, people. EPA: Huh? Part 2 AUD:USD 1.0645 donuts:dozen 12 Gold $1318.60 Giant robot spiders fought each other in a supermarket parking lot. Detective Seabiscuit sucked on a throat lozenge. Who are you again? he asked the toll-booth operator. I said my name is Rogery Sterling, replied the toll-booth operator. Rajry what? I said my name is Rogery Sterling, replied the toll-booth operator. Again. Where am I? Look, I'm telling you that that murder you're investigating was caused by software bugs in the software. Are we on a boat? Look at the diagram. This agency paid money to introduce, quite deliberately, weaknesses in the security of this library, through this company here, and this company here. Library, oh no. I have overdue fees. And they're running a PR campaign to increase use of this library. Saying that the competing options are inferior. But don't worry, they're trying to undermine those too. Detective Seabiscuit wasn't listening. He had just remembered that he needed to stop by the Robie House.

Ok, so I'm back in Mexico! This year, the best fare I found for travelling to spend the Winter^WSummer season with Regina's family had an oddity: I usually have a layover at either Santiago de Chile or Lima (Per ) of between 45 minutes and 2 hours, clearly less than enough to do anything. But this time, I had a massive 10 hours layover in Santiago. And spending 10 hours in an airport is far from fun. Specially when you have a good group of friends in town! I visited Chile in 2004 for Encuentro Linux (still before the time I had a digital camera: Those photos are all taken by Martin Michlmayr), and I have stayed in touch with a group of systems administrators since then. So, I mailed the list, and we managed to get eight people to have lunch together. In the order we appear in the photo:

• Victor Hugo dos Santos
• Mauricio Troncoso
• lvaro Herrera
• Ricardo Lemus
• Marcelo Riquelme
• Carlos Sep lveda
• Gunnar Wolf
• Pablo Silva

Some of them, even living in the same city, had never met in person before So, of course, we had a table reserved at the restaurant to the name of Dennis Ritchie. And having had nice, fun, sometimes-technical talks... Well, a tiny bit of his spirit was there. Of course, we can only trust he was there, as no Ouija boards were used and no null pointers were dereferenced (just to make sure not to disturb him). Victor Hugo and lvaro took me for a short Santiago city trip before lunch, we had a very nice time. Thanks! :-)

I ll be spending the week after next (June 17-23) in London for the annual meeting of the International Communication Association where I ll be presenting a paper. This will be my first ICA and I m looking forward to connecting with many new colleagues in the discipline. If you re one of them, reading this, and would like to meet up in London, please let me know! Starting June 24th, I ll be in Ann Arbor, Michigan for four weeks of the ICPSR summer program in applied statistics at the Institute for Social Research. I have been wanting to sign up for some of their advanced methods classes for years and am planning to take the opportunity this summer before I start at UW. I ll be living with my friends and fellow Berkman Cooperation Group members Aaron Shaw and Dennis Tennen. I would love to make connections and meet people in both places so, if you would like to meet up, please get in contact.

I will be speaking at the Southern California Linux Expo (and yes, given the topics covered, it's missing a GNU). My talk, "Four Freedoms for Freedom," is on Sunday, February 24, 2013 from 16:30 to 17:30.

The most obvious people affected by all four of the freedoms that define free software are the programmers. They are the ones who will likely want to -- and are able to -- modify software running on their computers. But free software is a movement to advance and defend freedom for anyone and everyone using any computing device, not just programmers. In many countries now, given the ubiquity of tablets, phones, laptops and desktops, "anyone and everyone using any computing device" means nearly all citizens. But new technological innovations in these areas keep coming with new restrictions, frustrating and controlling users even while creating a perception of empowerment. The Free Software Foundation wants to gain the support and protect the interests of everyone, not just programmers. How do we reach people who have no intention of ever modifying a program, and how do we help them?

Other presentations on my list to check out (in chronological order, some conflicting):

• Matthew Garrett
• Deb Nicholson
• Sofia Kelly
• Bradley Kuhn
• Mark Holmquist
• Kyle Rankin
• Jenn Greenaway
• Dennis Kibbe
• Stephen Walli

If you will be there and want to meet up, drop me a line.

Given the very positive feedback for Dennis Felsing s tool ghc-vis, which visualizes the heap representation of a Haskell value, including all the gory details such as thunks, values retained by thunks indirections, sharing etc, I saw the need to provide this information also directly in GHCi, without having to load a graphics library or opening extra libraries. So I added the required features (traversing the heap and pretty-printing the results) to my ghc-heap-view package and, also following ghc-vis s lead, added a ghci file that, when loaded, provides you with a :printHeap command. Here you can see it in action: A plain value

Prelude> :script /home/jojo/.cabal/share/ghc-heap-view-0.4.0.0/ghci
Prelude> let x = [1..10]
Prelude> x
[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]
Prelude> :printHeap x
_bh [S# 1,S# 2,S# 3,S# 4,S# 5,S# 6,S# 7,S# 8,S# 9,S# 10]

Note that the tools shows us that the list is a list of S# constructors, and also that it is still hidden behind a blackhole. After running System.Mem.performGC, this disappears. A thunk

Prelude> let x = Just (1 + 1)
Prelude> :printHeap x
Just _bco
Prelude> x
Just 2
Prelude> System.Mem.performGC
Prelude> :printHeap x
Just (S# 2)

Here, we see how the calculation was deferred until forced by showing the value of x. The name _bco stands for a bytecode object as used by the interpreter. Getting useful information from them is a bit harder than for compiled thunks, so for more accurate results put the code in a Haskell source file, compile it and use the GHC.HeapView API to print the interesting parts. A partial application

Prelude> let a = "hi"
Prelude> let partial = (a ++)
Prelude> partial ""
"hi"
Prelude> System.Mem.performGC
Prelude> let x = (a, partial)
Prelude> :printHeap x
let x1 = "hi"
in (x1,_fun x1)

The information <emph>which</emph> function is called there (++ in this case) is lost at runtime, but we still see that the second element of the tuple is a partial application of <emph>some</emph> value to the first element. A cyclic structure

Prelude> let s = "ho"
Prelude> let x = cycle s
Prelude> length (take 100 (show x))
100
Prelude> System.Mem.performGC
Prelude> :printHeap x
let x0 = C# 'h' : C# 'o' : x0
in x0
Prelude> let y = map Data.Char.toUpper x
Prelude> length (take 100 (show y))
100
Prelude> :printHeap y
C# 'H' : C# 'O' : C# 'H' : C# 'O' : C# 'H' : C# 'O' : C# 'H' : C# 'O' : C# 'H' : C# 'O' : _bh (C# 'H' : C# 'O' : C# 'H' : C# 'O' : C# 'H' : C# 'O' : C# 'H' : C# 'O' : ... : ...)

The cyclic, tying-the-knot structure of cycle is very visible. But can also see how easily it is broken, in this case by mapping a function over the list. Mutual recursion

Prelude> let  x = 'H' : y ; y = 'o' : x  
Prelude> length (show (take 10 x, take 10 y))  seq  return ()
Prelude> System.Mem.performGC
Prelude> :printHeap (x,y)
let x1 = C# 'H' : x3
    x3 = C# 'o' : x1
in (x1,x3)

If you want to look at multiple variables at once, just pass a tuple to printHeap In the hope that this will be a useful tool for you, I uploaded version 0.4.0.0 of ghc-heap-view to hackage.