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22 September 2023

Ravi Dwivedi: Debconf23

Official logo of DebConf23

Introduction DebConf23, the 24th annual Debian Conference, was held in India in the city of Kochi, Kerala from the 3rd to the 17th of September, 2023. Ever since I got to know about it (which was more than an year ago), I was excited to attend DebConf in my home country. This was my second DebConf, as I attended one last year in Kosovo. I was very happy that I didn t need to apply for a visa to attend. I got full bursary to attend the event (thanks a lot to Debian for that!) which is always helpful in covering the expenses, especially if the venue is a five star hotel :) For the conference, I submitted two talks. One was suggested by Sahil on Debian packaging for beginners, while the other was suggested by Praveen who opined that a talk covering broader topics about freedom in self-hosting services will be better, when I started discussing about submitting a talk about prav app project. So I submitted one on Debian packaging for beginners and the other on ideas on sustainable solutions for self-hosting. My friend Suresh - who is enthusiastic about Debian and free software - wanted to attend the DebConf as well. When the registration started, I reminded him about applying. We landed in Kochi on the 28th of August 2023 during the festival of Onam. We celebrated Onam in Kochi, had a trip to Wayanad, and returned to Kochi. On the evening of the 3rd of September, we reached the venue - Four Points Hotel by Sheraton, at Infopark Kochi, Ernakulam, Kerala, India.
Suresh and me celebrating Onam in Kochi.

Hotel overview The hotel had 14 floors, and featured a swimming pool and gym (these were included in our package). The hotel gave us elevator access for only our floor, along with public spaces like the reception, gym, swimming pool, and dining areas. The temperature inside the hotel was pretty cold and I had to buy a jacket to survive. Perhaps the hotel was in cahoots with winterwear companies? :)
Four Points Hotel by Sheraton was the venue of DebConf23. Photo credits: Bilal
Photo of the pool. Photo credits: Andreas Tille.
View from the hotel window.

Meals On the first day, Suresh and I had dinner at the eatery on the third floor. At the entrance, a member of the hotel staff asked us about how many people we wanted a table for. I told her that it s just the two of us at the moment, but (as we are attending a conference) we might be joined by others. Regardless, they gave us a table for just two. Within a few minutes, we were joined by Alper from Turkey and urbec from Germany. So we shifted to a larger table but then we were joined by even more people, so we were busy adding more chairs to our table. urbec had already been in Kerala for the past 5-6 days and was, on one hand, very happy already with the quality and taste of bananas in Kerala and on the other, rather afraid of the spicy food :) Two days later, the lunch and dinner were shifted to the All Spice Restaurant on the 14th floor, but the breakfast was still served at the eatery. Since the eatery (on the 3rd floor) had greater variety of food than the other venue, this move made breakfast the best meal for me and many others. Many attendees from outside India were not accustomed to the spicy food. It is difficult for locals to help them, because what we consider mild can be spicy for others. It is not easy to satisfy everyone at the dining table, but I think the organizing team did a very good job in the food department. (That said, it didn t matter for me after a point, and you will know why.) The pappadam were really good, and I liked the rice labelled Kerala rice . I actually brought that exact rice and pappadam home during my last trip to Kochi and everyone at my home liked it too (thanks to Abhijit PA). I also wished to eat all types of payasams from Kerala and this really happened (thanks to Sruthi who designed the menu). Every meal had a different variety of payasam and it was awesome, although I didn t like some of them, mostly because they were very sweet. Meals were later shifted to the ground floor (taking away the best breakfast option which was the eatery).
This place served as lunch and dinner place and later as hacklab during debconf. Photo credits: Bilal

The excellent Swag Bag The DebConf registration desk was at the second floor. We were given a very nice swag bag. They were available in multiple colors - grey, green, blue, red - and included an umbrella, a steel mug, a multiboot USB drive by Mostly Harmless, a thermal flask, a mug by Canonical, a paper coaster, and stickers. It rained almost every day in Kochi during our stay, so handing out an umbrella to every attendee was a good idea.
Picture of the awesome swag bag given at DebConf23. Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi

A gift for Nattie During breakfast one day, Nattie (Belgium) expressed the desire to buy a coffee filter. The next time I went to the market, I bought a coffee filter for her as a gift. She seemed happy with the gift and was flattered to receive a gift from a young man :)

Being a mentor There were many newbies who were eager to learn and contribute to Debian. So, I mentored whoever came to me and was interested in learning. I conducted a packaging workshop in the bootcamp, but could only cover how to set up the Debian Unstable environment, and had to leave out how to package (but I covered that in my talk). Carlos (Brazil) gave a keysigning session in the bootcamp. Praveen was also mentoring in the bootcamp. I helped people understand why we sign GPG keys and how to sign them. I planned to take a workshop on it but cancelled it later.

My talk My Debian packaging talk was on the 10th of September, 2023. I had not prepared slides for my Debian packaging talk in advance - I thought that I could do it during the trip, but I didn t get the time so I prepared them on the day before the talk. Since it was mostly a tutorial, the slides did not need much preparation. My thanks to Suresh, who helped me with the slides and made it possible to complete them in such a short time frame. My talk was well-received by the audience, going by their comments. I am glad that I could give an interesting presentation.
My presentation photo. Photo credits: Valessio

Visiting a saree shop After my talk, Suresh, Alper, and I went with Anisa and Kristi - who are both from Albania, and have a never-ending fascination for Indian culture :) - to buy them sarees. We took autos to Kakkanad market and found a shop with a great variety of sarees. I was slightly familiar with the area around the hotel, as I had been there for a week. Indian women usually don t try on sarees while buying - they just select the design. But Anisa wanted to put one on and take a few photos as well. The shop staff did not have a trial saree for this purpose, so they took a saree from a mannequin. It took about an hour for the lady at the shop to help Anisa put on that saree but you could tell that she was in heaven wearing that saree, and she bought it immediately :) Alper also bought a saree to take back to Turkey for his mother. Me and Suresh wanted to buy a kurta which would go well with the mundu we already had, but we could not find anything to our liking.
Selfie with Anisa and Kristi. Photo credits: Anisa.

Cheese and Wine Party On the 11th of September we had the Cheese and Wine Party, a tradition of every DebConf. I brought Kaju Samosa and Nankhatai from home. Many attendees expressed their appreciation for the samosas. During the party, I was with Abhas and had a lot of fun. Abhas brought packets of paan and served them at the Cheese and Wine Party. We discussed interesting things and ate burgers. But due to the restrictive alcohol laws in the state, it was less fun compared to the previous DebConfs - you could only drink alcohol served by the hotel in public places. If you bought your own alcohol, you could only drink in private places (such as in your room, or a friend s room), but not in public places.
Me helping with the Cheese and Wine Party.

Party at my room Last year, Joenio (Brazilian) brought pastis from France which I liked. He brought the same alocholic drink this year too. So I invited him to my room after the Cheese and Wine party to have pastis. My idea was to have them with my roommate Suresh and Joenio. But then we permitted Joenio to bring as many people as he wanted and he ended up bringing some ten people. Suddenly, the room was crowded. I was having good time at the party, serving them the snacks given to me by Abhas. The news of an alcohol party at my room spread like wildfire. Soon there were so many people that the AC became ineffective and I found myself sweating. I left the room and roamed around in the hotel for some fresh air. I came back after about 1.5 hours - for most part, I was sitting at the ground floor with TK Saurabh. And then I met Abraham near the gym (which was my last meeting with him). I came back to my room at around 2:30 AM. Nobody seemed to have realized that I was gone. They were thanking me for hosting such a good party. A lot of people left at that point and the remaining people were playing songs and dancing (everyone was dancing all along!). I had no energy left to dance and to join them. They left around 03:00 AM. But I am glad that people enjoyed partying in my room.
This picture was taken when there were few people in my room for the party.

Sadhya Thali On the 12th of September, we had a sadhya thali for lunch. It is a vegetarian thali served on a banana leaf on the eve of Thiruvonam. It wasn t Thiruvonam on this day, but we got a special and filling lunch. The rasam and payasam were especially yummy.
Sadhya Thali: A vegetarian meal served on banana leaf. Payasam and rasam were especially yummy! Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi.
Sadhya thali being served at debconf23. Photo credits: Bilal

Day trip On the 13th of September, we had a daytrip. I chose the daytrip houseboat in Allepey. Suresh chose the same, and we registered for it as soon as it was open. This was the most sought-after daytrip by the DebConf attendees - around 80 people registered for it. Our bus was set to leave at 9 AM on the 13th of September. Me and Suresh woke up at 8:40 and hurried to get to the bus in time. It took two hours to reach the venue where we get the houseboat. The houseboat experience was good. The trip featured some good scenery. I got to experience the renowned Kerala backwaters. We were served food on the boat. We also stopped at a place and had coconut water. By evening, we came back to the place where we had boarded the boat.
Group photo of our daytrip. Photo credits: Radhika Jhalani

A good friend lost When we came back from the daytrip, we received news that Abhraham Raji was involved in a fatal accident during a kayaking trip. Abraham Raji was a very good friend of mine. In my Albania-Kosovo-Dubai trip last year, he was my roommate at our Tirana apartment. I roamed around in Dubai with him, and we had many discussions during DebConf22 Kosovo. He was the one who took the photo of me on my homepage. I also met him in MiniDebConf22 Palakkad and MiniDebConf23 Tamil Nadu, and went to his flat in Kochi this year in June. We had many projects in common. He was a Free Software activist and was the designer of the DebConf23 logo, in addition to those for other Debian events in India.
A selfie in memory of Abraham.
We were all fairly shocked by the news. I was devastated. Food lost its taste, and it became difficult to sleep. That night, Anisa and Kristi cheered me up and gave me company. Thanks a lot to them. The next day, Joenio also tried to console me. I thank him for doing a great job. I thank everyone who helped me in coping with the difficult situation. On the next day (the 14th of September), the Debian project leader Jonathan Carter addressed and announced the news officially. THe Debian project also mentioned it on their website. Abraham was supposed to give a talk, but following the incident, all talks were cancelled for the day. The conference dinner was also cancelled. As I write, 9 days have passed since his death, but even now I cannot come to terms with it.

Visiting Abraham s house On the 15th of September, the conference ran two buses from the hotel to Abraham s house in Kottayam (2 hours ride). I hopped in the first bus and my mood was not very good. Evangelos (Germany) was sitting opposite me, and he began conversing with me. The distraction helped and I was back to normal for a while. Thanks to Evangelos as he supported me a lot on that trip. He was also very impressed by my use of the StreetComplete app which I was using to edit OpenStreetMap. In two hours, we reached Abraham s house. I couldn t control myself and burst into tears. I went to see the body. I met his family (mother, father and sister), but I had nothing to say and I felt helpless. Owing to the loss of sleep and appetite over the past few days, I had no energy, and didn t think it was good idea for me to stay there. I went back by taking the bus after one hour and had lunch at the hotel. I withdrew my talk scheduled for the 16th of September.

A Japanese gift I got a nice Japanese gift from Niibe Yutaka (Japan) - a folder to keep papers which had ancient Japanese manga characters. He said he felt guilty as he swapped his talk with me and so it got rescheduled from 12th September to 16 September which I withdrew later.
Thanks to Niibe Yutaka (the person towards your right hand) from Japan (FSIJ), who gave me a wonderful Japanese gift during debconf23: A folder to keep pages with ancient Japanese manga characters printed on it. I realized I immediately needed that :)
This is the Japanese gift I received.

Group photo On the 16th of September, we had a group photo. I am glad that this year I was more clear in this picture than in DebConf22.
Click to enlarge

Volunteer work and talks attended I attended the training session for the video team and worked as a camera operator. The Bits from DPL was nice. I enjoyed Abhas presentation on home automation. He basically demonstrated how he liberated Internet-enabled home devices. I also liked Kristi s presentation on ways to engage with the GNOME community.
Bits from the DPL. Photo credits: Bilal
Kristi on GNOME community. Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi.
Abhas' talk on home automation. Photo credits: Ravi Dwivedi.
I also attended lightning talks on the last day. Badri, Wouter, and I gave a demo on how to register on the Prav app. Prav got a fair share of advertising during the last few days.
I was roaming around with a QR code on my T-shirt for downloading Prav.

The night of the 17th of September Suresh left the hotel and Badri joined me in my room. Thanks to the efforts of Abhijit PA, Kiran, and Ananthu, I wore a mundu.
Me in mundu. Picture credits: Abhijith PA
I then joined Kalyani, Mangesh, Ruchika, Anisa, Ananthu and Kiran. We took pictures and this marked the last night of DebConf23.

Departure day The 18th of September was the day of departure. Badri slept in my room and left early morning (06:30 AM). I dropped him off at the hotel gate. The breakfast was at the eatery (3rd floor) again, and it was good. Sahil, Saswata, Nilesh, and I hung out on the ground floor.
From left: Nilesh, Saswata, me, Sahil. Photo credits: Sahil.
I had an 8 PM flight from Kochi to Delhi, for which I took a cab with Rhonda (Austria), Michael (Nigeria) and Yash (India). We were joined by other DebConf23 attendees at the Kochi airport, where we took another selfie.
Ruchika (taking the selfie) and from left to right: Yash, Joost (Netherlands), me, Rhonda
Joost and I were on the same flight, and we sat next to each other. He then took a connecting flight from Delhi to Netherlands, while I went with Yash to the New Delhi Railway Station, where we took our respective trains. I reached home on the morning of the 19th of September, 2023.
Joost and me going to Delhi. Photo credits: Ravi.

Big thanks to the organizers DebConf23 was hard to organize - strict alcohol laws, weird hotel rules, death of a close friend (almost a family member), and a scary notice by the immigration bureau. The people from the team are my close friends and I am proud of them for organizing such a good event. None of this would have been possible without the organizers who put more than a year-long voluntary effort to produce this. In the meanwhile, many of them had organized local events in the time leading up to DebConf. Kudos to them. The organizers also tried their best to get clearance for countries not approved by the ministry. I am also sad that people from China, Kosovo, and Iran could not join. In particular, I feel bad for people from Kosovo who wanted to attend but could not (as India does not consider their passport to be a valid travel document), considering how we Indians were so well-received in their country last year.

Note about myself I am writing this on the 22nd of September, 2023. It took me three days to put up this post - this was one of the tragic and hard posts for me to write. I have literally forced myself to write this. I have still not recovered from the loss of my friend. Thanks a lot to all those who helped me. PS: Credits to contrapunctus for making grammar, phrasing, and capitalization changes.

1 November 2016

Simon Richter: Using the Arduino IDE with a tiling window manager

The Arduino IDE does not work properly with tiling window managers, because they do some interesting reparenting. To solve this, add
_JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1
export _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING
to the start script or your environment. Credit: "Joost"

1 June 2016

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in May 2016

FTP assistant This month I marked 286 packages for accept and rejected 35. I also sent 13 emails to maintainers asking questions. Apart from this nothing unusual happened this month. Debian LTS This was my twenty-third month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This month my all in all workload reached a new high with 31.00h. This resulted in patches for 35 CVEs and the following uploads: Thanks a lot to all the people who answered my calls for testing, especially Gabriel Filion, Joost van Baal-Ili and Stefan! This month I also had another term of doing frontdesk work and looked for CVEs that are important for Wheezy LTS or could be ignored. Other stuff As already mentioned in an earlier post, I tried to enliven the Internet of Things in Debian. If you would like to help in this field, please drop me a line.

10 March 2016

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 45 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between February 28th and March 5th:

Toolchain fixes
  • Antonio Terceiro uploaded gem2deb/0.27 that forces generated gemspecs to use the date from debian/changelog.
  • Antonio Terceiro uploaded gem2deb/0.28 that forces generated gemspecs to have their contains file lists sorted.
  • Robert Luberda uploaded ispell/3.4.00-5 which make builds of hashes reproducible.
  • C dric Boutillier uploaded ruby-ronn/0.7.3-4 which will make the output locale agnostic. Original patch by Chris Lamb.
  • Markus Koschany uploaded spring/101.0+dfsg-1. Fixed by Alexandre Detiste.
Ximin Luo resubmitted the patch adding the --clamp-mtime option to Tar on Savannah's bug tracker. Lunar rebased our experimental dpkg on top of the current master branch. Changes in the test infrastructure are required before uploading a new version to our experimental repository. Reiner Herrmann rebased our custom texlive-bin against the latest uploaded version.

Packages fixed The following 77 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: asciidoctor, atig, fuel-astute, jekyll, libphone-ui-shr, linkchecker, maven-plugin-testing, node-iscroll, origami-pdf, plexus-digest, pry, python-avro, python-odf, rails, ruby-actionpack-xml-parser, ruby-active-model-serializers, ruby-activerecord-session-store, ruby-api-pagination, ruby-babosa, ruby-carrierwave, ruby-classifier-reborn, ruby-compass, ruby-concurrent, ruby-configurate, ruby-crack, ruby-css-parser, ruby-cucumber-rails, ruby-delorean, ruby-encryptor, ruby-fakeweb, ruby-flexmock, ruby-fog-vsphere, ruby-gemojione, ruby-git, ruby-grack, ruby-htmlentities, ruby-jekyll-feed, ruby-json-schema, ruby-listen, ruby-markerb, ruby-mathml, ruby-mini-magick, ruby-net-telnet, ruby-omniauth-azure-oauth2, ruby-omniauth-saml, ruby-org, ruby-origin, ruby-prawn, ruby-pygments.rb, ruby-raemon, ruby-rails-deprecated-sanitizer, ruby-raindrops, ruby-rbpdf, ruby-rbvmomi, ruby-recaptcha, ruby-ref, ruby-responders, ruby-rjb, ruby-rspec-rails, ruby-rspec, ruby-rufus-scheduler, ruby-sass-rails, ruby-sass, ruby-sentry-raven, ruby-sequel-pg, ruby-sequel, ruby-settingslogic, ruby-shoulda-matchers, ruby-slack-notifier, ruby-symboltable, ruby-timers, ruby-zip, ticgit, tmuxinator, vagrant, wagon, yard. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:
  • #816209 on elog by Reiner Herrmann: use printf instead of echo which is shell-independent.
  • #816214 on python-pip by Reiner Herrmann: removes timestamp from generated Python scripts.
  • #816230 on rows by Reiner Herrmann: tell grep to always treat the input as text.
  • #816232 on eficas by Reiner Herrmann: use printf instead of echo which is shell-independent.
Florent Daigniere and bancfc reported that linux-grsec was currently built with GRKERNSEC_RANDSTRUCT which will prevent reproducible builds with the current packaging.

tests.reproducible-builds.org pbuilder has been updated to the last version to be able to support Build-Depends-Arch and Build-Conflicts-Arch. (Mattia Rizzolo, h01ger) New package sets have been added for Subgraph OS, which is based on Debian Stretch: packages and build dependencies. (h01ger) Two new armhf build nodes have been added (thanks Vagrant Cascadian) and integrated in our Jenkins setup with 8 new armhf builder jobs. (h01ger)

strip-nondeterminism development strip-nondeterminism version 0.016-1 was released on Sunday 28th. It will now normalize the POT-Creation-Date field in GNU Gettext .mo files. (Reiner Herrmann) Several improvements to the packages metadata have also been made. (h01ger, Ben Finney)

Package reviews 185 reviews have been removed, 91 added and 33 updated in the previous week. New issue: fileorder_in_gemspec_files_list. 43 FTBFS bugs were reported by Chris Lamb, Martin Michlmayr, and gregor herrmann.

Misc. After merging the patch from Dhiru Kholia adding support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in rpm, Florian Festi opened a discussion on the rpm-ecosystem mailing list about reproducible builds. On March 4th, Lunar gave an overview of the general reproducible builds effort at the Internet Freedom Festival in Valencia.

1 September 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 18 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Aur lien Jarno uploaded glibc/2.21-0experimental1 which will fix the issue were locales-all did not behave exactly like locales despite having it in the Provides field. Lunar rebased the pu/reproducible_builds branch for dpkg on top of the released 1.18.2. This made visible an issue with udebs and automatically generated debug packages. The summary from the meeting at DebConf15 between ftpmasters, dpkg mainatainers and reproducible builds folks has been posted to the revelant mailing lists. Packages fixed The following 70 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: activemq-activeio, async-http-client, classworlds, clirr, compress-lzf, dbus-c++, felix-bundlerepository, felix-framework, felix-gogo-command, felix-gogo-runtime, felix-gogo-shell, felix-main, felix-shell-tui, felix-shell, findbugs-bcel, gco, gdebi, gecode, geronimo-ejb-3.2-spec, git-repair, gmetric4j, gs-collections, hawtbuf, hawtdispatch, jack-tools, jackson-dataformat-cbor, jackson-dataformat-yaml, jackson-module-jaxb-annotations, jmxetric, json-simple, kryo-serializers, lhapdf, libccrtp, libclaw, libcommoncpp2, libftdi1, libjboss-marshalling-java, libmimic, libphysfs, libxstream-java, limereg, maven-debian-helper, maven-filtering, maven-invoker, mochiweb, mongo-java-driver, mqtt-client, netty-3.9, openhft-chronicle-queue, openhft-compiler, openhft-lang, pavucontrol, plexus-ant-factory, plexus-archiver, plexus-bsh-factory, plexus-cdc, plexus-classworlds2, plexus-component-metadata, plexus-container-default, plexus-io, pytone, scolasync, sisu-ioc, snappy-java, spatial4j-0.4, tika, treeline, wss4j, xtalk, zshdb. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: Chris Lamb also noticed that binaries shipped with libsilo-bin did not work. Documentation update Chris Lamb and Ximin Luo assembled a proper specification for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in the hope to convince more upstreams to adopt it. Thanks to Holger it is published under a non-Debian domain name. Lunar documented easiest way to solve issues with file ordering and timestamps in tarballs that came with tar/1.28-1. Some examples on how to use SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH have been improved to support systems without GNU date. reproducible.debian.net armhf is finally being tested, which also means the remote building of Debian packages finally works! This paves the way to perform the tests on even more architectures and doing variations on CPU and date. Some packages even produce the same binary Arch:all packages on different architectures (1, 2). (h01ger) Tests for FreeBSD are finally running. (h01ger) As it seems the gcc5 transition has cooled off, we schedule sid more often than testing again on amd64. (h01ger) disorderfs has been built and installed on all build nodes (amd64 and armhf). One issue related to permissions for root and unpriviliged users needs to be solved before disorderfs can be used on reproducible.debian.net. (h01ger) strip-nondeterminism Version 0.011-1 has been released on August 29th. The new version updates dh_strip_nondeterminism to match recent changes in debhelper. (Andrew Ayer) disorderfs disorderfs, the new FUSE filesystem to ease testing of filesystem-related variations, is now almost ready to be used. Version 0.2.0 adds support for extended attributes. Since then Andrew Ayer also added support to reverse directory entries instead of shuffling them, and arbitrary padding to the number of blocks used by files. Package reviews 142 reviews have been removed, 48 added and 259 updated this week. Santiago Vila renamed the not_using_dh_builddeb issue into varying_mtimes_in_data_tar_gz_or_control_tar_gz to align better with other tag names. New issue identified this week: random_order_in_python_doit_completion. 37 FTBFS issues have been reported by Chris West (Faux) and Chris Lamb. Misc. h01ger gave a talk at FrOSCon on August 23rd. Recordings are already online. These reports are being reviewed and enhanced every week by many people hanging out on #debian-reproducible. Huge thanks!

17 May 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 3 in Stretch cycle

What happened about the reproducible builds effort for this week: Toolchain fixes Tomasz Buchert submitted a patch to fix the currently overzealous package-contains-timestamped-gzip warning. Daniel Kahn Gillmor identified #588746 as a source of unreproducibility for packages using python-support. Packages fixed The following 57 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: antlr-maven-plugin, aspectj-maven-plugin, build-helper-maven-plugin, clirr-maven-plugin, clojure-maven-plugin, cobertura-maven-plugin, coinor-ipopt, disruptor, doxia-maven-plugin, exec-maven-plugin, gcc-arm-none-eabi, greekocr4gamera, haskell-swish, jarjar-maven-plugin, javacc-maven-plugin, jetty8, latexml, libcgi-application-perl, libnet-ssleay-perl, libtest-yaml-valid-perl, libwiki-toolkit-perl, libwww-csrf-perl, mate-menu, maven-antrun-extended-plugin, maven-antrun-plugin, maven-archiver, maven-bundle-plugin, maven-clean-plugin, maven-compiler-plugin, maven-ear-plugin, maven-install-plugin, maven-invoker-plugin, maven-jar-plugin, maven-javadoc-plugin, maven-processor-plugin, maven-project-info-reports-plugin, maven-replacer-plugin, maven-resources-plugin, maven-shade-plugin, maven-site-plugin, maven-source-plugin, maven-stapler-plugin, modello-maven-plugin1.4, modello-maven-plugin, munge-maven-plugin, ocaml-bitstring, ocr4gamera, plexus-maven-plugin, properties-maven-plugin, ruby-magic, ruby-mocha, sisu-maven-plugin, syncache, vdk2, wvstreams, xml-maven-plugin, xmlbeans-maven-plugin. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Ben Hutchings also improved and merged several changes submitted by Lunar to linux. Currently untested because in contrib: reproducible.debian.net
Thanks to the reproducible-build team for running a buildd from hell. gregor herrmann
Mattia Rizzolo modified the script added last week to reschedule a package from Alioth, a reason can now be optionally specified. Holger Levsen splitted the package sets page so each set now has its own page. He also added new sets for Java packages, Haskell packages, Ruby packages, debian-installer packages, Go packages, and OCaml packages. Reiner Herrmann added locales-all to the set of packages installed in the build environment as its needed to properly identify variations due to the current locale. Holger Levsen improved the scheduling so new uploads get tested sooner. He also changed the .json output that is used by tracker.debian.org to lists FTBFS issues again but only for issues unrelated to the toolchain or our test setup. Amongst many other small fixes and additions, the graph colors should now be more friendly to red-colorblind people. The fix for pbuilder given in #677666 by Tim Landscheidt is now used. This fixed several FTBFS for OCaml packages. Work on rebuilding with different CPU has continued, a kvm-on-kvm build host has been set been set up for this purpose. debbindiff development Version 19 of debbindiff included a fix for a regression when handling info files. Version 20 fixes a bug when diffing files with many differences toward a last line with no newlines. It also now uses the proper encoding when writing the text output to a pipe, and detects info files better. Documentation update Thanks to Santiago Vila, the unneeded -depth option used with find when fixing mtimes has been removed from the examples. Package reviews 113 obsolete reviews have been removed this week while 77 has been added.

21 December 2012

Wouter Verhelst: BSP postmortem

This post is a bit late, but still interesting: Last weekend, I held a Bug Squashing Party at my company's offices in Mechlin, Belgium. This is the first time I've attended, let alone hosted, such an event; so I'm not that experienced in figuring out what I can and cannot do with other people's packages yet. As a result, our success rate was a bit lower than I'd hoped for. Still we closed two bugs, figured out that one more bug required just some binNMUs, that one should probably be tagged wheezy-ignore (as it was tagged squeeze-ignore too, and hasn't seen updates since then), and touched three more bugs. Having said that, I did have a bit of a hidden agenda, in that I've been wanting to build a stronger Debian community in Belgium; we are ranked fairly highly on the Debian Developer per capita list, but us Belgian DDs never meet up, in contrast to DDs from three of the four countries that surround Belgium. In that, I did have some success, too; some local people showed up who'd never (directly) contributed to Debian before. While I'm not silly enough to think that just showing up to a BSP once makes you suddenly an active member of a community, it's still a good first step. Unfortunately, however, I did not manage to get any other active Belgian DDs to show up. Apart from myself, only Dutch DD Joost Van Baal and DD Emeritus Joost Damad were present. If I can't find a way to improve on that, I'm not sure this BSPing will have a long life in Mechelen. At any rate, though, I did have a lot of fun doing this. Surely that, if nothing else, counts as "success".

12 February 2010

Joost Yervante Damad: Nokia N82 Bluetooth + GPRS/3G

A few months ago I did an interesting discovery about using my cellphone to go on the internet via bluetooth. I had this strange situation before where it just stopped working, and after revisiting all configs it worked again. What really happens is that my cellphone somehow crashes, after which I power cycle it by removing the batteries. The phone then boots again, but here is the twist: the service channels in the phone are re-allocated and apparently in a random order! This implies that the RFCOMM channel configured in the /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf file is possible wrong now! Solution: just browse the services again with sdptool browse, adapt the file and it should work again!

16 September 2009

Jeroen van Wolffelaar: Phase change

It's done: today I heard about the last (passing) mark for the last course I need to follow for my Master in Applied Computing Science, at Utrecht University: a paper about RFID security and privacy as part of the Cryptography course. Besides some small paper still due for (ahum) my Bachelor, the only thing left is my thesis with associated research. Today I got an invitation for my first working day at ORTEC in Gouda, next month, where I'll be doing research (and implementation) on some exciting new route planning algorithms. It'll require some getting used to it, five days a week, 8 hours a day, for the rest of the year. One of the biggest challenges will be getting up in time every single day, but I'm sure I'll be fine with that eventually. I have confidence that the interesting research will make up for it completely! Already this Friday I'll be going to FOSDEM with Thijs, partly by train, and partly hitchhiking a ride from Joost. Too bad my laptop practically died... But reading mail etc. not the most important thing in FOSDEM, you can do that at home too I hope to meet yet again a whole lot of old and new Debian people over there. For the first time in 3 years no talk from me, other duties took too much time lately. I'll need to discover how much time I'll be able to spend on Debian as a full-time employee, but I think it'll make it easier for me to divide my time: I really missed doing Debian stuff from time to time, and I need to fix up a number of neglected areas real soon now. Good night!

30 May 2009

Joost Yervante Damad: how to set a serial port at MIDI speed in linux

Linux serial ports only work at standard speeds by default. MIDI runs at 31250 baud, which is not a standard speed. However there are tricks to get custom speeds, but documentation is quite fuzzy. This is a simple recipe that worked for me with an FT232 USB-Serial board.

Check the baud base of the device:

$ setserial -g -a /dev/ttyUSB0
/dev/ttyUSB0, Line 0, UART: unknown, Port: 0x0000, IRQ: 0
Baud_base: 24000000, close_delay: 0, divisor: 0
closing_wait: infinite
Flags: spd_normal low_latency

As you can see the baud base is 24000000 here.
Next calculate the divisor by dividing the baud_base you see here by the speed you want.
In my case 24000000/31250=768.

Apply the new setting:

$ setserial -v /dev/ttyUSB0 spd_cust divisor 768

Next start your serial application, you might want to make sure it is already set to the correct speed before you do the above changes else it might destroy your settings. The correct speed is 38400 baud, which is now aliased to 31250.

With minicom just use the menu (CTRL-A Z) to change the settings.

Screen can be used like this:

screen /dev/ttyUSB0 38400

Exit screen by pressing CTRL-A CTRL-\

Sweet.

28 April 2009

Joost Yervante Damad: arduino toolkit on x86_64 linux Debian/Ubuntu

Update:

I received an email from Ethan Bisset with a much nicer solution: just use the debian provided serial library instead of the one provided with the arduino software.

This is his recipe:

1. Get arduino software
2. apt-get install sun-java6-bin binutils-avr avr-libc gcc-avr librxtx-java
3. Untar arduino software
4. Delete <arduino>/lib/librxtxSerial.so
5. Done!

(below is the old entry:)

Download the linux 32-bit arduino toolkit from the arduino toolkit download page and untar in a directory.

Install the avr tools: apt-get install avr-libc binutils-avr gcc-avr

Install "ia32-sun-java5-bin". ( apt-get install ia32-sun-java5-bin )

Adapt the "arduino" startup script script and replace java in it by

/usr/lib/jvm/ia32-java-1.5.0-sun/bin/java

Execute the "arduino" startup script. It works just fine now.

Thats all.

Many thanks to the Debian java packagers for providing this 32-bit compatibity jvm!

1 March 2009

Joost Yervante Damad: glibc 2.9 - maradns

As Debian has been released my "unstable" box recently upgraded to glibc 2.9.
This caused DNS resolving to mysteriously fail in some applications.

Turns out that only IPv6 enabled applications suffer.

Apparently libc now fires both an IPv4 and IPv6 DNS resolving request in parallel. It looks like some DNS servers don't handle that correctly and answer an error on the IPv6 request before the IPv4 request even has time to resolve further in the internet.

In my case it was my local NSLU2 running Debian lenny causing the trouble, more specific the maradns local DNS server and DNS proxy running on it.

I manually upgraded maradns to the latest version (> 1.3.10) and things are "back" to normal.

Another solution is to disable IPv6 systemwide but I prefer not to do that as I use IPv6 occationally for testing.

I fear that this will cause more trouble for alot of people with routers doing DNS proxying.

7 February 2009

Joost Yervante Damad: openMSX 0.7.0

A new version of openMSX has been released!

Important new feature is save-states. This gave me the means to finally finish the very first game I bought as a kid: Konami's Nemesis 2 for the MSX computer.

In these times games were usually hard. Nemesis 2 is even harder. The only way to play it without save-states is not dying all 15 levels. Given that Nemesis 2 is a shooter this is VERY hard :)

nemesis2_stage_24_2.png

Each one of those red bullets and grey stones is fatal :)

But save-states wasn't enough. I also enabled "old-people" mode, meaning running the emulator at 75% speed of the original MSX computer.

After more then an hour of hard labour playing using alot of save-states I finally managed to finish the game.

Only 22 years late ;-)

P.S.: I checked with my MSX friends and no-one was able to finish this game without some form of cheating....

Joost Yervante Damad: dell precision m6400 power brick

I'm really happy with my new Dell precision M6400.
The only thing most people complain about is the size of the power brick, and I can't agree more. It's a huge 200 Watt thing and it's really as large and heavy as a stone brick.

Luckily I still have a spare power brick of my old Dell precision M65: a 90 Watt PA-10 family power brick. It has exactly the same voltage (19.5 Volt) so I decided to try it.
I've been using it now for a few days when at customer sites and it works fine.

(Try at your own risk!)

28 January 2009

Wouter Verhelst: FOSDEM and Novell

Sigh. I'm not part of the FOSDEM organisation team, and this is by choice. I know that I wouldn't find the time to help organize a conference of the scale of FOSDEM, since I'm rather liable to forget to do important things at times. Having said that, I happen to run a company together with Philip Paeps, who is now one of the main FOSDEM organizers; apart from that, I've also managed the Debian presence there for the past few years (lost count how many exactly), and arranged the key signing party for a few years with Joost Van Baal taking over for me starting this year. As such, I'd like to believe that although I'm not exactly in to all their secrets, I do have a front-row seat when it comes to how things are going there. FOSDEM is the "Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting". It has been that since 2001, and will always remain so. Yes, originally it was called "OSDEM", because frankly, the organisation of the original OSDEM was done by a group of people who like Open Source, without necessarily subscribing to the Free Software ideals. The core group of the organisation is a rather diverse group; for instance, Philip has been known to be rather... negative... about Ubuntu, while Mark (one of the press contacts) has done some activism and translation work for Ubuntu. The change of name from OSDEM to FOSDEM was done not because the organisation's ideas about software were changed overnight by a mail from Richard Stallman or anyone else from the FSF; but rather, because they were open-minded enough to understand that having a name which only says 'Open Source' would be excluding a considerable part of the community that encompasses both Free and Open Source people. This is why the name wasn't changed in FSDEM; it is FOSDEM. I'm quite sure that the fact that FOSDEM is so open-minded about many of the controversial issues that have separated our community over the years not just Open Source vs Free Software, but so many other things as well is one of the main reasons why FOSDEM is so popular today: because everyone, and I truly mean everyone, will find something that he or she likes. That is why I'm so saddened that some people seem to find it necessary to not only whine, but also boycott a conference, because they believe that FOSDEM should not take money from a big Free Software/Open Source contributor, just because they also happen to be a company, and as such make business deals with Microsoft. Note that I'm not either defending or condemning Novell's attitude here; but it is a fact that not everyone in the larger Free and Open Source community feels the same way about the whole Novell/Microsoft deal (else there wouldn't be an openSUSE anymore), and as such they still deserve a place on FOSDEM. Over the history of the organisation of FOSDEM, it's always been a place where everyone could get their opinion out; whether it be the opinion that "Free Software Must Rule The World", or that "It's All About The Way You Do Things"; as long as your opinion is shared by a large enough number of people in the larger FLOSS community, it is welcome. I feel that blocking one organization from sponsoring the event, just because they have made some deals which a significant group of people, one which nevertheless does not encompass the whole of the FLOSS community, disapprove of, would set a dangerous precendent that might jeopardize the very core of what makes FOSDEM so great: its impartiality. Thank god that didn't happen.

19 January 2009

Joost Yervante Damad: a month

Last year I even did it for longer then a month, but this year I want at least to redo a minimal effort, thus I'm going for a month of sobriety, as a kind of cleansing :) (and no, I'm not religious).

These are my 5 daily checkpoints:

  1. smoothie for breakfast

    This is something which we (me and my wife) do already anyway, have a fresh fruit smoothie for breakfast. Currently our favorite mix is 4 blood oranges, freshly pealed and parted, a seep of Sea-buckthorn elixir, and a couple of frozen strawberries (or cranberries). Mix all in the blender, long enough to don't have any parts left. It is extremely tasty, and gives a serious vitamin boost for the winter. The idea is to have it for breakfast and then don't drink or eat anything else for at least 1.5 hours, to make sure it's (almost) fully digested.

  2. < 4 coffee

    This is a hard one; people who know me will know I'm a serious coffee lover. I have a special espresso machine, and typically serve single origin or special blend coffees. It's hard to resist :)

  3. exercise

    Just a walk with the dogs already counts.

  4. no sugar

    This is usually not so hard for me, as I'm not into sweets anyway.

  5. no alcohol

    This is tougher. I'll have to stick to coffee, tea and fruit juices.
This is all as much a physical as a mental exercice :)


29 November 2008

Joost Yervante Damad: Linux, Debian & Bluetooth

I was getting sick of all the wires on my desk, and I needed a new keyboard anyway,
so I bought a logitech bluetooth key and mouse (mx 5000). It's supposed to work just fine.

The keyboard comes with a bluetooth dongle, but it's rather silly not to use the bluetooth build in my laptop, so i never tried the dongle.

I was running linux-image-2.6.26-1-amd64 on my laptop and it had serieus issues with bluetooth. It was very hard to get the device to pair, it imvolved alot of manual probing/forcing.

This morning I upgraded kernel to 2.6.27.7 from kernel.org and it all started working flawlessly...

P.S.: might be fun to see if I can find a way to have it's LCD display work in Linux ;-)

25 November 2008

Joost Yervante Damad: first snow (meme)

Since everybody is posting pictures of the first snow of the year, I can't stay behind. Quickly popped out this morning to make this snap of my favorite habitat, the valley of the "Grote Nete":


(click on the image to enlarge)

nikon d300 tamron 17-50 f/2.8 2008 Joost Yervante Damad



15 November 2008

Joost Yervante Damad: Intel Matrix Storage: software raid?

It's still unclear to me if this is software raid or not.
It might depend on the chipset. My chipset is "Intel ICH9M-E SATA AHCI/RAID controller hub" which seems to hint that it is hardware RAID.

Dear lazyweb, anyone know how to find if this is software or hardware raid?

29 October 2008

Joost Yervante Damad: RC-Bugs / Debian Bug Sprint

The Debian Lenny release has still quite a big list of Release Critical bugs, and as Debian developer I feel that I should do my share, and at least look at the list of bugs and see if there's any I could do something for.

Almost always though, I find that I won't touch the remaining bugs in the list.because of one or more of these reasons:

  1. a package I really don't care about
  2. hugely complex package or might also use something obscure like cddb
  3. it seems like people are already looking into it
  4. it requires a political solution, not a technical one

As part of the effort to get Lenny released, Joss Mouette started the Debian Bug Sprint.
This is really a cool concept, and it is a shame not more people participated.

The reason for me it is cool is that it forced me to break the rules I mentioned above, because I got a bug which fitted 1 and 4 of my list above!

Turned out this bug is really a border case in interpretation of Debian policy.

The package is perfectly usable without any extern dependencies, hence it is currently in the main section of Debian. However it doesn't end there. The package also has a download script that can fetch firmware images for certain printers. It appears for people with these printers the package is NOT usable without external files.

Aparantly though, the current, as one person involved in the bug calls it, "spirit" of Debian is to tolerate this, as it is good enough that it is usable without external dependencies for SOME persons.

However the bug submitter doesn't agree, and thinks this is a case that needs addressing withing the Debian project.

I suggested splitting up the package and moving the download script to contrib, but this was mostly dismissed as idea.

The end result is that the maintainer decided to escalate the problem to the Debian CTTE.
This means it probable won't be solved by today, soo I will have to bake cookies for someone :)

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