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6 November 2025

Sahil Dhiman: Debconf25 Brest

DebConf25 was held at IMT Atlantique Brest Campus in France from 14th to 19th July 2025. As usual, it was preceded by DebCamp from 7th to 13th July. I was less motivated to write this time. So this year, more pictures, less text. Hopefully, (eventually) I may come back to fill this up.

Conference
IMT Atlantique

Main conference area

RAK restaurant, the good food place near the venue

Bits from DPL (can't really miss the tradition of a Bits picture)

Kali Linux: Delivery of a rolling distro at scale with Mirrorbits by Arnaud Rebillout

The security of Debian - An introduction to advanced users by Samuel Henrique

Salsa CI BoF by Otto Kek l inen and others

Debian.net Team BoF by debian.net team

During the conference, Subin had this crazy idea of shooting Parody of a popular clip from the American-Malayalee television series Akkarakazhchakal advertising Debian. He explained the whole story in the BTS video. The results turned out great, TBF:
You have a computer, but no freedom?
Credits - Subin Siby, licensed under CC BY SA 4.0.

BTS from "You have a computer, but no freedom?" video shoot

DebConf25 closing


DC25 network usage graphs. Click to enlarge.

Flow diagrams. Click to enlarge.

Streaming bandwidth graph. Click to enlarge.

Brest
Brest Harbor and Sea

I managed to complete The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince) during my travel from Paris to Brest

Paris
Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Montmartre


View of Paris from the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Montmartre

Paris streets

Cats rule the world, even on Paris streetlights

Eiffel Tower
Eiffel Tower. It's massive.

Eiffel Tower
View from Eiffel Tower
Credits - Nilesh Patra, licensed under CC BY SA 4.0.

As for the next DebConf work, it has already started. It seems like it never ends. We close one and in one or two months start working on the next one. DebConf is going to Argentina this time and we have a nice little logo too now. DebConf26 logo
DebConf26 logo
Credits - Romina Molina, licensed under CC BY SA 4.0.
Overall, DebConf25 Brest was a nice conference. Many thanks to local team, PEB and everyone involved for everything. Let s see about next year. Bye! DebConf25 Group Photo
DebConf25 Group Photo. Click to enlarge.
Credits - Aigars Mahinovs
PS - Talks are available on Debian media server.

5 November 2025

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in October 2025

Welcome to the October 2025 report from the Reproducible Builds project! Welcome to the very latest report from the Reproducible Builds project. Our monthly reports outline what we ve been up to over the past month, and highlight items of news from elsewhere in the increasingly-important area of software supply-chain security. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please see the Contribute page on our website. In this report:

  1. Farewell from the Reproducible Builds Summit 2025
  2. Google s Play Store breaks reproducible builds for Signal
  3. Mailing list updates
  4. The Original Sin of Computing that no one can fix
  5. Reproducible Builds at the Transparency.dev summit
  6. Supply Chain Security for Go
  7. Three new academic papers published
  8. Distribution work
  9. Upstream patches
  10. Website updates
  11. Tool development

Farewell from the Reproducible Builds Summit 2025 Thank you to everyone who joined us at the Reproducible Builds Summit in Vienna, Austria! We were thrilled to host the eighth edition of this exciting event, following the success of previous summits in various iconic locations around the world, including Venice, Marrakesh, Paris, Berlin, Hamburg and Athens. During this event, participants had the opportunity to engage in discussions, establish connections and exchange ideas to drive progress in this vital field. Our aim was to create an inclusive space that fosters collaboration, innovation and problem-solving. The agenda of the three main days is available online however, some working sessions may still lack notes at time of publication. One tangible outcome of the summit is that Johannes Starosta finished their rebuilderd tutorial, which is now available online and Johannes is actively seeking feedback.

Google s Play Store breaks reproducible builds for Signal On the issue tracker for the popular Signal messenger app, developer Greyson Parrelli reports that updates to the Google Play store have, in effect, broken reproducible builds:
The most recent issues have to do with changes to the APKs that are made by the Play Store. Specifically, they add some attributes to some .xml files around languages are resources, which is not unexpected because of how the whole bundle system works. This is trickier to resolve, because unlike current expected differences (like signing information), we can t just exclude a whole file from the comparison. We have to take a more nuanced look at the diff. I ve been hesitant to do that because it ll complicate our currently-very-readable comparison script, but I don t think there s any other reasonable option here.
The full thread with additional context is available on GitHub.

Mailing list updates On our mailing list this month:
  • kpcyrd forwarded a fascinating tidbit regarding so-called ninja and samurai build ordering, that uses data structures in which the pointer values returned from malloc are used to determine some order of execution.
  • Arnout Engelen, Justin Cappos, Ludovic Court s and kpcyrd continued a conversation started in September regarding the Minimum Elements for a Software Bill of Materials . (Full thread)
  • Felix Moessbauer of Siemens posted to the list reporting that he had recently stumbled upon a couple of Debian source packages on the snapshot mirrors that are listed multiple times (same name and version), but each time with a different checksum . The thread, which Felix titled, Debian: what precisely identifies a source package is about precisely that what can be axiomatically relied upon by consumers of the Debian archives, as well as indicating an issue where we can t exactly say which packages were used during build time (even when having the .buildinfo files).
  • Luca DiMaio posted to the list announcing the release of xfsprogs 6.17.0 which specifically includes a commit that implements the functionality to populate a newly created XFS filesystem directly from an existing directory structure which makes it easier to create populated filesystems without having to mount them [and thus is] particularly useful for reproducible builds . Luca asked the list how they might contribute to the docs of the System images page.

The Original Sin of Computing that no one can fix Popular YouTuber @laurewired published a video this month with an engaging take on the Trusting Trust problem. Titled The Original Sin of Computing that no one can fix, the video touches on David A. Wheeler s Diverse Double-Compiling dissertation. GNU developer Janneke Nieuwenhuizen followed-up with an email (additionally sent to our mailing list) as well, underscoring that GNU Mes s current solution [to this issue] uses ancient softwares in its bootstrap path, such as gcc-2.95.3 and glibc-2.2.5 . (According to Colby Russell, the GNU Mes bootstrapping sequence is shown at 18m54s in the video.)

Reproducible Builds at the Transparency.dev summit Holger Levsen gave a talk at this year s Transparency.dev summit in Gothenburg, Sweden, outlining the achievements of the Reproducible Builds project in the last 12 years, covering both upstream developments as well as some distribution-specific details. As mentioned on the talk s page, Holger s presentation concluded with an outlook into the future and an invitation to collaborate to bring transparency logs into Reproducible Builds projects . The slides of the talk are available, although a video has yet to be released. Nevertheless, as a result of the discussions at Transparency.dev there is a new page on the Debian wiki with the aim of describing a potential transparency log setup for Debian.

Supply Chain Security for Go Andrew Ayer has setup a new service at sourcespotter.com that aims to monitor the supply chain security for Go releases. It consists of four separate trackers:
  1. A tool to verify that the Go Module Mirror and Checksum Database is behaving honestly and has not presented inconsistent information to clients.
  2. A module monitor that records every module version served by the Go Module Mirror and Checksum Database, allowing you to monitor for unexpected versions of your modules.
  3. A tool to verifies that the Go toolchains published in the Go Module Mirror can be reproduced from source code, making it difficult to hide backdoors in the binaries downloaded by the go command.
  4. A telemetry config tracker that tracks the names of telemetry counters uploaded by the Go toolchain, to ensure that Go telemetry is not violating users privacy.
As the homepage of the service mentions, the trackers are free software and do not rely on Google infrastructure.

Three new academic papers published Julien Malka of the Institut Polytechnique de Paris published an exciting paper this month on How NixOS could have detected the XZ supply-chain attack for the benefit of all thanks to reproducible-builds. Julien outlines his paper as follows:
In March 2024, a sophisticated backdoor was discovered in xz, a core compression library in Linux distributions, covertly inserted over three years by a malicious maintainer, Jia Tan. The attack, which enabled remote code execution via ssh, was only uncovered by chance when Andres Freund investigated a minor performance issue. This incident highlights the vulnerability of the open-source supply chain and the effort attackers are willing to invest in gaining trust and access. In this article, I analyze the backdoor s mechanics and explore how bitwise build reproducibility could have helped detect it.
A PDF of the paper is available online.
Iy n M ndez Veiga and Esther H nggi (of the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts and ETH Zurich) published a paper this month on the topic of Reproducible Builds for Quantum Computing. The abstract of their paper mentions the following:
Although quantum computing is a rapidly evolving field of research, it can already benefit from adopting reproducible builds. This paper aims to bridge the gap between the quantum computing and reproducible builds communities. We propose a generalization of the definition of reproducible builds in the quantum setting, motivated by two threat models: one targeting the confidentiality of end users data during circuit preparation and submission to a quantum computer, and another compromising the integrity of quantum computation results. This work presents three examples that show how classical information can be hidden in transpiled quantum circuits, and two cases illustrating how even minimal modifications to these circuits can lead to incorrect quantum computation results.
A full PDF of their paper is available.
Congratulations to Georg Kofler who submitted their Master s thesis for the Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Austria on the topic of Reproducible builds of E2EE-messengers for Android using Nix hermetic builds:
The thesis focuses on providing a reproducible build process for two open-source E2EE messaging applications: Signal and Wire. The motivation to ensure reproducibility and thereby the integrity of E2EE messaging applications stems from their central role as essential tools for modern digital privacy. These applications provide confidentiality for private and sensitive communications, and their compromise could undermine encryption mechanisms, potentially leaking sensitive data to third parties.
A full PDF of their thesis is available online.
Shawkot Hossain of Aalto University, Finland has also submitted their Master s thesis on the The Role of SBOM in Modern Development with a focus on the extant tooling:
Currently, there are numerous solutions and techniques available in the market to tackle supply chain security, and all claim to be the best solution. This thesis delves deeper by implementing those solutions and evaluates them for better understanding. Some of the tools that this thesis implemented are Syft, Trivy, Grype, FOSSA, dependency-check, and Gemnasium. Software dependencies are generated in a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) format by using these open-source tools, and the corresponding results have been analyzed. Among these tools, Syft and Trivy outperform others as they provide relevant and accurate information on software dependencies.
A PDF of the thesis is also available.

Distribution work Michael Plura published an interesting article on Heise.de on the topic of Trust is good, reproducibility is better:
In the wake of growing supply chain attacks, the FreeBSD developers are relying on a transparent build concept in the form of Zero-Trust Builds. The approach builds on the established Reproducible Builds, where binary files can be rebuilt bit-for-bit from the published source code. While reproducible builds primarily ensure verifiability, the zero-trust model goes a step further and removes trust from the build process itself. No single server, maintainer, or compiler can be considered more than potentially trustworthy.
The article mentions that this goal has now been achieved with a slight delay and can be used in the current development branch for FreeBSD 15 .
In Debian this month, 7 reviews of Debian packages were added, 5 were updated and 11 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. For the Debian CI tests Holger fixed #786644 and set nocheck in DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS for the 2nd build..
Lastly, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted another openSUSE monthly update for their work there.

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:

Website updates Once again, there were a number of improvements made to our website this month including: In addition, a number of contributors added a series of notes from our recent summit to the website, including Alexander Couzens [ ], Robin Candau [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ] and kpcyrd [ ].

Tool development diffoscope version 307 was uploaded to Debian unstable by Chris Lamb, who made a number of changes including fixing compatibility with LLVM version 21 [ ], an attempt to automatically attempt to deploy to PyPI by liaising with the PyPI developers/maintainers (with this experimental feature). [ ] In addition, Vagrant Cascadian updated diffoscope in GNU Guix to version 307.

Finally, 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:

4 November 2025

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppCNPy 0.2.14 on CRAN: Minor Maintenance

Another (again somewhat minor) maintenance release of the RcppCNPy package arrived on CRAN just now. RcppCNPy provides R with read and write access to NumPy files thanks to the cnpy library by Carl Rogers along with Rcpp for the glue to R. The changes are all minor chores. As R now checks usage of packages in demos, we added the rbenchmark to Suggests: in DESCRIPTION. We refreshed the main continuous integration script for a minor update, and also replaced one URL in a badge to avoid a timeout during checks at CRAN. So nothing user-facing this time! Full details are below.

Changes in version 0.2.14 (2024-11-03)
  • The rbenchmark package is now a Suggests: as it appears in demo
  • The continuous integration setup now uses r-ci with its embedded setup step
  • The URL used for the GPL-2 is now the R Project copy

CRANberries also provides a diffstat report for the latest release. As always, feedback is welcome and the best place to start a discussion may be the GitHub issue tickets page. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

3 November 2025

Melissa Wen: Kworkflow at Kernel Recipes 2025

Franks drawing of Melissa Wen with Kernel Recipes mascots around This was the first year I attended Kernel Recipes and I have nothing but say how much I enjoyed it and how grateful I m for the opportunity to talk more about kworkflow to very experienced kernel developers. What I mostly like about Kernel Recipes is its intimate format, with only one track and many moments to get closer to experts and people that you commonly talk online during your whole year. In the beginning of this year, I gave the talk Don t let your motivation go, save time with kworkflow at FOSDEM, introducing kworkflow to a more diversified audience, with different levels of involvement in the Linux kernel development. At this year s Kernel Recipes I presented the second talk of the first day: Kworkflow - mix & match kernel recipes end-to-end. The Kernel Recipes audience is a bit different from FOSDEM, with mostly long-term kernel developers, so I decided to just go directly to the point. I showed kworkflow being part of the daily life of a typical kernel developer from the local setup to install a custom kernel in different target machines to the point of sending and applying patches to/from the mailing list. In short, I showed how to mix and match kernel workflow recipes end-to-end. As I was a bit fast when showing some features during my presentation, in this blog post I explain each slide from my speaker notes. You can see a summary of this presentation in the Kernel Recipe Live Blog Day 1: morning.

Introduction First slide: Kworkflow by Melissa Wen Hi, I m Melissa Wen from Igalia. As we already started sharing kernel recipes and even more is coming in the next three days, in this presentation I ll talk about kworkflow: a cookbook to mix & match kernel recipes end-to-end. Second slide: About Melissa Wen, the speaker of this talk This is my first time attending Kernel Recipes, so lemme introduce myself briefly.
  • As I said, I work for Igalia, I work mostly on kernel GPU drivers in the DRM subsystem.
  • In the past, I co-maintained VKMS and the v3d driver. Nowadays I focus on the AMD display driver, mostly for the Steam Deck.
  • Besides code, I contribute to the Linux kernel by mentoring several newcomers in Outreachy, Google Summer of Code and Igalia Coding Experience. Also, by documenting and tooling the kernel.
Slide 3: and what's this cookbook called Kwokflow? - with kworkflow logo and KR penguin And what s this cookbook called kworkflow?

Kworkflow (kw) Slide 4: text below Kworkflow is a tool created by Rodrigo Siqueira, my colleague at Igalia. It s a single platform that combines software and tools to:
  • optimize your kernel development workflow;
  • reduce time spent in repetitive tasks;
  • standardize best practices;
  • ensure that deployment data flows smoothly and reliably between different kernel workflows;
Slide 5: kworkflow is mostly a voluntary work It s mostly done by volunteers, kernel developers using their spare time. Its features cover real use cases according to kernel developer needs. Slide 6: Mix & Match the daily life of a kernel developer Basically it s mixing and matching the daily life of a typical kernel developer with kernel workflow recipes with some secret sauces.

First recipe: A good GPU driver for my AMD laptop Slide 7: Let's prepare our first recipe So, it s time to start the first recipe: A good GPU driver for my AMD laptop. Slide 8: Ingredients and Tools Before starting any recipe we need to check the necessary ingredients and tools. So, let s check what you have at home. With kworkflow, you can use: Slide 9: kw device and kw remote
  • kw device: to get information about the target machine, such as: CPU model, kernel version, distribution, GPU model,
  • kw remote: to set the address of this machine for remote access
Slide 11: kw config
  • kw config: you can configure kw with kw config. With this command you can basically select the tools, flags and preferences that kw will use to build and deploy a custom kernel in a target machine. You can also define recipients of your patches when sending it using kw send-patch. I ll explain more about each feature later in this presentation.
Slide 13: kw kernel-config-manager
  • kw kernel-config manager (or just kw k): to fetch the kernel .config file from a given machine, store multiple .config files, list and retrieve them according to your needs.
Slide 15: Preparation Now, with all ingredients and tools selected and well portioned, follow the right steps to prepare your custom kernel! First step: Mix ingredients with kw build or just kw b Slide 16: kw build
  • kw b and its options wrap many routines of compiling a custom kernel.
    • You can run kw b -i to check the name and kernel version and the number of modules that will be compiled and kw b --menu to change kernel configurations.
    • You can also pre-configure compiling preferences in kw config regarding kernel building. For example, target architecture, the name of the generated kernel image, if you need to cross-compile this kernel for a different system and which tool to use for it, setting different warning levels, compiling with CFlags, etc.
    • Then you can just run kw b to compile the custom kernel for a target machine.
Second step: Bake it with kw deploy or just kw d Slide 18: kw deploy After compiling the custom kernel, we want to install it in the target machine. Check the name of the custom kernel built: 6.17.0-rc6 and with kw s SSH access the target machine and see it s running the kernel from the Debian distribution 6.16.7+deb14-amd64. As with building settings, you can also pre-configure some deployment settings, such as compression type, path to device tree binaries, target machine (remote, local, vm), if you want to reboot the target machine just after deploying your custom kernel, and if you want to boot in the custom kernel when restarting the system after deployment. If you didn t pre-configured some options, you can still customize as a command option, for example: kw d --reboot will reboot the system after deployment, even if I didn t set this in my preference. With just running kw d --reboot I have installed the kernel in a given target machine and rebooted it. So when accessing the system again I can see it was booted in my custom kernel. Third step: Time to taste with kw debug Slide 20: kw debug
  • kw debug wraps many tools for validating a kernel in a target machine. We can log basic dmesg info but also tracking events and ftrace.
    • With kw debug --dmesg --history we can grab the full dmesg log from a remote machine, if you use the --follow option, you will monitor dmesg outputs. You can also run a command with kw debug --dmesg --cmd="<my command>" and just collect the dmesg output related to this specific execution period.
    • In the example, I ll just unload the amdgpu driver. I use kw drm --gui-off to drop the graphical interface and release the amdgpu for unloading it. So I run kw debug --dmesg --cmd="modprobe -r amdgpu" to unload the amdgpu driver, but it fails and I couldn t unload it.

Cooking Problems Slide 22: kw patch-hub Oh no! That custom kernel isn t tasting good. Don t worry, as in many recipes preparations, we can search on the internet to find suggestions on how to make it tasteful, alternative ingredients and other flavours according to your taste. With kw patch-hub you can search on the lore kernel mailing list for possible patches that can fix your kernel issue. You can navigate in the mailing lists, check series, bookmark it if you find it relevant and apply it in your local kernel tree, creating a different branch for tasting oops, for testing. In this example, I m opening the amd-gfx mailing list where I can find contributions related to the AMD GPU driver, bookmark and/or just apply the series to my work tree and with kw bd I can compile & install the custom kernel with this possible bug fix in one shot. As I changed my kw config to reboot after deployment, I just need to wait for the system to boot to try again unloading the amdgpu driver with kw debug --dmesg --cm=modprobe -r amdgpu. From the dmesg output retrieved by kw for this command, the driver was unloaded, the problem is fixed by this series and the kernel tastes good now. If I m satisfied with the solution, I can even use kw patch-hub to access the bookmarked series and marking the checkbox that will reply the patch thread with a Reviewed-by tag for me.

Second Recipe: Raspberry Pi 4 with Upstream Kernel Slide 25: Second Recipe RPi 4 with upstream kernel As in all recipes, we need ingredients and tools, but with kworkflow you can get everything set as when changing scenarios in a TV show. We can use kw env to change to a different environment with all kw and kernel configuration set and also with the latest compiled kernel cached. I was preparing the first recipe for a x86 AMD laptop and with kw env --use RPI_64 I use the same worktree but moved to a different kernel workflow, now for Raspberry Pi 4 64 bits. The previous compiled kernel 6.17.0-rc6-mainline+ is there with 1266 modules, not the 6.17.0-rc6 kernel with 285 modules that I just built&deployed. kw build settings are also different, now I m targeting a arm64 architecture with a cross-compiled kernel using aarch64-linu-gnu- cross-compilation tool and my kernel image calls kernel8 now. Slide 27: kw env If you didn t plan for this recipe in advance, don t worry. You can create a new environment with kw env --create RPI_64_V2 and run kw init --template to start preparing your kernel recipe with the mirepoix ready. I mean, with the basic ingredients already cut I mean, with the kw configuration set from a template. And you can use kw remote to set the IP address of your target machine and kw kernel-config-manager to fetch/retrieve the .config file from your target machine. So just run kw bd to compile and install a upstream kernel for Raspberry Pi 4.

Third Recipe: The Mainline Kernel Ringing on my Steam Deck (Live Demo) Slide 30: Third Recipe - The Mainline Kernel Ringing on my Steam Deck Let s show you how easy is to build, install and test a custom kernel for Steam Deck with Kworkflow. It s a live demo, but I also recorded it because I know the risks I m exposed to and something can go very wrong just because of reasons :)

Report: how was the live demo For this live demo, I took my OLED Steam Deck to the stage. I explained that, if I boot mainline kernel on this device, there is no audio. So I turned it on and booted the mainline kernel I ve installed beforehand. It was clear that there was no typical Steam Deck startup audio when the system was loaded. Franks drawing of Melissa Wen doing a demo of kworkflow with the Steam Deck As I started the demo in the kw environment for Raspberry Pi 4, I first moved to another environment previously used for Steam Deck. In this STEAMDECK environment, the mainline kernel was already compiled and cached, and all settings for accessing the target machine, compiling and installing a custom kernel were retrieved automatically. My live demo followed these steps:
  1. With kw env --use STEAMDECK, switch to a kworkflow environment for Steam Deck kernel development.
  2. With kw b -i, shows that kw will compile and install a kernel with 285 modules named 6.17.0-rc6-mainline-for-deck.
  3. Run kw config to show that, in this environment, kw configuration changes to x86 architecture and without cross-compilation.
  4. Run kw device to display information about the Steam Deck device, i.e. the target machine. It also proves that the remote access - user and IP - for this Steam Deck was already configured when using the STEAMDECK environment, as expected.
  5. Using git am, as usual, apply a hot fix on top of the mainline kernel. This hot fix makes the audio play again on Steam Deck.
  6. With kw b, build the kernel with the audio change. It will be fast because we are only compiling the affected files since everything was previously done and cached. Compiled kernel, kw configuration and kernel configuration is retrieved by just moving to the STEAMDECK environment.
  7. Run kw d --force --reboot to deploy the new custom kernel to the target machine. The --force option enables us to install the mainline kernel even if mkinitcpio complains about missing support for downstream packages when generating initramfs. The --reboot option makes the device reboot the Steam Deck automatically, just after the deployment completion.
  8. After finishing deployment, the Steam Deck will reboot on the new custom kernel version and made a clear resonant or vibrating sound. [Hopefully]
Finally, I showed to the audience that, if I wanted to send this patch upstream, I just needed to run kw send-patch and kw would automatically add subsystem maintainers, reviewers and mailing lists for the affected files as recipients, and send the patch to the upstream community assessment. As I didn t want to create unnecessary noise, I just did a dry-run with kw send-patch -s --simulate to explain how it looks.

What else can kworkflow already mix & match? In this presentation, I showed that kworkflow supported different kernel development workflows, i.e., multiple distributions, different bootloaders and architectures, different target machines, different debugging tools and automatize your kernel development routines best practices, from development environment setup and verifying a custom kernel in bare-metal to sending contributions upstream following the contributions-by-e-mail structure. I exemplified it with three different target machines: my ordinary x86 AMD laptop with Debian, Raspberry Pi 4 with arm64 Raspbian (cross-compilation) and the Steam Deck with SteamOS (x86 Arch-based OS). Besides those distributions, Kworkflow also supports Ubuntu, Fedora and PopOS. Now it s your turn: Do you have any secret recipes to share? Please share with us via kworkflow.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: duckdb-mlpack 0.0.3: macOS binaries, unit tests, more outputs

A littler two weeks a short post announced the duckdb-mlpack as ML quacks : combining the powerful C++ machine learning library mlpack with the amazing analytical database engine duckdb. About a week ago another short post covered first extensions. We actually followed-up with release 0.0.3 days later, and never posted about it so this short note catches up. In release 0.0.3, we provide macOS binaries: following a known issue with one of the components, we apply a simple patch to enable the build. Next up are wasm and windows, if you know your way around these platforms please get in touch. Release 0.0.3 also added first unit tests, serializes the coefficients from the (regularized) linear regression into the output table. See see two previous posts linked above for details and background, the repo for code, issues and more, and the extension page for more about this duckdb community extension.

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

Kentaro Hayashi: Migrating from hugo-theme-learn to alternative theme

Introduction For personal web site, I use hugo and hugo-theme-learn for statically generated contents. Recently I've noticed that these combination of specific version is not compatible with. (Not so frequently update contents, so it was delayed to found this situation)

What was the actual error? 
ERROR deprecated: .Site.IsMultiLingual was deprecated in Hugo v0.124.0 and subsequently removed. Use hugo.IsMultilingual instead.
Total in 21 ms
It seems that hugo-theme-learn is not compatible with recent Hugo anymore.

How to deal with it? With checking upstream issue, I've found the following issue. What are people migrating too? 'hugo-theme-relearn' was noted as an alternative. As 'hugo-theme-learn' is not actively maintained anymore, so it is easy to migrate from hugo-theme-learn to hugo-theme-relearn. For example, it needs just a few lines of configuration. 
diff --git a/website/config.toml b/website/config.toml
index 702d4da..99ddf03 100644
--- a/website/config.toml
+++ b/website/config.toml
@@ -3,7 +3,7 @@ languageCode = "en-US"
 defaultContentLanguage = "en"
-theme = "hugo-theme-learn"
+theme = "hugo-theme-relearn"
 themesdir = "themes"
 metaDataFormat = "yaml"
 defaultContentLanguageInSubdir= true
@@ -16,6 +16,7 @@ defaultContentLanguageInSubdir= true
   disableNextPrev = true
   disableSearch = true
   disableShortcutsTitle = true
+  themeVariant = 'learn'
 [markup]
   [markup.goldmark]
It was sad that hugo-theme-learn is not maintained actively, but many thank to this greateful hugo theme. And also thanks the effort to fork it as hugo-theme-relearn.

Birger Schacht: Status update, October 2025

At the beginning of the month I uploaded a new version of the sway package to Debian. This contains two backported patches, one to fix reported WM capabilities and one to revert the default behavior for drag_lock to disabled. I also uploaded new releases of cage (a kiosk for Wayland), labwc, the window-stacking Wayland compositor that is inspired by Openbox, and wf-recorder, a tool for creating screen recordings of wlroots-based Wayland compositors. If I don t forget I try to update the watch file of the packages I touch to the new version 5 format. Simon Ser announced vali, a C library for Varlink. The blog post also mentions that this will be a dependency of the next version of the kanshi Wayland output management daemon and the PR to do so is now already merged. So I created ITP: vali A Varlink C implementation and code generator, packaged the library and it is now waiting in NEW. In addition to libscfg this is now the second dependency of kanshi that is in NEW. On the Rust side of things I fixed a bug in carl. The fix introduces new date properties which can be use to highlight a calendar date. I also updated all the dependencies and plan to create a new release soon. Later I dug up a Rust project that I started a couple of years ago, where I try to use wasm-bindgen to implement interactive web components. There is a lot I have to refactor in this code base, but I will work on that and try to publish something in the next few months.

Miscellaneous Two weeks ago I wrote A plea for <dialog>, which made the case for using standardized HTML elements instead of resorting to JavaScript libraries. I finally managed to update my shell Server to Debian 13. I created an issue for the nextcloud-news android client because I moved to a new phone and my starred articles did not show up in the news app, which is a bit annoying. I got my ticket for 39C3. In my dayjob I continued to work on the refactoring of the import logic of our apis-core-rdf app. I released version 0.56 which also introduced the #snackbar as the container for the toast message, as described in the <dialog> block post. At the end of the month I released version 0.57 of apis-core-rdf, which got rid of the remaining leftovers of the old import logic. A couple of interesting articles I stumbled upon (or finally had the time to read):

Russ Allbery: Review: The Raven Scholar

Review: The Raven Scholar, by Antonia Hodgson
Series: Eternal Path Trilogy #1
Publisher: Orbit
Copyright: April 2025
ISBN: 0-316-57723-5
Format: Kindle
Pages: 651
The Raven Scholar is an epic fantasy and the first book of a projected trilogy. It is Antonia Hodgson's first published fantasy novel; her previous published novels are historical mystery. I would classify this as adult fantasy the main character is thirty-four with a stable court position but it has strong YA vibes because of the generational turnover feel of the main plot. Eight years before the start of this book, Andren Valit attempted to assassinate the emperor and failed. Since then, his widow and three children twins Yana and Ruko and infant Nisthala have been living in disgrace in a cramped apartment, subject to constant inspections and suspicion. As the story opens, they have been summoned to appear before the emperor, escorted by a young and earnest Hound (essentially the state security services) named Shal Worthy. The resulting interrogation is full of dangerous traps. Not all of them will be avoided. The formalization of the consequences of that imperial summons falls to an unpopular Junior Archivist (Third Class) whose one notable skill is her penmanship. A meeting that was disasterous for the Valits becomes unexpectedly fortunate for the archivist, albeit with a poisonous core. Eight years later, Neema Kraa is High Scholar, and Emperor Bersun's twenty-four years of permitted reign is coming to an end. The Festival is about to begin. One representative from each of the empire's eight anats (religious schools) will compete in seven days of Trials, save for the Dragons who do not want the throne and will send a proxy. The victor according to the Trials scoring system will become emperor and reign unquestioned for twenty-four years or until resignation. This is the system that put an end to the era of chaos and has been in place for over a thousand years. On the eve of the Trials, the Raven contender is found murdered. Neema is immediately a suspect; she even has reasons to suspect herself. She volunteers to lead the investigation because she has to know what happened. She is also volunteered to be the replacement Raven contender. There is no chance that she will become emperor; she doesn't even know how to fight. But agnostic Neema has a rather unexpected ally.
As the last chime fades we drop neatly on to the balcony's rusting hand rail, folding our wings with a soft shuffle. Noon, on the ninth day of the eighth month, 1531. Neema Kraa's lodgings. We are here, exactly where we should be, at exactly the right moment, because we are the Raven, and we are magnificent.
The Raven Scholar is a rather good epic fantasy, with some caveats that I'll get to in a moment, but I found it even more fascinating as a genre artifact. I've read my share of epic fantasy over the years, although most of my familiarity of the current wave of new adult fairy epics comes from reviews rather than personal experience. The Raven Scholar is epic fantasy, through and through. There is court intrigue, a main character who is a court functionary unexpectedly thrown into the middle of some problem, civilization-wide stakes, dramatic political alliances, detailed magic and mythological systems, and gods. There were moments that reminded me of a Guy Gavriel Kay novel, although Hodgson's characters tend more towards disarming moments of humanization instead of Kay's operatic scenes of emotional intensity. But The Raven Scholar is also a murder mystery, complete with a crime scene, clues, suspects, evidence, an investigation, a possibly compromised detective, and a morass of possible motives and red herrings. I'm not much of a mystery reader, but this didn't feel like sort of ancillary mystery that might crop up in the course of a typical epic fantasy. It felt like a full-fledged investigation with an amateur detective; one can tell that Hodgson's previous four books were historical mysteries. And then there's the Trials, which are the centerpiece of the book. This book helped me notice that people (okay, me, I'm the people) have been sleeping on the influence of The Hunger Games, Battle Royale, and reality TV (specifically Survivor) on genre fiction, possibly because the more obvious riffs on the idea (Powerless, The Selection) have been young adult or new adult. Once I started looking, I realized this idea is everywhere now: Throne of Glass, Fourth Wing, even The Night Circus to some extent. Competitions with consequences are having a moment. I suspect having a competition to decide the next emperor is going to strike some traditional fantasy readers as sufficiently absurd and unbelievable that it will kick them out of the book. I had a moment of "okay, this is weird, why would anyone stick with this system for so long" myself. But I would encourage such readers to interrogate whether that's only a response from unfamiliarity; after all, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government either. This is hardly the most unrealistic epic fantasy trope, and it has the advantage of being a hell of a plot generator when handled well. Hodgson handles it well. Society in this novel is structured around the anats and the eight Guardians, gods who, according to myth, had returned seven times previously to save the world, but who will destroy the world when they return again. Each Guardian represents a group of characteristics and useful societal functions: the Ox is trustworthy, competent and hard-working; the Fox is a trickster and a rule-bender; the Raven is shrewd and careful and is the Guardian of scholars and lawyers. Each Trial is organized by one of the anats and tests the contenders for the skills most valued by that Guardian, often in subtle and rather ingenious ways. There are flaws here that you could poke at if you wanted to, but I was charmed and thoroughly entertained by how well Hodgson weaves the story around the Trials and uses the conflicting values to create character conflict, unexpected alliances, and engrossing plot. Most importantly for a book of this sort, I liked Neema. She has a charming combination of competence, quirks (she is almost physically unable to not correct people's factual errors), insecurity, imposter syndrome, and determination. She is way out of her depth and knows it, but she has an ethical core and an insatiable curiosity that won't let her leave the central mysteries of the book alone. And the character dynamics are great; there are a lot of characters, including the competition problem of having to juggle eight contenders and give them all sufficient characterization to be meaningful, but this book uses its length to give each character some room to breathe. This is a long book, well over 600 pages, but it felt packed with events and plot twists. After every chapter I had to fight the urge to read just one more. The biggest drawback of this book is that it is very much the first book of a trilogy, none of the other volumes are out yet, and the ending is rather nasty. This is the sort of trilogy that opens with a whole lot of bad things happening, and while I am thoroughly hooked and will purchase the next volume as soon as it's available, I wish Hodgson had found a way to end the book on a somewhat more positive or hopeful note. The middle of the book was great; the end was a bit of an emotional slog, alas. The writing is good enough here that I'm fairly sure the depression will be worth it, but if you need your endings to be triumphant (and who could blame you in this moment in history), you may want to wait on this one until more volumes are out. Apart from that, though, this was a lot of fun. The Guardians felt like they came from a different strand of fantasy than you usually see in epic, more of a traditional folk tale vibe, which adds an intriguing twist to the epic fantasy setting. The characters all work, and Hodgson even pulls off some Game of Thrones style twists that make you sympathetic to characters you previously hated. The magic system apart from the Guardians felt underbaked, but the politics had more depth than a lot of fantasy novels. If you want the truly complex and twisty politics you would get from one of Guy Gavriel Kay's historical rewrites, you will come away disappointed, but it was good enough for me. And I did enjoy the Raven.
Respect, that's all we demand. Recognition of our magnificence. Offerings. Love. Fear. Trembling awe. Worship. Shiny things. Blood sacrifice, some of us very much enjoy blood sacrifice. Truly, we ask for so little.
Followed by an as-yet untitled sequel that I hope will materialize. Rating: 7 out of 10

2 November 2025

Guido G nther: Free Software Activities October 2025

Quiete some things made progress last month: We put out Phosh 0.50 release, got closer to enabling media roles for audio by default in Phosh (see related post) and reworked our images builds. You should also (hopefully) notice some nice quality of life improvements once changes land in a distro near you and you're using Phosh. See below for details: phosh phoc phosh-mobile-settings stevia (formerly phosh-osk-stub) phosh-tour meta-phosh xdg-desktop-portal-phosh libphosh-rs Calls Phrog phosh-recipes feedbackd feedbackd-device-themes Chatty Squeekboard Debian Cellbroadcastd gnome-settings-daemon gnome-control-center gnome-initial-setup sdm845-mainline gnome-session alpine droid-juicer phosh-site phosh-debs Linux Wireplumber Phosh.mobi e.V. demo-phones Reviews This is not code by me but reviews on other peoples code. The list is (as usual) slightly incomplete. Thanks for the contributions! Comments? Join the Fediverse thread

Ben Hutchings: FOSS activity in October 2025

Russell Coker: PCIe Problems

HP z840 Dead Slot I just had an issue with the HP z840 system I m using as a build server [1]. I had to take it to a site that was about 20 minutes drive away and after getting there it didn t work and just gave 6 beeps and the red LED on the power button flashed. The beeps indicate a video issue, which refers to the Intel Arc B580 card (which is annoyingly large) [2]. I swapped the card with another video card I had lying around (which I knew to be reliable) and got the same result. It turned out that the PCIe*16 slot that I was using for it had broken, maybe bumps during transport with the big heavy GPU had broken it. I plugged it into the next slot along which is a PCIe*8 slot that s open ended so it takes larger cards. The upside of this is that the system is still working well, the downside is that the issues I already had with the GPU being unreasonably large are exacerbated by losing one of the *16 slots. Having it in a PCIe 3.0*8 slot is not a problem for me as I only plan to use it for 8K display and for ML stuff and I think that *8 speed (7.8GB/s) is sufficient for both those tasks. In that slot the card could display 8K video at 60Hz with 32bpp and no compression (something that I don t anticipate ever doing). It could also transfer the maximum size LLM in under 2 seconds which isn t an unreasonable delay for starting a LLM. The question now is, should I remove PCIe cards before transport in future? HP z640 Intermittant Errors The next issue I have is with my HP z640 workstation which is now my main workstation [3]. I started getting the below errors and then I had the kwin_wayland session hang and another time I started getting video corruption with mpv. 
Oct 10 20:46:36 xev kernel: pcieport 0000:00:02.0: AER: Correctable error 
message received from 0000:00:02.0
Oct 10 20:46:36 xev kernel: pcieport 0000:00:02.0: AER: found no error details 
for 0000:00:02.0
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: pcieport 0000:00:02.0: AER: Multiple Correctable 
error message received from 0000:00:02.0
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: pcieport 0000:00:02.0: PCIe Bus Error: 
severity=Correctable, type=Data Link Layer, (Transmitter ID)
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: pcieport 0000:00:02.0:   device [8086:2f04] error 
status/mask=00001040/00002000
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: pcieport 0000:00:02.0:    [ 6] BadTLP                
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: pcieport 0000:00:02.0:    [12] Timeout               
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: pcieport 0000:00:02.0: AER:   Error of this Agent 
is reported first
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: amdgpu 0000:02:00.0: PCIe Bus Error: 
severity=Correctable, type=Data Link Layer, (Transmitter ID)
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: amdgpu 0000:02:00.0:   device [1002:6987] error 
status/mask=00001000/00002000
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: amdgpu 0000:02:00.0:    [12] Timeout               
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: snd_hda_intel 0000:02:00.1: PCIe Bus Error: 
severity=Correctable, type=Data Link Layer, (Transmitter ID)
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: snd_hda_intel 0000:02:00.1:   device [1002:aae0] 
error status/mask=00001000/00002000
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: snd_hda_intel 0000:02:00.1:    [12] Timeout               
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: pcieport 0000:00:02.0: AER: Correctable error 
message received from 0000:00:02.0
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: pcieport 0000:00:02.0: AER: found no error details 
for 0000:00:02.0
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: pcieport 0000:00:02.0: AER: Multiple Correctable 
error message received from 0000:00:02.0
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: pcieport 0000:00:02.0: AER: found no error details 
for 0000:00:02.0
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: pcieport 0000:00:02.0: AER: Multiple Correctable 
error message received from 0000:00:02.0
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: pcieport 0000:00:02.0: PCIe Bus Error: 
severity=Correctable, type=Data Link Layer, (Transmitter ID)
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: pcieport 0000:00:02.0:   device [8086:2f04] error 
status/mask=00001040/00002000
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: pcieport 0000:00:02.0:    [ 6] BadTLP                
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: pcieport 0000:00:02.0:    [12] Timeout               
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: pcieport 0000:00:02.0: AER:   Error of this Agent 
is reported first
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: amdgpu 0000:02:00.0: PCIe Bus Error: 
severity=Correctable, type=Data Link Layer, (Transmitter ID)
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: amdgpu 0000:02:00.0:   device [1002:6987] error 
status/mask=00001100/00002000
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: amdgpu 0000:02:00.0:    [ 8] Rollover              
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: amdgpu 0000:02:00.0:    [12] Timeout               
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: snd_hda_intel 0000:02:00.1: PCIe Bus Error: 
severity=Correctable, type=Data Link Layer, (Transmitter ID)
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: snd_hda_intel 0000:02:00.1:   device [1002:aae0] 
error status/mask=00001100/00002000
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: snd_hda_intel 0000:02:00.1:    [ 8] Rollover              
Oct 10 20:46:37 xev kernel: snd_hda_intel 0000:02:00.1:    [12] Timeout
On that system I took the CPU out and reinstalled it with new heatsink paste on the theory that it might not have made good contact with some of the pins. The system also has one DIMM slot not working which can be a symptom of poor seating of the CPU. Doing that made no difference to the DIMM slot (I had bought the system for $50 in unknown condition ) but the video has worked correctly since. It has been suggested to me that reseating the CPU didn t directly affect the issue and that just taking the system apart could have addressed an issue of the GPU not making good contact in the PCIe slot. It has been suggested that I could try contact cleaner which can be obtained from automotive supply stores among other places. I m hesitant to put that in a PCIe slot but putting it on the connector of the card and then polishing it off seems like something to consider. Another suggestion was to use isopropyl alcohol to wash the contacts. I guess washing a PCIe slot out with isopropyl alcohol and leaving it for hours to dry is an option as a last resort. For the moment it seems to be fine but I am not certain that the problem is gone forever. At the moment my main aim is to have these systems keep working until after the release of DDR6 workstations which is when I expect DDR5 workstations to become affordable on all the second hand sites.
Related posts:
  1. The Intel Arc B580 and PCIe Slot Size A few months ago I bought a Intel Arc B580...
  2. CPL I ve just bught an NVidia video card from Computers and...
  3. Taking my Thinkpad Apart and Cooling Problems I ve been having some cooling problems with my Thinkpad recently....

1 November 2025

Junichi Uekawa: Playing Clair Obscur Expedition 33.

Playing Clair Obscur Expedition 33. I didn't think I would try again and again to beat a boss I cannot beat for multiple days. But here I am.

31 October 2025

Scarlett Gately Moore: A New Chapter: Career Transition Update

I m pleased to share that my career transition has been successful! I ve joined our local county assessor s office, beginning a new path in property assessment for taxation and valuation. While the compensation is modest, it offers the stability I was looking for. My new schedule consists of four 10-hour days with an hour commute each way, which means Monday through Thursday will be largely devoted to work and travel. However, I ll have Fridays available for open source contributions once I ve completed my existing website maintenance commitments.

Open Source Priorities Going forward, my contribution focus will be:
  1. Ubuntu Community Council
  2. Kubuntu/Debian
  3. Snap packages (as time permits)
Regarding the snap packages: my earlier hope of transitioning them to Carl hasn t worked out as planned. He s taken on maintaining KDE Neon single-handedly, and understandably, adding snap maintenance on top of that proved unfeasible. I ll do what I can to help when time allows.

Looking for Contributors If you re interested in contributing to Kubuntu or helping with snap packages, I d love to hear from you! Feel free to reach out community involvement is what makes these projects thrive. Thanks for your patience and understanding as I navigate this transition.

Russell Coker: Links October 2025

Informative video about the way corporations charge different rates based on location and even type of device used on the web site [1]. This should be illegal everywhere! Bruce Schneier with Heather Adkins and Gadi Evron wrote an insightful post about AI Hacking and the Future of Cybersecurity, the future seems grim [2]. Slaughterbots is an interesting Dust SciFi movie exploring the future of autonoms weapons [3]. Arstechnica has an intersting article on a genetically engineered plant with a more efficient system for photosynthesis [4]. If this goes to plan it could revolutionise agriculture! David Brin wrote an insightful blog post about the Seldon Paradox [5]. Also he wrote the final book in the Foundation series so he is the current living export on Hari Seldon. Charles Stross wrote an insightful blog post about the pivot away from fossil fuels and the future of computers without Moore s Law [6]. Audrey Woods wrote an insightful article about the end of Moore s Law, we can get more transistors from multichip modules bit it s only small linear improvements not exponential [7]. Bruce Schneier and Barath Raghavan wrote an interesting article about AI s OODA loop problem, it s a good way of thinking about some of these issues [8]. I think that LLM security is a losing game. Getting them to mostly not tell people how to commit crimes is the limit of controls. Manga telling the story of Revelations in all it s drug inspired madness [9]. When I read the entire Bible I skipped Revelations because it s too obviously the product of mental illness. CNN has an interesting article about bitcoin ARMs which are almost exclusively used for crime [10].
Related posts:
  1. Links February 2025 Oliver Lindburg wrote an interesting article about Designing for Crisis...
  2. Links April 2025 Asianometry has an interesting YouTube video about elecrolytic capacitors degrading...
  3. Links September 2025 Werdahias wrote an informative blog post about Dark Mode for...

Emmanuel Kasper: Best Pick-up-and-play with a gamepad on Debian and other Linux distributions: SuperTux

After playing some 16 bits era classic games on my Mist FPGA I was wondering what I could play on my Debian desktop as a semi-casual gamer. By semi-casual I mean that if a game needs more than 30 minutes to understand the mechanics, or needs 10 buttons on the gamepad I usually drop it. After testing a dozen games available in the Debian archive my favorite Pick-up-and-play is SuperTux. SuperTux is a 2D platformer quite similar to Super Mario World or Sonic, well also 16 bits classics, but of course you play a friendly penguin. What I like in SuperTux:
  • complete free and opensource application packaged in the Debian main package repository, including all the game assets. So no fiddling around to get game data like Quake / Doom3, everything is available in the Debian repositories. The game is also available from all major Linux distributions in their standard repositories.
  • gamepad immediately usable. Probably the credits has to go the SDL library, but my 8bitdo wireless controller was usable instantly either via 2.4Ghz dongle or Bluetooth
  • well suited for casual players: the game mechanics are easy to grasp and the tutorial is excellent
  • polished interface, the menus are clear and easy to navigate, and there is no internal jargon in the default navigation till you run your first game. (Something which confused me when playing the SuperTuxKart racing game: when I was offered to leave STK I was wondering what that STK mode is. I understood afterwards STK is just the acronym of the game)
  • feel reasonably modern, the game does not start in a 640 480 window with 16 colors and you could demo it without shame for a casual gamer audience.
What can be say of the game itself ? You play a penguin who can run, shoot small fireballs, fall on your back to hit enemies harder. I played 10 levels, most levels had to be tried between 1 and 10 times which I find OK, the difficulty is raising in a very smooth curve. SuperTux has complete localization, hence my screenshots show french text. SuperTux tutorial Comprehensive in-game tutorial World Map There is a large ice flow world, but we are going underground now Example Level Good level design that you have to use to avoid those spiky enemies Underground level The point where I had to pause the game, after missing those flying wigs 15 times in a row SuperTux can be played with keyboard or gamepad, and has minimal hardware requirements, anything computer with working 3D graphic acceleration released in the last 20 years will be able to run it.

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 307 released

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 307. This version includes the following changes: 
* Attempt to fix compatability with LLVM 21.
  (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#419)
* Update copyright years.
* Update CI to try and deploy to PyPI upon tagging a release.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

30 October 2025

Utkarsh Gupta: FOSS Activites in October 2025

Here s my monthly but brief update about the activities I ve done in the F/L/OSS world.

Debian
Whilst I didn t get a chance to do much, here s still a few things that I worked on:
  • Uploaded ruby-rack, 3.1.18-1, to fix a bunch of CVEs.
  • Asssited a few folks in getting their patches submitted via Salsa.
  • Mentoring for newcomers.
  • Moderation of -project mailing list.

Ubuntu
I joined Canonical to work on Ubuntu full-time back in February 2021. Whilst I can t give a full, detailed list of things I did, here s a quick TL;DR of what I did:

Debian (E)LTS
This month I have worked 16 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS) and 05 hours on its sister Extended LTS project and did the following things:
  • ruby-rack: There were multiple vulnerabilities reported leading to DoS (memory exhaustion) and proxy bypass.
    • [unstable/forky]: Uploaded a fix to unstable via 3.1.18-1 to fix 5 CVEs.
    • [trixie/bookworm]: Uploaded a fix for all 5 CVEs in trixie via 3.1.18-1~deb13u1 and 7 CVEs in bookworm via 2.2.20-0+deb12u1.
    • [LTS]: Uploaded a fix for all 7 CVEs in bullseye via 2.1.4-3+deb11u4. And released DLA 4357-1.
    • [ELTS]: Backported fixes for CVE-2025-46727 & CVE-2025-32441 to buster and stretch but the other backports are being a bit tricky due to really old versions. But I ll spend some more time there before coming to a conclusion.
  • wordpress: There were multiple vulnerabilities reported leading to Sent Data & Cross-site Scripting.
    • [bookworm]: Uploaded a fix for all 4 CVEs in bookwrom via 6.1.9+dfsg1-0+deb12u1.
    • [LTS]: Uploaded a fix for all 4 CVEs in bullseye via 5.7.14+dfsg1-0+deb11u1. And released DLA 4358-1.
  • [LTS] Attended the monthly LTS meeting on Jitsi. Summary here.
  • [E/LTS] Monitored discussions on mailing lists, IRC, and all the documentation updates.
Until next time.
:wq for today.

28 October 2025

Russell Coker: Internode NBN500

I have just converted to the Internode NBN500 plan which is now the same price as the NBN100 plan. I m in a HFC area so they won t let me get fiber to the home (due to Malcolm Turnbull breaking the NBN to help Murdoch) so I m limited to what HFC can do. I first tried it out on a 100mbit card and got speeds of 96/47 mb/s according to speedtest.net. I ve always had the MTU set to 1492 for the PPPoE connection (something I forgot to mention in my blog post about connecting to the Arris CM8200 on Debian [1]) but when run on the 100mbit card I had to set it to 1488. Apparently 1488 is the number because 4 bytes are taken for the VLAN header and 8 bytes for the PPPoE header. But it seems that when using gigabit ethernet it doesn t take 4 bytes for the VLAN (comments explaining that would be appreciated). when connected via gigabit with a MTU of 1492 I got speeds of 534/46 which are quite good. When I tested with my laptop on a Wifi link while sitting next to the main node of my Kogan Wifi6 mesh [2] via 2.4GHz wifi I got 172/45. When using 5GHz I got 514/41. When using 5GHz at the far end of my home over the mesh I got 200/45. Here s a table summarising the speeds. I rounded all speeds off to 1Mbit/s because I don t think that the results are even that accurate. I think that Wifi5 over mesh reporting a faster upload speed than Wifi5 near the AP is because of random factors not an actual benefit to being further away, but I will do more tests later on.
Connection Receive Mbit/s Send Mbit/s
100baseT 96 47
Gigabit 535 46
2.4GHz Wifi 172 45
Wifi5 514 41
Wifi5 Over Mesh 200 45
Related posts:
  1. Kogan AX1800 Wifi6 Mesh I previously blogged about the difficulties in getting a good...
  2. Internode NBN with Arris CM8200 on Debian I ve recently signed up for Internode NBN while using the...
  3. 2.5Gbit Ethernet I just decided to upgrade the core of my home...

Russ Allbery: Review: Those Who Wait

Review: Those Who Wait, by Haley Cass
Publisher: Haley Cass
Copyright: 2020
ISBN: 979-8-9884929-1-7
Format: Kindle
Pages: 556
Those Who Wait is a stand-alone self-published sapphic romance novel. Given the lack of connection between political figures named in this book and our reality, it's also technically an alternate history, but it will be entirely unsatisfying to anyone who reads it in that genre. Sutton Spencer is an English grad student in New York City. As the story opens, she has recently realized that she's bisexual rather than straight. She certainly has not done anything about that revelation; the very thought makes her blush. Her friend and roommate Regan, not known for either her patience or her impulse control, decides to force the issue by stealing Sutton's phone, creating a profile on a lesbian dating app, and messaging the first woman Sutton admits being attracted to. Charlotte Thompson is a highly ambitious politician, current deputy mayor of New York City for health and human services, and granddaughter of the first female president of the United States. She fully intends to become president of the United States herself. The next step on that path is an open special election for a seat in the House of Representatives. With her family political connections and the firm support of the mayor of New York City (who is also dating her brother), she thinks she has an excellent shot of winning. Charlotte is also a lesbian, something she's known since she was a teenager and which still poses serious problems for a political career. She is therefore out to her family and a few close friends, but otherwise in the closet. Compared to her political ambitions, Charlotte considers her love life almost irrelevant, and therefore has a strict policy of limiting herself to anonymous one-night stands arranged on dating apps. Even that is about to become impossible given her upcoming campaign, but she indulges in one last glance at SapphicSpark before she deletes her account. Sutton is as far as possible from the sort of person who does one-night stands, which is a shame as far as Charlotte is concerned. It would have been a fun last night out. Despite that, both of them find the other unexpectedly enjoyable to chat with. (There are a lot of text message bubbles in this book.) This is when Sutton has her brilliant idea: Charlotte is charming, experienced, and also kind and understanding of Sutton's anxiety, at least in app messages. Maybe Charlotte can be her mentor? Tell her how to approach women, give her some guidance, point her in the right directions. Given the genre, you can guess how this (eventually) turns out. I'm going to say a lot of good things about this book, so let me get the complaints over with first. As you might guess from that introduction, Charlotte's political career and the danger of being outed are central to this story. This is a bit unfortunate because you should not, under any circumstances, attempt to think deeply about the politics in this book. In 550 pages, Charlotte does not mention or expound a single meaningful political position. You come away from this book as ignorant about what Charlotte wants to accomplish as a politician as you entered. Apparently she wants to be president because her grandmother was president and she thinks she'd be good at it. The closest the story comes to a position is something unbelievably vague about homeless services and Charlotte's internal assertion that she wants to help people and make real change. There are even transcripts of media interviews, later in the book, and they somehow manage to be more vacuous than US political talk shows, which is saying something. I also can't remember a single mention of fundraising anywhere in this book, which in US politics is absurd (although I will be generous and say this is due to Cass's alternate history). I assume this was a deliberate choice and Cass didn't want politics to distract from the romance, but as someone with a lot of opinions about concrete political issues, the resulting vague soft-liberal squishiness was actively off-putting. In an actual politician, this would be an entire clothesline of red flags. Thankfully, it's ignorable for the same reason; this is so obviously not the focus of the book that one can mostly perform the same sort of mental trick that one does when ignoring the backdrop in a cheap theater. My second complaint is that I don't know what Sutton does outside of the romance. Yes, she's an English grad student, and she does some grading and some vaguely-described work and is later referred to a prestigious internship, but this is as devoid of detail as Charlotte's political positions. It's not quite as jarring because Cass does eventually show Sutton helping concretely with her mother's work (about which I have some other issues that I won't get into), but it deprives Sutton of an opportunity to be visibly expert in something. The romance setup casts Charlotte as the experienced one to Sutton's naivete, and I think it would have been a better balance to give Sutton something concrete and tangible that she was clearly better at than Charlotte. Those complaints aside, I quite enjoyed this. It was a recommendation from the same BookTuber who recommended Delilah Green Doesn't Care, so her recommendations are quickly accumulating more weight. The chemistry between Sutton and Charlotte is quite believable; the dialogue sparkles, the descriptions of the subtle cues they pick up from each other are excellent, and it's just fun to read about how they navigate a whole lot of small (and sometimes large) misunderstandings and mismatches in personality and world view. Normally, misunderstandings are my least favorite part of a romance novel, but Sutton and Charlotte come from such different perspectives that their misunderstandings feel more justified than is typical. The characters are also fairly mature about working through them: Main characters who track the other character down and insist on talking when something happens they don't understand! Can you imagine! Only with the third-act breakup is the reader dragged through multiple chapters of both characters being miserable, and while I also usually hate third-act breakups, this one is so obviously coming and so clearly advertised from the initial setup that I couldn't really be mad. I did wish the payoff make-up scene at the end of the book had a bit more oomph, though; I thought Sutton's side of it didn't have quite the emotional catharsis that it could have had. I particularly enjoyed the reasons why the two characters fall in love, and how different they are. Charlotte is delighted by Sutton because she's awkward and shy but also straightforward and frequently surprisingly blunt, which fits perfectly with how much Charlotte is otherwise living in a world of polished politicians in constant control of their personas. Sutton's perspective is more physical, but the part I liked was the way that she treats Charlotte like a puzzle. Rather than trying to change how Charlotte expresses herself, she instead discovers that she's remarkably good at reading Charlotte if she trusts her instincts. There was something about Sutton's growing perceptiveness that I found quietly delightful. It's the sort of non-sexual intimacy that often gets lost among the big emotions in romance novels. The supporting cast was also great. Both characters have deep support networks of friends and family who are unambiguously on their side. Regan is pure chaos, and I would not be friends with her, but Cass shows her deep loyalty in a way that makes her dynamic with Sutton make sense. Both characters have thoughtful and loving families who support them but don't make decisions for them, which is a nice change of pace from the usually more mixed family situations of romance novel protagonists. There's a lot of emotional turbulence in the main relationship, and I think that only worked for me because of how rock-solid and kind the supporting cast is. This is, as you might guess from the title, a very slow burn, although the slow burn is for the emotional relationship rather than the physical one (for reasons that would be spoilers). As usual, I have no calibration for spiciness level, but I'd say that this was roughly on par with the later books in the Bright Falls series. If you know something about politics (or political history) and try to take that part of this book seriously, it will drive you to drink, but if you can put that aside and can deal with misunderstandings and emotional turmoil, this was both fun and satisfying. I liked both of the characters, I liked the timing of the alternating viewpoints, and I believed in the relationship and chemistry, as improbable and chaotic as some of the setup was. It's not the greatest thing I ever read, and I wish the ending was a smidgen stronger, but it was an enjoyable way to spend a few reading days. Recommended. Rating: 7 out of 10

27 October 2025

Dirk Eddelbuettel: #054: Faster r-ci Continuous Integration via r2u Container

Welcome to post 54 in the R4 series. The topic of continuous integration has been a recurrent theme here at the R4 series. Post #32 introducess r-ci, while post #41 brings r2u to r-ci, but does not show a matrix deployment. Post #45 describes the updated r-ci setup that is now the default and contains a macOS and Ubuntu matrix, where the latter relies on r2u to keep things fast, easy, reliable . Last but not least more recent post #52 shares a trick for ensuring coverage reports. Following #45, use of r-ci at for example GitHub Actions has seen steady use and very reliable performance. With the standard setup, a vanilla Ubuntu setup is changed into one supported by r2u. This requires downloading and installating a few Ubuntu packages, and has generally been fairly quick on the order of around fourty seconds. Now, the general variability of run-times for identical tasks in GitHub Actions is well documented by the results of the setup described in post #39 which still runs weekly. It runs the identical SQL query against a remote backend using two different package families. And lo and behold, the intra-method variability on unchanged code or setup and therefore due solely to system variability is about as large as the inter-method variability. In short, GitHub Actions performance varies randomly with significant variability. See the repo README.md for chart that updates weekly (and see #39 for background). Of late, this variability became more noticeable during standard GitHub Actions runs where it would regularly take more than two minutes of setup time before actual continuous integration work was done. Some caching seems to be in effect, so subsequent runs in the same repo seem faster and often came back to one minute or less. For lightweight and small packages, loosing two minutes to setup when the actual test time is a minute or less gets old fast. Looking around, we noticed that container use can be combined with matrix use. So we have now been deploying the following setup (not always over all the matrix elements though) 
jobs:
  ci:
    strategy:
      matrix:
        include:
          -   name: container, os: ubuntu-latest, container: rocker/r2u4ci  
          -   name: macos,     os: macos-latest   
          -   name: ubuntu,    os: ubuntu-latest  

    runs-on: $  matrix.os  
    container: $  matrix.container
GitHub Actions is smart enough to provide NULL for container in the two other cases, so container: $ matrix.container is ignored there. But when container is set as here for the ci-enhanced version of r2u (which adds a few binaries commonly needed such as git, curl, wget etc needed for CI) then the CI jobs runs inside the container. And thereby skips most of the setup time as the container is already prepared. This also required some small adjustments in the underlying shell script doing the work. To not disrupt standard deployment, we placed these into a release candidate / development version one can op into via an new variable dev_version 
      - name: Setup
        uses: eddelbuettel/github-actions/r-ci@master
        with:
          dev_version: 'TRUE'
Everything else remains the same and works as before. But faster as much less time is spent on setup. You can see the actual full yaml file and actions in my repositories for rcpparmadillo and rcppmlpack-examples. Additional testing would be welcome, so feel free to deploy this in your actions now. Otherwise I will likely carry this over and make it the defaul in a few weeks time. It will still work as before but when the added container: line is used will run much faster thanks to rocker/r2u4ci being already set up for CI.

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

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