Benjamin Mako Hill: For Additional Confusion
Market Data section of the Financial Times US Edition print edition from May 5, 2021.
Reproduction of the FT Market Data section showing a subset of Japanese companies from the FT 500 list of global companies. The duplicate lines are highlighted in yellow. This page is from today s paper (November 26, 2022).
i3
configuration to Sway, and adapt my systemd startup sequence to the
new environment. Screen sharing only works with Pipewire, so I also
did that migration, which basically requires an upgrade to Debian
bookworm to get a nice enough Pipewire release.
I'm testing Wayland on my laptop, but I'm not using it as a daily
driver because I first need to upgrade to Debian bookworm on my main
workstation.
Most irritants have been solved one way or the other. My main problem
with Wayland right now is that I spent a frigging week doing the
conversion: it's exciting and new, but it basically sucked the life
out of all my other projects and it's distracting, and I want it to
stop.
The rest of this page documents why I made the switch, how it
happened, and what's left to do. Hopefully it will keep you from
spending as much time as I did in fixing this.
TL;DR: Wayland is mostly ready. Main blockers you might find are
that you need to do manual configurations, DisplayLink (multiple
monitors on a single cable) doesn't work in Sway, HDR and color
management are still in development.
I had to install the following packages:
apt install \
brightnessctl \
foot \
gammastep \
gdm3 \
grim slurp \
pipewire-pulse \
sway \
swayidle \
swaylock \
wdisplays \
wev \
wireplumber \
wlr-randr \
xdg-desktop-portal-wlr
$HOME, mostly dealing with my esoteric
systemd startup sequence, which you won't have to deal with if you are
not a fan.
It s amazing. I have never experienced gaming on Linux that looked this smooth in my life.... I'm not a gamer, but I do care about latency. The longer version is worth a read as well. The point here is not to bash one side or the other, or even do a thorough comparison. I start with the premise that Xorg is likely going away in the future and that I will need to adapt some day. In fact, the last major Xorg release (21.1, October 2021) is rumored to be the last ("just like the previous release...", that said, minor releases are still coming out, e.g. 21.1.4). Indeed, it seems even core Xorg people have moved on to developing Wayland, or at least Xwayland, which was spun off it its own source tree. X, or at least Xorg, in in maintenance mode and has been for years. Granted, the X Window System is getting close to forty years old at this point: it got us amazingly far for something that was designed around the time the first graphical interface. Since Mac and (especially?) Windows released theirs, they have rebuilt their graphical backends numerous times, but UNIX derivatives have stuck on Xorg this entire time, which is a testament to the design and reliability of X. (Or our incapacity at developing meaningful architectural change across the entire ecosystem, take your pick I guess.) What pushed me over the edge is that I had some pretty bad driver crashes with Xorg while screen sharing under Firefox, in Debian bookworm (around November 2022). The symptom would be that the UI would completely crash, reverting to a text-only console, while Firefox would keep running, audio and everything still working. People could still see my screen, but I couldn't, of course, let alone interact with it. All processes still running, including Xorg. (And no, sorry, I haven't reported that bug, maybe I should have, and it's actually possible it comes up again in Wayland, of course. But at first, screen sharing didn't work of course, so it's coming a much further way. After making screen sharing work, though, the bug didn't occur again, so I consider this a Xorg-specific problem until further notice.) There were also frustrating glitches in the UI, in general. I actually had to setup a compositor alongside i3 to make things bearable at all. Video playback in a window was laggy, sluggish, and out of sync. Wayland fixed all of this.
man -k sway to find what they need. I don't think we need that kind
of elitism in our communities, to put this bluntly.
But let's put that aside: Sway is still a no-brainer. It's the easiest
thing to migrate to, because it's mostly compatible with i3. I had
to immediately fix those resources to get a minimal session going:
| i3 | Sway | note |
|---|---|---|
set_from_resources |
set |
no support for X resources, naturally |
new_window pixel 1 |
default_border pixel 1 |
actually supported in i3 as well |
brightnessctl instead of
xbacklight to change the backlight levels.
See a copy of my full sway/config for details.
Other options include:
nm-applet work. Based on this
nm-applet.service, I found that you need to pass --indicator for
it to show up at all.
In theory, tray icon support was merged in 1.5, but in practice
there are still several limitations, like icons not
clickable. Also, on startup, nm-applet --indicator triggers this
error in the Sway logs:
nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.325 [INFO] [swaybar/tray/host.c:24] Registering Status Notifier Item ':1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet'
nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.327 [ERROR] [swaybar/tray/item.c:127] :1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet IconPixmap: No such property IconPixmap
nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.327 [ERROR] [swaybar/tray/item.c:127] :1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet AttentionIconPixmap: No such property AttentionIconPixmap
nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.327 [ERROR] [swaybar/tray/item.c:127] :1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet ItemIsMenu: No such property ItemIsMenu
nov 11 22:36:10 angela sway[313419]: info: fcft.c:838: /usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSans.ttf: size=24.00pt/32px, dpi=96.00
bar.tray_output property in the
Sway config, try: tray_output *.
The non-working tray was the biggest irritant in my migration. I have
used nmtui to connect to new Wifi hotspots or change connection
settings, but that doesn't support actions like "turn off WiFi".
I eventually fixed this by switching from py3status to
waybar, which was another yak horde shaving session, but
ultimately, it worked.
echo MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 >> ~/.config/environment.d/firefox.conf && apt install xdg-desktop-portal-wlr
MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 firefox
if [ "$XDG_SESSION_TYPE" == "wayland" ]; then
export MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1
fi
XDG_SESSION_TYPE is not actually set when starting Sway from gdm3
which I find really confusing, and I'm not the only one. So
the above trick doesn't actually work, even if the environment
(XDG_SESSION_TYPE) is set correctly, because we don't have
conditionals in environment.d(5).
(Note that systemd.environment-generator(7) do support running
arbitrary commands to generate environment, but for some some do not
support user-specific configuration files... Even then it may be a
solution to have a conditional MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND environment, but
I'm not sure it would work because ordering between those two isn't
clear: maybe the XDG_SESSION_TYPE wouldn't be set just yet...)
At first, I made this ridiculous script to workaround those
issues. Really, it seems to me Firefox should just parse the
XDG_SESSION_TYPE variable here... but then I realized that Firefox
works fine in Xorg when the MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND is set.
So now I just set that variable in environment.d and It Just Works :
MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1
chromium -enable-features=UseOzonePlatform -ozone-platform=wayland
Use system title bar and
borders setting.
It can do some screensharing. Sharing a window and a tab seems to
work, but sharing a full screen doesn't: it's all black. Maybe not
ready for prime time.
And since Firefox can do what I need under Wayland now, I will not
need to fight with Chromium to work under Wayland:
apt purge chromium
--enable-features=WaylandWindowDecorations --ozone-platform-hint=auto
$PATH in /etc! and certain things are simply not
working in my setup. For example, this hook never gets ran on startup:
(add-hook 'after-init-hook 'server-start t)
redshift -m drm -PO 3000
gammastep with a simple gammastep.service file
associated with the sway-session.target.
nov 16 16:41:43 angela sway[843121]: 00:00:00.002 [ERROR] [wlr] [libseat] [common/terminal.c:162] Could not open target tty: Permission denied
foot-terminfo package
on the remote host, which is available in Debian stable.
This should eventually resolve itself, as Debian bookworm has a newer
version. Note that some corrections were also shipped in the
20211113 release, but that is also shipped in Debian bookworm.
That said, I am almost certain I will have to revert back to xterm
under Xwayland at some point in the future. Back when I was using
GNOME Terminal, it would mostly work for everything until I had to use
the serial console on a (HP ProCurve) network switch, which have a
fancy TUI that was basically unusable there. I fully expect such
problems with foot, or any other terminal than xterm, for that matter.
The foot wiki has good troubleshooting instructions as well.
Update: I did find one tiny thing to improve with foot, and it's the
default logging level which I found pretty verbose. After discussing
it with the maintainer on IRC, I submitted this patch to tweak
it, which I described like this on Mastodon:
today's reason why i will go to hell when i die (TRWIWGTHWID?): a 600-word, 63 lines commit log for a one line change: https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot/pulls/1215It's Friday.
| Tool | In Debian | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| alfred | yes | general launcher/assistant tool |
| bemenu | yes, bookworm+ | inspired by dmenu |
| cerebro | no | Javascript ... uh... thing |
| dmenu-wl | no | fork of dmenu, straight port to Wayland |
| Fuzzel | ITP 982140 | dmenu/drun replacement, app icon overlay |
| gmenu | no | drun replacement, with app icons |
| kickoff | no | dmenu/run replacement, fuzzy search, "snappy", history, copy-paste, Rust |
| krunner | yes | KDE's runner |
| mauncher | no | dmenu/drun replacement, math |
| nwg-launchers | no | dmenu/drun replacement, JSON config, app icons, nwg-shell project |
| Onagre | no | rofi/alfred inspired, multiple plugins, Rust |
| menu | no | dmenu/drun rewrite |
| Rofi (lbonn's fork) | no | see above |
| sirula | no | .desktop based app launcher |
| Ulauncher | ITP 949358 | generic launcher like Onagre/rofi/alfred, might be overkill |
| tofi | yes, bookworm+ | dmenu/drun replacement, C |
| wmenu | no | fork of dmenu-wl, but mostly a rewrite |
| Wofi | yes | dmenu/drun replacement, not actively maintained |
| yofi | no | dmenu/drun replacement, Rust |
input-method-unstable-v2 protocol (sample
emoji picker, but is not packaged in Debian.
As it turns out, wtype just works as expected, and fixing this was
basically a two-line patch. Another alternative, not in Debian, is
wofi-pass.
The other problem is that I actually heavily modified rofi. I use
"modis" which are not actually implemented in wofi or tofi, so I'm
left with reinventing those wheels from scratch or using the rofi +
wayland fork... It's really too bad that fork isn't being
reintegrated...
For now, I'm actually still using rofi under Xwayland. The main
downside is that fonts are fuzzy, but it otherwise just works.
Note that wlogout could be a partial replacement (just for the
"power menu").
mpv seems to work fine under Wayland,
better than Xorg on my new laptop (as mentioned in the introduction),
and that before the version which improves Wayland support
significantly, by bringing native Pipewire support and DMA-BUF
support.
gmpc is more of a problem, mainly because it is abandoned. See
2022-08-22-gmpc-alternatives for the full discussion, one of
the alternatives there will likely support Wayland.
Finally, I might just switch to sublime-music instead... In any
case, not many changes here, thankfully.
swayidle with a configuration based on
the systemd integration wiki page but with additional tweaks from
this service, see the resulting swayidle.service file.
Interestingly, damjan also has a service for swaylock itself,
although it's not clear to me what its purpose is...
--audio, duh). It's also
packaged in Debian.
One has to wonder how this works while keeping the "between app
security" that Wayland promises, however... Would installing such a
program make my system less secure?
Many other options are available, see the awesome Wayland
screencasting list.
.Xresources - just say goodbye to that old resource system, it
was used, in my case, only for rofi, xterm, and ... Xboard!? swaymsg input 0:0:X11_keyboard xkb_layout de
input *
xkb_layout "ca,us"
xkb_options "grp:sclk_toggle"
nm-applet work. based on
this nm-applet.service, I found that you need to pass --indicator. In
theory, tray icon support was merged in 1.5, but in practice
there are still several limitations, like icons not
clickable. On startup, nm-applet --indicator triggers this
error in the Sway logs:
nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.325 [INFO] [swaybar/tray/host.c:24] Registering Status Notifier Item ':1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet'
nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.327 [ERROR] [swaybar/tray/item.c:127] :1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet IconPixmap: No such property IconPixmap
nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.327 [ERROR] [swaybar/tray/item.c:127] :1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet AttentionIconPixmap: No such property AttentionIconPixmap
nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.327 [ERROR] [swaybar/tray/item.c:127] :1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet ItemIsMenu: No such property ItemIsMenu
nov 11 22:36:10 angela sway[313419]: info: fcft.c:838: /usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSans.ttf: size=24.00pt/32px, dpi=96.00
bar.tray_output property in the Sway config, try: tray_output *.
Note that there is currently (November 2022) a pull request to
hook up a "Tray D-Bus Menu" which, according to Reddit might
fix this, or at least be somewhat relevant.
This was the biggest irritant in my migration. I have used nmtui
to connect to new Wifi hotspots or change connection settings, but
that doesn't support actions like "turn off WiFi".
I eventually fixed this by switching from py3status to
waybar.i3 I was using this bespoke i3-focus
script, which doesn't work under Sway, swayr an option, not in
Debian. So I put together this other bespoke hack from
multiple sources, which works.| X11 | Wayland | In Debian |
|---|---|---|
arandr |
wdisplays | yes |
autorandr |
kanshi | yes |
xdotool |
wtype | yes |
xev |
wev | yes |
xlsclients |
swaymsg -t get_tree |
yes |
xrandr |
wlr-randr | yes |
xlsclients but is not
packaged in Debian.
See also:
.xsession like
this:
#!/bin/sh
. ~/.shenv
systemctl --user import-environment
exec systemctl --user start --wait xsession.target
xsession.target is not started by the Sway
session. It seems to just start a default.target, which is really
not what we want because we want to associate the services directly
with the graphical-session.target, so that they don't start when
logging in over (say) SSH.
damjan on #debian-systemd showed me his sway-setup which
features systemd integration. It involves starting a different session
in a completely new .desktop file. That work was submitted
upstream but refused on the grounds that "I'd rather not give a
preference to any particular init system." Another PR was
abandoned because "restarting sway does not makes sense: that
kills everything".
The work was therefore moved to the wiki.
So. Not a great situation. The upstream wiki systemd
integration suggests starting the systemd target from within
Sway, which has all sorts of problems:
$PATH and environment.
So I went down that rabbit hole and managed to correctly configure
Sway to be started from the systemd --user session.
I have partly followed the wiki but also picked ideas from damjan's
sway-setup and xdbob's sway-services. Another option is
uwsm (not in Debian).
This is the config I have in .config/systemd/user/:
I have also configured those services, but that's somewhat optional:
You will also need at least part of my sway/config, which
sends the systemd notification (because, no, Sway doesn't support any
sort of readiness notification, that would be too easy). And you might
like to see my swayidle-config while you're there.
Finally, you need to hook this up somehow to the login manager. This
is typically done with a desktop file, so drop
sway-session.desktop in /usr/share/wayland-sessions and
sway-user-service somewhere in your $PATH (typically
/usr/bin/sway-user-service).
The session then looks something like this:
$ systemd-cgls head -101
Control group /:
-.slice
user.slice (#472)
user.invocation_id: bc405c6341de4e93a545bde6d7abbeec
trusted.invocation_id: bc405c6341de4e93a545bde6d7abbeec
user-1000.slice (#10072)
user.invocation_id: 08f40f5c4bcd4fd6adfd27bec24e4827
trusted.invocation_id: 08f40f5c4bcd4fd6adfd27bec24e4827
user@1000.service (#10156)
user.delegate: 1
trusted.delegate: 1
user.invocation_id: 76bed72a1ffb41dca9bfda7bb174ef6b
trusted.invocation_id: 76bed72a1ffb41dca9bfda7bb174ef6b
session.slice (#10282)
xdg-document-portal.service (#12248)
9533 /usr/libexec/xdg-document-portal
9542 fusermount3 -o rw,nosuid,nodev,fsname=portal,auto_unmount,subt
xdg-desktop-portal.service (#12211)
9529 /usr/libexec/xdg-desktop-portal
pipewire-pulse.service (#10778)
6002 /usr/bin/pipewire-pulse
wireplumber.service (#10519)
5944 /usr/bin/wireplumber
gvfs-daemon.service (#10667)
5960 /usr/libexec/gvfsd
gvfs-udisks2-volume-monitor.service (#10852)
6021 /usr/libexec/gvfs-udisks2-volume-monitor
at-spi-dbus-bus.service (#11481)
6210 /usr/libexec/at-spi-bus-launcher
6216 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon --config-file=/usr/share/defaults/at-spi2
6450 /usr/libexec/at-spi2-registryd --use-gnome-session
pipewire.service (#10403)
5940 /usr/bin/pipewire
dbus.service (#10593)
5946 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon --session --address=systemd: --nofork --n
background.slice (#10324)
tracker-miner-fs-3.service (#10741)
6001 /usr/libexec/tracker-miner-fs-3
app.slice (#10240)
xdg-permission-store.service (#12285)
9536 /usr/libexec/xdg-permission-store
gammastep.service (#11370)
6197 gammastep
dunst.service (#11958)
7460 /usr/bin/dunst
wterminal.service (#13980)
69100 foot --title pop-up
69101 /bin/bash
77660 sudo systemd-cgls
77661 head -101
77662 wl-copy
77663 sudo systemd-cgls
77664 systemd-cgls
syncthing.service (#11995)
7529 /usr/bin/syncthing -no-browser -no-restart -logflags=0 --verbo
7537 /usr/bin/syncthing -no-browser -no-restart -logflags=0 --verbo
dconf.service (#10704)
5967 /usr/libexec/dconf-service
gnome-keyring-daemon.service (#10630)
5951 /usr/bin/gnome-keyring-daemon --foreground --components=pkcs11
gcr-ssh-agent.service (#10963)
6035 /usr/libexec/gcr-ssh-agent /run/user/1000/gcr
swayidle.service (#11444)
6199 /usr/bin/swayidle -w
nm-applet.service (#11407)
6198 /usr/bin/nm-applet --indicator
wcolortaillog.service (#11518)
6226 foot colortaillog
6228 /bin/sh /home/anarcat/bin/colortaillog
6230 sudo journalctl -f
6233 ccze -m ansi
6235 sudo journalctl -f
6236 journalctl -f
afuse.service (#10889)
6051 /usr/bin/afuse -o mount_template=sshfs -o transform_symlinks -
gpg-agent.service (#13547)
51662 /usr/bin/gpg-agent --supervised
51719 scdaemon --multi-server
emacs.service (#10926)
6034 /usr/bin/emacs --fg-daemon
33203 /usr/bin/aspell -a -m -d en --encoding=utf-8
xdg-desktop-portal-gtk.service (#12322)
9546 /usr/libexec/xdg-desktop-portal-gtk
xdg-desktop-portal-wlr.service (#12359)
9555 /usr/libexec/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr
sway.service (#11037)
6037 /usr/bin/sway
6181 swaybar -b bar-0
6209 py3status
6309 /usr/bin/i3status -c /tmp/py3status_oy4ntfnq
6969 Xwayland :0 -rootless -terminate -core -listen 29 -listen 30 -
init.scope (#10198)
5909 /lib/systemd/systemd --user
5911 (sd-pam)
session-7.scope (#10440)
5895 gdm-session-worker [pam/gdm-password]
6028 /usr/libexec/gdm-wayland-session --register-session sway-user-serv
[...]
$PATH, which
broke a lot of my workflow. It's hard to tell exactly how Wayland
gets started or where to inject environment. This discussion
suggests a few alternatives and this Debian bug report discusses
this issue as well.
I eventually picked environment.d(5) since I already manage my user
session with systemd, and it fixes a bunch of other problems. I used
to have a .shenv that I had to manually source everywhere. The only
problem with that approach is that it doesn't support conditionals,
but that's something that's rarely needed.
apt install pipewire pipewire-audio-client-libraries pipewire-pulse wireplumber
systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user --now disable pulseaudio.service pulseaudio.socket
systemctl --user --now enable pipewire pipewire-pulse
systemctl --user mask pulseaudio
~/.config/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf.d/autoconnect.conf:
context.exec = [
path = "pactl" args = "load-module module-always-sink"
path = "pactl" args = "load-module module-switch-on-connect"
# path = "/usr/bin/sh" args = "~/.config/pipewire/default.pw"
]
~/.config/pipewire/pipewire.conf (or
pipewire-pulse.conf, maybe) directly, as that will break your
setup. If you want to add to that file, first copy the template from
/usr/share/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf first.
So far I'm happy with Pipewire in bookworm, but I've heard mixed
reports from it. I have high hopes it will become the standard media
server for Linux in the coming months or years, which is great because
I've been (rather boldly, I admit) on the record saying I don't like
PulseAudio.
Rereading this now, I feel it might have been a little unfair, as
"over-engineered and tries to do too many things at once" applies
probably even more to Pipewire than PulseAudio (since it also handles
video dispatching).
That said, I think Pipewire took the right approach by implementing
existing interfaces like Pulseaudio and JACK. That way we're not
adding a third (or fourth?) way of doing audio in Linux; we're just
making the server better.
d c 06 10:36:31 curie sway[343384]: 23:32:14.034 [ERROR] [wlr] [libinput] event5 - SONiX USB Keyboard: client bug: event processing lagging behind by 37ms, your system is too slow
notmuch new).
The proposed fix for this in Sway is to gain real time privileges
and add the CAP_SYS_NICE capability to the binary. We'll see how
that goes in Debian once 1.8 gets released and shipped.
xeyes (in the x11-apps package) will run in Wayland, and can
actually be used to easily see if a given window is also in
Wayland. If the "eyes" follow the cursor, the app is actually running
in xwayland, so not natively in Wayland.
Another way to see what is using Wayland in Sway is with the command:
swaymsg -t get_tree
chooser installed, see
xdg-desktop-portal-wrl(5)) Should online communities require people to create accounts before participating?
This question has been a source of disagreement among people who start or manage online communities for decades. Requiring accounts makes some sense since users contributing without accounts are a common source of vandalism, harassment, and low quality content. In theory, creating an account can deter these kinds of attacks while still making it pretty quick and easy for newcomers to join. Also, an account requirement seems unlikely to affect contributors who already have accounts and are typically the source of most valuable contributions. Creating accounts might even help community members build deeper relationships and commitments to the group in ways that lead them to stick around longer and contribute more.
Ever considered doing research about online communities, free culture/software, and peer production full time? It s PhD admission season and my research group the Community Data Science Collective is doing an open-to-anyone Q&A about PhD admissions this Friday November 5th. We ve got room in the session and its not too late to sign up to join us!
The session will be a good opportunity to hear from and talk to faculty recruiting students to our various programs at the University of Washington, Purdue, and Northwestern and to talk with current and previous students in the group.
I am hoping to admit at least one new PhD advisee to the Department of Communication at UW this year (maybe more) and am currently co-advising (and/or have previously co-advised) students in UW s Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, Department of Human-Centered Design & Engineering, and Information School.
One thing to keep in mind is that my primary/home department Communication has a deadline for PhD applications of November 15th this year.
The registration deadline for the Q&A session is listed as today but we ll do what we can to sneak you in even if you register late. That said, please do register ASAP so we can get you the link to the session!
I first started using Debian sometime in the mid 90s and started contributing as a developer and package maintainer more than two decades years ago. My first very first scholarly publication, collaborative work led by Martin Michlmayr that I did when I was still an undergrad at Hampshire College, was about quality and the reliance on individuals in Debian. To this day, many of my closest friends are people I first met through Debian. I met many of them at Debian s annual conference DebConf.
Given my strong connections to Debian, I find it somewhat surprising that although all of my academic research has focused on peer production, free culture, and free software, I haven t actually published any Debian related research since that first paper with Martin in 2003!
So it felt like coming full circle when, several days ago, I was able to sit in the virtual DebConf audience and watch two of my graduate student advisees Kaylea Champion and Wm Salt Hale present their research about Debian at DebConf21.
Salt presented his masters thesis work which tried to understand the social dynamics behind organizational resilience among free software projects. Kaylea presented her work on a new technique she developed to identifying at risk software packages that are lower quality than we might hope given their popularity (you can read more about Kaylea s project in our blog post from earlier this year).
If you missed either presentation, check out the blog post my research collective put up or watch the videos below. If you want to hear about new work we re doing including work on Debian you should follow our research group blog, and/or follow or engage with us in the Fediverse (@communitydata@social.coop), or on Twitter (@comdatasci).
And if you re interested in joining us perhaps to do more research on FLOSS and/or Debian and/or a graduate degree of your own? please be in touch with me directly!
I wrote this blog post with Kaylea Champion and a version of this post was originally posted on the Community Data Science Collective blog. Critical software we all rely on can silently crumble away beneath us. Unfortunately, we often don t find out software infrastructure is in poor condition until it is too late. Over the last year or so, I have been supporting Kaylea Champion on a project my group announced earlier to measure software underproduction a term we use to describe software that is low in quality but high in importance. Underproduction reflects an important type of risk in widely used free/libre open source software (FLOSS) because participants often choose their own projects and tasks. Because FLOSS contributors work as volunteers and choose what they work on, important projects aren t always the ones to which FLOSS developers devote the most attention. Even when developers want to work on important projects, relative neglect among important projects is often difficult for FLOSS contributors to see. Given all this, what can we do to detect problems in FLOSS infrastructure before major failures occur? Kaylea Champion and I recently published a paper laying out our new method for measuring underproduction at the IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER) 2021 that we believe provides one important answer to this question.
Conceptual diagram showing how our conception of underproduction relates to quality and importance of software.
These 30 packages have the highest level of underproduction in Debian according to our analysis.For more details, check out the full paper which is available as a freely accessible preprint.
This project was supported by the Ford/Sloan Digital Infrastructure Initiative. Wm Salt Hale of the Community Data Science Collective and Debian Developers Paul Wise and Don Armstrong provided valuable assistance in accessing and interpreting Debian bug data. Ren Just generously provided insight and feedback on the manuscript.
Paper Citation: Kaylea Champion and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2021. Underproduction: An Approach for Measuring Risk in Open Source Software. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER 2021). IEEE.
Contact Kaylea Champion (kaylea@uw.edu) with any questions or if you are interested in following up.
I served as a director and as a voting member of the Free Software Foundation for more than a decade. I left both positions over the last 18 months and currently have no formal authority in the organization.
So although it is now just my personal opinion, I will publicly add my voice to the chorus of people who are expressing their strong opposition to Richard Stallman s return to leadership in the FSF and to his continued leadership in the free software movement. The current situation makes me unbelievably sad.
I stuck around the FSF for a long time (maybe too long) and worked hard (I regret I didn t accomplish more) to try and make the FSF better because I believe that it is important to have voices advocating for social justice inside our movement s most important institutions. I believe this is especially true when one is unhappy with the existing state of affairs. I am frustrated and sad that I concluded that I could no longer be part of any process of organizational growth and transformation at FSF.
I have nothing but compassion, empathy, and gratitude for those who are still at the FSF especially the staff who are continuing to work silently toward making the FSF better under intense public pressure. I still hope that the FSF will emerge from this as a better organization.
Graph of subscribers and moderators over time in /r/NoSleep. The image is taken from our 2016 CHI paper. I recently published a paper with Sayamindu Dasgupta that provides evidence in support of the idea that kids can learn to code more quickly when they are programming in their own language.
Millions of young people from around the world are learning to code. Often, during their learning experiences, these youth are using visual block-based programming languages like Scratch, App Inventor, and Code.org Studio. In block-based programming languages, coders manipulate visual, snap-together blocks that represent code constructs instead of textual symbols and commands that are found in more traditional programming languages.
The textual symbols used in nearly all non-block-based programming languages are drawn from English consider if statements and for loops for common examples. Keywords in block-based languages, on the other hand, are often translated into different human languages. For example, depending on the language preference of the user, an identical set of computing instructions in Scratch can be represented in many different human languages:
Examples of a short piece of Scratch code shown in four different human languages: English, Italian, Norwegian Bokm l, and German.
Summary of the results of our model for two prototypical individuals. I recently finished a paper that presents a novel social computing system called the Wikipedia Adventure. The system was a gamified tutorial for new Wikipedia editors. Working with the tutorial creators, we conducted both a survey of its users and a randomized field experiment testing its effectiveness in encouraging subsequent contributions. We found that although users loved it, it did not affect subsequent participation rates.
Start screen for the Wikipedia Adventure.
The number of active, registered editors ( 5 edits per month) to Wikipedia over time. From Halfaker, Geiger, and Morgan 2012.The Wikipedia Adventure was designed to address issues that new editors frequently encountered while learning how to contribute to Wikipedia. It is structured into different missions that guide users through various aspects of participation on Wikipedia, including how to communicate with other editors, how to cite sources, and how to ensure that edits present a neutral point of view. The sequence of the missions gives newbies an overview of what they need to know instead of having to figure everything out themselves. Additionally, the theme and tone of the tutorial sought to engage new users, rather than just redirecting them to the troves of policy pages.
Those who play the tutorial receive automated badges on their user page for every mission they complete. This signals to veteran editors that the user is acting in good-faith by attempting to learn the norms of Wikipedia.
An example of a badge that a user receives after demonstrating the skills to communicate with other users on Wikipedia.
Survey responses about how users felt about TWA.
Survey responses about what users learned through TWA.
This blog post, and the open access paper that it describes, is a collaborative project with Sneha Narayan, Jake Orlowitz, Jonathan Morgan, and Aaron Shaw. Financial support came from the US National Science Foundation (grants IIS-1617129 and IIS-1617468), Northwestern University, and the University of Washington. We also published all the data and code necessary to reproduce our analysis in a repository in the Harvard Dataverse. Sneha posted the material in this blog post over on the Community Data Science Collective Blog.
Last week, we presented a new paper that describes how children are thinking through some of the implications of new forms of data collection and analysis. The presentation was given at the ACM CHI conference in Denver last week and the paper is open access and online.
Over the last couple years, we ve worked on a large project to support children in doing and not just learning about data science. We built a system, Scratch Community Blocks, that allows the 18 million users of the Scratch online community to write their own computer programs in Scratch of course to analyze data about their own learning and social interactions. An example of one of those programs to find how many of one s follower in Scratch are not from the United States is shown below.
Last year, we deployed Scratch Community Blocks to 2,500 active Scratch users who, over a period of several months, used the system to create more than 1,600 projects.
As children used the system, Samantha Hautea, a student in UW s Communication Leadership program, led a group of us in an online ethnography. We visited the projects children were creating and sharing. We followed the forums where users discussed the blocks. We read comment threads left on projects. We combined Samantha s detailed field notes with the text of comments and forum posts, with ethnographic interviews of several users, and with notes from two in-person workshops. We used a technique called grounded theory to analyze these data.
What we found surprised us. We expected children to reflect on being challenged by and hopefully overcoming the technical parts of doing data science. Although we certainly saw this happen, what emerged much more strongly from our analysis was detailed discussion among children about the social implications of data collection and analysis.
In our analysis, we grouped children s comments into five major themes that represented what we called critical data literacies. These literacies reflect things that children felt were important implications of social media data collection and analysis.
First, children reflected on the way that programmatic access to data even data that was technically public introduced privacy concerns. One user described the ability to analyze data as, creepy , but at the same time, very cool. Children expressed concern that programmatic access to data could lead to stalking and suggested that the system should ask for permission.
Second, children recognized that data analysis requires skepticism and interpretation. For example, Scratch Community Blocks introduced a bug where the block that returned data about followers included users with disabled accounts. One user, in an interview described to us how he managed to figure out the inconsistency:
At one point the follower blocks, it said I have slightly more followers than I do. And, that was kind of confusing when I was trying to make the project. [ ] I pulled up a second [browser] tab and compared the [data from Scratch Community Blocks and the data in my profile]. Third, children discussed the hidden assumptions and decisions that drive the construction of metrics. For example, the number of views received for each project in Scratch is counted using an algorithm that tries to minimize the impact of gaming the system (similar to, for example, Youtube). As children started to build programs with data, they started to uncover and speculate about the decisions behind metrics. For example, they guessed that the view count might only include unique views and that view counts may include users who do not have accounts on the website. Fourth, children building projects with Scratch Community Blocks realized that an algorithm driven by social data may cause certain users to be excluded. For example, a 13-year-old expressed concern that the system could be used to exclude users with few social connections saying:
I think this was a great idea! I am just a bit worried that people will make these projects and take it the wrong way, saying that followers are the most important thing in on Scratch. Kids conversations around Scratch Community Blocks are good news for educators who are starting to think about how to engage young learners in thinking critically about the implications of data. Although no kid using Scratch Community Blocks discussed each of the five literacies described above, the themes reflect starting points for educators designing ways to engage kids in thinking critically about data. Our work shows that if children are given opportunities to actively engage and build with social and behavioral data, they might not only learn how to do data analysis, but also reflect on its implications.
Number of subscribers and moderators on /r/NoSleep over time.This blog post was written with Charlie Kiene. The paper and work this post describes is collaborative work with Charlie Kiene and Andr s Monroy-Hern ndez. The paper was published in the Proceedings of CHI 2016 and is released as open access so anyone can read the entire paper here. A version of this post was published on the Community Data Science Collective blog.
Scratch is a block-based programming language created by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group (LLK) at the MIT Media Lab. Scratch gives kids the power to use programming to create their own interactive animations and computer games. Since 2007, the online community that allows Scratch programmers to share, remix, and socialize around their projects has drawn more than 16 million users who have shared nearly 20 million projects and more than 100 million comments. It is one of the most popular ways for kids to learn programming and among the larger online communities for kids in general.
Front page of the Scratch online community (https://scratch.mit.edu) during the period covered by the dataset. As children use digital media to learn and socialize, others are collecting and analyzing data about these activities. In school and at play, these children find that they are the subjects of data science. As believers in the power of data analysis, we believe that this approach falls short of data science s potential to promote innovation, learning, and power.
Motivated by this fact, we have been working over the last three years as part of a team at the MIT Media Lab and the University of Washington to design and build a system that attempts to support an alternative vision: children as data scientists. The system we have built is described in a new paper Scratch Community Blocks: Supporting Children as Data Scientists that will be published in the proceedings of CHI 2017.
Our system is built on top of Scratch, a visual, block-based programming language designed for children and youth. Scratch is also an online community with over 15 million registered members who share their Scratch projects, remix each others work, have conversations, provide feedback, bookmark or love projects they like, follow other users, and more. Over the last decade, researchers including us have used the Scratch online community s database to study the youth using Scratch. With Scratch Community Blocks, we attempt to put the power to programmatically analyze these data into the hands of the users themselves.
To do so, our new system adds a set of new programming primitives (blocks) to Scratch so that users can access public data from the Scratch website from inside Scratch. Blocks in the new system gives users access to project and user metadata, information about social interaction, and data about what types of code are used in projects. The full palette of blocks to access different categories of data is shown below.
Project metadata
User metadata
Site-wide statistics
Simple demonstration of Scratch Community BlocksI was trying to think of something that somebody hadn t done yet, and I didn t see that. And also I really like to do art on Scratch and that was a good opportunity to use that and mix the two [art and data] together.We also found at least some evidence that the system supported self-reflection with data. For example, after seeing a project that showed its viewers a visualization of their past coding vocabulary, a 15-year-old realized that he does not do much programming with the pen-related primitives in Scratch, and wrote in a comment, epic! looks like we need to use more pen blocks. :D.
Doughnut visualization
Ice-cream visualization
Data-driven doll dress up
Here is my monthly update covering a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world (previously):
DebConf 16 in Capetown/South Africa was fantastic for many reasons.
My Capetown/South Africa/Culture/Flight related lessons:
Adults worry a lot these days. Especially, they worry about how to make other people learn more about computers. They want to make us all computer-literate. Literacy means both reading and writing, but most books and courses about computers only tell you about writing programs. Worse, they only tell about commands and instructions and programming-language grammar rules. They hardly ever give examples. But real languages are more than words and grammar rules. There s also literature what people use the language for. No one ever learns a language from being told its grammar rules. We always start with stories about things that interest us.In a new paper titled Remixing as a pathway to Computational Thinking that was recently published at the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) conference, we used a series of quantitative measures of online behavior to try to uncover evidence that might support the theory that remixing in Scratch is positively associated with learning.
Of course, because Scratch is an informal environment with no set path for users, no lesson plan, and no quizzes, measuring learning is an open problem. In our study, we built on two different approaches to measure learning in Scratch. The first approach considers the number of distinct types of programming blocks available in Scratch that a user has used over her lifetime in Scratch (there are 120 in total) something that can be thought of as a block repertoire or vocabulary. This measure has been used to model informal learning in Scratch in an earlier study. Using this approach, we hypothesized that users who remix more will have a faster rate of growth for their code vocabulary.
Controlling for a number of factors (e.g. age of user, the general level of activity) we found evidence of a small, but positive relationship between the number of remixes a user has shared and her block vocabulary as measured by the unique blocks she used in her non-remix projects. Intriguingly, we also found a strong association between the number of downloads by a user and her vocabulary growth. One interpretation is that this learning might also be associated with less active forms of appropriation, like the process of reading source code described by Minksy.
The second approach we used considered specific concepts in programming, such as loops, or event-handling. To measure this, we utilized a mapping of Scratch blocks to key programming concepts found in this paper by Karen Brennan and Mitchel Resnick. For example, in the image below are all the Scratch blocks mapped to the concept of loop .
We looked at six concepts in total (conditionals, data, events, loops, operators, and parallelism). In each case, we hypothesized that if someone has had never used a given concept before, they would be more likely to use that concept after encountering it while remixing an existing project.
Using this second approach, we found that users who had never used a concept were more likely to do so if they had been exposed to the concept through remixing. Although some concepts were more widely used than others, we found a positive relationship between concept use and exposure through remixing for each of the six concepts. We found that this relationship was true even if we ignored obvious examples of cutting and pasting of blocks of code. In all of these models, we found what we believe is evidence of learning through remixing.
Of course, there are many limitations in this work. What we found are all positive correlations we do not know if these relationships are causal. Moreover, our measures do not really tell us whether someone has understood the usage of a given block or programming concept.However, even with these limitations, we are excited by the results of our work, and we plan to build on what we have. Our next steps include developing and utilizing better measures of learning, as well as looking at other methods of appropriation like viewing the source code of a project.
This blog post and the paper it describes are collaborative work with Sayamindu Dasgupta, Andr s Monroy-Hern ndez, and William Hale. The paper is released as open access so anyone can read the entire paper here. This blog post was also posted on Sayamindu Dasgupta s blog and on Medium by the MIT Media Lab.
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