Search Results: "hp"

28 March 2024

Scarlett Gately Moore: Kubuntu, KDE Report. In Loving Memory of my Son.

Personal: As many of you know, I lost my beloved son March 9th. This has hit me really hard, but I am staying strong and holding on to all the wonderful memories I have. He grew up to be an amazing man, devoted christian and wonderful father. He was loved by everyone who knew him and will be truly missed by us all. I have had folks ask me how they can help. He left behind his 7 year old son Mason. Mason was Billy s world and I would like to make sure Mason is taken care of. I have set up a gofundme for Mason and all proceeds will go to the future care of him. https://gofund.me/25dbff0c

Work report Kubuntu: Bug bashing! I am triaging allthebugs for Plasma which can be seen here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/plasma-5.27/+bug/2053125 I am happy to report many of the remaining bugs have been fixed in the latest bug fix release 5.27.11. I prepared https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/5/5.27.11/ and Rik uploaded to archive, thank you. Unfortunately, this and several other key fixes are stuck in transition do to the time_t64 transition, which you can read about here: https://wiki.debian.org/ReleaseGoals/64bit-time . It is the biggest transition in Debian/Ubuntu history and it couldn t come at a worst time. We are aware our ISO installer is currently broken, calamares is one of those things stuck in this transition. There is a workaround in the comments of the bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/calamares/+bug/2054795 Fixed an issue with plasma-welcome. Found the fix for emojis and Aaron has kindly moved this forward with the fontconfig maintainer. Thanks! I have received an https://kfocus.org/spec/spec-ir14.html laptop and it is truly a great machine and is now my daily driver. A big thank you to the Kfocus team! I can t wait to show it off at https://linuxfestnorthwest.org/. KDE Snaps: You will see the activity in this ramp back up as the KDEneon Core project is finally a go! I will participate in the project with part time status and get everyone in the Enokia team up to speed with my snap knowledge, help prepare the qt6/kf6 transition, package plasma, and most importantly I will focus on documentation for future contributors. I have created the ( now split ) qt6 with KDE patchset support and KDE frameworks 6 SDK and runtime snaps. I have made the kde-neon-6 extension and the PR is in: https://github.com/canonical/snapcraft/pull/4698 . Future work on the extension will include multiple versions track support and core24 support.

I have successfully created our first qt6/kf6 snap ark. They will show showing up in the store once all the required bits have been merged and published. Thank you for stopping by. ~Scarlett

23 March 2024

Kentaro Hayashi: How about allocating more buildd resource for armel and armhf?

This article is cross-posting from grow-your-ideas. This is just an idea. salsa.debian.org

The problem According to Developer Machines [1], current buildd machines are like this:
  • armel: 4 buildd (4 for arm64/armhf/armel)
  • armhf: 7 buildd (4 for arm64/armhf/armel and 3 for armhf only)
[1] https://db.debian.org/machines.cgi In contrast to other buildd architectures, these instances are quite a few and it seems that it causes a shortage of buildd resourses. (e.g. during mass transition, give-back turn around time becomes longer and longer.)

Actual situation As you know, during 64bit time_t transition, many packages should be built, but it seems that +b1 or +bN build becomes slower. (I've hit BD-Uninstalled some times because of missing dependency rebuild) ref. https://qa.debian.org/dose/debcheck/unstable_main/index.html

Expected situation Allocate more buildd resources for armel and armhf. It is just an idea, but how about assigning some buildd as armel/armhf buildd? Above buildd is used only for arm64 buildd currently. Maybe there is some technical reason not suitable for armel/armhf buildd, but I don't know yet.
2024/03/24 UPDATE: arm-arm01,arm-arm03,arm-arm-04 has already assigned to armel/armhf buildd, so it is an invalid proposal. See https://buildd.debian.org/status/architecture.php?a=armhf&suite=sid&buildd=buildd_arm64-arm-arm-01, https://buildd.debian.org/status/architecture.php?a=armhf&suite=sid&buildd=buildd_arm64-arm-arm-03, https://buildd.debian.org/status/architecture.php?a=armhf&suite=sid&buildd=buildd_arm64-arm-arm-04

Additional information
  • arm64: 10 buildd (4 for arm64/armhf/armel, 6 for arm64 only)
  • amd64: 7 buildd (5 for amd64/i386 buildd)
  • riscv64: 9 buildd

19 March 2024

Colin Watson: apt install everything?

On Mastodon, the question came up of how Ubuntu would deal with something like the npm install everything situation. I replied:
Ubuntu is curated, so it probably wouldn t get this far. If it did, then the worst case is that it would get in the way of CI allowing other packages to be removed (again from a curated system, so people are used to removal not being self-service); but the release team would have no hesitation in removing a package like this to fix that, and it certainly wouldn t cause this amount of angst. If you did this in a PPA, then I can t think of any particular negative effects.
OK, if you added lots of build-dependencies (as well as run-time dependencies) then you might be able to take out a builder. But Launchpad builders already run arbitrary user-submitted code by design and are therefore very carefully sandboxed and treated as ephemeral, so this is hardly novel. There s a lot to be said for the arrangement of having a curated system for the stuff people actually care about plus an ecosystem of add-on repositories. PPAs cover a wide range of levels of developer activity, from throwaway experiments to quasi-official distribution methods; there are certainly problems that arise from it being difficult to tell the difference between those extremes and from there being no systematic confinement, but for this particular kind of problem they re very nearly ideal. (Canonical has tried various other approaches to software distribution, and while they address some of the problems, they aren t obviously better at helping people make reliable social judgements about code they don t know.) For a hypothetical package with a huge number of dependencies, to even try to upload it directly to Ubuntu you d need to be an Ubuntu developer with upload rights (or to go via Debian, where you d have to clear a similar hurdle). If you have those, then the first upload has to pass manual review by an archive administrator. If your package passes that, then it still has to build and get through proposed-migration CI before it reaches anything that humans typically care about. On the other hand, if you were inclined to try this sort of experiment, you d almost certainly try it in a PPA, and that would trouble nobody but yourself.

17 March 2024

Thomas Koch: Using nix package manager in Debian

Posted on January 16, 2024
The nix package manager is available in Debian since May 2020. Why would one use it in Debian? Especially the last point nagged me every time I set up a new Debian installation. My emacs configuration and my Desktop setup expects certain software to be installed. Please be aware that I m a beginner with nix and that my config might not follow best practice. Additionally many nix users are already using the new flakes feature of nix that I m still learning about. So I ve got this file at .config/nixpkgs/config.nix1:
with (import <nixpkgs>  );
 
  packageOverrides = pkgs: with pkgs;  
    thk-emacsWithPackages = (pkgs.emacsPackagesFor emacs-gtk).emacsWithPackages (
      epkgs:
      (with epkgs.elpaPackages; [
        ace-window
        company
        org
        use-package
      ]) ++ (with epkgs.melpaPackages; [
        editorconfig
        flycheck
        haskell-mode
        magit
        nix-mode
        paredit
        rainbow-delimiters
        treemacs
        visual-fill-column
        yasnippet-snippets
      ]) ++ [    # From main packages set
      ]
    );

    userPackages = buildEnv  
      extraOutputsToInstall = [ "doc" "info" "man" ];
      name = "user-packages";
      paths = [
        ghc
        git
        (pkgs.haskell-language-server.override   supportedGhcVersions = [ "94" ];  )
        nix
        stack
        thk-emacsWithPackages
        tmux
        vcsh
        virtiofsd
      ];
     ;
   ;
 
Every time I change the file or want to receive updates, I do:
nix-env --install --attr nixpkgs.userPackages --remove-all
You can see that I install nix with nix. This gives me a newer version than the one available in Debian stable. However, the nix-daemon still runs as the older binary from Debian. My dirty hack is to put this override in /etc/systemd/system/nix-daemon.service.d/override.conf:
[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=@/home/thk/.local/state/nix/profile/bin/nix-daemon nix-daemon --daemon
I m not too interested in a cleaner way since I hope to fully migrate to Nix anyways.

  1. Note the nixpkgs in the path. This is not a config file for nix the package manager but for the nix package collection. See the nixpkgs manual.

Thomas Koch: Chromium gtk-filechooser preview size

Posted on January 9, 2024
I wanted to report this issue in chromiums issue tracker, but it gave me:
Something went wrong, please try again later.
Ok, then at least let me reply to this askubuntu question. But my attempt to signup with my launchpad account gave me:
Launchpad Login Failed. Please try logging in again.
I refrain from commenting on this to not violate some code of conduct. So this is what I wanted to write:
GTK file chooser image preview size should be configurable The file chooser that appears when uploading a file (e.g. an image to Google Fotos) learned to show a preview in issue 15500. The preview image size is hard coded to 256x512 in kPreviewWidth and kPreviewHeight in ui/gtk/select_file_dialog_linux_gtk.cc. Please make the size configurable. On high DPI screens the images are too small to be of much use.
Yes, I should not use chromium anymore.

Thomas Koch: Good things come ... state folder

Posted on January 2, 2024
Just a little while ago (10 years) I proposed the addition of a state folder to the XDG basedir specification and expanded the article XDGBaseDirectorySpecification in the Debian wiki. Recently I learned, that version 0.8 (from May 2021) of the spec finally includes a state folder. Granted, I wasn t the first to have this idea (2009), nor the one who actually made it happen. Now, please go ahead and use it! Thank you.

10 March 2024

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in February 2024

FTP master This month I accepted 242 and rejected 42 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 251.

This was just a short month and the weather outside was not really motivating. I hope it will be better in March. Debian LTS This was my hundred-sixteenth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. During my allocated time I uploaded: I also started to work on qtbase-opensource-src (an update is needed for ELTS, so an LTS update seems to be appropriate as well, especially as there are postponed CVE). Debian ELTS This month was the sixty-seventth ELTS month. During my allocated time I uploaded: The upload of bind9 was a bit exciting, but all occuring issues with the new upload workflow could be quickly fixed by Helmut and the packages finally reached their destination. I wonder why it is always me who stumbles upon special cases? This month I also worked on the Jessie and Stretch updates for exim4. I also started to work on an update for qtbase-opensource-src in Stretch (and LTS and other releases as well). Debian Printing This month I uploaded new upstream versions of: This work is generously funded by Freexian! Debian Matomo I started a new team debian-matomo-maintainers. Within this team all matomo related packages should be handled. PHP PEAR or PECL packages shall be still maintained in their corresponding teams. This month I uploaded: This work is generously funded by Freexian! Debian Astro This month I uploaded a new upstream version of: Debian IoT This month I uploaded new upstream versions of:

4 March 2024

Colin Watson: Free software activity in January/February 2024

Two months into my new gig and it s going great! Tracking my time has taken a bit of getting used to, but having something that amounts to a queryable database of everything I ve done has also allowed some helpful introspection. Freexian sponsors up to 20% of my time on Debian tasks of my choice. In fact I ve been spending the bulk of my time on debusine which is itself intended to accelerate work on Debian, but more details on that later. While I contribute to Freexian s summaries now, I ve also decided to start writing monthly posts about my free software activity as many others do, to get into some more detail. January 2024 February 2024

1 March 2024

Scarlett Gately Moore: Kubuntu: Week 4, Feature Freeze and what comes next.

First I would like to give a big congratulations to KDE for a superb KDE 6 mega release  While we couldn t go with 6 on our upcoming LTS release, I do recommend KDE neon if you want to give it a try! I want to say it again, I firmly stand by the Kubuntu Council in the decision to stay with the rock solid Plasma 5 for the 24.04 LTS release. The timing was just to close to feature freeze and the last time we went with the shiny new stuff on an LTS release, it was a nightmare ( KDE 4 anyone? ). So without further ado, my weekly wrap-up. Kubuntu: Continuing efforts from last week Kubuntu: Week 3 wrap up, Contest! KDE snaps, Debian uploads. , it has been another wild and crazy week getting everything in before feature freeze yesterday. We will still be uploading the upcoming Plasma 5.27.11 as it is a bug fix release  and right now it is all about the finding and fixing bugs! Aside from many uploads my accomplishments this week are: What comes next? Testing, testing, testing! Bug fixes and of course our re-branding. My focus is on bug triage right now. I am also working on new projects in launchpad to easily track our bugs as right now they are all over the place and hard to track down. Snaps: I have started the MRs to fix our latest 23.08.5 snaps, I hope to get these finished in the next week or so. I have also been speaking to a prospective student with some GSOC ideas that I really like and will mentor, hopefully we are not too late. Happy with my work? My continued employment depends on you! Please consider a donation http://kubuntu.org/donate Thank you!

25 February 2024

Jacob Adams: AAC and Debian

Currently, in a default installation of Debian with the GNOME desktop, Bluetooth headphones that require the AAC codec1 cannot be used. As the Debian wiki outlines, using the AAC codec over Bluetooth, while technically supported by PipeWire, is explicitly disabled in Debian at this time. This is because the fdk-aac library needed to enable this support is currently in the non-free component of the repository, meaning that PipeWire, which is in the main component, cannot depend on it.

How to Fix it Yourself If what you, like me, need is simply for Bluetooth Audio to work with AAC in Debian s default desktop environment2, then you ll need to rebuild the pipewire package to include the AAC codec. While the current version in Debian main has been built with AAC deliberately disabled, it is trivial to enable if you can install a version of the fdk-aac library. I preface this with the usual caveats when it comes to patent and licensing controversies. I am not a lawyer, building this package and/or using it could get you into legal trouble. These instructions have only been tested on an up-to-date copy of Debian 12.
  1. Install pipewire s build dependencies
    sudo apt install build-essential devscripts
    sudo apt build-dep pipewire
    
  2. Install libfdk-aac-dev
    sudo apt install libfdk-aac-dev
    
    If the above doesn t work you ll likely need to enable non-free and try again
    sudo sed -i 's/main/main non-free/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
    sudo apt update
    
    Alternatively, if you wish to ensure you are maximally license-compliant and patent un-infringing3, you can instead build fdk-aac-free which includes only those components of AAC that are known to be patent-free3. This is what should eventually end up in Debian to resolve this problem (see below).
    sudo apt install git-buildpackage
    mkdir fdk-aac-source
    cd fdk-aac-source
    git clone https://salsa.debian.org/multimedia-team/fdk-aac
    cd fdk-aac
    gbp buildpackage
    sudo dpkg -i ../libfdk-aac2_*deb ../libfdk-aac-dev_*deb
    
  3. Get the pipewire source code
    mkdir pipewire-source
    cd pipewire-source
    apt source pipewire
    
    This will create a bunch of files within the pipewire-source directory, but you ll only need the pipewire-<version> folder, this contains all the files you ll need to build the package, with all the debian-specific patches already applied. Note that you don t want to run the apt source command as root, as it will then create files that your regular user cannot edit.
  4. Fix the dependencies and build options To fix up the build scripts to use the fdk-aac library, you need to save the following as pipewire-source/aac.patch
    --- debian/control.orig
    +++ debian/control
    @@ -40,8 +40,8 @@
                 modemmanager-dev,
                 pkg-config,
                 python3-docutils,
    -               systemd [linux-any]
    -Build-Conflicts: libfdk-aac-dev
    +               systemd [linux-any],
    +               libfdk-aac-dev
     Standards-Version: 4.6.2
     Vcs-Browser: https://salsa.debian.org/utopia-team/pipewire
     Vcs-Git: https://salsa.debian.org/utopia-team/pipewire.git
    --- debian/rules.orig
    +++ debian/rules
    @@ -37,7 +37,7 @@
     		-Dauto_features=enabled \
     		-Davahi=enabled \
     		-Dbluez5-backend-native-mm=enabled \
    -		-Dbluez5-codec-aac=disabled \
    +		-Dbluez5-codec-aac=enabled \
     		-Dbluez5-codec-aptx=enabled \
     		-Dbluez5-codec-lc3=enabled \
     		-Dbluez5-codec-lc3plus=disabled \
    
    Then you ll need to run patch from within the pipewire-<version> folder created by apt source:
    patch -p0 < ../aac.patch
    
  5. Build pipewire
    cd pipewire-*
    debuild
    
    Note that you will likely see an error from debsign at the end of this process, this is harmless, you simply don t have a GPG key set up to sign your newly-built package4. Packages don t need to be signed to be installed, and debsign uses a somewhat non-standard signing process that dpkg does not check anyway.
  1. Install libspa-0.2-bluetooth
    sudo dpkg -i libspa-0.2-bluetooth_*.deb
    
  2. Restart PipeWire and/or Reboot
    sudo reboot
    
    Theoretically there s a set of services to restart here that would get pipewire to pick up the new library, probably just pipewire itself. But it s just as easy to restart and ensure everything is using the correct library.

Why This is a slightly unusual situation, as the fdk-aac library is licensed under what even the GNU project acknowledges is a free software license. However, this license explicitly informs the user that they need to acquire a patent license to use this software5:
3. NO PATENT LICENSE NO EXPRESS OR IMPLIED LICENSES TO ANY PATENT CLAIMS, including without limitation the patents of Fraunhofer, ARE GRANTED BY THIS SOFTWARE LICENSE. Fraunhofer provides no warranty of patent non-infringement with respect to this software. You may use this FDK AAC Codec software or modifications thereto only for purposes that are authorized by appropriate patent licenses.
To quote the GNU project:
Because of this, and because the license author is a known patent aggressor, we encourage you to be careful about using or redistributing software under this license: you should first consider whether the licensor might aim to lure you into patent infringement.
AAC is covered by a number of patents, which expire at some point in the 2030s6. As such the current version of the library is potentially legally dubious to ship with any other software, as it could be considered patent-infringing3.

Fedora s solution Since 2017, Fedora has included a modified version of the library as fdk-aac-free, see the announcement and the bugzilla bug requesting review. This version of the library includes only the AAC LC profile, which is believed to be entirely patent-free3. Based on this, there is an open bug report in Debian requesting that the fdk-aac package be moved to the main component and that the pipwire package be updated to build against it.

The Debian NEW queue To resolve these bugs, a version of fdk-aac-free has been uploaded to Debian by Jeremy Bicha. However, to make it into Debian proper, it must first pass through the ftpmaster s NEW queue. The current version of fdk-aac-free has been in the NEW queue since July 2023. Based on conversations in some of the bugs above, it s been there since at least 20227. I hope this helps anyone stuck with AAC to get their hardware working for them while we wait for the package to eventually make it through the NEW queue. Discuss on Hacker News
  1. Such as, for example, any Apple AirPods, which only support AAC AFAICT.
  2. Which, as of Debian 12 is GNOME 3 under Wayland with PipeWire.
  3. I m not a lawyer, I don t know what kinds of infringement might or might not be possible here, do your own research, etc. 2 3 4
  4. And if you DO have a key setup with debsign you almost certainly don t need these instructions.
  5. This was originally phrased as explicitly does not grant any patent rights. It was pointed out on Hacker News that this is not exactly what it says, as it also includes a specific note that you ll need to acquire your own patent license. I ve now quoted the relevant section of the license for clarity.
  6. Wikipedia claims the base patents expire in 2031, with the extensions expiring in 2038, but its source for these claims is some guy s spreadsheet in a forum. The same discussion also brings up Wikipedia s claim and casts some doubt on it, so I m not entirely sure what s correct here, but I didn t feel like doing a patent deep-dive today. If someone can provide a clear answer that would be much appreciated.
  7. According to Jeremy B cha: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1021370#17

23 February 2024

Scarlett Gately Moore: Kubuntu: Week 3 wrap up, Contest! KDE snaps, Debian uploads.

Witch Wells AZ SunsetWitch Wells AZ Sunset
It has been a very busy 3 weeks here in Kubuntu! Kubuntu 22.04.4 LTS has been released and can be downloaded from here: https://kubuntu.org/getkubuntu/ Work done for the upcoming 24.04 LTS release: We have a branding contest! Please do enter, there are some exciting prizes https://kubuntu.org/news/kubuntu-graphic-design-contest/ Debian: I have uploaded to NEW the following packages: I am currently working on: KDE Snaps: KDE applications 23.08.5 have been uploaded to Candidate channel, testing help welcome. https://snapcraft.io/search?q=KDE I have also working on bug fixes, time allowing. My continued employment depends on you, please consider a donation! https://kubuntu.org/donate/ Thank you for stopping by! ~Scarlett

11 February 2024

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Upcoming Improvements to Salsa CI, /usr-move, and more! (by Utkarsh Gupta)

Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

Upcoming Improvements to Salsa CI, by Santiago Ruano Rinc n Santiago started picking up the work made by Outreachy Intern, Enock Kashada (a big thanks to him!), to solve some long-standing issues in Salsa CI. Currently, the first job in a Salsa CI pipeline is the extract-source job, used to produce a debianize source tree of the project. This job was introduced to make it possible to build the projects on different architectures, on the subsequent build jobs. However, that extract-source approach is sub-optimal: not only it increases the execution time of the pipeline by some minutes, but also projects whose source tree is too large are not able to use the pipeline. The debianize source tree is passed as an artifact to the build jobs, and for those large projects, the size of their source tree exceeds the Salsa s limits. This is specific issue is documented as issue #195, and the proposed solution is to get rid of the extract-source job, relying on sbuild in the very build job (see issue #296). Switching to sbuild would also help to improve the build source job, solving issues such as #187 and #298. The current work-in-progress is very preliminary, but it has already been possible to run the build (amd64), build-i386 and build-source job using sbuild with the unshare mode. The image on the right shows a pipeline that builds grep. All the test jobs use the artifacts of the new build job. There is a lot of remaining work, mainly making the integration with ccache work. This change could break some things, it will also be important to test how the new pipeline works with complex projects. Also, thanks to Emmanuel Arias, we are proposing a Google Summer of Code 2024 project to improve Salsa CI. As part of the ongoing work in preparation for the GSoC 2024 project, Santiago has proposed a merge request to make more efficient how contributors can test their changes on the Salsa CI pipeline.

/usr-move, by Helmut Grohne In January, we sent most of the moving patches for the set of packages involved with debootstrap. Notably missing is glibc, which turns out harder than anticipated via dumat, because it has Conflicts between different architectures, which dumat does not analyze. Patches for diversion mitigations have been updated in a way to not exhibit any loss anymore. The main change here is that packages which are being diverted now support the diverting packages in transitioning their diversions. We also supported a few packages with non-trivial changes such as netplan.io. dumat has been enhanced to better support derivatives such as Ubuntu.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Python 3.12 migration trundles on. Stefano Rivera helped port several new packages to support 3.12.
  • Stefano updated the Sphinx configuration of DebConf Video Team s documentation, which was broken by Sphinx 7.
  • Stefano published the videos from the Cambridge MiniDebConf to YouTube and PeerTube.
  • DebConf 24 planning has begun, and Stefano & Utkarsh have started work on this.
  • Utkarsh re-sponsored the upload of golang-github-prometheus-community-pgbouncer-exporter for Lena.
  • Colin Watson added Incus support to autopkgtest.
  • Colin discovered Perl::Critic and used it to tidy up some poor practices in several of his packages, including debconf.
  • Colin did some overdue debconf maintenance, mainly around tidying up error message handling in several places (1, 2, 3).
  • Colin figured out how to update the mirror size documentation in debmirror, last updated in 2010. It should now be much easier to keep it up to date regularly.
  • Colin issued a man-db buster update to clean up some irritations due to strict sandboxing.
  • Thorsten Alteholz adopted two more packages, magicfilter and ifhp, for the debian-printing team. Those packages are the last ones of the latest round of adoptions to preserve the old printing protocol within Debian. If you know of other packages that should be retained, please don t hesitate to contact Thorsten.
  • Enrico participated in /usr-merge discussions with Helmut.
  • Helmut sent patches for 16 cross build failures.
  • Helmut supported Matthias Klose (not affiliated with Freexian) with adding -for-host support to gcc-defaults.
  • Helmut uploaded dput-ng enabling dcut migrate and merging two MRs of Ben Hutchings.
  • Santiago took part in the discussions relating to the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) and the Debian public statement that was published last year. He participated in a meeting with Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), Marcel Kolaja and Karen Melchior, and their teams to clarify some points about the impact of the CRA and Debian and downstream projects, and the improvements in the last version of the proposed regulation.

9 February 2024

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in January 2024

FTP master This month I accepted 333 and rejected 31 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 342.

Hooray, I already accepted package number 30000.

The statistic, where I get my numbers from, started in February 2002. Up to now 81694 packages got accepted. Given that I accepted package 20000 in October 2020, would I be able to accept half of the packages that made it through NEW? Debian LTS This was my hundred-fifteenth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. During my allocated time I uploaded: This month I was finally able to really run the test suite of bind9. I already wanted to give up with this package, but Santiago encouraged me to proceed. So, here you are fixed-Buster-version. Jessie and Stretch have to wait a bit until the dust has settled. Last but not least I also did a few days of frontdesk duties. Debian ELTS This month was the sixty-sixth ELTS month. During my allocated time I uploaded: This month I also worked on the Jessie and Stretch updates for bind9. The uploads should happen soon. I also started to work on an update for exim4. Last but not least I did a few days of frontdesk duties. Debian Printing This month I adopted: At the moment these packages are the last adoptions to preserve the old printing protocol within Debian. If you know of other packages that should be retained, please don t hesitate to ask me. But don t wait for too long, I have fun to process RM-bugs :-). This work is generously funded by Freexian! Debian Astro This month I uploaded a new upstream version of: Debian IoT This month I uploaded new upstream versions of: Other stuff This month I uploaded new upstream version of packages, did a source upload for the transition or uploaded it to fix one or the other issue:

Abhijith PA: A new(kind of) phone

I was using a refurbished Xiaomi Redmi 6 Pro (codename: sakura . I do remember buying this phone to run LineageOS as I found this model had support. But by the time I bought it (there was a quite a gap between my research and the actual purchase) lineageOS ended the suport for this device. The maintainer might ve ended this port, I don t blame them. Its a non rewarding work. Later I found there is a DotOS custom rom available. I did a week of test run. There seems lot of bugs and it all was minor and I can live with that. Since there is no other official port for redmi 6 pro at the time, I settled on this buggy DotOS nightly build. The phone was doing fine all these(3+) years, but recently the camera started showing greyish dots on some areas to a point that I can t even properly take a photo. The outer body of the phone wasn t original, as it was a refurbished, thus the colors started to peel off and wasn t aesthetically pleasing. Then there is the Location detection issue which took a while to figure out location and battery drains fast. I recently started mapping public transportation routes, and the GPS issue was a problem for me. With all these problems combined, I decided to buy a new phone. But choosing a phone wasn t easy. There are far too many options in the market. However, one thing I was quite sure of was that I wouldn t be buying a brand new phone, but a refurbished one. It is my protest against all these phone manufacturers who have convinced the general public that a mobile phone s lifespan is only 2 years. Of course, there are a few exceptions, but the majority of players in the Indian market are not. Now I think about it, I haven t bought any brand new computing device, be it phones or laptops since 2015. All are refurbished devices except for an Orange pi. My Samsung R439 laptop which I already blogged about is still going strong. Back to picking phone. So I began by comparing LineageOS website to an online refurbished store to pick a phone that has an official lineage support then to reddit search for any reported hardware failures Google Pixel phones are well-known in the custom ROM community for ease of installation, good hardware and Android security releases. My above claims are from privacyguides.org and XDA-developers. I was convinced to go with this choice. But I have some one at home who is at the age of throwing things. So I didn t want to risk buying an expensive Pixel phone only to have it end up with a broken screen and edges. Perhaps I will consider buying a Pixel next time. After doing some more research and cross comparison I landed up on Redmi note 9. Codename: merlinx. Based on my previous experience I knew it is going to be a pain to unlock the bootloader of Xiaomi phones and I was prepared for that but this time there was an extra hoop. The phone came with ROM MIUI version 13. A small search on XDA forums and reddit told unless we downgrade to 12 or so it is difficult to unlock bootloader for this device. And performing this wasn t exactly easy as we need tools like SP Flash etc. It took some time, but I ve completed the downgrade process. From there, the rest was cakewalk as everything was perfectly documented in LineageOS wiki. And ta-da, I have a phone running lineageOS. I been using it for some time and honestly I haven t come across any bug in my way of usage. One advice I will give to you if you are going to flash a custom ROM. There are plenty of videos about unlocking bootloader, installing ROMs in Youtube. Please REFRAIN from watching and experimenting it on your phone unless you figured a way to un brick your device first.

8 February 2024

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds at FOSDEM 2024

Core Reproducible Builds developer Holger Levsen presented at the main track at FOSDEM on Saturday 3rd February this year in Brussels, Belgium. Titled Reproducible Builds: The First Ten Years
In this talk Holger h01ger Levsen will give an overview about Reproducible Builds: How it started with a small BoF at DebConf13 (and before), then grew from being a Debian effort to something many projects work on together, until in 2021 it was mentioned in an Executive Order of the President of the United States. And of course, the talk will not end there, but rather outline where we are today and where we still need to be going, until Debian stable (and other distros!) will be 100% reproducible, verified by many. h01ger has been involved in reproducible builds since 2014 and so far has set up automated reproducibility testing for Debian, Fedora, Arch Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and coreboot.
More information can be found on FOSDEM s own page for the talk, including a video recording and slides.
Separate from Holger s talk, however, there were a number of other talks about reproducible builds at FOSDEM this year: and there was even an entire track on Software Bill of Materials.

2 February 2024

Scarlett Gately Moore: Some exciting news! Kubuntu: I m back!!!

It s official, the Kubuntu Council has hired me part time to work on the 24.04 LTS release, preparation for Plasma 6, and to bring life back into the Distribution. First I want thank the Kubuntu Council for this opportunity and I plan a long and successful journey together!!!! My first week ( I started midweek ): It has been a busy one! Many meet and greets with the team and other interested parties. I had the chance to chat with Mike from Kubuntu Focus and I have to say I am absolutely amazed with the work they have done, and if you are in the market for a new laptop, you must check these out!!! https://kfocus.org Or if you want to try before you buy you can download the OS! All they ask is for an e-mail, which is completely reasonable. Hosting isn t free! Besides, you can opt out anytime and they don t share it with anyone. I look forward to working closely with this project. We now have a Kubuntu Team in KDE invent https://invent.kde.org/teams/distribution-kubuntu if you would like to join us, please don t hesitate to ask! I have started a new Wiki and our first page is the ever important Bug triaging! It is still a WIP but you can check it out here: https://invent.kde.org/teams/distribution-kubuntu/docs/-/wikis/Bug-Triage-Story-WIP , with that said I have started the launchpad work to make tracking our bugs easier buy subscribing kubuntu-bugs to all our packages and creating proper projects for our packages missing them. We have compiled a list of our various documentation links that need updated and Rick Timmis is updating kubuntu.org! Aaron Honeycutt has been busy with the Kubuntu Manual https://github.com/kubuntu-team/kubuntu-manual which is in good shape. We just need to improve our developer story  I have been working on the rather massive Apparmor bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apparmor/+bug/2046844 with testing the fixes from the ppa and writing profiles for the various KDE packages affected ( pretty much anything that uses webengine ) and making progress there. My next order of business staging Frameworks 5.114 with guidance from our super awesome Rik Mills that has been doing most of the heavy lifting in Kubuntu for many years now. So thank you for that Rik  I will also start on our big transition to the Calamaras Installer! I do have experience here, so I expect it will be a smooth one. I am so excited for the future of Kubuntu and the exciting things to come! With that said, the Kubuntu funding is community donation driven. There is enough to pay me part time for a couple contracts, but it will run out and a full-time contract would be super awesome. I am reaching out to anyone enjoying Kubuntu and want to help with the future of Kubuntu to please consider a donation! We are working on more donation options, but for now you can donate through paypal at https://kubuntu.org/donate/ Thank you!!!!!

29 January 2024

Russell Coker: Thinkpad X1 Yoga Gen3

I just bought myself a Thinkpad X1 Yoga Gen3 for $359.10. I have been quite happy with the Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen5 I ve had for just over a year (apart from my mistake in buying one with lost password) [1] and I normally try to get more use out of a computer than that. If I divide total cost by the time that I ve had it working that comes out to about $1.30 per day. I would pay more than that for a laptop and I have paid much more than that for laptops in the past, but I prefer not to. I was initially tempted to buy a new Thinkpad by the prices of high end X1 devices dropping, this new Yoga has 16G of RAM and a 2560*1440 screen that s a good upgrade from 8G with 1920*1080. The CPU of my new Thinkpad is a quad core i5-8350U that rates 6226 [2] and is a decent upgrade from the dual core i5-6300U that rates 3239 [3] although that wasn t a factor as I found the old CPU fast enough. The Yoga Gen3 has a minimum weight of 1.4Kg and mine might not be the lightest model in the range while the old Carbon weighs 1.14Kg. I can really feel the difference. It s also slightly larger but fortunately still fits in the pocket of my Scottware jacket. The higher resolution screen and more RAM were not sufficient to make me want to spend some money. The deciding factor is that as I m working on phones with touch screens it is a benefit to use a laptop with a touch screen so I can do more testing. The Yoga I bought was going cheap because the touch part of the touch screen is broken but the stylus still works, this is apparently a common failure mode of the Yoga. The Yoga has a brighter screen than the Carbon and seems to have better contrast. I think Lenovo had some newer technology for that generation of laptops or maybe my Carbon is slightly defective in that regard. It s a hazard of buying second hand that if something basically works but isn t quite as good as it should be then you will never know. I m happy with this purchase and I recommend that everyone who buys laptops secondhand the way I do only get 1440p or better displays. I ve currently got the Kitty terminal emulator [4] setup with 9 windows that each have 103 or 104 columns and 26 or 28 rows of text. That s a lot of terminals on a laptop screen!

Michael Ablassmeier: qmpbackup 0.28

Over the last weekend i had some spare time to improve qmpbackup a little more, the new version: and some minor code reworks. Hope its useful for someone.

25 January 2024

Joachim Breitner: GHC Steering Committee Retrospective

After seven years of service as member and secretary on the GHC Steering Committee, I have resigned from that role. So this is a good time to look back and retrace the formation of the GHC proposal process and committee. In my memory, I helped define and shape the proposal process, optimizing it for effectiveness and throughput, but memory can be misleading, and judging from the paper trail in my email archives, this was indeed mostly Ben Gamari s and Richard Eisenberg s achievement: Already in Summer of 2016, Ben Gamari set up the ghc-proposals Github repository with a sketch of a process and sent out a call for nominations on the GHC user s mailing list, which I replied to. The Simons picked the first set of members, and in the fall of 2016 we discussed the committee s by-laws and procedures. As so often, Richard was an influential shaping force here.

Three ingredients For example, it was him that suggested that for each proposal we have one committee member be the Shepherd , overseeing the discussion. I believe this was one ingredient for the process effectiveness: There is always one person in charge, and thus we avoid the delays incurred when any one of a non-singleton set of volunteers have to do the next step (and everyone hopes someone else does it). The next ingredient was that we do not usually require a vote among all members (again, not easy with volunteers with limited bandwidth and occasional phases of absence). Instead, the shepherd makes a recommendation (accept/reject), and if the other committee members do not complain, this silence is taken as consent, and we come to a decision. It seems this idea can also be traced back on Richard, who suggested that once a decision is requested, the shepherd [generates] consensus. If consensus is elusive, then we vote. At the end of the year we agreed and wrote down these rules, created the mailing list for our internal, but publicly archived committee discussions, and began accepting proposals, starting with Adam Gundry s OverloadedRecordFields. At that point, there was no secretary role yet, so how I did become one? It seems that in February 2017 I started to clean-up and refine the process documentation, fixing bugs in the process (like requiring authors to set Github labels when they don t even have permissions to do that). This in particular meant that someone from the committee had to manually handle submissions and so on, and by the aforementioned principle that at every step there ought to be exactly one person in change, the role of a secretary followed naturally. In the email in which I described that role I wrote:
Simon already shoved me towards picking up the secretary hat, to reduce load on Ben.
So when I merged the updated process documentation, I already listed myself secretary . It wasn t just Simon s shoving that put my into the role, though. I dug out my original self-nomination email to Ben, and among other things I wrote:
I also hope that there is going to be clear responsibilities and a clear workflow among the committee. E.g. someone (possibly rotating), maybe called the secretary, who is in charge of having an initial look at proposals and then assigning it to a member who shepherds the proposal.
So it is hardly a surprise that I became secretary, when it was dear to my heart to have a smooth continuous process here. I am rather content with the result: These three ingredients single secretary, per-proposal shepherds, silence-is-consent helped the committee to be effective throughout its existence, even as every once in a while individual members dropped out.

Ulterior motivation I must admit, however, there was an ulterior motivation behind me grabbing the secretary role: Yes, I did want the committee to succeed, and I did want that authors receive timely, good and decisive feedback on their proposals but I did not really want to have to do that part. I am, in fact, a lousy proposal reviewer. I am too generous when reading proposals, and more likely mentally fill gaps in a specification rather than spotting them. Always optimistically assuming that the authors surely know what they are doing, rather than critically assessing the impact, the implementation cost and the interaction with other language features. And, maybe more importantly: why should I know which changes are good and which are not so good in the long run? Clearly, the authors cared enough about a proposal to put it forward, so there is some need and I do believe that Haskell should stay an evolving and innovating language but how does this help me decide about this or that particular feature. I even, during the formation of the committee, explicitly asked that we write down some guidance on Vision and Guideline ; do we want to foster change or innovation, or be selective gatekeepers? Should we accept features that are proven to be useful, or should we accept features so that they can prove to be useful? This discussion, however, did not lead to a concrete result, and the assessment of proposals relied on the sum of each member s personal preference, expertise and gut feeling. I am not saying that this was a mistake: It is hard to come up with a general guideline here, and even harder to find one that does justice to each individual proposal. So the secret motivation for me to grab the secretary post was that I could contribute without having to judge proposals. Being secretary allowed me to assign most proposals to others to shepherd, and only once in a while myself took care of a proposal, when it seemed to be very straight-forward. Sneaky, ain t it?

7 Years later For years to come I happily played secretary: When an author finished their proposal and public discussion ebbed down they would ping me on GitHub, I would pick a suitable shepherd among the committee and ask them to judge the proposal. Eventually, the committee would come to a conclusion, usually by implicit consent, sometimes by voting, and I d merge the pull request and update the metadata thereon. Every few months I d summarize the current state of affairs to the committee (what happened since the last update, which proposals are currently on our plate), and once per year gathered the data for Simon Peyton Jones annually GHC Status Report. Sometimes some members needed a nudge or two to act. Some would eventually step down, and I d sent around a call for nominations and when the nominations came in, distributed them off-list among the committee and tallied the votes. Initially, that was exciting. For a long while it was a pleasant and rewarding routine. Eventually, it became a mere chore. I noticed that I didn t quite care so much anymore about some of the discussion, and there was a decent amount of naval-gazing, meta-discussions and some wrangling about claims of authority that was probably useful and necessary, but wasn t particularly fun. I also began to notice weaknesses in the processes that I helped shape: We could really use some more automation for showing proposal statuses, notifying people when they have to act, and nudging them when they don t. The whole silence-is-assent approach is good for throughput, but not necessary great for quality, and maybe the committee members need to be pushed more firmly to engage with each proposal. Like GHC itself, the committee processes deserve continuous refinement and refactoring, and since I could not muster the motivation to change my now well-trod secretarial ways, it was time for me to step down. Luckily, Adam Gundry volunteered to take over, and that makes me feel much less bad for quitting. Thanks for that! And although I am for my day job now enjoying a language that has many of the things out of the box that for Haskell are still only language extensions or even just future proposals (dependent types, BlockArguments, do notation with ( foo) expressions and Unicode), I m still around, hosting the Haskell Interlude Podcast, writing on this blog and hanging out at ZuriHac etc.

20 January 2024

Fran ois Marier: Proper Multicast DNS Handling with NetworkManager and systemd-resolved

Using NetworkManager and systemd-resolved together in Debian bookworm does not work out of the box. The first sign of trouble was these constant messages in my logs:
avahi-daemon[pid]: Host name conflict, retrying with hostname-2
Then I realized that CUPS printer discovery didn't work: my network printer could not be found. Since this discovery now relies on Multicast DNS, it would make sense that both problems are related to an incompatibility between NetworkManager and Avahi.

What didn't work The first attempt I made at fixing this was to look for known bugs in Avahi. Neither of the work-arounds I found worked:

What worked The real problem turned out to be the fact that NetworkManager turns on full mDNS support in systemd-resolved which conflicts with the mDNS support in avahi-daemon. You can see this in the output of resolvectl status:
Global
       Protocols: -LLMNR +mDNS -DNSOverTLS DNSSEC=no/unsupported
resolv.conf mode: stub
Link 2 (enp6s0)
    Current Scopes: DNS mDNS/IPv4 mDNS/IPv6
         Protocols: +DefaultRoute -LLMNR +mDNS -DNSOverTLS
                    DNSSEC=no/unsupported
Current DNS Server: 192.168.1.1
       DNS Servers: 192.168.1.1
        DNS Domain: lan
which includes +mDNS for the main network adapter. I initially thought that I could just uninstall avahi-daemon and rely on the systemd-resolved mDNS stack, but it's not actually compatible with CUPS. The solution was to tell NetworkManager to set mDNS to resolve-only mode in systemd-resolved by adding the following to /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/mdns.conf:
[connection]
connection.mdns=1
leaving /etc/avahi/avahi-daemon.conf to the default Debian configuration.

Verifying the configuration After rebooting, resolvectl status now shows the following:
Global
       Protocols: -LLMNR +mDNS -DNSOverTLS DNSSEC=no/unsupported
resolv.conf mode: stub
Link 2 (enp6s0)
    Current Scopes: DNS mDNS/IPv4 mDNS/IPv6
         Protocols: +DefaultRoute -LLMNR mDNS=resolve -DNSOverTLS
                    DNSSEC=no/unsupported
Current DNS Server: 192.168.1.1
       DNS Servers: 192.168.1.1
        DNS Domain: lan
Avahi finally sees my printer (called hp in the output below):
$ avahi-browse -at   grep Printer
+ enp6s0 IPv6 hp @ myprintserver   Secure Internet Printer local
+ enp6s0 IPv4 hp @ myprintserver   Secure Internet Printer local
+ enp6s0 IPv6 hp @ myprintserver   Internet Printer        local
+ enp6s0 IPv4 hp @ myprintserver   Internet Printer        local
+ enp6s0 IPv6 hp @ myprintserver   UNIX Printer            local
+ enp6s0 IPv4 hp @ myprintserver   UNIX Printer            local
and so does CUPS:
$ sudo lpinfo --include-schemes dnssd -v
network dnssd://myprintserver%20%40%20hp._ipp._tcp.local/cups?uuid=d46942a2-b730-11ee-b05c-a75251a34287

Firewall rules Since printer discovery in CUPS relies on mDNS, another thing to double-check is that the correct ports are open on the firewall. This is what I have in /etc/network/iptables.up.rules:
# Allow mDNS for local service discovery
-A INPUT -d 100.64.0.0/10 -p udp --dport 5353 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -d 192.168.1.0/24 -p udp --dport 5353 -j ACCEPT
and in etc/network/ip6tables.up.rules:
# Allow mDNS for local service discovery
-A INPUT -d ff02::/16 -p udp --dport 5353 -j ACCEPT

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