Search Results: "gabriel"

10 December 2024

Russ Allbery: 2024 book haul

I haven't made one of these posts since... last year? Good lord. I've therefore already read and reviewed a lot of these books. Kemi Ashing-Giwa The Splinter in the Sky (sff)
Moniquill Blackgoose To Shape a Dragon's Breath (sff)
Ashley Herring Blake Delilah Green Doesn't Care (romance)
Ashley Herring Blake Astrid Parker Doesn't Fail (romance)
Ashley Herring Blake Iris Kelly Doesn't Date (romance)
Molly J. Bragg Scatter (sff)
Sarah Rees Breenan Long Live Evil (sff)
Michelle Browne And the Stars Will Sing (sff)
Steven Brust Lyorn (sff)
Miles Cameron Beyond the Fringe (sff)
Miles Cameron Deep Black (sff)
Haley Cass Those Who Wait (romance)
Sylvie Cathrall A Letter to the Luminous Deep (sff)
Ta-Nehisi Coates The Message (non-fiction)
Julie E. Czerneda To Each This World (sff)
Brigid Delaney Reasons Not to Worry (non-fiction)
Mar Delaney Moose Madness (sff)
Jerusalem Demsas On the Housing Crisis (non-fiction)
Michelle Diener Dark Horse (sff)
Michelle Diener Dark Deeds (sff)
Michelle Diener Dark Minds (sff)
Michelle Diener Dark Matters (sff)
Elaine Gallagher Unexploded Remnants (sff)
Bethany Jacobs These Burning Stars (sff)
Bethany Jacobs On Vicious Worlds (sff)
Micaiah Johnson Those Beyond the Wall (sff)
T. Kingfisher Paladin's Faith (sff)
T.J. Klune Somewhere Beyond the Sea (sff)
Mark Lawrence The Book That Wouldn't Burn (sff)
Mark Lawrence The Book That Broke the World (sff)
Mark Lawrence Overdue (sff)
Mark Lawrence Returns (sff collection)
Malinda Lo Last Night at the Telegraph Club (historical)
Jessie Mihalik Hunt the Stars (sff)
Samantha Mills The Wings Upon Her Back (sff)
Lyda Morehouse Welcome to Boy.net (sff)
Cal Newport Slow Productivity (non-fiction)
Naomi Novik Buried Deep and Other Stories (sff collection)
Claire O'Dell The Hound of Justice (sff)
Keanu Reeves & China Mi ville The Book of Elsewhere (sff)
Kit Rocha Beyond Temptation (sff)
Kit Rocha Beyond Jealousy (sff)
Kit Rocha Beyond Solitude (sff)
Kit Rocha Beyond Addiction (sff)
Kit Rocha Beyond Possession (sff)
Kit Rocha Beyond Innocence (sff)
Kit Rocha Beyond Ruin (sff)
Kit Rocha Beyond Ecstasy (sff)
Kit Rocha Beyond Surrender (sff)
Kit Rocha Consort of Fire (sff)
Geoff Ryman HIM (sff)
Melissa Scott Finders (sff)
Rob Wilkins Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes (non-fiction)
Gabrielle Zevin Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (mainstream)
That's a lot of books, although I think I've already read maybe a third of them? Which is better than I usually do.

3 October 2024

Mike Gabriel: Creating (a) new frontend(s) for Polis

After (quite) a summer break, here comes the 4th article of the 5-episode blog post series on Polis, written by Guido Berh rster, member of staff at my company Fre(i)e Software GmbH. Have fun with the read on Guido's work on Polis,
Mike Table of Contents of the Blog Post Series
  1. Introduction
  2. Initial evaluation and adaptation
  3. Issues extending Polis and adjusting our goals
  4. Creating (a) new frontend(s) for Polis (this article)
  5. Current status and roadmap
4. Creating (a) new frontend(s) for Polis Why a new frontend was needed... Our initial experiences of working with Polis, the effort required to implement more invasive changes and the desire of iterating changes more rapidly ultimately lead to the decision to create a new foundation for frontend development that would be independent of but compatible with the upstream project. Our primary objective was thus not to develop another frontend but rather to make frontend development more flexible and to facilitate experimentation and rapid prototyping of different frontends by providing abstraction layers and building blocks. This also implied developing a corresponding backend since the Polis backend is tightly coupled to the frontend and is neither intended to be used by third-party projects nor supporting cross-domain requests due to the expectation of being embedded as an iframe on third-party websites. The long-term plan for achieving our objectives is to provide three abstraction layers for building frontends: The Particiapp Project Under the umbrella of the Particiapp project we have so far developed two new components: Both the participation frontend and backend are fully compatible and require an existing Polis installation and can be run alongside the upstream frontend. More specifically, the administration frontend and common backend are required to administrate conversations and send out notifications and the statistics processing server is required for processing the voting results. Particiapi server For the backend the Python language and the Flask framework were chosen as a technological basis mainly due to developer mindshare, a large community and ecosystem and the smaller dependency chain and maintenance overhead compared to Node.js/npm. Instead of integrating specific identity providers we adopted the OpenID Connect standard as an abstraction layer for authentication which allows delegating authentication either to a self-hosted identity provider or a large number of existing external identity providers. Particiapp Example Frontend The experimental example frontend serves both as a test bed for the client library and as a tool for better understanding the needs of frontend designers. It also features a completely redesigned user interface and results visualization in line with our goals. Branded variants are currently used for evaluation and testing by the stakeholders. In order to simplify evaluation, development, testing and deployment a Docker Compose configuration is made available which contains all necessary components for running Polis with our experimental example frontend. In addition, a development environment is provided which includes a preconfigured OpenID Connect identity provider (KeyCloak), SMTP-Server with web interface (MailDev), and a database frontend (PgAdmin). The new frontend can also be tested using our public demo server.

22 August 2024

Debian Brasil: Debian Day 2024 em Natal/RN - Brasil

por Allythy O Debian Day um evento anual que celebra o anivers rio do Debian, uma das distribui es GNU/Linux mais importante do Software Livre, criada em 16 de Agosto de 1993, por Ian Murdock. No ltimo s bado (17/08/2024) no Sebrae-RN comemoramos os 31 anos Debian em Natal, no Rio Grande do Norte. A celebra o, foi organizada pela PotiLivre(Comunidade Potiguar de Software Livre), destacou os 31 anos de hist ria do Debian. O evento contou com algumas palestras e muitas discuss es sobre Software Livre. Tivemos 70 inscri es, 40 estiverem presentes. O Debian Day em Natal foi uma ocasi o para celebrar a trajet ria do Debian e refor ar a import ncia do Software Livre. Palestrantes Agradecemos imensamente a Isaque Barbosa Martins, Eduardo de Souza Paix o, Fernando Guisso,que palestraram nessa edi o! Obrigado por compartilhar tanto conhecimento com a comunidade. Esperamos ver voc s novamente em futuros encontros! foto da palestra conhecendo projeto Debian Link dos slides do Debian Day Participantes Um grande obrigado tamb m a todos os participantes, n s fazemos isso por voc s! Esperamos que tenham aprendido, se divertido e feito novas conex es entre a comunidade Participantes do Debian Day Natal-RN Essa edi o do Debina Day Natal foi organizada por: Allythy, Clara Nobre, Gabriel Damazio e Marcel Ribeiro.

8 August 2024

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in July 2024

Welcome to the July 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In our reports, we outline what we ve been up to over the past month and highlight news items in software supply-chain security more broadly. As always, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. Table of contents:
  1. Reproducible Builds Summit 2024
  2. Pulling Linux up by its bootstraps
  3. Towards Idempotent Rebuilds?
  4. AROMA: Automatic Reproduction of Maven Artifacts
  5. Community updates
  6. Android Reproducible Builds at IzzyOnDroid with rbtlog
  7. Extending the Scalability, Flexibility and Responsiveness of Secure Software Update Systems
  8. Development news
  9. Website updates
  10. Upstream patches
  11. Reproducibility testing framework

Reproducible Builds Summit 2024 Last month, we were very pleased to announce the upcoming Reproducible Builds Summit, set to take place from September 17th 19th 2024 in Hamburg, Germany. We are thrilled to host the seventh edition of this exciting event, following the success of previous summits in various iconic locations around the world, including Venice, Marrakesh, Paris, Berlin and Athens. Our summits are a unique gathering that brings together attendees from diverse projects, united by a shared vision of advancing the Reproducible Builds effort. During this enriching event, participants will have the opportunity to engage in discussions, establish connections and exchange ideas to drive progress in this vital field. Our aim is to create an inclusive space that fosters collaboration, innovation and problem-solving. If you re interesting in joining us this year, please make sure to read the event page, which has more details about the event and location. We are very much looking forward to seeing many readers of these reports there.

Pulling Linux up by its bootstraps (LWN) In a recent edition of Linux Weekly News, Daroc Alden has written an article on bootstrappable builds. Starting with a brief introduction that
a bootstrappable build is one that builds existing software from scratch for example, building GCC without relying on an existing copy of GCC. In 2023, the Guix project announced that the project had reduced the size of the binary bootstrap seed needed to build its operating system to just 357-bytes not counting the Linux kernel required to run the build process.
The article goes onto to describe that now, the live-bootstrap project has gone a step further and removed the need for an existing kernel at all. and concludes:
The real benefit of bootstrappable builds comes from a few things. Like reproducible builds, they can make users more confident that the binary packages downloaded from a package mirror really do correspond to the open-source project whose source code they can inspect. Bootstrappable builds have also had positive effects on the complexity of building a Linux distribution from scratch [ ]. But most of all, bootstrappable builds are a boon to the longevity of our software ecosystem. It s easy for old software to become unbuildable. By having a well-known, self-contained chain of software that can build itself from a small seed, in a variety of environments, bootstrappable builds can help ensure that today s software is not lost, no matter where the open-source community goes from here

Towards Idempotent Rebuilds? Trisquel developer Simon Josefsson wrote an interesting blog post comparing the output of the .deb files from our tests.reproducible-builds.org testing framework and the ones in the official Debian archive. Following up from a previous post on the reproducibility of Trisquel, Simon notes that typically [the] rebuilds do not match the official packages, even when they say the package is reproducible , Simon correctly identifies that the purpose of [these] rebuilds are not to say anything about the official binary build, instead the purpose is to offer a QA service to maintainers by performing two builds of a package and declaring success if both builds match. However, Simon s post swiftly moves on to announce a new tool called debdistrebuild that performs rebuilds of the difference between two distributions in a GitLab pipeline and displays diffoscope output for further analysis.

AROMA: Automatic Reproduction of Maven Artifacts Mehdi Keshani, Tudor-Gabriel Velican, Gideon Bot and Sebastian Proksch of the Delft University of Technology, Netherlands, have published a new paper in the ACM Software Engineering on a new tool to automatically reproduce Apache Maven artifacts:
Reproducible Central is an initiative that curates a list of reproducible Maven libraries, but the list is limited and challenging to maintain due to manual efforts. [We] investigate the feasibility of automatically finding the source code of a library from its Maven release and recovering information about the original release environment. Our tool, AROMA, can obtain this critical information from the artifact and the source repository through several heuristics and we use the results for reproduction attempts of Maven packages. Overall, our approach achieves an accuracy of up to 99.5% when compared field-by-field to the existing manual approach [and] we reveal that automatic reproducibility is feasible for 23.4% of the Maven packages using AROMA, and 8% of these packages are fully reproducible.

Community updates On our mailing list this month:
  • Nichita Morcotilo reached out to the community, first to share their efforts to build reproducible packages cross-platform with a new build tool called rattler-build, noting that as you can imagine, building packages reproducibly on Windows is the hardest challenge (so far!) . Nichita goes onto mention that the Apple ecosystem appears to be using ZERO_AR_DATE over SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. [ ]
  • Roland Clobus announced that the Debian bookworm 12.6 live images are nearly reproducible , with more detail in the post itself and input in the thread from other contributors.
  • As reported in last month s report, Pol Dellaiera completed his master thesis on Reproducibility in Software Engineering at the University of Mons, Belgium. This month, Pol announced this on the list with more background info. Since the master thesis sources have been available, it has received some feedback and contributions. As a result, an updated version of the thesis has been published containing those community fixes.
  • Daniel Gr ber asked for help in getting the Yosys documentation to build reproducibly, citing issues in inter alia the PDF generation causing differing CreationDate metadata values.
  • James Addison continued his long journey towards getting the Sphinx documentation generator to build reproducible documentation. In this thread, James concerns himself with the problem that even when SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH is configured, Sphinx projects that have configured their copyright notices using dynamic elements can produce nonsensical output under some circumstances. James query ended up generating a number of replies.
  • Allen gunner Gunner posted a brief update on the progress the core team is making towards introducing a Code of Conduct (CoC) such that it is in place in time for the RB Summit in Hamburg in September . In particular, gunner asks if you are interested in helping with CoC design and development in the weeks ahead, simply email rb-core@lists.reproducible-builds.org and let us know . [ ]

Android Reproducible Builds at IzzyOnDroid with rbtlog On our mailing list, Fay Stegerman announced a new Reproducible Builds collaboration in the Android ecosystem:
We are pleased to announce Reproducible Builds, special client support and more in our repo : a collaboration between various independent interoperable projects: the IzzyOnDroid team, 3rd-party clients Droid-ify & Neo Store, and rbtlog (part of my collection of tools for Android Reproducible Builds) to bring Reproducible Builds to IzzyOnDroid and the wider Android ecosystem.

Extending the Scalability, Flexibility and Responsiveness of Secure Software Update Systems Congratulations to Marina Moore of the New York Tandon School of Engineering who has submitted her PhD thesis on Extending the Scalability, Flexibility and Responsiveness of Secure Software Update Systems. The introduction outlines its contributions to the field:
[S]oftware repositories are a vital component of software development and release, with packages downloaded both for direct use and to use as dependencies for other software. Further, when software is updated due to patched vulnerabilities or new features, it is vital that users are able to see and install this patched version of the software. However, this process of updating software can also be the source of attack. To address these attacks, secure software update systems have been proposed. However, these secure software update systems have seen barriers to widespread adoption. The Update Framework (TUF) was introduced in 2010 to address several attacks on software update systems including repository compromise, rollback attacks, and arbitrary software installation. Despite this, compromises continue to occur, with millions of users impacted by such compromises. My work has addressed substantial challenges to adoption of secure software update systems grounded in an understanding of practical concerns. Work with industry and academic communities provided opportunities to discover challenges, expand adoption, and raise awareness about secure software updates. [ ]

Development news In Debian this month, 12 reviews of Debian packages were added, 13 were updated and 6 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. A new toolchain issue type was identified as well, specifically ordering_differences_in_pkg_info.
Colin Percival filed a bug against the LLVM compiler noting that building i386 binaries on the i386 architecture is different when building i386 binaries under amd64. The fix was narrowed down to x87 excess precision, which can result in slightly different register choices when the compiler is hosted on x86_64 or i386 and a fix committed. [ ]
Fay Stegerman performed some in-depth research surrounding her apksigcopier tool, after some Android .apk files signed with the latest apksigner could no longer be verified as reproducible. Fay identified the issue as follows:
Since build-tools >= 35.0.0-rc1, backwards-incompatible changes to apksigner break apksigcopier as it now by default forcibly replaces existing alignment padding and changed the default page alignment from 4k to 16k (same as Android Gradle Plugin >= 8.3, so the latter is only an issue when using older AGP). [ ]
She documented multiple available workarounds and filed a bug in Google s issue tracker.
Lastly, diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb uploaded version 272 and Mattia Rizzolo uploaded version 273 to Debian, and the following changes were made as well:
  • Chris Lamb:
    • Ensure that the convert utility is from ImageMagick version 6.x. The command-line interface has seemingly changed with the 7.x series of ImageMagick. [ ]
    • Factor out version detection in test_jpeg_image. [ ]
    • Correct the import of the identify_version method after a refactoring change in a previous commit. [ ]
    • Move away from using DSA OpenSSH keys in tests as support has been deprecated and removed in OpenSSH version 9.8p1. [ ]
    • Move to assert_diff in the test_openssh_pub_key package. [ ]
    • Update copyright years. [ ]
  • Mattia Rizzolo:
    • Add support for ffmpeg version 7.x which adds some extra context to the diff. [ ]
    • Rework the handling of OpenSSH testing of DSA keys if OpenSSH is strictly 9.7, and add an OpenSSH key test with a ed25519-format key [ ][ ][ ]
    • Temporarily disable a few packages that are not available in Debian testing. [ ][ ]
    • Stop ignoring the results of Debian testing in the continuous integration system. [ ]
    • Adjust options in debian/source to make sure not to pack the Python sdist directory into the binary Debian package. [ ]
    • Adjust Lintian overrides. [ ]

Website updates There were a number of improvements made to our website this month, including:

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

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework running primarily at tests.reproducible-builds.org in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In July, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen, including:
  • Grant bremner access to the ionos7 node. [ ][ ]
  • Perform a dummy change to force update of all jobs. [ ][ ]
In addition, Vagrant Cascadian performed some necessary node maintenance of the underlying build hosts. [ ]
If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

21 July 2024

Mike Gabriel: Polis - a FLOSS Tool for Civic Participation -- Issues extending Polis and adjusting our Goals

Here comes the 3rd article of the 5-episode blog post series on Polis, written by Guido Berh rster, member of staff at my company Fre(i)e Software GmbH. Enjoy also this read on Guido's work on Polis,
Mike Table of Contents of the Blog Post Series
  1. Introduction
  2. Initial evaluation and adaptation
  3. Issues extending Polis and adjusting our goals (this article)
  4. Creating (a) new frontend(s) for Polis
  5. Current status and roadmap
Polis - Issues extending Polis and adjusting our Goals After the initial implementation of limited branding support, user feedback and the involvement of an UX designer lead to the conclusion that we needed more far-reaching changes to the user interface in order to reduce visual clutter, rearrange and improve UI elements, and provide better integration with the websites in which conversations are embedded. Challenges when visualizing Data in Polis Polis visualizes groups using a spatial projection of users based on similarities in voting behavior and places them in two to five groups using a clustering algorithm. During our testing and evaluation users were rarely able to interpret the visualization and often intuitively made incorrect assumptions e.g. by associating the filled area of a group with its significance or size. After consultation with a member of the Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) Group at the University of Groningen we chose to temporarily replace the visualization offered by Polis with simple bar charts representing agreement or disagreement with statements of a group or the majority. We intend to revisit this and explore different forms of visualization at a later point in time. The different factors playing into the weight attached to statements which determine the pseuodo-random order in which they are presented for voting ( comment routing ) proved difficult to explain to stakeholders and users and the admission of the ad-hoc and heuristic nature of the used algorithm1 by Polis authors lead to the decision to temporarily remove this feature. Instead, statements should be placed into three groups, namely
  1. metadata questions,
  2. seed statements,
  3. and participant statements
Statements should then be sorted by group but in a fully randomized order within the group so that metadata questions would be presented before seed statements which would be presented before participant s statements. This simpler method was deemed sufficient for the scale of our pilot projects, however we intend to revisit this decision and explore different methods of comment routing in cooperation with our scientific partners at a later point in time. An evaluation of the requirements for implementing mandatory authentication and adding support for additional authentication methods to Polis showed that significant changes to both the administration and participation frontend were needed due to a lack of an abstraction layer or extension mechanism and the current authentication providers being hardcoded in many parts of the code base. A New Frontend is born: Particiapp Based on the implementation details of the participation frontend, the invasive nature of the changes required, and the overhead of keeping up with active upstream development it became clear that a different, more flexible approach to development was needed. This ultimately lead to the creation of Particiapp, a new Open Source project providing the building blocks and necessary abstraction layers for rapid protoyping and experimentation with different fontends which are compatible with but independent from Polis.
  1. Small, Christopher T., Bjorkegren, Michael, Erkkil , Timo, Shaw, Lynette and Megill, Colin (2021). Polis: Scaling deliberation by mapping high dimensional opinion spaces. Recerca. Revista de Pensament i An lisi, 26(2), pp. 1-26.

17 July 2024

Mike Gabriel: Weather Experts with Translation Skills Needed!

Lomiri Weather App goes Open Meteo In Ubuntu Touch / Lomiri, Maciej Sopy o has updated Lomiri's Weather App to operate against a different weather forecast provider (Open Meteo). Additionally, the new implementation is generic and pluggable, so other weather data providers can be added-in later. Big thanks to Maciej for working on this just in time (the previous implementation's API has recently been EOL'ed and is not available anymore to Ubuntu Touch / Lomiri users). Lomiri Weather App - new Meteorological Terms part of the App now While the old weather data provider implementation obtained all the meteorological information as already localized strings from the provider, the new implementation requires all sorts of weather conditions being translated within the Lomiri Weather App itself. The meteorological terms are probably not easy to translate for the usual software translator, so special help might be required here. Call for Translations: Lomiri Weather App So, if you feel entitled to help here, please join the Hosted Weblate service [1] and start working on Lomiri Weather App. Thanks a lot! light+love
Mike Gabriel (aka sunweaver) [1] https://hosted.weblate.org/
[2] https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/lomiri/lomiri-weather-app/

3 July 2024

Mike Gabriel: Polis - a FLOSS Tool for Civic Participation -- Initial Evaluation and Adaptation (episode 2/5)

Here comes the 2nd article of the 5-episode blog post series written by Guido Berh rster, member of staff at my company Fre(i)e Software GmbH. Enjoy also this read on Guido's work on Polis,
Mike Table of Contents of the Blog Post Series
  1. Introduction
  2. Initial evaluation and adaptation (this article)
  3. Issues extending Polis and adjusting our goals
  4. Creating (a) new frontend(s) for Polis
  5. Current status and roadmap
Polis - Initial evaluation and adaptation The Polis code base consists of a number of components, the administration and participation interfaces, a common web backend, and a statistics processing server. Both frontends and the backend are written in a mixture of JavaScript and TypeScript, only the statistics processing server is written in Clojure. In case of self hosting the preferred method of deployment is via Docker containers using Docker Compose or any other orchestrator. The participation frontend for conversations can either be used as a standalone web page or be embedded via an iframe. For our planned use case we initially defined the following goals: After a preliminary evaluation of our own and consulting with Policy Lab UK who were also evaluating and testing Polis and had already made a range of improvements related to self-hosting as well as bug fixes and modernization changes we decided to take their work as a base for our adaptations with the intent of submitting generally useful changes back to the Polis project. Subsequently, a number of changes were implemented, including the removal of hardcoded domain names, the elimination of unnecessary cookies and third-party requests, support for an alternative email sending service, and the option of disabling Facebook and X integration. For the branding our approach was to add an option allowing websites which are embedding conversations in an iframe to load an alternative stylesheet for overriding the native Polis branding. For this to be practical we intended to use CSS custom properties for defining branding-related styles such as colors and fonts. That approach turned out to be problematic because although the Polis participation frontend stylesheet is generated via SCSS and some of the colors are parameterized, however, they are not used consistently throughout the SCSS stylesheets, unfortunately. In addition the frontend templates contain a large amount of hardcoded style attributes. While we succeeded in implementing user-defined stylesheets, it took a disproportionate amount of development resources to parameterize all used colors and fonts via CSS custom properties aggravated by the fact that the SCSS and template files are huge and contain many unused rules and code.

2 July 2024

Mike Gabriel: Polis - a FLOSS Tool for Civic Participation -- Introduction (episode 1/5)

This is the first article of a 5-episode blog post series written by Guido Berh rster, member of staff at my company Fre(i)e Software GmbH. Thanks, Guido for being on the Polis project. Enjoy the read on the work Guido has been doing over the past months,
Mike A team lead by Raoul Kramer/BetaBreak is currently adapting Polis for evaluation and testing by several Dutch provincial governments and central government ministries. Guido Berh rster (author of this article) who is an employee at Fre(i)e Software GmbH has been involved in this project as the main software developer. This series of blog posts describes how and why Polis was initially modified and adapted, what issues the team ran into and how this ultimately lead them to start a new Open Source project called Particiapp for accelerating the development of alternative Polis frontends compatible to but independent from the upstream project. Table of Contents of the Blog Post Series
  1. Introduction (this article)
  2. Initial evaluation and adaptation
  3. Issues extending Polis and adjusting our goals
  4. Creating (a) new frontend(s) for Polis
  5. Current status and roadmap
Polis - The Introduction What is Polis? Polis is a platform for participation which helps to gather, analyze and understand viewpoints of large groups of participants on complex issues. In practical terms participants take part in conversations on a predefined topic by voting on statements or submitting their own statements (referred to as comments in Polis) for others to vote on1. Through statistical analysis including machine learning participants are sorted into groups based on similarities in voting behavior. In addition, group-informed and overall consensus statements are identified and presented to participants in real-time. This allows for participants to react to and refine statements and either individually or through a predefined process to come to an overall consensus. Furthermore, the order in which statements are presented to participants is influenced by a complex weighting system based on a number of factors such as variance, recency, and frequency of skipping. This so called comment routing is intended to facilitate a meaningful contribution of participants without requiring them to vote on each of a potentially huge number of statements 2. Polis open-ended nature sets it apart from online surveys using pre-defined questions and allows its users to gather a more accurate picture of the public opinion. In contrast to a discussion forum or comment section where participants directly reply to each other, it discourages unproductive behavior such as provocations or personal attacks by not presenting statements in chronological order in combination with voting. Finally, its comment routing is intended to provide scalability towards a large number of participants which generate a potentially large number of statements. The project was developed and is maintained by The Computational Democracy Project, a USA-based non-profit organization which provides a hosted version and offers related services. It is also released as Open Source software under the AGPL 3.0 license. Polis has been used in a variety of different contexts as part of broader political processes facilitating broader political participation and opinion-forming, and gathering feedback and creative input. Use of Polis in Taiwan One prominent use case of Polis is its adoption as part of the vTaiwan participatory governance project. Established by the g0v civic tech community in the wake of the 2014 mass protests by the Sunflower movement, the vTaiwan project enables consultations on proposed legislation among a broad range of stakeholders including government ministries, lawmakers, experts, interest groups, civil society as well as the broader public. Although the resulting recommendations are non-binding, they exert pressure on the government to take action and recommendations have been adopted into legislation.345 vTaiwan uses Polis for large-scale online deliberations as part of a structured participation process. These deliberations take place after identifying and involving stakeholders and experts and providing through information about the topic at hand to the public. Citizens are then given the opportunity to vote on statements or provide alternative proposals which allows for the refinement of ideas and ideally leads to a consensus at the end. The results of these online deliberations are then curated, discussed in publicly broadcast face-to-face meetings which ultimately produce concrete policy recommendations. vTaiwan has in numerous cases given impulses resulting in government action and provided significant input e.g. on legislation regulating Uber or technological experiments by Fintech startups.35 See also
  1. https://compdemocracy.org/Polis/
  2. https://compdemocracy.org/comment-routing/
  3. https://info.vtaiwan.tw/
  4. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/27/taiwan-civic-hackers-polis-consensus-social-media-platform
  5. https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/08/21/240284/the-simple-but-ingenious-system-taiwan-uses-to-crowdsource-its-laws/

18 March 2024

Gunnar Wolf: After miniDebConf Santa Fe

Last week we held our promised miniDebConf in Santa Fe City, Santa Fe province, Argentina just across the river from Paran , where I have spent almost six beautiful months I will never forget. Around 500 Kilometers North from Buenos Aires, Santa Fe and Paran are separated by the beautiful and majestic Paran river, which flows from Brazil, marks the Eastern border of Paraguay, and continues within Argentina as the heart of the litoral region of the country, until it merges with the Uruguay river (you guessed right the river marking the Eastern border of Argentina, first with Brazil and then with Uruguay), and they become the R o de la Plata. This was a short miniDebConf: we were lent the APUL union s building for the weekend (thank you very much!); during Saturday, we had a cycle of talks, and on sunday we had more of a hacklab logic, having some unstructured time to work each on their own projects, and to talk and have a good time together. We were five Debian people attending: santiago debacle eamanu dererk gwolf @debian.org. My main contact to kickstart organization was Mart n Bayo. Mart n was for many years the leader of the Technical Degree on Free Software at Universidad Nacional del Litoral, where I was also a teacher for several years. Together with Leo Mart nez, also a teacher at the tecnicatura, they contacted us with Guillermo and Gabriela, from the APUL non-teaching-staff union of said university. We had the following set of talks (for which there is a promise to get electronic record, as APUL was kind enough to record them! of course, I will push them to our usual conference video archiving service as soon as I get them)
Hour Title (Spanish) Title (English) Presented by
10:00-10:25 Introducci n al Software Libre Introduction to Free Software Mart n Bayo
10:30-10:55 Debian y su comunidad Debian and its community Emanuel Arias
11:00-11:25 Por qu sigo contribuyendo a Debian despu s de 20 a os? Why am I still contributing to Debian after 20 years? Santiago Ruano
11:30-11:55 Mi identidad y el proyecto Debian: Qu es el llavero OpenPGP y por qu ? My identity and the Debian project: What is the OpenPGP keyring and why? Gunnar Wolf
12:00-13:00 Explorando las masculinidades en el contexto del Software Libre Exploring masculinities in the context of Free Software Gora Ortiz Fuentes - Jos Francisco Ferro
13:00-14:30 Lunch
14:30-14:55 Debian para el d a a d a Debian for our every day Leonardo Mart nez
15:00-15:25 Debian en las Raspberry Pi Debian in the Raspberry Pi Gunnar Wolf
15:30-15:55 Device Trees Device Trees Lisandro Dami n Nicanor Perez Meyer (videoconferencia)
16:00-16:25 Python en Debian Python in Debian Emmanuel Arias
16:30-16:55 Debian y XMPP en la medici n de viento para la energ a e lica Debian and XMPP for wind measuring for eolic energy Martin Borgert
As it always happens DebConf, miniDebConf and other Debian-related activities are always fun, always productive, always a great opportunity to meet again our decades-long friends. Lets see what comes next!

16 February 2024

Mike Gabriel: Debian Edu 12 - Call for Testing

This is a call for testing of Debian Edu based on Debian bookworm. With the Debian 12.5 point release all required packages have landed in the Debian Edu ISO images that allow you to install a Debian Edu system based on Debian 12. ISO Image Downloads You can find the Blueray Disc ISO image (use for main server installation) at: http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/release/current/amd64/iso-bd/debian-ed... For standalone workstation installations or installations on an already up-and-running Debian Edu site, please use the netinst ISO image: http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/release/current/amd64/iso-cd/debian-ed... Quick Start HowTo For testing Debian Edu 12, set up e.g. LXD or libVirt and install (at least) three virtual machines. In your virtualization software prepare an internal network where the VMs can reach one another without needing access to your local network. The three VMs: Happy testing! Further Readings Overall installation profile concept of Debian Edu:
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BeforeGettingStarted Debian Edu 12 manual:
https://jenkins.debian.net/userContent/debian-edu-doc/ Debian Edu 12 status page:
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Bookworm

11 January 2024

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in December 2023

Welcome to the December 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In these reports we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a rather rapid recap, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, almost all software is distributed to end users as pre-compiled binaries (more).

Reproducible Builds: Increasing the Integrity of Software Supply Chains awarded IEEE Software Best Paper award In February 2022, we announced in these reports that a paper written by Chris Lamb and Stefano Zacchiroli was now available in the March/April 2022 issue of IEEE Software. Titled Reproducible Builds: Increasing the Integrity of Software Supply Chains (PDF). This month, however, IEEE Software announced that this paper has won their Best Paper award for 2022.

Reproducibility to affect package migration policy in Debian In a post summarising the activities of the Debian Release Team at a recent in-person Debian event in Cambridge, UK, Paul Gevers announced a change to the way packages are migrated into the staging area for the next stable Debian release based on its reproducibility status:
The folks from the Reproducibility Project have come a long way since they started working on it 10 years ago, and we believe it s time for the next step in Debian. Several weeks ago, we enabled a migration policy in our migration software that checks for regression in reproducibility. At this moment, that is presented as just for info, but we intend to change that to delays in the not so distant future. We eventually want all packages to be reproducible. To stimulate maintainers to make their packages reproducible now, we ll soon start to apply a bounty [speedup] for reproducible builds, like we ve done with passing autopkgtests for years. We ll reduce the bounty for successful autopkgtests at that moment in time.

Speranza: Usable, privacy-friendly software signing Kelsey Merrill, Karen Sollins, Santiago Torres-Arias and Zachary Newman have developed a new system called Speranza, which is aimed at reassuring software consumers that the product they are getting has not been tampered with and is coming directly from a source they trust. A write-up on TechXplore.com goes into some more details:
What we have done, explains Sollins, is to develop, prove correct, and demonstrate the viability of an approach that allows the [software] maintainers to remain anonymous. Preserving anonymity is obviously important, given that almost everyone software developers included value their confidentiality. This new approach, Sollins adds, simultaneously allows [software] users to have confidence that the maintainers are, in fact, legitimate maintainers and, furthermore, that the code being downloaded is, in fact, the correct code of that maintainer. [ ]
The corresponding paper is published on the arXiv preprint server in various formats, and the announcement has also been covered in MIT News.

Nondeterministic Git bundles Paul Baecher published an interesting blog post on Reproducible git bundles. For those who are not familiar with them, Git bundles are used for the offline transfer of Git objects without an active server sitting on the other side of a network connection. Anyway, Paul wrote about writing a backup system for his entire system, but:
I noticed that a small but fixed subset of [Git] repositories are getting backed up despite having no changes made. That is odd because I would think that repeated bundling of the same repository state should create the exact same bundle. However [it] turns out that for some, repositories bundling is nondeterministic.
Paul goes on to to describe his solution, which involves forcing git to be single threaded makes the output deterministic . The article was also discussed on Hacker News.

Output from libxlst now deterministic libxslt is the XSLT C library developed for the GNOME project, where XSLT itself is an XML language to define transformations for XML files. This month, it was revealed that the result of the generate-id() XSLT function is now deterministic across multiple transformations, fixing many issues with reproducible builds. As the Git commit by Nick Wellnhofer describes: 
Rework the generate-id() function to return deterministic values. We use
a simple incrementing counter and store ids in the 'psvi' member of
nodes which was freed up by previous commits. The presence of an id is
indicated by a new "source node" flag.
This fixes long-standing problems with reproducible builds, see
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=751621
This also hardens security, as the old implementation leaked the
difference between a heap and a global pointer, see
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1356211
The old implementation could also generate the same id for dynamically
created nodes which happened to reuse the same memory. Ids for namespace
nodes were completely broken. They now use the id of the parent element
together with the hex-encoded namespace prefix.

Community updates There were made a number of improvements to our website, including Chris Lamb fixing the generate-draft script to not blow up if the input files have been corrupted today or even in the past [ ], Holger Levsen updated the Hamburg 2023 summit to add a link to farewell post [ ] & to add a picture of a Post-It note. [ ], and Pol Dellaiera updated the paragraph about tar and the --clamp-mtime flag [ ]. On our mailing list this month, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted an interesting summary on some of the reasons why packages are still not reproducible in 2023. diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made a number of changes, including processing objdump symbol comment filter inputs as Python byte (and not str) instances [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian extended diffoscope support for GNU Guix [ ] and updated the version in that distribution to version 253 [ ].

Challenges of Producing Software Bill Of Materials for Java Musard Balliu, Benoit Baudry, Sofia Bobadilla, Mathias Ekstedt, Martin Monperrus, Javier Ron, Aman Sharma, Gabriel Skoglund, C sar Soto-Valero and Martin Wittlinger (!) of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, have published an article in which they:
deep-dive into 6 tools and the accuracy of the SBOMs they produce for complex open-source Java projects. Our novel insights reveal some hard challenges regarding the accurate production and usage of software bills of materials.
The paper is available on arXiv.

Debian Non-Maintainer campaign As mentioned in previous reports, the Reproducible Builds team within Debian has been organising a series of online and offline sprints in order to clear the huge backlog of reproducible builds patches submitted by performing so-called NMUs (Non-Maintainer Uploads). During December, Vagrant Cascadian performed a number of such uploads, including: In addition, Holger Levsen performed three no-source-change NMUs in order to address the last packages without .buildinfo files in Debian trixie, specifically lorene (0.0.0~cvs20161116+dfsg-1.1), maria (1.3.5-4.2) and ruby-rinku (1.7.3-2.1).

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework (available at tests.reproducible-builds.org) in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In December, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Fix matching packages for the [R programming language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(programming_language). [ ][ ][ ]
    • Add a Certbot configuration for the Nginx web server. [ ]
    • Enable debugging for the create-meta-pkgs tool. [ ][ ]
  • Arch Linux-related changes
    • The asp has been deprecated by pkgctl; thanks to dvzrv for the pointer. [ ]
    • Disable the Arch Linux builders for now. [ ]
    • Stop referring to the /trunk branch / subdirectory. [ ]
    • Use --protocol https when cloning repositories using the pkgctl tool. [ ]
  • Misc changes:
    • Install the python3-setuptools and swig packages, which are now needed to build OpenWrt. [ ]
    • Install pkg-config needed to build Coreboot artifacts. [ ]
    • Detect failures due to an issue where the fakeroot tool is implicitly required but not automatically installed. [ ]
    • Detect failures due to rename of the vmlinuz file. [ ]
    • Improve the grammar of an error message. [ ]
    • Document that freebsd-jenkins.debian.net has been updated to FreeBSD 14.0. [ ]
In addition, node maintenance was performed by Holger Levsen [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian [ ].

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:
If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

22 December 2023

Joachim Breitner: The Haskell Interlude Podcast

It was pointed out to me that I have not blogged about this, so better now than never: Since 2021 I am together with four other hosts producing a regular podcast about Haskell, the Haskell Interlude. Roughly every two weeks two of us interview someone from the Haskell Community, and we chat for approximately an hour about how they came to Haskell, what they are doing with it, why they are doing it and what else is on their mind. Sometimes we talk to very famous people, like Simon Peyton Jones, and sometimes to people who maybe should be famous, but aren t quite yet. For most episodes we also have a transcript, so you can read the interviews instead, if you prefer, and you should find the podcast on most podcast apps as well. I do not know how reliable these statistics are, but supposedly we regularly have around 1300 listeners. We don t get much feedback, however, so if you like the show, or dislike it, or have feedback, let us know (for example on the Haskell Disourse, which has a thread for each episode). At the time of writing, we released 40 episodes. For the benefit of my (likely hypothetical) fans, or those who want to train an AI voice model for nefarious purposes, here is the list of episodes co-hosted by me: Can t decide where to start? The one with Ryan Trinkle might be my favorite. Thanks to the Haskell Foundation and its sponsors for supporting this podcast (hosting, editing, transscription).

5 December 2023

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: Montreal's Debian & Stuff - November 2023

Hello from a snowy Montr al! My life has been pretty busy lately1 so please forgive this late report. On November 19th, our local Debian User Group met at Montreal's most prominent hackerspace, Foulab. We've been there a few times already, but since our last visit, Foulab has had some membership/financial troubles. Happy to say things are going well again and a new team has taken over the space. This meetup wasn't the most productive day for me (something about being exhausted apparently makes it hard to concentrate), but other people did a bunch of interesting stuff :) Pictures Here are a bunch of pictures I took! Foulab is always a great place to snap quirky things :) A sign on a whiteboard that says 'Bienvenue aux laboratoires qui rends fou' The entrance of the bio-hacking house, with a list of rules An exploded keyboard with a 'Press F1 to continue' sign An inflatable Tux with a Foulab T-Shirt A picture of the woodworking workshop
  1. More busy than the typical end of semester rush... At work, we are currently renegotiating our collective bargaining agreement and things aren't going so well. We went on strike for a few days already and we're planning on another 7 days starting on Friday 8th.

7 October 2023

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: Montreal's Debian & Stuff - "September" 2023

Last Sunday, our local Debian user group gathered to chat, to work on Debian and to do other, non-Debian related hacking. A "Debian & Stuff"! It had been a while since we held a proper meetup. Our last event was the Montreal BSP we organised back in March 2023... We somewhat missed the window for a June meetup and summer events never seem to gather a good crowd, so I didn't try to organise one. All this to say it was nice to see folks from the Montreal Debian community :) This event was also the first time we were hosted by L'Espace des possibles - Petite Patrie, a social venue that aims to provide a space for not-for-profit activities, like repair caf s, sowing classes, board game nights, etc. It was really nice and we will surely meet there again in the future. A group picture during the event Many people came to the event, including some new ones. Although people always tend to come and go during the day, a total of 12 people attended the event. As always, people worked on very different projects! One of the focus of this D&S was assembling AirGradient DIY basic kits. Our local community has been talking a lot about air quality metrics in the past few months1. Tiago thus decided to have a company print the PCBs for this kit and graciously gave away a few spares. Michael then took upon himself to order parts on AliExpress and a few of us ended up soldering the kits together while chatting. An AirGradient DIY basic kit, semi-assembled Otherwise, some Debian work was also done: The whole event was super fun, the tacos we had for lunch were delicious (and very authentic!), and we ended up at a local microbrewery to share a pint later in the evening. Looking forward to the next event!
  1. Mostly as a result of the large forest fires in Canada this summer. I myself blogged twice about air quality-related projects recently.

28 March 2023

Mike Gabriel: UbuntuTouch Focal OTA-1 has been released

Yesterday, the UBports core developer team released Ubuntu Touch Focal OTA-1 (In fact, Raoul, Marius and I were in a conference call when Marius froze and said: the PR team already posted the release blog post; the post is out, but we haven't released yet... ahhhh... panic... Shall I?, Marius said, and we said: GO!!! This is why the release occurred in public five hours ahead of schedule. OMG.) For all the details, please study:
https://ubports.com/blog/ubports-news-1/post/ubuntu-touch-ota-1-focal-re... Credits Thanks to all the developers, other contributors and funding providers that helped to reach this massive milestone. I dare to drop some names here at the risk of forgetting others (I put them in alphanumerical order): Alan, Alfred, Brian, Christoffer, Daniel, Eline, Florian, Guido, Jami, Jonathan, Kugi, Lionel, Maciek, Mardy, Marius, Mike, Nigel, Nikita, Raoul, Ratchanan, Robert, Sergey. I have been involved in the development and release process over the past four years and I feel honoured to work with so many fine and genuine people on such a unique project. It is a pleasure to work with you guys!!! Also a big thanks to the UBports Foundation and its BoD for being the umbrella organisation of all Ubuntu Touch related initiatives. Consumer-Ready Ubuntu Touch is one of the very few Open Source projects that brings fourth a 100% FLOSS phone operating system. After using Ubuntu Touch myself for several months now, I can confirm that it is a consumer grade OS that can be used by non-tech people as a daily driver for mobile communications and connectivity. Go for it and try it out.

5 February 2023

Mike Gabriel: Call for translations: Lomiri / Ubuntu Touch 20.04

Prologue For over a year now, Fre(i)e Software GmbH (my company) is involved in Ubuntu Touch development. The development effort currently is handled by a mix of paid and voluntary developers/contributors under the umbrella of the UBports Foundation. We are approaching the official first release of Ubuntu Touch 20.04 with rapid pace. And, if you are a non-Englisch native speaker, we'd like to ask you for help... Read below. light+love
Mike (aka sunweaver at debian.org, Mastodon, IRC, etc.) Internationalization (i18n) of Ubuntu Touch 20.04 The UBports team has moved most of the translation workflows for localizing Ubuntu Touch over to Hosted Weblate: To contribute to the UBports projects you need to register here: The localization platform of all UBports / Lomiri components is sponsored by Hosted Weblate via their free hosting plan for Libre and Open Source Projects. Many thanks for providing this service. Translating Lomiri The translation components in the Lomiri project have already been set up and are ready for being updated by translators. Please expect some translation template changes for all those components to occur in the near future, but this should not hinder you from starting translation work right away. Translating Lomiri will bring the best i18n experience to Ubuntu Touch 20.04 end users for the core libraries and the pre-installed (so called) Core Apps. Translating Ubuntu Touch Apps For App Developers (apps that are not among the Core Apps) we will now offer a translation slot under the UBports project on hosted.weblate.org: If you are actively maintaining an Ubuntu Touch app, please ask for a translation component slot on hosted.weblate.org and we will set up your app's translation workflow for and with you. Using the translation service at Hosted Weblate is not a must for app developers, it's rather a service we offer to ease i18n work on Ubuntu Touch apps. Who to contact? To get translations for your app set up on Hosted Weblate, please get in touch with us on https://t.me/ubports, please highlight @sunweaver (Mike Gabriel), @BetaBreak (Raoul Kramer), @cibersheep and @Danfro with your request.

9 November 2022

Debian Brasil: Brasileiros(as) Mantenedores(as) e Desenvolvedores(as) Debian a partir de julho de 2015

Desde de setembro de 2015, o time de publicidade do Projeto Debian passou a publicar a cada dois meses listas com os nomes dos(as) novos(as) Desenvolvedores(as) Debian (DD - do ingl s Debian Developer) e Mantenedores(as) Debian (DM - do ingl s Debian Maintainer). Estamos aproveitando estas listas para publicar abaixo os nomes dos(as) brasileiros(as) que se tornaram Desenvolvedores(as) e Mantenedores(as) Debian a partir de julho de 2015. Desenvolvedores(as) Debian / Debian Developers / DDs: Marcos Talau Fabio Augusto De Muzio Tobich Gabriel F. T. Gomes Thiago Andrade Marques M rcio de Souza Oliveira Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana Samuel Henrique S rgio Durigan J nior Daniel Lenharo de Souza Giovani Augusto Ferreira Adriano Rafael Gomes Breno Leit o Lucas Kanashiro Herbert Parentes Fortes Neto Mantenedores(as) Debian / Debian Maintainers / DMs: Guilherme de Paula Xavier Segundo David da Silva Polverari Paulo Roberto Alves de Oliveira Sergio Almeida Cipriano Junior Francisco Vilmar Cardoso Ruviaro William Grzybowski Tiago Ilieve
Observa es:
  1. Esta lista ser atualizada quando o time de publicidade do Debian publicar novas listas com DMs e DDs e tiver brasileiros.
  2. Para ver a lista completa de Mantenedores(as) e Desenvolvedores(as) Debian, inclusive outros(as) brasileiros(as) antes de julho de 2015 acesse: https://nm.debian.org/public/people

Debian Brasil: Brasileiros(as) Mantenedores(as) e Desenvolvedores(as) Debian a partir de julho de 2015

Desde de setembro de 2015, o time de publicidade do Projeto Debian passou a publicar a cada dois meses listas com os nomes dos(as) novos(as) Desenvolvedores(as) Debian (DD - do ingl s Debian Developer) e Mantenedores(as) Debian (DM - do ingl s Debian Maintainer). Estamos aproveitando estas listas para publicar abaixo os nomes dos(as) brasileiros(as) que se tornaram Desenvolvedores(as) e Mantenedores(as) Debian a partir de julho de 2015. Desenvolvedores(as) Debian / Debian Developers / DDs: Marcos Talau Fabio Augusto De Muzio Tobich Gabriel F. T. Gomes Thiago Andrade Marques M rcio de Souza Oliveira Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana Samuel Henrique S rgio Durigan J nior Daniel Lenharo de Souza Giovani Augusto Ferreira Adriano Rafael Gomes Breno Leit o Lucas Kanashiro Herbert Parentes Fortes Neto Mantenedores(as) Debian / Debian Maintainers / DMs: Guilherme de Paula Xavier Segundo David da Silva Polverari Paulo Roberto Alves de Oliveira Sergio Almeida Cipriano Junior Francisco Vilmar Cardoso Ruviaro William Grzybowski Tiago Ilieve
Observa es:
  1. Esta lista ser atualizada quando o time de publicidade do Debian publicar novas listas com DMs e DDs e tiver brasileiros.
  2. Para ver a lista completa de Mantenedores(as) e Desenvolvedores(as) Debian, inclusive outros(as) brasileiros(as) antes de julho de 2015 acesse: https://nm.debian.org/public/people

20 October 2022

Mike Gabriel: Ubuntu Touch development - Wanna sponsor ARM64 CPU power for CI build infrastructure?

What is Ubuntu Touch? (And what does sunweaver have to do with it?) With Ubuntu Touch, the UBports Foundation offers a truly unique mobile experience - a viable alternative to Android and iOS. The UBports community provides a free and open-source GNU/Linux-based mobile operating system. One that can be installed and used today. Currently, there is an intensive effort going on lifting Ubuntu Touch from its current Ubuntu 16.04 base up to an Ubuntu 20.04 base. (And very soon after that to an Ubuntu 22.04 base...). With the Ubuntu Touch 20.04 base the progress bar is already at (I'd say) 89%, but we recently got hit by a drawback. I am currently involved in the Ubuntu Touch core development team at UBports and on medium short notice our current ARM64 server sponsor has announced to decommission our ARM64 build server that currently powers all the ARM64 and armhf CI builds. Call for Hardware Sponsoring So, the UBports core development team is currently desperately looking for a sponsor (or a few sponsors) who can provide us with (datacenter-hosted) ARM-based CPU power. It is important, that also 32-bit ARM builds are possible with the hardware provided. For testing, I recently ordered a HoneyComb LX2 (by SolidRun) as a possible solution (multi-node in the end), but the board arrived in a non-usable state, it seems. So this also didn't work out as easy as expected. As the former provider/sponsor is about to pull the plug, this call for help is kind of urgent. Please get in touch if you can help us out or know people who can. Thanks!!!
Mike (sunweaver at debian.org, libera.chat, OFTC, Telegram, matrix.org, etc.)

27 June 2022

Russ Allbery: Review: Light from Uncommon Stars

Review: Light from Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki
Publisher: Tor
Copyright: 2021
ISBN: 1-250-78907-9
Format: Kindle
Pages: 371
Katrina Nguyen is an young abused transgender woman. As the story opens, she's preparing to run away from home. Her escape bag is packed with meds, clothes, her papers, and her violin. The note she is leaving for her parents says that she's going to San Francisco, a plausible lie. Her actual destination is Los Angeles, specifically the San Gabriel Valley, where a man she met at a queer youth conference said he'd give her a place to sleep. Shizuka Satomi is the Queen of Hell, the legendary uncompromising violin teacher responsible for six previous superstars, at least within the limited world of classical music. She's wealthy, abrasive, demanding, and intimidating, and unbeknownst to the rest of the world she has made a literal bargain with Hell. She has to deliver seven souls, seven violin players who want something badly enough that they'll bargain with Hell to get it. Six have already been delivered in spectacular fashion, but she's running out of time to deliver the seventh before her own soul is forfeit. Tamiko Grohl, an up-and-coming violinist from her native Los Angeles, will hopefully be the seventh. Lan Tran is a refugee and matriarch of a family who runs Starrgate Donut. She and her family didn't flee another unstable or inhospitable country. They fled the collapsing Galactic Empire, securing their travel authorization by promising to set up a tourism attraction. Meanwhile, she's careful to give cops free donuts and to keep their advanced technology carefully concealed. The opening of this book is unlikely to be a surprise in general shape. Most readers would expect Katrina to end up as Satomi's student rather than Tamiko, and indeed she does, although not before Katrina has a very difficult time. Near the start of the novel, I thought "oh, this is going to be hurt/comfort without a romantic relationship," and it is. But it then goes beyond that start into a multifaceted story about complexity, resilience, and how people support each other. It is also a fantastic look at the nuance and intricacies of being or supporting a transgender person, vividly illustrated by a story full of characters the reader cares about and without the academic abstruseness that often gets in the way. The problems with gender-blindness, the limitations of honoring someone's gender without understanding how other people do not, the trickiness of privilege, gender policing as a distraction and alienation from the rest of one's life, the complications of real human bodies and dysmorphia, the importance of listening to another person rather than one's assumptions about how that person feels it's all in here, flowing naturally from the story, specific to the characters involved, and never belabored. I cannot express how well-handled this is. It was a delight to read. The other wonderful thing Aoki does is set Satomi up as the almost supernaturally competent teacher who in a sense "rescues" Katrina, and then invert the trope, showing the limits of Satomi's expertise, the places where she desperately needs human connection for herself, and her struggle to understand Katrina well enough to teach her at the level Satomi expects of herself. Teaching is not one thing to everyone; it's about listening, and Katrina is nothing like Satomi's other students. This novel is full of people thinking they finally understand each other and realizing there is still more depth that they had missed, and then talking through the gap like adults. As you can tell from any summary of this book, it's an odd genre mash-up. The fantasy part is a classic "magician sells her soul to Hell" story; there are a few twists, but it largely follows genre expectations. The science fiction part involving Lan is unfortunately weaker and feels more like a random assortment of borrowed Star Trek tropes than coherent world-building. Genre readers should not come to this story expecting a well-thought-out science fiction universe or a serious attempt to reconcile metaphysics between the fantasy and science fiction backgrounds. It's a quirky assortment of parts that don't normally go together, defy easy classification, and are often unexplained. I suspect this was intentional on Aoki's part given how deeply this book is about the experience of being transgender. Of the three primary viewpoint characters, I thought Lan's perspective was the weakest, and not just because of her somewhat generic SF background. Aoki uses her as a way to talk about the refugee experience, describing her as a woman who brings her family out of danger to build a new life. This mostly works, but Lan has vastly more power and capabilities than a refugee would normally have. Rather than the typical Asian refugee experience in the San Gabriel valley, Lan is more akin to a US multimillionaire who for some reason fled to Vietnam (relative to those around her, Lan is arguably even more wealthy than that). This is also a refugee experience, but it is an incredibly privileged one in a way that partly undermines the role that she plays in the story. Another false note bothered me more: I thought Tamiko was treated horribly in this story. She plays a quite minor role, sidelined early in the novel and appearing only briefly near the climax, and she's portrayed quite negatively, but she's clearly hurting as deeply as the protagonists of this novel. Aoki gives her a moment of redemption, but Tamiko gets nothing from it. Unlike every other injured and abused character in this story, no one is there for Tamiko and no one ever attempts to understand her. I found that profoundly sad. She's not an admirable character, but neither is Satomi at the start of the book. At least a gesture at a future for Tamiko would have been appreciated. Those two complaints aside, though, I could not put this book down. I was able to predict the broad outline of the plot, but the specifics were so good and so true to characters. Both the primary and supporting cast are unique, unpredictable, and memorable. Light from Uncommon Stars has a complex relationship with genre. It is squarely in the speculative fiction genre; the plot would not work without the fantasy and (more arguably) the science fiction elements. Music is magical in a way that goes beyond what can be attributed to metaphor and subjectivity. But it's also primarily character story deeply rooted in the specific location of the San Gabriel valley east of Los Angeles, full of vivid descriptions (particularly of food) and day-to-day life. As with the fantasy and science fiction elements, Aoki does not try to meld the genre elements into a coherent whole. She lets them sit side by side and be awkward and charming and uneven and chaotic. If you're the sort of SF reader who likes building a coherent theory of world-building rules, you may have to turn that desire off to fully enjoy this book. I thought this book was great. It's not flawless, but like its characters it's not trying to be flawless. In places it is deeply insightful and heartbreakingly emotional; in others, it's a glorious mess. It's full of cooking and food, YouTube fame, the disappointments of replicators, video game music, meet-cutes over donuts, found family, and classical music drama. I wish we'd gotten way more about the violin repair shop and a bit less warmed-over Star Trek, but I also loved it exactly the way it was. Definitely the best of the 2022 Hugo nominees that I've read so far. Content warning for child abuse, rape, self-harm, and somewhat explicit sex work. The start of the book is rather heavy and horrific, although the author advertises fairly clearly (and accurately) that things will get better. Rating: 9 out of 10

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