Here s my (fifteenth) monthly update about the activities I ve done in the F/L/OSS world.
Debian
This was my 24th month of contributing to Debian.
I became a DM in late March last year and a DD last Christmas! \o/
Amongs a lot of things, this was month was crazy, hectic, adventerous, and the last of 2020 more on some parts later this month.
I finally finished my 7th semester (FTW!) and moved onto my last one! That said, I had been busy with other things but still did a bunch of Debian stuff
Here are the following things I did this month:
Debian (E)LTS
Debian Long Term Support (LTS) is a project to extend the lifetime of all Debian stable releases to (at least) 5 years. Debian LTS is not handled by the Debian security team, but by a separate group of volunteers and companies interested in making it a success.
And Debian Extended LTS (ELTS) is its sister project, extending support to the Jessie release (+2 years after LTS support).
This was my fifteenth month as a Debian LTS and sixth month as a Debian ELTS paid contributor.
I was assigned 26.00 hours for LTS and 38.25 hours for ELTS and worked on the following things:
LTS CVE Fixes and Announcements:
Issued DLA 2474-1, fixing CVE-2020-28928, for musl.
For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 1.1.16-3+deb9u1.
Issued DLA 2484-1, fixing #969126, for python-certbot.
For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 0.28.0-1~deb9u3.
Issued DLA 2487-1, fixing CVE-2020-27350, for apt.
For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 1.4.11. The update was prepared by the maintainer, Julian.
Issued DLA 2488-1, fixing CVE-2020-27351, for python-apt.
For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 1.4.2. The update was prepared by the maintainer, Julian.
Issued DLA 2495-1, fixing CVE-2020-17527, for tomcat8.
For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 8.5.54-0+deb9u5.
Issued DLA 2488-2, for python-apt.
For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 1.4.3. The update was prepared by the maintainer, Julian.
Issued DLA 2508-1, fixing CVE-2020-35730, for roundcube.
For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 1.2.3+dfsg.1-4+deb9u8. The update was prepared by the maintainer, Guilhem.
ELTS CVE Fixes and Announcements:
Issued ELA 324-1, fixing CVE-2020-28928, for musl.
For Debian 8 Jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 1.1.5-2+deb8u2.
Issued ELA 325-1, fixing CVE-2020-28896, for mutt.
For Debian 8 Jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 1.5.23-3+deb8u4.
Marked CVE-2020-17527/tomcat8 as not-affected for jessie.
Marked CVE-2020-28052/bountycastle as not-affected for jessie.
Marked CVE-2020-14394/qemu as postponed for jessie.
Marked CVE-2020-35738/wavpack as not-affected for jessie.
Marked CVE-2020-3550 3-6 /qemu as postponed for jessie.
Marked CVE-2020-3550 3-6 /qemu as postponed for stretch.
Marked CVE-2020-16093/lemonldap-ng as no-dsa for stretch.
Marked CVE-2020-27837/gdm3 as no-dsa for stretch.
Marked CVE-2020- 13987, 13988, 17437 /open-iscsi as no-dsa for stretch.
Marked CVE-2020-35450/gobby as no-dsa for stretch.
Marked CVE-2020-35728/jackson-databind as no-dsa for stretch.
Marked CVE-2020-28935/nsd as no-dsa for stretch.
Auto EOL ed libpam-tacplus, open-iscsi, wireshark, gdm3, golang-go.crypto, jackson-databind, spotweb, python-autobahn, asterisk, nsd, ruby-nokogiri, linux, and motion for jessie.
Bugs and Patches
Well, I did report some bugs and issues and also sent some patches:
Issue #44 for github-activity-readme, asking for a feature request to set custom committer s email address.
Issue #711 for git2go, reporting build failure for the library.
PR #89 for rubocop-rails_config, bumping RuboCop::Packaging to v0.5.
Issue #36 for rubocop-packaging, asking to try out mutant :)
PR #212 for cucumber-ruby-core, bumping RuboCop::Packaging to v0.5.
PR #213 for cucumber-ruby-core, enabling RuboCop::Packaging.
Issue #19 for behance, asking to relax constraints on faraday and faraday_middleware.
PR #37 for rubocop-packaging, enabling tests against ruby3.0! \o/
PR #489 for cucumber-rails, bumping RuboCop::Packaging to v0.5.
Issue #362 for nheko, reporting a crash when opening the application.
PR #1282 for paper_trail, adding RuboCop::Packaging amongst other used extensions.
Bug #978640 for nheko Debian package, reporting a crash, as a result of libfmt7 regression.
Misc and Fun
Besides squashing bugs and submitting patches, I did some other things as well!
Participated in my first Advent of Code event! :)
Whilst it was indeed fun, I didn t really complete it. No reason, really. But I ll definitely come back stronger next year, heh! :)
All the solutions thus far could be found here.
Did a couple of reviews for some PRs and triaged some bugs here and there, meh.
Also did some cloud debugging, not so fun if you ask me, but cool enough to make me want to do it again! ^_^
Worked along with pollo, zigo, ehashman, rlb, et al for puppet and puppetserver in Debian. OMG, they re so lovely! <3
Ordered some interesting books to read January onward. New year resolution? Meh, not really. Or maybe. But nah.
Also did some interesting stuff this month but can t really talk about it now. Hopefully sooooon.
I typically use LibreOffice Impress for my talks, much to some folks' surprise.
Yes, you can make slides look okay with free software! But there's one
annoying caveat that has bothered me for ages.
Impress makes it nearly impossible to enter presenter mode with a single
display, while also displaying slides. I have never understood this limitation,
but it's existed for a minimum of seven years.
I've tried all sorts of workarounds over the years, including a macro that
forces LibreOffice into presenter mode, which I never was able to
figure out how to reverse once I ran it...
This has previously been an annoyance but never posed a big problem, because
when push came to shove I could leave my house and use an external monitor or
screen when presenting at meetups. But now, everything's virtual, I'm in
lockdown indefinitely, and I don't have another display available at home. And
about 8 hours before speaking at a meetup today, I realized I didn't have a way
to share my slides while seeing my speaker notes. Uh oh.
So I got this stupid idea.
...why don't I just placate LibreOffice with a FAKE display?
Virtual displays with xrandr
My GPU had this capability innately, it turns out, if I could just whisper the
right incantations to unlock its secrets:
After restarting X to allow this newly created config to take effect, I now
could see two new virtual displays available for use:
ehashman@red-dot:~$ xrandr
Screen 0: minimum 8 x 8, current 3840 x 1080, maximum 32767 x 32767
eDP1 connected primary 1920x1080+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 310mm x 170mm
1920x1080 60.01*+ 59.93
...
640x360 59.84 59.32 60.00
DP1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DP2 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
HDMI1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
HDMI2 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
VIRTUAL1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
VIRTUAL2 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
And indeed, after running these commands, I found myself with a virtual
display, very happy to black hole all my windows, available to the imaginary
right of my laptop screen.
This allowed me to mash that "Present" button in LibreOffice and get my
presenter notes on my laptop display, while putting my actual slides in a
virtual time-out that I could still screenshare!
Wouldn't it be nice if LibreOffice just fixed the actual bug?
Well, actually...
I must forgive myself for my stage panic. The talk ended up going great, and
the immediate problem was solved. But it turns out this bug has been
addressed upstream! It's just... not well-documented.
A couple years ago, there was a forum post on ask.libreoffice.org that
featured this exact question, and a solution was provided!
Yes, use Open Expert Configuration via Tools > Options > LibreOffice >
Advanced. Search for StartAlways. You should get a node
org.openoffice.Office.PresenterScreen with line Presenter. Double-click that
line to toggle the boolean value to true.
I tested this out locally and... yeah that works. But it turns out the bug from
2013 had not been updated with this solution until just a few months
ago.
There are very limited search results for this configuration property. I wish
this was much better documented. But so it goes with free software; here's a
hack and a real solution as we all try to improve things :)
Earlier this year, I helped plan and run the Community Data Science Workshops: a series of three (and a half) day-long workshops designed to help people learn basic programming and tools for data science tools in order to ask and answer questions about online communities like Wikipedia and Twitter. You can read our initial announcement for more about the vision.
The workshops were organized by myself, Jonathan Morgan from the Wikimedia Foundation, long-time Software Carpentry teacher Tommy Guy, and a group of 15 volunteer mentors who taught project-based afternoon sessions and worked one-on-one with more than 50 participants. With overwhelming interest, we were ultimately constrained by the number of mentors who volunteered. Unfortunately, this meant that we had to turn away most of the people who applied. Although it was not emphasized in recruiting or used as a selection criteria, a majority of the participants were women.
The workshops were all free of charge and sponsored by the UW Department of Communication, who provided space, and the eScience Institute, who provided food.
The curriculum for all four session session is online:
The workshops were designed for people with no previous programming experience. Although most our participants were from the University of Washington, we had non-UW participants from as far away as Vancouver, BC.
Feedback we collected suggests that the sessions were a huge success, that participants learned enormously, and that the workshops filled a real need in the Seattle community. Between workshops, participants organized meet-ups to practice their programming skills.
Most excitingly, just as we based our curriculum for the first session on the Boston Python Workshop s, others have been building off our curriculum. Elana Hashman, who was a mentor at the CDSW, is coordinating a set of Python Workshops for Beginners with a group at the University of Waterloo and with sponsorship from the Python Software Foundation using curriculum based on ours. I also know of two university classes that are tentatively being planned around the curriculum.
Because a growing number of groups have been contacting us about running their own events based on the CDSW and because we are currently making plans to run another round of workshops in Seattle late this fall I coordinated with a number of other mentors to go over participant feedback and to put together a long write-up of our reflections in the form of a post-mortem. Although our emphasis is on things we might do differently, we provide a broad range of information that might be useful to people running a CDSW (e.g., our budget). Please let me know if you are planning to run an event so we can coordinate going forward.
Earlier this year, I helped plan and run the 