Search Results: "kartik"

10 September 2022

Andrew Cater: 202209101115 Debian release day - Cambridge - Bullseye and Buster testing starting

And I'm over here with the Debian images/media release team in Cambridge.First time together in Cambridge for a long time: several of the usual suspects - RattusRattus, Sledge, Isy and myself. Also in the room are Kartik and egw - I think this is their first time.Chat is now physically in Sledge's sitting room as well as on IRC. The first couple of images are trickling in and tests are starting for Bullseye.
This is going to be a very long day - we've got full tests for Bullseye (Debian 11) and Buster (Debian 10) so double duty. This should be the last release for Buster since this has now passed to LTS.

19 September 2020

Bits from Debian: New Debian Maintainers (July and August 2020)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months: Congratulations!

3 May 2020

Fran ois Marier: Backing up to a GnuBee PC 2

After installing Debian buster on my GnuBee, I set it up for receiving backups from my other computers.

Software setup I started by configuring it like a typical server but without a few packages that either take a lot of memory or CPU: I changed the default hostname:
  • /etc/hostname: foobar
  • /etc/mailname: foobar.example.com
  • /etc/hosts: 127.0.0.1 foobar.example.com vogar localhost
and then installed the avahi-daemon package to be able to reach this box using foobar.local. I noticed the presence of a world-writable directory and so I tightened the security of some of the default mount points by putting the following in /etc/rc.local:
mount -o remount,nodev,nosuid /etc/network
mount -o remount,nodev,nosuid /lib/modules
chmod 755 /etc/network
exit 0

Hardware setup My OS drive (/dev/sda) is a small SSD so that the GnuBee can run silently when the spinning disks aren't needed. To hold the backup data on the other hand, I got three 4-TB drives drives which I setup in a RAID-5 array. If the data were valuable, I'd use RAID-6 instead since it can survive two drives failing at the same time, but in this case since it's only holding backups, I'd have to lose the original machine at the same time as two of the 3 drives, a very unlikely scenario. I created new gpt partition tables on /dev/sdb, /dev/sdbc, /dev/sdd and used fdisk to create a single partition of type 29 (Linux RAID) on each of them. Then I created the RAID array:
mdadm /dev/md127 --create -n 3 --level=raid5 -a /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1
and waited more than 24 hours for that operation to finish. Next, I formatted the array:
mkfs.ext4 -m 0 /dev/md127
and added the following to /etc/fstab:
/dev/md127 /mnt/data/ ext4 noatime,nodiratime 0 2
To reduce unnecessary noise and reduce power consumption, I also installed hdparm:
apt install hdparm
and configured all spinning drives to spin down after being idle for 10 minutes by putting the following in /etc/hdparm.conf:
/dev/sdb  
       spindown_time = 120
 
/dev/sdc  
       spindown_time = 120
 
/dev/sdd  
       spindown_time = 120
 
and then reloaded the configuration:
 /usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/95hdparm-apm resume
Finally I setup smartmontools by putting the following in /etc/smartd.conf:
/dev/sda -a -o on -S on -s (S/../.././02 L/../../6/03)
/dev/sdb -a -o on -S on -s (S/../.././02 L/../../6/03)
/dev/sdc -a -o on -S on -s (S/../.././02 L/../../6/03)
/dev/sdd -a -o on -S on -s (S/../.././02 L/../../6/03)
and restarting the daemon:
systemctl restart smartd.service

Backup setup I started by using duplicity since I have been using that tool for many years, but a 190GB backup took around 15 hours on the GnuBee with gigabit ethernet. After a friend suggested it, I took a look at restic and I have to say that I am impressed. The same backup finished in about half the time.

User and ssh setup After hardening the ssh setup as I usually do, I created a user account for each machine needing to backup onto the GnuBee:
adduser machine1
adduser machine1 sshuser
adduser machine1 sftponly
chsh machine1 -s /bin/false
and then matching directories under /mnt/data/home/:
mkdir /mnt/data/home/machine1
chown machine1:machine1 /mnt/data/home/machine1
chmod 700 /mnt/data/home/machine1
Then I created a custom ssh key for each machine:
ssh-keygen -f /root/.ssh/foobar_backups -t ed25519
and placed it in /home/machine1/.ssh/authorized_keys on the GnuBee. On each machine, I added the following to /root/.ssh/config:
Host foobar.local
    User machine1
    Compression no
    Ciphers aes128-ctr
    IdentityFile /root/backup/foobar_backups
    IdentitiesOnly yes
    ServerAliveInterval 60
    ServerAliveCountMax 240
The reason for setting the ssh cipher and disabling compression is to speed up the ssh connection as much as possible given that the GnuBee has avery small RAM bandwidth. Another performance-related change I made on the GnuBee was switching to the internal sftp server by putting the following in /etc/ssh/sshd_config:
Subsystem      sftp    internal-sftp

Restic script After reading through the excellent restic documentation, I wrote the following backup script, based on my old duplicity script, to reuse on all of my computers:
# Configure for each host
PASSWORD="XXXX"  # use  pwgen -s 64  to generate a good random password
BACKUP_HOME="/root/backup"
REMOTE_URL="sftp:foobar.local:"
RETENTION_POLICY="--keep-daily 7 --keep-weekly 4 --keep-monthly 12 --keep-yearly 2"
# Internal variables
SSH_IDENTITY="IdentityFile=$BACKUP_HOME/foobar_backups"
EXCLUDE_FILE="$BACKUP_HOME/exclude"
PKG_FILE="$BACKUP_HOME/dpkg-selections"
PARTITION_FILE="$BACKUP_HOME/partitions"
# If the list of files has been requested, only do that
if [ "$1" = "--list-current-files" ]; then
    RESTIC_PASSWORD=$PASSWORD restic --quiet -r $REMOTE_URL ls latest
    exit 0
# Show list of available snapshots
elif [ "$1" = "--list-snapshots" ]; then
    RESTIC_PASSWORD=$GPG_PASSWORD restic --quiet -r $REMOTE_URL snapshots
    exit 0
# Restore the given file
elif [ "$1" = "--file-to-restore" ]; then
    if [ "$2" = "" ]; then
        echo "You must specify a file to restore"
        exit 2
    fi
    RESTORE_DIR="$(mktemp -d ./restored_XXXXXXXX)"
    RESTIC_PASSWORD=$PASSWORD restic --quiet -r $REMOTE_URL restore latest --target "$RESTORE_DIR" --include "$2"   exit 1
    echo "$2 was restored to $RESTORE_DIR"
    exit 0
# Delete old backups
elif [ "$1" = "--prune" ]; then
    # Expire old backups
    RESTIC_PASSWORD=$PASSWORD restic --quiet -r $REMOTE_URL forget $RETENTION_POLICY
    # Delete files which are no longer necessary (slow)
    RESTIC_PASSWORD=$PASSWORD restic --quiet -r $REMOTE_URL prune
    exit 0
# Catch invalid arguments
elif [ "$1" != "" ]; then
    echo "Invalid argument: $1"
    exit 1
fi
# Check the integrity of existing backups
RESTIC_PASSWORD=$PASSWORD restic --quiet -r $REMOTE_URL check   exit 1
# Dump list of Debian packages
dpkg --get-selections > $PKG_FILE
# Dump partition tables from harddrives
/sbin/fdisk -l /dev/sda > $PARTITION_FILE
/sbin/fdisk -l /dev/sdb > $PARTITION_FILE
# Do the actual backup
RESTIC_PASSWORD=$PASSWORD restic --quiet --cleanup-cache -r $REMOTE_URL backup / --exclude-file $EXCLUDE_FILE
I run it with the following cronjob in /etc/cron.d/backups:
30 8 * * *    root  ionice nice nocache /root/backup/backup-machine1-to-foobar
30 2 * * Sun  root  ionice nice nocache /root/backup/backup-machine1-to-foobar --prune
in a way that doesn't impact the rest of the system too much. Finally, I printed a copy of each of my backup script, using enscript, to stash in a safe place:
enscript --highlight=bash --style=emacs --output=- backup-machine1-to-foobar   ps2pdf - > foobar.pdf
This is actually a pretty important step since without the password, you won't be able to decrypt and restore what's on the GnuBee.

10 August 2017

Kartik Mistry: DebConf17

So, I m here. It will take sometime to write about this, but this is to just reminder to myself that I exists on this blog too!

2 May 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 53 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between April 24th and 30th 2016. Media coverage Reproducible builds were mentioned explicitly in two talks at the Mini-DebConf in Vienna: Aspiration together with the OTF CommunityLab released their report about the Reproducible Builds summit in December 2015 in Athens. Toolchain fixes Now that the GCC development window has been opened again, the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH patch by Dhole and Matthias Klose to address the issue timestamps_from_cpp_macros (__DATE__ / __TIME__) has been applied upstream and will be released with GCC 7. Following that Matthias Klose also has uploaded gcc-5/5.3.1-17 and gcc-6/6.1.1-1 to unstable with a backport of that SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH patch. Emmanuel Bourg uploaded maven/3.3.9-4, which uses SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH for the maven.build.timestamp. (SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH specification) Other upstream changes Alexis Bienven e submitted a patch to Sphinx which extends SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH support for copyright years in generated documentation. Packages fixed The following 12 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: hhvm jcsp libfann libflexdock-java libjcommon-java libswingx1-java mobile-atlas-creator not-yet-commons-ssl plexus-utils squareness svnclientadapter The following packages have became reproducible after being fixed: Some uploads have fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Package reviews 95 reviews have been added, 15 have been updated and 129 have been removed in this week. 22 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb and Martin Michlmayr. diffoscope development strip-nondeterminism development tests.reproducible-builds.org Misc. Amongst the 29 interns who will work on Debian through GSoC and Outreachy there are four who will be contributing to Reproducible Builds for Debian and Free Software. We are very glad to welcome ceridwen, Satyam Zode, Scarlett Clark and Valerie Young and look forward to working together with them the coming months (and maybe beyond)! This week's edition was written by Reiner Herrmann and Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible builds folks on IRC.

23 January 2015

Jaldhar Vyas: Mini-Debconf Mumbai 2015

Last weekend I went to Mumbai to attend the Mini-Debconf held at IIT-Bombay. These are my impressions of the trip. Arrival and Impressions of Mumbai Getting there was a quite an adventure in itself. Unlike during my ill-fated attempt to visit a Debian event in Kerala last year when a bureaucratic snafu left me unable to get a visa, the organizers started the process much earlier at their end this time and with proper permissions. Yet in India, the wheels only turn as fast as they want to turn so despite their efforts, it was only literally at the last minute that I actually managed to secure my visa. I should note however that Indian government has done a lot to improve the process compared to the hell I remember from, say, a decade ago. It's fairly straightforward for tourist visas now and I trust they will get around to doing the same for conference visas in the fullness of time. I didn't want to commit to buying a plane ticket until I had the visa so I became concerned that the only flights left would be either really expensive or on the type of airline that flies you over Syria or under the Indian Ocean. I lucked out and got a good price on a Swiss Air flight, not non-stop but you can't have everything. So Thursday afternoon I set off for JFK. With only one small suitcase getting there by subway was no problem and I arrived and checked in with plenty of time. Even TSA passed me through with only a minimal amount of indignity. The first leg of my journey took me to Zurich in about eight hours. We were only in Zurich for an hour and then (by now Friday) it was another 9 hours to Mumbai. Friday was Safala Ekadashi but owing to the necessity of staying hydrated on a long flight I drank a lot of water and ate some fruit which I don't normally do on a fasting day. It was tolerable but not too pleasant; I definitely want to try and make travel plans to avoid such situations in the future. Friday evening local time I got to Mumbai. Chhattrapati Shivaji airport has improved a lot since I saw t last and now has all the amenities an international traveller needs including unrestricted free wifi (Zurich airport are you taking notes?) But here my first ominous piece of bad luck began. No sign of my suitcase. Happily some asking around revealed that it had somehow gotten on some earlier Swiss Air flight instead of the one I was on and was actually waiting for me. I got outside and Debian Developer Praveen Arimbrathodiyil was waiting to pick me up. Normally I don't lke staying in Mumbai very much even though I have relatives there but that's because we usually went during July-August the monsoon season when Mumbai reverts back to the swampy archipelago it was originally built on. This time the weather was nice, cold by local standards, but lovely and spring-like to someone from snowy New Jersey. There have been a lot of improvements to the road infrastructure and people are actually obeying the traffic laws. (Within reason of course. Whether or not a family of six can arrange themselves on one Bajaj scooter is no business of the cops.) The Hotel Tuliip (yes, two i's. Manager didn't know why.) Residency where I was to stay while not quite a five star establishment was adequate for my needs with a bed, hot water shower, and air conditioning. And a TV which to the bellhops great confusion I did not want turned on. (He asked about five times.) There was no Internet access per se but the manager offered to hook up a wireless router to a cable. Which on closer inspection turned out to have been severed at the base. He assured me it would be fixed tomorrow so I didn't complain and decided to do something more productive thank checking my email like sleeping. The next day I woke up in total darkness. Apparently there had been some kind of power problem during the night which tripped a fuse or something. A call to the front desk got them to fix that and then the second piece of bad luck happened. I plugged my Thinkpad in and woke it up from hibernation and a minute later there was a loud pop from the power adapter. Note I have a travel international plug adapter with surge protector so nothing bad ought to have happened but the laptop would on turning on display the message "critical low battery error" and immediately power off. I was unable to google what that meant without Internet access but I decided not to panic and continue getting ready. I would have plenty of opportunity to troubleshoot at the conference venue. Or so I thought... I took an autorickshaw to IIT. There also there have been positive improvements. Being quite obviously a foreigner I was fully prepared to be taken along the "scenic route." But now there are fair zones and the rickshaws all have (tamperproof!) digital fare meters so I was deposited at the main gate without fuss. After reading a board with a scary list of dos and don'ts I presented myself at security only to be inexplicably waved through without a second glance. Later I found out they've abandoned all the security theatre but not got around to updating the signs yet. Mumbai is one of the biggest, densely populated cities in the world but the IIT campus is an oasis of tranquility on the shores of Lake Powai. It's a lot bigger than it looked on the map so I had to wander around a bit before I reached the conference venue but I did make for the official registration time. Registration I was happy to meet several old friends (Such as Kartik Mistry and Kumar Appiah who along with Praveen and myself were the other DDs there,) people who I've corresponded with but never met, and many new people. I'm told 200+ people registered altogether. Most seemed to be students from IIT and elsewhere in Mumbai but there were also some Debian enthusiasts from further afield and most hearteningly some "civilians" who wanted to know what this was all about. With the help of a borrowed Thinkpad adapter I got my laptop running again. (Thankfully, despite the error message, the battery itself was unharmed.) However, my streak of bad luck was not yet over. It was that very weekend that IIT had a freak campus-wide network outage something that had never happened before. And as the presentation for the talk I was to give had apparently been open when I hibernated my laptop the night before, the sudden forced shutdown had trashed the file. (ls showed it as 0 length. An fsck didn't help.) I possibly had a backup on my server but with no Internet access I had no way to retrieve it. I still remained cool. The talk was scheduled for the second day so I could recover it at the hotel. Keynotes Professor Kannan Maudgalya of the FOSSEE (Free and Open Source Software for Education) Project which is part of the central government Ministry for Human Resource Development spoke about various activities of his project. Of particular interest to us are: FOSSEE is well funded, backed by the government and has enthusiastic staff so we should be seeing a lot more from them in the future. Veteran Free Software activist Venky Hariharan spoke about his experiences in lobbying the government on tech issues. He noted that there has been a sea change in attitudes towards Linux and Open source in the bureacracy of late. Several states have been aggressively mandating the use of it as have several national ministries and agencies. We the community can provide a valuable service by helping them in the transition. They also need to be educated on how to work with the community (contributing changes back, not working behind closed doors etc.) Debian History and Debian Cycle Shirish Agarwal spoke about the Debian philosophy and foundational documents such as the social contract and DFSG and how the release cycle works. Nothing new to an experienced user but informative to the newcomers in the audience and sparked some questions and discussion. Keysigning One of my main missions in attending was to help get as many isolated people as possible into the web of trust. Unfortunately the keysigning was not adequately publicized and few people were ready. I would have led them through the process of creating a new key there and then but with the lack of connectivity that idea had to be abandoned. I did manage to sign about 8-10 keys during other times. Future Directions for Debian-IN BOF I led this one. Lots of spirited discussion and I found feedback from new users in particular to be very helpful. Some take aways are: Lil' Debi Kumar Sukhani was a Debian GSoC student and his project which he demonstrated was to be able to install Debian on an Android phone. Why would you want to do this? Apart from the evergreen "Because I can", you can run server software such as sshd on your phone or even use it as an ARM development board. Unfortunately my phone uses Blackberry 10 OS which can run android apps (emulated under QNX) but wouldn't be able to use this. When I get a real Android phone I will try it out. Debian on ARM Siji Sunny gave this talk which was geared more towards hardware types which I am not but one thing I learned was thee difference between all the different ARM subarchitectures. I knew Siji first from a previous incarnation when he worked at CDAC with the late and much lamented Prof. R.K. Joshi. We had a long conversation about those days. Prof. Joshi/CDAC had developed an Indic rendering system called Indix which alas became the Betamax to Pango's VHS but he was also very involved in other Indic computing issues such as working with the Unicode Consortium and the preseration of Sanskrit manuscripts which is also an interest of mine. One good thing that cameout of Indix was some rather nice fonts. I had thought they were still buried in the dungeons of CDAC but apparently they were freed at one point. That's one more thing for me to look into. Evening/Next morning< My cousin met me and we had a leisurely dinner together. It was quite late by the time I got back to the hotel. FOSSEE had kindly lent me one of their tablets (which incidently are powerful enough to run LibreOffice comfortably.) so I thought I might be able to quickly redo my presentation before bedtime. Well, wouldn't you know it the wifi was not fixed. As I should have guessed but all the progress I'd had made me giddily optimistic. There was an option of trying to find an Internet cafe in a commercial area 15-20 minutes walk away. If this had been Gujarat I would have tried it but although I can more or less understand Hindi I can barely put together two sentences and Marathi I don't know at all. So I gave up that idea. I redid the slides from memory as best I could and went to sleep. In the morning I checked out and ferried myself and my suitcase via rickshaw back to the IIT campus. This time I got the driver to take me all the way in to the conference venue. Prof. Maudgalya kindly offered to let me keep the tablet to develop stuff on. I respectfully had to decline because although I love to collect bits of tech the fact it is it would have just gathered dust and ought to go to someone who can make a real contribution with it. I transferred my files to a USB key and borrowed a loaner laptop for my talk. Debian Packaging Workshop While waiting to do my talk I sat in on a workshop Praveen ran taking participants through the whole process of creating a Debian package (a ruby gem was the example.) He's done this before so it was a good presentation and well attended but the lack of connectivity did put a damper on things. Ask Me Anything It turned out the schedule had to be shuffled a bit so my talk was moved later from the announced time. A few people had already showed up so I took some random questions about Debian from them instead. GNOME Shell Accessibility With Orca Krishnakant Mane is remarkable. Although he is blind, he is a developer and a major contributor to Open Source projects. He talked about the Accessibility features of GNOME and compared them (favorably I might add) with proprietary screen readers. Not a subject that's directly useful to me but I found it interesting nonetheless. Rust: The memory safe language Manish Goregaokar talked about one of the new fad programming languages that have gotten a lot of buzz lately. This one is backed by Mozilla and it's interesting enough but I'll stick with C++ and Perl until one of the new ones "wins." Building a Mail Server With Debian Finally I got to give my talk and, yup, the video out on my borrowed laptop was incompatible with the projector. A slight delay to transfer everything to another laptop and I was able to begin. I talked about setting up BIND, postfix, and of course dovecot along with spamassassin, clamav etc. It turned out I had more than enough material and I went atleast 30 minutes over time and even then I had to rush at the end. People said they liked it so I'm happy. The End I gave the concluding remarks. Various people were thanked (including myself) mementos were given and pictures were taken. Despite a few mishaps I enjoyed myself and I am glad I attended. The level of enthusiasm was very high and lessons were learned so the next Debian-IN event should be even better. My departing flight wasn't due to leave until 1:20AM so I killed a few hours with my family before the flight. Once again I was stopping in Zurich, this time for most of a day. The last of my blunders was not to take my coat out of my suitcase and the temperature outside was 29F so I had to spend that whole time enjoing the (not so) many charms of Zurich airport. Atleast the second flight took me to Newark instead of JFK so I was able to get home a little earlier on Monday evening, exhausted but happy I made the trip.

1 September 2014

Christian Perrier: Bug #760000

Ren Mayorga reported Debian bug #760000 on Saturday August 30th, against the pyfribidi package. Bug #750000 was reported as of May 31th: nearly exactly 3 months for 10,000 bugs. The bug rate increased a little bit during the last weeks, probably because of the freeze approaching. We're therefore getting more clues about the time when bug #800000 for which we have bets. will be reported. At current rate, this should happen in one year. So, the current favorites are Knuth Posern or Kartik Mistry. Still, David Pr vot, Andreas Tille, Elmar Heeb and Rafael Laboissiere have their chances, too, if the bug rate increases (I'll watch you guys: any MBF by one of you will be suspect...:-)).

28 April 2013

Vasudev Kamath: Tribute to Beloved Teacher

Today I'm writing this blog with saddened heart. My mentor and a best friend Dr.Ashokkumar is no more. He died yesterday after fighing with Lymph Node cancer. Ashokkumar or Ashok sir that is how we all students used to address him, was a Professor in Information Science Engineering in NMAM Institue of Technology and recently transferred to Computer Science Engineering Departement. My last meeting him with him was last year December during which he was looking every bit okay other than he had knee pain because of which he couldn't walk freely. But I never imagined that it will be my last meeting with him. Ashok sir was also behind the FLOSS event that took place in NMAM Institute of Technology including MiniDebconf 2011 which saw 2 of the foreign DD's Christian Perrier and Jonas Smedegaard. It was because of his first organized FLOSS event which I volunteered called Linux Habba I entered into the FLOSS world. This means its because of him that I started my FLOSS world journey and reached to my current level. Also it was because of his motivation I started writing this blog which I continue till this day.
I whole heartedly thank Ashok sir for teaching me guiding me and motivating me during my difficult times. You will always be remembered through out my life. May your soul Rest In Peace.
Here are the 2 pics of Ashok sir taken during Minidebconf (Credits: Christian Perrier and Kartik Mistry) Ashokkumar with Jonas and Me Ashokkumar during inaugaration of MiniDebconf with Christian and Kartik on stage Good bye Sir :-(

20 March 2013

Kartik Mistry: New laptop or how to teach tech to anyone? Part 1

* So, we got new laptop last week. The entire plan was to introduce my wife into tech world or atleast in Debian and/or OpenSouce world. I visited home for one of this and other personal reason(s) [Expect next post on this!]. My wife reported her first bug (installation-report, with help from me) which was closed by mighty bubulle! I handed over couple of freely available Python books and we started with codecademy s Python track. So far, things are good, but being really non-tech person, I m currently working as support system for her. I ve used KDE as desktop. Machine runs on latest kernel from experimental due to issues with hardware mentioned here. I was not able to explain IRC in much depth, so we re using non-free methods like Google Talk for communicating and reporting. Wish us luck! :) I ll report Part 2 when things will be enough to report the progress.

15 February 2013

Kartik Mistry: My fantastic four aka #DPLgame

* Inspired by DPL Game post. Not in order,
1. Christian Perrier
2. Martin Zobel-Helas
3. Russ Allbery
4. Cyril Brulebois Pick anyone. All four are capable leaders! Although, I only met Christian personally from list, I ve watched others doing great work in Debian since long time.

31 January 2013

Kartik Mistry: Mandatory yearly post

* Somehow, I felt that there should be post for atleast to abuse Planet Debian in the new year of 2013. So, what s going on? 1. Finished Full Marathon aka Standard Charted Mumbai Marathon with pathetic timing of 5h55m35s (and felt good at the end). 2. Good thing: Visited family twice in last 2 months. 3. N number of Idlis were consumed. Where, N >= 300. Overall, I m big fan of South Indian food which is more suitable for my stomach. Thanks to running, my junkfood consumption is lesser than I can imagine but you can find me in those places during some weekends to fullfill calories lost in LSD run! 4. Last Sunday, I delivered lecture on Debian Ecosystem , mostly same presentation with additional updates and details, at SVIT, Doddaballapur (technically, some outskirt of BLR) as part of FSMK s 5 days event. It was well received from the applause I got. Photos are still lying in memory card and probably will not come out until next usage of camera. 5. I m very silent on Debian packaging and someone will hit me for pending tasks, but enjoying packaging and fixing tlsdate/torbirdy for Debian lately to get motivation. Other than that, few uploads were done.

15 October 2012

Kartik Mistry: [Life] Relocation and running

* In case you re not watching my twitter (and other social medias), I ve moved to none other than Bangalore. I m working with credativ. So, hello all DDs there! * On running front, I m back to track from today. Planning to run Bangalore Ultra 50K next month and then Mumbai Marathon (SCMM) in January 2013. BLR Ultra registration should be done in next 1-2 days. * It is challenging to stay along after four and half years of staying with family (and out of it 3 years of working from home!). I hope to move them here as soon as some things are fixed and start enjoying real life.

13 October 2012

Vasudev Kamath: Weekly Log - 06/13-102012

Update for 06/10/2012 Well I had not written the weekly work log for the last week that is because the week was short (oh yeah thanks to all these bandhs our week got fluctuated and to be frank the week was only 4 days long) and second was my lazyness. Here goes the update * After a long discussion with Aravinda on "why productivity is reducing these days." We concluded the social network is eating up most of time. So decision was made and I closed all pinned tabs for Twitter Gmail Identi.ca and Friendica on my browser * After the above resolution I finished almost 4 chapters of Moder Perl within 2 hours!. Indeed Social networks kill the productivity. Update for 13/10/2012 I've really fallen in love with computerised bots, thanks to the wonderful KGB bot :-). So majority of my work on this week is on bots. Jabber Dictionary Redesign After thinking for a while I decided to re-write the dictionary bot which when release got an overwhelming response as see in the comments of above link. Few reason for re-write
  1. Generalise the bot framework so single bot can handle multiple languages
  2. Improve the data collection on bot side
  3. Current code base was not very well organised and trying to add more feature it had become messy.
  4. Provide XEP support to help in data collections
Few changes which are already implemented include
  1. New code is now using pyxmpp2 library instead of GPLed xmppy used by current code.
  2. Implemented XEP-0071 extension to properly format the meaning display by the bot
  3. Current implementation was displaying all words in one set without distinguishing between adjectives,verbs proverbs etc. even though wiktionary displays meaning based on this. New implementation gives out meaning in same format as it is displayed on wiktionary.
Things remaining todo
  1. Separating wiktionary parsing logic from bot code by providing some sort of intermediate interface between bot and wiktionary parsers.
  2. Adding more language wiktionary parsers and teaching the bot to become multilingual :-)
  3. Integrating XEP-0004 (Data Forms) for taking the meaning input from user. Current code requires user to enter data in particular format
suckless-tools fix for Wheezy Jakub Wilk suggested me to prepare a minimal version of suckless-tools for Wheezy which includes a patch to the bug #685611. And few minor changes which involve taking over the package and fixes in copyright file other than above mentioned bug. Hopefully release-team will be okay with these changes. I'm waiting for the upload to file an unblock-request. I did face a problem I was halfway through wit suckless-tools_39-1 when Jakub asked me about this change and current repository was fresh one prepared for 39-1 and didn't have history for 38 version. First I thought of preparing separate repository for 38 version which was not an correct option, but I even couldn't play with current repository. So finally I renamed current version of repository to suckless-tools-39.git on collab-maint and prepared fresh repository suckless-tools.git basing it on 38-1 version. From 39 version suckless-tools will be following 3.0 (quilt) source format and will not be working with git-buildpackage as the tool can't handle multi-tarball packages. Yes every tool involved in the package will have separate tarball from 39. More work on Bots Well today I again worked on Jabber bot, but not the dictionary bot. This time its an SMS Gateway bot for Jonas Smedegard and the coding was done in Perl. Thanks to jonas I finally could apply what I learnt in Perl. Code may not be very elegant but it works :-). And after hacking one full day in Perl now I'm not feeling very much interested to go back and hack on my own Python based dictionary bot :-). But I will anyway. Misc So that's it folks. Quite longish post hope you are not bored reading it :-). Well time for movie C'ya all with next weeks log.

9 October 2012

Christian Perrier: Bug #690000

(doh, I nearly had it. I just got #690019, #690020 and #690022 for l10n stuff) Bartek Krawczyk reported Debian bug #690000 on Monday October 8th, against guake. And my friend Sylvestre Ledru, the package maintainer, now has to fix it instead of trying to promote the use of Scilab over proprietary alternatives in the French aerospace research organizations..:-) Bug #680000 was reported as of July 2nd: 3 months and 8 days for 10,000 bugs. This is a VERY significant drop in the bug reporting rate in Debian. Last time, I wrote: "How will the wheezy freeze affect this? We'll see in two months!". We have the answer: the wheezy freeze triggerred an important drop in bug reporting rate in Debian. My general feeling is somehow different: for whatever reason, I feel like the *overall* activity in the project has dropped significantly. I seem to have less mails to read, less bugs reported against my packages, even less heated discussions here and there, as well as several very quiet channels on IRC. Am I pessimistic when feeling that the overall momentum is sliding out of Debian? Maybe I am, so, folks, please make me optimistic and move you fingers out of the place where they are and help releasing that damn penguin. Apart from that, our next milestone (apart from the wheezy release!) will be bug #700000. Remember the bet?. It looks like the probability of Kartik Mistry winning it is now away (he bet for Now 8th 2012) and the best position is hel by David Pr vot (he bet for December 12th). On the other hand, my own chances are increasing if the bug rate drop is confirmed and if bug #700000 is reported in more than 3 months (I bet for February 14th 2013, guess why?). We'll see that in a few weeks!

1 October 2012

Vasudev Kamath: Weekly Log - 01102012

Well this weeks log comes bit late as my week got extended till today ;-). I had working day at office on Saturday and Sunday due to 2nd Quarter end and instead today is declared as compensatory holiday and tomorrow any how is Gandhi Jayanti. So here it goes. Debian Related Most of my work this week was done for Debian-IN team Well most of this weeks work involved KGB ;-) Personal Works Misc Played Cricket after very long time (Guess after 10 long years). Well it was not official match or anything it was just another Gully Cricket. After the match it came to mind that I need regular physical workout :-P. Well that's it Cya till next week :-)

22 September 2012

Vasudev Kamath: Weekly Log - 22092012

After thinking a while I thought I should record my weekly FLOSS work and I'm starting by this week. This week I'm on vacation and in home town so I could give bit more time for my FLOSS activity. So here it goes this weeks work Bug Squashing
Both these packages are uploaded to unstable first RC bug was related to Debian Installer hence was unblocked before we could file unblock-request. Kartik filed an unblock-request and adsb unblocked it happily and both the packages landed in unstable. New Packages
Both these packages will be backported once Wheezy freezes. One pending wnpp is left on Debian-IN which I've left for Kartik to finish ;-). Font Package Helper I bumped version on dh-make-font[1] to 0.3 now it accepts upstream URL with -u, --upstream switch this will be placed in Homepage: field of control file and in Source: field of copyright file. Probably I need to think of introducing xz compression to original source tarball where upstream is not giving any tarball and probably rewrite it using Perl so it can get included dh-make package. Already a bug filed to get it included in dh-make package 658154. [1] http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=debian-in/dh-make-font.git;a=summary Misc and Learnings
Well that is it for this week. Hopefully I will have new stuffs to put up here for the next week, till then Cya.

21 September 2012

Kartik Mistry: KDE Needs You!

* KDE Randa Meetings and make a donation! Click here to lend your support to: KDE Randa Meetings and make a donation at www.pledgie.com ! I know that my contributions to KDE is minimal at this stage, but hey I m doing my part this time for sure!

22 April 2012

Christian Perrier: Bug #670000

Julien Cristau reported Debian bug #670000 on Sunday April 22th, against libgtkada. This bug is indeed part of a MBF for packages that are "marked as Multi-Arch: same, but contain files in arch-independent paths with arch-specific contents" (doh, these multi-arch things are sometimes giving me headaches!) Bug #660000 was reported as of February 15th: 2 months and 7 days for 10,000 bugs. As expected, QA work and release preparation do trigger an increase in bug report rate and we're now again quite close from the "10,000 bugs in two months mark". I forgot to report that bug #666666 has been reported in the meantime. This time by one of the top bug reporters in Debian, namely Lucas Nussbaum, during one of his archive-wide package rebuilds, against psimedia. Next step will be bug #680000, targeted in June 2012. With this rate, bug #700000 should be reported around mid-November 2012 and Kartik Mistry would win the Bug #700000 prediction contest". In the meantime, Launchpad will have reached bug #1000000 (the highest bug number is currently #986849....which will be no longer true by the time you read this). The rate in LP is currently about 20,000 bugs per month. I wonder how many of these are closed as I feel like this is humanly impossible to process that many bug reports.

15 April 2012

Vasudev Kamath: Update: Falcon Debian package Status

Recently I wrote about packaging Falcon programming language for Debian. So here is the status of package. Package builds multiple binaries and we have successfully separated modules from core Falcon language component
  1. falconpl (Falcon language itself )
  2. falconpl-dbg (Debug symbols)
  3. libfalconpl-engine1 (Falcon engine library)
  4. libfalconpl-engine1-dbg (Debug symbols for Falcon enging)
Core modules like feathers and modules writtein Falcon itself are part of libfalconpl-engine1. Rest of modules are separated into following packages
  1. falconpl-mongodb: Mongodb connector module
  2. falconpl-dbi : Database Abstraction layer
  3. falconpl-dbi-sqlite3: SQLite3 connector based on DBI module
  4. falconpl-dbi-postgresql: PostgreSQL connector based on DBI module
  5. falconpl-dbi-mysql: MySQL connector based on DBI module
  6. falconpl-dbi-firebird: Firebird DB server connector
  7. falconpl-curl: Curl bindings for Falcon
  8. falconpl-dbus: DBus bindings for Falcon
  9. falconpl-dmtx: Data Matrix reader/writer for Falcon
  10. falconpl-hpdf: Haru based PDF module for Falcon
  11. falconpl-gd2: Graphic manipulation module for Falcon
There are 4 modules which I'm not sure how to build (dependency) or if at all possible to build for Linux they are dynlib, wopi, sdl, conio. I need to consult upstream on these modules status and ability to build. Modules not built We didn't build dbi-oracle and dbi-odbc modules as these are proprietary software dependant. Additionally in a conversation with upstream on IRC it was told dynlib module can't be built for 64bit and X86 version of Linux because lack of assembler, but I've not fully confirmed this. Legal Issues To enable the curl bindings I added curl dependency which in turn has dependency on libssl1.0 library which is part of openssl source package which is causing lintian thrown GPL violation error. Kartik will be looking into this. Patches submitted I've submitted total of 6 patches of which 5 patches are already applied to upstream git repo and 6th one is waiting to be applied. In other words upstream is really helpful to us. Well thats all for this week more updates next week (or may be even before that ;-) )

6 April 2012

Vasudev Kamath: Packaging Falcon Programming Language for Debian

Falcon is a programming language which is not yet packaged for Debian. I saw that the ITP#460591 is owned by my Debian mentor and good friend Kartik Mistry. So I jumped in to help him finish this package. Ok enough of introduction now directly to point. We thought its better to base the Debian package on upstream Git repository itself so we can do snapshot release like Go Language package is doing. So in this post I'm going to give steps we used to do this and also guidelines on future packaging of Falcon.
    1. First step we need to clone the upstream Falcon's git repo. Then duplicate *master* branch into *upstream* branch.
      git clone http://git.falconpl.org/falcon.git
      git checkout -b upstream
      
    
    2. Now by staying on *upstream* branch we made it track the upstream's git repo using following commands
       git remote add upstream-falcon http://git.falconpl.org/falcon.git
       git branch --set-upstream upstream-falcon
       
    
    3. We made the master branch point to origin which is our collab-maint git repository.
       git checkout master
       git remote set-url origin git.debian.org:/git/collab-maint/falconpl.git
       
    
    4. Next is creating the pristine-tar branch so that it will be easy for us to build using *git-buildpackage* tools. We just took snapshot of upstream's head and created a tarball and then used *pristine-tar* utility to commit it. Then we tagged upstream version
       git checkout upstream
       git archive --format=tar HEAD   gzip -9 > ../falconpl_0.9.6.8-git20120403.orig.tar.gz
       git tag upstream/0.9.6.8-git20120403
       pristine-tar commit ../falconpl_0.9.6.8-git20120403.orig.tar.gz
       
    
    5. And finally we copied **debian** directory from Ubuntu's falconpl package into our master branch and modified the debian changelog to match our new snapshot version. To release a new version all we need to do is follow step 4 and then additionally merge the upstream with master
So our repo is now in proper shape to be built using git-buildpackage. But we are left with many things to clean and fix. So things which are currently pending are
  1. Make copyright file in Debian copyright format 1.0
  2. Separate out each module falcon builds into separate package. Looks like Ubuntu doesn't install any of modules
  3. Last but not the least upload it to Debian ( Kartik's task :-) )
Even though I'm packaging Falcon for Debian I'm not a Falcon programmer so if there are any Falcon programmer reading this post and want to help you are always welcome :-).

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