Here is my monthly update covering a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world (previously):

• Various improvements to django-slack, a library to easily post messages to the Slack group-messaging utility from projects using the Django web development framework:
  • Added explicit support to send messages asynchronously via the Celery distributed task queue. (#29)
  • Worked with Patrick Clope to add an escapeslack template filter to ensure the correct characters for Slack's API are escaped using Django's built-in safe is too invasive. (#36)
  • Corrected an issue where custom endpoints and channel names were incompatible. (#27)
  • Overhaul of the field/option/block parsing. (49ff3c4)
  • Moved away from using a django.template.Context instance, preventing a deprecation warning. (#31)
• Added a create-folders subcommand to my tickle-me-email Getting Things Done (GTD) email toolbox to create numbered folders for the rotate "tickler" functionality. (#3)
• Wrote and released a Django template tag to collapse multiple whitespace/newline characters in order to correctly format, for example, plaintext emails that make extensive use of for-loops. These would normally require careful and fragile placement of the % for .. % and % endfor % tags. (Repo)
• Pushed a number of updates to my Strava Enhancement Suite, a Chrome extension that improves and fixes annoyances in the web interface of the Strava cycling and running tracker:
  • Fix unit conversion where the element was wrapped in an another HTML element. (#48)
  • Hide premium indicator from top-level navigation. (#45)
  • Correct matching of the "shop" link in top-level navigation and footer module. (#47 & #46)
  • Remove "premium" pages on Club pages. (#44)
• Added a security-oriented warning to Ansible's documentation regarding the behaviour if an UFW firewall application profile is added and subsequently removed. (#1740)
• Added support to my django-staticfiles-dotd "staticfiles" library which concatenates Javascript and CSS files from .d-style directories to support an arbitrary file rendering method. This allows the use of media pre-processors such as SASS within such directories. (#1)
• Corrected my Chrome extension for the FastMail web interface to correctly hook into the internal "send" mechanism. (#2)
• Moved my stravabot IRC bot to use dh-virtualenv and systemd, improving security and reliability. (1c48709)
• Updated django-pedantic-http-methods a tool to raise an exception during development when attempting to perform side effects in GET and HEAD HTTP methods to support the latest version of Django. (#1)

---

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between January 24th and January 30th:

Media coverage Holger Levsen was interviewed by the FOSDEM team to introduce his talk on Sunday 31st.

Toolchain fixes Jonas Smedegaard uploaded d-shlibs/0.63 which makes the order of dependencies generated by d-devlibdeps stable accross locales. Original patch by Reiner Herrmann.

Packages fixed The following 53 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: appstream-glib, aptitude, arbtt, btrfs-tools, cinnamon-settings-daemon, cppcheck, debian-security-support, easytag, gitit, gnash, gnome-control-center, gnome-keyring, gnome-shell, gnome-software, graphite2, gtk+2.0, gupnp, gvfs, gyp, hgview, htmlcxx, i3status, imms, irker, jmapviewer, katarakt, kmod, lastpass-cli, libaccounts-glib, libam7xxx, libldm, libopenobex, libsecret, linthesia, mate-session-manager, mpris-remote, network-manager, paprefs, php-opencloud, pisa, pyacidobasic, python-pymzml, python-pyscss, qtquick1-opensource-src, rdkit, ruby-rails-html-sanitizer, shellex, slony1-2, spacezero, spamprobe, sugar-toolkit-gtk3, tachyon, tgt. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• angband-doc/3.0.3.6 by Manoj Srivastava, obsolete patch by Chris Lamb.
• atdgen/1.7.2-1 by St phane Glondu.
• bibtool/2.63+ds-1 by Jerome Benoit.
• cglib/3.2.0-1 by Emmanuel Bourg.
• cmst/2016.01.28-1 by Alf Gaida.
• coreutils/8.25-1 uploded by Michael Stone, fixed upstream.
• doc-base/0.10.7 uploaded by Robert Luberda, original patch by Dhole.
• fpc/3.0.0+dfsg-1 uploaded by Paul Gevers.
• libaqbanking/5.6.4beta-1 by Micha Lenk.
• libgcrypt20/1.6.4-5 uploaded by Andreas Metzler, original patch by Lunar.
• libgwenhywfar/4.15.2beta-1 by Micha Lenk.
• libxdmcp/1:1.1.2-1.1 by Helmut Grohne (report).
• lpe/1.2.8-2 by Adam Majer, obsolete patches (#778197, #793697 by Chris Lamb and akira.
• mariadb-10.0/10.0.23-2 by Otto Kek l inen.
• mixxx/2.0.0~dfsg-1 by Sebastian Ramacher.
• pd-lua/0.7.3-1 by IOhannes m zm lnig.
• pd-zexy/2.2.6-2 by IOhannes m zm lnig.
• polymake/3.0-1 uploaded by David Bremner, fixed upstream.
• prometheus/0.16.2+ds-1 by Mart n Ferrari.
• screengrab/1.95+20160128-1 uploaded by Alf Gaida (report).
• spykeviewer/0.4.4-1 by Robert Pr pper, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• testdisk/7.0-1 uploaded by Roland Stigge, upstream patch reported by Mattia Rizzolo.
• xorg/1:7.7+13 uploaded by Timo Aaltonen, original patch by Dhole, merged by Andreas Boll.

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

• gnubg/1.05.000-4 by Russ Allbery.
• grcompiler/4.2-6 by Hideki Yamane.
• sdlgfx/2.0.25-5 fix by Felix Geyer, uploaded by Gianfranco Costamagna.

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

• #812876 on glib2.0 by Lunar: ensure that functions are sorted using the C locale when giotypefuncs.c is generated.

diffoscope development diffoscope 48 was released on January 26th. It fixes several issues introduced by the retrieval of extra symbols from Debian debug packages. It also restores compatibility with older versions of binutils which does not support readelf --decompress.

strip-nondeterminism development strip-nondeterminism 0.015-1 was uploaded on January 27th. It fixes handling of signed JAR files which are now going to be ignored to keep the signatures intact.

Package reviews 54 reviews have been removed, 36 added and 17 updated in the previous week. 30 new FTBFS bugs have been submitted by Chris Lamb, Michael Tautschnig, Mattia Rizzolo, Tobias Frost.

Misc. Alexander Couzens and Bryan Newbold have been busy fixing more issues in OpenWrt. Version 1.6.3 of FreeBSD's package manager pkg(8) now supports SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. Ross Karchner did a lightning talk about reproducible builds at his work place and shared the slides.

Debian LTS August was the fourth month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. In total I spent four hours working on:

• pykerberors: Fixed a regression in DLA-265-1 affecting the default parameters of checkPassword(). This resulted in DLA-265-2.
• wordpress: Craig Small updated wordpress to fix CVE-2015-2213 CVE-2015-5622 CVE-2015-5731 CVE-2015-5732 and CVE-2015-5734. I did some testing and released DLA-294-1.

Besides that I did CVE triaging of 9 CVEs to check if and how they affect oldoldstable security as part of my LTS front desk work. Debconf 15 was a great opportunity to meet some of the other LTS contributors in person and to work on some of my packages: Git-buildpackage git-buildpackage gained buildpackage-rpm based on the work by Markus Lehtonnen and merging of mock support is hopefully around the corner. Debconf had two gbp skill shares hosted by dkg and a BoF by myself. A summary is here. Integration with dgit as (discussed with Ian) looks doable and I have parts of that on my todo list as well. Among other things gbp import-orig gained a --merge-mode option so you can replace the upstream branches verbatim on your packaging branch but keep the contents of the debian/ directory. Libvirt I prepared an update for libvirt in Jessie fixing a crasher bug, QEMU error reporting. apparmor support now works out of the box in Jessie (thanks to intrigeri and Felix Geyer for that). Speaking of apparmor I learned enough at Debconf to use this now by default so we hopefully see less breackage in this area when new libvirt versions hit the archive. The bug count wen't down quiet a bit and we have a new version of virt-manager in unstable now as well. As usual I prepared the RC candidates of libvirt 1.2.19 in experimental and 1.2.19 final is now in unstable.

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

• Bdale Garbee uploaded tar/1.28-1 which includes the --clamp-mtime option. Patch by Lunar.

Aur lien Jarno uploaded glibc/2.21-0experimental1 which will fix the issue were locales-all did not behave exactly like locales despite having it in the Provides field. Lunar rebased the pu/reproducible_builds branch for dpkg on top of the released 1.18.2. This made visible an issue with udebs and automatically generated debug packages. The summary from the meeting at DebConf15 between ftpmasters, dpkg mainatainers and reproducible builds folks has been posted to the revelant mailing lists. Packages fixed The following 70 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: activemq-activeio, async-http-client, classworlds, clirr, compress-lzf, dbus-c++, felix-bundlerepository, felix-framework, felix-gogo-command, felix-gogo-runtime, felix-gogo-shell, felix-main, felix-shell-tui, felix-shell, findbugs-bcel, gco, gdebi, gecode, geronimo-ejb-3.2-spec, git-repair, gmetric4j, gs-collections, hawtbuf, hawtdispatch, jack-tools, jackson-dataformat-cbor, jackson-dataformat-yaml, jackson-module-jaxb-annotations, jmxetric, json-simple, kryo-serializers, lhapdf, libccrtp, libclaw, libcommoncpp2, libftdi1, libjboss-marshalling-java, libmimic, libphysfs, libxstream-java, limereg, maven-debian-helper, maven-filtering, maven-invoker, mochiweb, mongo-java-driver, mqtt-client, netty-3.9, openhft-chronicle-queue, openhft-compiler, openhft-lang, pavucontrol, plexus-ant-factory, plexus-archiver, plexus-bsh-factory, plexus-cdc, plexus-classworlds2, plexus-component-metadata, plexus-container-default, plexus-io, pytone, scolasync, sisu-ioc, snappy-java, spatial4j-0.4, tika, treeline, wss4j, xtalk, zshdb. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• apr/1.5.2-2 by Stefan Fritsch.
• binutils-m68hc1x/1:2.18-6 by Santiago Vila.
• buxon/0.0.5-5 uploaded by Santiago Vila, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• cdtool/2.1.8-release-3 by Santiago Vila.
• check/0.10.0-1 by Tobias Frost.
• ffe/0.3.4-2 by Santiago Vila.
• flowscan-cuflow/1.7-9 by Santiago Vila.
• gmt/5.1.2+dfsg1-2 by Bas Couwenberg.
• gtkspellmm/3.0.3+dfsg-2 by Philip Rinn.
• htp/1.19-2 uploaded by Santiago Vila, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• igerman98/20131206-6 by Roland Rosenfeld.
• intlfonts/1.2.1-9 uploaded by Santiago Vila, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• irda-utils/0.9.18-14 uploaded by Santiago Vila, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• jackd2/1.9.10+20150825git1ed50c92~dfsg-1 uploaded by Adrian Knoth, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• jove/4.16.0.73-4 by Cord Beermann.
• jquery/1.11.3+dfsg-1 uploaded by Antonio Terceiro, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• libapache2-authcookie-perl/3.22-3 by Niko Tyni.
• libaqbanking/5.6.1beta-2 fixed and uploaded by Micha Lenk.
• libcitygml/1.4.3-1 by Bas Couwenberg with a fixed new upstream release.
• libevhtp/1.2.10-3 by Vincent Bernat.
• libgnome2-perl/1.046-2 by Niko Tyni.
• libmarc-charset-perl/1.35-2 by Niko Tyni.
• libtime-y2038-perl/20100403-5 by Niko Tyni.
• libxray-absorption-perl/3.0.1-3 uploaded by gregor herrmann, original patch by Niko Tyno.
• lpc21isp/1.97-2 by Agustin Henze.
• luakit/2012.09.13-r1-6 by Santiago Vila, also with a patch from akira.
• moarvm/2015.07-1 by Daniel Dehennin with a fixed new upstream release.
• mosquitto/1.4.3-1 by Roger A. Light.
• ngircd/22.1-2 by Christoph Biedl.
• nn/6.7.3-10 uploaded by Cord Beermann, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• owncloud-client/2.0.0~rc1+dfsg-1 by Sandro Knau .
• postfix-gld/1.7-7 uploaded by Santiago Vila, patches for gzip by Chris Lamb and mtimes by akira.
• pppconfig/2.3.22 by Santiago Vila.
• prometheus/0.15.1+ds-2 by Mart n Ferrari.
• python-xlrd/0.9.4-1 by Vincent Bernat.
• recode/3.6-22 by Santiago Vila.
• ruby-rmagick/2.15.4-1 by Antonio Terceiro.
• scite/3.6.0-1 by Antonio Valentino.
• smartlist/3.15-25 by Santiago Vila.
• tar/1.28-1 uploaded by Bdale Garbee, original patch by Reiner Herrman.
• transmissionrpc/0.11-2 uploaded by Vincent Bernat, original patch by Juan Picca.
• uruk/20150810-1 uploaded by Joost van Baal-Ili , original patch by Lunar.
• webassets/3:0.11-2 uploaded by Agustin Henze, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• xfig/1:3.2.5.c-5 by Roland Rosenfeld.
• xfonts-bolkhov/1.1.20001007-8 by Santiago Vila.

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

• cvs-buildpackage/5.24 uploaded by Santiago Vila, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• gcc-mingw-w64/15.5 by Stephen Kitt.
• vtk6/6.2.0+dfsg1-4 by Anton Gladky.

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

• #797027 on zyne by Chris Lamb: switch to pybuild to get rid of .pyc files.
• #797180 on python-doit by Chris Lamb: sort output when creating completion script for bash and zsh.
• #797211 on apt-dater by Chris Lamb: fix implementation of SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH.
• #797215 on getdns by Chris Lamb: fix call to dpkg-parsechangelog in debian/rules.
• #797254 on splint by Chris Lamb: support SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH for version string.
• #797296 on shiro by Chris Lamb: remove username from build string.
• #797408 on splitpatch by Reiner Herrmann: use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to set manpage date.
• #797410 on eigenbase-farrago by Reiner Herrmann: sets the comment style to scm-safe which tells ResourceGen that no timestamps should be included.
• #797415 on apparmor by Reiner Herrmann: sorting with the locale set to C. CAPABILITIES
• #797419 on resiprocate by Reiner Herrmann: set the embedded hostname to a static value.
• #797427 on jam by Reiner Herrmann: sorting with the locale set to C.
• #797430 on ii-esu by Reiner Herrmann: sort source list using C locale.
• #797431 on tatan by Reiner Herrmann: sort source list using C locale.

Chris Lamb also noticed that binaries shipped with libsilo-bin did not work. Documentation update Chris Lamb and Ximin Luo assembled a proper specification for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in the hope to convince more upstreams to adopt it. Thanks to Holger it is published under a non-Debian domain name. Lunar documented easiest way to solve issues with file ordering and timestamps in tarballs that came with tar/1.28-1. Some examples on how to use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH have been improved to support systems without GNU date. reproducible.debian.net armhf is finally being tested, which also means the remote building of Debian packages finally works! This paves the way to perform the tests on even more architectures and doing variations on CPU and date. Some packages even produce the same binary Arch:all packages on different architectures (1, 2). (h01ger) Tests for FreeBSD are finally running. (h01ger) As it seems the gcc5 transition has cooled off, we schedule sid more often than testing again on amd64. (h01ger) disorderfs has been built and installed on all build nodes (amd64 and armhf). One issue related to permissions for root and unpriviliged users needs to be solved before disorderfs can be used on reproducible.debian.net. (h01ger) strip-nondeterminism Version 0.011-1 has been released on August 29th. The new version updates dh_strip_nondeterminism to match recent changes in debhelper. (Andrew Ayer) disorderfs disorderfs, the new FUSE filesystem to ease testing of filesystem-related variations, is now almost ready to be used. Version 0.2.0 adds support for extended attributes. Since then Andrew Ayer also added support to reverse directory entries instead of shuffling them, and arbitrary padding to the number of blocks used by files. Package reviews 142 reviews have been removed, 48 added and 259 updated this week. Santiago Vila renamed the not_using_dh_builddeb issue into varying_mtimes_in_data_tar_gz_or_control_tar_gz to align better with other tag names. New issue identified this week: random_order_in_python_doit_completion. 37 FTBFS issues have been reported by Chris West (Faux) and Chris Lamb. Misc. h01ger gave a talk at FrOSCon on August 23rd. Recordings are already online. These reports are being reviewed and enhanced every week by many people hanging out on #debian-reproducible. Huge thanks!

A good amount of the Debian reproducible builds team had the chance to enjoy face-to-face interactions during DebConf15.

Names in red and blue were all present at DebConf15

Hugging people with whom one has been working tirelessly for months gives a lot of warm-fuzzy feelings. Several recorded and hallway discussions paved the way to solve the remaining issues to get reproducible builds part of Debian proper. Both talks from the Debian Project Leader and the release team mentioned the effort as important for the future of Debian. A forty-five minutes talk presented the state of the reproducible builds effort. It was then followed by an hour long roundtable to discuss current blockers regarding dpkg, .buildinfo and their integration in the archive. Toolchain fixes

• Kenneth J. Pronovici uploaded epydoc/3.0.1+dfsg-12 which makes class and modules ordering predictable (#795835) and fixes __repr__ so memory addresses don't appear in docs (#795826). Patches by Val Lorentz.
• Sergei Golovan uploaded erlang/1:18.0-dfsg-2 which adds support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to erlc. Patch by Chris West (Faux) and Chris Lamb.
• Dmitry Shachnev uploaded sphinx/1.3.1-5 which make grammar, inventory, and JavaScript locales generation deterministic. Original patch by Val Lorentz.
• St phane Glondu uploaded ocaml/4.02.3-2 to experimental, making startup files and native packed libraries deterministic. The patch adds deterministic .file to the assembler output.
• Enrico Tassi uploaded lua-ldoc/1.4.3-3 which now pass the -d option to txt2man and add the --date option to override the current date.

Reiner Herrmann submitted a patch to make rdfind sort the processed files before doing any operation. Chris Lamb proposed a new patch for wheel implementing support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH instead of the custom WHEEL_FORCE_TIMESTAMP. akira sent one making man2html SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH aware.

• #796330 on d-shlibs by Reiner Herrmann: sort with LC_ALL set to C.

St phane Glondu reported that dpkg-source would not respect tarball permissions when unpacking under a umask of 002. After hours of iterative testing during the DebConf workshop, Sandro Knau created a test case showing how pdflatex output can be non-deterministic with some PNG files. Packages fixed The following 65 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: alacarte, arbtt, bullet, ccfits, commons-daemon, crack-attack, d-conf, ejabberd-contrib, erlang-bear, erlang-cherly, erlang-cowlib, erlang-folsom, erlang-goldrush, erlang-ibrowse, erlang-jiffy, erlang-lager, erlang-lhttpc, erlang-meck, erlang-p1-cache-tab, erlang-p1-iconv, erlang-p1-logger, erlang-p1-mysql, erlang-p1-pam, erlang-p1-pgsql, erlang-p1-sip, erlang-p1-stringprep, erlang-p1-stun, erlang-p1-tls, erlang-p1-utils, erlang-p1-xml, erlang-p1-yaml, erlang-p1-zlib, erlang-ranch, erlang-redis-client, erlang-uuid, freecontact, givaro, glade, gnome-shell, gupnp, gvfs, htseq, jags, jana, knot, libconfig, libkolab, libmatio, libvsqlitepp, mpmath, octave-zenity, openigtlink, paman, pisa, pynifti, qof, ruby-blankslate, ruby-xml-simple, timingframework, trace-cmd, tsung, wings3d, xdg-user-dirs, xz-utils, zpspell. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• apr/1.5.2-3 by Stefan Fritsch.
• aprx/2.08.svn593+dfsg-2 uploaded by Colin Tuckley, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• blkreplay/1.0-3 uploaded by Andrew Shadura, patch by Dhole.
• cal3d/0.11.0-6 uploaded by Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo, patch by akira.
• cgsi-gsoap/1.3.8-1 by Mattias Ellert.
• eyefiserver/2.4+dfsg-1 by Jean-Michel Vourg re.
• gnujump/1.0.8-3 uploaded by Evgeni Golov, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• hkgerman/1:2-29 by Roland Rosenfeld.
• jove/4.16.0.73-4 by Cord Beermann.
• libevhtp/1.2.10-3 by Vincent Bernat.
• libmkdoc-xml-perl/0.75-4 uploaded by gregor herrmann, original patch by Niko Tyni.
• libparse-debianchangelog-perl/1.2.0-6 by Niko Tyni.
• librostlab-blast/1.0.1-5 uploaded by Andreas Tille, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• libxray-absorption-perl/3.0.1-3 uploaded by gregor herrmann, original patch by Niko Tyni.
• lua-penlight/1.3.2-2 by Enrico Tassi.
• mosquitto/1.4.3-1 by Roger A. Light.
• nagios-plugins-contrib/15.20150818 by Jan Wagner and Bernd Zeimetz.
• nn/6.7.3-10 uploaded by Cord Beermann, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• pybik/2.1-1 by B. Clausius.
• pyepr/0.9.3-1 uploaded by Antonio Valentino, original patch by Juan Picca.
• python-xlrd/0.9.4-1 by Vincent Bernat.
• transmissionrpc/0.11-2 uploaded by Vincent Bernat, original patch by Juan Picca.
• unoconv/0.7-1.1 sponsored by Vincent Bernat, fix by Dhole.
• vim-latexsuite/20141116.812-1 uploaded by Johann Felix Soden, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• volk/1.0.2-2 by A. Maitland Bottoms.
• xbmc/2:13.2+dfsg1-5 by Balint Reczey.
• xdotool/1:3.20150503.1-2 uploaded by Daniel Kahn Gillmor, initial patch by Chris Lamb.
• xfig/1:3.2.5.c-5 by Roland Rosenfeld.
• xfireworks/1.3-10 uploaded by Yukiharu YABUKI, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• xul-ext-monkeysphere/0.8-2 uploaded by Daniel Kahn Gillmor, original patch by Dhole.

Uploads that might have fixed reproducibility issues:

• brian/1.4.1-3 uploaded by Yaroslav Halchenko, original patch by Juan Picca.
• opennebula/4.12.3+dfsg-1 by Dmitry Smirnov.
• pcsx2/1.3.1-1008-g9f291a6+dfsg-1 by Miguel A. Col n V lez.
• webassets/3:0.11-1 uploaded by Agustin Henze, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.

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

• apache2/2.4.16-3 uploaded by Stefan Fritsch, original patch by Jean-Michel Vourg re.
• gerris/20131206+dfsg-6 uploaded by Anton Gladky, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• kodi/15.1+dfsg1-1 by Balint Reczey.
• zshdb/0.05+git20101031-4 uploaded by Iain R. Learmonth, original patch by Chris Lamb.

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

• #795861 on fakeroot by Val Lorentz: set the mtime of all files to the time of the last debian/changelog entry.
• #795870 on fatresize by Chris Lamb: set build date to the time of the latest debian/changelog entry.
• #795945 on projectl by Reiner Herrmann: sort with LC_ALL set to C.
• #795977 on dahdi-tools by Dhole: set the timezone to UTC before calling asciidoc.
• #795981 on x11proto-input by Dhole: set the timezone to UTC before calling asciidoc.
• #795983 on dbusada by Dhole: set the timezone to UTC before calling asciidoc.
• #795984 on postgresql-plproxy by Dhole: set the timezone to UTC before calling asciidoc.
• #795985 on xorg by Dhole: set the timezone to UTC before calling asciidoc.
• #795987 on pngcheck by Dhole: set the date in the man pages to the latest debian/changelog entry.
• #795997 on python-babel by Val Lorentz: make build timestamp independent from the timezone and remove the name of the build system locale from the documentation.
• #796092 on a7xpg by Reiner Herrmann: sort with LC_ALL set to C.
• #796212 on bittornado by Chris Lamb: remove umask-varying permissions.
• #796251 on liblucy-perl by Niko Tyni: generate lib/Lucy.xs in a deterministic order.
• #796271 on tcsh by Reiner Herrmann: sort with LC_ALL set to C.
• #796275 on hspell by Reiner Herrmann: remove timestamp from aff files generated by mk_he_affix.
• #796324 on fftw3 by Reiner Herrmann: remove date from documentation files.
• #796335 on nasm by Val Lorentz: remove extra timestamps from the build system.
• #796360 on libical by Chris Lamb: removes randomess caused Perl in generated icalderivedvalue.c.
• #796375 on wcd by Dhole: set the date in the man pages to the latest debian/changelog entry.
• #796376 on mapivi by Dhole: set the date in the man pages to the latest debian/changelog entry.
• #796527 on vserver-debiantools by Dhole: set the date in the man pages to the latest debian/changelog entry.

St phane Glondu reported two issues regarding embedded build date in omake and cduce. Aur lien Jarno submitted a fix for the breakage of make-dfsg test suite. As binutils now creates deterministic libraries by default, Aur lien's patch makes use of a wrapper to give the U flag to ar. Reiner Herrmann reported an issue with pound which embeds random dhparams in its code during the build. Better solutions are yet to be found. reproducible.debian.net Package pages on reproducible.debian.net now have a new layout improving readability designed by Mattia Rizzolo, h01ger, and Ulrike. The navigation is now on the left as vertical space is more valuable nowadays. armhf is now enabled on all pages except the dashboard. Actual tests on armhf are expected to start shortly. (Mattia Rizzolo, h01ger) The limit on how many packages people can schedule using the reschedule script on Alioth has been bumped to 200. (h01ger) mod_rewrite is now used instead of JavaScript for the form in the dashboard. (h01ger) Following the rename of the software, debbindiff has mostly been replaced by either diffoscope or differences in generated HTML and IRC notification output. Connections to UDD have been made more robust. (Mattia Rizzolo) diffoscope development diffoscope version 31 was released on August 21^st. This version improves fuzzy-matching by using the tlsh algorithm instead of ssdeep. New command line options are available: --max-diff-input-lines and --max-diff-block-lines to override limits on diff input and output (Reiner Herrmann), --debugger to dump the user into pdb in case of crashes (Mattia Rizzolo). jar archives should now be detected properly (Reiner Herrman). Several general code cleanups were also done by Chris Lamb. strip-nondeterminism development Andrew Ayer released strip-nondeterminism version 0.010-1. Java properties file in jar should now be detected more accurately. A missing dependency spotted by St phane Glondu has been added. Testing directory ordering issues: disorderfs During the reproducible builds workshop at DebConf, participants identified that we were still short of a good way to test variations on filesystem behaviors (e.g. file ordering or disk usage). Andrew Ayer took a couple of hours to create disorderfs. Based on FUSE, disorderfs in an overlay filesystem that will mount the content of a directory at another location. For this first version, it will make the order in which files appear in a directory random. Documentation update Dhole documented how to implement support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in Python, bash, Makefiles, CMake, and C. Chris Lamb started to convert the wiki page describing SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH into a Freedesktop-like specification in the hope that it will convince more upstream to adopt it. Package reviews 44 reviews have been removed, 192 added and 77 updated this week. New issues identified this week: locale_dependent_order_in_devlibs_depends, randomness_in_ocaml_startup_files, randomness_in_ocaml_packed_libraries, randomness_in_ocaml_custom_executables, undeterministic_symlinking_by_rdfind, random_build_path_by_golang_compiler, and images_in_pdf_generated_by_latex. 117 new FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb, Chris West (Faux), and Niko Tyni. Misc. Some reproducibility issues might face us very late. Chris Lamb noticed that the test suite for python-pykmip was now failing because its test certificates have expired. Let's hope no packages are hiding a certificate valid for 10 years somewhere in their source! Pictures courtesy and copyright of Debian's own paparazzi: Aigars Mahinovs.

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

• Stephen Kitt uploaded binutils-mingw-w64/6 which enabled deterministic archives.
• Daniel Stender uploaded gamera/3.4.2-1 which removed timestamps from the documentation generator output.
• Emmanuel Bourg uploaded maven-archiver/2.6-2 which formatted the date in pom.properties with the UTC timezone.
• Dmitry Shachnev uploaded python-qt4/4.11.3+dfsg-2 which removes timestamps from generated files. Original patch by Reiner Herrmann.

Tomasz Buchert submitted a patch to fix the currently overzealous package-contains-timestamped-gzip warning. Daniel Kahn Gillmor identified #588746 as a source of unreproducibility for packages using python-support. Packages fixed The following 57 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: antlr-maven-plugin, aspectj-maven-plugin, build-helper-maven-plugin, clirr-maven-plugin, clojure-maven-plugin, cobertura-maven-plugin, coinor-ipopt, disruptor, doxia-maven-plugin, exec-maven-plugin, gcc-arm-none-eabi, greekocr4gamera, haskell-swish, jarjar-maven-plugin, javacc-maven-plugin, jetty8, latexml, libcgi-application-perl, libnet-ssleay-perl, libtest-yaml-valid-perl, libwiki-toolkit-perl, libwww-csrf-perl, mate-menu, maven-antrun-extended-plugin, maven-antrun-plugin, maven-archiver, maven-bundle-plugin, maven-clean-plugin, maven-compiler-plugin, maven-ear-plugin, maven-install-plugin, maven-invoker-plugin, maven-jar-plugin, maven-javadoc-plugin, maven-processor-plugin, maven-project-info-reports-plugin, maven-replacer-plugin, maven-resources-plugin, maven-shade-plugin, maven-site-plugin, maven-source-plugin, maven-stapler-plugin, modello-maven-plugin1.4, modello-maven-plugin, munge-maven-plugin, ocaml-bitstring, ocr4gamera, plexus-maven-plugin, properties-maven-plugin, ruby-magic, ruby-mocha, sisu-maven-plugin, syncache, vdk2, wvstreams, xml-maven-plugin, xmlbeans-maven-plugin. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• cgal/4.6-3 by Joachim Reichel.
• cmake/3.2.2-1 by Felix Geyer.
• dbus/1.8.16-2 by Simon McVittie.
• dialog/1.2-20150513-1 by Santiago Vila.
• dmaths/3.5.2.5+dfsg1-1 by Innocent De Marchi.
• faad2/2.8.0~cvs20150510-1 by Fabian Greffrath.
• fence-agents/4.0.18-1 by Christoph Berg.
• gamera/3.4.2-1 uploaded by Daniel Stender, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• hello-traditional/2.10-3 by Santiago Vila.
• libapache2-mod-perl2/2.0.9~rc1-1 uploaded by Niko Tyni, fixed upstream.
• libdbix-fulltextsearch-perl/0.73-11 uploaded by Dominic Hargreaves, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• libjpeg-turbo/1:1.4.0-7 uploaded by Ond ej Sur , original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• libtime-format-perl/1.12-2 by gregor herrmann.
• libx11-keyboard-perl/1.4-5 by gregor herrmann.
• mailman/1:2.1.20-1 uploaded by Thijs Kinkhorst, original patch by Lunar.
• miscfiles/1.4.2.dfsg.1-10 uploaded by Robert Luberda, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• mkvtoolnix/7.9.0-1 uploaded by Christian Marillat, fixed upstream.
• mozilla-dom-inspector/1:2.0.15-1 by David Pr vot.
• nano/2.3.99pre3-1 uploaded by Jordi Mallach, original patch by Lunar.
• ndiswrapper/1.59-3 uploaded by Julian Andres Klode, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• original-awk/2012-12-20-3 uploaded by Santiago Vila, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• procmail/3.22-25 uploaded by Santiago Vila, original patch by Lunar.
• pxz/4.999.99~beta4+gitae80846-2 by Holger Levsen.
• python-tuskarclient/0.1.17-2 uploaded by Thomas Goirand, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• routino/2.7.3-2 by Bas Couwenberg.
• scantailor/0.9.11.1-3 by Daniel Stender.
• serverstats/0.8.2-11 prepared by Bjoern Boschman, original patch and upload by Chris Lamb.
• sysstat/11.1.3-1 by Robert Luberda.
• t-prot/3.4-3 by Axel Beckert.
• wmsystemtray/1.4+git20150508-1 by Doug Torrance.
• yafc/1.3.6-1 uploaded by Sebastian Ramacher, fixed upstream

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

• allegro4.4/2:4.4.2-6 uploaded by Andreas R nnquist, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• base-files/9.1 uploaded by Santiago Vila, original patch by Lunar, follow-up patch submitted to fix umask-related variations.
• castle-game-engine/5.1.1-2 by Paul Gevers.
• device3dfx/2013.08.08-2 uploaded by Guillem Jover, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• gettext/0.19.4-1 by Santiago Vila.
• sendmail/8.14.9-1 by Andreas Beckmann.
• smartlist/3.15-24 Santiago Vila Use gzip -n to stop recording current time. Closes: #777445.
• uruk/20150401-1 uploaded by Joost van Baal-Ili , original patch by Chris Lamb.

Ben Hutchings also improved and merged several changes submitted by Lunar to linux. Currently untested because in contrib:

• Dmitry Smirnov uploaded fheroes2-pkg/0+svn20150122r3274-2-2.

reproducible.debian.net

Thanks to the reproducible-build team for running a buildd from hell. gregor herrmann

Mattia Rizzolo modified the script added last week to reschedule a package from Alioth, a reason can now be optionally specified. Holger Levsen splitted the package sets page so each set now has its own page. He also added new sets for Java packages, Haskell packages, Ruby packages, debian-installer packages, Go packages, and OCaml packages. Reiner Herrmann added locales-all to the set of packages installed in the build environment as its needed to properly identify variations due to the current locale. Holger Levsen improved the scheduling so new uploads get tested sooner. He also changed the .json output that is used by tracker.debian.org to lists FTBFS issues again but only for issues unrelated to the toolchain or our test setup. Amongst many other small fixes and additions, the graph colors should now be more friendly to red-colorblind people. The fix for pbuilder given in #677666 by Tim Landscheidt is now used. This fixed several FTBFS for OCaml packages. Work on rebuilding with different CPU has continued, a kvm-on-kvm build host has been set been set up for this purpose. debbindiff development Version 19 of debbindiff included a fix for a regression when handling info files. Version 20 fixes a bug when diffing files with many differences toward a last line with no newlines. It also now uses the proper encoding when writing the text output to a pipe, and detects info files better. Documentation update Thanks to Santiago Vila, the unneeded -depth option used with find when fixing mtimes has been removed from the examples. Package reviews 113 obsolete reviews have been removed this week while 77 has been added.

Debian Jessie has been released on April 25th, 2015. This has opened the Stretch development cycle. Reactions to the idea of making Debian build reproducibly have been pretty enthusiastic. As the pace is now likely to be even faster, let's see if we can keep everyone up-to-date on the developments. Before the release of Jessie The story goes back a long way but a formal announcement to the project has only been sent in February 2015. Since then, too much work has happened to make a complete report, but to give some highlights:

• New variations are now tested: umask, kernel version, domain name, and timezone. We might only be missing CPU type and current date now.
• Many improvements to the test system on jenkins.debian.net and the pages showing the results.
• Now not only packages from unstable are tested but also those in testing and experimental.
• When rescheduling packages for testing, the build products can be kept and the IRC channel gets a notification when its over.
• binutils version 2.25-6 is now built with the --enable-deterministic-archives flag. Making ar, strip and others create deterministic static libraries.
• Number of identified issues has grown from about 80 to 123 today.

Lunar did a pretty improvised lightning talk during the Mini-DebConf in Lyon. This past week It seems changes were pilling behind the curtains given the amount of activity that happened in just one week. Toolchain fixes

• Niels Thykier uploaded debhelper/9.20150501 which includes fixes to dh_makeshlibs (#774100), dh_icons (#774102), dh_usrlocal (#775020). Patches written by Lunar.
• Helmut Grohne uploaded doxygen/1.8.9.1-3 which will not generate timestamps in HTML by default. Kudos to akira for bringing the issue upstream.
• Kenneth J. Pronovici uploaded epydoc/3.0.1+dfsg-6 adding a --no-include-build-time option. Patch by Jelmer Vernooij.
• David Pr vot uploaded php-apigen/2.8.1+dfsg-2 which now has reproducible output.
• C dric Boutillier uploaded ruby-prawn/2.0.1+dfsg-1 which now produce a deterministic output when using gradients. Patch by Lunar.
• Jelmer Vernooij uploaded samba/2:4.1.17+dfsg-4 which contains a patch by Matthieu Patou making the output of pidl (from libparse-pidl-perl) reproducible.
• Dmitry Shachnev uploaded sphinx/1.3.1-1 in experimental which should produce deterministic output. The original patch from Chris Lamb has inspired the upstream fix.
• gregor herrmann uploaded libextutils-depends-perl/0.404-1 which makes ExtUtils::Depends output deterministic. Original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• Niko Tyni uploaded perl/5.20.2-4 which makes the output of Pod::Man reproducible. Nice team work visible on #780259.

We also rebased the experimental version of debhelper twice to merge the latest set of changes. Lunar submitted a patch to add a -creation-date to genisoimage. Reiner Herrmann opened #783938 to request making -notimestamp the default behavior for javadoc. Juan Picca submitted a patch to add a --use-date flag to texi2html. Packages fixed The following packages became reproducible due to changes of their build dependencies: apport, batctl, cil, commons-math3, devscripts, disruptor, ehcache, ftphs, gtk2hs-buildtools, haskell-abstract-deque, haskell-abstract-par, haskell-acid-state, haskell-adjunctions, haskell-aeson, haskell-aeson-pretty, haskell-alut, haskell-ansi-terminal, haskell-async, haskell-attoparsec, haskell-augeas, haskell-auto-update, haskell-binary-conduit, haskell-hscurses, jsch, ledgersmb, libapache2-mod-auth-mellon, libarchive-tar-wrapper-perl, libbusiness-onlinepayment-payflowpro-perl, libcapture-tiny-perl, libchi-perl, libcommons-codec-java, libconfig-model-itself-perl, libconfig-model-tester-perl, libcpan-perl-releases-perl, libcrypt-unixcrypt-perl, libdatetime-timezone-perl, libdbd-firebird-perl, libdbix-class-resultset-recursiveupdate-perl, libdbix-profile-perl, libdevel-cover-perl, libdevel-ptkdb-perl, libfile-tail-perl, libfinance-quote-perl, libformat-human-bytes-perl, libgtk2-perl, libhibernate-validator-java, libimage-exiftool-perl, libjson-perl, liblinux-prctl-perl, liblog-any-perl, libmail-imapclient-perl, libmocked-perl, libmodule-build-xsutil-perl, libmodule-extractuse-perl, libmodule-signature-perl, libmoosex-simpleconfig-perl, libmoox-handlesvia-perl, libnet-frame-layer-ipv6-perl, libnet-openssh-perl, libnumber-format-perl, libobject-id-perl, libpackage-pkg-perl, libpdf-fdf-simple-perl, libpod-webserver-perl, libpoe-component-pubsub-perl, libregexp-grammars-perl, libreply-perl, libscalar-defer-perl, libsereal-encoder-perl, libspreadsheet-read-perl, libspring-java, libsql-abstract-more-perl, libsvn-class-perl, libtemplate-plugin-gravatar-perl, libterm-progressbar-perl, libterm-shellui-perl, libtest-dir-perl, libtest-log4perl-perl, libtext-context-eitherside-perl, libtime-warp-perl, libtree-simple-perl, libwww-shorten-simple-perl, libwx-perl-processstream-perl, libxml-filter-xslt-perl, libxml-writer-string-perl, libyaml-tiny-perl, mupen64plus-core, nmap, openssl, pkg-perl-tools, quodlibet, r-cran-rjags, r-cran-rjson, r-cran-sn, r-cran-statmod, ruby-nokogiri, sezpoz, skksearch, slurm-llnl, stellarium. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• berkeley-abc/1.01+20141105hg5b5af75+dfsg-3 uploaded by Ruben Undheim, original patch by Johann Klammer.
• binutils/2.25-7 by Matthias Klose.
• bitmap-mule/8.5+0.20030825.0433-16 uploaded by Tatsuya Kinoshita, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• blobby/1.0-2 by Felix Geyer.
• codelite/7.0+dfsg-2 by James Cowgill.
• conkeror/1.0~~pre-1+git150409-1 by Axel Beckert.
• convmv/1.15-1 by Christian Perrier.
• cpl/6.6~b-1 by Ole Streicher.
• deheader/1.1-2 by Reiner Herrmann.
• dict-foldoc/20150318-1 uploaded by Iustin Pop, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• ding/1.8-1 by Roland Rosenfeld.
• doc-rfc/20150425-1 by Iustin Pop.
• doxygen/1.8.9.1-3 by Helmut Grohne.
• eureka/1.07-1 by Fabian Greffrath.
• eximdoc4/4.85-2 uploaded by Andreas Metzler, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• flashproxy/1.7-3 by Ximin Luo.
• heimdal/1.6~rc2+dfsg-10 by Jelmer Vernooij.
• init-system-helpers/1.23 by Martin Pitt original patch by Lunar.
• ldb/2:1.1.20-2 by Jelmer Vernooij.
• libalien-wxwidgets-perl/0.67+dfsg-1 uploaded by gregor herrmann, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• libcairo-perl/1.105-1 by intrigeri.
• libclass-methodmaker-perl/2.24-1 uploaded by gregor herrmann, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• libcommon-sense-perl/3.73-3 uploaded by gregor herrmann, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• libelixirfm-perl/1.1.976-4 uploaded by gregor herrmann, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• libgnome2-perl/1.045-3 by intrigeri.
• libjs-jcrop/0.9.12+dfsg-2 uploaded by David Pr vot, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• liblas/1.8.0-2 by Bas Couwenberg.
• libopengl-perl/0.6704+dfsg-1 uploaded by gregor herrmann, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• libparse-recdescent-perl/1.967009+dfsg-2 uploaded by gregor herrmann, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• librasterlite/1.1g-5 by Bas Couwenberg.
• libterm-size-perl-perl/0.029-2 uploaded by gregor herrmann, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• libvdpau/1.1-1 by Andreas Beckmann.
• libxml-sax-expatxs-perl/1.33-2 uploaded by gregor herrmann, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• lynx-cur/2.8.9dev4-2 by Axel Beckert.
• mapcache/1.2.1-3 by Bas Couwenberg.
• mdbtools/0.7.1-4 by Jean-Michel Nirgal Vourg re.
• mopidy uploaded by Stein Magnus Jodal, fixed by upstream.
• objenesis/2.1-1 by Markus Koschany.
• opendkim/2.10.1-2 uploaded by Scott Kitterman, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• pktools/2.6.3-1 by Bas Couwenberg.
• posh/0.12.4 uploaded by Clint Adams, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• prboom-plus/2:2.5.1.4~svn4425+dfsg1-1 by Fabian Greffrath.
• qlandkartegt/1.8.1+ds-1 by Bas Couwenberg.
• readosm/1.0.0d-1~exp2 by Bas Couwenberg.
• robocode/1.9.2.4-1 by Markus Koschany.
• ruby-prawn/2.0.1+dfsg-1 uploaded by C dric Boutillier, original patch by Lunar.
• sane-backends/1.0.25+git20150425-1 by J rg Frings-F rst.
• scoop/0.7.1-3 by Daniel Stender.
• springlobby/0.218-1 by Markus Koschany.
• subvertpy/0.9.2-1 by Jelmer Vernooij.
• t-prot/3.4-2 by Axel Beckert.
• talloc/2.1.2-3 by Jelmer Vernooij.
• tdb/1.3.4-2 by Jelmer Vernooij, patch now applied by upstream.
• tk-html3/3.0~fossil20110109-5 by Ole Streicher.
• tox/1.9.2-2 uploaded by Barry Warsaw original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• trove3/3.0.3-2 by Erich Schubert.
• txt2man/1.5.6-2 uploaded by Joao Eriberto Mota Filho, initial patch by Jonathan Wiltshire.
• units/2.11-2 by Stephen Kitt.
• win32-loader/0.7.10 upload by Didier Raboud, original patch by Lunar.
• zec/0.12-3 uploaded by Clint Adams, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• zomg/0.8-1 uploaded by Clint Adams, original patch by Chris Lamb.

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

• ada-reference-manual/1:2012.2-4 by Nicolas Boulenguez.
• adacontrol/1.16r11-3 by Nicolas Boulenguez.
• aspectj/1.8.5-1 by Emmanuel Bourg.
• binutils-m68hc1x/1:2.18-4 uploaded by Riku Voipio, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• debianutils/4.5) uploaded by Clint Adams, original patch by Lunar.
• ioquake3/1.36+u20150412+dfsg1-1 by Simon McVittie.
• libsdl1.2/1.2.15-11 uploaded by Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo, original patch by Chris Lamb; currently FTBFS.
• libsdl2/2.0.2+dfsg1-7 by Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo, original patch by Chris Lamb; currently FTBFS.
• nedit/1:5.6a-2 by Paul Gevers.
• openarena-085-data/0.8.5split-4 by Simon McVittie.
• openarena-data/0.8.5split-4 by Simon McVittie.
• openarena/0.8.8-12 by Simon McVittie.
• openchange/1:2.2-6 by Jelmer Vernooij.
• puredata/0.46.6-1 by IOhannes m zm lnig.
• pyexiv2/0.3.2-8 by Michal iha ; currently FTBFS.
• quakespasm/0.90.0-2 by Stephen Kitt.
• sed/4.2.2-5 by Clint Adams, patch by Lunar.
• v4l2loopback/0.8.0-5 uploaded by IOhannes m zm lnig, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• vim/2:7.4.712-1 uploaded by James McCoy, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• zookeeper/3.4.6-4 by Emmanuel Bourg.

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

• #783882 on jodconverter by Reiner Herrmann: tell javadoc to stop writing timestamps.
• #783885 on bind9 by Reiner Herrmann: pass -DNO_VERSION_DATE to build system.
• #783688 on serverstats by Chris Lamb: fix permissions.
• #783453 on cdbackup by Chris Lamb: remove build date from version string in binary.
• #783478 on texi2html by Juan Picca: pass --use-date to texi2html.
• #783933 on imagemagick by Reiner Herrmann: remove timestamps from PNG and use deterministic package build date.
• #783515 on memtest86+ by Lunar: fix embedded mtimes and pass -creation-date to genisoimage.
• #783558 on websvn by Chris Lamb: fix permissions.

Improvements to reproducible.debian.net Mattia Rizzolo has been working on compressing logs using gzip to save disk space. The web server would uncompress them on-the-fly for clients which does not accept gzip content. Mattia Rizzolo worked on a new page listing various breakage: missing or bad debbindiff output, missing build logs, unavailable build dependencies. Holger Levsen added a new execution environment to run debbindiff using dependencies from testing. This is required for packages built with GHC as the compiler only understands interfaces built by the same version. debbindiff development Version 17 has been uploaded to unstable. It now supports comparing ISO9660 images, dictzip files and should compare identical files much faster. Documentation update Various small updates and fixes to the pages about PDF produced by LaTeX, DVI produced by LaTeX, static libraries, Javadoc, PE binaries, and Epydoc. Package reviews Known issues have been tagged when known to be deterministic as some might unfortunately not show up on every single build. For example, two new issues have been identified by building with one timezone in April and one in May. RD and help2man add current month and year to the documentation they are producing. 1162 packages have been removed and 774 have been added in the past week. Most of them are the work of proper automated investigation done by Chris West. Summer of code Finally, we learned that both akira and Dhole were accepted for this Google Summer of Code. Let's welcome them! They have until May 25th before coding officialy begins. Now is the good time to help them feel more comfortable by sharing all these little bits of knowledge on how Debian works.

Hi Everyone, So first I want to say, that I appreciate all the interest in our project from the folks who read our posts at Planet Debian. This will be our last post there for now, I hope you enjoyed the posts about my Google Summer of Code project and other info about Elektra we posted there. To stay informed about Elektra s releases, please subscribe to this RSS feed. Today I want to thank you all and tell you about the latest exciting Elektra news, our newest release 0.8.10! This new release brings many exciting updates and features, since I didn t to a post for Elektra 0.8.9, this post will cover changes and additions from Elektra 0.8.8 to 0.8.10. First of all, there is now a new gui for KDB! A big thanks goes out to Raffael Pancheri for developing this GUI! Once included in your Elektra build, this gui can be run using the command kdb qt-gui. It is very important to note that the gui is in version 0.0.2, meaning it is an alpha project and shouldn t be considered stable yet! This GUI is a convenient tool that lets you mount, unmount, search, import and export configurations. We are very excited about this tool and we hope it makes Elektra more accessible to all users. Check out the screenshot below to see this new GUI in action: A few other new features are that Felix added support for multi-line into the ini plugin. Users are able to turn this feature on or off for each configuration. Additionally, Kai-Uwe added support for Windows 7 to Elektra! The Windows 7 port relies on a new resolver called wresolver which is a simpler version of the regular resolver which is compatible with Windows. Additionally, there is a new Java binding, so now Elektra is compatible with applications and plugins written in Java! On top of these features, a new hosts plugin and a new rename plugin have been written. The new hosts in conjunction with improvements to the ini plugin allows for multiple styles of comments (because some ini dialects allow ; and # to be used to differentiate comments) to be used and preserved in configuration files. Additionally, this new hosts plugin is compatible with and differentiates between ipv4 and ipv6 entries. There have also been a huge number of under-the-hood improvements, changes, and fixes; there have been so many in-fact that I am going to list them:

• The CMake variables regarding SWIG bindings are now abandoned in favor to the new variable BINDINGS that works like PLUGINS and TOOLS.
• A proof of concept storage plugin regexstore was added.
• A new race detection tool was added that will help us improve the resolver.
• Most plugins use the CMake add_plugin function which allows plugin developers to more easily and consistently add plugins when building Elektra.
• Elektra is now fully XDG 0.8 complaint.
• Elektra also now meets OpenICC Draft specifications and we added a new tool, kdb mount-openicc
• A new command was added, kdb list-tools which lists the available kdb tools.
• The DPLUGINS flag for CMake now allows you to exempt a plugin from a build using the - prefix such as DPLUGINS=ALL;-xmltool" which would exclude xmltool.

There are many more new changes that I could not mention here. Please keep up-to-date with Elektra news and releases by subscribing to this RSS feed and following our news page on GitHub. As always feel free to comment on our posts and I will get back to you as soon as possible. Again, thanks for reading our blog, enjoy the new release! Sincerely,
Ian S. Donnelly P.S. Happy New Year to everybody!

Hi Everybody! Great news! I am very happy to announce that we have reached a new milestone for Elektra and released a new version, 0.8.8! This release comes right on the tail of the 0.8.7 release and it might just be our biggest release yet! We already have a great article covering all the changes from the previous release on our News documentation on GitHub. I just wanted to focus on a few of those changes on this blog, especially the ones that pertain to my Google Summer of Code Project. First of all, Felix has worked to greatly improve the ini plug-in. This is the plug-in I used in my technical demo for mounting Samba s smb.conf file. It now works even better with complex ini files such as smb.conf which means the automatic merging of files like smb.conf is even better now! That really goes to show one of the greatest strengths of the design of Elektra. Just by improving plug-ins, all the functions of Elektra can improve as well. The merge code was not changed in this release, yet because of an updated plug-in, the merge has improved. Secondly, there have been some good improvements to the kdb command-line tool. Many of these improvements were used in my technical demo, but now they are actually a part of release (and a little more refined from then). We added a new command called kdb remount which allows a user (or script) to mount a file to the Elektra Key Database using an existing backend. An example of this command is:
kdb remount [new filename] [new path] [existing mountpoint]
This command mounts the new file to the new path in the Key Database using an existing backend. This works with the conffile merging by allowing us to mount the various versions of the conffile without having to specify which backend to use (it will use the same backend as the currently used conffile). Additionally, the umount command was updated to allow users to umount using the current mountpath (allowing commands such as kdb umount system/smb.conf) as opposed to backends. Moreover, we added an option to the kdb import command to specify a merge strategy using thing -s option. Now you can import a file into the Key Database and merge the content of that file with the current Keys in the Database. Thirdly, we added some new scripts to Elektra to help with the ucf integration. These scripts were used in my technical demo, but now they are part of the release. elektra-mount and elektra-umount are wrappers for the commands kdb mount and kdb umount respectively. They are designed to be used in debian package scripts and are adapted for easier use than the generic commands. For instance, running elektra-mount will check to see if a file is already mounted at that location in the Key Database. Similarly, elektra-umount will not produce an error if the file was already unmounted. This is because maintainer scripts can be run multiple times in a row and producing an error will stop dpkg even when it shouldn t. Additionally, we added a script called elektra-merge which can be used as a method for ucf to merge configuration files. This script acts as a liaison between ucf and elektra allowing automatic merges to be done by ucf using Elektra s merge features in a seamless manner. For information of how these scripts work, check out my tutorial on integrating elektra-merge into a debian package. The last bit of news I would like to share is the great progress of the Debian package. Thanks to Pino Toscano, version 0.8.7-4 of Elektra is now available in the Debian testing repo! This is great news as we are now that much closer to replacing the outdated Elektra 0.7 versions that are currently the latest versions of Elektra in the stable repo. Once the 0.8.X versions of Elektra make it to stable it will be much easier for us to keep the latest versions of Elektra in Debian, and that s key to allowing Elektra to help improve users lives. You can download the release from:
http://www.markus-raab.org/ftp/elektra/releases/elektra-0.8.8.tar.gz size: 1644441
md5sum: fe11c6704b0032bdde2d0c8fa5e1c7e3
sha1: 16e43c63cd6d62b9fce82cb0a33288c390e39d12
sha256: ae75873966f4b5b5300ef5e5de5816542af50f35809f602847136a8cb21104e2 And the API-Documentation can be found here: http://doc.libelektra.org/api/0.8.8/html/ Hope you enjoy the new release! Sincerely,
Ian S. Donnelly

Hi Everybody! I have been keeping very busy on this blog the past few days with some very exciting updates! Everything is now in place for my Google Summer of Code project! Elektra now has the ability to merge KeySets, ucf has been patched to allow custom merge commands, we included a new elektra-merge script to use in conjunction with the new ucf command, and we wrote a great tutorial on how to use Elektra to merge configuration files in any package using ucf. There are few things I have missed updating you all on or are still wrapping up. First of all, I would like to address the Debian packages. While Elektra includes everything needed for my Google Summer of Code Project, it must be built from source right now. Unfortunately, with the rapid development Elektra has seen the past few months, we did not pay enough attention to the Debian packages and they became dusty and riddles with bugs. Fortunately, we have a solution and his name is Pino Toscano. Pino has, very graciously, agreed to help us fix our Debian packages back into shape. If you wish to see the current progress of the packages, you can check his repo. Pino has already made fantastic progress creating the Debian packages. I will post here when packages are all fixed up and the latest versions of Elektra are into the Debian repo. Some great news that we just received is that Elektra 0.8.7 has just been accepted into Debian unstable! This is huge progress for our team and means that users can now download our packages directly from Debian s unstable repo and test out these new features. Obviously, the normal caveats apply for any packages in unstable but this is still an amazing piece of news and I would like to thank Pino again for all the support he has provided. Another worthy piece of news that I unfortunately haven t had time to cover is that thanks to Felix Berlakovich Elektra has a new plug-in called ini. In case you couldn t guess, this new plug-in is used to mount ini files and the good news is that it is a vast improvement on our older simpleini plug-in. While it is still a work in progress, this new plug-in is much more powerful than simpleini. The new plug-in supports section and comments and works with many more ini files than the old plug-in. You may have noticed that I used this new plug-in to mount smb.conf in my technical demo of Samba using Elektra from configuration merging. Since smb.conf follows the same syntax as an ini file this new plug-in works great for mounting this file into the Elektra Key Database. I hope my blogs so far have been very informative and helpful. Sincerely,
Ian S. Donnelly

Hi Everybody, A few days ago I posted an entry on this blog called dpkg Woes where I explained that due to a lack of response, we were abandoning our plan to patch dpkg for my Google Summer of Code project, and I explained that we had a new solution. Well today I would like to tell you about that solution. Instead of patching dpkg, which would take a long time and seemed like it would never make it upstream, we have added some new features to ucf which will allow my Google Summer of Code project to be realized. If you don t know, ucf, which stands for Update Configuration File, is a popular Debian package whose goal is to preserve user changes to config files. It is meant to act as an alternative to considering a configuration file a conffile on systems that use dpkg. Instead, package maintainers can use ucf to handle these files in a conffile-like way. Where conffiles must work on all systems, because they are shipped with the package, configuration files that use ucf can be handled by maintainer scripts and can vary between systems. ucf exists as a script that allows conffile-like handling of non-conffile configuration files and allows much more flexibility than dpkg s conffile system. In fact, ucf even includes an option to perform a three-way merge on files it manages, it currently only uses diff3 for the task though. As you can see, ucf has a goal that while different than ours, seems naturally compatible to our goal of automatic conffile merging. Obviously, since ucf is a different tool than dpkg we had to re-think how we were going to integrate with ucf. Luckily, integration with ucf proved to be much more simple than integration with dpkg. All we had to do to integrate with ucf was to add a generic hook to attempt a three way merge using any tool created for the task such as Elektra and kdb merge. Felix submitted a pull request with the exact code almost a week ago and we have talked with Manoj Srivastava, the developer for ucf, and he seemed to really like the idea. The only changes we made are to add an option for a three-way merge command, and if one is present, the merge is attempted using the specified command. It s all pretty simple really. Since we decided to include a generic hook for a three-way merge command instead of an Elektra-specific one (which would be less open and would create a dependency on Elektra), we also had to add functionality to Elektra to work with this hook. We ended up writing a new script, called elektra-merge which is now included in our repository. All this script does is act as a liaison between the ucf --three-way-merge-command option and Elektra itself. The script automatically mounts the correct files for theirs and base and dest using the new remount command. Since the only parameters that are passed to the ucf merge command are the paths of ours, theirs, base and result, we were missing vital information on how to mount these files. Our solution was to create the remount command which mirrors the backend configuration of an existing mountpoint to create a new mountpoint using a new file. So if ours is mounted to system/ours using ini, kdb remount /etc/theirs system/theirs system/ours will mount /etc/theirs to system/theirs using the same backend as ours. Since theirs, base, and result should all have the same backend as ours, we can use remount to mount these files even if all we know is their paths. Now, package maintainers can edit their scripts to utilize this new feature. If they want, package maintainers can specify a command to use to merge files using ucf during package upgrades. I will soon be posting a tutorial about how to integrate this feature into a package and how to use Elektra in your scripts in order to allow for automatic three-way merges during package upgrade. I will post a link to the tutorial here once it is published. Sincerely,
Ian S. Donnelly

Hi Everybody, The original plan for my Google Summer of Code project involved creating a merge tool for Elektra including a kdb merge command, that part is all finished and integrated into the newest release of Elektra, 0.8.7 already. The next step was to patch dpkg to add an option for conffile merging. The basic overview of how this would work is:

• Original versions of conffiles would be saved somewhere on the system to serve as a base file
• The users current version of the conffile would serve as ours
• The package maintainers version would be used as theirs
• The result of a three-way merge would overwrite the user s current version and be saved as a new base
• Dpkg would need an option to perform a three way merge with a hook that allowed any tool to be used for the task, not just Elektra.

Obviously, all of these things require patching dpkg, although not in too large away. Luckily, we found a previous attempt to patch dpkg for a three-way merge hook, however it is a few years old and was never included in dpkg. Felix decided to update this patch to work with the new versions of dpkg and cleaned up a bit of redundancy, he then resubmitted it to see if the dpkg maintainers would be interested in such a patch, and to start a dialogue about including all the patches we need. Unfortunately there has been no response from the dpkg team, any many bugs on their tracker have been sitting unanswered for years. Additionally, dpkg s source can be quite complex and it would require a ton of effort for us to make all these patches with no guarantee of integration. As a result, we have decided to go another route (which I will be posting about soon). I just wanted to update anybody interested on the progress of my Google Summer of Code Project by letting them know the experience with dpkg. We have come up with a new solution that is already looking great and you will hear a lot more about it this final week of Google Summer of Code. Stay Tuned!
- Ian S. Donnelly

Hi Everybody! I am very proud to inform you all that Elektra has just shipped a new release, version 0.8.7, with many great features and fixes! First of all, I want to let you all know that a lot of work from my Google Summer of Code Project has made its way into this release. Elektra now includes support for a three way merge of KeySets! A special and sincere thanks goes out to Felix Berlakovich for helping me test this new merge feature and adding some great features to allow for different merge strategies and dealing with meta keys. You can try out the new merge features using the kdb merge command or by using the Elektra API. There is still work to be done with Merging and improving documentation (also look for some posts on this blog soon about the feature). Additionally, thanks to Felix, we have technical previews for some new plug-ins. The new plug-ins are keytometa and ini. In short the keytometa plugin allows to convert normal keys to meta keys during the get operation and reverting this conversion during the set operation. The ini plugin is basically a rewrite of the simpleini plugin and makes use of the inih library. Also there have been many improvements made to the glob plug-in. He even found some time to add a new script for bash tab completion which is located under scripts/kdb-bash-completion. To use it on debian just copy it to /etc/bash_completion.d/ and make sure it is executable. Moreover, we fixed a lot of things with this newest release. Pino Toscano has been working on fixing up the Debian packages for Elektra but he has also fixed many other things along the way including fixing a lot of spelling errors, simplifying the RPATH setting, improvements to respecting $HOME and $TMPDIR, and improvements to some test cases. The kdb tool now does a better job of checking for subfolders that aren t allow and it now makes sure to output warnings before errors so errors can more easily be seen. We have also improved some tests for kdb tool and some plugins as well as fixed compiler warnings on clang and gcc 4.9. We also made some fixes to kdb import and export for some storage plugins and fixed some bugs so that kdb run_all now works flawlessly. There have also been a few tweaks to the API for this release, specifically in the C++ bindings. There is now a delMeta() function for C++. The reason for this is that contrary to the C API, calling

key.setMeta("metaname", NULL)

does not delete the metadata, but stores the value 0 . Additionally, we changed the arguments for isBelow, isDirectBelow, and isBelowSame for the C++ binding to be easier to understand and be more natural to use. Before this change, the C++ binding closely mirrored the C API which lead to an unintuitive behaviour. Before the change the API did the following:

Key ( user/config/key/below ).isBelow (Key ( user/config )) == false
Key ( user/config/key/below ).isBelow (Key ( user/config/key/below/deeper )) == true

That is because the first argument in the C API is the object itself in the C++ API.
The attribute of being below the key in question (the object) refers to the second key in the C API.
While this makes some sense for the C API, it definitely does not for the C++ API. Now the API behaves as follows (as intuitively expected):

Key ( user/config/key/below ).isBelow (Key ( user/config )) == true
Key ( user/config/key/below ).isBelow (Key ( user/config/key/below/deeper )) == false

We even had time for a bunch of documentation changes. We now have a tutorial for contextual values to GitHub so developers can start using contextual values with Elektra. We also included a specification for metadata and a better specification for contracts. There is even a little bit of extra news to share. We now use GitHub for active development of Elektra. We have adopted its issue tracker for issues. Also, now pull requests automatically get built by the server to see if the merge would brake the build and whether it passes all the tests. We are also in the process of updating a lot of our documentation and READMEs to use Markdown so they can be viewed easily on GitHub. Also, Raffael Pancheri has been making really great progress on a qt-gui for Elektra. There is still work to be done but it looks great and is coming along nicely. You can download the release now from Markus site: http://www.markus-raab.org/ftp/elektra/releases/elektra-0.8.7.tar.gz size: 1566800
md5sum: 4996df62942791373b192c793d912b4c
sha1: 00887cc8edb3dea1bc110f69ea64f6b700c29402
sha256: 698ebd41d540eb0c6427c17c13a6a0f03eef94655fbd40655c9b42d612ea1c9b Also there are packages already ready for some distributions:

• Fedora
• Gentoo
• Arch Linux

There is a lot of ongoing work to fix the Debian packages and I will post about it on this blog when they are good to go! Enjoy the new release!
-Ian S. Donnelly

This was another good week. This week I focused on cleaning up the merge implementation as well as learning about Debian packaging. As far as cleaning up the implementation, I got a few tests written to test the merge function. Additionally I rewrote the merge command code (the code responsible for the kdb merge command, it depends on the implementation of merge I wrote last week). Now the kdb merge command takes in a parent key for each keyset and creates a keyset containing all the keys under the parent key. It then invokes the KeysetMerge function I wrote on those keysets and saves the returned keyset to the key database. Most of the week I spent learning about Debian packaging. I was able to get some hand-on experience by creating a package for the augeas plugin for Elektra. I modified the control file to include the libaugeas0 dependency and adding in a description of the plugin. Also I created a new libelektra-augeas4.install file to install the share library to the correct location on the system. Then, I tried building the source using git-buildpackage but unfortunately it failed on packaging the plugin because the libelektra-augeas.so file was never built. It turned out that the augeas plugin had to be added to ElektraCache.cmake under plugins_dep (plugins with dependencies) so that the plugin would be built on make. So I fixed that and ran buildpackage again and voila! It worked! I successfully make my first Debian package! The other thing I looked into was how configuration files get updated during a package upgrade under Debian. It turns out, most package define their configurations as conffiles . These conffiles do not get overwritten during package upgrade if the user has edited them. Basically, during an upgrade, dpkg calculates a checksum on each conffile and if it has changed, prompts the user what to do. Instead, the goal of our project is to attempt an automatic merge of the conffile and if successful, used the merge version. If the merge is unsuccessful dpkg will prompt the user as usual. I need to figure out how to change dpkg s behavior during an upgrade with a conffile so I can build a prototype of a package upgrade merging a file. Lastly, this week I looked into adding tab completion to the kdb tool. Currently kdb does not try to complete commands using tab completion in bash. It turns out adding tab completion isn t that difficult. You basically just need to write rules for how tab completion should work for your program and add it to /etc/bash_completion.d/ I wrote a basic tab completion script for kdb that will complete the commands for kdb. It follows here: #Proof of concept bash completion for kdb. You must copy this file to /etc/bash_completion.d/kdb and load it with ". /etc/bash_completion.d/kdb"
_kdb()

local cur prev opts
COMPREPLY=()
cur="$ COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD] "
prev="$ COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD-1] "
opts="check convert cp export file fstab get getmeta import info ls lsmeta merge mount mv rm set setmeta sget shell test umount vset" if [[ $ cur == * ]] ; then
COMPREPLY=( $(compgen -W "$ opts " -- $ cur ) )
return 0
fi

complete -F _kdb kdb Its just a proof on concept but its a really neat feature and surprisingly easy to implement. One of the other students working on Elektra, Felix, is also working on tab completion. I think we will collaborate and have this feature implemented for kdb very soon. For next week I have a few goals I would like to accomplish. First of all I will have a working prototype of a package being upgraded with automatic conffile merging using kdb merge. Second, I want to continue working on the merge implementation to make it cleaner and work on more sophisticated keysets. I also need to add better error handling to tell if a merge was successful or not, and if not why. Third, I want to work on some of the lintan errors for the deb package of Elektra 0.8.6 and try to get some of those fixed to move closer toward release. Lastly I want to updated the kdb man page for Debian to make it more informative for the shell tool. I was able to get all my goals done for this week except the man page and getting some of the lintian errors fixed up. Overall though it was a very productive week. Until next week,
Ian S. Donnelly

This week went much better. I figured out how to properly implement over an Elektra Keyset and was able to write my first implementation of the Merge function. Right now I need to move on to testing my implementation and fixing the bugs. Already I am aware of a change that will need to be made. I am going to need to use full key names for lookup instead of a cascading lookup like I have now. I plan to use the full name for the root of the keyset in conjunction with the keys full names to change the names to look in the right place for each keyset. Additionally I had a video call with Markus and Felix today and I have a clear plan for what the next two weeks should look like. I really feel like I am getting into the swing of things and better understanding Elektra as well as the development process. So for next week I plan to better test the merge implementation and fix any bugs that crop up. Additionally I plan to write some automated tests for the merge function to make sure it is running correctly. Additionally I am going to work to understand Debian packaging. Also I am going to look at Samba and understand when it checks the configuration files when upgrading the package to see where the merge tool would be used. I want to get a prototype of a package upgrade running the kdb merge tool during an upgrade instead of prompting the user to manually merge the config files. I also plan to spend some extra hours looking at the latest version on Elektra and trying to fix errors with the debian package. I am going to package a version with the augeas_plugin. Additionally I am going to work on fixing some of the lintian errors that are occurring. In other words, it is going to be a very busy week. For reference, here is the proper way to iterate through a keyset. KeySet ks;
Key key;
ks.rewind(); //This is the line I was forgetting. It is necessary to call this function to point the KeySet's internal cursor to the beginning of the KeySet.
while(key=ks.next())
//This will iterate through the KeySet until key is no longer valid (the end of the KeySet).
Anyway, I will update you all next week. Until Then,
Ian

This weekend, Bernd Zeimetz organized a BSP at the offices of conova in Salzburg, Austria. Three days of discussions, bugfixes, sparc removals and a lot of fun and laughter. We squashed a total of 87 bugs: 66 bugs affecting Jessie/Sid were closed, 9 downgraded and 8 closed via removals. As people tend to care about (old)stable, 3 bugs were fixed in Wheezy and one in Squeeze. These numbers might be not totaly correct, as were kinda creative at counting Marga promised a talk about an introduction to properly counting bugs using the Haus vom Nikolaus algorithm to the base of 7 . Speaking of numbers, I touched the following bugs (not all RC):

• #741806: pygresql: FTBFS: pgmodule.c:32:22: fatal error: postgres.h: No such file or directory
  Uploaded an NMU with a patch. The bug was introduced by the recent PostgreSQL development package reorganisation.
• #744229: qpdfview: FTBFS synctex/synctex_parser.c:275:20: fatal error: zlib.h: No such file or directory
  Talked to the maintainer, explaining the importance of the upload and verifying his fix.
• #744300: pexpect: missing dependency on dh-python
  Downgraded to wishlist after verifying the build dependency is only needed when building for Wheezy backports.
• #744917: luajit: FTBFS when /sbin is not in $PATH
  Uploaded an NMU with a patch, which later was canceled due to a maintainer upload with a slightly different fix.
• #742943: nagios-plugins-contrib: check_raid: wants mpt-statusd / mptctl
  Analyzed the situation, verified the status with the latest upstream version of the ckeck and commented on the bug.
• #732110: nagios-plugins-contrib: check_rbl error when nameserver available only in IPv6
  Verify that the bug is fixed in the latest release and mark it as done.
• #684726: nagios-plugins-contrib: RFP: check-v46 Icinga / Nagios plugin for dual stacked (IPv4 / IPv6) hosts
  Mark bug as done, the changelog was missing a proper Closes tag.
• #661167: nagios-plugins-contrib: please include nagios-check-printer-status
  Mark bug as done, the changelog was missing a proper Closes tag.
• #745895: nagios-plugins-contrib: does not compile against Varnish 4.0.0
  Write a patch for supporting the Varnish 3 and 4 APIs at the same time. Also proposed the patch upstream.
• #744922: nagios-plugins-contrib: check_packages: check for security updates broken
  Forward our security_updates_critical patch and Felix fixes to it upstream, then updating check_packages to the latest upstream version.
• #744248: nagios-plugins-contrib: check_cert_expire: support configurable warn/crit times
  Forward Helmut s patch upstream, then updating check_cert_expire to the latest upstream version.
• #745691: django-classy-tags: FTBFS: Sphinx documentation not found
  Analyze the issue and the fix proposed in SVN, comment on the bug.
• #713876: thinkfan: [PATCH] bugfix: use $MAINPID for ExecReload
  Prepare and upload of the latest upstream release, which includes Michael s patch.
• #713878: thinkfan: [PATCH] use dh-systemd for proper systemd-related maintscripts
  Apply Michael s patch to the Debian packaging.
• #728087: thinkfan: Document how to start thinkfan with systemd
  Apply Michael s patch to the Debian packaging.
• #742515: blktap-dkms: blktapblktap kernel module failed to build
  Upload an NMU with a patch based on the upstream fix.
• #745598: libkolab: FTBFS in dh_python2 (missing Build-Conflicts?)
  Upload an NMU with a patch against libkolab s cmake rules, tightening the search for Python to 2.7.
• #745599: libkolabxml: FTBFS with undefined reference to symbol _ZTVN5boost6detail16thread_data_baseE
  Upload an NMU with a patch against libkolabxml s cmake rules, properly linking the tests to the Boost libraries.
• #746160: libcolabxml: FTBFS when both python2 and python3 development headers are installed
  Filling the bug while working on #745599, then uploading an NMU with a patch against libkolabxml s cmake rules, tightening the search for Python to 2.7.
• #714045: blcr-dkms: blcr module is not built on kernel 3.9.1
  Checking the status of the bug upstream, and marking it as forwarded.
• #653404: hdapsd: init.d status support
  Added Peter s patch to the Debian packaging, upload yet pending.
• #702199: hdapsd: Typo in package description
  Fixed typo in the description, upload yet pending.
• #745219: crmsh: should depends on python-yaml
  Verifying the bug with Stefan Bauer and sponsoring his NMU.
• #741600: 389-ds-base: CVE-2014-0132
  Sponsoring the NMU for Tobias Frost.

A couple of (non-free) pictures are available at Uwe s salzburg-cityguide.at. Thanks again to Bernd for organizing and conova and credativ for sponsoring!

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Redland/librdf offers powerful features like being able to persist an RDF model to a relational database (only PostGreSQL seems to work on my setup with 1.0.16, but I may have misconfigured it). You can then do SPARQL queries over the model, and lots of other nice things. Unfortunately, the default PHP bindings are not really object-oriented, so the code isn t looking so good. But thanks to a gentleman named David Shea, there is an object-oriented library named LibRDF (case is sensitive), that helps write nice looking PHP. I discovered it via the blog post of Felix Ostrowski, who took over the maintenance of the LibRDF library (still the docs live on the original author s site). In his post, Felix illustrates how you may use it to parse Richard Cyganiak s FOAF profile. But the examples he gives don t illustrate the full potential of persistence of the RDF graph into the DB. Here s my contribution in 2 examples that will hopefully help : first, one that load Richard s FOAF to the DB, and one, that later retrieve the saved model and perform the same query (both pushed to my github clone of the library). There may be some problems with the use of librdf, including its availability, as it is not full PHP of course and I ve heard of memory management problems, but, depening on your needs, this may be quite handy for writing Linked Data applications.

I ve send a mail today with a summary of some of my experiences in Managua and tiny bits of Nicaragua late April / early May 2012. If you are considering going to DebConf12 (which you obviously should do as you are reading this!) go and read this mail, as it includes a thematically sorted list of impressions and advice written by Gunnar, Norman, Leo, Felix and myself, which should give you some better idea about DebConf12 in Managua! While I spent 14 days in Nicaragua in total, for the last three days I was joined by Gunnar Wolf, to make sure my impressions about the local team, the status of the preparations and everything were correct. Our visit also seems to have been very motivating to local team members, whom I ve seen really enthusiastic to welcome a huge Debian crowd for the first DebConf in Central America in just a few weeks! At the last DebConf12 IRC meeting I summarized it like this: in very short: my two weeks were great, I had a great vacation, met many members of the localteam, which is way bigger then it seems on irc, saw and liked UCA (Universidad Centroamericana, the DebConf12 venue), had zillions of reunions (meetings, see schedule wiki page) and met many nice people and a very hot & interesting country+capital with great countryside. The deadline for sponsored accomodation ends in three days - so if you haven t registered yet, hurry up, DebCamp starts in 49 days! :-) (After that registration is still possible, but you will need to pay for your costs yourself.) We re looking forward to see you there and have a great DebConf together! Hopefully we sweat together while Wheezy is frozen :-D

as I was mostly offline last week, this is a report covering two weeks. as in the week before, it's mainly a mix of build-arch & gcc 4.7 bugs.

• #662023 cairo-5c: "cairo-5c FTBFS No package 'librsvg-2.0' found"
  unreproducible, lower severity, then closed by maintainer
• #666311 src:freeradius: "freeradius: FTBFS: libfreeradius-radius-2.1.10.so: could not read symbols: Invalid operation"
  fix target dependencies in debian/rules, upload to DELAYED/2
• #666325 src:uudeview: "uudeview: FTBFS: ! LaTeX Error: File a4wide.sty' not found."
  add missing build dependency, found by Sebastian Ramacher, upload to DELAYED/2
• #666341 src:vgrabbj: "vgrabbj: FTBFS: make[1]: *** No targets specified and no makefile found. Stop."
  fix target dependencies in debian/rules, upload to DELAYED/2
• #666343 src:cairo-5c: "cairo-5c: FTBFS: make[1]: *** No targets specified and no makefile found. Stop."
  fix target dependencies in debian/rules, upload to DELAYED/2
• #666346 src:openjade: "openjade: FTBFS: make[1]: *** No targets specified and no makefile found. Stop."
  fix target dependencies in debian/rules, upload to DELAYED/2
• #666349 src:openais: "openais: FTBFS: make[1]: *** No targets specified and no makefile found. Stop."
  fix target dependencies in debian/rules, upload to DELAYED/2
• #666366 src:felix-latin: "felix-latin: FTBFS: ! I can't find file t3enc.def'."
  add missing build dependency, upload to DELAYED/2
• #667146 cutesdr: "cutesdr: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing header, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667172 gambit: "gambit: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add this-> qualifiers, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667186 goldendict: "goldendict: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing header, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667190 gpsim: "gpsim: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  apply patch from Paul Tagliamonte, upload to DELAYED/5, then rescheduled to 0-day at maintainer's request
• #667191 gpt: "gpt: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing header, upload to DELAYED/5, later integrated into maintainer upload
• #667198 handlersocket: "handlersocket: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing header, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667200 hexxagon: "hexxagon: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch from Paul Tagliamonte, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667207 ifrit: "ifrit: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to declare a function before its usage, do a QA upload
• #667211 itksnap: "itksnap: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add this-> qualifiers, upload to DELAYED/5, then rescheduled to 0-day at maintainer's request
• #667219 kawari8: "kawari8: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add this-> qualifier, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667221 kdesvn: "kdesvn: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch from Paul Tagliamonte, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667223 kdocker: "kdocker: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing header, upload to DELAYED/5, later sponsored maintainer upload
• #667225 kelbt: "kelbt: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  patch to add this-> qualifier, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667226 kgb: "kgb: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch to add missing header, upload to DELAYED/5
• #667233 kvpnc: "kvpnc: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch from Paul Tagliamonte, upload to DELAYED/5
• #669447 src:bsnes: "bsnes: FTBFS: ./ruby/audio/alsa.cpp:4:28: fatal error: alsa/asoundlib.h: No such file or directory"
  add missing build dependency, send patch to BTS, adapted version included in maintainer upload

After using our small pre-website for some time now, we are very happy to announce the official website has gone live: http://debconf12.debconf.org Now it is the right time for you to get involved supporting the event or just enjoy the design and help us to spread the new website, f.e. by using our nice banners in the artwork section. Please stay tuned: Registration is going to be opened soon.